“I can’t get a grip on it,” said the dust-wife. “It should have some attachment to a body somewhere, but there isn’t one. The bodiless dead are much harder to grab. But they also can’t hurt you, usually.”
“Usually?”
“Never say never.”
The last syllable of never echoed for much too long, er … er … er … And then Marra realized it wasn’t an echo at all. She took a step back from the mouth of the hallway behind her.
… un … un … un … run … run…！
“Did an echo just tell us to run?” asked Agnes, adjusting Finder and looking rather calmer than Marra felt.
“Do ghostly echoes have our best interests at heart?” asked Fenris, also remarkably calm.
“Rarely,” said the dust-wife.
Marra thought, I’m surrounded by lunatics, and I love them all, but maybe we should be running anyway. She took another step back.
… run … running … coming … coming … coming for you … run …
Erk, said the brown hen, with deep distrust.
Whistles erupted from the hallway they had just come down. The echoes sped up until they tripped over each other—Run! Coming! Hide! Robbers! Run! Run!
Bonedog went berserk. Fenris stopped trying to hold his leash and just picked him up bodily, hands slipping through the illusion to clutch at his spine. The dust-wife slammed the butt of her staff on the ground. The hen crowed.
The thief-wheel filled the passageway and came spilling out into the room.
* * *
At one point, it might indeed have been a wheel. When it was smaller, perhaps, when there were only five or ten souls jammed together, rolling over each other, ghostly faces screaming before being ground into the floor to move the bulk of the creature along. Now there were dozens of faces and the wheel had become a thick slug, elongating through the passageways, ten feet high and the gods only knew how long.
Run!
Hide!
It’s coming!
Run, robbers, run!
It filled the doorway, heaving with screams as if breathing. The echoes rang through the room. Some of the faces had hands beside them, waving frantically, and Marra realized that the graverobbers trapped inside were trying to warn the living humans away. They aren’t threatening us. They’re trying to tell us to get away before it gets us, too.
The dust-wife never faltered. She stepped forward, directly into the thief-wheel’s path. “Bodiless dead,” she said. “We are not graverobbers. You have no power over us.”
She was so calm and so confident that Marra believed her. Of course the dust-wife could fix it. She was the master of the dead. She could raise ghosts and lay them. Why had she ever doubted?
The thief-wheel screamed a warning from fifty mouths and ran the dust-wife down.
The moonlight vanished. The room went pitch-black.
Marra blundered away from the thief-wheel, staggering through the dark. She pitched over something and went down hard, skinning her palms on the ground. She could hear shrieks and shouting, the wails of the dead, and over it all, the furious clucking of the demon hen.
Something grabbed her. It didn’t feel like a human. It felt like a great wall of glue that engulfed half her body. Marra screamed and slapped at it, which was a mistake. Her arm went in and got stuck. She retained enough presence of mind to throw her head back to try and keep her mouth free.
“Marra!” shouted Fenris.
Then the thief-wheel was moving with a sickening forward slide. She bashed the back of her head against the wall and saw pinpricks of white against the blackness.
Run!
Run!
Run! piped the faces around her in the dark. And then one, next to her ear, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I can’t make it stop, it just keeps going …
Were they going through another corridor? Stone scraped her back. She was being carried forward but also sliding inexorably toward the back of the thief-wheel in a queasy, seasick motion. Oh god, she thought very clearly. I will be devoured and stay as a ghost forever under the palace.
This seemed uniquely horrible. Not that she would die, but that she would be trapped here, in the palace, which she was beginning to hate with a fine and enduring passion. Her back scraped against more stone and she tried to lean closer into the thief-wheel but she couldn’t, not without putting her face in it, and she’d rather not have any skin on her back at all than do that.
I’m so sorry I can’t stop it, sobbed the voice next to her ear. I keep trying but it won’t stop …
“It’s all right,” she said automatically. She was going to be ill and she was being dragged backward along the length of a creature made of lost souls and glue and still she was trying to reassure someone. Of course she was. That was how she was going to die, telling someone it was all right for stabbing her, really, she didn’t mind …