But what I’ve told you is close. Close enough, according to our sources.
… You may not believe me, Finch-Crossley, but I don’t take any of it personally. Not really. They behave as their nature and their situation warrants. I can respect that. There’s a sick kind of honor in that, really. But that still doesn’t mean I don’t plan on finishing what Manzikert started. Because, as you’ve guessed, we now have a new weapon. A new weapon that is very old.
* * *
They’d reached the far shore, the sea giving way to land. The boat nudged up against a lip of flat rock. Which led to an overhang carved out of the black stone. The ancient fossilized remains of a fireplace out front. Beyond the fireplace, evidence of habitation.
Almost as unreal as the story the Lady in Blue had told him. The air moist and cold. Finch shivered.
Didn’t know whether to believe her or not. Didn’t know if it mattered. Nothing she’d said sounded any more or less plausible than what Duncan Shriek had written in his books. Understood, too, the weight of everything she had shown him. Knew it in his gut.
Wanted to tell her he lived in a different world. The world where Stark wanted to hurt people he loved, where Heretic could have him killed on a whim. Where Wyte’s condition went from bad to worse. All of it gritty and immediate, with immediate consequences. He wasn’t Crossley’s son anymore. He was Finch, and there was a reason for that. Survival.
“You’re too quiet,” she said.
“I’ve heard worse theories,” Finch said. Because he felt he had to say something. Because he felt overwhelmed.
The Lady in Blue gave him a curious look, head tilted to the side. “Not convinced? That’s a shame, because you can disbelieve it all you want. It’ll get you nowhere. Now get out of the boat and help me,” she said.
The shocking cold of the shallow water woke him up. They pushed the rowboat up onto the shore. The Lady in Blue unhooked the lantern, walked forward.
“What is this place?” Finch asked as his boots found dry land.
“Wait and see,” she said. Ushered him toward the overhang.
A cozy little space, sheltered by the rock. A thick layer of dust covered the uneven floor. Looked fuzzy in the lantern light. A welter of numbers and words had been carved into the far wall, all the way up to the ceiling. So many marks that they struck Finch like a cacophony of noise. Made him claustrophobic.
In the far corner, a skeleton on top of a blanket had disintegrated into a thicket of fibers and fragments. Intact. Yellowing. Human. Delicate, almost birdlike. Curled up in a position of sleep. On its side.
Looking at those small bones, Finch felt a sudden, inexplicable sadness. “Is that the monk?”
Words from the man’s mouth in the clicks and whistles of the gray caps’ language. And then, a sudden and monstrous clarity that can never be put into words.
“Yes, according to Shriek, that’s Samuel Tonsure,” the Lady in Blue said. “This is where he died. A hermit. In exile. Truff knows why the gray caps left him to this fate. Blind. Alone. He must have gone mad in his last years.”
She pointed to the other corner. To a large pockmark in the floor. Light green. With rings within rings. Like a cross section of tree trunk. “And that’s where Duncan was found. We didn’t even know that he was human, or alive. He looked to us like a gray cap whose legs had been fused into the ground. When he was brought to me, I don’t think he even knew who he was. He’d learned to walk among gray caps undetected. He’d traveled through the doors for many, many years. And then he’d come home here, alone, lonely. To give up being human. Half out of his mind. Attuned to the rhythms of mushroom and spore. Here, by Tonsure’s side. Like a dog guarding the grave of its master. I think he thought he’d wake up in a thousand years and everything would be different. Or that he’d never wake up at all.”
Remembering Duncan’s words: “They found me and infiltrated me—I could feel their tendrils, their fleshy-dry-cold-warm pseudopods and cilia and strands slowly sliding up my skin, like a hundred tiny hands. They tried to remake me in their image.”
“And you found a way to use him.” An echo of his voice against the stone. A place more like a memorial than a home.
“Yes. After a while. After we managed to remind him that he was human. Amazing how long that part took.”
Finch said, “What happened next?”
Pain in her smile. “Do you want to know a secret?”
He leaned in toward the Lady in Blue, humoring her. This close she looked somehow off-balance. Something in her eyes. The faint smell of cigars. Masked by the freshness of some subtle herb.
“Duncan Shriek isn’t dead,” she whispered.
Then she jabbed something into his neck.
No time for surprise. No time for anything but falling through the gullet of the skery. Again.
9
Came to: On the battlements of a fortress at night. Gun emplacements dark and menacing.
Duncan Shriek isn’t dead. For a moment he was losing his balance. Then someone propped him up from behind. I don’t believe it. Not Crossley, not Finch.
Cold, with a wind blowing. Above, the heavens, laced with stars that seemed to be falling in together. A wash of silver and gold across the sky. Beyond the walls, a vast empty space. A desert? In that space, a thousand green fires blossoming. He knew this place—he knew it. It had been in his memory bulb dream. Shriek’s memories. Bliss was here.
The Lady in Blue stood beside him again. Surrounded by dozens of soldiers. Intent on moving supplies, guard duty, or cleaning weapons.
“This is the monastery fortress of Zamilon, or at least a version of it,” the Lady in Blue said, as if reading his thoughts. “Abandoned for many decades, until we came along.”
Duncan: “Where the eastern approaches of the Kalif’s empire fade into the mountains no man can conquer, the ruined fortress of Zamilon keeps watch over time and the stars. Within the fortress … Truffidian monks guard the last true page of Tonsure’s famous journal.”
Below the battlements, the great hulking shadows of some kind of machinery. Engines of war flanking a wide road that led to a huge door. Looked like it was made half of volcanic rock and half of charred book cover. Set in the door, a smaller door, and a small door set into that one.
Painted and carved into every surface, radiating outward, the symbol from the scrap of paper:
Finch pointed to it. “What’s that?”
“It’s part of how we travel through the doors. Part of the … mechanism. But it means something different to the gray caps. It doesn’t work the same way for us as for them. Thankfully.”
Turned to the scene beyond the battlements. Furtive movement out there. Occluding the fires at times. A suggestion of long, wide limbs. Of misshapen heads.
“And all of that?”
“Those are the fires of enemy camps. Not gray caps. Not human. Something else. They don’t know what to make of us. And we don’t know what to make of them. But we have to hold this positison. Do you want to know why?”
Felt again like he was falling. “I’m not sure.”
The Lady in Blue pulled him around. Held him by the shoulders. A viselike grip. An almost inhuman strength. He understood now, on a physical level, how she had held on, and kept holding on, all this time.