“We had this thing, with our names,” he continued, speaking as if to no one, blowing heavy air from his nostrils before swinging his eyes onto Nix. “My brother didn’t just open lids and toss out bones. He defiled them, arranged ’em, gnawed on ’em. Mocked their remains. Or so the story goes.”

  “But you don’t believe it.” Nix was on her feet. “Cutie, it is true that I am a scholar of biology and the brain. Just as it’s true your brother suffered for the deeds of other fiends. I didn’t want to say anything. I figured you’d scoff at me as elitist men do when I try and point toward a menace in and under Pelliul.”

  Aricow stooped to pick up a piece of his brother’s brain.

  Nix said at his ear, “Ghouls, Aricow.” It did not surprise Nix that the dimwit nodded, that his eyes lighted and mouth uttered an inaudible oath. Sailing upon this, Nix sidled closer. “I am but a girl, but I am the writer of things not accepted. The journaler of darkness the dimwitted need to hear. I am here to confirm the existence of ghouls, and to pin on them their vile deeds. Perhaps even your dea…imprisoned brother’s. No, I have not seen your dear brother,” answering his question.

  “What happened to your face?”

  “A romp with a feisty wench,” she flung, smiling with clawed-on cheeks. “But this hole here, it was dug by someone. Was it not? And for a reason. The unfair Parilgotheum is just below. Together, we may stand a chance.”

  “I don’t have food.” To which Nix raised a loaf of bread and an apple. “I have no—”

  “Water will be the least of our concerns.” Nix followed a floating leaf as it disappeared into the abyss.

  “Weapons?”

  “Do you have one?” Nix asked. Aricow pulled a knife from his boot. “Yes, in front of me you should go. I’ll deprive myself my lantern. To you it goes, as would all rations I can give.”

  “I saw him here,” Aricow despaired.

  “A dream. But the gods rarely give us gifts. Look at the freshness of that blood, the finger-holds in that mud. We, cutie, are standing atop such a gift. Madness it would be not to accept these divine allowances.”

  “…You want ghouls, and I want my brother.”

  Nix choked, not expecting the distillation. “Well, yes. Yes, I suppose so. Guard me?”

  *

  Nix hugged the lantern to her breasts. She had to go first, but this had also been a valid reason to deprive Aricow his only weapon. With her teeth clamped around the knife, she dug the palm of her free hand into the wet, slipping mud. The tunnel’s downgrade made a controlled descent difficult. All the more when she came to twists, slickened by quick rainwater, turning their journey into a chaotic slide better fit for burrowing lunatics.

  Lantern light shook, mud gave way or clumped at edges. The two slithered over stones and lathered in filth. What may have been rocks intentionally placed by gods or men now sat obsolete, some sinking in softened earth. Able to stand at last, Nix stretched her back as behind her Aricow dumped onto the floor of an ancient staircase.

  “What do we have here?” a voice said, sending Nix into a spin, costing her the grip of her lantern, losing its light in a sudden, floor-crashing crunch.

  “That voice,” Aricow seemed to say, finding one of Nix’s legs and climbing up it like a rat. He squeaked, “Who’s there?”

  Nix repeated the question, remembering she held a knife whose blade was immune from darkness.

  Aricow was frozen, and no more could a body stiffen than in the hollowness of an entombed staircase. The voice was humming, somewhere in the dark. Male, that much Nix was certain, but this underworlding’s age and intent was decidedly obscure.

  “Why don’t you,” the potential ghoul said, “why don’t you both step into the light?”

  “Don’t say nothin’,” Aricow whispered. “Don’t provoke it.”

  Whoever this inmate was, he was surely insane, as all denizens down here were. “What light?” Nix snarled, taking a limp slash at the air. “Scum.” The only light had been in the now busted lantern that sizzled at her feet.

  What the voice said next sent Aricow shaking, though it should have Nix. “We have a fair maiden,” it said, “one who belongs way, way, way down here… with us. What brings you to revel?”

  Nix may have spoken. She may have responded, in normal circumstances perhaps even with something witty out of one of her manuscripts. But she was squinting, and in disbelief. A man came forth, black against a dilating bloom of light.

  Aricow’s yelp and the glowing contours of his face reassured her she wasn’t suffering an illusion. “How?” Nix mustered. “There’s light?” But the foul, bald lech was disinterested in speech.

  The bent creature scrutinized Aricow, and Aricow, stricken queer, stared back at the man who stood laminated in glow. Not as in a barrelhouse, where torches burned their health at their heads, light down here showed Aricow and Edomax tinged by low teases of gold and rose.

  “You,” Edomax said. “I’ve seen you.”

