by Ben Galley
I suppressed my shiver well, and lowered my head as if in thought. I had sworn to follow my own path, and it had brought me my freedom. I decided to follow my curiosity and the dead gods’ wishes. After all, this was the best offer I’d received in all my time in Araxes. I deserved some peace and quiet, if only for an evening. Maybe some answers to the gods’ claims. And if it were to end in fire or some fetid hole, at least I had gained my freedom, as I had promised. I was just irked I was so soon out of choices in my first few moments of freedom.
‘Fine,’ I said, playing the guest. ‘Lead the way.’
The sisters turned without a word and led me back along the gully. I followed through the sand, enjoying the lingering warmth in the half-coin, thumbing the edges where the chisel had cut. Such a simple act, and yet it could bind a soul between worlds. Trap it.
As a locksmith, I prided myself on knowing a key when I saw one, and in my hand I knew I held the most important key in all the Reaches. At least to me.
A battlefield will draw even the most resistant eye. I gazed down at the corpses the Cult now picked through like sandy magpies. One man had been torn in two by the chop of a sword, shoulder to belt, and now he lay splayed in the sand. His head had lolled back, and his open eyes were frozen and clouded in death. I flinched as they blinked.
I held that gaze – ghost to corpse – for several strides. They followed me each step of the way. I looked away, seeking something brighter in the next slain soldier. A woman with a slit throat cracked her neck to stare at me. And another, lying in the crook of the woman’s arm, face smashed but one dangling eye still managing to turn to watch my journey.
So it continued, to my growing horror. Every corpse I passed locked me with its dead gaze until I managed to turn my back on it. Then I would find another, and another, gawping at me from beyond the grave. Despite the deep sense of unease with which it filled me, and strange as it may seem, I saw no malice in any of the stares. No hate or hunger. Only caution. I wondered which dead god hid behind which dead eye.
We mounted the ridge and were immediately bathed in the glow of Araxes. Though the sisters stared reverently for a moment, I had found one last corpse. This one had an arrow protruding from his throat, and lo and behold, a stare for me. I held this one while Liria and Yaridin waited for their guard to assemble around us.
‘Everything all right, Caltro?’ Liria’s voice dragged me from my staring match with the dead man, and I nodded avidly. Yaridin was staring at the corpse now, eyebrow raised.
‘Perfect,’ I said. ‘I’m just not one for battle.’
They hummed sympathetically and turned their backs. As they signalled for us to move off, I glanced back at the soldier. His eyes were back on me yet again, and before I looked away, he threw me a wink. Shaking my head, I turned away, and set my eyes on the city.
Even with my freedom finally clutched in my hands, it still felt as if I was strolling back into the dragon’s lair.
Chapter 13
A Darker Shade
In the City of Countless Souls, it pays to keep your friends as close as your enemies. They might be one and the same.
Common Araxes saying
I had expected from the sister’s mention of ‘travelling’ that it would be an armoured carriage and procession affair. But after they had led me through a warren of streets, completely bamboozling me with an adobe maze, they showed me an empty courtyard and a well of stairs.
My next assumption had been a private tunnel, and something on rope and rails. But the candlelit room at the bottom of the winding stairs had only one entrance, and we had just come through it.
I should have guessed earlier: the sisters had got to the Sprawls unnaturally fast. And unnatural it was.
A bath, was what it was. An ornate contraption of brass and copper, cradled in a font of black rock in the centre of the room. It glowed in the flickering light. Papyrus tubes wrapped in wire sprouted from its sides and base. Holes drilled into the floor swallowed them. In the silence, I heard the pop of bubbles.
No other furniture greeted us besides the bathtub. A few scrolls hid in one corner, and racks of spare cloaks and smocks, but that was it.
Members of the Cult – though I suppose I should have called it the Church – spread out around the room, beginning to hang up their cloaks. Some were more ragged and stained than others. I spotted a few missing limbs hiding under the rents, glowing a fresh white. If that had been me, I would still be howling, but even the most wounded amongst them was as stoic as a brick wall.
