Aricow always hid in shadow and whispered to Golbert what negotiations were needed. Avoiding spells and curses, they accrued a larder of juicy rats, flint, and all for the meager barter of directing the Ordrid to Golbie’s latest kill.

  *

  More tasty than plump rats, more invoking than chippable flint, Golbert wanted out. But Aricow had advised him against prying apart the Parilgotheum’s impossible iron doors. Even their journey to find again the underworld’s only entrance brought them peril. At the base of those stairs, familiar to all who’d been condemned, a band of misfits swarmed.

  “Get behind me,” Aricow said.

  “I’m the warrior.”

  The unfolding combat didn’t make sense. Not only his gallant brother’s misguided, dangerous step forward, but that nearly a dozen men sped past Aricow and leapt on Golbert. Neither did it make sense that from the bottom of the pile, Golbert watched his brother’s strikes go seemingly unnoticed. He could fell a man with one punch, yet these clawing biters clawed and bit with impunity.

  “I can’t help you,” Aricow cried, crashing his fists into the neck of one raising high a sharpened stone.

  Concentrating the entirety of his strength, an explosion of starved men became the air, some landing twisted on rocks or on the jagged, bottommost step of the stairs.

  Free and on his feet, Golbert relieved the one of his crude knife, spilling his guts onto his feet before moving to another. Aricow cheered as he fought. Golbert, in turn, cheered now that his brother’s strikes again found promise. Then it happened.

  Aricow took a stalactite club to the chest, then the head.

  His attacker was dispatched, but not before clubbing Golbert too.

  Those who were dead lay still. Those who could scamper did. Aricow sounded as if he were fading, somewhere. Golbert couldn’t tell whose knock made it so.

  “Find that Edomax. You got enough corpses here to barter a spell out of here.”

  Summoned by his name or by the fresh flood of blood, the ghoulish Ordrid himself popped out from behind a rock.

  “Good work, soldier boy!” For a slight man, his laugh boomed, growing in cadence with every corresponding cave or tunnel. “And all by yourself, too.”

  “Myself?” Golbert said, appalled, bending down to hoist up Aricow. Edomax watched this with keen interest, but said nothing. Aricow not only didn’t speak but he now somehow felt weightless. “Show me and my brother a way out,” he said. “Where this awful world and the one above meet.”

  “There’s a price, such freedom. Freedom for you…and your brother.”

  The price wasn’t just the dead strewn about, but helping chant a verse a million times, a million times a million.

  Taking a break from prepping his spell, Edomax leisured up to Golbert. The burly killer squatted over his brother, reciting the incantation, the latter breathing wounded and mouthing nothing. Unmoved by such moments, Edomax demanded a perverse sex act as the final payment to initiate the spell being brewed. Relating the suction of a cave slug was more metaphor than needed.

  “And would you want this of my brother, too?”

  “No,” the Ordrid snickered, as if remembering something. “No, you will do.”

  Golbert would have preferred seeing his brother off, over the words he had to mutter. He would have preferred shutting Aricow’s eyes with his own worn fingers. But in the time he needed to pin the foul man to the wall and spit insanities that he’d “rather die!” Aricow, alone and on the cool earthen floor, beat him to it.

  After a while, it was the Ordrid who spoke. Rubbing his throat, “Very well, soldier, I have you,” adding as if obligated, “and your brother, the answer.”

  “If you knew a way, then why haven’t you escaped?”

  “I am in paradise. Prying lids and animating those who speak with now-dead tongues.”

  Golbert’s question had come to him without form, but the man’s answer brought him back to not only the prime reason for his wishing to leave, but why he’d been sentenced. “I didn’t open coffins,” he grumbled. “Didn’t pry lids—to the gods, I wouldn’t touch a corpse if it were flung at me.”

  “Pity.”

  Both men stood, looking at the bodies. Golbert had left him four, fresh and unstinking. Edomax asked and was granted a solemn touch. When he pressed against Golbert’s brow, the sentenced soldier saw a way: the tunnels, the stairs, a route. Freedom.

  “I’m taking him with me,” Golbert said. “No way am I leaving him with your ways, sir.” But Aricow was gone, vanished as if claimed by air. The Ordrid’s laugh prompted Golbert on his way, and it continued for a long while, ringing in the tunnels and hollows and forgotten darkness.

