Screams
Berend props himself up, his back against the dais and his head resting at the base of Isra’s altar. A smiling goddess, her arms cradling sheaves of wheat balanced on her wide hips like a pair of infants, gazes down at him beatifically. He’s always liked Isra; her green-clad nuns have gentle hands and a collection of excellent painkilling drugs, and they listen to his war stories, even pretending to be interested. The goddess herself hasn’t done much of anything, in his experience, but that’s how these things go. You pray to the gods, and maybe some people show up to do what needs to be done, and everyone gives the gods all the credit and moves on with their lives.
That is, until Berend learned that Galaser had given up his whole godly person to hold back the thing with all the eyes. He still doesn’t quite believe it. Maybe he didn’t really believe in the gods, not really. They were more like concepts than divine beings, weren’t they? Maybe someone like Isabel believed in Ondir as a person, the keeper of the gates or what have you, but most people didn’t.
Isabel would tell him that it doesn’t matter. Ondir is the gate, and also the idea of death. And so Galaser, the idea of a warrior, can stand on the idea of a fortress wall and give his life defending it. Berend might ask her for clarification, but she’s asleep, or close enough that he doesn’t want to disturb her.
He should do the same. He’s slept in much worse conditions—he’s dry, there’s a roof over his head, and for all the trouble he’s been having, there isn’t cannon fire raining down on him. Berend puts his head back and looks up at Isra’s generous figure until his aching eyes close and the noise of the crowded, improvised hospital fades.
When he opens his eyes again, Arden Geray is standing in front of him.
More accurately, this is most of Arden Geray. His face is a blur, like someone smeared their thumb through wet paint, and his arms and legs end in shattered fragments, floating there in place of his hands and feet.
Berend knows this is Arden Geray, despite the absence of his face, because of the bullet hole in his chest. The tattered remains of a starched shirt help, but Berend put that hole there. He’d recognize it anywhere.
The man who hacked Mikhail Ranseberg into pieces for some imaginary holy war steps forward on shaky legs, his ghostly form flickering like a candle in an open window. He reaches out, the jagged ends of his arms grasping blindly.
Berend sits up, ignoring the stiffness in his neck and the swathe of pinpricks across where the edge of the dais pressed into his back. He can see the ghost. That’s unusual. What’s more unusual is that he’s not the only one: two men laid out on cots prop themselves up on bandaged elbows to stare at Geray, and three attending nuns run toward the altar with gray faces and clasped hands.
Geray isn’t alone. Two more ghosts stumble, faceless and fragmented, through the rows of cots and the bodies lying in them. A dozen more, whole and dressed in helmets and coats with watch emblems on their breasts, crowd the main doors.
Isra’s temple, like any other holy site, should be warded against the dead. The room begins to shake, everything not carved out of stone trying to throw itself against the walls, weighed down by living bodies and the ghosts’ lack of a coherent will.
“Send someone to the temple of Ondir,” Berend hears one of the priestesses order.
In response, another sets down a basket of rolled bandages and runs down the narrow central aisle between rows of cots. She edges carefully around the ghosts of the watchmen and slips out behind them, the door open just long enough for Berend to see that the sky is still an unnatural red.
He commends her for acting so quickly and braving the ghosts, but no matter how fast she gets to the temple at the bottom of the hill, it’s not going to help. The priests of Ondir are keeping to themselves, and the city’s only Sentinel is asleep on the floor by Berend’s side, powerless to help even if she was awake.
They need to get to Vernay. Berend has his doubts about how much more priests of Ondir can help, while the ones he’s already met can’t do anything, but at least it’s a start. He isn’t helping anyone here, and there are nuns stepping over him to get to the altar. A match flares, and the smell of incense grows stronger.
He shakes Isabel’s shoulder. She wakes with a start, her eyes as wide and staring as the ghosts’, panic on her face. Realization comes over her slowly, and she takes a shuddering breath.
“How long was I asleep?” she asks.
Berend shrugs. It could have been a few minutes or several hours. The light through the glass depictions of Isra as midwife, farmer, and doting grandmother is still deep red, giving the scenes a sinister cast. He only knows enough about the motion of the planet to fire a long-range cannon, but he imagines that the lack of a normal sunrise and sunset bodes ill for the future.
Isabel catches sight of Geray, and whatever visual capacities he still possesses focus on her. He rushes at her, passing through Berend’s legs.
His touch is so cold that pain shoots into Berend’s hips and down to his feet. He’s touched a ghost before—he still has the wounds on his chest to prove it—but this is much worse. He bends his knees, thankful that his joints don’t seem to have frozen solid, and stands on unsteady feet.
Isabel covers her head with her arms, and Geray rushes straight through her, through the altar and the nun standing beside it. The latter’s keening scream echoes into the dome.
“What do you want?” Isabel gasps, her breath coming in puffs of cloud.
But Geray can’t answer. He can only scream, louder than the unfortunate nun, louder than church bells or the roar of the sea, so loud that the temple shakes and the candles fall, spilling hot wax on the stone floor.
