Underground (47 page)
I let myself drop deep into the Grey, to the point of the grid. Searing lines shot off in hard geometric shapes and sudden baroque curlicues that flung energy through the invisible world like catapults. Quinton grabbed my hand; his grip felt remote and thready like a handful of empty plush, but it seemed to hold me in my own shape, rather than spinning out into the blackness of the grid in a million burning strands. He turned on his pocket flashlight whose beam looked like smoke on water. We went forward by inches as I looked for something that didn’t belong—a line too hot, disconnected, wild among the busy conduits of the Grey’s power lines. Lass kicked and writhed, making me jerk in Quinton’s grasp.
We rounded the first corner, coming to the alley colonnade. I turned into it. Lass settled and sighed. I turned back out, toward the distant corner where we’d first seen Tall Grass and Jenny Nin sitting in the light of a small fire with Grandpa Dan and his shadowy wings. Lass moaned and twisted, clawing at my back, trying to escape. I shuddered and took another step and another. Each footstep was a struggle against the unwilling ghost.
Progress slowed more the farther we all moved into the darkness under the street and Lass became increasingly hysterical, shrieking and throwing himself against me. I stumbled over nothing time and again, forced to stop and hold on to a bit of wall in order to look around, searching for the leash, feeling ice-cold stone I couldn’t see beneath my hands.
Down the farthest corridor—where Lass had hidden while Grass tried to give me the hat that had belonged first to Bear and then to Jenny—I saw a gleam as richly colored as pure emeralds and scintillant with old magic that smelled of water lilies and smoke. I crept closer against the thrust and panic of the ghost, who screamed, “No, no, no, no!” and slashed at me with bitter cold and the barbed edge of terror.
I gritted my teeth against the spurt of agony and felt hard, crumbling stone beneath my knees and hands. Quinton’s thin, warm touch moved up onto my back as I crawled toward the green line that grew thicker as I neared. Its length coiled away into the distance, as thick as my thumb, impossibly cutting through walls and looping over the vibrant lines of the grid like a mad vine over a trellis. I could hear it singing in a hundred languages. I reached for it and my incorporeal prisoner shrieked, gibbered, and lashed me blind. I shut my eyes, gasping and shaking my hanging head, my hand falling short of my goal. Tears gushed over my lashes and ran blood-hot down my face.
Quinton’s touch drew away and I felt a twist of my own fear tightening the grip of Lass’s terror on my body. I moaned as Lass howled in despair and sank into a dull blankness in my head. I blinked my vision clear and rolled back to sit against the nearest wall, trying to focus again on the normal.
Quinton was looking at something in his hand under the beam of his light. He held it up and I could see its true shape as a green shadow around its thin and ragged manifestation outside the Grey.
“It’s just a bit of string. But it feels heavy.”
The long green tail of it snaked away into the mist of the Grey, shivering like a live thing. I put up my hand.
“Give it to me, please.”
He handed it over and I felt the weight of something far at the invisible end. I tugged it. The green line went taut, singing. I pushed myself back up onto my feet but kept my back to the wall for support.
The wall across from me rippled and the rings of disturbance spread outward through the Grey until they vanished in the edges of vision. The singing blended to a roar and Sisiutl swam through the wall on a slice of time, shouting in a dozen languages, drowning Lass’s horrified keening. The snakelike heads snapped and hissed, and the whole monstrous serpent rolled to bring its screaming center face to glare at me, gnashing its teeth and bringing its other heads close to strike.
I knew it understood at least some English—it had listened to Lass and had called me a thief—so as it raged and menaced us, I grabbed the feather from my bag and yanked once more on the leash. It reared up and I poked the central face with the long plume of the feather.
Sisiutl recoiled and snorted, its appearance rippling as the wall and the Grey had done before. I gave one more sharp jerk on the string and, thinking of Tanker’s commands to Bella, ordered, “Peace, Sisiutl. Be quiet.”
The monster seemed surprised, blinking all its eyes. Then it made two coils of its snake ends and raised the central head to my own height, staring with yellow eyes from the nearly human face. Meeting that gaze was like looking into a restless kaleidoscope. I had to shake myself and cling to the sobering pangs of Lass’s pressure in my head to keep from falling into that stare.
We looked at each other as Lass went rigid and silent in my head. Quinton kept as still as the stone walls.
“I have your leash. That makes me your master for the time being,” I said, not giving it a chance to argue or bargain. “I’m going to return your leash to Qamaits so you can go back to sleep.”
“Hungry!” it roared.
“You’ve had enough to eat. Don’t be greedy. You will stay here and be patient while I go to find Qamaits.”
Sisiutl growled and snapped at us.
I yanked the string. “Enough! You
will
stay until called for.”
will
stay until called for.”
Amazing me, Sisiutl lowered itself to the ground and sulked like a reprimanded dog.
“Now to find Qamaits,” I said, starting to turn for the exit. Too soon. At the sound of her name, Lass twitched violently, making me jerk and stumble. Quinton grabbed my arm and steadied me, casting a nervous glance at Sisiutl.
“Do you trust it?”
I gave an unsteady nod. “Rules. It has to follow them. Now, you,” I said, turning my attention inward to Lass. “Where can we find Qamaits—the old Indian woman who gave you Sisiutl’s leash?”
