“It’s a griffin, Cass,” I shouted back. “One of these things took you from the KI to Rhodes. It nearly killed you!”
He stared at the beast in utter horror.
“By the great Qalani, just take me now,” Bhegad groaned. “I can’t endure this.”
Skilaki stood wearily, her wispy hair drafting upward as the fire neared. “You asked to see the greef,” she muttered, “and not so much as a simple thank-you.”
The beast turned to face us, its yellow eyes and red body the only color in the gray forest. It had managed to smother the flames on its wings, which were now edged black with soot. As Cass stood and faced it, the griffin bellowed in anger.
“I left you,” Cass said, staring at the red lion-bird. “I left you at the bottom of the river.”
“He’s remembering!” I said.
“This thing . . .” Cass said. “Yes. I do remember. I do. It nearly killed me. Twice. The second time . . . was the river. Took part of me with it. To the bottom. My memory. My ability. It wasn’t fair!”
The griffin snorted, sitting back on his furred haunches. It cocked its head at Cass, baring its teeth.
Cass stared for another minute. Then, to my astonishment, he bared his teeth right back.
The griffin jerked its head away, looking startled.
“What is he doing?” Aly whispered.
“I don’t know,” I muttered, “but it looks dangerous.” Aly and I ran to Cass, grabbed him from behind, and pulled him toward us.
“I remember it!” Cass shouted, stumbling along the path at our side. “And I’m not scared of it anymore!”
“Remind me to give you a medal,” Aly said. “If we live.”
We nearly collided with Skilaki, who was staring at Cass. “Very curious,” she said. “This boy’s memory is not quite human, I suspect.” Then, turning toward the griffin, she trilled: “Greef, metaphero aeroporikos eis vasilissa!”
“What does that mean?” Cass cried out.
“How should I know?” I said.
Professor Bhegad was saying something, but I couldn’t hear him. The griffin reared back and let out a scream. Beating its wings downward, it lifted itself on red-furred haunches, revealing legs as tautly muscled as a lion’s. It was coming for us.
Quickly I draped one arm around Professor Bhegad’s shoulder and dug the other under his legs. He felt bony and brittle, and by now he weighed little more than a child. “Run!” I called out. “Now!”
“No . . .” Professor Bhegad said. “We can’t . . .”
“Yes, we can!” Aly replied. “Or that thing will eat us!”
With a thrust of its wings that sent a gust of hot wind our way, the griffin leaped.
We raced back down the hill, away from the fire. The griffin’s shriek pierced the air. I felt its talons dig into my shoulders. Again. I tightened my grip on Professor Bhegad—partly not to lose him, partly to deflect the pain. “Help . . .” I shouted through gritted teeth.
The griffin yanked me upward so hard I thought it would rip my shoulders off. As my feet left the ground, I clasped my fingers as tightly as I could under Professor Bhegad.
Aly and Cass raced toward me, grabbing at my leg, trying to pull me down to the ground. “Don’t—I’m going to drop Bhegad!” I cried out. “Grab . . . Tweety’s . . . leg!”
I could feel them both reaching upward, wrapping their fingers around the beast’s ankles. The pain of the talons had taken over my body, pushing every nerve fiber beyond its limits, pushing me beyond thought and feeling. I could hear Cass and Aly yelling. I could sense the heat from below, washing upward in waves. But I felt nothing, sensed nothing, as if they were in a dream, shut away from reality.
I held tight. The professor was slipping. I concentrated every thought on my fingers, on locking them like magnets.
“Vasilissa!” Skilaki called, as if in another realm. She was floating beside us under her own power. And with considerably less pain.
“Is she telling the griffin to kill us?” Cass demanded.
“Vasilissa,” Bhegad said, “means ‘queen.’ She is telling it to take us to Artemisia.”
We were dropping now. With the downward motion, the professor felt lighter in my arms. A dry, stagnant coolness wafted up from below. I blinked, forcing my eyes open.
