by Sam Gayton
“We will,” Pieter said. “After all, There aren’t many miles in a one-wheeled wagon.”
Amna beamed, and looked up at Alexander. “Do not worry for your sister. With this boy, she will be just fine.”
Alexander looked away, tail flicking moodily. His ears had been stuffed with pillows from the palace bedrooms to block out Amna’s song: he was not going to the afterlife with them. All his scowling and clawing up of courtyard cobbles had not changed Teresa’s mind. She had just folded her arms and given him one of her looks (the one that only a big sister can give her little brother).
“You might have the body of a gigantic kitten now, but inside you’ve still got the soul of a six-year-old. You’re staying behind to guard us, Alexander, and that’s that. Don’t look at me that way. Of course I’m allowed to give you orders. I’m your big sister: technically, I’m first in line for the throne. And I can actually sit in it too.”
At last, Alexander bowed his head and blinked his eyes at them both. Teresa reached out and kissed his pink nose, then held Pieter up as Alexander’s tongue, red and rough as a brick wall, scraped over his face.
“This is a whole new definition of the word soul mates,” she murmured, taking off her gloves. Grim’s hand was inside a box beside Pieter. All Teresa had to do was lift the lid and touch the skeletal fingers, and they would be pulled toward the land of the dead.
She hesitated. “What are the chances we’ll come back?”
He calculated quickly. “Roughly one in five thousand, four hundred—”
“Stupid question, forget I asked,” Teresa interrupted, and opened the box and tipped it onto her lap. Grim’s hand tumbled out and tugged Pieter on the nose.
He felt something similar to a sneeze. Around him, the world washed away like a painting in the rain.
So it was that Pieter and Teresa took Grim’s hand, and let it pull them into the world of the dead. Apart from the far-away glimmer of Amna’s fire, their souls were the only shining lights in that gray and gloomy place. Pieter was the blue of clear skies, and Teresa was the color of a spring thunderstorm.
“Thank the afterlife!” she sighed, looking down at the ghostly outline of her Spice Monkey suit. “Our souls are wearing clothes. You won’t believe how much time I spent worrying about that.”
“I’m body shaped!” Pieter cried, feeling a sudden lurch of vertigo as he looked down from a much higher place than he was currently used to. Legs, shoulders, knees, and toes—all below his neck once more. And why wouldn’t they be? Monsieur Snippy had executed his body, not his soul.
“This must be the place Amna told us about,” Teresa said, turning her attention to the foggy world around them. “The Gray Sea, she called it, that separates the white of this life from the black of the next.”
They stood under a sky the color of fog on a beach the color of ashes, watching as waves the color of slush broke across the shore. Hush, each one whispered as it slumped and dissolved. Hush. Hush.
Pieter shrugged. (Oh, it felt good to do that again.) “It certainly matches Amna’s description.”
Grim’s hand crawled across the sand like a crab, heading toward an ancient rowboat that bobbed on a ragged rope in the surf.
“ ‘And the Pale Traveler will lead you across,’ ” Teresa said, remembering one of the many wildfolk sayings Amna had shared with them before they went.
They followed the hand and got in, and the boat cast off by itself with no oars or rudder. Soon they had crested the waves and were gliding slowly out to sea.
There in the shallows, the rowboat passed over giant jellyfish creatures floating an arm’s reach beneath the keel, like luminous orchids they could reach out and pluck. Their petaled fronds wilted and bloomed, wilted and bloomed as they drifted in the black water, and trapped in their long trailing tentacles were faint struggling souls, fuzzy and blue, no shape to them at all.
“Didn’t Amna say something about the Lotus-Eaters?” Teresa said, grim-faced, as they both peered over the side. “The last living things that feed on the fringes of life. Those things have souls in their tentacles: they’re eating memories. Look.”
She pointed at the tentacles. Blue light from the souls was being sucked along them and into the center of each creature. Pieter saw faint pictures and shapes flickering there, like lanterns filled with dreams.
“Maybe they jumped in,” Pieter said. “To forget.”
“Or they were trying to swim back to their lives.”
“Poor souls.” He shuddered. “Why would they try and do that?”
