The most surprising aspect of the Glass Spider was that it could move. Miriam claimed the Spider's legs could crawl through the dust faster than an eagle could fly, stirring up silt in mammoth plumes that streamed away for miles behind the speeding bug. It had been racing through the dust for most of the past week, covering a hundred leagues every hour; but a short while ago it had finally stopped, apparently at its journey's end.
What was the Spider's purpose? Who built it? Miriam didn't know, but at least she could list the people who had arrived with her ten days ago.
Her immediate superior had been the drow back at the corpse-heap; since the wights had torn him to bloody confetti, we didn't bother asking his name.
The drow's boss was our old friend Bleach-Hair, his real name Petrov. Petrov hailed from some Prime Material world whose predominant landscape was ice; Miriam didn't remember the world's name, and none of us cared. (I might comment, by the way, that so-called ice worlds usually have their share of green fields, lakes, and even jungles; when someone like Petrov says he comes from an ice world, he almost always comes from a perfectly normal world and just lived in an icy part of it. Folk of the Prime Material plane are so parochial they seldom know much about their own homes, let alone the multiverse at large.)
Petrov occupied the second highest rung on the ladder of command. Above him were two powerful figures who shared control of everything that happened in the Glass Spider. One was a human mage who called himself «The Fox»… although Miriam contended «The Loon» was a more appropriate title. The Fox loved fire the way another man might love women; he could gaze at flames for hours, talking to the blaze and showing every sign of listening to it talk back. Thanks to various magic spells, he could even caress fire, bathe in it, wear it like a cloak. Needless to say, the Fox manufactured the firewands used at the courts, and masterminded all the other fiery accidents that had struck faction headquarters in Sigil. The very first incident – the riot at the Gatehouse asylum – had started when the Fox broke out of a padded cell where he had been confined for years.
The Fox had managed his escape with the help of the other leader of this group, a human woman named Rivi. She was not a sorcerer – Miriam claimed that Rivi hated sorcerers, although she got along well with a barmy like the Fox – but Rivi could still do things that struck Miriam as magic: reading minds, for example, or projecting her thoughts through the building to give orders to underlings.
«Oh,» said Hezekiah. «Rivi must be psionic.»
«What do you know about psionics?» I asked him.
«How do you think I teleport?» he replied. «I'm not a magician.»
«I thought you were.»
«Nope. It's all mind over matter.»
Hmm. If Hezekiah's mind could win that kind of contest, it substantially lowered my opinion of matter.
Most of the party had died in short order; the Fox had been battered by evil magics, and driven insane; but a few, including Felice, had escaped unscathed, dragging the Fox with them and eventually making their way back to Sigil. Naturally, the survivors had all reported these events to their factions, depositing personal accounts of the expedition in the various faction archives. Just as naturally, the Fox had set about stealing those accounts from faction headquarters the moment Rivi freed him. His eagerness to return here suggested that the long-ago expedition had found some kind of treasure in the Plane of Dust but hadn't taken it with them. Now, the Fox had come back to collect that treasure, using the information he had stolen from the factions.
Miriam's story introduced a dozen new puzzles about what was going on, but such questions could wait. At least we knew something about our opposition now: fire-wizard Fox, psionic Rivi, and an assortment of bashers from Sigil. There was only one other question in my mind, and I asked it. «If Petrov and his cronies captured some prisoners, where would he take them?»
«To Rivi,» Miriam answered immediately. «She can do things to people's minds. She can… change you. Back when she and the Fox were recruiting people, they hired two first-rate knights of the post: sneak thieves. Only problem was, the thieves wouldn't work together – one was githyanki, the other githzerai. Hated each other like poison. So Rivi took them away for a few hours, and next thing you know, they're bosom buddies. Lifelong friends. She did something spooky to their brains.»
«Is that really possible?» I whispered to Hezekiah. It irked me to turn to a Clueless for information, but he was the only authority we had on psionic powers.
«Rearranging a person's thoughts can be tricky,» he whispered back. «Making it permanent is even harder. It once took Uncle Toby a whole day to stop two kings from declaring war with each other. Of course, he had to fix up their generals too, so that's what dragged out the time.»
«Your Uncle… painted over their minds?» I pictured how easily I could change a frown to a smile with just a few strokes of the brush. Was it that easy for Uncle Toby? Was it equally easy for Rivi? If this brainpainter had enough time to work on Yasmin, to rape her mind…
«We have to save the others,» I said. «We have to save them now.»
«Where can we find this Rivi?» Wheezle asked quietly.
«Her quarters are on the lower level,» Miriam replied. «I can show you.»
I glanced at Wheezle, raising my eyebrows. «We cannot trust her,» Wheezle said, answering my unasked question. «On the other hand, it is safer to take her with us than leave her or kill her. As long as she remains in our hands, she has an incentive to cooperate.» The little gnome turned to her. «You understand what these wights will do if you betray us?»
The wights leered in her face, but she just jutted out her chin. «I know the game,» she answered. «I'll play.»
«And I'll make sure she does,» Hezekiah said. «I'll take her under my wing.»
He moved to her side and smiled. Suddenly, he was terrifying again – his face didn't change a muscle, but his smile took on the unnatural brightness of a killer, the placid tranquility of a child who could slay its mother without conscience. In that face was all the cruelty of childhood, the taunts, the bullying, the inventive tortures of insects and younger siblings.
«You'll be good, won't you?» Hezekiah told Miriam. Then he was simply a Clueless boy again, his smile only a smile, his face only an eighteen-year-old face.
I couldn't stand to look at it.
«Don't worry about me,» Miriam mumbled. «You're my high-up man, you are.» She edged away from him but kept her head lowered, like a dog showing submission to a wolf.
«Then we're all set,» the boy said. «Let's get going.»
If we didn't rescue Yasmin and the others before the wights found their objective, I knew we'd all be in big trouble. No one went to all this bother for something innocuous.
Soon, we were approaching the next intersection of a radial arm with the Spider's central ring. As before, a furniture-filled lounge occupied the area where the arm connected with the body; but in the center of the room was a spiral wrought-iron staircase leading down to a lower level. The iron was bare and unpainted, yet I couldn't see the slightest fleck of rust – either these steps were scoured daily by a platoon of wights with sandpaper, or there was some kind of magic at work, maintaining this place in pristine condition. I put my money on the magic: the whole Glass Spider was in good upkeep, but it had an air of antiquity about it, as if it had endured for eons, impervious to decay.
Miriam gestured that we should go down the stairs. Wheezle stopped her and sent two wights ahead to see if the way was clear. They came back smiling their pointy grins and hissing in a relaxed fashion that suggested no one was lurking in ambush. We formed up our company again, wights at the head and rear, more wights tightly surrounding Miriam; then we began our descent.
As we climbed downward, my ears picked up a rumbling in the distance. It took me a few seconds to identify the sound; but then I remembered a tour I had taken of The Lady's Chime, that huge clock tower just down the street from Sigil's Hall of Speakers. The upper floors of the tower had echoed with the clicking of gears, the whirr of flywheels, and the ratcheting of counterweights pulling time forward. The rumble I heard now had the same sort of mechanical edge to it – a giant clockworks muttering to itself. We must be approaching the machinery that allowed the Glass Spider to move.
A long arcing corridor led us away from the stairs, and soon the air filled with the smell of metal: bare metal, oiled metal, hot metal. The corridor was lit by glass globes suspended from the ceiling; each globe burned bright and white from some inner fire. Their light revealed that Hezekiah had linked his arm with Miriam's as soon as we reached this lower floor. Clearly, he didn't want to risk her running away while he'd been appointed to watch her.
The mechanical rumble grew louder as we continued forward. Ahead lay an open doorway, and beyond that was a room full of metal machinery: I recognized gears, chain-belts, cables, and other simple trappings, but the great bulk of equipment was beyond my comprehension. How could one understand a bank of square crystals glowing with hieroglyphs of light, or huge metal drums that occasionally hissed steam through red-hot stopcocks? What was the purpose of a dozen metal pistons pounding in and out of smoking cylinders, or a gold stalactite mounted above a copper stalagmite with squirts of lightning leaping between their points? All I knew was that the air burned and reeked with oil, like the vestibule of some fiery hell.
