“That may be. But you’ll stay with your brother instead.”
Firefly put on a championship pout but she left the carpet.
The hunter girls were scared. The coming adventure might get ugly. And they were little more than kids themselves.
I was scared, too. Why was I being isolated?
Ankou bounded aboard as we lifted off, landing between the girls. He eyed me like he wondered why I was aboard, and maybe even why I kept on breathing.
So I asked, “Why am I here? Really.”
“I don’t know. I just have a feeling that you should be. Make your eyes useful while I keep us from crashing.”
“Did you do something to them guys?”
“What guys?”
“The wizards. They haven’t been talking. Not even Goblin and One-Eye, and they won’t hardly shut up if their lives depend on it.”
“I did nothing. But you’re right. I should’ve noticed. However, I have been distracted.” The how and why of that she did not explain.
Before I could ask anything more she said, “Ankou, talk to me.”
She and the cat stared one another in the eye. I heard nothing. The carpet kept rising. The air got cold, and then it got colder. The face of the earth dwindled until it looked like a detailed map, parts of which were obscured by clouds and haze. I wanted to shut my eyes and pray till the Taken returned to earth, but I lacked my beads and I was a thousand leagues and more away from anywhere afflicted by the gods of my youth. They would not hear my screams.
Air currents toyed with us. We drifted. The carpet began a slow rotation. The Taken paid no heed.
Granite hills lay somewhat to the right of our direction of drift. They slipped in and out of focus, masked by a shimmer and possibly some thin smoke. I saw what I did because the sun was so blistering bright that it ripped right through the haze, the shimmer, and the smoke.
Straining, I managed to poke the Taken’s biceps, then pointed. “Those hills.”
“You’re right. Somewhere there.” Said with no enthusiasm.
She did not want to do whatever we were doing now.
Bless me, I could understand hoping for failure. I have been there, but with that hope disappointed more often than not.
The hunter girls produced startled squeaks. They began chirruping at one another and the Taken too fast to follow, in TelleKurre, which was a language that no modern girl ought to know.
Mischievous Rain nodded but looked like she was suffering from severe sudden-onset constipation. What was moving her?
I had no idea yet why she wanted me here.
There must be a reason. She did not act on impulse. Was it personal? Something about the kids? It must be something that she did not want to share with my fellow thugs.
I did not think that I would learn anything now, with the hunter girls all excited and Ankou around to eavesdrop.
And there could be other witnesses. Shin’s jars were amongst the junk that had not been cleared away before we took off. If I had even one ball I could creep back there, shift the girl sitting on the box, and see if the jar lids were all in place.
The sun was too bright. It slew the idea of shadow, for now.
No matter. Mischievous Rain had gotten focused again. She took us down until we floated below the taller treetops.
“What the hell?” I was seeing something that could not be. We were too far from civilization. “You couldn’t build that without about a thousand workers.” Which undertaking would have left tracks all over the legends of this end of the world.
We had found a castle smack-dab in the middle of a supposedly haunted, accursed, uninhabited wilderness. Well-tended fields, being worked as we watched, lay between us and the granite upthrust on which the fortress perched. It was built of dressed granite blocks, mostly in the common gray color but with some blocks black and even a few in the rare shade called rose. Some effort had gone into their arrangement but I did not recognize the resulting design.
“That must have taken generations to build. Damn! Is it for real?”
The castle had a sketchy, miragelike quality. It became invisible whenever a cloud masked the sun.
“It’s real,” the Taken said. “Written in stone.”
“How did they ever build it?” I could not get past that.
“They used sorcery.”
Of course. And that meant that there must be some real badasses over yonder. Or there would have been some back when the shack got thrown up. “Is that what you’ve been looking for?”
“It is. But it’s not what I expected to find.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that it’s an order of magnitude more dangerous than I expected.”
“So what did you expect? And why is this worse?”
Her response was imprecise and not directed toward me. “The wrong people are in control, now. How did they ever get in?”
Though ofttimes I am dim, and I understood that I was missing plenty here, I did not doubt that fierce danger lurked over yonder, wicked enough to intimidate one of the Taken.
I was way out of my element now. I could not fathom what was going on. Or was not going on yet but was poised like a viper to go.
Ankou left us after another eye-on-eye session with Mischievous Rain, whose tattoos now seethed. Her skin crawled like maggots in an old corpse.
She said something. I did not catch it.
Pale and scared, the hunter girls took jars from Shin’s box. Really children still, they looked even younger than they were when they left the carpet.
They took a few steps and faded, going invisible. Definitely a useful skill for recon types.
I turned to ask the Taken about that—and decided not to trouble her.
She had become a suggestion of a hominid shape inside a boiling cloud of designs tattooed on the air itself.
Riding inches off the ground, the carpet drifted backward until it snagged on some brush.
The hunter girls returned, amazed that they had survived but totally pleased to have done so. They said nothing, just nodded in response to an inquiring look from Mischievous Rain. Both sprawled on the carpet, shaking.
