Gates of Thread and Stone

CHAPTER 15

I JOLTED FORWARD, my hand closing on the boy’s shoulder.

“That—on your neck,” I stuttered, and then let go. I hadn’t meant to touch him, but it looked so much like Reev’s.

G-10’s fingers brushed over the bright scar tissue edging the tattoo. He smiled, and this time, it didn’t quite reach his eyes.

“My collar,” he said. “Broke the leash, though.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Instead of answering, he gestured to a door I hadn’t noticed. The wood bore scars and scrapes and looked ready to fall off the hinges.

“The Rider is inside,” he said.

I couldn’t swallow. I kept seeing the gargoyles lined up on top of those lampposts. Wild animals transformed into perfectly controlled guards.

G-10 knocked briskly on the door—which didn’t cave in—and pushed it open. He stepped aside to let us enter.

The study had peeling blue walls, brightly lit by an assortment of mismatched lanterns, and an oversize desk. In the middle of the room, a man stood bent over a round table, building an elaborate series of towers out of beige blocks. He murmured something and then snatched up one of the blocks and bit into it. It made a chewy sound.

Was this the Rider? I slid my hand behind my back to hide the knife.

The door shut behind us, with G-10 on the other side. The Rider straightened, half-eaten block in one hand. His other hand tugged at a strand of hair that stuck out from his head. He was tall, even hovering over Avan. And he was startlingly thin, his gaunt face topped with black hair that was peppered in gray. His eyes, deep set and shadowy against his light-brown skin, regarded us with mild curiosity.

Why would G-10 leave us alone, armed, with the Rider?

“Bread bite?” the man asked, holding up his bitten block. His voice was deep and resonant, and I felt it vibrate through the small room as if we stood in a much larger space. If emptiness had a voice, this was it.

G-10 had left us with the Rider because he didn’t believe we were a real threat. Not to this strange-looking man who could steal people from behind Ninurta’s walls and unsettle me with a couple of words.

I stared at the Rider’s offering and didn’t answer. He shrugged and shoved the rest of it—the bread bite—into his mouth.

“Mmm. Brilliant with honey,” he said, indicating the amber moat surrounding his bread towers. At the forefront of the display was a pile of bread bites artfully arranged into what looked like a miniature horse and rider.

He moved over to a set of purple drapes hanging from floor to ceiling. He had to elbow aside standing lamps to get through. They wobbled on their uneven bases, the flames inside wavering, but didn’t tip. He parted the curtains to display a pair of glass doors. Natural light joined the array of lanterns in the room. Beyond the glass doors, the view presented another angle of the courtyard.

He gestured to two chairs beside the doors. The upholstered seats were torn, and stuffing spilled out the sides.

“Welcome to Etu Gahl,” he said. His voice made me feel empty, too. Adrift. Hopeless. “Please sit.”

I didn’t move. I didn’t want to sit or eat or make small talk with him. Avan remained standing as well. The Rider didn’t appear bothered by our refusal.

“My name, as it is now, is Irra,” he said, and swept us a liquid bow. He wore a tattered suit, the tails of his untucked shirt fluttering around him.

As it is? I didn’t know what to expect when we found the Rider, but this wasn’t it. The friendly guard, the quiet threat cloaked in hospitality, the man’s frazzled appearance—if this was a trick to throw us off, then it was working.

But I wasn’t interested in whatever game the Rider was playing. “Where’s my brother?”

Irra’s lips curved into a smile. His eyes, golden brown and an odd match to his gaunt face, wrinkled at the corners. He bent over his table and began building a tower of bread bites again.

“And what brother might that be?” he asked, his voice like the wind sighing across the Void.

“Reev,” I said, shivering. The weirdness of this place was getting to me. “You kidnapped him a few days ago.”

“Did I?” His eyes cut to me, and I realized my initial thought had been right: Even armed, we weren’t a threat to him. The moment we stepped onto his bridge, it had been the other way around.

I resisted the urge to step back and put the knife between us.

“You’ve been misled,” he said.

A weight lodged in my stomach.

“Are you saying he’s not here?” Avan asked.

Hearing the question made that weight grow unbearably heavy.

“That’s correct. I like to stay on top of our new arrivals, and there have been none since G-10 five months ago.”

That couldn’t be true. “What did you do with my brother?” I demanded. If the Rider could turn gargoyles into guards, who knew what he could do to people?

“I assure you that your brother, whoever the unfortunate fellow might be, holds no interest for me.”

“But what about the hollows?” I asked. “What about your war with Kahl Ninu?”

“DJ said you were kidnapping Ninurtans,” Avan said.

Irra looked unimpressed, his eyebrows raised over hooded eyes. “DJ is not the most reliable of sources.”

“You’re lying,” I said. He had to be. Because if he wasn’t, then—I breathed in through gritted teeth. If he wasn’t lying, everything we’d done to get here had been a waste. Leaving Ninurta, accepting the reality that we might never go home again, crashing into the forest, and nearly getting killed by gargoyles—this entire journey would have been for nothing.

