by Paula Guran
“Roz,” Lark whimpered. He sounded like the eleven-year-old Clark Dunkin that she had happened to sit next to in sixth grade: sniveling and sullen but, still, full of a future. The years of dishevelment sloughed off in seconds, revealing the baby face below. Was this how the Tree could promise endless life, like her mother said? “Help me.”
She blinked, and became faintly aware that she was crying. “Don’t fight it.”
Now roots were bursting out of his storm-worn sneakers, running wildly toward moist earth—they were trying to find some place to settle, to never let go. Lark was trying to shamble forward but he could only heave his chest, retching until he couldn’t breathe. Tree bark tore through his jeans, and his arms finally straightened and seized and were destroyed—no, transformed. Only the human skin died. Lark arched his back and would have broken his vertebrae had they not turned to pliable wood; his mouth tore open and a dozen branches leapt from his wooden throat, sprouting blood blossoms. It was almost beautiful.
Roz was kneeling by then, in deference and fear. When Lark’s screams finally stopped, she knew that it was her turn. Where others go, one must follow. She lifted her head and saw the great and gnarled Tree, glowing blue-green with something far stronger and far more alien than fox fire, achingly reach its branches toward her and then shrivel back. It was so jealous, so unsure of her loyalty. “Roz-zz-lyn,” her mother said, from somewhere in the rush of leaves, “why d’ you want to lee-eave us?”
Roz picked up the ax. A wail swept through the branches, but Roz only threw the weapon into the murky green waters of Goose Lake. “I’ll never leave,” she said, and began trudging homeward. “I promise.”
It was not a warm embrace. The Tree’s branches bit deep into her back as it entwined her, and she soon lost the ability to see anything but heartwood. Still, she melted into the Tree as easily and completely as if she had never been parted from it. Little by little, the walls came down: the walls of Whippoorwill, the walls of her skin. I’m scared, she thought as the flesh of her tongue dissolved into sap, and though the only response she heard was a deep and ancient drumbeat pulsing from far within the Witching Tree, she finally understood.
Nadia Bulkin writes scary stories about the scary world we live in. It took her two tries to leave Nebraska, but she has lived in Washington, D.C. for four years now, tending her garden of student debt sowed by two political science degrees. In 2015, you can find more of her stories in the Aickman’s Heirs, Cassilda’s Song, and She Walks in Shadows anthologies—or check out nadiabulkin.wordpress.com.
He could taste sorcery in the air, and he hated the flavor . . .
Kur-a-Len
Lavie Tidhar
Part One: Expectations of a Funeral
The funeral, Gorel thought, went very well: and it was only partially marred by the deceased rising in his coffin with his arms outstretched, his mouth open in a scream that echoed amidst the silent gravestones.
In the event it was dealt with summarily. It had not, it seemed to Gorel, come entirely unexpected. The young man—the deceased’s nephew, so Gorel understood—reached for a curved knife that hung his side and in a smooth, seemingly practiced movement plunged it into his uncle’s chest. The deceased sank back in the coffin and ceased from all semblance of life. The proceeding service was tasteful, subdued, and accompanied with heart-felt sobs, but whether of grief or relief Gorel couldn’t quite say. When it was over and the coffin, nailed tightly shut, had been lowered into the earth and covered thoroughly, the small party of mourners slowly dispersed.
“Here lies the body of Seraph Gadashtill, Ninth Caliph of Mindano Caliphate, last in the line of the necromancer-kings,” the caretaker said in a singsong voice. Then she put a mark by the name on her list and turned away. She made a gesture with her hand and the Zambur servers hurried over in their shambling gait, spades and materials at the ready. “You know what to do,” the caretaker said. She and Gorel stood and watched the Zambur begin to build the Last House of Rest above the former-caliph’s grave. Around them similar structures spread out to the horizon and beyond. Mansions and palaces, castles and towers and manors, all built to miniature scale.
