The Song of Glory and Ghost

by N. D. Wilson

  “No!” Glory said. “He doesn’t understand! And neither do I. I’m not a time-walker.”

  “That is not entirely true. You have the glass,” Ghost said. “You have already used it to make tunnels of slower time or faster time. Give it to me.”

  Glory pulled the hourglass out of her binoculars case and handed it over.

  Ghost stood it up on his flat left palm and studied it.

  “Father Tiempo must be an artist,” Ghost said. “A time dancer and a pilgrim. But Segador moves as a thief, with silence as well as violence, in and out of time like a blade. There is no door or barrier of time that can forbid my entry.” He looked up at Glory. “The blade I will give you can slice through the walls between worlds. It can cut through flesh and bone and even spirit. Will you willingly carry the Reaper’s blood? It will be a curse to you, but powerful. Carrying it will mark you.”

  “If that’s what I need to save Peter,” Glory said, “then, yes.”

  “Hold on,” Sam said. “Why don’t you just kill these Tzitzithings and the Vulture? Isn’t it your job?”

  “I may not kill,” said Ghost. “I gather. And sometimes, like right now, I assist and equip. The Tzitzimime are not mortal, but they gather an army of those who once were. Since Glory is willing, I am giving her a blade sharp enough to carve any being or thing that exists within time, because it parts time itself. Cut the canvas and you cut the painting. Are you ready, Glory?”

  “Absolutely not,” Glory said. “Let’s do this.”

  Ghost nodded, and held his right hand above her hourglass. His palm opened and black blood poured down out of the wound, as thick and heavy as honey. When it touched the inside of the glass, it immediately began to spin and whirl.

  Sam’s throat went too dry for speech. He watched the dark, spinning blood fill the hourglass, and then it passed down through it, reentering the boy’s other palm on the underside but leaving the glass stained.

  Ghost straightened and handed the hourglass back to an astonished Glory. Steam trailed out of both open ends, and Glory winced with pain when it touched her skin, but she gripped it tight. Sam coughed and swallowed hard until he could speak.

  “What do we do now?” Sam asked, staring at Peter’s gray body. “How do we start?”

  The boy called Ghost straightened his cap on his head.

  “Glory,” he said. “Raise your hourglass.”

  Glory raised her arm, pointing toward the doorway.

  “You will be clumsy at first, but the finesse will come. Think of how far back you would like to see, and cut yourself a window.”

  Glory moved her wrist in a tight circle, and a small pool of sand spun into a bright glassy hole in the air in front of her. Through the hole, Sam and Glory were staring at the bedroom decades before, with the sun pouring in the windows over the water and a young maid with white earbuds in, singing at the top of her lungs while dancing and pushing a vacuum. The maid bounced, slid to the side, and then looked up at Sam and Glory.

  She screamed. Glory dropped her hand, and the window vanished.

  “Try not to startle people to death,” Ghost said. “Do not slice any mortal into two times unless you intend to, it is necessary, and they deserve such a gruesome death. The power you now hold in that glass would make villains of most men, and I do not intend for you to become a lesser Vulture. With Tiempo’s glass and my blood—and much practice—you will be able to exit time and let it move beneath you. But such leapings into the future or tumblings into the past are done by feel and in total darkness. Unless great skill is developed, there will always be imprecision. To see where you are going, choose your direction—forward or backward—encase yourself in slow time, and let the world race past.

  “But you will be rooted in one point in space, not safely removed in the darkness between times. Be careful not to shatter yourselves in some collision with a sprouting city or impale yourselves on the rocketing growth of a redwood tree. Become slow in the wrong place and every tree will come up at you faster than an arrow. And, of course, in a fight, or in a rush to travel through space, you can do the opposite. Encase yourself in time so fast that even the light outside your shell slows before your eyes. In the great mortal tragedies, I have gathered hundreds of souls in a single human second. But even more caution is required here. At such speed, even a breath can collapse a skull. A stray touch can disintegrate a limb.”

  Ghost stopped his speech, and Sam and Glory looked at each other, and then they both looked at the glass in Glory’s hand.

  “So . . . can you come with us?” Sam asked.

