Emma nodded, throat dry, as Allison and Michael approached her. “You—you know what—what’s done with your . . .” the words trailed off.
The man smiled at her gently—and as if she were four years old. All of you look like babies to someone as old as me. Who had said that? She thought it was Ally’s grandfather but couldn’t be certain; the voice was strong, but there was no accompanying image. Just her own sense of resentment at being treated like a child.
There was no resentment now. If someone arrived who could take the burden of this fight from her hands, someone responsible and—yes—adult, she would hand it over gratefully.
And yet, here she was, all the responsible adults in her life hours away. Ernest was here—but Ernest wasn’t a Necromancer. Whatever it was he intended Emma to do, he couldn’t do it or he would have done it by now, and they wouldn’t be here. She was holding the hand of a girl who had existed for far longer than she had, and people were looking to her for guidance or even orders.
Emma’s desire in life had been—and still was—to play a supporting role. She could imagine herself as the second-in-command almost anywhere, tending to the details and supporting the person who could deal with the big picture and make the decisions. All of the decisions she felt competent to make were small: what to wear, what to do with her hair, what make-up to buy, what to cook or eat for dinner, what classes to take. Even the question of which university to attend had given her hives.
This? This was too much. It was too much for her.
And this man seemed to know it. His smile was kindly, but it wasn’t exactly saturated in respect, and oddly enough, right at this very moment, she couldn’t resent it at all.
“I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “I didn’t introduce myself. There hasn’t been great call for good manners for a long time. My name is Marcel.” He glanced at the woman, who glowered. But she looked at Helmi, at Helmi’s hand, ensconced in Emma’s, and her expression gradually softened.
“Name’s Belinda. Friends called me Belle, back in the day.” She extended a hand. Emma glanced down at Helmi, who looked mutinous. She then lifted the hand that was bound in their chains—it was the right hand, anyway.
Belinda took it firmly; when she’d been alive, she’d probably had a crusher handshake. Her hand was cold. Emma expected that. What she didn’t expect was the way the handshake changed the woman’s features. Her brows rose, her mouth dropped open. No words came out for what felt like too long.
“Do we have time for this?” Amy asked. She added, because she was Amy, “I’m Amy Snitman, Emma’s friend. We’re in a bit of a rush because that portal isn’t going to last all night.”
The woman’s eyes opened further. “You—you can see me?”
Sarcasm flashed, briefly, across Amy’s face. Amy was not part of the welcoming committee, anywhere, ever. She managed to rein it in and said, “When Emma holds your hand, the rest of us can see you. It’s not good for Emma, though.”
Belinda shook her head. “It’s so warm.” She proved she was more adult than Helmi; she released Emma’s hand. “What do you want with that portal?” Some of the wonder was still contained in the hard edges of her very practical tone.
“We need—all of us—to get to the City of the Dead.”
“You’ll die.”
“We might. But we’re all going to die one day, anyway.”
“Not the way she’ll kill you. You want to kill her?”
“We want—” Emma exhaled. “I want to stop her. I’ve led a pretty easy life. I’ve never lived in a war zone. I’ve never lived on the streets. Almost all of the violence I’ve seen, I’ve seen at a safe remove.”
“Almost?”
“Long story. I don’t know if I can kill another human being. But if she’s not stopped, she’s the hell that everyone I love is going to. I don’t care if she dies. What I want is for the dead to be able to leave this world.”
“It’s what the dead want, as well,” Belinda said. “Fine. If I tell you I don’t want to help you, will you force me?”
Emma shook her head. “But . . . I have that luxury. Helmi is here. Margaret is here. They’re willing to help even if you’re not.”
Helmi snorted. “She’s testing you.”
Emma nodded. “Wouldn’t you, in her position?”
“Marcel isn’t.”
“Maybe he’s just more trusting.”
“Or more of a suck-up,” Belinda snapped. Marcel didn’t appear to be unduly upset by the insult.
“How can you help?” Emma asked.
“If it’s true that we have choice,” Marcel replied, “I believe that we can shift—slightly—the destination to which the portal will take you.”
“I’ve arranged for a bit of distraction,” Helmi told him.
“Yes. Perhaps our help is unnecessary or even unwelcome.”
Emma shook her head. “Do you know the City?”
“I doubt I know it as well as the Queen’s sister—but yes, I know it. The dead come to the City and not always because they are called. If they are wise, they avoid it, of course; some have even escaped it, once they’ve walked its streets. I was not so wise.”
“Are you bound to the Queen?”
“No. And yes, the person who held my reins will know that I am gone. He will perhaps assume that I have finally been fully consumed. I cannot offer to take you somewhere safe; there is no safety in the City for the living.”
“Or the dead,” Emma murmured.
“Even so. But you must move quickly, as your friend says.”
Margaret walked to where Belinda had been standing while she was bound. “Let me,” she offered.
