Chaos (18 page)

Both of them nodded, and I looked up to see Treasa glaring down at me. “Shut the bloody hell up,” she hissed. “We’re close.”

When we reached the trapdoor, she pulled out a flat metal object the size of a ruler and slid it up between the metal door and the rock. A moment later, she’d lifted the door a few inches and was peering around. Then she swung it upward and climbed out. I followed eagerly, emerging into a dark room that smelled like shit and rotting meat. I covered my nose as I moved aside for Ana. “Ugh. What is that?”

“We’re close to the kitchens,” whispered Treasa.

“I don’t want to know what’s on the menu,” I muttered, stepping over to the trapdoor and pulling Malachi up. His muscles were twitching, and he leaned on me gratefully. I swiped my hand over his sweaty face, wishing we could stop here and rest. But we couldn’t waste the opportunity the fire hour had given us.

I closed the trapdoor and positioned the crude locking mechanism so it looked locked but could easily be pushed aside with jostling from below. Treasa gave me a nod of approval. She pulled a small lantern from her cloak and used what looked like a palm-sized safety pin to create a spark and light the candle inside. We were in a high-ceilinged room with a giant pipe running along one side, and a trough on the other. It was filled with metal plates and knives, all smeared with grime. The only doorway led to a primitive but huge kitchen with multiple fireplaces. Iron pots and large flat griddles were stacked in various places.

“The kitchens are supposed to be along the main corridor,” whispered Treasa as we huddled in the doorway. “And the throne room is at the end of it.”

“We should count how long it takes us to make it to the throne room,” said Malachi, “and identify possible points of exit.”

“As well as the location and number of the guards,” added Ana in a flat voice. “We’re kidding ourselves if we think everyone in this palace is asleep.”

“Agreed,” I said, drawing a knife. The others followed suit. “I’ll go first.”

Ana nodded. We pulled our hoods over our heads and crept through the doorway and into the quiet kitchen. Treasa held her lantern close to her body, where she could easily cover it with her cloak. Behind me, I could hear the quiet wheeze of Malachi’s breathing.

We reached the main corridor and peeked out. The floor, lit with lanterns that flickered along the hallway, looked like it was made out of narrow stalks of polished white wood. My brow furrowed as I gestured at it. “I thought there weren’t any trees around here.”

Treasa gave me a look. “It’s not wood, idiot. Why do you think they call it the Bone Palace?”

“Why do they have to be so freaking literal here?” I peered up the hallway and saw a big open room about forty yards ahead. It was lit with a blue glow. I looked over my shoulder at Ana. “What do you bet that’s the portal?”

She nodded. Treasa held up a finger. “I’m going to count steps. Keep up.”

I launched myself after Treasa, jogging silently, trying not to think too hard about wha
t . . .
or who, reall
y . . .
lay beneath my feet.

A soft cough of surprise came from behind us. I whirled around. Malachi and Ana were facing two Mazikin. They were dressed in leather cloaks, one red and one blue, and staring at us with their tongues lolling. The one in blue was leading a human in a matching blue cloak by a leash. If they sounded the alarm, we’d have countless Mazikin descending on us quickly. We had no clear way out unless we could make it back to the kitchens—and the Mazikin were blocking our path.

The one in red opened its mouth. Ana reached for her knives, but it wasn’t going to happen fast enough. The howl pierced the silence—

And ended in a high-pitched whine as the Mazikin in blue fastened its jaws around the red-cloaked Mazikin’s throat.

EIGHTEEN

I
N AN INSTANT,
M
ALACHI
and Ana were standing, knives drawn, over the struggling red-cloaked Mazikin. The blue-cloaked human had been lurched to the floor as its master fought, and the human’s hood fell back.

“Mom,” I said in a choked voice.

Ana quickly cut through the leather strap of the leash that had been strangling her. Rita didn’t back up, though. She threw herself toward the blue-cloaked Mazikin and clung to its back.

