City of Ghosts

Chapter Twenty-six

He pushed ahead of her, bent over deep. The space surrounding them was a tunnel in the most basic sense of the word: an empty tube cut through dirt, scraped away with shovels and picks and hands, hands she could feel with every crouching step. Hands that wanted to touch her. Hands like snails sliding out of the dirt to grab—

She stopped short. Pressed her own hands into the dirt. Even infused with black magic, it was still dirt, still pure and natural, still a source of strength and power. That power was the Church’s wellspring, the source of all its magic and its dominion over the ghosts who wanted to destroy humanity out of simple, unthinking hatred; just touching it, digging her fingers into it, centered her.

But oh, yeah, the grime and darkness were there. Anger and blood and … what was—

“You right? Ain’t dig spendin all day in here.”

She looked up at his whisper and saw him several feet in front of her, half-turned, still bent over. This was uncomfortable for her; it must be awful for him, with his height.

“Yeah, yeah, it just—Something feels wrong.”

“Ain’t none of this right, aye?”

“But this feels … wrong wrong, you know what I mean? Not just like black magic or murder or whatever. It feels like, like the people who dug this are wrong. Something’s wrong with them.”

“Like they fucked in them heads?”

“No, it’s—Well, yeah, but … I don’t know. I can’t explain it.” She pulled her hands back from the dirt, brushed them against each other.

“Wanna head back?”

She looked up sharply. Yes, she wanted to head back; no, she didn’t want to admit it. “No. Go on.”

He shrugged and kept on; she noticed he carefully avoided touching the hard-packed mud on either side of them, and that when on one occasion his shoulder brushed it, he jerked away from it.

She didn’t bother to ask. And honestly she didn’t think she could find her voice even if she wanted to. With every step the feeling of wrong increased. She caught herself rubbing her arms, trying to calm her goosebumped skin. Trying to still her shivering, trying to soothe the turmoil in her mind.

It was no use. She couldn’t seem to calm down. Couldn’t seem to focus on anything.

Terrible stopped short; she bumped into him and hardly noticed it. He glanced back at her, gestured for her to look.

The tunnel opened to a cavernous space, a space like nothing she’d ever seen in her life and hoped never to see again.

At first she thought they were back above ground. Bright light dazzled her eyes, made them sting and water; it took a few seconds to realize it wasn’t daylight but candlelight she was seeing, that candles climbed the dirt walls in dizzying columns. Stretched across the ceiling were long crisscrossing strands of rope; from the ropes hung bones and skulls, scarves, ratskins, and twisty lines of feathers bound together. The same ropes dangled down the walls, between the candle rows, between shelves of bone and wood, between what looked almost like beds.

Small beds. Narrow beds.

More skulls littered the floor. Some of them were human.

The stench of rotting meat filled her nose; bile and saliva filled her mouth. This wasn’t a home, wasn’t someone’s cavelike hideaway. These were the hidden people, the ones so secret and reviled even Downside spoke their names as curses. This was a charnelhouse, a slaughterhouse.

Not the Lamaru, at least not if what she knew about Downside legend was true. Something much, much worse.

“We have to get out of here,” she started, grabbing his arm and starting to turn back. “We have to get out of here now, right now—”

Too late. Something scuttled along the wall behind the ropes; boards in crooked rows created a kind of hall outside the main open space, and something … something tiny and misshapen ran behind it, its feet slapping the hard-packed dirt. They’d been seen.

Terrible’s hand went to his knife. “We run they follow, aye?”

She nodded, her teeth sinking into her lip so hard she drew blood. They could run—maybe. But their journey to this cave had been rough, a long hard slog over rocks and dirt. She didn’t think they could get back much faster, and she had absolutely no doubt that the inhabitants of this little corner of hell could.

More movement over their heads; a small body clambering along the rope like a monkey. A very small body. A child.

“Ain’t see another way out.”

Her skin prickled everywhere, every gaze that hit her registering like another shock. So many of them, she felt them, their choking sick hunger clouding her thoughts and her vision. The door they’d come through had been hidden by glamour. She bet the exit—if there was one—was hidden as well.

They really didn’t have time for this shit, but neither did they have a choice. She fisted her hands, took a deep breath. Found her power, deep inside, let it flare while she scanned the walls. Ignore the movements, the unmistakable fact that more bodies twisted past behind the boards, that harsh dry whispers crossed the bone-littered space, and find the exit. Find the door.

“There.” She pointed at it; they didn’t have time for her to explain. “There, go, run—”

His big hand wrapped hers, held it tight as he set off across the floor. At the same time the people behind the boards came out, ran for them.

Oh shit they’re wrong they’re so wrong—

Twisted bodies, handless, deformed. Gaping mouths devoid of teeth, bloody smiles with too many of them. Leering foreheads reflecting the candlelight, tiny eyes set too close over humping crooked noses. Reaching for them, brushing her clothes, her hair—

She stumbled; Terrible yanked her back up, kept running. Around her wails sounded, voices cackling and screaming. Steel glinted as knives were raised.

The door wasn’t far now, she saw it, a plain door—a real door—high over steps cut in the dirt. It was a star she reached for as she pulled Terrible to the side and let him draw her along faster than she could go on her own, her lungs threatening to explode from breathlessness and hopelessness and the aching pressure of madness and twisted inhuman humanity.

A figure stepped in front of the door. They were halfway up when she saw it was Maguinness, smiling gently, his arms folded before him.

He raised a pale, long-fingered hand; the noise around them ceased, left only the ringing of her ears.

“I know you.” His gaze ran up and down Terrible’s body; Terrible’s hand tightened almost imperceptibly around hers. “Work for the lord, you do.”

“Aye.”

Now that beatific smile, horrible in its emptiness, fell on her. “And you work for the other one. Why have you bothered my children?”

