Ichor : Blood & Secrets

Chapter 40

In silence, Octiva and Meredith let Casie tie their wrists in front of them. Casie then let Klaus tie her wrists and thread a long rope between the three of them, as if they were a chain gang of prisoners.

Casie could feel a flush coming up from below her chest to burn in her cheeks. She couldn’t meet Klaus’s eyes, not this way, but she knew without asking that Klaus was thinking about the time that Lucien had dismissed him from his apartment like a dog, in front of just this audience, plus Matt.

Vengeful cad, Casie thought as hard as she could in Klaus’s direction. She knew the last word would hurt the most. Klaus prided himself on being a gentleman…

But “gentlemen” don’t go into the Dark Dimension, Klaus’s voice in her head said mockingly.

“All right,” Klaus added aloud, and took the lead rope in one hand. He started walking briskly into the darkness of the cave, the three girls crowding and stumbling behind him.

Casie would never forget that brief journey, and she knew neither Octiva nor Meredith would either. They walked across the shallow opening of the cave and into the small opening in the back, which gaped like a mouth. It took some maneuvering to get the three of them into it. On the other side the

cavern flared out again, and they were in a large cavern. At least that was what Casie’s enhanced senses told her. The everlasting fog had returned and

Casie had no idea which way they were going.

Only a few minutes later a building reared up out of the thick fog.

Casie didn’t know what she had been expecting from the Demon Gate. Possibly huge ebony doors, carved with serpents and encrusted with jewels. Maybe a rough-hewn, weathered colossus of stone, like the Egyptian pyramids. Perhaps even some sort of futuristic energy field that flickered and flashed with blue-violet lasers.

What she saw instead looked like a ramshackle depot of some kind, a place for holding and shipping goods. There was an empty pen, heavily fenced, topped with barbed wire. It stank, and Casie was glad that she and Klaus had not channeled power to her nose.

Then there were people, men and women in fine clothes, each with a key in one hand, murmuring something before opening a door in one side of the building. The same door—but Casie would bet anything that they weren’t all going to the same place, if the keys were like the one she had briefly

“borrowed” from Shinichi’s house a week or so ago. One of the ladies looked as if she were dressed for a fancy masquerade, with fox ears that blended into her long auburn hair. It was only when Casie saw under her anklelength dress the swishing of a fox tail that she realized that the woman was a kitsune making use of the Demon Gate.

Klaus hastily—and none too gently—led them to the other side of the building, where a broken-hinged door opened into a dilapidated room that, strangely, seemed larger on the inside than on the outside. All sorts of things were being bartered or sold here: many looked as if they had to do with the management of slaves.

Casie, Meredith, and Octiva looked at one another, round-eyed. Obviously, people bringing wild slaves in from the outside considered torture and terror all in a day’s work.

“Passage for four,” Klaus said briefly to the slump-shouldered but heavyset man behind the counter.

“Three savages all at once?” The man, eyes devouring what he could see of the three girls, turned to look at Klaus suspiciously.

“What can I say? My job is also my hobby.” Klaus stared him straight in the eyes.

“Yeh, but…” The man laughed. “Lately we bin gettin’ maybe one or two a month.”

“They’re legally mine. No kidnappings. Kneel,” Klaus added casually to the three girls.

It was Meredith who got it first and sank to the ground like a ballet dancer. Her dark, dark gray eyes were focused on something no one but she could see. Then Casie somehow untangled the single syllable from the others. She focused her mind on Lucien and pretended she was kneeling to kiss him on his prison pallet. It seemed to work; she was down.

But Octiva was up. The most dependent, the softest, the most innocent member of the triumvirate found that her knees had gone solid.

“Redheads, eh?” the man said, eyeing Klaus sharply even as he smirked.

“Maybe you’d better buy a little tingler for that one.”

“Maybe,” Klaus said tightly. Octiva just looked at him blankly, looked at the girls on the ground and then threw herself into a prostrate position. Casie could hear her sobbing softly. “But I’ve found that a firm voice and a disapproving look actually work better.”

The man gave up and slumped again. “Passage for four,” he grunted and reached up and pulled on a dirty bell rope. By this time Octiva was weeping in fear and humiliation, but no one seemed to notice, except the other girls.

Casie didn’t dare to try to comfort her telepathically; that wouldn’t fit in with the aura of a “normal human girl” at all, and who knew what traps or devices might be hidden here in addition to the man who kept undressing them over and over with his eyes? She just wished she could call up one of her

Wings attacks, right here in this room. That would wipe the smug look off the man’s face.

