Operation Arcana - eARC

by John Joseph Adams

  Fantastic as a village of hungry ghosts seemed, the behavior of our enemies made more sense in that context.

  We should expect an occasional Imperial nudge intended to keep us hopping toward disaster.

  I am destined to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when shit happens. I turned up while Rusty was trying to plug Midnight. Then . . .

  I was two rods from the latrine when someone inside squealed in surprise, pain, and terror. The moon’s light showed me nothing because Darling insisted that the pits be masked by canvas to preserve the modesty of the females among us.

  I hollered as I charged.

  Two kids came out to see about the noise. Both had deserted with Chasing Moonlight. They owned no combat skills. I laid them out as quick as it takes to tell it.

  Canvas did not mask the latrine from the eye of the sky. The half moon shed light enough to show me what I expected: Midnight’s brother and friends swarming Rusty, who was in serious trouble, having been caught seated on logs with his trousers down.

  Punch! Grab! Sling! Prod, poke, and jab! Punch! I am no master infighter, but I have stayed in one piece for years. And the idiot kids had not posted a lookout, or said lookout had been unable to resist joining in on the fun.

  Give them this: they hit their man at the exact perfect moment. But we need to knock off points for not having brought the tools to make quick work of the job.

  My yells brought help fast. Quick response is something we do well, our lessons learned in a brutal school. There is still a Company.

  Nobody got dead. Not even Rusty, though he might wish for worse luck when he woke up and began to enjoy the pain. His chances would be iffy for a while. He lost a lot of blood, one weeping shallow wound at a time. The boys cut him a lot, inside a shithouse. Sepsis was almost certain. Also, in time, a spider’s web collection of thin new scars.

  Only a double handful of cuts needed stitching. The rest I cleaned with alcohol and swabbed with an astringent. I made Midnight assist though I was sure she had had nothing to do with the attack. The lesson was that medicine and surgery leave no space for personal feelings.

  I know. I make exceptions. I am dumb enough to have recorded a few in these Annals. Sic a lawyer on me. I will borrow some black on his hair-splitting ass, too.

  So. Do as I say, child, not as I do.

  She amazed me. Rusty naked and painted with dried or jellied blood troubled her very little. She did not interfere with his hunger for breath. She might have considered elevating him to eunuch status but let that go, too. She followed instructions precisely. Scary, a kid her age having that much control. What next? Conquering armies and new dark towers?

  I was halfway in love when we finished, not with the girly girl but with the unflappable surgeon’s assistant.

  All the others did was keep Robin away while Midnight and I fixed Rusty. Then, tired as she was, she took over wrangling Rusty’s only living friend.

  During that was when Chasing Midnight finally admitted to herself that she might be the wild talent the rest of us said. She began flirting with all of our wizards. They all, Silent included, took her on as a kind of smart, pretty pet.

  She started winning the hearts and minds of the soldiers, too. She recruited herself a platoon’s worth of adopted, protective big brothers.

  Definitely a menace to tomorrow, this Chasing Midnight.

  Darling got a little jealous.

  She never had any competition before.

  I stretched out aboard a cot a parallel yard from Rusty’s and fell asleep halfway hoping I had not gotten every wound completely clean. The regular guy suppressed by the physician wished “that asshole Rusty” all the joys and complications of protracted gangrene.

  Darling’s judgments were neither harsh nor unpopular. Moonlight’s boys got extra duty. Moonlight himself got extra extra for fomenting. Darling overlooked their desertion completely.

  Oh. The boys had to carry Rusty’s litter when we were on the move. That pained them more than any other punishment could.

  “We have a problem,” the Lieutenant told the assembled officers. Darling sat to one side, leaving it all to him. She washed me in disapproval. I had brought Midnight. She wondered if something untoward was going on with us. Croaker might be a good man, generally, but he was a man.

  My thinking was, the kid ought to start learning now because she could end up running the show someday. She had that much going on.

