He was interrupted by a commotion farther up the slope. X and Plum turned toward the noise, and saw an elderly man wandering through the thicket of bodies. The man was stumbling, and wiping his glasses on his shirt. He had sparse, bluish-white hair that stood up in tufts like seagrass. He was perilously close to the forbidden area.
Oedipus and Rex descended, waiting to see if he’d be foolish enough to cross over. The crowd cheered the man on, though he seemed addled, disoriented. They were eager to see the boxers beat him. Even the Countess sat up in bed, ready to be entertained. The cat cried unhappily in its box.
“Oh, the poor man,” said Plum.
The old soul fumbled his glasses. They fell to the ground. He bent down to search for them, a hand on his lower back which seemed to pain him, but he was too late: three ghastly looking souls were already fighting over them like children.
“Please stop this, all of you!” said the man. “My glasses are fragile and already terribly scratched!”
A woman won the struggle for the spectacles. The man held his hand out to her, but she just laughed, and threw them over his head to Oedipus.
The elderly man hung his head, his neck elongating like a turtle’s, and began to cry. He pleaded with Oedipus for his glasses. His eyesight must have been terrible because he wasn’t even facing the boxer as he spoke to him, not quite. It seemed to X that neither Oedipus nor Rex wanted to hurt him. But when Oedipus went to return the spectacles, the Countess bellowed from up above, “Let him fight thee for them, if they be so precious!”
The old man smoothed his few tendrils of hair. X could hear his sobs even a hundred feet away. The crowd cheered louder, and pushed him up the hill. He collapsed to his knees in the forbidden borderland, just a few steps from Oedipus.
“I can’t watch this,” said Plum. “I won’t.”
But X couldn’t look away.
Oedipus pummeled the old man as if it were a regrettable chore. He left him facedown on the slope.
And then the Countess rose from her bed.
She didn’t even put her shoes on—she just padded down from the plateau in her stockings.
The Countess took her knife from her belt, and sliced open the back of the elderly man’s thighs, severing his hamstrings. The man reared up as if he’d been electrocuted. X knew he would never walk again. When Oedipus tried to hand him his glasses, the old man couldn’t even open his hand to take them.
Mercifully, a woman in a long, black, servant’s dress and a bloodied apron emerged from the crowd to help. She gave instructions to the souls nearby. Two of them lifted the man’s body and pulled him back into the crowd, as if into a dark lake.
X was appalled by what he’d seen. Dizzied. The hopelessness of his own situation came flooding back to him.
He felt Plum’s hand on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” said Plum. “But you’ll see much worse before long. The Countess didn’t even put him on the altar. She couldn’t have been very hungry for sins.”
X barely heard what Plum said.
“Can I trust you?” he said. “Tell me true, for everything depends upon it.”
“You can,” said Plum. “I promise you can.”
“I must get out of this place,” said X. “I vowed to myself and to Zoe that I would save my mother, and that my mother would save me. Laugh at me if you must.”
“I certainly will not,” said Plum.
“Regent promised to help me,” said X. “I had no reason to doubt him, yet he sent me to this ungodly hill instead.”
“What exactly did he say?” said Plum.
“He said he had done everything he could for me,” said X. “He looked at me as if I would understand, yet how could I?”
“He didn’t say anything else?” said Plum.
“He said he’d given me everything he could,” said X.
Plum weighed this for a moment, then looked down at the objects in the silver foil, as if they held secrets.
“Is it possible that he meant all this?”
nine
Plum was right—he had to be.
X fanned his collection out in what space he had, and stared at everything with a new intensity.
A silver comb.
A red-green button made out of bloodstone.
The tip of a rusted drill.
A shard of white porcelain.
A broken bracelet.
X remembered Regent demanding that the guards recover everything from the river when Dervish dropped them in. Regent had treated these things like they were irreplaceable. X understood why now: these weren’t random things from the Overworld, as Regent had claimed. They were clues somehow. They would lead him to the mysterious person who knew where his mother was being held.
Regent had sent X to the Countess’s hill to fulfill his promise. Yes, X had flouted the laws of the Lowlands and shamed Regent. But through it all, and despite it all, the lord had never actually abandoned him.
X now knew that to be true.
He picked up the bracelet engraved with the word “Vesuvius.”
He asked Plum if he knew of anyone on the hill by the name.
“The only Vesuvius I know of is the volcano,” said Plum.
“I’m ashamed to say I don’t know it,” said X.
“No need to apologize,” said Plum. “Vesuvius was the volcano that destroyed Pompeii. I don’t remember if it was BC or AD, to be honest. And no, I don’t know anyone here with that name. But there are thousands of souls on this hill. He could very well be here.”
The idea of asking every soul on the hill if they were Vesuvius—or if they recognized the things in the silver packet—overwhelmed X. It was almost certainly impossible, especially with guards on the move and the Countess on the lookout for victims. But what else could he do?
Just holding the bracelet and button and the other items made X feel closer to his mother than he ever had. They had been in his possession many years, but he’d never known that they told a story.
X knew that his mother had been a lord. He knew that Regent had been a friend to her and that Dervish had detested her, just as he detested everyone who was not a dried husk like himself. His mother must have been bold—full of life in a place full of death.
There was one more thing X knew about her: she’d fallen in love and given birth to him. Here in the Lowlands! She had broken every law to do it. She’d lost her standing as a lord in the process, tossed it willingly away. This, more than anything else, made X feel that he knew her and that her blood coursed in him. Hadn’t he done much the same as his mother when he endangered everything to be with Zoe? And wouldn’t he do it again?
Plum interrupted X’s thoughts.
“Guard,” he said.
X closed up the foil, slipped it into the lining of his coat, and looked down the slope to see who was coming.
But it was only his friend with the baseball bat.
The guard looked miserable. He’d unzipped the top of his tracksuit because of the heat, and was dragging his foot nearly sideways behind him. His sunglasses must have made it hard to see because he kept tripping over bodies.
“Is wretched place, as in advertisements,” said the guard when he reached them. “Vehement crazy. Who is large man?”
“This is Plum,” said X. “He’s a friend. Plum, this is the guard who conveyed me here—at great cost to himself. Don’t be misled by his forbidding spectacles, he is a friend as well. I call him … the Ukrainian.”
The guard spoke gruffly to hide how much he liked his new name.
“Everybody think sunglasses are extreme joke, yes?” he said. “But they are prescription, okay? For the distance.”
“Hello,” said Plum. “Here’s a question one doesn’t ask very often: Would you please hit us with your bat—just so the Countess doesn’t get suspicious?”
“Of course,” said the Ukrainian. “This is tremendous point.”
“I’ll take the first blow myself—in the stomach, preferably,” said Plum. “As you can see, I have some extra padding there.”