"Lost Sons and Lost Souls" by A.R. George

It was a truly glorious night when Kiraleen reached the end of her journey.

Half of the cold winter sky was on fire with the Northern Aurora – a seething, rippling sheet of white light, flaring up like glowing smoke behind the town of Escon, her home. Kiraleen sat and watched for a long time – watched the lights of the sky, watched the lights of Escon, and the glow from the top of the Sentinel Tower where its beacon had been lit for the solstice. It was difficult to decide which was more beautiful after so many long years away, and Kiraleen silently basked in the privilege of seeing both.

Then, her grave blue eyes lightened for once, she rode down to the gates.

*          *          *          *          *

Down the Parade of Honour, where the statues of Escon’s dead leaders and heroes were faintly washed in aurora-glow; through the Grave Square, under which the bones of a dozen ancient traitors were buried in dishonour; along a dozen streets each named after a battle or general decades old. Escon was a city founded in war and built on war, the cusp of a bitter frontier, and that history was sunk deep into the psyche of its people.

Kiraleen, one of those very people, noticed only that she was passing by streets and buildings that had not changed in twenty years. Everything was as solid and sober as she remembered, the streets just as even and narrow, and she made her way from memory without any difficulty at all to the Bear and Stag, genuinely smiling when she saw the same shingle swinging over the door, loose on one side so it wobbled and squeaked.

The first real change she found after stabling her horse was inside the Bear and Stag. The tavern itself was still configured in the same economical chaos, with tables and chairs jammed in the limited space for maximum capacity, but the face at the bar was not bald Androck’s – it belonged to a man closer to Kiraleen’s own age, just shy of approaching forty, with the flecks of age starting to show in his dark beard.

Something about his face was familiar, though. Kiraleen stared hard as she took a stool at the quiet bar, and finally found a hint of Androck in the man’s lantern jaw. “Sullan?”

“Yep,” he replied briskly, mopping one corner of the bar with his apron. “How can I help?”

“Don’t you remember me, Sullan? Kiraleen Trebeyan. I used to –”

“-Practically live here.” Sullan’s square face shifted from friendly courtesy to a broad-split grin, immediately sloughing twenty years, and he dropped his apron. “’Course it’s you, Kira! You were one of Da’s favourites – though I guess that wasn’t too hard, since most the others never paid.” He gave what could only be described as a guffaw, then sighed. “Ah, too bad he’s not here now. He’d have been dancing on tables for glee.”

“He’s -?”

“Dead, yeah. Gone these last six years, now.” Sullan smiled ruefully. “Died happy with grandbairns, mind, so it’s not for anyone to cry too long over. When it’s your time, it’s your time, eh?” His smile broadened, and he slapped an empty tankard down in front of Kiraleen. “But he’ll rise up and turn into one of the restless Dead if I don’t water you soon! What’ll you have?”

“Oh, nothing for me, Sullan. I’ve just come looking for some information. I’m trying to find my son.”

Sullan arched his brows. “You have a son? Strike me down! What’s his name?”

“I don’t know,” said Kiraleen quietly.

The bulky barkeeper looked solemn for the first time. “I see. Left him at the Temple steps, did you?”

“Yeah.”

“That why you left Escon?”

“Yeah.”

“So …” Sullan hesitated for a moment, but he had all the pluck and nerve of his father before him. “I mean, shut me up if it’s none of my business, Kira, but … twenty years. Why d’you want to find him now?”

Kiraleen went quiet for a while, slowly running her fingers through her tight-pulled russet ponytail as she tried to sort out which of all her answers to give him. Because I’m curious? Because I’m guilty? Because he’s mine? Because I’ve finished doing all the things I wanted to, and I might want him now?

Because I want to just … see him, at least, before I die.

“Blood calls to blood and all that, I guess,” she replied aloud. “Even if it takes a couple decades.”

Sullan looked discomforted by her darkly ironic remark, and changed the subject. “I daresay them out at the Temple will be able to help – better than us in town, probably! People round here are pretty distracted by the celebrations. Maybe you’ve heard? Archmage Rohenna has taken an apprentice from our town! Can you believe it? All sorts of visitors have come for the ceremony …”

“I’ll make a few inquiries in town anyway, I think. Just in case. The Temple of Light is too far to visit now.”

“You can’t prowl around doorknocking at this time of night, either!” protested Sullan. “Settle yourself over by the fire. Have a bit to eat and wet your throat. I’ll put you up in one of the back rooms for tonight, no charge. No charge and no argument,” he amended as she drew a breath.

*          *          *          *          *

The stew filled a hole in Kiraleen’s stomach that she hadn’t even realised was there, only strengthening the sense of comfort she had felt since arriving in Escon. As she finished up, leaning back in her chair and suddenly feeling every last day of her long service as a caravan guard, she took quick stock of the other patrons in the Bear and Stag.

As Sullan had said, there were plenty of obvious visitors who’d come to Escon, a variety that the locals would no doubt have found intriguing, but was simply everyday experience for Kiraleen. There were suntanned Southerners, a few short, scholarly types from the Midlands, and even a light scattering of Elves, all ostensibly here to see the splendour of the ceremony for the Archmage’s apprentice.

One small group did surprise her a little – a small knot of the roving Daiathais, the Eyeless, a peculiar warriors’ sect whose affiliates wore grey, were raven-haired to a man, and went about with their eyes bound, even in battle. The Eyeless, it was said, could see into the Plane of the Dead. Some stories claimed that they plucked their own eyes out to gain this power, and dyed their hair the colour of death as a warning; others maintained that looking into the Dead Plane weakened their eyesight, forcing them to screen out light, and sucked all colour from their hair. Kiraleen had heard all sorts of tales about them in her time, and considered most of them utter tripe; nor was she enlightened as to which were true and which were false by the time the small group of Eyeless rose and left the tavern on business unknown.

