Hoarfrost (Whyborne & Griffin Book 6) (21 page)

Whyborne

Griffin
finished his tale as Iskander bound Christine’s wound. I sat with my back
against the corridor wall, hands dangling loosely between my knees. “So I was
correct in my guess,” I said. “This Mother of Shadows can communicate with you
telepathically because of what happened in Chicago and Egypt. Is that right?”

Griffin
shrugged. He watched Iskander help Christine back into her layers of clothing,
rather than look at me. “Such was my impression.”

“The Lapidem
is probably the key.” Griffin had returned my poor abused scarf to me, and I
wrapped it around my neck again with a silent thanks to Miss Parkhurst. “It had
already created a conduit between you and an umbra. Some imprint of that
connection must remain on your mind.”

“I
suppose.” His tone was flat, the words clipped, and he still didn’t look at me.

“What
are we to do?” Christine asked.

“Run for
the exit?” Jack suggested hopefully.

Iskander
shook his head. “I can’t imagine the umbrae will simply let us leave.”

“And
Whyborne’s trapped here anyway.” Christine struggled to her feet, leaning
heavily on Iskander.

“What?”
Griffin finally turned to me, his eyes wide.

Curse
it. “My ketoi blood has proved a bit of a problem.” I explained what happened
to us, and my own conjectures.

“Why
didn’t the Mother of Shadows just speak to you instead of Griffin?” Jack asked
when I finished.

“I’m not
certain. Possibly because I strengthened my mental barriers, to keep out the
dweller in the deeps.” My knees creaked as I levered myself up. “Still, she
might not be able to talk to me even if I lowered my defenses.”

“Don’t,”
Griffin said.

“I
assure you, I have no intention of doing so.” I looked at the wan faces around
me. “Christine’s question remains—what are we to do now?”

“I doubt
we’ll be left much in the way of choice.” Griffin’s mouth tightened into a grim
line. “The Mother of Shadows wants to see us face-to-face, as it were.”

“Then
let’s go,” Christine said. “We’ve already wasted enough time. Turner could be
halfway back to Hoarfrost by now.”

I looked
at Jack uneasily. He’d saved Griffin from being shot by the guard, and he’d
accompanied Griffin and Iskander on this rescue mission, but I didn’t trust him
for an instant.

Umbrae
waited for us in the room beyond, their black bodies glistening slick and oily
in the lantern light. Workers clustered in the corners, and soldiers blocked
every entrance save for the one going deeper into the mountain. No doubt the
Mother of Shadows watched us through their eyes.

I
glanced down at Griffin. His face was set, but the corners of his mouth had
gone white. I couldn’t imagine the courage it took him to come here, to the
stygian depths haunted by the very creatures that had destroyed his life with
the Pinkertons and left him burdened by memories that woke him screaming in the
night.

And he’d
done it for me. Well, for Christine also—Griffin would never leave a
friend behind. But I knew without asking he’d thought of me to shore up his
courage, as I had thought of him. I wanted to tell him how brave he was, wanted
to
show
him how much I loved him.

“Thank
you for coming for us,” I said, too quietly for anyone else to hear. “I know it
can’t have been easy. Isn’t easy.”

“Of
course I came.” His hand brushed against mine. “You had to know I would.”

I hooked
my smallest finger with his. Jack walked behind us, but I didn’t give a damn
what he thought.

We
passed through what seemed an endless series of ramps and rooms, herded
continuously deeper by the umbrae. Eventually, the rooms let out into an enormous
chamber, large as a cathedral. Columns marched down the center of the huge
space and stretched to a distant ceiling lost to the reach of our lanterns. The
ubiquitous murals covered every inch of column, every expanse of wall. Unlike
the rest of the city we’d seen, the reliefs here had bits of inlaid mica or
small gems, forming the eyes of the animals or adding a flourish to the
decorative arabesques. The entire room glittered as a result, as though we
stood beneath the night sky, or amidst a host of stars.

Workers
swarmed everywhere, gliding up columns and along walls, withdrawing from our
lights. Beyond them, in the shadows where our small lanterns couldn’t reach,
something stirred.

