A Chime for these Hallowed Bones (Chapter 5)
The dead never slept, so neither did Kabarāhira.
Countless lamp-wights washed the streets with hazy, yellow light. While the traffic wasn’t as thick as it would be in the daylight, the living still went about their business. Yadleen led Akal and Rajeev past groups of boisterous students seeking entertainment in all-night tea rooms, yellow-robed temple guards escorting priests to opium dens, and even an old crone who waddled along as if the hours after midnight were the perfect time for a casual stroll. Patrolling pairs of warrior-wights ensured order. These dead carried long bamboo staves and wore a half-dozen chakrams on their belts, the steel rings flashing in the jade light of their ghostfire. The guide-wights hanging in gibbets at intersections also glowed jade. Rajeev made the mistake of looking at the first of these gibbets that they passed, triggering a croaking litany of directions to the nearest city landmarks.
While the city was bright and active, it was also eerily quiet. There was no breeze to stir the wind chimes hanging outside most windows. Without that undercurrent of music, Yadleen found herself peering furtively down each street they crossed, straining her ears for the merry jingle of silver bells. A quiet night meant street shepherds were out and about. It was only a matter of time before they crossed paths with a fellow necromancer who might recognize them.
Sure enough, they’d only made it five blocks when Yadleen heard that telltale jingle. She ushered Akal and Rajeev into an alleyway. Seconds later, a street shepherd came around the corner. This red-robed necromancer carried an oversized staff, one festooned with so many bells that it looked like the sapling of some metallic plum tree. Behind him walked a procession of unbound bhūtas. They shuffled along in time to the street shepherd’s steps, enthralled by the music.
Rajeev sucked in a sharp breath. Yadleen wondered if this was his first time seeing an unbound bhūta. Even as used to them as she was, she couldn’t deny that they were uncanny to behold.
Each of the spectral figures was composed entirely of ghostfire. Of the ones the shepherd had rounded up tonight, three were yellow ghostfire, while one was jade. They’d stand half again as tall as Master Baig if they walked erect, but the jade one slouched, while the yellow ones bent almost double. While they were humanoid, their only discernable features were feet that pointed backwards and horned heads like bulls.
Rajeev spoke with false airiness once the last of the bhūtas had passed. “Those are supposed to be the souls of the Archon’s ancestors, right?”
Yadleen frowned. “They’re what’s left of the Eldest, if that’s what you mean. Let’s go.”
She’d hoped this would silence Rajeev. Instead, he started questioned Akal in a hushed tone as they continued along the street. “Is that grove outside the city really a massive Eldest burial ground?”
“Of course it is!” Akal spoke in a stage whisper, as if he thought keeping their voices down was a joke. “Why did you think Kabarāhira is ‘the City of Graves’? It’s not like we bury our dead.”
“I thought that was a –”
“Ghost story?” Akal suggested cheekily.
Yadleen bristled. Akal, of all people, should not be joking around with the alchemist, let alone playing tour guide. He might not have eavesdropped on the entire conversation in the office, but surely he understood enough by now to realize Master Baig’s precarious position. Surely, he understood how much the Baig family stood to lose just from talking to Rajeev.
Rajeev said, “I was going to say, ‘myth’. Besides, Dadiji taught me that the bhūtas spawn from the Well, not a burial ground.”
“Both are true,” Yadleen snapped.
She tensed up as she felt Rajeev’s gaze on the back of her head. “The Well’s inside the burial ground?” he clarified.
Yadleen sighed. She hadn’t meant to spit that out. Still, at least Rajeev’s focus was on her now. Better her talk to her, rather than Akal further risking his family’s honor by talking to fruit of an Unnamed branch.
Without looking back, she said, “There’s a maze of flooded caves that spreads under the entire sultanate, with tunnels going out even farther. The bhūtas spawn in the cavern directly beneath the burial ground. The Naga said there are millions of them down there.”
“Millions?” Rajeev repeated in disbelief.
“So the Naga said. We only see the fraction that are too restless to stay underground. Before the Well, they’d wander out and emerge through springs, then prowl the land in search of bodies to possess.” Yadleen paused while she checked the next intersection for any sign of another shepherd. For a moment, she was tempted to throw in a jab about the Kimian Empire’s obsession with conquest, but nothing good came to her. She instead continued with, “That’s why the Naga dug the Well. Most of the restless bhūtas will go for the most obvious exit, and we can bottleneck them once they reach the surface.”
“A fraction of millions of ghosts? Bottleneck or no, you’d need an army to hold back those numbers, or at least some heavy artillery,” Rajeev said skeptically.
Yadleen stopped and glanced back at the alchemist. “Why would we need an army, when we have necromancy?”
“Of course, there is any army, too,” Akal chimed in. “We just keep them in storage for if necromancy isn’t enough on its own.”
Yadleen glared at him, silently urging him to keep his mouth shut. Akal just smiled blithely.
Rajeev looked between the two of them. “Did the dragon explain why bhūtas only appear here? There are Eldest graves all over the Empire, and we don’t have to deal with ghosts. Is it just because there are so many graves in one place?”
Chorus knew Yadleen couldn’t answer that. It was a mystery the Naga herself had never spoken about. Yadleen’s gut warned that Rajeev would find some way to rub her face in her ignorance, regardless of the fact that no answer existed. She’d had enough of his arrogance for one night.
