The Bone Triangle (40 page)

A middle-aged woman in the third row spoke up. She had heavily freckled shoulders that spoke of too many days in the desert sun. Her left shoulder, the one she used to lift her arm high, had a tattoo on it depicting a heart pierced by an arrow. “What if we don’t write well with these pens?” she asked. “What if our handwriting is—illegible?”

“Good question,” piped up Gilling. “You don’t have to worry about that! The writing only has to be readable to
you
. The point of the exercise is to focus your mind. It isn’t really an essay assignment. If you know what you’re writing, that’s good enough.”

The presence of all these innocents made me feel responsible for them. They had no clue what might befall them in the next few minutes. As far as I could tell, I was the only one on guard duty. Meng and Gilling were moving to safe spots at the far end of the room.

I waved to Gilling and quickly gained his attention. Meng busied herself by murmuring instructions to each of her thralls in turn. Doubtlessly, she was steeling them for the trials ahead.

“Why are you doing this, Gilling? Are you completely under her spell?”

He stared at me for a moment. The right corner of his mouth twitched. “I don’t know what you mean, Draith. You’ve been acting strange, lately.”

I nodded, agreeing with him gently. He was under her influence, I was sure of that.

“I know,” I said. “But I’m wondering about some things. Why did she leave you out there on the beach world? Was she trying to kill you or not?”

He reached up with his hand and pushed back a lock of his long, fine hair. “We weren’t in complete agreement
back then,” he said. “I didn’t understand her point of view. I lacked—discipline.”

“I see,” I said, nodding encouragement. Inside, I was becoming angry again and second-guessing my part in all this. It was hard to watch friends under Meng’s influence. Maybe I was wrong about allying myself with her. Maybe it would be best to kill her by surprise or at least to incapacitate her. Then I could face the Beast on my own, win or lose.

While I struggled with this choice, I thought of one more question to ask him. “What about the twin books? The twin
The Flowers of Evil
?”

“What about them?”

“There’s been new writing in the one Jacqueline has. She saw the book change, writing a new poem as she watched.”

Gilling’s eyes lit up. “Impossible. Tantalizing.”

“Are you doing it somehow? Is it part of all this?”

He shook his head. His gaze drifted to the board again, to the name at the top. “No, it was the Beast. I’m quite sure of it. I lost the twin book, you see. It was taken from me and sucked away into the Beast’s den. What intrigues me most about your account is the implication that this being can
alter
an artifact. Could that be a special property of its private world? Many of the worlds seem to break rules that the cosmos applies so faithfully here.”

I thought about the Beast writing its own poem in my book, and the implications were chilling. Was it trying to communicate? At the very least, that showed intellect on its part. Previously, I’d thought of the Beast as a monster, a creature like a great white shark or maybe a more dangerous relative from shark ancestry, such as a megalodon.

But to know that a thinking being was behind this…it was frightening. An intelligence that could possess artifacts of power and manipulate them in ways we could not?
A creature of such intellect should not be hunting humans in our streets.

Not unless it was as Gutter Jim had once said: that to the Beast, we were the animals. We were prey, to be hunted and consumed at will. From its point of view, it was a Kodiak bear, and we were a river full of wriggling salmon.

Somehow, this line of thinking clarified the situation again, helped steel my resolve. The Beast was infinitely worse. At least Meng was human.

Gilling moved on now to explaining the details of the process. He told the recruits that human blood must be used as ink and that, unfortunately, the supply had run out long ago. I thought of the empty plastic bags I’d seen in the closet and was suddenly certain what had once been contained within them.

The woman with the heart tattoo on her freckled shoulder raised her hand again. Gilling gave her a fluttering smile and nodded to her.

“What are we supposed to use, if we are out of blood?”

Gilling’s eyebrows lifted high. “Ah, now you have brought us to the heart of the matter. If you would all find the small knife on your desks—careful! They are quite sharp, and we mustn’t waste a drop…”

I grimaced and squinched my eyes as the cutting and scribbling began. At first, the process was quite controlled and almost normal. Like biology students required to examine their own blood under a microscope, they took great care and moved with reluctant slowness.

Then, however, they began to scribe. They drew the diagram first, then wrote the Beast’s name. The first time was slow and deliberate. The second iteration, however, was more intense. They were engaged now, focused. They worked with silent concentration. Soon, some of them ran
out of ink. They did not hesitate when they picked up the knife for more.

They continued working, sliding up their scrolls to find fresh spots upon which to scratch and bleed. Each time they repeated the process, they became less finicky. They stabbed their own hands without a qualm and dipped their pens into the liquid that ran from their desks to dribble on their hospital gowns and splatter on the concrete floor.

After the first few minutes, I couldn’t watch. Fortunately, a distraction was provided in the form of a rip that emerged and grew in strength. It was exactly where Gilling and Meng had said it would be: in the center of the chalkboard. I stared at it and readied myself.

If something did reach through that rip, I told myself it would not get to the innocents who scratched away their life on their scrolls. I would stop it, somehow.

But the formation of this rip was disturbing and quite unlike anything I’d ever witnessed. Rather than a clean surge of light, the room dimmed and filled with a murk that reminded me of the choking atmosphere I’d encountered in the Beast’s world.

At first, the murky cloud maintained a cohesive form. Then it broke apart, sending tendril-like wisps of self-aware smoke. Each of these vaporous threads reached out toward one of the scribes. When the vapor touched them, each scribe made an odd sound, a sort of death rattle of released breath.

The scribes, now connected to the central mass on the chalkboard, worked with frantic energy and concentration. Hunched over their scrolls, they bent forward until their faces almost kissed the desks. Their eyes were wide and staring. They sweated and no longer spoke. Occasionally they released guttural sounds.

