by Paula Guran
The preacher: his wide-brimmed hat was gone and his head was bare, his single eye staring ahead, His lips moved constantly, mumbling over and over something that might have been a prayer. His boots left faint marks in the ground, and his open coat flapped about him in an unseen wind. As the coat moved Gorel could see, revealed for just an instance, a row of gleaming vials hooked to the lining of the coat: gods’ dust, and freshly procured.
Gorel stepped out of the shadows. “Preacher,” he said. The preacher stopped, his eye gazing this way and that like a pendulum unable to settle on a precise rhythm. Finally, his lips stopped moving, his eye focused, and he regarded Gorel with the hint of a smile before saying, “Yes, sheriff?”
“What are you doing here?” Gorel said, and the preacher shrugged and said, “Taking a stroll.”
“Is that a usual thing?”
The smile became mocking. “Almost every night. Sheriff.”
“Where do you get it?” Gorel found himself asking. The mocking smile grew wider. “What gods are there to track within a cemetery?”
“Ah,” the preacher said, and the smile grew obscene. “There is your question and your answer right there, in one neat package. Good night, sheriff.” And he made to turn away, but slowly, and there was something suggestive in the way he did it, a watching awareness that made the hairs on Gorel’s arms stand on end and form a hardness in him . . . He had a sudden, overwhelming desire, but didn’t know if it was to shoot the man, or fuck him.
The question and the answer in one neat package . . .
“I need to . . . ” Gorel said, and his voice was hoarse.
“Yes, sheriff?”
“I need to search you.”
“By all means,” the preacher said, and then he was close. Gorel could smell the scent of him, a smell of sweat and gods’ dust and power. He reached under the coat and patted the preacher, but did so slowly, his hands traveling across the man’s powerful torso and then down, to the preacher’s belt. “Is it dust you want,” the preacher said, his voice soft—“or is it love? And can you even tell the difference, man of Goliris?”
Their bodies came together, and Gorel’s hardness encountered the preacher’s own. When they kissed the preacher tasted of alcohol and dust, and his bristles were against the skin of Gorel’s palms. The preacher’s tongue was in Gorel’s mouth and then Gorel pushed the preacher to the ground, removing his coat, unbuckling his belt with slow, sure hands. They kissed again, and Gorel licked the flesh on the man’s face where his eye should have been, tasting it with the tip of his tongue. Then, working his way down, he took the preacher’s hardness in his mouth, tasting gods’ dust even there—it was as if the preacher was a being made of the stuff, and Gorel found him irresistible. When the preacher began to moan Gorel eased off him and the preacher’s hands found him and were rubbing him, forcing his own trousers down, and then he was pushing Gorel down to the ground, Gorel’s face in the dirt as the preacher’s hardness was against Gorel’s cheeks, rubbing slowly in those twin mounds of flesh, and when he entered him his hand cupped Gorel from behind and rubbed him, and he cried out.
When it was done they had walked away from each other, as strange to each other as when they met. He did not encounter the preacher this way again and, mostly, the nights were quiet—at least until the burial of Seraph Gadashtill, Ninth Caliph of Mindano Caliphate, last in the line of the necromancer-kings . . .
Part Two: The Corpse Had No Face
She came to him in the dream. She had no face, no substance. She was all fog, and cold to the touch. Wraith-fingers touched his skin and made him shiver. Her voice was dead. She said, Who are you?
Gorel, he whispered.
Her voice grew insistent, the touch of her unbearable. Where do you come from? Where do you belong?
Golir—he began to say, and she screamed, the noise like an ice pick driven into his brain, and he woke, his heart pounding, into a silent night.
The funeral was over. The caliph had been laid to rest. That night darkness lay over the tombs like an old blanket. Nothing stirred. In the Last Homily last drinks had been served and the lights were killed. The ninth caliph’s burial party had since retreated to their beds and to sleep, having spent the day in mourning, prayer, and drinking. All was silent.
Gorel prowled the cemetery. His head hurt. The traces of a dream lingered inside like wisps of cloth, cloying, frayed. A faceless woman who looked familiar despite the lack of form.
