Grave Ghost

by Tia Reed

  Arun climbed down the wobbly ladder. The old woman in her fraying sack of a dress was bent over a tub of softening vegetables, squinting at her husband. Placing her hands in the small of her back, she stretched out and twitched Arun a nervous smile.

  Arun nodded at her, indicated the uneven roof. “That should keep the rain out.” The overcast sky had made distant rumblings all morning.

  She made her peculiar noise of acknowledgement and watched her husband approach over the yellow-green grass. The buffalo flicked tails and ears to deter the flies from landing on their muddy hides, more successful at it than the continual movements of his hand.

  “I must leave.” He had planned to walk to the distant village, offer labour for food and, if he was lucky, passage on a boat to Pengari.

  She blinked several times. “Late. You not go alone. You go with him. He take you.” She tipped her chin towards the stranger. Her smile showed a nervous hesitancy.

  Arun kept a wary eye on their progress. Even from this distance, his mahktashaan training picked out an aggressiveness in posture. This stranger had the stench of a threat about him, but if this was a betrayal there was nowhere in this inhospitable land he could run.

  “I would like to stay, but I have lost something important to me. It is imperative I find it.” He fixed a pointed look to the south.

  “Eh?” The old woman closed her left eye. One wrinkled cheek hiked up. She shook her head. “Gone. Buffalo walk on pretty stone. It break. You go with him.”

  She knew of the crystal then, and for certain had it. Arun nodded and returned inside. He tapped his boots against log and earth as he examined the widest of the gaps between the splintering planks. The search took mere minutes. There was nowhere in the bare, ramshackle hut he had not already looked, nor had he seen sign of turned earth among the grazed patches of grass from his vantage on the roof.

  A rapid conversation marked the arrival of the old man. Arun caught a flash of gold changing hands as he opened the door. The stranger, a short, clean-shaven but dirty man gone to flab, turned an appraising eye on him and grunted as the old man launched into his own tongue. There ensued a rapid exchange of single words that had too much the sound of barter about it.

  “You’re seeking passage south,” the stranger said without greeting or introduction. “I’ll take you for a fee.”

  “I thank you for the offer, but I have no coin and intend to make my own way.”

  “You’re not from around these parts.” The man’s smile was more a sneer as he tapped the pommel of his sword. “What with jabberweis and brigands, a lone unarmed man doesn’t survive long. You can work off your keep.”

  Arun managed a reluctant nod. One armed man he could evade, even without a sword.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “Where are we going?” Jordayne demanded as Prahak forced her into a rowboat and ordered his men onto the rippling lake.

  His eyes were fixed on the rotting zombie. His men did not need to be told to put their backs into the row. “Lord Point.”

  Her eyes widened with a flash of fear. In Verdaan, she would have little chance of rescue. Prahak grinned as their skiff drew alongside a creaky boat that had signalled its arrival with the flash of a lantern. Men hooked her hands and hauled her onto the sagging deck. Prahak forced her into the hold. It stank of fish and unwashed men.

  “You can take the journey to decide which piece of your slutty body the mage will receive. You know the choices.”

  “Stupid man. You would make more of a point if you target the shah.”

  Prahak flashed his cold grin. “When it’s his turn, Ordosteen will receive your head.”

  The hatch closed with finality, leaving her to shiver in the dark puddles as the boat caught the wind and skimmed the lake. Its pitch and roll, the crack of thunder, the lashing rain kept her wide awake. At distant dawn, he returned with the calm, allowing a snap of purple sky to show through the hatch. He let the door bang as he came down, taking slow, deliberate steps that were every bit as intimidating as he intended. The lantern he carried threw soft light against the harsh lines of the planks. He hung it from a hook on the ceiling.

  “It is time I make good on my promise.”

  “You are not man enough for it.”

  He shoved her against the hull, groped her through her clothing. “It will take but minutes to prove I am more than man enough for you.”

