The man aged. His hair whitened and thinned. His eyes grew cavernous, and his cheeks clung to his teeth. He still gripped the black star in one hand, but in the other, he held only ashen snake skins.
“I am Nimroth,” he said, and the voice was brittle and old. “Called Blackstar. Devourer of Death. Adam to the Undying Race.” Henry could feel Henrietta’s fingers digging deep into his arm, and the man changed again.
Gray sores spotted his bald head. His gums had receded, and stray white hairs drifted away from his chin and ears. His voice was high, shrill, like a sick child’s. He was hunched over something on the floor—the black star—rolling it back and forth, rocking slowly and chattering to himself, almost singing.
“Nimroth, Nim, Nim’s frogs. Pretty frogs need six legs. Six legs for swimming. Six for plucking. Kitten heads for throwing. Sister’s kittens lost their heads, but couldn’t stop their mewing.”
And the man’s image was gone. The old monkey-looking lady winked at Henry, and he swallowed hard. Henrietta was trying to pull him farther back. He didn’t want to go. There were other open doors behind them.
“He’s locked up, locked up!” the woman shrieked. “Old Mad Nim and his marble in the dark. Listen! Listen!” The woman lunged forward, sprawling on the floor. She pressed her ear on the stone circle in the center of the room. Henry pushed Zeke and Henrietta back toward the shelf.
“Shhh,” the woman said. “Listen!”
Henry’s pulse drummed inside him. He stood perfectly still, trying to quiet his breathing. And then he heard it. Faintly. A slow, smooth sound, almost a grinding, almost a sliding. A stone ball rolling on stone.
“He’s down there?” Henrietta whispered. “Right now? Under that?”
The woman cackled. “Down. Down. No light for Nimroth.” She grew suddenly serious. “No light for Niac. No light for brothers and sisters and cousins and mothers. No light for Nia.” Her eyes widened with sadness. “No sweet-bloods. Only Nimiane has light. Only Nimiane has sweet-bloods.” She scrambled back up to her feet. With hunched shoulders, she glanced around the room, as if she might be overheard. Henry ran his flashlight quickly over the doorways and then back to the shriveled woman. She winked and then whispered, “Nimiane found a way Out.”
She hobbled toward Henry.
“Back,” Zeke said, and he stepped to the front. The woman slid sideways, staying out of his reach, and pointed at Henry. She sniffed.
“Your blood!” she said. “Your blood! You opened the Out! She tasted your blood! Ooh, I licked it off her finger. Sister let me lick.”
Suddenly, the woman lunged forward. Henry dropped his flashlight and jerked away, but she was too quick. Her hands were on his face—hands as cold as death. He grabbed her wrists, and she screamed, clawing at his hand, at where his dandelion brand pressed against her skin. Zeke knocked her backward, and she sprawled out on the stone circle. Whimpering, she clutched her knees to her chest.
“No bloods,” she said. “Not for Nia. Nimiane tastes you. Her blood eats you. You will die and be ash. Ash, ash. Your face will be the moon. She drinks the souls. She is Nimroth now.”
Henry coughed and shivered, trying to shake the chill from his skin. He put his right hand to his jaw, felt his pulse slow, his breath become even.
“We need to get out of here,” Henrietta said. “Right now. We have to go back or find another way out.”
Zeke kept his light trained on the shaking woman. Henrietta moved hers around the walls, pausing on every open door. Henry picked up his flashlight. For a moment, the room was silent. A slow, rolling sound crept beneath the floor.
“Nia,” Henry said. But the shriveled shape rocked on its side and ignored him. “Who shut you in here?”
“Sisters,” Nia said quietly. “We were last. All were mad. Mother drooled. We sealed her up in stone. Brothers mad beneath their slabs. All save Nia and Nimiane. She shut me in. She closed the doors.” The woman squinted into Henry’s flashlight. “Your father’s blood, sweet-bloods, green-bloods, opened the doors, and she came in after, she came to feed on boy bloods.” She giggled like a little girl and rubbed her bald head with both bony hands. “Little boys tricked her. They shut her in, still with her strength. They sewed the stones with greens and grapes. But blind Nimiane found the Out. A little blood for strength, and down.” She slapped the round stone. “Down to the old ones to learn the small ways. She broke the deep seal, the old seal. Not Nia.”
