David Nickle - The 'Geisters

As she went on, the ledge levelled out, and the bare rock was replaced by broad cobblestones. The cliff wall behind her, conversely, became craggier. In the distance, she could hear the sound of fast water—rapids, or maybe a waterfall, and she also thought she might have heard the sound of wings beating— leathery wings, as those of gigantic bats— and perhaps deep, mournful moaning— from the souls of the risen gladiators, waiting for their final judgement in the Corridor of Bones….

“Ah,” said Ann aloud, and listened as her voice echoed back across the great chamber.

She thought she might know where she was. And as she took three more steps, and the ledge separated from the cavern wall and became a kind of bridge, she became sure of it.

These were the caverns beneath the Coliseum of Dusk—in the middle of which hung the Arch-Liche of the Games’ inverted tower, a thick basalt uvula that dangled from the greatest cavern’s throat.

She wanted to applaud, as the tower emerged from the mists—carved with runes that she and Philip had devised on the remains of a tablet of scientific graph paper, dotted with arrow slits and balconies, illuminated in parts with firelight, and the screams of the giant glow-bugs that the Arch-Liche had enslaved the last time he’d walked in the world’s moonlight.

Ann smiled. For the first time since she was a child, she truly felt as though she were coming home. By the time she was halfway across the bridge, she couldn’t help herself: she was running.

In the first room—a wide entry hall—a fine meal was set out on a long oaken table. Ann avoided it, remembering it as a trap: the succulent venison that topped the centrepiece was really the carcass of a gigantic spider, basted in its own venom. The bunches of grapes were flesh-burrowing grubs, that would render an adventurer paralyzed, if she failed to make her saving throw. The entire banquet—the suckling pig, the mounds of honeyed yam, the links of sausage, all of it—was poisonous, its true nature hidden by the cunning illusions of the Arch-Liche. The only thing safe to consume on the table was the wine, thick and dark and infused with a healing potion that would undo the effects of all but the most fatal of the poisons.

If Leah and Ryan and the rest of them had ever gotten that far in her campaign, they would have been so impressed. And, Ann was sure, so dead.

Ann bypassed the banquet, and moved farther into the tower. She visited its dungeons, near the top, where the Arch-Liche, in an unholy pact with the ruling families of Tricasta, kept hostage some of their more troublesome political enemies. She spent some hours in the Hanging Gardens, where pale vampiric flowers drank the blood of cave-blind rodents and blossomed into glorious crimson for hours afterward. She slept the first night in the Arch-Liche’s laboratory, where he had invented his glass automaton guards to watch over his treasury and mind the doomed gladiators. The laboratory was deserted, but the forge was easy to light, and it kept the place warm.

The next morning, she found her way to the kitchens and made herself a proper breakfast, absent both illusion and poison, and took the bowl to the Liche’s private chambers at the very bottom tip of the tower. She was delighted to find the Golden Telescope of Scrying there, mounted as she hoped, and settled in to observe all the goings-on in Tricasta and the lands surrounding it.

The next day mingled with the one after, and the one past that, and so on. The Arch-Liche, if he even still occupied this tower, never made himself known. Ann had the entire space to herself.

There were no mirrors in the Arch-Liche’s chambers, nor anything even polished enough to cast a reflection. But while Ann could not look upon her own face, she could look at her hands and feet, and notice how quickly the scant colour from the Caribbean sun faded. She was becoming like alabaster, like bone, here in these new sunless chambers. When she looked down on the afternoon siestas at the fountain in Tricasta, Ann found herself squinting at the brilliance. Her joints made clicking noises when she bent to pick up a cup. Her teeth seemed to be looser in her mouth.

In these tiny measures, she came to understand that she was dying. She was wasting away—vanishing. In the belly of the Insect.

And she understood also: she did not wish to die here.

She wished she could speak with Eva, and she thought about trying to contact her now, using the telescope or one of the great spell tomes in the library. But she knew that she couldn’t. Eva understood herself to be a master of the psychic realm—able to send stores of energy to needy souls like Ann, speak to spirits and communicate via the power of the Universal Mind.

But Ann had to remind herself that the prison Eva had helped devise for the Insect had failed. Her intuitions about Michael—her assurances that he was a nice man, a good match, probably good in the sack—were as wildly tone-deaf as was her misplaced trust in Ian Rickhardt, who’d been able to draw out the deepest of Ann’s secrets with nothing more convincing than smarmy patter and mediocre flattery. And Eva had utterly failed to ferret out Philip, Ann’s own brother, and his lifelong betrayal.

Eva had shared a house with Ann. She had helped her through terrible trauma—the loss of her parents, and later, of her Nan.

But when it came to this business, Eva was nothing more than a fraud—most charitably, an unwitting fraud. She had no way into this place—this prison, literally of Ann’s own making.

Philip might listen to her call, now. He might help her. Ann wandered to the upper galleries of the tower—nearer its own, inverted base—and considered how she might do so. But she could conceive of no incantation by which to call him, that wasn’t comprised of her tears. He was her brother and she had loved him and it had been… what? A lie?

She stepped onto the south balcony, high enough that the ceiling of rock was visible barely a dozen yards overhead. It was freezing out here, cold enough that she felt it in her bones, her thickening joints. Her breath rattled in her throat.

She didn’t want to vanish. She let her hands fall to her side.

Warm fingers entwined with hers.

Ann squeezed as breath tickled her throat. Thank God you were here to hold my hand.

She let herself be turned around, to face the girl.

She had dark hair tied into snaky braids, and darker eyes. She wore a long pale tunic, and black boots with toes that curled on themselves.

You , mouthed Ann.

She was tall, and she filled out her tunic as a grown woman does—not like the child that Ann remembered distantly; not like the creature, the Insect, that Ann had come to understand her to be. She had grown and shifted in so many ways, but for one:

Her smile was still wide as the world.

Don’t vanish , the girl mouthed.

Ann leaned in, and kissed her. She closed her eyes, and as she did so, many things did vanish, into darkness, and into silence. But not Ann, and not the girl either.

The two of them stayed put.

They were it now.

Susan Rickhardt poured them each another glass, killing the bottle.

It was not a Rickhardt Estates label. Susan had just finished explaining how she liked this stuff, from Rosewood Estates, a little bit better than a constant diet of the house wine.

They were sitting on the long tasting bar, maybe a dozen feet from the urn that held Michael’s ashes. Ann vaguely recalled that Charlie Sunderland had left her here, in Susan’s care. Just sit here , he’d said. Your friend Susan will keep you entertained . And Ann had said… what? Nothing, probably.