Tosho is Dead

by Opal Edgar

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  The castle shook. We crouched so as not to topple again. A large stone fell at my foot, followed by a lot of dust. We both threw our arms up as the roaring cry of splitting rocks resounded from under our feet, from the ground, up the walls and down from the sky. I looked up, but the ceiling was way too high to see what was going on up there, even with my super vampire sight.

  “It’s all held together with power – with the Reaper gone …” Baas started.

  “It’s all going to collapse on us.” I finished.

  The mirrors cracked all round us in crystalline chimes. I grabbed a shield from the grasp of a hairy monster’s corpse before cowering on the ground with Baas. We pulled it up over us as the shards rained down. They exploded on impact in billions of deadly slivers.

  “The mirror Tosho! You’ve got to—”

  The floor rumbled and cracked, and a fracture ran from the entrance towards us, growing wider by the second. More lightning flashed. Something was going on in the soul-sucking mirror. It warped and twisted and whistled like a kettle. I abandoned the shield to Baas’s grip.

  “If I die for real, please free all the souls for me,” I said.

  I crawled away from our makeshift shelter and got back on my feet, swaying like a surfer riding a tsunami. The mirror pulsed, sending a wave of pain through my skull with every flash of light it gave out.

  I ran, avoiding the debris tumbling down and the shockwaves sending me metres off course. The whistling was growing shriller and shriller and— BANG! It felt like my eardrums had exploded. Glass flew everywhere. Sulphurous gas cascaded over us, burning our skins. Baas opened his mouth wide and held onto his head.

  He was screaming. But I couldn’t hear. I touched my ears to make sure they weren’t bleeding. All sound was gone. Stone blocks tumbled down over our heads, making no noise on impact. It was surreal.

  Miraculously, the soul-sucking mirror hadn’t shredded me. I grabbed the largest sliver of glass I could find, a piece the size of my hand. Cloudy swirls inside hid the evil mouth: it breathed with difficulty, gulping air and sinking deeper into the depths of the smog every second. The smoke receded and my amber eyes gleamed in the reflection, right through the sunglasses. All that remained in the mirror was me. But even that grew static, blurry. Slowly my reflection dissolved as the glass grew dull and grainy. Before I had time to shout, it turned to black sand in my palm.

  Had the trapped souls escaped? I hadn’t seen anything, but maybe that was normal.

  I only hesitated a microsecond before adding the sand to Lil’Mon’s bag. The black and white grains mixed together in the pouch. I had no time to question my choice. I was propelled another couple of metres to the side by a tremor of the tiles. I crawled as fast as I could to Baas. He was saying something and rolling on the ground, but I didn’t get any of it. I had his eyes, so he was blind, and the explosion had affected our hearing …

  What was a vampire without super senses?

  I had no idea. I grabbed his shoulders and shoved us towards the exit before the rest of the ceiling collapsed on us.

  The floor shook as we ran. We swayed and tumbled, but got to the double door. A veil of daylight broke over us as we bounced out. Baas broke away from me as we stood near the top of a giant staircase. Windows exploded in avalanches of shards. I tried to grab him before he turned to mincemeat, but that was counting without his superhuman speed. As I leaped forth, he was already gone. I clattered forwards because of the momentum and he pulled me out of harm’s way. We pushed against the wall. When all the glass had finished clattering to the floor, I caught Baas’s sleeve ruffles and pulled us to the window. He resisted: his mouth articulating something.

  I pointed at my ears and shook my head negatively. I still couldn’t hear him. So he pointed at the staircase and pulled me towards it. It’s true, there were two ways out: the bay window and the stairs. I had no idea how far we were from the ground. I could only see blue sky and mountain tops, and was that birds in the distance?

  Looking down, I could see that the stairs only led to a pit of darkness. The windows grew scarcer with each descending floor, until none remained. I shook my head negatively. Baas made his I’ll-god-damned-eat-your-face-if you-don’t-do-what-I-say expression. But I wasn’t going to cave. I pointed at the window again. The birds were getting bigger. They were colourful, like parrots. It’s amazing how getting rid of the source of evil let in some life. I smiled. Their long beaks almost looked like giant noses, or those plague masks we saw in medieval history books – masks!

