Dying Is My Business

Twenty

The ruins stood on the far side of the West Side Highway, directly across from the lush greenery of DeWitt Clinton Park, with its manicured grass and impeccable swing set. The ruins looked out of place, a reminder of a much older New York City, before the relentless tentacles of gentrification had strangled it. Once an apartment building, time and decay had turned it into little more than an empty, crumbling, graffiti-covered façade. With no walls and no roof, it stood open to the elements.

Thornton led us through the hole where the front door should have been. Beyond it, where the interior of the building once stood, was a field of overgrown grass and weeds. He led the way through the field and past a low, broken brick wall that marked the rear corner of the building. There, he cleared away some trash and twigs to reveal a thick metal door in the ground, inscribed with the words N.Y.C. SEWER. A padlock sat hooked, but not locked, through the door’s latch. Thornton removed the lock and pulled the handle, but the door slipped from his fingers and clanged shut again. He stared at it as if he couldn’t understand what had just happened.

I pulled the door open for him. Beneath it was a hole in the ground—dark, rectangular, and lined with concrete. A ladder stood bolted to the side, running deep into the darkness below. Behind me, Thornton was still staring at his hands.

“You okay?” I asked.

He looked up at me, and said only, “We should hurry.” They were the first words he’d spoken to either of us in nearly half an hour.

Bethany started down the ladder first. When she’d descended a dozen feet or so, I went next. It grew darker the deeper down I went. The sunlight from the doorway above me dissipated in the murk. After a moment Thornton began his descent, closing the door above him and casting us in complete darkness. With no way to see how far down the ladder went, I couldn’t tell where I was on the rungs. I felt like I was floating in outer space. By the time I reached the bottom, I figured we had to be a good forty or fifty feet down. I expected to step off the ladder into a knee-deep river of sewage. The idea of walking through human excrement wasn’t the most enticing prospect, but walking through New York City’s seemed exponentially worse somehow. I was happily surprised when my boots hit dry metal instead. In the darkness I heard Bethany digging around in her vest. She mumbled a creepy incantation, and a moment later there was light, emanating from the same round, mirrored charm I’d seen at the warehouse. She held it in front of her like a flashlight to illuminate the cement tunnel around us.

I wiped the grime from the ladder off my hands. “You can’t seriously tell me there’s a dragon living under New York City.”

“Is it really so hard to believe?” she asked. “You’ve probably heard him moving underground at night, or seen the smoke of his breath coming up through manholes all over the city.”

“I thought that was just the subway, and steam,” I said.

“Sometimes. Other times it’s Gregor, out looking for more treasure to hoard.”

Treasure? My mind swelled with images of a room full of gold, and chests overflowing with silver and jewels. It made my fingers tingle. I could buy my freedom from Underwood with that kind of money. Grease enough palms to get the answers I needed. How much would it take? I wondered. How much could I carry?

Once Thornton reached the bottom of the ladder, he held onto the rungs an extra moment for balance. He didn’t make eye contact with either of us. Bethany shone the light one way, then the other. The tunnel extended deep into the distance on either side. The walls and ceiling were curved to form an almost perfectly round tube, arcing down to meet the flat metal platform of the floor.

“Which way?” she asked.

Thornton didn’t reply. He just started walking, following the thick iron pipes that snaked along the ceiling.

“I guess we’re going this way,” Bethany said. We started walking after him.

“There’s something I don’t get,” I said. “There must be sewer workers down here all the time, Con Ed guys fixing the underground transformers, phone company workers checking the lines. You’re telling me in all this time no one has noticed a dragon living down here?”

“Maybe they just don’t know where to look,” she said. “Gregor has lived down here a long time. My guess is, he knows how to stay out of sight.”

“How long is a long time?”

She shrugged. “Who can say? Gregor is an Ancient, one of the first creatures to walk the Earth. Before civilization, before recorded history, before there was anyone or anything else here, this world belonged to them.”

“You’re fucking with me,” I said, but her expression was serious. “That would make him millions of years old.”

“Plenty of time to learn how not to get caught,” she said.

“How can anything live that long?”