Malachi tried to lift my mom off the pile as the red-cloaked Mazikin let out a gurgling death rattle, but Rita clawed at him and he let go quickly. The blue-cloaked Mazikin raised its head. It was Zip. She wiped her bloody muzzle on her cloak and whined. Ana knelt next to her and began to speak to her in Mazikin, and Malachi quickly joined the conversation.

I clenched my teeth. Hearing him speak that ugly language reminded me forcefully of those moments after Juri had possessed Malachi’s body. I’d never wanted to hear those evil sounds coming from his beautiful mouth again. I turned back to Treasa, who was scanning the halls, looking like she was about to explode.

“We’ll be lucky if that one in red didn’t wake the guards,” she muttered. “We have to get the carcass out of this hallway.”

Malachi seemed to be telling Zip the same thing, because the two of them stood up, wrapped the dead Mazikin in its red cloak, and dragged it into the kitchen while Ana and my mother followed behind, using their own cloaks to mop up the blood left on the bone floor. They disappeared into the kitchen while Treasa and I haunted the corridor. A moment later, a low growl sent us scooting into the kitchen.

“The guards are coming,” Treasa whispered as Malachi and Zip emerged from the room with the trapdoor.

“Food scraps,” said Ana quickly, and when she saw my look of confusion, she added, “They have excellent senses of smell. We can hide, but they’ll know we’re here. Come on.” She followed her nose to the source of the awful smells, a huge pile of rotting food at the back of the kitchen. Without hesitating, she grabbed a handful and rubbed it on her clothes. Trying not to barf, I did the same, as did Malachi and Treasa.

Zip had cleaned off her mouth and stripped herself of her cloak. She shoved my mother toward us and motioned for us to give her the same stench treatment, then loped toward the hallway. We crouched behind a shelf of huge iron pots and listened to her having a conversation consisting of grunts and coughs with several Mazikin out in the main corridor. Malachi offered whispered translation. “She’s saying that she forgot her comb in the kitchens and came to get it. She says she stubbed her paw in the darkness and cried out, and is apologizing for bothering them. She works here, apparently.”

Takeshi had told me as much. “Are they buying it?”

Malachi nodded. “They don’t suspect her. They’re actually speaking quite affectionately to her.”

I let myself sag with relief. My mother edged up close to me, covering her mouth with her hand.
“Yo quiero que vuelva Zip,”
she said in muffled tones.
“Los demás quieren robarme los dientes, pero ella no les permita.”

Ana gave her a worried look. “Lela, your mother is saying something about having her teeth stolen—”

I put my hand on her arm. “Don’t tell me what she says unless it actually makes sense.”

Malachi reached over and tucked a curl behind my ear. I noticed he didn’t disagree with me. “Zip’s coming back,” he said, rising from behind the shelf.

She joined us, and my mother threw herself at the Mazikin, wrapping her arms around Zip’s furry neck. Zip patted her head lovingly. My mother had probably never experienced that kind of protective caring. Somehow, here, of all places, she’d found someon
e . . .
or some
thin
g
. . .
that cared about her.

Zip, Malachi, and Treasa conversed for a few minutes before turning to me. “She said she can take us to the throne room,” Ana translated.

Zip led us back into the main corridor, and we jogged toward the throne room. The blue glow grew brighter, and as we reached the edge of the vast room, we could see light sparkling against the salt-crystal-crusted ceiling. On one side of the room was a semicircular set of steps that led up to two thrones, everything made of bone. The curved tops of the thrones were lined with human skulls. Behind the throne platform was a huge mosaic, colored bits coming together to form one giant grinning Mazikin face. I glanced at Zip, and she pointed to my mouth. I looked back at the mosaic and squinted.

“It’s made from teeth,” Treasa whispered.

And suddenly the reason my mother was babbling about teeth seemed totally logical.

We slowly edged into the room. There were two sleeping Mazikin guards leaning against the wall near the source of the blue light, which looked like a giant well, framed by a waist-high circular wall made of stacked stones. Pointing to the guards, Ana touched Treasa on the shoulder, and the two of them skimmed quickly along the edge of the room, drawing their knives. They killed the guards silently within seconds. Zip skittered after them and gestured into a hallway a few yards away from the bluish well—which I could only assume was the portal—and the three of them dragged the bodies into the darkness of the corridor. Malachi, my mom, and I reached the well as they returned without the guards.

