The Palace of Ghosts rose from the fog like a dreadful specter summoned forth to haunt Tenders’ Row. At this hour, the sun had dissolved the early morning fog like cotton candy in water, but, for the Palace of Ghosts whose office was all things haunting, it only was appropriate that it clung even to the phantoms of now expired weather phenomena. All the better to leave the true shape of the palace and its grounds obfuscated. An outlier on a street otherwise drenched in the honey-gold light of a late morning sun—accentuating the unReal architectures of those palaces devoted to the other eight “official” Godtenders.
People flowed through their doors with shoulders pulled up and heads bowed only to leave in complete relaxation. This street epitomized the heights of what every summoner could achieve, but in the Godtenders people saw the best of what humanity could be. I only saw the edification of those who’d decided I was their enemy. It was why I stood still as a river stone gazing into the fog’s imperceivable depths—not because I’d yet to work out what to say to Lupe.
“You don’t have to say anything,” a woman said. Her voice was the haunting melody of a breeze carrying autumn leaves beyond a hill.
My line of thought shattered, I shaped a response from the shards while my eyes slid from one corner to the next in search of her.
“What makes you think I was worrying about what to say?” I asked.
She laughed and tapped her hand against my elbow. Down here. I tilted my head to discover her, a woman of forty years in brightly patterned pajamas, carrying a bag of mochi donuts. One of which she held between pinched fingers coated in cinnamon and sugar.
“Your jaw,” she said. “It was clenching and unclenching.”
“Really?” I asked, skepticism framing my question even as I forced my jaw to unclench and stay unclenched.
She shrugged, “Eh, I don’t always get it right. Why loiter out front then?”
“I have a friend inside right now,” I answered, technically truthful. “I’m just waiting for her.”
“It’d be easier to wait inside,” she said.
“I wouldn’t want to be rude,” I parried. “I’m not really that religious.”
“Neither am I,” she said with a wink, “and they let my goofy ass in.”
“I’ve never been inside a palace before.”
“First time for everything.”
I opened my mouth and realized I’d expended my ammo of quasi-truthful statements. All that remained was the unmitigated truth: I’m afraid that if I step onto the palace grounds everyone will want to kill me. There was shame and irony in the thought as I silently voiced it in my mind. All the wariness that’d adhered me to my ad hoc post in front of the palace was absent when I’d agreed to infiltrate Marduk’s throne—an objectively more dangerous mission.
“I’ll hold your hand,” the woman offered, smirking.
The mocking undertone of her statement set fire to the dregs of my trepidation. So what if the Godtenders wanted to kill me, they had since I was ten, and even when one of their agents was right in front of me she failed to spot the hybridae before her. If they were going to come for me, then they would, but I wasn’t going to let the fear of them keep me from living my life.
I held up my claws. “Sorry, I’m still not used to these,” I said. “Wouldn’t want to hurt you.”
“The girls must love those.”
“They do,” I said with a wink, then crossed the threshold that marked Brightgate as separate from the Palace of Ghosts.
Immediately the warmth of the late morning sun was gone, replaced by the phantom chill of morning that defined Brightgate’s fog. The in-and-out tide of visitors to the palace disappeared. It was only me…until I heard the sweaty clap of the woman’s flip-flops as she caught up to me—not like I’d gotten that far.
“Didn’t lose all that nerve already, did you?” she asked, passing me.
“I’ve seen worse,” I tossed out and hurried after her.
As we pushed deeper into the fog, I noticed that we weren’t entirely alone. Faded silhouettes, verdigris in color, milled about on both sides of the cobblestone path we traveled on. They didn’t speak or move—though I spotted a few sitting on benches beside people that looked more solid, alive even. The curious nature of the unspeaking specters caused me to blink on my Omensight for a better look, and I immediately froze.
“What the fuck?” I asked.
The woman stopped, and asked, “Hmm, I thought you’d seen worse?”
