Heaven's Bones (22 page)

“That man, that gypsy—he walked out of the house, looking for something. The fog didn't seem to bother him. I thought he was …”

The tone of forlorn hope struck her and she hesitated on the path.

“He went into the house,” she said. “The manor house, just behind us. Can you see it?”

“I don't know what you're talking about, child,” he snapped, abruptly.

Fanny opened her mouth, closed it. With a shrug, she turned and walked along the rutted path.

Stumbling a little in the thick fog, Weldon followed.

“Why won't you?” Dirk Penhallow taunted. Artemis turned red and bit his lip.

Dirk wouldn't relent. “Are you afraid? Fraidy-cat?”

“No,” Artemis retorted. “I just think it's wrong, that's all. Don't want to rob my mam, an' all.”

Dirk snorted. “It's not your mam's knife, not really. And I've a right to see it; the Penhallows had it first.”

“No one had it first,” corrected Artemis. “Save the Lady that came from the moor.”

Dirk struck him lightly on the shoulder. “Yeah, I've heard all that, same as you. Aren't you the least bit
curious?”

Artemis bit his lip again, looking at the ground and thinking furiously. The truth was, he
was
curious. Dirk had the right of it there.

“All right,” he said finally. “But we're only to look, and leave right after, understood?”

Dirk nodded, his face eager.

Artemis knew his mam wouldn't like him playing with his cousin Dirk, although for family's sake she wouldn't forbid it outright.

“He's a darkling one,” she had said once over the night's washing-up. “Sight or Curse is the gift of the Lady.”

He'd only heard the term—
darkling
—once or twice, and wasn't quite sure what it meant—although he did know it was true what some said of his cousin—that the boy had the gift of
cursing, and sometimes he wished bad things on people that later came true.

Today Artemis' mother was taking a basket to the Tregards', where grippe had taken down half the family and there was no one well enough to cook, although the little ones that weren't stricken were parceled out betwixt the neighbors. With his father at the tin the house was empty, with no one to stop the two boys from creeping into Artemis' parents' room and investigating the bottom-most drawer of the great oak dresser.

Artemis had no brothers or sisters to interfere, which was unusual in their small Cornish village. “It's why you have the Sight so strong,” said his mother, philosophically. “You've no sisters of your own to thin it out betwixt and between you.”

They approached the cottage like housebreakers, although the door was unlocked and they knew full well the house was empty; still, it added to the adventure to creep up to the door, to assign one to lookout duty, to listen for footsteps. Once in, it was easy enough to tiptoe across the kitchen floor, and his mother's well-swept sitting room.

But outside his parents' bedroom Artemis hesitated, despite Dirk's gestures. His parents' bedroom was a mysterious place, their private sanctuary, and he never went in except under particular circumstances—to help his mam drag out the carpet for beating, perhaps, or to bring his father a hot stone when he was poorly.

“Fraidy-cat,” Dirk mouthed, and with a defiant shrug Artemis pushed open the door. The room was small and neat, although given grandiose proportions in Artemis' imagination. The white coverlet was folded tidily across the foot of the brass bed and dust motes winked golden in the beam of light that streamed between the parted curtains.

It was a peaceful scene, and Artemis would remember it for a long time after that day.

The oak dresser stood altarlike on the other side of the room, and they ventured across the polished wooden floor, stopping in panic and bursting into laughter when a board squeaked. They kneeled at the foot of the dresser, and wrestled the heavy drawer open between them.

Here was the treasured Irish linen, hand-embroidered and never brought out in Artemis' memory, and a few pieces of silver carefully wrapped and stowed away. Artemis reached to the back of the drawer and groped around, coming out finally with a bulky object wrapped round and round again in a long swaddle of linen.

It gave him a queer feeling to handle the bundle, and he passed it over to Dirk, who took it eagerly.

“Good-o, Artie,” he whispered, untucking the corner of the swaddling and unrolling it. It seemed an absurd length to wrap such a small object in—the heirloom silver had not half so much. The linen piled up on the floor between them, provoking more hilarity, until the knife was exposed in Dirk's hands.

“ 'Strewth, Artie,” he said, lifting it up to the light. “Isn't that a pretty thing, then?”

It was a long thin blade, deadly sharp, with an elaborately patterned handle made to nestle in the palm of the hand. Mastering his unaccountable distaste for the object, Artemis leaned over and looked at it.

Was it his imagination, or were there dark stains crusted at the base, where the blade was sunk in the grip?

The handle was covered in a repeating circular pattern. When he peered at it, he saw the swirls looked like skulls, grinning at him obscenely. He blinked and looked again, and now they were row upon row of sinuous dancers, an entire harem of beautiful girls, smiling invitingly. When he tried to look closer they dissolved again into meaningless spirals.

Artemis felt nauseous.

Dirk ran his finger over the patterns appreciatively.

“That's workmanship,” he breathed. “They knew their work, they did, back from where the Lady came from.”

“It's just a story,” said Artemis, gruffly. “No one knows if it's true.”

The blade, he saw, was as shiny as if it had just been polished and there was a faint design on the flat of it, hard to see unless you saw it move in the light: a double ribbon twisted together.

“ 'Course it's true,” said Dirk. “Leastways, your mam believes it, and my granddam too. And it seems like a thing from another world, don't it? Here,” he held his hand out to Artemis, the blade lying flat on it. “Hold it awhile. It feels warm, almost. Almost alive.”

Reluctantly Artemis reached out, and then paused. The sick feeling in his belly worsened.

