The bird was flying.
It was flying over a dark landscape, a charred plain. Far below, a chasm gaped in the earth, and the bird swooped and plummeted inside, twisting sideways into the narrow crack, making Claudia hiss with fear.
The Key went black. One single red light pulsed in it.
But even as they stared at it the coach rumbled to a halt, the horses stamping and blowing, and the door was flung open. The Warden's shadow darkened the threshold.
"Come, my dear," he said quietly. "They're all waiting."
Without looking at Jared, without even letting herself think, she stepped out of the coach and drew herself upright, her arm in her father's.
Together, they faced the double row of applauding courtiers, the splendor of silk banners, the great stairway leading upward to the throne.
Sitting on it, resplendent in a silver gown with vast ruff, sat the Queen. Even from this distance the redness of her hair and lips were evident, the radiance of the diamonds at her neck. Behind her shoulder, a scowling presence, stood Caspar.
The Warden said calmly, "The smile, I think."
She put it on. The bright, confident smile, as false as everything in her life, a cloak over the coldness.
Then they walked steadily up the stairs.
IT WASthe ironic stare of his nightmares and he recognized it, his voice hoarse. " You? "
Behind, he heard Gildas's gasp. "Strike at it. Strike, Finn!"
The Eye was aswirl. Its pupil was a spiral of movement, a scarlet galaxy. All around it, heaving itself up, the darkness convulsed, and he saw the vast hide of the Beast was studded with objects, bits of jewelry, bones, fragments of rags, shafts of weapons. They were centuries old; skin and hide had grown over them. With a tearing and cracking an outcrop of dark faceted rock became its head and reared up over him; spurs of metal slid out like claws, grasping the shuddering tilting floor of the cavern.
Finn couldn't move. Dust and fumes clouded over him.
"Strike!" Gildas grabbed his arm.
"Its useless. Can't you see ...?"
Gildas gave a roar of anger, snatched the sword from him, and thrust it into the clotted hide of the Beast, leaping back as if he expected blood to cascade out in a great gout.
Then he stared, seeing what Finn had seen.
There was no wound. The hide opened and dissolved, absorbed the blade, reassembled around it. The Beast was a composite creature, a grinding, swift formation of millions of beings, of bats and bones and beetles, dark clouds of bees, an ever-changing kaleidoscope pattern of rock fragments and metal shards. As it turned and rose into the roof of the chamber, they saw that over the centuries it had absorbed all the terror and the fear of the City, that all the Tribute sent out to placate it had been absorbed, eaten, had only made it grow huger. Somewhere inside it were the billions of atoms of the dead, of the victims and the children dragged out here by decree of the Justices. It was a magnetized mass of flesh and metal, its crumbling tail studded with fingernails and teeth and talons.
It stretched out its head above them and leaned down, bringing the great red Eyes close to Finn's face, making his skin scarlet, his shaking hands look as if they were red with blood.
"Finn,'' it said, in a voice of deep pleasure, a throaty treacle of huskiness. "At last."
He stepped back, into Gildas. The Sapient's hand gripped his elbow. "You know my name."
"I gave you your name." Its tongue flickered in the dark cavern of its mouth. "Gave it long ago, when you were born in my cells. When you became my son."
He was shuddering. He wanted to deny it, shout Out, but no words would come.
The creature tipped its head, studying him. The long muzzle, dripping bees and scales, fragmented into a cloud of dragonflies and re-formed again. "I knew you'd come," it said.
"I've been watching you, Finn, because you are so special. In all the entrails and veins of my body, in all the millions of beings I enclose, there is no one quite like you."
The head zoomed closer. Something like a smile formed and broke. "Do you really think you can escape from me? Do you forget that I could kill you, shut down light and air, incinerate you in seconds?"
"I don't forget," he managed to say.
"Most men do. Most men are content to live in their prison and think it is the world, but not you, Finn. You remember about me. You look around and see my Eyes watching you, in those nights of darkness you called out to me and I heard you ..."
"You didn't answer," he whispered.
"But you knew I was there. You are a Starseer, Finn. How interesting that is."
Gildas pushed forward. He was white, his sparse hair wet with sweat. "Who are you?" he growled.
"I am Incarceron, old man. You should know. It was the Sapienti who created me. Your great, towering, overreaching endless failure. Your nemesis." I zigzagged closer, its mouth wide so that they could see the rags of cloth that hung there, smell the oily, oddly sweet stench of k. "Ah, the pride of the Wise. And now you dare to seek a way free of your own folly."
It slid back, the red Eyes narrowing to slits. "Pay me, Finn. Pay me as Sapphique paid.
Give me your flesh, your blood. Give me the old man and his terrible desire for death.
Then perhaps your Key may open doors you do not dream of"
Finn's mouth was dry as ash. "This isn't a game."
"No?" The Beast's laugh was soft and slithering. "Are you not pieces on a board?"
"People." His anger was rising. "People that suffer. People you torment."
For a moment the creature dissolved to clouds of insects. Then they clotted in abrupt gargoyles, a new face, serpentine and sinuous. "I'm afraid not. They torment each other.
There is no system that can stop that, no place that can wall out evil, because men bring it in with them, even in the children. Such men are beyond correction, and it is my task only to contain them. I bold them inside myself. I swallow them whole."
A tentacle lashed out and around his wrist. "Pay me, Finn."
Finn jerked back, glanced at Gildas. The Sapient looked shrunken, his face drawn as if all his dread had fallen on him at once, but he said slowly, "Let it take me, boy. There's nothing for me now."
"No." Finn stared up at the Beast, its reptilian smile inches from him. "I've already given you one life."
"Ah. The woman." The smile lengthened. "How her death tears at you. Conscience and shame are so rare. They interest me."
Something in its smirk made him catch his breath. A jolt of hope hurt him; he gasped, "She's not dead! You caught her, you stopped her fall! Didn't you? You saved her."
The red spiral winked at him. "Nothing is wasted here," it murmured.
Finn stared, but Gildas's voice was a growl in his ear. "It's lying, boy."
"Maybe not. Maybe ..."
"It's playing with you." Sour with disgust, the old man stared at the swirling confusion of the Eye. "If it is true we made such a thing as you, then I'm ready to pay for our folly."
"No." Finn grabbed him tight. He slid a dull circle of silver from his thumb and held it up, a glittering spark. "Take this for your Tribute instead, Father?'
It was the skull-ring. And he was beyond caring.
21
I have worked for years in secret to make a device that is a copy of the one Outside.