The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2015 Edition

by Paula Guran

  They were coming for him. He walked through the caretaker’s vast mausoleum, peered out of a window and took a step back.

  Wave after wave of white-pale Zamburs, carrying torches, brandishing spades, coming through the cemetery toward him.

  Humans: he thought he saw the preacher, hat pulled low over his eyes, watching in the shadows of a nearby tombstone, but couldn’t be sure. He looked again but the figure was gone. It could have just been a member of the Mindano delegation. He realized then that he hadn’t seen the preacher since . . . since before the first murder, and he wondered with some unease what it meant.

  He scanned the crowd again, pushing the preacher from his thoughts. There. Somewhere the other side, half-hidden behind other Gardentown residents, tall, skeletal, pale: Dr. Blud.

  Two watchers with an interest—a possible motive? Something Dr. Blud had said to him came back, suddenly: he had studied the Zul-Ware’i war, had come, therefore, from the vicinity of Mindano. And he was a necroscientist . . . which meant necromancer to Gorel, which meant sorcerer, which meant . . .

  He didn’t know what it meant. But he was going to find out.

  At least, he thought, watching the Zambur converging on the tomb with their burning torches, he would if he could somehow manage to escaped . . .

  But why try? she said. He turned to her. She hovered beside him, not flesh, not quite real: the woman from his dreams. She had a face now, the dead girl’s face, but it was changing, shifting itself to fit her. Stay and let them take you, she said. Join me. I am lonely. We could . . .

  “We could start by cutting out the shit,” Gorel said, speaking aloud, and the specter beside him seemed to shimmer—in anger or amusement, he couldn’t tell. Her naked body was flushed, a translucent cover that didn’t hide the flow of blood inside, and the beating heart that wasn’t there before. She smiled when she saw his eyes. Soon I will be ready, she said. It has been so long . . .

  “You?” he said. Her body both repelled and attracted him. Outside the Zambur were advancing, but slowly. He had to find a way out. “You killed them?”

  How could I? she said. I am dead.

  “Not dead enough . . . ” Gorel muttered, and she laughed. Gorel backed away from the window. He remembered his earlier thoughts—that there must have been something underneath this place. He stared at the mute portraits on the walls, but they were just blackened frames. “How do I get out of here?” he said. But the specter was no longer there.

  Gorel cursed ghosts, women, murderers, and Zambur. Of the four, he reflected, the Zambur were the least palatable. And they were after him. He went back to the library, hoping to find an answer in books. Outside, the tomb was surrounded in a ring of flame.

  He was not a reading man by nature. He used books the way he used his guns: to track and to gain. But he remembered a saying of his friend, the old wizard Champol: “A book near the heart can save your life.” Champol would then pull out, with great ceremony, a small battered leather-bound volume, a neat hole drilled at its center, cutting almost clean through. “There’s your proof,” Champol would say, and wheeze a laugh. He hadn’t seen the old bastard in years. He wondered what he was up to.

  He scanned the bookshelves. Champol’s book, if he remembered rightly, was some sort of religious tract. For some reason it seemed important to him at that moment to recall the exact title. Champol was not much for religion—neither was Gorel, until that encounter with the goddess Shar and her black kiss . . . he shuddered and wished he had more dust. He had put off seeking the preacher again . . . and now it was too late. His thoughts wandered, shying from the fate waiting for him outside. Think about Champol’s book. Maybe it was a philosophical discourse? Something about gods, at any rate. He couldn’t think why it was important. He tried to focus on the bookshelves, but his hands shook—withdrawal and fear. He needed more dust, more belief. Somewhere in the cemetery there was a source of dust. Yet there were no itinerant gods in the cemetery—he would have known if there had. Gods did not usually keep quiet about their presence.

  Shouts from outside. They wouldn’t come in, not after he’d killed those three Zambur, but they knew he had no way out. A book near the heart can save your life . . . too bad it had been too late, he thought, to save the caretaker’s.

  He needed to find a way out. Books offered a way out. Or so he’d been told. They provided escape. Escapism. He needed an escape. It didn’t make much sense and yet it did—he could sense it in a part of him, perhaps the part that was starved of dust, that was sensitive to it—there was something down there, waiting, and the entrance was nearby.

  He began searching the shelves, pulling out books. His search grew more frantic. He could hear a calling from down below, cold and ancient, guiding him . . . he thought he heard the caretaker’s voice and shivered, but he kept on going. The shelves were growing bare, like trees in the fall. And yet—nothing.

  Not the books then. Something else. Something in the room . . . he examined the floor but could see no hidden trapdoor, no opening into the underground. There must be something! His hands shook harder and then he remembered—yes . . . he had meant to follow it up, and hadn’t had the chance. Preacher again. He kept coming up. Something about the man that wasn’t right . . . when he found the corpse of Kelini Pashtill he had gone through her pockets. There had been a small, rolled packet in there. He fished in his pockets and drew it out. Dust. He had known it was dust the moment he took it, didn’t know what had made him palm it, not showing it to the caretaker, keeping it secreted away. Had Pashtill bought from it the preacher? What did it mean? If he got out he would corner the man and beat an answer out of him, regardless of what had gone before. Right now all he could think of was the dust. He opened the packet. The white powder lay inside. He took a pinch between thumb and forefinger, brought it to his nose, sniffed it.

