The Folly of the World (19 page)

Shit.

“What is it?” said Jan as she spluttered on the edge of the hole.

“What?” she gasped. “What?”

“Was it the fish?”

“What? No, no,” Jo shook her head, clinging to the roof and forcing herself to stay in the water—if she got out now, she’d never go back in. This stupid goddamn house… “Some old bones is all, gave me a fright.”

“In his room?” Jan asked quietly, something strange to his expression. “He…”

“Nay, in the, I guess the kitchen? Down the stairs, next to the room?”

“Why did you go down there?” he asked, and though his tone was easy as ever, she felt a surge of guilt at disappointing him.

“I got… the door, it fell. I got turned ’round, was all. Saw someone down there.”

“Probably just your eye fooling you, Jo, nobody—”

“I saw her! I’m not like Sander, I see what I see and know it when I do, God’s wounds. Now I’m to get your ring, and leave her where I seen her.”

Down she went before he could doubt her further, and she forced herself to enter the black passage just as quickly as she had before discovering what lay beneath it. It was much easier to navigate now with the stairwell letting in a little light, and she kept her eyes straight ahead as she kicked past it and entered the bedchamber. It was still like the bottom of a well in here, with the window and now the doorway letting in halos that did fuck-all for her against the rear wall where the fireplace lay. Crossing the room, she became tangled in wet webbing that almost made her die of terror before realizing in the doorway’s trickle of light that she was caught up in old blankets drifting over the large, decaying bed. Freeing herself, she kicked into the deeper dark, resolving to get the ring this time or drown down here.

When she couldn’t get the stone loose, she considered the window, but lest the fish still be lurking, she went back down the hall and up through the hole. Jan didn’t say anything and neither did she, and then she was back at the hearth.

Come on, cuntbitch, she thought, and then she had it, pulling the knife out and letting it sink to the bottom as she got one hand around the small stone and basketed the fingers of her other beneath it. The block came easily but still she took it slow, and then it was free. Nothing dropped into her palm, and still clutching the little hearthstone in her other hand, she gingerly slid her fingers into the gap.

There was something there, something softer than a ring, and larger. Dropping the stone, she now cupped that hand beneath the recess as she withdrew the thin, square object tucked back in there. It felt like lean leather, but squeezing it all over, she detected no hardness in its center, no circle of metal to make her grin in the dark. When it was out and again nothing dropped into her hand, she shoved her fingers back into the gap, desperately now, but nothing met her touch but smooth rock. Christ’s crown…

Pinching the square tightly in one hand, she slowly patted the slick floor in front of her, her heartbeat picking up like a fast-building squall. It had to be here, it had to be. Before she realized it, bright flashes of light were popping all around her, and then she was drowning. There was no time to use the hall, and she clumsily made for the gap in the window. Tearing herself through it, swimming up, up, up, with the soft square crushed in one fist, her head and chest angrily pulsing, she surfaced with a gasp that was even more painful than the choking had been. Her stomach shuddered as she slammed herself against the muddy bank of the roof, pulling herself up even as the tears came and the sobs cheated her of the air she had freely won.

Jan was by her side, then, cooing to her, but all she could hear was the pounding of her heart, the crashing of the sea inside her skull. Miserably, she offered him her closed fist and, a look of rapture on his face, he took it in both hands. She sobbed louder, and he tried to pry her fingers apart, but she wouldn’t give it up, wouldn’t let him see that she had failed him, wouldn’t—

“Jo,” he murmured, and she let him have it, falling away as he felt it, took it, his delight turning to confusion, and she had half a mind to drown herself. The best she could manage was to fall back in the muck, panting and weeping as he examined the square. He unfolded it carefully, and nothing fell out of it because nothing had ever been inside it.

“Shit,” he said quietly, sweetly, as if the rectangle of vellum were a small, frightened animal he was trying to calm. He
flipped it away and it landed beside Jo. Something had been written on it, once, but even an illiterate of her caliber surmised that the smear of old ink was illegible. He stared down at the mud, his face as unreadable as the vellum.