“If I knew the answer to that,” she said, “I’d be a very rich woman.”

The air grew more humid the farther we went. I heard the faint trickling of water up ahead. The tunnel opened out onto another that ran perpendicular to it, an older tunnel whose walls and ceiling were fashioned from stone bricks instead of cement. A stream of something pungent ran through a narrow trench at the center of the floor. Suddenly I envied Thornton the loss of his sense of smell.

The farther we walked the more I sensed we were descending deeper beneath the city. I heard the flow of water through tunnels above us, the distant sound of subway wheels far overhead, and wondered just how deep we were. I wasn’t sure how long we’d been walking, and after turning down numerous branching tunnels I was pretty sure I was lost. Thornton knew where he was going, but if something happened to him, or if his amulet ran out of juice before we got back to the surface, we were screwed. There was no way we’d find our way out again.

Thornton stopped halfway down a tunnel and ran his hands over the bricks in the wall. “There’s a door here. It’ll open if you push.”

I inspected the wall. It looked solid, without any seams to indicate where a door might be hidden. “Are you sure this is the right spot?” Thornton gave me an impatient look. “Okay, I believe you, I just don’t see any door.”

“Just push,” Thornton insisted.

I braced my legs and pushed against the wall. The bricks were slick with condensation, which made it hard to grip, but surprisingly, they gave a little under my weight. I pushed harder, and a large, square slab of the wall slid inward. After a moment a hidden mechanism took over, and the slab withdrew on its own, pulling in and sliding aside until there was an enormous opening in the tunnel wall. Big enough, I noticed, for something much, much larger than us to pass through.

Beyond the doorway was another tunnel, this one illuminated by burning torches set in iron sconces along the walls. Bethany extinguished the glowing charm with another muttered incantation, and put it away in her vest. We stepped through the doorway and started walking. The wall slid back into place behind us.

I watched the flames gutter on the torches. Torches didn’t just light themselves, which meant someone had to have lit them. But a dragon? Was I really supposed to swallow that?

This tunnel was much taller and wider than the others. The walls were hewn from a peculiar reddish-brown rock that had been worn smooth over time, as though it had been eroded by an underground river that long since dried up. Every inch of the walls and ceiling was decorated with carved symbols—pictographs, sigils, emblems, and figures, all flickering in the guttering torchlight. Whatever they were, they looked old. Really old. How long had this tunnel been hidden down here?

Abruptly, the tunnel came to a dead end where a massive, round stone slab had been set into the center of the wall. It was carved in bas-relief with eight human-shaped figures, as featureless as silhouettes, except for the chiseled auroras of light around each of them and the strange symbols etched on their torsos.

“What is it?” I asked.

Thornton studied the figures. “A puzzle. We can’t go any farther until we solve it.”

“You’ve been down here before, you must know the answer,” Bethany said.

“It’s different each time,” he said. “That’s how Gregor keeps everyone out. Especially thieves.”

“So what are we supposed to do?” I asked. “It doesn’t even look like a puzzle.”

“I think we’re supposed to choose one of these eight figures,” he said. “But what’s the criteria here? Why select one over the others? Who are they supposed to be?”

“It must have something to do with those symbols,” Bethany said. “If we can decipher what they are, maybe we can figure out the rest.”

Thornton moved closer to study the designs etched onto the figures. “They’re not symbols,” he said. “They’re pictograms. Runes. It’s Ehrlendarr, the language of the Ancients.”

“Can you read it?” I asked.

Thornton sighed. “Gregor taught me to how to speak it a little, but reading it was never my forte. This first one looks like it means breath. Wind? Damn, I’m just not sure.”

I examined the figures. Other than the different runes on each one, they were identical. I didn’t see any other clues as to who they might represent. I reached out to touch one of them, but Thornton batted my hand away. It felt like being hit with a slab of cold meat.

“Don’t,” he snapped. “Not until we’re sure. If you choose the wrong one, valves open in the walls and this whole chamber gets flooded with fire.”

I pulled my hand back. Apparently Gregor took his security seriously. Anyone who made the wrong choice was toast. Literally.

