Pay Dirt Read online

  I waited, listening to the sounds of rocks shifting and clothing scraping against stone. At least if the tunnel collapsed on her she would probably survive it. The last day had made me realize just how resilient she was.

  I heard her reach the end of the collapsed section and pull herself out the other side. There was a moment’s silence. Then her voice echoed down the hole at me.

  “Ozzy,” she said. “You should come see this.”

  With another wary look at the collapsed ceiling, I took a deep breath and clambered up the rock pile. Stones shifted under my weight. Suppressing my nervousness, I put my flashlight between my teeth and wriggled into the tight space at the top of the pile.

  There wasn’t enough room for me to crawl on all fours, so I slithered along by wiggling my elbows. Both my shoulders scraped at the sides of the gap. I felt dust and small stones catching in my beard while sharper rocks scraped at my belly. I wasn’t particularly claustrophobic, but this was not my idea of fun. If the passage got an inch or two narrower, I’d end up stuck. If that happened I wasn’t sure I could even push myself back the way I’d come. After all I’d been through, this seemed a stupid way to die.

  The collapsed section was no more than ten feet long, but it seemed to take forever to wriggle through. About halfway through I had the unsettling sensation that I was being born again. I blame the lack of sleep.

  Finally, I stuck my head out the other side. I didn’t breathe a sigh of relief until I managed to work my shoulders past the opening. I scrambled out, slid down the pile of rubble, then picked myself up and dusted myself off.

  Lilian was further down the tunnel, staring up at an apparent dead end. The rat sat beside her. It wasn’t until I took my flashlight out of my mouth and got a bit closer that I saw exactly what it was they were looking at.

  The tunnel on this side of the collapse seemed wider than it had before. Instead of continuing on, though, the shaft ended abruptly in a wall of stone so flat and smooth it couldn’t have been formed by the same tools that’d carved out the rest of the mine. As my flashlight played across it, the wall seemed to have an unnatural sheen, like it was made of obsidian.

  A door was set into the wall. It seemed to be carved from the same stone as the wall around it. There was no handle, and I couldn’t see any hinges.

  Circling the door, a string of symbols had been carved. They stretched all the way down to the bottom of the wall, and then described a semi-circle on the floor in front of the door. I couldn’t read the text, but it was clear that it was written in the same script that was on the gold coins. The first conclave had used the language of their enemy to seal him in.

  I studied the symbols for a few seconds, then lifted my flashlight and pointed it at the center of the door. There, set into the stone, was a circular piece of glass. Like Stuckey had said, it was about the size of a dinner plate. It was slightly convex, like a lens, but as I looked into it I could only see myself reflected back.

  A crack ran vertically down the center of the glass, splitting the image in two. Stuckey hadn’t mentioned that when he’d told me what Habi had found here.

  “Entombed in glass,” I muttered.

  “What?” Lilian’s voice was hushed as well. Even the rat had ceased its squeaking.

  I reached out and touched the broken glass. “I can’t be sure. But I think the wards that sealed this place have been damaged.”

  “And what exactly does that mean?”

  “It means we’re trying to rescue the biggest idiots in Lost Falls.” I looked down at the rat. “I can only assume Ursula was responsible for cracking the wards.”

  The rat sniffed at the door and said nothing.

  “Well, it looks like they managed to close it back up again,” Lilian said as she studied the edges of the door. The crack between the door and the wall was so small I didn’t think I could even get a crowbar in there to pry it open. “If your friend’s inside, think he can open it up for us?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. This tomb wasn’t really designed to keep people out. It’s to keep its occupants sealed within. When they closed the door, they locked themselves back in.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the three gold coins. “Luckily, we’ve got the keys.”

  I rattled the coins in my hand and studied the door. There were no obvious keyholes or sockets where one of the coins would fit. Gingerly, I selected one of the coins and placed it over the broken glass in the center of the door. A few seconds passed. Nothing happened.

  Isidora’s rat looked up at me and gave an impatient squeak.