“Same reason we’re here, Pieter. Unfinished business.”
The shore and the Lotus-Eaters disappeared as they sailed farther out. Soon there was nothing but gloomy dusk, and rippling water, and a horizon dividing the two. Amna’s fire shrank down, smaller and fainter, until it was no more than a distant star, shining in the corners of their eyes.
A faint wind blew now and then in the stillness. Pieter couldn’t stop shivering. Not because he was freezing—feeling the cold here was impossible. It was more that the memory of coldness made him shiver, just like his soul remembered that it was body shaped, and usually wore a Tallymaster outfit.
“Did you see how those souls beneath the water had gone all fuzzy?” he said. “Memories are powerful here. We’re nothing without them.”
Teresa lay back in the rowboat’s seat and looked up at the sky. “Then we better not forget who we are.”
But that was hard when their lives already seemed so far away, and it only got harder. Day never broke. Night never came. Time stood frozen. When Pieter and Teresa woke, haunted by the memory of hunger and thirst, the sky was still dusk and the water was still calm and the rowboat was still sailing ever onwards.
“Your hair’s grown,” he told Teresa one day when he woke. “Like Rapunzel’s.”
She stared back at him, expression blank and puzzled.
“You’re wrong,” she insisted, reaching up to touch her plait. “It’s always been this long, since before we met.”
Pieter said nothing, but inwardly he was troubled to the depths of his soul. Teresa wasn’t remembering herself right. She had forgotten that her plait should be shorter, because Lord Xin had sliced it off during their battle on the kitchen shelves.
Hadn’t he?
Or was it Amna’s charms he’d cut?
But when had that been?
Memory was powerful in the land of the dead, but so too was forgetting. Their souls began to grow faded and worn at the edges like old denim. Perhaps if they had been alone on that long journey, Pieter and Teresa would have lost every part of who they were, memory after memory blown from their heads until they were shapeless will-o’-the-wisps that did not even remember their names.
But it did not happen. They were best friends who knew each other better than summer knows the sun. When Teresa forgot about her plait, Pieter reminded her. When he couldn’t remember how he drank his khave, she told him: half a nib of sugarcane and a smidge of blazing pip.
“Oh, of course!” he’d say. “And what’s this little flickering thing I can see, like a tinderfly stuck behind my eye?”
“That’s Amna’s fire, which she’ll keep lit until we follow it back home.”
“I remember now. And am I right in thinking that you’re actually a secret princess?”
Teresa’s soul blushed blue. “Shut it.”
At last, the horizon ahead began to darken, turning from dusk to deepest night. Constellations Pieter had never seen before appeared above them, and the sky glittered with the ghosts of a billion stars that had gone supernova.
The boat surged on, quicker now.
They journeyed into a wide estuary, veering around the sharp reef rocks, then the silt banks, then the dead marsh grass and bubbling mudflats, until the sea became a swamp. Fog surrounded them, thick and cold and gray as old porridge. In the murk they began to see wisps of light in the swamp, drawing closer.
It was Teresa who spotted the first t
inderlamps, swinging above the water from the petrified marsh trees like hanged men. Soon, small wooden shacks were appearing, perched up in the bare branches, then finally whole streets of empty houses that teetered on rotting stilts or sat half slumped in the swamp water.
The rowboat bobbed down the silent waterways. And from this city of shrouded windows and leaning doorways, stared the ancient faces of the dead.
2
The Conquering of Catacomb
Every soul had its own shape and color. Wildfolk drifted like wisps of fire smoke, or hung like moonbeams. Laplönder souls seemed to dance in the air, like dust motes in sunlight beneath the everpines. Petrossians glittered, beautiful and cold as icebergs, or swirled like the wind in Worsen.
All the souls that Grim has ever guided, Pieter thought to himself in wonder. Everyone that ever died in Petrossia . . . he led them here to the land of the dead, and they built themselves a city.
“Hello?” he called out to them.
The souls shrank back into their houses. They shuttered their windows and put out their lamps.
“Why are they hiding?” Teresa said in the eerie quiet.