“Live well, sister,” one said to her courteously as he passed, speaking in the strange, antiquated manner for which the sect was famed, and for a little while she wondered why.

Her thoughts wandered, then, to other things – memories of Escon, and a young life that seemed aeons gone. She remembered all her friends, their time training in the Esconite Guard … and Antayn, that dear, immature fool with the clear blue eyes, who had tried for all those years to make her laugh, not understanding that real life required far more dimensions than that.

So many memories as one aged, and so strangely selective. Kiraleen could clearly remember the expression on Antayn’s face – right down to the wavering glitter in his beautiful eyes – when she’d told him she wouldn’t marry him … and yet she couldn’t even remember what their son had looked like as she’d set him down carefully on the Temple steps and walked away …

I hope he has Antayn’s eyes, Kiraleen thought distractedly as she stared at the woodgrain of the tabletop, then blinked and glanced up as her empty bowl suddenly began to rattle. All around the taproom, voices raised in curiosity and alarm as a strange tremor shivered up from the ground – softly at first, but already growing stronger.

“What is this?” Kiraleen heard Sullan bellow as bottles jittered off the shelves and smashed on the floor. Patrons clutched at tankards and gripped their chairs while the whole room groaned and shook, doors rattling, tables trembling across the floorboards –

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over.

“Earthquake,” someone suggested in the ensuing silence, but without conviction – if it was a quake, it was the first since Escon’s founding. Kiraleen sat in her chair in silent surprise for a moment, then realised that her breath was now steaming in front of her face.

A deep, instinctive sense of foreboding poured into her gut. Standing up from her chair, she slowly approached the bar and drew breath to ask Sullan if he needed help with the mess of glass –

Kiraleen stopped in mid-stride as she saw two figures behind the bar. One was Sullan, bent over with his back to the room as he gathered up glass shards, but the other … the other stood facing her, the light gleaming on his bald, polished crown, his weather-scarred face arranged in a frustrated, panicked expression.

“Androck!” Kiraleen choked.

“Sullan, remember?” corrected Sullan easily, standing and turning with a ginger handful of glass. As his eyes turned to the other at the bar, however, his square face whitened, and the glass began to shower from his shaking hands like musical rain. “D…Da?”

Androck continued to fixedly stare ahead rather than acknowledge his son, his brows creasing and uncreasing in anxiety. “What do you want?” he cried. “I’m not him! Don’t call any more! Which is the way back?”

“I … I haven’t … oh, sweet Elementals, what is this?” whispered Sullan hoarsely. The taproom had gone silent after Androck’s shouting – some stared at the bar in confusion and horror, but only those who knew the man to be dead, for he looked as solid and real as Sullan himself.

“I’m not him! I’m not him! Where is the way back?” Androck shouted, his big hands grabbing a bottle from the bar and hurling it full-force across the room. Kiraleen dropped as it flew over her head, hearing it smash against a beam behind her, and stared in shock at her old friend, but his eyes were no longer fixed on any one thing, roving about wildly.

“Da, stop! It’s all right! We’ll –” Sullan began, grabbing at Androck’s arm and catching hold, but Androck bellowed in panic and threw his son back against the shelves, lunging down at him as he hit the floor.

“I’m not him! I’m not him!”

Kiraleen drew her shortsword from its sheath at her hip and vaulted the bar, collaring Androck from behind, trying to shock him out of his hysteria. “Stop! Stop! Look who it is!” she yelled, but saw no sign of him even hearing, and could not pull him away as much as an inch as he pounded mercilessly at Sullan. She hit him full-force across the back of the head with the pommel of her blade, but he did nothing more than flinch and hurl her painfully back …

As Sullan’s forequarters slammed back into the glassy shards for the dozenth time or more, Kiraleen picked herself up painfully from the floor – fearing horribly now for Sullan’s life – and cut a sharp slash across Androck’s back. He yelled again, but didn’t stop; Sullan took the punishment for it instead, smashed down twice more against the floor with frightening strength. The next one looked likely to snap Sullan’s spine.

So Kiraleen thrust her sword into Androck’s back.

She had prepared herself for blood and screaming, but neither came. Androck jerked once as the shortsword rammed home, then slid forward with a windy sigh. The sigh dragged on like a dying breeze, and like that breeze, Androck himself began to fade away: flickering first, as with the guttering of a candle, then steadily draining out of sight with the passing of his last, sustained breath.

Kiraleen felt her hands trembling. Bending down, she helped Sullan stagger to his feet, his back wet with blood from the glass still embedded there, his face streaked with it after Androck’s blows.

Sullan stiffened as she manoeuvred him over to lean forward on the bar. “Listen, Sullan,” she said softly, “if he hadn’t looked likely to kill you, I’d never –”

“No, Kira, look,” he replied, still hoarse and shaking, and pointed across the taproom.

A man stood in more or less the centre of the crammed tables and chairs – a giant of a man over six feet tall, muscled like a bull. The other patrons were watching him warily, as if wondering why he had chosen to stand.

“Who is he?” Kiraleen murmured.

“Dead,” Sullan whispered back. “He was killed here last year in a fight that got out of hand.”

The dead man was looking around the bar in visible interest and curiosity, clearly seeing everything in front of him – a striking contrast to Androck’s hazy panic. “Nope, I’m not him,” the giant said casually.

“What do you mean, ‘him’? Who’s ‘him’?” Kiraleen called out, and the dead man turned to look at her.

“Someone’s looking for him. I dunno,” he replied with an easy shrug. “Don’t much care, either. Can’t say I’m sorry to be here – I still owe this place a few!”

