The ghosts didn’t seem to notice. They kept straining towards the corner of the far wall.
“Why? What are you trying to reach?” I asked them. There was only the blank wall and bare, dusty flagstones.
It was too complex a question, and I didn’t expect an answer.
The trauma of their deaths was undoubtedly what had created the ghosts — although what had caused them to return now to haunt the Sunstone house, I didn’t know — but there had to be an anchor holding them here, something their essences were attached to. Without that, they would have drifted away a long time ago.
I moved to stand directly in front of them and reached out a tendril of magic. Silver, charcoal, and arevena flowers trapped ectoplasmic magic, but for some reason they were no barrier to any other type of magic. Which was a good thing, or I would have had to step inside those circles. I had done some stupid things in my time, but that wasn’t going to be one of them.
The magic I was using wasn’t designed to disrupt or unpick the ghosts. I hoped the lack of threat would mean they didn’t do their psycho-beast transformation. All I wanted was to get their attention. Shine the right light, you know.
When their eyes focused on me, a surge of adrenaline hit my heart. But they stayed human, in shape at least.
“What are you scared of?” I tried.
Nothing. My question was too general. I had to remember they weren’t the people they had been. They were echoes of them in a dark cave. I had to find the right question to draw out what limited information they held.
“How did you die?”
This drew glances back towards the stairs. I used my magic to carefully pull their attention around again.
“How did you die?” They would remember that, if nothing else, and I could work from there, teasing out the loose fragments that remained in them.
“We didn’t see.” The young woman’s voice was scarcely a whisper.
“We didn’t look.” The man. Just as much a tremble on the air.
“We didn’t listen.”
“We didn’t hear.”
Well. That wasn’t at all suspicious, was it? In my experience, the more time people spent denying something, the more likely they were to have done it. It wasn’t quite the answer to my question — like I said, you couldn’t have a conversation with a ghost, just tease out the remnants of what they had been — but it was information. They had seen and heard something. Whatever it was, it had been enough for someone to hunt them down and kill them.
But I wasn’t here to solve a two hundred and fifty year old murder. I needed to find out what was holding them here. Now that I had an angle, I could pursue it, follow down the thread of their memories until I found … something.
“You ran,” I said.
“We ran.”
I looked around the cellar. It was large, but not that large. The shelves and boxes might offer somewhere to hide, but who could say what had been down here two hundred and fifty years ago? Maybe there had been something else, something important.
“Why here?”
The ghosts swayed towards the edge of the circle again, as though trying to flee, before recoiling back from the silver. Again, they seem to be straining towards the far corner of the cellar. Maybe there had been something there to hide behind all that time ago, something long removed.
“The door was barred.” The ghost of the young woman glanced over her shoulder again, face crumpling with fear.
“You were locked in? So you fled here? To hide?”
“We didn’t see.”
“We didn’t look.”
“Yeah. Great.” Echoes could only tell you so much. I had pushed too far, beyond what these ghosts could respond to. My questioning had confirmed my suspicions, to a degree, but it hadn’t told me anything useful. It had been a throw of the dice, anyway. Ghosts could rarely tell you exactly what was keeping them here. It could just be the place where they had died, but it was usually something more personal and important to them. Their bones were a popular option; who wasn’t attached to their bones? That was why you could usually find a ghost or two hanging around a graveyard. Unluckily for me, the Sunstones didn’t seem to be storing a pile of human bones between the sacks of flour and dried beans.
In fact, I couldn’t see anything here that was old enough to be linked with them. Unless the chests of tea were really out of date, everything in here was too modern.
I summoned light, making the ghosts fade slightly.
The flagstones, the ceiling, and the walls were all old. The only thing that stood out was the back wall. I crossed to it. It was old, too, but maybe not as old as the rest of the cellar, and the brick looked cheap. The other walls were made from dressed stone. I ran my fingers over the bricks. Sand sheeted away. Once, the bricks might have been selected to match the other walls, but time had changed that.
“What are you doing there?”
The wall didn’t answer.
“You’re losing it, Nik, talking to a wall.”
“Better than talking to myself,” I replied.
If Benny had been here, he wouldn’t have been polite about my state of mind.
“You can fuck off and all,” I muttered.
With a prayer that this wouldn’t bring the ceiling down on my head and that the Estimable Sunstone wouldn’t try to take this out of my wages, I took a step back and punched a hole in the flaking wall with my magic.
It crumpled as satisfyingly as a sandcastle under a wave. Dust billowed over me. I coughed and flapped a hand in front of my face.
In good news, the ceiling hadn’t fallen on my head. In bad news, there wasn’t anything behind the bricks except another wall, this one from dressed stone like the others around the cellar. Talk about an anti-climax.
As the dust settled, though, I realised it wasn’t just a wall. Six feet to my left was a door. The wood had crumbled and decayed. It looked as frail as old paper in its frame. A wooden bar had been fixed across it, although that was mostly gone. At one end, the rusty remains a padlock showed where the bar had been locked in place.
The door was barred.
