The Chestnut King: Book 3 of the 100 Cupboards (16 page)

“Henry,” Zeke said. “What do we do?”

“Pauper son.” Nimiane’s voice was calm, soothing. “You rouse my ancestors. You disturb their darkness.”

Henry blocked her out. He shut his eyes and saw only distant vines, a web of strength, and his own sputtering gold, struggling to reach them.

“Henry,” Henrietta whispered. “Do something. The old one’s coming. He’s climbing out of the floor. He’s sniffing.”

Henry turned.

Coradin was smiling, his stiff black hair on his shoulders. He pulled a long silver blade from his belt. Henry took Henrietta’s little kitchen knife and handed her his flashlight. In the middle of the room, a shape crawled
slowly out of the hole. Henry’s eyes left Coradin’s and settled on the black ball the ancient man pushed in front of him. In it, compressed, tiny, Henry saw worlds, millions of lives, forests and generations, tangled tight in a common death.

Coradin’s mouth moved, but Nimiane spoke. “The Blackstar,” she said. “Is it not more potent than a weed, more precious than a dandelion’s gold? Through it, my long-sire drank the world, as he will drink you. Through it, our blood was changed.”

Henry jumped forward and kicked the old man’s wrist. The ball rolled free, and a wail rose up like the howl of some otherworldly wolf.

The man grabbed at Henry’s legs, snarling. Henry kicked him in the shoulder and jumped back. Zeke and Henrietta were beside him. Henry braced himself for another attack. While Coradin laughed, the old man whimpered and crawled slowly forward. The ball had wandered into a corner where it no longer flamed. Henry ran to it, but stopped, blinking. It was nothing but smooth stone. The same lifeless stone as the walls. It was nothing at all. Mad Nimroth’s marble.

Henry picked it up and bowled it past the old man, back into the hole. It dropped, cracked, and bounced on what must have been stairs, and after a long moment of silence, it found the bottom. Dust snowed from the ceiling with the echo.

Three other pale faces were peering from the hole, blinking into the flashlights. The old man slithered down
past them and disappeared. Coradin walked forward, and with one strong movement of his leg, slid the circular stone back over the hole.

He stepped onto it. Henry and the others stepped back.

“What will you do now, pauper son?” The voice was still Nimiane’s. The big man stared into the light, unblinking. His three ear notches stood out like black teeth in his pale skin.

Henry licked his lips and gripped his small knife. “I think we’re going to have to kill you,” he said.

“Me?” Nimiane laughed. “I cannot be killed. Did you not know this?”

“I killed one of the others,” Henry said. “You just have to cut the puppet’s strings.”

“The puppet’s, yes. And then the puppet dies. But I am not the puppet. I hold the strings.” Coradin stepped forward. “I do not think you will kill this one. He is strong. But even if you do, even if I commanded this fingerling to kneel before you so that you might snip his strings, there are others. Kill them, and I can make more. Can you stand against them all? The emperor has many such that he can give me, and fingers are never difficult to find. I do not make Endor new. Death cannot be freshened or reborn. I make a new Endor. I sit in the saddle of the world, with fleets at my command both east and west. The emperor’s red-shirted thousands kneel before me, and the world kneels before them. Even at Endor’s zenith, before the first madness, when Nimroth held the true Blackstar and looked to the corners of the world, he did not have such
obedience.” Coradin held his fist to his chest. “I, not Niac, not Nimroth, I shall be the greatest of the undying blood, though you shall not live to see it.”

“Stay close,” Henry whispered.

Henrietta, pressed against his side, was breathing loudly. “What?” she asked.

“You heard,” Henry said. He didn’t want to say it again. In his left hand, Henry gripped his knife. In his right, he gripped his necklace. The metal was more than warm. It was hot, and his hand throbbed more than his jaw. His eyes had shifted again, and he was watching the thick gray strands weaving off Coradin’s head and down through the open black pyramid. He was looking at the vines, traces of his father, frayed and broken around the pyramid door.

Coradin took another step forward, off the slab. Henry saw his legs tense. The big man was going to spring. “Where is your defiance, pauper son?” Nimiane laughed. “You, who did not fear to enter my dreams, who entered the tomb cities of Endor? Where are your weeds now? You proclaimed yourself to be my curse, but I have seen nothing of it.”

“Tomahawk,” Henry said, hoping Zeke would understand. “Now.”