She cast her eyes away from him, couldn’t keep looking at his waxy visage. Above him toads danced on strings, rows and rows of them. Guarding the door. Guarding the inhabitants of this room. His children?

His children. She gagged, tried unsuccessfully to turn it into a cough. The glint in his eye told her she hadn’t fooled him.

Terrible spoke. “Looking for aught else, is all.”

“Oh, no … no, I don’t think so. Methinks you wouldn’t have entered here by mistake. You, witch. You destroyed my door.”

“I’m sorry” was on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t bring herself to utter it, much as she knew she should. Terrible had calculated their chances pretty well; between the two of them they could handle a lot, but an army of inbreeds—quite probably cannibalistic inbreeds, if the skulls on the floor were anything to go by—was too much. Their odds of fighting their way out of this wouldn’t attract even the most desperate lost-cause gambling addict.

“I thought it was connected to something else,” she said. “The Church will pay damages if you file a claim.”

Not that she expected him to. But perhaps mentioning the Church would cause him to rethink whatever murder-and-devour plans he was formulating in that rat’s-nest head of his.

Of course she didn’t really expect that either. But it was worth a try.

He blinked, slowly. Like a toad. “The Church … ah. I see. Followed them, you did? The other witches.”

The Lamaru? “Is there something you want to tell me about them?”

“I do not believe I do, no.”

“But you know who they are. You attacked them last night.” And he was smiling, a smile she didn’t like at all; it raised nervous prickles up her spine.

“I know many things. I know they have dark plans that should be stopped. I do not know what they are.”

“Then why are you—”

“I see them. Bothering me. Bothering my children. You waste our time, witch. Catch them. That you should, I do know.”

“Why? What did they do to you?” Shit, she shouldn’t be doing this, not now. Not when his horrible “children” licked their lips on the steps below her and she could feel their hungry gazes on her body.

Their hungry gazes … his children. Had the Lamaru killed them? Were his children the genetically altered bastards that that report described? If they truly were inbred, the result of years of it … ugh. “They bothered your children?”

His eyebrows disappeared into the tangled mass of his hair. “Said it, did I not?”

“How did they bother them? Is that why you did what you did?”

“Not your business.”

“I think it is.” Bells rang in her head, deafening bells. If the Lamaru had killed Maguinness’s children … that would be reason enough for revenge, right?

And now he knew who she was. Knew she knew about him, knew she was—however peripherally—involved. Crossfire could be a real bitch. Her skin went colder than it already was.

But he clearly wasn’t going to tell her anything, and she didn’t have the authority to change that at the moment. Sure, she could ask Terrible to step in, but even if things between them hadn’t been totally fucked up she didn’t know if he’d be too eager to do the stepping in while a horde of inbred lunatics filed their teeth into points behind them.

And either way, she had to account for the information. She was well within her rights to be out wandering the streets with anyone she chose, and to stumble across Maguinness’s hidey-hole in the process, but to actually bring him in for questioning she’d need Lauren. Unless she could get him to talk on his own. To come in on his own.

“We can stop them, you know.” She looked him dead in the eyes, wished she hadn’t when the contact jolted down her spine. How was he so powerful? “If you tell me what you know, we can—”

“I don’t think it’s your business,” he repeated.

He stood before her; she hadn’t seen him move, but there he was, on the next step. Closer than he’d been a moment ago. The stink of him was almost as bad as the realization of what sort of family he was raising; sweat and smoke and greasy, bloody filth.

His eyes were worlds in his face now, swirling orbs of color and darkness. “Yes,” he whispered. “Look at me. Let me see … let me see into you, little witch.”

He grabbed her arm, flipped it over so her wrist was exposed. She gasped. A stab of pain flew up it at his touch, but she couldn’t look away, couldn’t focus on anything else. Terrible’s hand on hers tightened even more; she felt it without it actually registering in her mind, like watching him squeeze someone else’s hand.

“Hmm.” His fingers crawled spiderlike over the black scar of her Binding while his gaze kept hers trapped. “Interesting.”

His hand closed over the scar like a vise. Power shot through it, searing power that stole her voice, stole her thoughts.

“Arteru niska,” he whispered. Her arm hummed, her tattoos crawled and itched. She tried to scream but nothing came out; he’d taken her breath along with her will, and her vision went black around the edges.

In that darkness, between the red spots exploding before her eyes, she saw bright white lights form and spread, blotting out everything until all she saw was blinding, hateful white—

Pain slammed into her, exploded from her wrists into her chest and her head, breaking the spell. Her entire body shook; she tried to pull away from him, from his grip wet with her blood, oh, shit, her blood drooling from the Binding wound, dripping out, and his children started screaming.

More light flashed into her eyes: Terrible’s knife at Maguinness’s throat.

He didn’t speak. Didn’t need to.

Through the haze of pain and blood she saw Maguinness glance from her to his children and back to Terrible.

“Aye, they might,” Terrible said quietly. “Too late for you, though.”

“I could help you, little witch,” Maguinness said to her. “Could break that Bind and set you free. We could help each other. Yes, we could.”

She swallowed. “Tell me why you’re fighting them. What you know.”

He shrugged, dropped her wrist. The energy receded.

“Do not come here again,” he said. “Leave us be. We do not need the Church interfering in our lives.”

He stepped to the side.

It took two tries to get her rubbery legs to climb the stairs, but the door opened easily enough when they got to the top. Fresh, damp air—what could be considered fresh in Downside, anyway—flooded her lungs, her face. The rain had stopped.

Before the door closed behind them she took one last look back, and wished desperately that she hadn’t.

Maguinness stood there in the shrinking space between the door and the jamb, watching them go.

He was licking her blood off his fingers.