The Black Rose (22 page)

“You know, for people who meant to be clever, you're not very good with words.” Dannie was cross-legged on the floor of the cube, using the rare light to inspect and clean a few of her tools. Jack wondered if there was anywhere that she couldn't make herself at home.

“This is Dannie,” Jack explained in response to Lucy's confused expression. “We picked her up in Albion.” It struck him then just how much he had to tell Lucy, including that they'd found another Shard; and how much she had to tell him, like how they'd been captured and whether the Shard they were after had fallen into the Cult's hands.

Sardâr cut through the multitude of Jack's thoughts. “We don't have time for proper introductions. We need to get out of here as soon as possible.”

“Where's Ruth?” Adâ asked.

“She's—”

There was rumbling. They all looked downwards. The floor flickered and sparked, flashing in and out of existence as if running on a temperamental circuit. In the moments of vanishing, they could see through to the pit of Darkness below, except that it wasn't just Darkness. Dozens of red pinpricks glinted upwards out of the gloom, flickering like a multitude of crimson bulbs.

For a moment Jack wasn't sure what he was seeing, but then, with an audible gasp, realization hit him like a winding punch to the stomach.

The Darkness blasted upwards through the floor like a wave of oil, a multitude of talons, fangs, wings, tails, spikes, and all other appendages ever conceived to harm. He tried to throw up an alchemical barrier, but nothing happened. He was buffeted upwards, Lucy and the rest of them vanishing in a tidal hurricane of demonic energy. Things were scraping at his flesh, raking the cloak from him. The bile sensation in his throat rose to an unprecedented peak. He was passing away into the shadows, everything fading as he lost consciousness.

Ruth ran. She didn't think what she was doing. All she felt in that moment was pure, unmitigated terror of the Darkness present around her as long as she could remember. She sprinted down the corridor, footsteps echoing, cloak flapping, the obsidian mass belching from the open doorway and twisting to pursue her like a raging river. She pelted towards the elevator shaft, hammering on the door. It slid open under her fists and she tumbled inside, pressing herself against the wall.

The doors weren't closing. The Darkness had rolled into view, the froth at the front a surge of forming and dissolving shapes—claws, fangs, wings, spikes, will-o'-the-wisp eyes—a surge of demonic energy reeling towards her. She punched the keypad in desperation, not even looking at the buttons. The Darkness was drawing closer and closer, resolving into a single gigantic hand, extending its grip to enclose her within its grasp.

The doors slammed shut, and the elevator shot downwards. The g-force almost lifted her off her feet as the air was sapped upwards. The shaft was dim but did not possess the same quality of Darkness that had just chased her.

She hit the floor hard as the elevator crunched to a halt, her head slamming into the metal.

She blinked the stars away from her eyes and hauled herself to her feet. The doors had slid open again. This must, she thought, be far below the floor where the others had disappeared. There was no curving hallway of cells here: just a straight corridor, encased in the same neon light, leading to a single door at the end. She glanced up. There was no way she was going back, so the only way was forwards.

She initially thought it was silent down here too, but as she approached the door, she became aware of noises beyond. They sounded like screams, filtered through several walls. She looked back at the elevator. Whatever was beyond this door could not be worse than that ravenous Darkness.

Ruth entered, and she saw what Nexus truly was.

She saw the cubes of tortuously bright light, each occupied by a proclaimed enemy of the state. She heard the endless cries of agony and despair. She tasted the harsh tang of multiple demonic presences, rising inside her throat and charring her nostrils. A screaming woman being thrashed by spiked tentacles; an amputee losing more of his limbs by the second to corrosive smoke; a child, not older than twelve, gasping as the water rose to the ceiling of his cell—a multitude of people, as human as she, were rent both physically and mentally before her eyes.

She didn't make it beyond the stairs. She dropped to the mesh floor, her breaths falling irregularly. Reality seemed suddenly more imminent around her. Another scene crowded into her vision like a hologram mapped onto the first, and the barrier between the present and past was blasted asunder.

She saw the door of her home ripped down in a coil of black smoke: her mother screaming, her father grasping her in his arms and telling her to go. She saw herself running, running beyond the house and felt the heat of it explode in flames behind her. She was running, running into the dark labyrinth of Nexus streets, her ragged clothes rippling in the wind. She was running, running as far away as she could from her home and the torment inflicted on her parents. She was winding down the alleyways, her sense of direction consumed by fear. And there, before her, was a pool of obsidian: a portal from which the cloaked sorcerers always arose and snatched away her friends and neighbors.

And she realized what she had been dreaming for as long as she could remember was not what had happened. She had not been pulled into Darkness against her will, ripped from her homeland through the shadows and emerging in a distant ocean. It had been her choice. She saw again, now, her younger self reach out and touch the Darkness, willing it to take her. Her instinct of terror had given way to all-consuming despair. Now, as then, she had no purpose, and oblivion was beckoning her into its portal.