“It wasn’t there,” she finally croaked when she was able to sit up and speak without fear of vomiting. “I swear. I looked. I felt. I was so careful, Jan!”

“You got it!” Sander called from the boat. Jo saw that he and Andrei were floating nearby, pike and net held lazily underarm as they watched the pathetic sight on the shore. Jo hated Sander so much she could taste it, a burning bile in the back of her throat.

“No, it’s a letter,” said Jan. He was still looking at the mud between his boots, his voice too low to be addressing anyone but himself. “To me. From my father. He must have thought I’d come back, sneak in, and try to steal it. So he left me that, to taunt me. Or maybe apologize. Something.”

“What?!” shouted Sander, much louder than he needed to. Probably to make a point or something. Jan ignored him.

“How do you know?” she asked, staring at the ruined sheaf.

“Because I’m not a complete cretin,” he said tiredly, as though he had been the one to near-drown himself down there. “What else could it be?”

“Oh,” she rubbed her wrinkly hands together, trying to bring the feeling back to them. At least she was done with—

“Back down,” he said, a faint smile drifting up the creases of his face like smoke looking for a chink in a ceiling. “If there’s someone in the kitchen, who knows. Maybe.”

“What? What am I—”

“You go back down and search the body. His hands. The floor around him. There’s no way of telling where he hid his brother’s ring, but he rarely took his own off.”

“She hasn’t got it, then,” Sander told the Muscovite, no doubt straining his voice to ensure Jo heard him. The shitbird. “We’ll land this fish ’fore she brings it up!”

Jo ignored him, trying to hook Jan’s eyes on hers. “It’s not him. The kitchen, it’s a woman.”

“And how do you know that?” said Jan, finally meeting her gaze and spooking hers in the process. “No, it doesn’t matter. Search him, her, it, just go. And if it isn’t him, search every other room to see if he’s down there.”

“It’s too dark,” she said. “How am I to see?”

“You saw the one in the kitchen well enough.” He smiled coldly, not attempting to blunt the sharpness of his tone. “And you found the hearth, so if he’s here, I trust you’ll find him. Now, go.”

So go she went, goddamn his eyes, diving right off the roof without a care for whether the fish was still down there or if Sander speared her or she drowned for real this time. The plunge carried her past the second-story window, deeper into the meer, and then she curled through an open kitchen window and almost rammed into the seated corpse. She kicked backward, stirring up the muck that covered the old stone floor. Her toes cut through the thick sludge as she righted herself, floating in front of the woman, for woman she had to be—she was all black and bone, and her clothes had dissolved to mist-thin shreds, but what man had ever sat so hunched and miserable, had found himself so busy with work he could not quit it even to avoid his death? It was strange and terrible to see her thus frozen, as if the house had filled in an instant but the weight of her responsibility had kept her stuck to the floor down these many cold days and colder nights.

How
had
this come to pass, she wondered, what sort of flood took this poor bitch so unawares that she didn’t even drop her peeling knife, and yet hadn’t cast her about in its torrent? She should have been dashed against the walls, blown out the window, tangled in the banister, not left to sit quietly in her corner. It was a queer thing, and made Jo icy and ill to think of it.

Quickly then, woman or no, Jo went for the hands, squinting for a gleam of color, and when that failed, extending her own
fingers to stroke the blurry digits that lay arrested before her, bones woven together around the rusty knife like a sparrow’s nest upon a blackthorn branch. Nothing but pale twigs that felt softer than they should have, and with a sandiness to them that made Jo recoil as if her hand had been stung by a switch.

That was that, then, but as she turned back to the window she had swum through, something shiny snared her attention. It was a golden bar above her, where the hazy wall opposite the stair met the distant ceiling, and though her chest was beginning to tighten, she swam quickly to it. Another door, she realized, but there was light on the other side of it, not the dismal gloom of this sunken place but real, blazing light, and she let her fingers pass through the crack of brilliance shining through. The light seemed to skip over her fingertips and she smiled in the dimness. She must be drowning again, but before she fled for the surface she wedged her fingernails into the spongy seam, hooking the top of the door and kicking backward off the wall.

