The Dragon's Tooth Part 18

In the dim orange light, he could see that Antigone was still. Nolan was stirring. Cyrus held his breath and waited. The boy's red welts had almost disappeared, replaced with empty blisters of scaly skin. Cyrus unwound Patricia from his wrist, and she looked at him with bright emerald eyes. In the low light, her silver body actually glowed. He stroked her head with his thumb, and she slid forward, rubbing her whole body against it.

He eased the key ring down to her tail. Solomon Keys dropped into his hand.

twelve.

BURIAL.

CYRUS DUCKED OUT of the door. Inching along the shadowy planks, he stopped at the showers. The faint glow from Nolan's lantern barely reached his feet, giving him just enough light to see what he was doing. Gripping the three charms and the key ring tight, he stuck the shafts of the two keys into the nearest falling stream of water. He could see nothing in the splashing, but his arm grew suddenly heavy. Breathing hard, he slid back from the edge and looked at the keys in his hand.

Greeves hadn't lied.

One gold, one silver, but shaped like no keys he had ever seen, and heavier than they had any right to be. The gold one had a hollow triangle at its head, a square in its center, and a circle at its end. Smooth teeth lined its shaft on every side. The silver one was thin and bent like an elongated and slightly corks.c.r.e.w.i.n.g crescent moon. Some kind of writing, shaped like Arabic, had been etched into its surface, but Cyrus wasn't going back to the light for a closer look.

Dropping the heavy keys into his pocket, he made his way into the deep blackness of the Polygon.

Once Cyrus had managed to open the door and hop barefoot over the flooded threshold, he had enough nervous energy to rush the stairs, skipping slippery steps as he went. The hallway above was dimly lit, and he found his way quickly back into the big blue-glowing room beneath the water maze. From there, rather than trying to retrace Mrs. Eldridge's route, he headed for the iron spiral stairs he'd seen earlier, cobwebbed into a dark corner. His bare feet scuffed through heavy dust on the cold stone floor and found the metal stairs. The treads were rough with rust blisters, and Cyrus climbed slowly, his heart pounding against his molars.

He wound his way above the thick gla.s.s ceiling and into a tall shaft. Two of the walls were gla.s.s, with views into the maze, and the higher Cyrus climbed, the more terrifying the maze became. It was as tall as it had been wide-a full cube-with underwater tunnels tangled in an impossible three-dimensional knot of drowning potential.

Cyrus reached the top and stepped out into a high-ceilinged room with a single dangling light in its center, glowing like the moon. The floor was tiled around the edges, but the entire center was gla.s.s, sealing the water maze in all but two small open hatches in opposite corners-an entrance and an exit, with a whole lot of wet death in between.

Cyrus moved toward the closer one, trying to imagine what it would be like to drop in and swim into total confusion. The water rippled slightly at his feet, and his chest tightened. What would it feel like to have panicked lungs fill with water? His father knew.

Something moved beneath the gla.s.s. A quick shadow. And then water erupted at Cyrus's feet, and arms slapped at the tiled edge. Cyrus yelled, jumped backward, slipped, and sat down. Puddles raced toward him, and he scrambled up onto his feet.

Gasping, Diana Boone pulled herself up out of the maze and rolled onto her back. She was wearing a black suit with leggings that reached her ankles, but her tan arms and freckled shoulders were bare. The st.i.tches were gone from the gash at the base of her neck. Spitting to the side, she reached up and pulled her hair loose from its ponytail.

"You okay?" Cyrus asked.

Startled, Diana twisted around, and then sat up. Still panting, she smiled and nodded. "What are you doing here?"

Cyrus shrugged. "Just looking around."

Diana stood up and began wringing her hair out over her shoulder. "Well, be careful. Rupe has beefed up security. Acolytes are supposed to be in quarters, but especially you."

"What? Why?"

