Pile of Bones (30 page)

Kick over the pile. Do it now.

“Wait,” another voice said. It was the pair of boots. “I know how to find them. We don’t need fire. Just smoke.”

They were silent for a moment. Then three pairs of shoes
left. Only the boots remained. Ingrid shifted position, trying to get a better look. She saw only a worn pair of jeans whose frayed cuffs were tucked into hiking boots. He wasn’t moving. Why? Sam also seemed curious but was unwilling to find a better vantage point. After a few more seconds, he began whispering under his breath. She couldn’t understand what he was saying. He paused, as if listening, then murmured something else, largely inaudible. She made out a single word:
peels
. He spoke again. This time she heard
deal
. Maybe that’s what he’d said before. It had sounded like
peels
, though. Was he reciting poetry to himself?

After another pause, he ducked under the plastic and left the enclosure. Ingrid could hear Sam breathing. She frowned. Then something impossible occurred to her. At first, she denied it. But then she remembered the scene in the bathroom. Andrew’s wide, dark eyes. The faint whiff of ozone clinging to the tiles. Was it possible?

As she watched through the hole in the brackets, two tendrils of smoke appeared. They hovered a few inches off the ground. They had no spark, no source. They were simply there, as if something invisible were burning. The tendrils formed a smoke ring, which began to expand. It was followed by another ring, and another, each one larger, until smoke was pressing against the plastic shell of the construction zone. Sam coughed. Ingrid stood up, holding a hand to her mouth. The smoke made her eyes water. Through the haze, she could see Oliver, but he was slowly becoming indistinct. She took Sam’s hand, not wanting to lose her as well. The shadow beside Oliver might have been Shelby, or not. The smoke was thickening. How stupid they’d been. Dressing like warriors, thinking that they could roll the dice against someone like Mardian. He had precisely what they’d lost. An auditor.

There were two choices left. They could make a run for the elevators. Of course, they’d be followed easily enough, but it would give them a chance to regroup. They could fortify the archive. It seemed like a fitting place for a last stand. The second choice was to run for the emergency exit,
in the hopes that it was still clear. One of them could probably make it. She looked at Sam, already vanishing into the smoke. If they all charged at once, she might be able to escape in the confusion.

Ingrid squeezed her hand. “Listen. We have to get out of here. Stay with me for now, but as soon as I let go of your hand, I want you to run for the emergency exit. It’s past the information desk, in the far left corner. Don’t look back—just run. Understand?”

Sam nodded.

Ingrid couldn’t see the others. The smoke was too thick. She used her sword to raise the plastic cover, then stepped out of the enclosure. Sam followed. Smoke crawled up the walls, forming clouds above the computers. It might have started in the construction zone, but it was everywhere now. The fire alarms were silent. The smoke detectors continued to blink green, like nothing was happening, as clouds gathered in the vaulted arches of the ceiling. The smell didn’t remind her of burned soup, or a campfire. It was something different. It whispered of blind alleys, baked cobblestones, giant clay furnaces. Ingrid almost wanted to breathe it in. For a moment, she seemed to be somewhere else. The ground was uneven beneath her feet. The blade rippled in her hand, and she felt it flowing, part of her blood, her water. In the distance, she heard the boom of the clepsydra. Fortuna’s eyes were upon her.

Something stepped out of the smoke. Ingrid leveled her sword. The shape moved toward her, and she saw the gleam of a knife. She hesitated. It was easier in Anfractus. Her instincts took over. But on this side of the park, things were different. Fel was screaming at her:
Now, strike at the legs!
With one cut, she could open the popliteal artery. It would spray blood like an aquifer—she’d seen it happen on the sands. The sword refused to dance. Ingrid held on to it, trying to shut out Fel’s voice. This wasn’t the Hippodrome. She couldn’t just attack a stranger in the middle of the library. She couldn’t even respond to the negative comments on her last conference paper. All those passive-aggressive jabs at
her methodology. She’d just nodded, as she’d been taught, and said,
That’s a fascinating counterpoint, thank you so much.

On the inside, she wanted to thrust. She wanted to drench the Fiesta Room of the Edmonton Doubletree Hotel in rising arterial spray, wanted to scream
Your in-press article can go straight to hell
as she diced the critics and everyone else who’d told her that she was too old for grad school, that she should really just stick to raising her son.

