by Ben Galley
I wondered whether the dead could spit. If I couldn’t kick or shout, I might as well show my distaste in other ways. Unfortunately, saliva didn’t seem to be a ghost’s forte, despite all the mist and vapour.
‘Bastard!’ I cursed him, though it came out more as, ‘Marra!’
The painful gloves returned, hauling me into line with half a dozen other ghosts, each as naked as I. We glowed a faint blue, almost grey. I looked to my left to find none other than my oafish murderer. He wore a foul look, though not for me. For his displeased boss, most likely. I spotted the four holes in his bare sternum. Matching sheaths for the man’s metal claws.
The traders had fared better than I, though they were even more boggle-eyed and forlorn-looking than they had been in life. They looked as if they were going to pop at any moment and descend into hysteria. I didn’t blame them. One wore an ugly slash across his chest, nipple to waist. The other two had dark holes in their bellies, much like my own.
A couple I didn’t recognise stood with us, and that was our small brigade of ghosts: cowed and shivering, still trying to understand our forcible transition. There was too faint a margin separating life and death, and our minds had not yet caught up. We were still entrapped in the horror of our murders. Even then, after mist and knitted vapours had replaced our mortal fibres, we covered our nakedness with our hands.
The gargoyle came to take a closer look at me. Even I, with a stature not worth boasting about, bested him by a head.
‘To the cages,’ he ordered, and those in hoods pushed us down an adjoining corridor. The traders began to wail in their foreign tongue, but they were beaten swiftly and sharply with metal rods. I flinched away from their hands; the gloves burned me every time they touched my vapours. With each flinch, I was thwacked for resisting.
We were shown to a squat, deep cage sandwiched between the hewn rock of the tunnel and its dust floor. More cages stretched into the smoky darkness. I could see spots of blue glowing here and there.
I was the last to be shoved inwards before the doors were slammed and locked up tight. I instantly went to the thick bars, but my hands jolted from the metal as if I’d been bitten by a flame. They were clad in copper, the only material that could harm a ghost. The parts that weren’t covered in beaten copper felt soft and gelatinous to me, yet still immovable. I tried to shout again, but to no avail.
The big woman cackled at me. ‘Try all you like, shade.’
Four more ghosts hovered in the cage’s dark reaches, curled up in solitary balls. They glowed brighter than us. That must have meant they were older. A grim birthday, indeed, to be measured by how much time you’ve spent dead.
The man limped to the bars. ‘Listen up! My name is Boss Boran Temsa, and I shall be your master during this brief period before you begin your new life of servitude. This here is Miss Ani Jexebel, my most trusted aide and one of the finest sellswords in the Far Reaches. It is our pleasure to inform you that your bodies are dead. Deceased. Deprived of life. Your souls, however, have been liberated. Through the glory of the Tenets of the Bound Dead, copper coin and Nyxwater, you are now an esteemed member of the indentured. A shade. A ghost. A half-life.’
Though it had been obvious the moment the knife-blade had met my flesh, hearing it aloud drove the meaning home like a fresh stab to the gut. I strangled the bars for as long as I could, battling the pain. Temsa pressed on with his speech.
‘You should be excited. A new existence awaits you! Whatever ill-picked names your mothers gave you are no more. You no longer have to worry about possessions, or sustenance, or sleep. You have risen above such frivolous things as drinking and gambling and fucking. Leave them to the living, just like politics and religion and all the half-baked opinions you ever had on them. In fact, you can rest easy knowing that your existence is now out of your hands. That you need not bother yourself with the ideologies of freedom unless you are bequeathed it by some generous master. Because, ladies and gentlemen, you are now, for all intents and purposes, property.’
To make his point, Temsa held up a stack of seven halves of copper coins pinched between finger and thumb. I knew enough about the Arc to know they were our half-coins. What bound us to the living instead of death. A thousand-year-old perversion of the ancient tradition of paying the boatman for passage into the afterlife. Cheat the boatman. Cheat death. The Arctians had built their empire on the backs of those half-moons of copper.
