“Ugh. That’s a sound I’d like never to hear again, thank you.”
“Then you did hear it, even without this strange gift.”
“In the bone temple? Yes. The whole room was full of these tuned bones you’re talking about. It whispered everywhere. Every time Griffin cast or adjusted a spell, the whole room . . . wailed.”
Carlos turned an inquiring look on Quinton. “Did you hear this?”
“I heard something, but it only got loud once. Otherwise it was like a constant low whistling or whining that made my skin crawl.”
“I heard more, but not what Blaine describes.” Carlos returned his focus to me. “As a Greywalker, you hear the voices of Grey things more clearly, even without this strange, new gift.”
“All the damned time,” I said. “Lisbon sounds like it’s crying. Seattle hums. Mexico City rattles and whines like a steel guitar. I used to hear voices in the Grid itself, but I don’t anymore—which is fine by me. They almost drove me insane. Noisy is manageable, chatty . . . not so much.”
“It is something to bear in mind as we deal with the Kostní Mágové and their drachen.”
“Drachen?” Quinton asked. He looked at Carlos. “You mentioned something this morning. . . .”
“O Dragão do Inferno—the Hell Dragon. It is not the fragile thing that Griffin conjured two nights ago—she didn’t cast that herself, but released it from the small, carved bone she carried with her from the altar. That bone was another form of Lenoir’s spirit box. The Night Dragon and Hell Dragon require drachen bones and the work of a dreamspinner. Griffin is not one of those. But the Kostní Mágové here clearly have drachen bones and a dreamspinner in their company. They still need other bones and the chance to carve them with the appropriate spells and tunings, since they have yet to replace your niece. If they complete the skeleton and give life to the song of the bones, it will be a living nightmare.”
“And how are we going to stop them?” Quinton asked. “We took back Soraia, but there are other bones out there. We can’t protect every little girl. . . . Whatever they’re up to, they’re moving faster than we are. This morning, there were near riots outside the Jerónimos Monastery about the possibility that the tomb of Dom Sebastiaõ might not have been vandalized, but that ‘the desired one’ is coming back. Which is, frankly, an ‘End of Days’ scenario in my mind. You don’t want the Sleeping King to show up for anything less than—” He cut himself off and turned his head sharply away from both of us, staring out the front window.
“Less than what? An apocalypse?” I asked. “Why wouldn’t your father want that as well? It would do everything he wants and much faster than his current work with ghosts and undead agitators.” Then I turned to Carlos. “It’s what you said they—these bone mages—are after, too. We saw the master mage from the temple meet with another priest just before we saw the Night Dragon here in Alfama. And he matches the description of a priest seen at the monastery when it was robbed.”
“Rui,” Carlos said. “Are you certain they were the same man?”
“Not entirely—no one described his aura in the news report—but the one we saw just down the hill here? Yes. It was him—Rui. It’s not likely there are two priests of the same description involved in unrelated crimes concerning bones,” I said, “aura or not.”
Quinton and I told him about Purlis’s disruptions in other places—riots in Paris, bombings in Turkey, epidemics in Spain and the United States, the riots at the bank and the air base, the Night Dragons and monsters, and then about the dead pickpocket, the priests who must have been bone mages, and the other ossuaries that had been vandalized, coming at last back to the robbery at Jéronimos and the angry mutterings I’d heard the night before as I ran through the Baixa to Santa Justa.
“There is no Sleeping King,” Carlos said, but he was thinking as he did. “Sebastiaõ was not entombed in that crypt. But the dust of those bones would still be of use. . . . A great deceit—a pauper buried as a king. And they are aware that they can benefit from fear and unrest without having to cast a single spell to achieve it.”
“So that’s what my father has been doing in the past months, here in Europe—sowing discord and unrest to benefit the Mágové—as well as working for their ends more directly by acquiring materials and destroying resistance to economic and political decline. Europe is facing a crisis that’s not just about money or national boundaries—it’s the loss of hope for an entire generation. The system is failing them and they’re becoming desperate enough to do something rash. Or that’s what I think, from what I’ve seen in places like Ukraine and Syria. He still needs to create the same degree of division and despair here, but I’m not sure that rousing the hope of a few nuts in Portugal is going to do what the Mágové want.”
Carlos wore a speculative frown. “The numbers of those who truly believe in the Sleeping King may be small, but it will take very little to convince those whose despair and desperation can be romanticized into supporting a foolish cause. Poverty, unrest, disillusion, dispossession . . . This modern Europe is full of it and the number of those who feel hopeless and angry is growing. And from what I see, my countrymen are not what they once were. The world, the passage of time, has crushed them, reduced them from a people who once ruled an empire girdling the globe to those who barely rule their own country. With the Inferno Dragão, the Kostní Mágové could burn Portugal to ash and that alone would not be enough. But a legendary monster rising in a time of fear? It fits the myth of a coming apocalypse that they have sown, and it amplifies the irrational. It is something so far beyond what normal men and women believe in normal circumstances that many—most, eventually—will reject any more logical attempt at explanation. It will turn their logic against them. They will be hopeless, unable to imagine what to do, in the face of the impossible made flesh. Not all of the relics the bone mages have taken are intended to build the creature—only to sow discord and create other, smaller engines of terror. We will have to deprive them of the remaining pieces of their puzzle.”
“How?” I started.
Quinton interrupted. “None of this conversation is going to matter if we get captured,” he said, taking a step away from the bench and the window near it. “Look out the window, discreetly, and tell me what—or more to the point—who you see across the street.”
Carlos leaned his head to one side and peered down. I turned my gaze sideways through the Grey, looking for energy signs that were familiar or dangerous. There were three distinct and unpleasant forms outside in the Grey and a fourth, weaker one, farther down the road. The first was a violent tangle of colors tightly contained in bands of white that rose from the cold lines of the Grid in the street below—I knew the shape of it, but the colors weren’t as I remembered them. Beside it were two shorter shapes: One was a brittle black and bone-white with towering spikes of blood-red erupting from it; the other was a less-complex black-and-white I recognized from two nights earlier as Maggie Griffin. I couldn’t tell much about the fourth one—the colors were strange shades of aqua, violet, and marine blue, their curling, calligraphic shape unfamiliar. I stepped away from the window also and pushed myself back into the normal plane, casting only a glance out the physical window to confirm what I thought.
Well down the road, a skinny teenager crouched at the edge of the sidewalk, looking around with strange, dreamy eyes as he chalked something on the stones. I wasn’t sure if he was part of the party closer to the house or not. Across the street, at its widest point, where the road turned and flowed around a huge old tree that was now in the center of the lane, Maggie Griffin stood with her back to us, dressed as before in her narrow black dress and heels. She stood just in front of two men as if arguing with or being chastised by them. One I recognized instantly: Quinton’s father, James McHenry Purlis. He leaned heavily on a cane and his stance was awkward, his left trouser leg falling unevenly over the clumsy shape of a badly fitted artificial leg. Beside him stood the old man I’d seen with the priest and again at the bone temple with Griffin. He was short and slim, but age hadn’t bent him and where his wavy hair hadn’t gone gray, it was the lusterless black color of soot.