The Nightmare Garden

got his throat cut a week later. It’s a cursed place.”

“You don’t seem like you’d believe in curses,” I murmured.

“I believe in a lot of things,” Rasputina snapped. “We’re diving. Get below.” She climbed down the conning tower, the thump of her boots against the ladder amplified in the ice field until each footstep was the thump of a coffin lid.

I stayed outside for a moment longer, hearing only my own breath against my mask.

At first I found the night around me silent except for the wind, but slowly I realized it wasn’t. The launch was about the size of a soccer pitch, ridiculously small when you thrust a military submersible into it. Displaced water sluiced against the hull, and out in the night I could hear the ice cracking and knocking, over and over. It was an endless rattle, the sound of bone against bone.

Bone against bone.

My Weird tingled, and I gasped at the sharp pain against the front of my skull. I fumbled at my goggles, yanking them off, trying to get all the metal off my body to relieve the pain. As the filtered glass came away from my eyes, a thin finger of violet light unfurled in the sky above me, like pale blood in dark water. It was joined by greens, blues, yellows, dancing in concert.

I’d seen lanternreels of the aurora borealis, but these lights were nothing like that. The violet streak moved with a pattern, a purpose, with none of the randomness that indicated true northern lights. It flowed toward a point directly to the east of me, where the moon should have been.

The purple light gathered into a starburst, and it touched the very top of something growing out of the ice, the same color as the glacier and nearly invisible in the low light. Something so large that, from my vantage on the tower of the Oktobriana, it was blotting out the moon. Something that was reflecting starlight, like the ice and the sky, invisible until the aurora touched its spire.

It was ice and sky, I realized as I stared, forgetting that I was cold and ignoring the tears the wind sparked in the corners of my eyes. The aurora illuminated the massive shape by degrees, gleaming against its translucent ice walls. It was a palace, the kind you’d see in lanternreels of faraway lands or read about in forbidden fairy tales.

Or maybe it was a giant tomb, the kind that held the kings and princes of old, before the Storm or any of this at all.…

The Bone Sepulchre. My breath hitched, and I was helpless to look away as the violet light illuminated the surface. It was beautiful.

“Effie!” Sorkin bellowed from below. “We’re diving! Get yourself below!”

“Just a minute!” I yelled back over the wind, unable to tear my eyes from the great edifice before me. I could pick it out of the glacier easily now. Smooth surfaces I’d taken for natural flaws became columns and balconies and a tower that reached so high it became part of the night sky.

The aurora flashed and vanished, all its energy running in lines down the Bone Sepulchre like an electric current through a living thing, lighting every window, every rampart, every spire. Shocked and overjoyed, I shouted for Rasputina and Sorkin to come topside and look, pulling aside my mask to scream until the cold stole my voice.

They came rushing up the ladder. The dive siren sounded below, but they ignored it, as transfixed as I was by the glowing sight before us.

Rasputina stared, her face slack with disbelief. “I’ll be damned. It’s real.”

“It was the ice. The—the sound it makes,” I stammered. “The sound like breaking bones. It made me think, and then I saw the lights.…”

“It was right here all this time,” Rasputina muttered. “I could have been making a fortune doing this run.”

I swung my leg over the conning tower and grabbed hold of the ladder leading down the outside, knowing what I had to do. I was so close—just a jump to the ice and a short walk to the dock.

“Where in this frozen hell do you think you’re going?” Rasputina shouted at me. “You’ll die out there with nothing but your coat!”

“Going where I meant to when I got on this boat!” I shouted back. I couldn’t risk waiting around for more trouble in getting where I was going. I could make it. The Bone Sepulchre was so close, I had to tilt my head back to see the top spire.

“You can’t trek over ice!” Rasputina bellowed. “The snow could be six feet deep, and who knows how far away that thing really is!”

“Thanks for everything,” I shouted, jumping from the bobbing boat to the ice. I turned back to wave to Rasputina and Sorkin. They’d taken me far enough. This part I could do on my own. The thought warmed me a bit. My satchel was under my coat—I had barely let it out of my sight since I’d boarded the Oktobriana, because if Rasputina or her crew found the compass or my diary … well, it didn’t bear thinking about. I had everything I needed, minus a plan, but I’d deal with that when I actually reached the Brotherhood.

“Dammit, girl!” Rasputina shouted, leaning over the railing of the tower. “I am not responsible for you any longer! You are insane!”

My feet dug into the ice for balance, and I stood for a moment, staring at the Bone Sepulchre. I couldn’t argue with Rasputina—the idea of trekking across ice and knocking on the Brotherhood’s door unannounced was insane—but off the boat, in the open air with no iron close to me, I felt more lucid than I had in days.

I started walking, Rasputina’s voice and the Oktobriana’s bulk fading behind me, until I was alone on the glacier, with only the stars for company.

The Bone Sepulchre was much farther away than it had looked under the glow of the aurora, and I felt as if I’d been walking for hours when I heard the bells. Not the dull tolling of the bells at St. Oppenheimer’s back in Lovecraft, but a light tinkling that traveled to my ears across the windswept waste.

A shape came into view, whiter than the starlit ice field: a low conveyance of some kind, pulled by another hulking white shape.

The shape stopped, and something that at least looked human tugged at reins hung with sleigh bells. “Whoa.”

The shape was alive. I stood perfectly still in surprise, wind buffeting the empty bits of my too-large coat and pants, as it huffed a puff of dragon’s breath at me. Horns curled behind the creature’s ears, and its fur hung shaggy and white. It stamped its black hooves and returned my stare with glowing gold eyes. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I just put up my hands in surrender. Better to let them think I was harmless, at least to start with.

Despite my gesture of surrender, the human in the sleigh pointed a very businesslike gun at me, which I found to be a bit extreme. “State your business,” the man snapped. His eyes were covered by goggles like my own, and his winter gear was completely white, down to the fur on his collar, which looked suspiciously like the coat of the thing that pulled the sleigh. I didn’t like talking to faceless people, be they Proctors or the Brotherhood, but I backed up a step and raised my hands higher.

“I’m Aoife Grayson,” I said, over the howling wind. “I’m here to—”

Before I could finish, the faceless man vaulted from his seat and grabbed me, pressing the gun into my side and shoving me toward the sleigh. “Get in and get on the floor. Facedown.”

I tried to comply, but he shoved me and I fell. My bulky coat saved me from smashing my ribs on the bench, but I landed on the satchel, and Draven’s compass dug uncomfortably into my side. That was fine. As long as this man didn’t think I was a spy, he could shove me around all he wanted. I’d do what I’d always done back in Lovecraft when faced with a bully: keep my head down and try not to draw attention.

The man holstered his gun and turned the sleigh around, clucking loudly at the creature pulling it until it broke into an awkward gallop.

“Boy oh boy,” the man muttered to himself. “Wait until they see who I’ve got here.” He let out a surprisingly high-pitched cackle for such a big, gruff type. I stayed quiet not so much because he scared me, but because I was finally sheltered from the wind, which was a relief.

The ride was bumpy, at least from where I lay on the floor. The ice looked smooth, but we jittered and bounced, and the thing pulling us panted in a harsh rhythm in sync with my heartbeat.

When we slowed, I chanced a look up. We had passed through a carved archway, and doors slid shut behind