There
came the sound of a soft-bodied creature slithering against the stone. A huge
feeler, as thick around as my body, wrapped about one of the columns. Coils of
something long and black seethed and slid, blending into the shadows. For a
moment, my mind couldn’t make any sense of what I was seeing. Then a single,
huge eye opened high above us, peering down from near the ceiling.

Dear
God. Mother of Shadows indeed.

She was
a titan, the coils of her body vanishing into darkness. Her form reminded me
again of some colossal Chinese dragon, bewhiskered and serpentine. Or perhaps the
dragons recalled some fragmented memory of her kind. Did a great city like this
one lurk in the far wastes of Asia, amidst the desolation of the deserts or the
wildness of the mountains? Rumor claimed the plateau of Leng lay somewhere in
Asia, perhaps in Tibet.

“Fuck
me,” Jack whispered, his voice stripped with terror.

Griffin
stiffened, and his hand fell away from mine. Knowing this must be horrifying to
him, I turned to him, reaching out—

But it
wasn’t Griffin who stared back at me through his eyes.

Whyborne

“Did the
masters send you, kin from the sea?” Griffin asked. His voice was rough, like
something dragged across stone and left bloody. It contained none of his usual
inflections, but a cadence alien to his normal speech.

As alien
as whatever stared at me through his eyes. His pupils had shrunk to pinpoints,
the irises lightened to a pale, frosty green rather than their ordinary
emerald.

“Griffin!”
Jack stepped toward him, then stopped, as if he meant to interfere but didn’t
quite know how. “Let him go!”

The
sight of this
thing
inside Griffin sent a shudder through me. I wanted
it gone. I wanted to look into his eyes and see my lover looking back, not some
horror. But there was no choice, not if we had any hope of leaving here alive.

I tore
my gaze from him and focused on the vast, orange eye high above us, the
shifting coils beyond. “What do you mean? What masters?”

The
Mother of Shadows hissed. Through Griffin’s mouth, she said, “The cruel ones,
the creators, the enslavers. They created us to build for them, to fight for
them.”

“Us? The
umbrae?”

Griffin’s
lips peeled back from his teeth. “Us. Our kinds.”

My
extremities went cold. “The ketoi and the umbrae?” But that wasn’t possible,
was it?

“The
ketoi always struck me as being rather…unlikely,” Iskander said, almost
apologetically. “Biologically speaking, I mean. They seem rather a mishmash of
other things, and can breed with humans…if they were created as some kind of
servitor race, it would explain a great deal.”

The
stone reeled beneath me. I wanted to sit down, but I locked my knees and forced
myself to stare at the serpentine Mother of Shadows. Could it be true? Had some
unknown race created us to be their slaves? Was that why the umbra wouldn’t
attack—they’d been shaped to recognize their fellow thralls as belonging
to the same masters?

“Who—what—are
these masters?” I managed to ask. “The dweller in the deeps—the
god—is it one of them?”

She
paused. A thin trickle of blood leaked from Griffin’s left nostril. “No. It is
like we are. The masters are gone. Left this place long and long ago. We grew
strong and refused to submit. Refused to lose our children to them, to be
forced to build their cities and tend their needs and fight their wars. We rose
up, and they learned to fear us. They fled, abandoning their cities in order to
trap us within them.”

High
above, her head swayed slowly, back and forth. “We have lived here ever since.
Singing our history from one Mother to the next. Locked away through this age
of cold, trapped and yet free. Living on the creatures that stumble inside, on
the flying things, on our gardens.”

Griffin
turned sharply to me, brows diving down, fists clenching. “But now you have
come to steal our children!” His voice rose into a howl of rage. “I have seen
this one’s memories, seen what the humans do to the children of my sisters!
Break them, defile them, corrupt and hurt and destroy.”

I held
out my hands, half afraid she’d force him to attack me. “No, wait! That’s not
why we came here. We came to stop Turner, the man who stole your—your
child.”