  *

  And so Golbert lay in the mud in the tunnel, gathering his strength, weeping for his dead brother. When a frantic yelp rang out in the open space above, and his fingers at work gripped the cold flesh of a severed human leg, he merely flung it aside and kept climbing.

  The deep exhaustion from birthing oneself out from a slippery tube fully revealed itself now. Golbert lay in bewilderment below the blazing light of a lantern.

  “A ghoul,” gasped a woman, tossing her ravened hair back in a way that could only derive from some wild, unhinged excitement.

  Golbert wasn’t out of the Parilgotheum, just occupying one of its cleaner upper rooms, with yet another mad—woman? How the gaping she-lunatic procured a lantern and untorn clothes were a mystery, but all solved by the revelation he was that much closer. Though the ground was less filthy here, it had been ornamented by not only a severed leg but a number of limbs, one of which this new lunatic lobbed his way as if she was trying to feed a wild dog.

  “I’ll rip you to pieces.” Golbert rolled over to grasp the arm that had hit him and wiggle it furiously. To have come this far just to be stopped—for this woman surely would try. Blanketing rage came to a needle head, focusing Golbert on this backpedaling challenger. There would be no stopping him now.

  Tackling the woman proved as hard as taking away her dagger, which had gleamed to life in a sudden flash. Golbert clawed his enemy’s face. He bit at his enemy’s neck, spinning the shrieking bitch into determined rants that a ghoul was upon her. He seized the dagger. But he fell backward, hard.

  Golbert thought the unmanly scream had come from her. The throbbing eruption between his legs, and the instant, wicked glee on the face of this rogue persuaded him otherwise. Clutching his bits in one hand and her dagger with the other, Golbert kicked wildly at whatever he could send skyward. “I’m the warrior.” That he’d said. His feet met nothing, but the flurry had given him the space to spring back onto his toes and point the confiscated blade tit-level.

  “I’m the warrior!” he roared, or he thought he did. The stone that crashed between his eyes put him back on the ground.

  Spinning in the blind explosion of pain, he felt the slip. Enough time on battlefields had left Golbert with a rare wisdom. He knew such was the first on a path to certain doom. Even acknowledgement could mean a man’s death. He squirmed left, right, wherever a stone didn’t crack. His brain had become pandemonium. Death by woman? Had Aricow truly died?

  Worsening the confusion were oaths and shrill curses from his opponent, who’d traded small stones for a pregnant monster. “Die, ghoul!” Golbert’s attempt to rise ended with his legs being swept and white lights dancing when his head smacked the ground. “No corpse for you to eat. Ungrateful graveyard worm.”

  His fall had broken the dagger’s blade, and with it his spirit. The slip claimed him, wrapping him in its velvet fold. He still kicked, feebly. He still spat and challenged his doom to “do her worst,” knowing full well she would. He’d seen the eyes of killers before, and no more determined a glaze had ever bore down on him as the one looking at him now. The lantern burned somewhere, lighting the rock that crushed his skull.

  *

  Pelliul had its share of normal jails. Those who knew Dandana Nix knew she’d briefly occupied a bunk or two in a drab block before. But such confinement was only for criminals of the most petty sort—that, or those awaiting the final go-ahead before a hanging. The Parilgotheum, by theatric contrast, was reserved for crimes that offended man’s senses more than his written law. Surely the desecration of fellow veterans’ remains was as exotic and perverse as the sentencing magistrate could have mustered from his own paltry imagination.

  The corpse finally ceased its twitch. This mud-glazed, crazed inmate before Nix was no stranger. Well, not in the legal sense, she surmised, gawking to and fro from the reports she’d carried with her onto none other than Golbert fucking Amphilliod.

  It was an accident, one on the part of a fearful writer—mistaking the dirty lunatic for a hungry, raving ghoul. Nix had seen fingers, seen their retreat, and when they emerged once more she’d been ready. Once dead, and wiped free of layers of mud, a faded tattoo of the Suela campaign rung clear as if shouted from a caller’s horn: one of the very men Nix theorized took the fall for ghoul-mischief now lay lifeless as those stiffs who’d helped send him to hell.

