Chapter Twenty-Nine #4
She handed Mrs. Rose the child. “I need you to take him and run,” Elswyth said. Mrs. Rose took the infant and smiled, cooing. Then she looked confused.
“Where did you get a baby?”
“Run!” Elswyth said. She pushed Mrs. Rose off the table and down the tunnel that led toward the exit. Her pink dress disappeared into the shadows. Then Elswyth turned around and ran back into the room.
Silas turned to her. “What are you doing? Elswyth, run! I’ll hold him!”
“I can’t! Not without Persephone!”
Silas sliced another vine and then two more. Sweat glistened on his brow, and his shoulders slumped. The flame from the broken lantern was dwindling, and Gall stepped closer, vines testing the ground, searching.
Silas turned to her, exhausted. “Elswyth, please, ru—”
A vine the size of a man’s arm struck out at Silas. It impaled his stomach, protruding, blood-soaked, from his back.
Elswyth screamed, reaching out as the vine lifted Silas into the air. He slid farther down, inch by inch onto the vine, as blood dribbled from his mouth.
He raised his pistol again, shakily, and fired. The bullet missed Gall, instead shattering one of his tentacles. Silas tried to shoot again, but the gun fell from his hand.
Gall flung Silas across the room, discarded. He slid to a stop on the floor by Aranyani’s pool.
Elswyth ran to him, but Gall stepped between them, his tentacle vines blocking her path. He lowered himself down like a spider, examining her, and she was face-to-face with his lifeless eyes.
“Don’t fret, Elswyth. His life was unimportant. He was merely a tool. You, on the other hand… your life would be a great loss.”
Elswyth scrambled backward. She grabbed a piece of broken wood from the flames. Its tip burned like a torch. She thrust it at Gall, and he retreated into the shadows.
“A little fire will not kill me, Elswyth. I am life itself. I am the wet and rot of the ancient wood. I am the strength of green and growing things.”
Elswyth looked around her, desperate for anything she could use. And then she saw it. Sitting there, near the flames from Silas’s lantern, was her living engine. A glass orb of compressed, flammable gas.
She backed up, diving for it, and then held her torch to the surface of the sphere.
“Come any closer and I’ll do it,” Elswyth said.
Gall paused. He was silent for a moment. “The explosion would kill us all, Elswyth. Your sister is made of wood now, too,” he said. A vine gestured toward Persephone, where she lay motionless in her tree. “Would you end her life as well?”
“What life, Gall? You’ve taken that from her,” Elswyth said.
“I could save her. I could make her new again. After all the time you’ve spent searching for her—could you live, knowing it was you who killed her? You, who thinks all life is sacred?”
Elswyth looked at her sister, frozen in wood. Her face was still slack, her eyes now totally gray. It seemed that she’d lost her will to live as soon as she’d relinquished her son. A single tear fell from Persephone’s eye. But was it a small smile that Elswyth saw on her lips?
Elswyth set her jaw. “Everything dies. It’s our time, Gall.”
She dropped the torch and pushed the living engine off its stand. It rolled into the flames, glass cracking.
Gall screamed. He dove for the engine, vines wrapping around it, trying to push it from the fire.
Elswyth turned and ran. She got three steps away before the explosion hit her in the back.
When Elswyth came to, her body screamed with pain.
Cold stone pressed against her skin; when she opened her eyes, she saw she’d been thrown against the far wall of the chamber.
Bones lay scattered around her, and her body ached from a thousand cuts and bruises.
Blood dribbled from her mouth onto the floor.
The room came into focus. Gall—what had once been Gall—was at the center, burning.
His vines whipped around the room, covered in flame.
They flailed wildly, destroying the laboratory and the catacomb walls.
Gall’s corpse, at the center of it all, was a ball of flame, barely recognizable as a man.
An inhuman screeching echoed through the chamber, joined by the hissing and cracking of wood.
Behind Gall, Persephone’s tree was a torch. Fire consumed the trunk to the highest branches, filling the chamber above with smoke. There was no sign of her sister beneath the blaze. Only pure, white-hot light.
Heat washed over Elswyth, making her face shine with sweat. All around her, lab equipment burned. Even the elderwood roots that held up the walls were aflame, burning through the ground like seams of coal. Bones fell from the ceiling like bombs, flaming skulls shattering on the floor.
She tried to push herself up, but pain rocked her stomach.
Then she saw it, protruding from just above her navel: a piece of metal shrapnel.
Blood pooled around the wound, darkening the torn ferrosilk of her dress.
The shard of metal was the size of a blade, nearly buried to the hilt in her stomach. Panic seized her.
She winced… but found that she could still move. She sat upright, pushing herself against the wall, and reached for the shrapnel.
She paused, staring at her hand. It was completely coated in shining white wood.
Her heart beat quickly, and she scrambled to grab the shrapnel, pulling it out of her stomach.
Beneath the torn ferrosilk of her gown, more pale elderwood shone, glowing with its own light.
A small crack in the wood showed above her navel, bleeding slightly.
She watched as it resealed itself, and the wound vanished.
The Ebony, she thought. She looked to the burning sky, saying a silent thanks to Kehinde.