Wheezle stopped us once more and turned a questioning gaze toward Miriam. «It's always like this,» the woman shrugged. «You're a gnome – you should know about machines.»
«I specialize in death, not devices,» Wheezle replied. «Are we close to where this Rivi would be?»
«Her quarters are in this machine room,» Miriam said. «She likes it here.»
«How can she sleep with all this noise?»
«She says it just takes discipline. Rivi is hot blazing barmy about discipline.»
«Why doesn't that surprise me?» I muttered. But Wheezle was already leading us forward.
«There's a control room over in the corner,» Miriam said above the clatter of machinery. «That's where Rivi spends most of her time.»
«Then you stay here with Hezekiah,» I told her. «Wheezle and I will see if Rivi's home.»
«Whack her the second you see her,» Miriam advised. «She'll addle your chops if you don't.»
«No loyalty toward your former boss?» I asked.
«None,» Miriam replied. «If you don't put Rivi down, she'll turn my brains to cheese for helping you.»
«We shall try to avoid that eventuality,» Wheezle said. Kowtowing briefly to those who were staying behind, he gathered a selection of wights and gestured for me to take the lead.
The control room in the corner had thick concrete walls without a single window. An odd design – if you were a worker controlling the machinery, wouldn't it be nice to see what the equipment was doing? On the other hand, perhaps the room was not a command post where you calmly watched gauges so much as a bunker to take cover when you pushed the wrong button.
The door to the control room was closed. I took one side of it, Wheezle took the other, and the wights stood directly back from the opening, ready to charge in as soon as I turned the knob. Holding up his fingers, Wheezle counted off Three, Two, One. Flick, I threw open the door, and with a clatter of toe-claws across cement, the wights leapt forward. I jumped in right behind them, my rapier drawn and ready to impale anyone who could paint obscenities over other people's brains.
There was nobody home.
Undoubtedly, however, someone did live in this room. In the back corner was a small cot, its crisp sheets tucked and folded with a precision that would satisfy the most fastidious member of the Harmonium. Around the walls, wooden tables held neat stacks of paper, numerous books alphabetized by title, and a few scrolls hung on pine dowels. The whole place had an air of obsessive organization.
I turned my back on it. «Rivi's not here.»
«True,» Wheezle nodded. «But her library is. It could teach us a great deal about her intentions.»
«It would take days to read all this, and that's assuming it's written in a language we understand. Let's keep moving.»
«Surely we can spare a minute to glance at a page or two,» Wheezle said.
I waved my arm at the collection. «Which page?»
«The oldest.» He shuffled to the closest table and peered at the stacks – paper, parchment, vellum, papyrus. «The oldest,» he went on, «is most likely to tell of the beginning of things. Obscure secrets. Forgotten wisdom.» He moved to another table. «I have studied a number of ancient languages and am quite fluent in… ah, this looks interesting.»
Standing on tiptoe, he pushed away a stack of papers to reveal something underneath: a clay tablet, covered with scratchy marks like the footprints of a mouse. At some point in the past, the tablet had broken into three flat pieces; later on, Rivi or someone else had reassembled the pieces like parts of a puzzle, imbedding them in newer clay to hold them together. I had to admit, it certainly looked like the oldest document in the room.
«Can you read it?» I asked.
«I have seen the script before,» Wheezle replied. «The language is called Urqlish – extremely old. Some say it predates the eldest gods. No one knows how to pronounce its words, but my mentors taught me how to decipher such writings. The Urqs, whoever they were, left massive volumes of text to posterity. Much of it deals with incomprehensible facets of their culture, but this… this is something different.»
«What does it say?»
«Let me see. The Words of Savant… I can't make out the savant's name, but it doesn't matter. The Words of Savant whoever to his liege lord: Know, O Queen…»
When Wheezle finished reading, neither of us spoke for several seconds. Even the wights were silent, their burning gaze lost in some unknown distance.
«Miriam told us Rivi hated magic,» I said at last.
«Indeed,» Wheezle nodded. «And if she finds the two grinders… one grinder makes it impossible for people to cast magic, and the other is essentially the antidote. An exceedingly powerful pair of weapons.»
«What would happen,» I asked, «if she spread the white dust over a battlefield? While she and her allies were safely covered in the brown.»
«Magic decides many battles,» Wheezle replied, «especially when your opponents have none. With proper tactics, Rivi could become a fearsome conqueror.»
«Of course,» I said, «some god would eventually stop her. Step in and seize the grinders.»
Wheezle shook his head. «I think if one god tried to possess such powerful artifacts, other gods would prevent that from happening. Suppose, for example, that a good god claimed the grinders; evil gods would fear such weapons wielded in the cause of virtue, and would try to take the grinders for themselves. The struggle might precipitate Ragnarok itself – the final battle of god against god, wherein the cosmos is destroyed. No,» Wheezle said, «the gods will be extremely wary of intervening… and if any god does, Rivi will be the least of the multiverse's problems.»
«But suppose Rivi tries to conquer Sigil!» I protested. «Suppose she spreads her dust, then leads in an army equipped with magic. Surely The Lady of Pain would take direct action then – it's her job to protect Sigil.»
«The Lady of Pain may or may not be a god,» Wheezle replied. «She is Sigil's legendary protector, but she is also a great mystery. Perhaps she is only a sorcerer herself; in that case, she will be as helpless as any streetcorner conjuror. If by chance she is a god… well, as I say, gods of all persuasions would band together to prevent any other deity from claiming the grinders. Who knows the outcome?»
I shuddered. Scant minutes ago, our party had just come to rescue Yasmin and the others; now, it looked like the fate of whole worlds was on the line. Truth to tell, I still cared about Yasmin more than some abstract threat toward Sigil or any other realm… but the added pressure didn't help.
8. THREE SCORCHED PRISONERS
What was the Spider's purpose? Who built it? Miriam didn't know, but at least she could list the people who had arrived with her ten days ago.
Her immediate superior had been the drow back at the corpse-heap; since the wights had torn him to bloody confetti, we didn't bother asking his name.
The drow's boss was our old friend Bleach-Hair, his real name Petrov. Petrov hailed from some Prime Material world whose predominant landscape was ice; Miriam didn't remember the world's name, and none of us cared. (I might comment, by the way, that so-called ice worlds usually have their share of green fields, lakes, and even jungles; when someone like Petrov says he comes from an ice world, he almost always comes from a perfectly normal world and just lived in an icy part of it. Folk of the Prime Material plane are so parochial they seldom know much about their own homes, let alone the multiverse at large.)
Petrov occupied the second highest rung on the ladder of command. Above him were two powerful figures who shared control of everything that happened in the Glass Spider. One was a human mage who called himself «The Fox»… although Miriam contended «The Loon» was a more appropriate title. The Fox loved fire the way another man might love women; he could gaze at flames for hours, talking to the blaze and showing every sign of listening to it talk back. Thanks to various magic spells, he could even caress fire, bathe in it, wear it like a cloak. Needless to say, the Fox manufactured the firewands used at the courts, and masterminded all the other fiery accidents that had struck faction headquarters in Sigil. The very first incident – the riot at the Gatehouse asylum – had started when the Fox broke out of a padded cell where he had been confined for years.
The Fox had managed his escape with the help of the other leader of this group, a human woman named Rivi. She was not a sorcerer – Miriam claimed that Rivi hated sorcerers, although she got along well with a barmy like the Fox – but Rivi could still do things that struck Miriam as magic: reading minds, for example, or projecting her thoughts through the building to give orders to underlings.
«Oh,» said Hezekiah. «Rivi must be psionic.»
«What do you know about psionics?» I asked him.
«How do you think I teleport?» he replied. «I'm not a magician.»
«I thought you were.»
«Nope. It's all mind over matter.»
Hmm. If Hezekiah's mind could win that kind of contest, it substantially lowered my opinion of matter.