Isabel gets to her feet and backs down the aisle between rows of cots, watching Geray’s shuddering, flickering form. He rushes her again, and she grits her teeth and closes her eyes, bracing for it. A cold wind sweeps down the aisle after him.
She’s leading him out. She might not be able to command him as a Sentinel would, but he follows, driven by rage and hatred—or maybe he’s still attached to her, like he was after his house exploded. Isabel hadn’t mentioned seeing him when Berend found her by the bone wall, but there had been other concerns at the time. Berend had not been as circumspect as he would have liked the last time he found out the ghost of a murderer was attached to Isabel, anyway, so he can’t blame her for forgetting to bring it up.
“I’ll catch up,” he says. If she’s going to wrangle the ghosts, then he’s responsible for the rest—food, clothing, whatever can get them out of the city and to somewhere with answers. “Don’t go too far.”
She nods. The watchmen’s ghosts tug at her hair and clothing as she walks through them out the door, and Geray hurdles after her like a cannonball, trailing smoke.
The nuns are shaken, but much like the nurses in the university hospital, they get back to work. Berend leaves the dome and follows the smell of flour and ash to the temple’s communal kitchen, where a queue has formed outside the side door, under the livid sky. It must be morning, Berend guesses. He’s been blessed with at least a few hours of sleep, as his eyes don’t ache and he isn’t looking for the nearest horizontal surface anymore. The ache in his back confirms that he sat in the same position against the dais for a good long time.
He receives a stack of unleavened bread, tied in a kerchief, and one bowl of watery vegetable soup even though he asks for a second. At his request, another nun brings him a pair of men’s overcoats—the larger will fit him just fine, but the smaller will swallow Isabel up. He must look pathetic, because the nuns don’t need any convincing. He misses his good cloak and his hat with the feather.
Well. This is better than the alternative. Berend takes his bounty and walks the long way around the church, careful not to spill the soup. It doesn’t look very nourishing, but it’s hot.
He finds Isabel on the steps outside the temple’s main doors, her knees pulled up to her chest and her head on her arms. Geray is nowhere to be seen, but Berend is sure he’ll be back, because there hasn’t been a single misfortune in the recent past that has ever had the courtesy to leave him the hell alone. The ghosts of the watch, quiet and unmoving, keep vigil in a half-circle ten steps above Isabel.
There is some small justice in the world, Berend can admit, and it is that Geray has suffered the same fate as Mikhail. Berend hopes he’s suffering. He hopes that Geray has to pay for every second that Mikhail spent in fear and pain, before and after Geray killed him. He hopes that when he eventually figures out how to fix Mikhail, he can leave Geray out, at least for a while, but that’s not likely to be something he can choose.
He also hopes that when Geray shows up again, because of course he will, he’ll be able to tell him all of this.
“Is he gone?” he asks Isabel.
She looks around, notices the watch, and shrugs. “I guess so.”
“Here.” He hands her the soup, and the smaller of the two coats—brick red, with fraying cuffs and a missing belt—and unwraps the bread to give her half.
“Don’t you want this?” She holds the bowl back out to him, and steam curls enticingly from the murky, greenish surface.
Berend shakes his head. “All yours.”
She wraps her hands around the bowl and takes a sip. Berend watches her sigh and feels a pang of envy. There will be hot food when this is done, he tells himself, and he doesn’t believe it any more than he did when he was keeping night watches in the rain as a younger man.
But there had been hot food after that, so he has no reason to doubt it now, red sky and encroaching eyes notwithstanding.
“I should go to the chapel on the blue field,” Isabel says. “Most of my things are there, and I had a horse. I don’t know what happened to her, but she might still be around.”
The bread is still warm. Berend breathes in the smell before he takes a bite. “My sword is still in Marner’s place—or at least, I hope so. I’d rather not leave town without it.”
“You still want to go to Vernay with me?” Isabel asks.
“Whether I want to or not, I’m going,” he says. “I’m sorry to say it, but it looks like I’m all you’ve got. So you’ve got me. Wherever you end up going.”
Isabel considers him, her head cocked to one side and her expression unreadable. She takes another drink of the soup.
“We’ll meet back here, then,” she says.
Berend doesn’t want to split up. Something terrible happens every time he turns around. Still, he has to admit she’s right—they don’t have time, and the blue field and the university aren’t a short walk away anymore. “All right. But if something goes wrong, come straight back. We’ll figure out a better way.”
They finish eating and put on their coats. As Isabel walks away toward the eastern gate, a red shape under the red sky, Berend has the sinking feeling that he won’t ever see her again.
“It’s coming,” one of the watchmen’s ghosts whispers, and the others take up his unsettling chorus. “It’s coming.”
I’m trying to evoke a bit of Inanna’s descent into the underworld: “The dead will rise up and eat the living, and the dead will outnumber the living.” Thanks for reading!
Space Whales Press 
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