by Leo Hunt
Does it hurt if you die in the spirit world?
I open my mouth to say something to her — I have no idea what — and in that moment, the Widow lunges at me. I fall backward, hitting the stone shrine hard, flailing with my hands as she plunges the spear toward my head. I hit the shaft of the spear with my forearm and it goes wide, striking the dark stone next to my head.
The Widow presses a cold foot on my chest, pinning me to the ground.
I strike at her leg, but it’s like punching a statue. She could be cast of iron.
I see that she’s smiling, the first expression of joy I’ve ever seen on her face.
She raises the spear high for another blow.
I know she won’t miss again.
Why did I come here?
What did I think I would achieve?
I hear Ash screaming something.
The Widow turns her head, and at that moment, a gray furry body hits her in the chest, knocking her back. Ham’s a hunting dog, bred to bring down a stag, and he puts the full force of his weight into the blow, raking her with both huge paws. Ham’s jaws latch onto the shoulder of her spear arm, and I hear him snarling, angrier than I’ve ever heard him.
The Widow takes another step backward, shrieking and beating at Ham with her free hand, but he forces her back another step, and she falls off the side of the shrine. She topples back with a wail, Ham still snarling and struggling against her. They vanish into the Shrouded Lake in the blink of an eye, and all that’s left of them is a swirl of mist.
I get to my feet. I keep hoping Ham and the Widow will reappear from the lake, rear up out of the waters, still fighting, but I know that won’t happen. Once you fall through that curtain of fog, there’s no coming back. They’ve gone to another place, become part of whatever lies beneath the Shrouded Lake. Ham’s gone. I’ve known him since he was eight weeks old, since he was only the size of a rabbit, and I won’t see him again. He died to save me, and I don’t even have time to think about it, not while Ash is still between me and the nonpareil.
She’s waiting for me on the lakeshore, backpack left on the sand behind her. Her left arm ends in a strange swirl of fog, with flickers of white lightning playing through it. They look a little like finger bones. Ash holds the witch blade in her remaining hand, point angled down to the gray shore.
“Listen —” she begins.
“I don’t care,” I say. “Give me the nonpareil.”
Ash smiles, a bitter, hopeless smile. “You know I can’t, Luke.”
“I don’t want to kill you,” I say. To my surprise, I find that it’s true.
“Me neither,” she replies. “So get out of my way.”
“You know I can’t,” I say.
Ash gestures with the witch blade. The pale knife gleams in the strange silver light. Sigils shine in the darkness above us. “You’re defenseless, Luke,” she says. “It’s over. Let me through.”
“While I’m still standing,” I say, “it’s not over.”
This is stupid. She’s right. She’ll cut me to bits.
“I don’t want to kill you,” she says. “I really don’t.”
“Did you want to kill Elza?”
“I had no choice about that. Someone had to die to get the nonpareil.”
“Nobody had to die, Ash.”
“Somebody did. It was Ilana or Elza. Your girlfriend or my sister. I chose us over you.”
“You had no right to do that.”
“I love her,” Ash says with a bitter smile. “You love Elza. One person’s love had to destroy the other’s. There wasn’t a way for both of us to get what we wanted.”
She’s edging toward me as she talks, knife held tight in her hand. I know absolutely nothing about knife fights, except that it’s probably bad if your opponent has one and you don’t. I think I’m in a bad spot.
“I do like you,” Ash continues. “I am sorry. I kept you alive, and I didn’t have to. I think we’ve got a lot in common.”
“We’re nothing like each other. I’d never do what you did,” I say. “You can’t just use people. Me, Elza, Mark . . . we’re people, not tools for getting what you want.”
“And what was Octavius to you? What was your dog? You used them to get here, didn’t you? How did that work out for them?”
“They chose to help me,” I say.
“You’re no better than me,” Ash says. “Don’t kid yourself that you’re the hero here.”
“Everything I’ve done, I did to get Elza back. You forced me into this.”
“Luke,” she says again, gray eyes glittering, “this is stupid. I’ve got the witch blade. I’ll cut you to pieces. Just let me pass.”
“No,” I say.
