The Mirrored Shard

12 Across the Bleak Plain

THE FACELESS TRAVELED on foot and kept their circle tight around me, until I felt as if I’d smother.

As we left the city behind, I tried to move out of the tight knot of black robes, but the nearest Faceless hissed, sounding more like a serpent than a thing that was even remotely human, and I shrank back. “I’m sorry,” I said.

As we walked, the sun grew lower in the sky, a violet sunset that cast all of the land in a strange purple glow. I sped up my stride to get closer to the figure in the lead.

“How far are we going?”

“Two day’s walk from here lies the domain of the Yellow King,” said the Faceless.

“I am human,” I reminded him. “I need rest and food and water.”

“We will stop when it reaches full dark,” said the creature. “At the edge of the Moaning Marsh.”

“I can’t tell you how excited I am about that,” I muttered under my breath, but I resigned myself to walking until the Faceless were good and ready to stop.

The land flattened out, the short grass and scrub giving way to dense thickets and underbrush, and the land at the edges of the road growing wetter. The smell of decay and the whine of insects permeated the air around us, and I slapped at every inch of bare skin. I still ended up covered in welts.

I envied the Faceless their cloaks, and their lack of faces.

Finally, when I was just about to collapse and refuse to go any farther, the group circling me veered off the path. I saw a rough camp set up, a fire pit and some battered lean-tos. The stink of the marsh was all around us, and I realized that I’d be lucky to get any sleep.

“Here,” said the leader. He was a bit taller than the others, but that was the only way I could differentiate him. “We rest.”

The robed figures left the road and re-formed their circle, hunkering down on the ground like crows coming to roost. Their cowls drooped over the voids underneath, and after a time I could hear nothing but a slight wind through the reeds of the nearby marsh.

The ever-present cold of the Deadlands soon found its way into my bones, and I made my way back over to their small group and nudged the leader of the Faceless. “I’m cold.”

I got no reaction, and when I waved my hand in front of their cowls, nothing stirred. At least that left me free to go build a fire, if I could find anything to burn.

The marsh stretched as far as I could see, the dank smell of rotting plants rising up to meet my nose as I squelched through the mud, picking off the gray branches of drowned trees where I could find them. The wood was light and dry and would burn well.

I missed my father all the time, but I’d never missed him more than at that moment. He could light fire with a thought—it was his Weird. I had to resort to finding two rocks and striking them together until a spark finally caught the dried grass and twigs I’d stuffed into the center of a pile of sticks.

The Faceless paid no more attention to the fire than they had to me, and I drew close to it, holding my hands above the flames and trying to tuck my jacket around me.

I didn’t think I could sleep with all the worries about Dean, meeting the king and getting us both out of here banging in my head, but I’d drifted off, head bowed low, before I realized it.

The sound that woke me was inhuman, even for this place. It rose from within the earth, low and then oscillating higher and higher until I thought my eardrums would burst. It retreated, increased, as if everything around me in the marsh was screaming.

I got up and pulled a branch from the fire, the flame at the end of it flickering before me as I walked toward the sound. The Faceless never stirred, the wind ruffling the edges of their robes. They paid no more mind to it than statues would.

The marsh mud sucked at my feet, but the ground seemed firm enough a few inches down. I saw a blue light ahead, bobbing and weaving through the drowned forest, and doused my flame to follow it.

I couldn’t say why I was creeping around the Deadlands in the dark, just that the strange sounds and the blue light had captivated me. Dimly, I realized I was under the same sort of compulsion as when Lei had drugged me, but I couldn’t stop moving.

There were more lights, more moaning, only now it resolved into voices, whispers too indistinct to make out what they were saying.

All around me, the blue lights blossomed, and I could see they were tiny bodies, faces, with black eyes and long black teeth dripping with marsh muck.

I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t even do that.

What is she? one hissed. She’s not dead.

She’s marked, another whispered. Marked for the one who waits.

Not anymore, said the first. Now she’ll stay here with us, and we’ll let the marsh swallow up her bones.

All at once, just as I was starting to panic, a different kind of glow filled the marsh, and the bobbing blue shapes fled, screeching. The marsh gave one last, heaving groan and then everything settled again, except for the ever-present wind.

“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” a voice said. The syllables were clipped, from somewhere in Europe.

