The Mirrored Shard

11 The Graveyard of Memories

WE REACHED THE bottom of the well after an interminable ride punctuated only by the creaking of the cage and the rattling of the chain.

Finally, the cage came to rest on the small bones of rats and other, larger creatures with more teeth.

I was just glad they were only bones, and not entire souls waiting for us in the blood-tinged darkness.

The lights came from dozens of aether bulbs hung along a tunnel that had been bored into the rock and bricked over, crooked and jagged, the ground covered with piles of masonry from cave-ins.

The red light made everything shift and shimmer before my eyes. I could barely make out Ian in his dark suit as he walked ahead of me down the tunnel.

I stepped over the broken bricks, and managed not to cry out when something scampered across my foot. The tunnel widened, and Ian slowed to a stop.

“Just through there,” he said. He sighed and looked at me. “You’re about to see a part of me I’m not proud of, Aoife.” He ran a hand over his face and looked pained. “If you make it back to Archie, don’t tell him about this. I beg you.”

“Of course not,” I said, reaching out to touch the back of his hand. Was that it? Ian was so ashamed of whatever he’d done for this oracle spirit that he didn’t want his brother knowing what his afterlife had become?

I tried to smile, to let him know I was on his side. “It’s all right, Ian. I don’t have time to go into detail, but I of all people know that sometimes you do what you think you have to.”

Ian visibly relaxed. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you so much.”

I looked ahead into the darkness. “So what do I need to know before I talk to her?”

“She wants what’s most precious to you,” Ian said. “And she’ll bleed you dry little by little because it amuses her to see you suffer. But you need her, and she knows it, because she has powers beyond anyone I’ve ever met.”

“All right,” I said, taking a step forward. “Thank you, Ian.”

I wasn’t above lying to myself, telling the nervous, scared Aoife who just wanted to wake up that there was nothing to worry about, nothing to getting this oracle to tell me where Dean was and how to bring him back to the Iron Land with me.

That Aoife wasn’t a very good liar, but at least she gave me a little bit of comfort as Ian and I walked ahead. I could believe her, for the few minutes this would take.

We were inside an empty cistern, a storage place for water in the old times of the city, which were long gone now. “What does a dead city need with water and sewers?” I asked Ian.

“It’s what you see,” he said. “All the souls see a different city. Some see a medieval keep, some see a sleek metropolis. You and I know what lives under the ground in the Iron Land, and we know to be wary of it. So you and I see a soot-ridden industrial wasteland, because that’s what my afterlife is and yours will be too—nothing but monsters and smoke and iron, as far as the eye can see.”

“Thanks again for cheering me up,” I told him. “Were you always this grim or was it brought on by death?”

“My brother often said I could make a clown weep tears of despair,” Ian said. “But Archie mostly liked to hear himself talk.”

“Clowns deserve it,” I said. “After all, they make everyone else weep tears of despair.”

The center of the cistern was built up out of junk that had fallen into the sewers: furniture, old metal cargo boxes, even the front end of a jitney, its windows papered over with illustrations from books depicting scared children fleeing through a darkened wood.

The jitney door was covered with a silk curtain, through which even more red light shone.

“What now?” I whispered to Ian.

“Now you come in,” a rich, velvety female voice intoned, and the curtain twitched aside of its own accord.

“Go,” Ian told me when I looked back at him in question. “What’s said inside is meant for you and you alone.”

I girded myself and climbed the rickety steps into the jitney. It had been cut in half by some explosive accident, and the back was built out of old doors, some with carved gargoyle faces, some made of metal bars, all covered in silken rags and clothes.

In front of them was a pile of filthy cushions, and on that pile sat a woman wearing a mourning dress, the full skirt, corset and bustle speaking to a distant, more refined time.

Her face was pale but much younger than I was expecting, and she peered at me from under a hat and veil trimmed in black raven feathers.

“You’re a sight, aren’t you?” she said. “In my day, a girl would never run about in trousers, with her hair unpinned.”

“In your day, you were still alive,” I retorted. “So I guess we’re even.”

Her face split in a wide grin, and she patted the cushion next to her. “Sit down, my dear. I rather like you. How did you find me?”

I sat, but not too close. “Ian helped me.”

“Ian Grayson?” Her laugh sounded like the rough, hungry call of a ghoul. “Well, well. There’s a name I never thought I’d hear again.”