“Half my inheritance,” Ash says. “I’ll give you half. I don’t want anyone else to die because of me and Ilana. Just let me pass. You’d be one of the richest people on the planet.”
“No. I don’t want money. I want Elza back.”
Ash lunges forward at me, slashing with the knife. I duck backward, almost falling over, and the blade slices the air right in front of my face.
“Last chance,” Ash says. “Next time it’s for real. Get out of my way.”
“No.”
Ash lashes out with the witch blade again, leaping at me. I stagger, lurching drunkenly to one side. The Shrouded Lake is just behind me. If I keep retreating, she’ll drive me right into it.
Ash advances, and this time I move toward her, catching her knife arm just as the blade is about to slide into my eye. She pushes against me, and we fall to the ground. Ash is above me, pressing down with all her strength, and even though she’s five foot nothing, a girl with arms like lengths of string, the blade is still moving toward my face. I can’t hold her off.
How can Ash be this strong?
I’m using both arms to stop her, and it’s still not enough.
“You’re making . . . me . . . do this. . . .” she hisses through gritted teeth.
She strikes me with her ruined left hand, white lightning flickering through the warped remains of her fingers.
It isn’t her real left hand.
What did the Shepherd say? Will and wisdom. I’m not fighting Ash’s body. I never have been. That’s what he was telling me all along. We left our bodies back in Liveside. I’m fighting her will. It’s not her muscles that give her strength on this shore; what gives her strength is Ilana. Her love.
I push back against Ash’s body, push against the slow advance of her knife. I push against her, and I think of Elza. I remember Elza the day Kirk kicked a ball at her and she whirled around to face us. I remember the first day we talked about the ghosts, in the graveyard at Saint Jude’s, gray clouds overhead and pigeons slapping their wings against wet branches. I think of how she helped me when she didn’t have to, put herself in danger for someone she barely knew. I remember Elza sprinting across a lonely field, my body pursuing her; the way she outwitted the demon. I remember seeing her holding the Book of Eight by lamplight, the first moment I realized I felt something for her. I remember coming up the path from the Devil’s Footsteps and seeing her get out of Mum’s car, still alive, and feeling joy like I haven’t felt before or since. I remember how it felt to kiss her. I remember Elza out on the moors with me and Ham in January, the day she photographed us in the snow. I think of Elza laughing, Elza frowning as she tried to finish a poem, Elza falling asleep during the epic final fight of Starkiller 3. The way she’d dismiss bands she didn’t like as “utterly inconsequential.” The meticulous way she’d spread Marmite on her toast.
I realize what the nonpareil is, the thing that’s truly without equal.
It’s her.
All of this is what Ash took from the world. Tried to take from me.
I twist Ash’s wrist, twist until I think it’s about to break, until she screams and drops the knife, the witch blade falling to the ground beside us.
I can be as strong as she is. Stronger.
Will and wisdom.
But mostly w
ill.
I throw Ash off me, and she feels insubstantial, flat, like a doll made of paper. I’m above her, one hand wrapped around her throat. She’s screaming, trying to kick me off her, grabbing at a gray stone with her good hand and beating at my face, but I can barely feel it. My right hand is groping for the hilt of the witch blade.
We’re beyond words now.
She hits me so hard that the rock splits. In Liveside the blow would’ve killed me.
I find the knife’s rough hilt.
Ash’s fingers scrabble at my eyes.
Without another thought, I plunge the witch blade into her chest.
There’s no blood, just a strange burst of light.
Her hands go limp.
I stand up. Ash doesn’t move. The knife is still buried in her spirit body. She looks different somehow, duller and less solid, like her body’s turning to fog.
She’s dead.
I kneel down and slide the knife out of her chest. There’s no resistance; it’s like I stabbed smoke. The blade doesn’t even leave a wound. Her eyes are open.
“I didn’t have a choice,” I say to what’s left of Ash. “I’m really sorry.”
I find the nonpareil inside her backpack, wrapped in cloth. It feels warm, almost weightless, like fresh-baked bread. I make my way down to the shrine, past Ash’s dissolving body, up the shallow steps and along the promontory of dark stone, until I’m standing at the very edge of the shrine, looking out over the mist-shrouded waters.
