Library of Souls (17 page)

“For the love of birds, just go,” said Emma, and she stepped on behind me.

Addison slowed us down badly. His little legs kept slipping between the pikes, which made the pikes roll like axles and gave me awful stomach flutters. I tried focusing on where to place my feet without seeing past them into the chasm, but it was impossible; the boiling river attracted my eyes like a magnet, and I found myself wondering whether we were high enough for the fall alone to kill me or whether I'd survive long enough to feel myself cooking to death. Addison, meanwhile, had given up trying to walk altogether and instead laid down, whereupon he began to push himself along the pikes like a slug. In this way we proceeded, inch by undignified inch, to just beyond the halfway point—and then my flutters sharpened and gave way to something else: a knot in my stomach that I'd come to know all too well.

Hollow
. I tried to say it aloud but my mouth had gone dry; by the time I'd swallowed and got the word out, the feeling had multiplied tenfold.

“What dreadful luck,” Addison said. “Is it ahead of us or behind?”

I couldn't tell right away and had to poke around the feeling
for a moment before I could pin it down.

“Jacob! Ahead or behind?” Emma shouted in my ear.

Ahead
. My gut-compass was certain, but it made no sense: the downward slope of the bridge was now visible all the way to the gate, and the whole length was deserted. There was nothing there.

“I don't know!” I said.

“Then keep going!” Emma replied.

We were closer to the far side of the gap than the near; we'd be off the pikes faster if we continued forward. I shoved down my fear, bent and scooped up Addison, and started to run, slipping and wobbling on the unsteady pikes. The hollow felt close enough to touch, and I could hear it now, grunting toward us from some unseen place ahead. My eyes followed the sound to a spot in front of us but below our feet—on the cut-away face of the bridge, where several tall, narrow apertures had been carved into the stone.

There
. The bridge was hollow, and a hollow was inside the bridge. Though its body would never fit through the openings in the stone, its tongues easily could.

I'd made it across the pikes and onto solid bridge when I heard Emma cry out. I dropped Addison and spun to see her behind me, one of the hollow's tongues wrapped around her waist and whisking her into the air.

She screamed my name and I screamed hers. The tongue flipped her upside down and shook her. She screamed again. There was no worse sound.

Another of its tongues slapped the underside of the pikes and our makeshift bridge went flying, clattering apart and plunging like matchsticks into the chasm below. Then the second tongue went for Addison, and the third punched me in the chest.

I fell to the ground, the wind knocked out of me. While I struggled for a breath, the tongue slithered around my waist and scooped me into the air. The other had Addison by his hind legs. In a moment, all three of us were dangling upside down.

Blood rushed to my head, darkening my vision. I could hear Addison barking and nipping at the tongue.

“Don't, it'll drop you!” I shouted, but he kept on.

Emma was helpless, too; if she burned the tongue around her waist, the hollow would drop her.

“Talk to it, Jacob!” she shouted. “Make it stop!”

I twisted to see the narrow openings through which its tongues had squeezed. Its teeth gnawed at the stone slats. Its black eyes bulged hungrily. We hung like fruit on thick black vines, the chasm yawning below.

I tried to speak its language. “SET US DOWN!” I shouted—but what came out was English.

“Again!” Addison said.

I shut my eyes and imagined the hollow doing as I asked, then tried again.

“Put us down on the bridge!”

More English. This wasn't the hollow I'd come to know, the one I'd communed with for hours while it was frozen in ice. This was a new one, a stranger, and my connection with it was thin and weak. It seemed to sense that I was fumbling for a key to its brain, and it hauled us suddenly upward, as if winding up to fling us into the chasm. I had to connect, somehow,
now
—

“STOP!” I screamed, my throat raw—and this time, out came the guttural scratch of hollowspeak.

We jolted to a stop in midair. For a moment we just hung there, swinging like laundry in a breeze. My words had done something but not enough. I'd merely confused it.

“Can't breathe,” Emma croaked. The tongue around her was squeezing too hard, and her face was turning purple.

