The Void
Isabel gets to her knees and grips the back of the driver’s seat. It’s empty, and the carriage jerks and bumps over the fog-shrouded terrain with no apparent guidance. Ghostly figures part like water before it, barely lifting their heads to acknowledge it. Their attention is focused on the crumbling wall, and the seething mass of eyes behind it.
Where are we going? Either the carriage is compelled by a base, inanimate desire to move despite its lack of horses, or it has some destination it seeks out mindlessly like a compass needle finding north. Isabel can’t wait to find out when it will stop. Her body, and Brother Risoven’s, are still sitting on the carriage’s physical counterpart, less than an arm’s length from the horde of undead filling the streets of Mondirra. When the angry corpses pull the wheels off the carriage, which won’t be long given their numbers, both she and Risoven will be torn to bloody shreds in no time at all.
Risoven’s spirit crouches behind her, one arm over his eyes and the other hand gripping the edge of the open window below him. He prays in a breathless, whispered litany: “Watcher on the wall, master of the gate, guardian of the bridge, shepherd of all souls, deliver us, please.”
Ondir isn’t listening, wherever he might be now. Isabel reaches out and shakes Risoven by the shoulder. “We have to hurry.”
Risoven raises his head. He looks around and blinks, and a trick of the misty light and the motion of the carriage makes his eyelids look like they cover his magnified eyes and the lenses over them. “Where are we?” he asks.
“I don’t know.” In place of the shops she left behind in the physical world, there is only a vast, muddy field, split by the crumbling wall and torn up by the feet of men and horses, and over it, the sea of dead souls.
Risoven straightens his back, keeping his hand on the window. “The gate is gone,” he whispers.
He hadn’t believed her, at first, but he’d at least listened. “I’m sorry you had to see it,” Isabel says. She hasn’t gotten used to it, herself. The urge to look over her shoulder again and again, just to see if Ondir’s bridge is just out of sight, tugs at the back of her mind.
The sky is black, a starless void that stretches from one horizon to the next. Lightning cracks the inky surface with a sickly, pale green glow that sears Isabel’s vision. The air quivers as a soundless thunder rolls over the plain.
This carriage is only going to get them more lost. “We have to find the priests,” she says. “If they can help us, we might be able to quiet the other spirits. Are you ready?”
Risoven turns his huge eyes—bigger and glassier than they are in life—to her. “For what?”
“We’ll have to jump.” Isabel twists around to dangle her legs over the carriage door. With her free hand, she grabs Risoven by the wrist. The wheel beneath her hits a bump she can’t see, shaking the frame and almost dislodging her grip on the driver’s seat. If her body was present, it might have hurt. “Here we go.”
She pushes off before she can convince herself not to. For a second, she is weightless, with only her hand on Risoven’s arm to anchor her in the fog. Her feet hit the ground, and the mud ripples like water, breaking against the wall. Risoven stumbles into her a half-step behind. Undeterred, the carriage continues on, picking up speed as the fog swallows it.
Now that she’s on the ground, the wall towers above Isabel, its stones each as long as she is tall and half as wide. The eyes closest to her are two hand-spans across, glistening with reflected greenish light and rolling in hidden sockets. Something wet and dark and viscous oozes between the stones.
“What is this place?” Risoven wonders aloud.
Isabel has no answer for him. The wall wasn’t here the last time she entered the spirit world. The eyes, at least, are familiar, but that’s hardly a comfort. One focuses on her, staring through the mist of intangible bodies that presses in all around, its pupil narrowing in its purple iris and trembling like a palsied hand. Whatever intelligence lies behind it does not appreciate her being here.
The spirit of a man coalesces into view from the surrounding indistinct mass. He is tall, his eyes hidden by the reflection in his wire-rimmed lenses, and dressed in a long, plain robe.
Risoven’s breath catches. “Father Reeves,” he says. “If you’re here, you must be dead. I am sorry, my friend.”
The ghost of Father Reeves shakes his head, and the glare clears from his lenses. Behind them, his eyes are a softer, darker shade of mist. “Risoven,” he says.
“We need your help,” says Isabel. “The dead are restless. They’ve animated every body in the city.”
Reeves frowns and looks at the sky, the wall, and the other ghosts. “Where am I?”
“The nether world,” Risoven says. “You’re dead. Something must have happened to you when we were separated.”
“But where is the gate?” Reeves manages to keep his voice calm, and sounds rather like he’s accusing Isabel and Risoven of hiding it. He turns in a slow circle, his head tilted back.
“It’s gone. I tried to tell Father Pereth.” Two more eyes have turned toward Isabel, and she does not like the way they’re fixed on her. The faster she can get back to her body, the better. She doesn’t want to think of what will happen if the animated corpses get to her first. “The dead are wandering. I need your help to keep them from killing everyone in the city.”
“Why would Ondir abandon us?” Reeves asks, more to the inky sky than to Isabel. “We have been faithful. We’re fighting the council’s ruling.”
Isabel doesn’t have time for this. “Father Reeves. I need you to help us calm down the other ghosts. The entire city depends on it.”
