Burning lights greeted us as we slipped inside. Bright torches and bursting wreaths were held by hooks and sconces on walls of white marble. Bella shut the door, leaving but a sliver of air between iron and wall. Meanwhile, I inspected the walls themselves: cubbies for middle management.

  In the center of this vast tomb were pillars of jade and sparkling emerald housing rows of ornate sarcophagi. It was clear where we needed to go. A castle of candles burned atop one in particular. A crowbar would do the trick.

  I knelt to begin my work. So determined was I to collect our prize that I’d paid no attention to the jewels that the torches and candles reflected in, giving the place the effect of a grand ball.

  Bella removed the candles. I began to feel the bishop’s lid give but I was stopped by a unique foulness entering the tomb. It was so sudden, I’d thought we’d made a mistake and what awaited us under the lid was in its prime rot. Then I heard marble slabs sliding across the other. I’d suffered this smell before.

  I knew a ghoul was near.

  Bella gasped and latched onto me, costing me the immediate drawing of my sword. What we saw: It couldn’t have been the head of a ghoul looking upon us like a sprouted cabbage. And it couldn’t have been three—four—seven ghouls climbing out from a hole they’d made, having themselves tunneled under the mausoleum.

  Paltumorr’s pack was on us like flies. I flung Bella between me and the nearest pillar, slashing wildly at thin air. They snarled, they gnashed, they laughed at Bella’s shrill screaming. They clawed with hands like spiked shovels, but for all their gestures their interest in us seemed at best mild. They s were surrounding not us, but the bishop’s sarcophagus. It was to be contested, by me and brazen ghouls, until the door of the mausoleum swung wide.

  Snatchers poured in, not just by way of the door—some had surmounted the outer walls and broke a high window I hadn’t even known existed. With the falling glass, they too swung down into the bloodshed. Having once poked chipped swords and swung shovels at the other, the snatchers for the IHS and for Bileprine now toppled over sarcophagi wielding spears and war hammers. My disbelief clung to the ghouls. More than tunneling had been feasible, daring the world aboveground was an extraordinary act for ghouls—especially fighting armed men. They paid dearly for this. Some scampering off, holding their hacked-off limbs in their mouths or their trembling claws.

  I had read how they can assume the guise of those whose heart and brains they devour. I saw with my own eyes a ghoul leap on a snatcher who I’d run through, then vanish entirely. That snatcher, nude and crackling with life, soon rejoined the fray. His was a futile gesture. Once risen, he was felled by Bella herself, having procured his old spear that had barely missed her.

  Perhaps the disguised ghoul would have survived Bella’s thrust, but another ghoul, confused by its cohort’s act, attacked him, getting them both cleaved to bits.

  I swept and I hacked. I tried to remain Bella’s ever-parrying human shield. My swordsmanship was halted when a commanding grumble erupted from the depths. Those that remained of Paltumorr’s kind shrieked. Paltumorr, whom I recognized not only by height but by laughter as he deprived a snatcher of a much-needed arm, growled commands. Shields and blades lowered as the ghouls perked their ears and backed into a circle. Their own tunnel had been compromised.

  Glibbmor had arrived.

  Pouring onto the blood-smeared marble, the Glibbmor Ghouls attacked. Their leader was the last to emerge. Barking orders, compact like an afflicted gorilla, Glibbmor’s red hairs bristled. Everyone, everything able to kill proceeded to. The ghouls’ battle spilled in front of me and Bella. To make our escape, I hacked at two, busy rolling in a furious ball, biting the other.

  Rushing to end the battle quickly, I suppose, then slipping in human blood, the one who ended up on the bottom was Glibbmor. I don’t know why, but I looked far too long into the yellow globes of his eyes. I worked to slay the ghoul on top of him, who did not die easy but whirled in torrents of curses and teeth.

  In such chaos, I didn’t even know how I’d killed it, only that doing so had deprived me of my weapons, and my breath.

  I was leaning against a pillar, gulping the intrusive night air, when a ghoul seized me from behind. It draped an arm over my shoulder then pressed the accompanying claws against my chest. With what I best guess was a fist, it then struck me squarely on the head.

  Then I knew no more.

