The Black Reckoning Page 14

  She turned and looked into the darkness.

  “Come out.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then a voice said: “How’d you know?”

  Rafe, or Rafe’s ghost—she still wasn’t sure how to think of him—stepped from behind a tree, shadows obscuring his features.

  “I just felt it.”

  This was not exactly true. She’d only hoped he would be there, but hoped it so fervently that she had felt it had to be so.

  Kate said, “Aren’t you supposed to tell me it’s really you?”

  He shrugged. “What’s the point? If the Dire Magnus was pretending to be me, wouldn’t he say the same thing?”

  “I guess.”

  Rafe stepped closer. Gray light filtering through the trees fell across his face.

  “Well?”

  Kate studied him for a long moment. “It’s you.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Kate was about to answer when she realized she couldn’t. All she knew was that she wanted to believe; and right then, she knew she was lost.

  But she pushed the thought away and said what had been turning through her mind all night.

  “We’re going to the old giant city. We think whoever took the Reckoning from Rhakotis brought it there. He may still be there too. We don’t know what’s waiting for us. And with Dr. Pym gone, there’s no one to ask. Can you help?”

  Rafe shook his head. “The Dire Magnus doesn’t know who took the Reckoning. If he did, it would’ve made finding it easier.”

  Kate nodded, having half expected that answer. She said, “Emma can see people’s deaths.”

  “What?”

  “She can see people’s deaths. She said this one giant was going to die and then he did. Does it—”

  “It means the Bonding worked. At least partly. She’s connected to the Reckoning. As she gets closer, she’ll be able to feel the book itself. It’ll call to her.”

  They were both silent then for a few moments. Kate could hear the background rumbling of the giant’s snores, and in the pauses between them, the crackle of the fire and the soft passage of the river, so close by. The first shock of seeing Rafe, the wild, heart-pounding strangeness of being able to talk to him again, had passed, and Kate was filled instead with an appreciation of what this interaction really was. The Rafe she knew, the boy she had danced with, who’d protected her, who had held her in his arms, was gone forever. She was talking to a ghost. And sometime very soon, she would lose even that.

  She sensed too that Rafe knew what she was thinking and didn’t begrudge it, that he understood her reserve and that was why he wasn’t pressing her for more than she could give. It occurred to her that that was how she knew it was really him.

  “There’s something else. I can’t explain it, but ever since we rescued Emma, I’ve felt…”

  Kate found to her frustration that she really couldn’t explain it. For how could she describe the vague sense of unease she felt, the disturbing undercurrent that told her some unnamed and unseen trouble, some danger she had not yet encountered, was stirring?

  Rafe said, “It’s the Books.”

  “What?”

  “What you’re feeling. It’s the Books.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  Rafe took a moment before responding, but when he spoke, Kate felt that she had asked the thing he’d been waiting for her to ask.

  “You have to understand, the wizards who created the Books, your friend Pym among them, drew the magic out of the very heart of the world. But the Books are still connected to everything around us. Imagine them at the center of an enormous web, and each time you use the Atlas or your brother uses the Chronicle, the whole web trembles.”

  “But what does that really mean?”

  “You and your brother think what you’re doing doesn’t have larger effects, but it does. You stop one moment in time; he brings one person back to life; the power radiates outward, shaking everything. That’s what you’re feeling. And it’s going to get worse.”

  “So we shouldn’t use the Books anymore? We have to!”

  “I’m just saying: the bonds that hold the universe together can only bear so much. Soon, they’ll begin to snap.”

  Kate turned away. She didn’t want to hear any more. She needed the Atlas to take them all back to Loris. She had to use it!

  “What you asked before,” Rafe said, “about what’s waiting in the city, there is one thing I can tell you. Whoever brought the Reckoning here didn’t do it by accident. There’re a thousand other places it could’ve been hidden, dragon lairs, caves at the bottom of the ocean. Something about this place is special.”

  “Willy hasn’t said anything—”

  “He wouldn’t know. I have the feeling it was a secret. Be careful.”

  The sky was getting lighter. In another time, another place, they would’ve just been two teenagers standing alone in the shadows.

  Kate said quietly, “I had a dream last night. We were in the church. In New York. It was snowing.” She turned and looked at him. “Rafe, the next time, if I know it’s not you…”

  She was breathing hard now, her heart thudding against her chest, and the words caught in her throat.

  He nodded. “I know. Me too.”

  —

  After a quick breakfast of mutton (another word for sheep, it turned out), the small group crossed the river, the children and Gabriel riding on Willy’s shoulders as he waded through the thick brown water. When they reached the other shore, they found themselves entering a forest. But the forest was strangely, eerily silent. There were no birds calling to one another and announcing the dawn, no squirrels skittering along branches; everything was quiet and still, and the children, feeling this, grew quiet as well.

  Emma had woken before Gabriel and Michael and seen that Kate was not with them. She’d lain there without moving, till she’d heard Kate’s footsteps.

  “Where’d you go?”

  Kate had seemed surprised to be caught sneaking back, and Emma had watched her forming the lie.

  “Oh. I thought I heard a noise. It was nothing.”

