Empire of Bones (22 page)

Cyrus leaned against a shelf loaded with battered copper pots, and metal sheets ringed with the baked footprints of ten thousand cookies, and saucepans big enough for him to sit in. These were the rejects, the spares, the backups for special days when Ashtown was overflowing with
members from continental Estates and family holdings around the world. The last time they had been used was most likely when Bellamy Cook had been named Brendan, when Ashtown had been so full the Acolytes had been forced out of their rooms and into a tent city in the courtyard. Cyrus wondered how many people were still around and how many had retreated to homes in faraway places to wait things out.

The storage room was at least fifty feet long, but narrow and dim. The walls were gray stone, the floor was cement, the ceiling was cement. Four large bulbs spread light that was more moon than sun and added to the quiet underground coolness of the place. Cyrus and all the pots were on one side. The other side was packed tight with towers of plates and bowls, wooden boxes stenciled with pictures of forks and spoons and knives, and then more boxes, bigger boxes, overflowing with foam and labeled with stenciled letters:
CRYSTAL
,
SILVER
,
CHINA
. There were dozens of them, and some were the size of hay bales.

Cyrus looked toward the door at the end of the room, where Sterling had disappeared. Then he looked down at his hands and feet, sleeved in black, and he looked back at the shelf, with the door hidden behind it, where they had entered. He had memorized his step counts and turns along the way, exactly how Rupert had shown him. He could duck back in and disappear before Sterling came
back. He could get into the lake and swim for the harbor and steal a boat and try to find the plane. But he knew he was too late. Men had been in the tunnels, hunting for him. Of course, he could steal another plane. He could even call it borrowing. But if he did, where would he go? There was no way he could fly back to the camp. And it wasn’t like there was a telephone number he could call for help if he just flew somewhere random and then hid.

He flexed his gloved hands and listened to his knuckles pop. Why was he trusting Sterling? He wasn’t. Not really. Would he really be surprised if Sterling stepped back into this room with Bellamy Cook himself, if all the cook really wanted was to pack Cyrus up and ship him to Phoenix?

Cyrus knew that he needed his own plan, and he needed it soon.

Down the room, the shelf in front of the hidden door suddenly rocked and wobbled. Pots clattered together.

Cyrus backed away. He watched the shelf slide out into the room as the door behind it opened wider. His breath had stopped. His heart pounded on his eardrums. Run? Hide?

Dropping into a crouch, Cyrus pulled his knife and slid quickly toward the wobbling shelf. Tucking his shoulder, he rolled past it and froze, pressing himself tight against a large wooden crate.

The shelf stopped wobbling. Cyrus was stone. A single pot clicked against another as it rocked itself still.

Cyrus leaned forward, just past the crate, peering between pots at the narrow slice of darkness where the door had been pushed open.

“I smell you, boy,” a man whispered. Hidden beyond the door, he inhaled long and slow. “Your taste hangs sour in the air like your brother’s and mother’s.” He sniffed again. “But there’s something more rotten, something more like … your dead father.”

The door exploded open, flinging the shelf of pots across the room into towers of plates, knocking Cyrus back off his feet. In the rain of copper and china, a large shape stepped into the room, his head just below the lights. He was darker than Cyrus, but the bone tattoos were still easily visible. His hair was long and straight, his brow was heavy, and the bridge of his nose was wide, lined with folds, and tinted blue.

Cyrus crab-crawled back through rolling pots and shards of porcelain, and then scrambled to his feet.

The man drew two long, thin knives from his belt, then dropped into a low crouch, like an ape sitting on his heels. He grinned, baring the huge fangs of a baboon.

“Dear Cyrus Smith,” he growled. “Please come play. From, your friend Oliver.”

 twelve 

GARLICKER

C
YRUS ADJUSTED HIS GRIP
on the knife and shifted into the simple fighting stance Nolan had taught him. He kept his left hand loose and low; his fingers wanted to twitch, but he kept them still—
never show fear
—knees bent, weight lightly shifting from toe to toe like a boxer, body leaning slightly forward—
always show attack
. The man with the baboon nose and teeth stepped forward and flipped both of his long knives, catching the handles in big fists, blades pointed down. His black hair swung forward against his cheeks.

“Father wants you alive,” the ape-man said, inching forward. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t kill you first. He can raise the dead.”

Cyrus knew the strikes would come as punches—jabs and hooks that would land sharp steel instead of knuckles. And the man’s arms were extremely long. Cyrus’s breath quickened. He stared straight into the man’s dark eyes—
worry him, be unexpected
.

“What was your name?” Cyrus asked. “Before Phoenix turned you into a monkey?”

There are no real knife fights among mortals
, Nolan had said.
Only knife murders. The only true defense is
.… a kill.…

The man paused, straightening slightly, showing his fangs.

Cyrus managed half a smile. “Bobby? Wayne? Curtis, maybe? I’m sure you’re quick and you can climb,” he said. “And I know you have some nice little goldfish gills. But did Phoenix tell you about the monkey face before you signed up?” Cyrus did a bad imitation of Phoenix’s southern drawl. “ ‘I tell you what, Curtis, how about I make you look like the ugliest ape on the planet?’ ” Cyrus watched the man tense. “And you said what? ‘Yes, please, I want a baboon face’? Did he give you the butt, too?”