What could be going on in their minds? I was glad I couldn’t feel the grip of whatever powerful force held them. I knew now that the force behind this phenomenon wasn’t Meng. Perhaps it was the Beast itself, I thought. Perhaps it
wanted
the path to be opened. It was a chilling thought.

“I can’t take much more of this,” I said. “Can I step through now?”

“Just a moment more, please,” Gilling said in a calm, professional voice.

I could tell Meng’s grip upon his mind held Gilling in firm self-control. But after this was over, Gilling and I were both going to be treated to a lifetime of night terrors. I only hoped the scribes would be spared these memories.

Moans and burbling sounds slipped from their lax lips as the spell—or whatever it was—reached its zenith. Even Meng looked worried, her teeth showing in a grimace.

“Will these tendrils of smoke turn into tentacles?” I asked, wanting to know what I should expect.

“Quiet, please,” Meng said. “We are about to break through. The barrier—”

I never heard the rest of the sentence. At that moment a gush of energy was released from the center of the rip. The vaporous region changed, becoming the spinning star pattern of burned-orange light I was familiar with.

The scribes stopped working all at once. McKesson leaned back in his chair. He was bleary-eyed but looked to me like he was less exhausted than the rest. There was still some fight left in him. Others slumped over their desks and a few fell to the bloody floor, unconscious. All of them looked dazed and spent.

At least they were all still breathing. I turned back to the rip and saw it was dark—unusually so. In most cases, I could see a wavering version of the world on the far side, but this
time I couldn’t see anything other than a swirling darkness. I tensed, expecting an explosion of something nauseating. The rip didn’t disappoint me.

Liquid spilled into the room. I stumbled backward as muck ran around my shoes. It wasn’t blood, fortunately. It was something like the slime at the bottom of a swamp. The odor was overpowering.

“No tentacles, no guardians,” Gilling said in a hushed voice. “At least not yet.”

I glanced at him and back to the rip. My weapons were ready, and I wished right then I had McKesson at my side. He was a hard man to like, but he’d always come through when action was required. I thought of asking Meng to release him and let him join me, but I felt it would be unfair. Right now, he didn’t even feel the pain of his broken bones. Why torment him? He was too injured to do much good in a fight, anyway.

“What are you waiting for, rogue?” Meng demanded in a loud, ringing voice. “We’ve upheld our part of the bargain. Finish it!”

She rattled on about cowardice and deal-breakers. I didn’t look at her. I barely listened to her. I could tell she wasn’t accustomed to being ignored, but I planned to do this my way. I examined the muck, which still flowed around my shoes. The consistency of pancake batter, it had formed an inch-deep puddle around the rip. I didn’t like the look of it, but I didn’t see any way around it.

I took a cautious step into the rip. The sound of Meng’s voice cut out, which was a blessing. I entered another world, and I couldn’t recall ever having done so with such grim expectations.

This deep inside the Beast’s lair, I could sense its presence. I felt the malevolent intelligence as soon as I stepped through the portal. I could
feel
the Beast in my mind. I knew now what Cartoon had been talking about. He’d been more sensitive than I, but the aura of evil was undeniable. It made my spine tickle as if fingers played over it, and my heart raced in my chest. I recalled when I’d first encountered one of the guardians, the anamorphic things that haunted this place. I’d felt dread then, too, but this was more intense.

I stepped forward warily. My lungs filled with the heavy vapor of the place, a swamp-fog of hot, thick air. I struggled not to cough, not wanting to give myself away to whatever might be listening. The tunnels were wide in this region, but still curved at the bottom and arching overhead. There were no tentacle clusters, at least not at this spot. What there was, however, disgusted me almost as much. As I reached the
bottom of a curved passage, I found myself facing a deeper pool of swirling mud. Having no real choice, I stepped into the muck, a sludge of soupy material that squelched into my shoes with every step. The pool seemed to deepen the farther I moved from the rip Gilling and his minions had made for me. I wasn’t sure if I’d appeared inside a relatively high and dry section, or if the variation was due to some crossover effect, a smoothing out of the wrinkles between my world and this one.

I pressed ahead into a dark void, my shoes wanting to stay behind in the sucking mud. I struggled to keep them on and to advance as quietly as possible. The only light source I could detect was the green glimmer of my bottle, but even that seemed muted here. It was as if the light were being drawn from the chamber, even as the vapor dampened the air and the mud dragged at my feet.

I allowed the bottle to cast a beam of wan light in front of me, like a flashlight. I knew it might well alert an enemy, but I would rather that than stumble blindly over a waterfall of muck or into the waiting jaws of a patient behemoth.

The light was still muted, but it penetrated the world around me. I was surprised to see that not only the floor ran with mud, but the walls, too, seemed coated in a moving slime of the stuff. I tried not to think about possible reasons for this effect. I knew I might be witnessing a living morass of self-mobile bacteria or, worse, venturing into the digestive system of a vast being.

For a moment, the place was too alien, and I felt an overwhelming urge to run. I knew the rip was right behind me, and with luck I would reach it if I turned tail on the instant. The thought grew in my mind, and I worked hard to push it away.

To steel myself, I thought of Cartoon, the self-sacrificing thralls in Meng’s dungeons, and a dozen other dead innocents I’d seen. This invasion had to be stopped, and no one had ever come this close to the goal before. Perhaps it was unachievable, as the animal of fear in my mind screamed to me. But I was going to see it through and make my attempt.

The liver in my left hand squished up between my fingers as I squeezed it in my anxiety. I took six more steps and found myself standing knee deep in the muck.