I ached to yell. I tried, dead gods as my witness. I croaked and I hissed and I gasped. When that failed I threw every foul gesture I knew at the little man. Some I even made up on the spot.
The other ghosts joined me in our futile rebellion, but all the onlookers did was smile and chuckle. Temsa and his hillock of a bodyguard seemed to have seen it all before. He waved his hand dismissively. I could have burst into flame and he would have still paid me no attention.
‘Detail them,’ came the order.
Two men appeared, both in robes. One had a beard that had been braided down his chest, and he stayed mostly to the shadows. The other had a bald pate, and was brandishing a scroll and an inked reed. His skin was dark, of the deep deserts to the south. He cleared his throat before starting with the traders.
‘Right. You. Name.’
The ghost with the cut across his breast flapped his mouth wordlessly. He needn’t have bothered; the question was rhetorical.
‘We’ll call you “Amin”,’ the scribe suggested, reed already shuffling across the papyrus. Behind him, the bearded man began to scratch a name into the half-coin. Amin, the ghost, flinched with inner pain until the marks were made.
The scribe paused to look the man up and down. ‘Thirty years of age. Coincounter for ten.’
Miss Jexebel grunted. ‘Looks more like a cook to me.’
The scribe made a hurried correction. ‘Cook it is.’
And so it went, one sorry soul after the next. A name was plucked from thin air and marked on the half-coin, and thrown together with an age and a profession. When it was my turn, I mimed something threatening involving a foot and an orifice. I’m normally not so confrontational, but something about my circumstances demanded it.
The scribe barely frowned. He had no doubt seen it all.
‘Jerub,’ he dubbed me. ‘House-shade of five years.’
I doubled up as my half-coin was etched with the false name. It felt like an icicle retracing the stab marks in my chest, but it was brief. I was thankful they didn’t bother with surnames or job titles. I was on the brink of collapsing. I had felt no pain like it in my life, and I have felt more than my fair share.
Temsa sighed. ‘Get creative, man, I need to dress him up a bit. Look at that fucking neck. You know the buyers get squeamish over wounds like that. That’s why we keep it clean; aim for the chest, the stomach, or the bloody arse for all I care! Anything, so long as a smock can cover it up.’
‘Fifteen years, then. Thirty years of age.’
‘Twenty-eight. Give him some stable experience, too. Beetles and horses.’
‘Done, Boss.’
Temsa tapped his cane on the dusty stone. ‘In that case, my new shades, we bid you a good night. We’ll meet again on market day.’
With that, the group filed away into the corridor, murmuring about a fine evening’s work. I watched until the last thread of robe had disappeared from view, then I found a stone wall at the back of the cage, far away from the copper, and thumped my head against it. It was more a soft tap, and did nothing to vent my frustration. I tried over and over, but the wall held no pain for me, only muted resistance. I was no ghost of ancient fables; one that could pass through doors and walls. I was as bound by reality as flesh was.
Buoyed perhaps by my invulnerability, I decided to whirl on my murderer instead. I found him staring at me, shoulders hunched and fists clenched. He had been watching my display, and was no doubt as frustrated at his plight as I was at mine. His glowing eyes told me he blamed me for it, as if stabbing me had somehow been my fault. I
f he could have killed me a second time, I surely would have been a puff of cobalt mist already. As it was, his rage was useless.
I shook my head at him and found a space to be alone. There, I adopted the position of the others: knees tucked into my chest and arms wrapped around shins. With my chin resting in the cold jelly that was now my kneecaps, I stared at my new skin. The vapours clung to the shape I had worn in life. Every bump and feature and edge were all there, just softened and made of blue mist. My ample gut still presided, and, somewhat pleasingly, even my cock and balls had survived the grave. However, I suspected they would be as useless in death as they had been in life.