“Not
just a child! My daughter.” Coils unwound, thrashing, and her feelers cracked
the air like whips. Blood ran freely from Griffin’s nose now, slicking the
lower half of his face. “The one meant to come after me, the next Mother of
Shadows.”

Dear God
in heaven. That’s what Turner meant, when he said the chrysalis didn’t belong
to a mere solider. He hadn’t taken a simple servant, something to twist into a
fierce guardian like I’d seen in Egypt.

He’d
stolen a queen.

“And now
she is gone, beyond our reach,” the Mother said through Griffin’s mouth. “But
you are a sorcerer. And you are as trapped as we are.”

My heart
pounded in my chest. Soldiers appeared from the darkness, gliding slowly back
and forth through the vast chamber. “What do you want?”

“Release
us. Let us go forth and save my daughter.”

“I
wouldn’t know how to begin,” I said. “I learned how to lay down seals, but
not…oh.”

Oh God.
The curse breaking spell. It would work, wouldn’t it? But no. I didn’t have the
strength to blindly rip through eons-old magical wards of this extent.

“I could
in theory,” I said carefully. “But in practice, I don’t think the spell I know
would work. I don’t know what shape the magic creating the seals takes. A small
enchantment I could shatter with brute force, as I did with the pearl, but
this…” I gestured to the vast ceiling above me. “This is beyond me.”

A low
rattle came from Griffin’s throat. “I can see the seals. Perceive the magic.
But I cannot do anything about it. We have no magic of our own.”

Just as
the ketoi didn’t. These masters, these creators, whoever or whatever they’d
been, clearly wanted to keep such power out of the hands of their slaves.

Her rage
slipped away, became something more calculating. “This one’s mind has already
been opened to us. I can alter him, allow him to perceive the magic as well.
Together, the two of you can do what one alone cannot. Destroy the seals, and
set us free.”

Griffin

I sat
against one of the columns, my knees drawn up, my arms resting on them. I bowed
my head, hiding my face. I didn’t want to look at Whyborne, or Christine, or
even kindly Iskander. Or Jack, who thought he was saving me, and instead
brought me to this.

I wanted
to cry. Or scream, perhaps.

“Here,
darling.” Whyborne knelt beside me. “Drink some water.”

I took
his canteen and drank obediently. The others all hovered a short distance away,
giving us the illusion of privacy. Once I’d finished, he wet his handkerchief
and wiped tenderly at my face. Washing away the blood.

“Are you
all right?” he asked. “No—no, of course you aren’t. What a stupid
question.”

I leaned
my head back against the column. A soldier drifted out of the shadows at the
back of the great hall, and I watched its progress. What did it think of us?
Did it have opinions separate from the Mother of Shadows, or did the communal
nature of their thoughts render them less individual, more like a single
organism?

If so,
no wonder they went mad in isolation.

“One of
them killed Glenn.” Tears burned my eyes, and it was everything I could do to
hold them back.

Whyborne
sighed and lowered himself beside me. His hand found the nape of my neck,
gently massaging the tension there. “I know.”

The
tenderness of the gesture set loose the tears I’d fought against. “I feel like
I’m betraying him. How can I possibly pity the monster that killed him? How can
I set more of them loose on the world?”

Whyborne’s
hand stilled. “You won’t.”

His
words made no sense. “Won’t what? Pity it? I don’t want to, God. But I can’t
forget what I saw, what I felt.”

“No.” He
withdrew his hand, and my skin felt cold in the absence of his touch. “You won’t
set more of them loose on the world.”

The
possibility Whyborne wouldn’t know how to destroy the seals hadn’t even
occurred to me. “There must be a way—some spell you can use. Did you
bring the
Arcanorum?
”

Whyborne
sighed. “That isn’t what I meant.” He bit his lip. “When I removed the curse
from the pearl back in Widdershins, I forced my way through. I could feel the
weave of the spell, but it wasn’t enough to use effectively. Here, with
something so large, simply battering my way through a thin spot isn’t going to
work.”