  “The two of you are permitted to see me only twice,” Ghost said. “The third time we meet eye to eye, I will be carrying your soul away. Then you may see me as often as you like.”

  “Perfect,” Sam muttered. “Let’s hang out tons after we’re dead.”

  With her hourglass lowered, Glory leaned over the bed, picking up Peter’s hand. “And how much time do we have?”

  “One night and one morning,” Ghost said. “Now go. Trace Peter to his beginning and prevent his murder. In the darkness between times, trace the Vulture to his present, and deliver him the ending you were meant to. The ending he is owed.”

  Sam looked down at his friend, pale and cold. Already Peter’s body seemed hollow and collapsing, like a melon left in the garden through too many frosts. And before lunch tomorrow, Sam would be joining him if he and Glory failed.

  Ghost didn’t vanish in a flash; the light he left behind was too slow for that. It spilled onto the floor and washed up the walls and flowed across blood and sand and Peter’s still body. The windows in the room warped and wobbled, and Sam’s stomach did the same.

  Still holding Peter’s hand, Glory looked up at Sam.

  “Whatever you need,” she said. “Grab it now. We have to go.”

  Sam stared at her. At Peter. And then at the air where Ghost had been.

  “I should have told him my dream,” Sam said. “The animal people all running into the storm. They have to be the army he was talking about. The Tzitzi-clown whatevers are calling them. That’s what the coyote girl said, and then Ghost used the same word. Tzitzi . . .” He looked back at Glory. “The Vulture is in a cave, Glory. Another time garden, but this one is underground. And my snakes talked in the dream, too. Out loud.”

  “Sam!” Glory yelled. Sam blinked his mind silent. Glory tossed back her hair and lowered her voice, but her tone was still fierce. “Just do what I say, Sam. I’m supposed to lead. That’s what he said. Get what you need. Let me worry about the rest. Just keep us alive, okay?”

  Sam backed away, looking from Glory to Peter, and then around the room as if Ghost might still be present.

  “Trust me,” Glory said. “Now go! Get more arrows. Get food. Get shoes on. Whatever you can jam in a pack that won’t slow you down. Go!”

  Sam nodded. And he ran.

  Glory focused on Peter’s body and his bed of sand. She’d managed to split time’s speed before, even without Ghost’s infused glass. It had to be easier now. Glory raised her darkened hourglass.

  The glass was slick in her hand. Or her hand was slick on the glass. Her palms were cold and as wet as she was nervous. She stood up straight, breathing like a runner before a race, flexing her fingers.

  “I know this is dangerous,” she said to Peter. “I know I don’t have a clue, but Ghost seems to think I can figure it out, and you’re not here to stop me, Pete. Sorry.” She tried to focus her thoughts on the bed, intent on what she wanted. Her voice sank to a whisper as her concentration grew. “Let’s find out what the Reaper did to this thing.”

  THE SPIRIT OF PETER TIEMPO, GROWN TO HIS FULL STRENGTH and height, stood in the bedroom watching Glory. His invisible arms were crossed. His hair was tied back with a red cloth, and he was wearing the black robes of his priesthood. But he weighed nothing. He breathed nothing. No blood ran through his veins, because he had no veins. Light passed through him as easily as it passed through air.


  Ghost stood beside him, his head only reaching Peter’s shoulder.

  “This is foolishness,” Peter said. “She isn’t ready.”

  “Of course she isn’t,” said Ghost. “Has anyone ever been ready for such a task and such enemies?”

  “She will careen through time like a child in a rocket.”

  “Yes,” said Ghost. “As you once did.”

  “Which I now will never do. And Sam’s dream,” Peter said. “Skin-walkers are gathering to the Tzitzimime to form the Vulture’s army? I do not understand. He cannot expect to control them. Not any of them.”

  “Sam’s words were clear enough,” Ghost said quietly.

  “The mothers of darkness and skin-walkers from beyond the grave.” Peter shook his head. “The Vulture is a Sunday school teacher compared to them. Sam will need a miracle.”