  *

  I awoke to find myself near Bella. She too lay on the marble, though no amount of shaking could rouse her. Someone had slit her throat. She lay amongst the knocked-down, stamped-on wreaths.

  Screaming and stamping and clawing at my own eyes did no good. Howling at pillars and kicking fresh corpses gave me no solace, nor Bella any begged-for, pled for signs that life had returned. My pleas echoed off taunting, indifferent walls. I returned to her side. I tried to convince myself that her killing blow had at least been clean, her killer humane.

  My grief swung back into rage. I would find her killer, somehow. Strewn about, I saw four other dead snatchers. I’d haul off with them all, for it was said that necromancers could raise the dead for a hefty payment. Maybe one had done the slicing, and if not, maybe one had seen who did.

  Such thoughts carried me through until I at long last stumbled out from the sarcophagi. Not a single ghoul remained. Many had fallen, by iron and by their own kind, yet speaking I suppose higher of ghouls than of their human counterparts, their footprints led from pools of foul ghoul blood and ended at the mouth of their tunnel.

  Bishop Vhulviel’s sarcophagus had been knocked over and emptied. Who won, I didn’t care. My entire body began to ache and sting, but dulled to dim thrums every time I dared to look at Bella.

  I sat on a sullen block of marble. I could not move for I was as done with life as those bludgeoned and cut and strewn around me. My greed had cost me everything.

  When Ansul’s True marched in, I had no sword to fight with, nor inclination to find one.

  I obeyed my first impulse, peering into all those grim faces for the statuesque disapproval of my father. Silence was broken by the squeaks of what I’d first thought was a corpse cart. They wheeled out from behind their ranks a decrepit priest. “Bishop Vhulviel,” said his pusher, “your holiness, behold.” The ancient buzzard sat in a wheelchair, a smirk running across his face, his skin the stuff of ratted parchment.

  Turned over to the Metropolitan Ward, I’d later learn in the cold halls of high court how Bishop Vhulviel had a batch of criminals rounded up and strangled. Placed in a secret tomb, this cache of bodies was meant for Ansul’s Call. Upon the great day of resurrection, the bishop, that relic of sanctimony, would triumphantly brandish to none other than Tersiona herself all the sinners he’d removed.

  The announcement of his death, his funeral, leaving the damn door unlocked—all a decoy meant to rid the world of more incorrigibles in advance of his actual heavenly arrival. My father’s wretched zealots possessed more trickery than feuding snatchers or tunneling ghouls. I’d hear even later, this time from the confines of a dungeon cell, that it was this colorful batch of sinners that had purportedly attracted the ghouls, appealing to their sportive whimsies. Both ghoul clans had hoped to eat the bishop, learn his treasure’s whereabouts from his own vile mind, shed his flesh, then scamper off to assume such grand and notorious guises.

  One by one, the cold, hard stares of my captors shifted to something behind me. Already seized and in irons, I turned my head and saw, hidden between dense shadow and overturned décor, one ghoul had been left behind.

  I could hardly believe my eyes. Paltumorr had been the one attacking Glibbmor, and I had killed him. My sword was driven halfway to the hilt in Paltumorr’s gut. My dagger was in his throat, the oaken handle clutched by talons.

  This alone saved me the gallows and the preamble of soul-cleansing torture. I’d killed a ghoul, though Bishop Vhulviel lived just long enough to take all the credit.

  Though robbing graves was technically a death sentence, killing their robbers wasn’t. I was given five years per slain body snatcher, as our lives were not worth a pittance compared to a good citizen’s. I was tossed every bribe by the Ward and Chapwyns alike. Five dead snatchers made for heartier bellows than four. Better food, my own cell—with a window even—the possibly of getting out before my skin had turned to spotty leather. But nothing worked. They had no choice but to accept my story: Bella had merely been a murder victim, hauled to that great site of slaughter that fateful morning by an unnamed snatcher hoping to cash in on two corpses.

  So she was buried here, at the Institute of Human Sciences, in your honored place just yonder. Yes, I know. She must have meant enough to some here that they claimed her as their own. As difficult as that is to believe, if you’d have met her, you’d understand. I vowed one day to lay roses at her grave, though I would have preferred they be fresh, and my way not barred by so many locks.

