Such odd synchronicities were present this night, though the boy this time was unaware.

  “Ullumon,” the boy heard Leebu say in anger. What followed were only growls. The God’s Broth was done. The boy understood the cat’s admonishment of the foul Lathairboni no better than he did the old man’s retorts. The God’s Broth had worn off near the same instant the boy wished only for home. And Ullumon granted it.

  But perhaps the stars were maligned, for this meant the boy was unable to hear:

  “He won’t live through the night!”

  “Oh, the great cat shows tender, tender love. You worry about you, Leebu. Isn’t that what you preach?”

  “Then I’m going too.”

  “Going too! To guard the white boy? He’ll grow to hunt you.”

  “No!” The cat sprang across the room, pinning the old man. “To be rid of you, Ullumon!”

  What the boy saw next rivaled in its horror the battleground beyond the palms. It seemed the old man pulled from somewhere a shriveled, mummified eye. He pointed at it, then to the cat, who withdrew, hissing. The cat drew back, setting its might into its rear legs before leaping once more.

  Conabitt fled the hut screaming. The old man and the cat screamed, too. Then only the cat.

  The boy ran, being torn by branches or by animals he could not understand. Blinded he ran, right into a wall of metal.

  “Corporal,” a soldier said, absently touching his breastplate where the boy had bloodied his own nose. “Corporal!—we have ’im!”

  “Where have you been, boy?” another Orisulan soldier appeared out of the blackness holding a sword. No sooner had he spoke than his sword became a ring of light, coming up just in time to drop an armed shadow.

  More shadows were running towards them, revealing themselves as Nilosulans as they screamed and gathered. The True Men—Conabitt remembered—they always went ahead. What followed, now turning the night to orange, was a detachment of troops who’d lit the village on fire.

  “No!” the boy cried, at the Orisulans who flung torches, at the villagers who’d taken arms against them. Searing light from an engulfed roof revealed that his nose hadn’t been broken, but the man he’d collided into was the one who’d been bleeding. This man’s face had become snow. His long hair sat silken wet. The one Conabitt guessed was the corporal grabbed him by the collar. The boy was released when a spear found the tall man’s head.

  “Rebellion” it would be called, if an Orisulan lived to tell it, and the villagers with a collective, honed hatred that splintered the troops. Those who were displaced were bludgeoned with clubs. Those who remained together fared better. But no place, no trampled patch of blood-soaked ground was safe from sword or spear. The refuge of the palms blazed light as day.

  He crawled.

  Wide trunks were useful against flying spears. Shadows made by fires were enough to seep down into and hug the earth. The fingers of the trees rubbed his back, tickled he felt the urge to think, as he heard footsteps. It only took one look to see the men who’d followed him. Their skin gleaming, their muscles taut from use of the spears that still dripped.

  If Ullumon, if Leebu, if anyone were here. The men spoke at him in their tongue.

  Crying, the boy shut his eyes and tried to run. They pounced on him, grabbing him with their hands and lifting him effortlessly into the air. When he didn’t feel that unknowable certainty of a spear bursting through his belly, the boy opened his eyes. In the air, he was, yes. But, oddly, the two men now stood well under him. One was already chanting.

  Palm leaves enshrouded, suspending him wickedly, caught in the light of blazing fires, a white angel of death and dominion. The chanting man fell to his knees, prompting the other to drop his weapon. Frozen by the sight, known in the villages, whispered in the plains, they were no match for the soldiers who snuck up behind.

  Half blinded from the pain and the fighting, the Orisulans who hugged Conabitt had no interest in why he’d been in the trees. Before the palms had lowered him, Conabitt looked out over the raging flames and in the chaos saw the eye of a cat. Almost in the bush line, the orange ball gleamed, gleamed then seemed to wink, if cats do such things, then it was gone.

  “Conabitt,” a soldier later said, his own name now sounding foreign. Dawn awaited, as did the northbound ship the bandaged swordsmen assured him would take him and his family “out of this hell.”

  “Conabitt,” the soldier said again, clearing his throat. This soldier, who’d been calling out orders to put on their knees the few remaining villagers, stood with the stature of a seasoned leader. “Young lord,” the stout man said, pleasant enough, “you may wish to turn away. We have to deal with the rebels now.”

