Revelations II
Isabel closes her eyes. As she has no physical eyelids at the moment, it doesn’t do anything. Her vision is still filled with ghosts, crowding in around her, blocking all escape routes.
But they’re not coming for her. They’re moving past her, like an unending river of death across the fields. Their incorporeal steps sink into the ground as though they’re trudging through a mire, slowly and doggedly.
“Where am I?” asks the ghost of a young woman, a tattered shawl gathered around her head and trailing misty fibers. Tied around her chest is a sling to hold a young baby, but it is empty, lying flat against her swollen breasts.
A man in foreign garb, a fine robe of brocaded silk fastened up the front from his ankles to a standing collar, pushes past Isabel. He’s muttering to himself in a language she can’t understand, but the tone of frustration and confusion is clear.
“Who are all these people?” asks another ghost, a man in a noble’s doublet and riding boots. There’s something wrong with his neck, and he turns and turns, unable to face forward. “Where is my wife?”
Another woman drops to the ground near the farthest empty garden bed and wails, her hands over her face.
Isabel has never seen so many ghosts. What was a river is now a sea, and she is adrift in it. The shapes of the house and its surrounding hills diminish and fade into invisibility.
A heavy, solid weight covers her shoulder, and she’s back in her body again. She turns, disoriented, and finds that Berend has put a hand on her.
He gives her a squeeze and lets go. “Still with us?”
Isabel nods. For now. She feels dizzy, like she’s standing at the edge of a cliff. Never in all her years of service has it been so easy to enter the netherworld. She learned painstaking, hours-long rituals, spent days training her mind to focus, and now she’s crossing over without even thinking. Even in Geray’s house, where the barrier was so thin, it wasn’t this easy.
Easy isn’t the right word. Unstable; that sounds more accurate. It is as though the fabric of the world is unraveling, and soon it will break free from its moorings like a damaged sail on a ship.
“Where’s Geray?” Berend asks. His face is grim, and the flickering lantern deepens the lines around his mouth. “What is he doing here?”
Isabel can see him. He’s standing at the end of the garden, jostled from side to side by invisible bodies, and he wears an expression that might be fear and might be barely-contained rage.
“He’s here,” she says. “He’s been following me since—”
Before she can finish the thought, she’s back in the sea of ghosts again. Berend is beside her for only a second before the wave of wandering spirits pushes them apart. The ghosts pay no mind to Isabel or each other. Their heads are bowed, or they stare blankly forward, each trapped in their own solitary suffering. Even their questions and their cries of anguish are directed only toward themselves and the gods.
Maybe the girl—Bessa Kyne—is among them. Isabel shouts her name and feels no sound come from her throat, as though she is dreaming.
“I’m looking for a young woman,” she tells the nearest ghost, an old woman bent over a walking cane and draped in many layers of shawls. “She used to work in this house.”
The ghost ignores her. “So cold,” it mutters in a dry rasp, “so cold.”
Isabel tries again. If she can concentrate—not an easy feat, with spirits pressing in all around—she can manage to make an audible sound. “Bessa!”
“She’s not here, Sentinel,” Geray calls back. He’s shoving his way through the tide, pushing the others roughly with both hands. They don’t acknowledge him or the violence to their persons, only walking relentlessly onward.
“How do you know?” asks Isabel.
He arrives at her side, his body heaving and trembling like he’s desperately out of breath. “They used Warder’s device. She’s long gone.”
“You used it on Mikhail, too. The man you left in the Shell District. I was able to call him up before—” she gestures, helplessly, at the state of things. “Before all this happened.”
Geray stares at her. If Isabel hoped for a flicker of remorse, or even recognition of what Geray did to the people he killed, it isn’t coming. “You should be more worried about all this happening.”
“I am,” Isabel says. All of a sudden, she’s so very tired. “I’m trying to solve one thing at a time.”
“Look around you, Sentinel. Where is the gate? Where is Ondir’s bridge? Why are there so many dead wandering the earth?”
Isabel looks. The sky is a field of alien stars, glittering like silver dust spilled onto black velvet. In the distance, the Belisia estate casts a shadow over the peregrine spirits below. It’s much farther away than it is in the physical world.
Lightning cracks the sky, spreading from the eastern horizon to the west, shattering the evening darkness with a blue-white blaze. Isabel waits for thunder to follow, but it does not come, and all is silent but for the muttering of the ghosts.
Night reasserts itself, covering the land and sky again. A crack remains overhead where the lightning passed: a dull white etching of it against deep indigo. The stars shudder and blink out in a cascading wave from the crack. Only most of them come back.
“What’s happening here?” Isabel asks, unsure of whom she’s addressing. She sounds like another ghost, muttering unanswerable questions.
“I’m sure you recall the scriptures,” Geray says. He’s adopted the infuriating tone he likes to use with her, one that suggests she’s a child who needs to be led to the correct answer. “The gate is gone. What does that say about the Lord of Death?”
She has no idea what he’s getting at. “‘The gate and the god are one,'” she recites, humoring him.
“That’s right. Ondir is gone, and the dead are no longer passing into his realm.”