The door didn’t budge, but a splinter drove up into the bed of her pinky nail, and her gasp turned into a painful choking as a dark ribbon began to unspool from her fingertip, winding around her in the water. Shit, she really was fucking drowning. Fighting the jagged ache in her stomach and chest and the stinging in her finger and the ever-thickening water, she made for the window. A familiar, bulky silhouette passed before it, but she kicked ever harder, having more important things to worry about than some goddamn mud-munching fish.

Just as she passed through the portal, however, there was a burst of light from behind her, and even as she was planting her foot against the sill and launching herself up, up, up, she clearly saw her shadow cast out upon the muddy floor of the meer. The door had opened, she knew, and as soon as she had another breath she would see what lay beyond it, in the light.

J
olanda had been down too long, and Jan sighed with frustration. He had as good as held her under himself, letting her dive again after she had surfaced with a bloody finger and a wild, dangerous smile that looked far too much like those Sander wore. Jan had initially protested her going back in so soon, before she had even caught her breath, but she had told him she was sure that the ring was at hand, and so he had let her go.

Now she was bobbing against a ceiling, mouth frozen open, bulging eyes staring at nothing. Or maybe she had tried to force her way through a new window and become stuck in a gap between slats, fingernails peeled back from clawing at the wood, knees black from banging at the frame. What a horrible way to die.

Only now did it occur to Jan that he hadn’t reminded her to retrieve the rope and play it out as she had before, and he gave another long sigh as he took off the shirt he had only recently put back on after hewing open the roof. First would be to find the window she used to enter and exit the bedchamber, which would take him to the rope, and then he would use it as she should have as he went from room to room and—

She gasped, the splash of her surfacing somehow waiting for her to take in the air she must so desperately have needed before crashing all about her. She was close enough that he could have jumped out and landed on her, had he been of a mind. Her back was to him, and her whirling arms immediately began to carry her away from the roof, toward the graveyard. The boat was right there beside her, but she seemed blind to it, deaf to Sander’s
laughter as she passed the vessel, and then the big man’s cackling lurched into a shout as the boat pitched to the side. Sander fell into the bed of the violently rocking craft, and the Muscovite, who deftly kept his feet, gave a cry as he launched a spear. Jan realized what must be happening even as he backed up enough to get a good leap. That goddamn fish wasn’t such a bottom dweller after all, and as Jan jumped for the boat, he saw its black shadow in front of the vessel, cutting along after the girl. The behemoth was longer than Sander was tall.

Jan fell short of the boat and plunged into the water, but as soon as he broke the surface, Sander snatched the bare-chested man by the wrist and hoisted him up. It was like riding a pendulum, the boat nearly tipping every few seconds as it dipped from side to side, and then Jan was dropped into the bed of the boat and Sander fell atop him. Jan lay perfectly still lest they capsize, and Sander loomed above him, a look that was somewhere between pleasure and fury on his bearded face. As they pitched from side to side without sign of slowing, Jan felt with sudden, dreadful certainty that something was very wrong with Sander, that this was not the man he had shared so much with over the years—it was as if Sander were smoother, cleaner, clearer of eye even here in the midst of justifiable panic, and Jan’s heart jumped in his chest. This wasn’t Sander—this was a stranger.

“They fuckin sent it!” Sander hissed. “Some kind of hell fish, sent up to thwart us!”

Jan relaxed at this. Same old Sander. “Off me, but careful about it! Get us after it, man!”

Sander slithered backward and was on one of the benches before Jan had even sat up, the Muscovite so excited he had lapsed into his native tongue, babbling and pointing as he dropped onto the other rowing bench. The boat had been facing the roof, but together they brought it around fast, and then the vessel leapt forward like an otter after a bream. There was Jo, halfway to the rush-guarded border of the cemetery shallows, but where—

—The fish was following her but was closer to the boat than the girl, and Jan supposed his own fall into the water must have caused it to double back and investigate before resuming the chase.

“You said it ate mud and worms and shit!” Jan snarled, squinting to get a better look at the fish. It was a true monster, all right. “What’s it doing after her, then?”