Music Box (The Dollhouse Books, #4) (37 page)

But Balthazar scowled. “I doth not wish to be disturbed again when I have important matters at hand.” He turned back to me.

“Watch her!” Audette pointed at Jessamine. “She’s small but don’t underestimate her.”

Balthazar smiled icily. “Here, her spirit is bound. She canst harm but a flea that crawls in a pig pen.”

Tobias hit the end of his walking stick on the floor. “Let the girl down.”

“Thou art a fool yet, Tobias Batiste,” snarled Balthazar. “Thou darest issue me a command?”

Tobias bent his head, shaking it slowly. “I am an old man at the end of his life. I have done much wrong. It is not for us humans to flit between worlds—at least not when it is for our own gain.”

I stared at Tobias. He was human, not a ghost. Where could he have been all this time?

“Prithee doth not give me thine right and thine wrong, traitor.” Balthazar paced the floor. “History is written by the strong. By the mighty. I write my own history. I forge my own world, upon the steel blade of my sword.” Slowly, he wiped the blood from his sword onto his shirt.

Ethan’s blood.

Ethan’s life.

“We will take our leave now, Monseigneur,” said Mr. Batiste. “We will keep Tobias secure until you are finished here.”

“None of thee wilt leave.” Balthazar raised his voice. “Thou wilt observe every moment. When I hath finished with the girl, I wilt deal out a torture on Tobias of the like that hath never been dealt on human flesh. And he wilt write the words of the
Speculum Nemus
in his own blood.”

“I do not fear your torture.” Tobias fixed his gaze on Balthazar. “But as the last living testament of the words of the books of the
Speculum Nemus
, I must close the curtain. This is the message I bring to you.”

Stepping to the edge of the stairway, he held his chained arms in tight to his body. Closing his eyes, he let himself fall backward.

Balthazar’s head snapped up, and he threw out his arms. But he was too late to catch Tobias with any of his spectral powers. The old man was lying face-up on the stone floor, his blood spreading in a circle.

A thick silence entered the room.

Balthazar’s skin grew dark like charcoal, his eyes a raging sea. Everyone quavered and rolled like waves around him, waves in Balthazar’s sea—awaiting his wrath.

Only Jessamine was still. Lifting her chin, she spoke a stream of words. Ancient words.

Gradually, her words filtered through into people’s ears. They all turned to the pale girl who stood at the top of the stairs.

She finished abruptly, gazing around at everyone. “Those words are from Grandfather to you. Words to unbind spirits, learned when he was a child at the castle.”

The whites of Balthazar’s eyes shone in the darkness. His face became terror.

Knocking, scratching noises sounded from beneath us.

Balthazar backed away, his breaths strained and heavy.

With a yell, Zach jumped from the staircase and raced across the room. Pushing past his father, Parker followed him. Together, they dropped to their knees and heaved open the trapdoor of the ghost hole—the
oubliette
.

Filmy, grayish beings rose from the oubliette. Tangled, warped human shapes. Cold, coiled rage and hate bled from the beings. Circling Balthazar, they pulled him into the oubliette. His strangled screams echoed through the wide darkness of the dungeons—screams at the pain of his human flesh being torn from his bones.

His screams were terror and confusion and agony. He’d spent centuries as a spirit and only days as a human being, and I knew that pain would be alien to him.

The ghosts were not quick with Balthazar. They tortured him in slow increments.

The screaming stopped abruptly, and a dark cloud smoked from the cell. An acrid, burning smell filled my nostrils. I knew Balthazar was gone.

The people of the castle stood in mute shock, their mouths gaping and limbs frozen.

The spirits rose. For a moment, I could see faces amongst them. Faces of men, of women, of children. Then they vanished.

A loud crack came as something burst through the flooring. An ancient, gnarled tree root forced its way in through the stonework.

More roots punched their way through the floor, writhing as they crawled along the stone tiles.

I stared down in horror. The ancient tree that the castle grounds had been built upon were reclaiming their territory.

The people of the castle galvanized all at once. In a pack, they rushed away up the stairs.

“Zach! Get out of there!” Zach’s father stopped on the stairway as the others fled past him trying to escape.

Zach ignored him.