Amongst them the silent statues were dotted here and there, adding up to an immeasurable assembly of human and non-human figures. Far in the distance the Lake of the Drowned God glinted in the light of a dim sun, concealing inside its depths the buried remains of the sea-folk, the Merlangai; and away from it, and equally distant, were the giant Migdal trees whose canopies were decorated with what looked like hanging, pod-like nests, and which were, in reality, the last resting places of Avians.
“Everyone ends up here, sooner or later,” the caretaker said, perhaps putting a slight accent on “ends” than was strictly necessary. “Care for a drink, Gorel of Goliris?”
Already the dim sun was low on the horizon, and the mists were gathering at the bases of statues and follies. “Why not?” Gorel said, and the two of them turned away from the caliph’s new and final home and walked away, the sound of the working Zambur receding slowly behind them.
Gorel came to Kur-a-len, the Garden of Statues, on a night as cold as a dead woman’s hands. Above his head the darkness was punctured with the white light of cold distant stars. Mist curled about him and his graal moved slowly, having been made lethargic by the weak daylight that prevailed in that region. Through the mist Gorel could see lights, far away, and he thought longingly of a drink. He hurried his graal, trying to avoid looking directly at the shapes the mist was forming around them, shapes that formed mouths and spoke without sound, reaching insubstantial hands in what could have been threat, or pleading, or both.
He could taste sorcery in the air, and he hated the flavor. His hand hovered by the gun at his side, but there was nothing to shoot, nothing there but the mist. As if sensing rest was close, the graal hurried its steps, its legs moving soundlessly on the hard ground, its carapace a deep, exhausted black. Then they were through the mist and there were indeed lights there, and voices, and a strange, small town, a single street bounded on both sides by low-lying houses.
Gorel rode down the street, registering details: no two buildings were the same. There was a construction of metal and glass, built at odd angles, seeming to reach up to the night sky; there was a small squat building of pure white stone, no lights shining inside; a wooden longhouse where the shadow-veiled faces of Nocturne women seemed to stare down at him, but it could have just been shadows; a colony of bamboo houses piled on top of each other where small, shambling figures seemed to converse without sound, turning bald, round heads to watch him as he passed—Zambur, he thought with a shudder, his hand once again going to his gun. Finally, however, a cheerful round building with lights in its windows, the sound of singing, and a sign that said The Last Homily House. Gorel climbed off the graal and the creature sank gratefully to the ground, its long arched tail folded above it, the sting at its end closed, ready to capture moisture, at last, from the mist.
Gorel stepped into the Last Homily. Inside: a wooden curving counter, a row of dusty bottles on shelves reaching up to the ceiling, resembling an apothecary’s cabinet. Candles on the counter, spluttering with fat. The whole perception of the room was skewed: it seemed to swell and contract like a living thing. Tables in a semi-circle, occupied by shady figures—hard to tell in the faint light. No more singing—he had the sense of eyes studying him from the shadows. He fought the craving that swelled inside him the for the dark kiss, the goddess Shar’s dying gift to him, her curse. He stepped toward the counter and conversation resumed around him and he said, “Give me a drink.”
The thing behind the bar wasn’t human. Peeling skin stretched over an elongated skull; green-black teeth spread out in a grin; sunken eyes, yellow, and long thin fingers mottled gray, handling a bottle, deftly. Gorel stared at the grave-wraith and the grave-wraith stared back. “What would you like?”
Gorel scanned the shelves. Ancient bottles, crusted with dirt. Grass Giant tear wine; rice whiskey f
rom the banks of Tharat; Merlangai red, made with the sea-grapes from the deeps of the Drowned God’s domain; pickled scorpion oil from the sands of Meskatel; Suicide Rum from far-off Waterfalling; even a small bottle of the tree-sprite blood, called draeken. Rare bottles, impossible vintages: they had the smell of the grave upon them. “What’s the special?” Gorel said.
The bartender smiled. “Gravedigger’s Punch,” he said. “My own recipe. Heated up and guaranteed to fend off the cold.”
Gorel nodded, and the grave-wraith went to the side of the bar, where coal fire was burning low in a metal brazier, returned with a steaming mug.
“Cut with just a hint of dust,” the bartender said with a leer. “For the discerning gentleman of the road.”
