The air seemed to tremble as I walked, the Grey flickering and moving in front of me like a heat mirage. The uncanny whispering in my ears became a rumpus of voices arguing and cajoling, crying and shouting. I could see long, thick grid lines of red and yellow, and one wild blue leyline, surging through the Grey at a slight angle to the middle of the street and sending abrupt feelers of color toward each house along the way. Most cut off abruptly, leaving the shadows of squares and half circles behind. Odd colorless shapes like tiny hunchbacked dogs crept across the lawns here and there, disappearing into vapor and sparkles of light. My skin crawled and my heart sped up, anticipating something horrible as I went on.
The house number I wanted hung in cool black iron figures on a weathered wooden gate gone silvery with age. A high, thick hedge of small-leaved, thorny branches cut off the view of the house beyond and gave refuge to a flock of tiny gleaming eyes. Whatever owned the eyes chittered and hissed to itself as I approached. I was panting as if I’d run to the gate rather than walked. I glanced around, looking for anyone or anything else that might be watching and waiting for me, but only the hedge eyes blinked back. The ground beneath my feet was like jet in the Grey: black earth sparkling with the cut edges of black grass and black roots growing out of the silver-green mass of the hedge. The thinnest red line, braided with obsidian gleams, outlined the edge of the gate and its threshold.
“Break it, break it!” something urged in my head.
Whispers and shouts of “Defile, destroy!” and “How dare they?” and the miserable shriek of an infant while someone sobbed without relief racketed in my mind with sparks of color bursting across my vision like flashbulbs.
“Shut up!” I snapped. I looked for ghosts but didn’t see anything more substantial than the searing power lines of the grid and the misshapen horrors that crawled across the ground. I pressed my hands over my ears for a moment, feeling my fingers quake against my skull as I squeezed my eyelids closed and tried to imagine the calm blue lines of the grid washing over everything like water, washing the sounds away as I breathed in and out for two long, slow breaths. “Be quiet,” I muttered. “Not now.”
The volume of the noise seemed to ebb back to a murmur and I reopened my eyes, reaching out, still shaking, to open the gate. I touched it with care, letting my fingers just brush the black iron latch handle, testing for a magical current before I took a stronger hold and pressed the gate open.
The red-and-black line around the gateway flexed a little, then reshaped as the gate opened, making a doorway within the doorway. Looking straight through the opening, the little buff-colored house in the garden beyond appeared entirely ordinary and quiet. From any other angle, it was wreathed in inky flames and scarlet coals. Hoping I was interpreting the invitation correctly, I stepped through, keeping my focus on the charming little house and the ordinary brick path to its porch.
The gate clacked shut behind me. Under my feet, the path stayed clear, but to each side, beyond the edge of the bricks and the low border of plants filled with still more gleaming silver eyes, the black fire raged across the whole breadth of the yard. All right then: Stick to the walkway. I stepped forward with more confidence than I felt—the hellish panorama in the garden and lawn only adding to my fears—and made it onto the porch in a sweat.
The front door was painted a cheery blue outlined in black, as if some dread magic oozed through the narrow gap in the frame. I really didn’t want to knock. . . .
The door swung open before I could tap or ring, quiet but for a slight shushing as the bottom weather stripping brushed the hardwood floor inside. Carlos stood just inside the entry, glowering, the dark cloud of his power riding on his shoulders like a storm rolling up from black waters. He had always seemed large to me and now he seemed huge, looming in the opening like a giant from a monstrous fairy tale, a study in darkness: dark hair, dark eyes, dark beard masking his olive skin. He looked more like a jungle predator patiently waiting for his prey than most people’s idea of the undead. He cocked one eyebrow slightly and moved aside to let me in. “Blaine.”
I gave him a small nod and stepped over the threshold, keeping my teeth set against the ice that seemed to slice through me as I moved inside. The sensation left an impression of maggots and knives across my nerves that almost made me gag until it faded away a second later. Carlos pushed the door closed again and it made a surprising chime of crystal notes that shimmered blue and white in the interior darkness for a moment, reducing the noise in my head to a low mutter and leaving my skin goosebumped with uncanny cold. I could barely see him or the room now as anything but gray shapes in the gloom.
“You’d prefer some light, wouldn’t you.” It wasn’t a question.
“I haven’t grown cat’s eyes yet,” I replied, “so, yes, I would.”
He humphed a little as if amused by my human weakness. A quick shuffling sound preceded the brightening of the room, and as the lights came up, I glimpsed the same small, humped mist-shapes I’d seen creeping over the lawns outside now scuttling away from candles and oil lamps—there was no sign of electricity—throughout the visible rooms. Whatever they were, they’d lit the flames and now seemed to shy from them.
I caught my startled breath. “What are those?”
“Névoacria—the mist things.”
“I saw them outside. Are they . . . yours?”
“I use them. They grow here of their own accord from the displaced spirits of the dead. This ground was once a cemetery.”
That startled me, yet it made sense of the feelings and strangeness of the area, the hazy blackness of death on the ground and the deeper shades that held sway within the house. I hoped I’d never have to come here again, into a place the dead could neither find nor leave. A perfect place for a necromancer to work, I thought, and had no doubt the quaint little house had hidden Carlos’s secrets as long as it had stood. I pushed the sickening thought aside, cleared my throat, and asked the first seemingly safe thing that came to mind.
“And the eyes in the hedge . . . ?”
“Seraphi-guardi. That I did place there. It keeps watch for that which should not approach this place. The Guardian does not mind if I borrow some of its mille occhi for such a task.”
That made me blink. I’d heard the term “mille occhi” before—I couldn’t hang around people like the Danzigers without picking up a few words in Latin, Greek, and other languages—and knew it meant “a thousand eyes.” My father had written in his journals about the “Thousand Eyes” as if it were a single horrible creature that would swallow him for his misdeeds. I hadn’t had much time to puzzle that one out, nor had I cared much at the time with more immediate problems and threats to deal with. But now that I knew my dad had been a Greywalker, pieces fell into place. He had seen the Guardian Beast just like I had, but he had seen a different manifestation of it. He had seen the thousand watchful eyes of the Beast and known from the beginning that it hated the creature he’d called the White Worm-man: Wygan, the Pharaohn-ankh-astet. I wished I had known that.