  *

  Bosgaard’s tale was over. Night had long since fallen, and so had the emptied bottle we’d shared. Another student would be slogging to the duty hut soon to relieve me. I sat up and scanned the keys in my charge before lifting from its hook the right one.

  “What if she isn’t in there?” I said, handing him his key.

  “Rattle on church doors, I suppose. Find an old initiate who now wears the cassock of a priest. Find one who was there, beg and plead and tithe until her whereabouts are given to me. But,” he said, looking instantly sober, “stories from the dungeon are rarely lore.”

  I remained at the desk when he left.

  *

  Only a few minutes passed before I could take it no longer. Could this woman be in there? I didn’t want to intrude on Bosgaard’s mourning, but strangely I felt the man might want me in there. After all, he had poured out to me his tale.

  The door was open. Bosgaard was still lighting the menagerie of candles when I entered and immediately wished I hadn’t. Without looking up, he asked that I shut the door, which I stupidly did, then leaned against it and trembled. I felt like I was in the tale I’d just heard, seeing cubbies for the dead lining the walls. At the outer reaches of candlelight, there was an opened one. The casket that belonged inside it had been pulled down onto to the floor…and opened?

  Its contents were ghastly: a shrouded corpse, female and time-withered. Her chest and skull had been torn open.

  “We have a guest,” Bosgaard said. This guest, if she wasn’t the woman he’d explained as his reason for entry, was no guest I wished to meet. He had been a madman all along, and I was about to suffer his unspeakable schemes. He lit the last candle and he looked up, but not at me.

  “The sludge in these veins,” an awful voice groaned, plastering me against the door, “no spineless dandy can move. He can stay.”

  “You haven’t aged a day, Glibbmor,” Bosgaard said. “I am ready.”

  I almost slipped right off the edge of sanity herself. On a sarcophagus, what I’d first took for a misshapen man sat and leered at me. Flashing his yellow eyes back to Bosgaard, he leaned back to assume a kingly posture. In his overgrown hands was his scepter—a hulking, gnawed-on femur. At his feet, broken tile and dirt had been kicked up from a newly dug tunnel, just as I’d envisioned in that Chapwyn mausoleum. The ghoul smiled a wide, greasy smile when an ill choir of snickers came up from underneath him.

  The ghoul leaned forward and gibbered into the tunnel. Only Bosgaard’s stoic demeanor shielded me from pure and utter madness, a shield that lifted when we both saw human hands begin to emerge.

  What crawled up wore nothing. She covered her breasts with an arm. To conceal her more intimate parts, she reached into the open casket to tear free a piece of the shroud. When she looked upon the twenty-year-old corpse and its familiar dressings, she rose and stared blankly into the candles.

  Her face was no less stricken than my own. Her mouth hung open as if preparing to scream, though not knowing to who, her confused eyes suggested, was all that restrained her.

  Though frightened, she seemed to float, as if awakening from a dream. She turned and peered back down into the tunnel. What glowing eyes and hellish grins were looking up at her I tried not to imagine.

  “They won’t hurt you, Bella,” Bosgaard said.

  I wasn’t the only one who heard the question in his tone. Glibbmor clicked his teeth together. “I learned long ago the benefit of keeping my word to men.”

  Bella’s eyes squinted. Her hair, which I’d imagined short as a victim of lice, was unkempt, surely due to those days after death when our few features still grow. “Yes,” Bosgaard said. “It’s me, Bell.”

  “Boz?” She spoke, drifting through the candles’ dance and flicker. She studied his face, with her eyes first, then her hands. He was older now, much older, for time had gnarled his frame. She examined his dungeon-paled cheeks, the wrinkles around his brightened eyes.

  Of all the actors in this lunatic pageant, Glibbmor spoke. “I asked those of mine who were there that night. We didn’t see who killed her.”

  “Killed who?” asked Bella.

  “It’s not important now,” Bosgaard said, his eyes welling.

  “Thanks are in order,” Glibbmor stated. “Thanks, Bosgaard, for taking care of Paltumorr for me. It may have been my sorry carcass hauled off by those sorrier priests if you hadn’t,” he snickered, “so thank you, even if it wasn’t to protect the glorious ghoul king before you.”

  “King or not,” Bosgaard said, “you do have your messengers.”

