Library of Souls (35 page)

“Cells.”

She pointed. Dimly it came into view: the bars of a prison cell.

We crept down the stairs. The space began to reveal itself: we were at the end of a long, subterranean hallway lined with cells, and though we couldn't see yet who was in them, I had a soaring moment of hope. This was it. This was the place we'd hoped to find.

Then came a sudden slap of boots in the hall. Adrenaline surged through me. A guard was patrolling, rifle over his shoulder, pistol at his hip. He hadn't seen us yet, but he would, any moment now. We were too far from the hatch to escape the way we'd come, and too far from the ground to easily leap down and fight him, so we hunkered and shrank back, hoping the stairs' spindly railing would be enough to hide us.

But it couldn't be. We were nearly at his eye level. He was twenty steps away, then fifteen. We had to do something.

So I did.

I stood up and walked down the stairs. He noticed me right away, of course, but before he could get a good look I started talking. Loud and bossy, I said: “Didn't you hear the alarm? Why aren't you outside defending the walls?”

By the time he realized that I was not someone he took orders from I had reached the floor, and by the time he'd started to grab for
his gun I had already closed half the distance between us, barreling toward him like a quarterback. I hit him with my shoulder just as he pulled the trigger. The gun roared, the shot ricocheting behind me. We sprawled to the ground. I made the mistake of trying to stop him from squeezing off another shot while trying to give him the finger—I had it now—which was stuffed deep in my right pocket. I didn't have enough limbs to do both, and he threw me off him and stood up. I'm sure that would've been the end of me if he hadn't seen Emma running toward him, hands aflame, and turned to shoot her instead.

He squeezed off a round but it was wild, too high, and that gave me just the opportunity I needed to scramble to my feet and charge him again. I tackled him and we fell across the hallway, his back slamming into the bars of one of the cells. He hit me—hard, in the face, with his elbow—and I spun and fell. And then he was raising the gun to shoot me, and neither Emma nor I were close enough to stop him.

Suddenly, a pair of meaty hands reached out of the darkness, through the bars, and grabbed the guard by his hair. His head snapped back hard and rung the bars like a bell.

The guard went limp and slid to the ground. And then Bronwyn came forward inside the cell, pressed her face to the bars, and smiled.

“Mr. Jacob! Miss Emma!”

I had never been so glad to see anyone. Her large, kind eyes, her strong chin, her lank brown hair—it was Bronwyn! We stuck our arms through the bars and hugged her as best we could, so excited and relieved that we started babbling—“Bronwyn, Bronwyn,” Emma gasped, “is it really you?”

“Is that
you
, miss?” said Bronwyn. “We've been praying and hoping and, oh, I was so worried the wights had got you—”

Bronwyn was squeezing us against the bars so hard I thought I might pop. The bars were thick as bricks and made of something
stronger than iron, which I realized was the only reason Bronwyn hadn't broken out of her cell.

“Can't … breathe,” Emma groaned, and Bronwyn apologized and let us go.

Now that I could get a proper look at her, I noticed a bruise on Bronwyn's cheek and a dark stain that might've been blood spotting one side of her blouse. “What did they do to you?” I said.

“Nothing serious,” she replied, “though there's been threats.”

“And the others?” Emma said, panicked again. “Where are the others?”

“Here!” came a voice from down the hallway. “Over here!” came another.

And then we turned and saw, pressed against the bars of the cells lining the hall, the faces of our friends. There they were: Horace and Enoch, Hugh and Claire, Olive, gasping through the bars at us from the top of her cell, her back against the ceiling—all there, all of them breathing and alive, except poor Fiona—lost when she fell from the cliff at Miss Wren's menagerie. But mourning her was a luxury we didn't have right then.

“Oh, thank the birds, the miraculous bloody birds!” Emma cried, running to take Olive's hand. “You can't imagine how worried we've been!”

“Not half as worried as we've been!” Hugh said from down the hall.

“I told them you'd come for us!” Olive said, near tears. “I told them and told them, but Enoch kept saying I was a loony for thinking so …”

“Never mind, they're here now!” said Enoch. “What took you so bloody long?”

“How in Perplexus's name did you find us?” said Millard. He was the only one the wights had bothered to dress in prisoners' garb—a striped jumpsuit that made him easy to see.

“We'll tell you the whole story,” said Emma, “but first we need
to find the ymbrynes and get you all out of here!”

“They're down the hall!” said Hugh. “Through the big door!”

At the end of the hall was a huge metal door. It looked heavy enough to secure a bank vault—or hold back a hollowgast.

“You'll need the key,” said Bronwyn, and she pointed out a ring on the unconscious guard's belt. “It's the big gold one. I've been watching him!”

I scrambled to the guard and tore the keys from his belt. Then I stood frozen with them in my hand, my eyes darting between the cell doors and Emma.

“Hurry up and let us out!” Enoch said.

“With which key?” I said. The ring held dozens, all identical save the big gold one.

Emma's face fell. “Oh, no.”

More guards would be coming soon, and unlocking every cell would cost precious minutes. So we ran to the end of the hall, unlocked the door, and gave the keys to Hugh, whose cell was closest. “Free yourself and then the others!” I said.

“Then stay here until we come back to get you,” Emma added.