Reality crashed down around me like a thunderstorm, and I came back to myself. I found myself no longer standing in mud but in water up to my chest, feet sinking deeper into the muck with every passing second.

“Stay calm,” the voice said. “They lure you into the water and you drown without even realizing it. Before you can blink, you’re one of them, trapped in the Moaning Marsh for eternity.”

“You sure know a lot about this place,” I managed. The water was freezing, and my teeth chattered so violently I could barely talk.

“I’ve spent many nights here watching the glow,” the voice said. “Those things—I think they’re dead creatures from the marsh. Certainly not human.” The owner of the voice glided into view, managing to stay on top of the marsh even as I sank deeper.

“I try to help travelers when I can,” said Tesla. “But you’re not just a traveler, are you?”

I gaped, and stopped trying to stay afloat. Rancid water flowed over my lips and up my nose and I choked.

“Easy, easy,” he said. “You’ve got to move toward the shore.” Like the souls I’d encountered in the Iron Land, he possessed a slight silver glow, and when he glided closer to me, he illuminated solid ground about five yards away. “You can do it,” Tesla said. “You just can’t panic.”

I tried to move slowly, to float rather than sink, and eventually I pulled myself into the relatively solid mud, shaking uncontrollably.

“There, now.” He crouched beside me as I spat marsh water. I took the opportunity to look him in the eye, still hardly able to believe that out of all the souls roaming the Deadlands, I’d encountered him. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“You and I have very different ideas about ‘not so bad,’ ” I told him.

Tesla cracked a thin smile. “And I meant what I said before. I see a lot of Walkers, but you’re not one of them. You’re not just passing through; you’re going somewhere.”

“To see the king,” I agreed. His expression told me everything I needed to know about that idea. I tried to put on a brave face nonetheless.

“Then you’re going somewhere, but somewhere you’ll never return from.”

“I have”—I took a deep breath and decided to just come out with it—“I have so much I need to ask you, Mr. Tesla.”

He helped me to my feet and gave a wan smile as he regarded my soaked frame. “Please. Call me Nikola.”

Before I could tell him that I wasn’t sure I could do that, not until I processed that I’d actually met a great man such as him, albeit after death, he started walking, leaving me to follow.

We reached some rocks on the far side of the marsh. A line of blue sunlight had started at the horizon. “The nights are short here,” I said, and then wanted to bang my head against the same rocks for saying something so inane to Tesla himself.

“Nothing makes sense here,” said Tesla. “You’ll find that out if you stay much longer.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I’m just here for one thing.”

“No,” Tesla said. “You may have come here initially for selfish reasons, but now that the Yellow King knows of your existence, you are here at his pleasure. He will never allow you to find what you seek.”

I took in a shaky breath. I couldn’t seem to get rid of the bone-deep cold the marsh had put in me. “I just want to get my friend back. And I found him, so if the king is out to stop me, he’s slow.”

“I’m not talking about Dean Harrison,” Tesla said. “I’m talking about the real reason you’re here, Aoife. The Old Ones.”

I stopped walking at that, and folded my arms. “How do you know so much if you’re just a spirit?”

Tesla shrugged. “I was an inventor in life, and in death I have found ways to harness the energies of this bleak place. They feed me information, fluctuations in the fields.” He scraped a hand across his eyes. “Time was, I knew everything. Now it seems as if bits and pieces fall away as quickly as the bones that the souls grind on Ossuary Road.

“Stopping the Old Ones is something you will never accomplish,” Tesla said. “Imagine my horror when I found, through my Gates, that they were the spark, the source of magic and wonder in the universe. Something so horrible giving life to such brilliance, all across the Land.”

“I really just want Dean,” I lied, but Tesla shook his head.

“The king, the Old Ones—they are all threads binding the universe,” he said. “And I have not as yet figured out how the knot is tied, but I do know that if you pull one string, it will all unravel.”

I stared at Tesla and tried to look stony. “I have to try.”

“And once you steal from the king, and upset the plans of the Old Ones, what is your plan?” Tesla snapped. “You will be a marked woman.”

“I’m a living soul,” I said. “Somebody in the Iron Land is waiting for me.”

“And they found a way to come here and return to the living?” Tesla shook his head. “You know, I’d read theories. I even tried to construct a prototype once, but it failed miserably. Whoever sent you over is a genius.”

