The town seemed even more silent as they walked back through the empty streets toward the river. Ilias had never noticed silence like this before. Even counting time spent in Cineth and other noisy populated cities and villages, he was more used to quiet places than not. There was just something about this silence that felt...as if it was masking the presence of something else. “Something’s here,” he said.
Giliead wasn’t surprised. “I don’t think we’re going home empty handed.”
They reached the midden and Giliead stepped on top of a low pile of broken crockery, animal bones, food waste, and broken furniture. The buzz of flies was intense. “The shade was right around here. And I have the feeling it wasn’t long after she was killed that whatever it was happened--”
“So she’ll be near the top,” Ilias finished, taking the next pile over, wincing at the heavy odor of rot. This was what the Journals didn’t mention about the lives of Chosen Vessels and their companions. Ilias supposed it didn’t make good poetry: And then the Vessel of Cineth Giliead and his foster brother Ilias spent the afternoon digging in the middens looking for parts of the dead girl, hoping the dogs hadn’t gotten to her and that they could find enough of her to perform the rites on.
For some time, Ilias kicked aside dirt clods and dried dung, shards of glass and pottery, while Giliead dug in the other pile. Then Ilias hesitated as he spotted a tangle of stained yellow cloth. He crouched down, shoving away at the debris on top. Yes, there it is. A hand, still attached to a slender forearm, the flesh discolored and sunken with rot. He grimaced, twisting around to say, “Gil, I found--”
It was dark. Dark as the inside of a black cloth sack, the still air cool and a little damp, no sun, no stars, no moon. Ilias’ throat went dry and his heart squeezed in his chest, skipping a beat. Oh...no. “Gil,” he said softly.
Silence. There was no hint of the rush of the river, or the wind scattering dust and grit against the rocks. His eyes were starting to adjust and he could just make out shapes in the darkness. He was facing back toward the town and he could see the rooflines of the houses, black against the lighter darkness of the sky, but they marked a set of structures far taller than they should be, and the shapes were all wrong. I don’t know where I am.
“Here.” Giliead’s voice was quiet but tense, maybe only ten paces away. Ilias bit the inside of his cheek to hold back a sob of relief. “You see this too?”
“Yes,” Ilias managed to say, mostly evenly. “This isn’t-- Where are we?”
Maddeningly, Giliead countered with, “What do you see?”
Ilias gritted his teeth. “It’s all dark, the sky is like black water. I can see the town, but it’s all wrong. Everything’s too big, like it grew or I shrunk.” He turned slowly, feeling gritty stone under his boots. He realized the midden pile under his feet was different; it was all black gravel and rock now, the detritus vanished with the odor. And the rest of the world. “The mountains go up forever.” They were like black glass, glinting faintly, high above the canyons. And that doesn’t make sense, he thought, sick. There was no light, nothing to make that faint silver reflection. He shouldn’t be able to see at all.
“All right, that’s...good. I’m seeing what you’re seeing.” Giliead sounded a little shaky. “Except I can also see the town, the midden in daylight, just like it was a moment ago.” There was a faint crunch and he heard Giliead swear. “This is like being hit on the head until you see two of everything.”
Ilias turned toward the sound, his heart beating a little easier. If Giliead could still see the real world, than this was just a wizard’s illusion. Which meant there was a wizard nearby and Ilias was as good as blind and Giliead nearly so, but they weren’t dead yet. Squinting, he thought he could see Giliead as a distorted shape in the dark, about where he had been standing before. “Is that you? Can you see me?”
“Uh, no. I can’t. Wait. Move, wave your arms or something.” Ilias waved vigorously, and Giliead said in relief, “I can see you in the dark world.” He added a little worriedly, “But not in the daylit world.”
“Oh, that’s...” That really wasn’t what Ilias wanted to hear. He took a sharp breath, trying to get his pounding heart under control. “What kind of curse is this?”
“It’s not a curse. I don’t feel a curse, I can’t see any traces.” Giliead sounded uneasy and baffled. “It’s as if you’re somewhere else, and I’m caught between.”