A scream tore through the night.
At first he thought the scream was in his head. An echo from his dream, still going.
The scream rose, cut through the graveyard air like a butcher’s knife, fear primal and ugly in every note. Gorel felt his hands instinctively fall down to his guns. He left them there. Began to run.
The scream rose into a crescendo. Black birds rose in a cloud into the sky, startling him. The scream was cut short.
Running through the avenues of graves, birds silent above and around him, like an explosion caught in dark amber. All sound seemed to have stopped. He ran in the direction he thought the scream had come from, gun in hand, and saw a shadow fleeing ahead of him.
Not thinking, he pursued. The shadow fled faster, blending in and out of the outlines of giant graves. Running, the breath catching in his chest, the world in black and white but primarily black, echoes of the scream still in his head, dream or awakening he didn’t know which.
Through black night and tombstones jutting from the ground, his feet soft on the earth, the shadow never slackening his pace. His breath was coming out burning, dragon’s breath, the shadow slowed, turned to face him—
No face, nothing but shadow, and yet: he could sense it, feel it, a grin splitting up that mask of darkness, amused or manic or both—
Gorel raised his gun. His finger tightened on the trigger, yet he had only the sense of the watching shadow’s grin growing wider still. He squeezed off a shot and, still running, stumbled into something heavy on the ground. The unexpected impact threw him, a second shot went wide, and he went down. When he rose a moment later the shadow he’d been pursuing was gone, and on the ground beside him was a dead woman.
“Kelini Pashtill,” the caretaker said. She sighed, and the shadows rustled around her like garments that, for her, they perhaps were. “Third cousin to the former caliph and a member of the burial party.”
“What was she doing out here on her own?” Gorel said, thinking—no wonder she isn’t pleased. He said aloud, “People bring their dead to the Garden, they don’t expect it to be the other way around.”
“We’ll offer a free burial,” the caretaker said. “Of course. Still . . . ”
A hunch: “Has this happened before?”
Silence. Finally, another shrug. “There are always complications . . . ”
He wanted to answer, thought better of it, bent down to examine the body instead.
Kelini Pashtill could have been pretty once. It was impossible to tell with her face gone.
“But nothing recent.”
Bending down, a faceless corpse staring back at him. Nothing else missing—the rest of the body in perfect shape. He said, “One of the dead?”
“It seems likely.”
He searched through the woman’s pockets. A small rolled pack-et—he palmed it on the way out. “The caliph?”
The caretaker shrugged. “He should be safely ensconced in his grave,” she said.
Gorel remembered a past encounter with a necromancer. They did not die easy. He said, “This is murder.”
The caretaker said, “Yes.”
“And therefore bad for business?”
“Yes.”
He stood up, nodded. Behind the caretaker a huddled group of Zambur, waiting. “Take her away,” Gorel said.
Where do you come from, the ethereal voice said, the sound like crunched glass rattling in his skull. Longing in the voice, and hate—a strange mixture. Fingers like fog touching him, caressing him, the voice whispering, Tell me,
again and again, Gorel frozen, trapped in the membrane of the dream world where the separation between the living and the dead was weakest. He braced himself for a scream but this time it wasn’t there, which was somehow more frightening. He could sense hunger again, coming back strong, and desire and loathing, but all that happened was the voice repeating, again and again the words Tell me.
He fought to awaken. Her fog, her form, wrapped him like a shroud. Goliris, he said, and felt her slacken about him. Goliris. The word hurt her, and he wielded it like a knife, cutting away at her entrapment of him. Goliris. Goliris. She whispered, No . . . and let him go and he reached for her and took her face and turned it toward his own, expecting the blankness—and screamed, because where before there had been no face at all was now the countenance of the dead Kelini Pashtill.
“This is an outrage,” Sorel Gadashtill said. He spoke flatly, without an intonation. There was no emotion in his voice, unless you counted cold as an emotion. Gorel said, “I quite understand—” and the caliph’s nephew—fat, red-faced, with intelligent eyes that seemed to look through Gorel as if he were a graveyard worm, said, “Do you, sheriff?”