  “He has one,” Ghost said. “In Glory. And she has the weapon I have given her and a boy too foolish to obey his fears or hers. They are only two small sparks, but they may grow into a blaze.”

  Dead Peter was perfectly still. And then, despite his lack of a body, he shivered.

  IF GLORY SPALDING WAS GOING TO RACE A CLOCK, THE FIRST thing she wanted to do was try and slow down the clock she was racing. If she could drag Peter’s time to a virtual stop, she would. Of course, she might just end up killing him faster. Or she might end up killing herself. She might end up peeling Peter so deeply into his own time frame that she would never be able to find his moments again. Maybe this would be his tomb. If Peter were conscious, she knew he would be asking her not to do what she was about to.

  But he wasn’t conscious.

  The hot glass grew heavy in Glory’s singed hand. She imagined Peter’s heartbeats slowing down, each of his breaths wandering for days, and she raised her hourglass, fighting to hold it above her head as it grew even heavier, bracing it with her other hand.

  Cold black sand poured down Glory’s neck, and then she let the hourglass fall.

  The shift in time hit the mattress around Peter like a falling wall. His body bounced. The sand around him spun into a whirlpool, swallowing every sound and ray of light, drawing even more sand up from the floor, mixing it with Peter’s blood.

  A web of dark glass began to melt and tangle into a small dome around the bed. Glory’s senses were fading, but she swung the hourglass again and newly formed glass thickened and grew urgent. Layer after webbed layer whined and stretched and hardened on the dome until Peter and the bed were hidden behind an uneven wall of what looked like crystal midnight stone.

  And then, as Glory forced her arms up to swing again, the dome grew faint and vanished, and the hourglass was weightless in her hands. The light returned. Glory’s vision sharpened. She was breathing hard, and her nose was bleeding down the back of her throat. Peter and the bed were gone, leaving only a wide hole in the carpet and a shallow crater in the marble floor below. A smell as harsh and hot as burnt hair dominated the room. Only the bed’s headboard remained, and it tipped forward slowly and fell, slamming into the crater at Glory’s feet.

  Glory staggered backward, her heart fluttering against her ribs. Dizzy, she shoved her hourglass back into her pocket and braced both hands on her knees. What had happened? Why wasn’t Peter just inside the glass, dying more slowly?

  Gagging, Glory coughed gobby blood onto smooth white stone where her bed had just been.

  She knew what the problem was. She had slowed Peter’s time too much. Peter was slow, all right, so slow that Glory and the house and everything outside the glass had left him behind and moved on into the future without him. And that was the point, right?

  Glory pressed her palm to her slick forehead and shut her eyes. Peter would make it to the moment she was in eventually. Wouldn’t he? But when? She had peeled the time streams way too far apart.

  “Stupid!” Glory grimaced down at the headboard inside the crater. It would still work. Wouldn’t it? If she could find the right moment, sure. But now breaking the glass dome and splashing the two times back together again was going to require some serious . . . math. Or something just as bad.

  “Sorry about the bed, Pete,” she said out loud. “I hope you didn’t tip off.”

  She didn’t have time to be frustrated. That much she knew. Straightening, she backed toward the doorway. Sam wasn’t going to like this. Not at all. But she didn’t need to tell him. Not unless they were still alive and the Vulture wasn’t in about twenty-four hours.

  “So much for trust me, Sam,” Glory said, and she turned to run downstairs.

  A huge man filled the doorway with his bulk.

  Glory jerked in surprise and backed away. She had forgotten about the gunshots and breaking glass from earlier—the invasion of their island.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “What are you doing here?”

  The man’s shoulders touched both sides of the doorjamb as he entered the room, and he had to duck his knobby forehead under the lintel. His red beard had been twisted and waxed into five thick spikes, and his eyes were wide with interest. A crudely sawed-off shotgun with a large black drum for shells dangled from his massive right hand. Three wooden baseball bats had been duct-taped together into an oversize club for his left.

  “Girlie.” He nodded his head in acknowledgment, grinning as he did. His voice was thick and curdled, and he sniffed at the air with garden hose nostrils as he moved toward Glory. “What have you been burning?”

  “Sam!” Glory yelled. “Sam!”