Belinda nodded. She came to stand by Emma’s side, her hands behind her back. Yes, Emma thought, she was being tested. And yes, it made sense. Respect wasn’t always given; sometimes it had to be earned. Belinda had no reason to trust anyone living who could actually see her—and many, many reasons not to.
Michael still held Petal’s lead. Chase, red hair almost glowing with reflected light, joined them, as did Ernest. Amy stood slightly back, frowning, her arms folded.
“Where will the portal open?” Emma asked.
“There are buildings in the city itself that are no longer used—if they ever were. The dead don’t need housing. The Queen did not pull those buildings down, and when she chooses to walk—to parade—in celebration, she orders the dead to fill the windows as she passes beneath them. That is where you will be going.”
Emma repeated this for the benefit of the living. To Amy, she added, “Any last questions?”
“A lot. They’ll have to wait.”
Ernest went first, at Ernest’s less than silent insistence. Chase followed, glancing once at Allison as if he were afraid to leave her behind. Maybe he was, but he was more afraid of what waited on the other side, because they couldn’t see anything. Dim outlines and darkness, that was it.
She almost asked Marcel if the buildings were furnished, but Chase cursed loudly enough to be heard. Emma stopped breathing until the cursing stopped; it was followed by the right type of silence.
Helmi let go of Emma’s hand. “I’ll meet you there,” she said. “I don’t like portals, and I don’t use them.”
“Belinda? Marcel?”
“We will follow you before the portal vanishes,” Marcel replied. When Emma looked confused, he looked, pointedly, at her right hand.
Emma reached out—with her numb left hand—and placed it gently around Michael’s shoulder. “Let’s go,” she said quietly.
“And get Nathan back?” Michael asked, as Petal sniffed the hem of his coat—where the pockets were.
She nodded.
• • •
Stepping through the portal was not at all like stepping through an open door, which was what Emma had been expecting. It was very much like e
ntering an old train tunnel, but without concrete or plaster or rock for walls.
It was gray here, charcoal gray. There were hints of light, but like faint stars, they could only be seen in the corners of Emma’s vision; they vanished when she turned to look.
“No wonder Helmi doesn’t like portals,” she said aloud.
“Helmi dislikes portals because she understands the perversion that creates them.”
Emma was not surprised to see an ancient, rag-covered woman walking by her side. She carried a cane, although it wasn’t necessary. Nothing about her appearance was necessary.
“Oh?”
“Do you think we traveled this way in my youth? We could have avoided a great deal of danger had we done so. Travel was not for the faint-hearted; it was for the desperate. And we so often were.”
“Yet you’re here.”
“Yes, Emma, I am here. This is a space that the living do not own; they can use it only if they have the power of the dead to anchor them. It is a space we once reached without the need to physically enter it; a space we traversed to find the lost and bring them safely to their new home.” She looked, briefly, to her left, somewhere above Emma’s head. “It is how we found the dead we could not touch or reach. It’s not what you did when you went to the boy in the fire. It’s not what you did when you found Mark. Were you trained, you could have done either from the absolute safety of your own circle, your own home.
“This path is not bound to, or by, geography, because the dead aren’t.”
“Andrew and Mark were, though.”
“They were trapped; they believed they were still alive. When I was magar, boys such as those would have been my responsibility. They were lost.
“Belinda and Marcel are not. They are not trapped in the moment of their death. They know where they must go—and know, as well, that they cannot. They should not be here. In my youth, in my life, they would not have been.”
“Are you here to guide us?”
“You have your guide at the moment. I am not bound to you.”
Marcel appeared by Emma’s side, gazing about the gray and featureless landscape as if he were on a nature walk. Emma wondered what he could see because, clearly, he could see something. She didn’t ask. Instead, gathering courage, she said, “Marcel, are you bound to me?”
His brows rose, but his smile was gentle. “You are definitely unlike other Necromancers I have known. Yes, Emma. At the moment, I am yours.”
“I don’t know how to let go,” she confessed. “Binding is supposed to take hours. This didn’t.” She lifted the slender chains.
“Perhaps,” he said, “it would be best—for me at least; I cannot speak for Belinda—if you continued to hold me. I do not believe that Necromancers are taught how to release the dead they control, but I could be wrong.”
“You are not wrong,” Margaret said. “Divesting oneself of power was not a concern. Gathering it was.”
Petal whined. If everyone else found the nothingness of the landscape unsettling, Petal found it frightening. There was very little as pathetic as a frightened creature the size of a rottweiler. Emma would have distracted him with food, but food was in backpacks, and they would need to husband it. They had no idea where they were going and no idea whatsoever how long they would be there.
“Marcel?”
“Ah, apologies,” the older man said. “It has been some time indeed since I’ve been free to wander.” He coughed a little, which Emma understood to be a type of punctuation, and added, “My apologies if I stare.”
“At what?”
“You, Emma Hall. When I’m this close, what I see in you is enough to blunt the hunger.”
She didn’t ask what hunger meant; she thought she knew. She had seen what lay beyond the closed door she had, with so much effort and so much support, opened briefly, and she had wanted it for herself: an end to grief, an end to loneliness, an end to the weight of responsibility.