The craving rose inside Gorel again, and he put the mug to his mouth and drank, greedily, the hot liquid burning his lips. Yes. There was gods’ dust there. His mind seemed to soar, to clear, return. The craving he had been suppressing eased at once. The grave-wraith leered harder, said, “Hey, Preacher. I think you got a customer.”
Wood scraping stone: the sound of a chair being pushed slowly back. Gorel turned, one hand going for the gun. In the shadows, a figure standing up, wide-brimmed pulled-down hat, approaching with slow, heavy steps. A single eye stared into his face. The other was missing. There was no eye-patch. There was no wound. Smooth skin grew where the left eye should have been. He thought—sorcery, and his fingers itched on the butt of the gun.
The face regarded him serenely for a long moment. Then, “Where you from, stranger?”
The voice was melodious and rich. Gorel, taking another sip from the punch, said, “Not from here.”
A single eye regarded him with some amusement. “No one is from here,” the man said. “For most of us this is the final stop in a long and wearing journey.”
“Just passing through,” Gorel said. “Sorry to disappoint.”
The man nodded, as if to himself. “Mind if I sit down?” he said. Not waiting for an answer he pulled a bar stool toward him and sat down. “I can tell,” he said, “that you are a man of great faith. Pray, what church do you belong to?”
“The church of mind your own fucking business,” Gorel said, and the man laughed. “A most ancient and venerable one, then.”
In a round corner that was still a corner, a group of Zambur, glancing over: they looked like pale toadstools. The man shot them a glance and they looked away. He said, “But you are not without faith. Or have your stores been depleted?”
Gorel looked at him again: this time he looked closer.
Tall, the hair turning into the gray of old wood. The single eye bright and blue and clear as a pond. He glanced down: the hands were dark brown and scarred. He glanced up again. The man wore a coat. Now he let it open, just a little, showing Gorel a small black vial hanging on the inside lining. “You in the market?” the preacher said, glancing—too casually—at Gorel’s arms, where the old tracks of needle marks from his time in Meskatel could still be seen. “Because, as it happens, I have the goods if you are.”
Gorel smiled. The preacher smiled. Behind the counter, the grave-wraith’s rotting teeth shone wet in the candlelight.
He spent his first night in Gardentown, as the small enclave of the living outside the Garden of Statues was called, in the Hotel of Nameless Gods that stood beside the Last Homily, and he spent it in blissful oblivion, the supply of gods’ dust he had acquired from the preacher coursing through his blood and into his brain, setting him on a fire that was better than food, better than sex, better than being alive. As he slept, if he slept, it seemed to him for some time that he was walking on a vast plane, and above his head there were no stars, and he heard voices whisper to him, joining up into a multitude that became one sound, a howling like a great wind: but what it said he didn’t know.
When morning arrived the sunlight was weak and murky, as if strained through a dirty glass. It was cold, a clammy, unpleasant chill that insinuated itself against the body, penetrating like questing fingers through the clothes. Mist lay in clumps and lazy eddies on the street. When he came out to check on it, the graal was motionless, its carapace dark, only the barest green showing through. As he walked down the one street Gorel saw a group of Duraali chieftains, the elaborate scars on their faces vivid, talking in hushed voices; and further down, as the town ended, a group of Ebong carrying a large round sarcophagus as black and impenetrable as their own heads. Funeral parties, he thought. He passed the last house and found himself outside the Garden of Statues.
He had heard of the place. A memory, far, painful: his adoptive father in the Lower Kidron, speaking. It was only a short while, perhaps a year after he was found, a boy exile from Goliris, cast off by sorcery and treachery across the World to this strange place. He was not yet fluent in the language . . .
Uncle Neshev had just died, an explosion in his workshop finally terminating the long and illustrious career of the old gunsmith. “We should have sent him to Kur-a-len,” Gorel’s father had said to his mother. Gorel, listening: “What is Kuralen?”
He had learned their language, after they had found him. The language of Lower Kidron was strange to him, so different to the rich tongue of Goliris, where words had the force of command, and a prince of Goliris could name and thus order all that was around him.