Yaridin stepped forwards to the bath. She dipped a finger in it, as if testing its temperature. Liria hung at my side, watching her sister. ‘You have no doubt wondered how we travelled to the Sprawls with such alacrity.’
I had.
‘The great god Sesh gave us many gifts, Caltro. Healing, for example, and many that others have no knowledge of – even the Nyxites, who claim to be the shepherds of the Nyx. That is our task, not theirs.’
‘And here I was thinking it was time to bathe.’
She smiled sweetly, though I suspected her thoughts were sour. I wondered how long they’d tolerate my cheek.
‘Being a part of our Church has benefits, as we will show you. Bathing is not one of them. What you see before you is a Whorl. A Nyxwhorl, to be precise.’
‘And what does it do?’
‘The Nyx is a river for souls, yes? Then it must flow, surely?’
I nodded along.
‘The Whorl makes it flow where a soul wants. Where we want, and in this case it is from Whorl to Whorl.’
It seemed like an untrustworthy kind of magic to me, but I wasn’t about to be rude. Not too rude, at least. ‘Bath portal. Got it,’ I replied. I swore I got a snigger from one of the cultists. Not infallible after all, then, I guessed. Part of me waited expectantly for a dry chuckle or daring tut inside my head, and then I remembered Pointy no longer hung from my side.
‘One question.’ I held up my half-coin, still firmly wrapped in my hand, and it caught the light of the candles spread around the room. ‘Won’t that count as me throwing my coin into the Nyx, and send me to the afterlife?’
‘It would, without the Whorl. They are complex machines that temper Sesh’s spell, Caltro. How do you think we do it?’
As Liria spoke, Yaridin disrobed, dropping her road robe to the floor. She was naked beneath, devoid of wounds besides the twin scars at her neck. And there hung her own half-coin on a silver chain. Her serpentine form glowed brightly, and though I might have been a ghost, I was still a man, and some stirrings survive the grave. Beauty is the same, dead or alive.
I watched, perhaps too closely, as she stepped gracefully into the Whorl. It was deeper than it looked, and she seemed to sink into it with a hiss. Liria pointed the way for me.
‘You will be fine, Caltro. Not many get the honour of Whorl-travel.’
‘The honour, you say,’ I replied, looking down at the rippled grey water. It was murky enough that I couldn’t see an inch past its surface. Still, I shuffled out of my smock and stood awkwardly in the candlelight. I clutched my half-coin in front of my belly and… other parts.
‘After you,’ Liria prompted me.
I dipped a toe, not trusting this bath an inch, but knowing I hadn’t any other choice. It was cold, even to a ghost, and I shivered as I stood upright on the slanted sides of the bath. I let go tentatively, but as soon as my fingertips parted with the copper, the Nyx sucked me down.
The rushing press of a river consumed me, as if I deliquesced and became water myself. It was bitingly cold, and loud. Alongside the constant roar of water and bubbles, I heard those countless voices again, calling from a cavern beyond the Nyx. They sounded angry, impatient. Trapped.
Before I could give them any serious thought, I was bursting into air again. Not gasping for breath, no, but just as desperate to be free of the cloying, black water. My hands clawed at nothing until they found the curving edges of metal under them. I grasped and hauled, an
d after much blinking, found myself in a very similar room to the one I’d just left.
At first, I thought it a trick, taking Yaridin’s warm smile for mockery. But I saw the tunnel beyond the door, leading out into a cavernous space.
‘Caltro Basalt, welcome to the Katra Rasaan. The Cathedral On Its Head. You may call it the Cathedral for ease,’ said Yaridin, and as the Nyxwater cleared from my ears I heard the roar of voices and bustle far ahead.
Another splash came from behind me and I moved out of the way to let Liria, also naked except for her coin, step from the bathtub. The Whorl.
Yaridin held a robe out for her sister, identical to the one she had just left in the Sprawls, and handed me a grey version.
‘I would have assumed red.’
‘You are not one of us, Caltro,’ said Liria with a slight chuckle. ‘Not yet.’
‘Good,’ I replied, a little harsher than I had planned. ‘Red’s not my colour.’
