He slid through the door into a hallway broad enough for four men abreast. Voices carried around a corner. “Freeze!” He heard bare feet, running.
A crossbow bolt tore down the crosswise hall, leaving a crackle of spent lightning. Corbin peered around the corner in time to see Umar vault a desk at the hallway’s end and punch the guard in his throat. They fell together. Umar’s hand tightened into a fist, then descended with the sound Ray Capistano’s cleaver made when he cut steak.
Umar stood, holding keys. He tried one key in the lock of the door behind the watchman’s desk, and when it didn’t work he tried another.
“They’ll hunt you down.”
“They are busy.”
“They’ll come for you when it’s done.”
“If they find me.” Corbin had grown used to Umar’s doubled voice, but that laugh still twisted in his chest.
The fifth key worked.
They walked between two wire cages, behind which rested neat arrays of shelves: a library of danger. Corbin did not recognize most of the contents of those shelves, and when he did, he wished he didn’t. A diamond-bladed sword bloomed with purple light, and a paper tag marked its gold hilt. Beside it lay a pipe with a rusty stain at one end, likewise tagged. Bags of powder in many colors. A single six-sided die. A spike-knuckled glove slicked with greenish oil. A deck of playing cards. A pair of red slippers. A sheaf of blasting rods. Tagged, tagged, tagged, tagged, tagged. That was the first floor.
On the next level down, each shelf held a single object surrounded by a blue Craft circle. Nothing here struck him as unusual in form: a book bound in pale tan leather. A corduroy blazer. A bow tie. A silvery mechanical wand with a green gem at one end. An unadorned ring. A knife with a wooden handle. A clay cup.
The knife whispered like a woman, not like any woman but like June in bed when they were young together, before everything. The wand sang. The blazer pulsed when he looked at it too long.
He drew closer to Umar.
On the third floor each cage held a single item, and he did not look at these.
The fourth floor held no cages, only doors: three on either side. Ghostlights glowed green above the lintels. Umar walked to the last door on the left, stood in front of it, and placed one hand above the latch.
Corbin felt cold. Sweat drops studded Umar’s face. His lips curled open, a skeleton’s grin. Shadows deepened in the hollows of his cheeks. Flared nostrils expelled steam. Corbin had seen Umar move through men like wheat, but turning his hand a few degrees clockwise seemed to break him.
The latch clicked open. The light above the door went red.
Umar sagged.
Frost covered the doors and walls. Corbin shivered, not just from the cold. “Open,” Umar told him.
He should not. Whatever was inside this room, it was bigger than Corbin Rafferty. But he’d come this far when he should have turned back at every step. And he knew no other way to hurt Her.
He opened the door.
Inside was more a closet than a room. A single table occupied most of the space, surrounded by a glowing silver circle on the concrete floor. A folded jacket and slacks lay on the table, and worn brown leather shoes. Red suspenders coiled like snakes atop the clothes. Beside them stood a steel box.
Corbin pointed, mutely, to the circle.
“It will not hurt you,” Umar said.
Corbin stepped across, as if diving into the ocean on a winter day. He did not die. He felt nothing, in fact.
“Bring me the box.”
“What’s inside?”
“Bring it to me.”
Corbin touched the box, found it cool. Lifted the latch. Packing immaterial swathed the inside, viscous and opaque. He reached into the immaterial and felt a pitted surface like dried, bleached wood. His fingertips traced a dome larger than two big fists pressed together, and ridged at the front, with two large holes and a third triangular gap beneath them. Many-voiced incoherent whispers filled his ears.
Wind whistled through bare grass on a stony moor. Sirens wailed.
He lifted the skull from the box.
Silver lines crossed and recrossed the bone, and cut his eyes like knives. They moved as he watched. Turned. Danced.
The skull weighed nothing in his hand. It grew, filling the closet cell though somehow it still fit in Corbin’s hand. Bone bowed out the concrete walls. Corbin stared into the gulf of its eye socket. At that bottomless pit’s bottom, he saw a glint of fire. He could fall into the skull, burning like priests said rocks burned as they fell from space, to become the fire there himself.
“Return the skull to the box,” Umar said. “And close the box. Bring both to me.”
Given the choice between nameless dread and simple obedience, Corbin’s body chose the latter.