Last Rites (Darkling Mage 6)

Strange as it may sound, in the distance, I once caught a glimpse of something that must have been a tower. The implication that the Dark Room had its own terrain, its own sky – that it truly was a realm separate from our reality, and not just a transportation chamber – both thrilled and terrified me.

The shuddering mists seemed gentler, somehow. Quieter. Those ever-present clouds of darkness and odorless smoke that roiled and curled at my ankles, reaching tendrils for my skin, had felt tamer, more docile in the time since I’d wrenched control of the Dark Room away from Other Dustin and Yelzebereth. Their tranquility, naturally, only made me nervous. The calm before the storm, you know?

And in those exploratory excursions, the main difference was that I never had a destination in mind. In the past the Dark Room had always just been a vehicle, a transition point, the express train from this part of our reality to another. Exploration was a different thing entirely. Once I even considered bringing in sheaves of graphing paper, to draw myself a kind of map.

“I wouldn’t bother,” Carver had told me. “The nature of the Dark Room is to be amorphous, always shifting. There’s very little rhyme or reason to its architecture. Its features alter with each of your visits. You already know that.”

And damn it if he wasn’t right. Carver had been really supportive about my interest in discovering the Dark Room. In fact, he encouraged me to visit as often as I could. He said that immersing in the very elements and environments that tied us to our powers would only deepen our mastery.

It was why he always let Sterling gallivant wherever he liked come nightfall, why he was so confident about letting Gil expose himself to the light of the full moon. In Asher’s case, it meant hanging out in a graveyard. Creepy, but whatever works, right?

So yeah, no map, no graphing paper. What that meant was doing my best to negotiate the corners and corridors of the Dark Room, letting my mind and body adjust to its ever-changing topography. Going with the flow, in essence. I’d never made it as far as the tower in the distance – in fact, it seemed to move further the closer I came to it.

For that matter, I’d never made any real headway in the many times I’d visited fully with the intent of charting out the Dark Room. No landmarks, no rooms or caverns to discover. Just long, twisting passages in some great, unending labyrinth.

But that night, it seemed, was fated to be different. That night, I found one end of a golden piece of thread.

My heart puttered. What the hell? That had never happened before. The Dark Room’s contents were always uniformly, well, dark. Its very nature was to be devoid of color and life, of any other objects apart from the shivering mists. The thread, glimmering and gold on the ground, seemed to mock me. It tempted me. Like a moron, I followed its trail.

Don’t you start with me, now. Imagine you were in my place. All that time I spent in the Dark Room, and then this? I picked up one end of the thread, parts of me quivering with anticipation. I wound the string around my hand, gathering more of its beautiful, enticing gold.

The thread was warm. It bore a soft, strange glow, so alien, yet so tauntingly familiar. I was just wondering where I’d seen it before when I felt a tug from the other end. My chest thumped. Gold. Could it be Mammon? The demon prince of greed?

The force pulling on the string tugged harder. Desperately I fought to untangle the length of it that I’d looped around my fingers, but the thread only tightened, threatening to cut off my circulation. I cried out at the pain, the sound of my voice going dull and numb as it entered the strange, dead air of the Dark Room.

Another strong, sharp pull came from the other end of the string. This time, it pulled me with it.

I shouted, as if anyone could hear and help me, as the deceptively delicate golden thread yanked me bodily across the labyrinth at top speed. My feet tangled under me as I ran after it, terrified of having my arm ripped out of its socket by the force, and when I couldn’t run fast enough to catch up I tripped and sprawled all over the Dark Room’s floor.

And that – well, that was just another uncomfortable first. The ground was knobbly and cold, like pebbled stone, but it was slightly slick, and wet. Worse – so close to the floor, with my cheek making contact, I swore I could feel it moving. Pulsing, like the hide of some great, reptilian beast.

But yeah – I figured I’d have enough time to worry about that later, if I survived Mammon, or a monster, or shit, the fucking minotaur itself basically dragging my battered body all over the ground. This was it. A half-man, half-cow was going to tear me to pieces and eat my innards for its carnivorous man-cow breakfast. What a way to die.

I held onto the end of the thread for dear life, one hand caught in its web, the other struggling in futility to untie its living knots – when all at once it loosened and let go. I tumbled over the ground, my hands instinctively going up to cover my face.

Not the face. Never the face.

The air shot out of my lungs as I slammed painfully into the floor. I moaned, my entire body no doubt covered in bruises, my clothes disheveled, my hair a tousled, awful mess. I groaned as I groped at myself, checking that I was still in one piece.

One nose, two arms, two legs, two balls, and Little Dustin, all intact and accounted for. I sighed in relief, choking once from the sudden, stabbing pain of what must have been a bruised rib. Good. If Little Dustin – I mean Not So Little Dustin – was safe, I was all good.

My vision swam from the impact, the bright lights of my strange new surroundings ringed in hazy, pale haloes. Wait. Lights? Among them were three pairs of eyes, which twinkled as they watched me. My heart pounded.

Was it Hecate, separated into all her three bodies? No. This wasn’t her. I clambered away on my hands and feet, blinking rapidly, squeezing my eyes as if that could work away the blurriness. Spitting out bits of gravel, I looked up into three very similar, yet subtly different faces.

“Dustin Graves,” said the Sisters. “We need to talk.”

Chapter 5

I looked around myself, thinking that maybe the fall had just jarred my brains enough to cause some kind of minor hallucination. Nope. The calliope music was real. As were the bright, twinkling lights, the stalls and booths filled with games and attractions. I was back at Madam Babbage’s, only there were no customers.

“Was all that really necessary?” I looked each Sister in the face, biting back my anger. “Does anyone want to tell me what’s going on here?”

One Sister raised her eyebrow. “This is an intervention, Dustin Graves.”

I grunted when another picked me up by the scruff with powerful, perfectly manicured hands. “We talked about this,” she said, smoothing down the creases in my jacket, then recoiling in mock horror. “You’re a winter palette.”

My frown should have been answer enough, but she stared at me, waiting for a response. “I still don’t know what that means,” I mumbled. “Between saving the world and trying not to die, it’s been really rough making time to look at fashion magazines.”