Yaridin distracted me by tapping the white feather embroidered on the breast. I thumbed it, somewhat irritated I couldn’t feel the detail of the silver thread. It felt good to put it on without forging it; to have it lingering in my peripheries, emblazoned where my heart should be. I realised I had been making a dent in the vapours of my palm with my half-coin, and instead wrapped it around my butchered neck. I paused for a moment, wishing I had their small scars and not this gaping knife-wound.
The sisters had an annoying knack of guessing my thoughts. Liria spoke them aloud. ‘Be proud of your wounds, brother. It’s what makes you dead.’
‘Had we not been raised in the Church of Sesh, we would likely bear a wound like yours.’
‘Or worse.’
‘Come.’
If I was still alive, I wagered my neck would be sore from looking between the sisters all day. They spoke as if they batted a ball to one another, with me standing on the sidelines trying to keep score.
Letting them lead me on, we emerged from the tunnel into a huge cavern, walls carved straight from the stone and peppered with windows, doorways and paths. The walls came to a narrow point below my feet in concatenating steps, and I saw the meaning of Katra Rasaan, the Cathedral On Its Head. I tilted my head, and saw how the roof could have been the Cathedral floor. It must have been two hundred feet above us, tiled like flagstones. It even had huge transepts, reaching off into long chambers just beneath the streets. It seemed Horix wasn’t the only one who had chosen to build down instead of up in a city full of sky-scraping buildings.
On the walkways of stone and dark wood, and below us in the crisscross of streets, rivers of shades and living ran red and shining blue. I saw ghosts of every shape and race, all proudly bearing the white feather. I saw preachers standing on corners, gathering flocks to them. I saw a market of sorts, selling wares only a cultist could need. Spare cloaks and scrolls on Sesh, no doubt. I saw food for the living members of the Cult too, hundreds compared to the thousands of dead filling the Cathedral. Most importantly, I saw I was not alone. Not just slit throats, but there were wounds in those crowds I couldn’t begin to fathom the cause of. Some used crutches or canes; others, chairs with wheels.
I decided to cut straight to the obvious. I had planned to get answers while I was here; it was time to get some. ‘How many people know this place exists? I take it the emperor and his daughter don’t?’
The sisters answered in turn, standing either side of me. ‘No. A few fortunate citizens. Most established members of the Church.’
‘Which includes several sereks, many nobles, and a few within the Chamber of the Grand Builder.’
‘And you, Caltro.’
‘Most believe we skulk in basements or old crypts. And the Church did, for a time. We have been building the Katra Rasaan for a hundred years, long before we were banished from the Core.’
I was busy gazing up at the walkways and the tumble of buildings they connected. Perhaps it was the thief in me, but I realised it all the same. ‘There are no guards,’ I said.
‘There are, but at the entrances and more sensitive areas reserved for the more enlightened.’
I pointed a finger between the pair of them. ‘Like you two?’
Yaridin and Liria traded a proud look. The latter spoke. ‘Caltro. We have been with the Church from birth until our thirtieth years, and for four hundred years since the knife.’
‘There are few as enlightened as we are. We are honoured to lead the Church.’
Liria held up a finger before I could ask anything else. Every reply spawned two more questions, and my head was already bursting. The head of the Cult, standing right before me, with the nearest soldier back in the Whorl room, donning a cloak. It was her trust in me that would have stayed my hand, had I a weapon. That, and my burning curiosity.
‘Later, Caltro. For now, come with us. We have arranged a welcome for you.’
‘A gift, if you will.’
‘For trusting us this far.’
‘How kind,’ I said, wondering what kind of gift they could possibly have for me. Surely not Pointy. Maybe it was a nice new scarf.
The sisters led me up a spiral staircase carved from a single block of limestone. We continued to climb, using the sloping paths that wound around the inside of the upturned spire. The crowds made space for us wherever we went, greeting the sisters with reverent nods, bows, and saying, ‘Welcome! Welcome!’ to me every chance they got. To the sisters, they said, ‘Sesh be praised.’ To which the apparent reply was, ‘In life and death.’ I was severely bored of all such words by the time we reached a thick, round doorway.