I studied the figures again, making sure to keep a safe distance. “If the first word is breath, or wind, maybe they’re not people. What else comes in groups of eight?”

Thornton hung his head and chuckled to himself. “I’m an idiot. I was so focused on the runes it didn’t even occur to me to wonder why there were eight of them. Bethany, look at these other markings around them, like each one is giving off energy or power.”

Bethany’s whole face lit up. “It’s them.”

“It’s got to be,” Thornton agreed. “That first word isn’t breath or wind, it’s air. These runes represent the eight elements.”

“Eight? Aren’t there only four?” I asked.

“No, there are eight,” he said. He pointed to each one of the figures. “Air, earth, water, fire, metal, wood, time, and magic.”

“So these figures are the elements,” I said.

“No,” Bethany said. “They’re the Guardians.”

“The who now?” I felt like I was lagging about a hundred miles behind them.

“They have other names you may have heard of,” she explained. “The Athanasians. The Everlasting. Those Who Dwell Between. They’re ageless and omniscient beings who live at the center of all things, in a place called the Radiant Lands. It’s said that at the dawn of time, these eight beings were granted eternal life and dominion over the elements, one for each of them. They’ve always been there, watching over the world, maintaining the balance. Some say they’re gods and that they created the Ancients, and from the Ancients came the mortals and all life on Earth.”

“You buy any of that?” I asked. It sounded pretty crazy to me. But then, everything was sounding crazy to me.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never been very religious.”

“If they’re supposed to be watching over us and maintaining the balance, they’re doing a piss-poor job of it,” Thornton said. “All the suffering and misery in the world, all the darkness and evil, and the Guardians don’t do a damn thing. It’s like they’re above it all, happy to just sit back and watch while everything falls to shit.”

Something occurred to me. I turned to Thornton. “In the bar last night, you told me there were forces that were supposed to keep everything in balance. You meant them, didn’t you? The Guardians?” He nodded. “But you also said something went wrong.”

“It did,” he said. “Centuries ago, one of the Guardians disappeared. Left. Just gave the world the finger and took off to who knows where. It threw off the balance, and everything changed. Guess which element this Guardian had dominion over.”

That one was easy. “Magic,” I said, and a piece of the puzzle slid into place. “That’s what caused the Shift.”

“You got it in one,” Thornton said.

“So when Morbius created the Five-Pointed Star, he was trying to restore the balance that had been changed by the Shift.”

“Except it got him killed, and the balance is still screwed up,” Thornton said. “I’m not surprised no one took up the mantle after him. Who’s going to risk their lives to put things right when even the Guardians don’t have your back? When they can just leave their posts whenever they want and let everything come crashing down?”

I looked at the figures again. “So if there are only seven Guardians left,” I asked, “how come there are eight of them here?”

Bethany’s eyes grew big, and she turned to me with a wide grin. “Trent, there might be hope for you yet. I think you just gave us our answer. If solving this puzzle depends on us choosing one of the Guardians over the others, it makes sense it would be the one who’s not there anymore.”

She pointed at the eighth figure, all the way at the end. I’d thought the rune on that figure looked like a simple circle, but now, as I looked closer, my heart lurched in my chest. It was an eye inside a circle—the same symbol on the brick wall in my earliest memory. The rune for magic? How could that be? What did it mean?

Thornton moved his hand to the figure Bethany had indicated. He cast a quick, uncertain glance at her. “You’re sure? I told you what happens if we’re wrong.”

“Do it,” she said, nodding gravely.

He smirked. “That’s so you, Bethany. Possibly your last words before dying and they’re a direct order.” He pressed his palm against the figure, and it sank an inch into the surrounding rock. A loud grinding noise echoed through the tunnel, followed by the sharp, metallic clank of a lock giving way on the other side of the wall. The slab rolled aside on a hidden track, disappearing into the wall and leaving a huge, round doorway before us.

Bethany let out the breath she’d been nervously holding, and went through first. Thornton and I went after her, and once we were through, the slab rolled back into place behind us. Before us sprawled an enormous, vaulted tunnel, much wider and longer than the last one.