My vapours had a slight flow to them, mimicking the old flow of blood. As I moved my hand, my form would drag and waver like a candle in a draught. My chest wounds glowed a whiter shade, just as I imagined my neck did. I probed them to find no pain, and half my finger disappearing inside my ribcage.
When I couldn’t take any more examination, I tried to sleep, but it turned out sleep was a luxury reserved for the living. So, as any man is wont to do when he finds himself in the shit-heap of dire circumstances, I fantasised about what I should have done differently.
I re-ran the chase, cursing myself for not taking that left, or that right. I thought of all the clever ways I didn’t know of turning a knife around in an attacker’s grasp. I dreamt up witty lines that I could have parted with. I even wondered at how I would have recounted the near-death tale to my mysterious employer in the Cloudpiercer. The possibilities were unreachable, but they were distracting enough to be comforting. At first.
A person who longs to change the past will only see themselves as a product of what could have been. The longing changes nothing of the present. Every time I looked up, I was still sat in a grimy cell with immovable bars; my only company eight other ghosts, my only pastime pawing at my slit throat. The present was a miserable existence, if that word even still applied. That was how I spent several hours turning the beauty of hindsight into a tool of torture.
Save us. The nonsense of my death-dream bubbled up again. I’d assigned it to either some madness intrinsic to the binding process, or profound blood loss before death.
The point was, there were no gods to be saved by. That was the truth of it. If there were, I’d be the one asking for saving, right there and then, prostrate and howling at the heavens. The gods died the same day the dead began to roam the world, and some Arctian geniuses learned to bind them. Why bother offering yourself to the mercy of deities and slinging coin at church coffers when the afterlife is graspable and stands glowing before you? No religion, no guilt. No intangible authorities holding keys to immortality. You can just grab it yourself. All you have to do is die in turmoil, and stop anybody claiming your body before you do. Indenturement. What else would happen when humans are left in charge of death?
I remained hugging my shoulders, dashed by the weight of my situation. Once again, I thought of that thin margin between life and death. When alive, it’s a precipice that’s easy to slip over. When you’re dead, it’s a sheer cliff face without a handhold in sight.
Fighting a whimper, I did what I was good at and handled my problems piece by piece. I knew that I wanted the only things left to me as a dead man: my freedom, and justice for Temsa’s sins.
The greatest city in the world might have been feral, but it was not lawless. The Arctian Empire was a society ranked by how many shades a person owned. Their precious Code dictated every area of binding and selling ghosts. If only a veneer, it was still a strict system; they simply lacked the ability or inclination to enforce it. But every system can be worked. If there was anywhere justice could be served on these soulstealers, it was here. It would take strength and patience, but I would have my deliverance, and I could return to being… something. A new me, at the very least.
A dead me.
I cushioned the sob against my glowing arm.
Chapter 4
Oases
A shade who wishes to make a claim of past illegal or wrongful indenturement may only do so if they are free or if allowed by their current master. They may submit a claim to the Chamber of the Code for review, and if such a claim is deemed trustworthy, evidence may be required and a hearing held. Should the shade’s claim be proven true, and the original procurer of the shade found guilty of illegal indenturement, they shall be stoned until death.
AMENDMENT: Current time for review is set at three years.
Article 7, S2 of The Code of Indenturement
It was a brutish trick of deserts to be as cold at night as they were hot in the day. Her knees were half frozen, her feet as numb as stumps. Though breath escaped her mouth in plumes, the tough work of dragging the corpse kept no warmth in her body. It barely distracted her from the punishing cold in her chest.
The skull-faced moon was being lazy, hiding behind the horizon. Only the starlight bathed her tonight. Instead of the undulating horizon, she kept her eyes on the constellations, mouthing their old Krass names. In all her years spent living in the Arc, she had never forgotten them.
Mamil the Wanderer.
The Hook of Utros.
The Broken Pyramid.
Sothis.
And the five Undying Stars, circling the Stillstar, guiding her north to Araxes.
That fucking city.