We plunged toward the central, open court of a sprawling stone castle. Its crenellated towers were cracked and broken, its battlements empty, its walls overgrown with scraggly vines that had sprouted between its bricks. Just outside its walls lay piles of bones and rotting carcasses, in a narrow ring of soil that served as a bank to the River Photia. The so-called river, I realized, was actually a wide moat of raging fire that ringed the castle.
In a moment the castle walls blotted out my view. My eyes quickly took in the center court’s cracked, crumbling walls, festooned with flaming sconces. I felt my feet jam against the hard soil. The griffin loosened its grip and I tumbled away. I felt as if knives had been jammed into my shoulders, and I must have been screaming, because Aly was holding me tight. “You’re going to be okay, Jack,” she said. “We’re here. Everything’s working out.”
Blinking my eyes, I looked upward into Skilaki’s face. She was shouting commands at the griffin, which retreated on its coiled legs, chittering, until its flanks hit the castle’s inner wall.
Professor Bhegad was facedown in the hard-packed dirt. I turned him over. His eyes were shut, his mouth open, his chest still. The flames from a wall sconce sent eerie dancing shadows across his face.
I tried to remember a junior CPR class I’d taken with my dad. Kneeling over the old man, I dug the heels of my hands into his chest. One-two-three-stop . . . one-two-three . . . Cass and Aly knelt beside me.
One-two-three . . .
“Pkachh!” Bhegad let out a violent cough, his eyes bugging open. “My boy, you are hurting me!”
I sat back as he struggled to sit up. Aly was hugging the old man, and I leaned toward Cass, who put his arm around my shoulder. “Good work, Jack,” he said.
Our relief lasted only a few seconds, interrupted by a deep, echoing boom behind us.
We turned. A half-rotted wooden door had smacked open, crashing against the castle’s inner wall. Splinters flew into the courtyard.
The open door revealed a portal of total blackness. Two pairs of eyes slowly emerged, white as golf balls, as if the irises themselves had been bleached away. As they came closer to the portal, moving steadily up and down, gaunt faces appeared around them.
I heard a sudden choking sound from Cass. I wanted to hurl, too. Two men trudged out of the darkness, dressed in rags and harnessed to a wooden yoke like oxen. Their skin was flaked and shredded, their scalps scraped down to the skull in spots. Hair sprouted in odd places like random loose wires, and neither of their mouths had lips. They grunted and drooled, pulling a pair of chains attached to a giant chariot that creaked on broken wheels.
“I don’t like this at all . . .” Aly murmured.
“Zombies,” Cass said. “I hate zombies.”
The chariot was an ornately carved wood cabin on a frame of four rickety wheels. Draped around the cabin was a curtain of dingy gray fabric. From inside, a voice shouted something in an unintelligible language.
“Unngh,” replied one of the two creatures of burden.
A hand reached out of the curtain and snapped a long, leather whip hard against the zombie’s back.
I winced, but he didn’t seem to notice.
Out of the cabin stepped a tremendous figure, a man so large that the entire vehicle seemed to lift off the ground as he stepped off. He didn’t appear to be a zombie, but that’s not to say he looked like a normal human, either. His skin had a strange rigidity, as if it was actually some weird kind of plastic. His chin had chins, and you could hide small kittens in the rolls under his eyes. He lumbered toward us, leaning on a jeweled bronze staff, whose handle was a small alabaster replica of the Mausoleum. His mouth was pushed into a kind of grin by the pres
sure of the flab underneath it, but his eyes were dull and cold as he looked at us.
“They speak English, Mappas,” Skilaki said.
The man called Mappas didn’t say a word, but held out his palm toward the cabin.
From out of the curtain came a slender hand that was dwarfed by the big man’s. A woman emerged, with thick silver-white hair that spilled over the shoulder of a flowing golden gown. Its hem was ripped in places, but its embroidered pattern was festooned with jewels. The woman’s ankles were thin, and the skin on her face was dry, seamed and puckered like a walnut. She seemed withered and ancient, but compared to the zombies around her, she was the picture of health.
“Bow all to Queen Artemisia!” bellowed Mappas.
I looked at Cass and Aly, who shrugged. We were already on our knees so we bowed from the waist.