  “No,” Conabitt said, earning him a surprised look. He was thinking about his brief, wild journey, who he’d made it with, what he’d learned, and how it somehow felt over before it had even truly begun. Wrapped in a new confidence, one as unusual for young boys as would be becoming animals or allowed to speak their speech, the boy salvaged from the ground the tattered remains of a soldier’s cloak, turning it into a robe. “No, it’s all right. May I give the order?”

  Arigol and the Parilgotheum

  In the city of Pelliul, mothers warn children not to venture toward homes or worn-down shops wobbling above the Parilgotheum. Beyond the threat of thieves or bludgeoning by loosened brick is the long-held worry that ghouls creep just below the cobblestones. It is said those dead-eaters vie for space with the inmates of the noted underground prison.

  The Parilgotheum, said to have been named such after the epitaph on one of its pillars, existed long before Pelliul. Well, the ruins did—a city’s worth, with no shortage of withered sarcophagi. Attempts to incorporate its porticos, crumbling tunnels, and what forth were abandoned when a sublevel, unknown to even the most ambitious archeologists, caved, pulling said lettered men down—along with the growing, top-level renovations—to an abyss since boarded and sealed.

  A fresh block of city was laid out over the necropolis. Now, low-rent housing and sly shops carry on in their maledictions, distantly aware that iron cellar doors cap a dark world of roaming madmen and the various bones cluttered there throughout the settling of centuries.

  It was above the Parilgotheum that the writer, Dandana Nix, arrived after following a trail of what magistrates called “clues.” Desperate times called for desperate measures—one of the many clichés she tried earnestly to avoid penning into her work, though it perfectly applied these days to her daily life. Racking up tabs in breweries and winehouses did nothing to help her accounts, to say nothing of her productivity and ever-important health.

  She needed new material. Nix had taken to writing crime dramas, starting with scrolls that sold in back rooms, and now up to the lofty height of leather-bounds that were driving her homeless. She needed another hit. Her work The Embryonic Sorcerer sold like wildfire, and like most wildfires was extinguished by an arbitrary change in the wind. Nothing left but wisps of smoke like fans who never bothered with the sequel.

  That she’d paid a timid neophyte to further his putrescence in black magic until their petty crimes flamed up into his self-obliteration was a detail she omitted. Her readers fancied her a brilliant pensmith, inexplicably capable of diving down to the bottoms of the human condition. This was true, to an extent. Nix’s spelunk into depravity had earned her a piquant, lower-level fame. The sort where fellow willows batted long eyelashes from behind the glass of immodest bookstores, or literate barbarians would sometimes embrace her as if she too were a sworder, one who’d shared in a vague but glorious conquest.

  That she actually committed many of the crimes she wrote would remain a secret, her “magic,” her vat of feculent ooze, her muse-like powers bursting from the constellations of her inkwell. To watch someone die just to take note of their struggled breath, the waxing gloss of eyes grown fearful, the terror when death herself grabbed them by the balls: it paid the bills. Bills that were growing right alongside the fear of getting caught.

  Trying to address both at once, Nix decided to sheathe her dagger and pore over archives at a magistrate’s office. Soon, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, the ambitious writer was walking, notes-scroll in hand, gathering one clue after the other.

  Her first stop had been a ditch. This slump in the graveyard made its border walls above seem doomish and oppressive. The official report had read the plot under the southwestern elm. Staring up at where its trunk met the earth and accounting for new headstones erected since, the site of a “disturbed corpse crime” sat, as she would soon learned they all did, at a scene’s lowest point.

  She’d discovered a string of bizarre cases involving those who were already dead. Graveyards, low-earth morgues, public mausoleums flooded by rain. Unaffected victims, to say the least, but bereaved families howled when a son was dug up or a still-stinking matriarch was found flopped over her own tombstone, chest torn open and rotten brain missing. Visits to ever more nefarious places drummed up rumors. The mythic eaters of the dead. Those who worked in graveyards or meandered in the twilights where she huckstered her reads chorused ghouls were the culprit. Ghouls. Crime-committing ghouls. Who could ask for greater material? Not only drama, but fascination of the land’s untarnished love for the gross and macabre.