“Put us down on the bridge,” I said—in Hollow again!—the words clawing at my throat as they came. Every burst of hollowspeak felt like I was coughing up staples.

The hollow made an uncertain rattle. For an optimistic
moment I thought it might actually do as I'd asked. Then it snapped me up and down as fast and hard as you'd shake out a towel.

Everything blurred and briefly went black. When I came to, my tongue was numb and I tasted blood.

“Tell it to put us down!” Addison was shouting. But now I could hardly speak at all.

“Ahm twying,” I mumbled. I coughed, spitting out a mouthful of blood. “Puhh uff dow,” I said, in broken-tongued English. “Puhh uff—”

I stopped, reoriented my brain. Took a deep breath.

“Put us down on the bridge,” I said in crisp hollowspeak.

I repeated it three more times, hoping it might slip into some furrow of the hollow's reptilian brain. “Put us down on the bridge. Put us down on the bridge. Put us down on the—”

It gave a sudden bone-rattling roar of frustration, pulled me to the openings in the bridge where it was imprisoned, and roared again, flecks of black spittle spraying my face. Then it hauled all three of us up and hurled us back the way we'd come.

We tumbled through the air for what felt like too long—we were falling now, I was sure of it, arcing downward to our doom—and then my shoulder connected with the hard stone of the bridge, and we slid and skidded all the way down its slope to the bottom.

* * *

We were, miraculously, alive—banged up but conscious, our limbs still connected to our bodies. We'd tumbled down the smooth marble bridge, scattering the pile of heads at the bottom as we rolled to a stop. They were all around now, taunting us as we collected ourselves.

“Welcome back!” said the one nearest me. “We quite enjoyed your screams of terror. What powerful lungs you have!”

“Why didn't you tell us a hollow was hiding in the damned
bridge?” I said, rocking myself up to a sitting position. Pains flared all over my body, from scraped hands, scuffed knees, and a throbbing shoulder that was likely dislocated.

“Where's the fun in that? Surprises are much better.”

“Tickles must've taken a fancy to you,” said another. “He chewed the legs off his last visitor!”

“That's nothing,” said a head with a shiny hoop earring like a pirate. “Once I saw him tie a rope around a peculiar, lower him into the river for five minutes, then reel him up and eat him.”

“Peculiar al dente,” the third said, impressed. “Our Tickles is a gourmand.”

Not quite ready to stand, I scooted over a few feet to Emma and Addison. While she sat rubbing her head, he tested his weight on an injured paw.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I knocked my head pretty good,” Emma replied, wincing as I parted her hair to examine a trickle of blood.

Addison held up a limp paw. “I fear it's broken. I don't suppose you could've asked the beast to set us down gently.”

“Very funny,” I said. “Come to think of it, why didn't I just tell it kill to all the wights and rescue our friends, too?”

“Actually, I was wondering the same thing,” said Emma.

“I'm
joking
.”

“Well, I'm not,” she said. I dabbed at her wound with my shirt cuff. She drew a sharp breath and pushed my hand away. “What happened back there?”

“I think the hollow understood me, but I couldn't make it obey. I don't have a connection with that hollow like I do—did—with the other one.”

That beast was dead, crushed under a bridge and probably drowned, and now I was a little sorry about it.

“How did you connect with the first one?” asked Addison.

I quickly recounted how I'd found it frozen in ice up to its eyeballs,
and after a night spent in strangely intimate, hand-atop-head communion I had, apparently, managed to safe-crack some vital part of its neurology.

“If you had no connection with the bridge hollow,” said Addison, “why did it spare our lives?”

“Maybe I confused it?”

“You need to get better at this,” Emma said bluntly. “We have to get Addison across.”

“Better? What am I supposed to do, take lessons? That thing will kill us the next time we get near it. We'll have to find another way across.”

“Jacob, there
is
no other way.” Emma raked a veil of mussed hair away from her face and held me with her eyes. “
You're
the way.”

I was launching into a creaky rebuttal when I felt a sharp pain in my backside and leapt yelping to my feet. One of the heads had bitten me on the ass.