“He’s my uncle,” I said, deciding the direct approach was best, “and I don’t think he likes you much.”

“You’re correct,” she said. “But there was a time that he liked me very much indeed. When he was my eyes and ears aboveground, my enforcer, convincing souls to come and give up part of themselves so I could stay alive. We were in love, and then he ran. So many love stories end that way.”

I looked her in the eye. She had the same deep black voids as the spirits who’d attacked me in the Iron Land. “I know all about Ian,” I said. “I’m not shocked, so why don’t you and I discuss what I came here to do?”

Her smile vanished. “You know, suddenly I don’t think I like you so much anymore.”

“I don’t like you either,” I said. “There, now we agree on something. Can I ask my question and get your price?”

She bared her teeth for a moment, but I kept my expression stony. I wasn’t going to play games with this woman. She wasn’t any different from the petty students at the Academy or the manipulative care-parents I’d had to live with. As long as I didn’t show weakness, she didn’t have power.

“What’s your name, girl?” she said at last.

“Aoife,” I answered. I dared her with my gaze to make some comment one way or the other. “What do they call you?” I countered.

She brought back the grin, hungrier and less sincere. “My name is Ariadne,” she said. “In my time, there were legends of a maiden who led a hero through a maze to safety. That’s why my father named me so—a fair girl with courage and heart.”

“Looks like he went wrong somewhere,” I muttered under my breath.

“Now they call me Miss Spider,” she said. “No longer the way out of the maze but the monster at the center of it.”

I forced myself to keep sitting still, holding her gaze. “I’ve met a lot of monsters. I just want to ask my question and be on my way.”

“Ah,” Spider said, running a fingernail up my arm. Her touch was like fire. “But what do you have to offer me in return?”

“Whatever your price,” I said. “I’m willing to negotiate.” I decided to just plunge ahead and let it all out in one breath. “I’m trying to find a soul trapped here in the Catacombs. His name is Dean Harrison. He wasn’t supposed to die, and I need to find him.”

Spider tapped her chin, as if she were doing sums in her head. “To find one of the new dead among the clamoring horde … if he’s even still in one piece after the Faceless are done with him—”

“Don’t say you can’t do it,” I interrupted. “I know you can. Ian said if anyone could, it was you.”

“Ian always was a flatterer,” she said. “And you’re right, Aoife. I can do it. But I won’t. You don’t have anything that’s worth leading someone into the Catacombs. You don’t have anything that will make me go head-to-head with the Faceless.” She flounced her skirts and looked away. “There’s nothing I can do.”

“That’s crap,” I said loudly, standing up. “You can do it. You just don’t want to.”

“I’m a businesswoman.” Spider stretched out on the cushions, dislodging a cluster of roaches that skittered into the darkness. “And you’re just a sad little scrap with nothing I want.”

I had sworn I wouldn’t reveal what I was to anyone except Ian, but if this was the only way to Dean, I had no choice. “I’m not dead,” I told Spider.

Her black drowning-pool eyes grew by halves. “What did you say?” she demanded.

“I’m alive,” I said. “Back in the Iron Land. I’m using a machine to detach my soul from my body and venture here. But I’m alive, so that has to be worth something.”

Spider stared at me, and I knew I had her. The pure hunger in her eyes was unnerving, the expression of a desperately starving girl suddenly within reach of sustenance.

“I suppose,” she said carefully, “that we might work something out.”

“You want memories?” I said. “My soul? What?”

“You’re eager.” Spider regained some of her composure, managed to rein in the starved expression in her eyes. “What’s this Dean boy to you?”

“Everything,” I said honestly. “That’s why I’m willing to do whatever it takes.”

“Very well,” Spider said. “Your best memory. Your happiest moment. You want happiness back, I want what you hold most dear.”

I couldn’t remember a time I’d been truly happy or content. The joke was on Spider with this one.

“Done,” I said, and held out my hand. “Take it.”

“In time,” Spider said, rising from the pillows with surprising alacrity for a woman wearing such a heavy dress. “I always deliver on my promises before I take payment.” She came close, so close I could smell the heavy scent of dirt and decay wrapped around her as tightly as her clothing. “But I always get paid, Aoife. Make no mistake, and don’t try to cheat me.”

“I’m honest,” I said. “You give me what I want and you can pry whatever happy moments you like free from my brain.”

