by Ben Galley
The Nyx ran through every corner of the map, springing up in wells and marshes, always lingering just under the surface. Nobody knew where it began or if it even had an end. It was a vital constant across the Reaches and it was sacred as well as feared, for it was the gate to death and back again. Once upon a time, it had ferried the dead to the afterlife. We surrendered our dead to it or buried them in graves near its banks, always with a copper coin in their mouths for the boatman, and in doing so we had sent them to a better place with joy.
A thousand years ago, that abruptly changed. Something perverted the waters across the Reaches. Not long after, a bunch of sages supposedly received the secrets of binding from the dead gods, and decided to snap the coin in half. They say the greatest discoveries always come from the most capricious of circumstances, and lo and behold, binding was conceived. The Nyx became the key to trapping souls in the harsh light of day, and death and life became irreversibly intertwined. The Tenets were written by the Nyxites, then came the Arc’s Code, which was adopted across the lands. Society was upheaved. Dynasties were built. The gods were declared dead. Murder became fashionable. Here we were, a millennium on.
Without Nyxwater, a ghost cannot be bound. Those that die before their time and aren’t snapped up to be indentured rise from their dead body and are tethered to it for forty days. Their only chance for paradise is to drag their body to the nearest Nyxwell before they’re claimed. If they fail to reach one, they fade away, lost to the void. No afterlife for them. It’s the same if a half-coin is destroyed.
In that moment, I wondered if a void of nothing was better than spending a thousand years in that endless cave of shouting dead. That was the only afterlife I had seen, and if I thought of it for too long, I began to feel the trickle of water over my feet, the rising roar of voices. Paradise. I snorted. I would call that a paradise when I was the fucking emperor of the Arc. It was nothing but a great lie.
Feeling a cold shudder run through me, I watched the Nyxites – the robed fellows who were allowed to touch the waters – as they tested the river with cups on long poles. It was said that almost every Nyxwell found in civilisation or the wild was tended by at least one Nyxite at all times. I reckoned that was primarily so they could charge silver for it. Those humble caretakers had cleverly orchestrated a thousand-year-old monopoly that nobody had ever questioned. Being the only ones who harvested and distributed the Nyxwater, they were treated more like priests.
Rumour had it that the Nyx was drying up. It was one of those rumours that everybody laughed at, but then immediately shivered privately at the thought of. If the river ever dried up, so would the Realm’s shade industry.
A long queue snaked back and forth on the far side of the Nyxwell. I wandered closer, inspecting the crowd of people. Almost all of them seemed to be accompanied by large bundles or boxes. Those who could afford it had guards to keep them safe. Those who didn’t hugged their sacks and boxes to them, wary-eyed and cautious. It made sense. The best time to bind a soul is before it’s been properly bound. At that point, whomever gets the body to Nyxwater first wins the claim.
I saw a few free ghosts amongst the crowd. As I watched, one was called forwards and up the steps to the Nyxwell’s dais. He was clutching something to his chest, but I still saw the white feather on him. There was a moment of discussion between the Nyxites and an officious-looking man, and then the ghost stepped forward to the edge overlooking the black waters. I watched him throw his half-coin down into the Nyx. The coin met the waters with a hiss. In the same moment, the ghost deliquesced into a cloud of blue smoke. The wind wiped him away in moments. He had completed his payment and chosen the afterlife. I pitied his mistake. That endless cavern was not freedom to me. That was giving up.
‘Next!’ came the cry from a soldier on the steps, and it was then I noticed two black-suited figures leaning against the Nyxwell’s base. I walked closer to see their insignia.
They both looked Arctian by their features, and they were busy muttering about something, punctuating their words by pointing. They seemed to be scrutinising the queue, looking on with what appeared to be mild amusement. A seal of a woman bearing scales and a star, stitched in gold thread, sat upon their chests. They had shaved heads, and black tattoos creeping from their collars onto their cheeks.
