by Leo Hunt
Something black flies down through the mist, cawing. It’s a bird, a raven, with a stone beak and silver coins for eyes. It dives at my face and I thrash it away, still running, my hand throbbing with cold where I hit the creature.
There are more of them, black flashes above me as I run. I’m hurtling through gray woods, no idea where I’m going. I skid down a bank, sending coins flying, the birds crying harshly in the gray mist. I’m completely out of control, and when I trip over a root and fall flat on my face, it’s almost a relief.
The birds land in a circle around me. They’re made of shadow, the way the Fury was, although whether they’re demons or some other kind of spirit isn’t clear to me. There’s a pause while we look at one another, me on my hands and knees, them glaring back with glinting coin eyes. The nearest shadow bird screams, a high, horrible sound like a chain saw ripping into metal, and they leap at me.
I do the only thing I can do: I cover my eyes with one hand, frightened by the birds’ cruel flint beaks, and lunge at them with my sigil. The ring blazes with cold, sending shock waves of icy power through my body, and I convulse like I’m having a fit. The birds scream louder, and I feel their wings beat at me, their stone beaks tearing at my back and legs, but I swing my sigil toward them. The coldness grows, white light streaming from my sigil ring, and when it fades, the birds are gone. I’m on my own in Deadside, crouched in the gray forest, surrounded by a freshly fallen pile of silver coins.
I trek through the forest alone and across a barren gray moor, concentrating on walking forward, keeping one foot in front of the other, not sure what my plan is now. I try to hold my companions in my mind as I walk, remembering what the Shepherd said: that to will yourself to find something in Deadside is how you will come upon it. Ham and the Shepherd. The Shepherd and Ham. Did the birds take them? What happened?
I shouldn’t have spoken. What even was that place? The Shepherd should’ve . . . but he told me not to speak. He told me what I needed to know.
Ham and the Shepherd. Ham and the Shepherd. I’ll find them, and we’ll make our way to the Lake. Save Elza. We can still do this. I’ll do it alone if I have to. Without the Book . . . no, keep walking. I can’t give up.
Ham and the Shepherd.
Ham and the Shepherd. I try to hold them in my mind as clearly as I can. Ham’s stupid marmalade eyes and the Shepherd’s cruel black ones, Ham’s long fluffy tail, the Shepherd’s hooked nose and full waxy lips.
This is where I’ll find them, I insist as I climb a low hill.
This is it. They’ll be right here.
To my amazement the mist clears and I come upon them, waiting at the base of a huge dead tree. The Shepherd is leaning against its gray trunk, examining the Book, and Ham is lying on his side in the grass at its base.
“Hey!” I shout.
It worked! I can’t believe it actually worked. I never thought I’d be glad to see the Shepherd, but here he is, and despite his sour ways, aren’t we starting to get along —
The Shepherd walks up to me and, without a word, he strikes me across the face. It doesn’t hurt the way it would in the living world, but he’s strong enough to knock me flying, sending me thudding to the ground. He draws his boot back and kicks me in the stomach, and then in the throat for good measure.
“Damn idiot!” he yells. “You bungler! Do you understand what nearly became of us?”
Ham snarls and leaps between us, baring his teeth at the Shepherd. The ghost looks from me to my dog and backs off, still glaring with cold fury.
“Sorry,” I say, holding my hands up, both in supplication and to remind him who’s wearing the sigil. “I’m sorry! I just —”
“You just did the exact thing I told you not to do! You spoke to them!”
“It was the Judge —”
“Those things are no longer men! They are worshippers now!”
“What . . . what was that place?”
The Shepherd adjusts his hat, which had come askew when he hit me. He seems calmer now. Ham drops his hackles but still stands between me and the ghost.
“We had the misfortune to come across the Ravendark Tree,” the Shepherd says. “An old power. Older even than the Black Goat, though that one would never admit it.”
“It’s a . . . a god?”
“A shrine, of sorts. A living temple. As to what power is honored there, I think it is best not to know. An ancient and nameless spirit.”
“I’m . . . I’m sorry.”