Not a curse and somewhere else. Ilias tried to think about what that meant and stay calm. It wasn’t easy. “Is this what happened to the Taerae?”
“That’s a good guess.” Ilias could hear Giliead moving, turning, his boots crunching on the pebbles. “There,” Giliead said suddenly.
Ilias turned, following what he thought was Gil’s pointing arm, and saw a crumpled bundle on the ground. He started toward it, but his boot slipped and he stumbled sideways, flailing to regain his balance. Giliead said sharply, “You all right?”
“Yes, it’s the rock here. It’s like glass. Cuts like it, too,” he added as he lifted his boot and felt the slit in the leather.
“It cut you?”
“Just my boot.” For a moment, Ilias didn’t understand the tone of alarm in Giliead’s voice. Then cold realization hit. “This isn’t some kind of dream, illusion, whatever. Things here can affect me. Maybe both of us.”
He heard Giliead take a deep breath. “Just...be careful.”
Careful, Ilias thought, if that’s the best advice he has... They moved toward the one thing visible that wasn’t black stone. It was a body, a man, dressed in the rough kilt of a laborer. Giliead kept an eye on their surroundings, since he was the only one who could see in both worlds, while Ilias nudged the body cautiously with a boot, then rolled him over. He crouched down to look more closely. The man was young, wearing copper earrings, his face and chest marked with livid blue-black bruises. “He’s not breathing, but I don’t see a wound,” Ilias said. He probed cautiously, wincing as he felt the give under his hand. “His ribs are all caved in. Must have been beaten to death.” He looked up at Giliead. “He’s cold, but not stiff or rotted. He doesn’t stink.”
Giliead grimaced. “Things must be different in this place.”
“Things? The way the world works?” Ilias would have felt a chill in his stomach if he wasn’t frozen solid down there already. But it made a weird kind of sense. No sun, no wind, no time, no rot.
“There’s another body,” Giliead said quietly.
There was a trail of bodies. Ilias followed them across the ground where the middens had been, up into the first street of the weirdly altered town. Men, women, children. Some with open wounds, or crushed skulls, though there wasn’t much blood. Ilias lifted a lifeless hand and found bloody skin under the nails. “They did this to each other,” he said grimly.
“That was the curse,” Giliead said from somewhere behind him.
Ilias had been reluctantly drawing the same conclusion. “A curse, or madness, from being trapped here in the dark for days?”
“That was surely part of it. But they had help.” Giliead’s voice hardened. “There.”
His skin creeping, Ilias turned to look.
Something was moving in and out of the abstract shapes of the black glass doors and windows. It was amber-colored, shedding drifts of mist. It seemed to turn and look at them, and Ilias caught a half-second impression of a human face. Then it was turning away, drifting into the dark.
“That was a gul,” Giliead said, while Ilias was still trying to find his voice.
“How--” Ilias started again, realized it was pointless, and swallowed the words. “It didn’t look like a gul, but you could tell it was one?”
“Yes.” Giliead’s eyes studied the dark intently. “There’s more. A lot more. I think... We know what happens when a gul takes someone.”
“It eats them. It eats their soul, too, that’s why there are never shades.” Ilias thought he could see other flickers in the dark now, the black glass thro
wing colors that didn’t come from the sourceless moonlight.
“What happens when a gul takes a wizard?”
“I--” Ilias remembered the stake outside the city’s wall and his fear dissolved in a rush of angry annoyance. “They couldn’t have been that stupid!” If you were going to kill a wizard, you had to do it quickly, no matter how much you wanted to torture the bastard.
“Oh yes, they could have. And that arrogant. If his soul is powerful enough to control the guls...” Giliead was still facing toward the flickers of gul-light. “This happened to us when we were about to find the sister’s body, to free her shade. He must not want it freed.”
“I did find it. Or at least I found somebody in there. But he can’t talk to her, touch her. Can he?”
“I have no idea. I don’t even know if he took the guls or if they took him.” Giliead turned slowly, looking out into the dark. “Let’s go back to the sister’s body and see if there’s anything else there.”