‘Sirs?’ I began. ‘If I could have a moment of your time—’
‘Whoa! Back up, shade!’ one yelled, instantly shoving a gloved hand in my face. His voice caused some disturbance in the queue.
The other was also quick to shoo me away. ‘Keep your distance! Back, I say! Better. What’s your problem?’
‘Well, sir—’
‘That’s Proctor, if you please, half-life!’
‘I—’ I had no idea what that was, but I assumed it was official. Perhaps related to the Code. My love for law enforcement was close to non-existent. For most of my life, these sorts of men had played the role of the enemy. Now, I was hoping they would be allies. ‘What exactly do you, er… proct?’
The men chuckled between them. ‘New here, I take it?’
‘Can’t tell, him being so blue and all.’
The first man sighed at my blank expression. ‘We try to keep the peace, shade, what little of it is left to keep. Make sure nobody’s causing trouble, like you currently are.’
‘I’m not causing any trouble. I wanted to complain of a murder. My murder. And illegal indenturement.’
The proctors rolled their eyes. ‘Yeah, you and every other shade.’
‘But this is serious. A man named Boss Temsa sold me. He’s a rampant soulstealer—’
A leather glove sewn with copper plates shot out and caught me in the sternum. I staggered, spilling half the basket onto the dust.
The proctors had gone back to their leaning. ‘Go line up at the Chamber like all the rest. Or find a scrutiniser if you got tips on a particular boss. There’s nothing we can do.’
Your jobs, for starters, I thought. That would have been refreshing. I suspected crime paid more than the law did in this city.
‘Where is this Chamber, then?’ I asked, already retreating.
A thumb jerked somewhere to the east, amidst the towers of stone and marble. Nothing remotely resembled a chamber to me. In my gazing I caught sight of the sun. It had risen quickly, and I realised I had little over an hour left to make it back to the widow’s tower.
Not bothering to thank the lazy idiots, I headed west hurriedly. It occurred to me that a minute of lateness might be all the excuse Vex needed to be rid of me. I rushed through whichever markets and bazaars I found in my path, showing the list to whoever I could, noting the words I didn’t understand. They snorted and spat and waved me away, and in the end I gave up in favour of haste. My task incomplete, and my victory over Vex unaccomplished, I ran back through the crowds as fast as I could, thankful I had memorised the shape of Horix’s tower.
Vex was waiting calmly for me as I came staggering under the courtyard archway, feeling bullied and invisible after fighting the press of the crowd. Two of the other ghosts had already made it back. Dust clung to the vapours around their face and arms. One had a bright red stain splashed across his smock. Their baskets lay at their feet.
‘Let’s see how you did, Jerub!’ Vex called, blue teeth bared in a wide smile.
I placed the basket and papyrus-wrapped clay in the dust and stood back to let him examine them.
‘I didn’t get the last few things,’ I said.
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh, no?’ He showed me the list, fingers jabbing at the strange words. ‘You have not come back with increased respect?’ Tap. ‘Humility?’ Tap. ‘Obedience?’ Tap.
I wanted to roll my eyes at his little game. ‘I suppose I have.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’ He stuck out a hand, and I placed what few coins I had left in his palm. ‘Hmph. Not very impressive.’
Vex made us wait for the fourth ghost, giving him almost an hour past noon before beckoning to a nearby soldier
. The man came forward with a cloth bag, and out of it came the missing ghost’s half-moon of copper. In the light, I could have made out the broken seal of a spiked crown and coin, and the etched glyph of the ghost’s name. But all I could focus on was the bag, knowing full well my own half-coin was in there. I could have seized it and ran. Made it as a free ghost. Worn the white feather.
Vex produced a curious set of pincers with jagged teeth at the end of their jaws. He clamped the half-coin in them and began to squeeze. I could hear the metal squeaking as it was punctured.
For a long time, nothing happened. The other two ghosts and I winced together, but there was no screaming, no patter of hurried feet. Nothing.
