Part 20 (2/2)
”We've had no word from La Jocondette.” Killilly marched over to Hestor, who stood alone, whispering to himself. ”The Lady has vanished.”
”No, that's not right.” Hestor shook his head, casting a quick glance over his shoulder to a corner of rooftop where the darkness gathered, dripping down from the sky. ”She leads the attack at dawn. She's our general.”
”We'll soon see.” The Charnel Girl captain seemed eager. She had one arm around a disfigured white-blond woman, who kept putting her fingers over the place where her lower lip should have been.
”Offer up the false shaman,” Marvin suggested, jerking his head in Cooper's direction.
Killilly frowned. ”What for?”
Marvin shrugged. ”Maybe he's an adept, maybe he's a fool-either way, he's a distraction, and if the Lady really is gone . . .”
Hestor nodded. ”You know what kind of option failure is, Lil, and it's no option at all.”
”Your failure, not mine.” She spat at Hestor's feet, then turned on Marvin. ”You f.u.c.ked him for this? For a distraction? I don't understand you boys. Sandiz lost a lip to his pink-haired friend.” She jabbed a finger toward Sesstri, who snarled and snapped her teeth at the two who held her down.
”I f.u.c.ked him because I wanted to,” Marvin hissed, a viper defending itself against several opponents at once. ”And because he was with the Lady. It's not my fault if Sandiz can't keep her ugly face in one piece.”
”Brilliant.” Killilly looked exultant and terrified and capable of anything. ”Just f.u.c.king brilliant.” Her colors became a yellow-orange chain around her ankles, intertwined with marigolds.
Rough hands shoved Cooper forward and he stood alone in a patch of dark rain. Ice ran up his spine as he felt-more than saw-a shadow plunge from the sky. It dropped with the speed of a warhead and Cooper flinched, but its landing made no impact. The shadow resolved into a huddle of rags just inches from his feet. The black ma.s.s shuddered and Cooper took a step backward.
Before him rose the lich-lord, cloaked in dark wools and crowned in pale fire that radiated the opposite of heat. Cooper saw sc.r.a.ps of withered, parchment-dry skin plastered to a skull the color of iron, missing its jawbone. But its eyes! The lights where its eyes should be sparked with electricity, questing and hungry. It stood on skeletal toes that did not touch the ground, suspended above the rooftop as if wearing invisible heels. Jewelry pasted to its fleshless face glittered gold beneath a snowy wig, a coiffed asymmetric bob that the lich adjusted with one hand, preening. Looking at it, Cooper understood that it had no s.e.x, and that if the undead thing appeared masculine or feminine, then it wore gender merely as an accoutrement.
”Lord!” cried Killilly with what felt like false enthusiasm. ”You arrive earlier than antic.i.p.ated, and so our bliss at your presence is all the sweeter for its unexpectedness!”
”Aesssr,” it hissed from its jawless iron skull, but Cooper could not tell if the word was a demand, a question, or an announcement. ”I felt my aesssr cry out in pain disssproportionate to your little inductions. Ssso I desssided to sssurprise you, darlings. Perhaps you have thrown a tantrum and abused my aesssr because you managed to lose the Lady, yesss?”
Appearing at Cooper's side, Marvin pushed him to his knees with hands on Cooper's shredded shoulders, and he folded like a doll, intimidated by the figure that loomed before him and emanated the strangest aura: charismatic putrescence, black on black on black, but limned in gold. A thrice-black wind blew the petals off of the crocus in his mind, and Cooper found himself caught in a web as- again-his thoughts became not his own. I should be thinner, he decided, aware of the absurdity of the desire even as he was helpless to resist it. The lich poured a blackness inside him, filling up his mind with need for fleshless fingers entwined around his hair, his master's blade like ice against his pulsing neck. Gold and black and forever.
They will destroy me, Cooper knew, watching Hestor approach. They will send me somewhere small and dark and I will scream there until my voice is paper and my bones turn to rust. To his right, the rain poured sheer and straight past the lip of the roof to the ground, so far below. It might as well be bottomless.
”Perhapsss you can explain to usss why your ssscheme failed, Hessstor?” lisped the lich-lord in a dry voice.
”Lord?” Hestor showed the first hint of doubt about the Lady and her fate. He had colors, but Cooper couldn't make out the shape.
”She is with usss no longer, Hessstor. She is gone, forever. We were a.s.ssssured that thisss was impossssible-our agreement with our Unseelie allies, in fact, was predicated upon thisss fact. Can you tell usss why the Lady isss Dead?” Was the lich-lord smoking a cigarette? It was, a brown cigarette smoldering in a black holder. It waved the opera-length Bakelite like a wand. ”And can you tell usss how?”
Hestor shook his head in denial. ”That's impossible, Lord! She cannot Die, she is the mother of life without Death, who will found your dynasty of freedom!”
”Neverthelessss”-the lich shrugged its padded shoulders and lifted its gloved hand in a gesture of feigned helplessness that reminded Cooper of nothing so much as a fas.h.i.+on model draped in black cashmere- ”Dead she remainsss.” It waved Hestor away like a caloric canape.
”But this whole thing was her . . . it was her idea!” Hestor didn't understand. Tonight was his triumph, and he was covered in Cooper's blood to prove it.
The lich made a noise of disappointment that sounded like a hundred beetles clacking their mandibles. ”Do you really believe that, Hessstor? Do you really?”
”Believe what, Lord?”