Still grinning, the man abruptly reached out and snatched a startled Southerner from his chair by the throat, lifting him above eye-level with horrible ease. The Southerner’s friends leaped up with a shout, but the dead man simply clenched his hand with a muted crack and then hurled their nerveless companion into their midst, wading in with fists eagerly curled.

A few more patrons leaped out of their seats to join the fray, swarming around the giant as grunts and yells bounced around the taproom. After a protracted, seething struggle, someone pulled a knife in the confusion, and the giant went down to a blow from behind. As the shouting gave way to shock, as it always did when such fights turned ugly, a familiar low, windy sigh escaped the fallen giant’s lips, and like Androck, he gently faded out of view.

Participants in and spectators of the brawl began to back away, swearing fervently to the Saint and the Maiden, but the first Southerner’s friends had all huddled around him, trying to lift him off the floor in grief as his broken neck lolled his head around.

Sullan straightened at the bar, painfully, and waved the men over with a numb look on his face. Kiraleen shook her head as the Southerners slowly bore their companion to the bar and laid him down there, dazed and miserable as they tried to find a trace of life in him – pointlessly, Kiraleen thought.

But then the prone Southerner stirred, curling his fingers and giving a soft groan. The others cried out in sharp joy as he moved, and one began to cry, taking his hand and patting it repeatedly in fear and relief.

“It’s … hurting,” the Southerner said softly. “Please, make it go away … I’m not him …”

The man sat up, his head still hanging to one side at an impossible angle, and pushed himself off the bar, staggering for balance and shoving the others away as he stumbled for the door. Someone in the sparse tavern-crowd began to whimper, a thin, childlike sound, as the broken-necked Southerner made his unsteady way through their midst and tottered outside.

“This place has been cursed,” someone else loudly whispered – and suddenly a race was on for the door, though there was confusion half-way as those closest remembered that the dead Southerner might be near the door and abruptly tried to back up again. Kiraleen, Sullan and the dumbstruck Southerners simply stood and watched the chaos, unable to speak as the door was finally fumbled open.

The aurora still undulated silently in the small patch of sky visible through the doorway, smoky-pure wisps of light. At first glance outside, it looked as though pieces of the aurora had torn free and fluttered down to the ground: the square out front of the Bear and Stag was scattered with pale, icy shapes buffeted by the night air.

But these light-wisps had faces, wavering, filmy faces, and nebulous bodies which stubbornly migrated back to humanoid shapes each time the wind stopped tugging at them. Amongst these white shapes strayed other, more solid ones – some wandering, some shouting or screaming, some running. It was impossible to tell how many were real people and how many were those grim, solid ghosts …

Someone slammed the door, and the taproom was overrun by the frightened clamour of three dozen frightened people. Kiraleen slipped into a vague, automatic state as her mind tried to fit all the lightning events inside, leaving Sullan by the bar and trying without much success to calm people down.

“Did you see? Did you see? The square’s full of –”

“Like the hosts of the Twilight Lands … or the Dead Plane …”

“It’s the end of days! That’s what it is! The Saint save us, the world is being unmade!”

“Nonsense.”

A temporary hush fell over the tavern as the last spoke up – clearly, coolly, completely untouched by the surrounding chaos. Kiraleen left off in her efforts to try and help a fainting carter breathe, turning like the rest of the patrons as a leaderless army would look to the first raised voice.

It was an Elf, the only figure left seated at the further end of the room. His clothes were loose and long-sleeved, colourless grey, and his black hair was pulled back in a long tail out of his slim-featured face – but the most defining mark was the grey cloth wound securely over his eyes. He was one of the Eyeless … the only one who had not left the tavern earlier, it seemed.

“Those are the Dead outside, not demons,” said the Elf evenly. “You would be in no doubt whatsoever if this were the ‘end of days’.”

“It may as well be!” Sullan finally spoke up, his voice cracking under strain. “I can’t tell Dead from living any more! They can all walk in here and kill us without –”

“They might,” acquiesced the grey-clad Elf, nodding slowly. Calm radiated from him like light from a lantern, a calm that even the handful of other famously imperturbable Elves in the room did not seem to share. “Some will if they can, certainly. On the other hand, if you arm yourselves, I imagine you can deal with all but the strongest quite conventionally. – Hit them,” he clarified for the more fearful faces.

Sullan hardly seemed to be listening any more. “But … Da. It was Da. In here. I buried you well! Why did you come back? Why are you here? What did I do?”

Kiraleen grimaced at the frantic edge in the big man’s voice, silently willing him a step or two back from madness. “Let’s decide what’s to be done,” she suggested quietly, her voice only just heard above the renewed tide of cries. Once she spoke, however, most voices hushed, and all eyes trained on her attentively. “To begin with, we have to make sure that we’re safe in here. If some of us watch the room carefully for … arrivals …”

Most were furtively doing that already, Kiraleen realised. “We also need to arm ourselves. Anything will do – a stool, a bottle, whatever you can get, I guess.”

She glanced at the silent Eyeless. “You’ve got a sword,” she noted, eyeing the weapon strapped at his shoulder. “Maybe you could stay by the door –”

“I will not be staying,” he replied. The whole taproom stared at him as he softly rose and began threading his way through the jumbled stools and tables. “Whatever has brought about this summoning of the Dead is not in here.”

“You can’t go out there,” warned Kiraleen. “Wait until we’ve settled in safely here – as much as possible – and maybe a few more of us can go with you.”

The Elf’s head lifted a fraction, as though he were casting a glance ceilingward underneath the wrap of his eyes. “I do not advise it,” he replied, glided smoothly to the door, and pulled it tightly shut behind him.

“Damn,” whispered Kiraleen. All eyes were now turned to her – Sullan offered no leadership huddled by his bar, his face a wash of tears and blood, and his three waitresses were hunched and crying by the kitchen door.

