The psychic abrasion made me feel that escape was not as certain as I’d hoped. I looked for any relief I could find, grasping at the smallest detail. My occasional snatched sight of the deeper Grey was my touchstone. Since the Grid tends to run north-south and east-west, with certain energy colors dominant in their direction of flow, I was able to reacquire my bearings whenever I thought I would finally collapse from the disorientation of the haunted corridors that ran ruler-straight yet seemed to twist and writhe like snakes. My glimpses of the Grid weren’t much help, but at least I knew which way I’d have to head to catch up to Quinton if I did manage to get out of here alive.
“Do you know the story of the girl and the ghost bone?” Rui asked as we walked. Our guards ignored his question.
For a moment I thought he knew about what had happened in Carlos’s garden and the discussion we’d had, but as I stared at him, there was no shift in his aura to indicate that he was baiting me. “No,” I replied, letting my fatigue and fear color my voice.
“Ah, it’s a folktale my grandmother told,” he said, “but an interesting one. . . . You’ll understand your purpose much better once you know the story.
“Long ago, in the hills, an old and terrifying witch with four arms and three legs captured a clever but lazy young girl who had run away from her family. The witch made the girl her slave. As she had three legs, the witch wasn’t very spry, but she was very powerful and she forced the girl to perform a great deal of manual labor that the witch was incapable of because of her mismatched legs. The witch also had no fingers on two of her four hands and this meant she did a great deal of her work by raising bone golems and skeletons, but a living servant was much stronger and smarter, and so she kept the girl in her house and forced her to work.” He told the tale with unholy glee, sending frissons up my spine and twisting my stomach into knots. I walked along with him, not bothering to hide my horror and disgust.
Rui grinned, showing crooked teeth, and went on, pleased with my revulsion. “The girl knew that the witch planned to devour her eventually but not all at once, for the witch was a frugal old monster. Every month the witch cut off one of the girl’s fingers and ate it, then threw the bones onto the fire. And each morning after the witch had consumed the finger, the girl saw that the witch had grown a new finger of her own, and so it went for several months.
“The girl was no fool and she knew her fate, so she watched the witch for an opportunity to escape. She noticed that the witch always sang a song to the bones as she burned them to ash and then took the ashes away to make soap. The witch saved the soap to wash her face at the end of the month before she decided which of the girl’s fingers she would dine upon the next day.
“The girl, in spite of having no education and being very poor, was very astute. She made a hole in the hearth and hid it with a bit of pitch so that when the witch went to scrape the ash from the fireplace, the pitch had melted away and some of the ash had fallen, unnoticed, into the hole. Once the witch had gone to weave her other spells and work her wiles, the girl scraped up the ash and made her own tiny bit of soap with which she washed her own face. When next she looked at the witch, she could see that the witch’s skeleton was made of bones from all the children she’d eaten over the years. The girl knew then that once the witch had eaten all her fingers and made her useless for work, her own leg bones would become the witch’s new leg and all the rest of her bones the instruments of the witch’s magic.
“So the next time the witch cut off one of her fingers, the girl watched everything and discovered how the witch made the bone her own. Then the girl laid her plans and waited for the day the witch would come to cut off her leg. On that day, the girl washed her face with the rest of the magic soap and recited the magic words that she’d learned from observing the witch. When the witch arrived with her knife, the girl pretended to be asleep until the witch had cut off her leg. Then the girl snatched the witch’s own leg away, ate it herself, and pushed the witch into the fire. Once the witch had burned to ashes, the girl then picked all her own bones from the fire, put them back where they belonged, and burned the witch’s hut to the ground. Then the girl returned to her own village and lived happily ever after. . . .”
“Somehow I don’t think ‘happily ever after’ is how that really ended,” I said.
Rui stopped by a door and opened it into darkness as our guards flanked us with their weapons trained on me. “That would depend upon whether you were the girl or the villagers. I preferred to be the girl. Please step inside the room.”
I shifted my gaze to the shadowed space beyond the open door and shuddered in dread as a cold white cloud choked with bones and black coils of death poured out. “Do I have a choice?”
“Of course you don’t.” He clutched my arm suddenly with his free hand and flung me through the open doorway with a surge of red energy.
I tumbled over the sill and rolled into the darkness, hoping I could gain an advantage and jump him as he came through the door, but Rui was prepared for me. The lights snapped on, making me blink as he stepped into the room. Although I lunged for him anyhow, he fended me off with a rough thrust of clattering bones that flew from the floor like a fence and shoved me back. The door closed with a sound like doom.
TWENTY-FIVE
The room was something more akin to a torture chamber than a hospital operating room, though there were aspects of both present. The bones arranged around the walls and scattered on the floor definitely tipped it over into horror-movie territory. A large book bound in bone and skin lay on a small lectern as if in a pulpit, the atmosphere around it black as murderous thoughts. I saw tables and instruments in the normal world; piles of bones, pools of blood, and seething, unformed ghost-stuff in the Grey, but nothing that looked like a way out short of a body bag. Cold panic swelled over me as wailing ghosts rushed to surround me, patting and snatching at me with incorporeal hands that left ice in their wake.
Rui smiled, more crooked teeth and a gleam of blood-tinged delight in his eye. “When I was a child,” he said, “I knew that the story was supposed to frighten me into behaving and never straying from doing as my parents and my grandmother told me to do. But to me, the girl was a hero. She learned even from those who did not wish to teach her and she turned their strength against them when she seemed powerless. I also learned more than my masters wished me to and used their tricks to gain power over them. One in particular left me to dwindle and stagnate, cursing me, hoping to weaken my power by refusing to teach me further. He alone eluded my revenge, and you, my beautiful creature, will help me have it. Please remove your clothes.”