Before they saw the town, they saw the trees. A small river carved down from the rocky hills, and watered a copse of trees as black as rich soil, though there was nothing rich about the trees themselves. When the wind blew, it was as if the trees were clawing at each other, rattling their leafless branches. As Caly pushed the bike up the river, the thickets grew thicker, and both river and trees seemed to point toward a shadow looming in the distance.
The Blacktree. It had to be. Pale moss clung from its immense, outstretched limbs, which spread graciously over the rooftops of an old pioneer’s town. When the wind blew, the moss fluttered and the whole tree shifted and swayed, like a giant slowly striding on the horizon, but never moving.
Caly stopped the bike behind a tree, hiding it from view of the town. No point in announcing their presence. They found the half-buried road, suspiciously void of any footprints or repulsor marks, though the snow and sand were fresh enough it might not mean anything.
“What do you think?” Caly whispered.
Olm squinted through the black, skeletal trees. Huddled cabins, made of real wood, marked the periphery of the town. They were sturdy homes, built to last, built to be passed down from hard-working parent to hard-working child. A community.
“Looks like nobody’s home,” Olm said, keeping his voice low.
No lights were on in the windows. No sound, except the scraping wind and the creaking of the trees.
“I always wanted to see a ghost town,” the human said.
Caly and Olm both ignored him.
“Perimeter check?” Olm asked.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Caly agreed. “Let me go first, I’ll sweep out far to that side. Then you take the human and go around the back of the houses. I’ll—where are you going?”
With absolutely no sense of stealth or self-preservation, the human walked straight toward the town. Instead of ducking behind trees, he cupped his hands and shouted an echoing, “Hello!” and was about to do it again when Caly grabbed him by the stupid collar of his stupid vest, pulling him back to their hiding spot.
“What in the fucking void are you doing?”
“What?” the human said innocently, “Scipio said the people here were friendly.”
“He also said they ran into problems,” she snapped. “Which could mean anything.”
Olm chimed in, “Could be raiders in there, now. Or worse.”
“Seriously, human. How have you not been shot yet?”
He blinked at her. “Who says I haven’t been shot?”
“OK, new plan. We don’t know who’s in there—”
“—if there’s anyone in there—” Taws amended.
“Look. Human. I’d like to not get shot today, so for the time being, let’s assume the worst. Keep quiet, and stick with Olm. And in case I’m not being clear here,” Caly spoke slowly, as if instructing a child, “The only reason you should speak is if you see something out of place. Got it?”
The human nodded, not saying a word.
“Good. Now, stay low.”
“Because we’re pretending there are bad guys around, right?”
“Right,” Olm said.
“No, not right! We’re not pretending. They could be here. Stars, we’re being cautious. There’s a huge difference.”
Olm furrowed his brow, and put his free hand to his chin. “I’m not sure there is.”
“No, no,” the human said, “She’s got a point. If you pretend, it means you know you’re safe, but you act like you’re not safe. Where as, if you’re cautious, you know that you don’t know if you’re safe or not.”
“But either way, you still have to act like you’re not safe,” Olm countered.
Caly barely managed to strangle her own frustrated scream. Both Olm and Taws looked sheepishly at her.
“We’ll be quiet,” The human whispered, “Promise.”
“Yeah. Change of plan,” she said sharply. “The three of us are going in together.”
Miraculously, they stayed silent as they crept into the alley on the edge of town. Well, Caly and Olm crept while the human hung in the back, craning his neck around like a tourist who forgot his camera. They peered through the windows of the cabins, curtained and half-covered with dust. Caly saw someone’s unkempt bed, but no signs of a struggle. And in another, a breakfast nook with a table for two and candles that had melted into dry pools of wax. A wall-mounted screen, turned off. Behind one house, she almost tripped over a cellar door that was covered by a mound of wind-blown sand.