“He’s a drunk,” I said. “He doesn’t even know we’re using his device.”

Tesla barked a laugh. “I know how that feels. How you create something and can’t see that it could be used for evil.” His face drew down. “Can’t see what you’ve done until it’s too late.”

“You couldn’t possibly know what the Gates would do,” I told him, picking up on his discomfort. “You couldn’t know what was beyond them.”

“I had hopes,” Tesla said. “To see worlds beyond my own. Everyone in the scientific community laughed at me, but there were a few men, men who were not of science but of the otherworld, who didn’t think what I’d said was at all laughable.”

He went to the edge of the rock and stood silhouetted against the rising sun. “The Fae had been using their hexenrings to visit the Iron Land since time immemorial, taking our children, playing with humans as if we were pets. We just wanted a way to strike back. I wanted to help. I had no idea that us constructing our own Gate, sending the flow the other way, would fracture the barriers between all the worlds, allow things to come from anywhere and everywhere.” He rubbed his forehead. “Yes, things like you and I and full-blooded Fae need to use a Gate, but I always knew that the endgame would be the barriers fraying, time and space crashing into each other, and the destruction of the universe. Only the Old Ones will survive, and that’s the way they like it. They’re probably laughing at us right now.”

“They’re doing a lot more than that,” I said softly. I thought I’d feel shame, but it felt almost good to finally tell someone the truth. “I almost destroyed the Iron Land, and I bargained with them to set things right. All I really got was my mother back, though. They didn’t fix the destruction, and now they’re returning to the Lands because of what I did.”

Tesla shut his eyes. “You found my last Gate. The one to the dreamland, to that awful man in black.”

“Crow’s not awful,” I said, thinking of the sad, pale man who lived alone in the land that controlled the dreams of all the others. “He tried to stop me. But I didn’t listen. And I didn’t listen to anyone else, so now I’m here trying to save my friend who died because I couldn’t live with what I’d done.”

I didn’t have to breathe in the Deadlands, but it appeared that I could cry. Tears slipped down my cheeks, colder than my frozen skin.

“Listen to me,” Tesla said. He came back to me and took me by the shoulders. “Why you came here isn’t important. You were probably doomed from the moment you went under. The Old Ones are the most powerful things in the universe, yes, but the worst one is Nylarthotep.”

Tesla was solid, if gray, as if he were a piece of lantern reel in the world of color. I looked down at his hands. “What happened to you? You’re not like the other Walkers.”

He gave a dry laugh. “I’m what happens after you’ve been a Walker for a few hundred years. Eventually I’ll dry up and blow away. But not today.”

“The Great Old Ones grew terrified of the power Nylarthotep commanded,” he said, “so they dumped him here, cut off from everything, with only the dead for company. Here he’s the Yellow King.”

I shifted my feet. If the Faceless knew I was gone, then all this trying to get them to lead me to the Yellow King would be for nothing. “I should get back to the camp.”

“No!” For the first time, Tesla’s face hardened, and he grabbed me by the wrist when I tried to walk away. I struggled, panicked, but for a dead man he was strong.

“I must have an audience with him,” I said. “It’s the only way to get Dean out of here.”

“And I’m telling you that there’s no hope of that,” Tesla said. “That Fae nonsense about everyone having a thread of life and only when it’s cut by fate do you descend into the Deadlands? That’s bunk. You die, you’re dead, and the spheres keep turning without you.”

“No …” I shook my head and tried to struggle, but there was no undoing his grasp. “No, I heard if it wasn’t your time …”

“You were marked the moment you came to the Deadlands,” Tesla told me. “The Yellow King knows someone with your gifts is his only hope of getting free, of returning to the power he once commanded. The Old Ones might destroy us, or they might usher in a new age of science and prosperity, but if Nylarthotep is freed it will be the end of everything—for the Fae, for the Iron Land, for everything.”

“You can’t know that,” I told him. I didn’t want to believe anything he was saying, but I had a horrible, sinking feeling in my guts that it was true.

“I can,” Tesla said. “Because when I died and came here, he tried to do the same thing with me.”

A wan smile lit his face, and in the growing light I could see the hollow pain in his eyes, the look of permanent loss, of things he could never get back, only remember. My mother had had the same look, for as long as I’d known her.