  Silent disapproved, too, but only because Darling was hurting. He agreed with my long-range assessment despite what having a sorceress in charge might mean.

  “We have fallen under a glamour,” the Lieutenant told us. “It keeps us from going the direction we want.” No secret, that. Whatever we tried, come sundown the sun would be directly ahead. Come sunrise it would be directly behind. Darling’s talent was too localized to resist any sorcery beyond a hundred feet. Those she could not shield shambled on like zombies.

  Our wizards would fight it but still had to trudge on along with the other hundreds.

  So there it was. The Village of Hungry Ghosts, where immortal souls, perhaps once human, lived on in old but epic squalor. I was reminded of a bat cave occupied for ten thousand years. The immortality of the hungry ghosts produced neither prosperity nor any form of sanitation. A commentary on the essential wickedness of willful circumvention of natural order.

  Our wizards sat in a row, inches separating their shoulders. They stared at ruins so ancient they were barely recognizable as recollections of human construction. Midnight rested on her knees behind the gap between Goblin and One-Eye, determined to observe and learn. The rest of the Company were supposed to be setting camp a half mile away, beyond a narrow defile of a dry wash, beside a bitter pool fed by a marginally less bitter spring that once must have served the village. Remnants of an aqueduct ran to the memory of a town. Darling made herself an anti-magic plug in the defile, at a point where she could both watch and protect the handful of us who had assistants who could set up our part of the camp for us while we did something we found more interesting.

  I was inside Darling’s null, barely, feeling the siren call of the village, which was as relentless as gravity itself. Whatever our efforts, sooner or later somebody was going to break down and go sprinting in.

  Goblin said, “They’re bound here. They can’t leave without a body to carry them. But if they do leave and their host dies, they’ll die, too.”

  One-Eye said, “They do generate one hell of a siren call, don’t they? We can barely handle it.”

  “The Lady knew,” I told the Lieutenant, who relayed my comment to Darling.

  She nodded. She seemed unconcerned, there inside her null, keeping scores from marching toward personality death. Did she not get the horror?

  Of course she did. She was Darling. Darling always understood, better than any of us.

  Silent signed that he sensed six hungry ghosts but thought there might be more so long separated from flesh that they had become undetectable. He warned that those would be more dangerous than those that he could sense. They would be the hungriest. They would be able to seize living flesh. Elaborate ceremonies were necessary only for abandoning used-up flesh, not for taking new bone.

  Silent seemed remarkably well informed. I did not ask. He would tell us if he thought we needed to know.

  Goblin and One-Eye muttered. Silent signed. Midnight watched and listened. She read sign well enough now to eavesdrop on Silent’s dancing fingers. She was not good at signing herself, yet, though.

  She would learn. You have to sign to deal with Darling or Silent. Darling is deaf and dumb. Silent is bone stubborn about not talking. And signing is handy when we are sneaking around on people we mean to hurt or who plan on hurting us.

  Darling beckoned. I needed to fall back to where she blocked the defile, restraining glassy-eyed, confused shamblers who wanted to go make love with the hungry ghosts.

  Sometimes our most potent resources conflict. Darling’s null, though
, never spread out enough for general use in battle. We employed her in ambushes and where sorcery-capable antagonists were unaware of what they faced.

  Our antagonist here was hunger incarnate, or would-be incarnate. The hungry ghosts had no other drive. Normally they did not need to be anything else. Lure a victim with the siren call, devour him from within, slowly, while the flesh withered, then find another host, always where there were fellow incarnates to help with timely migrations.

  Speaking of. If these ghosts snagged enough Company people they could migrate physically, collectively, the lot of them, somewhere with a rich supply of replacement flesh.

  Did anyone else realize that? “Are any of them still incarnate?”

  Silent raised three fingers and flurried signs that said something about asses.

  Goblin translated. “There is one old woman and two wild asses.”

  “They possess animals, too?” I conjured an image of possessed killer box tortoises. Tortoises were common in this almost desert.

