Aerie (13 page)

No, she makes them kneel. Some of them refuse.

What is she doing? Isn't she supposed to be
stopping
the famine?
Helping
her people? Her goal is feeding the hungry, not helping to starve them out of the sky.

My mother's crew brings out their swords. I can hardly watch as they slaughter a ship's worth of innocents for refusing to submit to Zal's will.

Zal herself cuts the one-winged batsail off its mast and lets it fall. The carrion birds swoop after it.

The lightning in the
fata morgana
flashes and then the image recedes. It's like it's the ghost of something that happened here, projected by the phoenix's song.

I don't need to see any more. I know Zal. She wants to look down from that ship and see no lights, no earth, nothing but empty water. My mother's a destroyer and I'm a—

What am I?

Now that the image is gone, in the place where it was I see the actual shipwreck Zal left here, this time real, tangible. It's right here, the aftermath. We're sailing through a graveyard.

The air wreck Zal created is ruined and bobbing in the air, smashed to planks and splinters. The squallwhales around us sing out in horror, and I notice that hanging from the ship's hull are several dead whales, the escort of the ship Zal raided. Also, the rigging's full of bright feathers, and as we get closer, I see that they're canwr.

Dead, all of them, brilliantly plumaged skeletons. I see no crew, only massive holes in the wrecked ship's deck. The sails are tattered and the masts are splintered.

Nightingales
, hisses the phoenix. It flies closer to us.
They came from Magonia
.
With her. Nightingales. Singing death.

Then it's gone, a bright star twisting away through the night.

I know what Zal wants now. I know that she doesn't care about life. She only cares about destruction. It was never about hunger, or if it was, it hasn't been for a long time. She's broken and seeking revenge on earth and Magonia both.

I look at Heyward, and I look at the squallwhales.

“Do we keep going?”

A squallwhale answers me instead.

Glowgone
it sings, looking at one of the mutilated squallwhale corpses. Petrichor is the smell, not decay. Rain and stone. But the whale is dead, and the canwr are dead, their necks broken, maybe a hundred of them. The deck of the ship is covered with feathers and bones.

Deeper sky
, sings the whale.
Brighter song. To the pearl clouds and the ice.

Heyward nods. “Keep going,” she says. “South.”

A flock of bats flies around my face, twitchy things with glider
wings and little fox faces. I'm—

In a cage? A moving cage. I can't see the mandrake. I'm being carried, heading down, on a steep, slippery slant.

I hurt all over, and my vision is weird. I feel like maybe I have a concussion, but I'm whole. Grimm, it comes back to me, is dead. I can't even think about what happened to him.

Why didn't the mandrake kill me too?

It's a
bounty hunter
, my brain informs me. That means the mandrake wants to sell me to someone. That means it thinks I might be valuable.

I jostle and slide from end to end of my cage, and all around me there are high-pitched creaks. The knowledge of how I'm being transported finally rolls over me like nausea. These are bars made of the mandrake's rib cage, and I'm inside them.

There's a staircase going down into the dark, and far below us I can hear water splashing. We're going deeper into the center of the earth.

I have no GPS. No Google. No Wikipedia. No maps of anything underground. I spent the past year memorizing the sky,
itemizing constellations, plotting charts, learning languages, but not
under
the earth. Not this.

This is becoming a pattern. Cluelessness over and over again.

Far in the distance I can hear a ghastly sound, a shrieky howling.

The roots in the ceiling rustle and stretch. They make a sound that isn't makeable by humans, or at least I don't think I could make it. Maybe Aza could.

We walk, and as we walk, roots listen and consider us, moving in the earth above our heads, guiding us down one of the tunnels.

Far off down the river I hear a long, wavering scream.

My vision goes in and out, twitching, and I'm not sure which direction we're going. My compass, still on my person, is pointing west, but I have no idea if that's true.

Not just one scream. A bunch of other voices, shouts, chanting noises. High- and low-pitched, something that sounds like a drum. Something that sounds like a waterfall.

The mandrake stops, growls, and I feel it quiver, somehow taking root.

We drop through the dirt.

We tunnel downward and sideways, really, really fast, like the kind of vines that strangle trees and pull down houses. Kudzu. That's the word I'm thinking as we twist around rocks. I gasp when I can, when we move through caverns and empty places in the damp ground.

At last, we're skidding along a slippery black path with a stream alongside it, and the increasing smell of something burning. The walls are made of pumice now, and they're hot.

There's a tunnel, and glowing light and sound. The screaming's stopped and now all I hear are a million languages at once, howls and whistles, whispers and barks.

The mandrake moves through the tunnel, slow and sure. There's light down here.

It's bright as a volcano, because it IS a volcano.

