Caitlin Kittredge - The Mirrored Shard

“Good,” Nylarthotep said. He held out his hand, and I took it. The shock was like that of touching something long dead that had lingered underwater, grown spongy and rotten. Something that would corrupt you through your skin.

I drew back, wrapping my arms around myself. “I told you, I can’t go back to the Iron Land on my own. My soul is alive, sure, but I can’t put it back in my body like some stage-magic trick. The only way is if they wake me up.”

“Hmm.” Nylarthotep paced in a slow circle and then faced me. “Then I suppose we’ll just have to talk to them, won’t we?”

The thought of him getting his hooks into Conrad or Cal spurred me. “Show me that Dean will be safe,” I said, “and I’ll do it.”

Nylarthotep cocked his head. “But you just said you couldn’t.”

“I’m a liar too,” I said. There was no untruth in that. I was an excellent liar, better than anyone in my family, besides my father, could ever hope to be. “I’ve had a way out of here since I came to you.”

In my waistband, Crow’s paper crackled. It warmed to the same temperature as my skin, and I showed no reaction. It was my only weapon against Nylarthotep.

“Clever little thing,” Nylarthotep said. “I knew you’d been holding out on me.”

“I’ll release you from the Old Ones’ hold,” I said. “But you’re going to give me Dean.” I straightened my spine and put force behind my next words. “Or you might as well kill me right here.”

Nylarthotep stared at me for a moment and then shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe my audaciousness. “Very well. Take the boy’s soul, take his body as it was when he lived. What lies in his grave will be returned to wherever his soul ends up, and it will be restored. Just take it all and bring it back to the living world. His remaining thread is yours.” His teeth showed. “There will be many more where he came from when I slip these bonds.”

“I’ll need space to work,” I said. “Constructing a Gate here is very complicated. I’ll need real materials.”

Nylarthotep caused another one of the iron doors to open, and inside I saw a complete inventor’s workshop, the best any engineer could ever hope for. “Take anything I can create for you, little girl. I look forward to our partnership.”

“There’s one more thing,” I said as he started to sweep away. I had to seem defiant and angry, as if I were doing this under duress.

“What?” Nylarthotep demanded. “What is it now?”

“My name,” I said, glaring at him. “It’s not ‘little girl.’ It’s Aoife.”

AS SOON AS Nylarthotep left, I pulled out the paper and unfolded it. The paper was stained with rust-colored marks that I suspected were blood. There was a single word on it, and I felt as if it might have originally been in a language I couldn’t read, but the ink shifted under my eyes, a small enchantment I’d seen before. My father used it to encrypt his diaries. He’d been going to teach me someday.

The ink spelled out a single word.

BLEED

There was a small symbol below the word that looked like an ampersand turned on its side. With every blink of my eyes it twisted into something new.

“Oh yes, Crow,” I muttered. “You’re so helpful and direct. Never cryptic. Everything’s spelled right out.”

I looked around the workshop, though I knew there was nothing useful there. That had been pure distraction for the Yellow King so it would seem like I was puzzling over the most difficult sort of problem, one that required solitude and concentration. Either he’d believe me and leave me alone, or he’d figure out what I was really doing and he’d kill me.

Then I’d be trapped here forever. Perhaps I’d even be turned into one of the Faceless.

That alone was enough to keep me staring at the page until pinpoints of light swam in front of my eyes.

Bleed. Hadn’t I done nothing but bleed ever since I’d come here? Bleed from the wound Dean had left in my soul, bleed for all the sleepless nights without him? How could I possibly bleed more?

I considered, watching that symbol turn and turn under the enchanted ink, until I knew I was out of time. After a number of minutes, a pattern began to emerge. It was of five symbols relentlessly flashing under my eyes.

Was the Elder Sign one of them? None of them? Some kind of optical illusion or trick?

I swatted the paper aside and then threw the rest of the materials on the table at the wall for good measure. A glass beaker shattered in my grasp and the shards went deep into my palm. I cursed and wrapped my hand in the hem of my shirt, but the blood was flowing freely.

Everywhere it hit the ground, I saw the image of the room Nylarthotep had constructed begin to melt away, like someone had applied heat to the celluloid film wound in a lantern reel.

Bleed . It was so simple I hardly believed it possible, but the evidence was before me.

I picked up the paper again and folded it so the enchanted images were superimposed over one another. They made a pleasing pattern, and I wondered if the mad scholar hadn’t been trying to tell whoever found his diary something, without being too obvious about it.

Crow had trusted me to do this. He’d trusted me to be smart enough to figure it out. I couldn’t let him down.

I put the paper down and brushed my fingers along the broken glass. I was going to need a lot more blood.

It could have been minutes or hours until Nylarthotep came back—the time passed in a blur, and I finished dizzy and cold, sitting in the middle of the floor.

He regarded me and finally laid aside his cowl. His face was narrow and white, like a skull with a hide stretched over it rather than the face of a living thing. His skin, if you could call it that, was white, and long white hair trailed from the back of his head, gathered into a braid at the nape of his neck. His mouth was full of terrible, sharp teeth, and I saw stars and planets and galaxies whirling behind his black eyes, as if Nylarthotep had created worlds even within himself.

“What do you have for me?” he asked.

I’d cobbled together an utterly fake frame of pipes and wood, and pointed at it. “I need a … matrix for the Gate to work within,” I said. “We should be all set.”

Nylarthotep approached, and before he could realize the trickery I’d wrought, I shut the door of the workshop behind him and moved away from the fake Gate, where my feet had been covering the blood symbols.

Nylarthotep reacted as if I’d thrown boiling water on him. He whipped back and actually hissed, like a cat who’d seen a wild animal.

“You think this will stop me?” he howled. “You think you can stop me?”

I felt my Weird unfold and I pushed it into the symbols, allowing the ancient power to flow through them. They began to glow and rise from the floor, and then to combine, to vibrate before my eyes with the power of the cosmos.

“No!” Nylarthotep raged. He turned on me as the symbols began to engulf him, wrap around him, the blood they were made of running over his face, his bare skull, those terrifying eyes.

“Do you really think you’ve fixed anything?” Nylarthotep smiled. “Do you really think you’ve stopped anything set in motion by me aeons before you were born?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Nylarthotep’s images began to burn away all around us as the Elder Sign covered more and more of him. “But I do know that everyone dies eventually.” I took another step. “Even you.”

When I turned to run, I didn’t look back. The Deadlands were burning around me and I knew I didn’t have much time.

As I fled, the chaos caused by my proximity to Nylarthotep lessened, and I had another bout of vertigo and pain. Who knew how long Conrad and Cal had been trying to wake me up?