by James Maxey
“Hear something?” Infidel asked.
“I… don’t think so. Dog ears are so sensitive, they play tricks on me. I’m picking up faint voices, but they must be coming from miles away.”
“She’s free now,” Blade said, his voice trembling. “She was my dream while I was alive. Now, she’ll be the world’s nightmare.”
“What? Who? What’s going on?”
“The Whisper,” he said, holding his ghostly hands toward the sky, watching the light filter through his ethereal skin. “I died with a heart full of rage. She’ll be trapped in this emotion. She’ll kill and kill and nothing will ever slake her anger.”
“Let’s start over,” I said. “I’m not following you. I mean, I understand she’ll be angry, but-”
“Whisper was my wildest dream, brought back from the land of sleep by my experimentations in somnomancy. Dream magic,” he said, his voice sounding choked and tight. “She’s a dream creature who pretended to be human to make me happy. She became the living embodiment of my lust and vanity. I’ve walked in the shadows for so long I grew to love the darkness. Now…” He frowned, the saddest face I’ve ever seen. “Now I will have nothing but darkness.”
He shuddered and the wispy edges of his body began to blur.
“Don’t surrender!” I shouted, offering him my hand. “You can stay behind if you hold on to something hard enough.”
If he heard me, he didn’t respond. The tower of mist no longer looked like a man; then, it didn’t even look like mist. All that was left was the pool of blood where he’d stood and the light and shadows of the forest dancing upon it.
I dropped to my knees before the pool of blood. I was desperate to bring him back; until this moment, I hadn’t known that I could talk with other ghosts. I plunged my hand into the gore. “Come back,” I cried out. “Come back, please!”
Nothing happened. Though my condition was no different than what it had been a moment before, I suddenly felt desperately lonely, like a fallen Wanderer left on a desert island. I was surrounded by the living, but was not a part of them. Were there other ghosts in the world? Or was I the only soul who’d failed to move on? Was I just as much a failure at dying as I had been at living?
I lifted my hand from the blood, expecting it to come away clean. Instead, it was coated red, the warm fluid running down my naked arm. Yet, the drops that fell didn’t ripple in the pool below. It wasn’t real. It was ghost blood. I smeared it between my fingers and it faded away.
Suddenly, there was a loud canine yelp; I turned and found that Infidel and Menagerie had pressed ahead toward the fight up-trail. Now, a gutted wolf was hurtling through the air straight toward me. It tumbled in mid-flight, trailing loops of blue-gray intestine. The wolf crashed into a tree with a sickening wet-meat slap. Menagerie shifted back to human form as he slid to the ground, still gutted. His eyes were glassy as he stared at the gore in his lap. I noticed two bloody prints on his shoulders, about the size of a woman’s hands. Infidel?
I flew to her side, tugged by the knife. She stood on a vine-draped stone platform, all that remained of some lost temple. She was surrounded by dead forest-pygmies, but, this time, she wasn’t the person who had killed them.
Instead, that was the work of the Whisper. My ghost skin crawled as I saw her. She was no longer an empty hole in space, as she had been when I’d seen her earlier. She was now a creature of flesh, though it wasn’t human flesh. Her skin looked as if it had been carved from onyx; her eyes and lips and nails were gems of dazzling ruby. In her left hand was the hilt of a sword, the blade nothing more than a jagged stump. Despite her mineral skin, she moved fluidly as she lunged toward Infidel.
I noticed that fragments of a broken sword lay at Infidel’s feet. She was looking down, confused by where the metal had come from. She didn’t seem to see the stone demon about to strike her.
The Whisper caught Infidel beneath the chin with a two-handed uppercut that lifted her from her feet and made her lose her grip on her long sword. Infidel fell on her butt as her sword spun in the air. The Whisper caught the sword with a fluid back-swipe, lifted it over her head, then chopped down with a vicious grunt, attempting to cleave Infidel in half. The sword snapped as it crashed into Infidel’s skull.
“Ow!” Infidel said, raising her hands to her scalp. She drew her fingers away. No blood.
The Whisper leaned back, howling, shaking her clenched fists at the sky in frustration.