A groaning creak made Pieter jump, as a trap door beneath one of the houses swung open. A family of wildfolk souls began drifting down a ladder one at a time onto their moss-covered marsh rafts.
“Hey!” Pieter called.
The wildfolk family crouched down, touching charms in their hair.
“Where are you going?” Pieter asked. “And have you seen a talking skull anywhere?”
A few frightened whispers came back across the water, then the wildfolk started paddling off in the other direction as fast as they could. Soon they were lost in the fog.
“Did you understand them?” he asked Teresa. “What did they say?”
“Warnings,” she said, her soul the color of ice. “They told us to leave, and . . . something else. Something I don’t understand.”
“What?”
“The czarmy has come, they said. Not the Czar: the czarmy.”
The boat drifted on down city canals choked with reeds, gliding under half-sunken walkways and bridges that dripped rust, until finally it bumped against a jetty and scraped to a stop. Grim’s hand crawled out, scurried down a passageway, and was soon out of sight. Pieter and Teresa jumped onto the jetty and scrambled after it, following the clack of bone fingertips over the stone floors. There was no other sound. The city was silent and still and shrouded by mist.
Finally, they began to hear faint shouts from up ahead. The voices were muffled by the fog, but Pieter could still hear the panic in them. Blue flashes lit the passageway as souls flitted across it like bursts of thunder in a cloud: there and then gone. It felt like the moment before a storm. Danger prickled the back of Pieter’s neck. Something was happening up ahead, and getting closer . . .
“Pieter, look out!”
Teresa scrambled up a wall to one side, her Spice Monkey skills making her lightning quick. But Pieter was too slow. A torrent of souls was rushing down the passageway toward them, solid and blue as a wave. They plunged straight through him without stopping, their thoughts lodging in his head one after another as he merged with each soul for just an instant.
Run!
The czarmy is in Catacomb!
A sword so sharp it cuts—
Teresa’s hand gripped Pieter and hauled him sideways, free of the flood of spirits.
“Their heads were in my head,” he gasped. “I heard their thoughts—this city’s name is Catacomb. They’re fleeing from the Czar.”
“Come on!” Teresa gripped his hand and together they jumped back in and forced their way up the passageway, like salmon forging their way upstream. Souls barged straight through them, the panic and wild terror of each one hitting Pieter and Teresa like thunderclaps, until at last they stumbled out onto a wide square plaza.
“Holy Sohcahtoa,” Pieter breathed.
The plaza was paved with black and white tiles like a giant chessboard, and lined with grand balconied buildings. This was the center of the Catacomb, where every canal and passageway led.
And it was swarming with czars.
Not just one czar, but every czar. All the kings of Petrossia. Every man who had ever worn the Iron Crown.
Teresa yanked Pieter back into the mouth of the shadowy passageway, and together they hid from the glaring pairs of green eyes that each had their own portrait back in the Hall of Faces. Pieter couldn’t believe how many there were. Sons, fathers, grandfathers . . . wicked uncles and short-lived nephews . . . hundreds of the foulest souls ever to have lived and died, all gathered in the plaza below.28
There was Ivan the Savage, whose teeth were sharpened into points; Boris of the Nine Wives, with his soul like a milky blister ready to pop; Vladimir Beard-cleaver, famous for scalping the chins of his enemies and pinning them to his chest like they were medals. Even Tiffany Blood-drinker was there, trying desperately to glue the ghost of a squirrel tail back onto her top lip.
The czars gave up chasing away the last few screaming souls, then drifted back to the plaza, grinning and strutting and fighting over which of them had committed the most massacres when he’d been alive.
“He’s brought them all together,” Teresa said in awestruck horror. “An army of czars.”
How Pieter wished they had somehow been able to bring Alexander’s strength with them, or Amna’s magic, or Teresa’s alchemy. But what had come in their little boat, across seas and deserts wider than forever? Only him. Just her. Nothing but the two of them, against an entire czarmy.
Suddenly the uproar in the plaza hushed. All the kings turned inward, forming an empty circle at their center. A curved white blade appeared in the middle of the air like a crescent moon, and fell down to the ground in a slash and a slice. A door had appeared, cut from the very fabric of reality. Pieter’s soul shook as his mind frantically did the calculations to square-root his fear.
