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Morna had died waiting for someone to rescue her, wasting away in a tower cell seemingly without doors. The wizard who had kidnapped her stopped showing up with food and water, and she died far from home in an unfamiliar land.
In death, she wandered the abandoned castle, wailing in her dismay. The sun would set, she would rise and begin her mournful cry afresh. She couldn’t say how long she had been dead. Countless nights of moaning blurred into each other. She no longer noticed seasons, and she didn’t keep a journal.
One night, a boy appeared on the blasted heath that surrounded the castle and watched her.
Normally she didn’t see people. There was no settlement visible and people rarely passed near the castle. When she did see people, they didn’t want to see her. Some averted their eyes, made a sign of warding against evil. Some were children, daring each other to touch the wall of the fortress and then run giggling from their fear.
But this boy seemed fearless, and he returned most nights. When he wasn’t looking at the castle walls, he was looking at her. She walked along the battlements, sounding her mournful cry, and he watched.
Even in death, she learned, she still felt self-conscious.
On one trip to the castle, the boy arrived carrying a heavy sack. Morna paused in her wailing, curious about the change in his routine. The boy pulled out a strange looking crossbow that was nearly as long as he was tall. After wrestling with it, he cocked the bowstring and placed a multi-pronged hook on top of it.
He staggered to lift it, then fired it toward the battlement near where she stood. The hook, which trailed a rope behind it, hit the wall and clattered back down to the ground. He cursed and reset the whole process. After several more tries, the hook caught on the wall, and he began climbing.
In all the time Morna had haunted this castle, no one had ever tried to break in. Since she had died, no one had tried to leave, either. She didn’t know if she should assure him that he didn’t need to go through all this effort for her. It was too late to rescue her, and the wizard was missing.
It was hard to monitor his progress along the wall. She could walk through everything in the castle except the exterior walls and the space above them. She couldn’t lean out over the crenellations to see how the boy was doing.
With a grunt of effort, the boy reached the top of the wall and pulled himself onto the battlements. He sat there panting, then looked up as she drew close, smiling a lopsided smile. She was so baffled by his arrival that she didn’t know how to respond. It didn’t occur to her to smile back.
“I can’t believe it,” he said. “I can’t believe I swiped you right from under Gill’s nose. You’re going to make me rich beyond my wildest dreams.”
Morna frowned, not certain what he meant.
“You probably don’t understand me at all,” he said as he rummaged through his bag. He pulled out a box with a brass screen on one side and a crank handle on another. “I just need you to hold still while I put you in this box, and then I’ll get you off to market.”
Though she didn’t know what the box was, she suspected it was bad. Even in death, she felt fear. And she ran.
She shot through the nearest wall, gliding down the stairs and through the next wall at the bottom. Since she no longer drew breath, she wasn’t winded from the effort or tight-chested from the fear. And yet she couldn’t remember the last time she had been this afraid. Certainly not since she died. And even then, she had been more delirious from hunger than actually afraid.
She paused in the garden and lurked between the trees and the overgrown flowerbeds, listening for her pursuer. No sound reached her ears. She would have sighed with relief if she breathed, but she felt certain she had escaped whatever bizarre fate the boy had in mind for her.
And then his footsteps rang in the corridor. He glanced into the garden from the hall he ran down before running past. Then he doubled back and paused in the doorway with his smile. He lifted the box with the mesh aimed toward her and began walking her way.
He made shushing noises. “It’s alright, Princess. It’s alright. Just get in the box, and I’ll get you out of here to a new home.”
“What kind of new home?” she asked. She hadn’t spoken since her death, and the sound of her moaning words alarmed her.
The boy’s expression fell. “I guess you can understand me after all. I don’t know what you heard me say earlier. But it’s a nice place, definitely not weird or uncomfortable. Probably.”
Morna shrieked and ran through the nearest wall and down the corridors again. She didn’t have a plan, she just ran through rooms, desperate to get away from the boy. In each room, she looked around for something useful. The castle was not large, and she had been through almost every room multiple times in the past. She had seen everything in those rooms, but she kept darting through them in hopes of finding something new.
She spotted the boy sneaking around the corridors of the castle, peeking into each room before creeping on to the next door. Each time she saw him, her fear went up another notch.
Eventually she willed herself to enter one of the two rooms she hadn’t returned to since she had died: the library.
It had been her first memory when she was kidnapped by the wizard. He had brought her there, tied up, while he gloated about the ransom he was extorting from her father the king. She’d wept and begged, but to no avail. He had dragged her up into the tower and sealed her in her doorless prison.