* * *
Miriam didn't know exactly what Rivi and the Fox were up to, but they wanted to find something that was buried in the dust a long time ago. The mysterious object had been unearthed once before, by an expedition under the leadership of Felice DeVail, Guvner Oonah's mother. The Fox had belonged to that expedition, along with members of many other Sigil factions; they had toured several planes including Dust, eventually jumping by accident into the middle of the Gray Wastes and finding themselves trapped between hostile armies in the Blood Wars raging there.Most of the party had died in short order; the Fox had been battered by evil magics, and driven insane; but a few, including Felice, had escaped unscathed, dragging the Fox with them and eventually making their way back to Sigil. Naturally, the survivors had all reported these events to their factions, depositing personal accounts of the expedition in the various faction archives. Just as naturally, the Fox had set about stealing those accounts from faction headquarters the moment Rivi freed him. His eagerness to return here suggested that the long-ago expedition had found some kind of treasure in the Plane of Dust but hadn't taken it with them. Now, the Fox had come back to collect that treasure, using the information he had stolen from the factions.
Miriam's story introduced a dozen new puzzles about what was going on, but such questions could wait. At least we knew something about our opposition now: fire-wizard Fox, psionic Rivi, and an assortment of bashers from Sigil. There was only one other question in my mind, and I asked it. «If Petrov and his cronies captured some prisoners, where would he take them?»
«To Rivi,» Miriam answered immediately. «She can do things to people's minds. She can… change you. Back when she and the Fox were recruiting people, they hired two first-rate knights of the post: sneak thieves. Only problem was, the thieves wouldn't work together – one was githyanki, the other githzerai. Hated each other like poison. So Rivi took them away for a few hours, and next thing you know, they're bosom buddies. Lifelong friends. She did something spooky to their brains.»
«Is that really possible?» I whispered to Hezekiah. It irked me to turn to a Clueless for information, but he was the only authority we had on psionic powers.
«Rearranging a person's thoughts can be tricky,» he whispered back. «Making it permanent is even harder. It once took Uncle Toby a whole day to stop two kings from declaring war with each other. Of course, he had to fix up their generals too, so that's what dragged out the time.»
«Your Uncle… painted over their minds?» I pictured how easily I could change a frown to a smile with just a few strokes of the brush. Was it that easy for Uncle Toby? Was it equally easy for Rivi? If this brainpainter had enough time to work on Yasmin, to rape her mind…
«We have to save the others,» I said. «We have to save them now.»
«Where can we find this Rivi?» Wheezle asked quietly.
«Her quarters are on the lower level,» Miriam replied. «I can show you.»
I glanced at Wheezle, raising my eyebrows. «We cannot trust her,» Wheezle said, answering my unasked question. «On the other hand, it is safer to take her with us than leave her or kill her. As long as she remains in our hands, she has an incentive to cooperate.» The little gnome turned to her. «You understand what these wights will do if you betray us?»
The wights leered in her face, but she just jutted out her chin. «I know the game,» she answered. «I'll play.»
«And I'll make sure she does,» Hezekiah said. «I'll take her under my wing.»
He moved to her side and smiled. Suddenly, he was terrifying again – his face didn't change a muscle, but his smile took on the unnatural brightness of a killer, the placid tranquility of a child who could slay its mother without conscience. In that face was all the cruelty of childhood, the taunts, the bullying, the inventive tortures of insects and younger siblings.
«You'll be good, won't you?» Hezekiah told Miriam. Then he was simply a Clueless boy again, his smile only a smile, his face only an eighteen-year-old face.
I couldn't stand to look at it.
«Don't worry about me,» Miriam mumbled. «You're my high-up man, you are.» She edged away from him but kept her head lowered, like a dog showing submission to a wolf.
«Then we're all set,» the boy said. «Let's get going.»
* * *
With a pair of wights taking the lead, we proceeded down the corridor. Below us, in the circular arena surrounded by the ring of the Glass Spider, other wights continued to wade through the dust, searching for who-knew-what. I wondered how big their target was. Something the size of a needle would take days to find, but something substantial, like a spellbook or a magic sword, would surely turn up soon; there was a lot of ground to cover out there, but there were a lot of wights searching.If we didn't rescue Yasmin and the others before the wights found their objective, I knew we'd all be in big trouble. No one went to all this bother for something innocuous.
Soon, we were approaching the next intersection of a radial arm with the Spider's central ring. As before, a furniture-filled lounge occupied the area where the arm connected with the body; but in the center of the room was a spiral wrought-iron staircase leading down to a lower level. The iron was bare and unpainted, yet I couldn't see the slightest fleck of rust – either these steps were scoured daily by a platoon of wights with sandpaper, or there was some kind of magic at work, maintaining this place in pristine condition. I put my money on the magic: the whole Glass Spider was in good upkeep, but it had an air of antiquity about it, as if it had endured for eons, impervious to decay.
Miriam gestured that we should go down the stairs. Wheezle stopped her and sent two wights ahead to see if the way was clear. They came back smiling their pointy grins and hissing in a relaxed fashion that suggested no one was lurking in ambush. We formed up our company again, wights at the head and rear, more wights tightly surrounding Miriam; then we began our descent.
As we climbed downward, my ears picked up a rumbling in the distance. It took me a few seconds to identify the sound; but then I remembered a tour I had taken of The Lady's Chime, that huge clock tower just down the street from Sigil's Hall of Speakers. The upper floors of the tower had echoed with the clicking of gears, the whirr of flywheels, and the ratcheting of counterweights pulling time forward. The rumble I heard now had the same sort of mechanical edge to it – a giant clockworks muttering to itself. We must be approaching the machinery that allowed the Glass Spider to move.
A long arcing corridor led us away from the stairs, and soon the air filled with the smell of metal: bare metal, oiled metal, hot metal. The corridor was lit by glass globes suspended from the ceiling; each globe burned bright and white from some inner fire. Their light revealed that Hezekiah had linked his arm with Miriam's as soon as we reached this lower floor. Clearly, he didn't want to risk her running away while he'd been appointed to watch her.
The mechanical rumble grew louder as we continued forward. Ahead lay an open doorway, and beyond that was a room full of metal machinery: I recognized gears, chain-belts, cables, and other simple trappings, but the great bulk of equipment was beyond my comprehension. How could one understand a bank of square crystals glowing with hieroglyphs of light, or huge metal drums that occasionally hissed steam through red-hot stopcocks? What was the purpose of a dozen metal pistons pounding in and out of smoking cylinders, or a gold stalactite mounted above a copper stalagmite with squirts of lightning leaping between their points? All I knew was that the air burned and reeked with oil, like the vestibule of some fiery hell.
Wheezle stopped us once more and turned a questioning gaze toward Miriam. «It's always like this,» the woman shrugged. «You're a gnome – you should know about machines.»
«I specialize in death, not devices,» Wheezle replied. «Are we close to where this Rivi would be?»
«Her quarters are in this machine room,» Miriam said. «She likes it here.»
«How can she sleep with all this noise?»
«She says it just takes discipline. Rivi is hot blazing barmy about discipline.»
«Why doesn't that surprise me?» I muttered. But Wheezle was already leading us forward.
* * *
A machine room full of moving parts is no place to go when your nerves are on edge. Gears clank; you whirl, expecting an attack. Steam erupts from a release valve; it leaves cloudy films on nearby surfaces, looking like ghosts out the corner of your eye. Pistons bang and conveyor belts flap; so much motion, so many nooks for enemies to hide. Every second, there was something new to jump at.«There's a control room over in the corner,» Miriam said above the clatter of machinery. «That's where Rivi spends most of her time.»
«Then you stay here with Hezekiah,» I told her. «Wheezle and I will see if Rivi's home.»
«Whack her the second you see her,» Miriam advised. «She'll addle your chops if you don't.»
«No loyalty toward your former boss?» I asked.
«None,» Miriam replied. «If you don't put Rivi down, she'll turn my brains to cheese for helping you.»
«We shall try to avoid that eventuality,» Wheezle said. Kowtowing briefly to those who were staying behind, he gathered a selection of wights and gestured for me to take the lead.