Oh G.o.d, Cooper realized with a feeling that was indistinguishable from despair or exultation, Hestor has no clue what's really going on, does he?
The lich flicked its electric eyes toward Cooper and gave the ghost of a nod. ”Your chattel understands more than you do, my proud sssubordinate.” It laughed, like parchment shredding. ”You missstake a p.a.w.n for the queen.”
Lolly's mother. If Thyu had ordered him kidnapped and brought to the Lady for a.n.a.lysis, then whoever had summoned the Undertow to La Jocondette had been clever, brave, and well- informed enough to betray her. From his time inside the Cicatrix, she seemed the most likely party to successfully outmaneuver Lallowe Thyu. The lich nodded again, and Cooper found himself almost incontinent at the prospect of this dried, molted thing deferring to him when it should by all rights have been devouring him instead. The last petal flew off the flower in his head.
”I don't understand,” Hestor said, almost whining, scrambling for some foothold of understanding. ”The Lady will be our queen, Lord. She is the instrument of our victory.”
”Oh dear.” The lich wedged its long cigarette holder in the s.p.a.ce of a missing tooth and removed the glove covering one of its hands, tugging off each finger of the soft leather, one at a time. Beneath lay bones like rusted metal ore. ”I thought I heard you contradict me.”
Hestor's eyes grew wide as saucers, and Cooper heard the inarticulate wail of fear from inside his head. The lich smiled with its eyeless eyes. ”Sssurely I was missstaken?”
”But, but-” Hestor whined like a spoiled child, and the lich-lord reached out with a limp wrist and backhanded the Death Boy chieftain off the rooftop. Hestor flipped once in midair, his feline reflexes and bristle of tawny hair giving the impression of an abused alley cat-his eyes locked onto Cooper's for half a second, and then he was gone, trailing a scream.
”Heheh.” The lich rasped out a papery giggle, then coughed up something wet and charcoal- gray that sizzled as it landed on the rain- slick roof. ”Maybe Hessstor will find more sssuccesss in his next life. Marvin, do we sssuffer incompetenssse?”
Marvin stepped forward with an almost military, regimented posture. ”No Lord, never.”
”Lady,” the lich-lord said. The word was both a command and a question.
”I-I don't know, Lord. I was the last to see her, wasn't I, Cooper? She was fine when I left her, wasn't she, Cooper?”
”Really, Marvin?” The ease with which the lich had unemployed Hestor stirred Cooper from his stupor. ”Are you really stupid enough to ask me to confirm your f.u.c.king story?”
Marvin said nothing, his fists balled and his jaw tight.
Cooper turned to the lich, less afraid of it now. ”To be honest, Miss or Mister Lich, I don't remember any lady at La Jocondette,” Cooper said, and almost smiled. ”But I've spent enough time with Marvin to know how much he likes to lie.”
”I sssee.” The lich tutted cigarette smoke and made to leave, looking toward the ever-churning vortex above. It sounded merely disappointed, and seemed to Cooper to have expected nothing more from its living followers.
Something s.h.i.+fted below-Cooper sensed the change. There was a woman made of bruised light who felt herself . . . return. As if a piece of her that had been hiding suddenly returned, slid into place and ignited. Meanwhile the Undertow cowered before their G.o.d. Cooper held his breath, and didn't dare to hope.
”Lord?” Marvin begged. The lich inclined its head a single degree. ”Thank you, Master. Your freedom is my freedom, Master. Forgive me.”
”Oh good,” shrugged the lich, drawing its wool wrap close about its overpadded skeletal shoulders and rising a few feet into the air. ”Yesss, yesss-freedom. Whatever. Do as you please with them, Marvin. You've earned it, haven't you? Yesss, earned it with your warm body.” The lich swept its bare hand to indicate the cowering Undertow. It rasped a noise that resembled a chuckle. ”They are yours for as long as you can keep them.”
Suddenly a staccato burst of exploding gla.s.s ripped through the night as something blew out all the windows on the floor of the harem beneath them. The building shook, its embedded circuitry strobing light in frenzied bursts, and the roof was thrown into a chaos of pure golden light. Cooper heard a cry that sounded something like a bird and an insect making whalesong together, but so loud it nearly concussed his skull- then, through tears, he saw a smear of light rocket into the air at enormous speed, hurtling away from the tower in an arc of sun-bright wings and a buzzing, keening wail.
RunFlyScreamExplode! ExplodeScreamFly, RunCooperRun! EscapeEscapeEscape!
Cooper caught his breath-it was her, the aesr. It had worked. Somehow, against any logic he recognized and yet making a perfect kind of sense, his gambit had worked: she had freed herself. Cooper laughed out loud, drawing baleful glances from the agitated Death Boys and Charnel Girls, especially Marvin-who had seamlessly a.s.sumed Hestor's hauteur. It did him little good, though-the Undertow were in chaos.
The lich remained an intractably still figure, hovering on the tips of its toes while its minions surged around it. Cooper watched it following the bright path of the freed aesr with its eye- sparks: she flew straight as an arrow toward the Dome. From the lich, Cooper sensed a colossal ambivalence that dwarfed them all, and also a seething, shocked despair.
Then a screech from the far corner of the roof cut through the confusion, and Marvin whipped his head around in annoyance. The lich remained implacable while a streak of gray fury hurtled across the rooftop. Asher had escaped his captors and his face was twisted like a granite gargoyle.
”You sick f.u.c.k!” Asher cried, his eyes skewering the lich.
Cooper cheered. The lich wafted behind Marvin.
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