  “Higher order vertebrates.”

  “What do we do now?” Midnight asked. Very young, untrained, yet confident that she belonged to a “we” that included only her and the men she knelt behind, not our broader gang.

  Chasing Midnight never lacked confidence or self-esteem. Neither did she own an inflated notion of who and what she might be.

  No one but the Annalist, who worries about secret meanings hidden within words, studied her question. The Annalist relayed his curiosity to Darling. Darling was in a mood because people kept piling up and jostling her as they tried to see what was going on out front. She signed back, “Is it possible to kill the hungry ghosts?”

  Unsentimental and pragmatic, our Darling, in the hard places—especially where somebody was preying on weaker folks. She disdained painful revenge but lacked all qualms about cutting throats she deemed in need of cutting.

  Rusty had that in mind back when he was doing all that rocking. He had it in mind, still. He was putting in his longest streak of good behavior ever.

  I relayed Darling’s question aloud. Maybe because of the “first do no harm” oath from when I was too young not to have a caul of idealism across my eyes, I do have one of the softer hearts in the Company.

  They tell me it will get me killed. No doubt they are right.

  Once again Silent had the answer. “Yes.”

  Darling signed, “Then get killing. I cannot block this path forever.”

  The null is part of her, always. When it goes active against sorcery it sucks the energy out of her the same as the sorcery sucks it out of the sorcerer.

  It was obvious immediately that there was a sad gap between knowing that a hungry ghost could be killed and knowing how the killing could be managed. Even Silent had no suggestions.

  “Oh, Sweet Billi Afi!” One-Eye blurted, in a flat voice. “I guess it had to happen.”

  Four people oozed toward the Village of Hungry Ghosts. They had circumvented Darling by clambering over a ferociously rocky barrier hill between the ruins and the bitter oasis. All four had bloodied themselves during the crossing. Two were refugee kids. One was a mildly retarded cook’s helper named Thorodd Asgeir who had been with the Company for years without capturing the attention of the Annalist. The last was one of the Chasings’ boy bandits.

  I shouted. Goblin and One-Eye shouted. Silent gripped Midnight’s arm and kept her from charging her doomed cousin. None of the four heard a word. They walked faster as they got closer to the village. Their expressions said they were marching straight on into heaven.

  Goblin and One-Eye groaned. One-Eye began a muttered countdown. Silent shivered, angered by all the stupid. Midnight mostly looked puzzled. Unlike the old men she had no idea what was about to happen.

  She had not yet seen the true bleakness of the world. Hunger, cold, and human bad behavior were the only ugliness she knew.

  “Two, one, and . . .” Seconds passed. One-Eye was not quite in rhythm today. “And there she goes.”

  The screaming started as a dense and intense shimmer enveloped the four. One refugee kid’s head exploded. All four came apart in tiny, bloody fragments. The insanely hungry ghosts knew no restraint.

  The shimmer intensified as ropes of twisted light streaked into the bloody scrum.

  One-Eye told Silent, “There were more dormant ones than you thought.”

  Silent grunted, which proved how rattled he was.

  Midnight gasped once, then just watched. Her face lapsed into the grim hostility that had shone there whenever she looked at Rusty back on that first day. She was scary, there, for a while.

  Meantime, One-Eye declared this shit to be all Croaker’s fault because he disappointed his honey in the Tower so bad that she wanted him and his friends hooked up with horrible deaths.

  I called across, “I would sincerely appreciate you giving that crap a rest.”

  He grinned a grin full of nasty teeth and gave that foul hat of his a full half turn. He was thrilled. He had gotten under unflappable Croaker’s skin.

  I said, “I guess we can assume we were pushed to these hungry ghosts. But might there be more to it than just trying to put the hurt on us?”

  The wizard crew looked up in militarily precise cadence as a shadow rippled across the ground. I looked up, too, in time to see a smaller vulture join a pair already circling. A young one, not long out of the nest, now an apprentice to mom and dad in the carrion clean-up business.