  “Shut up. I know.” I aimed a lazy kick in the rat’s direction, and it hissed and scurried away from my shoe.

  I tried pressing the coin against the door in a couple more places. When that didn’t work either, I tried the second coin, and then the third. Growing frustrated, I tried pressing all three coins against the door at once. It remained stubbornly closed.

  “Come on,” I growled. “What kind of useless keys are these?”

  Safely out of kicking range, the rat squeaked again.

  “If you’re so smart, you try,” I snapped. I jangled the coins in my hand. Maybe Stuckey was wrong. Maybe these weren’t keys at all. Maybe this was all a goddamn waste of time.

  Sure, I could probably break open the door myself. Ursula had done it, after all, and I’d be damned before I would concede that some coven witch was better at breaking wards than me. But it would take time. Time that I suspected we didn’t have. It was a stroke of luck we’d beaten both the wraith and York’s cultists here. I didn’t expect that luck to hold for long.

  “Ozzy.” Lilian held out her hand. “Let me try.”

  Something in her voice kept me from saying anything in reply. Even in the darkness I could see she was staring at the door with an unusual intensity. I dropped the coins into her hand.

  She shuffled through them without looking at them, selecting one by feel. With a deep breath, she stepped forward and began to run the coin along the line of symbols that surrounded the door.

  She opened her mouth and began to speak. Her voice came out low and thrumming, a hypnotic chanting that washed over me like the sound of waves on a cloudy day. It was a few seconds before I realized her eyes were following the symbols on the wall as she ran the coin across them.

  She could read it.

  For a few minutes I watched, enraptured, as she spoke those strange, droning words. Then I began to get bored. This tomb sure as hell wasn’t designed to be opened in a hurry. After two minutes, Lilian was barely a quarter of the way through the text. Growing restless, I turned my attention away from Lilian to scan the walls and floor of the tunnel.

  As I lowered the beam of my flashlight, I spotted some sooty smears on the rocky floor near the ring of symbols. I crouched and studied them more closely.

  It looked like the smears had been made with ash suspended in a liquid medium. They formed crude symbols that I guessed were designed to counter the protective wards around the tomb. As I shone my light around, I spotted more of the smears painted across the walls and ceiling.

  This had to be Ursula’s work. Part of some witchcraft to crack open the tomb. It wasn’t the most elegant work, but as with Isidora, I sensed a raw power that more than made up for any sloppiness of technique.

  In one spot, on the left wall, a couple of the crude symbols had been smudged. I peered closer. I could’ve been wrong, but it looked a little like someone had swept a hand across the symbols. Trying to disrupt them? Or was it an accident, someone stumbling around in the dark and rubbing up against the damp soot?

  As Lilian neared the end of her incantation, I moved a little closer to the door, shining my light around its edges. There, at the impossibly small crack in the door, I spotted something I hadn’t noticed before. It was almost indiscernible against the glassy black stone of the door, except for the difference in the way the light reflected off it. There were black streaks of ash against the edge of the door. As if whoeve
r had run their hand through Isidora’s symbols had been trying to claw at the door.

  Lilian brought the coin back to its starting position and read off the end of the incantation in her droning voice. Silence returned to the tunnel. She stepped back, swaying a little on her feet.

  I steadied her. “You okay?”

  She just nodded. She was still staring at the door, which hadn’t moved.

  “You going to explain what just happened?” I asked.

  She raised a finger, pointed at the door. “Look.”

  I looked. I couldn’t see anything. Then I blinked, and there it was. Where there had been flat stone, now there was a circular indentation in the door. It was about the size of a large salad bowl. It appeared to be made of thick glass, through which I could see several large bronze gears. An iron cylinder running vertically down the center of the indentation formed a kind of handle.

  Lilian handed the coin back to me. “I found the door handle for you.”

  “You’re full of surprises, you know that?”

  “Everyone likes surprises.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. They always seem to bite me in the ass. You want the honors?”