I slashed a claw through the air and her teasing—it was impossible to care about that right now. All my attention was claimed by the tapestry of the world. Normally, when I examined Realspace, it was an infinite assemblage of every Court I could name and countless more I couldn’t. A collaboration that resulted in all colors being present yet mixed into a faded lilac—neutral, balanced, normal. Individual Courts perceivable only when a single thread was closely examined. Here, that neutrality was gone. Replaced by a faint verdigris, the color Ghosts, that painted over the tapestry the world like a wash of watercolor.
“Is this a territory?” I asked.
“No. Those are dreadful impositions,” she said. “Also a major barrier if we wanted to keep up visitation rates.”
“Then what am I looking at?”
“A consecrated space,” she answered.
“What does it do?”
“Brings you closer to the god and their Tender,” she said with a mocking innocence that paired poorly with her slouchy outfit.
Enjoying my expression of dissatisfaction, she laughed all the way to the doors of the palace—that, as it turned out, we’d been three steps from discovering. They were carved from onyx stone, taller than the apartment complex I’d visited during the wild hunt, and laid open like a rib cage cracked and splayed for autopsy. On the interior of one door was the relief of Marguerite Ghost-Shepherd, her iconic braid curling about her limbs and body protectively, carved bells hanging from each segment—they chimed in the breeze, while her hands held a drum just above her heart.
“She’s beautiful,” I whispered, only partially guilty at complimenting my enemy.
The woman agreed, and added, “In this aspect, sure”
Noting my raised brow she continued, “Don’t get me wrong, this is the Mags the layperson tends to love. Beautiful, but lacking.”
“I’m not religious,” I said, “but wouldn’t the priests find you saying that somewhat…”
“Heretical?” she offered. “Probably, but they can suck it from the back. I’m god’s favorite princess.”
Barely holding back my own laughter, I pointed to the other door, “What about that one?”
Unlike the other door’s inner face, this one had a relief carved only at the edges of the door. They depicted what seemed like events in Marguerite Ghost-Shepherd’s life. Battles, love affairs, deaths, and at the top of it her standing beside her fellow Godtenders. All of this was the frame that surrounded a large pane of some unknown metal polished to mirror shine. Though warped, it seemed, seeing as my own reflection was rendered cyclopean in stature to fill the mirror’s entirety. There wasn’t even room for the woman beside me.
“It’s to honor the Sovereign of Ghosts,” she said. “What’s more haunting than what you find looking back at you with your own eyes.”
My thoughts flashed to my last experience with mirrors—that other me’s somber smile which I didn’t share. Turning away from any consideration of that, I entered the palace. It was surprisingly empty—though, at the time, I chalked it up to an aspect of its design. A way to keep visitors focused on their visit as opposed to gawking at who was around them. Still, it meant that the palace’s interior—no doubt spatially expanded—felt broad as the plains that sprawled across the center of Turtle Island.
A brook babbled down the center of the atrium we’d stepped into. It was flanked by riparian willows that tilted in respect to a long dead wind. The ceiling was impossible to find, replaced as it was by an obsidian expanse speckled with stars. Walls were equally imperceivable, instead, the space just faded into a gray horizon.
“Are all palaces like this?” I asked.
The woman answered, “Only the consecrated, and even then not all the time. Anyways, I have things to do and you have a friend to find. Follow the guide up the brook until you hit the Oak Hall. That’s where the vision rooms are…well, usually are.”
“Vision rooms?” I asked.
“You’ll know what I mean when you get there,” she said. “Now, take some donuts and stop stalling. It’s not like you’ll know what to say before you get there.”
She pushed the bag of donuts into my arms and hopped the brook to its west bank—a specificity that felt accurate at the time, although I don’t know why. I would’ve watched her leave until she assimilated into the gray horizon, but my attention was yanked from her by the yipping of a coyote. Once it confirmed my acknowledgment, it yipped again and raced off along the bank of the brook.