“But if
I agree to let her change me, I can guide you,” I said. This would work. It had
to. “We can do this, Ival. We have to try.”

He shook
his head. “No.”

I couldn’t
be hearing him correctly. “What do you mean? You’re trapped here!”

“Don’t
you think I know that?” Our raised voices had to be getting the attention of
the rest, but neither of us looked anywhere but at each other. “You said it
yourself, though. We’ve seen the damage just one of these umbrae can do on
their own. Their creators—
our
creators, whatever they
were—sealed them away out of fear!”

“So?
Does it make them evil, any more than the ketoi are?”

“The
ketoi weren’t shut away in the depths.” Whyborne shook his head. “The risk is
too great. We’ll pretend to agree, we’ll go to the door, and—”

“No!” I
rose to my knees to face him. “I’m not leaving you here.”

“You don’t
have a choice!” He dashed the back of his hand angrily over his eyes. “People
will die—”

I
grabbed the front of his coat, hands fisting in the thick leather. “I’d watch
the world burn if it meant keeping you safe!”

My shout
reverberated through the enormous hall. Whyborne stared at me, eyes wide. No
one else said anything, and even the umbrae stilled.

“You don’t
mean that,” he said at last.

“Of
course I do.” I gripped his coat more tightly, as if I could force him to
understand. “You think I’m a good man? Selfless? Noble?” A hollow laugh
threatened to escape me, but I swallowed it down. “I play at being those
things. I try to do what’s right. But I would do
anything
to keep you
safe.”

“Even
unleash the very creatures that killed your partner?”

“Glenn
is dead.” I felt scraped raw, split open, a nerve exposed to air. “Maybe he’d
hate me for doing this. Maybe he’d understand. I don’t know, and it doesn’t
matter. I love you, Ival. More than anything in this world. More than
everything else in the world put together. And I will not leave you here to
die. To hell with the cost.”

Tears
gathered in his eyes, and he blinked rapidly. “Griffin…” he said, but didn’t
seem to have any idea what to say next.

Christine,
naturally, did. “Don’t be a fool, Whyborne,” she snapped as she approached,
still leaning heavily on Iskander for support. “We aren’t leaving you here, and
that’s that.”

“These
are the sort of things my family is supposed to kill,” Iskander said to her
with a frown. “You can’t seriously be suggesting we let them loose!”

How
could he say such a thing, after all we’d risked to save our loved ones? “If
Christine were the one trapped here, I rather expect you’d feel differently.”

“Whyborne’s
the sort of thing you’re supposed to go around killing too, isn’t he?”
Christine pulled away from Iskander roughly. “Are you going to do away with him
next? Go back to Widdershins and murder Heliabel and Persephone?”

“It
bloody well isn’t the same and you know it!”

“Why
not?” Jack asked. He held up his hands quickly. “No one start yelling at me. I’m
not going to say what you think.” His gaze went to Whyborne. “All I know is
Nicholas told me my brother was in danger, because he’d befriended a monster who
would use and then murder him. Dr. Whyborne was a dangerous maniac who needed
to be put down like a dog. Maybe Nicholas was deceived by these Endicott
people, I don’t know. But I know I was wrong.”

Despite
everything, my heart lightened. “Jack…”

“I’d be
a blind fool not to see he cares about you,” Jack said with a rueful smile.
“And given what you said to me earlier, it’s clear Nicholas and I made a bad
mistake. You didn’t need saving.”

“Thank
you,” I said.

Christine
scowled at the mention of Turner. “And what does this have to do with the
umbrae?”

“We
assumed Dr. Whyborne was a danger to Griffin because of his inhuman blood.
Because if he isn’t even human, how could he be…”

“A real
person?” Whyborne snapped.

Jack had
the grace to look shamefaced. “If you want to think of it that way. So I wanted
to ask, is there any reason to think the umbrae will do something terrible if
the seals are broken?”

“They were
sealed away by their own creators,” Whyborne repeated stubbornly.