Spider gave me a bright smile and a pat on the shoulder. “That’s what I like to hear. Come now, let’s go meet Ian and find your boy before the Faceless chew him up and spit him out.”

Ian was pacing the dirt outside the jitney, and his face pulled tighter than a slamming door when he saw Spider.

“Look at you,” she cooed. “Poor Ian. Those months and years of being a Walker have been so unkind.”

She crossed the space between them and touched his cheek, sparing me a look as I stood by uncomfortably. “He used to have such a handsome face.”

Ian recoiled from her touch. “Don’t start with me, Spider. What’s between you and the girl has nothing to do with me.”

“She’s your blood,” Spider drawled. “And you have nothing to do with her?”

“Don’t listen,” Ian told me. “Spider will twist your ear as long as you let her, and twist your head in the bargain.”

“Oh, Ian,” she laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant laugh. It was the sound a person would make as something sharp jabbed into her flesh. “You always were such a sweet-talker.”

Spider led us down another long tunnel, part of the sewers that were apparently a piece of what was inside my head. I wondered at what memory the Deadlands had drawn on, what kind of darkness inside me that it fed on. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know.

As we walked deeper, the muddy ground sloping beneath our feet, the sewers gave way to something older. The walls were studded with alcoves that held skulls, and the eyes lit up with a faint green glow as we passed.

“Just remnants of souls,” said Spider. “What’s left when the Faceless are done with them.”

I felt a plummeting sensation in my gut. “Dean’s not …”

“Oh no, dear,” Spider said. “He’s far too new. And if he was taken before his time, he’s got fight in him. They could use him for centuries before they drain him dry.”

“Thank you for being so reassuring to the girl,” Ian said from behind me.

“I consider it part of the service,” Spider said dryly. She stopped at a fork in the tunnel and took the left-hand path.

I followed, listening to water drip and things skitter in the darkness beyond the glowing eyes of the skulls. Just as I was beginning to think Spider had betrayed us, she stopped at a figure standing in the shadows.

“Ian,” she snapped, “be a dear and give a lady some light.”

Ian sighed, but drew out his lighter and flicked the lid open. A flame blossomed and illuminated the figure of a girl. Her dress was lush and purple, the sort of thing worn to the type of party a girl like me could only read about in old storybooks. Her hair was immaculate, but dry and weak as a spiderweb, so thin and pale that Ian’s light penetrated it, turning it molten gold.

The waist of her dress had been cut away, and resting where her guts should have been sat the face of a clock, all brass and gear and ticking urgency. The girl’s clockwork eyes rolled open, and camera irises regarded us with the dispassionate glare of a machine.

Spider bent to examine the face of the clock. “Counters,” she said. “The Faceless use them to keep track of all the souls in any given quadrant of the city. We think they were alive, once—the lost and the forgotten sorts.”

“They look human,” I said.

“A lot of things in this place look human,” Spider told me with a wink. “But rest assured, this pretty face was never anything but a predator stalking the red-light district and making herself sick on human souls.”

She jabbed at the clock, causing the gears to seize. “Isn’t that right, dearie?”

The girl’s jaw was clockwork, but it worked a bit, and even though her eyes weren’t human, I saw something in them—pain, and sadness. The same sort of look I saw on caged animals, ones who knew they had no hope of escape.

“Tell her who you’re looking for,” Spider said.

“Dean Harrison,” I told the counter. “I need to find Dean Harrison.”

Something inside her skull whirred, the spiderweb hair vibrating slightly, and then her torso rotated, the clockwork ticking, counting something off. Souls? Seconds? Last breaths?

I didn’t know, but she pointed down one of the many tunnels around us. “Number sixty-three,” she said in an echoey voice piped through some sort of aethervox.

“And there you have it,” Spider said. She looked over her shoulder as a cry echoed through the tunnel. “And we better get moving, if we don’t want to become just another pet for the Faceless to amuse themselves with.”

We hurried down the tunnel. This place was completely different from the skull-lined corridors. Those had been like something out of a bad dream or a horror story. This place was all iron, like a prison back in the living world, each door marked with a clumsily painted number.

I could hear sounds from behind some doors, and shadows danced beyond the bars of others, small windows set at face level. I saw fangs, twisted features, skulls without skin and shrieking vapors without form.