As we ran, the scrubs shrank into the mid-calf grasses of the savanna. Eventually, the brook swerved left, and to my right were two oaks that stretched up into the ceiling-sky and merged forming an arch: Oak Hall. Our sprint dropped to a jog as we crossed beneath the arch entering a woodland of firm oaks. Each one so old that the gap between the floor and their roots was large enough to wedge a door into place; of which there were, doors that is. Verdigris painted wood, brassy knobs, and a carved number to distinguish. The coyote led me to number #4.
“Um, thank you,” I said.
The coyote tilted its head up at me in confusion, likely expecting something more from the encounter. I looked down to the bag of donuts—why not—and removed one, vanilla glazed, then held it out, respectfully, for the coyote. Equally respectful, it clamped its jaws around the treat, stepped away from me, and curled up as it ate. I rolled the bag’s open side back up—I didn’t want the others to grow stale—then opened the door, where I was met by the faint notes of Lupe’s playing.
I stepped through the door, pulling it shut behind me, and ventured down into the shaded darkness of a tunnel composed of oaken roots. The stairs, formed by compacted soil, proved firm after I took my initial steps. From there it was a short jaunt down a single flight of steps. After each one, the impact of Lupe’s playing strengthened. First. it grew in volume, I was approaching the source, but soon it became something distinguished. Not just a few notes to a noise, but a feeling that worked its way through my flesh to pierce my heart. After a few more steps I could name the sound. A wail. A wail fit for a dirge too grand for words to encircle. Accompanied by lighter notes in a minor key, jagged little things—regrets—that tore apart the ventricles of my compartmentalized emotions.
Tears found themselves wiped off on my arm. They’d occluded my vision to the point that I hadn’t quite noticed that the last step was upon me. With a sniff, I took it and ducked my head beneath the tunnel’s ceiling, stepping out into a field of cloying ankle-deep mist and hundreds upon hundreds of Ghosts. Those closest to me were somewhat indistinct, but as I walked down the central aisle between the blocks the Ghosts had organized themselves into, I noticed their features sharpened into something far more distinct than those in the back, let alone those I’d seen in the palace’s front yard. If it wasn’t for the verdigris pallor undertoning their skin you’d think they were alive.
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However, whether alive or dead, Lupe played for her audience with every ounce of skill she possessed. Her fingers strummed the dawnaxe’s plasma strings into every color across the spectrum, loaning her a luminosity that shimmered across her bare sweat-slick chest—not even a shirt would inhibit her feeling. Yet for all that she glowed, dewy and grand, the dawnaxe was not to be outdone; its own metal portions incandescent, shapes of burning white light that threatened blindness if I tried to watch them any closer—so I didn’t. I fixated on Lupe’s face; the way her hair plastered across her forehead dripping with sweat, the way her lips fell in a grimace while her teeth clenched the end of a cigarette that left behind a trail of indigo smoke with every shake of her head.
I was fixated on her face, but when I think back I know I was aware of everything. How her dawnaxe had grown to such an incandescence that it melted out of her hands. The fact that the lack of an instrument didn’t stop her from playing her song on light itself. Nor did I miss the detail where she levitated into the air, backlit by a full body halo, and started graduating! I saw it all, but what I focused on was Lupe’s face as her song crescendoed. How her eyes opened, the clouds within parted, and from within her came the full unmitigated awful grandeur of the Morning sun.
Then, on the cusp of everything, she struck a wailing chord driving the song into a minor key before completing the phrase. I could hear with my spirit the step that was missed, a moment passed that might never come again, and fell to the misty ground clutching at my chest to close a wound that wasn’t mine. A wail tore through my throat, reminding me of scarred tissue formed on the night my parents died. I forced myself to look up and watched as Lupe sobbed molten sunlight. Pushing up against the burden of all my feelings, I willed my legs to move. First a limping walk, then a jog, then a sprint. I raced toward the onyx stage, scrabbled my way atop it, and held out my arms as Lupe played the final notes of her song, fitfully, hauntingly, and beautifully. Then I watched as she fell from the sky, crashed into me, and cast us both into darkness.