Diana's eyes widened. "You have to know. Rupe called a big meeting, Keepers and Explorers together." She paused, and her voice softened. "He said that Phoenix is after you and that he already has your older brother. I'm really sorry."

Cyrus swallowed and then nodded. He wasn't sure what to say.

Diana stepped toward him. "Rupe even tried to put us on gun-ready-sidearms at all times. He thinks Maxi might try to drop in. Cecil put a stop to that, but a lot of people will still be carrying. I would if I were you. And not just because of Maxi. Some of the Keepers are possum-scared and some are hornet-mad. They'd throw anyone overboard if it kept Phoenix away."

She rubbed her wound, thinking. "Keep a special eye on the guardsmen and groundskeepers. They're all working off demotions or debts-by far the surliest." She looked at Cyrus's bare feet in the puddle she'd made, and then back up at his face. "I need to go, and so should you. I'm in on a few flights tonight."

Cyrus watched Diana collect a small bundle of clothes along with a large, holstered revolver. She looked back at him when she reached a swinging locker room door.

"You're not heading back to your room, are you?"

Cyrus shook his head.

Diana laughed. "You really are a Smith. You know, my dad knew yours. I've heard the stories."

The door swung, and Diana Boone was gone.

Cyrus looked around. The room held what looked like another locker room door and then two big wooden doors set into arches on opposite ends. He hurried for the closer one and tugged it open on quiet hinges. Stone stairs led straight up, and he jogged them quickly while the door closed behind him. At the top, he followed a hallway around two corners and then paused. He'd reached a covered stone sky bridge lined with windows on both sides. Out one side, he could see the great lawn, the lit fountain, and a small group of men moving around with rifles. Out the other side, a half-moon hung between jutting statues on the high roofline of the main building, a chewed pearl stuck in some monstrous jaw.

Cyrus hurried across the bridge and banged into a locked door hidden in shadow.

"Darn it." He turned around. Back to the water maze? The heavy keys were pressing against his hip. Digging them out quickly, he faced the door.

"Don't worry," Cyrus said quietly. Antigone was asleep and nowhere near, but he could still hear her worry in his head. "I'm not going to steal anything."

Behind Cyrus, moonlight sprayed through the windows, but in front of him the door was in total shadow. He felt for a keyhole, but he couldn't even find a k.n.o.b.

Cyrus tucked the key ring into his mouth. Then he unwound Patricia and held her next to the door, her silver body pooling light on the dark wood. The keyhole was set exactly in the middle, but Patricia quickly ate her own tail and disappeared.

"C'mon." Cyrus unwound Patricia again. Her emerald eyes stared at him. Her mouth opened, and her tail flicked up.

"Uh-uh," Cyrus said. Before he could think, he popped the tip of his forefinger into her mouth. She hesitated, looking at him, and then she slid herself up past his first knuckle and wrapped her body tight around his fingers.

Cyrus laughed, spitting the keys down into his free palm. "I hope you come off just as easy." He held his snaked hand up to the door and looked at the keyhole. It wasn't small. He slid the gold key in easily and felt the metal change in his hand. He turned the key. Inside the door, a latch clicked. Cyrus pulled what was now a plain gold skeleton key out of the hole, glanced at it, dropped it into his pocket, and pushed open the door.

Holding Patricia up in front of him, Cyrus moved into a narrow arched hallway. Small doors pocked the walls. Stone faces, part bust, part gargoyle, looked down at him from the ceiling. Light glowed beneath one of the doors, and he could hear the low mumble of voices.

Cyrus hurried forward. Beside a large tapestry of a woman decapitating a unicorn, the hallway ended in a tight stone spiral stair. Up or down? Cyrus went down, moving in Patricia's faint silver light.

At the bottom, he entered an undecorated hallway. The ceiling was higher and the hall was longer, but there were only two facing doors. Both were black riveted steel. One had been left open.

