Vespa stared at him. “You took that from Rackham, didn’t you?”
Charles’s grin looked ghastly in the half-lit shadows. “I can’t see how it matters, but yes.”
“Why, Charles? Why are you doing all this?” Vespa said. “My father has always been good to you. In time, he would have—”
The boy’s face hardened. “You will not interrogate me, witch. I will reveal my business all in good time. Enough talking. Move. And if you try to lead us into difficulty, Tinker boy, think again.”
He pushed them forward. The wraith who had once been a man shuffled along with the rest, as mindless and in thrall as the Tinkers at the Refineries.
CHAPTER 23
Syrus leads us out of the garden, across an old pasture, and into the eaves of the Forest. He hesitates a moment before choosing a path. The moon weaves odd shadows through the naked branches. There is much creaking and scraping, and far off, a lonely howl that sets Syrus shaking.
Charles is an ever-present menace behind us with his cursed soul jar. I’m reeling with what’s come to pass, even as I’m angry at myself for not being more careful. We should have waited longer or I should have tried to go alone. But since Charles infiltrated the Architects and has known everything all along, perhaps it never would have mattered. He has us all at his mercy.
I rub the toad and pebble together in my pocket. They make a sound like a cricket singing. I’ve been trying since the moment the Wad revealed himself to summon up energy of the sort Bayne used to rescue me from the Imperial Refinery, wondering if I could transport Syrus in the same way.
But there’s nothing inside me. I don’t know how to make the magic work. I am so angry and frustrated I could scream.
I don’t know exactly what Charles means about the werehound bite, but after a while, Syrus is limping.
“What happened?” I whisper.
“I broke into the Lowtown Refinery. A werehound bit me.” There’s pain in his tone deeper than just the fact of the wound.
“Why did you go and do a foolish thing like that?”
He looks aside at me. “Because you wouldn’t help me. I had to try to get my family out somehow.”
I blanch, glad for the cover of darkness. I pull the old scarf closer about me. “Your family is locked in the Refinery?”
“Yes. With a bunch of other Tinkers. They turned my people into werehounds, too.”
His words clip off like there’s more that he just can’t bear to say. It strikes me how vulnerable he is. I can’t bear to tell him what I saw in the Imperial Refinery—the Tinkers being shoved into the boiler and made into wights. What if those people were his family?
“You’re very brave,” I say, “to have gone in after them like that.”
“Thanks.” He wipes his nose. I see the glimmer of snot or tears.
What he says next stabs me to the heart. “If you have so much power, why don’t you use it now to get us out of this?”
I realize he is just questioning the truth as he sees it, just as I did with Bayne many a time. I swallow an angry retort. “I’m trying. It’s just . . . I really don’t know how.”
Syrus snorts. “Figures.”
“Quiet!” Charles says behind us. “I have ways of stitching your mouths shut, you know.”
I very nearly turn and run back to punch him in the face, but I don’t. Yet it’s as if he hears my thoughts for, suddenly, Charles yanks me backward and closes his fist around mine.
“Enough of that,” he hisses.
I pull my hand from his grip.
“Be assured I can turn you to dust if I choose,” he says in my ear.
“Well, why don’t you?” I say. My destiny seems to be dust, no matter what I do. The stench of his breath makes me want to gag. “Why all the games? Just do it and have done!”
He releases my hand and steps back, far enough out of reach that I can’t punch him as I’d like.
“Whether I like it or not, I need you. But only for a little while longer. After that, you’re of no further use to me. Now move along.”
I turn and continue behind Syrus. We’re on a narrow part of the trail, so I get as close behind him as I can without stepping on his heels. “When the time comes,” I whisper to the back of his head, “you run like mad and get Bayne.”
He nods slightly, enough to show me he’s heard.
The rest of the walk is a grim march through moonlight. The wraith stumbles over roots and breaks limbs, his breath as heavy and ungainly as his shambling, and it makes me sick to the core. Though I joked that Charles was capable of much evil, I never guessed that he would be far more powerful or dastardly than anything my vivid imagination could conceive. He was always a nuisance, a thief of my father’s attention and time, but the sheer malevolence of his designs astonishes me. And what is the ultimate goal? To build some Engine that will take him back to Old London? Whatever for?
At last, Syrus stops at the edge of a clearing.
“Here,” he whispers.
I can see a bit of a mound, covered with bracken and tumbled flint that glows softly in the moonlight. A ticking sound, a little
I stare into the darkness of the Manticore’s den. Charles tells his men to surround the clearing, and they go stomping off. I can’t believe the Manticore isn’t awake and already ripping out their throats.
“Now,” Charles says to me, “it’s your turn. Lure her out and the men will chain her and bring her back to Virulen.”
I’m about to protest, but Charles grabs Syrus by the collar. He’s fingering the lid of his horrid jar with the other. “You don’t want to be responsible for a boy wraith, do you? Summon the Manticore!”
I think wildly about our options. If I could get the jar from Charles, could I use it on him? If I can summon the Manticore, can I convince her to kill him and not me and Syrus? I don’t know.
Charles shoves me out of the trees. Faintly from somewhere behind me, I hear singing—a boy’s voice. Syrus. I stumble for several paces before I fall to the ground on my hands and knees. Twigs and gravel and . . . bones? . . . dig into my palms. The ticking grows louder and there’s a glow like the sun come to earth. My heart slams into my mouth. I crouch in a ball, all my vicious anger at Charles draining into a terrifying déjà vu. I am as I was before the Sphinx and this time there is no one to save me.
I look up and the Manticore smiles at me.
There are three rows of iron teeth behind that smile, but it’s the ticking that draws my eyes. Her clockwork heart burns with a spectral fire in her chest.
The Manticore’s voice is a chiming bell. In her song, I hear the shape of words, but they wash over me in waves of liquid silver. I cannot understand them.
The men creep forward with their chains. I’ve betrayed her. I’ve betrayed everything that I’m just beginning to believe in. I sob.
“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” I babble it over and over as if I’m only seven instead of seventeen.
And then her eyes look into mine. By the light of her heart they are blue, bluer than any ocean or sky or flower I’ve ever seen, bluer even than Bayne’s eyes just before we kissed. And I can’t hear anything. All is still.
Fierce compassion washes over me, a feeling I always expected to feel during the long masses to the saints, but never quite did. She understands me with a deep knowing that I can’t even begin to fathom.
“Why?” I whisper.