“Explain it to me, then,” Gorel said, and the man sighed. “We brought our dear, dead caliph—” Gorel bit back on mentioning the caliph was not quite dead when he was brought back, if the frenzied scene at the funeral was any indication—“to this place because it is a place of peace. We paid—” the word seemed to pain him—“paid a not-insignificant sum of money to the caretaker of this place, to ensure my uncle’s final rest. That, clearly, hasn’t happened.”
“I’m confused,” Gorel said. He noted the rings on the fat man’s fingers. Had Jericho Moon, his friend and some-time companion, been there, he would have quickly found the right time and place to relieve the caliph’s nephew of those bulky, expensive items. It occurred to Gorel he would do well to do it himself. Nevertheless . . . he was being paid with knowledge this time, not money. Well . . . not only money. That there might be dead of Goliris at the Garden . . . he made a note to himself to chase the caretaker again for the information. She had seemed reluctant to part with it so far. “Are you suggesting it was the caliph responsible for the death?”
“The murder,” Sorel Gadashtill said—with some relish, it seemed to Gorel. “Of course it is. You didn’t know him.”
Gorel listened. Sorel Gadashtill seemed to appreciate the audience. He said, “He was a monster.” He said it the way one would ask for the salt to be passed. Gorel marked it, didn’t comment. “He was a bloodthirsty, vicious, cruel, capricious ghoul.” A small, affectionate smile lit up his face for a moment, transforming it completely: at that moment he looked younger and innocent, a nephew talking about a favorite uncle. Perversely, it reminded Gorel of his own younger self. “He was the best ruler the Gadashtill dynasty had seen in over four hundred years. His loss is a loss to us all.”
“I’m not sure,” Gorel said slowly, “that I entirely understand.” Though he suspected that he did.
“Don’t you?” the caliph’s nephew said. “It seems perfectly obvious to me. The caliph had served his country diligently for far longer than the duration of a normal human’s life. Again and again he came back from the dead to serve. It was enough. The man needed rest! And at vast expense, this was the place settled on. It was, in fact, the caliph’s own explicit wish, to be buried here. The great Garden of Statues! A haven of the dead, a place guaranteed by tradition and money to hold its denizens. No wonder he is upset.”
“Upset?” Gorel said, thinking again of the woman’s faceless corpse.
“Don’t you understand?” Sorel Gadashtill said. “He cannot help returning. It was why we had to—even at the funeral itself—most regrettable—” he actually looked embarrassed for a moment. Gorel flashed back to the caliph rising in his coffin, the nephew’s knife rising in tandem, plunging into his uncle’s chest, sending him back. Shaking himself back to the present, he said, “So you think your uncle is behind the death.”
“It is his nature,” Sorel Gadashtill said. “And besides, Kelini was always his favorite.”
So far, so bad, Gorel thought. He had a corpse, and he had a suspect, only the suspect too was dead. Yet something rang false to him in the nephew’s story, and he couldn’t tell what it was. He shelved it, went to the Last Homily instead. Bartender grave-wraith behind the counter, members of the caliph’s burial party drinking in a corner, scowling as he walked in. No sign of Blud or Deth, no sign of the preacher—by the window a party of new arrivals, talking in low voices. A huddle of Zambur drinking from smoking beakers—he didn’t want to know.
He went up to the counter, sat down on a stool. The bartender eyeballed him. “What can I get you, sheriff?”
“Punch,” Gorel said.
The grave-wraith leered. “Coming right up.”
Gorel’s hand on his wrist stopped him. The grave-wraith’s flesh felt slimy, flecks of skin coming off in his grip. “And some information.”
“That’s extra,” the grave-wraith said, and pulled his hand away. He was no longer smiling.
Gorel said, “The dead girl.”
“What about her?”
“She was here last night.”
The grave-wraith shrugged. “Where else is there to go?”
“You tell me.”
“Let me get your drink,” the grave-wraith said, and leered again. “Mix some dust in for you? That’s also extra.”