  Jordayne’s wrists were chafed. Hours of rubbing the rope against the damp wood in the sodden hold had frayed few of its thick strands. Sweet, exacting revenge would come in its time. Until then, wits were her tool for escape. “Untie me. I’ll teach you new heights of desire.”

  “You prove yourself a slut.”

  “Is a slut not trained in the art of pleasure? This could be good for both of us. Or will the mage keep my greatest delights all to himself?”

  Prahak shifted one large hand to her collarbone, the other around her neck. His squeeze was slight but sure. And yet it was his djinn’s burn which deepened in colour. “I have no intension of untying you, whore.”

  Jordayne’s grin was wicked. Touching her fingers together, she ran them from his navel up his chest and tapped them over his heart. “Best not, then. My talents are not for those afraid of the fairer sex.”

  His hand moved up and down her throat.

  “Do get on with it. You are proving yourself a bore.”

  “History will note me as the most exhilarating of defilers when I boast how willing you were to participate in your own demise.” He pulled a knife from his boot and slit the rope around her wrists. “You will please me or I’ll cut off a toe.”

  “Well. That is better,” she said, resisting the urge to rub her grazed skin, instead ripping his shirt to reveal his bronzed chest. She pressed a hand flat against him as she walked around. Drew it up, and massaged his shoulders.

  He grunted, a sound a woman of her talents had no troubling labelling as anticipation.

  “I’m waiting.”

  “For this?” She tugged his shirt off his shoulders. The fine fabric fell down his arms. Pressing herself against him, she slid her hands over him, teased him with her fingers, her mouth, her tongue, working lower, feeling like utter filth.

  She had him when he groaned, had to move around, allow his disgusting hands to grope, the cold blade of the knife he still held to lie flat along her arm. How easy to guide him with murmurs of “not here, not yet,” moving her own hands to the place of his surrender.

  A furtive touch in just the right spot helped dampen his misguided passion.

  He clapped his hand on her own. “I am not so deficient you can quell my lust for your disgrace.”

  The occasional footfall vibrated through the deck. No cries of alarm to suggest an attack.

  She ran the tips of her fingers along the back of his neck, her tongue around his djinn’s burn. “Your manhood will thank you for the wait,” she whispered into his ear.

  He leaned into her neck. His breath was hot, his hands tight. “Your toe will thank you to finish what you started.”

  “Are you waiting for this?” She grinned as he articulated his pleasure to the thud of the falling knife, may dear, departed Trove forgive her. A great deal of who she was, of what she was capable, she owed to him. “Or this?”

  She had meant the next touch to cool, but his lust was for power, not love. He pushed her down, dropped on top of her, there on the wet floor of the hold. She wrapped her legs around him even as he fumbled with the tie of her shalvar, even as she reached for the knife. Her fingertips brushed the blade, spinning it out of reach. She slid her arm across, closed her hand over the cut rope and flicked it around his neck, running it up and down to continue what her fingers had begun. “What about this?” Men adored the tickle of a frayed end on their neck, their throat.

  “Let me leave you breathless,” she whispered.

  Crossing the ends, she yanked. Ecstasy to which he succumbed for the length of a mere sigh, the shrewd man. Self-preservation
overrode desire. He gripped at the rope. She tightened it. He grabbed at the roots of her hair, pulled her head up, smacked it down. Pain jarred through her skull into her teeth. The rope slackened in her hand. She tugged, but he hit her again, snuck a hand between the rope and his neck, and loosened the noose. He rose to one knee. Jordayne clung to him, hands on the rope, pulling in vain. He was strong. And he was reaching for the knife.

  A chill pressure knocked against her hands. They flew apart, burning along the rope, and off it. The rope went taut. Prahak’s eyes bulged out of his head. Jordayne let go and fell to the floor. Prahak’s knuckles pressed into his throat. Vae preserve her, the rope was strangling him of its own accord. Propped on an elbow, she stared in fascination. His face was turning a red to match his djinn’s burn.

  The sudden patter of running feet, the muted cries, had to herald her rescue.

  She picked up the knife.