The ghosts hadn’t meant the front door of the house. They had meant this one. They had fled to the cellar because they wanted to reach this door, but they had found it locked, and then…
Then someone had caught up with them and killed them.
Which begged the question: what was behind that door?
I didn’t need magic to break through. It collapsed under my hand. I extended my light inside.
Beyond the door was a passageway. It had fallen in at some point, chunks of stone and dirt blocking the way beyond the first four yards, and no one had dug it out. That was the way of Agatos. When something fell down, you just built on top of it, ruins built on ruins, layers of the city laid down over generations like layers in the rocks.
But the rubble wasn’t all that was in the passageway. As the light brightened, I saw skeletons on the floor. The bones were scattered like someone had held one of those Khorasani dance parties with all the kicking in here. There was no flesh on the bones, and most of the clothes were gone, too, rotted away, but a pair of sandals had survived, and to one side, as though dragged there, was a single boot.
I wasn’t stopping to count bones, but there were two skulls. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that these were the bodies left behind by my ghosts.
There was no sign that the bodies had been dismembered — there were no obvious knife or saw marks — but the bones had been spread around, probably by scavengers, rats in the darkness.
Dead bodies didn’t freak me out, and skeletons even less so, but the thought of the rats gnawing away in the blackness made me shiver and my stomach turn.
This tunnel must have led to a back door, a servants’ passage to bring supplies to the house without bothering the high and mighty Sunstones. The dead servants must have run here, thinking they could escape, but they had found the door locked. They had been caught, killed, and their
bodies tossed behind the door. Then, had the murderer collapsed the passage and put up a new wall to hide the evidence? There had to be easier ways to get rid of the bodies. Unless it was someone who wasn’t used to dealing with dead bodies and who hadn’t planned it.
It didn’t matter. The ghosts must have become trapped by their remains. They had been unable to let go. Did they return to their bones every night in some futile hope of resuming their cut-short flight?
When I had first followed the ghosts to the cellar, I had been certain they hadn’t passed through the wall. The traces of their fading ectoplasm had been firmly within the cellar. That must have been where they had been killed when they could flee no further.
A great wave of pity washed over me. It was all so fucking pointlessly tragic. Whatever secret they had stumbled upon, none of it mattered anymore. How could a forgotten secret be worth ending this young couple?
All I could do was give their lost echoes some peace.
Carefully, I gathered up the bones and stacked them in the passageway. It was a pathetically inadequate pile.
That’s all any of us leave behind. It was a depressing thought.
I drew in raw magic, shaped it, and set fire to the bones. There were old and dry, and they burned quickly in the magical flames. Within minutes, there was nothing left but ashes.
“Sorry,” I muttered, then turned away.
The ghosts were still there, trapped in the rings of silver, charcoal, and arevena.
“Mara’s piss!” I swore.
They should have dissipated the moment I had destroyed their anchor. Which meant the bones hadn’t been the anchor. I had no idea what was. I couldn’t even give the ghosts the peace they deserved.
I could still do right by Galena Sunstone, though. I could still do what I’d been paid to. Properly disrupted, these ghosts might not manifest again for hundreds of years. It felt like a bodge job, but you did what you had to.
I didn’t know where the magic that sustained ghosts came from or why. There was a lot I didn’t know about magic. Depths, there was a lot nobody knew about magic, not even the high mages, bless their egotistical, overpowered little souls. I did know how to disrupt it, though. The key was to identify and unpick the knots that held the whole wispy, ectoplasmic mess together. Without those keystones — knots, whatever; it was still just a metaphor — the whole construct would collapse like a paper bird in the rain. The ghosts would re-form eventually, but not until the lot of us were dead and forgotten.
That made the whole thing sound a lot easier than it was. If it was easy, anyone could have done it. There was a reason I should be paid the big money.
For some reason, that argument never worked with my clients.
I let my eyes unfocus until I could see the magic in the room, the green of the raw magic, rising like steam off a hot pie, and the white ectoplasmic magic, seething, unsettled, and restless in the silver circle.
I reached out a thread of my own magic, teasing my way into the ectoplasm. A more powerful mage might simply have hammered at it with overwhelming power, hoping to shatter the whole damn lot. I didn’t have that option, and in my experience it was ineffective. Ghosts dismissed that way were, more often than not, back the next night. My way was better, which was a good job, as it was the only way I had.
This was more instinct than science. It was like feeling my way through an abandoned cellar with my eyes closed, trying to find the way out without accidentally grabbing hold of a lurking rat or getting tangled in spiders’ webs.
And now I was wishing I had thought of a less pertinent simile. Because I couldn’t do this while keeping up my magical light, and the lamp was starting to dim.
Pull yourself together, Nik.
The magical thread encountered something more … visceral. Resistant. A point of solidity in the ever-shifting veils.
I fed more magic in, chasing down the thread, to overwhelm the knot. I felt it fray. The white ectoplasmic magic thinned and dissipated.