  Those weren’t birds at all! They had the grotesque long noses of the Venice carnival masks. Power thieves were on our heels. I gave up and fled after Baas.

  We sprinted to the stairs, thrown round like toy soldiers in a portable tin box. And down we went, jumping over four or five steps at a time. Soon we were back in the pitch-black. Baas was ahead, needing light as much as a blind earthworm. How the hell could he run like that without fearing what came ahead?

  We plunged deeper and deeper into the ground, and our pace slowed: not because we feared the dark, but because we were tired of all the running. Floors appeared and then rose above our heads as we kept descending towards I-had-no-idea-what. The foundations shook, but the floors above kept the rubble from breaking our heads open. The lower we got the more stable our footing was. Either we were getting used to the jittering stairs or this part of the castle wasn’t about to collapse.

  We went down at least 50 floors before we finally hit the last step. The pavement was worn smooth from more than a million footfalls. There were four archways we could choose from. One of them looked much older than the others, with white moss growing between its disjointed stones.

  Baas, face held high, sniffed the air. He mouthed something which might have been, “Nut play,” and pointed towards the old arch. Obviously, the one that looked the most dangerous and disused. He looked at me with my wide open blue eyes, useless in the dark. I liked them there better than in my own face. There, they didn’t look like my father’s. I grabbed his arm and let myself be guided by my blind friend.

  Chapter 20

  Stepping Into the Styx

  The passage sloped down. And the lower we went: the lower the ceiling became. Baas was fine, but I had to bend not to get scalped. The walls were sweating. Over the centuries, the mineral water had left deep grooves in the rock and three-dimensional maps of sediment deposit. The puddles on the floor got bigger and bigger as we progressed. Being dead was really quite liberating. I would have hesitated much longer before marching down this path if I had been alive.

  Finally, there was a glow in the distance.

  But breathing was a mistake. I gagged, expelling the putrid air with a coughing fit. No way had we reached the outside. And I was positively famished. There had better be something I could chew on wherever this tunnel was leading us. Baas gained speed as sight boosted his confidence. I couldn’t keep up. I went to grab his shirt but he snarled at me when my hand came close. He opened his mouth, but my ears were still ringing.

  I lip-read, “Yikes! What a powdered oyster! Toad apple!” Which didn’t seem quite appropriate.

  “I can’t hear a thing!” I said.

  He mouthed better this time, slowing down. The anger was gone from the words, but I’m pretty sure he said, “You stink worse than a bloated warthog. Don’t touch me.”

  I stepped backwards, a little hurt. “Well, I can’t help being a zombie! This whole thing was a fiasco. I’m no closer to being a spirit and Elise’s no closer to being saved: we don’t even know where they took her!”

  I had no idea if Baas heard me because he just plunged ahead. I kept shuffling behind, feeling my limbs go soft. The stone pavement stopped as light hit my shoe.

  This wasn’t outside.

  We had walked right into a huge natural cave. Some sort of fluorescent algae grew everywhere. I was glad for the sunglasses because the brightness stung. The cave was cut in two by
a thrashing torrent. Stalagmites broke its surface here and there. Grey foam gathered on the banks, but the general tint of the water was a worrying black with red shimmers.

  I knew it. All the adventures in dead-land ended dunked in water.

  A tree trunk rushed by and blew up on impact with one of the upside down icicle-shaped formations. The kindling escaped from the scene as if hell was after it, and, in a second, all trace of the tree was gone from my vampire sight. We might have been able to hold our breath indefinitely, but we couldn’t fight that kind of current.

  I turned to Baas, but he had already gone ahead and done his thing. His shirt was neatly folded, despite its revoltingness. His satin buckled slippers rested on top, and he was busy pulling his hose off. His bare back was one of the most horrifying things I’d ever seen. It was a giant crisscross of scars. Not a centimetre of it had been spared. His dark skin broke alternatively in pink mounts or black slashes. It was as if the scars had scars themselves. They told of years of savage beatings. They told the truth. It was so easy to forget, when you saw him in nobleman’s clothing, what his past had been. He caught me staring, and his jaw locked a little tighter.

