The Mirrored Shard (9 page)

The water closet wasn’t big enough for both of us, really, and the door wouldn’t shut completely. I squeezed in close to Cal, sharing air and heartbeats.

We heard shouting in the cabin, but it was all passengers. None of the usual screams of robbery. I peered through the tiny crack left in the door.

The pirates moved soundlessly and with purpose, snatching jewels off necks, watches off chains and wallets
from shaking fingers. I felt my stomach tighten. This was all wrong. They were mechanical. They might have been automatons for all the emotion they showed.

They wore canvas pants and jackets, rusty weapons strapped to their bodies. Gas masks with bulging glass eye sockets and flexible hoses covered their faces explained how they could have survived in their half-ruined ship.

The leader glared at everyone he passed, and I could sense the weight of his gaze even through his mask.

“Something’s wrong,” I whispered to Cal. They didn’t move like men, didn’t speak. It was as if they’d been conjured out of the air and the smoke that surrounded their battered ship.

Cal flared his nostrils and sniffed. “They don’t smell like men,” he murmured. “They smell like dead things.” His face rippled, and I could tell that he was fighting to keep the ghoul inside him under control. I didn’t want to be close to him if it came out, but I’d rather be pressed against Cal as a ghoul than deal with whatever was out there.

“What do we do?” Cal whispered.

I watched as the pirates advanced. “I’m supposed to know?” Why did I always have to be the one with the plan? Why did I always get stuck in these horrible situations?

I thought about what Conrad had said, that creatures were spilling into the Iron Land from everywhere else. Could this be a part of it, these strange, lumbering creatures chasing humans through the sky? Could the airmen out there have risen from the wrecks in the desert below, animated once again to take to the sky and pillage crafts full of the living?

Given what was happening in Arkham, I decided that was as likely as anything else. But reasons didn’t really matter now—what mattered was getting us out of this.

“Here’s the plan,” I whispered. “We stay here, and we don’t move, and we hope they just pass us by.”

“That’s a crappy plan,” Cal whispered back.

I shoved my hand over his mouth as the pirate leader drew within feet of us, head swinging back and forth as if he was sniffing the air.

The feeling of my heart nearly throbbing out of my chest was joined by a sharp, lancing pain in my shoulder. The shoggoth bite venom gave off only the faintest sense for Cal when he was in human shape, but from the pirate, also in human shape, there was pain so intense that flashbulbs exploded in front of my eyes.

I was only half surprised when the pirate whirled abruptly and yanked the water closet door open. Cal had been right—it was a crappy plan.

The pirate stood over me, staring. Finally, he put out his hand.

“I don’t …” Pain made my voice small and insubstantial. “I don’t have anything for you.”

The pirate yanked me up with one hand, and the stench of decay rolling off him added another dimension to the senses-bending agony I was experiencing. He smelled like spoiled meat, like flowers wilted and rotted inside a greenhouse, like diesel exhaust trapped inside a tiny space.

He growled, low, and I got the impression that was the only sound he
could
make, that some horrible catastrophe had ripped his voice from him.

I panicked. I kicked against him, struggled, shoved. I hit him in the sternum and felt a give under my hands that sent nausea roiling in my guts. Under the jacket, a stain spread, and it fell open to show a mass of green and black flesh with snapped ribs beneath.

It looked as if he’d been in an accident, perhaps the one that destroyed his airship, the steering yoke slamming into his chest and leaving a long dent that crawled with maggots.

I screamed, and lost any advantage I might have had, thrashing wildly. I wanted to fight, but seeing a dead man walking around had driven reason from me.

The other pirates moaned and turned toward us, while the passengers had gone into a blind panic, trying to flee anywhere they could, crying, falling over seats. One of the stewardesses fell and twisted her leg, and I heard bone snap.

My Weird, usually the thing I clung to, was useless. I couldn’t send this creature anywhere, couldn’t even break the dead man’s iron grip.

This might be it, I realized. I wouldn’t be taken, if what I knew of the animated dead from Cal’s magazines and comics was true. I’d be tossed off the side of the ship for amusement—or worse, I’d be food.

I managed to wrench free of the pirate’s grasp, but he still loomed over me, and the pain from my shoulder was so bad I could barely see straight. His origin was definitely the result of the encroachment of the Old Ones—creatures of their ilk always made my bite scar flame with pain.

He raised a rusty wrench twice the width of my forearm.
It was so stupid—I’d managed to escape Thorn, survive the Mists and Draven’s madness, and I was going to die by wrench.

Something flashed above me, something gray, like a streak of smoke, and then Cal slammed into the pirate from the side, falling on him, all teeth and claws and ashen, veined skin.

He wasn’t human any longer. The pirate went down as Cal tore at him, and I managed to scramble up and grab the wrench.

“Move!” I shouted at Cal, and raised the wrench over my head. I brought it down, again and again. The pirate’s gas mask goggles cracked, the canvas leaked, and I kept smashing until there was nothing but a crimson smear on the thick carpet of the airship.

Other passengers got the idea and fell on the pirates, using coffee servers and heavy cases and walking sticks to beat on the walking corpses until one by one they fell, snapping and snarling and trying to bite the passengers. I shivered. Looked like I’d been right about the purpose of the raid—food, not jewels.

Fortunately, the chaos meant nobody noticed that Cal had changed, and he ducked back into the closet to reverse into his human shape. His clothes were shredded, but there was nothing we could do about that.

I thought everything was going to be fine until the stewardess with the broken leg pointed at us and started to scream.

“That’s a demon!” she shrieked. “Something from the underground, from my nightmares! Keep it away from me!”