“Leave her alone!” I shouted.
The stone woman spun around, her eyes narrowed into slits as she glared at me.
“She’s done nothing to you!” I shouted. “It’s the Truthspeaker who you should be pissed off at.”
The Whisper growled and leapt toward me. I felt no fear, certain her hands would pass through my ghostly form. Instead, I sucked in air as her ice-cold fingers grabbed me by the throat and jerked me from my feet.
She licked my cheek with a tongue rough as sandstone. She whispered in my ear, “A spirit untainted by matter! What a delightful treat! We dream-dwellers feast upon souls, which are too often made foul by the filth of the bodies they cling to. Once I’ve choked down the Truthspeaker and the others, I’ll come back for you as dessert.”
She tossed me aside like I weighed no more than a kitten; I suppose, in hindsight, that I don’t even weigh that. Then, she bounded from the platform, darting back down the trail. I was very happy at that instant not to be Father Ver. My cheek burned where she’d licked it. It wasn’t all that good to be me, either. What had I done to deserve this?
My eyes were caught by movement. Menagerie raised a trembling hand to his neck and touched the jellyfish outlined there. He collapsed into a puddle of quivering, glassy snot. I don’t know what he’d thought he’d been reaching for, but I doubted this was it. Then, a heartbeat later, he was once more back in his human form. His guts were back inside his body. There was no sign he’d ever been injured other than the dazed look on his features.
Meanwhile, Infidel was back on her feet, the bone-handled knife in her hand, spinning around, thrusting the blade toward any stray sound. As much as I wanted to stay with her, I did some cold calculations and realized that if I didn’t want to become nightmare chow, I needed to get back to Relic and warn him of what was coming down the mountain. He’d been aware of the Whisper earlier; apparently he could see dream-women as easily as ghosts.
I leaned in Relic’s direction, picturing him in my mind. Go! I thought, and I went. I shot back down the mountain, flashing through trees and blood-tangle vine, moving in a straight line unencumbered by the tortuous terrain of the volcanic slope.
I whipped to a stop inches from Relic’s burlap-covered face.
“Relic!” I shouted.
He winced. So. The disobedient dead man returns.
“The Whisper! Nightmare! Kill us all! Dessert!”
Relic sighed. Calm yourself, Blood-Ghost. You need not try to form sentences. If you will still the turmoil of your thoughts, I will pluck what you wish to tell me from your mind.
I surrendered all attempts at speaking a coherent warning and allowed the memories of the past five minutes to wash through my mind.
“A nightmare loose in the material realm,” said Relic. “This is bad. This is very bad.”
Relic looked around. Everyone able-bodied was off in the jungle collecting the scattered gear. Father Ver and Zetetic were left sitting in the center of an enormous footprint.
Relic hobbled toward Father Ver. “Sir, if I may interrupt, you are in great and imminent danger.”
Father Ver looked up. He had finished stitching together the Deceiver’s torn lips. Despite his hatred for the man, I couldn’t help but notice he’d done a clean and competent job. The priest asked, “What are you babbling about?”
“Ivory Blade is dead,” said Relic. “The dream-lover he crafted is on her way to take revenge against you. I suggest you call Lord Tower back from his work.”
Father Ver stood and looked toward the sky. Th
e knight was nowhere to be seen. He looked at Relic skeptically. He was used to only being told the truth, but I could see he didn’t trust Relic. He said, “If there is a danger-”
He never finished his sentence. There was a sudden crash from a nearby bush. A spray of leaves flew out as the Whisper leapt. She cast no shadow; no doubt I was the only person who could see her as she flew with hands outstretched toward the Truthspeaker’s neck. Her mouth opened wide, revealing diamond teeth, then wider still, far beyond a human jaw-span, as she prepared to bite out the Truthspeaker’s throat.
Relic moved with a speed that proved he wasn’t as crippled as he pretended, striking out with his staff, catching the Truthspeaker at the back of the knees. Father Ver was knocked from his feet as the Whisper flew through the space where his throat had just been. She thrust her leg down, catching the priest dead in the center of his face with her stony knee. He gave a sharp cry of pain as he went down hard, blood streaming from his nose.
