Page 34 of The Iron Sword

Nyx shook her head. “This place,” she muttered. “It’s strange. It feels ancient, but I can sense the iron poison here as well. How is this possible?”

“I believe it is due to the nature of the Between,” Grimalkin replied. “Nothing in the Between is permanent—it is constantly shifting, moving between the Nevernever and the mortal world at random. Phaed is one such place, if you remember. The site that we stand in now might have existed anywhere, at any time, in the mortal realm or Faery. Until someone found an anchor to hold it in place.”

“You’re making my head hurt, cat,” Puck muttered. “Can’t you just say ‘nothing ever makes sense in Faery’ and leave it at that?”

A figure appeared in the spaces between pillars, the bleached white deer skull staring at me from the darkness. I jerked up, whipping my head toward the figure, only to find myself gazing into an office with a bald human sitting at a desk, busily typing away.

“Ash?” Meghan glanced back at me, eyes shadowed with concern. “Did you see something?”

“I...don’t know.” The human at the desk continued to type, and the room around him remained empty, but I knew something had been watching us. “For a moment, I thought I saw something,” I went on. “But it was in the other place, in the Between.”

“I saw it, too,” Nyx said softly, her gold eyes narrowed as she scanned the hall and tiny offices on either side. “I think something knows we’re here.”

“Well, Furball is gone,” Puck said, his voice echoing a bit too loudly in the sudden silence. “So, you know what that means.”

We came to a single elevator at the end of the hallway. When Meghan hit the button, the doors slid open, revealing the polished metal box through the frame. A trio of nightmare piskies buzzed out, zipping over our heads, and went flying down the corridor. Nyx recoiled, shrinking away from the opening like it was the open mouth of a dragon.

Puck put a hand on her arm. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “Trust me, first time I rode one of these things, I felt like I was going to die. You’ll be okay, though,” he added. Reaching into his shirt, he pulled out an amulet, a stylized raven on a chain. “You have one of these things, remember?”

Nyx took a steadying breath. “So much iron,” she said, looking in disdain at the metal box. “How can any fey exist here? Even those piskies, those Evenfey. How can they survive in this place with so much iron and—and...what is that word? Technalobby?”

“Technology,” I offered. “And they can survive because the amount of anger in this place overshadows the effects of iron. They’re sustaining themselves off all the negative glamour.”

Meghan was staring at the inside of the elevator, her eyes dark. If I turned my head slightly, I could see the opening of a ruined stone staircase, plunging down into the black.

“It’s down there,” Meghan said. “Whatever it is. Something powerful. And angry.”

Puck sighed. “Of course, it is,” he said, more in resignation than annoyance. “’Cause it’s never something cheerful and happy. We never find a giant smiling bunny, do we? It’s always something angry and powerful that wants to eat our faces. Fun times. Well, gang...?” He indicated the open doors. “Into the jaws of death we go. Furball, if you’re still listening, we’ll see you down there.”

I stepped through the elevator doors, with Meghan and Puck behind me. Nyx, after one last moment of hesitation, followed as well. The rest of us stood along the mirrored edges, letting the Forgotten stay in the center, as far away from the walls as she could, and Puck wrapped his arms around her waist from behind.

As the doors slid shut, I saw the hallway we had just come down stretching out before us. For a moment, I caught a thin silhouette standing at the very end, the skull mask watching us with empty eye sockets. I blinked, and the thing was closer, long sharp fingers reaching out like spider legs. Then the doors hissed shut, hiding the creature from view, and the elevator began to descend.

13

THE NIGHTMARES BENEATH

We continued to descend far longer than I thought we should; though I hadn’t been in many human elevators, it seemed like too much time passed before the box finally came a shuddering halt, letting out a sharp ding that made Nyx jump and unsheathe her light blades.

When the doors started to open, I tensed, half expecting a horde of enemies on the other side, or perhaps to come face-to-face with the eerie figure that had been shadowing us ever since we got here. Instead, a wave of roiling, angry glamour washed into the elevator. Beyond the frame, the hall was cloaked in shadow, with images of ruined stone and moss-eaten pillars overlapping the real world. The buzz of piskie wings echoed through the corridor, and tiny shapes moved in the shadows, both in the real world and within that other place.

“Can you feel it?”

The voice slithered into the hall, making us drop our hands to our weapons, gazing around warily. A face flickered into sight down the corridor, the stark white deer skull, appearing for just a moment before winking out of sight.

Weapons out, we moved cautiously down the hall, but the figure did not appear again, though the whispers continued, swirling around us.

“The anger, the rage. The beautiful hate. It is almost time. It is very nearly enough. Soon, the king will awaken. Soon, the way to Evenfall will appear.”

“What is Evenfall?” Meghan demanded.

As I passed a door to what looked like a maintenance room in the real world, from the corner of my eye, I saw the figure in the doorway, the skull face very close to mine. I jerked and whirled around, half drawing my blade, only to find myself staring into a room of brooms and mop buckets.

“Evenfall,”the voice whispered, sounding like it was somewhere in that room, hiding behind discarded cleaning implements.“You wouldn’t know it. No one, in this world or the other, remembers. The memory of Evenfall was stripped from every living creature centuries ago. But I remember now. I remember what was hidden away. When the Veil disappeared the night of the sacrifice, when the mortals were able to see us, even if it was for a moment, I remembered the king. And Evenfall.”

“What king?” Nyx asked. “There was no king of Faery. I served the Lady my whole life—there was no king before her.”

“Forgotten,”the thing whispered.“Evenfey. You are like me, the memories of yourself stripped away, sealed behind fear and hate of our kind. No matter. Soon, you will remember. The king awakens. Our king awakens. The rage of this world, the violence and anger and uncompromising chaos of it all, stirs him from his unnatural slumber. I built this site, this place of power, to speed the process. Humans helped me, oblivious to what they were creating. They are easy to manipulate, to prod in the right direction. A few whispers, a suggestion or two, and they created this—this site that lives in the ether of their world, amplified by their hateful thoughts and accusations.”The voice chuckled.“InSite. Quite the clever play on words, is it not? The mortals think they are so insightful, that they must share their great wisdom and realizations with their poor, ignorant fellows, and yet, all they do is incite one another. And through it all, the beautiful, violent emotions continue to build. Rage, hatred, fear. They seep through the cracks of this world and into the dreams of the sleeping king. His dreams are terrible in their beauty. You have seen them, have you not? The creatures that roam the Between, terrifying all they come across?”

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