  An explosion. For a moment he thought it was inside his head, but no—it was outside. They had broken down the wall. His head swam. They were coming after him. The dust rushed through his bloodstream, his heart pumping hard and dust going to his brain. He took another sniff, and another. His hands steadied. The packet was empty.

  There was high-toned screeching outside and then the wall of the library disintegrated. But Gorel was no longer there.

  Death waited underground for him. He could taste the flavor of it in the back of his throat, dust and bones and rust, a coldness and a shiver and the stench of a blood that had been spilled long ago.

  There were nine stone sarcophagi in the cavern. He didn’t wish to look inside them, but could sense a strange appraisal emanating from inside. They were watching him.

  He had sought escape in books and found it in a drug. Yet was dust a drug? A god’s black kiss, an enslaving, a desire, a need: yes, all those things, a distilled faith he had not wanted and could not now refuse. It had opened the door for him—he was sure of that. For there was a door, though to call it a door would be not to understand it. A hole, an absence, but hidden—a fall. It was as if, for just one moment, he had died, and in death was freed to fall. It only lasted for a moment, and when it was over he had landed there, in the cold dark cavern underground. The dead were there, but he could not see them, only sense them—for now. But they were watching him, aware, troubled somehow—he could sense that, a great agitation in them, a restlessness, as if their sleep has been disturbed.

  He pushed them away from his mind. He needed to find a way out. A way back to the surface, back to the public face of the Garden of Statues, and there . . .

  But what? He was wanted now, wanted for two murders he did not commit, and they would be looking for him, hunting him. He could, he thought, walk away. Steal out of the cemetery and continue on his way. For what, after all, did he owe this dismal place? He had been sidetracked here, lured with the promise of knowledge, a clue to help him on his way, back to his kingdom, his birth-right, his home: back to Goliris, the greatest kingdom the World had ever seen, from which he had been banished, to which he w
ill return, with the cold vengeance nurtured, forever nurtured inside himself. He could leave—but he knew he wouldn’t, not now, for his anger was up, and someone would pay for trying to play with him, a prince of Goliris. There would be more dead in the Garden before Gorel would be finished.

  He spoke his vow out loud then, and it seemed to him that the watchers in the darkness nodded, as if in agreement. A weight seemed to come off from his shoulders and the tomb felt warmer. Preacher, he thought. He would find the preacher and squeeze the information from him, squeeze very hard. His instincts told him there was an intelligence behind the two murders, an intelligent agency, and aware—alive. The dead seldom schemed, unless amongst themselves.

  It would be underground, he thought then. Here it would hide, in the subterranean world of the cemetery. He thought then of the World, which was immense and ancient, a world above ground of sun and rain and stars. Yet how much of the World was hidden, was beneath the surface, how many lives and deaths were hidden in the flesh of the World?

  “I’ll find you,” he said, speaking out loud, and had the sense that the silent sarcophagi approved.

  He looked at his surroundings. A cavern, yes, and those nine stone coffins that seemed to exude an unnatural chill—he felt his hands grow numb with sudden cold—but there, beyond them—a door.

  Who would set a door into the wall of a tomb?

  He went over to it, ran his hands along its sides. The door was stone, and cold to the touch. There was no handle. He tried pushing it. To his surprise, it moved.

  Turning his back on the coffins made him wary. He could sense them watching him, evaluating, measuring. He wondered who or what they had been. Former caretakers? He decided he didn’t really want to know and pushed harder.

  The door gave.

  He stepped through it into warmth. It was dark and dank down there, the smell of rotting things, of fungus. As he began to shut the door behind him, pushing to close it, it seemed to him something emanated from the coffins and was reaching out for him, tendrils of intent, grasping to take hold of him like a ghostly hand. He shut the door with a curse and stood with its back to it, and heard something heavy bang against the door and fall to the ground.

  Where was he?

  It must have been an old service tunnel, he realized. The Garden must be riddled with them, miners’ tunnels that ran between the tombs. There might be an entire other city underground, with avenues that ran between the houses of the dead.

  He followed the tunnel. Somewhere down there, there might be an answer, he thought. He followed the tunnel and soon reached a place where the tunnel forked. He chose the left one and followed it. The tunnel slowly expanded around him as he walked. At intervals he passed doors. They were marked with etched symbols, dead alphabets he could not read. He searched for the script of Goliris but did not see it

  There were places for lamps set in the walls but there were no lamps in them. Moss grew on the walls and glowed faintly in the dark. It was warm and humid. From time to time he thought he heard the tiny scuttling sound of minute creatures. Apart from them his footsteps were the only sound in the dark.

  The tunnel forked again, and again he went left. On and on he walked, past untold graves, but all was silent. It occurred to him the Zambur, at least, must know of the tunnels, might come down there, looking for him. But how could they find him if he himself did not know where he was, or where he was going?

  Slowly, he became aware of a thread in the dark. Something, some external influence was pulling him in a specific direction. It was like dust, like the black kiss: a binding tied in with the power he was enslaved to.