“Uh.” Ilias faced the abstract landscape, all obsidian and silver shadow. “Good luck with that.”
“This way.”
“I know the way, it’s just the midden isn’t here in this--” Something huge moved above them in the dark and Ilias yelled a warning. He dove sideways, landing badly on the sharp stone. Rolling to absorb the shock, he came to his feet, hearing Giliead hit the ground and recover not far away.
He sensed more wild movement in the dark and yelled again to warn Giliead, ducking sideways as a clawed hand swiped for him. He came back to his feet, dodged in and sliced at it with his sword. He felt a satisfyingly meaty connect and the creature whipped away from him with an ear-splitting shriek. He darted forward and out, swinging at it, and felt the breeze as it grabbed for him again and missed.
He heard bootsteps and then Giliead was at his back. “Real world or just here?” Ilias asked, breathless.
“Just here,” Giliead said grimly. “I think it’s a curseling, created for this place.”
“Oh, that’s fine,” Ilias muttered. Darkness moved above their heads and the creature made a strange sort of low whistling snarl, giving Ilias a very creepy picture of what its mouth must look like. “Gil, I’ll distract it, you go find her body.”
“Ilias--” Giliead snarled in frustration. But there was no way to argue; Ilias wouldn’t be able to see the corpse, he couldn’t even see the middens. “Just be careful!”
“No, really,” Ilias snapped. As Giliead bolted for the middens, Ilias dodged forward, toward the moving darkness. He thrust the sword upward and felt it bite into flesh. Something whipped around and knocked him sideways, slamming him into the ground. He rolled away, but the dark shape above him seemed to flow past, following Giliead.
Stumbling to his feet, feeling blood trickle down his face, Ilias could just see the outline of Giliead moving frantically in the dark area where the midden should be. “Look out, Gil, it’s after you! It--” He blinked and there was someone standing over Giliead now, vivid and brilliant, like one of the guls.
It was a young man, barely Ilias’ age, with bright blond hair and a handsome face. He said, “Leave her alone. Haven’t you done enough?”
Giliead kept digging, saying over his shoulder, “She’s dead. Don’t you want her to rest?”
“I want her with me! I want her here!” the man shouted.
“You got her killed!” Ilias yelled, hoping to distract him. “You only brought her to make it easier for you to travel. If you loved her, you would have left her behind.”
“Ilias, come here!” Giliead yelled sharply. Ilias didn’t argue; he bolted toward Giliead. Something cold snatched at his arm, his hair, the side of his face. He tore through it, twisting and flinging himself past the clawlike hands. He landed hard at Giliead’s feet.
“You all right?” Giliead asked tensely, shoving pebbles out of the way.
“Yes. What--”
“We’re surrounded by guls in the real world.”
“Oh, then it’s worse.” Ilias pushed himself up, back aching from being slammed into the rock.
“He’s afraid.” His breath rough as he shoved at the invisible debris, Giliead said, “Ilias, this isn’t a girl’s body.”
“What--” Then Ilias had it, too. The wizard was lying; he wasn’t trying to keep the shade of his dead sister, he was trying to keep his own shade. That was his body in the midden. “But guls don’t leave bodies.”
“I’m betting they left his,” Giliead said tightly. “Maybe whatever curse he used to try to fight them kept them from consuming all of his body. It’s given him a hold in their world, let him control them somehow. He must need his shade to keep that control.”
Ilias shifted, watching wispy shapes move in the darkness. “Laodice said she didn’t think the Taerae would desecrate a girl’s body like that. Maybe they didn’t even kill her.”
“Guls!” Giliead yelled.
“I’ve got them, just do it!” Ilias shoved to his feet, and swung his sword in an arc. He felt it catch at something, as if he was swinging at silk shrouds. The guls kept drawing back, trying to lure him forward and away from Giliead. But that was the first lesson he had had pounded into him as the brother of a Chosen Vessel, by his foster parents, by the older Vessels who had taught Giliead, by the poet Bythia, by the Journals. Whatever you’re fighting, it’ll trick you, it’ll taunt you, it’ll try to get you away so it can use you against him. He had no intention of falling for that.
