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She pressed forward, lured through the blindfold of darkness by the promise of a glimmering, uneven light that danced against a portion of the stone wall far ahead. Shoulders hunched against the damp and cold, she passed one hand along the gritted wall to guide her. Something hard crunched under her feet, and Isobel willed herself not to look, not to even imagine what sort of matter covered the floor.
She stepped into the pocket of dim light, which illuminated a bridgelike portion of the passageway, one that overhung a vast and open vault of catacombs. Her eyes followed the orange-yellow flickering to its meager source—a torch. There, far below, a man worked in solitude. Divested of his cloak and coat, a trowel in one hand, he busied himself in laying a brick wall across a gaping black archway.
A clanking echoed from within the hole, as though from chains. A tingling of bells issued forth, and Isobel froze, her eyes widening with the realization that there was someone inside the recess. At once she recalled the pair of men she’d heard when she had first stepped through the doorway that had transformed into the ebony clock. There had been one with a mask and a cloak, and hadn’t the other worn a hat with bells?
The man working to wall up the hole paused, a brick in one hand. Slowly he turned his head until his eyes met with hers. She fell back with a gasp, then plunged headlong down the darkened path.
She ran, the floor snapping and popping underfoot.
Around the next corner, at the end of the long corridor, Isobel saw a shaft of soft blue light. It streamed through an open archway, and she sped toward it. Her footing slipped on the jagged edge of something hard, and she tripped forward, slamming onto the stone, sending up a rush of dust.
The light confirmed her worst fears. Bones and ash scattered the floor.
Her fingers curled in the grit as she pushed herself onto her knees.
No, wait, she thought. Not bones at all.
Hand shaking, Isobel slid her fingers beneath what had looked to her a moment before like the cap of an ancient skull. It was, instead, the broken sliver of a porcelain face, the curve of a cheek all too evident in the outline. All the pieces were similarly identifiable. Broken fingers, like tiny tombstones, lay scattered in the dust. Half of a hand here. Part of an arm there. A jaw. An ear.
Isobel flung the shard aside. She stood, wiping her hands on the folds of her grime-caked dress, then pressed them to either wall to steady herself. She continued through the passage, finally stepping past the shaft of blue light and through the narrow archway. She drifted over the threshold and down one step, finding herself suddenly within the confines of a large marble crypt.
Slats of blue-gray light funneled down from high square windows, each no larger than a letter-size envelope. Inside, the smell was dry and sharp, like burnt paper. Countless broken and misshapen faces stared sightlessly down at her from their perches along marble shelves lining the four tall walls. More hollow and intact appendages littered the outer edges of the space, strewn like the remnants of discarded marionettes.
At the front of the crypt, an iron door stood ajar. Backed by blue-tinted stained glass, the door was the source of the sapphire light, which fell like a translucent gauze over the crypt’s centerpiece—an elevated stone tomb. Atop the tomb, chiseled in polished marble, lay the carving of a beautiful woman, her eyes closed in death, her cold stone hands fastened around an equally frozen bouquet of roses. Isobel knew she had seen that face before, had watched it emerge from the unfolding blackness that had claimed Varen.
The woman’s hair, like that of a sorceress, lay spread around her head. It draped over the sides of the sarcophagus in long, coiling tendrils. Her marble dress, heavy and flowing, like the inaugural gown of a queen, spilled from either side of the elevated tomb while the embellished train fell in gentle folds along the stairs leading down from the base. The pleats and endless ripples in the marble garment gave the illusion of softness, her face the illusion of life. It was as if at any moment Isobel could expect to see her chest rise and fall with the intake and release of breath. Perhaps the most disturbing element about the tomb, however, was that the impossibly heavy lid had been shifted open.
Isobel didn’t dare climb the steps and peer inside, knowing that the only thing worse than finding a withered body within would be not finding one. She waded instead through the carpet of broken faces and parts until she reached the crypt door.
“Mistress?”
At the sound of the voice, low and grating, she halted.
“Mistress, is that you? Have you returned?” the voice asked, curious.
Isobel’s hand stopped short of the iron-and-glass door. She pulled back and, with careful steps, drew to peer around the other side of the sarcophagus.
He sat slumped against the far wall, half of him lost in shadow. A Noc. He looked up, his dark gaze focusing on her. “Ah,” he said, grinning, “now there’s a surprise. Tell me, what demon has tempted you here?”
He was different from the other Nocs. This Isobel noticed right away. Instead of a dark red to black, his hair was deep black to blue-violet. As he lifted his head from the wall, his hair spiked up from his skull like the feathered crest of a bird. His teeth, pointed like the tips of countless sharpened pencils, gleamed an unsettling indigo. Though his face was whole, he was missing nearly half of himself on one side, including an arm from the shoulder down, part of his abdomen, and his leg from the knee. A thin layer of dust coated his dark pants, evidence that he’d not moved for some time.
He wore no shirt or jacket, which was what revealed the most unusual thing about him.
Scrolling designs covered much of his exposed skin. His chest, sculpted and smooth like a Greek statue’s, depicted minutely detailed tattoos of sailing ships, tossing waves, and foam. A long-haired mermaid graced his existing shoulder, her scaly tail sweeping the length of his arm. An entire portion of the sea epic vanished into the pit of his missing side, and though the pictures themselves might have been beautiful, Isobel was too distracted by the fact that they had been chiseled into his skin like carvings. That thought, combined with his demonic grin, the garish white of him, and the jagged gaps in his body, made them somehow vulgar.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Not who”—he wagged a blue-clawed finger at her— “what.”
“Fine,” Isobel obliged, “what?”
“Baffled,” he replied, “at how you, fetching though you are, could have cost me an arm and a leg.”
Isobel stepped out fully from behind the tomb, eyeing him warily.
“If I had known about your masked friend,” he continued, “and his way with a sword, I’d have let Pin go first in the chase.”
“Chase?” she asked, her voice echoing through the crypt.