The control room in the corner had thick concrete walls without a single window. An odd design – if you were a worker controlling the machinery, wouldn't it be nice to see what the equipment was doing? On the other hand, perhaps the room was not a command post where you calmly watched gauges so much as a bunker to take cover when you pushed the wrong button.
The door to the control room was closed. I took one side of it, Wheezle took the other, and the wights stood directly back from the opening, ready to charge in as soon as I turned the knob. Holding up his fingers, Wheezle counted off Three, Two, One. Flick, I threw open the door, and with a clatter of toe-claws across cement, the wights leapt forward. I jumped in right behind them, my rapier drawn and ready to impale anyone who could paint obscenities over other people's brains.
There was nobody home.
Undoubtedly, however, someone did live in this room. In the back corner was a small cot, its crisp sheets tucked and folded with a precision that would satisfy the most fastidious member of the Harmonium. Around the walls, wooden tables held neat stacks of paper, numerous books alphabetized by title, and a few scrolls hung on pine dowels. The whole place had an air of obsessive organization.
I turned my back on it. «Rivi's not here.»
«True,» Wheezle nodded. «But her library is. It could teach us a great deal about her intentions.»
«It would take days to read all this, and that's assuming it's written in a language we understand. Let's keep moving.»
«Surely we can spare a minute to glance at a page or two,» Wheezle said.
I waved my arm at the collection. «Which page?»
«The oldest.» He shuffled to the closest table and peered at the stacks – paper, parchment, vellum, papyrus. «The oldest,» he went on, «is most likely to tell of the beginning of things. Obscure secrets. Forgotten wisdom.» He moved to another table. «I have studied a number of ancient languages and am quite fluent in… ah, this looks interesting.»
Standing on tiptoe, he pushed away a stack of papers to reveal something underneath: a clay tablet, covered with scratchy marks like the footprints of a mouse. At some point in the past, the tablet had broken into three flat pieces; later on, Rivi or someone else had reassembled the pieces like parts of a puzzle, imbedding them in newer clay to hold them together. I had to admit, it certainly looked like the oldest document in the room.
«Can you read it?» I asked.
«I have seen the script before,» Wheezle replied. «The language is called Urqlish – extremely old. Some say it predates the eldest gods. No one knows how to pronounce its words, but my mentors taught me how to decipher such writings. The Urqs, whoever they were, left massive volumes of text to posterity. Much of it deals with incomprehensible facets of their culture, but this… this is something different.»
«What does it say?»
«Let me see. The Words of Savant… I can't make out the savant's name, but it doesn't matter. The Words of Savant whoever to his liege lord: Know, O Queen…»
Know, O Queen, that in the mists of the past, things were not as they are today. There was a time when the secrets of magic were hidden from the seven races; indeed, some scholars say there was a time before magic was born, when humans alone lived in a fresh and simple world.
But the flower of magic blossomed in its time, and the simple world yielded to a more complicated age. Wizards seized great power for themselves; and in the way of all souls, some used their power for good while others used it for evil. Often, rival sorcerers waged terrible war on each other, devastating the land and slaughtering innocents by the thousands.
At that time, our gods were not yet born. Some sages claim that the beings who walked the hidden places of the land were not true gods at all: they were mere mortals, but able to command engines of such puissance that our ancestors mistook them for gods. I do not know the truth of it, O Queen; but I can tell you there were celestial powers of one type or another who watched the havoc wrought by magicians and shook their heads in sorrow.
Some of these powers sought to curb the destruction by creating sorcerers of their own: priests who would shape the forces of magic in obedience to their patron's will. Thus began the practice of gods granting spells to the most devout of their followers.
But some celestial powers believed that fighting magic with magic was purest folly. «Surely,» these powers said, «the best way to stop this madness is to stop magic itself.» For many days, they debated how they could do this. The flux of magic had come to fill the multiverse, and no one was strong enough to exhaust the supply. At last, however, one group of powers, the most exalted among their colleagues, devised a plan: if they could not shut off the flux itself, they could at least prevent lesser beings from sculpting the flux, so that humans and others could no longer wield the stuff of sorcery.
Then gathered the greatest of those powers. Their names are forgotten; we know them only as the Warrior, the Poet, the Witch, the Prayer, the Healer, the Scholar, and Death. Using all the knowledge at their command, they constructed a laughably simple device – a grinder, such as a peasant might use to grind out pepper or salt. This grinder, however, ground out a never-ending supply of sticky white dust.
Such a simple thing; and yet, the dust was not simple. In the presence of a concentration of magic, the dust fed on that magic and grew as hot as molten steel – a magical heat so pure and piercing it could burn the very fiends of the pit. Now imagine, O Queen, what might happen to your court mage if he had particles of such dust on his clothes or skin. As he began to cast a spell, he would draw into himself the flux of magical energies, concentrating it within his being… when suddenly, his skin would sear with agony, his clothes catch fire! Wracked with pain, he could not complete the spell; or if he pressed on by sheer force of will, he would continue to burn until he turned to ash.
This was the plan of the celestial powers – to grind out such dust and spread it throughout the world… indeed, through all the realms of the multiverse. In every place, the dust would disperse, settling on people, on plants and animals, on houses and seas; and how could mages escape that dust? It would settle on their bodies, their clothes, their food, their drink… no amount of washing could get every particle.
Armed with the grinder, its creators began to tour the Ten Thousand Worlds. Wherever they spread their dust, magicians quickly ended their sorceries. Of course, some sought to develop spells to protect themselves from the dust; but how could they cast such enchantments? Even those who thought themselves flameproof, who danced with fire and drank molten rock, found themselves ravaged by the dust's awful heat. Thus all sorcery was suspended, and for a time, the Ten Thousand Worlds returned to the simplicity of life without magic. Most people, I believe, breathed a sigh of relief.
But what of the other celestial powers… the ones who had armed their priests with magicks of their own? Those powers raged in fury at the anti-magic dust; for the deities with magic-wielding followers revelled in the influence exerted by their priests, and without magic, the priests were mortals like anyone else. Congregations began to ask uncomfortable questions, the most important being, «Do I truly want to worship this god?» People may bow their heads to any deity if there are sufficient rewards for devotion, or punishments for disobedience; but if the rewards and punishments stop, congregations soon realize some deities are less worthy of worship than others.
Great were the howls of wrath from celestial powers snubbed by their flocks. They raged against the creators of the grinder, and banded together to declare a war of vengeance. Long did the battle thunder through the heavens. The seven creators were the greatest of the powers, but arrayed against them were so many angered deities that at last the seven were defeated. I cannot tell you their fates, O Queen; some scholars say the creators were obliterated, while others say they were torn apart but soon re-formed to become the gods we revere today.
As for the grinder, the other celestial powers found they did not have the strength to unmake it, or even to stop the continuing flow of magic-killing dust. Their solution was to create a second grinder and a second type of dust: a brown dust that draws and channels the magical flux away from the white dust. I have told you, O Queen, what would happen if your court mage attempted to cast a spell with the white dust on his skin; but if he also had brown dust it would act as a funnel, drawing magic away from the white dust and directing it into your mage's soul. The white dust would not burn, and the magical flux would be even more focussed than usual.
In fact, O Queen, your court mage and all things in all places contain a few motes of both the white and brown dust. The creators of the first grinder spread its dust to all worlds; and after those creators were defeated, the other powers spread equal quantities of their own dust to counteract the first. Once the different dusts had come to balance, the two grinders were bound together, like mundane salt and pepper shakers, and thrown into an empty plane of existence. There they have continued to grind, even to this very day. They have filled that plane with their dust, from one horizon to the other, and they will persist in their grinding to the end of time.
Or so the ancient tales say.
When Wheezle finished reading, neither of us spoke for several seconds. Even the wights were silent, their burning gaze lost in some unknown distance.
«Miriam told us Rivi hated magic,» I said at last.
«Indeed,» Wheezle nodded. «And if she finds the two grinders… one grinder makes it impossible for people to cast magic, and the other is essentially the antidote. An exceedingly powerful pair of weapons.»
«What would happen,» I asked, «if she spread the white dust over a battlefield? While she and her allies were safely covered in the brown.»
«Magic decides many battles,» Wheezle replied, «especially when your opponents have none. With proper tactics, Rivi could become a fearsome conqueror.»