It was like walking into a museum of New York City history—that is, if museums were filled with mountains of garbage. Lit by more torches along the walls, the tunnel was so cluttered with junk that there was only a narrow path down the middle for us to walk on. The junk had been sorted into piles: broken TVs of every make and model, from early 1950’s tubes to high-definition flat screens; discarded dressers and chests of drawers; mounds of old mattresses; a towering pyramid of aged air-conditioning units; a teetering, almost sculptural heap of garbage cans, both old-time aluminum receptacles and modern polyethylene bins. Bethany was right about Gregor being a hoarder, only I hadn’t expected his treasure chamber to be filled with the things most New Yorkers left out on the curb for garbage pickup. It was a far cry from the piles of gold and jewels I’d imagined.

Something glittered by the side of the path, catching my eye. It was a tall pile of subway tokens. The Transit Authority didn’t use tokens anymore, I knew. They’d been replaced years ago by prepaid swipe cards that were a lot cheaper to manufacture. I’d never seen a token before. Curious, I reached for one, but Thornton shot me a warning glance.

“Don’t touch anything, don’t take anything,” he said.

I pulled my hand back. “I was just—”

“Trust me, he’ll know,” Thornton interrupted. He didn’t mention what the consequences of touching Gregor’s “treasure” were, but after learning what would happen if we chose the wrong answer to the puzzle, it was a fair guess that the punishment would be gruesome and permanent.

Thornton turned to continue walking, but his legs suddenly gave out from under him and he fell. I heard the distinctive snap of bone, but I couldn’t tell what had fractured. His limbs looked all right, even the mangled arm he’d reset. A rib, maybe? Dead and decaying at an accelerated rate, he’d become as fragile as porcelain.

Thornton squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth, pushing himself up onto his hands and knees. He punched the floor angrily. “Damn it, come on!”

I took him by the shoulders to help him up.

“Don’t,” he said. He didn’t look at me, just shrugged my hands off. With a groan, he sat back on his haunches, wrapping his arms around his stomach as if he were in pain. In the guttering torchlight I saw his hands were marbled with black necrotic tissue. The lights from the amulet on his chest pulsed even more weakly than before. “I was supposed to have twenty-four hours,” he said. “You told me I had twenty-four hours.”

Bethany moved toward him. “Thornton, what’s happening? Talk to me.”

He turned his face away from her. When he spoke his voice sounded hollow. “I can see myself rotting. I can feel it from the inside. It’s horrible. You should have left me dead, Bethany. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask you to bring me back.”

“I didn’t know what else to do,” she said. She knelt down in front of him. “I’m sorry, Thornton. I know you’re worried, and I know you’re scared, but I won’t let anything happen before we get you back to Gabrielle. I promise.”

He turned to her, finally. His eyes were dry, but I thought he would have been crying if he could have. “You can’t promise that, Bethany. No one can.”

Silently, she stood, offered him her hands, and helped him back to his feet.

We continued down the tunnel. Ahead of us was another titanic doorway, this time filled with bright light pouring through from the other side. The air grew colder as we approached it. I closed my trench coat around me, my breath steaming in front of my face, and followed Bethany and Thornton through it into the light.

On the other side, I paused and blinked, certain what I was seeing couldn’t be real. I’d expected another chamber or tunnel, but what spread out before us now as far as the eye could see was a vista more suited to the Himalayas than a cavern beneath the streets of New York City. We were standing on a stone bridge, long and wide and rimmed with ice. In the distance a range of snow-capped mountains rose out of a shroud of white mist. I walked to the edge of the bridge and looked over, past the enormous icicles that dangled beneath us, but the mist hid the ground below. It was impossible to tell how far down it went. There was no visible light source in this place, and yet light permeated the landscape from all directions. It looked like sunlight, but it couldn’t be. We were still underground. How could there be sunlight beneath the city? How could any of this be here?

“Where are we?” I asked, my breath forming a cloud.

“Tsotha Zin, also known as the Nethercity,” Thornton said. “It’s a safe haven, a place where many of those who believe it’s become too dangerous on the surface choose to live, under Gregor’s protection. They don’t trust anyone who’s still on the surface—topsiders, they call them—but Gregor and I have an understanding.”