“Kur meaning garden,” his adoptive father said patiently. “A-len, of statues, plural. It is a cemetery. The greatest cemetery in all the World.”
“Uncle Neshev always spoke of going there, one day,” his adoptive mother said. “The greatest gunsmith of all Lower Kidron, founder of our Foundry, is buried there. Mirkah the Gunmaker, who was once a sorcerer but had abandoned sorcery for the honesty of a gun.”
“Why can’t Uncle Neshev go?” the young Gorel had asked. His father sighed and shook his head. “It is far, far from here,” he said. “For a man of the Lower Kidron to be buried in Kur-a-len he must set out while he is still young. No, Uncle Neshev must be satisfied here. A burned-down foundry is a decent enough grave for a gunsmith.”
And now he was there. The cemetery spread out before him, the mist thinning where the graves began. It was not an entirely flat land. The cemetery seemed to slope down, forming small, uneven rolling hills and shallow dales, but all were occupied: a metropolis in miniature, houses of glass and metal and stone, enduring all, and amidst them the statues, denizens of this vast realm who seemed to have frozen in mid-stroll.
For a moment the sun seemed to shine brighter, its light casting away the gloom of the mist, and a thousand thousand graves gleamed as one, almost blinding him.
“Breathtaking, isn’t it? I could look at them forever,” a voice said softly behind him. Startled, Gorel turned.
She was wreathed in shadow. He could not see her face, could only glimpse hints of a full round figure, of bright eyes studying him from behind the darkness that was her veil. A Nocturne, he thought—but it was daylight, now. She seemed to read his mind. “Half-Nocturne,” she said. “Half-Diurnal.”
“I thought the two never met,” Gorel said.
The figure behind the shadows seemed to smile. “There are stories of love in the liminal hours,” she said in a singsong voice, as if reciting a well-worn-out poem. “In the times of dusk and dawn, brief stolen moments before the sun, after the moon. I,” she added, “was a dusk child. But that was long ago, and far away from here, and the story of that love is not buried here.”
They watched the garden then. It was a scene of decayed grandeur, and it seemed peaceful to Gorel. He thought then of his home, of the vast palace of Goliris where the shoreline met the jungle, where the seat of the great empire was, and he thought of the cemetery of Goliris, where his ancestors resided in the great palaces of the dead. Memory came floating into his mind:
Dusk, and his father held his hand in his. “Where are we going?” Gorel had asked, and the ruler of all Goliris said, “To a family council.”
They had walked through the twisting corridors of the p
alace, deeper and deeper, and when they stepped outside it was at the gardens that met the deep dark forests, their smell overpowering in its mixture of rot and growth, and they followed a dark path and came at last to the houses of the dead.
They had been built in concentric circles. Each was a miniature of the grand palace of Goliris. There were halls and corridors inside those tombs, and the traps of Goliris were replicated inside them, the vast underground prisons and the foundries and laboratories and, in each, the throne room, and a full-sized throne. They walked amidst the palaces as the sky became the deep purple of a bruise and at last turned black. Standing inside the circle, with no light and the darkness pressing from all sides, Gorel was afraid, and held on tightly to his father’s hand. “Gorel,” his father had said, “The line of Goliris had never been broken. Not even death releases a prince of Goliris—” and the faces came out of the darkness, the same faces that would later visit him in his dreams and make him cry in the night—ancient, wizened faces, as bitter as coffee beans, and reached out pale, insubstantial hands to him, and said—
He shook himself awake, found himself craving dust again, and noticed the half-Nocturne was examining him. “Who are you?” he said.
She seemed to laugh. The sound was like night wind rushing through bamboo walls. “I’m just the caretaker,” she said.
“Do you—” he said, and stopped, and said again, “Do you have dead here from Goliris?”
It was hard to tell, but it seemed to him that she was troubled. “The dead come here from everywhere in the World,” she said.
“You must know,” he said. She shook her head. “There are lists, maps of the cemetery, but . . . you must understand, sometimes they are inaccurate. And sometimes they just . . . change. It is dangerous to wander the avenues of the dead.”