  The hatch banged open.

  “Prahak, get up here,” Bristles called.

  Prahak made a strangled sound as he staggered into the square of light spilling through the hatch, Vae curse him.

  “Stinking scums!” Bristles jumped into the hold. His knife was in his hand before his feet thumped on the planks. He hopped a foot towards Prahak, swung it around towards her. “Let him go.”

  “I’m not touching him.”

  Men shouted, the mast groaned.

  Bristles scratched at the taut rope. When his thick fingers couldn’t loosen it, he tried to wedge the tip of his blade under it. The Vae help him if he nicked Prahak in the neck. Jordayne crept up, her knife angled to pierce his side, to drive up under his ribs into his heart. His blade sliced through the rope. He moved sideways with the sudden slackening. Her knife slid across his waist as Prahak took a gulp of air. Bristles roared, with fury not pain, by the fierce look in his eye. He charged at her. Blood was oozing through his shirt, dripping onto the rope snaking beside his worn boots. Now was the perfect time for whatever entity had helped her to reappear. It took its misted time, allowing Bristles to slam her against the bulwark. Allowing Prahak, in complete control of himself, the fiend, to say “She is –”. Thank her unnatural rescuer the dealer’s last word was swallowed by wind. It raced through the hold, flapping their hair and clothes. Bristles’s hands locked tight on her even as he looked around. His chin snapped up, as though someone had slugged him hard. Air whooshed out of his lungs as his stomach caved in. His hand strained against an invisible force. His legs went out from under him and he fell.

  “You’ll keep,” Prahak said.

  “As always,” she replied.

  His feet tapped on the rungs. Shouts rang out from above. Beside her, Bristles lashed at the air. His body jerked, as though someone was landing violent kicks. He dropped the knife. It rose straight into the air, positioned itself over him and dropped. He took his last gasps to a thud and a thump and a crack.

  Jordayne quelled a disconcerting pinch of fear. “Druce?” Her wary question elicited no answering movement in the hold. On deck, the panic was cutting through a sudden, howling gale.

  “Thank you,” she murmured.

  Not even a breath of a breeze in reply.

  She pulled the knife from Bristles’s chest. Soreness and bruising were not reason enough to trust in an unknown entity. At least three more of the despicable scum manned this creaky, leaking vessel, but she would gain nothing by remaining in the hold. She climbed the ladder and opened the hatch.

  A stream of chilled air screamed across the wrecked deck towards Crude Voice. The callous brute was staring at a third man whose bruised body lay at unnatural angles against the cabin. He let out a long yell as the air twisted around his leg. His body flipped and landed hard on deck. His head knocked the mast again and again and again, cracking the wood, splotching it with blood.

  Braced against the bulwark, Prahak locked eyes with her. “Sold your soul, whore?” he asked, infuriating in his calculating coldness. Did nothing perturb the man?

  “I too have a promise to keep,” she said, blinking out tears from the wind screeching along the boat. A face ghosted in its stream, Rondel’s face, terrible in its anger. It ripped the sail, tore it off the mast and billowed it out across the lake. Circled so it could continue to pummel the boat. The vessel rocked. Jordayne slid towards Prahak. Steadying herself against the cabin, she bided her time. The ship pitched as the waves heightened. The timbers groaned as the wind forced them apart. Plank after plank spit its nails and tumbled into the lake. The mast creaked. Prahak looked up. His attention diverted, she threw the knife. At that instant, the mast snapped. Prahak jumped as it crashed down, missing him by a handbreadth, deflecting her knife.

  “Until next time,” Prahak said. Giving her a mock salute, he jumped overboard.