I stared out at the mountain peaks in awe, and noticed tiny shapes along the slopes that resembled houses. “You’re telling me someone built a city under New York?”

“No,” he said. “I’m telling you someone built New York over a city.” He cupped his hands by his mouth and shouted, “Gregor!” His voice echoed across the mountaintops. He called it again. I thought, skeptically, that Gregor was an odd name for a dragon.

As the echoes died away, the mist below the bridge roiled and broke. A massive shape reared up before us like a mountain in its own right, only it was alive and moving, an enormous, reptilian head at the end of a long, sinuous neck.

I gasped and took a nervous step back. Gregor bore only a passing resemblance to the dragon on the cover of The Ragana’s Revenge. His hide was shingled with thick, stone-gray scales, not green ones. Where his eyes should have been there burned two cold, white fires. His head was encircled with yellowing ivory horns that swept back like a crown from his serpentine face. There was something that seemed almost prehistoric about him, an air of such immense age that suddenly I had no trouble believing he was as old as Bethany claimed.

The nostrils at the end of his long snout flared as big as windows as he inhaled a deep breath. The massive suction nearly pulled me off my feet. Bethany held onto my arm to keep from falling over. Then the dragon opened his titanic jaws and let loose an angry, deafening roar. The heat of his breath blasted me like a furnace. I couldn’t help noticing that his teeth were bigger than I was. He could swallow me with a single bite.

“It’s okay, Gregor, they’re with me!” Thornton shouted.

The dragon closed his jaws, the echo of his roar bouncing across the mountains and dying away. He lifted his head high, exhaling plumes of steam from his nostrils, then lowered himself to the bridge again. Once more, the dragon inhaled mightily. I braced my legs to keep from being vacuumed into Gregor’s nostrils. Bethany clung to me again until it was over.

“The tiny female is unknown to me. You know strangers are not welcome here,” Gregor said. The long spiky bristles that dangled like a beard from his chin quivered as he spoke. His voice boomed across the mountain range like thunder.

If my jaw could have dropped any farther than it already had, it would have landed at my feet. Not only was the dragon talking, he could speak English. I turned to Bethany, but she put a finger to her lips before I could say anything. I turned back to the dragon. He was studying me with his burning eyes. Somewhere in that white fire I sensed a vast intelligence.

“This one, the male,” Gregor continued. “The stench of death clings to him. He is not what he seems.”

I stiffened. Just how much could Gregor tell about me with a sniff?

“Yeah, he’s all kinds of wrong,” Thornton agreed. “But even so, I can vouch for him. I can vouch for them both.”

“Very well.” Gregor swiveled on his long neck to face Thornton. “I see you have returned with the Breath of Itzamna upon your chest, old friend, and the scent of the dead. I regret that your fate has found you so soon. I will miss your companionship.”

Clearly uncomfortable, Thornton changed the subject quickly. “Please tell me you still have the box I left with you.”

“Of course,” the dragon said. A gigantic hand rose from beneath the bridge, its scaly claws balled in a fist. All three of us backed up to give the hand room as it came to rest before us. “I promised you I would keep it safe, and I have done no less. I would give it to none but you.”

Thornton nodded. “I know. Believe me, just this once I wish that weren’t the case.” He looked at the dragon’s massive fist. “Thank you, I’ll take it now.”

“However,” the dragon said, “it is such a pretty box.”

Thornton rolled his eyes. “Gregor…”

“I would hate to lose such a beautiful item from my collection,” the dragon continued. “It brings me such pleasure to look at.”

I glanced at Bethany. Once again she gestured for me not to say or do anything to interfere.

“Gregor, I’m running out of time,” Thornton said. “The Breath of Itzamna won’t last much longer. Please, I need the box.”

“I propose a barter, then. A fair trade,” Gregor said.

Thornton frowned and shook his head. “What do we have that you could possibly want?”

“Something of equal beauty that I may keep,” Gregor said. He swiveled his massive head until he loomed over Bethany, and my blood went cold. The dragon wanted her? For what, a snack? I moved to get between them, but she warned me to stay back with a quick shake of her head. Gregor continued, “The bauble that hangs around the female’s neck has caught my eye. I would have it in exchange for the box.”