Then something surged. It was almost faster than I could react to, and overwhelming. It roared along the thread, like someone had grabbed hold of the other end and whipped it. I released the thread just before the surge in magic could hit me. Even so, I was knocked back. I collided with the lantern and heard glass smash. Light blazed from the circle of silver. Utter terror hit me at the same time, pouring from inside the circle and almost overwhelming me. I covered my eyes, blinking furiously. When I could finally see again — it could only have been a couple of seconds later — the ghosts were gone. In their place was a beast. I say beast, but it wasn’t like any living creature I had ever seen. It was part bear, part ancient tiger, part wolf. It was hard to see where one creature began and another ended. They were smeared into one another, the feature from one beast joined to that of the next. It should have been a child’s patchwork drawing, but somehow it fitted, as though the real versions of the animals were no more than partial shadows pulled from this being. Its mouth showed fangs the length of my forearm. Muscles rolled like miniature avalanches beneath skin and fur.
I stumbled back, staring up at the ghost-beast. It was vast, almost too big for the circle to enclose. Its head brushed the cellar ceiling.
Where in the Depths had that come from?
I switched to my magical vision again. The ectoplasm raged inside the circle, blazing like a lightning storm. It was too bright to look at directly. I knew with utter conviction that no magic I could throw at it would even slow it down.
The beast turned its head, and a wolf’s eyes fixed on me. I could feel the malice and hunger in them. This wasn’t ghostly influence affecting my perception. This was something deeper, older, far more terrifying.
The beast’s muscles bunched. Then it lunged. It hit the silver barrier and recoiled. Silver cups shifted on the flagstones with a chink of metal. I scrambled back. That couldn’t be happening. A ghost couldn’t affect silver. It was impossible.
I got to my feet. The beast was still gazing directly at me. Down at me. I was tall, but this thing towered over me, and I didn’t like it. It made me feel like mouse looking up at a cat. A very scared, very impotent mouse. It was a good thing the beast didn’t stand on its hind legs, I thought. It would smash through the ceiling. Just my luck to get crushed by falling bricks when everyone else who had met this thing had been ripped to pieces.
You’re gibbering, I told myself
Yeah? You would, too.
This is impossible. Fucking impossible.
They had been ordinary ghosts, nothing special. I had had them trapped, isolated. They should have disintegrated like a dandelion head being kicked.
Not taking its eyes from me, the beast pushed deliberately forwards again. Silver scraped over stone.
Shit. I should run. But where? If it got free of the circle, I didn’t know how far it would pursue me. Right now it was trapped. Kind of. If I was going to deal with it, it would have to be here and now.
“Why do you get yourself into this crap, Nik?” I muttered.
Come on. Come on.
The ghosts were at the centre of this. Somehow. The beast had arrived when the priest had tried to exorcise them in Sunstone’s kitchen. The same had happened here when I had started to unpick them. They had to be linked to this thing, and for all its raging, physical intensity, the beast manifested itself through ectoplasmic magic, too.
I couldn’t stop this beast. It was too powerful. But maybe the ghosts were still in there. The beast needed them, or why would it manifest so violently when anyone tried to get rid of them? If I could destroy the ghosts, perhaps that would be like kicking away a chair the beast was standing on.
Screw it, I didn’t have any better ideas.
As if detecting my intentions, the beast threw itself against the circle again. Silver scattered.
I swore. Thank all the dead and living gods that the Sunstones seem to have hoarded silver like a dung beetle hoards shit, but one more hit like that and the dung beetles wouldn’t be t
he only ones deep in crap.
How the Depths was I supposed to destroy the ghosts? When I had tried to unpick them, the beast had chased down my thread of magic, somehow using it to bypass the protection of the silver, charcoal, and arevena.
Think, Nik, you dumb bastard.
Something had to be holding the ghosts here. An anchor. There always was one. It hadn’t been their bones, and if it was just the cellar, I was screwed anyway.
Assume it’s something else.
What, then? What was I missing? I needed to know more about them. What did they care about? What mattered more to them than anything else? Enough to cheat even death, at least as echoes.
It had to be something in this cellar. The ghosts kept returning here.
I tried to ignore the gigantic murder-ghost-beast in the failing circles and think.
The ghosts had been pushing towards the far corner of the cellar. When I had knocked down the wall and found the hidden door with the bones beyond, I had assumed that was where they had been heading. But the direction had been off. Not by much, just a few feet, but still off.
What was it about that corner that was so special? A corner was just a corner, right? All I could see were old flagstones, caked in dust and dirt. There was nothing there.
“What matters to you so much that you keep coming back?” I muttered.
Something more important than their own mortal remains.
I smacked my open hand against my head. Think!
A sudden flash of memory came to me. The spiral engagement band running up the young woman’s arm, beneath her sleeve. It hadn’t been with the bones in the collapsed corridor. I had assumed, without really thinking about it, that whoever had killed them had taken it. But that would have been stupid. Why hide the bodies then carry a piece of the evidence away with you?
Assume they both had engagement bands. They were to be married, but they were fleeing … someone. Someone who hated them enough to hunt them down, or who had a secret they so desperately wanted to protect.
Shadow of a Dead God: A Mennik Thorn Novel Page 23