She tested one of the cabin’s back doors, and found the handle turned easily enough. Unlocked. She pushed the door open with the tip of her rifle. No alarms, no tripwires. No nothing.
“If there was a raid, why would they leave the doors unlocked?” Caly wondered aloud.
“Maybe it wasn’t a raid,” Olm said.
“Or maybe it wasn’t bandits,” the human said. Both of them looked at him.
“Then what?” Caly asked.
“I told you,” the human shrugged. “It’s a ghost town.”
“Yeah?”
“So maybe it’s ghosts.”
Olm sighed.
“You know,” Caly said, “I really thought you were going to say something intelligent, like maybe there was a gas leak during a town meeting. But no. You say it’s ghosts.”
“Hey, I don’t shoot down your dumb ideas.”
“That’s because I don’t have dumb ideas.”
She expected him to fight back, maybe to insult her and thereby lower himself and further prove he was the lesser xeno. Instead, the human only flashed her that stupid grin, like he knew something she didn’t, and kept walking. Somehow, it made her feel like he’d gotten the best of her. It bothered her more than it should have.
Something else was bothering her. People didn’t just leave without reason, and if they did, they usually didn’t go quietly. Yet there were no signs of looting or forced entry anywhere. Even on the side streets, all the homes were untouched, the doors unlocked. Someone’s laundry hung from a line across the streets. Behind one house, a generator hummed and the lights were still on. When they entered, Olm took a step back as if punched in the gut.
“Ugh,” he wrinkled his nose, all the cracks in his face contorting with disgust. “That is not a good smell.”
Caly couldn’t smell it, thanks to her helmet, but her sensors warned her of the rotting scent all the same. Olm pinched his nostrils with one hand, and went ahead. But when he came back out, he only shook his head and said, “Just someone’s dinner left out too long. Still sitting there, untouched.”
“Nothing came along to eat it?” Caly asked. “I mean, what kind of town doesn’t have any roaches or rats?”
The human opened his mouth. Before he could say anything about ghosts, Caly shot him a look. She even cleared her visor, almost without thinking, and the human froze.
“If you’re about to say the g word again—”
“I didn’t know you were couran,” Taws said.
Caly blushed, though she didn’t know why, and immediately darkened her visor again. “Of course, I am. What else would I be?”
“It’s just … I didn’t know.”
She waited for him to ask “the question,” the one that everyone always asked: If you’re couran, what happened to your horns? But the human was silent, his eyes as hard as flint. Caly touched uncomfortably at her forehead, where her horns should’ve been. It was an old habit, one she thought she had outgrown when she left home.
Frustrated, more with herself than with the human, she huffed out a breath, frosting the lower half of her visor.
One house, crammed against all the others, stood out among the rest. Where the others were made with strong timbers that lifted proud roofs, this house leaned against the others. Too many plants littered its porch, untamed and sprawling out of their pots, and tacky, brass ornaments hung from every rafter. There’s always that one neighbor …
But it was the basement that drew their attention: white symbols were painted on the cellar doors, on the wall above, and even on the dirt with white paint, cut to pieces by the shifting sands. Some were chalked in great detail, and others were scribbled in a mad, sloppy frenzy. They felt familiar, but Caly couldn’t put a finger on where she remembered them from.
The three of them stared at it for a long time.
“I don’t like it.” Caly said. She wrapped her arms around herself, and that little voice in the back of her mind—the one she was so good at keeping locked up—gnawed on her thoughts. Maybe this whole thing was a mistake. She and Olm could handle themselves in a tight situation … but this felt like something else. Something worse.
“They’re Khuus,” Taws nodded at the symbols, referring to one of the reigning species on the Crown Council. The Khuus took themselves too seriously for Caly’s tastes. It seemed the human wasn’t a fan of them either, by the way he withdrew on himself. Gone was the goofy smile, replaced with something darker.
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“They’re wards. Prayers for safe haven. Prayers in the hour of need.”
“How do you know?” Olm asked.