“Listen …” she began, trying to shepherd her thoughts into order, but couldn’t banish the thought of the Elf walking alone through the haunted streets. Somehow the thought had juxtaposed itself with the memory of heartbroken Antayn, quietly farewelling her for the last time before he left Escon, knowing nothing of the child Kiraleen carried as he disappeared down Kirgan Road …

“I have to go, but I’ll be back. Be careful,” Kiraleen said quickly, reversing her intended words, and slipped outside before logic could reseat itself.

*          *          *          *          *

The name of the square that the Bear and Stag faced on to was Five Spear Square. Kiraleen had always simply associated the name with some past lord’s insignia … until now.

Five grim black shafts jutted up towards the sky by the square’s southern end, bleakly silhouetted by the burning aurora. Impaled on each one, quivering at the buffets of the wind, was a man – or the memory of a man – executed for a crime or in a battle that Escon could no longer remember, and Kiraleen could hear their voices groaning out from on high over the other cries in the square: “I am not he … I am not he …”

Her flesh seethed with cold fear as she took a few faltering steps away from the familiar door of the Bear and Stag, lost in the nightmare of Escon’s past almost immediately. A flock of misty shapes all converged on her at once – some mute and barely distinguishable from fog, some wailing and begging her to ‘send them back’ with their filmy lips quivering …

Kira staggered through the mist of the Dead, her hands outstretched before her to fend off the hazy shapes, and found herself almost in the centre of the square when they dispersed. A man was kneeling nearby, screaming into the hands that hid his face, but the mere sound of the muffled words “… not him! …” were enough to sweep away all thoughts of going to his aid.

Who’s dead? Who’s not? Where’s that damned Elf? thought Kiraleen frantically, squeezing her sword-hilt hard as she stared around the clamour of the square.

While she looked northward, her eyes briefly lifting to the constancy of the light from the night-wrapped Sentinel Tower, a cold hand suddenly closed gently – not startlingly – around the wrist of her sword-hand. Kira turned, her breath quick, and found herself facing the blanched figure of what seemed to be a girl who had never quite reached adulthood.

The girl’s colourless eyes were huge, empty, and sad. Kiraleen looked down to the light, white fingers around her wrist, then back at the girl herself, and managed, “Can I … help?”

“Warm,” the girl whispered, her voice no more than a breath.

“Do you have a name?”

“Warm,” repeated the girl, reaching out with her other icy hand to gently hold Kiraleen’s wrist, and leaned forward swiftly to sink her teeth in Kira’s arm.

The feeling of thin fangs digging into muscle shocked a short, sharp scream from Kiraleen’s lips – just one more scream to join the other shrieks and moans of the square. With a panicked backhand blow she struck the girl-thing’s face away from her, grabbing her bleeding arm and staring wild-eyed as the creature mournfully drifted away again.

Kiraleen turned and strode hard towards the north, trying to leave the square behind, refusing to look at the shapes and faces in the gloom. Her sword was in hand now, and her grip on it twitched whenever something flickered towards her.

“Warm …” a voice breathed.

Her heart stuttered as she whirled again, shortsword raised, and saw a pale woman hovering right at her elbow. Striving to keep her breathing steady, Kiraleen levelled her blade at the woman, feeling more blood trickling down her arm.

Someone grabbed her from behind, pinning her upper arms to her sides with savage strength. “I’m not him, damn you! If you don’t show me the way back …” hissed a voice in her ear.

“Get off!” snarled Kiraleen, ducking and twisting out of the unseen ghost’s grip. She lashed out viciously at the eerie white woman, who had tiptoed further forward, and then lashed out on her other side at her other assailant – the memory of a wiry man in tattered beggar’s clothes. When she lashed out again – undirected, desperate, just trying to keep the Dead at bay – the dead beggar grabbed at her sword, trapping it in his clenched fists.

“Do you know how this feels? Do you want to know?” the beggar spat, holding Kiraleen’s blade as she tried to tug it away. On her right, the white woman timidly crept closer again, wide eyes intent on Kira’s red-stained sword-arm. “Because I’ll gladly –”

Suddenly the beggar stumbled, struck from behind, and his grip on the sword loosened. Kiraleen acted in a jumbled mixture of instinct, panic, and training – she swung her blade in a sharp, horizontal sweep, cleanly striking the dead man’s head from his shoulders, and then leaped at the bleached, creeping woman-thing, slashing bloodless cuts across its upraised arms, forward-swing and cross-swing, until it wailed and fled.

She stood there, gasping from exertion and fear, as the beggar crumpled and faded with his severed head letting out that eerie, soughing sigh. The Eyeless from the tavern was standing behind the dissipating man, his cloth-wrapped gaze silently trained on her.

“You should not be out here,” he said.

“I wouldn’t be, but for you!” returned Kiraleen angrily, feeling her arm throb.

The Eyeless’s mouth quirked. “I am somewhat better at this than you are. The Dead are my province. Go back to the tavern.”

“I don’t care how good you think you are – it’s madness out here. Come back with me and we’ll get to the bottom of it later.”

“Look at this.” The grey-clad Elf swept out an arm to encompass the square – the shouts, the screams, the milling shapes, the hideous silhouettes of the five spitted, groaning spirits on their spears. “The living of this place will not last long among the Dead. Some are harmless, but many are not. There is no ‘later’.”

Kiraleen swallowed hard. “All right. I’ll come with you.”

“No,” said the Eyeless.

“I have as much a stake in this as you, Elf. More, probably.”

“Forget this ‘stake’ and go back.”

“No!” Kira shook her head sharply, unable to prevent her steady, years-long accumulation of guilt and frustration from breaking loose. “My son is in this town – or someone who knows how to find him – and there’s no way that you or anyone, dead or living, is going to stop me. I will not leave this world without seeing my son. I don’t care what’s in the way and I don’t care what I have to do. Do you hear? I won’t die until I see him!”