Once again, her mind slipped to worry. Ever since the sun had set, whispers had plagued her. Every time a breeze moaned across a dune, every time something screeched in the darkness, she heard doubt. The woman turned to check the ghost was still trailing her. Her gaze was met with a foul stare, white eyes burning in blue sockets.
Time and the Tenets were against her. By the rules of binding she had thirty-four days left to make the journey to Araxes and bind his body in the Grand Nyxwell. Only the grandest would do, of course. Driving a horse to death could get it done in thirty. Four days: that was the daemon of a leeway she danced with. Arrive late, and the ghost would be lost to the void. He would vanish to nothing, and with it the chance to bind him. She had vowed over his bleeding and gasping body that would not be the case, and by the dead gods, she would keep that promise.
The pale sand at her heels turned blue. He was growing brighter now, more so every mile. It had instilled in him a boldness. Over the past hour, she had felt him warming up to another barrage of insults, working his limbs and muttering to himself. She had always been able to read him like a scroll.
‘What cutting words do you have for me now?’ she asked, and was rewarded with a tut.
His tone sounded jovial at first, soon slipping to hoarse rage. ‘Well, Nilith, as it happens I find myself curious. You’re still tramping north but it’s been almost a day since your last drink of water. As the sun is due to rise soon enough, I was wondering when you were planning on dropping down dead!’
‘How considerate of you.’ Nilith let him wait for her answer. ‘If you must know, I’m following an old riverbed, swallowed up by the sands.’
‘And what good is that to us? You, I mean. What good is it to you? I could not give less of a fuck.’
She turned to look him in the eye, and at the gash her knife had drawn before his end. She recalled the blood bubbling over his lips as he gawped up at her like a hooked fish. He had muttered repugnant curses instead of the poignantly philosophical last words he had no doubt dreamed of. Farazar had been a fool in life and now he was a fool in death.
‘It means an oasis further ahead, idiot. Oases rise from old riverbeds, because old riverbeds mean old springs.’
‘And if there are people?’
‘Then you will have to be extremely quiet, won’t you? Otherwise you’ll find out how much copper hurts a ghost.’ Nilith tapped the hilt of her dagger, its cuprous blade catching the starlight.
‘And you?’
‘I will be even quieter.’
‘I knew I should have married somebody from the Arc, not a barbarous easterner! The sun has cooked your brain, you foul wench.’
Nil
ith laughed at that, giving his body a sharp tug. ‘If it’s cooked mine in the twenty-two years I’ve spent shackled to you, then I hate to think what it’s done to you and your ancestors over the centuries. Maybe that explains the Arc’s lust for blood. Now quiet your tongue, before I cut it out. You may be dead, but I can still hurt you.’
She pressed on, letting Farazar hover behind her and test the limits of his boundaries. For anybody who was slain in turmoil – whether by blade or accident or disease – and not bound straight away, their ghost would naturally rise from their corpse several days after their death. The strange spell of death always tied them to their bodies. Twenty feet away from his corpse in any direction, and Farazar would hit a glass wall. If she moved onwards he would be hauled after his body. It infuriated him. He would poke at scrub grass and try to kick at stones, but he had not yet gained the form or control to have much luck besides nudging them.
Nilith decided to survey their surroundings, and after clambering out of the riverbed and to the top of a particularly tall and arduous dune, she was rewarded with the glimmer of torchlight. It twinkled, star-like, in the centre of a plain between the dunes, where a small village huddled around a burst of palms and ferns. Nilith could smell water on the breeze, sweet and full of minerals. Her parched tongue rasped in her mouth, like a sponge left out in the sun.
‘People, like I said. I hope they catch you. Cut off your hands.’
Nilith drew the dagger and waggled it under the ghost’s chin. She had half a mind to leave Farazar there, but if her sneaking turned sour, she didn’t want to be running back on herself to fetch him. As a compromise, she approached the village by a curving path and left his body parallel to it, behind a wilted bush of some kind. The desert plants were all twig and thorn to her.
‘You’re going to abandon your prize? My body, here? In the dark? How dare you!’
