by Jackson Lear
Kiera.
She was still fourteen. I was twenty.
Some of what she spoke of had actually happened, as though I was remembering a conversation of ours. Everything else seemed to be my imagination, me putting words into her mouth.
I had reached that limit few people ever get to: staring into the other world. The cackles ran around me, keeping me awake for longer. If I died in that state I’d have ended up as one of them. All night it went: the kroats grunting, hunting me, the sloshing through the water, the shadows moving through the fog, my name being called out all around me, and my old friend talking to me from beyond her death.
To this day I have no idea how I survived that night. I have often wondered how much of me is still trapped there. The sun rose. The Kroats retreated back to their dens, slipping into the water and swimming away. I was the only one to make it back to Erast.
For another year I kept chasing Kiera, trying to stay awake for longer and longer, all in the hope of finding out if she was real; a ghost from beyond or just me desperate for her forgiveness. The year passed by in a blur. Sometimes she laughed, sometimes she screamed. The longer it went on, the more she screamed.
Greaser snapped me out of it. After a long night of drinking he told me what he saw: a stupid twenty one year old, half starved, a wreck, of no use to anyone, shouting into the night, crying at whatever fog he thought was there.
“This shit will drive you mad, Raike. It drives everyone mad.” He hung his head, staring at the ground with quiet reflection, the kind that told me he’d seen worse. This was not a wound of his to poke at. “If you can’t get it together, tonight, then in the morning I’m going to tell the Captain to kick your ass to the gutter, you got it?”
I was reasonably drunk, but when you have Greaser’s gnarled, fat finger pointing straight at your face, it sobers you up quickly. I stared back at him, finding my attention rising no higher than his mouth. One of his front teeth was unusually smaller than the ones around it. I’m pretty sure I nodded like an idiot.
“Good.” He poured me another drink. Any more and we’d need a mop and bucket.
“Does it have a name?” I asked. “That place? Where they talk to you?”
“Probably, but it’s none of your concern anymore. Some of us have put ourselves on the line to keep you in the company. The Captain’s patience has already gone. Ours is wearing thin. There’s no more second chances.”
It wasn’t long after that I saw my first person getting tanked. Cockroaches were scattered over him. As the water crept up they scurried across his hands and face. Venom ants as well. I poured with the rest of them because I was more terrified of what would happen to me if I didn’t. Up until that day the guy had been our swift talker, the face of the company. The Captain allowed a lot of shit to fly, just as long as you did your job. Father a dozen children? No problem. Can’t stop killing people in the street? You won’t be able to hear for all the swearing blasted into your ears, but you’d get a perpetual second chance. What you never got away with was betraying the company and our swift talker did just that. Along came the rats and eels. Along came the sludge from the latrine.
There was no cheering from any of us. He spluttered to the last breath, confessing who got to him and how. A rival company wanted our territory. We had planned to heist the shipyard because they refused to pay us for our protection. Our rivals were going to ambush us on our way out, after we’d used all of our magic to break into the place.
As I poured water over my friend, everything became clear. Whatever life I had as Brayen didn’t matter anymore. Whatever thoughts I had of Kiera I kept to myself. I still saw her in the ether during a four day binge of exhaustion so I stopped at three days from then on. I focused less on magic and more on my blade.
I’d kept it together for fourteen years. Now I was back in the shits with the company. As it happened I was with some of the most powerful mages this side of Blaxin. These mages aren’t interested in bullshit like eating only green food or exhausting yourself through walking because you sleep on your front. That crap’s for novices. These guys … when they had nightmares, whole cities shook.
“Has anyone here ever actually seen the Eyeless Ghost?” I asked, surrounded by my friends playing bones.
Two faces dropped in an instant like I had pulled them out of ice water, shivering, lucky to be alive, and their minds numb from the cold.
Scurvy snorted through his nose. “That’s a kid’s story.”