For a long time, the Eyeless stared at her in silence. The chaos of the square continued to rage around them, but did not touch them, leaving them still and unspeaking in the eye of the storm.

“Go back,” he repeated, and smoothly turned away.

Kiraleen started after him, her rare temper subsiding again beneath her usual, lucid determination, and although another fog-drift of lamenting ghosts briefly enveloped her before she could catch him, she saw the direction he chose: north. He was gone when she fought free, but she set off in grim pursuit all the same, leaving the five looming spears and their ghosts behind her for the narrower streets ahead – and wishing that she couldn’t hear more wails and screams coming from that very direction.

*          *          *          *          *

“Hey! Eyeless! I’m following, so we might as well go together!”

No voice – no living voice – answered Kiraleen as she anxiously rushed down the dark, narrow streets. There were cries and shrieks aplenty, however, and the Dead thronged about in all their varied forms: most directionlessly drifting, some beating on the tightly barricaded doors where the living had shut themselves away, some taking a bleak interest in Kiraleen herself. She did not stay for the latter.

The eaves of Escon’s northern streets hung over her head, shadowy at the best of times, but the night itself was clear and beautiful. The aurora continued to softly wisp in the sky, vaguely reminiscent of the eerier, flitting ghosts themselves.

“Eyeless!”

Kira cut through Spring Square – sparing a flicker of relief that her pursuit had not taken her to the Wall of Swords, whatever bloody, ghost-filled history that old plaza entailed – and forced her way onward through all the Dead things that tried to mob her, shrieking their protests that they were ‘not him’. It was easy to become disoriented in the constant fight-and-flight, but Kiraleen had a landmark in the skyline to help her now: the glow of the Sentinel Tower, a black shape against the ripples of the Northern Aurora.

The tower itself was very close now, and only grew closer as Kira pushed on up the rising swell of Escon’s sloping north. Only when she began to draw near to its massive stone base – fenced off in iron – did she realise that this was perhaps the Eyeless’s destination.

She certainly saw no sign of him elsewhere as she jogged up the slope, shouting vainly for him to see reason and wait for her. Perhaps he meant to climb the tower and look out over the city for some hint of the trouble’s source. It seemed a long shot to Kiraleen – not to mention the fact that the tower’s sentries would have shut the place up tight when they first started seeing ghosts – but she decided to look for the troublesome Elf there anyway.

The iron gates, at least, were open. Kiraleen circled around the tower up to the old gates facing onto Tara Avenue and found them ajar, their heavy chains softly swinging with the night breeze. She stepped through, then stared upward for a moment, following the rise of the Sentinel Tower with her eyes.

It rose clean and straight from the old stones where it had been set, limned by whitish light from the shifting aurora – burning with ghost-fire. Kiraleen stared with her neck craned up towards the tower summit and the fire of the beacon there, with the tower staring back at her through its lower, dark window-eyes, remembering the days when she and Antayn had spent long hours on duty by the beacon …

Keeping the dead man’s watch, she thought, and abruptly wished she’d chosen a better turn of phrase. Shaking off the ill-timed webs of memory, she strode down the cobbles towards the door. It was open.

That was when she knew – beyond the building soldier’s feeling in her gut – that something was wrong.

It was cold inside the Sentinel Tower – but it had always been cold. Even the rosy tint of memory could not abolish that recollection. Kiraleen stepped into the antechamber cautiously, her steps hollow, loud and solitary in their echo. Her gut continued to warn her as she stepped towards the staircase, dimly spiralling up into the blackness above her head.

“Eyeless?”

Her voice leaped up the walls directly, bouncing back and forth away to the same shadow that swallowed the higher stairs. And then, very faintly, she heard an unintelligible voice – the fracture of an echo of a voice – calling something in response from high, high above.

Kira began to climb, her boots tolling out wary footsteps and hollow echoes in unequal measure. Around and around she paced in the near-darkness, as she had so many times so many years ago, fighting off troublesome memories and increasingly icy misgivings.

The pale light of the night outside – through the sparse tower windows – was her only illumination. Kiraleen paused after a long climb at what she knew to be the third-last window, looking out towards the colour-muted view of Escon fully a hundred feet below. The town sloped away gently down the hill to the south, sprinkled with a few scattered lights – the torches outside the Town Mint were still burning, she noted, and far beyond Escon’s southern wall was the pinprick of light that marked the near Temple of Light. There was nothing more sinister to see than the faint, natural-seeming drifts of ‘mist’ in Escon’s squares and plazas …

Suddenly two strong hands locked on Kira’s shoulders from behind, clamped down, and pushed.

Kiraleen plunged headfirst through the window – narrow enough to graze her arms in the deadly passing – with a reverberating cry, twisting and scrabbling at the window-ledge as she tumbled out. For several soul-rending moments she hung there, all Escon swinging and lurching under her struggling legs, before the unseen murderer above her slammed a clenched fist down on her shaking fingers.

Time lost all meaning. In seconds and years Kiraleen’s hands slipped away from the stone, the scream tearing from her mouth in private centuries. Cold night air flowed around her like water as she fell away backwards from the tower window, kicking and screaming still with the ends of her bound her savagely whipping her face.

The Sentinel Tower soared back into the sky above her flared eyes, rearing higher and higher away while she plunged into night. Her last thought was not of Escon or Antayn, but it was sharp with a regret that made her scream louder still, anguished:

I can’t die without seeing my son! I can’t die without seeing my son! I can’t die without –

*          *          *          *          *

Dancing, drifting light-mist wisped in the darkness.

Residual explosions of terror and bitter, bitter regret went off in Kiraleen’s otherwise blank mind. She was confused – so confused – what was she looking at, and where?