“He took me from the Catacombs, when my soul had barely realized it was dead,” Tesla continued, “and he asked me to open a Gate. I was dead, so I could no longer use any of my Weird, but he didn’t believe there wasn’t something I could do for him.”

Tesla released me, but he didn’t need to keep me close. I wasn’t going anywhere now. I had to hear the end of his story.

“He tortured me for months—maybe years,” Tesla said. “Time flows differently here, I’m sure you can feel. He tormented me, kept me as his special amusement. And you’re walking into his trap. He’ll string you along, promising to release your friend’s soul back into the world, and then he’ll cut you a deal—your friend’s new life for his own freedom.”

Tesla shut his eyes and sucked in a breath. “And you’ll take it. Because if I had had the power, at the end of my time under him, I would have done anything he asked just to make it stop.”

“I—” I started, but he cut me off.

“You’ll sacrifice what’s left of the Lands for your friend, because that’s what he wants. Nothing but death and destruction. An age under the Yellow Sign, and even the Old Ones won’t be able to stop him if he escapes.”

I tried to stand, but my knees went weak. I’d been tunnel-visioned for so long, focusing only on Dean, that everyone telling me that what I wanted was impossible had flown in one ear and out the other.

“It can’t be true,” I whispered, but even to my ears my voice was thready and unconvincing. More important, I wasn’t convinced anymore.

Where had I gotten the information from? My mother, who was unreliable under the best of circumstances and given to spinning outright fantasies at the worst.

And ever since I’d come here, Ian and Spider and everyone else had told me it was impossible.

“I’ll just …” I swallowed hard. Letting Dean go felt as if I’d reached into my chest and torn out my own heart, as if I grasped it bloody and warm and still beating in my fist, squeezing the last of the life from it.

“Just wake up?” Tesla snorted. “No. Your body is alive but your soul is here, and now that Nylarthotep knows about you, only he can allow you to leave. And he won’t do that unless you bargain with him.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?” I screamed. A flight of birds lifted from the marsh at the sound, disappearing into the sky.

Tesla shook his head. “He only let me go because I was useless to him. I hope you’re smarter than I am, Aoife. I really do.”

He started to say more, but his head jerked up at a whisper of sound from behind us, and all at once I was surrounded by the Faceless. Tesla had vanished surely as a vapor.

What do you think you’re doing? one of them hissed at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, putting the appropriate amount of quaver in my voice. It wasn’t hard. “I followed one of those blue lights … I …”

The leader of the Faceless grabbed me by the arm. “Stupid girl,” he growled, dragging me back to the road.

“We reach the place today,” he said. “No more time for you wandering off.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again, but they’d circled me already and didn’t reply.

We walked, but I barely paid attention to my surroundings. My mind was full of what Tesla had told me, and boiled over when I added to the mix the fact that I was never going to get Dean back.

Had never been going to.

Had let myself be blinded by hope and grief.

Was this what had happened to Tesla, after he caused the Storm? Had he become so numb that he simply faded away?

And what waited for me with the Yellow King? According to Tesla, he was the worst thing in the universe. The root of all evil, really.

Waiting for me. Waiting for me to free him, which was something I was almost sure I couldn’t do here, in the Deadlands.

As if losing Dean wasn’t bad enough, a splitting pain ripped through my skull, stopping me in my tracks.

I moaned and lost my footing, going to ground on the gritty roadbed.

The Faceless surrounded me, whispering among themselves, but I couldn’t focus on anything except the pain. It felt like when I’d first tried to make a Gate without any sort of apparatus to support my Weird. Like I was being torn in half and sent to opposite ends of the universe.

Cal and Conrad must be trying to wake me up, I realized through the pain and my own screaming. I writhed in the dust, stinging crystals coating my throat.

But it was as Tesla had said—nothing happened, and after a moment the pain ceased and I was left shaking and nauseated on the road.

“What happened?” one of the Faceless asked their leader.

“I don’t understand humans,” the leader said. “Get her up. Keep walking. The king is expecting us.”

If I hadn’t been sure that Nylarthotep was expecting me before, that this was all part of his plan, I was now.

I was going into the lair of the one all the spirits had warned me about, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to protect myself.