  He pointed his chin at the river. In a sweeping gesture his clothes ended up on his head, where he held them with both hands, as if that could keep them from getting wet. He moved his toes towards the lapping waves. His foot caught the current and in a blink of an eye he was under. No dry clothes for him, after all.

  I dived in, not bothering to undress. The world exploded in sounds as the water punched my eardrums. The current was crazy strong. I rolled in the gravel at the bottom and tumbled like I was in a cyclone. Things zoomed past, hitting me painfully. The sound was deafening after the ringing silence. I opened my eyes. I had to find Baas. Grit assailed my eyes. Nothing could pierce the silty darkness of this river. I saw no further than my own shirt pocket. How was I going to get Baas back?

  I was suddenly yanked backwards. The force dislodged my right arm. I screamed, gulping putrid water in the process. The current steamrolled past me, pressing my body in all directions, but still I didn’t move away. Something round my ankle kept me from drifting further. It felt slimy, but strong, and moved up! Wait, this was no illusion, it was now just below my knee.

  I panicked and kicked blindly. The slimy grip tightened and reeled me in. I struggled, plunging my hands into the silty bottom of the river, but the groves my finger created disappeared as instantly as they were formed. They offered no resistance. I was dragged onto the bank, coughing and spluttering.

  Grey sand crunched under my hands. Black glistening roots broke its monotonous surface. All over they laced the ground. They belonged to tall willowy trees that drooped curtains of long silver leaves. Behind me, I heard the sand part under a footstep. I closed my fists tight and turned to my attacker.

  “Blasted goat poacher! Why couldn’t you just follow me?” Baas grumbled, rubbing at his wrist.

  “That was you!”

  “Well, what did you think? Who else would bother pulling your sorry smelly bones out of the Styx?”

  Sticks was a name? Not only a name, but a very, very familiar one: like something important right at the touch of my fingers. Something to do with me and …

  “In the pool where the sticks lies dormant!” I yelled out, startling Baas into dropping his shirt.

  It splashed on the rocks, scaring some oozy creatures. But not the crabs. They scurried away with it between their pincers. I jumped after them, but they were faster than expected. Baas caught it after two graceful bounds. He shook the crustaceans off with disdain.

  “The Sticks is a river?”

  “Yes, the Styx is the river that runs between worlds. She’s a multi portal that carries souls to the most horrific places of the afterworld, ending only in Hades's kingdom. And, while I really wanted to get out of the Grim Reaper’s back yard, I had no intention of letting the Styx carry us to her final destination,” Baas said.

  “Poseidon told me the last known place of Bartholomew’s sword was in the Sticks! And then it was stolen.”

  Baas frowned as he struggled into his wet shirt. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, and we’re here! It’s great! We can investigate.”

  “We’re not going where the Styx lies dormant, Tosho. That’s the end destination. Even I can’t fight certain things. Especially if you’re right, and the sword was there. If I’d known that earlier I wouldn’t have dared to jump in.” He shivered.

  “Why?”

  Baas thoughtfully finger combed his hair. It had become unruly tight curls that formed a halo round his head, nothing like the pristine hair rolls he’d had before. He yanked a few times and gave up. As he lost his pretty clothes and veneer, something more genuine was poking through. Maybe I was seeing the boy he’d been when we was alive. And I liked the person he hid with all the fierceness of a leopard.

  “The Styx is not just a river,” Baas started, “it’s a woman. And Bartholomew’s sword sucks souls. Do you get where I’m going? If it fell in the river, it got hers. I have no idea what that did to her, but we better not stick round to find out—”

  “Well that’s not very gentlemanly, running off without saving the lady in peril,” a woman cut in.

  We were both startled to our feet. In one movement we turned towards her. She stood in the rapids. The dark rushing flood was the hem of her dress, and it flowed up against her body in a skin-tight water dress. Her deep-sea-green hair curled over her shoulders, cascading low on her back. Her skin shone grey and sleek like a seal’s.

