Two tombs later, they heard it again. Bonedog actually bayed this time, his ghostly voice waking echoes like sibilant birds. “I don’t like that,” said Agnes to no one in particular.
“I can’t get a grip on it,” said the dust-wife. “It should have some attachment to a body somewhere, but there isn’t one. The bodiless dead are much harder to grab. But they also can’t hurt you, usually.”
“Usually?”
“Never say never.”
The last syllable of never echoed for much too long, er … er … er … And then Marra realized it wasn’t an echo at all. She took a step back from the mouth of the hallway behind her.
… un … un … un … run … run…!
“Did an echo just tell us to run?” asked Agnes, adjusting Finder and looking rather calmer than Marra felt.
“Do ghostly echoes have our best interests at heart?” asked Fenris, also remarkably calm.
“Rarely,” said the dust-wife.
Marra thought, I’m surrounded by lunatics, and I love them all, but maybe we should be running anyway. She took another step back.
… run … running … coming … coming … coming for you … run …
Erk, said the brown hen, with deep distrust.
Whistles erupted from the hallway they had just come down. The echoes sped up until they tripped over each other—Run! Coming! Hide! Robbers! Run! Run!
Bonedog went berserk. Fenris stopped trying to hold his leash and just picked him up bodily, hands slipping through the illusion to clutch at his spine. The dust-wife slammed the butt of her staff on the ground. The hen crowed.
The thief-wheel filled the passageway and came spilling out into the room.
* * *
At one point, it might indeed have been a wheel. When it was smaller, perhaps, when there were only five or ten souls jammed together, rolling over each other, ghostly faces screaming before being ground into the floor to move the bulk of the creature along. Now there were dozens of faces and the wheel had become a thick slug, elongating through the passageways, ten feet high and the gods only knew how long.
Run!
Hide!
It’s coming!
Run, robbers, run!
It filled the doorway, heaving with screams as if breathing. The echoes rang through the room. Some of the faces had hands beside them, waving frantically, and Marra realized that the graverobbers trapped inside were trying to warn the living humans away. They aren’t threatening us. They’re trying to tell us to get away before it gets us, too.
The dust-wife never faltered. She stepped forward, directly into the thief-wheel’s path. “Bodiless dead,” she said. “We are not graverobbers. You have no power over us.”
She was so calm and so confident that Marra believed her. Of course the dust-wife could fix it. She was the master of the dead. She could raise ghosts and lay them. Why had she ever doubted?
The thief-wheel screamed a warning from fifty mouths and ran the dust-wife down.
The moonlight vanished. The room went pitch-black.
Marra blundered away from the thief-wheel, staggering through the dark. She pitched over something and went down hard, skinning her palms on the ground. She could hear shrieks and shouting, the wails of the dead, and over it all, the furious clucking of the demon hen.
Something grabbed her. It didn’t feel like a human. It felt like a great wall of glue that engulfed half her body. Marra screamed and slapped at it, which was a mistake. Her arm went in and got stuck. She retained enough presence of mind to throw her head back to try and keep her mouth free.
“Marra!” shouted Fenris.
Then the thief-wheel was moving with a sickening forward slide. She bashed the back of her head against the wall and saw pinpricks of white against the blackness.
Run!
Run!
Run! piped the faces around her in the dark. And then one, next to her ear, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I can’t make it stop, it just keeps going …
Were they going through another corridor? Stone scraped her back. She was being carried forward but also sliding inexorably toward the back of the thief-wheel in a queasy, seasick motion. Oh god, she thought very clearly. I will be devoured and stay as a ghost forever under the palace.
This seemed uniquely horrible. Not that she would die, but that she would be trapped here, in the palace, which she was beginning to hate with a fine and enduring passion. Her back scraped against more stone and she tried to lean closer into the thief-wheel but she couldn’t, not without putting her face in it, and she’d rather not have any skin on her back at all than do that.
I’m so sorry I can’t stop it, sobbed the voice next to her ear. I keep trying but it won’t stop …
“It’s all right,” she said automatically. She was going to be ill and she was being dragged backward along the length of a creature made of lost souls and glue and still she was trying to reassure someone. Of course she was. That was how she was going to die, telling someone it was all right for stabbing her, really, she didn’t mind …
The thief-wheel dropped her. Perhaps she had worked her way to the end. She struck the floor of the corridor and then, mercifully, she fainted.
Chapter 19
When Marra came to, she was freezing. She had curled up under the nettle cloak but had no idea how much time had passed. Long enough for the stone floor to leach all the warmth out of her, at least. She listened for the sound of the thief-wheel but could hear nothing. “Fenris?” she called. “Agnes? Dust-wife?”
Her voice echoed but brought no response. There was no spark of light anywhere.
She got to her feet and spread her arms wide, feeling for walls. A corridor. She yelled for her friends again to no avail.
“When you’re lost in the woods, stay put,” Marra muttered. “That way people can find you. But this isn’t the woods, and I don’t think we’ve got enough time…”
Which direction had the thief-wheel dragged her? How far had she gone? She had no idea.
She took a deep breath and pulled the nettle cloak tightly around her. “All right,” she murmured. “All right.” She picked a direction and began to walk.
Doorways to tombs opened under her fingers. She ignored them. The big tombs were always at the ends of the corridors. She walked forward until she reached some kind of threshold and then felt her way forward in the dark. The echoes sounded like a large room.
Smooth metal. Carved stone. Tiny square edges. Something that felt familiar, and then Marra realized she was touching a death mask. She jerked away and blundered toward the wall, only to realize that she had lost track of where her entryway was. How would she know if she was going in the right direction?
She fetched up against a wall and felt like weeping.
I’m lost. I’m lost in the dark and I will die down here. The dust-wife might already be dead. Oh, Lady of Grackles, help me, help me. I tried to help myself, but I don’t think I can help this bit …
Silence. Cold. Dust.
And then, in the great darkness under the palace, Marra saw a light.
It was only a spark at first, more golden than torchlight. She thought perhaps it was not really there, because it looked like the gold sparks that came when she rubbed her eyelids. But it strengthened and came closer and closer still, illuminating the walls with their carvings of cold, dead kings.
It was a woman. Where she walked, she kicked up clouds of light, like dust.
Marra lifted her eyes and saw that the woman held a severed hand in her right hand and that her left wrist ended in a stump.
It was the saint from the goblin market.
A long time later, it would occur to Marra to wonder why the saint had been there, in the palace of dead kings. At the time, it did not. She was a saint. Saints walked where they would.
The saint lifted her severed hand so that the first finger lay across her lips in a gesture for silence. Marra crouched at her feet, gazing up, and nodded.
The saint beckoned, and Marra followed.
They went slowly but sure-footedly. The light of the saint’s passage glittered off carvings of men and gods and stranger things. Marra watched whole histories unfold, as carved generals defeated armies of beasts misshapen and beautiful and strange.