The Mirrored Shard (23 page)

Tesla shut his eyes and sucked in a breath. “And you’ll take it. Because if I had had the power, at the end of my time under him, I would have done anything he asked just to make it stop.”

“I—” I started, but he cut me off.

“You’ll sacrifice what’s left of the Lands for your friend, because that’s what he wants. Nothing but death and destruction. An age under the Yellow Sign, and even the Old Ones won’t be able to stop him if he escapes.”

I tried to stand, but my knees went weak. I’d been tunnel-visioned for so long, focusing only on Dean, that
everyone telling me that what I wanted was impossible had flown in one ear and out the other.

“It can’t be true,” I whispered, but even to my ears my voice was thready and unconvincing. More important,
I
wasn’t convinced anymore.

Where had I gotten the information from? My mother, who was unreliable under the best of circumstances and given to spinning outright fantasies at the worst.

And ever since I’d come here, Ian and Spider and everyone else had told me it was impossible.

“I’ll just …” I swallowed hard. Letting Dean go felt as if I’d reached into my chest and torn out my own heart, as if I grasped it bloody and warm and still beating in my fist, squeezing the last of the life from it.

“Just wake up?” Tesla snorted. “No. Your body is alive but your soul is here, and now that Nylarthotep knows about you, only he can allow you to leave. And he won’t do that unless you bargain with him.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?” I screamed. A flight of birds lifted from the marsh at the sound, disappearing into the sky.

Tesla shook his head. “He only let me go because I was useless to him. I hope you’re smarter than I am, Aoife. I really do.”

He started to say more, but his head jerked up at a whisper of sound from behind us, and all at once I was surrounded by the Faceless. Tesla had vanished surely as a vapor.

What do you think you’re doing?
one of them hissed at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, putting the appropriate amount of
quaver in my voice. It wasn’t hard. “I followed one of those blue lights … I …”

The leader of the Faceless grabbed me by the arm. “Stupid girl,” he growled, dragging me back to the road.

“We reach the place today,” he said. “No more time for you wandering off.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again, but they’d circled me already and didn’t reply.

We walked, but I barely paid attention to my surroundings. My mind was full of what Tesla had told me, and boiled over when I added to the mix the fact that I was never going to get Dean back.

Had never been going to.

Had let myself be blinded by hope and grief.

Was this what had happened to Tesla, after he caused the Storm? Had he become so numb that he simply faded away?

And what waited for me with the Yellow King? According to Tesla, he was the worst thing in the universe. The root of all evil, really.

Waiting for me. Waiting for me to free him, which was something I was almost sure I couldn’t do here, in the Deadlands.

As if losing Dean wasn’t bad enough, a splitting pain ripped through my skull, stopping me in my tracks.

I moaned and lost my footing, going to ground on the gritty roadbed.

The Faceless surrounded me, whispering among themselves, but I couldn’t focus on anything except the pain. It felt like when I’d first tried to make a Gate without any
sort of apparatus to support my Weird. Like I was being torn in half and sent to opposite ends of the universe.

Cal and Conrad must be trying to wake me up, I realized through the pain and my own screaming. I writhed in the dust, stinging crystals coating my throat.

But it was as Tesla had said—nothing happened, and after a moment the pain ceased and I was left shaking and nauseated on the road.

“What happened?” one of the Faceless asked their leader.

“I don’t understand humans,” the leader said. “Get her up. Keep walking. The king is expecting us.”

If I hadn’t been sure that Nylarthotep was expecting me before, that this was all part of his plan, I was now.

I was going into the lair of the one all the spirits had warned me about, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to protect myself.

The One Who Waits

A
S WE WALKED
, I detected a subtle change in the landscape around us. The Deadlands were varied and terrifying in every aspect, but now I sensed a shift in the very fabric of reality itself. My Weird made me sensitive to such things. The trees turned in odd directions, the branches curling into spirals. The ground appeared to shimmer and reappear, first as sand, then water, then back to sand.

I sensed the insidious influence of something, someone, on the landscape, on the very physics that made up this twisted mockery of reality that was the Deadlands.

Tesla had been right. Nylarthotep, if this was him, was powerful beyond anyone I had encountered.

I tried not to let that sink me into a panic as we walked on, the landscape shimmering more and more at the edges.

“So when do we get to the palace?” I asked, more to
distract myself than to make conversation. The Faceless wouldn’t answer me anyway.

“There is no palace,” the leader said, surprising me. “There is only the view of the Yellow King, or his absence.”

“All right, then,” I muttered. I thought the Fae had loved to be cryptic, to muck around with people’s heads, but they had nothing on the Faceless. Tremaine could take lessons from them.

“If I’m to have an audience with him,” I said loudly, “I am going to have to actually see him.”

“You’re awfully eager for a mortal,” said the Faceless. “To look upon his visage is to endure madness and pain beyond anything you can imagine.”

I stopped, stared into the black hole beneath the creature’s cowl. “You have no idea what I can imagine. Or endure.”

He wheezed something in a language made of whispers and wind. I think he might have been cursing my stubborn refusal to be scared.

“Come,” he said. “We draw near.”

We walked on until the road disappeared, shimmering into a thousand gently glowing lines that contained stars, supernovas, suns—shreds of the universe peeking through tears in reality.

I winced, and forced myself not to put my hands to my temples. Each of the tears felt like a Gate, and my Weird ached to explore them, control them, bend and shape them until they’d take me anywhere I wished to go.

