Dying Is My Business (25 page)

“So what are we supposed to do?” I asked. “It doesn’t even look like a puzzle.”

“I think we’re supposed to choose one of these eight figures,” he said. “But what’s the criteria here? Why select one over the others? Who are they supposed to be?”

“It must have something to do with those symbols,” Bethany said. “If we can decipher what they are, maybe we can figure out the rest.”

Thornton moved closer to study the designs etched onto the figures. “They’re not symbols,” he said. “They’re pictograms. Runes. It’s Ehrlendarr, the language of the Ancients.”

“Can you read it?” I asked.

Thornton sighed. “Gregor taught me to how to speak it a little, but reading it was never my forte. This first one looks like it means breath. Wind? Damn, I’m just not sure.”

I examined the figures. Other than the different runes on each one, they were identical. I didn’t see any other clues as to who they might represent. I reached out to touch one of them, but Thornton batted my hand away. It felt like being hit with a slab of cold meat.

“Don’t,” he snapped. “Not until we’re sure. If you choose the wrong one, valves open in the walls and this whole chamber gets flooded with fire.”

I pulled my hand back. Apparently Gregor took his security seriously. Anyone who made the wrong choice was toast. Literally.

I studied the figures again, making sure to keep a safe distance. “If the first word is breath, or wind, maybe they’re not people. What else comes in groups of eight?”

Thornton hung his head and chuckled to himself. “I’m an idiot. I was so focused on the runes it didn’t even occur to me to wonder why there were eight of them. Bethany, look at these other markings around them, like each one is giving off energy or power.”

Bethany’s whole face lit up. “It’s
them
.”

“It’s got to be,” Thornton agreed. “That first word isn’t breath or wind, it’s air. These runes represent the eight elements.”

“Eight? Aren’t there only four?” I asked.

“No, there are eight,” he said. He pointed to each one of the figures. “Air, earth, water, fire, metal, wood, time, and magic.”

“So these figures are the elements,” I said.

“No,” Bethany said. “They’re the Guardians.”

“The who now?” I felt like I was lagging about a hundred miles behind them.

“They have other names you may have heard of,” she explained. “The Athanasians. The Everlasting. Those Who Dwell Between. They’re ageless and omniscient beings who live at the center of all things, in a place called the Radiant Lands. It’s said that at the dawn of time, these eight beings were granted eternal life and dominion over the elements, one for each of them. They’ve always been there, watching over the world, maintaining the balance. Some say they’re gods and that they created the Ancients, and from the Ancients came the mortals and all life on Earth.”

“You buy any of that?” I asked. It sounded pretty crazy to me. But then,
everything
was sounding crazy to me.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never been very religious.”

“If they’re supposed to be watching over us and maintaining the balance, they’re doing a piss-poor job of it,” Thornton said. “All the suffering and misery in the world, all the darkness and evil, and the Guardians don’t do a damn thing. It’s like they’re above it all, happy to just sit back and watch while everything falls to shit.”

Something occurred to me. I turned to Thornton. “In the bar last night, you told me there were forces that were supposed to keep everything in balance. You meant them, didn’t you? The Guardians?” He nodded. “But you also said something went wrong.”

“It did,” he said. “Centuries ago, one of the Guardians disappeared. Left. Just gave the world the finger and took off to who knows where. It threw off the balance, and everything changed. Guess which element this Guardian had dominion over.”

That one was easy. “Magic,” I said, and a piece of the puzzle slid into place. “That’s what caused the Shift.”

“You got it in one,” Thornton said.

“So when Morbius created the Five-Pointed Star, he was trying to restore the balance that had been changed by the Shift.”

“Except it got him killed, and the balance is still screwed up,” Thornton said. “I’m not surprised no one took up the mantle after him. Who’s going to risk their lives to put things right when even the Guardians don’t have your back? When they can just leave their posts whenever they want and let everything come crashing down?”

I looked at the figures again. “So if there are only seven Guardians left,” I asked, “how come there are eight of them here?”

Bethany’s eyes grew big, and she turned to me with a wide grin. “Trent, there might be hope for you yet. I think you just gave us our answer. If solving this puzzle depends on us choosing one of the Guardians over the others, it makes sense it would be the one who’s not there anymore.”