“Are you hungry, Nia?” Henry asked. He unslung his backpack and unzipped the pouch.
Henrietta hit him. “What are you doing? Don’t feed it. Maybe kill it, but don’t feed it.”
“Sweet-bloods can’t kill,” Nia said. “Can’t kill Niac. Can’t kill Nimroth or his marble. Blackstar blood won’t die, can’t die. Death won’t die. No, it won’t.”
Henry pulled a piece of jerky out of his bag and threw it to the grinning woman. It hit her in the shoulder and landed on the slab. She stared at it. She sniffed.
“She doesn’t even have any teeth,” Henrietta said. “How’s she going to eat jerky?”
Nia reached out and poked the dried meat. Then she picked it up, gripping it hard.
“Cattle,” she said, and closed her eyes.
“What’s she doing?” Henrietta whispered.
The jerky twisted in her hand. The ends curled and folded. The piece of meat grayed and then fell to the floor in a trickle of ash.
Nia opened her eyes. Henry braced himself, watching her closely. “The taste,” she said quietly. “It has been long. Long. Too long.” Already she seemed stronger, and Henry wasn’t sure if he liked that.
Suddenly, the shrunken woman jumped to her feet, with her arms upraised, morphing back into the figure of the man. “I am Nimroth!” she boomed.
“Stop it!” Henry yelled. “Enough!”
Nimroth’s arms dropped. His shape faded.
“Green-bloods,” Nia said quietly, and sat back down. “No more Nimroth for green-bloods.”
Henry bit his lip, took a deep breath, and walked around the woman. He put his hand on the smooth door where he had seen his father’s vines in the stone. “Nia?” The woman stared at him. “What’s behind this door?”
“Down,” she said. “Down, down, down to the tomb streets and the tomb cities. Where mad Endor lives. Dark Endor. No light for the under-streets and the dead doors.”
Henry moved to the other sealed doorway. “This one?” he asked.
“Up,” she said, and raised her arms. “Up, up, up to the ash.”
Henry nodded at Zeke and Henrietta. Zeke picked up Henry’s backpack, and he and Henrietta slid past Nia, backing toward Henry with their flashlights on the shrunken woman.
“So,” Henrietta asked. “If we don’t find your dad, we have to come back through here?”
“Right,” Henry said, running his hands over the smooth surface of the door. “Assuming that we get out in the first place.”
The stone was lifeless to him. This was not stone that had been something else first. It had not been shaped by rivers or seas or fire or time. This was not stone that had once lived and was now dead. This was stone that had always been stone. Stone that had never had life and could never have it. But inside it, someone had woven life and sealed its seams.
How had his father done it? A sealing spell? Some curse? Mordecai had said that Henry would learn words of power, that he would make his own. But there hadn’t been time, not with his scar growing and the witch to hunt.
Henry ran fingers around the joints. There were scratches. From stone shards? Fingernails? He pointed his flashlight back across the room at the little pyramid. It had been sealed, too, though differently—the web was external—and he and Henrietta had broken through it without even knowing.
They shared Mordecai’s blood. Could he just break through? He looked back at the door. And if he did break through, what would follow him out into the world?
Henrietta reached under Henry’s cloak and pulled on the pouch of h
is hoodie. “Henry. I hear something.”
“The rolling?” Zeke asked.
Henrietta shook her head and pressed her back against the wall beside Henry. Her light flicked around the room, bouncing between openings.
The rolling had stopped. Footsteps. Muffled shuffling footsteps. But from where? Which door? Zeke clenched the hatchet and shifted on his feet like he was in the batter’s box. Henrietta jerked off her backpack and fished out a short-bladed kitchen knife.
“Can we go back?” she asked. “Is there time to go back?”
Something hard cracked against stone. The echo rattled around them.
Nia was smiling, with her head cocked and her eyes closed, seated on the center slab. “Up, up, up,” she said. “Up they come.” She opened her eyes. “Nimiane broke the seal. Not Nia. The old ones smell the sweet-bloods.”
The slab shook beneath her.