Taws shrugged. “Studied them. They will be the first to die, when it begins.”
“When what begins?” Caly asked. “What in the void is he talking about now?”
“Not a clue,” Olm rumbled. Olm wrapped both hands around the doors’ handles, and heaved. Dozens of skull-shaped objects hanging from strings bounced and bumped into each other, and Caly fell into a crouch, pulling out her rifle before she saw what they were. They were only onions, fat and white, hanging from twine.
Olm pulled back the curtain of strung-up vegetables.
“Olm,” Caly wasn’t sure what she wanted to say, but she didn’t like this at all. She still had her rifle up, half-expecting some beast to launch itself out of the darkness below. Her throat was dry, and despite the fact that all the streets and buildings were empty, she couldn’t shake that claustrophobic feeling crawling up the back of her neck. Ghosts, she thought. Of course it’s not ghosts.
“There’s someone in there,” Olm said. And before she could stop him, he ducked inside.
The wind lifted, moaning over the rooftops. Scraping and whispering through the empty streets. Something, one of the houses maybe, creaked in the breeze.
“Olm?” she called in.
He ducked back out, shaking his head, more confused than anything. “One. Dead. Human was right—she was Khuus.”
“How did she die?”
Olm shrugged. “Just curled up, on the floor. She was covered in white.”
“Weird.”
“She painted on the walls, the same words, over and over. Just said, ‘The dead cannot die. Forever she reigns. Forever, they serve.’”
The wind sang louder, and carried with it a ponderous creaking sound. The last time Caly felt this bad was back on Chevaul, her home world. When her own mother set the trap. Caly had acted too slowly, then. But this time, she was determined to keep her eyes open. Determined to stay three steps ahead, ready to get the jump—
“HELLO!” Taws cupped his hands, and bellowed it again, his voice echoing over the town.
“Shitting stars!” Caly ducked behind the railing of the porch. Olm used the cellar doors as cover.
When the echoes died, and no sound came back, not even the flapping wings of frightened birds, Caly hissed at him from her cover.
“You lunatic, what in the fuck are you doing?”
“Wanted to see if anyone’s out there.”
“And if there is?”
“Oh right,” he said and cupped his hands again, “WE’RE FRIENDLY, BY THE WAY. NOT GONNA SHOOT YOU.”
Caly stomped over to the human, clapped both hands on his shoulders, and pulled him down to the ground. He yielded with an indignant yelp. She refused to let go until both of them were crouching under the eaves of an abandoned porch. An old rocking chair, surrounded by too many clay pots and dry-weather plants, tilted slightly in the breeze. The brown, shriveled leaves of the plants rustled against each other, a sound mirrored by that distant, wretched creaking.
“Are we friendly, human? Are we? And how do we know they’re friendly? Hm? If you have a death wish human, I know a bullet that you can wear in your skull. There could be anything out there. People don’t just up and leave for nothing. So stay still and let me figure this out. And for Crowns’ sake, keep your voice down.”
“Are all your people like this?”
“Like what?” Caly snapped.
“Like that,” Taws said, gesturing at her whole self, as if she was the problem. Caly was about to growl at him that she was simply trying to keep them all alive, and the only reason she was out here was because Taws had stolen their money, and if he had just agreed, like a sensible person, to pay them back immediately, she and Olm wouldn’t have to be out on this insane quest to take on Mad Yole and grab her bounty, but Olm threw up his hand to silence both of them.
The hrutskuld stared up at the rooftops, his head cocked slightly as if he was listening to something, but all Caly could hear was the moaning breeze and that damned creaking. Olm crept up from the basement steps and toward the corner of the street.
