tunnel.
“You must think you’re very brave,” said the Faceless in the lead.
“No,” I said. “Not brave. Just determined.”
“Come, then,” another said. “Come with us, and see the one who waits.”
12
Across the Bleak Plain
THE FACELESS TRAVELED on foot and kept their circle tight around me, until I felt as if I’d smother.
As we left the city behind, I tried to move out of the tight knot of black robes, but the nearest Faceless hissed, sounding more like a serpent than a thing that was even remotely human, and I shrank back. “I’m sorry,” I said.
As we walked, the sun grew lower in the sky, a violet sunset that cast all of the land in a strange purple glow. I sped up my stride to get closer to the figure in the lead.
“How far are we going?”
“Two day’s walk from here lies the domain of the Yellow King,” said the Faceless.
“I am human,” I reminded him. “I need rest and food and water.”
“We will stop when it reaches full dark,” said the creature. “At the edge of the Moaning Marsh.”
“I can’t tell you how excited I am about that,” I muttered under my breath, but I resigned myself to walking until the Faceless were good and ready to stop.
The land flattened out, the short grass and scrub giving way to dense thickets and underbrush, and the land at the edges of the road growing wetter. The smell of decay and the whine of insects permeated the air around us, and I slapped at every inch of bare skin. I still ended up covered in welts.
I envied the Faceless their cloaks, and their lack of faces.
Finally, when I was just about to collapse and refuse to go any farther, the group circling me veered off the path. I saw a rough camp set up, a fire pit and some battered lean-tos. The stink of the marsh was all around us, and I realized that I’d be lucky to get any sleep.
“Here,” said the leader. He was a bit taller than the others, but that was the only way I could differentiate him. “We rest.”
The robed figures left the road and re-formed their circle, hunkering down on the ground like crows coming to roost. Their cowls drooped over the voids underneath, and after a time I could hear nothing but a slight wind through the reeds of the nearby marsh.
The ever-present cold of the Deadlands soon found its way into my bones, and I made my way back over to their small group and nudged the leader of the Faceless. “I’m cold.”
I got no reaction, and when I waved my hand in front of their cowls, nothing stirred. At least that left me free to go build a fire, if I could find anything to burn.
The marsh stretched as far as I could see, the dank smell of rotting plants rising up to meet my nose as I squelched through the mud, picking off the gray branches of drowned trees where I could find them. The wood was light and dry and would burn well.
I missed my father all the time, but I’d never missed him more than at that moment. He could light fire with a thought—it was his Weird. I had to resort to finding two rocks and striking them together until a spark finally caught the dried grass and twigs I’d stuffed into the center of a pile of sticks.
The Faceless paid no more attention to the fire than they had to me, and I drew close to it, holding my hands above the flames and trying to tuck my jacket around me.
I didn’t think I could sleep with all the worries about Dean, meeting the king and getting us both out of here banging in my head, but I’d drifted off, head bowed low, before I realized it.
The sound that woke me was inhuman, even for this place. It rose from within the earth, low and then oscillating higher and higher until I thought my eardrums would burst. It retreated, increased, as if everything around me in the marsh was screaming.
I got up and pulled a branch from the fire, the flame at the end of it flickering before me as I walked toward the sound. The Faceless never stirred, the wind ruffling the edges of their robes. They paid no more mind to it than statues would.
The marsh mud sucked at my feet, but the ground seemed firm enough a few inches down. I saw a blue light ahead, bobbing and weaving through the drowned forest, and doused my flame to follow it.
I couldn’t say why I was creeping around the Deadlands in the dark, just that the strange sounds and the blue light had captivated me. Dimly, I realized I was under the same sort of compulsion as when Lei had drugged me, but I couldn’t stop moving.
There were more lights, more moaning, only now it resolved into voices, whispers too indistinct to make out what they were saying.
All around me, the blue lights blossomed, and I could see they were tiny bodies, faces, with black eyes and long black teeth dripping with marsh muck.
I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t even do that.
All at once, just as I was starting to panic, a different kind of glow filled the marsh, and the bobbing blue shapes fled, screeching. The marsh gave one last, heaving groan and then everything settled again, except for the ever-present wind.
“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” a voice said. The syllables were clipped, from somewhere in Europe.
Reality crashed down around me like a thunderstorm, and I came back to myself. I found myself no longer standing in mud but in water up to my chest, feet sinking deeper into the muck with every passing second.
“Stay calm,” the voice said. “They lure you into the water and you drown without even realizing it. Before you can blink, you’re one of them, trapped in the Moaning Marsh for eternity.”
“You sure know a lot about this place,” I managed. The water was freezing, and my teeth chattered so violently I could barely talk.
“I’ve spent many nights here watching the glow,” the voice said. “Those things—I think they’re dead creatures from the marsh. Certainly not human.” The owner of the voice glided into view, managing to stay on top of the marsh even as I sank deeper.
“I try to help travelers when I can,” said Tesla. “But you’re not just a traveler, are you?”
I gaped, and stopped trying to stay afloat. Rancid water flowed over my lips and up my nose and I choked.
“Easy, easy,” he said. “You’ve got to move toward the shore.” Like the souls I’d encountered in the Iron Land, he possessed a slight silver glow, and when he glided closer to me, he illuminated solid ground about five yards away. “You can do it,” Tesla said. “You just can’t panic.”
I tried to move slowly, to float rather than sink, and eventually I pulled myself into the relatively solid mud, shaking uncontrollably.
“There, now.” He crouched beside me as I spat marsh water. I took the opportunity to look him in the eye, still hardly able to believe that out of all the souls roaming the Deadlands, I’d encountered him. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“You and I have very different ideas about ‘not so bad,’ ” I told him.
Tesla cracked a thin smile. “And I meant what I said before. I see a lot of Walkers, but you’re not one of them. You’re not just passing through; you’re going somewhere.”
“To see the king,” I agreed. His expression told me everything I needed to know about that idea. I tried to