  “I carry two little lost children in my arms, tenderly welcoming them into my embrace, despite them not offering payment, and they leave without a thank you! How did your mothers raise you?”

  “Mine didn’t,” Baas said, taking a step backwards. “I’m glad to see you’re still amongst us and that removing your soul didn’t send you on the reincarnation cycle.”

  “Are you?” she said, tapping her chin lightly with a long finger. “What about you, Merlin? After our nice chat, barely two decades ago, you would abandon me to my fate now that you don’t need me?”

  I stared, open mouthed. What was it with people in this world knowing who my soul was? In fact, why was I only meeting people who met Merlin before he decided to wear my skin? It was as if I was chasing him. Worse, it felt like I was always three steps behind. What had he been doing before he decided to be me? And did that have to do with why the power thieves wanted to eat us?

  The Styx got closer to the shore, her penetrating gaze boring into my skull. I pushed my sunglasses higher on my nose, glad to still have them.

  “I’m not Merlin. I’m Tosho. Merlin’s my soul, and we’re not really talking right now, so I’m afraid I don’t know you. But, on the plus side, I’m already looking for the sword of Bartholomew to help someone. If I can help you with your soul in the same process, I’d be glad to … help,” I finished lamely.

  She stopped moving and Baas stared at me.

  “How do you propose to do that?” she asked.

  “Well, maybe you saw who took the sword? It was in the pool where you lie dormant,” I said.

  Maybe if I kept pretending to be calm, if I kept pretending I knew what was happening and that I could deal with it, everything would be all right. The Styx was now listening instead of threatening. Maybe we could even find a compromise. Maybe I would really save Elise.

  “I know where it was.” The Styx grimaced. “And yes, I saw who took it …”

  “There is only one thing that would stop you from going after that person: knowing that he was stronger than you. We are not stronger than you. If you admitted defeat before fighting, what can we hope for?” Baas asked.

  “Stupid child. The sword took my soul. How do you think I’m still dead without it?”

  A wave of foul smelling water sloshed out of the river bed and splashed us angrily. Baas remained impassive, but his brain must have been running for an answer that wouldn’t get us drowned. T
he dark rivulets slithered back to their bed. The red shimmers flashing past looked like screaming faces … it hit me.

  “You carry souls between worlds,” I said, repeating what Baas had told me. “That’s how you didn’t disappear. You borrow them as they pass through you. That means you can’t leave the river bank and this shape because, if you do, you won’t have access to a soul anymore. Without a soul you get reborn.”

  “Are you sure you’re not Merlin?” She squinted.

  I turned to Baas. “Merlin is the only soul I have. Maybe it’s a good thing we couldn’t get him in the mirror. I couldn’t have helped anyone if I’d disappeared. I won’t get reincarnated, only Merlin will.”

  Baas looked at me straight on. “I’m sorry. I was willing to take that chance. My only defence is that I really believe you are independent from Merlin. You don’t need him to be you. Merlin isn’t a soul: he’s a spirit. You’re something that’s never been seen before. I really think without him you’ll immediately become a spirit. You’re resilient and magnanimous, and you seem at peace with the world.”

  I couldn’t believe the praise he was giving me. It felt so out of character. Sure, he was also admitting that he couldn’t have cared less if I’d disappeared, but he was giving me a REALLY big compliment.

  One I didn’t even deserve.

  Me: at peace? How could I be, when everything was unfair round me? Wasn’t being at peace like accepting what was going on? I couldn't accept people like power thieves coming along and destroying everything, hurting people and literally feeding off them. I would never forgive them for what they’d done to Elise’s world, and, if they hurt her, I couldn’t even say what I might do to them.

  The Styx looked from Baas to me, slowly, appraisingly. “An eternity without a soul isn’t worth it, even if you keep walking round you’ll be barely better than a golem,” she said. “Whatever chimera you are, you don’t want to strip yourself of Merlin, however faulty he might be. If you will help me get my soul back, I will owe a debt to you. How about free passage to any world you want: no tests, no appraisals and no questions asked.”