I looked down into the portal, a swirling well of sparkling liquid blue about ten feet below the edge, lapping at the rocky walls. The gelatinous substance made soft slurping sounds as it moved in its slow circle, a beautiful sapphire whirlpool. I gripped the stacked stones, feeling the cold radiating up from the portal’s surface. “What is that stuff?”

Zip was hooting and coughing. Ana leaned close to me. “Apparently that’s a closely guarded secret. But look.” She pointed at the bottom of the well. “See them?”

Deep in the blue goo, I sa
w . . .
Mazikin. Lying at the bottom of the well, perfectly still. “Are they dead?”

“They’re probably the ones occupying bodies,” said Malachi.

So a Mazikin jumped through, and its spirit flew off to displace a human soul while its body sank to the bottom of this well to wait for its return. “What happens if you jump in there without a body waiting on the other side?”

Once Ana had translated, Zip shook her head, shuddering. “Then your spirit has no home, nothing to contain it. It leaves your body and is lost forever,” Malachi said in a hollow voice. “Perhaps it is like the dark tower. An end.”

“So I guess a pool party is out of the question,” I muttered.

Malachi chuckled, and I returned my attention to the creatures lying dormant at the bottom of the well, cocooned in blue gelatin until they returned to themselves. I tried to make out each Mazikin’s features, wondering which one was Juri. I wondered if he could feel our stares, if he had any idea how badly I wanted to destroy him. I wished Takeshi were here with the grenades, because I wanted to do it right now. But just as I was imagining what that might feel like, the surface of the portal began to hum, vibrations that made the floor shudder beneath our feet.

Zip let out a yelp and shoved my mother away from the portal, gesturing for us to follow. I heard Mazikin growling coming from the main corridor. As we ran past, I glanced into the portal and was filled with horror. The surface had changed to reveal a wavering, distorted image: a man, lying on a table. We were peering down at him from above. He stared upward, looking absolutely terrified. His wrists and ankles were tied. Next to him stood a few people, stroking his arms, but I couldn’t see who they wer
e . . .
until one of them leaned over the man to speak to him. I recognized the black hair, the shape of his head, the muscles of his shoulders.

It was Juri, wearing Malachi’s body. And he was about to send another human to hell.

My fingers curled over the rocks. I was caught, wanting desperately to draw a knife and dive in, though I knew that would never work. Juri tilted his head and looked up, wearing a wicked smile I recognized and loved, and I froze up completely.

His eyes narrowed and his smile faltered, almost as if he could see me.

Wait. What if he
could
see me?

A steely arm wrapped around my waist and dragged me backward. “There’s nothing we can do right now,” Malachi said as he pulled me into the corridor where the others had hauled the bodies of the Mazikin guards. Malachi guided me into a dark room, the first doorway on the left. My heart was pounding hard enough to make breathing an effort. Had Juri seen me? It wasn’t possible, right?

Zip waited inside the small chamber, where blood was smeared on the floor. This was where they’d brought the guards, but they were nowhere to be seen. Zip closed the metal door after us, and Treasa held up her lantern as the stench hit me.

We were in a Mazikin bathroom. There was a row of holes in the floor at the back of the room, and the odor made me gag—though I suddenly knew where they’d stashed the bodies. They were probably floating down the river at this very moment.

Zip edged to the front of the room, farthest from the toilet holes, and picked quietly at the wall. A beam of blue light pierced the almost dark. Ana and Treasa leaned close. “We can watch from here,” Treasa said in a bemused whisper. “They’ll never sense us.”

“What if one of them needs to pee?” I asked.

“It will be the last thing they ever do,” Malachi said, holding up a knife.