  Hell was right. Looking down into the hole, Nix noted her proximity to the penal underworld. “You were a fugitive,” Nix kicked Golbert’s foot. “Compelling.”

  The Parilgotheum lurked below. Nix salivated, double-checking the fuel in her lantern, entertaining a sudden paranoia that someone might stumble upon her find.

  A brief excursion up the stairs bore news, though at first she knew not how to take it. A storm now raged, so unyielding that rain was going to make its way down to the cellar. Trickles and drips, before long, were a waterfall. The deluge she noted, but it was the onset of lightning that persuaded her to do what her heart had been beating for.

  Staying the night to work would be a nightmare for writers who penned the pomp of truth, justice, beauty. But a dream it was for those who penned nightmares. As Nix worked out this tangled arrangement of metaphor, she breathed deep and uncorked her ink. Such insane places only helped her work. No time better than now, with Parilgotheum prisoner brains all over the place.

  Even if ghouls weren’t real, who cared? The parade of nuts that might file out of that tunnel being carved further by rain; at least one might not be so bent on fighting. She’d already gotten a kill. A uniquely organic one, too. An interview now would be far, far better.

  She wanted to be rid of it: the self-loathing she felt shuffling alongside other artists in places where every sort of failure proclaimed themselves the mistook owner of genius.

  The charnel worm in her head shifted, burrowing. She was not a fraud! If such an unpleasant intruder were made of flesh, she would’ve scourged her brain to scramble both out with a sharp stick. But alas her affliction, her whisperer of doubt, was no more than a figment of her intellect, an intellect she pulled back to the task at hand. She would write, and damn the gods, she would marvel the masses or slice her own wrist.

  What tales were there to tell, from down there? Ignited in the moment, Nix needed not food nor drink, though she had brought enough to last verily a week. She only needed the portions of her scroll yet addressed, and her trusted inkpot and quill.

  As was often the case, moments of pure vision, pure undisturbed creation, were disrupted by the imps only artists know. This one was an imp she’d grown accustomed. None of this, this encounter, meant ghouls weren’t real.

  Nix stopped mid-paragraph to consider the clues that had gotten her here. The lowness of the cellar. The proximity to graves just beyond the shadow of this rotting warehouse—where not one but two corpse meddlings had been reported. Escaped madmen could be to blame, yes, but her better sense still bode her a skeptic.

  So, the lithe user of words and limbs redistributed the latter. Unsickened by their signs of continued decay, she completed her errand by dragging Golbert to a dark nook, hoping, if ghouls came forth, to lock in a deal by rolling out the larder at just the right moment.

  Her writing went well enough, but her soul was nagged as if it were a new flounce pulled by a puppy. She’d converted this encounter with the hidden dead celebrity, but she disliked ever more the gaping hole before her, leading down, staring at her like a taunting, unblinking eye. Not for what might come soon shouldering out, but for what treasures it might hold. Could she really wait? Should she? She caught herself listening to the rush and gurgle of subsiding rainwater, sounding as if it too were singing her to everlasting despair.

  Unable to ignore the itch, the writer put down her scroll and hovered over the mouth of the tunnel. If it would mean more violent encounters with deranged men, she at least could go forth with confidence many would not be former soldiers, nor would they possess what that poor fool must’ve to have made it out onto the cellar floor. Plus, having breasts rarely hurt.

  Nix stowed her gear. She flung her useless dagger and made, as best she could, a bed on a slab cut from stone. A peal of thunder, late to the dying symphony, seemed to hasten her ambition. She’d soon regain her strength. Then, after her eyes were open and breakfast gnawed, she’d crawl down into what only madmen, and perhaps ghouls, knew.

  *

  “Pardon,” the protagonist trotting around on Nix’s scroll spoke. Sleep nothing, she’d tried, only to find herself working so deep it was as if a new character were with her. “My lady?”

  Now that was strange. When worlds on both sides of her skull briefly converged, as they sometimes did, they were always dispelled by recognition. That one could persist? The writer swept her lantern through the blackness and across the stairs, almost dropping it when it revealed a man was standing at the top.

