Bone Gods

powerful than any single mage had torn a rip in the fabric of the Black here, and it was clinging to her mind, sinking in a million tiny needles that made all of her senses scream. For the Antiquarians to do such a thing, they were far worse than Lawrence had imagined. And she was here with them alone. Brilliant.
    “Breathe,” Tyrell said, taking the folded photo from his vest with a clipped motion. “If I can stand it, so can you.”
    Pete forced herself to focus on anything except her irregular heartbeat and the roar of the Black all around. The feeling wasn’t any worse than when they’d run suicide drills during her police training, back and forth in the rain and muck, until a cadet either passed out or chucked up their guts. “Hurry,” she mumbled at Tyrell, loathing the fact he’d made her beg. “Please.”
    Tyrell pressed the photo to his lips, mumbled something Pete couldn’t understand, and then dropped it to the floor.
    Blue flame crept in everywhere, over the walls, across the floor, through Tyrell’s hair, caressing his face and hands. Pete watched it raise the hairs on her arm, but she didn’t scream. It wasn’t really fire; it was power, bleeding out of the Black and into the physical realm. Jack could do the same trick.
    Tyrell panted slightly, and while the witchfire crept over every surface, Pete felt more than saw something vast and fathomless open before her. This sliver of the Black bumped against another, connected, slippery as soap bubbles. “The archives say they know nothing,” Tyrell said presently. “I’m sorry, my dear.”
    “Piss off,” Pete said. She could feel a bit of herself again, enough to know that she’d be miserable with bruises by the next day. If she even made it out here without her brain turning into cauliflower. “Try again.”
    “I’m sorry.” Tyrell crumpled the photo between his fists. “The archives have spoken. If they don’t know, it’s not there to know.”
    Pete pulled herself to her knees, and then, using the wall, stood up. She felt her knees wobbling, but she locked them and favored Tyrell with a glare. “People don’t just do this for a laugh. There’s a reason he’s dead.”
    “Humans want to ascribe reason to everything,” Tyrell said. “It’s a failing of the breed.” He made for the door. “Our bargain is void, of course. I’m sorry that I, as an Antiquarian, could not be of service.” His awful caved-in mummy’s face composed itself into an expression that actually seemed contrite, but Pete pointed a finger at him.
    “I’m desperate. You’re right. But I’m also not an idiot.” Her arm was too heavy to do anything but hang, so she let it. “You know something.”
    Tyrell tugged at the door. “That’s odd.”
    “Tell me,” Pete said. “Whatever it is. I can take it.”
    “No, Miss Caldecott,” Tyrell snapped. “You can’t. Because you’re human, and like a human you will try to rush in and change things, push and shove them into your image of what the world should be.” He gave the door a kick. “Bastard thing. Enchantments are as dodgy as a knockoff watch.”
    Pete inserted herself between Tyrell and the door, even though a fresh wave of dizziness crested and crashed over her. “Tell me,” she snarled. “I have even less patience than the average human, Tyrell.”
    Tyrell worried his hands, nails clacking. “It’s not a death spell, all right? It’s not a spell at all. The carvings are Babylonian and a sort of necromancy, yes, but not in the narrow way you think. Not simply calling or repelling the dead. This thing that was done to this flesh—it has no order and no sense. It’s as if someone who didn’t speak the language wrote a book in Chinese, yeah? Nothing can come of it.”
    “Clearly somebody thought different,” Pete said. The carvings had power. What she’d felt in the museum wasn’t simply psychic soot, deposited by the normal passage of the Black.
    “Perhaps. I don’t know. I don’t care. Antiquarians do not concern themselves in the affairs of the Black,” Tyrell said. “Far more pressing is the fact that I cannot open the door.”
    Pete stared dumbly at him for a moment. “What?” It was certainly her day for asking obvious questions.
    “The Black has been torn,” Tyrell said. “Shredded and remade, just now. It has pressurized us here, as if we were submerged deep under the ocean.” He shrugged. “Something massive is passing through, and we are feeling the