The Mysteries of Holly Diem (Unknown Kadath Estates Book 2) (31 page)

Snowball surveyed the scene with evident boredom, and
then gave Yael a curt nod.

I swear it happened.

Yael offered a prim curtsey, bobbing her masked head
in gratitude.

“Thank you, Lord of Ulthar. I owe you another a favor.”

The cat accepted her gratitude solemnly. Everyone
seemed to be taking this quite seriously.

“Okay.” Yael offered a quick nod. “Anyone up for a rescue?”

I bit my tongue. We picked our way through the
scorched ruins of Madeleine Diem’s home, aiming for the entrance to the Tidal
Chamber.

“Turn back!”

The Pallid Mask called out to us, still using the
shape of Elijah Pickman’s face, despite the fact that it was little more than a
shadow pinned to the ground, fluttering like newspaper in the wind.

“Holly Diem and April Ersten’s fates are sealed,”
Elijah asserted. “There is no reason for the rest of you to suffer any
further.”

“Now you care about my suffering,” Sumire said,
tapping her arm and looking as if she was seriously considering punching him. “Little
late.”

Yael made an exasperated noise and pushed past Sumire.

“There is no point to this conversation,” Yael said
shortly. “You aren’t Elijah Pickman. Not anymore.”

The impaled shadow objected, but no one stayed to
listen. We regarded the stone piled atop the door to the Tidal Chamber.

“Sumire,” Yael said, inclining her head at the mound
of rubble. “Would you do something about that?”

“With pleasure.”

Sumire made a show of rolling up her sleeves on the
way. Her first punch split a boulder in half, and sent up a rain of dust and
gravel. We took cover while she went to work. Several tons of rock lasted maybe
three minutes against the girl with the mechanical arm, who whooped and
hollered as she demolished everything in front of her.

“Okay!” Sumire cried out from the dust. “All clear.”

The heavy wooden door was reduced to splinters. Sumire
cheerfully kicked the last of the rubble aside.

“You stay, Professor,” Yael said gently, stopping Dawes
at the door. “If we don’t return by morning, I need you to deliver a message.”

The Professor objected, but we talked him out of it. I
wasn’t sure about the legitimacy of Yael’s message, but I shared her unspoken
concern about the mild-mannered ghoul going any further into the domain of the dormant
Drowned Empress. He eventually allowed himself to be persuaded, and received a
scribbled note and whispered instructions from Yael. He gave me plaintive look
and a clasp on the shoulder when I passed him on the way down.

Yael led the way down the broad stair, picking a path between
fallen stones with the aid of a powerful LED light and Dunwich’s guidance,
Sumire following close behind. I brought up the rear, naturally, using the
bulky plastic flashlight from beneath my kitchen sink to work around the
scattered debris and fallen stones.

It wasn’t a good feeling, descending those stairs
again. If the first visit had been tempting fate, then making a return bordered
on lunacy. The coral was cracked and leaked seawater on our heads in an indoor
imitation of rain. The darkness in the stairwell was pungent and greasy, the
air tainted with solvents.

We passed the first door, and behind it, we encountered
the humidity I remembered from our previous visit, dense and reeking of fermenting
seaweed. Water dripped from the rocks overhead and coated the stairwell,
running in rivulets and making the footing treacherous. Sulfurous crystal
extruded from granite walls, threatening to snag an unwary hand. I could feel
the weight of the ocean above us, seeping through the walls of the stairwell.

The door halfway down the stair was missing, only the
twisted hinges remaining. I glanced at the puddles of blood and fish oil, and
wondered about Fenrir.

The sealed door waited at the base of the stair,
composed of waterlogged timbers and a set of rusted iron bands. Wet sounds snuck
beneath the door and through the cracks in crumbling stone. Yael took out her
lock pick roll, but Sumire eased her aside with a grin. She cracked mechanical
knuckles and examined the door. Took a stance. Wound up.

She reduced the door to splinters. Sumire patted her
new arm like a mother proud of her honor student.

Yael smiled at Sumire’s enthusiasm, and then slipped
through the broken doorframe. Sumire and I followed at her heels.

I didn’t notice the water until I was splashing about
in it. The Tidal Chamber was decorated with driftwood and sea glass, strung
with garlands of decomposing seaweed that emitted swarms of black flies when
approached. The water was kiddie-pool warm and ankle-deep, lapping at the walls
in gentle swells with no obvious source. The wall we emerged from was massive,
unbroken save the door we had emerged from, crude blocks of stone piled till
they touched the distant cave roof and extending out to either side as far as
the luminescent moss would allow me to see. In front of us, the stone floor
sloped gradually away, toward the darkness from which the water emerged.

It was low tide, as Professor Dawes promised.

Two lines of gas torches fixed on poles marked a short
path among the tide pools. At the end of the path, a few meters into the water,
a massive rock was situated above the spray, covered by gas lamps on stakes. Beside
a slender chair on a dais composed of the enameled bones of an undersea
monster, Madeline Diem stood; artificial legs in the water, tiara polished,
smiling immaculately. The dress she wore was the same tropical blue as her eyes.
Splayed across the stairs leading to the dais, April and Holly lay with their
hands and ankles shackled, gagged with silk handkerchiefs and apparently
unconscious.

“Preston! You made it!” Madeleine opened her arms
wide, as if to embrace me from across the room. “I was beginning to doubt you.”

***

“Doubt?” Yael’s voice was cool, and packed with weary judgement. “How
many deals did you cut, Preston?”