One by one, heads, once finely coiffed or sporting natty hats, now with bloody cuts in their scalps, turned in our direction. Now that the pirates were subdued, the bedraggled, bruised faces were all focused on us.

“Crap,” I muttered. Cal just stared, until I grabbed him and jerked him with me. There was nowhere to go but across the gangway, unless we wanted an angry mob burning Cal alive, or simply tossing us both out a hatch. I thought about pointing out to the ungrateful cow that Cal had probably saved all our lives by giving us an opening to attack the pirates, but I figured she wouldn’t take the truth about what he was well. Humans never did. I turned and ran, my feet clanging on the rusty gangway.

The void below was dizzying, blue sky and orange earth meeting each other in an endless loop above and below the sliver of metal that connected the two ships.

I caught a whiff of the smoke still billowing from the battery compartment, but kept running. Cal clung to me, and angry passengers gathered around the hatch watching us. All we needed was the pilot to show up with his shock pistol and we’d be done for.

I found the clamps to disengage the gangplank after we reached the other side, and let it fall away. We bobbed up immediately, our slight weight in comparison with the huge zeppelin’s making us rise far and away. The entire crew had boarded our ship, leaving theirs conveniently empty for us.

Cal wrinkled his nose and coughed. “I don’t think these fumes are doing us any favors,” he wheezed.

I found extra gas masks hanging in the cargo area and pulled one on. The ship was so small you could walk front
to back in ten steps. The abandoned pilothouse, a bubble with the glass screens cracked and half fallen away, sat above the main cabin.

“Put this on,” I told Cal. I checked the gas mask. It was free of blood and skull fragments. The leak must have caused the pirates to crash, but even with no pilot, something had brought them back, made them take to the sky even though they’d been smashed to pieces on the desert floor below.

“Thanks,” Cal said, his voice tinny and distorted through the filters of the mask. “Now what do we do?”

“We …” I looked up at the pilothouse. Blood had painted the console, but the ship was still flying. The balloon bladders were intact, and we had at least a little bit of battery power.

“We should fly,” I told him.

“You think we can figure it out?” I could sense Cal’s skepticism.

“I mean, we have to,” I said. “There’s nothing down there to survive on, and Las Vegas is still hundreds of miles away.”

I looked out at the desert and the low rumple of mountains in the distance. “We have to,” I repeated. “
I
have to, for Dean.”

“What if there’s nothing there?” Cal asked. “What if this Horatio Crawford is a fraud and there’s no way to bring him back?”

“Then at least I will have tried,” I told Cal. “And I won’t have to wonder anymore if there was something I could have done and didn’t. I won’t have to go through life missing him more than I already do.”

Cal thought for a moment, and I waited, feeling every bit of me vibrate with anxiety. This was the only way. The only way I could try to help Dean.

“Okay,” he said at last. “Let’s see if we can’t get this heap to stay in the air for just a little longer.”

To the Walled City

I
THREW MY ARMS
around Cal and hugged him, hard. He grunted but hugged me back. “You know whatever stupid idea you have, I’m on board for it,” he muttered. “You’re pretty much the only friend I’ve got besides Bethina.”

We climbed to the pilothouse, and I set about trying to figure out the controls. Cal squinted through the cracked windscreen.

“So what were those things back there?”

I ran my fingers over the panel. Dried blood flaked off under my touch and drifted to the scorched deck.

“I don’t know,” I told Cal. “Have you ever seen anything like them?”

“Never,” he said. “Not even down in the Lovecraft sewers.”

They could have come from the Mists, but the things that lurked there were generally alive.

I turned on the aether feed experimentally, but it was
dead. We had no navigation systems, just my eyes. The fans clattered, causing more smoke to billow around us and deposit a layer of soot on our exposed skin.

The ship lurched forward when I opened the throttle, and I moved the yoke until the pitch and yaw arrows lined up. I locked the yoke in place and set the compass to true west. At least this way we wouldn’t crash. I kept us lined up with the mountains, tracking the sun as it made its way behind them.

“Aoife?” Cal said. “You all right?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t get the pirate’s face out of my mind, the spray of red, the stench as I’d thrust my hand into his rib cage. I knew in my gut the pirate had been human once, before he’d crashed into the desert. Only to rise again as … what?

Looking skyward, I saw the blot of the Gate that would admit the Great Old Ones and move them into the same sphere as the living world, until they landed upon the earth. The blot was the size of a silver dollar now, larger than the sun by half and impossible to ignore.

You did this
, it whispered to me.
You’re the cause of all of this—the dead rising, the dreams that are driving people mad
.

Crow, the figure who lived in the place of dreams where only a Gateminder could visit, had told me their influence could herald a golden age … or the end.

Judging by what had happened on the airship, it was definitely the latter.

Cal squeezed my shoulder. “We’ll be all right,” he said. “I mean, how hard can it be to get to San Francisco? Not like it’s easy to miss.”

He thought I was worried about piloting, about finding our way to the West Coast, and I let him think that. Eventually, I’d have to admit to Cal, and to myself, the price I’d paid to get my mother back. The price I might have made the world pay. I didn’t know what the Old Ones would do when they arrived, but their influence led me to think it couldn’t be anything that would help the world.

The Iron Land was torn enough as it was—the country was in disarray since Draven’s disappearance, people were openly defying the Proctors, and those were just the obvious changes.

I stared out the windscreen again, watching the desert pass beneath us and trying not to think about what would happen when we landed.

We flew over Las Vegas in the dark, a glittering handful of jewels flung on the carpet of the desert around it, past the black, mirrored expanse of Lake Mead and over the Hoover Dam, aether rising from the refineries it powered in blue, silver and purple streams that buffeted the airship. It made me feel as if I were inside a vast dome made of light.