Vex pressed harder, bending the coin crooked, digging a gash in it. The spell seemed to be protesting. That was when the scream came: not from beyond the courtyard, as we had expected, but from within the tower. A belch of dust came next, then ghosts in smocks dragging limp bodies out into the sunlight. They were painted red with blood and caked in sand.
‘Fetch a physician!’ shouted a ghost with a giant beard.
For a moment Vex froze, staring at the bent coin as if it had somehow caused the chaos. It hadn’t, of course, and once he realised he yelled at the ghost next to me, ‘Go! Fetch a physician!’
I stood by as four bodies were dragged into the courtyard, their faces and bones crushed by something heavy. They were house-guards, some of Kalid’s men, and their chainmail hadn’t saved them. I found them morbidly intriguing, to know that was all I lacked. A body. Just a complicated lump of meat.
The vacancy in the nearest corpse’s eyes was mesmerising. They were frozen wide, bloated veins reaching through their whites to a dark centre. They said the eyes were the windows to a soul, and perhaps they were. I imagined the guard’s ghost, trapped behind those small windows, throwing itself at them as a prisoner might at his cell bars.
‘Out of the way, shade!’
Two more bodies were thrown onto the pile. These were still groaning, and I stared while a hushed conversation was carried out behind me between Vex and the bearded ghost.
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know, Vex.’
‘Tell me! Has there been any damage—?’
‘Not that I know of!’ the man yelled as he strode back inside the building.
As Vex chased him inside, I was left alone, ignored. The two injured fellows were pulled into the shade and given water while I stayed with the corpses. I knelt beside one, head cocked. The dome of his skull had been caved in so that his forehead stopped just above his eyebrows. Beyond that was pink and grey mush littered with skull fragments. Dark blood still seeped from severed arteries.
I stayed like that for some time as I pondered where this man’s soul was; whether it was stuck in that body, dormant until buried or bound, or whether it was already there, in that vast crowd waiting beyond the afterlife, staring at distant gates and stars.
The corpse’s sand-caked lips twitched, and I recoiled with a noise I was not proud of.
‘You’re wasting time,’ he rasped at me.
I looked around. The other shades and guards were still tending the injured. Nobody had heard the voice, nor my effeminate yelp.
The eyes were coming alive now, rolling about in their sockets until they found me. One was cloudy, the other a bloodshot blue.
He couldn’t possibly be alive. No man could have survived his injury. I looked back and forth between the eyes and the red mess of his skull.
‘You can’t—’
‘You’re wasting time, Caltro. You should be fighting, not dallying in servitude.’
‘Fighting? Fighting who? For what?’
‘Damn it, boy!’ The corpse’s face compressed into a deep scowl. ‘Fighting for us! Fighting to stop the flood!’
My mouth hung open. I was still busy trying to figure out whether I had become delusional. I didn’t know ghosts could lose their minds, but here I was, chatting with a corpse.
‘What are you?’
‘Stop wasting time. Save us from chaos. Do what we ask of you!’
The corpse twitched again. This time its hand flicked out, limp and bending in places there shouldn’t have been joints. I recoiled again.
‘Take it!’
The urgency in the voice forced me to do it. I touched the still-warm skin and an image flashed across my eyes, all sideways, with a figure kneeling before me on a sunny day.
It was me. I was the corpse. In the time it took for a single grain of sand to fall through an hourglass, I was back in that vast space under the stars, feeling the press of the endless dead around me.
‘You can’t let us die…’ the voice gurgled into nonsense. ‘Can’t let the river burst…’
With that, the corpse died, again. The mist returned to its good eye, and the lips twitched no more.
‘Get out of the way!’ another voice yelled at me. ‘Bloody shades, always getting in the way!’
Dazed, bewildered, I stepped back as another body was hauled into the daylight. The man and the woman standing above it, both guards, took a moment to clear their lungs and stare at the pile.
‘Fuckin’ mess, this is!’ said the woman.
I chose that moment to walk away. I wanted space. I wanted to shrug the feeling of being crushing out of my shoulders. I didn’t care for their talk, nor to know the reason why those bodies had come out of the tower so crushed and broken. All I cared for was the tingle in my hand where I had touched the dead flesh, and the voice that had demanded I fight a flood.
