The victors write the histories of wars. Great men pen their memoirs without wasting ink on the villages they burned or the washerwomen they raped. And the living, of course, have rather a monopoly on telling tales of ghosts.
Even I, who was never fantastical or morbid by nature, had once listened with pleasure to accounts of pale women groaning on parapets or drowned children eternally beckoning beside lakes. I had not wondered how such apparitions might tell their own stories, if anyone had cared to solicit their version of events. Now that the shoe was on the other foot—though my lower extremities were so nebulous that feet were impossible to distinguish—I found I had a great deal to say regarding my own history and condition. My mouth thirsted for language until I felt a dry crackling all down my insubstantial throat. My fingers twitched to hold pen and paper. It was a useless craving. On the rare occasions that such articles came within my reach, I could not grasp them. Not even make them stir.
Gus suffered from no such constraints.
As a general rule, he was solitary and disciplined in his habits, dedicated to his magic to the point of austerity. After his conversation with Miss Anura, he spent nearly all his time hiding in a garden shed behind his parents’ house. He sat on the dusty floor, his back rigid and his eyes squeezed shut in tense meditation, and paused only rarely to devour the food Margo hid behind a shovel.
I quickly realized that he must be employed, for all his apparent stillness, in collecting magic from the workings of his own consciousness. Nearly three talens per unworld rotation, he had said, with a pride that made plain he thought it an impressive figure. From the agonized pinching of his face, I was sure he was striving to increase his output. How were such magical dribblings gathered, in what manner of purse were they stored? I learned such practical details later, but at that time I was still ignorant. He slept in brief snatches, curled on the same splintery boards, and his discomfort was to me a very minor pleasure.
No: for me the salient fact was that every day, every minute Gus spent in the unworld brought him nearer death. I fluttered above him, savoring the taste of expiring time. And since he kept silence during these vigils, the inequity between us—that he was alive, and I not; that he could tell tales, where my voice produced only one burning, wordless threnody—was not so glaring. Then we were just two wordless minds crouched in a shed, each scheming against the other as best we might.
I saw my father once through a gap in the planks, somehow become an old man with sunken eyes and swaying head. I thought I glimpsed Anna once in the distance as Gus made his way to the hedge where he relieved himself, but she was so tall and so far away that I could not be certain. My fantasies—that my survivors might somehow sense my nearness and my longing—were not borne out, try though I did to project my urgent love across the air. My cries were silence to them, my love extinct.
I never saw either of them again.
Even Gus’s self-discipline was not limitless, and after perhaps ten days he faltered. The night came when he slunk home to Nautilus. When he, indeed, got drunk.
We met Asterion the minotaur in a large common hall where comfortable chairs and settees in intimate groupings dotted a cavernous space. A fireplace taller than a man and wide as a heifer blazed with flames that, even at a distance, had a distinctly unnatural aspect. Uncharacteristically for Nautilus, an immense pair of doors with the appearance of molten silver stood directly opposite the fire. The furniture was mostly finely carved wood of various periods, upholstered in velvet or brocade: luxurious, yes, but likely imported from the unworld and looking somewhat out of place against the restless glow of the walls, the eerie writhing columns.
Asterion was already nestled in a large armchair of azure silk. He heard my screaming the moment Gus passed through the double doors and craned around the chair’s back to wink at us; a scattering of other heads, human and otherwise, turned along with his, then nodded and returned their attention to their companions. The faces present showed every tint imaginable, deep brown brows and creamy cheeks intermixed with verdigris and violet, and all the unworld’s languages coasted on their breath. Some had what I took for familiars perched on heads or shoulders: ravens with iridescent blue plumage, tiny golden lizards with lion’s faces. I noticed, too, a subtle haze, and a stink like burning violets wafting among the company.
As we approached the minotaur, I noted the bottle of lilac-colored cordial on a small table, the two glasses, and understood that Asterion did not care to leave Gus fully possessed of his faculties.
Gus’s eyes flicked around and his shoulders hunched. “It might be better to return to my room,” he said, not bothering with a greeting. “Catherine will make it impossible for everyone here to converse.”
“Oh, they can block out her squealing for just a lit or two; it isn’t expensive magic as long as you don’t need to keep it up for terribly long. The Nimble Fire is open to all citizens, however encumbered. And there’s nothing like the scent of seeping magic, when so many of us are gathered together! Have you savored it before?”
