Azrael Morningstar's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

The devil-shaped bike coughed and died at the edge of a black pool. Azrael Morningstar kicked the starter twice. Nothing. He climbed off and dragged the bike up onto a hump of dry root. The reaper tattoo on his back burned cold. Somewhere down under the mud, his brother's soul was sinking deeper, and he did not know which of the ten crooked paths in front of him went to the crack in the world. He had ridden a full hour past the healer's porch and lost the trail. The swamp swallowed roads. Every trunk looked like the last one. He needed a guide, and he needed it now. A barefoot boy stepped out from behind a leaning tree. Mud caked his robes to the knee. His head was shaved. His eyes were amber and did not blink. Azrael had heard about him in the roadhouse two nights back — the child the hunters followed when they wanted the big thing in the water to come up. Seven years old on the outside. Older than the swamp on the inside. "You're loud," the boy said. "The dead hear you." "I'm looking for the crack. The way down." The boy tilted his head. "You don't have a name for me to call you by." "No." "Then follow." He led Azrael on foot through reeds that closed behind them. They passed an iron post banded in red paint, planted crooked in the mud. The boy touched it as he went by. "Lords put these where the ground stops being theirs," he said. "Past this, nothing listens to them." They walked another half mile. The boy stopped at a clearing where a stone platform rose out of the muck. Its top was a cracked slab carved like a map, the lines split by a jagged break down the middle. A scrawny teenager sat on the edge of it, spellbook open on his knees, ink on his fingers, robe hem singed black. Behind him, between two split boulders, a seam of dark air shimmered and pulsed. It was taller than a man and wider than it had been an hour ago. Azrael could tell because the boy on the dais flinched every time he glanced at it. "Don't," the apprentice said, not looking up. "That one's mine to watch. It goes sideways, not down. You'll come out somewhere worse." Azrael turned to the child. "Then where's down?" The boy pointed at the broken slab. "The map showed it. The map broke." He set his small hand on the fracture. "The crack you want isn't a place anymore. It moved. The dead thing in the deep water knows where. I can call it up. It will trade." "Trade for what?" Amber eyes held him. "You already spent your name. You have one thing left worth taking." The boy looked at the bike on the ridge. "Give it the ride, and it will carry you to the mouth itself." Azrael thought of walking into the underworld on his own two feet, a stranger to his own brother, without the machine he'd meant to ride down on. He thought of another hour lost. He nodded once. The boy opened his mouth and made a sound that was not a child's. The black pool behind them bulged. Something red rose under the surface, huge and slow. The apprentice grabbed his book and ran. Azrael walked his bike down off the root and set the kickstand at the water's edge. The thing under the pool waited. He did not look back at it