  Jordayne skidded under the mast. It was rolling the boat to starboard. The deck took a perilous dip to the choppy water. She scanned the lake for signs of Prahak. His head broke the surface and he swam with confident strokes out of the churning circle of water. Land was nowhere in sight, but to the stern a ship was setting a course for the doomed vessel. With water flooding the hold, Jordayne was left with no choice. She kicked off her shoes, tore the ragged flaps off her kameez and dived into the waves, striking out for the ship.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  They arrived at the palisades as dusk blooded the horizon. Two crocs cut a swathe through the long grass in front of them but left the buffalo alone for easier prey. Arun slid off the cow as his terse companion, Werril, called out to a hidden guard. He was glad to rest his sore behind from its unfamiliar gait but the silence from the village warned him to remain alert.

  Large hands removed a board from between the outward leaning spikes that protected the village against jabberweis and crocs.

  “We get a boat here,” Werril said. He gestured Arun inside.

  The wide base of his stance, the lack of voices offering welcome, the scrape of a sword were not clues a trained mahktashaan missed. Arun did not hesitate. Spinning he kicked Werril’s knees from under him, drawing the man’s sword from his belt at the same time. He struck down but Werril rolled away and onto his feet, fleeing as three armed men burst from inside the palisade, one broad, the others small and wiry. Their savage faces convinced Arun of their intent. He slew the first without hesitation, and managed to withdraw the sword as the other men rushed at him. His blade flew from one sword to the next. He disarmed one and was forcing the other to retreat when two more men joined the fight. Had their attack been uncoordinated, he might have prevailed, but the three kept him occupied while Werril regained his feet, circled around and dealt him a heavy blow to the head. It dropped him to his knees. He gripped a handful of grass as the ground tilted beneath him. Werril dropped the rock he gripped in two hands at Arun’s side. Its impact juddered through the earth into Arun’s throbbing head, blurring the four figures around him into eight. In this dizzy, nauseous daze he would best one of them at most.

  He was weak and he was mortal. The thugs had chosen not to slay. He dropped the sword. It was the least of his risks. No surprise the men set on him, kicking him onto the damp ground. Predictable that when they thought he was bruised into submission, they called for rope and bound his hands.

  They hauled him up and shoved him inside the barricade. The village was no more than a ramshackle collection of ten huts which looked like they would topple with the first autumn gust. A half-naked toddler crouched in the dirt, sucking his muddy fingers. Two bruised women stared in sullen silence as the men drove him further inside while a skinny third averted fearful eyes.

  “Stop your gawking and get ready to serve me,” Werril said.

  Whimpering, the thin woman scuttled through a dark doorway.

  Arun’s captors shoved him towards a walled pit. The big man uncoiled a rope attached to a spindle and threw it into the shaft.

  “Any trouble out of you, and Werril will take it out on them,” a wiry man said as he slit Arun’s bonds.

  Arun thought he m
eant the women until he heard a soft shuffle from below.

  “Get in.”

  He hopped onto the coping and leapt for the rope, taking measure of the outlaws as it swung. Hardened men all, their pores encrusted with the dirt of their crooked work, their features eroded of conscience. He stood no chance in a fight and so he descended, so far the walls blotted out the fading light. The rope ended short of the floor in the stinking steam of human refuse. He let go and squelched into a tight press of unwashed bodies. His training and reflexes kept his landing safe. He peered into the hopeless dark.

  “How many of you are there?”

  A soft moan echoed up the shaft. He shuffled towards it, onto flesh, lifted his foot as a woman sobbed.

  “There’s seventeen,” a young voice whispered by his shoulder.

  Rocks pelted down from above. Hands grabbed at the missiles. Limbs writhed over the muck, searching.

  “Here.” The girl pressed a nugget into his chest. Her teeth gnawed at another. She broke off her meal when he did not move. “It’s best to catch it before it hits the ground.”

  Arun sucked and nibbled the stale bread. If he was to escape, he needed his strength.

  Rope swished down. Bodies lurched at the bucket swinging on its end. Filthy hands scooped water into parched mouths. Arun pushed them away and seized the bucket.

  “One at a time.” He refused to allow them reach until he had restored some order.

  “That was good,” the girl said when most had drunk their fill. “Often it spills.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Liya.”

  “What is this place? Why are you here?”

  “I think we’re slaves.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Zulmei.”