The Order of Odd-Fish (37 page)

“Escape
where,
Audrey?” said Jo. “Where can I go that’s safe? The Silent Sisters will kill you, then they’ll track me down again!”

“Twenty-nine! Twenty-eight! Twenty-seven!”

“Do you
want
the Silent Sisters to get you?” said Audrey. “I’m on
your
side, Jo. I’m trying to help!”

“But I can’t keep running away,” said Jo. “I’m the only one who can stop this!”

Audrey stood blocking the front door, her eyes desperate; but then she sagged, her energy and enterprise gone.

“Four! Three! Two…”

The lodge door opened. The crowd faltered, broke into gasps and whispers.

Jo stepped out onto the porch. The mob began to back away.

She walked down the stairs and into the street. The crowd parted before her. The Silent Sisters fell to their knees. She approached the palanquin and opened the curtain. Inside was a dark tent of perfumed pillows and jeweled drapery. Incense burned in a little gold pot.

Jo took a deep breath. She climbed up into the tent, closed the curtain, and lay down on the pillows. She felt the palanquin rise.

They had her.

T
HE
tent bounced and jiggled as the Silent Sisters carried it up the mountain. Surrounded by swaying red and purple curtains, cut off from the world, Jo felt as if she was tucked inside a pulsing heart. The gold pot steamed sweet smoke, blurring the jewels sewn into the overlapping layers of drapes, spiraling and blossoming into dizzying patterns; muddled by the incense, dazzled by the gems, Jo’s head grew fuzzy and huge, and she tried to look away, but the maddening jewels were everywhere, blinking and swirling, receding…fading…

Jo bit her cheek, dug her nails into the flesh of her legs, strained her eyes open, but everything was slipping away. Invisible voices whispered, thickening and slowing as the world grew heavier, dissolving in the dreamy smoke and curtains.

The palanquin bumped on the ground. Jo tried to sit up. She couldn’t. Her body wouldn’t move. She saw a dribble of gray light—and the Silent Sisters gathering around, opening the curtains. Gray veils crowded on every side, trembling fingers touching her all over. A nauseous chill slithered under Jo’s skin. The fingers clutched her arms, slipped under her back, and lifted her out into the cold morning.

They were on the peak of the mountain. The cathedral of the Silent Sisters towered out of the fog, dwarfing the wrecked buildings all around, its crooked spires and spiraling towers crusted with lurid coral, pink and aqua and gold. The cathedral looked like a huge prehistoric insect, panting and heaving, waiting for her.

The Silent Sisters carried Jo up the cathedral steps. Her body felt as limp and delicate as wet paper. With each step, she felt as if she might tear into pieces. A jewel-toothed slit loomed all around her, glinting dully, and she was inside.

The world disintegrated into disconnected colors. The incense had scrambled her mind into a foggy blur. The Silent Sisters took off her clothes and laid her in a jade basin of water, washing her with bony fingers. The only sound was the gurgle of the bath, distant and dwindling. The hands dried her, rubbed oils into her, massaged her until she felt like jelly. Then they wrapped her up in shrouds and carried her deeper.

Dim figures moved all around Jo, holding up chalices, waving scepters, whirling in solemn, incomprehensible dances. The wound on her neck was opening wider, twisting in on itself. She was losing her body. Her mind was a flickering match. A whispered chant swirled all around, a freezing calm spread through her. The match went out. She didn’t know who she was. She was dead all over.

The Silent Sisters carried her deeper, spiraling down through a corkscrew of crumbling black stone, cramped coiled tunnels like the inside of a wasp’s nest, hundreds of coffins packed in stacked rings, circling down to the bottom of the cathedral.

The golden mouth smiled.

Jo was too far gone to do anything. The jaws grinned wider, emeralds and rubies blinked, swarmed, silver glyphs uncurled, danced, and swirled away. She tried to twist around, but her body was slack. She passed into the golden mouth and its glittering lips closed behind her.

Jo lay on a stone floor. Her mind was poured out and lost, too vague and blank to think or feel or even be afraid. The darkness around her trembled and flowed and she felt a slow thump in her bones—the heartbeat of the All-Devouring Mother. The wound had spread all over Jo now, shooting roots deep into her. The wound opened and gave a tiny screech.

