Confined by this new stranger’s grasp, his wicked knife inches from the pale veins of her emaciated arms, Fenin was surprisingly calm. Her eyes closed, and she knelt without struggling, her hands stretched upward above her captor’s curled fist, as if in supplication.
“I’m not from Svilsara,” I said, a needless clarification that I nonetheless felt compelled to make. Whatever devilry Fenin’s city had concocted and inflicted upon its citizens, I wanted no part of it. “I am a warrior of the North. Unhand the girl, and I’ll let you depart from here in peace.”
His smile only stretched wider. “I might have known.”
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.”
Khalim took a breath. Cold, wet air, heavy with the scent of rain and decaying vegetation, chilled him from the inside of his chest, where his heart only shivered instead of beating, down to his feet and the tips of his fingers. He took a step back.
The beast rose up out of the underbrush, its forelimbs thick as tree trunks. Thick, black hair covered each arm and the shadowed body, wet and shiny in the scarlet glow of its eyes. A mask of bone, the larger mirror of the one on the creature still clinging to Khalim’s back, reflected an oval of burning red light. Below the mask, two rows of sharp teeth stretched out in a sinister smile.
Khalim had the distinct impression that this was a smile, not just an animal’s threat display in response to the sound of his approach. It could see him, and the sight of him amused it.
“Is this your mother?” Khalim whispered to the creature on his back, “or did you just take me here to be eaten?”
Isabel’s feet hit the ground, sending a shock from her heels into her knees and all the way to the joints of her hips. The palms of her hands burn as she removes them from the coarse linen sheet and exposes them to the air. A pair of raw patches marks each one, livid red where the skin has peeled away.
She looks back up toward the window. She could have fallen much, much farther. The improvised rope drifts in the afternoon breeze, its end brushing against the street. Berend’s face is framed in cut stone before he moves away from the window and disappears.
In between tiny, nibbling bites of the offered barley and dates, my strange companion provided something of an explanation for the circumstances in which we found ourselves. Her name was Fenin, and she was a maiden selected from birth with the dubious honor of being offered up as a meal to the great worm of the desert. To that end, she had been taken from her home and placed here, loosely tied to this rock, just that morning. For the preceding seventeen years of her life, she had been kept apart from others in a small house in the center of town, permitted to leave only with three escorts. “Svilsara is the greatest city upon the earth,” she insisted, though from her description, it only took an hour to complete her daily, supervised circuit of its inner wall. In that small house, she was provided with everything she could want: the finest of clothes and delicacies, a room full of books, and next year’s sacrifice as a companion. Why she looked as though she had been starved for a year and was dressed only in a threadbare, dust-stained robe, without even straw sandals to protect her feet from the sunburnt rock, she did not say.
Berend watches the window. He shouldn’t; he should be fortifying the doors, maybe figuring out some way to get Warder out of the direct path of danger. The nurse’s stockinged feet touch the ground, and she takes off running up the street. Isabel’s climb is slower, the soles of her boots scraping against the masonry wall and her arms unsteady. Berend checks the knots again.
The younger nurse approaches the door to the hall, one hand on the pair of shears in her pocket. She puts her ear to the door and listens.
“One of the doors is broken, but they can’t get through yet,” she says.
Her companion, a woman of about thirty with pale yellow curls escaping her cap, pushes past her and turns the latch. “Not yet. Soon, though.”
“Should we barricade the door in here?” asks the first. “What about the other patients?”
The desert was called Shunkare in the tongue of the merchants—one I did not yet know, and was unlikely to learn, traveling alone except for my horse—and it was made of dust, fine as silk and permeable as water. Save for the few days of the year when the rains came, the air burned to breathe and carried dust into the lungs, slaying the unwise and unmasked slowly and painfully while it painted the sky in streaks of violet with each rising and setting of the sun. As I set out from the oasis, I could see for miles: endless drifts of fine sand, carved by flooding and dried in place, like a frozen white sea.
“You should have predicted this, Sentinel,” Geray muses. He hovers two feet above the floor, as though to emphasize his relative safety and removal from the horde of undead at the door. “Hundreds of thousands of wandering spirits with nowhere to go, and the god of the dead absent. If they were a living mob, they’d have torches and pitchforks. I dare say you’d fare better were that the case.”
Isabel doesn’t have the will to stop herself from putting her hands over her ears. The pressure makes a dull roar that drowns out Geray and the wet, solid blows the walking dead are doing to the whitewashed wooden door. The lock is good iron, and the door itself a single, heavy oak panel, but it won’t hold forever.
West, then—as the river turned away toward the sea, and the distant peak of Mount Abora faded into memory, I pursued the setting sun through monsoon-flooded lowlands. Somewhere far to the north lay Phyreios, sleeping quietly under the watchful eye of its god, the mines empty and quiet; farther still stood the land of my birth, winter spreading over it like a cloak.
“The geography of the nether world is complicated,” Isabel explains. “It’s governed not by distance and space but by the spiritual and conceptual relationship of one place to another.”
Not one of the words in her second sentence makes any sense to Berend. It must be evident on his face, because she looks at him and continues, “My point is that there are a lot of places in the world beyond that haven’t been discovered, and no one knows what might be lurking there.”
“Like the place with the eyes,” Berend says. He still can’t shake the feeling that the next time he looks out a window, they’ll be there again, filling the sky and staring down at him with malevolent, predatory intentions. “Or was that a thing? A creature as big as the world?”
Isabel shrugs. “There isn’t much of a useful distinction. Ondir is the gate, and the gate is Ondir. He is the realm of the dead and its lord.”
There’s a reason Berend never even entertained the thought of joining the clergy as a young man. He rubs at his own eyes, hoping they don’t look as dry and crusty as they feel. His borrowed coffee is wearing off. “Right. So you’re saying that there’s a place, or a person, or a…thing that eats souls like a fire eats wood. Nobody’s heard of it before, because it just appeared out of nowhere, but that happens sometimes.” He blinks, willing himself to stay awake and coherent a little longer. “Do I have that right?”
He looks at Warder, who glances expectantly up at Isabel.
She holds up two empty hands. “It’s more complicated than that, but yes. More or less.”
Space Whales Press 