The Whisper tumbled like an acrobat as she hit the ground, rolling to her feet, spinning around, prepared to leap again at her fallen opponent. Before she left the ground, a small brown bat flitted over the treetops, diving right for her face. She swung her hand to knock it away, but the bat changed in mid-slap into a water buffalo. The beast dug his horn into her jaw as he slammed into her. They both bounced and rolled into the brush beyond the edge of the clearing.
Clever, thought Relic. As a bat, he could see her.
Suddenly, the water buffalo went flying up through the canopy. The Whisper was apparently at least as strong as Infidel, and just as tough if she’d survived a blow like that. Seconds later, she staggered out of the brush, trailing vines. There was enough greenery enveloping her that you could make out her form. She paused a second to tear away the vegetation. She turned back toward Father Ver, only to find that Reeker had run out of the forest to stand between her and the priest.
He sucked in a lungful of air as she dropped the last of the vines. She stepped toward him, a sneer on her ruby lips. Reeker exhaled, a billowy greenish fog that rolled through the air before him, spreading quickly to cover the space where she stood. She was faintly visible as the miasma clung to her. A tendril of the cloud reached me and I quickly retreated. It stank like awful, eye-watering, fetid cheese, after it had been eaten, half-digested, and vomited back up.
Reeker stood with his hands on his hips, looking pleased with his work. His eyes widened as her hand thrust out of the cloud and she jerked his face close to her own.
“A good trick,” she said, “assuming I needed to breathe.”
The Whisper flung the skunk-man skyward. She stepped from the cloud, coated with pale green droplets of condensation like jade on her onyx skin. Her gaze lowered once more to the Truthspeaker, who by now had risen to his hands and knees. She stepped toward him, only to be intercepted by an iron ball at the end of a chain that caught her in the gut. She folded over, carried backward by the momentum of the blow. No-Face charged out of the brush to pounce on top of the Whisper as she hit the ground. Straddling her, he pounded her face with a chain-draped fist, striking sparks. He struck again, but she opened her jaws to reveal her diamond teeth. She bit down on his fist as he struck.
“Haurrg!” No-Face howled as he jerked his hand away. She’d bitten straight through the chain. His little finger and a fair chunk of the side of his hand were missing. She slapped him where his ear should have been, knocking him off her. He writhed as he clamped his good hand over his mangled fingers. Blood spurted between his knuckles.
The Whisper stood and chuckled as she looked at Father Ver. “Is that the best you have to defend you?” She stalked toward the Truthspeaker. “If you’d like, I’ll wait around and finish off the ogress and the knight as well, crushing your hopes one by one. You’re going to die, Truthspeaker. There is absolutely nothing you can do about it.”
“There is no need to wait,” Father Ver said, kneeling before her.
The Whisper raised both hands above her head, knitting her fingers together, then swung with all her might to bash in the priest’s skull.
Father Ver lifted his right hand and caught the blow, stopping it with no more effort than he might have spent to catch a drifting leaf. He looked at her with a look of utter calmness, and said, “I do not fear you. You are nothing but a dream, and your dreamer is dead.”
And then she wasn’t there. The stink mist that had clung to her hung in the air for a fraction of a second, then dispersed in the breeze.
A shadow grew on the ground as Lord Tower dropped from the sky, cradling Reeker in his arms. He landed with a clang, spinning around swiftly to survey the scene. No-Face still writhed on the ground. Father Ver was on his knees with a bloody nose and a placid look in his eyes.
“What attacked you?” Lord Tower asked.
“Nothing,” said Father Ver.
I could see Lord Tower’s eyes narrow through the slits in his faceplate. “This is a lot of damage for nothing.”
Father Ver nodded. “This nothing mistakenly believed it was something. We won’t be bothered further by it. We’ve lost both Blade and the Whisper, by the way.”
“What? How did… how…” He paused, sniffing the air. “By the sacred quill, what is this wretched odor?”
“The scent of victory,” said Father Ver. “Without the half-seed’s miasma clinging to her, I wouldn’t have seen the Whisper about to strike.”
“Wait,” said Tower. “The Whisper did this?”