“No chance!” Hugh said. “We're coming after you!”

There was no time to argue—and I was secretly relieved to hear it. After all this time struggling on our own, I was looking forward to having some backup.

Emma and I heaved open the big bunker-like door, took a last look at our friends, and slipped away.

* * *

On the other side of the door was a long rectangular room cluttered with utilitarian furniture and lit from above by greenish fluorescent bulbs. It was doing its best impression of an office, but I wasn't fooled. The wall was spongy with foam soundproofing. The door was thick enough to withstand a nuclear blast. This was no office.

We could hear someone moving around at the far end of the room, but our view was blocked by a bulky filing cabinet. I touched Emma's arm and nodded my head—
let's go
—and we began to advance quietly, hoping to sneak up on whoever was in here with us.

I caught a glimpse of a white coat and a man's balding head. Definitely not an ymbryne. Had they not heard the door opening? No, they hadn't, and then I realized why: they were listening to music. A woman's voice sang a soft, slinky rock song—an old one I'd heard before but couldn't name. So strange, so dislocating, to hear it here, now.

We slid forward, the song just loud enough to mask our footsteps, passing desks crowded with papers and maps. A rack mounted to a wall held hundreds of glass beakers, silver-flecked black liquid spinning inside. Lingering, I saw that each was labeled, the names of the victims whose souls they contained printed in small type.

Peeking around the filing cabinet, we saw a lab-coated man seated at a desk shuffling papers, his back to us. All around him was a horror-show of random anatomy. A skinned arm with musculature exposed. A spine hung like a trophy on the wall. A few bloodless organs scattered like lost puzzle pieces on the desk. The man was writing something, nodding his head, humming along with the song—something about love, something about miracles.

We stepped into the open and moved toward him across the floor. I remembered where I'd last heard the song: at the dentist, while a metal pick stabbed at the soft, pink flesh of my gums.

“You Make Loving Fun.”

Now we were only a few yards away. Emma held out a hand, ready to light it. But just before we got within reach of the man, he spoke to us.

“Hello, there. I've been expecting you.”

It was a slimy-smooth voice I would never forget. Caul.

Emma summoned flames that shot from her palms with the sound of a whip-crack. “Tell us where the ymbrynes are, and I might spare your life!”

Startled, the man spun around in his chair. What we saw startled us, too: below his wide eyes, his face was a ruin of melted flesh. This man was not Caul—he wasn't even a wight—and it couldn't have been him who'd spoken. The man's lips were fused together. In his two hands he held a mechanical pencil and a small remote control. Pinned to his coat was a name tag.

Warren
.

“Gee, you wouldn't hurt old Warren, would you?” Caul's voice again, coming from the same place as the music: a speaker in the wall. “Though it wouldn't matter much if you did. He's only my intern.”

Warren sank low into his swivel chair, looking fearfully at the flame in Emma's hand.

“Where are you?” Emma shouted, looking around.

“Never mind that!” Caul said through the speaker. “What matters is that you've come to see me. I'm delighted! It's so much easier than hunting you down.”

“We've got a whole army of peculiars on their way!” Emma bluffed. “The crowd at your gates is just the tip of the spear. Tell us where the ymbrynes are and maybe we can settle this peacefully!”

“Army!” Caul said, laughing. “There aren't enough fight-ready
peculiars left in London to form a fire brigade, much less an army. As for your pathetic ymbrynes, save your empty threats—I'll gladly show you where they are. Warren, would you do the honors?”

Warren pushed a button on the remote in his hand, and with a loud
whoosh
a panel slid aside in the wall to one side of us. Behind it was a second wall made of thick glass, which looked into an expansive room engulfed in shadow.

We pressed against the glass, cupping our hands around our faces to see. Gradually, there came into view a space like a neglected basement, jumbled with furnishings and heavy drapes and human forms frozen in strange postures, many of which appeared, like the spare parts on Warren's desk, to have been stripped of their skin.

Oh God what's he done to them
—

My eyes darted around the dark, my heart racing.

“That's Miss Glassbill!” Emma cried, and then I saw her, too. She sat in a chair off to one side, mannish and flat-faced, perfectly symmetrical braids falling down either side of her head. We pounded on the glass and called to her, but she merely stared, in a daze, unresponsive to our shouts.

“What have you done to her?” I shouted. “Why won't she answer?”

“She's had bit of her soul removed,” Caul said. “Tends to numb the brain.”

“You bastard!” Emma shouted, and punched the glass. Warren backed his rolling chair into the corner. “You black-hearted, despicable, cowardly …”

“Oh, calm down,” Caul said. “I only took a
little
of her soul, and the rest of your nursemaids are in top health, if not spirits.”

A harsh overhead light flicked on in the jumbled room, and it became suddenly clear that most of the figures were just dummies—no, obviously not real—mannequins or anatomical models of some kind, posed like statues with their tendons and muscles all flexed and popping. But in among them, gagged, bound to chairs and wooden posts, flinching and squeezing their eyes shut against the sudden light, were real, living people. Women. Eight, ten—I hadn't time to count them all—most of them older, disheveled but distinguished-looking.

Our ymbrynes.

“Jacob, it's them!” Emma cried. “Can you see Miss—”