Carefully, she deflected with, “Many people have tried asking the bhūtas those questions. They’re good at remembering the things they hear from us, after all, so one would think they’d understand their own origins. Maybe they did know once. Whenever someone tries to ask them, though, the bhūtas start spewing gibberish. They mutter about ‘fragmentation’, ‘system decay’, ‘archive corruption’ and other such nonsense.” She spun on her heel. “Now, come. If we have breath to chat, we should pick up the pace.”
They made their way around the hill on which Kabarāhira was built, bringing the burial ground into view. At night, it was impossible to miss. A massive grove of sal trees grew atop it. The remains of the dead Eldest had hallowed these trees, allowing them to stretch two hundred feet tall, freezing them in a state of eternal autumn, and making them glow as if bathed in full daylight. Yadleen found herself tensing up, expecting more impossible questions from Rajeev, but he mercifully stayed silent.
At the foot of the hill, the city walls ran along the edge of the grove. A small labyrinth of temples and garrisons, built to stymie any massed bhūta exodus, was their last obstacle. They wove among these structures and beheld the Well.
The walls bulged outward to encircle a crater two hundred feet across and forty feet deep. A pool of water filled the bottom third of the basin. A ghat was built into the near slope of the crater, the wide granite steps descending out of Yadleen’s field of view. Eight brass bells, each the size of a grown man and manned by two warrior-wights in the uniforms of city guards, ringed the crater. As a child, Yadleen had been puzzled that this was the Well’s primary defense, but then she had seen the bells in action. If the first toll didn’t drive every unbound bhūta underground, the second would rouse an undead army from the garrisons.
Besides, the Well had long ago ceased to be a mere bottleneck. It was now a public resource. Just as most citizens of Kabarāhira couldn’t afford attendant-wights to pump water to their homes, most necromancers couldn’t afford a summoning chamber. Those without better means had to commune with and extract bhūtas at the source.
A group of back-alley necromancers in black cloaks were already here for that very purpose. They blocked the top of the ghat, one acting as staff-bearer while three others held a rope. Judging by how the far end of that rope ran down the ghat, there was a fifth member of their party somewhere down the stairs.
Yadleen pulled Rajeev and Akal into the shadowed doorway of one of the temples. She opened her carpet bag, handed the tambourine to Akal, and reassembled the staff. It was composed of three pewter sections that each housed a core of prayer-etched bone. She screwed these together, then added the thick loop that held the steel chimes. A gold-dipped skull slotted into a bracket within the loop.
Rajeev’s lip curled in thinly veiled disgust. “Is that the skull of a child?”
“What? Your grandmother deserves to dance with the Chorus, but a four-year-old claimed by consumption –”
A musical crash and a shriek interrupted Yadleen’s retort.
The back-alley necromancers sprang into action. The staff-bearer ran down the ghat, clashing the steel chimes. The three necromancers with the rope hauled at it desperately.
Yadleen couldn’t see what was happening on the ghat, but her memory painted all too clear a picture: a necromancer burning with ghostfire as one or more bhūtas invaded the body and vied for control of the bones. The staff-bearer advancing, the clamor of the chimes assaulting the dead like blows from a hammer, their pain transferred into their victim. The slow retreat of the bhūtas from flesh as they recoiled before chimes’ assault.
She staved off her rising panic by testing her staff. The steel chimes chattered angrily when she tapped the butt against the ground. I’m not a little girl anymore. Master Baig’s armed me with everything I need. I won’t make the same mistakes as some back-alley fool.
As if on cue, the ghat went quiet. Moments later, the necromancers with the rope hauled the limp form of the group’s fifth member into view. They picked this man up and bore him away. The staff-bearer backed up the ghat and followed them, holding her staff before her like a spear as she retreated. Despite the injury inflicted on their companion, it looked like the group had gotten what they came for. Jade ghostfire now blazed within the skull atop the necromancer’s staff.
Akal gave the tambourine an experimental rattle. His voice was slightly strained as he sighed and said, “That is a perfect example of why professionals wear bells. Did you remember yours, Yadleen?”
She handed him the staff and pulled off her shawl. The silver bells tinkled softly as she drew them from their pouch threaded them through her hair. Their music soothed her further.
“Here’s how this is going to work,” she instructed Rajeev. “You are going to stay next to Akal while I do the talking.”
Rajeev objected, “I’m not waiting at the top of the stairs. I want to be close enough to hear.”
“You will! I mean, I won’t leave you at the top of the stairs. Like Akal said, we’re professionals. We can get much closer. But you can’t do anything to draw the bhūtas’ interest, understand? Don’t move even one step lower than Akal. Don’t try to run back up the ghat, no matter how frightened you may be. And, under no circumstances, are you to speak the Naga’s Tongue. If you want me to get any specific details, you make that request to me in Ātapararan, and I’ll translate.” She fixed the alchemist with a pointed look. “Are we clear?”
“As glass,” Rajeev answered, his lips pursing.
Yadleen turned to Akal. “Are you ready?”
“I’ve played on this ghat since I was six,” Akal reminded her, the tension in his voice already gone. He traded her the tambourine for the staff.
“Then let’s get the truth,” she declared.
Thank you for reading! Chapter 6 releases next Tuesday, February 24th! I hope to see you then!
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