As her wrinkled lips curled upward, she sucked in a breath and clasped her hands together. “Which one of you,” she said, “is mine?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
THE TRADE
I THOUGHT ZOMBIES weren’t supposed to have emotions, but judging from the increase in drool, the two cabin pullers seemed pretty excited. “Miiiine,” one of them echoed.
Or maybe it was “maaa” or “mooo.” With zombies, it’s hard to tell.
I stood to face Artemisia, which was no easy task. She was much better maintained than Skilaki, but her skin was as stiff and wrinkled as tree bark, and it creaked when she spoke. Eyelashes had been painted above and below her lidless eyes, giving her a look of permanent surprise. “Well?” she said, her voice like the cry of a dying seagull. “Speak or I shall take you all!”
I tried to say something, to explain our mission, but my lips were dry.
“I . . . am yours, my queen,” Professor Bhegad said softly, struggling to his feet. “I offer my soul to you in return for a favor.”
“These three have the mark of Qalani on the back of their heads,” Skilaki interrupted. “They have the ability to leave, and they shall. But they require a certain . . . stone orb in exchange for this soul.”
“The stone was left in your keeping,” I said, “by our ancestor—”
“You were not asked to speak, wretched child!” The queen stepped forward. Her legs wobbled like matchsticks, but she held her chin high. “Am I to understand that you dare attempt a bargain with Queen Artemisia?”
“Boof! Boof-boof-boof!” bellowed Mappas, his body quaking with laughter. The force of his breath blew out the flame on the wall sconce nearest him.
“Silence, useless vizier!” Artemisia cried, and the man snapped to attention. She stepped closer to Bhegad, her eyes growing wide. “Do you imagine that I have any shortage of souls? That your meager corpus would satisfy me so that I would agree to a deal like this? Or are you cleverer than you seem, with some other offer for the ruler of Bo’gloo?”
One of the zombies began bowing and grunting. The other looked at it in momentary confusion, then picked its nose.
“Trainees,” Artemisia explained, shaking her head wearily.
“All three of them—Jack, Aly, and Cass,” Professor Bhegad said, “are descendants of the great Massarym.”
It rankled me to hear the name Massarym mentioned in the same breath as great, but I knew what Bhegad was getting at. And it seemed to have an effect on Artemisia. As hard as it was to see any expression on that leathery face, she seemed kind of impressed.
“Really?” she said, extending a bony finger toward my chin.
It took all my willpower not to jump away. She lifted my chin gently and pushed my head to the right, turning me around. “I see the mark. And, yes, the jawline is similar in this one. As for the others . . .”
“Show them,” Professor Bhegad whispered.
Both Aly and Cass turned to reveal the backs of their heads. “Mine’s covered with hair dye,” Aly explained. “But if you look close at the roots, you can see it growing in.”
Artemisia let her finger drop. She eyed Aly and Cass for a moment, and then slowly stepped backward, without turning from us. Mappas whispered something in her ear. He seemed to be giggling, but it was hard to tell because of the permanent uptwist of his mouth.
She nodded, waving him away. As she stepped forward again toward Professor Bhegad, he stood slowly. “Well,” she said, “as my Skilaki, my dear pet, my lapdog, has no doubt told you, I do not believe in one-sided arrangements. As you are descendants of Massarym, I can accept an exchange that will be satisfactory to us both.”
Artemisia came nearer. Even in her wrinkly state, she towered over Bhegad. Her thin lips pulled back, revealing sharp, gray teeth. I eyed the doorway to the palace. Was that where the Loculus was? Would she actually give it to us?
Her words hung in the air, odd and unreal, like a mirage in a desert. “Wait. Did you just say yes?” Cass said.
“The boy does not understand me,” Artemisia snapped, “yet I speak English to him!”
“He expresses joyous disbelief, my queen,” Skilaki replied.
Artemisia snapped her fingers “Mappas! Bring them what they asked for!”
The vizier waddled an about-face. Leaning on his bronze staff, he huffed and puffed into the doorway. “Thank you, merciful Artemisia,” Professor Bhegad said softly.
As she eyed the professor, her gray cheeks gained color, first a pale amber and then a warm brick red. “Your speech is courtly. It excites me to gain a worthy soul. An educated man, are you?”