Gus wrinkled his nose in reply. So that was the smoldering floral stench, the blur that feathered distant faces: it was magic bleeding to feed the common atmosphere, as Miss Anura had put it. It was startling to realize that I was smelling a system of taxation.
Asterion leered at me, then patted the chair drawn close to his. “Come. Try to relax. You’re among—colleagues, at least. How goes your work with the beamers?”
I had never heard the term before. After a moment’s reaching I realized it must refer to that translucent child whom Gus had made and then destroyed, and to all similar beings.
“As to that,” Gus said, and stopped, chewing the inside of his cheek. He remained standing, his long hands curled like dead spiders on the back of the chair Asterion had indicated. It was covered in cut velvet, midnight blue, with an acanthus pattern. “I regret that I’ve been obliged to suspend work on my great project. Temporarily, of course. I need to save every talen I can toward a, a personal expense.”
The minotaur’s brows shot nearly to his horns. “What could possibly deflect you from your purpose? I tell everyone I know that nobody equals Gus Farrow for dedication, and here you are simply dropping the whole undertaking?” The reproach in the beast’s voice rang false and tinny. “I did not think you were so fickle.”
“I’m not!” Tears of frustration swelled in Gus’s eyes. My whole being felt like a pair of twiddling thumbs; how could Gus, so intelligent in some things, be so obtuse in the face of Asterion’s manipulations? “I assure you, I would not abandon my work for any but the most pressing reasons! But now I find myself at the mercy of the unworld, with all its insulting indifference to everything I hold most precious.”
“The vagaries of the unworld should be behind you.”
“Indeed they should, and they are! Except in this one matter. I am disgusted, outraged that it, it impinges so—”
Asterion filled two glasses and held one out. “Sit down, my poor young friend. Tell me everything. Whatever is the trouble?”
Hesitation crimped Gus’s face. He was not given to being overly confiding, or not to anyone but Margo and me.
Then he accepted the glass and swung himself into the midnight chair. “My aunt—great-aunt, really. She’s ill, and I don’t know how long I have until her illness claims her.”
The minotaur’s expression suggested that the impending death of an elderly woman could not possibly be of much concern, and that therefore the real problem was yet to be stated. He turned his palms up, a gesture of waiting. Gus stared at him quite blankly and tossed back his lilac cordial. It had the smell of a bonfire on a spring night, similar to and yet distinct from the enveloping fug.
“Ladies in the unworld do have a way of expiring, given a bit of time,” Asterion observed at last, pouring more liquid into Gus’s cup. “I can hardly remember when such deaths seemed worth regretting, if they ever did.”
“But Margo is no ordinary lady!” The words burst from Gus like steam from a kettle. “She has that piercing vision that sees through all the obfuscations of society, that fine understanding—I believe that, if only she had found the right mentor in her youth, if only she had been cultivated, then she might have been one of us indeed. To let her simply die, as if she were no better than some veiled spinster always muttering at the back of the village church—it would be indecent. She ought to be one of us, and she ought to be here. Death is not for such as us, and it is certainly not for Margo!”
How very like Gus, I thought; since he considered himself the most exceptional of mortals, it followed that anyone he loved must be similarly anointed. Margo was quick and acerbic enough, no doubt, but when did that let anyone off the grave?
Of course, I had personal reasons for bitterness on the subject.
“Not everyone here tries to avoid dying,” Asterion pointed out idly. “There are those who maintain double lives, here and in the unworld, knowing though they must that aging and death will follow. Even your old mentor Darius, eh, though he’s had the sense at last to give it up? Personally I find it terribly wasteful.” He shrugged as if to say there was no accounting for tastes, especially a taste for April sunshine and springing grass.
“Well—let them. If they choose to squander their own immortality in that fashion, no one will stop them. But Margo—”
The minotaur let out a great whickering sigh, rolled his wet brown eyes. “Margo, Margo. If you are so determined, dear Gus, we should examine the matter practically. There are obstacles in the way of Margo’s immigration, I take it?”
“That amphibious bitch! I pleaded—offered her everything I could! For work she could complete in a matter of moments. It’s nothing short of extortion.”
The wide bovine mouth compressed in clear warning and the globular eyes swung meaningfully about. Gus flinched and fell silent. And I? I found myself unaccountably imagining what it would be like to sit with the amphibious bitch on one of the nearby sofas, laughing softly, her small blue hand in mine—never mind that I had no body to sit, or laugh, or touch.
“Allow me to sum up your position. You need funds, and quickly. You are already fully exploiting your inner resources, and finding them inadequate. Am I correct so far?”