When I opened my eyes again, it was to the sight of Lupe in a chair as she finished off the dreg of her cigarette. I pushed myself to a sitting position, and with the shift in perspective discovered what entity she’d bonded to. It had the body of an emaciated woman pushing seven feet tall with stretched limbs too disproportionate for any human. Her chest was illuminated from within and pulsed with what could best be described as the last thumps of a dying heart or the first struggling beats of a newborn. While her head was that of a wolf whose fur was the deepest black, and whose mouth was pierced shut from within by jagged shards of a sun it tried and failed to consume. Molten light dripped out the side of its mouth.
“Congrats on reaching Baron,” I said.
The burn trails from her molten tears crinkled around the hard smile she returned. She raised her cigarette in acceptance, noticed that there was no more herb within to smoke, and placed it carefully beside six other burnt-out cigarettes. I looked behind me and counted seven blocks of ghosts. Seven blocks for seven families.
In a bid to fill the quiet that curled up in the dead echo of music, I said, “I didn’t know you smoked.”
“I don’t…usually,” Lupe said, with a grin that allowed me to relax a hair. “It’s more of a special occasion kind of thing for me.”
“Did you plan on graduating?” I asked.
She leaned back in her chair. “No, yes, it doesn’t matter the answer. We both know that’s the occasion I chainsmoked seven of these babies for.”
“I’ve never seen cigarettes with blue smoke.”
Lupe crossed a leg over her knee. Watched me close with her clouded eyes, before flicking away from me with a sick bark of a laugh. Her eyes slid back to me, but her face was directed toward the crowd past my shoulder.
“If this is how you want to do this,” she said. “You haven’t seen cigarettes with blue smoke before because you haven’t seen cigarettes made from the blue lotus that grows in the muddy terraces of the Sunken Valley. That family, right there, they cultivated it. Made a special strain that pushed the hallucinogenic components way farther than before; Marduk’s territory messed up Realspace and the Underside across the entirety of the valley. However, summoning was still doable so long as you had the right circles and knew what you were calling out to. That other family, way there on the end, they had the summoning information. It was them who first noticed the trouble with trying to summon an entity of Morning when your children stopped believing there was ever a thing called, ‘the sun.’ So to account for this, they went to our lotus-growing family and traded summoning secrets for hallucinogens. Their kids couldn’t see the sun, but a hallucination could be a perfectly decent stand-in. Did result in most of us getting hooked to one degree or another to the damn things.”
“Do they taste good?” I asked, for no other reason than to delay.
Lupe sighed, “You didn’t kill the Angler Knight.”
“No,” I whispered.
“You know that’s okay, right?” she asked. “We can just get him using the Lodge’s plan. He’ll just be another body we’ll be taking down with the rest of them.”
There came that silence again; stalking around me, breath hot on the back of my neck—I was sweating. Like a kindergartner, I squirmed where I sat, rocking from cheek to cheek before I gave up on sitting altogether. The sheer discomfort of the words waiting in my gut rolled me forward until I was kneeling—a more appropriate position for requests like mine—and my chest tipped forward in a slight bow. I’d gone from never taking my eyes off Lupe’s face to staring at the black luster of her boots and the votive assembly of cigarettes.
“Lupe, we—”
“Stop,” she said, and this time shifted her posture. Parting her legs, leaning forward, elbows driving into her thighs so hard I knew it had to hurt—she wanted it to hurt, I bet, and her face so close to mine. “Now, look at me and ask again.”
I lifted my head—our faces hadn’t been that close since I’d hugged her at breakfast.
“We shouldn’t—”
Lupe slapped me. It was fast, and the pain came in the aftermath rather than from the strike itself. If I had any tears left in me they likely would’ve welled up. Though looking up from my supplicatory position, Lupe had the worse of it. Her tears came freely, flowed down the pre-carved channels of her face, and her expression was one of the deepest betrayal.