I found shade and let the croaking words play over, again and again. The flood is coming. Save us from it. A peculiar turn of phrase, to my ears, and I wondered whether I’d misheard those bloody lips.
There I stayed until Vex came to fetch me. He seemed subdued but angry enough to send us packing up the stairs and into our alcoves. Not a soul came to check us or summon us for work. We were left to wonder in silence, as instructed, and trade no rumours. The other ghosts had no glares for me that night. I got the feeling whatever dues they felt I owed the household had been paid.
There came a wailing in the middle of the night, long and thin and far beneath us. It sounded like a falcon at first, but I could hear the wretchedness in it, and no feathered beast free to roam the open skies could be so miserable. It was cut short by a distant thud; perhaps a door, perhaps a boot. Whether it was the ghost that had tried to run, or some unfortunate stepping into the wrong alley, I did not know. But it kept me upright and rigid until sunrise.
Chapter 10
The Beldam
When a king, a man who was a despot, arrived at the great gates to gain his way into duat, the afterlife, all gods but Mashat agreed to let him enter.
‘Surely,’ she petitioned her brethren, ‘this man is not deserving. Let him be cast back to the endless void, and taste the fruit of his evil ways.’
But the other gods scoffed. ‘This is not the way of it, Mashat,’ Sesh argued.
The goddess was not deterred. ‘If no justice is served in life, then justice should be served in death.’ Taking hold of the great and sacred chains of life, she bent them in a circle, end touching end. ‘And so it shall be. What a man bestows, a man shall receive. Not in form, but in kind.’
The gods tore their robes in outrage. ‘This man was a king in life. So shall it be in death!’ said Oshirim, lord of the gods.
Mashat shook her head. ‘King is merely a title when there are no kingly deeds to earn it.’
A fable of the Dead Gods
Nilith dragged herself upright once more. Anoish’s coarse hair, dusted with sand, was starting to scour away the skin of her cheeks.
The nausea came again, rising up like the swell of an ocean, dumping her on a shore of pain and dizziness. She tried to take a deep breath, caught a whiff of the nearby corpse, and retched.
Cracking open her eyes, she saw Farazar had wandered ahead. It was as if he too could smell it, and was trying to get upwind. Maybe he just di
dn’t like seeing his body dragging in the dust, tied to an even dustier horse.
He certainly had changed since the attack. His silences were longer, his mood even more sullen. Nilith wasn’t sure if he was busy plotting, or still brooding over her intentions for him and his corpse. In any case, she was finding it hard to care. She was in far too much pain for that.
A wound was quick to fester in the desert. The heat and grit made it hard to keep anything clean. The arrow injury had leaked poison into her blood and the fever had struck the day after. If she thought baking in the sun was tough before, with a burning fever it became unbearable. It made every hour twice as long, every jolt of Anoish a stab in the gut, every mouthful of water she slurped just something to sweat back out.
The day was almost over, and with the Steps of Oshirim now standing in their path, dark against the bruising sky, she had a choice to make. Her brain felt no good for choices, but she was out of time.
The shortest route through the mountains was over the Firespar. Though it was a monster of a mountain, it was the shape of a cone and thus easier to climb. It also happened to be the most dangerous route. As well as being treacherous underfoot, the Firespar had a healthy reputation for entertaining waylayers. Going around it or negotiating the craggier mountains would take several more days, and though they had travelled hard, they were days she would need. Araxes was still far beyond the horizon.
Nilith looked up at the distant mountains, jagged and misshapen like a pile of broken crowns. The Steps of Oshirim were mighty peaks: as red as a sunset and streaked with iron rust. The grand churning of the earth had built these gigantic protrusions, and the wind had carved them into whorls and pinnacles. The Firespar was their tallest: a dead volcano with a jagged, hollow peak. It dominated the range, sitting proudly at its centre like the Cloudpiercer lording over Araxes.