She pointed at the eighth figure, all the way at the end. I’d thought the rune on that figure looked like a simple circle, but now, as I looked closer, my heart lurched in my chest. It was an eye inside a circle—the same symbol on the brick wall in my earliest memory. The rune for magic? How could that be? What did it mean?

Thornton moved his hand to the figure Bethany had indicated. He cast a quick, uncertain glance at her. “You’re sure? I told you what happens if we’re wrong.”

“Do it,” she said, nodding gravely.

He smirked. “That’s so you, Bethany. Possibly your last words before dying and they’re a direct order.” He pressed his palm against the figure, and it sank an inch into the surrounding rock. A loud grinding noise echoed through the tunnel, followed by the sharp, metallic
clank
of a lock giving way on the other side of the wall. The slab rolled aside on a hidden track, disappearing into the wall and leaving a huge, round doorway before us.

Bethany let out the breath she’d been nervously holding, and went through first. Thornton and I went after her, and once we were through, the slab rolled back into place behind us. Before us sprawled an enormous, vaulted tunnel, much wider and longer than the last one.

It was like walking into a museum of New York City history—that is, if museums were filled with mountains of garbage. Lit by more torches along the walls, the tunnel was so cluttered with junk that there was only a narrow path down the middle for us to walk on. The junk had been sorted into piles: broken TVs of every make and model, from early 1950’s tubes to high-definition flat screens; discarded dressers and chests of drawers; mounds of old mattresses; a towering pyramid of aged air-conditioning units; a teetering, almost sculptural heap of garbage cans, both old-time aluminum receptacles and modern polyethylene bins. Bethany was right about Gregor being a hoarder, only I hadn’t expected his treasure chamber to be filled with the things most New Yorkers left out on the curb for garbage pickup. It was a far cry from the piles of gold and jewels I’d imagined.

Something glittered by the side of the path, catching my eye. It was a tall pile of subway tokens. The Transit Authority didn’t use tokens anymore, I knew. They’d been replaced years ago by prepaid swipe cards that were a lot cheaper to manufacture. I’d never seen a token before. Curious, I reached for one, but Thornton shot me a warning glance.

“Don’t touch anything, don’t take anything,” he said.

I pulled my hand back. “I was just—”

“Trust me, he’ll know,” Thornton interrupted. He didn’t mention what the consequences of touching Gregor’s “treasure” were, but after learning what would happen if we chose the wrong answer to the puzzle, it was a fair guess that the punishment would be gruesome and permanent.

Thornton turned to continue walking, but his legs suddenly gave out from under him and he fell. I heard the distinctive snap of bone, but I couldn’t tell what had fractured. His limbs looked all right, even the mangled arm he’d reset. A rib, maybe? Dead and decaying at an accelerated rate, he’d become as fragile as porcelain.

Thornton squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth, pushing himself up onto his hands and knees. He punched the floor angrily. “Damn it, come on!”

I took him by the shoulders to help him up.

“Don’t,” he said. He didn’t look at me, just shrugged my hands off. With a groan, he sat back on his haunches, wrapping his arms around his stomach as if he were in pain. In the guttering torchlight I saw his hands were marbled with black necrotic tissue. The lights from the amulet on his chest pulsed even more weakly than before. “I was supposed to have twenty-four hours,” he said. “You told me I had twenty-four hours.”

Bethany moved toward him. “Thornton, what’s happening? Talk to me.”

He turned his face away from her. When he spoke his voice sounded hollow. “I can see myself rotting. I can
feel
it from the inside. It’s horrible. You should have left me dead, Bethany. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask you to bring me back.”

“I didn’t know what else to do,” she said. She knelt down in front of him. “I’m sorry, Thornton. I know you’re worried, and I know you’re scared, but I won’t let anything happen before we get you back to Gabrielle. I promise.”

He turned to her, finally. His eyes were dry, but I thought he would have been crying if he could have. “You can’t promise that, Bethany. No one can.”

Silently, she stood, offered him her hands, and helped him back to his feet.