A moment later, something else wiped it off as completely as she could have desired. Klaus leaned across the counter and whispered something to him that turned the slumped man’s leering face a sickly color of green.

Did you hear what he said? Casie communicated this to Meredith using her eyes and eyebrows.

Meredith, her own eyes crinkling, positioned her hand in front of Casie’s abdomen, then made a twisting, ripping motion.

Even Octiva smiled.

Then Klaus led them to wait outside the depot. They had only been standing a few minutes when Casie’s new vision spotted a boat gliding silently through the mist. She realized that the building must be on the very bank of a river, but even with Power directed solely to her eyes she could barely

make out where the nonreflective land gave way to shining water, and even with Power directed solely to her ears she could barely hear the sound of swift deep water running.

The boat stopped—somehow. Casie couldn’t see any anchor dropped or anything to fasten it to. But the fact was that it did stop, and the slumped man put down a plank, which stayed in place as they boarded: first Klaus, and then his bevy of “slaves.”

On board, Casie watched Klaus wordlessly offer six pieces of gold to the ferryman—two for each human who presumably wouldn’t be coming back, she thought.

For a moment she was lost in the memory of being very young—only three or so, she must have been—and sitting on her father’s lap while he read to her from a wonderfully illustrated book about the Greek myths. It told about the ferryman, Charon, who took spirits of the deceased over the river

Styx to the land of the dead. And her father telling her that the Greeks put coins on the eyes of those who died so they could pay the ferryman…. There’s no coming back from this journey! she thought suddenly and violently. No escape! They might as well be truly dead….

Strangely, it was horror that saved her from this morass of terror. Just as she lifted her head, perhaps to scream, the dim figure of the ferryman turned from his duties briefly as if to look back over the passengers. Casie heard Octiva’s shriek. Meredith, shaking, was frantically and illogically reaching for the bag in which her gun was stowed. Even Klaus didn’t seem to be able to move.

The tall specter in the boat had no face.

He had deep depressions where his eyes should be, a shallow hollow for a mouth, and a triangular hole where his nose should have protruded. The uncanny horror of it, on top of the stink from the depot pens, was simply too much for Octiva, and she slumped sideways, limp against Meredith, in a faint.

Casie, in the midst of her terror, had a moment of revelation. In the dim, moist, dripping twilight, she had forgotten to stop trying to use all her senses to their fullest. She was undoubtedly better able to see the inhuman face of the ferryman than, say, Meredith. She could also hear things, like the sounds of long-dead miners tapping at the rock above them, and the scurrying of enormous bats or cockroaches or something, inside the stone walls all around them.

But now, Casie suddenly felt warm tears on her icy cheeks as she realized that she had completely underestimated Octiva for as long as she’d known about her friend’s psychic powers. If Octiva’s senses were permanently open to the kinds of horrors Casie was experiencing now, it was no wonder that Octiva lived in fear. Casie found herself promising to be a hell of a lot more tolerant the next time Octiva faltered or started screaming. In fact,

Octiva deserved some kind of an award for keeping a grip on sanity this far, Casie decided. But Casie didn’t dare do any more than gaze at her friend, who was completely unconscious, and swear to herself that from now on Octiva would find a champion in Casie Malrux.

That promise and the warmth of it burned like a candle in Casie’s mind, a candle she pictured held by Lucien, the light of it dancing in his green eyes and playing over the planes of his face. It was just enough to keep her from losing her own sanity on the rest of the journey.

By the time the boat docked—at a place just slightly more traveled than the one where they had embarked—all three of the girls were in a state of exhaustion brought on by prolonged terror and wrenching suspense. But they hadn’t really used the time to think over the words “Dark Dimension” or to imagine the number of ways its darkness might be manifested.

“Our new home,” Klaus said grimly. Watching him instead of the landscape, Casie realized from the tension in his neck and shoulders that Klaus was not enjoying himself. She’d thought he’d be heading into his own particular paradise, this world of human slaves, and torture for entertainment, whose only rule was self-preservation of the individual ego. Now she realized that she had been wrong. For Klaus this was a world of beings with Powers as great or greater than his own. He was going to have to claw out a foothold here among them, just like any urchin on the street —except that he couldn’t afford to make any mistakes. They needed to find a way not just to live, but to live in luxury and mingle with high society, if they were to have any chance to rescue Lucien.