A blast of gurgling thunder answered. Then Jo saw it, brooding in the shadows: shockingly enormous, a looming blob of sagging, scabbed, sewn gray flesh, a spider with countless arms, legs, and tentacles wriggling all around a moaning mouth. The mouth crouched back on a hundred legs, a row of furious eyes along its side, a mountain of chewed-up flaps, twitching snakes, crinkled sacs crisscrossed with veins and stitches hanging off, bubbling over—a gigantic, misshapen mouth, snuffling and groaning.

The gigantic thing was hissing toward her, but Jo’s heart was slow, her mind empty. Dozens of tentacles came slithering toward her, wrapping around her, and suddenly she was lifted high in the air, dangling above the steaming mouth. The mouth opened wider, wider, cracking open scabs. It exhaled a blast of hot rotten air—

And Jo was flung into the All-Devouring Mother.

She plunged into a lake of spit. The saliva burned her skin, sizzled down her throat. A whale-sized tongue swept everything toward a row of gnashing teeth. There was a tremendous gurgle, a drain opened under her, and Jo was flushed down into the All-Devouring Mother.

A dense stew of organs and arteries churned past, yanking, sucking, jerking Jo in every direction—and suddenly she was spit out of a tube and into the stomach.

It was a quivering funnel descending into a pool of glowing brown-green juices, foaming and throwing wildly shifting shadows, seething with dirty heat. She was steadily sliding toward the sizzling pool. She couldn’t move. In a panic she strained every muscle to get away. Nothing. She kept sliding toward the frothing acid.

A rumble came from the tube. The stomach heaved, shook, there was a great gurgling blast—and smashed timbers, blocks of stone, metal girders, and millions of bricks sprayed into the stomach, splashing and dissolving into the pool. The All-Devouring Mother was already devouring Eldritch City. The air swirled with sour gases, the ghastly brown light grew brighter, and the stomach began to expand.

Jo realized she could move her arms a little. Her legs were coming back to life. But it was too late, she was slipping faster and faster, caught up in a river of wrecked buildings, ripped-up roads and trees—she scrabbled, she couldn’t stop—Jo twisted, turned around, clawed for something to hold on to, the stomach convulsed and dropped—the pool rushed up and she plunged in.

The world fell away.

It came roaring back, too fast, too hot, too painful. Jo reversed, exploded, grew obscenely huge.

She wasn’t herself anymore. She was outside. There was too much daylight; it smashed her open, cut to her heart. She blinked with ten thousand eyes. She had too many eyes, she saw too many things. Ten thousand Eldritch Cities kaleidoscoped around her. She had too many mouths, gasping and shrieking, stretched sideways, puckered too tight, crammed with too many teeth shoved in the wrong way. She didn’t have enough skin. Someone had stitched her together, backward and inside-out and
wrong
—every stitch sang with pain, threads pulling and straining and tearing. She couldn’t move, it hurt too much, she had to move, she had to eat. She was starving. There was a building in front of her. She smashed it. She ate it. She needed more. She oozed, staggered, threw herself forward. Another building. It was in her mouth. She needed more. She was huge, she was getting huger, eating, swelling, eating Eldritch City, skewered with pain but boiling over with wild shrieking power. She recognized it all. It was hers. The Belgian Prankster was right. The Silent Sisters were right.

They had brought her back.

She was the All-Devouring Mother.

Jo screamed.

The world wavered, blurred, popped like a bubble. Suddenly she was back in her old body, back inside the monster, thrashing and drowning in sizzling juices, swirling down into a dark, sucking hole—and then she grabbed something solid.

Jo clutched at it desperately, holding on hard against the juices rushing downward all around her. Inch by agonizing inch she pulled herself upward, even as more and more of her tore off, sinking away into the hole far below. At last her head broke the surface and she heaved herself out of the pool.

She was holding a gold thread.

Jo stared at it. Her father’s message:
Follow the gold thread—

She collapsed into a puddle of bubbling gravy, panting.
I can’t go on,
she thought. But the All-Devouring Mother was already tearing Eldritch City apart. At any second she might lose her consciousness to it again. She could feel the world starting to flicker again. Tears streamed out of her cut-up eyes.
I can’t go on,
she said to herself.
I can’t.

Jo crawled, feeling her way along the gold thread into a throbbing tunnel. She felt like she was made of scrambled eggs, melting into the ground, getting sucked into the walls, falling apart in chunks. The gold thread dipped, looped, swerved, reversed, tangled with other threads, red, black, blue, orange, white, and green, crisscrossed and knotted. Jo held tight, following the gold thread with her hands, tremblingly, an inch at a time—

To the All-Devouring Mother’s heart.

