Dying Is My Business

arms and—

“You’re awfully quiet back there,” she said.

I took a deep breath and collected myself. “So, um, what are you going to call it? All magic charms have names, don’t they?”

“Most do,” she said. “Usually it’s a combination of the primary engineer’s last name and the function of the spell, like the Avasthi phalanx or the Mamatas silencer.”

I thought about it a moment. “I suppose the Savory lifesaver is out of the question?”

“Yeah, I think we can do better,” she said. “But I don’t care what they call it. I only care that it works.”

“You knew I’d come back,” I said. “Even though I told Isaac I wouldn’t.”

“Of course I knew. You’re like a bad headache, Trent. There’s just no getting rid of you.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you actually missed me.”

She barked out a sharp laugh. “Actually, I was enjoying the relative quiet in your absence. You weren’t gone long enough to miss.”

“But if I had been, you would have missed me.”

“Keep it up and I’ll put that amulet to the test after all,” she said.

We walked through an arched doorway into an enormous, underground Gothic chapel. We passed through rows of tombs arranged along the floor, stone sarcophagi with carvings of knights, kings, and queens lying in repose on the lids. In the light of Bethany’s charm, I saw more sarcophagi inside the numerous nooks carved into the walls. We went through a door on the far side of the chapel and descended more stairs. Once more I had the feeling we were descending into the depths of a great tower that had been swallowed by the earth. At the bottom of the steps, the corridor branched off in three different directions. Without a moment’s hesitation Bethany started down the passageway on the right, and I realized then what I should have from the start: Bethany knew exactly where she was going. In a dark underground labyrinth like this, with no map and no guide, that could only mean one thing.

“You’ve been here before,” I said.

“Once, a few years back,” she answered. “I had questions about my parents, who they were, why they abandoned me. I thought the oracles could tell me, or at least help me find them.”

“Did they?”

“They wouldn’t see me. They didn’t even open the door.” She stopped, shining her light on a pair of huge metal doors that towered before us. “Let’s hope this time they do.”

The doors stood nearly twenty feet tall, coming together at the top in a pointed arch. The knockers, two heavy bronze rings, hung low enough on the doors for someone of average height to reach. Bethany, not being of average height, had to stand on her tiptoes to swing one. The knocker fell against the door with a loud, deep noise that reverberated in my chest and echoed through the corridor. We waited. And waited. The doors didn’t open. Bethany knocked again, and again nothing happened.

She couldn’t hide the disappointment in her face. “They still won’t see me,” she said. She sounded ashamed, as if she were being punished for some imagined infraction. “Isaac was right, he should have come, not me. This is my fault.”

“The hell it is,” I said. I grabbed the knocker and slammed it hard against the metal. “Open the damn door!”

The doors opened this time, swinging inward on ancient, creaking hinges. We looked at each other, surprised. Even more surprising was that no one was waiting on the other side of the threshold. Apparently, the doors had opened on their own.

“Okay, that’s not creepy or off-putting at all,” Bethany said.

We walked cautiously inside. The doors swung closed behind us, once again seemingly on their own. The light from Bethany’s charm snapped off suddenly, plunging us into pitch-blackness.

“Turn it back on,” I whispered.

“I didn’t turn it off,” she answered. She cursed and shook the charm like it was a flashlight with dying batteries, but it stayed dark.

A moment later, the room lit up as the flames of dozens of candles sprang to life around us. We were standing in a circle of tall candelabras arranged in the center of a large chamber. And yet, despite the plentiful candles, everything outside the circle remained as black as night, as if the light itself refused to go there.

Dozens of birdcages were interspersed with the candelabras, hanging on hooks at the end of long chains that stretched down from the darkness above us. A few of the cages had birds in them, pigeons, warblers, and sapsuckers that hopped or fluttered their wings. The rest of them were empty. The chamber floor was carpeted with shed feathers, so many they could have come from whole flocks. They must have kept a lot of them as pets over the years.

A voice boomed out of the darkness, thunderous and echoing. “Speak.” It seemed to come from high above us, as though the oracles were up by the ceiling, or perhaps giants stuffed into the chamber somehow. I couldn’t see a thing, though. Looking up into the dark was like looking into a starless night sky.

A pigeon cooed nervously. Bethany cleared her throat. “My name is Bethany Savory—”

“We know who you are,” the voice interrupted.

“You are not of interest to us,” a second voice said, somewhere to the right of the first.

“Nor is the question of your heritage,” said a third, off to the left.

“I’m not here about me,” she said. I had to hand it to her. She was remarkably calm. It wasn’t everyone who could keep their composure after being told the biggest question of their life didn’t matter. “We’ve come in search of information.”

“You have questions,” the first voice said.

“Questions you believe we can answer,” the second voice said.

“Yet we answer no questions without payment,” said the third.

“I brought an offering,” Bethany said.

“Bring it forward.”

At the far edge of the circle of candles, a chain descended suddenly from the darkness above. On its end was a thick metal hook. Bethany walked to it, hung the birdcage on the hook, and stepped back again.

The darkness on the other side of the candles seemed to swell, billowing forward to envelope the birdcage. In the dark I heard the starlings struggle, flapping their wings in panic. Their shrill birdcalls were cut off a moment later with a sickening crunch.

I looked down and noticed the tiny bones scattered among the feathers on the floor. The birds weren’t pets. They were snacks.

The darkness receded, leaving an empty birdcage behind. Another, smaller circle of candelabras appeared suddenly, deeper inside the chamber, illuminating an old wooden table with an hourglass on top of it. As I watched, the sands in the hourglass began to fall.

“Ask your questions and we will answer,” a voice said. “When the sand runs out, we will answer no more.”

Bethany took another deep breath, steeling herself. “We seek the location of Stryge’s body.”

“You will find him to the north, in the same place where he fell in battle.”

“Stryge still sits upon his throne, entombed deep beneath the stones of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa.”

“And the stones of Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert.”

“And Bonnefont-en-Comminges.”

“And Trie-en-Bigorre.”

“And Froville.”

Bethany shook her head. “Wait, I don’t understand. I don’t know those names. Please, we don’t have time for riddles. Can’t you just tell us where his body is?”

“We have answered your question already. We will not answer it a second time. Yet the sand still runs. Time remains for other questions, and other answers.”

Bethany swallowed hard and nodded. She thought for a moment, then said, “If we’re too late and Stryge wakes up, how can we kill him?”

“What you ask is impossible. Stryge is an Ancient.”

“A primal entity forged in magic and eternity.”