Something powerful is drawing Ward back to Devil's Island. Something he thought he had forgotten. He must evade vicious lighthouse keeper George Jaggles in order to rescue it, but Jaggles will soon be the least of his worries. Because an assassin is...
It was a stairwell after all, long and precipitous, vanishing away into darkness. Cold damp air gushed up it, smelling unpleasantly of rot. He started down the stairs – slowly, for they were damp and slippery as well as steep, and there was no handrail – and the Corpusant followed. Its light crept down the stairs like the rays of a rising sun. Snokeys fled squealing before it.
Ward wondered if his promise to release the Corpusant had been reckless. He had assumed he would know what to do once he had the dice. He thought of the ring through which he had passed to and from the Author's world; how when the boy in his dream had looked at it from the side it had seemed to disappear. According to Corvus, the Corpusant had slipped into the world through a gap that was too small to see. Perhaps the ring was like that.
He suddenly remembered the initials that had been stamped on the ring. J.D.
"What was Deville's first name?" he said.
(Jean) the Corpusant said from behind him.
J.D. Jean Deville. The man who had trapped the Corpusant in the leaden room had also made the ring.
Well, he would find out one way or another when he got his dice back.
By the time he reached the bottom of the stair he was at least as deep in the earth as the tomb of Hatto in the Catacombs – certainly deeper than the lowest tunnel of Nick's empire, and far below the level of the subways.
Was this the Arcane Vault? He had imagined it as a great, airy room lined with shelves, stacked with the artifacts and banned art of the ages, neatly arranged, catalogued perhaps, with numbers and letters to mark the aisles and shelves. Instead, he found himself standing at the end of a long, dank tunnel. The floor was littered with detritus. The Corpusant's light washed over broken picture frames, books that had rotted into bloated masses in the damp, stacks of parchment black with mould, the skeletons of broken musical instruments, and mechanisms the purpose of which Ward could only guess. A giant, greasy printing press hulked against the left-hand wall. If there had ever been anything of value here it had long since been whisked away, perhaps to the house of some bureaucrat or other. All else had been left to moulder.
He looked back at the Corpusant. It shimmered in the air for a moment, but said nothing. Then he turned and proceeded down the tunnel, keeping to the centre where it was clear of detritus, where it appeared that something had pushed through the tunnel, sweeping the contents to each side.
The tunnel was perfectly straight, and to his reckoning headed south-east, back towards the city; if it continued on in this direction it would pass under the city and come out the other side. It stood to reason that there was another entrance to the Vault. That printing press had not been brought through the leaden room and down the long stair. But it didn't matter, for he had no intention of reaching the other end of the tunnel. He had only to reach the dice. Their call was stronger than ever now. Without realising it he had broken into a half-trot, and he had to force himself to slow back to a walk. There was plenty of time.
The snokeys that had fled before the Corpusant as they descended the stair were still rushing along up ahead. They had been joined by others – hundreds of them, a squirming knot of fur and leathery tails and eyes that shone with black panic. They seethed. Ward wondered what would happen if they came to a blockage in the tunnel.
He stopped suddenly. The dice were here. Right here.
It was a section of the tunnel that seemed no different to any other. The dice lay in a pile of rubbish that rose to the height of his waist. He couldn't see them. They must have been buried in the rubbish. Strange. Perhaps the person who had brought them here had tried to hide them. That made sense, he guessed. What did it matter anyway? They were here.
He put the lanthorn down on the tunnel floor and plunged into the rubbish with both hands. He heaved a gilded frame away and it broke apart; the canvas it had once held was no more than a few rotted shreds. He kicked over an ancient adding machine that rolled desultorily into the centre of the tunnel and lay there on its back there like a dead animal. One of his searching hands plunged into something soft and rotten – he jerked his hand back with a cry of disgust – then the fingers of his other hand touched something that sent a jolt of joyful recognition up his arm to his brain.
Reaching in with both hands, his nerves singing, he pulled it free of the junk pile. And stared at it.
It was not a leather pouch. It was a human skull.
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"Hello," said the skull. "Do you have time to talk about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?"