Lucien—no, she couldn’t allow herself the luxury of thinking about him at that time. Once she started she would become undone, begin to demand ridiculous things, like that they go round to the prison, just to stare at it, like a junior high kid with a crush on an older boy, who just wanted to be driven “by

his house” to worship it. And then what would that do to their plans for a jailbreak later? Plan A was: don’t make mistakes, and Casie would stick to that

until she found a better one.

That was how Klaus and his “slaves” came to the Dark Dimension, through the Demon Gate. The smallest one needed to be revived with water in the face before she could get up and walk.

Hurrying behind Klaus, Casie tried not to look either to the left or the right. She could see too much of what to Meredith and Octiva must have appeared to be featureless darkness.

There were depots on either side, places where slaves were obviously brought to be bought or sold or transported later. Casie could hear the whimpers of children in the darkness and if she hadn’t been so frightened herself, she would have rushed off looking for the crying kids.

But I can’t do that, because I’m a slave now, she thought, with a sense of shock that ran up from her fingertips. I’m not a real human being anymore.

I’m a piece of property.

She found herself once again staring at the back of Klaus’s head and wondering how on earth she had talked herself into this. She understood what being a slave meant—in fact she seemed to have an intuitive understanding of it that surprised her—and it was Not a Good Thing to Be. It meant that she could be…well, that anything could be done to her and it was no one’s business but that of her owner. And her owner (how had he talked her into this again?) was Klaus, of all people.

He could sell all three girls—Casie, Meredith, and Octiva—and be out of here in an hour with the profits.

They hurried through this area of the docks, the girls with their eyes on their feet to prevent themselves from stumbling.

And then they crested a hill. Below them, in a sort of crater-shaped formation, was a city.

The slums were on the edges, and crowded almost up to where they were standing. But there was a chicken-wire fence in front of them, which kept them isolated even while allowing them a bird’s-eye view of the city. If they had still been in the cave they had entered, this would have been the greatest underground cavern imaginable—but they weren’t underground anymore.

“It happened sometime during the ferry ride,” Klaus said. “We made— well—a twist in space, say.” He tried to explain and Casie tried to understand. “You went in through the Demon Gate, and when you came out you were no longer in Earth’s Dimension, but in another one entirely.” Casie only had to look up at the sky to believe him. The constellations were different; there was no Little or Big Dipper, no North Star.

Then there was the sun. It was much larger, but much dimmer than Earth’s, and it never left the horizon. At any moment about half of it showed, day and night—terms which, as Meredith pointed out, had lost their rational meaning here.

As they approached a gate made of chicken wire that would finally let them out of the slave-holding area, they were stopped by what Casie would later learn was a Guardian.

She would learn that in a way, the Guardians were the rulers of the Dark Dimension, although they themselves came from another place far away and it was almost as if they had permanently occupied this little slice of Hell, trying to impose order on the slum king and feudal lords who divided the city among themselves.

This Guardian was a tall woman with hair the color of Casie’s own—true gold—cut square at shoulder length, and she paid no attention at all to Klaus but immediately asked Casie, who was first in line behind him,

“Why are you here?”

Casie was glad, very glad, that Klaus had taught her to control her aura. She concentrated on that while her brain hummed at supersonic speed, wondering what the right response to this question was. The response that would leave them free and not get them sent home.

Klaus didn’t train us for this, was her first thought. And her second was, no, because he’s never been here before. He doesn’t know how everything works here, only some things.

And if it looked as if this woman was going to try to interfere with him, he might just go crazy and attack her, a helpful little voice added from somewhere in Casie’s subconscious. Casie doubled the speed of her scheming. Creative lying had once been a sort of specialty of hers, and now she

said the first thing that popped into her head and got a thumbs-up: “I gambled with him and lost.”

Well, it sounded good. People lost all sorts of things when they gambled: plantations, talismans, horses, castles, bottles of genii. And if it turned out not to be enough of a reason, she could always say that that was just the start of her sad story. Best of all, it was in a way, true. Long ago she’d given her life for Klaus as well as for Lucien, and Klaus had not exactly turned over a new leaf as she’d requested. Half a leaf, maybe. A leaflet. The Guardian was staring at her with a puzzled look in her true blue eyes. People had stared at Casie all her life—being young and very beautiful meant that you fretted only when people didn’t stare. But the puzzlement was a bit of a worry. Was the tall woman reading her mind? Casie tried to add another layer of white noise at the top. What came out was a few lines of a Britney Spears song. She turned the psychic volume up.

The tall woman put two fingers to her head like someone with a sudden headache. Then she looked at Meredith.

“Why…are you here?”