* * *
Coradin closed his eyes. He was in the cellar of an abandoned house, and he had done as the voice had said. The symbol had been drawn. The small doorway had been straightened and sat against a wall. Kneeling with the backs of his hands on the floor in front of him, he felt something cold grow inside him. Another voice took control of his tongue, and a woman’s words filled the room—they filled him. Painful words. Words of force, of violence. He could sense the boy.
His skin stretched, pulling away from his bones. His hair unraveled and flowed forward around his face. Something twitched on the back of his head.
And he was gone.
A surface soft and damp collapsed beneath him, and he tumbled onto a floor.
The place was all darkness, but something else was pulling him backward. He climbed to his feet and turned. He saw nothing, but cold fear swept over him. This was emptiness. But it held the boy. And sucking death. And somewhere distant, it held his blood brothers—eight fingers.
He stepped forward.
The slab shook again, and dust rattled off the walls. Henry’s heart was drumming in his ears. He couldn’t do this. They had to go back.
“Henry!” Henrietta spun him around. On the other side of the room, the shelf rattled, the small pyramid rocked, and suddenly, a man in black appeared on the floor beneath it. He was on all fours, and his hair hung loose. Something pale twitched on the back of his head. Coradin rose slowly, blinking, and raised one hand to shield his eyes from the flashlights.
“Pauper son?” His voice was Nimiane’s. High. Sweet. Powerful. “It is fit that you should die here.”
Shrieking, Nia scrambled away, disappearing into an open door. The round slab tipped up and ground slowly across the floor.
CHAPTER TEN
A hand reached up out of the hole in the ground. A hand holding a black sphere, shimmering around its edges with white flame.
Henry pressed his forehead against the smooth stone in the sealed doorway. Why had he thought this was a good idea? He flattened his dandelion palm against the door, but his little flame wouldn’t penetrate. He had found a place where a dandelion couldn’t grow.
“Henry,” Zeke said. “What do we do?”
“Pauper son.” Nimiane’s voice was calm, soothing. “You rouse my ancestors. You disturb their darkness.”
Henry blocked her out. He shut his eyes and saw only distant vines, a web of strength, and his own sputtering gold, struggling to reach them.
“Henry,” Henrietta whispered. “Do something. The old one’s coming. He’s climbing out of the floor. He’s sniffing.”
Henry turned.
Coradin was smiling, his stiff black hair on his shoulders. He pulled a long silver blade from his belt. Henry took Henrietta’s little kitchen knife and handed her his flashlight. In the middle of the room, a shape crawled slowly out of the hole. Henry’s eyes left Coradin’s and settled on the black ball the ancient man pushed in front of him. In it, compressed, tiny, Henry saw worlds, millions of lives, forests and generations, tangled tight in a common death.
Coradin’s mouth moved, but Nimiane spoke. “The Blackstar,” she said. “Is it not more potent than a weed, more precious than a dandelion’s gold? Through it, my long-sire drank the world, as he will drink you. Through it, our blood was changed.”
Henry jumped forward and kicked the old man’s wrist. The ball rolled free, and a wail rose up like the howl of some otherworldly wolf.
The man grabbed at Henry’s legs, snarling. Henry kicked him in the shoulder and jumped back. Zeke and Henrietta were beside him. Henry braced himself for another attack. While Coradin laughed, the old man whimpered and crawled slowly forward. The ball had wandered into a corner where it no longer flamed. Henry ran to it, but stopped, blinking. It was nothing but smooth stone. The same lifeless stone as the walls. It was nothing at all. Mad Nimroth’s marble.
Henry picked it up and bowled it past the old man, back into the hole. It dropped, cracked, and bounced on what must have been stairs, and after a long moment of silence, it found the bottom. Dust snowed from the ceiling with the echo.
Three other pale faces were peering from the hole, blinking into the flashlights. The old man slithered down past them and disappeared. Coradin walked forward, and with one strong movement of his leg, slid the circular stone back over the hole.
He stepped onto it. Henry and the others stepped back.
“What will you do now, pauper son?” The voice was still Nimiane’s. The big man stared into the light, unblinking. His three ear notches stood out like black teeth in his pale skin.