She did not, at this moment, want that. She wanted life, because life was not only those things. The man beside her would never have that life again. Emma had mastered the art of small talk by learning to find almost anything superficially interesting. At the moment, that hard-won mastery deserted her; she had almost nothing to say.
But true to Hall upbringing, she felt slightly guilty about it. “Do you know very much about the Necromancer who bound you?”
Marcel was silent for one long minute. “Not directly, no. The Necromancers are not particularly interested in the dead as people; they are interested only in the power they can harvest. As a virtual slave, my interest in my master would be different: I want to pay attention and to understand them in the vain hope that that understanding will give me the key to avoid both abuse and punishment. But the knowledge the dead gain simply by being dead is about what you’d expect. You possibly know more about me now than the Necromancer did.”
“I only know your name,” Emma pointed out.
“Indeed.”
“Do you know how much longer this is going to take?”
“I don’t have the same sense of the passage of time as you do. The dead generally don’t. It is perhaps one of the few mercies granted us in this world. I believe, however, that the passage through the portal is extended by geographic distance. It won’t take as long to reach the destination as it would by boat or foot. Did you really open the door?”
“Not fully,” she replied, “and not for long. And it took—it took hundreds of people’s help.”
“Dead people.”
She nodded, and because there was no end to the walk in sight, she told him about Andrew Copis and the events that led to the opening of the door. She left out the lantern, because the magar remained by her other side.
When she had finished, he nodded, gravely. “I believe,” he said, “we are here.” He glanced at the magar.
Belinda, walking slightly ahead, snorted. “You always talked like this?” she asked him.
“In English, yes. It was not my mother tongue.”
“It would drive me crazy,” Belinda told him. “We’re here, girl. Time to go back to the real world.”
• • •
The real world, as stated, was a dark, large room, but by the time Emma entered it, it was crowded. The dead didn’t need space, but the living did, and they took up a lot of it.
It was cold, in this room. Almost as cold as it had been in Amy’s cottage before the electric baseboards had been turned on. There wouldn’t be any source of heat here, if Marcel was right. This room was part of a building designed and created only for display. She was a bit surprised that there was more than just facade, a stage prop that could be brought out and carted off based solely on need.
“There should be windows,” Emma said, into the darkness.
Someone moved past her, and something moved into her legs, at almost the same time. Petal whined. Emma knelt and hugged him, scratching behind his ears. Petal wasn’t much of a barker, unless he was at home. This wasn’t his home, and he knew it.
This wasn’t anyone’s home. A wall of harsh light broke the darkness as Ernest pulled heavy curtains back.
“That’s a pretty serious window,” Amy said.
Given the size of the room, it was.
Ernest stepped back, lifting an arm. “If we’re standing in the window, we can be seen.” That stopped everyone, even Amy.
It didn’t matter. One didn’t have to stand in the window to see out. On the opposite side of what Emma assumed was street was a two-story building with long, tall windows. Two-story buildings seemed to go on in either direction, although to the left, they appeared to end in a corner. Individually, they weren’t impressive, but they were of a kind; there were no odd houses, no notable differences in architecture.
It didn’t matter; after the first glance, they became irrelevant.
T
owering above them at a height that almost obscured all of the sky was a building that defied imagination. A Tolkien artist might have created it in concept sketches before someone had to draw and render it, or worse, create it from scratch. It was both wide and tall; it had one spire that rose, narrowing slowly as it gained height. Beneath that spire were towers, all of stone, and upon those towers, flags had been raised.
The dead couldn’t raise flags—and couldn’t lower them, either.
“Yes,” Margaret said quietly, when words failed them all—even Amy. “That is the Citadel. In it, you will find the Queen of the Dead.”
• • •
“If she believes Eric,” Amy said into the pause that followed, “will she decide that it’s the right time for a parade?”
It was a good question. And Helmi, who had not accompanied them on their long walk, was the one who answered it. “Yes.” Emma reached out and offered Helmi a hand, which Helmi took with almost alarming speed. She then, to Emma’s surprise, repeated the answer so that Amy could hear it.
“Which doesn’t make this the ideal hiding spot.”
“No. But it might help us, anyway.”
“How, exactly?”
“If she believes Eric will finally stay with her forever, she’ll do two things. First, she’ll summon her Court.”
“Which means that there won’t be random Necromancers on alert anywhere else.”
“They’re always careful,” Helmi replied. “They use the dead to spy on each other. The advantage of being dead—and bound—the only advantage, is that the spies can’t be killed. They can’t be blinded, and they can’t be bound by anyone else. The older Necromancers use this to intimidate the newer ones. Those that survive learn to overlook the presence of other people’s dead.” She hesitated, and then continued. “If the dead are left to spy—and they will be if Court is in session—they’ll tell their masters what they’ve seen. They don’t have any other functional choice.”
“I can stop them,” Emma said, with more confidence than she felt.