Chapter 56
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
The Asphodel Meadows and the Endless Dark represent two states of the same transitory frame between death and whatever next existence a soul may find.
—Alex Peters, Soul States: A Transience Guide
Just after ten o’clock the following morning, we were racing down the Abyssal Steps toward the Renaissance Stratum. Emaline had texted me saying all she’d been able to learn was that Brach’s recovery team was headed there, and to hurry.
The stairs here had been crafted of stone blocks, but much of the mortar had eroded, dusting them with a sandy grit. The whole chamber smelled like a dry, crumbling well. And unlike the Steps above, they turned in a slow, arcing spiral downward.
They eventually dropped us at the stratum door, four black planks fastened together with thick iron nails and elaborate iron scrollwork in the shape of trees. A heavy iron ring hung at its center.
The old pressure rose, and the throbbing behind my eyes sent stabbing pains into my head.
With it, the large scar in my soul began to shine bright amber, the light pulling at Lady’s sutures, escaping in streams. It was becoming a major disruption to my shadow’s gleam notes. I held my head as memory erupted . . .
. . . I dig in my drawer and find the honorable mention certificate for the
science fair project Mama helped me build. When I see her at Ardells, she’s going to see what a good team we make . . .
My project had been about meteorites. I’d told Henry about it one night while we lay on the roof of the Iron Horse. That was the first night . . .
. . . I try to sing Mama’s verse for Henry, but I can’t finish. He puts his hand on my shoulder, and London suddenly feels more like home than home ever did . . .
I’d put away some of the good times, I realized, because if I didn’t remember the good stuff, the bad stuff didn’t seem so bad.
I struggled toward the stratum door, traced the Who quote, and Church shoved the heavy door open. The room teemed with instruments—lutes, shawms, viols, sackbuts, naker drums, harps. Around them the familiar smells of chalk dust, linseed oil, and aging songbooks filled the air.
On the far side, we opened another door into a music schoolroom.
Instructors in feathered hats, with blooming shirtsleeves and pantaloons, stood before children and teenagers seated in rough semicircles around the outer walls.
Each instructor held a different instrument and gestured to chalkboards marked with music notation.
I stepped into the cacophony of barking teachers, screeching oboes, and thumping lap drums. Everyone stopped playing and turned wide eyes toward us. Lady rushed ahead and explained to them who we were so they wouldn’t panic.
My skin was slick with sweat, and I collapsed into a chair near the door, uselessly fingering the hair ties around my wrist.
Chuey bent close, his rosary in hand. He was acclimating better to the pressures of the Strata than I was. “The old memories?” he asked.
“And then some,” I said. “Just need a tune to get my balance.”
He looked around the room, then made directly for a harpsichord against the rear wall. He whipped back imaginary coattails, sat on the bench, and ripped into “The Fifth Door” by Mannheim Steamroller. Chuey had a terrible voice, but he could have been a concert pianist.
The forceful rhythms and melody got inside me, soothing the ache and pressure.
When I could think clearly again, I realized the song was part of a Renaissance-style fantasia sequence and smiled over at Chuey.
He mugged back at me—we hadn’t wasted our library days.
He then finished the song with a flourish, the music instructors and students breaking into immediate applause.
I took a deep breath, grabbed my bow, and pulled a long reverse stroke against two contact rods on my lantern, the way Madam had shown me. Darkshine filled the room, and I called to mind the coda-style pattern I’d seen in the mature wraith and all its souls.
In the darkness, I saw glimmerings of the coda symbol. But they seemed too weak to be the collection of the wraith’s many souls. I turned a slow circle until I saw a flaring coda pattern against the music room’s west wall.
When the darkshine faded, the music instructors and students were gaping at me.
Lady returned to my side. “You all right?”
“Good as I’m gonna be,” I said. “Did you let them know what’s going on?” “They’re ward-folk,” she replied. “They can feel it collapsing. They were more concerned with the rumors that you killed Henry. But I set them straight.”
Church raised his voice to address the entire school. “Any of you who has a weapon, keep it at hand.”
The instructors began to marshal the students together as my friends and I hurried across the room and out the door into the street.
The daylight of the Renaissance Stratum shone brighter and more golden than any stratum I’d been to.
Smoke filled the southeast sky, but the light turned it shades of wheat and hay.
I still marveled to think this was all somehow underground.
Or was it? But beneath all that golden light, a few yards outside the door, several dozen prowlers crowded the edge of the ward.
“The barrier hasn’t collapsed as far on the lower strata,” Lakshmi observed. “But there’s still no way through.”
Prowler shadows revealed thanatists, vestiges, and semblances, most of them bearing the mark of the Shiguan. They eyed us close, daring us to cross the barrier.
I turned to Chuey. “You still have your Bluetooth speaker on you?” “Is D minor the saddest of all keys?” He pulled the speaker from his pack and handed it to me. This baby could push forty watts.
I thumbed it on, paired it with my phone, and booted up Cannibal Corpse’s “Hammer Smashed Face.” I pushed the volume to the top and thrust the speaker toward the prowling horde.
The brutal thrashing drums and riffs boomed.
Some of the mob covered their ears, others threw hand signs used to ward off evil as they ran. But they all scattered away.
