The Reign of the Departed

by Greg Keyes

  “I’m not sure about anything,” she said. “But here is the orchard, and here is the giant.”

  “Billy?” Errol shouted. “Is that really you?”

  The huge brow furrowed slightly, and then the massive head nodded.

  Still, Errol hesitated.

  Veronica did not. She strode up onto the giant palm and sat next to Aster.

  “Will you convey Drake as well?” Dusk asked. “He is my companion as much as my mount. I would not care to leave him.”

  Again, Billy nodded.

  Drake snorted and skittered, but he went up as well, as Dusk soothed and gentled him.

  When Errol joined them, Billy stood. He did it mindfully, but it was still like they were on a fast elevator with no walls or ceiling.

  For a moment they were still, high above everything.

  Then Billy began to walk.

  The wind was gentle at first, but as he picked up speed it rushed hard against them, stinging Errol’s face. Aster said something he didn’t understand, and the wind suddenly abated, although it still hissed and hushed all about, as if it had been bent around them. Errol wondered how fast they were going. It was hard to tell in the dark.

  Dawn came, and—if anything—Billy seemed even taller than he had been. The mountains were long gone, and now they rushed over a strange, broken landscape of moss and stone. They came to another sea, this one full, and with no hesitation Billy waded in. It was deeper than his waist, so he had to lift his hand higher, but they could see the flying fish skipping across the water below, and dolphins, and once even a sailing ship that nearly capsized in the waves created by their passage.

  Night came again, and another day. Billy set them down occasionally so that Aster, Dusk, and Drake could see to the needs fully live creatures had. But then they would go on.

  “How far have we come?” Veronica wondered.

  “How far do we have to go?” Errol replied. “This is a big place.”

  “Bigger than big,” Dusk said. “The kingdoms have borders, but some say no end.”

  “That doesn’t actually make sense,” Veronica pointed out.

  “Neither does riding in the palm of a giant,” Aster said.

  Seven days Billy walked. It wasn’t all wilderness; they came near several villages and one city with high walls and towers. Aster urged Billy to take care not to step on anyone, but whether that had any effect, it was impossible to say.

  And as they traveled, Errol changed more, and faster. His heart beat; odd, coarse hair began to sprout on his head. He began to feel a little hungry, and on the sixth day his lips actually parted. Parts of him that Aster hadn’t included began to grow, and he was glad he was wearing clothes.

  On the seventh day, Billy stepped from miles of uninhabited forest onto a broad grassy hill that sloped down into a marsh with hundreds of gleaming creeks that wound about one another like a nest of silvery serpents. Beyond that, another sea stretched to meet the horizon.

  But that wasn’t what Errol noticed first. It wasn’t what got his attention. The floating mountain held that.

  It looked as if someone had cut it from the earth and placed it in the sky, but they had done it carefully, because the four sides and the bottom formed an imperfect cube—imperfect because the top wasn’t flat, but was instead an irregular cone. On the spiky peak a castle stood, tiny with distance, but glittering red-gold in the noonday sun. He could make out a sort of trail of buildings winding down from the castle and around the mountain, corkscrew fashion, until they were hidden by a high stone wall and a gate. There the buildings ended but the road they verged continued down, around another, larger wall and then out into the air, becoming a delicate little bridge supported by long, absurdly thin columns with their footings in the marsh. The bridge crossed to a high, natural pillar of eroded stone, and then to another, slightly lower one—seven upthrust rocks in all, each a little shorter than the last.

  Billy walked them to where the bridge met the earth and set them down.

  And he began to shrink. In a few moments he looked like Billy again, no taller than he usually was, but bare-butt naked. The girls had all turned away from him.

  “Good thing we brought your pack,” Errol told him, digging out some clothes.

  At first the clothes seemed to puzzle Billy, but then he nodded and clumsily put them on.

  When he was dressed, he started walking up the bridge. He hardly seemed to know they were present.

