Michael rolled.
The blade glinted red and rang a quivering crystal note on the fire-lit mist of the Grey for a moment, slicing through the fabric of magic like a razor as the unearthly Norrin snapped and howled.
The keen edge nicked through Michael’s sleeve near the shoulder. Michael gasped and clapped his other hand over the shoulder. His eyes were wide with shock.
Marsden and I both jumped for the wraith as the phantoms of panicked prisoners rushed through us with the feel of an ice storm. Norrin twisted in our grasp, slippery and lithe as an oiled snake. Looking deeper into the Grey, I saw him as a hollow frame of bright energy lines without the usual tangled core of a soul. He was difficult to hook my fingers into as his apparent surface sparked and fizzed like an overloaded electrical circuit.
I glanced at Marsden as we struggled to hold the thing, but he didn’t seem to have any better grip on it than I did. Norrin swore and stabbed at us with his knife, his face oozing into the shapes of eldritch beasts and monsters.
The eerie blade bit in like the real thing. I could feel blood running down my chest where the eldritch knife had sliced me. It really was a ghost that could kill me! Or at least enough to make whatever tweaking and shaping Wygan had in mind possible. That chilled me, but I dug in and tried to get my fingers into the weave of the wraith’s energy shape, which resisted like callused flesh.
Marsden wrapped his arms around the writhing form and squeezed. The ghost shape compressed a little and Norrin shouted, “I’ll have yer liver, y’bastard!” as he fought to escape.
“We can’t break it. You’ll have to run. Go on!” Marsden urged me. “Get to the door and get out. Take the boy!”
I let go of Norrin and turned back to haul Michael to his feet. He came along, dazed and stumble-footed as I dashed for the nearest door that looked to lead out. But the door was locked and the terrified prisoners who had escaped their cells—or never been confined at all—swarmed around it, clawing at it frantically. The heavy iron-bound portal wouldn’t yield to me, either.
I looked back over my shoulder toward Marsden.
The other Greywalker doubled over and twitched as Norrin drove a blow into his gut.
“Marsden!” I shouted, alarmed; if the ghost’s knife could draw my blood, what did it do to him? They seemed to have prior history and maybe there was a connection the wraith could use against him.
“Key,” he gasped, the sound carrying to mortal ears through the cacophony of phantom horrors.
I scowled, closing my hand in my pocket on the hard metal thing Purcell had pressed on me. But I had no chance to question as Michael grabbed my hand, forcing me to look at him.
“The key. That puzzle thing. Maybe it works here.”
My dad’s—No, my key. How many gates could it open? Was it some kind of lock pick after all? I rifled through my pockets in haste, stabbing my fingers on sharp odds and ends until the cool, bent shape of my father’s puzzle came to my grip. Casting anxious glances over my shoulder, I scrambled through the puzzle’s solution, but it didn’t click into place and glow. I tried it again, shaking, trying to breathe steadily and not give in to my own exhaustion and the fear that rose off the ghostly crowd like a stench.
I could feel the flutter of temporaclines at the door. I could have simply slipped away on one, leaving Michael and Marsden to their own devices. The boy might be safe enough without two Greywalkers nearby to warp the thin veil between the worlds into a hellish reality around him. But Marsden had brought us to the slice of horror we found ourselves in, and I wasn’t sure that my disappearance would drop Michael back into the normal. If not, he’d be helpless in the memory of the burning prison and alone with Norrin once Marsden couldn’t hold the phantasm back anymore—and he was failing fast.
I shuffled the puzzle again, shooting another anxious look back at Marsden and Norrin in time to see the other Greywalker collapse to the floor. Norrin wheeled toward us, grinning and letting the unearthly blade catch the firelight.
Michael and I both swore. I started to push the key at him and head back to Norrin, but he refused it. He rubbed at his shoulder and looked at his hand, unsmeared by blood or gore.
“It hurts but. I’m not really bleeding. I’ll get Marsden. You open the door,” he added, dashing across the floor to meet the savage monstrosity that approached like a stalking tiger.
Michael ran all the way to Marsden’s side, dragging Norrin’s attention to him as he went.
I slid the puzzle through its paces with frantic fingers once again and felt it click into shape, humming its satisfaction. I jammed the glowing prong into the lock of the ghostly doors and twisted. The latch squealed and resisted the strange key for a moment. Then it gave up and clicked open. I almost cried in relief.
I turned back, running for Michael and Marsden. The old man was halfway to his knees as Michael hauled him up. Norrin pounced on the boy and Michael stumbled, knocking Marsden back down.
“No, y’don’t, y’bloody bastard,” Marsden muttered, scrabbling something from the ground. He flicked it out and the white cane unfolded from his hand, giving off a strange blue luminescence that snapped through Norrin and wrenched the specter’s attention back to him.
Norrin roared and dove for Marsden as if goaded with a hot iron.
“C’mon, y’murderin’ pig. Lost your strength, have ya? Y’cut me and held me to the Grey for that white snake but y’couldn’t break me enough, not even then. But y’came fer me a man full-growed when I were prisoner here. Have to go after youngsters now, do ya? Y’always were an effin’ coward,” Marsden panted, hunching onto his knees and elbows. He took another swipe at the lunging monster, knocking the knife from the phantom’s hand. As it fell away, it glimmered for an instant in a tangle of energy strands.
I dove for it, snatching it from the enclosing mist before it dissolved back into ghost stuff. I felt it firm up in my hand, burning like a live wire and holding the menacing shape Norrin had made of it: a blade that cut into the energy shapes of the Grey and left pain and ragged edges in its wake. I rolled to my feet and dashed two steps toward Norrin as the prison’s butchering wraith raked clawed hands into Marsden’s tucked head.
Marsden stifled a scream as the hands passed through his face, dragging an illusion of gore and the memory of an eye with them. I plunged the knife into Norrin’s back, ripping downward along the nonexistent spine and feeling the mirage of human form rend into frayed wisps of fury and hate.
The shape that had been Norrin shrieked and whirled into a cloud of bloody smoke and the stink of slaughterhouses.
Only the roar of the phantom flames and the cries of the terrified prisoners remained. I flung away the cruel knife of Norrin’s energy and saw it unravel and settle back into the grid as glimmering strands of magic, but I could already see the edges of Norrin’s form knitting back into shape in the Grey world. We had half an hour at most to get the hell out of the House of Detention, and I had no idea how far we had to go.
Michael and I put our shoulders under Marsden’s arms and levered him up. His legs were wobbly and the white cane collapsed as he put weight on it.
“Damn,” he muttered. “Relyin’ on sprats and women. ”
“Shut up and say thank you,” I suggested as we lurched forward like a bad entry in a three-legged race.
Head hanging so we couldn’t see his face, Marsden mumbled an ungracious thanks.
Michael snorted, shaking a bit. “Let’s just get out of here. I’m really hating this place.”
We stumbled out the door, open only to us, through the crowd of trapped prisoners, and up into the memory of a courtyard filled with rushing jailers and shouting constables trying to douse the flames at one corner of the building with buckets of water. By the time we’d walked out the unguarded prison gate and around the corner, past phantom crowds and more bucket brigades, Marsden was able to support his own weight.