“Don't be a damned jessie, Artie,” said Dirk exasperated, seizing his hand and pressing it down against his so that the knife was sandwiched between them.

Something jolted through Artemis' bones: a jolt as strong as if he'd dropped out of a tree and knocked the breath from his body. He wanted to pull away from Dirk's grip but was immobilized.

An image shot through his vision: a dark place with a bright bloody flame burning in the center, a flame with a blue core at its crimson center. Something leaned over it, a huge, burly creature, corded with muscle and slicked with sweat, and thrust a length of metal, clasped in an enormous pair of iron pinchers, into the flame.

Once the metal glowed red-hot it was withdrawn and Artemis heard the clank of a hammer in the darkness, and the hiss of tortured water.

The muscular figure loomed again, and again thrust the blade-form into the fire, and now it seemed him that there were faces in the flames—not the friendly images one sees in the hearth fire of
an evening, but figures with their mouths stretched open in silent, tormented screams; figures trapped and burning forever in the service of that monstrous blacksmith.

Then the image shifted and changed like meltwater, and now he saw a woman facing him, cloaked in a dark gray robe laced with silver. Her hair was silver too, under her hood, and her skin was so white it seemed almost blue. But her eyes were black, with no pupils to be seen. She held the knife in her palm, just as Dirk had done, holding it out as if it was a gift, and she grinned at him; her lips were blue and chilly and her teeth were separated and sharp, as if they'd been filed into points.

Artemis screamed and jerked his hand out of Dirk's grasp, and the knife went flying and skittering across the polished floorboards. Dirk's face twisted in annoyance, and Artemis clutched his hand to his chest. It felt like it was burning.

“Sweet Jesu.”

They both turned, startled, at the voice, and Artemis felt his heart drop to his belly: It was his mother, her mouth open in horror, her expression terrible. She was standing in the doorway of her violated bedroom, her visiting hat still pinned to her hair. The knife was lying at her feet. She was as white as a wraith.

Dirk managed to speak first. “We were just …”

He paused, and never finished. Fiona Donovan strode the three steps it took to reach him and struck him with all her might in the side of the head.

“Abomination,” she hissed in rage.
“Darkling
. Get out of my house.”

Dirk raised a trembling hand to his temple, where the red print of her hand stood out. Artemis was frozen in shock. He had never seen his mother strike anyone; he had never seen her angry.

Dirk's face flushed.

“Bad luck to you and yours,” he spat at her.

“Get
out,”
she barked, and grasped him by the collar.

The earth shook beneath their feet.

They froze in place; they all knew, every man, woman, and child in St. Agnes Town knew what that shaking meant.

The Weald Hole, where the men were after the tin. The mine was collapsing.

Artemis
saw
it: the dark tunnel, a trickle of water down the passage. The length of the wall peeling away like the bark of a tree. The wood supports buckling under the strain, the men trapped beneath.

“Da,” he gasped, seeing his father's face startled and white in the light of his lamp, and then a fall of rock and the spark extinguished.

“No,” said his mother, releasing Dirk and backing to the door. “Saints and angels, no!”

She was gone, outside, to the streets, where all the women must be gathering now, gathering to go down to the Weald Hole and know the worst.

“Oh God,” said Dirk to the empty doorway. “My God, I didn't, I didn't mean …”

He shot an agonized glance at Artemis, who still sat frozen, the image of his father in the rock fall as painful as a punch to the stomach.

Dirk's expression shifted again, twisted and angry.

“Damn you all, then,” he said, his voice trembling and weak.

He staggered for the door. The knife still lay on the floor, and he scooped it up. With a final bitter look at his cousin, he was gone.

Artemis breathed slowly until the image faded, until he was able to rise and join his mother and walk with her and the women down the well-worn path to the Weald Hole.

It was a passage they had tapped for the last year, and solid every day of that year. Until today, when it crumbled away like sand.

Twelve men gone, not as bad as it could be with thirty down there, but bad enough.

Artemis' father was one of the twelve.

Fiona Donovan never mentioned the knife to anyone, not even Artemis. She wore her black, and when she found the third Pollard son was looking for a house for himself and his new bride, she made over her lease and packed herself and Artemis off for London, where her brother's family lived and she could make her living doing laundry in the rich folks' houses.

They never spoke of Dirk.

Bryani House, the Mists

Here and there from his vantage point in the front doorway, Trueblood could catch a glimpse of gray-green foliage where the vapor thinned, but for the most part the fog was solid. It reminded him of the flank of an immense animal, breathing in and out.

For an immeasurable time he had existed, torn asunder, within the Mists. Jaelle and the rest of his kin shattered him, damn their eyes, but the Mists held him helpless and disembodied when he otherwise might have restored himself.

And then he had restored himself, drawn by the thoughts of others in places touched by the Mists, following their voices like echoes down a corridor until he found Robarts' mind, ripe with insanity and despair.

Could it be that once he'd found Robarts and his dominion, this place where an ancient, archaic world was rebirthing itself from the stones of its foundation, that the Mists themselves released him?

Robarts' world, with its machines and great engines. Its empires, creeping across land and sea. Warrens and alleyways, teeming with humanity, where life was as nasty, brutish, and short as any place where bloody Nature ruled. Cathedrals, where people tied to earth
by their own mortality dreamed of heaven. It was a fascinating place, at once attractive and repulsive.

It suited him. He would make it his own.

Trueblood drew closer to the vaporous wall, drawn to it in spite of himself. Everything he'd read, everything he'd learned told him the Mists did nothing without a purpose.

What did they want with him?