“Archaeologist,” Bhegad said. “I taught at university. Made many discoveries in the field.”
Artemisia seemed to shiver with joy, and I felt my stomach churn.
To her, the thought of the professor’s death was fun. “What will you do with him?” I asked.
“His soul will reside here for as long as it pleases me,” Artemisia replied. “I will learn from it, take life from it. When I am through, I will release it to roam the Cavern of Souls, until the day when, or if, it is placed in another body. In exchange, the professor himself—that is to say, his body—shall live eternally. If he is lucky, I will give it fine labor in the palace. I am growing weary of Nine and Forty-one.”
One of the two zombies, hearing his number, began braying and snorting. The other was digging a large glob of wax from his ear and hadn’t heard the remark.
“You’ll turn him into a zombie?” Cass blurted.
“I don’t know that name,” Artemisia snapped. “My Shadows do not have names.”
“You call them Shadows?” I said. “They look pretty solid to me.”
“Here, perhaps, but they take on a more . . . diaphanous appearance . . . when they wander the upper realms.” Artemisia flicked her fingers impatiently. “But I am not here to explain the mysteries of Bo’gloo to you. I am hungry for a soul.”
“A moment, dear queen,” Bhegad said. He turned to us, lowering his voice: “Do not protest, dear Aly. Trust Jack’s plan. Take the Loculus and return home, even if it must be without me. I am not long for this world. Urge your father to the Karai cause. Contact the rebels on the island. Three out of seven Loculi is tremendous progress—”
“But we can’t just leave you,” I protested.
“You have no choice!” Bhegad insisted.
“Enough!” Artemisia screamed. “Are you plotting to challenge my simple request?”
Bhegad spun around. “No, indeed. My apologies.”
Leaning on his staff for support, Mappas emerged from behind Artemisia, holding a large, round canvas bag that was dwarfed by his torso. “Here, my queen,” he snuffled. “As you wish. Ur, wished.”
The Loculus . . .
I ran for it, but Artemisia raised a hand and I felt myself flying backward. I landed hard on my butt.
The griffin, still huddled against the wall, perked up its ears.
“First things first,” Artemisia said. “Come forward, Professor Bhegad. Alone.”
Professor Bhegad squeezed our hands. “I have faith in all three of you,” he whispered. “I always wil
l.”
Aly was the last to let go. She was crying.
Holding his head high, Professor Bhegad strode on wobbling legs to Artemisia.
She raised a hand to his shoulder and touched him. For a long moment nothing happened, and I held a small hope that Bhegad was battling her, resisting in some way. But when a bolt of bright white light exploded from his chest, we all screamed.
The blast shot upward and Bhegad cried in agony, crumpling to the ground.
I ran to the professor, knelt beside him, and turned him over. His eyes looked past me to the gray sky, his glasses shattered on the ground beside him. His chest was still. Aly began pounding it, CPR-style.
“No, Aly,” I said, pulling her away.
Aly’s eyes were desperate. “He’s dead, Jack!”
Dead.
I knew it, but I couldn’t believe it. I stared into his lifeless face, immobile. Unable to think.
“Remember the p-p-plan,” Cass whispered. He looked toward Mappas, who was still holding the sack. “Let’s get the Loculus now.”
I heard a hawklike shriek. Artemisia had reared her head, her silver-white hair flashing gold and red. Her wrinkled skin smoothed and glowed with youth. Aly, Cass, and I sat back as if blown by a hot gale. Artemisia rose into the air, turning slowly. For a long moment she seemed to float like an angel, a smile of ecstasy on her regal, beautiful face. She was young and golden, her skin radiant, her feet and hands delicate, her gown bejeweled.
“She’s feeding on his soul . . .” Aly murmured.
Below her, Mappas swung the canvas bag like a shot put. With his piglike grin, he sent the Loculus soaring over our heads. It bounced off the inner castle wall and dropped to the ground.
Cass and Aly were too stunned to do anything, but I broke away to the bag and fetched it back. As I held it to them, I could see they were both in tears.