Caly shot a warning glare at the human, though her visor was still dimmed, so the effect was entirely lost upon him. Then, she crept off the porch and followed in Olm’s footsteps, her rifle in both hands, her finger sliding close to the trigger. Her own breath filled her ears, and the gravel crunched too loud under her feet. In the windows of a general goods store, Caly saw buckets and tools on display, next to a few handmade children’s toys and racks of button-down shirts and work slacks. Small valuables gleamed in the back of the store; jewelry and ammo, and a few firearms shelved on the back walls. All of it, just sitting there. Untouched.
Olm was only a few storefronts ahead of her, keeping low and walking as quietly as a hrutskuld could (which was surprisingly quiet). The street dumped into an avenue.
Olm stopped. Dropped his hands to his sides. And sank to his knees.
“Olm!” she whispered loudly, and rushed forward, thinking he’d been shot. But he wasn’t bleeding, and he didn’t fall over.
She padded over to him, and saw nothing but the Blacktree that towered over the town square. Her eyes dragged down through the branches, finding first the strands of moss and then, the ropes. They dragged like fishing lines in a slow-moving current. Dozens of them, maybe a hundred. Each one, weighed down by another body. Xenos in their town dresses, their frocks, their labor wear. Though she counted several species, all their necks were stretched, and their faces desiccated in the same way so that the corpses almost looked grotesquely related.
“Like animals,” Olm said, his voice trembling with grief, “They were slaughtered like animals. No chance for honor. No chance to fight. The Doors of Glory are shut. This is … They should have … A waste of good life.”
Caly put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. She never claimed to agree with the hrutskuld way, but right now, his anger was hers, too. Her suit’s fans whirred as they tried to clear the frost from her visor.
There were no flies, nor crows, wheeling overhead. And though many of the bodies were hanging low enough for their feet to graze the ground, there were no animal bites taken from their toes.
The wind blew, and the bodies swayed like life-sized marionettes in some sick play. The black boughs groaned in protest. Then, a new sound joined the macabre cacophony. At first, she thought the radio in her helmet had flipped on. Then, she realized it was coming from the human. He was swaying along with the bodies … and humming.
Caly cringed. Feeling more disgusted the longer her hummed.
Olm coughed, uncomfortable.
And still, the human didn’t stop. No, instead, he opened his mouth and started to sing. To actually sing. His words, a language she didn’t know, rose and pierced the wind and fell and rose again, until Caly couldn’t take it any longer.
“What is wrong with you?” Caly snapped.
Taws stopped. “What?”
“You’re singing.”
“It’s a funeral song,” Taws protested.
“You don’t sing at funerals,” Caly scoffed. “Nobody does that.”
“Why not?”
Caly looked at Olm for help.
Olm leaned in, his mouth twisted in a grimace. “Your people. They sing to the dead?”
“Yours don’t?”
“Of course, they don’t!” Caly said, trying (and failing) to keep herself from shouting. Her helmet’s exhaust fans were running on full power now, but she shouted over them. “The dead can’t hear. Singing to them when they’re gone—it’s cruel. You laugh at their misfortune?”
“I’m not laughing,” Taws said. “Do you really not sing to them?”
Olm shrugged, half-heartedly. “Hrutskuld do. Kinda. We sing during battle, and since most of us must die in battle, I guess it’s a kind of funeral song, too.”
Caly’s mouth worked at the empty air. She couldn’t get her thoughts out. From childhood, she had been drilled on the most useful aspects of the many xeno cultures. Hrutskuld worshiped war—from the prayers of their War Orders, to their Prophets and Champions, to their sacred battle rites—she thought she knew everything about them. Everything about their so-called “function,” as the couran curriculum called it.
Nobody had ever told her that the hrutskuld could sing.
How do I not know this? It was like someone had turned on a light in a dark corner of her mind. For all they had been through, she could only wonder, what else don’t I know about him?
“A battle song,” the human said. “I think it counts. Depends on what it sounds like.”
“Well,” Olm said, almost bashful. “Not sure if this is the right place to do it. I mean, the war hymns are meant to be sung in the midst of battle.”
“I can start shooting if you think that’ll help.”