But in her fear, she grew desperate, and ventured into the library.
It was the largest room of the castle. Most of the walls were lined with books. Tucked into one corner was a small writing desk. The center held a large work table with stacks of books and a large glass bottle resting on its side in a wooden cradle. As she moved about the room, she noticed someone had painted dozens of symbols in a circle. Next to it stood a lectern with an open book turned toward the circle. A shadowy smudge of some sort hovered inside the circle near the book.
As she drew near it, the smudge shifted and a cold and alien awareness focused on her.
Morna retreated from the circle and bumped into something in the process. From one of the shelves, a tiny voice yelled, “Mek!”
She had moved through the table and collided with the bottle. It teetered in its perch until a winged imp the size of her fist landed on it to stablize it. The imp glared at her and again said, “Mek!”
“Aha!” the boy shouted from the doorway. He smiled, trying to catch his breath, and stepped into the room. “Look, I get it. Change is hard. But you’re a sad princess, and this is your chance to get away from here. Just hold still, I’ll crank this handle, and then we can leave together.”
A derisive snort came from the circle of symbols. “Spookmonger,” a grating voice said from within the shadows.
“Who said that?” the boy asked, looking about frantically.
“What...what is a spookmonger?” Morna asked.
The boy’s attention whipped back to her. “Not me. No. I’m definitely not one.”
“They capture ghosts and sell them,” the shadow said. When it spoke, Morna thought she caught a glimpse of white specks flashing. Like teeth.
“People buy ghosts?” she asked. “Who? And why?”
“No one,” the boy tried to answer as the shadow said, “People with a lot of money and desperate for a cure of dubious quality.”
The boy glanced around the room, still not recognizing where the grating voice came from. He began working the crank again on the box. “Quiet, you. It’s nothing like that. What you’ll be doing is helping me. I have a wife and three kids to feed.”
Morna no longer had a stomach, and yet she felt increasingly nauseated as the boy cranked the handle on the box. She doubled over and tried to back away, but he pressed closer to her. In frustration, she shoved at the glass bottle, forcing it out of its cradle and over the edge of the table.
“Mek!” the imp cried in dismay.
If the glass made any noise when it was shattered, it was immediately overwhelmed and forgotten by the shrieking that erupted. A yellow miasma swam up around the boy and soon he screamed as well. Eyes wide, he dropped his box and swatted at the smoke that shrieked all around him. He staggered farther into the room and into the circle of symbols.
And into the shadow.
More teeth than seemed plausible flashed in the darkness. At the first sign of blood, Morna fled the room.
~*~
It was many nights before Morna returned to the library. Instead, she skulked around the battlements and stared at the horizon. The sorrow that had prompted her years of wailing had abated. It was replaced by a cold dread.
She’d never heard of spookmongers before, or that ghosts could be bought and sold. She’d thought starving to death was as bad as it could get, but clearly there were more cruelties than she imagined. And the only one who seemed to know anything about these spookmongers was in her second least favorite room in the castle.
But finally, her fears motivated her enough to seek out the shadow. She worried that there would be blood and gore all over the study. But instead, the room was returned to its previous state. The bottle that she had broken had been replaced with a different bottle, the swirling yellow mist once more inside.
“Hello?” she called out.
The tiny imp reappeared and positioned itself between her and the bottle, arms spread wide as though it would block her from accessing it.
The darkness said, “You returned faster than I expected.”
“I need help,” Morna said. “The boy—the spookmonger—he said something about beating someone else here. There are more people, more spookmongers coming.”
“That will not end well for you,” the darkness said.
“You aren’t worried?” she asked.
“I’m not a ghost. And they wouldn’t be able to do anything with me. The old wizard had trouble binding me, and he was an actual practitioner of the arts, unlike ruffians like the spookmongers. If someone damages the circle, I’ll return to my own plane. Which is a shame, but not lethal. I’ll miss having books to read, but I will survive.”
“Can you help me, umm—I beg your pardon, I do not know your name.”
“You would not be able to speak my actual name. But I have many sobriquets. My favorite has always been ‘The Empress of Teeth.’” White danced in the darkness, which Morna wanted to believe was a smile.
“My name is Morna,” the girl said. “Princess of—”
“Yes, I know who you are. And no, I cannot help. It is nothing personal. I simply cannot leave the circle. The best I could do is be available for you to lure people in here again.”
Morna wrung her hands and paced in front of the Empress. “What can I do then?”
The Empress was quiet for a while before asking, “What abilities have you cultivated?”