“This is as far as we go,” the Faceless said. “We are creatures of the dead, and what lies beyond …”

A slight wind came from the rifts, ruffling the capes of the Faceless. It almost appeared that they were scared themselves.

I knew I was.

“What lies beyond is not,” I said. “I get it.”

“I don’t understand the living,” the Faceless said. “Why you would voluntarily subject yourself to such a thing?”

“Because sometimes there are things more important than living,” I said.

I stepped forward, away from the creatures, and knew I was no longer speaking solely about Dean. Tesla had shown me that my coming here was never really about Dean, and Chang before him had made it clear too. It was about my inexorable destiny, both as the bringer of destruction and the only one who could reconstruct reality. Because of my Weird, and my position as Gateminder, that would always be my destiny.

I had made a bad bargain once. I had bargained selfishly—the Old Ones’ return for my mother. I’d been selfish here, too, but there was still time to fix it.

All I had to do was strike a good bargain with the worst creature in all the Lands, and I’d be home free.

“No pressure, Aoife,” I muttered to myself as I took another step forward.

The rifts hummed all around me. There was no sound in space, but the sheer power of the cosmos, the background music of the stars and planets, sang to my Weird, urging me to merge with the universe, become stardust.

I ignored it as best I could.

Nylarthotep had to be somewhere beyond these tears
in reality. His power was distorting the Deadlands, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t still standing on solid ground. Controlling reality was a Fae trick—keep your enemy off-balance, keep control of their reactions. It hadn’t worked when I’d been in the Thorn Land, and it wasn’t going to work now.

As I moved between the star roads, I became aware of a faint sound, of black smoke and dust rising all around me.

“Is it her?”

Her
.

Her
.

The Gateminder
.

The destroyer
.

The one who walks between worlds
.

I flinched. I hated that name, the name the rebel factions in Lovecraft had coined for me after I blew the Engine trying to make a bad deal with Tremaine.

“I want the king,” I said, loud enough that my voice echoed back at me. “I want Nylarthotep.”

She wants the king
.

The king
.

The watcher
.

The planner
.

The devourer of minds
.

Well, that was encouraging.

“I know you’re here!” I shouted. “Stop playing games with me.”

Games
, the smoke hissed at me.

Games and riddles and ciphers
.

Secrets
.

Lies
.

I squinted into the dust, feeling it sting my eyes. A face came into focus here and there, frozen in an expression of torment. They were like the souls and spirits I’d encountered before, but these were torn and shredded, twisted. They were just as affected by the proximity of the rifts as my Weird was.

“What happened to you?” I asked the cloud of souls. “Why are you here?”

We came
.

We crossed the barrier
.

We saw
.

And now we wait
.

“Wait for what?” I said, trying to be patient. If souls decayed even in the Deadlands, it must be exponentially faster.

For the end
.

The end of Fae and man
.

The end of days
.

The end of the stars and planets
.

The end of all things
.

“I want to see Nylarthotep,” I said again. “And I want to see him now.”

I sensed a shift, and the spirits drew back. I wondered if they were like me, humans with a Weird trapped by the Gates, or if they’d been tricked by Fae into walking through
hexenrings
only to end up here, or simply stumbled off the edge of the page, the way people did in the old stories, the ones people furtively passed around when the Proctors couldn’t hear.

It was easy to forget there’d been a world without magic before the first Storm exploded into the human world. A world where these things were just stories for children, distilled from stories for adults, to keep the darkness beyond the campfires out there, where it belonged.

But there had been, and these people were relics of it.

“You’re a rare case,” a voice said. It was textured and cultured, a rich velvet curtain of a voice, far from the rasp or growl I’d expected. “Most men would give up their lives to avoid meeting me face to face.”

“I’m not most,” I told the voice. “And I’m not a man.”

A laugh. Low, like a warm finger dragged across skin. “Then approach, girl who is not like most. Tell me why you seek the favor of the one who waits.”

I took one step, then another. It wasn’t like I could turn around. Reality was so distorted, I wouldn’t be able to find my way back without opening a Gate, and I couldn’t imagine that, in the Deadlands, a new Gate would lead anywhere good.

The distortion grew stronger as I approached, and the rifts fell away. My stomach lurched. I’d never gotten close to another being who could manipulate reality the way Tesla or I could. There was probably a good reason for that, because this was the worst I’d ever felt and still managed to stay conscious.

“Does it bother you?” Nylarthotep asked. He sat in a simple black chair with a high back, a robe similar to the ones the Faceless wore swirling to hide his figure. He wore a cowl emblazoned with the Yellow Sign. It wasn’t embroidered or painted, though—Nylarthotep’s robe was made
of the universe, and the Yellow Sign was a slice of a sun, churning and flaming upon his brow.

I felt dizzy looking at him, and it wasn’t just because the vortex of unreality had grabbed me with its iron grip and refused to let go. I’d never seen anything like Nylarthotep up close. He felt like the Old Ones.

Worse, though. The Old Ones were incredibly ancient, but they were neither good nor evil. They simply existed, in the way of planets and the universe, an existence that could no more be denied than sunlight could.

Nylarthotep pulsed with malignance. If you could describe evil and malice as a figure, as a feeling, it would be this. This nausea, this panic, my hindbrain screaming that I was close to something no human was ever meant to see.

“Of course you bother me,” I said. “I’ve been dreading meeting you ever since I decided to come here, back in San Francisco.”