I breathed a sigh of relief, but Bethany didn’t. “Now just a minute,” she said, putting her hands on her hips.

The dragon lowered his head to regard her more closely. His burning eyes narrowed with contempt. “Thornton, inform this tiny topsider that she is not to address me unless I require it.”

Thornton put his head in his hands. “Oh God, that’s not going to go over well.”

“I’ll address you as I see fit!” Bethany shouted back at Gregor. The sight of a five-foot-tall woman bellowing indignantly at a titanic, eons-old dragon would have been funny if I weren’t so worried that Gregor would respond by squashing us all with one gigantic hand. “And furthermore,” she continued, lifting the charm on the string around her neck, the blue veins in the little pearl-like sphere sparkling like glitter, “do you have any idea how hard it is to engineer a personal energy-barrier charm? This bauble, as you call it, isn’t for sale!”

“A shame. Its colors please me,” Gregor said. “I am afraid we have no deal, old friend.”

Thornton looked up at the dragon sharply. “Gregor, please.”

“I have given you my terms,” the dragon said.

Thornton looked at Bethany. Bethany looked at me—the real reason she was reluctant to part with it. “I told you, you’re safe now. It’s over,” I said. She looked skeptical. “Bethany, I know I kept something from you, something bad, but sooner or later you’re going to have to start trusting me again.”

She took a deep breath, lifted the charm from around her neck, and held it up by the string. “Don’t make me regret this,” she said to me.

A second enormous hand appeared from below the bridge, one long talon extended. Bethany hooked the charm’s string over the tip of the nail. The hand receded back into the mist with her charm.

Gregor’s other hand opened, and something tumbled out of his enormous, scaled palm to land at Thornton’s feet. My breath caught in my throat.

The box.

It was just as Underwood had described it, a foot wide by two feet long, and fashioned from a dark, weathered wood. The corners were cased in brass. A brass handle was hinged on one side so it could be carried. A trunk lock, also brass, was bolted to the wood and kept it securely closed. On the lid was the crest Underwood had said would be there, an iron-stamped coat of arms featuring two lions standing on their hind legs, their mouths open in pantomime roars. Between them, their forelegs supported a shield topped with a bejeweled crown. Unfurled across the face of the shield was a banner with words written in a language I didn’t know: IN DE EENHEID, STERKTE.

After everything we’d been through, the creatures we’d fought, and the lives that had been lost, the box looked crushingly ordinary. But then, boxes didn’t have to be special. It was what they contained that mattered, and what was inside this one had left a trail of blood, death, and betrayal behind it.

I’d known this moment would come eventually. I’d been anticipating it, even dreading it. But I already knew what had to be done.

Thornton took the box by its handle, but he was too weak to lift it.

“Let me,” I said, moving toward him.

Bethany got there first. She lifted the heavy box with a grunt and held it like a suitcase at her side. “No offense, Trent, but I’m not letting this box out of my sight again.”

Damn. I nodded and smiled like it was no big deal. I would have another chance.

Gregor began to descend back into the mist. “Guard that box well, old friend, and beware. What sleeps inside it must not be allowed to awaken. There are whispers. The oracles warn of an immortal storm, a gathering force so powerful it threatens all existence.”

“I don’t understand,” Thornton said. “An immortal storm? What does that mean? What does it have to do with what’s in the box?”

“Warn the others who dwell topside. The immortal storm must not come, or it will seal the doom of all—mortals, Ancients, and Guardians alike.”

Gregor disappeared into the mist and was gone. Thornton ran to the edge of the bridge and looked over. “Wait!” But there was no sign of the dragon.

As we walked back toward the tunnels, I kept my eyes on the box. I’d looked at the situation from every angle. There was only one way to throw off Underwood’s yoke from around my neck and send the message that he couldn’t manipulate me anymore. Only one way to keep Bethany and Thornton safe from the dangerous forces that wanted the box for themselves. Only one way to bring to an end all the suffering and death the box brought with it.

I had to destroy it.