A deep, subaudible rumble begins under her feet, pressing against the memory of her eardrums and making her immaterial skin vibrate. She holds out a hand, still flesh-colored but pale and translucent, and its outline blurs.
They’ve broken the wheels, she guesses, and an icy weight drops into her belly. It’s only a matter of time until she’s here permanently. Maybe it won’t hurt. She’s afraid to look for the connection to her body, and the world is shaking like a ship in a storm—she can’t focus on anything else.
Father Reeves’s hollow eyes go wide. If he can feel it, too, then Isabel has another good minute or two before she has to worry about her physical form. Instead of relief, all she can feel is a bone-deep nausea. He turns.
Thunder cracks with a force that turns the world to undefined mist. The wall splits open. Colorless light pours out of the gap, and with it comes a smell of acrid smoke and advanced decay. Isabel brings her hands to her face, but they do nothing to shield her eyes and nose.
Clarity returns, and the rumbling beneath her feet and through the air stops. A hand the size of a house grips the broken edge of the wall, too many fingers and too many knuckles straining against the mortar. Behind it lies a mass of eyes, staring at nothing, and a few tendrils glowing with the same colorless light as they taste the air.
“What is that?” Risoven whispers. “A demon?”
Isabel can only shake her head. Not in any tome she’s ever studied has there been anything like this. “I think we should leave,” she manages. “We’ll get to safety and try again.” The boundary between the nether world and the physical one is tenuous, and it’ll offer little protection, but it’s better than standing here on the plain waiting for the wall to come down and that thing to crush them under its enormous, spidery hands. A second one creeps up over the wall, six, seven, then eight fingers feeling at the top for weaknesses. Loose stones tumble to the ground.
“I don’t think any of us are leaving,” a familiar voice intones—Geray, his words dripping with feigned indifference. Isabel misses the precious few minutes that she had forgotten about him. He materializes at her elbow, a thin, pale figure in a sea of pale figures, distinguished mostly by the dark hole in his chest.
“Some of us are still alive,” says Isabel, “for the moment.”
“We’ll see how long that lasts.” He tries a smirk, but his mouth barely twitches. He’s afraid.
Isabel grabs Risoven by his translucent sleeve and pulls him away from the wall, into the mass of the gathered dead. An electric tingle at the back of her skull, like the feeling of being watched, is the only indication she’s still connected to her body. If only she could focus.
She looks behind her. The wall and its cavernous breach are still a stone’s throw away.
Of course. The wall is an idea, not a place, like most things in the nether world that aren’t gods or the souls of people—or the thing behind it, which defies classification. Nothing good will come of its inevitable collapse.
Come on. Focus. You can worry about it later, when the angry dead aren’t inches from tearing your body apart.
She can’t do it. She can’t tear her gaze away from the huge hands—is that another finger, growing from the end of the first?—and the tesselating mass of rolling eyes. Her hand is still clenched around Risoven’s sleeve, but she can’t feel either. There’s nothing to ground her. Even the plain beneath her feet is flimsy and intangible.
The shape of a man rises from the sea of ghosts. He’s dressed in plate armor, like a knight from an old story, and he carries a standard mounted on a spiked pole, the hem ragged and stained with mud and blood. He’s taller than the spirits surrounding him, and his legs grow longer as he walks, until the plume of his helmet reaches the top of the wall.
The void of eyes and its creeping hands are still larger.
A sudden tug tears Risoven’s sleeve out of Isabel’s hand. He has dropped to his knees, his hands clasped together and his head bowed. “Galaser,” is all he says.
The god of war and righteous struggle, for whom the most illustrious mercenary company on the continent had once been named, plants his standard in the breach. He spreads his plated arms and bellows a wordless challenge.
The thing beyond the wall makes no sound. Two of its hands climb down from the stones, one finger at a time like slow, headless spiders. Despite all its eyes, its hands move blindly, groping until they find the edges of Galaser’s armor and wrapping around his legs.
Isabel gets on the ground beside Risoven. She still feels like she’s floating in nothingness, and try as she might, she can’t lower her eyes out of respect or fear. There’s no need to blink, either, and that only makes it worse.
The god of war stands as still as his carved representation in the Temple District as the dozen or more fingers hold him in place. Glowing tendrils emerge from between the rolling eyes and plunge into the joints at his elbows and neck, then his shoulders and knees, until he is smothered in a field of colorless grass, waving in an imperceptible wind.
Then he’s gone, and in his place is a stack of crumbling stones—a patch in the wall. The breach still reaches a third of the way down from the upper edge, but the spidery hands are hidden from view, and only the eyes wedged into the chinks in the mortar look out onto the plain.
Isabel looks out to where the wall stretches out into the distance, disappearing into mist, and she has an idea of what might have happened to Ondir.
Father Reeves, his ghostly cassock trailing mist, approaches the wall. He holds out a hand and vanishes.
One more stone appears inside the breach.
Isabel gets to her feet. She knows what she has to do.
Forward to Part Three, Chapter One
And with that, Part Two is complete. Part Three will start without delay (next week for Patreon subscribers, or the week after for blog readers). If you’ve stuck it out this far, or if you’re just dropping in, thanks for reading!
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