“This world is not a game,” the Shepherd says. “If we had been slower, less lucky, it would be our heads on those poles, too, alongside the rest, singing that tree’s endless song.”
“We got away,” I say, getting to my feet. Ham presses himself against me, whining, and I stroke his head to soothe him.
“We did,” the Shepherd agrees. “Unfortunately your mistake has put us far off course. I had intended to leave the tree’s sacred grounds via an entirely different route.”
“We can’t catch them?”
“I do not believe so. Not now. Not on foot.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“There is a river nearby,” he says, pointing to a long ribbon of black ink that’s scrawled across his current page of the Book. “I believe we may be able to arrange transportation.”
We walk through gray heather, past gray copses of trees. Beyond a long stretch of dim marshes, we come to a stony riverbank and a fast-flowing black river.
“The Cocytus,” announces the Shepherd. “The River of Lamentations.”
The river water is strange, I realize: there are no reflections within it. The Cocytus is a swift flow of darkness, moving without sound or ripple. When I peer down into it, I can’t see the mirrored image of my own face. Nothing but blackness.
“Immerse the sigil in the river,” the Shepherd tells me, “and we will see what its Riverkeeper has to say to us.”
“What is a Riverkeeper?” I ask.
“A powerful spirit. Do nothing to incur its anger.”
“You’re sure about calling this thing?”
“With the time we have lost, I do not believe we have another option,” he says, not entirely reassuringly. “The Cocytus flows from the Shrouded Lake. If the Riverkeeper agrees to transport us upstream, I believe this to be our best chance of making it there before the Ahlgrens do.”
I don’t argue. I dip my right hand into the black water, immersing the sigil. It’s cold, unsurprisingly, although it doesn’t feel like putting your hand underwater. The sigil pulses with power. I withdraw my hand, and we wait.
For a while we get to rest. The Shepherd sits down, pores through the Book, occasionally removing his eyeglasses and peering intently at the pages.
Ham sits next to me, looking at the river with curious eyes. The trip’s been longer and more dangerous than I could’ve imagined, and we’re not done yet. I’m glad I didn’t leave him at home, though. I run my hands through his strange spirit fur. He grumbles. We sit like this for a while, and then without warning, the Riverkeeper emerges from the mist.
The spirit travels the Cocytus in a boat that reminds me of a gondola. The Riverkeeper’s boat seems to be made of bronze or brass, some dull-hued metal, elaborately engraved with spiraling designs. The gondola looks like it has been through a lot: it’s streaked with grime, some parts are dented and battered as though someone went at them with a hammer, and furry patches of white moss are clinging to the bits of the boat that ride higher above the water.
The Riverkeeper is a monster; there’s no other way to put it. The thing has to be eight feet tall at the least, more ogre than man, silently punting the gondola through the river of shadows. It wears a gray robe, something like a toga, spun from wool.
The monster’s boat glides closer to the shore and comes to a halt right in front of us, its brassy prow riding up onto the gray banks of the Cocytus. The enormous boatman steps lightly off the vessel and looks me up and down. Boatman might not be quite the right word, I realize now, because the l
eft-hand side of the Riverkeeper’s face is unmistakably a woman’s. She has a sharp cheekbone, flowing blond hair, an eye as blank and silver as a ball of mercury. The right-hand side of the Riverkeeper’s face is male, head shaven, with half a blond beard and mustache, and an eye that seems to be a glowing red ember. Whether these differences in anatomy extend below the neck, I’m mercifully unclear, as the creature’s robe is all-concealing. The feet that walk across the gray stones toward our party are bare and look more animal than human, with clawed hairy toes. I notice that the Shepherd is kneeling, and I decide it would be best if I did likewise.
Ham cringes beside me. I keep one hand resting on his paw. I press my forehead to the riverbank.
The Riverkeeper speaks, two voices as one, a low masculine rumble and a lighter, colder female tone. I don’t understand a single word the creature says.
“I will parley with them,” the Shepherd hisses to me.
“What language is that?”
“A spirit tongue. It was spoken when our world was young. Fortunately I am fluent.”
“So parley, then,” I hiss back.
