The Umbral Wake

by Martin Kee

  A black cloud hung just above the horizon, distant still, but growing closer by the minute.

  “They arrived this morning,” said Gil. She handed a spyglass to Skyla.

  Through the circle of light, she recognized the rounded bellies, the golden carriages, the cannons. She had read the textbooks. She knew airships when she saw them.

  They flew flags of the cross, flags of the crescent, flags of an angel blowing a trumpet, there were flags representing all the arcane religions, emblazoned red on white cloth, green cloth, purple cloth. There were crosses of every shape, size, and style, every religion with something to lose, every religion that wanted Skyla dead. It was no longer just The Church, she realized. The entire world had descended upon Rhinewall.

  But that wasn’t what truly frightened her. It wasn’t what made her hand shake and her stomach flip. It was the central airship—a mile-long, city-sized ship, rimmed with flags and golden turrets. The Godseat dwarfed the other vessels as if they were toys. A flying cathedral, its crosses ablaze, its turrets trained on the city. Smaller ships docked and left, ferrying soldiers to the beach in preparation for an invasion all but guaranteed of success.

  From beneath the Godseat, the grand floating throne of the Pope himself, a black pall of shadow spread like ink across the ocean. Visible only to Skyla, it spread through the water like a leviathan, its tentacles reaching out towards her. She saw things in that shadow, moving pictures and misdeeds. She saw people dying in Lassimir, people tortured in faraway dungeons. She saw Melissa in a steel chair, saw her aunt in a round room losing her soul. She saw men with red tan skin, slaughtered in a desert battlefield. Behind it all in the reflections of their dying eyes, stood a man smiling under a white fedora.

  Skyla had found the Reverend Lyle Summers.

  Epilogue

  In-Between

  TOM PEERED DOWN at the valley below. It was nice to have his head again, and he laughed at just how absurd a thought that was.

  “What?” the girl beside him asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “It just isn’t what I expected.”

  “I hear that a lot,” said Melissa. “It never is.”

  They stared down at a river, wide enough to be an ocean in its own right. His vision here seemed far better, far sharper than it ever could have been in life. The water stretched for miles. At the far shore sat a clunky, square, hideous building. And to his left was a tree so large it could have held up the entire world. His eyes were focused on the asylum.

  “And you say I would have landed down there?”

  Melissa nodded, grass growing up from around her feet. “I intervened. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Tom could clearly see the black disease that spread along the shore opposite the asylum. Tiny bodies formed a jagged line of soldiers. They stood at attention, their bodies twisted and tortured into unnatural weapons. A sickening blank vacancy spread out in their wake, a consuming nothingness that made his skin feel cold just by looking at it. The valley would soon become a battlefield, or maybe a killing field. Tom had no idea what would happen next, and he didn’t care. He just wanted to leave.

  “Well, if that was my only other option, I’m happy you did.” He turned to look at the girl. She was small, maybe only twelve, with mousy brown hair and an inquisitive smile fixed to her lips. “I’m just curious why.”

  “The Reverend will be invading soon,” she said. “Most of what you see here will be gone. The asylum, the hillside, the world tree—not that it really is the world tree. It’s all just make-believe, but the girl who it belongs to grows weary.”

  Tom frowned. “And you?”

  “I’m leaving to create a new sanctuary, nothing this dismal, mind you. But I want it to be someplace safe, someplace that isn’t just a mythology or an ideology.”

  “I take it the rest of…” He waved a hand at the wilderness that stretched behind them. “All this… is pretty much the same.”

  “A lot of it,” she said. “I’m keeping a lot of the wildlife at bay for now.”

  “Wildlife?” He narrowed his eyes.

  Melissa smiled. “Things’ll eatcha.” And winked.

  Tom snorted. “So what exactly are my options, if any?”

  “I was hoping you could help me. I need good administrators, managers, people who can help me organize, get things done. I need good people, Tom. People who can delegate and supervise.”

  He chuckled. “Wow, and here I thought I was in heaven.”

  “Oh, it’s not that bad,” Melissa said. “In fact, it can be as good as you want it to be. We all gravitate toward our talents.”

  “What does this job entail?” he asked. “Not that I’m going to turn you down, mind you. But your recruitment pitch is extremely thin on job duties.”

  “A lot of people are going to die soon,” she said, and her face hardened. “Both here, and up there.” She pointed at the clouds that dipped like frozen tornadoes. “In fact, I imagine it is going to be a slaughter.”

  “People can die here too?” he asked.