She was falling! Dying!

Kiraleen screamed as the memory hit her again, sharply, as much a protest as a terrified cry.

“It is over,” said a voice.

It was hard to believe those words, but they sounded again with a solid, unshakeable calm like ice smothering frantic fire. Kira sat up in a rising lurch from where she lay, looking away from the rippling aurora above with wild eyes.

The Eyeless was beside her, down on one knee as he leaned over and looked into her face. His brows were faintly furrowed, but not anxious, and he did not immediately speak again.

Kiraleen also found it difficult to reharness her shaking voice. “How did you … I thought … I thought I was bound for the Dead Plane …”

“Almost,” replied the Eyeless. “Eventually.”

She ignored his fatalism – natural for one of his profession, she supposed – and reached up to grip his shoulder, hard, in fierce thanks. Her hand was so numb that she could hardly feel it. “I’ll not forget this.”

“I imagine not,” he conceded. “Falling from such a height is memorable.”

This time Kiraleen let out a short burst of laughter – clipped, dizzy with relief, and a rare sound to pass her lips, but she was drunk on a miracle – and simply slapped his shoulder in wordless appreciation before she let her hand fall away. “What’s your name, Eyeless?”

“Esthain will serve,” answered the Eyeless, seeming momentarily nonplussed by her reaction.

“I’m Kiraleen. Kiraleen Trebeyan. There’s a proper introduction.” She smiled, closer now to her serious norm, and climbed to her feet, though her legs felt like wood. “So – are you going to come and help me pitch a shadow-sneak out of that window?”

“Do not go back in there,” Esthain warned, gracefully rising as she rose. “Not yet. That place is full of the Dead, as you well know.”

“A dead man pushed me out the window?”

The Eyeless nodded. “A dead guardsman. And more than that waits above – listen.”

“I don’t have your Elven –”

“Listen, Kiraleen.”

So she listened, looking up towards the summit of the Sentinel Tower as Esthain did. At first it was faint – just a whisper – but as she tried to attune her ears to it, it suddenly swelled to a roar:

HERE. COME HERE. COME TO ME. COME TO ME NOW. HEAR THE CALL, KNOW MY VOICE, WAKE AND RISE …

The sound shuddered powerfully into her bones, pure thundering pain, and her mind howled with the need of it. In fiery lines within her skull – like a brand, and just as permanent, her instincts warned – a man’s form began to trace itself …

“Now stop listening. You, at least, can shut it out.”

Esthain’s voice was faint and distant, but it recalled Kiraleen to herself. The heavy voice was unwilling to let her go, but she fought it back with strong thoughts of her quest – her son – and it finally, slowly faded away.

“I should not listen again, if I were you,” advised Esthain, looking away from the tower to Kiraleen – or so the turning of his cloth-wrapped face betrayed. “But you know now. That is necromancy. Someone in the tower – someone very powerful – is calling up the Dead in Escon.”

“Looking for ‘him’,” Kiraleen agreed, thinking of the male image that had just began to score itself deeply in her head. She could still see its vague lines hanging there, unfinished.

“I think so – but in a very dangerous manner. Dragging up such vast numbers of the Dead to seek out one lone spirit is a result either of destructive intent or overwhelming ignorance.”

“Then we have to go back to the Sentinel. We have to stop this.”

“If I could,” replied Esthain, “I would be at the tower’s summit already. Something blocks the stairwell – more than the Dead.”

Kiraleen shook her head helplessly. “So what now?”

“I do not know.” The admission seemed to come grudgingly, or so Kira gathered from the next crease of his brow. “But I shall think on it … however little time remains for that. The Dead are fast overrunning this place.”

The last grim thought brought another into Kira’s mind, jolting her: images of Sullan, crying and bleeding, and the desperate, frightened faces of the tavern crowd. “The Bear and Stag! I need to get back there first. I said I would.”

For the first time since they had met, Esthain’s colourless lips – usually near-parallel to the straight crease of his eye-binding – flickered in a peculiar, faint smile. “Your duty to the word certainly binds you tighter than most, Kiraleen.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, sensing more to the strange remark than there seemed.

“The fact that you are here at all quite surprises me.” He glanced back down the street as he said it, watchfully keeping his attention on a slow-building drift of ghosts. “Well, let us go, if you meant what you said. A promise unkept is a chain on the mind and soul.”

There seemed perhaps the faintest flicker in his voice as he said it. Kiraleen wasn’t sure of its nature, angry or regretful or weary, and was even less sure of its source, but she wasn’t about to pry – she of all people understood the irritation of private affairs being poked at by idle curiosity.

Without speaking any further, they walked back down the street sloping away from the Sentinel Tower – partially because it was difficult to be heard over all the clamouring ghosts, and mostly because Esthain seemed as comfortable with silence as Kira was. It was quite a relief. She had never understood the discomfort others felt when all conversation ceased, and never tried to toss out wasteful words just to fill the pause. Too many words and not enough thoughts behind them …

Wasn’t that just like Antayn?

Kiraleen sighed faintly to herself, vexed rather than nostalgic at all the memories insistently leaping up while more important matters were at hand. To hold them back, she finally chose to break the silence with a question that had come to mind some time ago, but had to raise her voice over near shrieking to be heard: “What can you tell me about the Dead, Esthain? I know nothing except what I’ve heard in old ghost stories.”

Esthain only half-turned his head. “It seems redundant to tell you what you will very quickly learn.”

“I’d rather not learn it the hard way. But if you’re going to press this ‘mysterious sect’ line, just tell me straight and I’ll work things out for myself.”

“You truly want me to explain the Dead to you …” Esthain’s arrow-straight mouth quirked up again in another moment of odd, pale amusement. “Very well. Tell me what you would know.”