  “Suppose the Lady can control hungry ghosts once they occupy somebody’s body?”

  “She might see this as a kind of Taking?” Goblin asked. “She could get control of the Company?”

  “Just thinking out loud.”

  “It would friggin’ fit!” One-Eye bellowed. “For the gods’ sake, Croaker, you sure can pick them!”

  I had some trouble keeping my temper. “What happened to those four idiots maybe says I’m all wet, but she is a long ways away. Maybe she don’t know how starved these hungry ghosts are.”

  Darling’s hands danced. I relayed. “The call is getting weaker and confused. The feeding frenzy broke their concentration.”

  Chasing Midnight now sat between Silent and One-Eye, with Goblin moved to the apex of a triangle. The girl did all the talking. Filthy old gray heads bobbed. Then Silent headed my way.

  Silent and Darling may be soul mates at the heart of the romantic tragedy of our age. They are what they are, doomed never to touch, but all their years of yearning have narrowed the distance they have to keep between them. They can stay close for hours sometimes, so long as they do not touch or make eye contact.

  They manage, however painful that must be. To quote our fallen Captain, “You do what you got to do.”

  Darling and Silent would cuddle up as much as nature allowed. They denied that any such thing was going on, of course, but even dim thug Rusty saw the untruth in that.

  Which signified only because Silent approached Darling close and signed in a blur, presenting a suggestion on behalf of Chasing Midnight. At the same time he offered arguments against Darling subjecting herself to the risks.

  Darling entered the Village of Hungry Ghosts in measured steps, that dumb-ass Company Annalist Croaker beside her on her right. He carried a seldom-seen bow that had been a gift from the Lady on his release from the Tower. He was pretty good with that bow.

  Along for the stroll was my favorite sergeant, Elmo, and two old soldiers named Otto and Hagop. Also with us, at Darling’s behest, speaking in tongues with terror, was Rusty.

  There was no popular support for his presence, but Darling insisted. He needed a chance for redemption. Even he understood, but, still, he looked like hammered shit as we headed into the ruins.

  We were about to execute a scheme bought instantly by Darling when Midnight proposed it. Darling had us drafted and rolling as quick as it took the buzzard family to complete a couple circles around the sky.

  Darling eased through the ruins, each step careful. We saw some dressed stones
still topping other dressed stones, but I suspected that the original structures would have been mostly mud brick. Rain would not be a frequent problem here.

  We smelled decay and saw some bones, but nothing like what I had worked myself up to expect.

  Hagop grumbled, “This reminds me of someplace we used to be.”

  Otto bobbed his head. “Aloe, five, six years ago.”

  I recalled, “That country was flatter. And civilized. There were people. Mostly nice people.”

  Hagop said, “It had the same feel, though. All the time like the shit was gonna come down any minute.”

  Yes. True. There was a sense of imminence. I became shakier. Hard not to suffer the heebie-jeebies when what looked like snakes of water slithered and splashed in the air on all the fringes of Darling’s tightened null. They would strike instantly if any crack opened.

  She grew more bold. That crack would not develop. She was the null. It did not turn on and off, though she could control its range and intensity a little. A very little.

  Looked like she knew where she wanted to go.

  The advancing null scared up a skeleton ass draped in mangy, saggy hide. It shambled out of a dark place, set out to put distance between us and it.

  Darling made an impatient gesture my way. Why was I just standing there, gawking?

  “Hungry ghosts,” I reminded myself. There was no moral ambiguity.

  The black arrow hit the air immediately. The frightened animal inside this being with a capacity for moral anxiety could get things done. Better to be alive tomorrow to whimper about what got done today.

  The arrow wobbled through the fuzzy bounds of the null. The spells on it took life. It struck behind the animal’s head, skipped off bone into brain. Rusty charged. Otto and Elmo yelled at him to hold up, it was too dangerous to get so far ahead. But nothing happened. When we got there Rusty was jabbing his spear into the carcass repeatedly.