“Legions of the dead don’t like Cannibal Corpse,” I said. “Seems hypocritical.”
I shot toward Greek Street, motioning my friends to follow.
With the wicked strains of Cannibal Corpse filling the air, we escaped unfollowed.
I pulled the darkshine stroke several more times, guiding us down cobbled and muddied byways and through well-heeled crowds gathered near art exhibitions, bookshops, and academies.
We turned past a burned-out home onto Brook Street and came to a regal house so new I could smell the freshly cut stone. There was something familiar about it that I couldn’t quite place. I bowed my lantern one last time. The flare of the wraith’s coda pattern appeared near the roof.
“Get your weapons ready,” I said, and started for the open front door. Just beyond the foyer, a thanatist and three vestiges, all bearing the Shiguan mark, lay dead on the stairs. Blood was splattered everywhere.
“Part of a recovery team,” Lakshmi said.
I led my friends over the bodies and up the stairs to the top floor. In the uppermost hall, three more Shiguan lay dead, two whose semblances were floating above their vestige shells.
Just behind them, a door stood ajar.
I crept past the bodies, eased around the doorjamb, and peered into the room.
It was the picture of Renaissance splendor: a vast apartment with high ceilings, dark wood paneling, silver candlesticks, and countless paintings depicting musicians in recital.
Nothing had been disturbed, and the wraith was nowhere to be seen.
But the air had grown suddenly chill, and my breath began to cloud.
I focused on the wraith and tried not to let it affect my mood.
In the far corner a ladder ascended into what I assumed to be an attic crawl space. Above us, something crashed, rumbling the ceiling, and someone shouted. I rushed to the ladder, swapped my lantern for my knife, and started up.
A man screamed.
A moment later, I stepped into one end of a spacious attic, my friends behind me. The wraith stood halfway down the left wall. It still towered eight feet tall, but its smoky black form had drawn itself into breeches, a doublet, and a long Elizabethan cloak.
On the right, facing the wraith, stood three vestiges: a tall chap with knee-high boots, a fellow with a hunched back, and a woman with a nose ring. Behind them stood the red-maned thanatist in the flowing chocolate coat and white ruffled shirt that I’d seen the night Henry was shot.
Against the far wall sat a desk littered with papers.
Above the desk rose a large window, to its left a spinet, and to its right a lute and small wooden box.
The wraith suddenly disgorged from its smoky form a vestige onto the floor.
He lay motionless near several feet of binding thread, charred dark and smoking.
The thanatist shouted to the tall chap. “Again, spool out more thread!”
The vestige raised a long spindle and spun it hard. Thread unwound like line cast from a reel.
The thanatist raised his lantern and bowed its rods in a fast seesaw motion.
Light from his stone grabbed the thread midair and spun it in broad loops around the wraith’s chest and arms. The human form of it began to roil at the edges like billowing clouds.
It shrieked and thrashed, trying to tear the Orcus loose.
“We can’t let them have it,” I said. “Help me get close enough to cut it free.”
We started forward. Lakshmi got ahead of me and kicked the hunched vestige against the wall to clear a path. The thanatist furiously played his lantern, tightening the Orcus, as he watched me close in.
Nose Ring rushed in from my side, but Chuey dove and tackled her to the floor.
The tall chap danced in with a set of axes. But Lady cracked him across the arms with her baton and drove him back with a blunt jab to the forehead.
The thanatist played a hard assault stroke at me. A percussive burst of light slammed into my shadow and dropped me to my knees. I couldn’t breathe. Then he played several bracing strokes, and his vestiges scrambled to their feet, forming a line in front of him.
The wraith screamed, a cacophonous bray that caused the Shiguan’s lantern to sputter as though the ghost stone would go cold.
But the thanatist hummed the light to twice its prior shine and returned to his binding play.
This time, though, he stroked two rods of the lantern.
A dissonant harmony rang out, turning his lamplight into a flickering beam.
He focused the shimmering rays on a deeper part of the wraith.
I couldn’t see what, but whatever the thanatist had found caused the wraith to howl in a spectrum of voices.
Just as I caught my breath, Church hauled me to my feet and bowled ahead. “Follow me in,” he cried, and whipped his satchel around like a rotor, turning aside vestige weapons and clearing another path to the wraith.
I dashed in and slashed with my khopesh, cutting through the Orcus around the wraith’s chest. The thread flashed a bright crimson, amber, and gold, a rush of wind whipping back my hair, then it fell and began to darken.
“Fool!” cried the thanatist, playing frantically, trying to restore the thread.
For a moment, it appeared his light would tie the ends together.
But Lakshmi crept up from behind him and sliced his bowstrings with her blade.
The bow clacked uselessly against the lantern’s brass support post. Before I could grab my own Orcus, the wraith let out another deafening scream that momentarily sapped my strength.
In a whirlwind, it rushed past the thanatist to the far end of the attic, where it slammed great billowing fists down on the desk, cracking the frame and legs.
It then shot to the corner and stomped the wooden chest beneath its wispy dark boot, spilling out reams of paper.
Screaming again, it shattered the large window above the broken desk. Glass rained down in shards across the floor. The wraith spared a glance back at us, then rushed through the gaping hole, the black smoke of its coattails trailing as it jumped from the attic.
The thanatist and his crew turned on me.