I stared back at the two pallid faces. “The girl who was abducted actually saw it.” I was digging myself into more shit than I could handle but at least now I had company.
Runaway. I had a feeling he’d be one of them. The other looked like he was about to kill me.
Chapter Nine
“What the fuck are you playing at, Raike?” asked Greaser. “You think this is some kind of joke?” For a guy as weathered as him, it sure was a surprise to see him spooked.
“I’ve seen it,” muttered Runaway.
“Hey?” asked Scurvy. “It’s a dumbass story used to scare kids.”
“I know. And I’ve seen it.”
“When?” I asked.
“It was only twice, nothing really.”
“When?”
Runaway looked from one face to another, dredging up some long hidden scream from his past. “The first time was in Dresdell. The other was the night before I set off for Erast.”
“You wouldn’t have been the first kid to have had a nightmare, you know,” said Docks.
“This one was different. You know how you know what something is the moment you see it, even if you’ve never seen it before?”
Scurvy clapped his hands together. “The promised land between a woman’s legs.”
Shadow locked in on him. “You’ve never seen a woman’s muff before?”
“What? Fuck you!”
“Because that’s what he was saying!” cried Shadow, holding back a laugh.
“He didn’t say anything about not seeing it before!”
“He did.”
“Fuck you, he didn’t.”
“He said, ‘even if you’ve never seen it before.’”
“No he didn’t.”
Shadow snapped his fingers towards Runaway. “Tell him.”
Scurvy wasn’t having any of that. “What the fuck does he know? He’s just going to agree with whatever you said to get a laugh.”
Shadow held his middle and forefinger on the table. “You see this? These are a woman’s legs. Up right here, at the very top …”
“Fuck you.”
“Spin her around, stick your nose in there, and–” Shadow sucked on the largest breath of air he could.
Scurvy slammed his hand of bones on the table, kicked his stool out from under him, and slopped his coins into one hand. “Fuck you.” He turned his wrath onto Runaway. “And fuck you too for whatever you said.”
Docks flipped over Scurvy’s bones. He had a decent hand. It probably wasn’t the best at the table but it might have become one if he bluffed well enough.
Runaway nudged his jaw towards Greaser. “What did your Eyeless Ghost look like?”
Greaser gnashed on his gums, glaring at me for raising the subject. The whole table watched him, our minds no longer on the game but at whatever misery consumed our friend. He peered at us carefully, judging our souls by the weight in our eyes. For what we’ve seen and done in our lives, we could’ve sunk an unsinkable ship just by climbing on board.
Greaser grunted at us. “I was eight. It was night. The neighbors woke me up with their shouting. I went to see what was going on. There was a creature climbing over their roof. I knew exactly what it was. It climbed along on its hands and feet, then it snapped its head up at me. I’d caught it in the act. It jumped over the street and landed at my window, hissing with its arm stretching out for me. I’ve never screamed as loudly as I did then. My dad came in, shitting himself at my cries. I kept pointing at the window, to the ghost, but my
dad couldn’t see it.
“Years later, I had a fight with my folks. I went to the army, lied about my age, joined. They were going to teach me about magic and, holy shit, I was going to be the best fucking mage there ever was. I would turn stone into gold, I’d have my pick of an emperor’s daughter, I’d have a palace full of exotic beauties. I was going to be better at this than anyone else who had ever lived.” He drew in a nervous breath. I got the idea that he hadn’t told this story in decades. The Captain would’ve known. He liked drinking with us and when you drink with the Captain it tends to get dark. He learns what terrifies us and the drink doesn’t cloud his memory like it might for us.
