Impatient, Tam beckoned them on. Once they got past the checkpoint, he explained, “They gave me today’s password in case anyone stops us.”
“How did you persuade them to let us see Silence?” Dred asked.
Jael was wondering the same. Though he hadn’t been inside long, he understood that passing an enemy’s border wasn’t done lightly. According to local gossip, she’d executed one of Grigor’s people for doing just that, not long before his arrival. But they had temporary clearance to be here.
“I told them it was a matter of life and death.”
Dred cut Tam a look. “You realize she’s much more interested in the latter?”
“It’s up to you to convince her not to execute us.”
Jael thought that sounded remarkably unconcerned, but maybe Tam had that much confidence in her abilities. She had rolled into Queensland and taken it over half a turn ago. That wasn’t done lightly. From what he could see, the men were loyal. Well. Loyal as men like this could be.
Me, included.
Some distance from the border, the first patrol dropped down behind them. Jael had a garrote around his neck before Tam managed to signal them. The smaller man did so frantically, struggling with the assassin who held him. Jael didn’t bother trying to imitate the sign; he just slammed his head back as hard as he could. He heard the crack of cartilage.
Got your nose.
Jael spun. The man didn’t cry out as blood streamed down his chin. His eyes were queer, dead and empty. Despite himself, a shiver ran through him. This place truly is hell, a mortal afterlife where they chain those too monstrous for freedom.
Me, included.
Instead of signaling back, the sentries slipped into the darkness. Jael had preternatural senses; that wasn’t a boast, but fact. He could hear Dred’s heartbeat beside him, Tam’s a little farther on. He heard her faint arrhythmia and Tameron’s accelerated breathing. He heard the skitter of claws; the ship was infested. But from Silence’s killers, he heard nothing at all.
Like they’re truly dead.
Regardless, he was glad he’d been invited along so he could see the other zone. So far, this one was grimier—darker—than Dred’s domain, and it had black paint on the walls. Not a huge difference.
But as they approached, he breathed, “Dear Mary, what’s that smell?”
“Death,” she said simply.
In his days as a merc, then from his time as a tank-thing, born of tubes and chemicals and wires, he’d seem some horrors. They’d driven many of his pod mad. To his knowledge, he was the only survivor of the Ideal Genome Project, and he’d still never witnessed anything like this. The room was full of rotting bodies, piles of bones. Obviously human, some had been fashioned into furniture. But they hadn’t been cleaned or treated, just rawly carved, and the stench lingered. A gaunt, sunken-eyed woman in black lounged on her grisly throne, gray hair a wild tangle about her head. Countless eyes fixed on them as they entered, but no one spoke.
It was silent as the tomb.
Jael thought back to Dred’s casual warning about Silence’s people and realized that was a massive understatement. If she was seeking an alliance with this lunatic, how bad must Grigor and Priest be? With an imperious gesture from a skeletal arm, Silence summoned them forward.
Her eyes burned like black holes in her skull, and Jael fought the urge to retreat. He’d never encountered anyone who unnerved him more; he didn’t like to call her a woman because she lacked some key element of humanity. Is that what people see when they look at me? The question chewed in and burrowed deep.
Silence studied them for a few seconds, then her thin fingers flew in complex gestures. Then a slim figure stepped forth from the shadows behind the gruesome throne. Clad in black, his face painted in gray and white to resemble a skull, this had to be the Speaker for the Dead, the one soul in Silence’s domain who was permitted to speak.
All part of the spectacle, Jael decided.
The Speaker intoned, “What brings you before Death’s Handmaiden?”
It should’ve been a ridiculous, melodramatic question. It wasn’t.
Dred held her ground. “I seek an alliance.”
Jael listened while she elaborated on the coalition between Grigor and Priest and the danger it posed to Entropy should Queensland fall. In preternatural stillness, Silence listened. And then she signed to her Speaker.
Who said, “Death fears nothing. What must be, will be.”
That was a load of shit. Silence was utterly demented, and no amount of logic would sway her. There was no time to check with the princess in chains as the idea came to him. He sensed stirring in the shadows, sensing that any moment, they would become the day’s entertainment. Since he’d been tortured before—and he had no desire for these lunatics to learn how long he could suffer without dying—Jael stepped forward.
“Then let Death decide,” he said.
Silence skewered him with a gaze made of black madness, then she signed to her Speaker. “Your words are intriguing, child.”
Don’t call me that. I never was one. Four turns into my creation, and I was already killing. Maybe he had no right to judge Silence.
“You said Death fears nothing, but I’ve heard he’s a gentleman. So let your champion face me. And if I survive, you stand with the Dread Queen against Grigor and Priest.”
9
Bitter Bargains
The new fish was crazy.
There was no other explanation for the challenge he’d extended—without Dred’s sanction. And she couldn’t object without looking like she couldn’t control her people. She remembered Wills’s prediction about how this one would destroy everything.
Suddenly, it didn’t seem so unlikely. The man was reckless beyond bearing.
Yet she let the offer stand. Worst-case scenario, he died, and she stood no closer to an alliance. Then she’d leave the corpse with Silence and follow Tam back through the shafts to Queensland and start trying to come up with a plan B before Grigor and Priest completed their battle strategies. Overall, things didn’t look so bright at the moment.
“Does he speak for you?” the Speaker asked, after conferring with Silence.
Yeah, we’ll be talking about that.
Tameron maintained a watchful air, but she could tell he didn’t approve. There was no way to deny it without losing face and the situation deteriorating, so she nodded. Then Silence turned to Jael.
Wordless, she pointed to the center of the hall, past mounds of gray, withered bodies, beyond the bone pickets spiked into the metal flooring. Dred had been here before, carrying messages for Artan, but the horror of the place never ceased to overwhelm her. But she couldn’t give any sign of that. Weakness led to teeth on your throat.