“Hey!” I shouted, rubbing the spot.

“Stick us back on our pikes like you found us, vandal!” it said.

I punted it as hard as I could and it tumbled away into the crowd of squatters. All the heads began to shout and curse us, rolling about grotesquely with the action of their jaws. I cursed back and kicked ash in their horrible leathery faces until they were all spitting and choking. And then something small and round came sailing through the air and hit me wetly in the back.

A rotten apple. I spun to face the squatters. “Who threw that?”

They laughed like stoners, low and snickering.

“Go back where you came from!” one of them yelled.

I was starting to think that wasn't a bad idea.

“How dare they,” Addison snarled.

“Forget it,” I said to him, my anger already fading. “Let's just—”

“How
dare
you!” Addison shouted, livid, rising up to address
them on hind legs. “Are you not peculiar? Have you no shame? We're trying to help you!”

“Give us a vial or get stuffed!” said a ragged woman.

Addison trembled with outrage. “We're trying to help you,” he said again, “and here you are
—here you are!
—while our people are being murdered, our loops torn out root and branch, sleeping before the enemy's gate! You should be flinging yourselves at it!” He pointed his wounded paw at them. “You are all traitors, and I swear one day I shall see you dragged before the Council of Ymbrynes and punished!”

“Okay, okay, don't waste all your energy on them,” Emma said, wobbling to her feet. Then a rotten head of cabbage bounced off her shoulder and fell
splat
to the ground.

She lost it.

“All right, someone's gonna get their face melted!” she yelled, waving a flaming hand at the squatters.

During Addison's speech, a group had been muttering in a conspiratorial huddle, and now they came forward holding blunt weapons. A sawed branch. A length of pipe. The scene was turning ugly fast.

“We're tired of you,” a bruised man said in a lazy drawl. “We're puttin' you in the river.”

“I'd like to see that,” Emma said.

“I wouldn't,” I said. “I think we should go.”

There were six of them, three of us, and we were in rough shape: Addison was limping, Emma had blood running down her face, and thanks to my injured shoulder I could hardly lift my right arm. Meanwhile, the men were spreading apart and closing in. They meant to drive us into the chasm.

Emma looked back at the bridge and then at me. “Come on. I know you can get us across. One more try.”

“I can't, Em. I
can't
. I'm not messing around.”

And I wasn't. I didn't have it in me to control that hollow—not
yet, at least—and I knew it.

“If the boy says he can't do it, I'm not inclined to disbelieve him,” Addison said. “We must find another way out of this.”

Emma huffed. “Like what?” She looked at Addison. “Can you run?” She looked at me. “Can you fight?”

The answer to both was no. I took her point: our options were winnowing fast.

“At times like this,” Addison said imperiously, “my kind don't fight. We orate!” Facing the men, he called out in a booming voice, “Fellow peculiars, be reasonable! Allow me a few words!”

They paid him no attention. As they continued closing off our escape routes, we backed toward the bridge, Emma crafting the largest fireball she could muster while Addison yammered about how the animals of the forest live in harmony, so why can't we? “Consider the simple hedgehog, and his neighbor, the opossum … do they waste their energy trying to throw one another into chasms when they face a common enemy, the winter? No!”

“He's gone completely crackers,” Emma said. “Shut your gob and bite one of them!”

I looked around for something to fight with. The only hard objects within reach were the heads. I picked one up by the last wisps of its hair.

“Is there another way across?” I shouted into its face. “Quick, or I'm throwing you into the river!”

“Go to Hell!” it spat, then snapped at me with its teeth.

I flung it at the men—awkwardly, with my left arm. It fell short. I rooted around for another head, picked it up, and repeated my question.

“Sure there is,” the head sneered. “In the back of a prizzo van! Though if I were you I'd take my chances with the bridge hollow …”

“What's a prizzo van? Tell me or I'll fling you, too!”

“You're about to get hit by one,” it replied, and then three gunshots rang out in the distance—
bam, bam, bam
, slow and measured,
like a warning. Immediately the men who'd been coming at us stopped, and everyone turned to look down the road.