  Emma hadn’t pressed her. In the morning light, the shadow hanging over her sister had been darker than ever.

  Gabriel had woken at the sound of the girls’ voices; they had then woken Michael, and the four of them had worked together to wake the giant. Shouts, pinches, kicks to his stomach—none of it had had any effect. Finally, Emma had snatched a burning branch from the fire and stuck it up his nose.

  The giant had let out a bellow that blew them off their feet, and he’d leapt up, dancing around and swatting at his face, crying, “Oh! Oh! Oh!” Kate had scolded Emma, and Emma had apologized to the giant, but really, she’d thought, he’d fallen asleep on guard duty; in some armies, he would’ve been shot.

  The forest was thick, but Willy was tall enough that the children and Gabriel could ride on his shoulders and not be clawed and swatted by passing branches. Willy seemed to pay the trees no mind, and Emma, looking back, could track the giant’s passage by the broken branches and trampled saplings in their wake. If anyone had a mind to follow them, the path could hardly have been clearer.

  It was midmorning when they came to the top of a rise, and Willy raised his arm and pointed into the distance. “There! That’s it!”

  “You mean behind those hills?” Michael asked.

  “Those’re no hills, Toadlip. That’s the city.”

  “My name—”

  “Is Toadlip,” Emma said automatically.

  She heard Michael mutter something unintelligible.

  Standing on the hill, they could see down to where the trees stopped and a broad plain opened up. Past the plain was what Michael had taken for a knot of gray hills. But it was now apparent they were looking not at hills but at an immense gray-black wall and, above that, the studded tops of buildings, clustering upward. Emma could see one building rising higher than the others, its roof gleaming as it caught the morning s
un.

  “If only me da’ could see what I’m seeing now,” Willy murmured. “The High City of King Davey. Amazing what you find when you leave the house. Amazing.”

  “Emma,” said Kate, who was sitting beside her sister, “do you feel anything?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She means do you feel the Reckoning,” Michael called from Willy’s other shoulder, where he and Gabriel sat. “Both of us, when we got close to our Books, felt them. Almost like something’s pulling on your chest.”

  Emma stared at the city in the distance and waited, hardly breathing. But she felt no tug or pull, just a vague nausea from eating too much sheep and then riding for hours on a giant’s shoulder.

  “I don’t feel anything.”

  “It doesn’t mean it’s not there!” Michael shouted. “We might just have to get closer!”

  Emma said nothing, and Willy thudded down the slope, eager to reach the city, and soon they came out of the forest onto the open plain. Willy was moving more and more quickly, and the children and Gabriel had to hold on tightly. But then, halfway across the plain, they came upon a stand of unusual-looking trees, and the giant slowed. The trees appeared to be all trunk, no branches at all, and were encased in moss and curving up out of the earth at strange angles. The trees were also surrounded by odd-shaped moss-and-grass-covered boulders.

  “They’re bones,” Michael said when they were right up next to them. “The bones of the giants that were killed.”

  It was indeed an enormous boneyard; the trees were the ribs of the giants, the moss-covered boulders the skulls, hands, knees, and legs. Willy and Gabriel and the children moved past the skeletons in silence.

  Finally, Kate said, “It’s really true. The story about King Davey and his giants going out to fight the stranger; it happened.”

  They passed one set of bones that was separate from the others, and when they reached the skull, for the giant appeared to have fallen backward when he died, they could see the ridges of the moss-covered crown that still encircled his brow.

  “It’s him,” Willy said in the nearest thing he could manage to a whisper. “It’s King Davey. Lookit his bones! He must’ve been fifty feet tall! Taller even than Big Rog!”

  For a moment, Emma was silent. She didn’t want to say it, but seeing the bones of the dead giants had filled her with a wild, almost giddy excitement. If the Reckoning had done this, then it could certainly kill the Dire Magnus.

  “Come on!” she said. “What’re we waiting for? Let’s go!”

  “You mean…go to the city, then?”

  Willy’s voice had none of the eagerness he’d displayed all morning, and Emma could see that even Kate was looking stunned and wary.

  “Yes, the city! Where else?!” And to Kate, she said, “The Reckoning’s the only way we’re gonna kill the Dire Magnus! You know it!”

  Kate nodded and told Willy that yes, they should go on.

  With clear reluctance, Willy resumed walking toward the city, throwing occasional glances back at the remains of King Davey and his soldiers and murmuring things like “I wonder, did I leave the kettle on back at the house?” Still, he kept on. And the nearer they got to the city, the larger it grew, the walls stretching both outward and upward, half a mile to the other side and hundreds of feet high. By the time Willy stopped before the city gates, he himself was dwarfed by the scale of the city.

  “Wow,” he said, looking up, “it’s…really big.”

  The walls were made of heavy blocks of gray-black stone that had been fitted together with great craftsmanship and precision. Indeed, the very fact that the walls were still standing so many centuries after the city had been abandoned—though they were covered by a thick lattice of weeds and vines, and there were large holes where chunks of stone had sheared away—testified to the skill of the city’s masons.