Then light exploded and Ilias yelped and flinched back, his eyes dazzled. It was daylight, he realized a moment later, as sensation flooded back. The wind, the rush of the river, the warmth of the sun on his skin, the foul odor of the rotted garbage. The dark city was gone and he was back in the real world, standing on the edge of a midden pile. Giliead was behind him, crouched in the debris, a knife in his hand as he dropped the third lock of hair onto the body in the midden. There were dead gul-bodies strewn around them, small furry lumps; the live guls still looked like beautiful men and women and had drawn back, watching them with wary malice. Ilias couldn’t tell which was the wizard, until one moved forward and he saw its human eyes.
Giliead pushed to his feet. Breathing hard, he said to it, “The Taerae didn’t kill your sister, did they? They weren’t that lost to reason. They caught you, left you for the guls. They threw what was left of your body here, but you didn’t need it anymore. When the gul ate your soul, you took control of it, took control of all the guls here.”
The wizard didn’t answer, and the wizard-gul sank to the ground, its body losing the alluring human form and turning lumpy and misshapen. It looked like the monkey-thing they had seen in the lower pass, except its belly was huge and distended.
The other guls were withdrawing, fading away into the shadows. The wizard still didn’t answer, and Ilias asked carefully, “Why does he look like that?”
Giliead was watching with a frown of concentration. “He can’t control them anymore. Without his shade, all that’s left is...whatever part of his soul and body that one ate.” He shifted his bow off his shoulder, bent it to string, and nocked an arrow.
The misshapen gul was crawling away, twisting in pain. Giliead’s arrow struck it behind the head. It shuddered and collapsed, dissolving into a pool of black fluid.
Ilias sat down on the midden, wanting to collapse as well.
* * *
They burned the dead guls, and Giliead dug the wizard’s head out of the midden and wrapped it in a shawl scavenged from one of the houses. They would take it back to the traders for proof, then to the nearest god’s habitation for burial.
“I thought all the bodies would come back,” Ilias said. “The townspeople. Once the wizard was dead.”
Giliead shook his head wearily. “I think they’re stuck in that other place, with the guls. And even if the bodies did come back, I don’t think it would matter. From what we saw, the guls must not really eat flesh; it just looks that way because they don’t leave any remains in this world. They actually
eat...everything. The soul, the shade, the body.”
Giliead was saying that there wouldn’t be any trapped shades to release, even if they had the bodies to do the rites on. Ilias was too tired and sore to be horrified at the moment, but he was sure that would come later. “We know there’s one shade trapped here.” He squinted against the noon sun, looking around the midden. “But where is she? You think she’s actually hidden under one of these piles, or was she just drawn here, to his body?” Ilias wasn’t looking forward to searching the midden and the town again, and there was always the chance her body had ended up in the river and been carried away, or left in the open and so torn apart by scavengers that there was too little left to be found. But they had to find her. Ilias was determined to save something in this cursed town, even if it was just a forsaken shade.
Giliead’s face was lost in thought. “I have an idea.”
* * *
They found her outside the city wall, near the pit with the execution stake, curled up under a tree. A wool wrap had been thrown over her, the colors hidden by windblown dirt and detritus. Giliead found a mild curse on the body to keep away scavengers. It didn’t prevent them from doing the rites.
“If she was out here, and wasn’t taken by a gul,” Ilias said, shouldering their waterskin and his pack as they walked toward the road. “He killed her.”
Giliead let his breath out, glancing back toward the town. “She must have come out here to try to release him, but she was too late. His body was dead and his soul had taken over the guls. He was one of them now, and he killed her. But maybe he thought he could make her into what he was, if he kept her shade here long enough. He would have her with him, then.” He looked down at Ilias, his mouth twisting in irony. “Maybe he loved her.”
Ilias made a rude noise. “She showed us where his body was.”