  Dandana Nix was a fictionalist, or, as she sometimes preferred, wasn’t a non-fictionalist. Those preachers and prattlers, why with their treatises better spent putting people to sleep—she yearned to set them ablaze! If ghouls were real, then they were masters of secrecy. She wouldn’t disrupt their doings. She merely wanted an interview. “The ultimate well,” she said, departing lit streets to tread into the city’s bilge. The ultimate well to bucket up inspiration. Hell, in a few years, if they spoke, she’d be penning ghoul stories right out of foul, fetid mouths.

  The lowest cringle on the map in the lowest bowl between two of Pelliul’s three great hills, there stagnates life above the penal necropolis. Onto a warehouse’s cellar floor rolled moldering limbs she’d procured from a sympathetic mortician. While she squinted, while she held firm her lantern, moon-white claws ripped through the earth. She’d been right. A ghoul was coming!

  *

  Golbert Amphilliod refused to die in the gloomy subterranea. Prompted by forces he did not fully understand, underworld hues of gold and red had provided light during his exhausting journey, to a derelict path, one that was leading up. He’d already ascended the spiral protrusions of a crumbling staircase. Before doing so, stones had given way first, between dry earth at the floor of the necropolis and this dark soil on which the wide city waited. Crawling past clumps of rock, he threw them behind him. His heart had rejoiced at the sight of an undernourished root, splayed out from the ceiling of the tunnel which had brought him here. To his knowledge, he would be the first ever to escape the dread Parilgotheum, and the orange light pulling him forward like a current—wholesome, unbewitched light—up ahead waved and wiggled.

  A busted gutter, perhaps a worn pipe from one of the city’s unaccounted aqueducts: water had burrowed a claustrophobic tunnel. Only mud lay between him and freedom. So Golbert kept on, crawling through the thick paste, grunting, birthing himself until at last reaching out with his fingers into what could only be the World Above.

  It was a mystery. What fueled the crystalline rocks? What still remained of the golds and reds that dizzied the underworld pressed against his cheek as a single crimson stud. Laying his head in the mud, he rested for a final burst up and out into hopefully a place near food and bereft of guards. His breathing calm, he couldn’t help but think again of his brother, Aricow.

  Brother, he thought. Brotherhood. Tragic. That Aricow had to depart—right when they were to learn how to escape this vile place. It was a cruelty just as it was cruel they both had somehow ended up down here together.

  Their last adventure was still pulling at his thoughts.

  Golbert was a veteran of the Suelan Suppression. Sticking around, he’d eventually been promoted to sergeant. Bursting the buttons of his once dapper uniform and rotting away by wine, he’d briefly manned the guard post that fronted the, then-brand-new Suelan Suppression Memorial Mausoleum.

  Suppression—hah! While on the topic of cruelty. A merry dance of words—a lordship for you, you slimy, scroll-spinning bastard, you. To get that carved in stone, in stone on and in other mausoleums, gravestones elsewhere, and to the gods, the uncounted, uncountable native rotting graves back in Suela. Man had sought to conquer man, and did. Suppression, yes, Golbert was guilty, serving as he did, no better than a cog in a thunderous wheel. Suppression of only a doomed people’s revolt to reclaim a stolen destiny. Suelan suppression now rang true, up there, in the World Above. Black-skinned slaves chopped wood and cleaned out slop and occasionally lost a foot.

  But he had soldiered, and he had slaughtered. He had spent his most virile years serving a colony since abandoned. Worse—or equal, perhaps, he’d arrived at the age of his father when he’d groaned of growing back pain and ear hair. And Golbert had arrived there with no other skill. A life of military service it was, then, portly or otherwise.