The smoke cleared, and she saw—neither a miles nor an academic—but rather a stocky kid in a green Roughriders T-shirt and baggy carpenter jeans. The gleam of metal was from the fire ax that he carried. He must have stolen it from the glass case She almost laughed. He could have been a younger Jack Nicholson, except that his eyes weren’t glazed over. They were bright with fear. It was a mystery how they’d both arrived at this point. He should have been watching the game, or cruising Northgate Mall with cash to burn. Instead, he was standing in a smoke-filled library, holding a weapon designed to break through doors. He was taking orders from a nurse who moonlighted as a eunuch. It would have been funny, except that the joke had unraveled a long time ago. The basilissa wanted them dead. She had no qualms about sending boys to do the job. What had she promised this poor kid? What did he think was going to happen?

His eyes narrowed. He tightened his grip on the ax.

“Wait,” Ingrid said. “Let’s just take a second, here.”

“You ruined me.”

She blinked. “What?”

“Holy shit. You don’t even remember.”

Ingrid stared at him. There was nothing familiar. He could have been anyone. Then she noticed that he favored his left leg. There was something bulky underneath the denim, like padding, or—a bandage. She looked at his face again. For a moment, she imagined him wearing a helmet, carrying a sword rather than a safety ax. He’d looked older
in the arx, surrounded by a group of miles. Was it really him? Was this cub the armored warrior she’d attacked outside Pulcheria’s chamber?

“You severed a tendon in my leg,” he growled. “I’m going to walk with a limp for the rest of my life. I’ll never play football again.”

“I’m sorry.”

“My parents can barely look at me. They say I should go to SaskTech and become an electrician. I had an athletic scholarship! Now I can barely sleep, my leg hurts so much. I have nightmares—about you.”

Sam was still behind her. Ingrid hoped that he couldn’t see her, that the smoke was obscuring her form. Where were Oliver and the rest of them? She needed to send them a signal. How did knights do it? They must have waved some kind of pennant. There was a provincial flag hanging above the circulation desk. If she could reach it, maybe she’d be able to communicate in frantic semaphore. Medieval texting. The thought almost made her crack a smile, but then she looked into the kid’s wasted eyes. He was a broken thing now, because of her. She’d always feared that Neil might wake up some day and begin to quietly hate her. It was a phase that everyone warned her about. What she hadn’t expected was that a complete stranger might grow to hate her, intensely, for the rest of his life.

“I know it’s not fair,” she said. “I know you want to hurt me. But you must have realized how high the stakes were.”

“Are you kidding? It was supposed to be fun. Go on quests, gain experience—just like any RPG. I knew about the monsters. But I wasn’t stupid. I stayed away from them. I never expected that another miles could do this to me.”

“I had no choice.”

“I’m nineteen!” His eyes glittered with pain. “I had my entire life ahead of me, and now everything I ever fucking wanted is gone. Because of you.”

He swung the ax wildly. She jumped back. Sam was no longer holding her hand—Ingrid couldn’t see her anywhere.
Gripping the ax two-handed, he swung again. He had the advantage. The ax blade was dull, but with enough force, it would still crush her armor like a tin can. Her sword was barely a prop. She’d have better luck stabbing him with a piece of rebar. She brought it up in time to parry the ax blade, and the shock of the impact made her wrist go numb for a few seconds. Gritting her teeth, she took another step back, keeping the blade high.

“I’m sorry for what I did to you,” Ingrid repeated. “You’re allowed to hate me. If I were in your place, I’d hate me, too. But we had no choice. Pulcheria was going to die.”

“She was safe in her room, until you showed up. It was our duty to protect her. You were the ones who broke into the arx.”

“Latona was going to kill her.”

His expression wavered. “You’re lying.”

“What did Mardian promise you?”

He hesitated, lowering the ax slightly. “He knows a medicus that can fix my leg.”

“The damage is done. The greatest doctors on this side of the park wouldn’t be able to fix your leg. What makes you think that someone in Anfractus could do a better job, without any drugs or technology?”

“She—I don’t know—something to do with the lares. Some kind of partnership. They can do things on the other side. Mardian swore it.”