Her ferrosilk gown had been destroyed, but the Ebony had somehow allowed her to survive the blast. It had awoken just as she needed it, as Kehinde had promised it would.
Elswyth gathered her strength, then pushed herself to her feet.
The tears in her ferrosilk gown exposed her luminescent elderwood armor, shining and unburnt.
The whole room shook. A thunderous crack echoed in the chamber, and a piece of stone fell from the ceiling, exploding into a field of burning rubble.
Elswyth fell to one knee, stumbling, just as Persephone’s tree fell.
It leaned, the wood screaming as it splintered.
Then it crashed directly on top of Gall.
The ball of flames that was Dr. Gall vanished, crushed under the burning tree. His vines followed, still whipping and writhing, until, finally, they stilled. The tendrils twitched for a moment on the floor before crumbling into ash.
Goodbye, Persephone, she thought.
Elswyth covered her eyes, warding off the wave of heat. Shrapnel scattered across the room, striking the walls. A burning chunk of flesh landed in front of her, sliding to a stop. It took her a moment to recognize Gall’s arm, now blackened, flesh sizzling off.
Something shone in the palm of the skeletal hand.
The metal was warped, misshapen, but the stone at the center was intact, gleaming in the fire.
It looked like a part of the flames, like the stone was drinking in the fire around it, shining amber bright.
It seemed to whisper to her in her delirium.
Whisper with a voice like a thousand leaves, moving in a hidden wind.
Elswyth crawled toward it. Her hand closed around the amulet and then jerked back.
The metal did not burn her wooden skin, but the heat still shocked her.
The amulet struck the ground, the ruined bezel breaking apart into black shards.
Only the amber remained, swirling with firelight.
Elswyth cocked her head, watching the light move within.
Then she picked it up. The stone was warm but not hot.
She examined it, turning it in her hand, watching the vitae dancing.
Again the whispers, calling to her, beckoning her to lean closer, to listen.
A crack appeared in the ceiling, and chunks of stone began to fall, smashing to the ground and shattering. She guarded her face, coughing from the explosion of dust. She gripped the amberheart, feeling the warmth of it, the waves of vitae flowing into her.
Elswyth stood, steadying herself. Her head swam, and she felt herself losing her grip on the Ebony.
It flickered and then faded, retreating somewhere.
Her own skin returned, and she felt the searing heat of the flames, the acrid smoke tearing at her eyes.
She limped toward the door, suddenly aware of a slow-spreading pain in her stomach where the shrapnel had hit her.
Elswyth reached the door—and then she saw Silas.
A trail of blood led toward him, a dark smear across the floor. He lay dying by the flower pool, stroking Aranyani’s hair.
Elswyth paused in the archway. Then she ran to him, crossing the ruined lab.
She leapt over burning branches and broken glass.
Above her, the ceiling shook, more bones and stones falling, smashing on the ground.
To her right, a chunk of stone fell, exploding.
She covered her head, shrapnel striking her skin, drawing blood.
She reached him, grabbing the back of his coat. “We must go!” she said. “The chamber is collapsing!”
Silas ignored her. He stared at Aranyani, tears in his eyes. “No. I won’t. Not without her.”
“Silas, you must! You must let her go!” Elswyth said. She grabbed at his jacket again, trying to drag him away.
He pulled himself closer to the pool, refusing to move. He looked up at Elswyth then. His veins were dark, filled with Gall’s poison.
“For what it’s worth, Elswyth. I did love you,” he said. Tears choked his voice. “I loved you with every part of me that still could.”
He looked to Aranyani. The flowers in her pool had wilted in the heat of the flames. Flecks of ash fell from the ceiling, settling on the still water around her face.
Elswyth knelt next to him. Her tears flowed freely now. She cupped his face. “If you really love me, Silas, then live. Let her go,” she said. Her voice cracked. “I’m right here.”
He stared at her, and she saw the tears cutting paths through the ash on his face. In a horrible moment, she realized that despite everything he’d done, when she looked into those eyes, she loved him. She still loved him.
“I—I can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“She is dead, Silas,” Elswyth said, as softly as she could.
He turned to Aranyani and then back to her. “Death has never been the end of love,” he said, a small, pained smile on his face. “Goodbye, Elswyth.”
Another crash. Elswyth stumbled back, throwing her hands over her head to protect herself.
Above them, a chasm cracked through the ceiling.
Elswyth could see the glass dome of the conservatory through it, shining like a jewel in the smoky air.
Flames licked at it, bursting glass into crystal shards.
Burning flowers rained down around them, making flames of a thousand colors.
Elswyth stood. A tear dripped from her cheek and fell into the ash below.
“Goodbye, Silas,” she said.
Then she ran. She ran to the tunnel that led from the catacombs, back to the surface, to safety.
Before she left, she turned around once more. Silas lay by the flower pool, weeping. With a shaking hand, he took Aranyani’s fingers in his and pressed them to his lips.
Then a chunk of stone fell from the ceiling, smashing to the ground in front of her. The rest of the ceiling followed, and Silas Blackthorn was gone.