Parker and Emerson ran to grab Zach. Zach wrestled himself away from them. Taking the sword Balthazar had dropped to the ground, Zach scrambled up a three-quarter wall. His eyes were wild and intent—a look I’d never seen on his face before. Jumping from the wall to one of the ropes that held me, he slashed the ropes free from my ankles and one of my arms.

“Zachary!” his father ordered. “Don’t be stupid.”

Zach’s hair fell over his face. “I’ve been stupid my whole life,” he called back.

He turned his head to me. “Hold on. When I cut the last of the ropes, I want you to swing to the wall. Can you do that?”

I tried to swallow but my throat was dry. I nodded at him. He sawed at the rope with the sword, and then pushed me. The rope arced across to the wall, taking me with it. Making a desperate grab for the wall, I caught hold of it and climbed on top.

Zach was left suspended on the rope, too high for him to jump to the floor without breaking every bone in his body.

“Henry!” Mr. Batiste roared. “You have to help my son!”

But Henry was gone. I knew where Henry would have raced away to—he would have gone to save his beloved astronomical clock. Even Zach’s mother had left—probably to save the family heirlooms. Everyone was gone. Parker and Emerson shot desperate glances back at Zach as they raced up the crumbling stairway. Mr. Batiste was the last one left in the dungeons. He stumbled as he made a leap for the top landing. Below, the floor heaved and cracked open. His cry echoed as he was sent tumbling down into the void.

Zach’s jaw tensed at the sound of the crashing stonework of the stairway and his father’s cry. But he didn’t turn to look.

Far below, a wide crack tore along the floor—stonework exploding through the air. A gaping pit opened up. I cried out as Ethan’s body fell deep into the dark chasm. My heart fell with him. I wanted to go with him. I knew I could not. All of this was not about me. I had to try, with everything left in me, to get out of here.

The floor directly beneath me sunk and disappeared as tree roots pulled the stonework down.

I raised my eyes to Zach. Both of us were going to die. Now, there was no way out.

His mouth trembled in a suffering torment. A silent message passed from him to me.
It’s my fault you are where you are now. I did this to you.

I gave a slow shake of my head, gripping the shaking wall.
No, Zach, you didn’t do this to me.

Tree roots pushed their way through the walls, their limbs knotting as they climbed upwards and over each other. The rope that held Zach snapped. His body tumbled free, falling into the cavernous floor.

My scream echoed in my ears, above the crashing sounds of breaking stone.

Away, in the duskiness at the bottom of the stairs, Jessamine stood by her grandfather’s side, as though waiting. A transparent figure lifted itself from the body of Tobias. Rising to his feet, a transparent Tobias put a hand on Jessamine’s shoulder and smiled at her with crinkled eyes.

Jessamine turned to me. “We must leave now, Calliope. I am not so bold as to ask your forgiveness, but I am sorry. I know now that we imprison ourselves—and therefore others—in the worst of ways.”

She held out her hand. I felt myself lifted from the wall. She set me down on the only intact piece of floor. The stonework beside the stairs that led downward had crumbled away—leaving the steps exposed like the bones of a body.

“Where do you wish to go, Calliope?” she asked me.

“I want to stay here.”

“As you wish.” She hesitated, staring at me. “You should not drink from the pool of Mnemosyne, Calliope. There is peace in darkness.”

Tobias looked on me with kind eyes. The figures of grandfather and granddaughter merged with the dim light and disappeared.

I turned and fled to the stairwell that would lead me down into the twisting earth.

C
ASSIE

In the ocean cave, I waded through the cold water to the edge of the rock platform, and tried to catch my breath. Keep your mind strong, Ethan had told me,
keep your mind steel
.

Shrugging off my jacket, I slid the eye from the back compartment. With trembling hands I placed it on the stone pedestal—it fit snugly into the concave space.

With backward steps, I found my way to the ruins of the ship and hid myself.

I sensed her coming.

My breaths rang hollow in my chest. Far away, the sun hung low on the horizon. In other earths, the sun was setting right now on people who knew nothing of a world turned to ice and decay, who knew nothing of serpents and shadows. This was not one of those worlds.