“Aren’t
masters always afraid of their slaves?” Jack asked. “Afraid of rebellion? If a
man abuses a dog and makes it vicious, of course he ends up fearing it might
turn on him, too.” He shook his head. “Whatever happened, it was a long time
ago. From what Griffin said, it sounds like the umbrae in Chicago and Egypt
were twisted and broken by the sorcerers who bound them.” He turned to me. “Griffin,
when the Mother of Shadows possessed you, did you get any sense she wants to
kill everyone in sight the second she’s loose?”

I didn’t
want to remember her in my brain. Controlling my voice while I could only watch
and listen.

And
feel. “She’s furious,” I said honestly. “Turner came in here and took away a
child,
her
child. But she knows we’re her only hope of getting it back.”

“And
will she kill us for refusing?” Jack asked.

I
frowned, searching my memories. “I don’t think so. She knows we aren’t
responsible for the theft of the chrysalis. But even if she lets us leave,
Whyborne will be trapped.”

“Whatever
the case, we have to make a decision soon,” Christine pointed out. “The seals
are at their weakest tonight. We either break them in the next few hours, or
the point becomes moot.” She glanced first at me, then at Whyborne. “I vote for
listening to Griffin and Jack.”

Whyborne
flung up his hands. “This isn’t up for a vote! I’m not going to let some
creature tamper with Griffin’s mind, no matter what.”

“That
isn’t your decision,” I said.

Whyborne
paled. “Griffin, you can’t.”

Exhaustion
ate at my bones. How long had it last been since any of us slept? And how long
would it be until we could again? “You do understand if you decide not to tear
down the seals, I’m staying with you.”

Fear
flickered in his dark gaze. “You can’t be serious.”

“I
assure you I am.” I took his left hand with mine, so our rings caught the
light. “I vowed to stand by you for as long as we both shall live. I won’t
forsake you now, Ival. Even if it means dying here beside you in the dark.”

He
closed his eyes, head bowed. His throat worked as he swallowed hard. “I…just
give me a minute. I need to think. Please.”

It hurt
to let go of his hand. I wanted to argue with him further, to force him to
listen to me. But I couldn’t. “All right,” I said.

He
walked away, arms wrapped tightly around himself. I made myself turn away and
go to the wall near the entrance, where I lowered myself to the floor. I wanted
to curl up against the wall, put my head on my arms, and lose myself in sleep.
Forget the umbrae, and sorcerers, and my fear Whyborne wouldn’t listen.

And forget
my guilt most of all, my betrayal of Glenn’s memory. If he could see me now
from his place in heaven, would he curse my name?

Boots
scuffed on the floor and I opened eyes I didn’t remember closing. Jack slid
down to sit beside me. He was as pale and filthy as the rest of us, and I tried
to imagine how this must all seem to him.

“How are
you holding up?” I asked.

“Better
than I have any right to, probably.” He smiled wanly. “Of course, if we survive
this, I’m going to get roaring drunk for a week.”

“I may
just join you.”

“I’ll
buy the first round.” He looked away for a moment, then back at me. “I’m sorry,
Griffin. I should have kept pushing Nicholas for answers, once I realized Dr. Whyborne
wasn’t the monster I expected. I should have pushed him to take a harder look
himself, to not believe whatever his cousins told him.”

“You
still think it’s all just a mistake on his part?” I asked. “Even after he
stabbed Christine? Abandoned them with the umbrae?”

Jack
tilted his head back, unspoken grief welling in his eyes. “I don’t know. He
wants to change the world, to save people, but I don’t see how he can think
this is right.”

“I
understand,” I said, and I did. “I joined the Pinkertons because I wanted to
make the world a better place. But I saw how far men would go, the things they’d
do, when convinced of their own righteousness. And the Endicotts are very, very
convincing.”

“I
suppose you’re right.” He flashed me a wan smile. “I just wanted to say,
whatever happens, I’m with you.”

“I
appreciate it.”

He
nodded in the direction Whyborne had gone. “For now, though, it looks as if
your fellow has come to a decision.”

Fear
crawled in my belly, but I forced myself to me feet. “Then by all means, let’s
see what he has to say.”