Henry licked his lips and gripped his small knife. “I think we’re going to have to kill you,” he said.
“Me?” Nimiane laughed. “I cannot be killed. Did you not know this?”
“I killed one of the others,” Henry said. “You just have to cut the puppet’s strings.”
“The puppet’s, yes. And then the puppet dies. But I am not the puppet. I hold the strings.” Coradin stepped forward. “I do not think you will kill this one. He is strong. But even if you do, even if I commanded this fingerling to kneel before you so that you might snip his strings, there are others. Kill them, and I can make more. Can you stand against them all? The emperor has many such that he can give me, and fingers are never difficult to find. I do not make Endor new. Death cannot be freshened or reborn. I make a new Endor. I sit in the saddle of the world, with fleets at my command both east and west. The emperor’s red-shirted thousands kneel before me, and the world kneels before them. Even at Endor’s zenith, before the first madness, when Nimroth held the true Blackstar and looked to the corners of the world, he did not have such obedience.” Coradin held his fist to his chest. “I, not Niac, not Nimroth, I shall be the greatest of the undying blood, though you shall not live to see it.”
“Stay close,” Henry whispered.
Henrietta, pressed against his side, was breathing loudly. “What?” she asked.
“You heard,” Henry said. He didn’t want to say it again. In his left hand, Henry gripped his knife. In his right, he gripped his necklace. The metal was more than warm. It was hot, and his hand throbbed more than his jaw. His eyes had shifted again, and he was watching the thick gray strands weaving off Coradin’s head and down through the open black pyramid. He was looking at the vines, traces of his father, frayed and broken around the pyramid door.
Coradin took another step forward, off the slab. Henry saw his legs tense. The big man was going to spring. “Where is your defiance, pauper son?” Nimiane laughed. “You, who did not fear to enter my dreams, who entered the tomb cities of Endor? Where are your weeds now? You proclaimed yourself to be my curse, but I have seen nothing of it.”
“Tomahawk,” Henry said, hoping Zeke would understand. “Now.”
Coradin hesitated, confused.
Zeke threw his hatchet. Henry threw his knife.
The crypt pulsed with green and gold. Coradin raised his arm against the hatchet and flinched as the small kitchen knife, a galaxy of swirling green blades, bloomed with fire in his chest, knocking him to the ground. The
hatchet rattled on the floor.
Henry was already running, pulling Henrietta by the sleeve.
He slid to his knees in front of the shelf, but he didn’t fight to reverse the swirl and clamber into the attic. This was no retreat. He couldn’t see his own right hand. He saw only an arm that ended in blazing dandelion fire, and he felt nothing but its scorching heat pulsing in his limbs.
His fire met the frayed ends of his father’s vines and lit them like a fuse. Henrietta screamed, and Zeke ducked as a vein of bloom exploded up the wall, spraying stone, chattering like a thousand mother squirrels. The flaming weeds fire-cracked across the ceiling and down to the two stone doors.
Stone shards sprayed across the room as Coradin struggled to his hands and knees. Every inch of the sealed arches had bloomed.
The room, already bright, was blazing. Each dandelion bloom spun its fire-story in front of Henry’s eyes, but he had no time to thank them. “Go, go!” he yelled, and he grabbed the pyramid off the shelf.
With Henrietta and Zeke behind him, hanging on to his cloak, he dashed across the room, shut his eyes, turned his shoulder, and jumped into the blooms.
Flowers and stone fell to pieces, and Henry tumbled into a narrow hall. Zeke and Henrietta piled up behind him. Henry scrambled out of the tangle and grabbed his backpack from Zeke. He threw it over his shoulder and tucked the little wooden pyramid under his arm. Henrietta handed him his flashlight, and he pulled her to her feet.
“Run!” she said. Zeke was pushing them both forward.
The hall was only wide enough for them to run in single file, and black-door mouths lined both sides. Faces and old shorn heads occasionally peered out at them, blinked, and ducked away from the flashlights. Henry could feel Henrietta’s grip on his backpack, and he knew Zeke wouldn’t fall behind. Ignoring the doorways, he followed the hall as quickly as he could. He followed it around curves and up short flights of stairs.