The Shepherd, still kneeling but now looking up at the creature, answers in the same language. When he speaks, it still sounds like nothing on earth. The Riverkeeper responds, perhaps impatiently. The Shepherd says something else. He gesticulates. He bows his head to the ground at one point, and I do the same. The Riverkeeper laughs, a horrible sound, and gestures at us in a way that seems indulgent somehow. I’m looking up at its long, split face, half male and half female, yet strangely coherent as a whole. The silver eye blinks, I notice, but the red-ember eye never does.
After a while the Shepherd stands upright, and I do, too. The Riverkeeper is making an extended point. It holds up two fingers, and then says something else and holds up one. The Shepherd nods and turns to me.
“The Riverkeeper is moved by our tale,” he says, “and is prepared to offer us passage so that you may avenge your beloved and return her to life.”
“Well, that’s very kind of it.”
“They do not offer us passage for free,” the Shepherd continues, smoothly. “A toll must be paid to sail the River of Lamentations.”
“Right.” I look at the monster’s strange face. “So what does it want from me?”
“The standard rate,” the Shepherd says.
“Which is what, exactly?”
“A tooth for each supplicant,” he says, as if we were discussing the weather, “and a finger for the master.”
“Wait —”
“These are reasonable terms,” the Shepherd tells me. “If you refuse, we will not make it to the Shrouded Lake in time.”
“Whose teeth are we talking about? Whose finger?”
“Yours, of course,” the Shepherd says, as though talking to a child.
The Riverkeeper addresses me in its doubled voice.
“They say you are free to choose which teeth, and which finger. The Riverkeeper is not ungenerous in these matters.”
“Shit,” I say under my breath. “Is this going to hurt?”
“I have never paid a river toll myself,” the Shepherd says. “But from what I have heard, it is one of the less painful ways to lose a finger.”
I look at the monster, at the bronze boat, at the dark, silent river flowing past us. Time’s running out. Ash already had a lead on us, and after that horrible incident with the Ravendark Tree . . . I don’t know what to do. I like my fingers, and my teeth as well. We’ve all had a good run together. But I want Elza back. I didn’t come this far to turn back now. You have to choose what you’ll give up to get what you want. With magic, I’m learning, nothing comes without a price. And I mean, fingers, what are they good for, really? Pressing buttons? Pointing? If you didn’t have a little finger, if you were just born without one, would you even really consider yourself at a disadvantage? It’s not like losing a hand. Worst that’ll happen is I can’t look posh and drink tea with my pinkie in the air.
“All right,” I say. “Fine. Let’s get this over with.”
“I would advise that you offer up the back teeth,” the Shepherd says. “Less visible.”
“Just what I was thinking,” I say, sounding braver than I feel.
The Riverkeeper motions with one long-fingered hand, a Shall we move along? sort of gesture.
“Tell it one back tooth from the left, one from the right,” I say to the Shepherd. “And the little finger . . . on my left hand. That’s my offer. And I want to be taken right to the Shrouded Lake.”
The Shepherd speaks again in the spirit language. The Riverkeeper nods.
“They accept,” he tells me.
I swallow. This is for Elza. If I don’t do this, I’ll never see her again. What’s a pair of teeth and a finger compared with that? A finger for her whole body and mind? A couple of teeth so I can see her smile again? It’s a bargain.
“Get on with it, then,” I say.
The Riverkeeper motions for me to open my mouth, and I do; the creature reaches inside, stooping in order to do so, and its long, spiky fingers jostle against my tongue and teeth. The giant’s hand tastes of metal and earth, a dull, sour flavor. The fingers find the teeth it wants, the molars at the very back, top left and bottom right, and they twist and tug at them as if trying to undo a knot. With a rush of heat, I feel the teeth give way — it doesn’t hurt, not the way it would in Liveside, because they’re just the spirit of my teeth — and the creature withdraws its hand, two of my white teeth stuck through with its bronze fingernails. The Riverkeeper holds them up to the gray light of Deadside, examining them with its silver eye and burning eye for flaws or weaknesses, and then, satisfied, it takes a small leather bag from inside its robe and stashes my teeth inside.
“And now the little finger,” pronounces the Shepherd.