Father Ver nodded. “It is good that we culled her out this early. Blade endangered us all with his reckless dabbling in dream magic. Our chances are improved without him.” There was no hint of remorse that he’d caused Blade’s death with his ill-thought command.
No-Face sat up, cradling his injured hand. “Yurga bunnah juh!”
“He’s right,” buzzed a hummingbird that hovered into the clearing. The bird flitted closer to Lord Tower, and suddenly Menagerie stood before the knight. The contrast between the two couldn’t have been more striking; the tattooed man in nothing but a loincloth facing the knight encased scalp to sole in spotless armor. “You came here with a team of six and you’re three down before we’ve even gotten close to the dragon. We’re professionals; we don’t like to work for amateurs.”
“That’s enough of your insolence,” growled Father Ver.
Menagerie opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out.
Lord Tower said, “Your concerns are noted, but matter little. I’ve taken a sacred vow to complete this mission. You are free to retreat if you wish, but I must carry on until the dragon is dead, or I am.”
Menagerie took a deep breath then said, in a respectful tone, “You have something better than a vow from us. You have a contract. We’ll continue on as long as you do.”
Tower looked up the slope. “I spotted a stream a short distance from here. We’ll make camp there while we continue to gather our gear and tend our wounded. If Blade is dead, we have a burial to perform. Tomorrow we’ll press on.”
“We’re right on the edge of forest-pygmy territory,” I said to Relic. “They’ll be out for blood after what the Whisper did to them. We should retreat back to the cave.”
We have nothing to fear, thought Relic. Even with these setbacks, we still have the power to kill any pygmy that dares to threaten us.
“You’re right. We’ll slaughter them when the come to drive us out, which they will. I’ve seen enough dead pygmies lately. Let’s retreat.”
I had no idea you were so tender-hearted, Blood-Ghost. Very well. Relic turned to Lord Tower he said, “I believe we are on the edge of forest-pygmy territory. It would be wise to go back to the cave. We can be assured of our safety there.”
Lord Tower shook his head. “We’ve paid dearly to cover even this small amount of ground. I won’t give up the progress we’ve made.”
Relic nodded. “As you wish.”
“Where is your War Doll?” Tower asked. “Have we lost her — I mean it — as
well?”
I didn’t wait for Relic to answer. It struck me that Infidel should have been back by now. I tuned myself to the knife and mentally leaned in its direction, flying to it at the speed of thought.
I found myself once more upon the vine draped platform where I’d left her. She was surrounded by forest-pygmies, easily a hundred of them. To my relief, they weren’t fighting her. Instead, they were gathering up the dead. A dozen of them stood around Infidel, holding her at bay with pointy sticks. I knew that Infidel could have easily fought her way out of the situation, but instead she just stood there with her hands in the air.
“Look,” she explained, in a calm voice. “I didn’t do this. I’ve got no grudge against you. Just put down the sticks. You’re only going to hurt yourself.”
“Ugamadebasda!” the lead pygmy shouted. “Ugamadebasda!” Every forest-pygmy tribe had its own dialect; I could understand most east-slope pygmies, but these west-slope pygmies slurred all the syllables of a sentence together into a single word, which made it tricky to follow. Still, from the general tone I gathered he was saying, “Shut up and keep your hands up.”
“I don’t speak the lingo, guys,” said Infidel. “I do know a little river-pygmy. Nanda chaka? Gratan doy bro?” Her accent was atrocious. She probably meant to ask if anyone knew river-pygmy, but instead she was asking if anyone had a canoe in their mouth. It didn’t matter; the forest-pygmies didn’t seem to understand her anyway.
She sighed. “I’m not getting of here without hurting a lot of you, am I?”
“I think there’s been enough hurting here today,” said a man’s voice from high in the trees above. The speaker used the crisp, finely enunciated syllables of a Silver Isle accent; it could have been Lord Tower speaking, except the voice wasn’t as deep or forceful. “Are you responsible for this slaughter?”
“Not me,” said Infidel. “There was this invisible woman who went crazy and, uh… hell, that’s just not believable at all is it?”
“Not terribly,” said the voice above.