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The hippogriffs stared at her with their angry yellow eyes and gave absolutely no sign as to whether they would or would not give her twenty-four hours. Janet struck out into the mud with Poppy and Josh trailing behind her.
“Not being critical at all,” Josh said, “but if I were High King or High Queen or whatever, I would have brought maybe a detachment of soldiers with us? Like in a support capacity? Maybe that elite Whitespire regiment thing that’s so hard to get into. You ever seen those guys drilling? It’s nuts the stuff they can do.”
Janet took a deep breath. Patience.
“We’re hunting a god, Josh. You know how that movie goes. You send the shock troops in first, the really bad-ass ones, the definitely undefeatable guys, and what happens? They get slaughtered like instantly. And it’s like ooo, scary, nuh-uh, those guys were supposed to be undefeatable! Then the heroes go in and do the real work. It’s all just to build dramatic tension. I thought maybe we’d skip that part and cut to the chase.”
“But I love that movie,” Josh said, a little forlornly.
“That raises a good point though, Janet,” Poppy said. “Since we’re cutting to the chase. How are we supposed to go about fighting a god?”
“Not fighting,” Janet said. “Hunting.”
Even she wasn’t that clear on the distinction she was making, but she thought it might shut them up for a few minutes so she could think. Somebody had to.
“And not we,” Josh said. “You’re not fighting. You’re taking care of the baby.”
“I’ll take care of the baby,” Poppy said, “by fighting.”
It was warm and muggy, but the mud-water that kept oozing up through the sodden grass they were walking on was bitter cold. There were depths to this place that the sun couldn’t touch. Fortunately Janet had on awesome boots.
“Anyway,” she said, “Martin Chatwin beat Ember. So it can be done. What’s Martin Chatwin got that the three of us don’t have?”
“Like about six more fingers,” Josh said. “For starters.”
It was good to be out in the field again, whatever the odds. And it was good to be in charge. Before the desert she’d never really given things her all, at least not when the others were around to watch. It was too vulnerable-making; in a way she hadn’t really had her all to give. No wonder the others hadn’t taken her as seriously as they should have. Plus she’d done a few fucked-up things. She wondered whether Quentin felt angry about what happened that night. Like it was her that broke up him and Alice! She’d only done it out of habit. If you’ve got a junkie in the house, you don’t leave your meds just lying on the table.
And like they would have lasted two more weeks anyway, given what a loser Quentin was back in those days anyway. The funny thing was, the more Quentin got his shit together the less she wanted to sleep with him. Weird how that worked.
When they found the boardwalk Janet started trotting along it, double-time. Poppy jogged along behind her but Josh called out “Hey, wait up!” and when they didn’t he started sort of slowly motivating his doughy body along. Guy lives in a fantasy world without junk food or cars or trans fats or TV and he’s still fat. You had to admire his dedication to the cause.
On the way Janet noticed a pair of child’s shoes, ancient and weathered, abandoned on a rock. It was the oddest thing. They looked pitifully small. She wondered what could have brought a boy that young—they were a boy’s shoes—all the way out here, this deep into the Northern Marsh, and what could have happened to him. Nothing good.
When the pier was in sight she drew the crossed axes from her back.
“Awesome axes,” Josh said. “Where did you—”
“Your mom gave them to me,” Janet said. “After I fucked her.”
“Why—”
“Because she enjoyed it so much.”
Not her best work maybe, but they couldn’t all be winners. And she really didn’t feel like telling that story again.
Janet stopped at the very end of the pier and looked around, hands on hips. Everything looked normal. Not a lot of apocalypse going on here. But then swamps already looked like the end of the world anyway. Maximum entropy, land and water commingled chaotically. There wasn’t much farther downhill they could go.
Stray windlets roughened the surface of the bog. A couple of dead, thunderstruck trees poked up in the middle. I was just here, she thought. Like a week ago. Suddenly she felt powerfully aware of the circularity and futility of life.