Isabel almost laughs. One strangled bark escapes her mouth before she realizes she’s rapidly approaching hysteria and tries to compose herself. Taking deep breaths doesn’t do much without fleshly lungs.
“Open your eyes, Sentinel,” Geray says. He’s angry now, but there’s a desperation in his voice that indicates he’s very, very afraid.
She shakes her head. “That’s impossible. Gods don’t die.”
“Gods don’t die,” Geray repeats. His voice shakes, and he flickers, as though he’s lit from below by a candle. The ragged black hole in his chest expands and contracts. “Then Ondir hasn’t just abandoned you, Sentinel. He has abandoned the whole world, and all the dead that should be in his care. It is the end of days, Sentinel. The dead will outnumber the living.”
Isabel looks into his hollow eyes and says, “Stop talking.”
And she’s back in her body once more, swaying in place, the soft earth beneath her feet and the night wind tugging at her clothes. She turns to Berend, on the outside of her ritual circle, and shakes him by both shoulders.
“What?” he says. His hands reach for his weapons before the swaying weight of the lantern stops him. “What happened?”
“We need to leave,” Isabel says. “Now.”
He steps back and raises the light, his eyes darting back and forth across the grounds. “What about Bessa? Did you see her?”
“I couldn’t find her. I don’t think she’s here.”
Berend’s lantern won’t show him any ghosts, but he casts it around as if Bessa’s spirit is hiding in the dark. “No, she has to be here. There were so many of them—she’s got to be.”
“We need to get back to the city. To somewhere safe,” says Isabel. “I don’t know what’s happening, but it’s very bad, do you understand?”
Geray comes up behind her and whispers in her ear with an icy breath. “Don’t play ignorant, Sentinel.”
“This is so much more than the two of us can handle,” she says, doing her level best to pretend Geray doesn’t exist.
Determined to make that impossible, he continues: “No one is going to help you. It’s only a matter of time before you’re just like me—a wandering ghost. I hope you suffer as much in death as I have. I look forward to watching it.”
Berend looks at her, his frustration turning to concern. “What’s wrong?”
The light pools around their feet as the night presses in. At least here, the stars are unchanged, though Isabel can’t help but think the sky has grown darker. Maybe it’s the contrast from all the light in the nether world.
Before she can answer him, Berend says, “Can you see them? All the ghosts?”
“Just one,” she replies, and then he’s falling away from her as she separates from her body again. Her stomach drops and her heart catches in her throat.
An icy wind tears at Isabel and the ghosts surrounding her, stirring the mist of their forms like waves on the sea. In the past five minutes, a terrible winter has settled upon this plane. Now there is thunder, deep and booming, shaking the ground. A sparkling, shimmering snow falls from the crack in the sky.
I have to stop this from happening, or I’ll never get back to the city.
She’ll have to wait until the winds of fate return her to her corporeal form. While she’s here, she might as well try to find Bessa, , or some hint as to what might be happening behind the small stretch of the incorporeal she is able to perceive.
Arden Geray, she reminds herself, was a murderous fanatic in life, willing to commit all kinds of blasphemy and crimes against his fellow humans, all for a false idea of what the gods really wanted from him. If anything, he might be the cause of all this, she muses, but she dismisses the idea. There have been murders before, and wars, and all kinds of atrocities, ever since the world was young. Nothing a man or many men could do had ever changed the nature of the gods.
She’s not entirely convinced that Ondir is gone. Where would he go? The idea goes against the very structure of the world as she knows it. It shouldn’t be possible. But then again, neither was what she saw when she called up Mikhail.
She owes this to Berend, wherever he’s ended up. She hopes she doesn’t have to summon him back when this is over.
“Bessa Kyne,” she calls out over the mass of wanderers. “You were a servant in the Belisia estate. You were promised a life for yourself and your child, and it was stolen from you. Where are you?”
The wind howls in response, and the passing ghosts look at their feet as they move past. They may not be able to hear, immersed as they are in their own pain, or they could be ignoring her. Geray has faded into the crowd somewhere, and Isabel is content to let him sulk.
“I want to set right what happened to you, Bessa Kyne,” she tells the sea of ghosts. “I swear it by Alcos and Isra, and by Mella and Galaser, and by Ondir—”
Thunder rolls across the misty plain. The sky shivers.
A young woman in a rumpled dress turns from the stream of souls and looks Isabel in the face. She cracks just like the sky, rending from the crown of her head to her feet, and she screams.
In a split second, she is gone, and she has taken the rest of the spirits with her except for Geray and, far off in the distance, Berend.
The sky breaks into a thousand pieces like chipping paint. Behind it is a white expanse filled with blinking black eyes. They roll in their sockets, focusing on nothing, while the world trembles.
A beam of fiery red light lances across Isabel’s vision. Something as big as the whole world screeches in pain and then roars in vengeful anger.
Isabel returns to her body just in time to see a crimson star dart across the ordinary dark sky and disappear below the western horizon. She gasps for breath.
Taking a groggy, disoriented Berend by the hand, she scuffs a wide opening into her ritual circle with both feet. “We have to go. Now.”
Like I said last chapter, things are getting conceptual. Let me know in the comments if you’re still following, or if I can be more clear! I always welcome feedback.
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