Listening to his drumming pulse, Cyrus stared at it. He could hear footsteps. He saw flashlights. Tugging his finger out of Patricia's mouth, he jumped backward into the shadow of the spiral stairs.

Exhaling and biting his tongue, Cyrus leaned his head into the hallway. Two men, nothing but shapes behind their flashlights, stood at the open door.

"I don't care," one of them said. "He can't make us open it. We checked the lock and that's that. If Rupe wants to check the inside of a Burial, he can do it himself. I might be stuck as a watchman for the next two months, but I'm not the b.l.o.o.d.y Avengel."

The other man spoke, but his voice was too low to make out, swallowed by whispering echoes. Cyrus slid forward.

"Can't see the fuss of it all," the first one said. "Double guards and Burial checking? Does he think old Rasputin's gonna up and walk away? And what exactly am I gonna do if he does? Or Tamerlane? I'd like to see the two of us put that one back to bed."

The black door boomed shut behind them, and flashlights flicked in both directions. "Who's Rupe protecting anyhow? Skelton's mutts? And for what? They'll be twice the trouble he was-there being two of them-and it's Billy's own outlaw friends that have Rupe sweating." The man snorted and then shivered loudly. "Truth? Run me into that nightmare Maxi, and I'd hand those two Smiths right over-with Parmesan, too, and an offer to grind the pepper. And Phoenix is worse than worse. Will you be dying for those two?"

"No, sir," said the second man. "Leave the dying to Rupe."

The men had turned and were walking away, voices fading with their footsteps.

Cyrus stepped into the dark hallway. When it was as silent as it was dark, he found Patricia's head and popped his finger back in her mouth. She didn't even seem surprised, sliding all the way up to the second knuckle. Holding his coiled silver light above his head, Cyrus moved slowly to the big black door. He slid his hand over the cold, rivet-puckered steel and found a single star-shaped keyhole beneath a heavy ring.

He looked around. Why not? Rupert had basically told him to test the keys. He breathed slowly, trying to quiet his pulse. His muscles were tightening-he felt just like he had before he'd climbed onto the roof of his school with a bucket of water balloons. Antigone would hate this. Dan would yell at him. He had no endgame at all. The princ.i.p.al would ask him exactly what he had been thinking, and there would be no answer. But still ... he dug out his keys. The gold one was too big. The silver one slid in easily, became a starred shaft, and turned.

Beneath his hand, Cyrus felt a quiet series of shafts sliding and tumblers tumbling. And then, nothing. He removed the key, and the heavy iron ring on the door sighed when Cyrus lifted it. The door swung in. Cold breath crawled out of the darkness and into Cyrus's lungs.

Cyrus stepped forward. The floor was colder beneath his bare feet, and his faint silver light didn't seem to penetrate the darkness beyond the door. He moved all the way in.

The room was an empty cube, entirely lined with the same black riveted steel as the door. Cyrus stretched his lit hand from side to side, to the ceiling, to the floor, straining his eyes. The floor in the center of the room was patterned-a small circle surrounded by a large ring of flat steel petals, like a black armored sunburst. In the very center, there was a keyhole. Cyrus moved toward it, easing his bare feet onto the broad steel petals. They were the source of the cold, and for a moment, he thought his feet would freeze in place. He knelt and inched forward on his knees, breathing hard.

"What do you think, Patricia?" Cyrus whispered. He was already pulling out his keys. His legs were frozen, his hands were almost pale. The gold key slid down into the floor. But he didn't turn it. He looked over his shoulder at the door and listened for footsteps. Nothing. He should go back. But retreating now would only mean coming back again later. Tomorrow. Next week. He wouldn't be able to leave it alone. Not for long.

Cyrus shivered. He was here now....

Bracing himself, Cyrus turned the key, and the floor began to fall away beneath him. Jerking the key back out, he dove onto his side, rolling clear of the growing hole. Steel whispered to steel as the petals dropped to form another spiral stair. Cyrus scrambled to his feet. Frigid air rolled across the floor, and pale-blue light flickered on the ceiling above the shaft.