The strike came even faster than Cyrus had expected.

A left fist, trailing vicious steel, flashed at his face. Cyrus ducked forward, between the man’s long arms. Knuckles grazed his forehead, the knife nicked his scalp, and he knew the right fist was already coming. Cyrus jerked toward the blow instead of away, and the man’s heavy wrist slammed into his temple. The blade missed its mark.

Slipping with the force of the blow, Cyrus stabbed and felt his blade find gut. He twisted and tore, hearing
the man snarl in pain, but he knew it was only deep enough to irritate.

Cyrus dropped straight to the floor. Steel whispered in his ear. He landed and tried to roll away, but he was too slow and he knew it.

A foot pinned Cyrus’s knife hand to the floor. Strong fingers gripped his short hair and jerked his head back, exposing his throat.

The end
, as Nolan always said.

“Romeo,” the man said. “My name is Romeo.”

“Bummer,” said Cyrus.

The room hissed with light. A white fireball swirled between the shelves and shattered around Romeo’s shoulders and head, flinging him off of Cyrus and into the pots.

Romeo lay on a bed of saucepans that were glowing orange with heat. Cyrus coughed and rose to his knees. He could hear fat sizzling, and the smell in the room was vile.

Sterling raised a fat-barreled gun to his shoulder and smiled. He was wearing a white apron and a hairnet over his beard. “For all their gills and ugliness, they’re still not fireproof.” He nodded at the door and his gold bells rang. “Come on, then. Your carriage awaits. There are more of ’em sniffin’ around.”

Sterling turned and swayed toward the door on his metal legs. He pulled it open and peered out.

Glancing back at the cooked body, Cyrus wiped his
knife on his leg, sheathed it, and hopped through shattered plates and scattered pots to where the poisoner cook was waiting.

Two large trolleys with canvas sides waited in a dim hall outside. One was empty and one was filled to the brim with dried garlic cloves. Sterling tapped the empty one with his gun.

“Hop in and get down. These boys might as well be hound dogs with the noses they’ve got. We don’t need you trailing foot scents.”

Cyrus climbed over the side and curled up at the bottom. The trolley smelled like apples. Sterling dropped the gun with its fat barrel and little gas chamber in on top of Cyrus. It was heavy. And hot. A moment later, Sterling tipped the garlic trolley up over Cyrus like the bed of a dump truck. Garlic cloves rained down.

Cyrus saw Ben Sterling’s smiling face, and then he couldn’t see anything but cloves and darkness. He had been completely buried.

The apple smell was gone.

Sterling began to whistle. The trolley wobbled and rolled. Wheel squeaks mixed with the small sound of Sterling’s ringing bells.

Cyrus felt the trolley tilt as Sterling pushed him up a ramp. He heard the rattle of an old elevator cage door. A moment later, a motor hummed, gears and cables whined, and Cyrus felt himself rising.

Cyrus squirmed. He didn’t trust Sterling. Not at all. So why was he buried in a garlic bin, completely blind to where Sterling was taking him? Yes, Sterling had torched Baboon Boy, but if there was a price on Cyrus’s head, that might not mean anything. To the pirate cook, it was probably only a question of who would pay him more, the transmortals or Phoenix?

“Hey,” Cyrus said. He tried to sit up. “Where are we going?”

A heavy hand plunged into the garlic and held Cyrus’s head down.

“Hush, lad,” Sterling said. “Don’t speak, don’t move.”

The elevator jerked to a stop. Cyrus heard the doors rattle open, and suddenly, he was surrounded by familiar noises—knives chopping, oven doors banging, pots clanking, yelps and shouts and laughs and songs. Sterling was pushing him into the great kitchens of Ashtown.

Even through the garlic the smells reached him, and his stomach rolled over on a bed of nails. How long had it been since he’d eaten? As he counted back the hours, the hunger inside him grew with the injustice of it all. And the hunger made him realize how tired he was. And the weariness made his calf prick up for some aching attention—yes, there had been pellets in his leg. And his head ached from slamming onto the chapel floor, and all of it together made Cyrus try to focus on how much trouble he was in, relying on Big Ben Sterling, of all people, to
keep him safe in Ashtown. Maybe he’d hit his head too hard, or maybe the adrenaline from the chapel and the tunnels and almost being killed by Romeo had pushed him too far to worry about himself. His worry was real; the fear inside him was loud, but it was aimed elsewhere.

What had happened to Rupert? Was he alive? Was he in the lake? Had he been taken? Was he on his way to face Phoenix already? Or was his body sprawled in blood in some hallway Cyrus hadn’t taken? What would happen without Rupert?

Cyrus wormed his face over to the canvas side of the trolley. He could see lights and shapes as they passed. He traced the cloth with his fingertips and found a tiny frayed square. He picked at the loose threads with his fingernails until he had a little peephole just big enough for one garlicky eye.