  The bridge was bigger than it looked from a distance, wide enough for maybe forty people to walk side-by-side.

  “Billy?” Aster said. “Where are we?”

  He didn’t turn to look at her. “The place,” he said.

  “Are you okay?” Veronica asked.

  “I’m small,” Billy replied, continuing on.

  After seven days in the palm of a giant, Errol was used to heights, but the bridge still made him queasy as they ascended. It seemed somehow precarious. When they reached one of the eroded rock pilings he felt a little better, but the bridge went through tunnels in them, and they were quickly passed.

  The tunnels had huge gates, but they were all open.

  It took them nearly the rest of the day to reach the mountain. The walls they had seen from below were huge, but they didn’t go all of the way around the peak; they were more like retainers for the road. They wound around the lower wall, across a long field of beveled stone, and through a gate in the upper.

  When they came to the first building, he understood he’d been wrong about the scale. It had been built by something bigger than humans. Not as big as Billy at his tallest, but definitely bigger than normal people.

  “Is this where you’re from, Billy?” he asked.

  “No,” Billy said. His voice sounded a little more natural. “I was here, though. Long time ago.”

  “Do giants live here?”

  “Not like me,” he said. “And not anymore.”

  “What happened to them?” Aster asked.

  Billy shook his head and shrugged.

  They passed through a vast, empty hall, then across a paved courtyard where weeds and vines had obviously had their run of things for a while. Towers and spires jutted up around them, but only along the narrow strip that coiled up the mountain, a strip no more than a hundred feet wide at any given point. Given how regular it was, it had obviously been carved. “This is all connected,” he realized. “This isn’t a road anymore—it’s a castle.”

  “Indeed,” Dusk said, as if this was all so very normal.

  Night came, but Aster wanted to push on, so she made light for them. They walked through arches carved in strange figures that might have been language, past sculptures of weird beasts and trees. Errol never saw any depiction of anything he would guess could have built this place.

  Finally they reached the top.

  “It’s made of gold,” Veronica said, as they stepped into the first hall. “Or something that looks an awful lot like gold.”

  “Red gold,” Dusk said.

  Drake’s hooves on the floor had a metallic ring to them.

  Billy wound his way through a labyrinth of rooms, large and small, until they came into an enormous courtyard. Unlike the others they had seen, this one appeared tended. The grass was regular and short. Trimmed hedges formed a maze in the center, and it was into that maze Billy took them.

  It ended in what amounted to a smaller courtyard, and a small, clear pool of water overlooked by weeping willows.

  Aster stopped and stood rigid, her hands in fists.

  “The water of health,” she finally murmured.

  “We’ve done it. We’re here.”

  FOUR

  THE WATER OF HEALTH

  It was a still, perfect, beautiful moment for Aster. The garden in the golden castle, the sky, the pool.

  Of course Errol ruined it.

  “This seems too easy,” he said.

  “Easy?” Aster said. “Easy? Are you kidding me?”

  “No,” Errol
said. “Here, now. Shouldn’t there be guards or something? Or a riddle we have to solve?”

  “I think the journey was quite enough,” Dusk said. “We have fought long and hard, and here is our prize.”

  Aster took off her backpack and reached in deep, withdrawing a little case about a foot and a half long and four inches high. She opened it; inside its velvet lined interior, each in its own little space, were seven crystal vials. She took them over to the pool, but now she was starting to worry; Errol sort of had a point.

  “How do we know this is the water of health?” she asked. “What if it’s just plain water—or worse, water of horrible dying?”

  “Or perpetual flatulence,” Veronica chimed in.

  “That’s a fair question,” Dusk said.

  “Veronica,” Errol said, after a moment. “If it gives Veronica a heartbeat it’s the right stuff.”

  “Hah,” Veronica said. “Sure. Give it to corpse girl. She’ll try anything.”

  “I just—” Errol began.