  The corridors slowly changed, earth giving way to wood, wood to stone. He passed turnings that seemed to open when he followed them a short while, became grand caverns, dark palaces, but he knew his road led elsewhere. For a while the space around him expanded, then shrank again. He felt he was walking around in great circles, following a maze with no openings, no ways leading out. He came to a stream, a thin line of brackish water running in a crack in the ground. He bent down and touched it. It was very cold, and he drank it. When he rose it seemed to him he could see better than before.

  He followed the water and it grew, a trickle becoming an underground river whose water was black and featureless.

  The water he drank coursed through him. He felt at first restless, then lethargic. He began to see things that weren’t there. Now the water of the river was very dark, and the river wide, so wide he could no longer see the other bank. He was going, he thought, into death.

  They came to him underground. They came to him in the darkness of the subterranean city of tombs, the ghosts of those who had lived and were now in the shadow realm: the dead. They were not real. They were assemblages of memory and dream, fragments and snatches of recollections of encounters, of jumbled details. He was in a realm he knew well, that thin membrane that separates the worlds, but it was worse, worse than it had ever been, for the dead had noticed Gorel of Goliris, had turned the inward gaze of their attention to him, like metal shavings attracted, without control, to a powerful lodestone.

  He tried to ignore them; he tried to keep his focus on the whisper of water, a thing that was real down there in the dark, or might have been. He wanted to know where the dark river flowed into. He tried to keep his eyes on a distant horizon, looking for a faint light, looking for a way out. Yet there were none, and he was afraid.

  She came to him then, the goddess Shar, she who gave him the black kiss, she who enslaved him in the dark forbidding jungles of the south, in the realm of the tree-ghosts, the Urino-Dagg. She came, glistening naked black skin, yet he could see the burn marks where his cindergun had done its work. Her teeth were small and sharp, and she spat at him. He felt her close to him, unreal hands reaching to fondle and caress, and he knew she would hurt him if only she could, would drag him down into the levels below the world where the dead reside. He ignored her, and she cursed at him, though her voice did not carry. Still he kept on, and after a time she ebbed away, her essence pulled apart by the world of physicality.

  Then came a succession of ghosts, which are no more or less than those who had passed and that we carry within us; those who are bound by shame and fear, love and excitement; those who, in their passing, had impacted us and left a sliver of themselves embedded in our consciousness. The old sorcerer of Goliris he had killed in the town called Prosperity, on the sands of Meskatel; though this time Gorel got a cold satisfaction from seeing the dead man’s face, staring accusingly up at him from the darkness, for he was one of the men behind his exile, and well deserving of his fate. The merchant he had tortured—but did not kill!—on the banks of the river Tharat, frog-man with his stomach slit open and his bulging eyes haunted and sad. And others, many others, so many he had killed or caused to die, so many that at first he did not see her, and when he did he stopped, faltered, and was mute.

  Not even death, she said to him, in a voice that was not a voice but a composite from his memories, his knowing of her. Not even death can release a prince or princess of Goliris . . .

  In seeing, he remembered her. In remembering, he saw. His mother, who was proud and yet loving: a queen of Goliris—that greatest of empires—who held him in her lap and sang him to sleep, who commanded lands beyond lands and seas beyond seas. He said, “I am the last but I will return. I will avenge you.”

  Fool! his mother said. We who are dead have no need for vengeance. We are not here, have gone beyond. Only the living have need of revenge.

  “Help me,” he said. His voice was small there in the darkness, a little boy’s, and lost. “Tell me how I could return!”

  You must find your own way, she said. Do not seek advice from the dead.

  He wanted to hold her, but she was not there. He wanted to tell her . . . but she was gone, offering nothing, giving nothing—yet perhaps she had . . .

  There had been that old story. There had once been an exile from Goliris. His mother had mentioned both
prince and princess. A princess of Goliris? The old story again . . . he never learned it fully. An ancient war, a split bloodline, and an exile . . .

  His thoughts wandered. He didn’t know how long he had been traveling there, underground, below the Kur-a-len, through the realms of the dead. The air was musty, and things rustled in corners; dark creatures that live in no-light scuttled away from him, frightened. There was no draft. Perhaps there had never been. It was airless down there, it was choking him. It was a tomb, and it would be his tomb. A princess of Goliris. What a nonsensical thing. Not even death.

  Could it be?

  Determination returned. He was a prince of Goliris—perhaps the last. He would not die here, like a rodent in a tunnel. The dead, his mother said, had no need of vengeance.

  But he was not dead—and he did.

  Part Four: Tomb of the Unknown God

  He came to another opening, and the river flowed through it. He stepped in, and found himself in a wide cavern with a black lake at its center.

  He stared at the lake. Around him the whispers of the dead dispersed like dry leaves. The black waves of the lake lapped gently at the shore.

  He had come here for a reason. He had followed the pull of the goddess’ curse, the black kiss of Shar, and it had led him here. He felt he was close to an answer, at least a part of one. What had he asked the preacher? The words came back to him—What gods are there to track with in a cemetery?

  Ah, the preacher had said, and his smile grew obscene. There is your question and your answer right there, in one neat package . . .