The Drowned Vault (28 page)

Cyrus swallowed hard and picked up his spotlight. Darkness. And hair. Swamping, curling, floating centuries of hair.

He held his knife and the spotlight in front of him and flutter-kicked forward. He burrowed through the hair, and it dragged across his skin like fine seaweed, tickling his arms and his face, sending shivers down his back. The walls of the tunnel were tight, and he felt like he was swimming through more hair than water. And then the tunnel ended and he floated out into a dark chamber. In the wider space, the hair billowed like smoke. Cyrus clawed his way through it, shoving it aside as he drifted up, swinging the spotlight all around.

The chamber was maybe twenty feet across, and the ceiling rose into a dark stone vault at least fifteen feet high. The hair was thicker below Cyrus and around his legs. By the entrance, Rupert was gathering armfuls of it in a dense wad, creating a few clearer patches of water. Cyrus kicked further up, and then studied the room below him, tracing every visible corner with the spotlight.

Below him, in the eye of the slow storm of hair, was the body of a man, floating just above a stone table. His face was calm but creased with scars where it wasn’t hidden by his beard. His limbs were chained to cannonballs, and the heavy chains kept him floating only inches above the slab. He wore a breastplate that had tarnished black, and a long blue coat with blackened metal buttons. Tall boots had been removed and tucked beneath his floating legs. Long corkscrewing fingernails dangled from his
hands, bent against the floor, and ran up the walls. More nails twisted and tangled up from his toes.

Cyrus focused on the man’s face. It was like looking at an uncle, or a cousin to his father that he had never known. It could even be his father, if his father had lived to see another decade. The man had his father’s brow, a slightly larger version of his father’s nose. The same shoulders.

Leaving a floating hill of hair behind, Rupert swam up beside Cyrus. After a moment, he nudged Cyrus, and the two of them descended.

Cyrus floated directly above his sleeping ancestor, face to face with him. Rupert pointed at Cyrus’s knife, and then gathered the man’s beard together with both hands, pinching it tight like a rope four inches below the jaw. Cyrus set the spotlight on the Captain’s chest, then sawed through the coarse hair in a straight line just above Rupert’s hands. When the knife broke through, Rupert began to wind the beard hair around his forearm like a garden hose and swam toward a corner, dragging and collecting hair as he went.

Cyrus gathered up the man’s hair at his scalp. He hacked one thick fistful, and then another as Rupert wound away the first. Six fistfuls and he was done. A minute or two later, and Rupert had it all crudely mounded in a corner and pinned beneath stones.

Rupert pointed Cyrus toward the fingernails, while
he went to the toes. The nails were soft in the water, and his knife slid through them easily just above each fingertip. One at a time, ten-foot-long corkscrew nails fell from the sleeper’s hands and feet and sank to the bottom.

Captain John Smith drifted quietly above his stone bed, free of his hair but still in his chains. Beneath him, on the bed, Cyrus saw a long silver saber—naked, but untarnished and unrusted.

Rupert gestured at Cyrus’s neck, and then at the cannonballs that secured the Captain’s chains. Cyrus handed the spotlight to Rupert and slid Patricia off his neck, catching the keys as they sank. Then he moved to the cannonball and chain that held the Captain’s right hand. Like the sword, the metal of the chain wasn’t rusted or even badly tarnished, but he couldn’t find a keyhole on the wrist manacle. He traced the chain down to the cannonball on the floor, and then he froze.

It wasn’t a cannonball. It was a head. Black, metallic to the touch, and bearded. Engraved in the forehead, there was a name:

VLAD II

Beneath the name, there was a keyhole. Cyrus ran his hands around the head. There were two little hinges in the iron hair on the back. He looked up. Rupert was staring at the ball chained to the Captain’s right ankle.
Cyrus floated over to see. It was another head, but this one was beardless.

VLAD IV

Cyrus swam over the top of the table, already knowing what he would find. The Captain’s left arm was anchored by a third head, this one with a long, droopy mustache.

VLAD III
TEPES

The left leg was chained not to a head but to a black iron block. The block was labeled:

RADU BEY

Cyrus looked at Rupert and held up his keys. Should he open them?

Rupert was kicking from iron head to iron head to iron head, and then back to the plain block. He appeared to be thinking, and Cyrus could understand why. There was something dangerous here, something truly unnerving about the idea of unlocking the heads—even more than the idea of Cyrus’s undead ancestor floating in this cavern for centuries.

Cyrus looked at the unrusted metals, at the unrotten clothes and the man’s unrotten flesh, as he waited for his Keeper’s decision. Finally, Rupert nodded at Cyrus.

Cyrus chose his little silver key and started with the black block on the left leg. It was the least unnerving of the four. He fingered the keyhole beneath the name.

And then the water quivered with sound waves. The chamber walls shook, and rocks dribbled down from the ceiling.

The walls shook again, and Cyrus watched, horrified, as Rupert bubbled in surprise and the squid unlatched from his face. Rupert snatched the gliding squid, peered through the tentacles at the beak, and then gargled frustration.

“Do it!” Rupert bellowed, geysering bubbles. He kicked toward the tunnel, gliding through the water in a race to get to the surface before he ran out of air. A moment later, he was gone.

Cyrus couldn’t move. How far away was the surface? Could Rupert make it? What had just happened? An earthquake?

Cyrus looked at the body of his ancestor, and then back at the tunnel mouth. He was supposed to do this. It was up to him. Cyrus slid the silver key into the hole in the iron block and waited for a moment.