  “I’m not sure I like the idea of being experimented on,” Veronica said. She suddenly seemed a bit subdued.

  “But if we don’t do something like that, we’ll never know if we have the real thing,” Aster pointed out.

  “It’s the real thing,” Billy said. “I know it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen it used.”

  “Okay,” Aster said. “Okay.”

  She took the vials to the pool. Without much surprise, she saw the handle of a little golden dipper sticking out of it. She filled one vial, then another. After she filled the fifth and reached for the ladle again, she saw with a start that the water was gone.

  “What happened?” She gasped.

  “One for each of us,” Dusk said. “I have heard this. It makes sense.”

  “You mean it’s gone forever?” she asked.

  “No,” Billy said. “Only for us.”

  “Oh,” Aster said, uncertainly. “Okay. That’s that, then.” She placed the vials back in the box, and the box in the backpack.

  “I’ll keep them safe,” she said. “But I have one for each of you.”

  “Wow,” Errol said. “I guess we did it. But I still say that was way too easy.”

  “It isn’t easy at all,” Veronica said. “What do you mean?” Errol asked.

  “Has anyone stopped to wonder how we’re supposed to get home?”

  A long silence followed her remark. What Aster noticed most about that next minute or so was Billy, who seemed to be studying the ground.

  “You know what?” Aster finally said. “We’ve done one impossible thing today, and I’m tired. Let’s save the next impossible thing for tomorrow, shall we?”

  Billy had found them some rooms overlooking the ocean, huge suites with outsized furniture. Aster chose hers, but before turning in she took Veronica aside, leading her through the castle until she was sure they were out of earshot of the others. There, in a hall of crystal columns, she handed Veronica one of the vials.

  “You’re the only one who can benefit from this immediately. I’ll keep it if you want. The choice is yours.”

  Veronica stared at the water for a moment, then reached for it.

  “Thanks,” she said, uncertainly.

  Aster returned to her room and unrolled her sleeping bag on the floor; the bed seemed like it was still okay, but it was dark, and she didn’t care to risk what might be living under the covers after all this time.

  She lay quietly, trying to summon back the sense of accomplishment she’d had at the pool, but it was elusive. Formless doubts worried at her.

  But that wasn’t the only reason she couldn’t sleep, and eventually she had to admit it. Quietly she rose and went to Billy’s room.

  He wasn’t asleep, either, but stood on a golden balcony in his room, staring out over the sea. The moon was up, and the breakers churned silver in its soft radiance.

  “Hey, Billy,” she said.

  “Aster,” he said.

  “Can’t sleep?”

  “No,” he replied.

  “Me either.”

  She was standing by him by then. His hair had returned when he shrank back down; he looked just like he had the night he had kissed her. Except his eyes, which seemed dreamier, more distant.

  “So,” she said. “You’re a giant.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “You could have told a girl,” she said.

  “I didn’t know,” he said. “I forgot. That happens when we stay little too long.”

  “What happened, to make you forget?” she wondered. “I mean, do you know?”

  He looked at her, and bent, and kissed her, and for a long time she didn’t ask any more questions. But eventually he drew back, and led her to a small bench, and put his arm around her.

  “We are lonely,” he told her, “we giants. We never meet one another. We walk by ourselves. We stay mostly in the distant places, where people like you do not live. When I am a giant, my thoughts are big and very slow and mostly about the world around me—the stars and the sea, the clouds and the sun—mountains. And I don’t feel the little things you call pleasures and pains. But sometimes I remember those things and wish to feel them; to have skin that can appreciate a hot bath, to eat bacon and sugar, smell a wood fire.” He smiled. “To kiss, I know now. To do those things, I have to become little. Usually only for a day or two, because it’s dangerous—like when you became the raven. We forget.”

  “Yes,” she said, remembering. “I get it.”

  “But it’s true the other way, too,” he said. “I almost forgot to become little again, when we got here. I almost put you down and kept walking.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Because I want to be with you,” he said. “A lot.”