Greaser stared into the howling abyss for a moment, testing it. “I did my fourteen years. I got out. My mom had died. My dad was sick. Real nasty, too. Coughing up blood. Fever. Dripping with sweat and complaining how cold he was. I had never once turned a rock into anything like gold. No one has. But this … I was going to fix this. I knew people who stayed up for three days, maybe four, rarely five … all for one effect. I was going to beat every last one of them. I stayed by my dad’s side, focusing with everything I had to keep him alive. I didn’t sleep. I never faded. Eighteen days I lasted. I could’ve been a god by then if I wanted. And I tell you, things start to change right before your eyes. Lights and colors fuck with you. The cup you’re reaching for is farther away than you thought, and instead of grabbing it you instead have a bowl in your hand and there’s no cup in sight. You can’t find it anywhere. Then you see it’s been by your side this whole time.
“I knew the moment my dad took his second last breath, that’s when I’d release it. And it came. That gasping wheeze. For eighteen days I had focused on nothing else but keeping him alive. He breathed in, and in our room was a demon. Tall and bald, light blue skin. Its eye sockets were empty. Its mouth was like jagged nails. It knelt down, moved over my dad’s chest until it was an inch away from my face. Its breath was rotting flesh. Its lungs were no more than distant screams of a house on fire with everyone inside calling for help and no one able to escape. It smiled at me, its whole face contorting. I could feel the words grate me, like it was raking my whole body on its unending teeth, serrating my bones. It knew my name. It reached into my chest, plucked at my lungs and heart and pulled something out, squeezing it through my ribs. ‘This belongs to me, nowwwww,’ it said.”
No one dared breathe a word. The whole city had fallen silent at the moment.
“It faded away, leaving me in the room with my dying dad. It should’ve been his last breath but he kept going. He asked for water, I gave him some. He asked for food, I gave him what I had. By morning his fever was gone. He had lost a lot of weight, struggled to walk, but he was better. Not completely himself, but good enough. I wanted to make him laugh again, and even though he smiled it never went more than that. He looked at me distantly. Something was missing in him. He was hollow. Never able to even chuckle. Nor did he have an interest in whatever he used to like doing, like he was missing something and yet had no intention of finding it again.”
Greaser was by no means an actor. Anyone else in that moment would’ve seized with the terror of revealing their inner soul to a bunch of cold hearted assholes. They would’ve slapped the table and howled with laughter, convincing us all that they had bullshitted us through what could have been the darkest moment in their life. Some of us even started to crack a smile, expecting that release. Their looks faded when Greaser remained silent. He looked at nothing in particular, stuck staring into the table until someone could pull him back.
I struck before anyone could cheer him up. “The girl in the orphanage, the one who’s missing, she saw the Eyeless Ghost. All the girls in her room did. It came to them as a nightmare but they all saw it at the same time. It chose her.”
“Then she’s as good as dead,” shrugged Greaser.
“I want to find her before it’s too late.”
“Captain said no.”
“She’s one of us,” I said. “Someone who’s come from a life of misery. Someone with barely any hope of the future. The Eyeless Ghost may have targeted her but it was a human who took her, and humans leave trails.”
Greaser disappeared into silence, unwilling to engage with reason.
We played on, making it a whole round before Runaway saved my ass. “I’ve seen it. Exactly as you described. Nails for teeth. Rummaging through someone’s chest.”
“It wasn’t real,” growled Greaser. “Eighteen days awake, of course I was seeing shit.”
“I saw it,” said Runaway. “I woke up in the night. It was kneeling over my friend when he slept, digging its fingers into his chest. It snapped its head around, saw me, and charged me like a bull without even needing to get to its feet. I screamed, others woke up, and the ghost fled. But I saw it. Nails for teeth, sticking out at angles. Blue skin. No eyes. I wasn’t the only one to see it. And I wasn’t the only one screaming.”
“This was in your orphanage?” I asked.
Runaway nodded. “I was nine.”
I turned back to Greaser. “So why would a ghost appear in a room of children just days before one of them disappeared?”
None of us had an answer for that.
“Some kind of mage is using the Eyeless Ghost to target people,” I said.
“Then they’re too powerful for us.”
“They say the same of emperors, and we’re onto the fourth in as many seasons. Whoever has Día, we can find them.”