With the slightest of pushes, we entered a long hall with a low ceiling. There were guards here, clad in red cloth and plate mail. Four of them, standing behind the doorway and beyond the light of the bright lanterns. They were not lit by flame, but by something fluttering behind frosted glass and cages of black iron.
I had ended up in enough cells in my youth to know a prison when I saw one, and they never failed to make me itchy, apparently even when I was dead. Saraka’s Dunrong Dungeon had been a particularly lengthy stay, due to breaking an arm shortly after being thrown into it. I’d heard the rule for surviving prison was to pick the biggest thug in the cell and break his jaw on day one. What they don’t tell you is if you fail to accomplish that most sweat-inducing of tasks with the first punch, you rarely get a second. They also don’t tell you what to do if the thug has friends. Not only did I fail to break his jaw, but the three of them succeeded in breaking my arm and several ribs for trying. And my pride, for that matter. But there isn’t a cage in the Reaches that can hold me for long. I’m proud to say I let myself out of that cell two weeks later, and left them to rot.
This place beneath the streets was most certainly a place of locks and keys, albeit the cleanest prison I had ever seen. The milky light of the lanterns showed no vomit or shit or blood. Not a single twitch-nosed rat, hardly a mote of dust. The light fell on rows of thick copper bars, not clad but cast in the metal. They were set deep into the wall, floor, and ceiling. At the sound of the door and shuffling robes, I saw a few glowing hands come to clutch the bars.
‘What is this place? A prison for ghosts that haven’t said their prayers?’ I asked.
Yaridin chuckled again, though it lacked any friendliness. ‘You make your jokes, Caltro. Humour is a convenient shield for the new and the uninitiated.’
That cut through me like a hot knife. I muttered incoherently under my breath and followed behind like a hound until they brought me to a packed cell halfway down the row. Two more cultists stood by, unseen in alcoves until now. A number of ghosts were clustered in the large cell. I looked over their glowing faces, not recognising a single one. Half of them were naked. The rest were in rags. One had his belly opened like somebody grinning mid-chew. Another woman had been nearly split open shoulder to groin. Most still had their coins about their necks. Free, yet prisoners all the same. I imagined how infuriating that would be, and all too suddenly, the notion that I was about to
join them sprang into my mind like a crocodile’s gaping jaws bursting from the shallows.
I began to edge away from the door. ‘Why am I here?’
‘Fear not, Caltro. These cells are for those who would seek to hurt the Church. Intruders, thieves, soulstealers looking to take a sister’s or brother’s freedom,’ Liria explained.
‘Heretics, too, and those who do not align with our plans.’
‘If they do not conform, we pass them to the Chamber of the Code for punishment.’
‘Though with their backlog, it does take some time.’ There was no hint of snide vindictiveness in her voice, as I might have heard in Horix’s or Temsa’s. Only a factual tone.
I was surprised at their honesty, but not at the darker underbelly of the Cult. That had already been made clear to me several times. It was why I was here to ask questions, why my eyes roved in every corner, why I was so taut I almost walked on tiptoes. And yet these cells were paltry compared to what I’d expected. If anything, they looked a world better than the basements beneath the Rusty Slab.
‘Some, we deliver justice to ourselves, and therein lies your gift.’
My ears pricked. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Justice, Caltro. Brothers, if you please.’
Liria motioned a hand to the guards, and they wiggled stout, complex keys in the cell door. The ghosts inside moved back towards the walls, nervously muttering. I searched their faces again, wondering who it was amongst them that had wronged me in this life or before.
One by one, each shade was hauled out and pushed into a nearby cell. Twenty-two I counted before the flow stopped. I stared down at the huddled figure that remained. He must have been hiding behind the others, knelt down and head hung. With copper-core rope, the brothers hauled him up and dragged him to my feet.
The ghost glowed a darker blue. He had lank, greasy hair that reached to his shoulders. His nose had been broken, and one eye bulged as if he had been pummelled before he died. I stared down at his naked body, noting the deep wounds in his chest and stomach where something with prongs had impaled him. He stared back at my neck with a cold, uncaring smirk, and in that moment I knew him.