  “Oh.” But that’s great, she thought. She just couldn’t quite say it.

  He hung his head. “I can help you return home. There are ways around the Hollow Sea that I remember now. I can carry you home in ten days. But then I really will forget. I will take you home and then walk away. It might be a hundred years before I become little again.”

  She absorbed that for a moment, feeling a sort of black ball form in her chest.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “Sure you would walk away?”

  “Yeah. It’s too long.”

  She took his hand and laced her fingers into his. She thought of her father, and everything she had gone through.

  “I must think of Errol,” she said. “And Veronica. I promised them things.”

  “I know,” he said.

  She took a few deep breaths, wondering how they could hurt so much.

  “I want to be with you, too, Billy,” she managed. “I’ll find some other way.”

  When she started the sentence she didn’t believe it. But by the end of it she did.

  “The water of health,” she said, excited. “It’s also known as the water of restoration. It might return your memories, restore you to human form.”

  His eyebrows lifted a little. “It might,” he said. “But my true form is giant.”

  “I think it will work,” she said. “I’m sure it will.”

  And she was sure, Billy saw it and grinned, and kissed her again. She closed her eyes and just felt, trying to stay in the moment and not let her mind race ahead. It was going pretty well, but it ended abruptly when something sharp pricked her in the back.

  “Gelde,” someone said. Aster felt a chill go through her, dragging a hard frost behind. Then everything stopped.

  Errol saw Veronica slip past his room; she paused for a moment at his threshold, maybe thinking him asleep. Then she continued on. After a moment, he got up and followed her. He found her in the garden, gazing at the pool. She had one of the vials in her hand. Overhead the stars blazed, bigger and brighter than he had ever seen them before.

  “I wondered if you were awake,” she said. She lifted the vial.

  “How did you get that?” he ask
ed. “I thought Aster was safeguarding it for the time being.”

  “She gave me one,” Veronica said. “I think she’s hoping I’ll try it out.” She slipped it back into her pocket.

  “Yeah. Look, I’m sorry I volunteered you. It wasn’t my place. I just—”

  “Want me to be alive again,” she said. “I know, Errol. And so do I. Sort of.”

  “What do you mean, ‘sort of’?”

  “I can do a lot of things like this, Errol. I’m more powerful here dead than I could ever be alive, back home. And anyway, back home? Nothing seems right about it. Everything looks weird. Everybody I knew who isn’t dead is old. I’m just not sure that going back there is for me. If I stay here, who knows what I might become, how powerful I could be?”

  He remembered her riding the monster amphiuma, the battle at Chula’s village. What she might become—was a little terrifying.

  “You’ll have me,” he said. “Things aren’t as different as you think.”

  She gazed at him for a long moment, and he looked at her, really looked at her. He saw the sadness and pain, but he also realized just how beautiful she had become to him, how much he wanted to make all of her pain go away. He reached and touched her cheek. She closed her eyes and nuzzled into his hand.

  “You made me that long speech about how you don’t belong there either,” she said. “You seem to be turning into a real boy just fine on your own. If your body back home dies, I’ll bet you won’t know the difference. It might be dead already. Why don’t we just stay here?”

  “You really want to be like this forever?” he asked. But she had a point. What was there for him back home?

  “Errol,” Veronica said, “I’ve been killed once already. Like this, I can’t be killed. I’m safe.”

  “I wouldn’t go so far,” a familiar voice murmured.

  Dusk stood at the entrance to the willow garden. Drake whickered behind her.

  “Anything can be slain,” Dusk went on. “But now you see, Errol? However she may seem, whatever she may say, she is a nov, a seductress, an eater of life. And she likes what she is.”

  “This is a private conversation,” Veronica snapped. “You aren’t wanted here.”

  “Of course, you’re right to be suspicious of the water of health. Its effects on a thing like you are—at best—unpredictable.”