  “For good,” she said. “The universe is a food chain, Tom. Everything can come apart with enough time. Entropy is the final, eternal predator.”

  “It’s war, isn’t it?” he asked. All joking had gone from his voice.

  Melissa gave him a grim smile. “Don’t let it get you too down. The last thing you want to be here is depressed.”

  He laughed in spite of himself. Here he stood on a cliff, looking at a childhood picture book landscape, a dark army of dead soldiers, an insane asylum a mile wide, a dragon chewing on the roots of a monstrous mythological tree. And a girl, killed by a man who saved his city, standing here, offering him a management job for all eternity. Tom wanted a drink. It was all too strange, too unreal.

  But the knife was real. The man wielding it was real. The pain was very real.

  “So what’s the catch?” he asked after thinking it over. “Because there is always a catch.”

  Melissa looked at him and bit her lip. “Well, you might not exactly like some of the people we will have to work with. We can no longer pick and choose our allies, not with so much at stake.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  More figures appeared from the forest behind them, men, women, even children. He saw nobody he recognized, but they were numerous. They stepped into the meadow where and Melissa waited. They looked around, confused, their eyes wide with the same disbelieving expression he had held a moment earlier.

  “Why is that?” he asked. “If this is heaven, then you’d think I wouldn’t have to be stuck with people I don’t like. Or is hell populated by more interesting people?”

  The parade of individuals continued to emerge. He scanned the faces, and his heart sank. One face he would have been happy to never see again. Rage split open his back. Something slick emerged, black tentacles of anger, hooks and claws, powered by shock and rage.

  “Him?” Tom almost spat the word. “Him! You’re joking! You have to be absolutely joking. I won’t do it. I won’t!”

  “That’s the thing,” Melissa said, ignoring his protest. “Space is getting tight and we have fewer and fewer options. Now, I’ve spoken to him, and he says there are no hard feelings, but we need Gareth just as we need everyone we can get. You’ll have to trust me on this one.”

  “No hard feelings? No. Hard. Feelings? Are you kidding me?”

  Gareth looked back at him. A squid of tentacles flowed from his own back. They hit the ground and pooled into hooks and blades. He nodded Tom’s direction. There was no apology in his eyes, no remorse. Nothing personal.

  “He’s a murderer.” Tom was shaking.

  Melissa continued. “He’s a fighter, Tom. And as an administrator and a goddess, we need fighters now more than ever before. We need them as much as I need you.”

  Tom sighed. He peered back over the cliff at the roiling army, then up. Bodies fell from the sky, tumbling into both sides of the battlefield. They fell like black rain, dissolv
ing into puddles that flowed across the landscape. People were dying up above, dying in droves.

  A flock of white ravens soared overhead, more than a flock, more like a storm cloud of them. They vanished over the horizon opposite the impending war. The crowd behind Melissa began to follow them, away from the chaos, away from the armies.

  Tom wanted to get away as well.

  “When do we start?” he asked with a sigh.

  “We start now,” said Melissa.

  * * *

  Acknowledgments

  Writing a sequel can be a weird tightrope walk sometimes, trying to balance on that line between too much and too little information. It’s also very easy to “lose the thread” when it comes to things like continuity and character development. When I take time off between books, working on other projects (in this case, BLOOM, a few prequels, and the PATCHER books) it becomes all too easy to walk into a minefield of bad storytelling when I return to the fray.

  Beta readers are the people who read your first-readable draft and tell you immediately what sucks. They fearlessly venture into what could be a truly terrible draft and shoot off flares for you to find the worst parts and make them suck less. In this case, I am truly grateful to Kim Ray Barnard, who tirelessly read draft after draft, pointing out in blunt, honest clarity what was wrong. Katia Clark was also instrumental in helping to point out where the early drafts went off point. Other readers who were exceptionally helpful are (in no particular order) Sylvia Petersen, Lani Pratt, Lisa Johnson, Angela Meadon, Serena Goldstein, Charles Barnard, and Jason Mullins.

  I’d also like to thank my editors, Tirzah and Julie who put the final drafts through the most thorough cleaning, and the cover illustrator, Daniel Johnson who has always provided amazing images to put on my books.

  Martin Kee is a native of Visalia, California, and is the author of A LATENT DARK, BLOOM: (OR, THE UNWRITTEN MEMOIR OF TENNYSON MIDDLEBROOK), and GLEAN(Patcher series #1). His novels exist somewhere in the borderlands between science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

  He can be stalked via Facebook

  and on Twitter @fersnerfer

  His collection of short stories and rantings can be found at http://marlanesque.com