«Of course,» I said, «some god would eventually stop her. Step in and seize the grinders.»
Wheezle shook his head. «I think if one god tried to possess such powerful artifacts, other gods would prevent that from happening. Suppose, for example, that a good god claimed the grinders; evil gods would fear such weapons wielded in the cause of virtue, and would try to take the grinders for themselves. The struggle might precipitate Ragnarok itself – the final battle of god against god, wherein the cosmos is destroyed. No,» Wheezle said, «the gods will be extremely wary of intervening… and if any god does, Rivi will be the least of the multiverse's problems.»
«But suppose Rivi tries to conquer Sigil!» I protested. «Suppose she spreads her dust, then leads in an army equipped with magic. Surely The Lady of Pain would take direct action then – it's her job to protect Sigil.»
«The Lady of Pain may or may not be a god,» Wheezle replied. «She is Sigil's legendary protector, but she is also a great mystery. Perhaps she is only a sorcerer herself; in that case, she will be as helpless as any streetcorner conjuror. If by chance she is a god… well, as I say, gods of all persuasions would band together to prevent any other deity from claiming the grinders. Who knows the outcome?»
I shuddered. Scant minutes ago, our party had just come to rescue Yasmin and the others; now, it looked like the fate of whole worlds was on the line. Truth to tell, I still cared about Yasmin more than some abstract threat toward Sigil or any other realm… but the added pressure didn't help.
8. THREE SCORCHED PRISONERS
Somberly, Wheezle and I left the control bunker, emerging once more into the full din of the machinery room. My Dustman colleague had stuffed his pockets with scrolls and documents, including the diary of Felice DeVail. Perhaps we didn't have time to read any more right now, but he fully intended to check through everything when he got the chance.
The wights greeted us with spike-toothed smiles, but Hezekiah and Miriam didn't notice us at first – they were too busy talking, or rather yelling into each other's ears so they could be heard above the clang of pistons. Even with them shouting, I couldn't make out what they were saying from any distance away; and as we approached, Hezekiah saw us and guiltily broke off his conversation.
I didn't like the look of that. Miriam was scarcely an irresistible seductress, but how much voluptuous charm would it take to turn the Clueless boy's head? She could never talk him into knifing Wheezle or me in the back – he was too naively virtuous for that – yet I worried he might help her «just a little» and get us into trouble just a lot.
«Remember she's the enemy,» I told him, shouting loudly myself. «She's untrustworthy and dangerous.»
«She says I'm dangerous too,» he replied. «The way I scared her makes her want to… she says she'd like to serve me.»
That made me blink in surprise – I hadn't expected her taking the submissive approach. When Hezekiah made himself the embodiment of terror, did he touch a responsive chord in Miriam's heart? Some people love to be overwhelmed, I knew that… and when I glanced at Miriam, I saw her gazing at the boy with an expression that was almost worshipful. Of course, it was quite probably a sham: just a different sham than I'd anticipated. «Be careful,» I muttered to the boy, then turned away, embarrassed.
«Where are you leading us now?» I asked Miriam.
«Petrov's quarters are just up ahead,» she answered. «You said he might have helped capture your friends. If he's in his room, you can ask him yourself.»
«Looking forward to it,» I assured her as I drew my rapier from its sheath. Even if she was leading us into a trap, I'd be happy to face Petrov with sword in hand.
The corridor opened into a sizable chamber with at least twenty bunk beds set into the walls, like the recessed niches of a mausoleum. In the middle of the room stood a few metal tables bolted to the floor, the sort of tables you might see in an army barracks, where the soldiers sit, play cards, and boast of their sexual exploits. These tables, however, were too brightly polished for a real barracks, with nary a stain from spilled beer, nor scratches from mugs slammed down in anger when someone's poker hand held one ace too many. The rest of the room also lacked any of the normal signs of occupation: the lingering smells of bodies, the scuff marks of boots on the floor.
«Remarkably tidy for a hide-out,» I said to Miriam. «Is this really where your cronies live?»
«Don't be a leatherhead,» she growled. «We underlings live farther down the hall. Mr. High-and-Mighty Petrov couldn't bear to tuck down with the likes of us, so he moved into this empty room. He tried to tell us Rivi wanted him close in case she got cold in the night… but that slag has so much ice in her veins, she couldn't warm up if she kissed a red dragon.»
«Uncle Toby once gave a sponge bath to a dragon,» Hezekiah piped up. «I don't know what color it was.»
«Hush,» I told him.
«No, really, this is an interesting story. The dragon had contracted a case of mummy rot from some adventurer she'd eaten, and Uncle Toby —»
I put a finger to his lips. «Button it,» I whispered. «Someone's coming.»
Chalk up another for a Sensate's razor-sharp hearing. Some distance ahead of us, a stream of grunts and groans echoed down the corridor, punctuated now and then by a juicy upswell of profanity. Wheezle gestured and immediately one of the wights wrapped its rotting hand over Miriam's mouth, just in case she tried to shout a warning. She tossed Wheezle an aggrieved look, as if the thought would never enter her mind… but even if she yelled her head off, the man approaching us probably wouldn't have heard. He seemed too caught up in venting his piteous moans to notice any of the world around him.
Thirty seconds later, he walked into what he thought was an empty room. The bleached white hair showed it was our old friend Petrov… but a Petrov who had clearly seen action since the showdown on the Vertical Sea. His head sported a blood-soaked bandage, and his bare chest had turned a bright lobster red. Under other circumstances, I might have believed his skin was sunburned; but I knew this particular damage was frostbite, courtesy of the blistering cold from Oonah DeVail's staff.
It made me smile that Petrov hadn't walked away from the fight unscathed. Unfortunately, the fact that he was walking at all suggested his side had won in the end. If Yasmin had come out on top, Petrov would even now be dining on dust outside the Spider.
Like a mountain of misery, the big basher shuffled to one of the tables and sat down with a heavy thud, letting his head slump forward into his hands. In all the time it took for him to get into the room, he had never spared a glance into any of the recessed bunks… which means he didn't notice eight wights and assorted breathers lying there in wait. His first clue that he wasn't alone must have been the tip of my rapier pricking the back of his neck.
«Greetings, honored hoodlum,» Wheezle whispered in Petrov's ear. «We would not hurt you for the world, but you have accidentally sat where Mr. Cavendish is about to thrust his sword. I suggest you keep very, very still.»
«Should he really be moaning like that?» Hezekiah asked. «I think he's hurt.»
«He wants us to let down our guard,» I said, as the wights slammed our captive onto the hard metal table. The jarring sound of impact was quickly replaced by a wail of agony from Petrov. «He's such a big baby,» I muttered.
Wheezle clambered up on a chair so he could lift himself to eye level with the man. «Now, honored hoodlum,» he said, «we would like to know what happened to our colleagues: the ones you confronted back at the Vertical Sea.»
«The sodding berks froze my hide off!» he growled. «But I got my revenge – showed them what a haunch of beef feels like inside the oven.»
I let the tip of my rapier nestle down against his Adam's apple. «Did you kill them?»
«I piking well wanted to… but Qi and Chi said no, Rivi would want to question them.»
«So all three are alive?»
«They were the last time I saw them. Not pretty,» he added with a leer, «but alive.»
With miniscule effort, I could have leaned forward and sent the bladepoint through his windpipe. Not pretty, but alive… the words flooded like poison into my heart. Petrov and his cronies had been carrying firewands as they fought our friends. I thought of Yasmin looking as savagely burnt as the victims in the court rotunda; and I had to walk away quickly before I forgot myself.
«Who are Qi and Chi?» I heard Hezekiah asking.
«Thieves. A githzerai and githyanki – they helped bring down your pus-swilling friends. While the boys and I made things toasty up front, Qi and Chi snuck up from behind and tickled some spines with steel. Your group surrendered nice and quiet once they'd been ventilated a bit.»
«Where are our teammates now?» Wheezle asked.
«Go pike yourself.» Petrov aimed some spittle in Wheezle's general direction. He got more on himself than he did on the gnome, but it was the thought that counted. «I've said enough already,» Petrov snarled, «and I'm not rattling my bone-box no more.»
