Page 196 of Brimstone

“Want?Hah!” Laughter boiled up the back of my throat. I clamped my lips shut and caught it before it could burst out of my mouth and make me look crazy.Feelingcrazy was enough, thank you very much. “It’s very simple, Danya. You’ll probably even enjoy it. I want you to punch me in the face as hard as you can.”

Danya’s eyes widened. “What?”

“I need you to knock me out.”

She recoiled, sinking deeper into the mud. “You’re insane,” she said.

“Probably. But it’ll help save Fisher. Now, do you want to abandon him to his fate for a second time, or do you want to help him, Danya? Because there are at least three other people I can ask—”

“I’ll do it,” she rushed out. “I mean, I’ve been wanting to knock you out cold ever since I met you. I’d be a fool to turn down the opportunity, wouldn’t I?”

“That’s the spirit. You should hit me right here, under the—”

The female leaped to her feet. She swung, and I saw it coming. I did nothing to stop her. I’d asked for it anyway. What would have been the poi—

Dust motes hung in the frigid air. They caught the eerie light that prowled in through the windows but didn’t move, as if they had been frozen in place. The dining table was set for eight. In the center of the table, a copper tureen shuddered, its lid rattling. The plates were piled high with delicacies: roasted fowl, buttered vegetables, miniature pies, and trenchers full of gravy. All of it was rotten. Maggots crawled among the meat. Flies crawled over the silverware and feasted on the decay. At each place setting, crystal goblets overflowed with viscous black liquid, moving . . . gods, there was somethingmovinginside the glasses.

My surroundings drew in tight as I realized where I was. This wasn’t the huntsman’s cottage. I’d focused very hard, right before Danya’s fist had found my jaw, to make sure Iwouldn’twake up there. I was right where I needed to be—inCahlish.

The windows were all smashed out in the dining room, just as they had been the first time I’d encountered the feeders. A fire spat in the hearth, but the flames were not yellow. They weren’t even the strange green of evenlight. They were gray and black, the color of smoke and shadow, though there was nothingbrilliant or magical about it. It was just a lifeless fire, all the vibrancy drained from it and gone.

The rot covered the walls and crept along the baseboards. Black tendrils of malignant power, searching for something biological to feast upon. It had already drained the house. The paint peeled from the cracked walls. The rugs were worn to ash, the floorboards beneath brittle and dry as ancient old bones.

Even here, in my dream, Cahlish had been claimed. It was a hollow shell of what it had been just yesterday, and seeing it like this, so faded and dead, tore something at the root of my soul. The faces of the males and females in the paintings on the walls, Fisher’s ancestors all, looked down on me with consternation, as if they blamed me for the state of their home and hoped that I woulddosomething about it. But there was nothing to be done. Cahlish was gone.

“Fisher!”

My shout echoed through the infected estate. I held my breath and waited.

Waited . . .

“Kingfisher! Whereareyou?”

Only my own panicked shout came back to me.

Whereareyou?

. . .areyou?

Gods. This wasnotgood. I’d had so many questions back in the huntsman’s cottage. Pertinent questions that I should have asked, like, “Hey, how does any of this work? How did we end up here? How do we control where we go or what we do in this place?” And, most importantly, “Will you always be here ifI’mhere?” But I hadn’t asked any of those questions, because Fisher had seemed as bemused by the whole thing as me. He hadn’t had the first fucking clue why we’d ended up in that cottage, even though we were in entirely different realms. And now, hereI was, unconscious in the dreamscape version of Cahlish, and I had no idea if Fisher was here.

I’d tried to go to sleep, but my thoughts had been spinning so fast I knew there was no way I was going to fall asleep naturally. Ergo, finding Danya at the camp. Ergo the black eye I was bound to have whenever I woke up . . .

“Fisher!”

No cry came back to me. Nothing. Only the sad, desolate echo of a house that had been full of life only yesterday. Was this what it was like in reality? Was the rot choking the stonework and rooting into the foundations of the building?

It was heartbreaking to see the estate like this, under attack and dying, but I didn’t have time to lament the loss. I’d hoped Fisher would be here, so I could talk to him and find out where the hell he was in reality, but if he wasn’t here in this dreamscape, then I couldn’t afford to linger. I had another task to tend to, and I was praying I wasn’t too late.

The door fell off its hinges when I tugged it open. It crumpled to the floor, dry as a husk. The rot snaked a path across the floor, filaments of glossy black corruption rearing into the air, searching for . . .me? Was I real here? Could the rot sense me as I hurried down the hallway? Could it infect me here? It wouldn’t pay to find out.

My footfalls echoed loudly as I hurried along the hallway, passing drawing rooms, the library, and a dozen other closed doors as I made my way to the stairs. The sole of my right boot had just hit the first step when there was a prodigious groan overhead; I looked up just in time to see the crystal chandelier above fall from the cracked ceiling.

“Fuck!”

I leaped back with no time to spare, and the crystal prisms and festoons shattered against the steps. My pulse beat out an erratic tattoo as I looked at the spot on the stairs where I’djust stood, and the giant hole that now yawned open like a snarling mouth in the ceiling. The rot dripped from the ruined plasterwork,pat, pat, patting onto the ground beside me.

Gods alive, this place wasnotsafe.