  She gestured for me to go ahead. Isidora’s rat scurried up, sniffed at the door, and looked at me.

  I took a deep breath. “All right. Let’s do this.”

  Stepping forward, I grabbed the handle with both hands. It seemed strangely warm. I could feel my own pulse pounding through my fingertips.

  I twisted the handle. I could feel weight behind it, but there was almost no resistance. It opened easier than a jar of pickles. As I rotated the handle, I could see the gears beyond the glass spinning.

  As the handle became vertical, it stopped with a heavy thunk. I paused a moment. Then I pushed.

  And the door swung slowly open.

  It seemed to turn on invisible hinges. There was no scrape of stone against stone. Even after all this time, the door seemed perfectly fitted to the frame.

  As it opened, I could feel a slight breeze as air rushed into the opening. A faint blue glow spilled out from within the tomb. It was a cold, flickering light, as if it came from some ghostly candle.

  Next to me, Lilian slipped one of her guns from her pocket. A moment later I did the same. My hands were trembling. Licking my lips, I raised both my gun and my flashlight and waited for the door to complete its slow swing.

  I’d expected a small cavern, maybe something a little bigger than the tunnel we were standing in. Some claustrophobic little tomb just big enough to hold the body of Morley the Profane and all the corrupted artifacts and stolen wealth they’d buried with him.

  Instead, the door opened on a hall as impressive as anything the goblins could build. It was both long and wide, with several alcoves set into the walls. Between the alcoves I could make out several passages leading off this main hall. The ceiling was as high as the ceilings in Early’s Victorian. Grand pillars reached up, holding back the weight of the earth.

  As with the door, the whole place seemed to be crafted from a single enormous piece of that black, glassy stone. I didn’t know whether the stone came from some natural deposit or whether it had been somehow transmuted from the earth and rock and ore that made up the land here. I couldn’t imagine the kind of power that would take. The sacrifices that would have to be made.

  Shimmering blue lights were mounted on the pillars. There were no flames, really, but they clearly weren’t electrical lights either.Altogether they hardly gave off more light than my flashlight. The shadows they left behind seemed deep and dark.

  For a moment, I thought the floor of the tomb was littered with gravestones. Dozens of black stone protrusions rose up from the floor in neat rows. But as my eyes adjusted to the dim blue light, I realized they were mostly too big to be mere grave markers. Most were cubic in shape. Some were small, about as big as a microwave, while others were furniture-sized. Simple symbols marked each box.

  The only area of clear space was the center of the hall. There, the big black cubes made way for a wide strip of floor surrounding the tomb’s central feature: something I could only describe as an obsidian coffin trapped in the world’s biggest spiderweb.

  At first glance the slab of black stone that hung vertically in the center of the hall resembled many of the other cubic stones lined up throughout the hall. It was only on closer inspection that I could make out the lines of symbols that covered every visible inch of the stone, like hieroglyphs on the walls of an ancient Egyptian burial chamber.

  Ropes of black glass stretched from the stone slab to tether on the ceiling and floor and surrounding pillars, suspending the slab a few feet off the ground. About halfway down the slab was a thin crack. Scattered across the floor beneath the suspended stone was a small pile of glassy stone debris.

  The reason for the crack was obvious. He was standing right next to it. He clutched a pick-axe tightly in both hands.

  Given the size of him, it wasn’t a surprise he’d only made a small dent in the stone slab. He’d always been a scrawny little bastard, and it seemed the years hadn’t bulked him up at all. His floppy red hair was matted to his forehead with sweat. Panting, he raised the pick-axe and took a step back.

  “Who’s there?” he called.

  I realized that we were shining our flashlights into his eyes, and Lilian and I were still wearing our concealment charms to boot. I unbuttoned my collar and gestured for Lilian to remove her talisman. As I lowered my flashlight, the red-headed man blinked a few times. A broad, goofy smile spread across his face.

  “Well, hey, big guy,” Holden said. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you to knock?”

