City of Ghosts

by Stacia Kane

  Nothing. Nothing but a recorded message informing her that due to the passing of a Church official, the offices were closed.

  Fuck.

  “What’s troubling, Tulip?” Lex lit a cigarette, watching her drop the phone into her lap and rest her head on the back of the seat. Beside her, Terrible’s arm tensed; she realized he was twitching every time Lex called her “Tulip,” but couldn’t figure out a way to tell Lex to stop it without calling attention to it.

  “I can’t reach anyone. They’re all—they’ve all gone down to the City, and Lauren is—ow!—impersonating me!”

  “What, like got she magic make her look like you?”

  She nodded.

  “Ain’t knowing were possible, me.”

  “Yeah. I didn’t think so either. Shit! The ceremony is about to start, they’re all heading down to the City, and I don’t know what they’re doing but I have a feeling it’s—ow—bad.”

  “Give you the tell what else bad. Them dogs? They all in my tunnels, dig, all over. Ain’t can get down there.”

  “What?”

  “Aye, why I gave you the ring up on the earlier, aye? When you screaming. Right before it them dogs started down there. Fillin all up, they are.”

  Her mind whirred. Okay. So the ceremony was about to start and the Lamaru were in on it, would be in the City, ready to unleash their crazed ghost-destroying psychopomps.

  Meanwhile Baldarel must have had his own psychopomps in the tunnels. The tunnels that he knew led to the train platform—at least she assumed he did.

  So what was he doing? Was he planning to burst into the City and—what? Kill the Lamaru and take over? Use his psychopomps to deliver the ghosts from the—No, because his psychopomps couldn’t go above ground, right? Or at least they hadn’t before.

  “Tulip?”

  “Yeah, I’m—I’m thinking. Shit.” Her hand was cool on her forehead; she pressed her palm against it, hard, trying to squeeze the answers out.

  Okay. The Lamaru’s psychopomps tore up ghosts. If they were planning to set them loose in the City, the carnage would be—She couldn’t even picture it. Didn’t want to picture it.

  “Where I takin you?” Terrible swung the car around a corner; they weren’t far from her place, or from the highway.

  She wanted to go home so bad. Take a quick shower, wash off everything that had happened and come out fresh and ready. Ten minutes was all she needed.

  But it was ten minutes she really couldn’t afford, and the state of her clothes didn’t matter, not when—Oh, right.

  “Are you planning to come into the City with me? I think the La—I think there’s going to be some fighting down there.”

  Lex hesitated. Terrible didn’t. “If you’re needing, aye.”

  “Aye, me too, then.”

  “You’ll have to wear robes. Over your clothes, but you have to wear them.”

  “Thought you tell me before nobody wearing clothes down there,” Lex said.

  “The Liaisers don’t. This is for a ceremony, so it’s a little different.”

  They shrugged. The car roared up the entrance ramp to the highway. They were coming with her, they would help her. She would have smiled with relief at any other time; as it was she didn’t think she’d ever be able to smile at anything ever again. The image of the City grew in her mind, the City empty of all but her coworkers’ screams.

  It spread and got worse. A world without ghosts meant a world without the Church. A world of anarchy. It was easy to imagine humanity happily settling into freedom, celebrating its escape from the constant threat of spectral attack.

  But Chess lived in Downside, a place where the Church’s laws barely reached. She knew what happened when there was no authority. She saw factions battling for supremacy, using innocent people as cannon fodder or shields. She saw destroyed cities. Destroyed lives.

  How many times in school had she been taught about the wars that had resulted from multiple governments? About racism and xenophobia and intolerance and everything else that existed simply because it could, simply because when cultures and belief systems clashed, no one wanted to give in or see the other side?

  In the Church those things didn’t exist. If the Church ceased to exist, would they return? Or worse?

  She didn’t want to find out. Didn’t ever want to find out. So she took a deep breath, and prepared herself to break one of the Church’s most ironclad rules—one she hoped they would forgive her for, because if they didn’t she’d be executed. If she survived the fight, that was.

  “Hey—maybe you guys have some more people you could call? Have them meet us there? I think—I think we’re going to want an army of our own.”

  * * *

  It wasn’t an army, but it wasn’t bad: twenty or thirty men, covered in weapons, with dangerous eyes and heavy boots. One or two she recognized. Most she didn’t. And it didn’t matter either way.

  They stood outside the enormous iron-banded double doors of the Church, right by the pillory where Reckonings took place, waiting for her orders. For her to tell them what to do; both Lex and Terrible had stepped back. She was in charge.

  Which made sense. She was the one who knew what they were facing.

  Okay. She turned her back on them, grabbed her pillbox, and tossed another Nip into her mouth. Not the smartest thing in the world to do, probably; speed fucked with her power and her ability to sense ghosts. But then, her system was still struggling with the heavy Dream load and she needed to be as alert as possible. And as for interfering with her ability to sense ghosts? She was going to the City. Of course there would be ghosts.

  At least she hoped there still would be. The sky was lightening above them. Time was running out.