“This is a misunderstanding,” I suggested hopefully.
“I never actually told you that I would do anything for you, Madeleine.”

“Well, yes,” she said, with an uncertain nod. “I just
assumed.”

“Why?”

“You are a cad, Preston,” Madeleine explained flatly, looking
about the room for understanding. “Motivated by base and perverse desires. I
specialize in working with exactly your type. You clearly lust after my elder
sister, putting me in a unique position to fulfil your doubtless vile
fantasies. I thought all of this was understood?”

Everyone seemed to think it over.

“She’s got you there,” Sumire said, with a cheerful
shrug. “Preston, you perv!”

“Hold on,” I said, glaring at anyone who would meet my
eyes. “This is slander. I’m not selling anyone out, Madeleine.”

“Aren’t you?” Her doll eyes blinked in an excessive
display of surprise. “Then why did you bring Yael Kaufman with you?”

“We are here to stop you. Together.” I cast about for
allies. “Tell her, Yael.”

“It’s true.” Yael hesitated more than I would have preferred.
“At least, I think it’s true.”

“Hmm.” Madeleine put one of Sumire’s fingers to her
lips. “Aha! I have it! As your desire for my sister is legendary…”

“It is?”

“It is.” Madeleine nodded solemnly. “You can have her,
for a little while anyway, in exchange for Yael.”

“That’s…terrible. On so many levels.”

“I agree, but that’s just the sort of person you are.”

“It is
not
.” I put my foot down and grimaced,
so everyone would know I was serious. “Listen, Madeleine – I want April back,
right now. Holly too, I guess. No deals. Do you understand?”

She sighed, and then stood, rolling April neatly out
of the way.

“I suppose.” She pulled the throne to the side, the
legs scraping across stone with an awful shriek. “Are you certain? This isn’t
in your best interest, Preston. The Institute will find you – they will find
her
.
You know it. Even now, they are so close.” She licked bitten lips, painted the
color of a fresh bruise. “Can you feel them, Preston? Watching you from
satellites and dreams?”

“Enough,” I growled, splashing into the pool. “I’m
taking April back.”

Madeleine removed a coral key from her modest décolletage,
gave me a smile some men would kill for, and then inserted it in a lock inset
in the side of the dais, just above the water level. As I waded forward, Sumire
splashing along behind me, Madeleine pulled open a heavy wooden trap door with
difficulty. Judging by the struggle, it had been a long time since that door
last opened.

It was immediately obvious as to why. That wasn’t a
trap door; it was the lid on a well of monsters.

Servants of the Deep spilled out like an unruly
geyser, sporting their unfortunate fusion of gills, and fins with the normal
human furniture. Hunched and scaled, bone protruding from dorsal growths of
varying sizes, accretions of what looked like coral attached to their faces and
bodies. Mandibles stocked with rows of hypodermic teeth. They wore robes, or
minimal leather garments, or nothing. Many wielded brass staves and
instruments, or wore golden headgear and jewelry inscribed with letters from
the city beneath the sea.

Madeleine cheerfully kicked the nonresponsive April
aside, and then very deliberately took a seat on her bound sister’s back. She
offered me a jaunty little wave as the fish-people advanced.

“Yael? Little help?”

Yael stood back at the edge of the pool, not far from
the door, along with the wet and agitated Dunwich, watching the mob grow.

“Hey, Yael? How do we get past all those fish-people?”

Her mouth formed a firm, sour line.

“Are you volunteering to be a distraction?”

“Not in particular.” The fish-people erupted out of
the trap door like the world’s foulest smelling volcano, to the evident delight
of Madeleine Diem. “So we’re gonna die, then.”

“Not necessarily,” Sumire said, casting aside her
jacket and walking to the center of the pool, thigh deep in the water. “I’m
invulnerable, remember?”

“Oh, right. Then just the rest of us will die.”

“Shut up, Preston.” Sumire beckoned to the advancing
horde of fish-people. “Watch me work.”

I had no objections. Neither did the Servants of the
Deep, apparently, because they clambered over one another to get at Sumire. She
waited for them in a slack and blissful southpaw stance; a knee bent, one hand open
like an invitation, the other closed in a fist.

The first of the Servants tried to charge through
Sumire. She impeded its progress only slightly, a quick trip tangling its legs
and sending it tumbling into the tide. The next fish-person attempted to strike
at her with the spines extending from its forearm like a bee’s stinger, but
Sumire sidestepped, seizing the Servant and tossing it into the oncoming crowd.
She felled an adjoining fish-person with an uppercut from her flesh and bone
arm, and then leveled a half-dozen of them with a swing of her mechanical arm.
The charge was confused, the first wave of Servants tumbling over or stumbling
back into their comrades, while those in the back attempted to fight their way
to the front.

Sumire hit the advancing front like a bowling ball, scattering
fish-people with every blow. She turned their reinforcements back, as new
arrivals from the trap door were forced back down the well by the confusion.

“Okay.” Yael dashed past me in her mask, kicking up
water as she went. “Make yourself useful.”

Yael clambered up a rock sticking out of the water,
and then used it to vault over a line of Servants. She hit a sandbar in a
crouch, Dunwich landing gracefully beside her. They sprinted away before the
fish-people could react.

Sumire lunged for the trap door, bringing her
mechanical arm down like a hammer. Fish-people were bowled over, and left to
splash about haplessly.

“You took my arm,” Sumire shouted at Madeleine, laying
out a fish-person with a tremendous lariat. “That was mean!”