«Dear, oh dear,» I tsked from the corner of the room, «torture time again. Hezekiah,» I raised my voice, «what faction do you think boasts the most fearsome torturers?»
«Ummm… the Mercykillers?»
«Not a bad guess,» I told him. «The Mercykillers like torturing people and they put a lot of effort into it… but alas, they're overly crude. They're too fond of breaking bones and spilling blood; they haven't devoted themselves to discovering what genuinely causes the maximum amount of pain. The true students of excruciation are… well, I blush to admit it, but the most adept torturers in the multiverse belong to my own faction, the Sensates.»
«You're a Sensate?» Petrov asked uneasily.
«That's right,» I answered, stepping up to the table. «We've spent centuries documenting every possible sensation the human body can experience. Many people think we only pursue pleasure, but that's wrong. We devote equal time to the study of pain. To the science of pain. For example, let me try to remember the location of the capitus nerve.»
I leaned over Petrov's body and drew out my tweak-knife. It was not an imposing blade, just a tiny thing I kept for whittling pen nibs when I wanted to sketch in ink; but it had a good sharp edge that I'd whetted less than a week earlier. In a pinch, it could double as a razor.
«The capitus nerve,» I said, making up the story as I went along, «runs all the way from the ball of the right foot to the left lobe of the brain.» I drew the unsharpened side of the blade up the length of Petrov's body. «Did you know that the longer the nerve is, the more pain it can experience? And the capitus nerve is the longest nerve in the body.»
«Who the sod cares?» Petrov snapped.
«I, for one, find it most stimulating,» Wheezle replied. «Please continue, honored Cavendish.»
«The capitus nerve runs through the most pain-sensitive areas of the anatomy. The knee. The inside of the thigh. The groin, of course.» I tapped each of these lightly with the flat of the blade. «Then there's the chest, which I notice is already in a tender condition. There's a great deal of individual variation in the route of the capitus through the chest, but you can usually find it by cross-correlating with a few other key meridians. First you find the small intestine…»
I jabbed my thumb deep into the pit of Petrov's stomach. He shrieked, probably thinking I was using the knife; or maybe he was reacting to true agony, from the frostbitten skin of his gut. «Ohh,» I said with great sympathy, «if you think that hurt, you're in trouble. The nerve I just hit was an itty-bitty one… scarcely able to feel pain at all. About the same size as this one.»
Extending a knuckle, I rubbed briskly along the man's sternum, raking back and forth across a knot of nerves I happened to know lurked there just under the skin. Petrov howled again. I wiped off my knuckle; flakes of chapped skin had stuck to it when it pulled away from Petrov's breastbone.
«Well, those two points of reference have given me a bearing on where the capitus nerve should be,» I told him. Lifting my knife, I added, «It may take some digging to hit the nerve bang-on, but I guarantee it will be worth the wait.» I leaned in toward one of the wights who was holding Petrov down. «Could you tilt his head so it's pointing away from me? They always vomit when I do this, and I don't have a change of clothes.»
«All right!» Petrov yelled. «Who the pike cares? I'll take you where the rotten sods are locked up.»
A few seconds ticked away in silence; then Wheezle touched my sleeve. «Could you show me where the capitus nerve is anyway? I would be most interested in learning.»
Wordlessly, I shook my head.
No, I decided, my father might have succeeded against such a mass of enemies, but I couldn't handle the odds. Saving Yasmin and the others was at least manageable. Once we rescued our friends, we could hightail it back to Sigil and fetch reinforcements. It wasn't a heroic plan, but it was something we might survive.
In time, I heard telltale sounds of clanking up ahead and Petrov led us into another machinery room, twin to the previous one. Obviously, the Glass Spider had several independent drive mechanisms, each with its own engine room; a separate motor for each of the Spider's legs. This machine room had the same number of pistons chugging away, the same layout, the same noise… but the control bunker in the corner had a huge wooden beam blocking the door shut.
«They're in there,» Petrov pointed to the door. «Gods rot you all.»
«Amen,» Wheezle agreed earnestly.
Three wights held Petrov, one held Miriam, and the other four went to work moving the beam. Judging from the way they strained, I estimated the timber weighed close to a ton. It took the wights a full minute to get the beam clear of the door, and in that time Hezekiah made a discovery: Oonah's ice-staff, tucked in under a desk whose surface glowed with incomprehensible runes of light.
«Rivi threw it there,» Petrov said grudgingly, as Hezekiah dragged the staff out. «Wouldn't let anyone else touch it because it was magic. She hates magic and every damned sorcerer in creation.»
«Doesn't that make the Fox nervous?» I asked.
«The Fox hasn't got enough brains to be nervous,» Petrov answered. «He's too sodding barmy to see Rivi's just using him.»
«Using him for what?»
But Petrov clamped his jaw tight and wouldn't say another word. I didn't press the issue – once we got old Bleach-Hair back to Sigil, the Harmonium could sweat everything out of him.
The wights dragged away the beam at last, and Hezekiah leapt forward to open the door. I dashed after him, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and barely managed to drag him back in time… because the second the blockage was gone, the door burst open with the force of a cannonball and Kiripao hit the floor in a diving roll. His momentum carried him up to his feet in one fluid motion, and he had embedded his fist through the ribcage of the nearest wight before he realized we were the good guys.
The wight, in life a female elf, glared pointedly down at Kiripao's hand plunged wrist-deep into her chest. Kiripao blinked for a few moments, then got the message. «Sorry,» he muttered, and levered the hand out of her thoracic cavity, dragging with it some stray bone fragments and a spill of the red powder that seemed to serve these wights as blood.
«Could I smell your hand?» I whispered to him.
«No.»
Of course, I told myself, Kiripao must be in good standing with his god. If he prayed for his injuries to heal, the deity would answer his prayers. And he could have patched up Yasmin and Oonah too in the same way… at least to the point where they were out of immediate danger.
Oonah hobbled from the control room a moment later, working up a warm smile when she saw this was a rescue party. Whatever healing she had received, it wasn't enough – her legs moved stiffly, as if each step brought her fierce pain. Her arms had the same stiffness as she reached to take back her ice-staff from Hezekiah; but once she grasped the staff in her hands, some of her constriction appeared to ease. I wondered if the staff had inherent healing powers, or if she simply felt better holding it. With reverent care, she set the butt of the staff onto the ground, then leaned her weight wearily upon it.
Several more seconds passed; I held my breath, waiting for Yasmin to emerge from the control room. Kiripao and Oonah said nothing. When I could bear it no longer, I rushed to the doorway and plunged inside.
When you're a Handmaid of Entropy, it seems you don't respond well to healing.
Yasmin sat propped against the far wall of the control room, her head sagging, her hands lying limply in her lap. For a moment, I didn't know if she was even alive; but then her chest lifted with a soft and shallow breath.
In a heartbeat I was crouching by her side, but reluctant to touch her for fear of causing pain. Her dragon-skin sheath had not been damaged by the firewands, but where the sheath hadn't offered any defense – her arms, her bare shoulders – Yasmin's flesh was deeply singed. Her hair had burned down to the scalp. Even worse, there was a patch of wet stickiness on her back, just below one shoulder blade. I guessed that Qi or Chi must have dirked her with a magic dagger, strong enough to pierce the tough dragon hide that was supposed to protect her.
With a tortured moan, Yasmin lifted her head to look at me. Her cheeks glistened with tears, squeezed out by the pain against her will. In a sighing whisper, she said, «You'll have to… draw another sketch of me, Britlin. The other one…»
She looked down at her hand and moved the fingers slightly. Flakes of burnt paper fluttered into her lap.
«What can I do to help?» I asked.
«Not much,» Oonah said from behind my back. «She's resistant to healing magic – all the Doomguard are.»
«I tried my best,» Kiripao added, «but her will fought back too strongly.»
«Entropy… must not be cheated,» Yasmin whispered. «A Handmaid… must stay… loyal…»
Her voice drifted off. At first, I thought she was simply too tired to continue speech; but her eyes had focused on something at the far end of the room, and I turned to see the others entering the control room in the company of the wights.