Lass went still and stubbornly silent.
“Tell me or I’ll cast you out and let the monster eat you.”
Lass jerked and writhed. “Don’t know where she is!” he whined in my head. “She’s just a fat old squaw!”
“Bull. You know her. Is she in the crowd that followed us here?”
I could feel him sulking. “No.”
“Then tell me who she is and where to find her!”
“Beside herself,” came the rolling voice of Sisiutl.
I shot a glance back at the zeqwa. It merely blinked innocently. Then it grinned with all its sparkling teeth, the forked tongues of its snake heads flickering. It chuckled as we retreated but stayed where I had ordered it. Trickster.
We rushed out of the block, careful to check before bursting out of the door to the street. A rush and flutter of wings swished into the air as we emerged, making crow shadows on the sidewalk beneath the waking streetlamps.
The crowd we’d left behind had grown—natives and ghosts, human and animal. They stood in the new-fallen night and watched us with patient eyes. Then they fell into step behind us as we began to walk.
“Beside herself . . . ?” Quinton muttered.
Ogress, eater of children, nightmare bringer . . . Tsonoqua was also an ogress. Fish had said Qamaits went by many names. Maybe one half-goddess, half-ogress would cleave to another. . . . I knew where she was.
TWENTY-TWO
The temperature had dropped with the sun. A pair of trash fires sent out yellow light at each end of Occidental Park and carved the shadows into broken, moving shapes. There were few people in the park and those were gathered around the heat and flicker from the burning cans. When Quinton and I entered the avenue of plane trees, the bizarre parade that had come to Grandpa Dan’s beckoning had tripled and followed us from the Cadillac Hotel to Oxy Park.
Lass had begun to stir again as we crossed Main, but I ignored him, peering into the jigsaw darkness toward the giant totems at the far end. In the erratic light, the black wooden statue of Tsonoqua—Nightmare Bringer—seemed to breathe and move, spreading her arms farther than usual to hold an oil-slick-edged hole in the air. The shape of the world seemed a bit warped at that spot. I headed straight for it, confirmed in my opinion that Qamaits and Tsonoqua were, like Sisiutl and Cerberus, just different names for the same thing. As we got closer, I could see a large, dark shape at the feet of Tsonoqua, bulking even larger with eerie shadows that moved independently of their object.
I stepped over the low rail that separated the totems from the walkway and stopped, facing the massive carving of Tsonoqua, whose arms reached out as if to pull me into an embrace—the better to eat me I supposed. The face, highlighted with red and green paint, pursed its lips as if to kiss, while a darkling gleam played in the hooded eyes. Another pair of dark eyes looked up from the face of the huge woman seated at the carving’s feet.
The Grey was more present around the totems and I didn’t bother to hold on to normal. Whatever happened next would take place in the thin space between the worlds. But as I let go, little changed, and I found Quinton still beside me and the strange audience of ghosts and humans, spreading around us in a circle, still visible in the Grey. The shimmering edges of the hole in the totem’s hands seemed to spread and hold the worlds together in the presence of the gathered spirits, animal and Indian. The real Indians and the birds were there as well, watching, encircling us and completing the sphere of magic that contained us all.
“I want to return your pet,” I started, “and the man you lent him to needs to account for his actions.”
Qamaits laughed, showing needle teeth in her spirit form, and shook her head. “No dog.”
“I didn’t say it was a dog. I don’t think your gods will be pleased that Sisiutl’s been killing people who never threatened them on the whim of this man you gave his leash to. I only want to send the man up the stairs to account for it and return Sisiutl to his post—neither of you should be in the human world.” Lass shrieked in my head and I winced as he began to claw and fight to escape.
Qamaits noticed and her laugh was dismissive. “I like it here. Sisiutl shares his meat. I do not have to hunt or gather food. It is cold, but I have many blankets and the people do not chase me away. Why should I go?”
“You have a duty,” I said, sickened, knowing the people Sisiutl had netted must have gone down the maw of this creature, too. “The man has done wrong and Sisiutl is tainted with it. I only ask you to show me the stair so the man can answer for that.”
As she considered, I looked at her collection of eclectic trash: the colorful blankets, discarded children’s toys, fancy liquor bottles . . .
She stood up, easily three times my bulk and a hair shorter, yet she loomed, double-shadowed. She stared at me with odd eyes that gleamed yellow and red and shook her head, baring her pointed teeth. “If Sisiutl goes back to the realm between, I must go, too. Why should I?”
“You have a duty to the gods and you don’t belong in the human world,” I repeated as I threaded the pheasant feather into my buttonholes to free my hands. “You must go back.”
Qamaits recoiled at the sight of the feather, her eyes staring. Then she roared and swelled even larger than her looming totem, the double shadows behind her filling and solidifying into a hulking shape from nightmare: wide and black and seemingly made of teeth and claws. “Meat!” she shrieked. “I eat you all!”
I jumped back, dragging Quinton with me and jerking on Sisiutl’s leash, calling for the serpent-headed creature. The double-ended monster rushed into the park, casting a wave of color through the Grey and screeching as it came.
The crowd shuddered, gasping or muttering strange words and issuing angry animal cries. The huge sea serpent stopped between Qamaits and me and glared at each of us with a different head. Qamaits drew up short, glowering.
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