“Abilities?”
“Can you move physical objects? Possess living things? Sway emotions?”
“No. I can walk through walls?”
“Any ghost can do that, and I’m sure those cretins will be prepared for such.”
“What about castle defenses? He was a powerful wizard. He must have had something.”
“Yes, he did.”
Hope blossomed in Morna’s absent heart. “Wonderful. How can we use them?”
“You need to wield his staff. I don’t know why the wizard disappeared, but he probably took his staff with him. Even if you were able to find it, you have no ability to wield it because you are insubstantial.”
“He could be dead,” Morna said. “And left the staff behind.”
“Have you seen a body? I thought not. Plus, even if he had died, he has contingency plans. His soul is bound to some hidden location far from here. He would just return as soon as he regrew his body.”
“He can do that?”
“Anyone can, if they know how. But that’s a more complicated prospect.”
“What about that bottle?” she asked. “I was able to touch that.”
“Of course you were. It’s warded. Much like my circle and, I gather, the outer walls. It keeps the screaming madness inside, and you out. Which makes it a physical thing for you.”
“Is the staff warded then?” she asked.
“Potentially, but this assumes the staff is still here. The wizard never left without it.”
“Where could I look?”
After a long pause, the Empress said, “Mek, can you bring us the master’s staff?”
The imp said, “Mek!” and flapped out of the library. After a few moments, the imp returned, wings laboring to keep it aloft while it carried the staff.
Morna reached out and took the staff. It was light in her hands, though she didn’t really feel it. Like the outer walls and glass bottle, it resisted her passing through it. She didn’t feel wood grain, just a force pushing back against her hands.
But if the staff was still in the castle, Morna wondered what had become of the wizard who had left her to starve. “Mek, where did you find this?”
Mek flapped off, and she followed in its wake. She found she couldn’t walk through the walls while holding the staff, so she had to navigate the castle through the actual doors. When she caught up with Mek, the imp sat next to the bottom of a flight of stairs.
She looked around for some obvious sign of why the staff was at this location but found nothing. “Mek, where’s your master?”
The imp flew off again and led her to a small courtyard with a midden heap. Mek sat next to it and looked up at her expectantly. At one point, the midden was probably used for whatever food scraps the wizard had left behind. Now it was the place where the boy lay. There wasn’t much left after the Empress had gotten hold of him, but what remained was left to compost.
It only took a moment of poking with the staff before an old skull tumbled into sight, part of it crushed inward.
Her own body was in her doorless tower cell, where Mek couldn’t get to it. But if the wizard had fallen down the stairs and smashed his brains against the landing, it was another mess for Mek to tidy up.
Morna stared at the skull long into the night. As the eastern sky began to lighten, she turned and headed back inside. She needed to understand the staff.
~*~
For several months, the staff brought her peace. But such security was fleeting.
When the spookmongers arrived, Morna was prepared. With some experimentation, she had learned to open and close the hidden doors that could only be accessed with the staff, including the entry into her “doorless” tower cell. She was still unwilling to enter the room where her remains lay, though it pained Mek to have a room the imp couldn’t clean. She woke the stone sentinels that used brute force to repel invaders and the enchantments that harmed or repelled mortals.
Under the advice of the Empress, Morna made certain that none of the spookmongers remained in the castle walls. Those who ran in terror from the defenses were allowed to flee. Those who died were dumped outside of the walls in case they themselves came back as ghosts. Morna didn’t want to spend her unlife trapped in the castle with someone who had tried to capture and sell her.
She remained vigilant, but she felt safer than she had since before she died. She watched the horizon for new intruders and read the old wizard’s books. She wanted to understand what it meant to be a ghost, and how she might move beyond that state, and she studied diligently on the castle walls. In time, she worked her way up to turning the pages of the books with her spectral hands instead of fumbling with the tip of the staff to do so.
And then the wizard returned.
He stood across the blasted heath, flanked by men she recognized as spookmongers she had chased off. His hair was different from when she last saw him, but she knew his face. Even in death, it haunted her.
Morna didn’t want to abandon the wall, afraid the wizard would sneak up on her, but she needed advice more. So she fled to the library.
“I believe I suggested he had such a thing.” The Empress of Teeth did not look up from her book.
“Can he get in without the staff?” she asked.
The Empress shifted back in the circle and regarded Morna. “Most likely. He created all the enchantments in here. I doubt his plans for immortality would leave him locked out of his own home.”
“Do you think the guardians would still attack him?” she asked.
“He’s had a few apprentices try to kill him by taking control of the staff, but it seems the more physical threats will not harm their master.”