Eliot had said Umber was under the swamp, which was both very specific and very vague. She thought about just jumping in blind, a leap of faith in Eliot and his intelligence-gathering skills. But then, giant turtle. While she was weighing the options, Poppy passed her and began climbing down the ladder. It was a slight breach of discipline, but this once she was going to let it pass. Poppy dipped an elegant toe in the water, then put her whole foot in.
“Huh,” she said.
“Careful.”
Poppy wasn’t careful. With the traditional Australian’s indifference to personal dryness and venomous underwater predators, she dived right in. The bog swallowed her up in one gulp, her entire lean length.
“Poppy!” Josh peered down after his vanished wife-and-child. “Poppy! Jesus!”
Nothing. Then Poppy’s hand broke the still surface of the water, like the Lady of the Lake, except in this case instead of offering up a magic sword the hand just delivered a big enthusiastic thumbs-up.
“Oh, thank God.”
Josh executed a well-practiced cannonball off the dock. Bombs away. So much for stealth. Janet descended the worn wooden ladder in a dignified fashion, like a normal person, until she was immersed up to her knees. She saw what Poppy meant—it did feel weird under there. Not wet, somehow, and like there was something trying to push her back up and out. She leaned down and put her head under.
And collapsed in an upside-down heap on wet ground. Janet felt thoroughly nauseated; her inner ear was objecting strenuously to what it was hearing from the rest of her senses. Something violently disorienting had just happened.
“Jesus!” She spat to keep herself from throwing up. Josh was already on his feet and jumping up and down.
“Again! Again!”
At least somebody was enjoying themselves.
They were under the water, the three of them, but inverted; that’s what had happened. They were standing on the underside of the surface of the swamp, which now was hard and slick. It was dark down here, but it was pretty clear what the main event was, namely a big castle that looked exactly like Whitespire but creepier, its battlements all lit up with flaring white torches. The sky above it—or the lake bed, or whatever it was—was black.
“An underwater, upside-down Castle Whitespire,” Josh said. “I’ll admit, that would not have been my first guess.”
“It’s a mirror image.”
“Mirrors invert left-right, not up-down,” Poppy said, with tedious correctness. “Plus the black-white thing isn’t—”
“OK, OK, I get it.”
They met no resistance, but the drawbridge was up, so the three of them flew over the wall and into the courtyard. They saw no one. Josh knocked on the thick door to the outer hall. No answer, but it opened easily. The place looked empty but not abandoned—it was neat and clean, and more torches smoked and sputtered along the walls.
“Spooky,” Poppy said.
They’d been standing there looking around aimlessly for a good minute before they even noticed the two guards standing frozen at the far end of the hall. Their eyes were dead—they looked about as alive as a couple of decorative urns.
“Oh,” Josh said. He called to them. “Hey, guys! What is this place?”
The guards didn’t answer. They wore somber, funerary versions of the Whitespire uniform, and that’s what it was with their eyes: their pupils were really dilated, like they were on drugs. Which you couldn’t really blame them, working down here. When Josh approached them they didn’t salute him or even come to attention, but they did move: they crossed their halberds in front of the door to bar his way.
“Oh, come on,” he said.
They lowered their weapons in his direction. Josh backpedaled.
“Got left!”
An ice axe from Janet took the one on the left straight in the forehead, sticking in his skull like it would have in a stump, splitting his helmet and his head right between his eyes. It was a beautiful throw. He dropped his weapon with a clatter and sank to a kneeling position but by some quirk of anatomy he didn’t quite fall over. He did bleed though, the dark flood pouring over his face and spreading out across the stone floor.
“Or,” Poppy said, “we could try diplomacy.”
Josh and Poppy both cast kinetic spells on the one on the right, lofting him bobbing into a corner of the ceiling like a lost balloon at a birthday party. He dropped his halberd, and it clanged and bounced once on the floor. Janet felt a little embarrassed for him.
“I can’t believe you killed yours, Janet,” Josh said.