  The gates were as high as the walls and made of wood and, no doubt thanks to whatever their makers had treated them with, appeared whole and solid. Somewhat gingerly, Willy placed one palm against the wood and pushed. The gate opened a few feet, then stopped. He pushed harder, and the gate gave a little more. Finally, he set the children and Gabriel on the ground, took two steps back, charged forward, and rammed his shoulder against the gate. The children heard ripping and snapping, Emma saw strange, silvery-gray bands on the inside breaking free, and the gate flew open.

  Picking himself up from the ground, Willy lifted the children and Gabriel to his shoulders and stepped through the gate, along a portico, and out into a large square. A wide boulevard of flattened stone led away from them, down through the center of the city, while two other streets split off to either side. The buildings before them were both impossibly massive and impossibly tall. It was hard for the children even to process what they were seeing; it was almost as if the city were normal-sized and they had shrunk to the size of insects.

  But what was most notable, what had the children’s hearts beating in their throats, was not the sheer enormity of the city. It was that everything—the streets, the buildings, the walls, even the giant streetlamps—was covered by the same silvery-gray bands that had barred the door. It was almost a kind of netting or even—

  “They’re spiderwebs!” Emma said.

  “But that’s—that’s not possible!” Michael exclaimed. He had a long history of arachnophobia (he even yelped at the harmless daddy longlegs Emma routinely put in his bed as “therapy”). “They’d have to be—”

  “Giant,” Willy said. “Giant spiders. Yep.”

  “You knew about this?” Kate asked.

  “Well, I didn’t know that they’d taken over the city. But back in King Davey’s time, there was giant everything, giant sheep and giant cows and giant chickens. The royal magicians did that, made everything up to scale, so to speak—only way you could hope to feed a city full of big folk. Problem was, in the casting of the spell, wasn’t just chickens and sheep that got big. Other things got big too.”

  “Like spiders,” Emma said.

  “Most a’ the giant creatures died out or were eaten up long ago, and we don’t have magicians now to do the spell; that’s why we spend all our time scrounging for food. But looks like the spiders might’ve survived.”

  For a moment, they just stared at the mummified city. Here and there, strands of webbing had broken free and wafted in the breeze.

  “So where are they?” Emma said.

  For besides the drifting webs, nothing moved. Nor were there any bodies of spiders lying about.

  “Perhaps they are dead,” Gabriel said. “Or have abandoned the city. Those webs look old.”

  The children had to agree. The webbing was dried out and fraying, like ancient lace.

  “So what do we do now?” Michael said, and it sounded as if he would’ve been quite happy if someone had said, “We turn around and forget all about this.”

  “We go on,” Emma said, and, unable to resist, she added, “even if there are giant, hairy spiders waiting to eat us!”

  Kate gave her a look.

  After a short discussion, they decided to proceed straight down the boulevard, into the heart of the city. Willy had drawn his sword, and he used it to clear the way, though he had to pause regularly and clean off the webs that stuck to the blade. His steps were quieter than normal, and when Emma glanced down, she saw that webs were clinging to the giant’s feet, so that it looked like he was wearing a pair of fluffy white shoes.

  As they moved forward, the children stared up at the buildings on either side, and the hugeness of the city began to strike home. Indeed, peering down side streets—which were crisscrossed with gray webs like streamers for a parade—the children found that the town houses and buildings in the distance seemed like far-off mountain ranges.

  Still they saw no spiders, living or dead.

  “It’s actually a nice city,” Michael said, after they’d been walking for a while and were passing a park surrounded by shops and cafés.

  Even Willy seemed to
have overcome his nerves.

  “It’s just as Da’ always said. Beautiful.”

  Then they entered an enormous square and stopped. Before them stood a massive building from which a tower rose five hundred feet into the air, far above anything else in the city. It was capped by a silver dome, and Emma realized that this was the tower and dome she’d seen from the forest.

  “It’s the palace of King Davey,” Willy said, with dumbfounded reverence. “He had it built ’cause he kept banging his head on the doorways of the old palace.”

  “We have to go inside,” Emma said.

  “Is it in there?” Kate asked. “Do you feel something?”

  Emma shook her head. “I just know.”

  Willy needed no more encouragement, and with the children and Gabriel holding on as best they could, he hurried across the square, ran up half a dozen stone steps to an open colonnade, and then used his sword to hack through the thick webbing that swathed a set of giant ceremonial doors.

  The inside of the palace was free of webs, and the group made fast progress through a series of vestibules and waiting rooms. The air was musty and stale, and though it was the middle of the day, only a faint grayish light penetrated the webbing that covered the windows from the outside, giving the palace a gloomy, tomblike air. A thick layer of dust carpeted the floor, and Willy left a cloudy trail behind them. After passing through the sixth or seventh antechamber, Willy pushed open a pair of intricately wrought metal doors, they entered a large circular room, and Willy stopped dead.

  “King Davey’s throne room. Has to be.”

  The room was built directly beneath the tower, allowing Willy and Gabriel and the children to look straight up nearly five hundred feet. Light filtering down showed a chamber that seemed oddly plain and unadorned, as if everything had been stripped away to focus all attention on the round dais in the center.

  “That was where he sat, dispensing wisdom to his people. But what happened to his throne?”