“He’s manipulating you. He—”

Something struck her in the back of the head. Ingrid stumbled, then sank to one knee. The pain made her want to throw up. She could see white dots in front of her eyes. Dimly, she made out a shape beside her. It was the man in the boots. He was holding a metal support strut. Ingrid touched the back of her head. She felt a tangled mess of hair and blood. The room began to spin.
You’re going to pass out,
her brain told her.
Between the smoke inhalation and the fresh blow to the head, it’s a miracle that you’re still conscious.

“Found one of them!” The auditor smiled down at her.
For a moment, his face resembled a paper lantern. His cheeks were slightly sunken, and he had a sharp nose.

“The lares,” she murmured, speaking to his boots. “Are they really here?”

He chuckled. “Of course. They’re everywhere. Those queer little gods. They couldn’t stay away from a place like this.”

“But—the rules—”

“There are no rules anymore. No sides. Latona’s going to make sure of that.” He raised the steel pole again. “You may have slowed her down, but you can’t stop her. All this smoke”—he gestured to the room around them—“came from one curious lizard that I found sleeping under the photocopiers. Imagine what an army would be capable of.”

“What’s your plan?” She grimaced from the pain. “Set fire to the world?”

“No. Just to the people who stand in our way.”

“Hey,” the kid began. “I’m not setting fire to anybody.”

The auditor stared at him. “You were about to bury an ax in this one.”

“I wasn’t actually going to kill her.”

“Then you’re an idiot.”

“She said that Mardian—”

“Don’t fucking listen to a word that she—”

The white dots cleared. Ingrid wrapped both hands around the blade. The auditor started to turn, but he was still distracted. Lurching to her feet, she raised the weapon to eye level, then drove it back down with all of her strength. It passed through the leather of the auditor’s boot, and she kept pushing until she heard the point scrape against the floor. He screamed and dropped the pole. Ingrid drew out the blade, reversed it, and smashed the pommel into his face. She heard the
pop
of cartilage surrendering to blunt-force trauma. He crumpled to the ground, his foot making bloody, snow-angel smears against the linoleum.

The kid advanced on her, ax held high. She tried to raise the sword, but he grabbed her wrist and squeezed. He had at least a hundred pounds on her, and his grip was a vise.
Ingrid could feel her hand going numb. Then something burst from the smoke and crashed into him. Two shadows went down in a heap. Ingrid switched the blade to her left hand. She was shaking but not scared. The smoke cleared a bit, and she realized that it was Carl who’d knocked him down. They struggled, and then the kid punched Carl in the face. He’d lost his ax in the scuffle, but when you’re built like a tank, you don’t need much else. He pinned Carl to the ground, kneeling on his chest. It wouldn’t take much more pressure to crack his ribs. Carl wheezed but couldn’t cry out. He’d lost his knife.

Ingrid heard a low whistle. Then she heard screaming. The kid’s left hand was pinned to the floor by an arrow. His fingers clenched spasmodically, nails digging at the ground.

“
Gnnah
—shit—oh
shit
—uhn—”

He slumped forward. He’d lost consciousness. A bloody palm print was beginning to form around the wound.

Shelby appeared, holding the bow. “Did I hit something?”

Carl managed to free himself. “You almost hit me.”

“The smoke was in my eyes.”

“Next time, you should yell something. Like
Fire in the hole
.”

“That’s for artillery, not arrows.”

“Then yell
Arrow in the hole
.”

“You’re fine.”

“My ribs beg to differ.”

The smoke was vanishing now. Maybe the salamander had grown tired and crawled back to its nest underneath the photocopiers. Ingrid saw two shapes in the far corner of the room. They were Oliver and Sam. Oliver had raised his knife, and Sam held the fire ax. She must have stolen it in the confusion. The two stared at each other in surprise. For a moment, Ingrid thought that Sam might still swing the ax. Then she lowered the weapon.

“I wouldn’t relax just yet.”

They all turned. Even the wounded auditor, still bleeding all over the floor, managed to crane his neck in the direction
of the voice. Mardian stood by the circulation desk. He was holding someone else. Was it the fourth pair of shoes? It took Ingrid a moment to recognize the figure, who was half the size of Mardian. She went cold as the realization struck her.

Andrew didn’t struggle. He just stood there, calmly, while Mardian pressed the edge of a knife to his throat.