  Nix squeaked a garble, uprooting herself to reach for her dagger in the now empty sheath.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” the man at the top said. “This is going to sound awfully foolish of me, but I’m looking for my brother—” Nix then felt and saw and knew, felt again the words before they actually came. Then they arrived. “Golbert.” Her head swam. “Golbert Amph—”

  “Amphilliot…I mean amphibian. I study them. Did you know many such beasts proliferate down here? Frogs, mostly.”

  “I did not,” the man said, tugging at his rusted beard. His eyes revealed a simplicity women like Nix could detect without effort.

  Nix said, “What’s your name, cutie?”

  “Aricow.”

  “Yes. Yes, Aricow of the brothers Amphilliod. I’ve heard of thee.” Scrutinizing her notes to the point of pageantry, “Not only do I study frogs, cutie, but some have audaciously labeled me a journalist. Your brother, tell me, he was sent into the Parilgotheum?”

  “Journal…yes, but how? You’ve heard of me?”

  Nix hoisted her notes and flapped them in the air. “The courts—or the barbaric atrocity we refer to as such—they do surprisingly well when it comes to records. Says here…” Nix’s undefined excitement made finding the correct page even more difficult than under the candlelight of a cluttered desk. When the dog-ears were at her nose, she called out as if they were in a ceremonial hall. “Says you petitioned the courts, stating your brother’s ‘postwar’ insanity.”

  “He needed the asylum, not the tunnels. Yeah, I petitioned. And yes, he was mad. Talkin’ to people who aren’t there. Mother’s batshittedness must’ve sludged down the cord.”

  “Roaring to life in both of their adulthoods” would’ve made a great follow-on, Nix thought. “Interesting.”

  Aricow, unarmed and about as fierce as a bloated tick, made his way off the steps and now padded closer. “I had the strangest dream. Why I’m here.” This Aricow surprised Nix further by chuckling, slapping his own hip as if he’d heard a joke. “Maybe my days at the barrelhouse are over. Hell, maybe I’m mad.”

  “I don’t think you are mad. Lucky, maybe. To your good fortune, cutie, I just so happen to also be a student of the brain.” She furtively kicked out of sight a congealed glob of exactly that. “Interpreting dreams is a bit of a specialty, too.” Nix found her notes scroll. She grabbed her quill. “Tell me more?”

  Aricow studied Nix, from the toe of her smudged leather boot to the roots of her black hair. Deeming her, amongst other things, not a figment, Aricow took up a convenient stone and began. “It was the strangest. Last night. I saw this horrid little man, teeth like sticks of butter. It was like he whispered to me. Words became pictures. I saw the warehouse, this very cellar. And I saw those stairs.” He stopped to stare quizzically at the woman. “I didn’t see you.”

  #

  Even for a starving lunatic, Golbert’s inherent strength had been clear. As had his murderous skills. Nix shuttered at the thought of how her encounter may have fared if the dead man had been ready, and not nourished by fleas.

  The same could not be said about his ho-hum brother. What beatings the dead one must have inflicted on the adolescence of this simple cooper. Asking Aricow why he hadn’t joined the war that had reportedly sapped Golbert of his wits, the answer came as actors, which the writer now watched present themselves on a stage. Flat feet shuffled. Knees as knocked as a turned-reluctant voluptuary’s. Only their wood-like deformities could take Nix’s glare off the man’s potted gut. Still, this made the sorry sight perfect bait.

  It worried Nix that Aricow chose to wander beside the exit of his brother’s tunnel. A skirmish Nix did not fear, but convincing Aricow to do what she was concocting would prove all the harder if the shuffling sloth found—“Brains? Is this blood?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Nix sighed. “It seems an animal was mauled there.”

  “The rats I saw comin’ down looked big enough to take down a boar.” Aricow moved directly over the hole, where he stopped and stared. “This was the last of it,” Nix heard him say, “of the dream. He was talking to us about a way out.”

  “Us?” Nix asked, unleashing from Aricow a sublime rant that absolutely demanded transcription. She could hardly keep up. Shaking the cramp from her wrist, Nix, poised to scribble, was convinced more than ever ghoul magic was at work. “Way out for whom?”