It's a giant hollow space. Large animals—animals I don't recognize—are spitted and roasting, and I don't want to look at them too closely. One of the creatures being cooked looks to be a giant tortoise, roasting in its shell. Everywhere, there are monsters, some tall and slender, others low to the ground, and everything's speaking at once, cacophony.

There're vats of orange lava spilling out and bubbling on the floor. I watch a giant, stony creature put his hands in, and pour some down his throat. Some kind of earth elemental, some kind of lava monster, which—

This isn't my specialty. A
cherufe
, is all I can think, something from Chilean mythology, an eater of lava and humans. Who knows what a cherufe might look like? This thing? They're supposed to cause earthquakes and landslides. And to be imaginary. Of course. Like everything is imaginary.

Like apparently
nothing
is imaginary.

This is like a theme park, the kind of ride where things jump out at you. It's dusty, with clouds of grit rising up whenever anything moves, fine black sand on the ground and red sand on the walls.

It occurs to me to be scared.

It occurs to me that I might not make it out of here, that I might end up over one of the fires. I don't see any other humans. This is no place for humans, clearly. It's a kiln.

But I can't access scared from this place in my soul. I can't access why I should care if I die or not. I'm here, and Aza's there, and Grimm's dead, and Eli? I have no idea where Eli is.

I feel detached from grief, concussed and done with wonder. This is what's underground? Fine, this is what's underground.

There are other mandrakes here too, and I see their long twisted limbs and strange faces.

They're talking very slowly, and they sound like trees in a storm, moving, scratching against one another. They have holes in their trunks, and inside each of their chests I can see open space surrounded by root bars, like a birdcage. Like the space in Aza's chest, except the mandrake version is not covered by skin.

The mandrake strides into the center of the caldera like it belongs here. Maybe it does.

Everyone's in a circle suddenly. The creatures start to stamp their feet, shaking the ground. How many times have the things like this moving below the surface of the earth caused buildings to fall up there? It's like football tackling, or like a bunch of fans in the stands, full of grunts and groans and beer. If enough fans stamp their feet, an entire stadium can shake. Could this be an earthquake happening above us?

And maybe I'm thinking about that to avoid thinking about THIS. I look up from inside the mandrake's chest. Way, way WAY above us, I can see sky. In front of us, though, I see something else.

Eli.

Alive. Caged in the chest of another mandrake. She looks hurt. Her hair is a tangle, but her face? There's a ferocity to it, like she's been through everything, but also like she's angry. I hope that's true. Anger is useful. She's not limp. She's on her feet.

“LET ME OUT!” Eli yells. “I'M NOT YOUR PRISONER!” She shakes the bars, and they tremble, but don't come close to giving.

Her mandrake spins for the benefit of the caldera, showing them the captive.

“Witness the transaction! The Singer,” the mandrake yells, and the voice hurts my head. But it's a voice. It's not a sound like wind. There are words.

“How much will the sky pay for their chosen one?” says something else, not a mandrake, but a circling twist of smoke.

“For her life, or for her secrets?” says another creature, this one the man who seems to be made of rocks and dripping lava.

“Enough,” says the mandrake that has Eli. “They will pay enough. They come.” I feel the mandrake I'm with tensing, and in the cage, Eli tenses too.

There's a humming noise and we all look out through the mouth of the volcano, to see something descending. It looks like a small submersible, connected by a cord to something high above us, extending up into the sky.

Chained to the front of the submersible is a bird with fiery feathers and a dragonish look. It smokes and hisses.

It's a phoenix. No other possibility. I don't have time to assess it. I'm just sort of . . . floored.

The vehicle lands and out of it comes a figure in a diving suit.

I can see his face through his mask. Even if I didn't recognize him from SWAB wanted posters, from the many images of him up on the walls there, and from the surveillance footage I watched from the conference room, Aza sang his likeness once,
into an image for me to see, and the tenderness with which she did it nearly killed me.

Dai.

He's here to buy Eli. What the hell can I do about it?

The mandrake that has Eli starts to open the bars of the cage in its chest, bending them to get her out.

“Your prisoner,” the mandrake whistles at Dai.

Dai shakes his head. “
This
is a human, not Aza Ray Quel.”

He doesn't know who she is. He doesn't know she's Aza's sister—shut up, Eli! Don't say anything to them.

“Take me to Aza!” Eli shouts, deaf to my psychic attempts to stop her. “Where's Aza? Where's my sister?!”

Damn it. Dai's face changes. He stares at Eli for a moment, assessing her.

“Eli Boyle?” he says slowly. His face changes. He looks completely uncertain. And also torn. I wonder what he's thinking.

“That'll do, I suppose,” he says at last. “I'll take her.”

“The payment,” says the mandrake.

This is the moment that Eli sees ME, and yells some more. I don't blame her. She looks at the edge.

“JASON!” she screams. My mandrake is spinning and so is hers.