The walls didn’t shake. The water didn’t quiver.

Cyrus turned the key, and the block fell open. A
small gold ring that had been hidden inside the block floated to the floor. The heavy chain links connecting the block and the Captain’s ankle clacked open one by one, settling slowly into a pile.

Beside Cyrus’s head, the Captain’s toes splayed.

Antigone raced toward the cliff, jumping logs and kicking through bushes, her bag bouncing on her back. The Boones and the Livingstones and Jax and Dennis and Nolan and Dan were in the planes, but she wasn’t leaving. Not without Cyrus.

“Tigs!”

She looked back. Dan was chasing her. Behind him, the forest was burning.

“We have to get Cyrus!” she yelled.

“I know!” Dan yelled. He was gaining fast. She’d never seen him run like this. “I’ll get him! Where were they diving?”

Two planes roared overhead. Four shapes tumbled out of their bellies, but they weren’t bombs this time. They had glider wings, but Antigone could see human legs dangling beneath them. Two were heading toward the harbor where the planes were anchored. The other two were coming in her direction. She heard gunfire, and then spiraling white balls of fire dropped from the gliders like brimstone. She’d seen fire like that before—these were Phoenix’s men.

One of the balls was growing larger, swirling toward them like a falling sun.

“Dan!” Too late. The fireball splintered in the treetops and exploded. Antigone staggered as searing heat, burning branches, and shattered timbers fell all around them. Dan was on the ground. Antigone turned back, virtually blind from the afterimage and deaf from the explosion.

Something heavy clamped onto the back of her neck and spun her around. She was looking at a hairy chest, and then at the snarling face and fiery cow-size eyes of Gilgamesh of Uruk.

Gil laughed, his breath hot and rotten, and then another fireball crackled past. Gil looked to the sky. Something had caught his attention. Throwing Antigone to the ground, he unslung a heavy horn bow from his woolen shoulder.

She blinked, struggling for breath. There were other shapes, too. Tall shapes all around her.

Gil drew the thickest arrow Antigone had ever seen and nocked it. He drew the string back to his thick snake lips and raised his bow to the sky. She didn’t understand the words he murmured, but she saw the crackle of light that danced around the arrow point and heard the hum that buzzed along the waiting string.

Antigone followed Gil’s aim. One of the gliders was swinging around to attack.

Gilgamesh let fly.

He’d already lowered the bow and turned back, laughing, before the tumble of wings and flame and legs fell from the sky. He drew a second arrow, eyeing Antigone.

“Little Smithling!” he boomed. “Your life is forfeit to the dragons, not to that bastard Phoenix!”

Gil’s companions came forward, lifted Antigone off the ground, and flung her high into the air. Gil raised his bow.

The arrow struck like lightning, too fast for pain, too fast for sight. It slammed into her chest just above her heart and threw her against a tree trunk. She should have hung there, pierced and dying on a tree, a cursed Smith on a spit. Instead, she fell, tumbling through branches, and then bounced on the earth. The arrow shaft broke beneath her.

She couldn’t breathe, and her mouth was pooling with blood. She could see it dribbling on the moss. She spat and coughed, and twisting slowly, she tried to crawl away. Six banana fingers closed around her arm and lifted her into the air.

Her leather jacket and safari shirt were torn where the arrow had struck. Gil shoved a finger into the hole and touched the smooth pearly surface of the undamaged Angel Skin beneath.

Antigone closed her eyes and drifted into a place without pain. She could hear timber burning and wind
rushing through the trees, and then Gil filling the forest with an angry roar.

“Arachne!”

Cyrus worked on the metal head chained to Captain Smith’s right foot, the gold ring that had fallen out of the iron block now rattling on his thumb.

Clean-shaven Vlad IV had a keyhole in his forehead, but it was full of grit. Cyrus punched at it with the tip of his knife, and then tried the silver key again. Frustrated, he rolled the head onto its face and shook it. Sand and gravel trickled down. He set the head back down and tried again. The key slipped in, and he turned it.

The metal head fell open and a brown human skull rolled out into the water, slowly losing its lower jaw as it did. As had happened with the iron block, the chain links opened and rattled down, and the Captain’s right foot seemed to wake.

Trying hard to ignore the skull rocking gently on the cave floor, Cyrus swam up to the Captain’s right hand. Vlad II. The key worked easily, and a second brown skull rolled out as the iron head opened and the chains fell off.

Cyrus wanted very much to be done. To get whatever was about to happen over with. He pushed up and swam across the Captain’s chest, only able to make himself glance quickly at the sleeper’s face before diving down to
the final head. What would he do if the man didn’t wake up? Drag his body to the surface?

VLAD III
TEPES

As Cyrus slid the key into the iron forehead, silver flashed through the water and a saber blade pressed up against his throat.

He couldn’t move. The squid bubbled and he couldn’t even inhale. He could feel the razor edge slowly parting his skin. A small cloud of blood floated up around his face.

“Not that one.”

The words were bubbled, but Cyrus understood. He slowly pulled out the key.

fifteen
SMOOTH STONES

D
AN KNEW
he was seeing the present. The dream was fluid, and he drifted through it easily.

There was a pretty young black girl strapped into a chair. She was bruised and damp, and her chin rested on her chest. Beside her, in another chair, was a damp boy with a broken nose and a swollen eye and long straggly brown hair. Dan knew him. His name was Oliver, and he was the sullen boy Antigone had tried to befriend in their Polygoners club. Dan could see the anger in him, the bitterness inside, planted long ago and growing.