The wights greeted us with spike-toothed smiles, but Hezekiah and Miriam didn't notice us at first – they were too busy talking, or rather yelling into each other's ears so they could be heard above the clang of pistons. Even with them shouting, I couldn't make out what they were saying from any distance away; and as we approached, Hezekiah saw us and guiltily broke off his conversation.
I didn't like the look of that. Miriam was scarcely an irresistible seductress, but how much voluptuous charm would it take to turn the Clueless boy's head? She could never talk him into knifing Wheezle or me in the back – he was too naively virtuous for that – yet I worried he might help her «just a little» and get us into trouble just a lot.
«Remember she's the enemy,» I told him, shouting loudly myself. «She's untrustworthy and dangerous.»
«She says I'm dangerous too,» he replied. «The way I scared her makes her want to… she says she'd like to serve me.»
That made me blink in surprise – I hadn't expected her taking the submissive approach. When Hezekiah made himself the embodiment of terror, did he touch a responsive chord in Miriam's heart? Some people love to be overwhelmed, I knew that… and when I glanced at Miriam, I saw her gazing at the boy with an expression that was almost worshipful. Of course, it was quite probably a sham: just a different sham than I'd anticipated. «Be careful,» I muttered to the boy, then turned away, embarrassed.
* * *
Within a minute, we had left behind the clamor of ratchets and throttles and gears. It hadn't been an interesting noise anyway – lots of volume but no finesse.«Where are you leading us now?» I asked Miriam.
«Petrov's quarters are just up ahead,» she answered. «You said he might have helped capture your friends. If he's in his room, you can ask him yourself.»
«Looking forward to it,» I assured her as I drew my rapier from its sheath. Even if she was leading us into a trap, I'd be happy to face Petrov with sword in hand.
The corridor opened into a sizable chamber with at least twenty bunk beds set into the walls, like the recessed niches of a mausoleum. In the middle of the room stood a few metal tables bolted to the floor, the sort of tables you might see in an army barracks, where the soldiers sit, play cards, and boast of their sexual exploits. These tables, however, were too brightly polished for a real barracks, with nary a stain from spilled beer, nor scratches from mugs slammed down in anger when someone's poker hand held one ace too many. The rest of the room also lacked any of the normal signs of occupation: the lingering smells of bodies, the scuff marks of boots on the floor.
«Remarkably tidy for a hide-out,» I said to Miriam. «Is this really where your cronies live?»
«Don't be a leatherhead,» she growled. «We underlings live farther down the hall. Mr. High-and-Mighty Petrov couldn't bear to tuck down with the likes of us, so he moved into this empty room. He tried to tell us Rivi wanted him close in case she got cold in the night… but that slag has so much ice in her veins, she couldn't warm up if she kissed a red dragon.»
«Uncle Toby once gave a sponge bath to a dragon,» Hezekiah piped up. «I don't know what color it was.»
«Hush,» I told him.
«No, really, this is an interesting story. The dragon had contracted a case of mummy rot from some adventurer she'd eaten, and Uncle Toby —»
I put a finger to his lips. «Button it,» I whispered. «Someone's coming.»
Chalk up another for a Sensate's razor-sharp hearing. Some distance ahead of us, a stream of grunts and groans echoed down the corridor, punctuated now and then by a juicy upswell of profanity. Wheezle gestured and immediately one of the wights wrapped its rotting hand over Miriam's mouth, just in case she tried to shout a warning. She tossed Wheezle an aggrieved look, as if the thought would never enter her mind… but even if she yelled her head off, the man approaching us probably wouldn't have heard. He seemed too caught up in venting his piteous moans to notice any of the world around him.
Thirty seconds later, he walked into what he thought was an empty room. The bleached white hair showed it was our old friend Petrov… but a Petrov who had clearly seen action since the showdown on the Vertical Sea. His head sported a blood-soaked bandage, and his bare chest had turned a bright lobster red. Under other circumstances, I might have believed his skin was sunburned; but I knew this particular damage was frostbite, courtesy of the blistering cold from Oonah DeVail's staff.
It made me smile that Petrov hadn't walked away from the fight unscathed. Unfortunately, the fact that he was walking at all suggested his side had won in the end. If Yasmin had come out on top, Petrov would even now be dining on dust outside the Spider.
Like a mountain of misery, the big basher shuffled to one of the tables and sat down with a heavy thud, letting his head slump forward into his hands. In all the time it took for him to get into the room, he had never spared a glance into any of the recessed bunks… which means he didn't notice eight wights and assorted breathers lying there in wait. His first clue that he wasn't alone must have been the tip of my rapier pricking the back of his neck.
«Greetings, honored hoodlum,» Wheezle whispered in Petrov's ear. «We would not hurt you for the world, but you have accidentally sat where Mr. Cavendish is about to thrust his sword. I suggest you keep very, very still.»
* * *
Wheezle assigned four wights to hold Petrov down, a number which struck me as excessive. True, old Bleach-Hair was a bulky brawler of a berk, and on a good night he could sling a pair of tavern wenches under each arm; but at the moment, a five-year-old with sharp fingernails could drop Petrov to his knees by poking the man's frostbitten tum-tum.«Should he really be moaning like that?» Hezekiah asked. «I think he's hurt.»
«He wants us to let down our guard,» I said, as the wights slammed our captive onto the hard metal table. The jarring sound of impact was quickly replaced by a wail of agony from Petrov. «He's such a big baby,» I muttered.
Wheezle clambered up on a chair so he could lift himself to eye level with the man. «Now, honored hoodlum,» he said, «we would like to know what happened to our colleagues: the ones you confronted back at the Vertical Sea.»
«The sodding berks froze my hide off!» he growled. «But I got my revenge – showed them what a haunch of beef feels like inside the oven.»
I let the tip of my rapier nestle down against his Adam's apple. «Did you kill them?»
«I piking well wanted to… but Qi and Chi said no, Rivi would want to question them.»
«So all three are alive?»
«They were the last time I saw them. Not pretty,» he added with a leer, «but alive.»
With miniscule effort, I could have leaned forward and sent the bladepoint through his windpipe. Not pretty, but alive… the words flooded like poison into my heart. Petrov and his cronies had been carrying firewands as they fought our friends. I thought of Yasmin looking as savagely burnt as the victims in the court rotunda; and I had to walk away quickly before I forgot myself.
«Who are Qi and Chi?» I heard Hezekiah asking.
«Thieves. A githzerai and githyanki – they helped bring down your pus-swilling friends. While the boys and I made things toasty up front, Qi and Chi snuck up from behind and tickled some spines with steel. Your group surrendered nice and quiet once they'd been ventilated a bit.»
«Where are our teammates now?» Wheezle asked.
«Go pike yourself.» Petrov aimed some spittle in Wheezle's general direction. He got more on himself than he did on the gnome, but it was the thought that counted. «I've said enough already,» Petrov snarled, «and I'm not rattling my bone-box no more.»
«Dear, oh dear,» I tsked from the corner of the room, «torture time again. Hezekiah,» I raised my voice, «what faction do you think boasts the most fearsome torturers?»
«Ummm… the Mercykillers?»
«Not a bad guess,» I told him. «The Mercykillers like torturing people and they put a lot of effort into it… but alas, they're overly crude. They're too fond of breaking bones and spilling blood; they haven't devoted themselves to discovering what genuinely causes the maximum amount of pain. The true students of excruciation are… well, I blush to admit it, but the most adept torturers in the multiverse belong to my own faction, the Sensates.»
«You're a Sensate?» Petrov asked uneasily.
«That's right,» I answered, stepping up to the table. «We've spent centuries documenting every possible sensation the human body can experience. Many people think we only pursue pleasure, but that's wrong. We devote equal time to the study of pain. To the science of pain. For example, let me try to remember the location of the capitus nerve.»
I leaned over Petrov's body and drew out my tweak-knife. It was not an imposing blade, just a tiny thing I kept for whittling pen nibs when I wanted to sketch in ink; but it had a good sharp edge that I'd whetted less than a week earlier. In a pinch, it could double as a razor.