The mark carved into the stone looks the same as it did before, but now that I’m holding the nonpareil, I find I can understand it. It’s not a complicated mark. I feel like I’ve known what it meant my whole life.
The mark means: SPEAK.
“I am the necromancer Luke Manchett, son of Horatio Manchett,” I say to the Shrouded Lake. “I need your help. I have a nonpareil.”
No voice answers me.
I look again at the mark cut into the stone, and I realize that it means something different now, or rather something new. I see that the mark is a word that can mean whatever the person speaking wants it to mean.
The mark now means: WHAT DO YOU DESIRE?
“I want Elza Moss, whose spirit is held within this nonpareil, to return to life,” I tell the lake, or whatever power lives beneath it. “I want her to return to life, just as she was.”
The mark means this: IT CAN BE DONE. MAKE YOUR OFFERING.
I remove the cloth and look at the nonpareil for the second time. It’s as beautiful as I remember it being. The nonpareil is like a soap bubble, a glass bowl, a heart, a pearl. Its surface is silvered like fish scales, with the texture of sun-warmed stone. Well-being like I’ve never known flows through me as I look at the object in my hands. I can smell summer grass, taste fresh chocolate. The patterns of light and color within the nonpareil are forming pictures: faces, bodies, smiling people. I see a man with slicked-back hair, a pencil-thin mustache, and I know it’s the Vassal. He waves to me and fades. I see a man with thinning blond hair, wispy and long like a dandelion that’s spreading its seeds, a man dressed in white, wearing rimless glasses, and I know without being told that it’s Magnus Ahlgren. I see people without number, men and women and children, and I know they’re the spirits that the Fury ate and burned away within itself. Each of them could be saved, but they’re not the one I’m looking for.
And then I see her.
Elza smiles out through the glassy wall of the nonpareil, and I smile back at her.
I raise the nonpareil above my head, and in response, the mist that covers the Shrouded Lake melts away, and I see the true surface of the water.
The Shrouded Lake is black and flat as glass, mirroring the stars in the sky, a perfect reflection of the strange constellations that warp and flow overhead. And then, as I look at the lake, I realize that’s not quite right either. It’s not the lake’s waters that reflect the sky. The sky in Deadside is a reflection of the Shrouded Lake. The lake is made of night sky, stars and galaxies beyond counting, symbols and magic marks flaring in the darkness, a depth of infinite light and volume. No wonder there was no sound when Ham and the ghosts fell. They went into the void itself. It’s dizzying, incredible. I’m standing on a short spur of rock that juts out over unbelievable emptiness.
I kneel at the end of the shrine and lower the nonpareil gently into the blackness. I let it go, and it falls into the infinite depth of the Shrouded Lake, flaring brighter and whiter as it falls like a meteor, and in just a brief moment, the nonpareil’s glow is lost among the uncountable mass of stars, and I know it has become one of them.
The mark carved at my feet means this: WE HAVE RECEIVED YOUR OFFERING.
The white mist flows back across the surface of the Shrouded Lake, hiding the bottomless sky from view.
The mark means: TURN AND GO, LUKE MANCHETT. RETURN TO LIFE. YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED.
“What about Elza?” I ask the mist.
THE BELOVED WILL FOLLOW. BUT YOU MUST TRUST IN HER.
“Trust how?” I ask.
DO NOT LOOK BACK.
I stand on the edge of the shrine, looking out over the mist, hoping against hope that I’ll see something rise up out of it, Elza or Ham or someone, but nothing happens. The stars flow silently overhead.
I turn around.
Ash is gone. Her backpack is still there, but her remains have vanished. Maybe they melted away, became part of the gray mist? Maybe something carried them away? What about Ilana? The idea of the one-armed girl, set loose on her own in Asphodel, doesn’t delight me. But I don’t see what else I can do. I can’t talk to her; she won’t trust me, and I don’t know how I could help her.
