Chapter 36 #2
Owen scoffed. “I’m not ungrateful for what ya did at the Castle, but this is the Dark we’re talking about.
It’s not like traveling the stairs or the Strata.
” He jabbed Cassius again. “It’s easy enough for you and me, but your friend here’s a mortal.
Thanatist, sure, but mortal.” He turned to me.
“Once you enter the Dark, it will be aware of you. Not just for today, either. And a little more each time you go in. It gets a sense for the lives that pass through it.”
“So, it’ll press at my memories,” I said. “Like the stairs—”
“You’re not listening,” Owen almost shouted, “it’s not like that at all.
It’ll press at what makes you mortal.” He squatted down, thinking.
“We might have a better chance at stealing Orcus from the basement labs of Brach’s Guildhall.
Bloody hell, a tenderfoot. The whole Dark will know we’re coming. ”
Cassius looked back toward the city. “Is the Guildhall a real option?” “I sell thread to the seamsters there.” Owen tapped his satchel of threads and needles.
“They’re fashioning mummers—near twins to topside mucky-mucks.
I could get us past the door. Nabbing the thread would be a trick, but I might like our chances there better than in the Dark with this one.
” He stuck a thumb at me, then looked up.
“We get caught trying to steal Orcus from Brach, we’re done for.
But we get found out in the Dark on account of a greenhorn who can’t guard his
mind . . .”
“What’s that mean, ‘guard my mind’?”
Cassius walked to the edge of the black cloud. “Mortals traveling the Dark have to take their minds away from what they’re doing. It is a skill known as division. You must be able to think of one thing while doing another, elsewise you reveal your presence to those who make the Dark their home.”
“Not just the creatures,” Owen added, “the Dark itself. Everything in there is connected.”
I walked to within a yard of the roiling black cloud. At its edge it looked like a swirling mist of dark and light, but a few yards in, it got too dark to see anything.
“Take a handful,” Owen invited. “Of the darkness?”
The tailor nodded. “Try plucking a piece like fruit from a tree.”
Hesitantly, I reached in. It had a thickness to it.
A yield. I curled my fingers and could feel it in my hand like a thin cloth.
When I pulled my hand back, a shred of the Endless Dark trailed from my fist. When I let go, it spilled to the ground like quicksilver but left no residue in my hand.
“Strata-folk use the Dark to form common necessities—food and clothes and such,” Owen explained.
“It requires concentration and belief to maintain, though. Otherwise, such things eventually dissolve. Point is the Dark has substance and responds to the mind. An errant thought travels like a ripple on a windless sea.”
“Guildhall or the Dark,” Cassius said. “Like Scylla or Charybdis.”
I stared back and forth between the city far behind us and the black cloud before us.
The Dark would somehow start to know me and I’d threaten the plan with my inexperience, but going back would take hours, not to mention that breaking into Brach’s stronghold might finally exhaust the man’s patience with me.
“Well, damned if you do and damned if you don’t, right?” I pulled out my lantern. “How do I take my mind away in the Dark?”
Owen just shook his head.
Cassius said the obvious. “Think of a song.” That felt instantly right.
“It is not the conventional approach to division,” Cassius admitted, “but I believe for you it could work.”
“Madness is what it is.” Owen stood. “Behind us is only half the cemetery. The other half lies ahead. Follow close.” He drew his bow and played his lantern to a radiant shine.
I did the same—getting only half the brightness—then Cassius and I followed the tailor into the Dark.
In my head, I booted up “Run to the Hills” by Maiden, and kept the tune and lyrics on silent repeat as we moved deeper inside.
We wove between rows of crypts and headstones and came to the edge of what seemed to be a broad circle of uneven earth. I shone my lantern down.
We were walking over statues of the dead laid out so densely it felt like cobblestone under my boots—like the Asphodel Meadows but worn almost smooth.
“Semblances arrive in the Dark,” Owen explained, “because they must choose to join the communal light of their stratum. And most of them enter where the connection between the Strata and the world above is strongest.”
“Like a cemetery,” Cassius observed.
Owen ran the toe of his boot over a white patch of ground. “Killing a semblance produces a discharge of energy.” He raised his lantern, casting its light across the broad circle. White scorched patches practically covered the ground. “It’s also a good place for wraiths to feed.”
“Wonderful,” I said. “So how do we get the Orcus thread?”
“You don’t do anything,” said Owen. “You just be damn sure nothing mucks it up for me while I’m having a go.”
My heart got suddenly loud in my ears, every beat, the blood rushing in my veins. I clutched at my chest, trying to ease the pounding rhythm—“ripples on a windless sea.” I’d gotten away from the song in my head and quickly dialed back up the Maiden tune in my mind.
Owen shambled a few yards into the stony circle, lantern in one hand, bow in the other. As he approached the center, lightning crackled in the darkness above us. A deep ripping sound tore through the air and a roll of thunder washed over us in hard waves.
“Be ready!” Owen screamed.
Lightning ripped the darkness again, crackling down from the black sky and resolving into thin, elegant ribbons of amber and crimson that cradled the form of a woman.
Her body came slowly to rest on the ground before us, then sank and calcified into the effigies around her. But her semblance rose in an elegant white dress and stood squinting against the radiant ribbons of light, which still held her fast.
Owen rushed in, lantern raised. He said something I couldn’t understand and bowed his lamp in three quick strokes. A beam of light spooled out and coiled around the bright streamers.
Watching it all go down, I forgot my mental song again.
All went silent, save the hard beating of my heart inside me, and I had the sudden desire to lie down with the effigies around me, sink into the stone . . .
The semblance screamed, not at Owen but toward the sky.
High above us a woman appeared, wearing a long, sleeveless grey dress and matching veil over her nose and mouth.
Her face and arms shone deathly pale. A silver cord hung over her shoulder, fastened with a curved silver horn.
And she carried a white spear from which the ribbons fell.
She pointed that spear down at us and started to descend.