The Mime Order (48 page)

“That’s what I’m wondering,” I said.

His eyes were full of sympathy. “You found Cutmouth. Where? Did she say anything?”

“I realized where she’d be: Jacob’s Island. It took a while to get past the doorman, then the islanders held me up, and—” I took a deep breath. “I wasn’t fast enough. She’d been stabbed by the time I arrived. The last thing she said was that I had to stop the
gray market
.”

“What’s that?”

“
I don’t know,” I admitted. “If a black market is illegal, I guess a gray market is . . . unauthorized. Or tolerated.”

“Jax has to know this,” Eliza said.

“What can he do about it? He can’t report the Abbess
to
the Abbess,” I said, and she sighed. “She’s interim Underqueen. If he lets on that he knows about it, she’ll just kill him, too.”

There was a short silence. Nick turned to look at the citadel, the lights caught in his eyes. “The scrimmage will decide what happens next. We know the Rag and Bone Man has some knowledge of the Rephaim,” he said. “He captured Warden. So we can assume that this gray market has something to do with—”

“Whoa, what?” Zeke interrupted, staring at him.

“Sorry,
Warden
’s back? As in, Paige’s keeper?” Eliza let out an angry sort of laugh. “When were you going to drop that bombshell?”

“Shh.” I looked over my shoulder, certain my sixth sense had flickered. “He’s been back for a while. I tried telling Jax when his allies showed up on our doorstep, but he didn’t want to—” I stopped. “Wait. Someone’s coming.”

I’d only just picked up on the presence of the dreamscape, creeping up on us from somewhere behind the tree. Almost as soon as I said it, a skinny man stepped out from behind the enormous trunk, barefoot and clad in little more than rags. I took a wide step away, hiding my face behind my hair.

“Evening, sirs and ladies, evening.” He swept off his hat with a bow. “Penny for a busker?”

Nick’s hand was already in his coat, on his pistol. “Bit remote for you here, isn’t it?”

“Oh, no, sir.” His white teeth caught the half-light of our flash-lights. “Nowhere’s too far for me.”

“You’re supposed to busk first,” Eliza said, with a nervous laugh. At the same time, she took a step to the left, blocking his view of me. “I’ll give you a tenner if you’re good. What do you do?”

“
I am but a humble rhabdomancer, milady. I give no prophecies, make no promises and play no pretty songs.” He pulled a silver coin from behind his ear. “But I can take you to treasure, sure as there’s a nose on my face. We rhabdomancers are like a compass when it comes to treasure. Take a walk with me, and you shall share it, milady.”

“Don’t,” I said, hardly moving my lips.

“He might have overheard us,” she whispered. “I’ve got some white aster in my bag. We can make sure.”

Every fine hair on my arms was standing on end. He’d been close enough to listen in us. Nick looked wary, too, but he didn’t argue. The rhabdomancer looped his arm through Eliza’s and led us down the hill, joking and telling tales as he went. Zeke ran after them, giving Nick a worried look. I kept my cravat over my face, wondering if I should just hightail it in the other direction.

The rhabdomancer weaved his way down to the trees. I stayed well behind. When he led us toward a dense thicket, I put on my English accent and called to the rhabdomancer, “You’re not taking us in there, are you?”

“Just a little way, ma’am, I promise.”

“He could murder us,” I hissed at Nick.

“Agreed. I don’t like it.” He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Muse! Diamond! Wait a minute!”

But she was already following the busker into the trees, and his words were snatched away by the wind.

Nick switched on his flashlight and followed, keeping hold of my arm. My heartbeat came in heavy thumps. My boots crunched on dry leaves. Or a skull . . . Adrenaline came shooting through my veins. Suddenly I was back in my pink tunic, bundled in a jacket and staring at the trees of No Man’s Land, waiting for the monster to emerge. My fingers dug into Nick’s arm.

“You okay?”

I nodded, trying to keep my breathing steady.

The
rhabdomancer had led them deep into the trees. Glass-like teardrops hung from the leaves, and each was fringed with crystals. Sheets of clear ice coated the branches, making them creak. A spider’s web, strung among the foliage, had been transformed to a silver lacery. Its creator hung from a thread, petrified. Nick’s flash-light beam fell on the others’ footprints, but they were already beginning to freeze over. My breath billowed in dense white clouds.