“And I guess Mek is in the same category?”
“Essentially.”
Morna’s shoulders drooped. “Then what can I do?”
The Empress drifted around the circle, a habit Morna recognized as one the Empress used when deep in contemplation.
Morna paced as well, hoping for some sort of insight but hoping even more that the Empress had a better suggestion. The princess poked at the bottle on the work table until Mek flew over and glared at her. “What about the screaming madness?”
The Empress paused. “What? No. It is dangerous to normal humans but easily corralled by the wizard.”
The pacing resumed. After a long time, the Empress simply said, “The best I can think of is that the apprentices were inexperienced in using the staff. You have used it for some time now and may be able to outthink the wizard.”
This left Morna with little hope, but it was all she had.
~*~
In the end, it was hopeless.
When the night rose and she manifested, Morna heard men’s voices in the castle. She drifted through the walls and found the wizard speaking with the spookmongers in the library. He held the staff in his hand, and the other men were preparing their ghost-catching boxes.
In the circle, the Empress roiled in anger. Morna was not certain if it was because of the wizard’s return or that the Empress’s book had been taken away.
One of the spookmongers spotted her and called out, “There she is, lads!”
Morna fled, slipping through the walls as quickly as she could. She tried to think of some place to hide, but in her fear, she couldn’t think of anything.
She fled through one of the spookmongers before realizing what she had done. Soon, all she saw were spookmongers. Every wall she passed through put her on a path with another spookmonger with another crank box. She zigged and zagged through the walls, trying to evade them, until finally she was penned in a corner of the castle, which she couldn’t pass through.
Pain and nausea overwhelmed her, and soon there was only darkness. She no longer had a sense of her limbs or her body, her spectral form instead reduced to a small but intense cramped muscle. Straining against her prison, she tried to reach out with what were once her hands and legs. She moved, but not enough to provide any relief from her pain.
The spookmongers laughed and chatted unintelligibly and seemed happy with themselves while she suffered.
For a moment, her prison contracted, and the pain of her existence intensified. Then it relaxed. It contracted again, more forcefully, and then relaxed. She could shift slightly, the boundaries of her existence not as rigid as they once were.
The spookmongers argued in the distance. Voices became more heated.
Morna pushed out again, and something snapped. Wood splintered, and metal banged against metal. One person screamed in pain, while others screamed in terror.
As she reformed her spectral body, she found herself, on the threshold of the main gate the shattered remains of one of the boxes scattered around her. One man, the one who had captured her in the end, lay on the ground and writhed in pain. Pieces of the box pierced his torso, while his hands and face carried huge lacerations.
The others backed away from her, making warding signs against evil.
“She broke the trap,” one said. “I ain’t never seen a ghost break the trap.”
“The wizard tricked us,” another said. “This ain’t a ghost. You saw those demons he had. She must be another demon. He’s having a laugh at us. He said he wanted help with the ghost here, but it was all to torture us.”
Morna said, “Yes. I am a demon.”
The spookmongers jolted with surprise at the sound of her voice, taking steps away from her.
“And if you linger here,” she said, “I am allowed to feed on you.”
The spookmongers fled, pausing only to pick up their injured friend. Out across the blasted heath they ran, not looking back.
Morna pushed her hand up against the open air, and felt the wards that kept her in. She assumed they had prevented her from being removed from the castle. It left her wondering what kept her in the box.
The trap lay in broken pieces around her. Most of it was lacquered wood and brass gears. But there were also pieces of crystal and a metal she couldn’t identify. She reached down and picked up a piece of it.
It was a jagged shard, with an oily sheen and symbols painted on it. Touching it, she knew this was what she had been inside of. Warded, like the walls and the bottle and the Empress’s circle. And under enough strain, it had shattered with great force.
She looked at the metal and then up at the castle. Then she headed in.
The wizard was in the library at the work table, looking at a book and frowning. His staff rested against the shelves behind him. The Empress regarded Morna as she drifted in but said nothing. The wizard did not notice the princess’s arrival.
Morna delicately set her metal shard near the door, then slipped out of the room to come back in through the wall behind the wizard. She didn’t enter all the way but passed through enough to watch him. When she felt certain he wouldn’t look back, she came into the room, picked up the staff, and shot through the door with it.
The wizard grunted in alarm, but by the time he got to his feet, Morna had used the staff to seal the door. Up the stairs she fled, to her old tower cell. She used the staff to open an entrance to the sealed room, slipped inside, and closed it behind her.