“This is odd,” Spider said. For the first time, she didn’t sound as if she were two breaths away from mocking me. “This place … this is for the worst souls, murderers and the kinds the king wishes to keep under close observation.” She turned her eyes on me. “You didn’t withhold the fact that your Dean is some kind of bad boy, did you?”

“Dean shouldn’t be here,” I said. I was starting to feel frantic. This was worse than I’d thought. If the king kept souls that he particularly wanted here, why was he keeping Dean? And what price was I going to have to pay to release him?

“And yet, he is here,” Spider said, coming to a stop. Her long, tattered skirt whispered around her feet, across the stone floor. “Right here, in fact.” She raised her hand to point at the ragged 63 painted above the door.

I flew across the space, all of my senses leaving me. I felt my body collide with the iron door, felt bruises blossom, but at the same time didn’t really process any of it. My eyes searched the cell and found only darkness save the tiny cube of light projected from the window.

“Ian!” I shouted, desperate. “I need light!”

“All right, all right,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. He squeezed, and I knew he was trying to calm me. I was trying to calm myself but was having no success.

The light penetrated each corner of the cell, until it finally lit on Dean. I let out a sob of relief, and banged my fists against the iron. Only Ian grabbing my wrists got me to stop.

Dean looked up, his gray eyes silver in the dim light. “Aoife?” he said softly. “Aoife … are you dead?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “Sort of, but not really. But that doesn’t matter, Dean. I’m here to get you out.”

“Not now, you’re not,” Spider said, looking over her shoulder. I heard a whisper close by, the sound of a soft foot over stone. “Faceless,” she said. “We have to leave, now.”

“No.” I grabbed the bars, reaching for Dean. “I’m not leaving without him.”

“You stupid girl, there’s nothing we can do!” Spider snapped. “Unless you plan to seek an audience with the king himself and bargain for the boy’s release, he’s here to stay.”

I turned on her, feeling the slow-burning fury in me turn volcanic. “You said you would help me.”

“And I could, if he were a regular soul!” Spider shouted. “But he’s not! For whatever reason, the king’s taken an interest in him, and there’s nothing I or you or anyone can do about that.”

She grabbed for me, but I wrenched my hand free. “I’m not leaving.”

“We must!” Ian hissed. “Or the Faceless will apprehend us.” His face blanched. “I’m not going back, Aoife. I’m not staying here, not in this rancid city. Do you have any idea what they’ll do to me?”

Dean blinked, as if he’d just been woken from a dream. “Aoife, I never thought I’d see you again.…”

“Don’t worry,” I told Dean. “I’m going to get you out of here.”

“Forget her!” Spider shouted, dragging Ian farther down the tunnel. “She’s done for!”

I heard them, but it was as if they were already far away. I was far too focused on Dean.

“I’m sorry, Aoife …,” Ian started, but the shadows of the Faceless had penetrated the tunnel, and he turned and ran.

I stayed where I was, waiting for the silent hooded figures to approach. They surrounded me, and it took a moment before I could speak.

“I know that your job is to exterminate me,” I said. “It’s what you must do. But before you do, I seek an audience with your king.”

The Faceless tilted their heads, and I knew they were staring at me even though I couldn’t see their eyes.

“Aoife, no …,” Dean said from his cell. “No, don’t do this. You don’t know what he’s like, what you’re getting yourself into.…”

“I do,” I said. “I’m doing what I have to.”

Looking back at the Faceless, I put on my bravest expression. At least, I hoped it was brave. Or merely foolhardy, instead of terrified. “I know you can talk,” I told the closest Faceless. “I know you can understand me.”

“And if we were to take you to the king,” it hissed at me, its voice like steam scalding skin, “what would you have to offer?”

“That’s between me and the king, don’t you think?” I snapped. “I don’t deal with minions.”

The Faceless hissed as one, but then they parted and gestured for me.

“Aoife, no …,” Dean said again, but I held up my hand to stop his arguments.

“It’s all right, Dean.” If this was the way it had to be, I’d do what I had to. I’d talk to the king, and I’d find a way to give him whatever he demanded for Dean’s release.

I walked to the center of the Faceless, and was surrounded by them as they led me to the mouth of the tunnel.

“You must think you’re very brave,” said the Faceless in the lead.

“No,” I said. “Not brave. Just determined.”

“Come, then,” another said. “Come with us, and see the one who waits.”