  As quickly as possible she marked them all with her black chalk, using the heaviest wards and sigils she knew. The risk of possession was high in the City, and none of these men would be able to fight it off. Hell, none of them would be able to fight a ghost at all. Maybe bringing them wasn’t such a good idea.

  No choice. She pushed up her sleeves and went to work on her tattoos, finishing the incomplete ones, an unwilling smile forming on her lips as power sizzled along her nerves and up her spine. A rush that never got old.

  “Okay.” She gestured for them to gather around her. Magic from their marks shifted in the air, adding to hers, a pleasant buzz in her brain over the speed and the still-present slow euphoria of Dream. “Guys, we’re heading into the City of Eternity, so there are some things you should know. Don’t approach any ghosts, or look at them directly. The wards I gave you should protect you, but be careful. They don’t have weapons down there—at least they usually don’t—but it’s entirely possible someone might be … someone might have given them some. Keep your hands on your own weapons at all times. If you let go, they’ll grab them, and they’ll come after you first—but they can’t harm you without a weapon. If you just ignore them, no matter how sca—no matter how uncomfortable it is, you’ll be fine. Okay?”

  General nods. She couldn’t tell if they were overconfident or too scared to speak, or maybe they just genuinely didn’t give a shit whether they lived or died.

  “Civilians aren’t supposed to enter the City. I need your word, all of you, that you won’t tell anyone about this or about what you see down there. Nobody. Got it?”

  More nods.

  She looked at them for a minute, at the mixture of excitement and unease reflected in their expressions, in the tense poses of their bodies and the way their gazes kept darting around to see if someone was going to crack.

  She wanted to say something else, to wish them all luck, or repeat her warnings, or … anything. But it was only a delaying tactic, and they couldn’t afford it.

  So she just nodded, turned around, and unlocked the double doors.

  Inside, the hall waited, huge and silent. Energy buzzed in the air, stronger than usual, a combination of her fear and the ceremony now taking place.

  “This way.” Her voice echoed
in the vast space around them, louder than usual without the low hum of voices in other rooms.

  The men trooped along behind her past the offices, through the doorway under the main staircase, and into the supply room behind the chapel.

  Here shelves were lined with everything a witch could ever need to defend against spectral attacks. Bins of herbs, rows of candles, their scent thick and spicy-sweet in the still air. Spare stangs. Iron filings, iron chips, iron blocks. Black and blue flowers for stang decoration; firedishes in every size from tiny to serving platter. Bulging sacks of graveyard dirt. And in the corner lay a stack of ceremonial robes. She slipped one over her head and handed out the rest.

  Her cardigan was still smeared with filth. She took it off and tied the arms backward around her waist so the body hung down like an apron. There might not be time to dig around in her bag once they were down there; hell, there definitely wouldn’t be. So she turned the sweater-apron into a pouch and loaded it up, choosing not just items that would fend off crazed psychopomps but anything she thought might have a use against the Lamaru or Baldarel and their particular brand of creeped-out, bloodthirsty black magic.

  “If you guys want to carry some iron too, it might be a good idea,” she said, reaching up to grab the wolfsbane bin. Its edge had just come off the shelf when Terrible’s hand joined hers, lifting the bin away and bringing it down for her.

  He didn’t look right. Well, no, he looked fine—better than fine, just seeing him gave her strength—but he looked … uncomfortable. Unease hovered around him; his eyes glinted at her from his too-pale face.

  “Hey, are you okay?”

  “Aye.”

  She opened her mouth again, ready to press him on it, but something in the way his jaw set made her close it again. Not only was there not time; even if there had been, this wasn’t the right time. Especially not in front of men who worked under him. Most especially not in front of Lex.

  So she let it go, and focused on loading the men up with as many protective items as she could grab: amulets on iron-link chains, small totems, charm bags stuffed with herbs and stones. In their identical pale-blue robes with their spiked hair and scarred faces they looked like prison inmates putting on a show.

  Silence prevailed as she led them through the chapel to the elevator and pressed the button. Her nerves were joining the game in a big way, her heart kicking in her chest, her stomach doing a tap dance beneath it. What was going on down there, in that silent place below the earth? The ceremony must have started; had the Lamaru already made their move? Had Baldarel?

  What would they find when they reached the platform? Had Baldarel’s dogs reached it yet?

  The elevator doors slid open and they climbed in. For the first time, Chess was grateful the car had been designed with rituals like the one they were about to crash in mind; it was a squeeze, and it made her a bit nervous about the weight, but they all fit. Silently. No one spoke. Her hands were freezing. She clenched them together in front of her, twisting them, flicking her fingernails the way she always did when speeding out of her skull. She couldn’t stop moving. Couldn’t stop picturing the possible carnage that awaited them, those earlier visions of an empty City and a world at war searing themselves into her brain.

  And beneath it all lay the old fear, the familiar one: of the City itself, of the silence and the spectral shapes and the dirt, of the empty-eyed ghosts sliding past her. Reminding her, always reminding her, that this was all that waited at the end: this desolation that everyone else seemed to find peaceful and comforting but that still caused her to wake up drenched in sweat a couple of nights a year.