Coradin hesitated, confused.

Zeke threw his hatchet. Henry threw his knife.

The crypt pulsed with green and gold. Coradin raised his arm against the hatchet and flinched as the small kitchen knife, a galaxy of swirling green blades, bloomed
with fire in his chest, knocking him to the ground. The hatchet rattled on the floor.

Henry was already running, pulling Henrietta by the sleeve.

He slid to his knees in front of the shelf, but he didn’t fight to reverse the swirl and clamber into the attic. This was no retreat. He couldn’t see his own right hand. He saw only an arm that ended in blazing dandelion fire, and he felt nothing but its scorching heat pulsing in his limbs.

His fire met the frayed ends of his father’s vines and lit them like a fuse. Henrietta screamed, and Zeke ducked as a vein of bloom exploded up the wall, spraying stone, chattering like a thousand mother squirrels. The flaming weeds fire-cracked across the ceiling and down to the two stone doors.

Stone shards sprayed across the room as Coradin struggled to his hands and knees. Every inch of the sealed arches had bloomed.

The room, already bright, was blazing. Each dandelion bloom spun its fire-story in front of Henry’s eyes, but he had no time to thank them. “Go, go!” he yelled, and he grabbed the pyramid off the shelf.

With Henrietta and Zeke behind him, hanging on to his cloak, he dashed across the room, shut his eyes, turned his shoulder, and jumped into the blooms.

Flowers and stone fell to pieces, and Henry tumbled into a narrow hall. Zeke and Henrietta piled up behind him. Henry scrambled out of the tangle and grabbed his
backpack from Zeke. He threw it over his shoulder and tucked the little wooden pyramid under his arm. Henrietta handed him his flashlight, and he pulled her to her feet.

“Run!” she said. Zeke was pushing them both forward.

The hall was only wide enough for them to run in single file, and black-door mouths lined both sides. Faces and old shorn heads occasionally peered out at them, blinked, and ducked away from the flashlights. Henry could feel Henrietta’s grip on his backpack, and he knew Zeke wouldn’t fall behind. Ignoring the doorways, he followed the hall as quickly as he could. He followed it around curves and up short flights of stairs.

And then it twisted, bent sharply, and doubled back.

Henry stopped, breathing heavily, coughing on the stale air and dust. The hall ran straight in front of him, straight as far as his flashlight could shine, straight and sloping down.

Henrietta panted behind him. “Henry, I have no idea what you did back there, but those were not normal dandelions.”

Zeke laughed, coughing. “You think?”

“They looked like they were made of fire. And one shot some rock in my eye.”

Henry moved forward slowly, shining his flashlight into doorways. He didn’t want to be moving down, not even down a slight slope. He wanted stairs. He sneezed and rubbed his nose on his sleeve, and then his forehead with
the back of his hand. He was sweating. “All dandelions are made of fire.”

“Is the guy with the witch in him going to die?” Henrietta asked. “I’d think anyone would with fire dandelions growing in his chest.”

Henry leaned into an arch. Stairs. A tight little spiral, but going down.

“He won’t die,” he said. Henrietta was leaning her backpack against a wall, with fingers locked on top of her head. “And we have to hurry. He’ll be following us soon. He’s a fingerling.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Henrietta said. “But you should have killed him.”

Henry stopped. They’d left Coradin on his hands and knees. He could have cut the finger off. The hatchet was right there on the floor. But he hadn’t expected his knife to work so well, and he hadn’t known what would happen when he connected his fire to his father’s old vines. He’d been in a rush to get out of that awful crypt and nothing more.

She was right. Henry knew he wouldn’t be feeling nearly as frantic if Coradin were dead. But he couldn’t worry about that now. He spotlit a doorway on the other side. Stairs. And this time, going the right direction.

“Right,” Henry said. “We’ll try this.”

“Henry,” Zeke said, pointing his light down the hall. “Look.”

Henry lifted his own flashlight. A group of shrunken
people, huddling together, were inching toward them. Henry handed his cousin the pyramid and dropped his backpack. He pulled out three more pieces of jerky and whipped them down the floor of the hall.

The little group froze, all sniffing. And then, scuffling and shrieking like gulls over bread, they began to fight.

“You know,” Henrietta said, “we might need those. Next time toss one of the sandwiches.”