“Ancestors!” boomed a familiar voice.
Through the door, the Czar stepped out onto Catacomb’s plaza.
* * *
28. The only exception was Nincombob the Brief, the jester who had snatched the Iron Crown and tried it on as a joke and had therefore technically been King of all Petrossia for the seven seconds the Czar had found him amusing enough not to execute.
3
The Czarmy
The Czar looked different from when Pieter had seen him last. One tip of his mustache was broken off, like a boar’s tusk. Along with his swirling, thunder-flashing, storm-colored soul, that only made him look more fearsome. In the Czar’s grasp, the soul-blade had become even more vicious looking than before.
Even the past kings of Petrossia shrunk back from him a little as he appeared. Then they remembered themselves, and launched into deafening roars. They saluted and spat and clapped and beat their hollow chests, each showing approval in their own way. Vladimir Beard-cleaver was so delighted he punched his neighbor in the face and tried to rip off his goatee.
“Catacomb is ours for the taking!” roared the Czar savagely, raising his scimitar blade aloft. “Doesn’t conquering make you feel alive again?!”
“If I was alive again,” Vladimir Beard-cleaver grumbled, “I’d have a whole new cloak made of my victims’ facial hair by now. When will you let someone else have a go with that sharp blade of yours?”
The czarmy made eager sounds of agreement, each of them gazing enviously at the scythe-sword.
The Czar nodded sympathetically. “I hear you, Great-uncle Vladimir. As souls, we can make our enemies remember pain—but we cannot truly harm them. It is impossible to kill what has already died. Unless, of course, you hold a soul-blade like I do.”
Without warning, the Czar sliced his sword. There was a hideous scream—a sudden dazzling flash. When Pieter opened his eyes, Vladimir Beard-cleaver was on the floor, holding onto his own knotted mustache and sobbing as it dissolved away into nothingness in his hands.
Pieter blinked. He could s
till see the afterimage of the soul-blade’s deadly slice, like a scar behind his eyelids.
“That,” growled the Czar, “was for assassinating my father.”
“Thanks, son!” a soul called out from the crowd.
“Vladimir Baby-face, as I now rename him, has a point!” called the Czar to the czarmy. “Only when we all have swords as sharp as mine will we be a force the land of the dead truly fears! Isn’t that right, Grim?”
Pieter and Teresa both clutched each other, as the Czar raised up the skull he had been holding down by his side.
There he was: Petrossia’s psychopomp!
Put me back together! Grim snapped. You promised!
“Promises are like peace treaties.” The Czar grinned. “Made to be broken.”
Around him, the czarmy roared with laughter.
You might think you’ve conquered Death, Grim warned. But there are other psychopomps—hundreds of them—all guiding souls in lands near and far. You’re only ruining Petrossia.
“Did you hear that?” bellowed the Czar. “Hundreds of others like Grim! And each of them carrying a soul-blade! That is why we must hunt down the psychopomps of Hertz, and Albion, and Madri, and Kiln!”
Grim was so horrified, his jaw dropped.
The Czar picked it up and popped it back into place.
You’ll end the worlds! the skull cried, as Pieter and Teresa listened in horror. Both the lands of the living and the dead! There’ll be chaos! Brimstone! Eternal maws of ceaseless horror!
“Sounds perfect, doesn’t it?” said the Czar to his troops. “Now let us hunt down these psychopomps, and soon you will all have swords sharp enough to kill the dead!”
“Huzzah for the Czar of Czars!” yelled the past kings of Petrossia.
Lunatics! Grim shrieked. Imbeciles! Idi-aaaaaaaahhhh!
The Czar booted the skull like a ball into the dustiest corner of the plaza, then ordered his czarmy to attention.
“We must go to Coda-in-the-West,” he said, “the city where those who die in Hertz are guided to! We will take our second soul-blade from the psychopomp of that land! But no rush. All I need to do to take us there is cut another door in the air.” He looked around at his ancestors. “Why don’t we enjoy ourselves in Catacomb first? It’s been a while since some of you have gone conquering and pillaging.” He grinned. “You ought to practice.”