“At your command, my lady, and more than willing.”
He went to the body. Strong as he was, big as he was, he still had to use both hands to lift the head. It swung back and forth as he carried it to the fountain. Eris didn’t see; she was weeping in Jaya’s arms.
Iota gave a loud grunt—“HUT!”—and his shirt split up the sides as he heaved the head. It landed in the fountain, staring up open-eyed into the rain. Like the gargoyle I’d passed on my way in.
5
We went along one of the pinwheel paths, this time with me leading. The back of the palace loomed over us, and again I knew it as a living thing. Dozing, perhaps, but with one eye open. I could swear some of the turrets had moved to new locations. The same was true of the crisscrossing stairways and the parapets, which looked like stone at one eyeblink and deep green glass filled with writhing black shapes at the next. I thought about Edgar Allan Poe’s poem about the haunted palace, where a hideous throng rushed out forever, to laugh but smile no more.
Here Mr. Bowditch’s initials remained. Looking at them was like meeting a friend in a bad place. We came to the red loading doors with their traffic jam of wrecked wagons, then to the dark green flying buttresses. I led my party around them, and although it took a little longer, I heard no objections.
“More voices,” Iota said, low. “Hear em?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What are they? Demons? The dead?”
“I don’t think they can hurt us. But there’s power here, no doubt, and not good power.”
I looked at Leah, who made a rapid circling gesture with her right hand: Hurry. I understood that. We couldn’t waste this precious daylight, but I had to show her. She had to see, because seeing is the start of understanding. Of accepting a long-denied truth.
6
Our curving walkway brought us close to the pool surrounded by its ring of palms, their fronds now lying limp in the rain. I could see the high pole in the center of the sundial, but it was no longer topped with the sun. Because of Radar’s trip on it, the sun had ended up facing the other way. It was now showing the two moons of Empis. They also had faces and the eyes also moved… toward each other, as if estimating the distance left between them. I could see Mr. Bowditch’s final mark, AB, with an arrow from the top of the A pointing straight ahead toward the sundial.
And the pool.
I turned to my little party. “Princess Leah, please come with me. The rest of you stay until I call.” I bent to Radar. “You too, girl. Stay.”
There were no questions or protests.
Leah walked beside me. I led her to the pool and gestured for her to look. She saw what remained of the mermaid lying below water now fouled with decomposition. She saw the shaft of the spear protruding from Elsa’s midriff, and the coil of intestines floating up from it.
Leah gave a muffled groan that would have been a scream if it had been able to escape her. She put her hands over her eyes and collapsed on one of the benches where Empisarians who had made the trek from their towns and villages might once have sat to marvel at the beautiful creature swimming in the pool, and perhaps to listen to a song. She bent over her thighs, still making those muffled groaning sounds, which to me were more terrible—more bereft—than actual sobs would have been. I put my hand on her back, suddenly afraid that her inability to fully voice her grief might kill her, the way an unlucky person could choke to death on a lodgment of food in the throat.
At last she lifted her head, looked at the dull gray remains of Elsa again, then raised her face to the sky. Rain and tears ran down her smooth cheeks, across the scar of her mouth, over the red sore she had to massage open to eat despite the pain that had to entail. She raised her fists to the gray sky and shook them.
I took her hands gently in my own. It was like holding rocks. At last they loosened and clasped mine. I waited until she looked at me.
“Flight Killer murdered her. If he didn’t do it himself, he ordered it done. Because she was beautiful, and the force that governs him hates all beauty—the monarchs, good people like Dora who were once whole people, the very land you are meant to rule over. What he loves is violence and pain and murder. He loves gray. When we find him—if we find him—will you kill him if I should fall?”
She looked at me doubtfully, her eyes swimming with tears. At last she nodded.
“Even if it’s Elden?”
She shook her head as violently as before and pulled her hands free of mine. And from the pool where the dead mermaid lay came Leah’s thrown voice, mournful and trembling: “He would never kill Elsa. He loved her.”