Greaser grunted, checked his bones again, played on. I kept my attention on anywhere but him. When I had to, I focused on his chest or hands, avoiding all eye contact. An hour went by. Chef laid four bowls of food out on our table of five.
“Sorry, Raike. Ain’t nothing personal.”
Agrat returned, tapping Día’s note against one hand. He took one look at the mood of the table and knew that I’d been working them. “I’ve got something.” He ran the note under his nose. “Lemoned cocoa butter.”
None of us had any idea what that meant.
“It’s a balm you rub onto dry skin. They add lemon to make it smell clean.”
“You said a man wrote that,” I said.
He rolled his eyes at me. “One did, I’m sure of it. One who also takes great care of his hands. Given enough time I might actually be able to see who wrote this, but I wouldn’t count on it being done quickly or all that useful that I can see him and no one else can, not unless I’ve met him before. What I can tell you is that grabbing a girl off the street probably means that the person who did this is a man, but carrying a girl any distance would require at least two of them and something to put her in – a sack, trunk, or the like. In all likelihood, a third person left this note behind, since the first two would’ve been busy and in a hurry. The author of this note pays very close attention to their hands and fingers. He might be suffering from arthritis or he might simply like his hands to be clean and youthful. If I had to guess I’d say he’s an educated man who earns his keep through the use of his hands.”
“A writer?” suggested Runaway.
“Perhaps, though I was thinking more along the lines of a diplomat, military correspondent, doctor, or architect.”
“They have all those in the army,” said Docks.
“Yes, but if the army wanted a girl it would have been much easier just to walk in and take her, especially without any questions like this being asked.”
Runaway turned back to me. “What do you think?”
“She doesn’t matter to anyone,” I said. “But none of us did when we were her age. We all hated the world. We all hated being in an orphanage, working the shittiest of shitty jobs, and dreaming of a way out. But it’s where we found our first friends. I remember all of their names. I’m sure you do too. Yet we all joined the company alone.”
Greaser grimaced at Agrat, the note, and especially at me.
“It’s easy going day in, day out, collecting money and threatening those who don’t pay us. It’s fu
n robbing places and knowing that we rarely have a hard day in our life. But we’ve all been drunk and we’ve all told that story, the one that brought us here. Alone. We shouldn’t but we’ve done it anyway. At some point we all had that one person who mattered more than anyone else. For whatever reason, they’re now gone from our lives. If it’s left a hole in us, then good. It means we’re not actually evil.”
I glanced over Greaser’s eyes briefly before his glare could silence me.
“The people who took her, they’re the same ones who terrified us when we were kids. I can’t be the only one who’s had dreams of going back to that time, being able to do what I can do now, and changing things. It should be impossible but here’s a second chance. I’m surrounded by the best swordsmen in the city and the greatest mages I will ever know. We find people. We terrorize them. We kill them. It’s what we do. We are the monsters in their nightmares. And this girl they’ve kidnapped? The one they’re going to murder? She’s one of us. She’s one of us back when we were thirteen – a nobody. Right now she’s screaming into the void, praying to every god there is that someone will come and help her. There may have been five murders like this that we know of. Unless we act quickly, Día is going to be the sixth. You’ve never been girls and you may not have been screamers, but on your darkest day back then, when you needed someone to come and save you from a living nightmare, did anyone come?”
No one answered.
“Someone’s been terrorizing orphans for years. It’s time to terrorize them back.”
Greaser blew out a blast of air from his nostrils, backed away from the table, and headed upstairs. The rest of us recognized that tension. Runaway looked to me, raised a single finger off the table, volunteering himself if the Captain gave the okay. No one else wanted to risk it.
I pocketed the note, Agrat left us in peace, and we resumed playing bones. For five, maybe six rounds, we said nothing unless it was about the game and even then it was one or two word statements.
An hour later the Captain stopped in the doorway. “Raike? Come here.”