Usually Meredith didn’t lie at all, but when she did she treated it as an intellectual art. Fortunately, she also never tried to fix something that wasn’t broken. “The same for me,” she said sadly.

“And you?” The woman was looking at Octiva, who was looking as if she were going to be sick again.

Meredith gave Octiva a little nudge. Then she stared at her hard. Casie stared at her harder, knowing that all Octiva had to do was mumble “Me, too.” And Octiva was a good “me, too-er” after Meredith had staked out a position.

The problem was that Octiva was also either in trance, or so close to it that it didn’t matter.

“Shadow Souls,” Octiva said.

The woman blinked, but not the way you blink when someone says something totally unresponsive. She blinked in astonishment.

Oh, God, Casie thought. Octiva’s got their password or something. She’s making predictions or prophesying or whatever.

“Shadow…souls?” the Guardian said, watching Octiva closely.

“The city is full of them,” Octiva said miserably.

The Guardian’s fingers danced over what looked like a palmtop computer.

“We know that. This is the place they come.”

“Then you should stop it.”

“We have only limited jurisdiction. The Dark Dimension is ruled by a dozen factions of overlords, who have slumlords to carry out their orders.” Octiva, Casie thought, trying to cut through Octiva’s mental haze even at the cost of the Guardian hearing her. These are the police.

At the same moment, Klaus took over. “She’s the same as the others,” he said. “Except that she’s psychic.”

“No one asked your opinion,” the Guardian snapped at him, without even glancing in Klaus’s direction. “I don’t care what kind of bigwig you are down there”—she jerked her head contemptuously at the city of lights— “you’re on my turf behind this fence. And I’m asking the little red-haired girl: is what

he is saying the truth?”

Casie had a moment of panic. After all they’d been through, if Octiva blew it now…

This time Octiva blinked. Whatever else she was trying to communicate, it was true that she was the same as Meredith and Casie. And it was true

that she was psychic. Octiva was a terrible liar when she had too much time to think about things, but to this she could say without hesitation,

“Yes, that’s true.”

The Guardian stared at Klaus.

Klaus stared back as if he could do it all night. He was a champion outstarer.

And the Guardian waved them away.

“I suppose even a psychic can have a bad day,” she said, then added to Klaus, “Take care of them. You realize that all psychics have to be licensed?”

Klaus, with his best grand seigneur manner, said, “Madam, these are not professional psychics. They are my private assistants.”

“And I’m not a ‘Madam’ I’m addressed as ‘Your Judgment.’ By the way, people addicted to gambling usually come to horrible ends here.” Ha, ha, Casie thought. If she only knew what kind of gamble we all are taking…well, we’d probably be worse off than Lucien is right now. Outside the fence was a courtyard. There were litters here, as well as rickshaws and small goatcarts. No carriages, no horses. Klaus got two litters, one for himself and Casie and one for Meredith and Octiva.

Octiva, still looking confused, was staring at the sun. “You mean it never finishes rising?”

“No,” Klaus said patiently. “And it’s setting here, not rising. Perpetual twilight in the City of Darkness itself. You’ll see more as we move along. Don’t touch that,” he added, as Meredith moved to untie the rope around Octiva’s wrists before either of them got on the litter. “You two can take the ropes

off in the litter if you draw the curtains, but don’t lose them. You’re still slaves, and you have to wear something symbolic around your arms to show it—even

if it’s just matching bracelets. Otherwise I get in trouble. Oh, and you’ll have to go veiled in the city.”

“We—what?” Casie flashed a look of disbelief at him.

Klaus just flashed back a 250-kilowatt smile and before Casie could say another word, he was drawing gauzy sheer fabrics from his black bag and handing them out. The veils were of a size to cover an entire body. “But you only have to put it on your head or tie it on your hair or something,” Klaus said dismissively.

“What’s it made of?” Meredith asked, feeling the light silky material, which was transparent and so thin that the wind threatened to whip it from her fingers.

“How should I know?”

“It’s different colors on the other side!” Octiva discovered, letting the wind transform her pale green veil into a shimmering silver. Meredith was shaking out a dramatic deep violet silk into a mysterious dark blue dotted with a myriad of stars. Casie, who had been expecting her own veil to be blue, found herself looking up at Klaus. He was holding a tiny square of cloth in a clenched fist.

“Let’s see how good you’ve gotten,” he murmured, nodding her closer to him. “Guess what color.”

Another girl might only have noticed the sloe black eyes and the pure, carven lines of Klaus’s face, or maybe the wild, wicked smile—somehow wilder and sweeter than ever here, like a rainbow in the middle of a hurricane. But Casie also made note of the stiffness in his neck and shoulders

—places where tension built up. The Dark Dimension was already taking its toll on him, psychically, even as he mocked it.