We continued down the tunnel. Ahead of us was another titanic doorway, this time filled with bright light pouring through from the other side. The air grew colder as we approached it. I closed my trench coat around me, my breath steaming in front of my face, and followed Bethany and Thornton through it into the light.

On the other side, I paused and blinked, certain what I was seeing couldn’t be real. I’d expected another chamber or tunnel, but what spread out before us now as far as the eye could see was a vista more suited to the Himalayas than a cavern beneath the streets of New York City. We were standing on a stone bridge, long and wide and rimmed with ice. In the distance a range of snow-capped mountains rose out of a shroud of white mist. I walked to the edge of the bridge and looked over, past the enormous icicles that dangled beneath us, but the mist hid the ground below. It was impossible to tell how far down it went. There was no visible light source in this place, and yet light permeated the landscape from all directions. It looked like sunlight, but it couldn’t be. We were still underground. How could there be sunlight beneath the city? How could
any
of this be here?

“Where are we?” I asked, my breath forming a cloud.

“Tsotha Zin, also known as the Nethercity,” Thornton said. “It’s a safe haven, a place where many of those who believe it’s become too dangerous on the surface choose to live, under Gregor’s protection. They don’t trust anyone who’s still on the surface—topsiders, they call them—but Gregor and I have an understanding.”

I stared out at the mountain peaks in awe, and noticed tiny shapes along the slopes that resembled houses. “You’re telling me someone built a city under New York?”

“No,” he said. “I’m telling you someone built New York over a city.” He cupped his hands by his mouth and shouted, “Gregor!” His voice echoed across the mountaintops. He called it again. I thought, skeptically, that Gregor was an odd name for a dragon.

As the echoes died away, the mist below the bridge roiled and broke. A massive shape reared up before us like a mountain in its own right, only it was alive and moving, an enormous, reptilian head at the end of a long, sinuous neck.

I gasped and took a nervous step back. Gregor bore only a passing resemblance to the dragon on the cover of
The Ragana’s Revenge
. His hide was shingled with thick, stone-gray scales, not green ones. Where his eyes should have been there burned two cold, white fires. His head was encircled with yellowing ivory horns that swept back like a crown from his serpentine face. There was something that seemed almost prehistoric about him, an air of such immense age that suddenly I had no trouble believing he was as old as Bethany claimed.

The nostrils at the end of his long snout flared as big as windows as he inhaled a deep breath. The massive suction nearly pulled me off my feet. Bethany held onto my arm to keep from falling over. Then the dragon opened his titanic jaws and let loose an angry, deafening roar. The heat of his breath blasted me like a furnace. I couldn’t help noticing that his teeth were bigger than I was. He could swallow me with a single bite.

“It’s okay, Gregor, they’re with me!” Thornton shouted.

The dragon closed his jaws, the echo of his roar bouncing across the mountains and dying away. He lifted his head high, exhaling plumes of steam from his nostrils, then lowered himself to the bridge again. Once more, the dragon inhaled mightily. I braced my legs to keep from being vacuumed into Gregor’s nostrils. Bethany clung to me again until it was over.

“The tiny female is unknown to me. You know strangers are not welcome here,” Gregor said. The long spiky bristles that dangled like a beard from his chin quivered as he spoke. His voice boomed across the mountain range like thunder.

If my jaw could have dropped any farther than it already had, it would have landed at my feet. Not only was the dragon talking, he could speak English. I turned to Bethany, but she put a finger to her lips before I could say anything. I turned back to the dragon. He was studying me with his burning eyes. Somewhere in that white fire I sensed a vast intelligence.

“This one, the male,” Gregor continued. “The stench of death clings to him. He is not what he seems.”

I stiffened. Just how much could Gregor tell about me with a sniff?

“Yeah, he’s all kinds of wrong,” Thornton agreed. “But even so, I can vouch for him. I can vouch for them both.”

“Very well.” Gregor swiveled on his long neck to face Thornton. “I see you have returned with the Breath of Itzamna upon your chest, old friend, and the scent of the dead. I regret that your fate has found you so soon. I will miss your companionship.”

Clearly uncomfortable, Thornton changed the subject quickly. “Please tell me you still have the box I left with you.”