"Right," Cyrus said, and he moved to the stairs. Patricia tightened on his fingers. He knew what he was doing. Maybe. This had to be one of the Burials. There could be a dead body at the bottom-maybe a frozen body. Maybe two. But whatever it was, he was going to see it. He was going to go down even if it froze his feet off.

Why? He could hear Antigone's frantic, absent objection. You can't. You shouldn't. Don't!

Cyrus bit his lip and inched forward. Why? Why had he gone through every room in the Archer, opening every drawer, every closet, and lifting every mattress? Why had he pulled tires from streams and wormed beneath the floorboards of barns and climbed into the ceiling of his mother's hospital room? Because he needed to.

As he descended into the cold blue light, Cyrus clutched Patricia's body as tightly as she clutched him. Green mixed with blue, flickering like fire. But it couldn't be fire. The colors were wrong. And it was cold.

Around each step, Cyrus expected to see the source of the light. But around each step, he found only more steps. The steel ran out and became stone. Another slow turn and his feet splashed into moving water. Cyrus didn't even notice.

In front of him, a large room was full of fast water, swirling in a whirlpool that reached every wall. Down in the whirlpool's mouth, before it became a throat, there was a nest of icy blue-and-green flame. In the center of that nest, a black stone column ran down out of sight. On top of the column, a man sat with his legs crossed. Cyrus could see the thick iron bands that clamped his crossed legs to the stone. But he could not see the man's arms. Fifty feet-at least-of brown beard and hair had tangled around his shoulders and arms and was stretched out in the swirling water like seaweed, even reaching the walls. The man's face was oddly peaceful, even n.o.ble. He looked like he was lost in some distant, slow-moving dream, or was savoring the warm crawl of a summer breeze on his face-as if his surroundings, the water, the stone, the cold fire and iron bands, were all illusion. His eyes were closed, and his skin was translucent white. In the center of his forehead, there was a brutal hole the size of a bullet.

While Cyrus stared, the flames between him and the man receded slightly. Something liquid, something warm and alive, reached into him. He could feel it racing in his veins. His jaw locked, and every hair on his body stood up and screamed.

Kill me.

He heard the voice, but the man on the column had not moved. His eyes were still closed.

The Reaper's Blade. Come. Cut me loose from this flesh.

Cyrus's right foot slid forward and down a step, deeper into the rushing water. What was he doing? He tried to jerk his foot back. He tried to pull himself away. His other foot was moving forward. The flames shrunk further.

I can live in you- In a rush, the flames rebounded, roaring to the ceiling. The voice was gone, ripped from Cyrus like his own gut. Gulping, gasping for breath, Cyrus fell backward onto the stairs.

As the flames receded to their original height, the bearded man raised his head slowly, opened his eyes, and looked into Cyrus's.

Crab-crawling frantically, Cyrus made it up around the first bend and out of sight. Coughing, still fighting for breath, he rolled onto his knees, scrambled to his feet, raced up the stairs, and tumbled out onto the steel floor. Then he crawled back to the keyhole, slid in the gold key with a shaking hand, and managed to twist before he dropped onto his face. The stairs rose slowly back up into the floor.

His hands were twitching. His stomach, knotted in fear, was loosening into nausea. His face, pressed against the icy steel floor, still dripped with sweat. Patricia stared at him from around his finger. She'd loosened her grip, but his finger was stinging. She might have bitten him.

"I'm sorry," Cyrus mumbled. "I'll listen to you next time."

He forced himself up. He needed to get out. Now.

He managed to pull the big door closed quietly, and made sure that it had locked. Then he staggered for his little spiral stairs and the long trek home.

He stopped. Voices. Laughter rolled out of the stairwell. Flashlights.

No. Cyrus spun around. No, no, no.