  31

  I could hardly believe it. I’d spent the last few days half-expecting to find nothing more than Holden’s headless corpse. Sure, I’d hoped I would find him alive. I’d clung to that hope like a drowning man clinging to a piece of driftwood. But to see him here, alive, healthy—even smiling, for fuck’s sake…

  I shoved my gun back into my pocket and strode forward. He put down the pick-axe and came to meet me.

  I threw my arms around him. He was sweaty and smelled like a dumpster on a hot summer’s day, but I didn’t care. He laughed and shoved me away after a couple of seconds.

  “All right, all right,” he said. “Enough of that. I’m taken, remember? Didn’t you hear I’m about to get married?” He looked up at me, grinning that lopsided grin of his.

  Hell, he’d barely aged a day.

  He stepped back to get a better look at me. “I like the beard. The clothes, not so much. Tell you what, when we’re done here, I’ll buy you a new coat. Something that doesn’t look like you let your dogs sleep on it.”

  I just looked at him. I didn’t know what to say. Thankfully, Holden could talk enough for us both. He looked over my shoulder, his smile faltering a little. He leaned in close and whispered to me.

  “So, I don’t want to alarm you, bud, but I think that girl you brought with you is in serious need of medical attention.”

  I glanced over my shoulder. Lilian was watching the door, one hand in the pocket that I knew held a gun. Even in the dim light, her injuries were obvious.

  I looked back at Holden and licked my lips. “Don’t worry about it,” I croaked. “She’s just…don’t worry.”

  He shrugged his skinny shoulders, then looked at me. He slapped my arm. “Hey, what’s the matter? You all right, big guy? Oh, hang on a minute, I better make sure my wife-to-be doesn’t try to blow you away. Urs!” He turned and called down one of the hallways leading off the main hall. “It’s okay, this is the friend I was telling you about. Come on out, let me introduce you.”

  I heard a clink of something glass being set down on the floor, then a woman emerged from the shadows of the hallway. Immediately I saw the resemblance to Isidora in her. She was younger, of course, and slightly fuller-figured, but she bore those same steely eyes, that same twist of her lips that made every expression into a sneer. She was dre
ssed in enough black leather to upholster a sex dungeon, and her snot-green hair was styled with an undercut on one side. I could see why she might’ve had trouble fitting in with the local witches’ coven. They’re an old-fashioned bunch.

  “Ursula, this is Ozzy,” Holden said. He clapped me on the shoulder. “We go way back. Man, I’ve lost count of how many times I had to save your sorry ass.”

  “My ass?” I shook my head incredulously. “I think you and I remember things very differently.”

  He winked at me, then gripped me around the torso and gestured grandly toward the punk rock witch. “This, Ozzy, is my lady love. Beautiful, isn’t she?”

  “She sure is something,” I said.

  From behind me came a squeal. Tiny feet pattered against the stone floor, scurrying past me and weaving between the cubes of black glass.

  The expression on Ursula’s face softened slightly as she saw the rat skittering toward her.

  “Sheila?” she said.

  The rat looked poised to leap at Ursula and clamber up her clothes, but at the last moment it slowed and came to a stop in front of the witch. Its tail flicked uncertainly.

  Ursula reached down, but the rat backed up a few steps. It turned and squeaked at me.

  Ursula’s brow furrowed. Her fringe fell down in front of her eyes. She swept it back with a flick of her head.

  “Wait…Izzie?”

  The rat squeaked again at me, more insistently. It started to move back toward the door to the tomb.

  Holden seemed oblivious to his fiancé’s confusion. His arm was still around me, and now his attention was focused on Lilian, who was lingering a few steps behind me.

  “So, who’s your friend?” Holden asked me. “Or girlfriend, maybe, huh? I don’t see any rings.”

  I ignored Holden’s nudges. “Oh, uh, Lilian, Holden; Holden, Lilian.” I followed the rat with my eyes. “Proper introductions later. We’ve lingered too long already. We have to get out of here. Come on.”