“Anything. Start with how ghosts can actually hurt the living.”

“They cannot.”

“But –”

“Ghosts cannot harm the living. Spirits can. The distinction between the two is quite important. A ghost is simply the harmless projection of a soul into the Mortal plane. The soul itself is still in the Dead plane – a wanderer standing outside a window, looking into a warm room while it waits in the dark. But a spirit is a houseless soul that has managed to fully re-enter the Mortal plane – quite present and quite real. To variant degrees.”

“All right.” Kiraleen pursed her lips. “Are all these Dead things in Escon spirits?”

Esthain’s head dipped as he walked.

“Even the faint ones? Why are some just mist, and others as solid as you and I?”

“Will. Strength. Time.” The Eyeless broke off temporarily as they approached another drift of ghosts, watching them, but these Dead paid them no mind. “If a spirit does not wish to be here, it will not try to focus its energy here – it will simply try to go back. If a spirit was not strong in life, it will certainly not be so in death. And the more time elapsed since the spirit’s first ‘death’, the more powerful it must be to fully recall its old shape and form.”

After a thoughtful pause, Esthain stopped walking, turning back to point at the filmy shapes they had just passed. “Those spirits have barely enough energy to affect the Mortal plane physically – ah, see now, striking at the doors is difficult for them. They are unwilling to be here, but not so long dead; they recall their forms clearly. The spirits that hold no shape but mist are unwilling, old, and weak. Most likely they cannot even see the Mortal plane clearly. Spirits which are willing and not long dead – or willing and very strong – hold the most solid form.”

Androck was strong and recently dead, Kiraleen thought sadly. So was that murdering bullock in the Bear and Stag. He was willing, as well … maybe that’s why he could see this plane and poor old Androck couldn’t …

“What about … monsters?” Kira asked, looking at the blood dried on her sleeve where the girl-thing had bitten her.

“A spirit can take any form it wishes if it has enough energy, Kiraleen. Oftentimes a spirit simply forgets what it once looked like. Those that choose teeth, or claws, or suchlike … well, they are an advantage if you are minded to strengthen yourself with the life-force of the living.”

“Spirits which have enough energy can give themselves a body,” she summarised.

“Something close to it. The body they create is not flesh; it is not warm and it does not bleed. But it has a solid presence.”

“So that’s why we can kill them.”

“Kill them?” Esthain echoed, one brow arching. “You cannot kill a soul, Kiraleen. You can only drive it from the Mortal plane. Souls are indestructible. If they do not find their rest on a further plane, they simply linger in the Dead plane next to this plane for eternity, roaming aimlessly … or waiting for a chance to return.”

Kiraleen frowned. “So why are the spirits so angry about being here?”

“Not all of them are.” Kiraleen had already belatedly remembered the burly spirit from the Bear and Stag before Esthain said it. “Some are quite content to be here – perhaps a few are angered only by the necromancer’s clamorous summons. The spirits that are discontent are those who have been gone too long from this plane … or those who have been dragged here from another, further place.”

“The holy Twilight Lands!”

“Perhaps that far. But there are many other places.”

It was no longer so difficult to imagine what fuelled the anger of some of the ghosts – Kiraleen had been raised using that word, ‘ghosts’, and decided not to abandon it completely for semantics’ sake – after imagining a forceful, painful abduction from peace back to the suffering Mortal plane. And the necromancer … whoever he or she was … could hardly have chosen a more fruitful place to drag forth the dead than battle-founded Escon.

Kiraleen lapsed back into silence, thoughtfully considering all that she had been told, and before long she and Esthain re-emerged into Five Spear Square once more. As she stared through the smothering mists of the Dead – watchful for the horrible, fanged girl – she suddenly felt a sharp, deep shock of horror as she realised that she could not see the Bear and Stag at the far side of the square.

It was all but buried under a crawling, clambering mass of screaming spirits.

*          *          *          *          *

Timber rattled and groaned under a hundred pallid, beating fists – some solid and making contact, others the aggressive motion alone – as the ghosts surged about the Bear and Stag, crying out their thin fury above the groaning din of the square. Some had climbed up the face of the building and were pounding at the windows on the second floor to force their entry, tearing away the shutters and shattering glass with fists which, although deeply scored, did not bleed.

The screams of the living within could not be heard, but Kiraleen saw other hands – frantic hands – wielding chairs and bottles in vicious panic to keep the spirits out. One, on the second floor, leaned out too far to swing a kettle at a reaching ghost and was snatched out through the broken window-frame, drawn into the seething pack of the Dead and lost without a sound.

“Hia, Daiathais! Hia, Daiathais!” shouted Esthain, his quiet voice swelling to the clear, powerful cry of a general on the field. At first Kiraleen thought it was a battle-cry, but the Eyeless cast about as he shouted, turning in each direction with a half-searching, half-commanding gaze. “Hia, Daiathais!”

“You think there are any other Eyeless left to help?” Kiraleen exclaimed.

“Here, it is beyond any doubt,” he replied. “Hia, Daiathais!”

And surely enough, as Kiraleen stood beside Esthain and followed his roving gaze, she saw more colourless shapes come running – figures wrapped in the fluttering grey cloth of their loose garb, unnervingly reminiscent of the raging spirits themselves, and all armed with sword, axe or knife. She counted only two dozen – the number may have been confounded by the ghost-drifts – but as they reached the square, Esthain darted forward for the tavern himself with his longsword held out wide. Kiraleen paused only a moment before she followed on his heels, thinking of Sullan crouched on his own tavern floor with blood on his face.