“Don’t say we,” she ordered.
With gritted teeth, I bowed lower. “I don’t want to kill him. He—”
“Murdered Melissa, even if it technically didn’t take.”
“Yes, but he also—”
“Was a part of the killing of the Seven Families. He gloated about it as he rammed his gauntleted fist into my face!”
My mouth was dry, and in the moment I swallowed to try and wet it, Lupe struck again.
“Help me understand, Nadia, why him? What information could you possibly have gained that changed everything in the handful of minutes for you?” she asked. “You…”
Lupe trailed off. Her head tilted to the side as she examined the information that she knew to fill in the gaps between the moment I impaled the Angler Knight and the moment I returned distressed. She tilted her head back the other way once she’d found the answer.
“You saw his face,” she said. “You saw his face, recognized him as someone you care about, and now you’re here begging me to agree to spare them. Nadia, please, tell me it isn’t the person you fucked in the bathroom.”
Silence was my answer.
“The dick was that good, huh?” she asked. “Tell me, if I fuck you like you’ve been wanting me to since we met, would that change your mind?”
“That’s not fair,” I said, shooting to my feet. “It’s not about just that. There’s a value in keeping him alive. We can convert him to an asset for the Lodge and—”
“Shhhh,” Lupe hissed. “I don’t care if he’ll have a use, Nadia. I care that he’ll get to live a day longer on this earth when they didn’t. So in fact, explain it to them Nadia. Why is his life worth all of theirs? Why does he get to live rather than face justice?”
“This is a farce,” I said.
She agreed, “Yeah, but you’re the one acting like a fucking joke.”
Fists at my side, I turned to face the crowd, and all pragmatic argument refused to blossom. There were too many of them. So many of them. My eyes couldn’t take in everyone at once, and so the Ghosts became smears of genders, skin colors, ages, and I only found a point to fixate on when I saw her. Or rather, I saw me.
At the center of the crowd, there in the aisle I’d raced down, was me from that night. Wet, bleeding, and, even from this distance, sporting a gaze dead and sharp as a machete left on a nightstand—violence implicit in its very existence. They were nothing like Lupe’s eyes which burned and wept in the throes of feeling. Hers was an expression of life’s pain rather than a promise of infinite inhuman violence without end. Lupe could still be reached—dissuaded, even, from the path that offered nothing. The one I couldn’t seem to shake.
“Lupe,” I said.
She barked, “No. Tell them!”
“I can’t,” I said. “They’re dead, and death can’t sate the dead. Unless you changed Courts or Amber knows a guy, it can’t bring them back either.”
She scoffed, “Okay, well I’m still alive, and I think I’ll be pretty sated once I know he isn’t.”
“You won’t,” I said. “It’s not in your nature.”
“And you know that because?”
I turned to face her, took a second look at her eyes, and then nodded.
“Cause you don’t have eyes like mine,” I said. “You’re still beholden to something greater than yourself. Greater than anything vengeance could give you.”
Her lips quivered, aching to snarl or maybe holding back a sob.
“And that would be?” she asked.
I reintroduced her to her own center. “Liberation.”
Lupe sucked down a shuddering breath. Her body rattled as the desiccated remnant of her philosophical core pinged and ponged inside her ribcage. She only stilled when her entity’s hand folded over her shoulder.
Her voice shrunk with guilt, “What does that even mean anymore? The Seven Families are dead. There’s no one left to liberate, Nadia.”
“Alls below, was your liberation so precious a commodity that it was earmarked for the Seven Families alone?” I asked. “Because from where I stand, it never runs dry and is owed to every person Marduk’s harmed. Whether it’s the people who didn’t stand up and fight beside you guys or those who buckled and joined the Lurkers because it was the only option. It even belongs to the Angler Knight, who was forced to compromise with that monster.”