“I’ve managed to collect forty-two talens in the last ten days. After taxes, at that. If only I knew for certain that Margo’s illness would not progress too quickly, it would be an excellent rate.”
“It would, but you don’t. And so you need a second source.”
And here they both confirmed their murderous tendencies. In this case the victim was ambiguity, which they dispatched by gaping up at me in perfect unison. It jarred me from my daydreams.
“A true sorcerer,” Asterion observed, “knows how to turn his burdens into opportunities.”
Gus threw back his drink. The minotaur’s hands were so deft, so nearly invisible, that I hardly caught their motion before the glass was filled again to the brim. Well, a few lit worth of legerdemain would be a fine investment.
“If I understand correctly, I would be drawing magic from Catherine’s consciousness, assuming she can still be said to possess such a thing. Or from whatever unconscious processes she has in place of thought. But either way, her processes are something that might be better left alone. Involving her could be dangerous.”
“Dangerous? Ah, so it could,” the minotaur said. He let the words stand as a dare.
At that Gus gulped his brimming glass and the hands blurred again.
“I’m not conversant with the method, though I’ve heard it discussed a bit. I understand that specialized equipment is involved.”
“It requires a heartstring—not the commonplace design, but one made for the purpose. An umbrastring, they’re called. Rare things, produced by a refined art. Not many of them kicking around, and not many sorcerers who have the craft to pull one off. Ghosts aren’t a popular specialty. Personally, I can’t understand the squeamishness, when they have the same legal status as—a hat, or any other object.”
Ghosts. It now occurred to me to scan the company for others of my kind, and I thought I spotted two in the distance. In one case, a pallid gentleman by the fire appeared to be quite literally skewered through his heart by a vaporous, weeping girl-child with African features, though he chattered on unconcernedly. And there, in the far corner: did that woman made of flickering blades not wear a boneless, translucent young man draped like a stole around her shoulders?
“Rare and refined have a habit of running up the bill, don’t they? It would be another expense I can ill afford.”
At this the minotaur drew something from its florid waistcoat. At first glance it appeared to be a sort of tuning fork, if such an implement could be made of tightly wound spider silk: translucent, glistening, the color of rain on an autumn night. There were two slim prongs that curved to merge in a single stem, and an ebony handle with a long and barely visible thread trailing from it. Set into the handle was a pearly dial not much larger than a pea, its swinging black hand hair-thin. Excepting the tail, the whole was not more than five inches in length.
“You could borrow mine.”
I regarded the object without enthusiasm. My mind was all that was left to me. The prospect of my murderer siphoning from that mind—what? A rippling magic current generated by my thoughts, a stream of primal being?—was enough to make my whole being flex with rebellion.
Gus looked from the thing to me, and back.
“For a percentage, I assume?”
The minotaur did not immediately reply. He was too occupied in watching my convulsions, pleasure shining on his face.
“Look at how she flashes! It’s a promising sign; the more active her reactions, the better her likely output. Oh, your Catherine hears us, plainly enough. She wishes to register an objection to our plans. Well, little miss, if you insist on hanging about you should expect to be put to work. Eh?”
Gus twisted to watch my furious winking, scalding white inverting to the black of an abyss and back again at terrible speed. For a moment his look was distinctly sheepish. He knew me well enough to understand that to me such a violation of my mind was even worse than a violation of the body. He knew, and some stitch of ancient loyalty yanked tight inside him.
Then he deliberately turned to the minotaur and forced a smile.
“Objecting is what Catherine does best, it would seem.” He paused, mastering his unwanted sympathy. “What percentage?”
“Even half would leave you much richer than you were previously.”
“A third.”
“With a very active, productive ghost—as your Catherine seems to be—we can sometimes collect as many as seven talens per unworld rotation! Nearly double your own rate. And in a state of high excitement”—here he eyed my involuntary signaling, its precipitous blink from ghastly white to jet—“it could go even higher.”
Now that Gus was engaged in haggling over my rape, he kept his gaze curiously averted. “A third. I’m the one who must always be listening to her carrying on. I should reap the benefits.”
The minotaur inclined its shaggy head with such a travesty of graciousness that I knew it had attained its goal. It had cultivated Gus entirely in the hope of exploiting me.
“Shall we begin?”
Gus drank again at that, priming himself for the violence at hand. The minotaur’s glass was untouched, of course.
“How is it accomplished?”
Hidden somewhere in his words was a question: could he avoid watching while the operation was performed?
