Ian sighed. “Why not?” he said. “We Graysons have to stick together.”
The air grew thicker as we approached the city, and though my chest didn’t rise and fall as it did when I was alive, I could smell it. It was a toxic smell, one of acrid smoke and charred meat but also of rot, the kind of rot that takes centuries to build, the cloying odor of a forest floor, the musk of turned earth, and the rotten tang of flesh regurgitated by insects.
The closer we got to the city, the worse the stench became. Ian slowed to a plod, and I looked over my shoulder. I could tell by the set of his shoulders and his rigid expression that he was afraid.
I had to keep him talking, get his mind off where we were going. And my mind, while I was at it. I wanted to wake up, to snap my soul back to the living world, open my eyes and see the cobwebbed ceiling of Chang’s shop, but if I did, I knew I’d never forgive myself for failing Dean when he needed me the most. My soul-self could exist here a little longer. It was a small price to pay.
“How did you escape that place to begin with?” I asked Ian, pointing to the city. He flinched and shoved his hands into his pockets.
“In the Catacombs, there are guards—watchers who were never human, never part of anything living. They can be bribed, and I knew things that they wanted to know, things about the other prisoners. I was an informant,” he said, as if dragging out the word physically hurt. “I got them to trust me, to think of me as amusing and harmless. Now I can’t stay in the same place for more than an instant. The Deadlands are infinite. Physics here doesn’t work the same as in a living Land. You could wander forever, compelled to drift, or cross your footsteps a hundred times in one day, but you better never slow down, because everything in this place is hungry for the energy your soul can provide.”
I felt a strong stab of pity for Ian straight through my chest. Whatever he’d done in life, he didn’t deserve this.
“I’m sorry I’m making you go back,” I said softly.
Ian shrugged. “Don’t feel bad on my account. Most Walkers forget their own names over time. They forget everything about who they were. I don’t want that to happen. At least now I feel useful.”
“Thank you,” I said, but he said nothing in reply, so we walked silently as the sun went down and rose again, the sky changing every hour or so from rose to ink and back again.
I must have watched the sun rise a dozen times while Ian and I walked. He was right—physics didn’t have the hold here it did in the living world. Finally Ian and I started talking again.
“You said someone in the city would know where Dean was,” I began. “What are they going to want in return?”
Ian gave a thin smile. “You really are Archie’s daughter, aren’t you? Always looking for the angles.”
“I didn’t learn that from my father,” I told him. “I learned that because he wasn’t around.”
“Ouch,” Ian muttered. “Sorry.”
“Just tell me how bad this is going to be,” I said. I wanted to know what price would be culled from me, either in blood or in promises or in sanity. All of those were negotiable with the sort of creatures I’d met lurking in the shadows between worlds.
“There’s a soul in there, one of the oldest I’ve met who still has her faculties,” said Ian. “A Spiritualist when she was alive. She can find things, people. As for what she wants”—he scratched his temple—“it depends. Sometimes she does it because she thinks it’ll be funny, other times she’ll slice out part of your memories and take them. It’s how she’s stayed sane for so long.”
I looked toward the city, listening to the endless wail of the sirens, the screaming of a place full of mindless pain. “Well, it’s not like I expected this to be easy.”
Ian didn’t say anything, and I had run out of questions, so we walked on in silence, until we reached the city walls.
We joined a clot of gray-tinged spirits moving along the road, which forked into the distance until it shimmered out of existence at the horizon.
“Souls,” Ian murmured in my ear. “The new dead. Just walk with them.”
“Won’t they realize we’re not like them?” I whispered.
Ian shook his head.
“They don’t notice much of anything. Some of them don’t even realize they’re dead yet.”
The figures were in various states of decay and decomposition. I looked at Ian, who appeared as he must have in life, suit and tie and all. “How come they’re in such bad shape?”
“Your soul manifests your true face when you die,” Ian said. “Good or bad. If you’re rotten to the core in life, your soul rots in death. Some of them hang on long enough to learn how to alter themselves so you can’t see all the things they did in life.”
Here and there, I picked out faces that were relatively normal-looking, but there were so many who were little more than skeletons with bits of flesh and cloth hanging from their bones that I focused on my feet, moving over the white ribbon of road. It crunched under my shoes.
“This isn’t sand, is it?” I realized.
“No,” Ian confirmed. “Ossuary Road is the bones of the things that lived in the Deadlands before men. The first creatures in the living world, the first to die. Eventually, even death grinds you down.”
The white dust all over my feet and legs took on a new weight. Who knew what came before the Fae, before men? “The Old Ones, you mean?” I said. “Things like that? I thought they were eternal.”
“ ‘That is not dead which can eternal lie, yet with strange aeons even death may die,’ ” Ian said. “I don’t know, Aoife. We had as little to do with the Great Old Ones in my day as we possibly could.”
We had nearly reached the gates of the city and I looked up at the archway, carved with an open, lidless eye.
“Welcome home,” Ian muttered. “Can’t believe I’m walking back into this place.”
Two black-clad figures stood by the gate like Proctors, making it seem almost like home. Their faces were shadowed with cowls, however, and I couldn’t attest with certainty that they even had features to hide. Their robes reached the ground, and the only extremities I could see were hands, which held long, clicking devices that spun like oversized pocket watches.
“What are they?” I murmured, careful not to make eye contact. I knew how not to draw attention to myself, and I didn’t want the attention of those things under any circumstances. Over time, since I’d left Lovecraft, I’d grown used to fear and uncertainty as background noise to everything I did, so when the hard, cold kind of primal fear cut straight to my gut, I didn’t ignore it.
“Guards,” Ian said. “Jailers. Protectors. Different things to different people.” He steered me past a group of souls in Crimson Guard uniforms, their faces burned beyond recognition above their high collars.
“Those devices don’t look friendly,” I said, nodding to the contraptions in the guards’ hands. As the needles on the faces of the things spun, one of the black figures stepped forward and snatched a soldier out of line. I gasped as the figure got close enough to me to twinge the shoggoth venom that still lived in the bite on my shoulder, and Ian grabbed my arm, keeping me upright and moving.
“They’re meant to pick out things from the outlands that try to creep into the city and steal souls,” he said. “The decayed, the screaming sands, things like that.”
The figures surrounded the soldier, more of them melting in from the shadows as if they’d dripped like inkblots from a pen, and the soldier began to scream. The appearance of a human soul sloughed away, and underneath was a skeletal thing with long legs that bent the wrong way and arms that scraped the ground. Its hands ended in long, bladed things that lived where fingers should on a person, and its jaw was elongated like a cricket’s, underslung and full of teeth.