Olm smirked and shook his head. Peculiarly, Caly noted, his grief seemed to recede before the human’s lunacy. As if the human could have that effect on him.
Still kneeling, Olm cleared his throat. He grunted. He loosed a growl that turned into a roar that echoed across the quiet street. He beat at his chest, squawking and shrieking and hammering his rock-hard belly as he rose to his feet and spittle flew from his mouth. His eyes flared wide, full of burning life. Caly first met Olm in the Pits. He had been only a shadow of this vibrant, furious, majestic warrior.
With a final ear-clapping shout, his song finished and Olm sank back to his knees, his broad chest heaving. And then, there was only the creaking of branches and the moaning of the wind.
“It sounds better,” Olm said, suddenly embarrassed, “When there’s a lot of us singing together, beneath the drum beat of artillery.”
Taws had his hands on his hips and a grin plastered on his face. “I think our friends in the tree definitely heard that one.”
“You think so?” Olm asked.
“They can’t honor themselves, hrutskuld. But you, you honor us all.”
Caly had to admit, despite all her instincts, the idea had a kind of twisted sweetness to it. Like the dead could defy death in one final act of mortal joy. Morbid, yes. But comforting at the same time.
The wind tugged the bodies, dozens of them hanging at eye-level, when an orange light caught her eye. Her helmet sensed a heat signature behind the swinging crowd.
“One of them’s still warm,” Caly said.
There was no way around the bodies, so the three of them had to push their way through to get to the Blacktree. A xeno, some couranoid xeno by his build, was nailed to the black bark.
But ‘nailed’ was the wrong word.
Black growths infused his flesh, pushing obsidian thorns out of his skin. Spikes grew from his arms, his chest, and in a kind of horn from the center of his forehead. A few of these spikes had burrowed their way into the bark of the tree, pinning him at the elbows and knees, so that his body slumped unnaturally forward.
And yet, her visor was certain the blood still flowed in his veins.
Caly nudged him with the barrel of her rifle.
The xeno lifted his head with a sucking gasp. His eye sockets sprouted with thorny, crystalline growths, and his misshapen crystalline teeth cut at his own lips. He howled at them, a grating, shattered scream that only grew louder in its unnatural strength. The xeno—or whatever it was—lurched against its obsidian bonds, and its flesh began to tear anew, bleeding a black liquid that splattered on the tree’s roots. Even as she stepped out of its reach, the thing gnashed and screamed and sucked in its hideous breath.
To her right, Caly heard the high-pitched whine of energy as Olm lifted his arm and discharged the Hammer. This close, the light was blinding, even with her visor darkened.
The cursed xeno dropped, dead, but still held to the tree by its bonds. Its skin burned as black as the tree to which it was nailed.
“At least he got to fight. Don’t care what he did in this life,” Olm said. “Nobody deserves that.”
Silently, Caly agreed.
With its face mostly disintegrated, Caly could see how the obsidian growths had threaded their way even through his skull.
“Guess we know why her bounty’s still up for grabs,” Caly said.
“It reeks of Dys,” Olm said.
“I always thought the stories of her were just that. Stories. A Spirine for her palace. I wonder what it’s doing to her.”
The three of them looked back up at the tree. At the bodies swinging around them. A thought popped into Caly’s head. “How many do you figure are here? Fifty? A little more?”
“A little more,” Olm agreed.
“The town’s bigger than fifty people. A lot bigger. Where do you think they went?”
The three of them exchanged glances. There was only one answer, and she was a few hundred klicks up north. Mad Yole. Forever she reigns.
“You know,” Caly said, “I’m starting to think this is a sign. Telling us we shouldn’t have come here.”
“No,” Taws said, before she could spool out the thought any longer. “This is exactly why I came here.”
He looked at her, his jaw clenched so tight she could see the muscles in his cheek. And the wetness in those hard, dark eyes.
“To end her?”
“To give her peace.”