Page 122 of The Mask Falling

The other voyants passed us at an intersection. Nods were exchanged, but none of them asked questions.

After that sole encounter, our group was alone. At times, we passed between tunnels using small holes in the walls. Ankou helped me through the first one, preventing me from falling through and cracking my skull on the floor. Once I had the knack for it, I could do it alone.

Monotony was setting in when the tunnels finally surprised me. One moment, Ivy was ahead of me; the next time I raised my headlamp, she was gone. So were all the others. Even though their dreamscapes had swerved left, all my light revealed was a dead end.

“In the corner.” Malperdy spoke around the bulk of Arcturus. “See where the walls don’t meet?”

My gloved hand found the opening. Like the entrance in the parking garage, it was so narrow that I felt a need to suck in my breath as I sidestepped into the tight space beyond. A beam of light shone just ahead of me. I followed, stale air congesting my throat, and imagined dust forming gray clumps in lungs.

At the end of the crevice, I emerged, weak-kneed, and found myself on an old iron staircase that corkscrewed out of sight. When I stepped onto it, it creaked under my weight, joining other metallic groans from below. I gripped the thin handrail. Steps had rusted away here and there, forcing me to pin my attention to my boots. At the bottom, I looked up, neck aching.

Ahead, the ground was no longer smooth. For an absurd moment, I thought the fragments were debris from a cave-in. Next, they whittled themselves into serried pieces of wood, stored down here for some unknown purpose. It was only when the truth was the last remaining option—an option too ghoulish to contemplate—that I started to pick out the shapes in the clutter. An ear-shaped curve that could only be part of a pelvis. Cracked knurls of knuckle and spine. The scalloped edge of a sternum. Bones on bones, brown with age, lying unnamed in the depths of the citadel.

I had never feared human remains. As a mollisher, I had stumbled upon more than one corpse. I had polished skulls to a shine at the black market. Death was part of voyant life.

Yet higher in the carrières, there had been a sense of dignity, of acknowledgment. A sense that the bones mattered. They had been touched with care, carefully arranged, illuminated by candles and torches. These were wretched, broken skeletons, dumped on top of one another and forgotten for three centuries.

All of these fragments had once been people. They had laughed and loved, wept and dreamed. Now they were rubble.

“This is why no one else has ever found Apollyon. They dare not come through the ossuary,” Renelde muttered. She was just ahead, up to her ankles in bone. “Do you feel them?”

I swallowed before I spoke. “I’ve never felt anything like this.”

Dust hung thick in the air. So did old, fermented spirits, enraged by their abandonment in this unhallowed ground. They were not at peace. When I took my first step into the cascade, bones cracked under my boot.

“Watch your step,” Malperdy said, voice strained. “The spirits will try to block our way if we disturb their bones.” He clung white-knuckled to the staircase. “I fucking hate this part.”

The tunnel was piled with bones. I had no choice but to step on the skeletons, to climb them where they clustered together, to snap them underfoot.

We broke formation to forge our own paths through the ossuary. At one point, my heel crunched right through the dome of a skull. A weak poltergeist lunged at me like a guard dog, outrage and anguish spilling through the æther. I froze, my scarred hand clenched to my chest.

The poltergeist stopped as if I had slapped it, then cringed away. I swallowed as Arcturus moved past me.

“They will not threaten a Rephaite,” he said. “Stay within reach of my aura.”

When he took another step, the spirits only trembled. I released a long-held breath and followed him.

Some bones were sharp enough to cut through skin. Now I understood the need for the gaiters. When the tunnel forced us into a crawl, I was grateful for them, and for the thick gloves. My palms crunched into knuckles and teeth and crumbs of spine. My knees ground into other knees. I started to mutter under my breath, greeting every skull, trying to write each bone a story. This jaw had once chewed fresh oysters and whelks by the Seine. Those fingers had once held a hammer, a paintbrush, a quill. I soon lost count. Even though I was icy cold, I told myself this was another hallucination, a remnant of my fever. I was not wrist-deep in a human rib cage, not crossing an endless hallway of the dead.

There must have been murders down here. It was the safest place in the world to dispose of a body.

Heavy breathing sounded behind me. I turned to see Malperdy rummaging in his jacket, his torso racked by huge retches.

In London, Nadine had carried headphones and an audio player to muffle the voices of the dead. Unlike Nadine, Malperdy wasn’t a whisperer—he must be either a sniffer or a gustant—but from the panic-stricken look on his face, he had mislaid whatever he used to get a handle on his gift. Seeing him cup his hands over his nose and mouth, Ankou grasped him by the shoulder and pushed a switchblade into his hand. Malperdy fumbled it open and pressed the tip into his arm, hard enough to draw blood.

I had always found it harder to dreamwalk when I was hurt. The knife was creating a needlepoint of pain, pulling his attention away from the æther. Ankou clapped him on the back.

“Malperdy,” I whispered, projecting my voice as much as I could. “Come closer to Warden.”

His eyes were streaming. Seeing me beckon, Ankou all but hauled him up, and the two of them waded toward us, bones rattling around their legs. With every footstep, Malperdy heaved.

Arcturus had stopped to wait for them. As soon as they were almost as close to him as I was, Ankou sighed in relief and rubbed his eyes.

Ahead, Ivy was inching along the wall, blowing out slow breaths. Léandre climbed gracefully from the bones and through another crack in the wall. I followed them into a new chamber, where the ground simply fell away. Léandre turned to face me, his skin tinged blue by our headlamps.

“Apollyon,” he said. “The entrance to Le Passage des Voleurs.”

Ivy stood at its edge. I planted a boot on the ground and looked down, into a bottomless pit.

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