Henry pulled off his cloak, folded it roughly, and rammed it under a strap on his backpack. Pulling the pack back on, he took the pyramid from Henrietta and pointed his flashlight at the stairs.

“Up,” he said. “Hope it goes all the way up.”

Henrietta put a hand on Henry’s backpack, and Zeke put a hand on hers. Henry stepped into the cramped, tunneled spiral, and he began to climb.

The stairway was not much wider than his shoulders, and the ceiling, peaked in the center, was only a foot above his head. The stairs themselves were shallow, four inches each at most, but worn even thinner in the center. A coat of dust had settled over it all, and Henry swirled up a cloud as he went, quick-stepping at a pace he hoped he wouldn’t have to keep up for long. Zeke began sneezing first, and then Henrietta, but Henry didn’t slow down. Twisting around a central stone column, they climbed, and Henry dragged his fingers along the wall, brushing them over rotting wood doors, or flicking his flashlight into openings as they passed, hoping for some sign that they were no longer belowground. His legs felt like they were filling with sand
and grew heavier with each twist, with each new doorway he left behind, with every step and every new cloud of dust.

They wouldn’t exactly be hard for Coradin to track. Not that he would need a stairwell breathing out an endless cloud of dust, or the three sets of footprints that had plowed it up. He had something better. He had gray strings that would track Henry wherever he went. Coradin would track the smell and the rot of Nimiane’s blood in Henry’s flesh.

Henry bit his lip and pushed his tired legs on. How far underground had they been? Six stories? Seven? He should have killed Coradin. Caleb would have. His dad would have. Anastasia probably would have. But Henry had run away, and now he had to keep running. He had to run until he faced Coradin and cut his puppet strings. Until he faced the other fingerlings and cut theirs. And then, when the witch made more, he’d have to face them. Unless his scar grew first, and his face turned gray and his eyes went glassy and the witch could speak out of his mouth like she had out of Coradin’s. Unless she gave him his own finger. Henry knew that he would be running until the witch died. The undying witch. Even if his father trapped her again. Even if she was resealed back into Nimroth’s foul crypt beneath the ancient streets of Endor, her blood would still send down its roots through Henry’s body.

Henry lifted his foot for another stair and staggered forward onto a landing. Henrietta let go of his backpack and dug a knuckle into her side. Both she and Zeke had
pulled their shirts up over their noses and mouths. Their foreheads were gray except where drips of sweat had drawn clean lines.

As the dust caught up to him, Henry coughed.

“You throw up quite a wake,” Zeke said.

Henry swung his light around the room. “Sorry. You want to trade?”

“There’s more?” Henrietta groaned.

Henry nodded at the walls. “Maybe. What do you think?”

The room was an octagon of black stone. The stairway down was on one face, and stairs continued up directly beside it. The other six faces held doorways, all of them open, all of them small, all of them leading down narrow halls.

Henrietta walked to the center of the small room and looked into each door. “I don’t know. I don’t see daylight anywhere. That’s what I’m really hoping for. You think we’re still belowground?”

Zeke stepped into one of the low doorways. “Long and straight,” he said. “No light and no fresh air.” He moved to the next one. “Same.”

Henry set the pyramid down and watched the dust curl up beneath it. “Okay,” he said. “I know that the undying Endorians all went crazy, and their kids and grandkids built a huge network of crypts and sealed them up so they wouldn’t have to deal with them. It makes sense that Nimroth and his family would be in one of the deepest—nobody would want him around. But we’ve been climbing for a while.”

Henrietta sat down.

“We have to hurry.” Henry kicked the bottom of her shoe. “I really hope he is, but somehow I don’t think Coradin can be too far behind us.” He wiped his forehead on his arm. “Man, I wish I knew how to seal doors. He’d be stuck right now. And Nimroth and Nimiane’s crazy sister are loose now, too, though I doubt they’ll follow us.”

Zeke turned back from the last door. “Coradin’s the one who followed us through the cupboard?”

“Right,” Henry said. “He has three notches in his left ear.”

“And a dandelion in his chest.” Henrietta puffed loose curls out of her face, but she didn’t stand up. “How do you know all this, Henry?”

“He told me his name when he tried to catch me in Hylfing,” Henry said. “And I have dreams. But we really need to decide which way to go.”

“Whatever you think, Henry,” Zeke said. “I don’t know the first thing about any of this. We’ll do what you tell us.”