«The capitus nerve,» I said, making up the story as I went along, «runs all the way from the ball of the right foot to the left lobe of the brain.» I drew the unsharpened side of the blade up the length of Petrov's body. «Did you know that the longer the nerve is, the more pain it can experience? And the capitus nerve is the longest nerve in the body.»
«Who the sod cares?» Petrov snapped.
«I, for one, find it most stimulating,» Wheezle replied. «Please continue, honored Cavendish.»
«The capitus nerve runs through the most pain-sensitive areas of the anatomy. The knee. The inside of the thigh. The groin, of course.» I tapped each of these lightly with the flat of the blade. «Then there's the chest, which I notice is already in a tender condition. There's a great deal of individual variation in the route of the capitus through the chest, but you can usually find it by cross-correlating with a few other key meridians. First you find the small intestine…»
I jabbed my thumb deep into the pit of Petrov's stomach. He shrieked, probably thinking I was using the knife; or maybe he was reacting to true agony, from the frostbitten skin of his gut. «Ohh,» I said with great sympathy, «if you think that hurt, you're in trouble. The nerve I just hit was an itty-bitty one… scarcely able to feel pain at all. About the same size as this one.»
Extending a knuckle, I rubbed briskly along the man's sternum, raking back and forth across a knot of nerves I happened to know lurked there just under the skin. Petrov howled again. I wiped off my knuckle; flakes of chapped skin had stuck to it when it pulled away from Petrov's breastbone.
«Well, those two points of reference have given me a bearing on where the capitus nerve should be,» I told him. Lifting my knife, I added, «It may take some digging to hit the nerve bang-on, but I guarantee it will be worth the wait.» I leaned in toward one of the wights who was holding Petrov down. «Could you tilt his head so it's pointing away from me? They always vomit when I do this, and I don't have a change of clothes.»
«All right!» Petrov yelled. «Who the pike cares? I'll take you where the rotten sods are locked up.»
A few seconds ticked away in silence; then Wheezle touched my sleeve. «Could you show me where the capitus nerve is anyway? I would be most interested in learning.»
Wordlessly, I shook my head.
* * *
More corridors to slog through, and time was ticking by. I wondered how long it would be till Rivi's wights found the grinders out in the arena of dust. There was no way to guess. If I were a true hero like my father, maybe I'd be racing after Rivi and the Fox instead of Yasmin: putting the fate of the multiverse ahead of a few individuals. We had Unveiler and could command the wights to attack our enemies. Unfortunately, the wights would all be wandering in the airless arena, where they couldn't hear us calling orders; meanwhile, we'd face a fire-mage and a mind-raper, plus their band of bully-bashers armed with flame-wands.No, I decided, my father might have succeeded against such a mass of enemies, but I couldn't handle the odds. Saving Yasmin and the others was at least manageable. Once we rescued our friends, we could hightail it back to Sigil and fetch reinforcements. It wasn't a heroic plan, but it was something we might survive.
In time, I heard telltale sounds of clanking up ahead and Petrov led us into another machinery room, twin to the previous one. Obviously, the Glass Spider had several independent drive mechanisms, each with its own engine room; a separate motor for each of the Spider's legs. This machine room had the same number of pistons chugging away, the same layout, the same noise… but the control bunker in the corner had a huge wooden beam blocking the door shut.
«They're in there,» Petrov pointed to the door. «Gods rot you all.»
«Amen,» Wheezle agreed earnestly.
Three wights held Petrov, one held Miriam, and the other four went to work moving the beam. Judging from the way they strained, I estimated the timber weighed close to a ton. It took the wights a full minute to get the beam clear of the door, and in that time Hezekiah made a discovery: Oonah's ice-staff, tucked in under a desk whose surface glowed with incomprehensible runes of light.
«Rivi threw it there,» Petrov said grudgingly, as Hezekiah dragged the staff out. «Wouldn't let anyone else touch it because it was magic. She hates magic and every damned sorcerer in creation.»
«Doesn't that make the Fox nervous?» I asked.
«The Fox hasn't got enough brains to be nervous,» Petrov answered. «He's too sodding barmy to see Rivi's just using him.»
«Using him for what?»
But Petrov clamped his jaw tight and wouldn't say another word. I didn't press the issue – once we got old Bleach-Hair back to Sigil, the Harmonium could sweat everything out of him.
The wights dragged away the beam at last, and Hezekiah leapt forward to open the door. I dashed after him, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and barely managed to drag him back in time… because the second the blockage was gone, the door burst open with the force of a cannonball and Kiripao hit the floor in a diving roll. His momentum carried him up to his feet in one fluid motion, and he had embedded his fist through the ribcage of the nearest wight before he realized we were the good guys.
The wight, in life a female elf, glared pointedly down at Kiripao's hand plunged wrist-deep into her chest. Kiripao blinked for a few moments, then got the message. «Sorry,» he muttered, and levered the hand out of her thoracic cavity, dragging with it some stray bone fragments and a spill of the red powder that seemed to serve these wights as blood.
«Could I smell your hand?» I whispered to him.
«No.»
* * *
Kiripao's robes had been reduced to charred rags during the fire-fight. He'd rearranged the remaining scraps into a passable loincloth, leaving his chest and legs bare. The flesh thus revealed was a three-colored patchwork: the angry red of burns, the pale pink of an elf's normal skin, and a milky white as unblemished as a freshly gessoed canvas. I'd seen that white before, and not just on blank canvases – it was new skin, recently regenerated by a powerful influx of healing magic. Over the next few hours, it would gradually adjust itself to match the rest of Kiripao's body; in the meantime however, it showed that the pious brother had taken quite a beating, and someone had patched him up afterward.Of course, I told myself, Kiripao must be in good standing with his god. If he prayed for his injuries to heal, the deity would answer his prayers. And he could have patched up Yasmin and Oonah too in the same way… at least to the point where they were out of immediate danger.
Oonah hobbled from the control room a moment later, working up a warm smile when she saw this was a rescue party. Whatever healing she had received, it wasn't enough – her legs moved stiffly, as if each step brought her fierce pain. Her arms had the same stiffness as she reached to take back her ice-staff from Hezekiah; but once she grasped the staff in her hands, some of her constriction appeared to ease. I wondered if the staff had inherent healing powers, or if she simply felt better holding it. With reverent care, she set the butt of the staff onto the ground, then leaned her weight wearily upon it.
Several more seconds passed; I held my breath, waiting for Yasmin to emerge from the control room. Kiripao and Oonah said nothing. When I could bear it no longer, I rushed to the doorway and plunged inside.
When you're a Handmaid of Entropy, it seems you don't respond well to healing.
Yasmin sat propped against the far wall of the control room, her head sagging, her hands lying limply in her lap. For a moment, I didn't know if she was even alive; but then her chest lifted with a soft and shallow breath.
In a heartbeat I was crouching by her side, but reluctant to touch her for fear of causing pain. Her dragon-skin sheath had not been damaged by the firewands, but where the sheath hadn't offered any defense – her arms, her bare shoulders – Yasmin's flesh was deeply singed. Her hair had burned down to the scalp. Even worse, there was a patch of wet stickiness on her back, just below one shoulder blade. I guessed that Qi or Chi must have dirked her with a magic dagger, strong enough to pierce the tough dragon hide that was supposed to protect her.
With a tortured moan, Yasmin lifted her head to look at me. Her cheeks glistened with tears, squeezed out by the pain against her will. In a sighing whisper, she said, «You'll have to… draw another sketch of me, Britlin. The other one…»
She looked down at her hand and moved the fingers slightly. Flakes of burnt paper fluttered into her lap.
«What can I do to help?» I asked.
«Not much,» Oonah said from behind my back. «She's resistant to healing magic – all the Doomguard are.»
«I tried my best,» Kiripao added, «but her will fought back too strongly.»
«Entropy… must not be cheated,» Yasmin whispered. «A Handmaid… must stay… loyal…»
Her voice drifted off. At first, I thought she was simply too tired to continue speech; but her eyes had focused on something at the far end of the room, and I turned to see the others entering the control room in the company of the wights.