“Please. I don’t even think these guys are human. They don’t make any noise, did you notice?”
“Bleed though.”
“Your mother bled when I—”
“Shh!” Poppy peered into the darkness the guards had been protecting. She held up a hand.
“—when I popped her cherry,” Janet finished in a whisper.
“That doesn’t even make sense!” Josh hissed.
“Shh!”
They shushed. In the silence, the dry, irregular sound of trotting hooves on stone. With some effort, her foot on the guard’s cloven head, Janet rocked her axe back and forth till it came free.
—
A half hour’s worth of not very dignified hide-and-seek followed. It was hard sometimes to figure out where exactly the sound was coming from. They padded along as silently as they could, trying to get a fix on it, cocking their heads and whacking each other on the shoulders and pointing and accusing each other of making too much noise in heated whispers.
Every once in a while they could hear a voice along with the hooves, muttering to itself, just on the edge of hearing:
“Yes, yes, just along here. Up we go. Right this way. Carefully now.”
Who was He talking to? It was annoying.
The voice didn’t sound at all like Ember’s Olympian baritone. One time they realized they could take a shortcut, and they nearly headed Him off—they got a glimpse of His flickering haunches disappearing up a spiral staircase.
“A close shave!” they heard Him say. “Nearly caught!”
This was followed by a weird high quavering moan.
The three of them stopped in a vaulted gallery they knew from Castle Whitespire. Aboveground it would have been brimming with sunlight. Here they looked out the windows into depthless blackness. They could see the bright ring of water far below them, the surface of the upside-down swamp, a drowned sun swimming in it like a yolk in a silvery egg. Once in a while a few upside-down fish skittered past the windows.
The hooves started again, closer.
“I don’t get this,” Josh said. “Dude is a god. If He really wanted to get away from us He would just apparate or whatever. Either He wants to be caught or He’s leading us into a trap.”
“Let’s find out,” Janet said.
Now that was some leadership right there.
“I think He’s heading up to the solarium,” Poppy said.
“Great, then He’s stuck. No way out.”
“So we’ve got Him trapped.”
“We could even just stay down here,” Josh said, “and not go up there.”
“What, and starve Him out?”
Even Poppy rolled her eyes.
“Let’s get this over with and get out of here. This place is creeping me out.”
“Yup.” Janet was coming around to Poppy. ’Nother couple of decades and they might even start getting along. Janet unslung her axes, her Sorrows, and took the stairs at a sprint. You don’t live in a castle full of spiral stairs without getting calves of adamantium. She heard Poppy whoop and head up behind her.
That quavering moan again.
“Goodness!” the voice said, up ahead, a genteel English tenor, not in its first youth, with a wee bit of a chuckle in it. It was an Edwardian comedy voice. “Alarums and excursions!”
It pissed her off. The fucking Chalk Man was down on his hands and knees. You think this is a joke? Alarums and excursions? I’ll show you a fucking alarum. Pounding up the steps, right behind Him now, she got a whiff of His divine oily wool, weirdly sweet. Even she was feeling the burn in her legs. She should have stretched.
“Stop! Jesus! We just want to talk!”
We just want to talk about how fucking dead You’ll be after we kill You.
Topside the solarium was a lovely domed chamber, but down here it was miserably gloomy in spite of the four torches that guttered in its four corners. Umber paused just long enough for Janet to get her first good look at him: He looked like His brother, obviously, enormous, with big ribbed horns swept back from his brow like they’d been brilliantined, except that where Ember was golden, Umber was a deep storm-cloud gray.
“Off we go!” He called.
One of the windows lit up with sunlight; after an hour under the swamp it was like looking straight into an arc lamp. Umber had opened up a portal to the world above.
He surged forward, made one preparatory gallop and then leaped through the window, did a half barrel roll in midair, and landed upside-down on—the sky? The ceiling? No, it was just grass. Up there the gravity was flopped the other way. He stuck the landing.
