“You don’t know me,” I told Ian. “You don’t know what my life has been like. I’ve spent most of it just like you—trying to exist, hoping someone much more powerful wouldn’t snuff me out. The only difference is that I’m not afraid. I’m stronger than the people trying to keep me from existing.”
“That’s great,” Ian said. “But in this place, the things looking to take you out aren’t some men in jackboots and a few Fae who whisper sweet lies in your ear. In this place, there are horrors you can’t imagine.”
“I don’t know,” I said, still furious that he was writing me off as a silly child. I’d had enough of that back in Lovecraft. “My imagination is pretty vivid.”
“Well, after this you’re going to have enough fodder for a lifetime of nightmares,” Ian said. “So get ready.”
11
The Graveyard of Memories
WE REACHED THE bottom of the well after an interminable ride punctuated only by the creaking of the cage and the rattling of the chain.
Finally, the cage came to rest on the small bones of rats and other, larger creatures with more teeth.
I was just glad they were only bones, and not entire souls waiting for us in the blood-tinged darkness.
The lights came from dozens of aether bulbs hung along a tunnel that had been bored into the rock and bricked over, crooked and jagged, the ground covered with piles of masonry from cave-ins.
The red light made everything shift and shimmer before my eyes. I could barely make out Ian in his dark suit as he walked ahead of me down the tunnel.
I stepped over the broken bricks, and managed not to cry out when something scampered across my foot. The tunnel widened, and Ian slowed to a stop.
“Just through there,” he said. He sighed and looked at me. “You’re about to see a part of me I’m not proud of, Aoife.” He ran a hand over his face and looked pained. “If you make it back to Archie, don’t tell him about this. I beg you.”
“Of course not,” I said, reaching out to touch the back of his hand. Was that it? Ian was so ashamed of whatever he’d done for this oracle spirit that he didn’t want his brother knowing what his afterlife had become?
I tried to smile, to let him know I was on his side. “It’s all right, Ian. I don’t have time to go into detail, but I of all people know that sometimes you do what you think you have to.”
Ian visibly relaxed. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you so much.”
I looked ahead into the darkness. “So what do I need to know before I talk to her?”
“She wants what’s most precious to you,” Ian said. “And she’ll bleed you dry little by little because it amuses her to see you suffer. But you need her, and she knows it, because she has powers beyond anyone I’ve ever met.”
“All right,” I said, taking a step forward. “Thank you, Ian.”
I wasn’t above lying to myself, telling the nervous, scared Aoife who just wanted to wake up that there was nothing to worry about, nothing to getting this oracle to tell me where Dean was and how to bring him back to the Iron Land with me.
That Aoife wasn’t a very good liar, but at least she gave me a little bit of comfort as Ian and I walked ahead. I could believe her, for the few minutes this would take.
We were inside an empty cistern, a storage place for water in the old times of the city, which were long gone now. “What does a dead city need with water and sewers?” I asked Ian.
“It’s what you see,” he said. “All the souls see a different city. Some see a medieval keep, some see a sleek metropolis. You and I know what lives under the ground in the Iron Land, and we know to be wary of it. So you and I see a soot-ridden industrial wasteland, because that’s what my afterlife is and yours will be too—nothing but monsters and smoke and iron, as far as the eye can see.”
“Thanks again for cheering me up,” I told him. “Were you always this grim or was it brought on by death?”
“My brother often said I could make a clown weep tears of despair,” Ian said. “But Archie mostly liked to hear himself talk.”
“Clowns deserve it,” I said. “After all, they make everyone else weep tears of despair.”
The center of the cistern was built up out of junk that had fallen into the sewers: furniture, old metal cargo boxes, even the front end of a jitney, its windows papered over with illustrations from books depicting scared children fleeing through a darkened wood.
The jitney door was covered with a silk curtain, through which even more red light shone.
“What now?” I whispered to Ian.
“Now you come in,” a rich, velvety female voice intoned, and the curtain twitched aside of its own accord.
“Go,” Ian told me when I looked back at him in question. “What’s said inside is meant for you and you alone.”
I girded myself and climbed the rickety steps into the jitney. It had been cut in half by some explosive accident, and the back was built out of old doors, some with carved gargoyle faces, some made of metal bars, all covered in silken rags and clothes.
In front of them was a pile of filthy cushions, and on that pile sat a woman wearing a mourning dress, the full skirt, corset and bustle speaking to a distant, more refined time.
Her face was pale but much younger than I was expecting, and she peered at me from under a hat and veil trimmed in black raven feathers.
“You’re a sight, aren’t you?” she said. “In my day, a girl would never run about in trousers, with her hair unpinned.”
“In your day, you were still alive,” I retorted. “So I guess we’re even.”
Her face split in a wide grin, and she patted the cushion next to her. “Sit down, my dear. I rather like you. How did you find me?”
I sat, but not too close. “Ian helped me.”
“Ian Grayson?” Her laugh sounded like the rough, hungry call of a ghoul. “Well, well. There’s a name I never thought I’d hear again.”
“He’s my uncle,” I said, deciding the direct approach was best, “and I don’t think he likes you much.”
“You’re correct,” she said. “But there was a time that he liked me very much indeed. When he was my eyes and ears aboveground, my enforcer, convincing souls to come and give up part of themselves so I could stay alive. We were in love, and then he ran. So many love stories end that way.”
I looked her in the eye. She had the same deep black voids as the spirits who’d attacked me in the Iron Land. “I know all about Ian,” I said. “I’m not shocked, so why don’t you and I discuss what I came here to do?”
Her smile vanished. “You know, suddenly I don’t think I like you so much anymore.”
“I don’t like you either,” I said. “There, now we agree on something. Can I ask my question and get your price?”
She bared her teeth for a moment, but I kept my expression stony. I wasn’t going to play games with this woman. She wasn’t any different from the petty students at the Academy or the manipulative care-parents I’d had to live with. As long as I didn’t show weakness, she didn’t have power.
“What’s your name, girl?” she said at last.
“Aoife,” I answered. I dared her with my gaze to make some comment one way or the other. “What do they call you?” I countered.
She brought back the grin, hungrier and less sincere. “My name is Ariadne,” she said. “In my time, there were legends of a maiden who led a hero through a maze to safety. That’s why my father named me so—a fair girl with courage and heart.”
“Looks like he went wrong somewhere,” I muttered under my breath.
“Now they call me Miss Spider,” she said. “No longer the way out of the maze but the monster at the center of it.”
I forced myself to keep sitting still, holding her gaze. “I’ve met a lot of monsters. I just want to ask my question and be on my way.”