Mischievous Rain withdrew, staying below the treetops. Ankou was not with us. I did not mention that. The Taken would know. And I wanted her focused on keeping us moving away from … an unknown something that scared me shitless.
She was shaken, too, but pulled herself together quickly. Soon we were headed west so fast that I was afraid I might lose what hair I had left.
* * *
So. We had found what Mischievous Rain had wanted to find. But that was not what she had hoped it would be.
We returned to the meadow camp, the kids, and all those grumbling wizards. Mischievous Rain cut her kids out of the herd. They whispered together for a while. Then she barked orders and went airborne again, this time with the wizards and Shin but without me, Firefly, the hunter girls, or the shadow pots.
Anyone who knew what was going on did not clue me in.
Firefly did suggest that us left-behinds ought to make preparations for a quick getaway.
Loud stuff happened off in the direction of the granite fortress. Then the Taken returned with all of our people still healthy, though she was mighty unhappy.
She had us load up while the hunter girls set out more shadow pots.
Because of Firefly’s suggestion we were aloft and headed west in minutes. I was in my usual spot, sufficiently animated by an urge toward survival that I smushed down all inclination to distract the Taken by pestering her with questions.
She was in a mood to rip out livers and eat them raw, anyway.
A quick survey of the sorcerer crew convinced me that even Buzzard Neck and Two Dead were more cowed than I was. They were better educated. They better understood what we were running from.
Twice we grounded for self-relief opportunities. Shadow pots vanished from Shin’s box each time.
The boy had three left when we got home and was whin
ing about being expected to make more.
The kid was bone lazy.
28
Once Upon a Time: Shambling Toward Oblivion
Decades passed. Precious lived on. The children he created lived on, too. A few produced children of their own. Laissa lived on as well, ever in slow decline, indifferent as a mother and no grandmother at all. In time she stabilized at the functional level of a slow four-year-old. She could communicate and perform small chores but was useless otherwise. She lost all interest in keeping warm. Precious considered that a chicken-or-egg conundrum in relation to her decline.
Sometimes Laissa confused Precious with Papa. Usually Precious played along to avoid confusion-inspired temper tantrums.
Laissa knew that once she had been more than what she was now, but she could recall no specifics. Except when …
Randomly, unpredictably, never obviously triggered by anything, Laissa would suffer seizures of complete lucidity. The fog would clear. She would be as bright as ever she had been, fully aware of herself, her surroundings, and her plight. But those spells never lasted more than twenty minutes. They could happen hours apart or years, and when they did it seemed that a different soul possessed her, a soul that remembered every moment since her resurrection.
Souls, the existence of, were of special interest to Precious. Could his mother still possess one, having spent so many hours dead? Could his artificially created daughters have souls? Were those girls, narrowly speaking, even human?
Laissa’s seizures always ended with Precious in tears because he could find no way to prolong those precious moments. Only then could he see the woman as she had been before he was born. Only then would she remember her sister. She asked when Kitten was coming home, every time.
She never confused the dark-haired fatherless girls with her sister. That amazed Precious. Those girls were exact copies of Kitten, who had, almost certainly, found death in the wilderness when he was only hours old.
Precious was an emotional boy who remained a boy emotionally because he had little chance to develop socially within his tiny community. The servant population dwindled with time. The remaining few became ever more inbred.
Thirty people populated the castle. Sixteen were Laissa, Precious, and his artificially created daughters. The only children were two dark-haired copy girls. They, as each of their sisters had, would receive the Blessing when they turned seventeen. They were the last youngsters Precious planned to create, though he could produce hundreds more. He had the process figured to perfection. He had no more need to experiment.
Too, nowadays he had no one to carry the fetuses but older copy girls. The serving women were all too old.
Precious spent decades trying to restore his mother’s mind. He failed and failed again, never finding the faintest glimmer of hope. Laissa had been too long dead before Papa reanimated her.
Had Papa known then all that he and Precious would later discover, Laissa’s story would have been less sad. She could have been restored so thoroughly that only a master necromancer might recognize that she had lain down with Death for a time.
* * *
Precious differed from his father in one respect. He had no interest in girls as girls, be those girls dead or be they alive, be they young or be they grown. He did experiment enough to discover that he would never be a natural father, and that he had no interest in the procreative act for its own sake. He found that all unpleasantly messy.
Most of the copy girls were not interested, either.
There were times when he thought the whole situation kind of sad.
Papa’s line would end with him, and his mother’s, too, perhaps.
Papa’s journals told the tale. Precious was his only child, a miracle that could not be explained and that should never have been.
* * *
Decades rolled. Precious ran out of ways to busy himself. He cared for his mother, helped improve the fields and herds that supported the castle, and added, thread by thread, to the spells protecting and concealing the fortress. And, despite regular decisions to quit, he produced the occasional copy girl because everyone loved having little scampers around the house.
The Ghost Country had remained quiescent for centuries. That began to change. The “ghosts” began to stir, provoked from without.