Had I exiled myself and Avan to chase a lie? If Reev wasn’t here, then what the hell was I supposed to do now?

Something nudged my hand. Avan pried the knife from my fingers. They’d been clenched around the hilt for so long that it hurt to move them. I covered my face, which felt hot against my cold hands.

“Not at this moment, no,” Irra said. “Lying has always been a distinctly human trait.”

Whatever that meant. All that mattered was whether he was telling the truth about Reev.

“If you’re not kidnapping them, then who is?”

Irra pinched one bread bite between his thumb and forefinger. Then he popped it into his mouth. He straightened and approached us, his presence overwhelming as he drew closer. I had to crane my neck to see his face.

“Do you know why the Tournament is kept a private Academy event?” he asked.

“What does that have to do with anything?” My neck hurt, but I didn’t look away. I wasn’t ready to give up. I would never be ready to give up on Reev.

His smile was much too wide. “Everything.”

“Almost everything inside the Academy is kept private,” I said impatiently. “Cadets aren’t even allowed to leave the campus until they’ve completed their two years.”

“True,” Irra said. “But the secrecy, particularly surrounding the Tournament, is because Ninu wouldn’t want you noticing any familiar faces.”

He couldn’t mean—

“Ninu is taking them to play in the Tournament?” Avan said.

“But . . . ,” I began. The Tournament was the final challenge that Watchmen Academy cadets had to face. It was their last chance to improve their ranking and placement after graduation. Ninu selected his sentinels from the cadets who won the Tournament. I’d read about it in school. Every year, a bunch of high school graduates left the district to join the Academy. I didn’t know any of them personally, but once they left, the chances of seeing them again were slim. The Watchmen were rarely assigned to their home neighborhoods.

“Are you saying Ninu kidnaps his own citizens and puts them in the Academy? Or right into the Tournament?” I asked. “Why would he need to do that? It’s not like they’re short on cadets.”

“The answer to that is a bit complicated,” said Irra.

“Well, we’ve come all this way, so I think we can spare the time.”

Irra scratched his cheek, looking thoughtful. Then he pushed past us and threw open the wooden door. “I’d like to show you something.”

He disappeared down the hall. After a quick look at Avan, I hurried after him.

Irra led us down hallways that could have been pulled from the Labyrinth, except the smell was musty instead of damp. Stained walls had progressed well beyond peeling, the puckered seams so brittle that they looked about to disintegrate at the slightest touch. The floor creaked and convulsed underneath us. We encountered a couple of girls in the halls. They both wore the same belted, faded-blue tunics with fitted pants, although one of them had altered her tunic by cutting the baggy hem and tying it tight above her hips so that the material hugged her curves. If these people were the Black Rider’s hollows, then DJ was seriously misinformed.

The girls nodded politely to Irra and then to us. When I glanced back, the same red tattoos were visible at the bases of their necks, beneath their matching ponytails.

Irra came to an abrupt halt at the top of a staircase. I skidded on my toes to keep from running into him. Avan steadied me with a hand on my lower back.

It felt different here. That empty feeling returned, stronger, pushing beneath my ribs: gnawing, cramping, ravenous. It dipped cold fingers into my chest.

“You feel that, right?” Avan murmured. I nodded and leaned into his hand, focusing on the warmth of his palm and letting it soak into my skin.

“This is where the walls of Etu Gahl end. For now. It does change.” Irra lifted his hand to indicate we should stay where we were.

We watched from the landing as Irra moved ahead and stood in the middle of a hallway that led to a dead end. I didn’t know what we were waiting for until I looked at his feet. The floor changed beneath him. No, not changed—aged.

I looked around. It wasn’t just the floor but the whole hallway. The walls turned from white to yellow to brown; paint bubbled and peeled; mold spread in a dark stain along the crease where the walls met the ceiling and then streaked down to the floor; an entire section of the wall sagged into the beams. In this narrow hallway, time had spilled forward at an unbelievable speed, nothing like what I could do.

But the threads remained undisturbed. Whatever he was doing, it was outside of time. Which didn’t make any sense, but my thoughts were too jumbled to work out what I was seeing.

New objects winked into being as well: end tables covered in lace and then linen and then plaid, set with silver saucers that gradually darkened to brittle brass. Paintings and photographs fastened themselves to the walls, the images fading in and out with new faces until the glass shattered and the wooden frames dwindled to dust. Past the hall where Irra stood, the dead end had given way, and a completely new room had sprung from nowhere.

“The living go to my sister when they pass,” he said. “But Etu Gahl is where ideas and objects come to die. My house is a place of forgotten things.”

Irra glanced back, and I felt his stare inside me, like something alive.

“What are you?” I asked.

“The hunger that cramps your stomach. The decay that shrivels your crops.” He dragged his fingers along the wall. It blistered and rotted beneath his touch. “The shadows that carve into your cheeks.”

He folded his elegant, slender hands at his waist. His golden-brown eyes were soft and warm and terrifying.

“I have been known as Famine. But call me Irra.”