  “Many,” Glibbmor said. “And none much enjoyed their trips into the dungeon, but for you…”

  Bosgaard took his eyes off Bella for the first time: “They told me it’d be quick.”

  “Indeed, mighty body snatcher,” Glibbmor nodded. “As also promised, we’ll give you a week to frolic. You’ll believe you’re you.”

  Bosgaard had told of Bella’s shrill scream. Now I got to hear it. Bosgaard flashed a knife, slicing his own throat. But it was not her continued pitch that cost me my consciousness, nor was it watching Bosgaard fall to the floor amongst ribbons of red hot spray. It was Glibbmor, who unseated himself to begin tearing into Bosgaard’s chest.

  What I say to you in plain words I did not witness in plain belief. Yet I can tell such a tale only if I will myself to believe what my eyes could not have seen, what my heart could not have felt.

  When I came to, I was on the floor. I was not the only one. Bosgaard lay nude on his back. There was a third. The old Bosgaard, torn open and head split like a melon, lay next to me too.

  For whatever covetous nature was Bosgaard’s, he had shed it by way of the most gruesome trial. Doing so, he was reunited with his Bella, who had not only calmed but rode the fresher version of her lover. They were still making love when I ran out screaming.

  I abandoned my post as I abandoned my notions of life, my notions of death, and what rules had surrounded them. I ran. I ran past City Cemetery, where the tips of obelisks had me erupting in unhinged laughter, wondering if I would do so again or if I would collapse and cry the next time I heard talk of Bishop Vhulviel the Ghoul Slayer.

  Roads became the polished stones of the Morgeltine District. I paused at times to retch against statues or lean into hedges. The world could never drop into my lap the calamities I’d listened to—or worse, the ones I’d seen. Had I ever known love, I could not tell, but if such ends greeted those enslaved to its pull, than perhaps I was better off without it. As I ran onto our street, I felt my life all the more deprived for not having something, someone, to burn my undeserved wealth and uncontested prospects over.

  As the sky glowed morning’s dawn, I collapsed at my father’s doors. There I climbed to my feet, tearing off the IHS sash and badge then straightening my garments, ready to tell a tale that would never be believed. But if a rural son of a pious zealot could somehow barter deals with a ghoul king while in prison, maybe I could plead with my father for a new occupation.

  The Archer and Adaline

  “We are Chapwyn, and we champion suffering.”

  “What?” I said. I was down on my knees and had to raise my head.

  “I said we are Chapwyn,” the priest repeated, fondling his censer, “and we give a Chapwyn offering?”

  “Ah.” I took to my feet, adjusting my sword and leaving the holy man to find another parishioner.

  I walked out of the church and back onto the cobblestones of Lirelet Avenue. Glow-lamps and the waves of hanging tapestries almost hid from me the night. But soon I was under its early stars, lost again in thought.

  The Azadi wars had been over for a decade, the “Years of Peace” ongoing for as long, yet I’d become conflict itself. Recent desperations had shown me it wasn’t entirely uncomfortable, reverting back to ways of life I’d abandoned. The church, its smells, its rhythmic chanting—they gave me sanctuary when I needed to contemplate where things had gone so wrong.

  I am a sex addict. That which is as simple as corking a bottle carries with it exhilarating heights and terrific depths of turbulent malice.

  Let me explain.

  All men carry a deep sense of love for tight, wet places. All men day dream about the tightening and slackening of cheeks that just walked past. It is solely men’s insatiable drive to make love that has perpetuated our kind out of plagues, curses, and war. All men, from the time childhood ends to the grips of senility. This, however, does not make them like me.

  Recently, I’ve attempted to open up about my condition to those who’d listen. I am assured all men feel as I do, often relating my obsession to a fat man’s lust for his plate. Such a pity. When the urge comes at you from across the ocean yet you are still unable to dodge its wave, when the joyous trinkets of the day turn to rubble and ash—that’s when you are beginning to understand enthrallment by an hourglass figure atop heart-crushing heels.

  Most nights, I toss and turn in my bed. When the sun beat upon me in earlier days, I prowled about not much different than the mildly deranged predator. Any who prohibited me from sating my lust were thrown to the wayside, regardless of reprisal.