“The fork is inserted, anywhere at all; you will see that it embeds itself in Catherine just as securely as if she were fleshed. The thread rests in your mouth. You will find it easy enough to draw on her, and you can pay me my share when we are done.” He paused. “If you prefer not to be observed, I can throw up a quick deflection so that no one looks at us for a bit.”
“The fork doesn’t go in her head? I suppose she has no brain anymore as a seat for her mental processes.”
“Exactly.” The minotaur nodded at me. “Whatever cognition she has is evenly distributed.”
How can I describe what I next experienced? To speak of bodily sensations is at best analogy where a body is lacking. The silken fork was jabbed into what once would have been the fleshy part of my calf. At once the area felt thicker, stiffer, something like when blood swells the site of an injury. As the minotaur had promised, the fork stuck quivering in me, though in every other case I was incapable of interaction with material things. Excepting the walls, of course; but they were not material in the ordinary sense.
For some reason, the minotaur had not thought to mention the pain.
It was different than bodily anguish, but pain was the only word for it. It was the sun’s glare on a sheet of ice, but rendered in cold pricklings; it was a rain of needles, each of them hungry, parasitic, and sipping at my mind. And it was neither of these, but something like the first slap of bereavement: a cruel visitant that strikes and then passes through, deducting from one’s essence as it goes.
Whatever it was, I buckled and flashed, quite unable to defend myself. And Gus held the thread in his mouth and sucked, his gaze fixed on his knees.
It went on until I felt myself whirl and bend, my black and white yanked from their usual alternation into a moody swirl; until so much of my consciousness flowed to power Gus that I folded into an uncertain dimness, nothing left to me but my scream. When I thought I could bear it no longer, Gus let slip the thread, and I heard his voice join with the minotaur’s in cries of celebration.
“Ten! No, nearly eleven. Of course, she may not be so generous always. But nonetheless!”
“I did tell you that Catherine’s mind was remarkable. I suppose it’s only to be expected that she continues to be—a great inspiration. A muse to me, in death as she was in life. Oh, my regard for her was not misplaced!”
I sagged above them, a limp and wrung-out ectoplasmic rag. Not since the immediate aftermath of my murder had I felt such obliterating despair. Meanwhile they crowed and their glasses clinked while heads antlered and scaly continued their intimate babble all around us; the deflection had worked, no one had seen. But didn’t they see me now? All the living present in this glimmering hall were human, I believed, or had been once. But no one felt the least compassion for me, or for those other poor wraiths for that matter? Did no one besides Miss Anura believe that I was still myself?
Gus and the minotaur drank and laughed while they laid plans for an ongoing project of mind-rape. They meant to meet regularly, I understood, going forward. Gus’s laughter in particular was uproarious; it brayed and brawled, the notes of it knocking one another about. I had known Gus all his life, and never had I heard him produce such sounds before.
Now and then he brushed away tears. After some indeterminate time, he pitched from his chair onto the floor and lay quite still.
The minotaur arranged for an army of glistering silver-blue beetles to carry Gus back to his room. I did not doubt that he would extract the fare from Gus later, with something over for himself. I sailed above while Gus slid prone through the alleys on the rattle of ten thousand chitinous feet. Gus’s eyes were closed, the lids lacquered in sweat.
Gus slept a long time, rousing only once to vomit purple fluid in a corner. Slowly I recovered myself, reared and flashed again.
When he woke and washed he kept his eyes stubbornly turned from me, while I did my best to flap into his line of sight. Given our peculiar relations, it was the nearest we could come to a quarrel.
“For Margo, Catherine,” Gus muttered at last. “You must see reason! I will only inconvenience you until we can bring her here, of that you may be sure. We must both give our utmost, spare ourselves no effort or discomfort, if only Margo can be saved.”
We. An outlandish construct, and a brutal one, that we. I tried to express as much with my scream, but it sounded the same as ever. Who was more isolate than I, a dead woman trapped among the living? I could not be packed into a we by anyone, least of all by my killer.
If everyone I’d loved had gone on with their lives and left me behind, then the only we I could conceive was the purest fantasy: a small blue hand in mine.
At that moment I would have gladly bled a thousand Margos to slow death, if by so doing I could have tasted my own life again. The realization surprised me: I hadn’t been an outstandingly good person while I lived, perhaps, but to feel such driving malice toward anyone? That was a new development in my character.
Death, though it rots the body, usually has at least the virtue of sparing the spirit from further corruption. But it had not spared mine.