  The man chuckled and ran the end of his club across his spiked beard.

  “Would that be your Sam?” he asked. “The cursed boy with the viper arms? Or my Sam? My princess? My daughter.” His voice rolled into a growl, and his upper lip curled, revealing a thick tusklike canine tooth of gold.

  “The lovely girl you fools stole from Leviathan Finn.”

  DEAD PETER TURNED TO GHOST AS THE BIG BEARDED MAN dragged Glory from the room.

  “Brother Reaper,” Peter said. “The game is over before it has even begun. Take me from this world now. It is bad enough to die; I do not want to see them killed, as well.”

  “Have faith,” said Ghost, grimly. “Someone has to.”

  7

  Oops

  WHEN GLORY OPENED HER EYES, SHE WAS PINNED ON HER side staring at half of a peach from one inch away. She knew that the peach was inside a large jar, along with many others that Millie Miracle had sealed in with it, and when she rolled her eyeball, she could almost see them. Glory’s cheek was pressed against the jar, as was the left side of her open mouth. Her tongue moved across the slick flavorless glass.

  Coughing, Glory tried to blink some clarity into her throbbing skull, and then she tried to sit up.

  It wasn’t easy. Her wrists were tied together behind her back—and tied again to the belt she always wore with her favorite jeans. The knots were so tight that her hands felt like lumps of dough, but she managed to kick and scrape and twist until her legs were under her. Pushing off the hard floor with her elbow, grunting and puffing through the pain, she managed to tip slowly upright, shaking and sweating with the effort, and finally found herself sitting flat on the floor of Millie’s biggest pantry.

  “Glory.” Sam’s voice was as dry as one of his rattles, and Glory twisted around to look behind her.

  Only the tips of Sam’s boots were touching the floor, but not enough to carry his weight. His poncho was gone, and his arms had been strung up to the highest shelves on either side of the wide pantry, leaving him dangling in a painful and helpless Y. Blood stained the chest of his white tank top beneath a messy split in his chin. Cindy and Speck were stretched up and out and thin, and were both completely motionless. Sam’s hands were purple and the snakes were lifeless dark stripes of mottled, scaled bruising in his pale arms.

  “You were right,” Sam gasped. “Shouldn’t have brought the girl.”

  Glory leaned against the loaded shelves, rocking and twisting her way onto her knees. Puffing loose hair out of her eyes, s
he focused on Sam.

  “What happened?” she asked. “Are you okay? Is anything broken?”

  Sam blinked. First one eye, then the other. His eyelids were sticky, unpeeling slowly, like his thoughts. What had happened?

  Gunshots. Broken glass. Needle-sharp ringing through Sam’s head, from ear to ear. His brothers hadn’t had a chance with bows and bats and knives.

  Hundreds of men had entered through shattered windows. Or dozens of men. Sam had recognized Bull and Dog. Or Dog and Bull, and a huge man with a beard like an upside-down spiked crown. His friends were pinned facedown and bound. Millie was yelling. And then Sam was knocked out with a club of three bats.

  And then, despite Samra’s protests, he’d been strung up half conscious in the pantry. And when Sam had come to again, Glory had been there.

  After a few seconds of fluttering, Sam’s eyelids slowly opened.

  “So,” Sam rasped. “I guess that’s it.”

  “What’s it?” Glory asked, confused.

  “What happened,” Sam said. “You asked.”

  “But you didn’t say anything.”

  “Oh. Well. I thought it. Samra called her dad. Somehow.”

  Glory knee-walked closer to him. “Is anything broken?”

  Sam nodded. “Windows.” His eyes were shutting again.

  “Hey!” Glory hissed. “Sam! Stay with me. I’m getting you out of here.”

  Sam’s head slumped forward and his weight sagged lower, his legs limp and his arms and shoulders stretching even further. And something bad was going on in his lungs. His breaths were shallow and faint.

  “No.” Glory banged into a shelf, scrambling up onto her feet. “These idiots will kill him. He’ll suffocate hanging like that.”

  Turning around in the tight space, crowded with Millie’s jams and jellies and pickles and peaches and pears, she kicked the door hard.