Dai turns. “YOU!” he shouts.

He manages one step toward me, when there's a glint of green and red, a fast-moving dart, and then a flash of spotted wings, another flash of bright blue feathers—

And then there's an explosion of birds, diving through the volcano's opening, and into the chamber with us. There's screaming and chaos, and for a moment I'm face-to-face with Eli, who is clinging to her bars.

Eli's cage fills with birds, and the birds transform. An owl woman bites through one of the wooden bars with her beak, and the mandrake the bar belongs to screams.

There are flames rising all around the caldera, and I start shaking the bars in my own cage, but then the blue jay's in with me, and she transforms too. A girl with a bright blue mohawk, dressed in armor, muscles very visible. Her arms are lined in blue and black feathers and her face is unholy beautiful. I can't even think about what this means, before she passes me an ax from her shoulder and shouts:

“Get to it, fool!”

She's hacking away at the other bars, and my mandrake is screeching, and staggering, and I catch a glimpse of Dai, doing something with the phoenix attached to his submersible.

My mandrake shrieks as a jet of fire hits just beside me. I'm smelling a smoke that could suffocate anyone, and I see Eli cover her face.

“It'll make you see things,” she shouts. “You'll hallucinate. Hold your breath, Kerwin.”

We lurch, and suddenly, my mandrake is crouching and leaping, and I'm bashing against the wood like I'm being beaten with two-by-fours. Eli's twisting inside her cage, like she did on the tree before, flipping up and around, kicking from the inside, and I see she's trying to kick the bars out.

I feel a shudder in the body of the creature I'm in, like a tree considering which direction to fall when sawed down. The mandrake is gushing sap, which pours down, stinging me, burning my skin. It's wet and mud and fire and blood.

Eli's kicking at the bars in her cage, swinging from the top of them and pushing her heels against the part of the mandrake's
chest that's weakened, and her mandrake screams in fury and pain as she does it.

The blue jay girl takes one more swing of the ax, and my bars give. There's fire everywhere now.

I leap out, and the blue jay girl comes with me. There are Rostrae everywhere, fighting the creatures from underground, and the mandrake are being stabbed in the eyes by flying birds, beaks, talons.

Eli's an inch away from freedom. I tug at the bars that are caging her, and she pushes. I feel them starting to splinter.

I turn my head, and Dai's there, his hands clutching the phoenix's wings. The phoenix is tremendous. He's barely holding on to it, but he looks straight into my eyes and then he pins the bird's wings back, screaming as he does. They're burning him. It screams too, and phoenix fire streaks across the cavern, a meteor of orange and blue flames, directly at us.

I don't even think about it. I throw myself between Eli and the fire.

It hits me in the chest, a blastbomb of light and sparks, and the phoenix is still screaming, a flood of fire pouring from its mouth.

The mandrake holding Eli bursts into flame and carbonizes, a black smoke cloud, a flaming echo around the screaming face.

I'm on fire, I realize, slowly, and Eli's shouting, and I can't hear anything, and then I start to feel the flames, the pain—

Eli twists upside down, her arms clinging to the bars of the cage. She kicks one foot, and then the other, until she's vertical, and as she does it, she kicks through the remaining charred head of her mandrake, and flips upward through her cage.

Dai's hands are tangled in phoenix feathers. He turns just as Eli high-kicks him in the chin, knocking him flat.

Then Eli's rolling me in the dirt, yelling, “You're not going to die on me! Roll! ROLL!”

Real death isn't like something from a movie. It smells like cooked skin and cloth, and a forest burning too. Breathing too hard, lungs scalded. Worse than lightning. Worse than hospital. Worse than being lost in pi.

Something grabs me by the straps of my backpack, and then another something grabs me, and I'm dizzy, but the flames are out. I rise.

I turn my head and Eli's beside me, rising too, both of us dangling from—

Talons.

Rising up and out of the volcano. Far below me. Treetops, buildings, fields. I pass through a cloud and feel myself shivering.

I can hear nothing but birds, screaming, shrilling, and I'm not in any kind of state to assess anything.
Analysis/paralysis
, says my brain, and laughs hysterically.

Birds have me by the neck, the back, the ankles, the arms. My head's pounding. There's no room for pi in there anymore, and that at least is a relief, though there's no room for logic either.

“Wait,” I croak. I start struggling. “Drop me! Leave me! I have to fight him!”

“He's hurt,” says Eli, her voice strangely calm for the voice of someone flying. I feel like I'm far away from myself, far away from the sound of voices. “He's delirious.”

I'm gasping, my lungs fried, my skin feeling crisped. I feel cold and hot at once.

I look down and see, what seems like a million miles below us, my own feet dangling in midair. Take me to a hospital. Take me to the graveyard. I'm dying.