Most of the maddened ghosts did not even turn to face their assailants at first as the Eyeless and Kiraleen attacked, lashing into the ethereal mob like madmen battling with empty mist. Then, as the most solid and aware of the spirits surged back in reply, the true chaos began. Kiraleen could barely see anything before her in the gloom but fleeting glimpses of flared, dead eyes and grappling hands. At first she was afraid of striking down one of the Eyeless – also glimpsed in flashes of glinting steel around her – but before long the fullest of the fighting overtook her, and her only thought was lashing away every least thing that reached in her direction.

A windy chorus of sighs rose up as the grim Eyeless slowly began to strike their marks down – that familiar, eerie sough of air that the Dead released as they dissipated. Kiraleen struck out as solidly as the rest, though one of the heavy-fisted body-blows that a snarling ghost dealt her back was nearly enough to put her on her knees. Gradually, the ranks of the spirits thinned, and no more of the chaotic ghost-crowd in Five Spear Square surged out to join them.

As Kiraleen eased back, letting several of the less-committed spirits scatter bitterly away, and the silent Eyeless closed bleakly on the rest, she knew the battle had been won. Esthain had just seized the last ghost trying to scale the tavern wall, dragging it down and pinning it there as another grey-clad man stabbed its ‘chest’ fully through, and the others had cleared a way to the door.

Kiraleen hurried through the press, sheathing her sword, and banged on the buckled timber with her fist. “Sullan! Sullan! Are you all right? Are you in there?”

Frightened cries from within were her only answer. At least she knew that some of the tavern crowd were still alive. “It’s me! Kiraleen! The ghosts have gone – open the door, quick!”

“Don’t do it!” someone screamed from the second floor, and Kira looked up to see a white, terrified barmaid’s face looking down from a ruined window. “There are grey ghosts everywhere!”

“They’re Eyeless, and they just saved the lot of you! Open this door unless you’d like to repay them by getting them killed! Is Sullan in there?”

There was a long pause, and more frightened muttering. At last Kiraleen heard a thin, shaken, unrecognisable voice. “I’m here, Kira. And I want to trust you. But how … how can it be safe to open the door?”

“Even if I were dead, Sullan, I’d not hurt you.”

“No?” Sullan’s half-broken voice rose, short and sharp. “I’ve a dozen broken bottles in my back that say you’re wrong, Kira! If Da tried to do for me, why should …?”

His tirade grew fainter at the last, and finally trailed off with fresh fear and grief.

Kiraleen bowed her head slightly, unclenching the fist she’d pounded at the door to lay her palm flat on it. “He couldn’t see you, Sullan,” she said more quietly. “He’d never have hurt you – you know it as well as I. But he couldn’t see you.”

There was a long silence – on Sullan’s part, at least. The people Kiraleen could hear inside the Bear and Stag continued their private, nervous conference, and in the square, the spirits wailed on.

“No-one could survive out there,” a muffled voice said behind the door. “She’s one of the Dead, all right. It’s not safe. We have to stay here.”

“It is precisely for safety’s sake that you must open the door,” Esthain’s clear voice countered, and Kiraleen readily stepped to one side as the Elf strode over to join her. “But we shall not be joining you inside. Nowhere in Escon is safe to bide – you must leave, for now.”

“Leave?” The clamour from inside the tavern grew to rival the clamour of the Dead outside for a moment. “Go out into the streets with the ghosts? We wouldn’t last a dozen heartbeats!”

“In there,” responded Esthain, looking up to the second floor’s ruined windows with his cloth-wrapped eyes, “you will be very lucky to last two dozen heartbeats.”

The refugees in the tavern were briefly silenced, a moment that Esthain seized on with the same authoritative insistence as before. “There are more than enough of us here to defend you, and we have all had long dealings with the Dead. Set your trust in us and we shall see you safe to the Temple of Light outside Escon’s walls. You may shelter there without fear until this trouble is over.”

This time another clamour rose in answer to Esthain’s words, but it was a clamour of desperate hope.

“The Temple! Of course! We’ll be safe there!”

“Holy ground!”

“The Dead can’t walk where the Saint and the Maiden are watching!”

“We’ll have to get there, first,” another voice said – the same voice that had raised the first doubts, Kiraleen thought – and immediately, the argument inside rekindled.

Kiraleen watched another faint furrowing of Esthain’s clear brow. “You can’t blame them, Esthain,” she warned, guessing that the tiny crease was a frown. “It’s madness out here. I wouldn’t readily agree to setting foot outside, either.”

“You would not have to agree to it,” Esthain replied. “And nor do they.”

With a sudden, sharp lunge that sent Kiraleen’s heart leaping into her mouth, the Eyeless lashed at the broken, weakly braced door with a twisting kick, deceptively graceful for the strength behind it, and the sound of a precarious barricade half-scattering to the floor drowned out the arguing voices inside. Several more screams rose, and the scraping sounds behind the door suggested that desperate hands were trying to block up the doorway again, but Esthain’s second kick made it a pointless exercise: the old door gave way at last, cracking through the middle and dropping its lower half from the ruined lower hinge.

A few stacked crates and chairs tumbled through the gap as the door broke, which may have been just as well for the Eyeless and Kiraleen – two defensive bottles smashed against the debris. “I regret this abrupt response,” Esthain called out over the noise, though his level tone did not change to show it, “but time is too short. Come out: the tavern door is even less a defence for you now than before, and no creature that meant you harm would waste words as I have.”

“Sullan,” Kiraleen added firmly, “you’ve my word that there’s no danger waiting out here – none from the Eyeless or from me.”

The silence this time, the last silence, was near-complete. At last there came more scraping sounds – the sounds of the broken barricade’s last remnants being pulled away – and the first to step through the doorway, pushing the free-swinging upper half of the door open as he passed through, was Sullan: pale, bloodied, weary.

“If there was anything that Da ever swore by,” the big man said slowly, favouring his torn back with a heavy slouch, “it was Kiraleen Trebeyan’s word. Lead on, Kira.”