I hold out my left hand, quivering only slightly. The Riverkeeper smiles for the first time, revealing bronze teeth that are shaped like trowels: blunt scraping instruments. It bends down toward me, gently fitting my little finger inside its mouth. I close my eyes and try to think about Elza’s face.
Our passage along the Cocytus, the River of Lamentations, is swift and mostly silent. We travel against the current, the logic of Liveside’s rivers having no hold over this flow of shadows. The Riverkeeper stands at the back of the bronze boat, punting us along with a wooden pole. The monster is silent as we travel; it sings no songs, neglects to point out notable features of the spirit world as we pass them. I sit in the middle of the gondola, legs crossed, with Ham’s furry head resting on my lap. I stroke his ears and rub his snout. The Shepherd sits at the boat’s prow, silent, unmoving, like a figurehead.
The sky overhead is hidden by gray fog, the banks of the Cocytus equally gray and barren of feature. We pass gray sandbanks, gray rocks, the occasional gray willow tree that droops down into the black water. The river runs through gray canyons of dizzying sheerness and steepness; runs through gray fields of astonishing flatness and drabness.
There’s no blood on my hand, no pain at all. It looks like I was born without a finger. There’s just a nub, a strange absence. The Riverkeeper sheared it off with a single bite and then let my finger drop from its mouth into its clay-colored hands. It examined the digit with the pride of an angler who’s reeled in a big fish, with the avarice of a diamond merchant presented with a flawless stone. Then the Riverkeeper took a golden box from its robes, the sort of thing you might keep a wedding ring in, and carefully tucked my finger away.
The river runs on. Nothing seems to swim in it, fortunately. We pass through a landscape of standing stones, each monolith higher than a house, arranged in a monotonous pattern that stretches as far as I can see. We pass under an elegant bridge, lit by hanging lanterns, and for a brief flash, I think I can see a child looking down at us. We sail through areas where the river is so wide and slow you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a lake, a swamp, and I see islands crammed with gray mangrove trees. We sail through narrow chasms where the
Cocytus runs fast as a fairground ride, the Riverkeeper expertly punting us upstream through ferocious rapids without the boat ever seeming in danger of capsizing. We sail past a bank where a herd of black horses with human heads are drinking from the water. They look up at us as we pass by, their eyes white and blank as marbles, but none of them says a word.
“Is this what happens when you die?” I ask as the monstrous horses fade into the fog.
“Pardon?” the Shepherd asks. He doesn’t turn around.
“This,” I say. “Is this it? Because I used to think, how sad to hang around on earth when you’re dead. But now . . .”
“You have started to see it as the better of two bad choices,” the Shepherd says. “You feel that the underworld is a place apparently designed to blaspheme against all that men feel to be good and decent. You see that Asphodel is a labyrinth built by a madman, a twilit chaos, where water flows uphill and night never falls and man and beast have become intertwined.”
“Something like that.”
“I cannot say I disagree,” the Shepherd says after a pause. “There are places worse than Asphodel, hard as that may be to believe. Tartarus, for example. The darkness.”
“I mean, this is where I’m going when I die? Where everyone goes? Gray mist and horrible things trying to eat you?”
“Perhaps,” the Shepherd says. “I have come to believe that, if there is a realm of perpetual mist, and a realm of perpetual darkness, there must be a realm of sunlight to match.”
“You think that?”
“I will never see it,” he says. “And I have never spoken to any who have been there and returned from its borders.”
The river flows. Our gondolier pushes against the riverbed, lifts the pole, pushes again. All I can see is fog, black water.
“Then again,” the Shepherd says at last, almost to himself, “who would be willing to leave Paradise?”
Hours, maybe days, pass, and then we come to a waterfall.
The falls are silent as the river, a colossal torrent of shadows, plummeting down a high ridge of gray granite. My questions about how we’ll navigate this obstacle are answered when we sail up to the fall of darkness and then, without any apparent effort, are punting up it. The waterfall is below us, with the river rising behind our boat like a wall. There’s no sense of gravity changing, no vertigo. We were traveling horizontally, and now we’re sailing vertically instead. There’s no more and no less to it than that.