He poured the drink from a casket the shape of a closed coffin, mixed in dust from a vial. When he brought it over Gorel said, “Who do you think killed her?”
“I don’t think,” the grave-wraith said. His long fingers tapped a beat on the counter, skeletal sound making Gorel wince. Gorel plonked a bracelet on the counter—death money, part of the caretaker’s idea of an expense account. The grave-wraith’s eyes grew larger and his leer subsided. “What’s that?” he said, trying for casual, and failing.
“Enchanted bracelet, gold inlaid with encased mermaids’ eyes”—the eyes, preserved under the sea, like chunks of amber—“from the island-nation of Etern, second dynasty.” He covered it with his hand, one frozen eye peeking out. “You like it?”
“Etern . . . ” the grave-wraith said. “Section eight has a few Etern tombs . . . ”
“You got family here?”
“What?” The grave-wraith took a step back from the counter. Slime oozed out of his left eye, yellow-green like pus.
Gorel said, “You might want to wipe that off.”
Instead of an answer the grave-wraith reached under the counter, returned with a small glass jug, unstoppered it. He put his eye over the opening and squeezed—the viscous liquid falling down like tears. The grave-wraith stoppered the bottle, returned it to its place, and put his leer back on. There were tiny insects moving between his teeth. “Family. Relatives. However that works.”
“I was buried here,” the grave-wraith said. “I didn’t live here.”
“Other wraiths around?”
The bartender shrugged.
“You don’t know, or you don’t care?”
The shrug again. “You’re not being very helpful,” Gorel said. “Considering.”
“Considering what, sheriff?”
“Considering what’s bad for the Garden’s business is bad for your business,” Gorel said. “In the long term. If people don’t trust the cemetery any more . . . ”
“They’ll keep coming,” the grave-wraith said. “No one cares much for the affairs of the dead. It’s why they put them here in the first place.”
Gorel sighed, took a sip from his punch. Dust hit him like a fist, sent him flying. “You may not have much of a personality,” Gorel said, “but you can mix a drink.”
“I should probably say thank you,” the grave-wraith said, “but fuck off will serve instead.”
Gorel smiled, showing teeth. “Tell me about the girl,” he said. He lifted the bracelet off the counter, dangled it in the air between them. The gold caught
the light. The mermaids’ dead eyes stared into nothing.
The bartender swallowed. “What do you want to know?” he said. His eyes were on the bracelet.
Gorel said: “Last night, she was here. Tell me.”
The bartender reached for the bracelet. Gorel moved it away. “You like it?” he said.
“Fuck you,” the bartender said, but without conviction.
“Tell,” Gorel said. The bartender told.
She came to the Last Homily with the rest of the Mindano Caliphate mission. They sat on their own. The men had beer, apart from the caliph’s nephew, who had Suicide Rum. The two ladies had draeken and Gravedigger’s Punch, respectively. Kelini Pashtill had the punch.
“Dust?” Gorel said, interested. The bartender shrugged. “Not apart from what’s in the punch, or not that I’d seen, at any rate.”
“Anyone else?” Gorel said.
The bartender shook his head, no.
Gorel said, “Go on.”
They were talking quietly. None of the regulars were around. “Isn’t that a bit strange?” Gorel said.
The bartender shrugged. “Things to do,” he said.
“Like what?”
The shrug again. It was beginning to irritate Gorel. “Do you know where they were?”
“You’ll have to ask them that yourself,” the grave-wraith said, but his eyes were locked on the bracelet and he didn’t sound convinced.
Gorel said, “Want to try harder?”
“Blud and Deth came in earlier for a drink,” the grave-wraith said. He looked like he’d come to a decision. “They left as the burial party came in. I heard Blud mention something about their dig. That’s all I know—they’ve been spending a lot of time in the Garden recently.”
“Do they have permission?” Gorel said.
The bartender began to shrug, took one look at Gorel’s expression and thought better of it. “You’ll have to ask the caretaker,” he said. “But I think they do. You don’t go messing around inside without some form of sanction.”
“And the preacher?” Gorel said, changing tack.