“Nadia,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“You’re selfish, unfair, and a fundamentally cruel person.”
I nodded—there wasn’t anything I could say to rebuke that, and I didn’t want to if it’d jeopardize Lupe agreeing to my shift in the mission.
“But you’re not wrong, alls below, you aren’t wrong,” she said. “What was his compromise?
“No idea,” I said, “but you can ask him.”
“If I don’t like his answer, I’ll kill him. I’m a Baron now.”
“But if it is good?”
“Alls below,” she said, rising from her chair. “I hope the Lodge works his ass into an early grave.”
Lupe found her shirt crumpled on the stage. Slipped it over her head, and clapped three times. After the third, the world around us just receded. Ghosts, scenery, all of it stretching out to a distant point beyond any horizon. The last snap of light frozen on a television before it was completely and truly off. In the newly minted void, I felt Lupe’s attention fall on me even as her face was oriented in the opposite direction.
“Nadia, when we were on that rooftop you implied that vengeance was your center.”
“I remember,” I said.
“Good, so answer this for me,” she said. “If the targets of your vengeance were right in front of you, what would you do to kill them?”
“Well…I…” I trailed off. I wanted to say something smart, maybe a little more philosophical considering the conversation we just had, but all of those would be fake answers trying to disprove the simple summation that Lupe placed around my neck as a garland.
The truth was…the truth was…that I felt her again. She was cold, heavy as the rain-soaked silks I wore that night, and her breath burned. The fury of a vengeance that could never be abated absolutely. Her presence lurked just behind my shoulder. Slowly, I turned around and beheld the truth of what I tried to kill when I Divi*** myself. What I knew haunted me.
A vision of a city reduced to a carcass of civilization. Buildings awash in Revelatory fire. Death as far as the eye could see where the only sign of life’s once presence was the soot shadows of those who failed to escape…me. They failed to escape the conflagration that hid inside of me, piloting my skin, pretending to be a human being. Yet here, in this visionscape, I stood atop a ruined tower silhouetted by a carmine moon. Proud and resplendent in that scaled inhuman form I wore, ever so briefly, in my fight against the Angler Knight. From a clenched fist dangled five nooses fitted for the five people who I’d let into my heart: Amber, Melissa, Sinaya, Lupe, and #404. While my other hand was outstretched as if to touch the five four-pointed stars upon which the five killers of my father were crucified, their bodies little more than skeletons with the only mark of their identity being the masks that distinguished them in the first place.
“Do you have your answer?” Lupe asked.
I stammered, “Yes. Can you see it?”
“No, I already disconnected from the room. It’s what the three claps are for.”
Of course, she’d clapped thrice and the room went black. I followed suit, and just as quickly as her vision snapped away to the other side of the void, so too did mine. In a blink, we were in a room about the size of my high school classroom. On every surface was a mirror, and in the center of the floor was a grate where the mist—perhaps some kind of component enabling the room’s sorcerous effect—drained into.
“I'll see you at Secretary’s,” Lupe said.
“Same,” I said, not turning to face Lupe, as my attention was held by my reflection.
Hers—that Nadia I thought was dead, wished was dead, why wasn’t it dead—wore an expectant expression paired with a sickle-sharp smile that I knew I wasn’t wearing. She tapped her forehead, right where the black star marked my temple. I never moved my arms. It was the sound of the door closing in Lupe’s exit that broke me from the terrors within.
I snatched up the bag of donuts and fled the room. Passing by a priest whose face was speckled with vanilla glaze crumbs. Raced down cozy hallways lit by gentle verdigris lights that were mirrored in the glossy finish of the wood flooring. Then pushed through the large cafe-esque atrium where people drank tea, priests counseled, and those like me—troubled by the revelation of what haunted them—did their best to brick over their newly-gained insights. From there, I was out the door, across the threshold, and this close to outrunning that dread insight. Yet now I have to wonder, are the visions given by Marguerite, do they come from within, does the answer matter?