He ran down the length of the hallway on boiled legs, rounded a corner, sprinted another length, and dead-ended at a door. Not locked. He didn't need the keys. Dropping them into his pocket, he slipped carefully through onto a cold marble floor. Another hallway, this one with sconces on crowded walls, burning low enough that the paintings and maps were mere shapes in shadow. He popped the still-glowing Patricia off his finger and raised her to his neck.

Beneath his bare feet, the floor became rough with mosaic.

A final corner and he knew where he was. He had reached the main hallway-big leather boat, reptilian skin, fresco-mapped ceilings and mosaic-mapped floors, all sleeping in shadow. He slowed down. Two chatting watchmen disappeared through a distant door.

Cyrus could see the entrance to the Galleria. Another fifty yards and he would be at the dining hall. Through the dining hall and he would reach the kitchen.

Food. At the suggestion, his body roared to life with complaints. He needed something to settle his stomach and refill his veins, something to take the wobble out of his legs and the panic out of his mind. He needed something to make him stop shivering and shaking. Then he could start his trek back.

Battling to keep his breathing low and his feet from slapping, he jogged close to the wall around statues and tables and tusked skulls.

He reached the dining hall and ducked out of dimness, through swinging doors, and into black nothing. He had only ever seen the s.p.a.ce from behind a heating grate, not well enough to pa.s.s through it blind, but he didn't bother Patricia again. Pausing inside the doors, his wide eyes strained for the faintest dusting of light. His pulse thundered, his ears rang, and the dim outline of a door appeared in the distance.

A plane pa.s.sed overhead.

Cyrus felt his way through a graveyard of tables, burdened with upside-down chairs, b.u.mping and adjusting his course until he finally reached the kitchen door and pushed it open on tired hinges.

Fire Island was dormant. The wall of copper kettles, pots, and skillets was fully armored. Beyond the wall of windows, a swollen half-moon skunk-striped the black lake. Harbored boats rocked naked masts. Flashlights and colored wands bobbed around the airfield. A plane, twin engines whining, pa.s.sed by the windows, eased itself away from the earth, and disappeared.

In the kitchen, only one small, elbowed lamp was lit beside a large pot-a copper vat-squatting on a low-flame burner near the windows. Spices, bottles, and a tub of mola.s.ses were scattered around it.

Cyrus rounded the island and approached the light. Steam was rising from the pot, and so was a smell to melt his heart. Barbecue sauce. It had to be. And stronger than most. Cyrus's mouth was suddenly liquid. Dan had tried to barbecue at first, but only ever with bottles of store sauce, and not for a while. Meat was expensive. This simmering joy was different. This would be sauce like his father's had been-or better.

Inhaling slowly, Cyrus rose onto his toes and examined the thick brown surface inside the pot. A slow bubble grew and burst, releasing spiced breath from the depths. He couldn't resist. Cyrus tapped the side of the pot, testing for heat, and then dipped his finger. Hot. Perfect. He raised it to his mouth.

A hairy fist clamped onto his wrist and spun him around. Big Ben Sterling loomed above him.

"What thief is this?" the cook asked.

"I-I'm sorry," Cyrus stammered. "I-You said-"

"Cyrus Smith, is it?" The cook scratched his unnetted beard. The very tip was tied tight with a small pink ribbon. Sterling grinned. "Ben did tell you to help yourself, didn't he? Well, not to this." He looked at the pot. "This needs testing, and that's a job for the vice-cook."

Grabbing a rag, he swabbed Cyrus's finger clean.

"I'm sorry," Cyrus said again. "It smells really good."

"That it does, lad," Sterling said. "But smell is only the beginning." Releasing Cyrus's wrist, he stepped back, and his thin metal legs were invisible in the darkness. He looked like a huge man levitating on his knees. The bells were missing from his ears. "Now tell me why Cyrus Smith is out wandering the night's middle while the Keepers are all in a beer froth about his safety?"