I stay on the shore for a short time, hand on the hilt of the knife, waiting to see if anything will come at me out of the pine trees or over the hills, whether Ash had one last trick up her sleeve. Nothing happens. The urge to turn and look over my shoulder, back toward the lake, is an almost physical pressure, like there’s a fishing line stuck into my forehead, but I resist. I press forward, through the tree line and over the hill that the Ahlgrens crested minutes or hours ago.
I walk downhill, and before long the fog of Deadside is rolling around me, dulling the bright landscape, obscuring the stars that flow overhead. I have a sudden intuition, as the stars dim, that this is what the sky looks like above all of Deadside, but it’s only when you stand at the edge of the Shrouded Lake that you can see it.
I return through Asphodel without anyone; no Shepherd, no Ham, no Elza, not even the Riverkeeper or Ash. Everyone’s gone. It’s just me, walking through the grayness with my head down, moving toward the land of the living with nothing but a knife and a promise. Whatever spoke from beneath the lake told me Elza would be following me, and that I would be protected. On the second count at least, its promise seems to hold. I don’t see any spirits, human or otherwise. The closest I come is when I’m walking a narrow mountain path, gray fog swirling around me, and somewhere below me I hear soft voices singing.
I walk alone, in silence, leaving Ham behind me, hoping that Elza follows. I walk alone, through gray fields and gray forests, alongside silent black streams and across a crumbling bridge over a mist-filled chasm. I walk alone, without the Book of Eight to guide me, holding the image of the passing place in my mind, willing it to emerge from the fog. I walk alone, with only my thoughts for company, and I don’t look back.
I have no idea how long the journey takes, but I arrive at my destination with a suddenness that jars me. I climb a low ridge, clinging to gray tree branches for leverage, my eyes fixed on where I’m going, and I find that I’ve scrambled up into a wide patch of gray sand and an enormous white snake is rearing up before me. I raise my arms like the Shepherd did and begin to declare.
“Mighty Gatekeeper,” I begin, “I am the necromancer Luke Manchett, returned —”
There’s no time for that, the Gatekeeper replies, interrupting me.
I fall silent. The snake runs its fat pink tongue over its tee
th. Have I done something wrong? If I got this far, beat Ash, reached the lake, only to get eaten by the Gatekeeper . . .
He awaits you at the threshold, the snake continues.
If I had a heart, it would be racing.
“Who?” I ask, but I think I already know.
He of Many Faces. Speaker of Secrets. The Black Goat. He awaits.
It’s all I can do not to turn and run. I think of Elza. If I turn back now, it was for nothing. I have to be brave. I’ve met him before.
“Thank you,” I say.
I bow to the Gatekeeper, and the snake bows its white head in turn. I walk past it, feet crunching in the gray sand, heading uphill, toward the passing place. The hill seems shallower than when we descended it, without plant life, just barren earth and stones. I reach the lip of the rise, the Devil’s Footsteps, and I stop walking because there’s something in the middle of the stones and it’s worse than anything I’ve ever seen, a choking clot of darkness with something moving inside it, something stillborn but still living, moving inside a womb of oil, and its head turns and I close my eyes — I don’t want to see I don’t want —
“My boy?”
I want to scream, but I don’t.
I open my eyes.
He’s there in the middle of the stones, exactly as he was the last time I met him. An aging, handsome face, the skin honey-tanned, white hair slicked back from his forehead, laughter lines by his mouth and eyes. A neat white beard and big white teeth. Always smiling. A wolf-gray suit and a shirt that’s deep midnight-blue. Hungry eyes and arms held out like he’s expecting me to hug him. Mr. Berkley.
“Is something the matter, Luke?” he asks. His voice is deep and cheerful, commanding without seeming bossy or mean, a voice you ache to trust. “You look like you saw something terrible.”
“I did,” I say.
“Manners,” he says, but still smiling, without anger. “This can’t be a surprise, surely? You’ve had rather a busy week. Taken up your father’s mantle again, summoned one of my children, slaughtered it at dawn, freed Octavius from the darkness, promised him a new body, made him your Shepherd once more, parleyed with a Riverkeeper, journeyed to the Shrouded Lake, made an offering to those that sleep there . . . Am I missing anything?”