In an age so long gone that it was recalled only vaguely in the early scriptures of Occupoa, what became the Ghost Country was the scene of a terrible sorcerers’ war, horrible beyond modern imagination. The scriptures recalled it as a war for control of Heaven. The fighting was so savage, and the combatants so obdurate, that entire nations perished in seas of molten stone, were crushed by stars called down from the firmament, or were consumed by dreadful plagues.
The battlefield in time became the graveyard of the olden horrors. They buried one another way down deep. Most passed on along the normal path of corruption and extinction, but some became the hateful entities that gave the region its name. Others refused to accept nature and became the walking dead. Some had not been fully dead when they were interred and insisted on never dying. And the most powerful, the champions, full of life, too strong to be killed, got buried alive, deeper than any others, entangled in chains of sorcery so weighty that, in time, those cruel beings would abandon their struggles and resign themselves to eternal sleep.
Who did that to them? They did it to one another, one captive at a time. So Occupoa’s book seemed to say.
That war had not been one strictly of sides and ideology but a last-man-standing tournament with divine supremacy as the winner’s crown.
The imprisoning chains were not eternal. They yielded slowly to deep time atrophy. After a millennium all that kept the buried down was the fact that they had given up. The worst, the most terrible, the deepest buried, dreamed an endless dream in an endless sleep.
Their world had changed beyond recognition. Their magic had dwindled, had become depleted, consumed as later men appropriated the resource. Those ancient monsters would today be infants compared to what they had been—yet they would be fiercely lethal if wakened to the fact that their chains had rotted away.
Lesser olden liches had created the Ghost Country’s reputation. Their chains had been weaker. They had been considered supernatural mosquitoes, though they could be deadly for any normal mortal who strayed too near their graves.
Their chains were gone but still they could not reach out far from their bones.
Those old spirits had no quarrel with the granite castle, Papa, nor any of Papa’s people. Why was not clear. Papa’s journals left Precious suspecting that his father had known the Ghost Country well before he emigrated to Dusk.
Papa never illuminated the mysteries of his earlier years.
There would be a grand story there, surely.
Precious experimented with Papa’s carpet. He invested countless hours in careful trial and error, making short practice flights, always with copy girls accompanying him. The girls loved flying. Every one of the silly witches was ready to go whenever he was.
He caught one or another of them trying to manage the carpet herself on several occasions.
He kept the truth of the spell card to himself.
The girls were good spotters. They discovered several encampments just inside the western verge of the forest. Precious would have overlooked them because he had to concentrate on managing the carpet.
He kept away from the outsiders. He wondered why they would dare enter the Ghost Country but would not go close enough to find out.
One of his girls volunteered to go spy on foot.
“No way. That would be much too dangerous.” He knew the world beyond the granite castle only through Papa’s journals. In those the outside was a realm of truly awful men.
One of his girls reminded him, “You’re a necromancer. This is the Ghost Country. Send a ghost to spy on them.”
“That might work.” Only, he had little experience with that kind of thing. Once he had tried to raise Papa’s ghost. T
hat had not worked out. Papa would not come back.
There were no ghosts in the castle. Never had been. No one ever laid a dead man, or a dead anything, down on barren granite. Precious had to find his ghost somewhere else. But where? And how?
He would have to search the forest. The protective spells close in were so dense and deep that no spirit, drow, or revenant, malign or benign, nor even anything alive, could get close or could get through. But those countless spells did nothing to keep anyone or anything in, and that sometimes led to wandering-livestock emergencies.
Properly prepared, anyone could come and go without difficulty.
No one had left since Laissa’s sister deserted. No one had come in for a century before Papa passed. The rest of the world avoided the Ghost Country religiously. Or had until now.
“We should mind our own business,” Precious said. “They haven’t bothered us. And there’s no reason that they would.” No one would ever reach the heart of the Ghost Country.
The copy girls were not pleased. They had become excited, were anticipating adventures, were hoping for a break in the endless sameness of castle life.
Those sweet, pretty darlings had no concept of painful mortality.
* * *
Even Laissa’s look-alikes were disinclined to remain passive, though the pro-action clique was that only relatively. Castle decisions were deliberate because time meant so little to its people. Seasons passed before a plan matured.
Precious did yield to the copy girls’ desires but proceeded with extreme caution. Papa’s journals had nothing good to report about the world outside, a realm of human predators for whom no evil was too black. Papa himself may have been one of the worst when he was young.
During the long preparation Precious drew closer to the fatherless girls—who were never really that, he had to admit. He might not be their parent biologically but, feeble though he was, he was the father they knew. They should more properly be called motherless copy girls.
The youngest did call him Daddy and melted his most stubborn resolve by calling him that while showing him big puppy-dog eyes.
His intercourse with the outside began with reconnaissance flights. His girls were bold and impatient but did remain rigorously cautious. He took four with him every time. They found several more outsider camps, all just within the western edge of the forest. The camps were occupied almost exclusively by ugly-looking and ugly-behaving men. Not one spoke a recognizable language. Their dress was alien, too, but Precious did not notice that. He had no standard by which to compare.