A massive shape pushed through the dark water. Every muscle in my body pulled tight. The last rays of sunlight lit the iridescent scales on her head, shining through her cold silver eyes. Lowering her head, she let the crystal fit itself into the concave space in her forehead.

Moments passed. The ocean flooded in and out of the cave. I stood silently as the icy water swilled around my legs.

The serpent pulled back from the eye and the pedestal. Rising up, she let out a sound I’d never heard from her before—a high-pitched, ear-piercing note that reverberated through the air and into the cave. A victorious cry. A calling.

She raised her face upward. Baying sounds echoed through the darkening sky, rising up and growing distant. She had sent the other serpents forth, away from the earth.

It was done.

Over.

I allowed a lungful of air to escape.

My earth would no longer know the serpents. The tomb of ice would slowly melt away.

The empress would join her species on the crystal planet—and she would die alongside them.

Silently, I waited.

A wrenching pain wound through my body, a hollow pit forming at the center of my victory. Ethan was dead. I wouldn’t know him again in this life. His strength, his warmth, the way his sepia eyes held and comforted me in their gaze—all gone. A briny vomit hit the back of my throat at the thought of him lying there on Balthazar’s dungeon floor.

The empress tilted her head as though she’d heard something. Her massive head swooped down into the cave. I stilled my breaths, moving back so that I could no longer see her. Ethan wanted me to survive. His spirit had urged me to keep going. And so I would.

In the dollhouse, the serpent’s shadow couldn’t see us but it could sense us. It knew when we slept and when we were awake... by the pattern of our breathing.
By our very heartbeats
.

I had to run.

Wheeling around, I thrashed through the water toward the passage. A black presence swam through the water, rising up in front of me—a shadow snake readying itself to strike.

Gasping, I looked back over my shoulder.

The empress pushed her forehead back into the crystal—she would now see the trickery of the crystal planet’s calculations. An anguished fury rattled through her as she drew her head back and smashed the pedestal to pieces. She summoned her shadow to her, and vanished.

Instantly, I knew where she’d gone—to the crystal planet to discover the fate of her species. She would hover, in the atmosphere, watching her species annihilated in the boiling oceans there.

My breaths were bullets shooting through my chest. I pushed myself through the waist-deep water, desperate to reach the passage.

Something crashed into the ocean behind me, a huge wave hurling itself over me. Screaming, I was thrown underwater. I battled to my feet, jerking my head around. It was her. A light beyond fury glimmered in her silver eyes.

A roaring noise resounded in the cave as a wave rose in the ocean up as tall as a mountain. The wave moved with terrifying speed, pummeling me to the floor of the cave and dragging me along. I tried to reach out for the wooden planks of the ship, but the force of the water ripped me away. My body was flung like a rag doll through the cave and out to sea.

Panic rushed through my core.

I was in the ocean.

In her territory.

With flailing strokes, I struggled to swim back.

High above, tree roots broke through the walls of the castle and climbed upward. Like veins.

Breaking apart, an entire wall of stone blocks came tumbling down. The blocks crashed onto the body of the serpent. She was knocked back into the ocean. Dark blood rose to the surface, spreading like oil.

My fingers found the edge of the rock platform that led back into the cave.

I sensed a shadow rising behind me. I turned my head. The red sunset glinted around the massive neck and head of the serpent. She swooped on me, driving me down. Tumbling through the turbulent water, I descended further and further into the deep.

The only escape now was the cave beneath the ocean.

Her cave.

Frantically, I swam away from her. Without a light it was impossible to see.

Keep your mind steel.

Feeling along the vertical rock wall, I moved down lower and lower. The dim illumination of the cave appeared below me. My foot kicked into open space.

I swam inside and up, and burst through the surface. Taking rapid breaths, I scanned the cave. The refraction had to be close by. I couldn’t see it. Terror charged through me.

Keep your mind steel.

Taking a slow breath, I told myself to look, to see.

It was there—the barest shimmer of light. I stroked toward it.

I was going home. Home to where the blanket of white would be melting into the frozen soil. Home to where those who were left would start again. Home to a place that would never feel like home again. Not without Ethan. But Ethan had once told me Nabaasa’s words,
When everything is gone, you will endure like a candle in darkness
. I didn’t know if that were possible for me, but I had to hold onto those words.