The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(41)

“The Spinner never spoke to us. God does.”

“Oh, yeah? What does God tell you?”

Black shrugged. “He moves beneath the green and the gold. The blue and the brown. The red, the white, and the black.”

“He sacrificed a piece of his very self, just like Genevieve. Just like Hansa.”

I didn’t like to hear the dead’s names in their mouths. “Murder isn’t sacrifice—they didn’t want to die. Saying it was a sacrifice implies there’s something they died for.”

Red turned to Black. “Assumes she knows everything, this girl.”

“And knows less than most.”

Red looked back at me. “Don’t you know the story of Saint Alixia? He cut off pieces of himself to feed the gateway between Heaven and Earth, to keep it always open for his kin. He cut off pieces till he fell down dead, and his blood became a river. His wife paddled down it to her divine reward.”

“That’s not a real story,” I said, though I supposed it could be. You never knew with saints.

“We’ve nothing more to say to you, child.”

“Child?”

“We’ve nothing more to say,” Red repeated. “You asked your questions and we answered them. If you won’t listen, bother us no more.”

“Let’s take her out of our prayers,” Black whispered.

There was more I wanted to say to that, but a harassed-looking man was hurrying over, hem trailing behind. He clapped his hands gently, looking past me.

“You three cannot be in here. I’ve already told you, no unattended children in the church.”

The thing in white piped up then. Her voice was bell-sweet and lightly turned. She looked not at the man but up, like she was practicing her Joan of Arc. “‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’” Her voice flattened, and her eyes met his. “Never, not ever. Never ever.”

Whether it was the scripture or her spooky little face, the man fell back, uncertain. “Well, that’s…” Without finishing his thought, he swept off toward the altar.

“Our advice to you,” said Red, turning back toward me.

“Is to listen when your betters speak,” said Black.

White looked at me, and I held my breath.

“And to remember every story is a ghost story,” she said. She reached out and pressed one cold little hand to my chest. Its nails were painted ballerina pink. “If you’re looking for answers, seek out your ghosts.”

The painted eyes of the saints watched me walk away. The lit candles guttered as I passed; I wondered what would happen if I trailed my fingers through the pool of holy water.

I looked back, just before opening the door, at the three dark beads of their heads over the pew back.

Four. For a moment, I thought I saw a fourth head. Then the door behind me opened and the sun sliced in, and I blinked the vision away.





22


What did Finch think they’d find through the door?

A goblin market. The wood between the worlds. An underworld of smoke and fire.

Not this: a few rippingly painful seconds spent falling through an icy fog. Then his body tipped onto dusty stone, hard through the patched-over knees of his jeans. He was certain he was upside down, clinging like a spider, till the world righted itself. Iolanthe was already standing, swatting the dust away, as Finch rose slowly to his feet.

They stood in a cracked courtyard circled with crumbling pillars, under a blank gray sky. But courtyard didn’t feel like an old enough word. It was an agora, then, vast and ancient and empty. Finch couldn’t tell if it was night or day, or whether those words had any meaning here. The pillars were neatly spaced, flanking wide stone roads, each angling steeply upward toward the broken teeth of the city encircling them.

This world was dead. Finch thought he understood what that could mean, having watched the disintegration of the Hinterland. But that was a bleeding world, running with life and rage and sentient stars, bucking against the insult of its own collapse.

He hadn’t understood what death could look like when the corpse was made of stone and wind and dust and all the million, million elements that sifted and slept the big sleep under a voided-out sky. The weight of it was unimaginable.

Iolanthe’s hand was friendly on his shoulder. Her calm was a lifeline, and the casual lilt of her voice. “Scary, isn’t it? We can’t stay too long without shelter—it gets under your skin out here. In your head. But look around while you can, hardly anyone gets to see a fossil world.”

Finch found his words at last. “What happened here?”

She was turning in place, looking at each road. Something about the one directly to Finch’s right must’ve appealed to her, and she started toward it. Far, far above them—though it was hard to say how far, because of the place’s surreal flatness—stood a palace of high gray towers, edgeless against the sky.

“A parasite happened,” she said. “Now follow me, and save your breath. It’s a long walk.”

The city seemed distant till suddenly they were in it, among the falling-down slabs of walls and shops and houses. They walked in silence, but inside Finch’s head was a rising fire. A building whose windows were great black eyes had on its roof a stone symbol like a thumbless hand, clearly some kind of long-fallen temple. There was a moment when he thought he saw a sign of life—an undulation in his vision, like the flicker of distant light—but Iolanthe didn’t seem to notice it, and then he wasn’t sure.