She avoided looking at her remains, left the staff against the wall, and flitted back down to the library. When she arrived, the wizard was cursing loudly and feeling along the door with his hands. She slipped over to where she had left her metal shard and picked it up. He turned at the sound of metal scraping on the wooden shelf.
“Hello child,” the wizard said. “You’ve been busy, haven’t you?”
Morna’s fear pushed back against her anger, and her sorrow got tangled in between. She tightened her grip on the metal, hesitating to strike out at him.
“I might owe you an apology for letting you die. That wasn’t part of the plan.”
Morna spat back, “You owe me an apology for abducting me in the first place.”
The wizard frowned. “That was just a mercantile matter, not negligence. The supplies needed for my work cost, well, a king’s ransom. But braining myself on the stairs and neglecting to manage my possessions—”
Morna’s anger pushed past her fear, and she slashed out at the wizard’s face with her jagged shard.
He staggered back in disbelief, clutching at his bloodied face. Only then did his expression show that he understood the trouble he faced. The wizard shot a look at the door, widened his eyes, then cast his glance about the room. He scampered away from Morna, snatching up a bag of something from his work table and backing into the corner next to his writing desk. As she drifted closer, he scattered a powder in front of himself.
From the circle, the Empress chuckled.
When Morna reached the wizard, she couldn’t cross the line of powder.
The wizard laughed hysterically. “It seems we’ve reached a dead end, princess. Perhaps we can negotiate a different option than your bloody vengeance? I could create a new body for you. Or steal one. We could give you a fresh new body, a fresh new life.”
Morna ignored the wizard. She didn’t need his help, she needed her revenge. Kneeling near the powder that formed the wall in front of her, she found she couldn’t get her hand near it, but the shard of metal was a different. It proved very simple to scrape the powder away with her crude tool.
The wizard began a droning chant, causing Morna to slide backward as though an invisible wall pushed her away. Desperate, she flung the shard of metal at the wizard and struck his forehead. Blood flowed from the gash, but he maintained his incantation.
She grabbed the bottle of screaming madness on the work table. She felt bad destroying another bottle, but Mek wasn’t there to tell her “mek.” The barrier halted even the motion of her throw, much like how the trap had been stopped by the castle wards.
But that had also caused the trap to explode.
“I’m sorry for what I’m about to do, screaming madness.” She pushed the bottle up against the barrier and continued pushing as hard as she could. Inside the bottle, the invisible wall pressed the yellow smoke into a thick mass at the end of the bottle.
Morna gave up hope that her mad scheme would work, but then there was a crack, and she lost her perception. As she coalesced back into awareness, the wizard stumbled, bloody and wounded, while trying to fend off the yellow miasma that shrieked around him.
She snatched up her metal shard again and charged the wizard, slashing at him and trying to herd him back toward the circle. The madness drifted off to scream elsewhere.
“Do you think me a fool?” he asked, raising his injured hands to protect his face from Morna’s attacks. “Do you think I’d be so dumb as to cross over into the summoning circle?”
“I think you’re out of options,” Morna said. “I am tireless, and you’re bleeding a lot. How do you think this is going to end?”
“I won’t have my soul devoured by that demon. You may as well strike me down. Just know that this is not the en—”
Morna struck him down.
“Mek!” the tiny imp said as it came into the room. It dithered for a moment, surveying the mess, before it descended upon the broken glass to begin tidying.
“That was exciting,” the Empress said. “I can get back to reading now.”
Morna had never felt so tired in all her death. “Is that really your biggest concern?”
“I care about you in my own way, Princess,” the Empress replied. “Though I will need to wait for Mek to finish tidying up before it will get me another book. I imagine the wizard’s soul was snatched back to his hidden artifact, and he’ll be back again in a few years.”
“Hopefully I won’t be here by then,” Morna said.
“Have you puzzled out a route past the wards?” the Empress asked.
“They stop spiritual entities. Not people. If I can create a body for myself, I could leave here. And there are presumably all the ingredients I would need in this castle.”
“An interesting idea,” the Empress said.
“I could make two bodies, if you wanted to come with me. See far off libraries.”
The Empress smiled with a million teeth visible.
~***~
Jeremy Zimmerman is a teller of tales who dislikes cute euphemisms for writing like “teller of tales.” He is the author of the young adult superhero book, Kensei and its sequel, The Love of Danger. In his copious spare time he is the co-editor of Mad Scientist Journal. He lives in Seattle with a herd of cats and his lovely wife (and fellow author) Dawn Vogel. Visit him online at www.bolthy.com.