Jo stopped. The heart loomed overhead, as huge as a house, a pounding, squirting, gray and purple mountain of bulges, valves, and tubes. Every pulse shook the entire body, sprayed a blast of yellow blood into the air, flooded the mammoth arteries, slurped the blood back in through the veins, ran down the heart’s side in sheets. Jo stared at the heart, terrified. If she went any closer, the heart would suck her in, tear her apart, pump her out in a hundred pieces. Jo stood still, hopeless. Everything wobbled—

The world disintegrated, streaming backward into darkness.

Then it expanded into stabbing daylight. She was the All-Devouring Mother again, huge and hungry and angry, bloated far larger than before, her hundreds of mouths full, overflowing with Eldritch City. Her eyes swiveled, spun around, saw people running—

She screamed and the world whirled, broke, glittered away. Jo gasped, her head pounding, back under the rhythmically exploding heart, still holding the gold thread. She couldn’t stop moving. Every time she stopped she lost her consciousness to the All-Devouring Mother. Jo climbed the swaying gold thread, twisting out of the way of the pulsing, sucking tubes, following it into a twisty little valve, into the All-Devouring Mother’s heart.

Inside the heart was a throbbing chaos. Jo couldn’t keep her balance, falling down and getting thrown against the walls as everything shivered and lurched around her as the heart exploded and shrank, exploded and shrank, with deafening thumps. The gold thread ended here, dangling from a knot of gold, red, blue, orange, white, and green, swinging in the ceiling of the quaking chamber.

Jo jumped and grabbed the end of the thread.

The thread strained, pulled back.

Jo pulled again, harder. A section of the heart’s lining split. She swallowed, pulled more. A whole wall of entrails collapsed, and the room flooded with steaming yellow blood.

Black hisses crept up all around, yanking her inside out. She exploded outward and was the All-Devouring Mother again, stomping and slithering around Eldritch City, the sunlight ripping through her skin. Little flying things were buzzing all around her, driving steel pins into her, hacking holes in her—tiny people on tiny ostriches. She swatted them away and rolled forward, opened her huge hot mouth for another building—

Jo screamed and yanked the gold thread with all her might. The heart ripped, zigzagged, tore apart, and suddenly she was back inside, squirming out of the heart, the gold thread tight in her fist, dashing through a swamp of guts, crashing through a jungle of bones, the gold thread pulling hard, ripping the monster apart behind her.

She was wild with pain and desperation; she wasn’t thinking, she was just running, climbing up the esophagus, back into the mouth, and suddenly the mammoth tongue rushed at her. Jo yanked the thread and the tongue split, collapsed, and sank away. She sloshed blindly through the spit, the world reeling around her red and black, pounding on all sides. For the first time she had hope. She was still in the monster’s mouth, but she had the gold thread. She could feel its tug. All she had to do was somehow get out, climb out of this mouth, and keep pulling the thread as far out as she could, unstitching the whole monster—

“Silly,” whispered the Belgian Prankster. “Did you think it would be that easy?”

Jo choked. The Belgian Prankster was on her before she could move. She couldn’t even see him, but his blubbery arms picked her up, crushing her. The world reeled dizzyingly around.

“We’re going back down,” he said. “And this time you’ll
stay down.
”

Jo kicked and screamed, mashed against his naked chest, swallowed in his ragged fur coat. He was squeezing her to death. Her bones were cracking; he was killing her. She looked up—

Just as Aunt Lily’s ostrich came hurtling out of the sky and kicked the Belgian Prankster in the face.

Jo fell from his scrabbling hands, collapsed into the bubbling spit, and saw them, high up in the air: the knights and squires of the Odd-Fish, all mounted on ostriches, flying down toward the All-Devouring Mother. Jo’s heart leaped. She didn’t know how, she didn’t care how—they’d come for her. Aunt Lily had come. Her friends had come.

The All-Devouring Mother roared, and a wormy army of tentacles exploded out, entangling the knights and squires. The Odd-Fish wheeled, darted, and streaked in, flashing their weapons—Dame Myra felled three tentacles with a slash of her axe, Sir Oort plunged his lance into a bulging sac, and Sir Alasdair and Dame Isabel fought side by side, dipping and swooping and skewering the monster with spears. The squires fluttered and dived, firing arrows at the All-Devouring Mother, and even the Schwenk was there, frolicking about, playfully plucking out the monster’s eyes and tearing off its ears. And Jo also saw—she couldn’t understand it—riding the Schwenk: Ken Kiang?