  They came to the bottom of the elevator shaft with a small jolt, and the doors slid open.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  I was certainly scared when I got on the elevator, and even more scared when it stopped and my Liaiser led me into the antechamber where I met the spirit of my dead great-grandfather. But there was no need to be afraid, and I managed to trace back four more generations of my family with his help!

  —“My Visit with the Dead,” by Etherida Pilcher, from It’s You! magazine, March 2000

  Thick, powerful energy swirled into the elevator car, over Chess, through her, leaving her chest tight. They’d started the ceremony, they must have, and she practically leapt from the car. They had to get moving, get on the train and go. Thankfully, they didn’t have to wait for it; it returned automatically after each journey. It was too dangerous to keep it near the City; bolts could be unscrewed, parts used as weapons. No foreign objects were permitted in the City.

  She hit the switch that opened the train’s doors and gestured the men inside, her heart pounding triple-time. Speed, and her fear of the City, dislike bordering on hatred. And above it all the absolute terror of what they might find when they arrived.

  The men sat down. She didn’t. Instead she forced herself to walk into the little booth in the front and press the button that brought the train to life. Dull blue lights glowed overhead, reflected off the Plexiglas windows, gleamed dully off the iron walls and fittings. Like sitting in an iceberg, it was; the heaters whirring overhead would kick out warm air in a few seconds, but for the moment it was cold and sterile inside the car, silent save for the dull grind of the first set of doors opening to admit them to the tunnel.

  Chess leaned against the iron pole in the center. She couldn’t sit down. Couldn’t look at any of them as the floor lurched under her feet and the train carried them into the darkness. How many of them were about to die? How many of the men sitting there, close enough to touch, were living the last moments of their lives?

  Her entire body buzzed so hard that she thought it might explode if she didn’t focus on keeping it together. Her pouch full of supplies made an ungainly weight in front of her. She still stank. And she was probably about to die painfully, along with the rest of them.

  This was her fault. If she’d caught on earlier, this might not have happened. If she’d paid more attention to Lauren and her suspicion that everything wasn’t right there. If she’d sat down and thought about the clues, about Baldarel’s tie to the smuggled ghost at the execution and the fact that the death of a Church employee in good standing automatically meant the entire staff would be in the City at the same time.

  She should have been quicker. Should have been better. And if she died—if any of them died—she had only herself to blame.

  Best of all, there was a very good chance that she was going to be killed by someone who was actually pretending to be her. Which reminded her …

  Something clogged her throat when she turned around. She pushed her words out around it. “There’s going to be a—ow—a girl in there who looks just like me. So … please be careful, okay?” She forced a smile; her face felt like a rubber mask. “Don’t kill anyone with my face.”

  They nodded. A few of them smiled. Fear touched their eyes. Terrible’s brows drew together, but he didn’t speak. And she was glad. She didn’t want him to talk to her, didn’t want anyone to talk to her.

  Outside the windows everything was black. The train with its motley load of passengers hurtled through the emptiness. With every second the power outside them grew, pressing against her skin, throbbing in her head. Her grip on the pole tightened. She could do this, she’d gotten through worse than this, dealt with power more intense than this, and she could do it this time, too. She held the thought in her mind, pictured it as bright red words against the black earth outside. Focused on it: She could do this. She had to.

  Finally the train ground to a halt. The doors slid open, spilling them out onto the smaller platform. Their breath fogged in the icy air, glowed iridescent blue in the light from the lone bulb above the thick double doors.

  The locked double doors. No big deal there. It actually felt good to handle it, to know that here at least was something she knew how to do. Something easy. Whatever else was happening, whatever other fears she had, whatever insecurities and blame and self-hatred and other freaky pr
oblems plagued her—at that moment it was about work, about doing something she’d been trained to do.

  From behind her came the sound of the train’s doors slamming back into place, the rush of wind as it began its return journey, but she ignored it. The train didn’t matter. The work mattered.

  First she inserted her key into the ornate lock, turned it counterclockwise three times until it clicked. Energy puffed out of the lock and licked her fingers, testing her. She waited, totally focused. Any second it would recognize her power, that elusive whatever-it-was that identified her as witch, and the power of the oaths and spells that made her Church. This was why the Lamaru needed a ceremony, or at least part of the reason; they could get onto the platform, but unless someone opened the door from the inside, they couldn’t get in. The lock required a Church member to open it.

  It happened. A flare of heat against her skin, there and gone in less time than it took for her speed-addled heart to beat once. As quickly as she could she pushed back at it. “Harraskata berkarantus.”

  The click would come next. She braced herself, set her feet more widely. Such a simple ward this one was, but so effective; a test of power, of reflexes, of knowledge.

  She felt the click rather than heard it; her entire body clicked with it. A rush of heat slammed into her and rocked her backward, but she held her ground, pushed against it harder. Fighting it like she had the Binding, only a few days that felt like months before.

  For a moment everything hung in the balance while she struggled with the load of magic threatening to blow the top of her head off. She gritted her teeth and fought harder, waiting, pushing.

  And just like that, it disappeared. Her balance was off; her forehead hit the door, but she was too busy feeling totally triumphant to be embarrassed by that. And what the hell, none of the men knew how it was supposed to go anyway.