“Can you feel any spirits?” Nick murmured.

“No.”

We quickened our pace. Zeke was crouching near a small body of frozen water and Eliza was kneeling beside it. I stopped dead. Bluish fog lingered a few inches from the ground. Behind them, the busker was talking with animated gestures: “. . . for years, you know, sir, and I always said there was treasure underneath it. Now, if you’d be so kind as to take this and try to break the ice.”

“Looks like a perfect circle.” Zeke ran his finger around the edge. “How likely is that?”

It didn’t just look like one. It
was
a perfect circle.

“Diamond, are you all right?” Nick said.

“I’m fine. Have you seen this? It’s incredible . . .”

Zeke took the coin from the rhabdomancer and brought it down on the ice. “Twice more, sir.” The rhabdomancer looked over his shoulder. “Twice more.”

My sixth sense was ringing like a set of bells. I’d seen this before, with Warden. The woods. The cold. The absence of spirits. As Zeke tapped the coin against the ice a second time, a wave surged through the æther. The realization punched the breath from my lungs.

He was knocking on a door that shouldn’t be opened.

“Get away from it.” I ran towards them. “Diamond, stop!”

Eliza started. “It’s just ice, Dreamer. Relax.”

“It’s a cold spot.” There was a rough edge to my voice. “A portal to the Netherworld.”

At
once, Nick hooked his arms under hers and pulled her to her feet, away from the ice. Zeke retreated too, swearing, but the rhab-domancer punched him hard in the jaw, making him stagger and fall. The coin slipped from between his fingers and rolled toward the ice. Without hesitating, I snatched one of my knives and hurled it at the rhabdomancer’s head, missing by an inch. He grabbed the coin and cradled it to his chest with one hand, scrambling toward the cold spot with the other.

“They’re coming,” he said. His eyes were unfocused, his lips tilted. “To give me my treasure.”

“Stop!” My revolver was already in my hands. “Don’t do it. You won’t find any treasure there.”

“You’re a dead woman,” he said, and raised the coin.

This time, the impact cracked the ice. The cold spot exploded. A million shards burst up from the ground, blinding me with diamond dust—and with a scream that echoed all over II-4, a Buzzer crawled out of the gateway, into London.

****

With impossible speed, the creature was on top of us. It leaped on the rhabdomancer, clapped its jaws over his head and, with a jerk of muscle, ripped it away. The body slumped, twitching as if it had been shocked. Dark blood pulsed from what remained, spilling on to the cold spot.

It was looking at me. The creature generated its own darkness—a cloud of black static on my vision—but for the first time, I could just about see the rotten giant. It was muscled and grotesque, with a blunt head, and its skin had a shiny, bloated look. Everything about it was too long, as if it had been stretched: its arms, its legs, its neck. A spine pressed through its skin like a knife edge. Its eyes were pure white orbs, slightly luminous, like moons.

The
sound of flies filled the air. Sweat ran down my neck. This creature was far larger than the one I’d faced in the woods.

There was a pouch of salt in my trouser pocket. Making no sudden movements, I drew it into my palm and looped the golden string over two of my fingers, showing it to the creature. I didn’t know how much it could understand, but it might sense what was inside.

The Buzzer stretched its neck with a wet clicking sound, then shook its head so fast it blurred. It sank its blunt fingers into the earth, freezing it, and crawled towards us.

I tried to focus on the auras of the other three. They registered like bad signals on my radar. The Buzzer was turning the æther to a dense, congealed mass, incapable of supporting spirits. Clots surrounded it, like blobs of oil in water. Nick tried to make a spool, but the spirits pulled against him so violently that he had to let them go.

There was no strength left in my knees. My vision shorted out for a moment. If I didn’t do something, we’d all go into spirit shock. I waited for the creature to get a few feet closer before I tipped a handful of salt into my hand and hurled it. It collided with the Buzzer with a sizzling burst of smoke, making a sound like a firecracker.

When it opened its mouth, showing its abyssal throat, a terrible scream emerged from inside it. Not just one scream, but a thousand tortured cries, moans and sobs, all held in one mouth. The sound pulled up every hair on my body and chilled the blood beneath my skin.

“Run,” I shouted.