  Golbert commanded the ceremonial unveiling of the mausoleum’s final addition: a statue depicting a masculine soldier stepping on the head of an equally ridiculous savage, ripping from the lower creature’s hands a grateful Suelan baby. He got adorned in all the old kit that wouldn’t fit, sang the songs he hadn’t forgotten, and, as the sky brushed away its jeweled gloss for an evening’s pallid splendor, he stepped inside the mausoleum to lock the front doors before bowing out a side exit. It was upon that stoop where he awoke, to his horror, for he reentered the darkness not only rubbing the phantom bump on his head, but sparked a torch to learn he stood center on a ghastly stage.

  The next day he was formally accused. Defiling corpses was bad. Defiling the corpses of men of whom the public sang ballads of your bonds, worse. Those who’d long watched him sulk and slog were quick to assign his final descent into madness as the result of wartime duties. Whereas weight bolsters the constitution of some, it breaks the bones of others. Whatever the reason, Sergeant Amphilliod was stripped of his rank, his beard, and his freedom. His testimony in court only accelerated the iron door’s opening, and their closing.

  “And now we are done, and down here together, Golbie,” Aricow had appeared and said, evoking the portmanteau they’d created as children when they’d banded together. “Ari—gollll. Arigol is back!” Fusing their names was an old strength, found again when the more able of the two mysteriously swirled in view. It had only been a few days—a week, at most, when he appeared. But down in the ancient ruins sealed below the city, those unlucky lawbreakers cursed to meander in near darkness did so with little use for time.

  *

  Golbert fell back on soldierly skills, killing fellow inmates with a voracity right out of that slut Nix’s novel, which he’d once read while hungover on duty. Bumping into others was a universal cause for alarm, if not fevered panic, scrambling up slopes or clutching stones to bash a potential murderer. Those who made their way into the penal necropolis were few, but if their crimes were a population, and if those crimes’ disturbing nature were somehow noise, then the Parilgotheum was nothing short of a bustling metropolis, and its tenants’ last clinging thread of sanity bore them the preference to wander the underworld alone.

  “But you aren’t alone, little brother,” Aricow said, his devilish sneer lit red and gold. “Let’s find you a way out.”

  Aricow appeared very much like his brother, but commanded a superior frame of hulk and grace. Legs like trees. Arms like the learned pit fighter. Whatever unspoken crime had hurled the elder down to accompany Golbert, red-haired and unmarred by filth, Aricow wore a stately varnish, undiminished in the echoing hell.

  Wiping some lunatic’s blood from his fingers, Golbert followed as Aricow led them to the mossy shores of a languid pool. Light was good here, good enough to see the footprints leading to and away, the black bodies of idle fish, the shimmer of snails before they’d vanish in the grip of his brother’s hands. Too compassionate for war, too smart for their recruiters, Golbert cheerfully watched as Aricow’s back rose, becoming his chest and stomach and the fish and snails clutched against them. Aricow would insist Golbert eat, always joking of better holes or claiming pious quips of not being hungry.

  One set of footprints had become familiar, not just around the pool but throughout. Maybe it was the narrow heel, or the way their owner seemed to skip about, not like a condemned man but some merry child, or how Edomax Ordrid always seemed to plant his feet where a reluctant and fearful Golbert had so recently brained a man. Aricow had known of him, back when they all had lived in the World Above. “Edomax,” Aricow would say, “let’s keep alive, Golbie. He may be of use to you.”

  The brothers, over a course of time that seeped and slimed like the nutritious slugs, established a cavern as the meeting place with the Ordrid. When he first shuffled out from the protection of shadow, Golbert thought they were being approached by a malformed, grinning goat.

  Allowing for his hunchback’s forward tilt and the man’s pronounced, yellowed teeth, Edomax looked very much the Ordrid: keen-eyed and perhaps grown to full bloom of ghastly paleness, now deprived the daylight they so famously shunned.

  For those he’d once given offence, or whatever kinsmen may have reddened at the thought that one of their own suffered his embarrassing peasant’s plight, all energy was perfectly wasted. Edomax had to have been an unbridled madman of the lowest sort. Low not in social stature, for Ordrids ruled like few other. But to be unprotected, cast out from that tribe suggested a lewd depravity not even his wicked kinsmen could conceal. The vile man, he roamed the necropolis, joyfully turning fellow inmates into the finalities of his varied derangements.