She raised her head, the lights and shadows of the room swimming together in her vision. She could taste the sulfuric Darkness: the contents of every torture cube not a separate entity but a collective force. She knew it was watching her. She sensed the energies seeping away from the prisoners' broken forms towards the fresh meat. Through the haze, she saw the obsidian congealing before her, slithering down the aisle in an oily pit. Shapes stirred within: coils of serpents, fangs of wolves, wings of bats, demons rising and taking form. A whirlpool of ravenously baying beasts surrounded her.

Ruth closed her eyes and steadied her breathing. She could never fight off this many demons, let alone in her current state. She tried to focus her mind inwards: the brush of the cloak against her skin, the prickling cold on her exposed hands and cheeks, the slowing thumping of her heart. If this was going to be it, then she would depart life meditating on the good parts. Snapshots rose from her memory. Her parents, before they'd been attacked, kissing her good night. Ishmael, brow crinkled with concern, hauling her atop
The Golden Turtle.
The meeting where she'd been appointed captain: Sardâr, Adâ, Gaby, Alex, and other Apollonians positioned around a drawing room on Earth. Jack's apologetic surprise when she'd come across him in the observatory. Jack in front of a fountain in Albion, laughing…

The baying had receded slightly, the bile sliding back down her throat. She opened her eyes. The demons were still there, but that was it—they were
still there.
She was seated in a lotus position, and the ground around her legs was humming with ivory light. The writhing wall of Darkness had not advanced beyond the white circle.

She sat and waited, her friends and family with her, the Darkness pressed against her sanctuary.

Jack could hear shuffling: thousands of footsteps echoing through the high vaults of a room. There was some pressure on his chest, making his breathing difficult. He eased his eyes open, pain throbbing through his head. He saw stone slabs, as on a cathedral floor, but quite a distance below him. It took a moment to make sense of his position. He was suspended at least twenty feet above the ground, his torso hunched forwards, his wrists, waist, and ankles clamped to some kind of pole. Wherever he was, it was dim. What seemed to be an immense stage curtain blocked his vision in front. By the candlelight from somewhere behind, he could make out several other figures suspended in a similar position on either side.

“Ruth? Lucy?
Sardâr?” His hissing was lost in the brushing of the curtain. None of the figures stirred.

“So we have our first awakening.” The voice came from behind him, a low and illustrious drawl.

Jack tried to look over his shoulder but could make nothing out. “Who's there?”

“Blind, so blind.”

There was a grinding noise, and the pole he was linked to rotated. He was turned to face the candles, perhaps hundreds, arrayed in a bank stretching to his right and left. Their flickering glow filtered upwards, casting a cave-like luminosity onto the wall behind. Curves and symbols were carved into the stone, and, as his eyes adjusted, the patterns formed into an immense dragon, wings raised above its head, mouth belching a plume of flame. Its claws were planted on the floor where the bank of candles broke; in between them was a throne.

It took Jack even longer to make out the figure there, swathed as he was in a black cloak. Yet there was something different about this Cultist. His robes were laced with a silver thread, which glinted in the candlelight. He was slumped, either in relaxation or exhaustion, but the impenetrable void of the hood was fixed upon Jack.

“You're—you're the Emperor of Nexus, aren't you?”

The figure crossed one leg over the other and folded his arms. “Indeed. This recognition no doubt arises from a glimpse you attained of one of our recent Council meetings. And you—
you
are the elusive Mister Jack Lawson.”

“That's right.” He assumed, given their captivity, that their cover long since had been blown.

“I must commend you on the audacity of your attempted rescue mission—although such audacity is rarely unaccompanied by some degree of naïve arrogance. Did you really think that you could penetrate this world's defenses undetected? Or did you take our lack of security as a spectacular turn of good fortune? Even before your antics in Lord Tantalus's diocese, the way had been cleared for you to go straight to your friends. Mindless fidelity makes one's actions oh so predictable.”

“So kidnapping Lucy and the others—that was just a trap for us?”

“Yes, and you do continue to run into these traps, don't you? Mount Fafnir, the Cave of Lights, now here. If I didn't know better, the ease with which you were captured would make me think you've still got a card to play.”

Jack was about to ask about Ruth but stopped himself. If his surreptitious count of the unconscious figures around him was right—and he wasn't sure—then they were one short. Ruth might have managed to get away unnoticed.

“Are we still in the Precinct?”

“No. This, boy, is the Cathedral—the center of our world.”

Jack took another glance to his left, towards the figure he was fairly sure was Sardâr. He hadn't the faintest idea of how to get out of this situation, so he had to continue to buy time until one of the others woke up. “What are we doing here?”

The Emperor's laugh echoed upwards and reverberated in the stone. Jack became newly aware of the footsteps, even more tumultuous than before, beyond their current enclosure.

“Oh, you will come to understand that soon enough. In fact”—he paused, listening to the noises beyond—
“very
soon indeed. The final preparations must be made.”

The Emperor didn't move from his reclined position. Indigo light began pulsating in the back of his palm, coiling into the shape of a rose, and within seconds his body had vanished into a retreating trail of ebony smoke.