We pounded through the trees, down the steep incline, toward the bottom of the hill and the car. Branches slashed at my face and snared in my hair. Ice skidded under my boots. I pulled frantically on the golden cord, blinking away the darkness in my vision. Warden might be our only chance to live. The ground seemed to pull at my
ankles,
dragging my limbs and eyelids downward.
So tired
. I kept going.
Just stop.
I kept going. When we reached another clearing, Zeke’s knees gave way. He fell as if his bones had disappeared.

Nick went down next. I staggered to a stop and grabbed his shoulders, trying to pull him back up, but my arms were running water and I collapsed beside him, shuddering. My aura constricted, flinching away from the creature, shortening my link to the æther. Suddenly I couldn’t feel Zeke, who was farthest away. With a blink, he vanished from my perception.

Stop I need it stop stop it’s like dying can’t breathe can’t breathe stop

My aura was like a vital organ squeezed in a fist, hampering its function. My eyes watered with the effort of staying conscious. Spirit shock was creeping up on me. My fingers were tipped with gray, my nails with a sickly white. I could breathe, but I was drowning. I could see, but I was blind.

Can’t focus stop can’t think stop stop

Eliza was ahead of us, a few feet away from Nick. She pushed herself up on her arms, gasping out curses, but the heels of her hands were slipping on ice and she couldn’t seem to get back to her feet. I couldn’t feel her dreamscape or her aura. Half-blind, I opened the pouch of salt again.

“Circle,” I wheezed at Nick.

That noise erupted again, the screams of the damned in a rotting cavern of mouth. Gritting his teeth, Nick dragged Eliza toward him, his strength doubled by adrenaline.

“Give me the salt!”

I thrust it into his hands. The Buzzer loped toward us, blurring with the darkness, white eyes and shadow and raw-boned rage. Too fast. Nick’s hands were shaking.

“Zeke!” His voice was hoarse. “
Zeke!
”

The creature was too close, bearing down on Zeke’s shivering body. I hurled my spirit across the clearing.

When
I collided with the dreamscape, it was just like it had been in Sheol I: a blistering point of impact, sending sparks through my spirit. A force was festering in this dreamscape, deep within the innards of its mind. With all the effort I could muster, I cut through its first line of defence, into its hadal zone.

The pain was catastrophic.

My spirit fell into what felt like a quagmire. I was on fire, a tongue of fire, burning inside out. This was no dreamscape.

This was a nightmare.

The hadal zone of this creature was excruciatingly dark, but I could just about see what my dream-form was standing in: a rotten mass of dead tissue. Blood bubbled through a slick of melted flesh. The sludge gripped my ankles and pulled me down, down, down until I’d sunk up to my waist in it. A skeletal hand gripped my nape, bending my body toward it. I threw my weight backward, trying to escape, to fly back to my body, but it was too late. Layers of decay closed over my head.

****

No air, no thought, no pain, no brain.

Evanescence.

Dissolution.

The loop of endless nothing, nothing,
nothing
.

In the void, there was one last inkling of thought: that this was hell. The absence of æther, of anything at all. This was what we feared, we voyants. Not death, but
non-existence
. The total destruction of spirit and self. Faces slipped away. In here there was no Nick and no Warden and no Eliza and no Jaxon and no Liss and everything was fading and Paige was going,
going
. . .

****

My
silver cord tightened, like a harness, and unearthed my dream-form from the rot. I surfaced in the terrible dreamscape, gasping for air that didn’t exist, beating at the hands that grasped me. Voices screamed in languages I didn’t understand. They wouldn’t let me go. I was going to die in here, inside the Buzzer’s dreamscape. Not sinking and suffocating. I broke a putrid arm in two, and with a last wrench, the cord threw me back across the æther, into my own body.

My lids lifted.

I took a breath.

The salt circle was sealed. Nick dropped the empty pouch and collapsed on his side as if he’d been shot.

The æther rippled, creating a kind of ethereal barrier around us, like the fences that had held us in the penal colony. The creature reeled back as though the salt had transformed to molten lava, throwing out more of its strange static. Was that an aura, horribly corrupted? It let out one last death-howl before it lumbered away, leaving its darkness to hang like smoke in the æther.

The four of us lay beneath the frozen branches of the trees. “Zeke,” Nick choked out, shaking him with one hand.