She wondered how many soundings of Power by the merely curious he was having to block each second. She was about to offer to help by opening herself up to the eldritch world, when he snapped, “Guess!” in a tone that didn’t make it a suggestion.

“Gold,” Casie said instantly, surprising herself. When she reached to take the golden square from his hand a powerful, pleasurable feeling of electric current shot from her palm up her arm and seemed to skewer her straight through the heart. Klaus clung to her fingers briefly as she took the square and Casie found she could still feel electricity pulsing from his fingertips.

The underside of her veil blew out white and sparkling as if set with diamonds. God, maybe they were diamonds, she thought. How could you tell with Klaus?

“Your wedding veil, perhaps?” Klaus murmured, lips close to her ear. The rope around Casie’s wrists had come very loose and she stroked the diaphanous fabric helplessly, feeling the tiny jewels on the white side cool to the touch of her fingers.

“How did you know you’d need all this stuff?” Casie asked, with bruising practicality. “You didn’t know everything, but you seemed to know enough.”

“Oh, I did research in bars and other places. I found a few people who’d been here and had managed to get out again—or who had gotten kicked out.” Klaus’s wild grin grew even wilder. “At night while you were asleep. At a little hidden store, I got those.” He nodded at her veil, and added, “You don’t have to wear that over your face or anything. Press it to your hair and it will cling to it.”

Casie did so, wearing the gold side out. It fell to her heels. She fingered her veil, already able to see the flirtatious possibilities in it, as well as the dismissive ones. If only she could get this damned rope off her wrists… After a moment, Klaus retreated back into the persona of the imperturbable master and said, “For all our sakes, we ought to be strict about

these things. The slum lords and nobility who run this abominable mess they call the Dark Dimension know that it’s only two days away from revolution at

any time, and if we add anything to the balance they’re going to Make a

Public Example of Us.”

“All right,” Casie said. “Here, hold my string and I’ll get on the litter.” But there wasn’t much point in the rope, not once they were both sitting in the same litter. It was carried by four men—not big men, but wiry ones, and all of the same height, which made for a smooth ride.

If Casie had been a free citizen, she would never have allowed herself to be carried by four people whom (she assumed) were slaves. In fact, she would have made a big noisy fuss over it. But that talk she’d had with herself at the docks had sunk in. She was a slave, even if Klaus hadn’t paid anyone to buy her. She didn’t have the right to make a big noisy fuss about anything. In this crimson, evil-smelling place she could imagine that her fuss

might even make problems for the litter bearers themselves—make their owner or whoever ran the litter-bearing business punish them, as if it were their fault.

Best Plan A for now: Keep Mouth Shut.

There was plenty to see anyway, now that they had passed on a bridge over bad-smelling slums and alleys full of tumbledown houses. Shops began to appear, at first heavily barred and made of unpainted stone, then more respectable buildings, and then suddenly they were winding their way through a bazaar. But even here the stamp of poverty and weariness appeared on too many faces. Casie had expected, if anything, a cold, black, antiseptic city with emotionless vampires and fire-eyed demons walking the streets. Instead, everyone she saw looked human, and they were selling things—from medicines to food and drink—that vampires didn’t need.

Well, maybe the kitsune and the demons need them, Casie reasoned, shuddering at the idea of what a demon might want to eat. On the street corners were hard-faced, scantily clad girls and boys, and tattered, haggard people holding pathetic signs: A MEMORY FOR A MEAL . “What do they mean?” Casie asked Klaus, but he didn’t answer her immediately.

“This is how the free humans of the city spend most of their time,” he said. “So remember that, before you start going on one of your crusades—” Casie wasn’t listening. She was staring at one of the holders of such a sign. The man was horribly thin, with a straggly beard and bad teeth, but worse was his look of vacant despair. Every so often he would hold out a trembling hand on which there was a small, clear ball, which he balanced on his palm, muttering, “A summer’s day when I was young. A summer’s day for a ten-geld piece.” As often as not there was no one near when he said this. Casie slipped off a lapis ring Lucien had given her and held it toward him. She didn’t want to annoy Klaus by getting out of the litter, and she had to say, “Come here, please,” while holding the ring toward the bearded man.

He heard, and came to the litter quickly enough. Casie saw something move in his beard—lice, perhaps—and she forced herself to stare at the ring as she said, “Take it. Quickly, please.”

The old man stared at the ring as if it....