All six of us huddled around the openings in the wall. Apparently, we weren’t the first people who had thought this toilet room was a great location for spying. I had a narrow view of the throne room from between cracks in the bone paneling. This wall was about five yards away from the portal, which was now humming loudly. Several Mazikin had gathered around it, but then a rumbling engine noise sent them scrambling away. Zip whimpered as the noise became louder. A moment later a huge heavy mechanized cart rolled into view, driven by a chauffeur with pointed ears poking through its leather cap. The Queen herself lounged on the wide platform at the back, on a soft-looking mattress. Her belly seemed even more distended than the last time I’d seen her.

Next to me, Malachi stiffened and pressed his hands against the wall. The last time he’d seen the Queen, she’d ripped his heart out. From the fierce tautness in his muscles, I could tell he was trying to control his terror at seeing her again. I refocused on her, those black eyes watching the portal greedily. With the help of two Mazikin in gowns, the Queen rose from her cart and waddled clumsily on her hind legs over to the portal’s edge. She looked in and licked her lips. I held my breath, and not because of the smell. If Juri had seen me, would he tip her off? Was there a way he’d let her know?

But she didn’t act like what she saw in the portal was anything other than what she expected. She smiled down at it, baring her razor fangs and blowing a kiss to whomever she was looking at inside, probably Juri. Then she beckoned another Mazikin forward, grunting and growling at it.

“She’s congratulating it for winning the lottery and telling it to obey Juri’s orders as if they were her own,” Ana whispered.

Now my hands were pressed to the stone wall. The mood in the throne room was celebratory, but somewhere in my home state, in the land of the living, there lay a man desperately clinging to his life. His soul. He was about to be lost, ripped from himself. And there was nothing I could do to stop it.

The lucky Mazikin climbed up on the stone wall surrounding the portal. It wasn’t wearing any clothes. It stroked its own fur with trembling clawed fingers. Its ears twitched. My eyes burned. This was so many kinds of wrong. How had this been allowed to happen once, let alone a million times? How could the Judge allow these creatures that she had created to do so much harm?

My throat tightened as the light from the portal became a column of solid blue that threw dancing sapphire prisms over the room. They were reflected in the ebony eyes of the creatures. The Queen ran her hand over her belly, then raised her arms. When she brought them down, the naked Mazikin jumped into the portal.

I pressed my forehead to the wall and bit my tongue, trying not to scream with rage. I could almost feel it—the fight, the despair, the losing battle. I turned to Malachi and wrapped my arms around his waist. His arms coiled around my back and neck as we clung to each other. The jubilant howls of the Mazikin slithered like snakes through the cracks in our space, winding around us. It only made me hold on to him tighter.

“We have to get them all out of the city,” he whispered desperately in my ear. “No one can be left behind. Not a single one.”

I nodded against his chest. “I know.” I had no idea if it was even possible, but we had to try. No one who had suffered the agony of being sent to hell could be abandoned here. “I
know
.”

He held me as the yowls of triumph grew quiet and the light filtering through the cracks grew dim. When I finally pulled myself away from him, it was nearly silent again. I could hear each breath from our small scouting party.

Zip and Treasa were speaking quietly near the back, though how they were tolerating the stench from the toilet holes was beyond me. Zip was pointing down one of the holes, and Treasa was nodding eagerly.

“Oh my God,” said Ana in a quietly disgusted voice. “They’re talking about whether the Tanner’s people can climb up through the holes. The Tanner brought rope.”

“I’m glad we took the ladder,” I replied.

“We should probably get back,” Ana said, turning to Zip and posing a question in Mazikin. After Zip answered, Ana translated. “In an hour or so, the palace workers will start to get up and prepare for the Queen to hold court. This place will be crawling with Mazikin.”

Zip slowly pulled the door open, and we all crowded into the side hallway, sucking lungfuls of relatively fresh air. We hadn’t taken two steps toward the throne room when the portal emitted a deep, percussive thump and filled the chamber with blinding light. Zip’s black eyes went wide. Without a word, she grabbed my mother and dragged her back into the hallway, barking at us as she fled right past the bathroom and out of sight.