  “I want to talk to a ghoul,” Nix blurted, convinced that if she wasn’t doing so already, this new character was connected to every foul string in this affair.

  “Kill him,” Edomax said leisurely, pointing his thumb. “Then I’ll try. They are quite skittish, you know.”

  Aricow’s knife was in his own neck before he could gasp. Fear had swollen the artery, serving Nix as the most convenient of landmarks. The second Amphilliod to die did so with a thump, taking his last breath on a stone floor pooling red.

  Eventually, Edomax Ordrid received the sexual requisite for the use of his greater spells. In return, the necromancer promised to send a ghoul in the guise of Aricow, “once his heart and brains are supped, back up to your cellar air. Now shoo, girl. I want a crack at him first.”

  *

  These days an honest writer was forced to cheat. Nix spat again. Vandahl had already penned the great maxims, and other, less celebrated fable-flingers had filled Orisulan canon with the talking animals which the seven stories all derive. But perspective—that was the gold mine left. And perspective was coming! Not as bursts of inspiration, where silver wings fluttered onto the tip of a scribbling feather. Instead, an ascending ghoul would bare new eyes to skulk at the underbelly of her world.

  Familiar walls of shadow greeted Nix again. From a worse storm that raged above, two waterfalls poured down into the cellar.

  She turned from the inundation to where she thought she’d stuffed Golbert. Surely the sweep of rain hadn’t carried off a dead body. Just to be sure, she crawled into the crevice. Its stony walls had remained dry. Fanning out her fingers, blood dripped fresh and free each time she swept her hand across where a man she’d killed had lay.

  She was pulled from her agitation. The hole had matured into a whirlpool, but neither its roil nor swirl was the noise that called her attention. She had watched him die—more than watched. The voice—that voice, unmistakably Aricow’s, gargled and choked against the downpour, making its way up the trafficked tunnel.

  Dandana Nix’s heart sped, taking her off her feet to rush at the rim of the swirl. A drenched head was emerging. “That weird little man did it. Here, let me help you.”

  A screaming fit popped through. “You killed me!” he screamed, over and over, rolling himself into defensive ball, until: “He—you…” All terror mudded away, replaced with gawking wonder. Aricow, as Nix had seen him but an hour before, stared up with eyes that did not burn with undead, waning grandeur, but were alive. “You—you stabbed my throat?”

  “Surely and sweet,” Nix sung.

  Aricow, the ghoul’s—the man’s voice rediscovered panic. “Golbie, he was supposed to be here. Right here.”

  Nix waited out a feeble volley of feet. This must be a ghoul, a ghoul who’d subsumed dead Aricow and now was lost in its host’s memories. Confirmation, Nix rejoiced. There was no wound in his neck, for its piping right then allowed: “Brother! Help me!”

  Exposed to prolonged darkness, rank odor, mice, roaches, and rot, even the writer of dark works had been rattled. She’d remained forward-driven, yes, but her soul had been inevitably taxed by run-ins with those describable as the living damned. However, what lodged in her nightmares so firmly appeared so quick that she had to shake the brains in her skull and blink her eyes thrice before believing.

  Aricow’s pleas exhausted, the soaked and shivering man had laid his head on the wet stone beneath him. In that same instant, right before Nix was able to shoot up and spin around, Aricow had looked to the rear of the cellar, and he’d smiled.

  Nix could only partway grasp who was the living figure before her. Golbert stood, healthy, better off than before his face had been crushed, a face now full and whole and looking right at her.

  “Confluence,” Nix heard herself say. Brother and brother, rains fall, streams flow, united, becoming the torrent. “Are you feeling well? Yes, come this way. Let us all speak. What a journey, um, you must’ve, both must’ve endured. You,” Nix spoke to the one lifting up the other. “Or you. What craziness we endure. Down here together…in a mice-and-lice cellar. Soaked as a toad.”

  Dandana Nix could only stare at the look in Golbert’s eyes, and how they matched the canine maliciousness that now twinkled darkly in Aricow’s.

  “No! No!” she pled with the hands of the larger, arisen Amphilliod while Aricow watched sportively from the comfort of a slab. Renewed in strength, the trained limbs of Golbert pressed her down, down to a shallow pool, where she felt her nose and lips go under the water and then against the floor.

  After a few encounters with drowning, it appeared to the writer that Aricow had found her notes-scroll and was now reading aloud all the first-draft deaths she’d concocted for various, ill-formed figures. “Then he or she held his or her face until the lungs burst, and he or she did so while breaking what rib or kidney the poor fool left exposed.”

  The stronger brother was equipped not only with brute force, but with guileful ears, and an apparent talent for converting words to action.

  *

  Outfit in bodies who’d known and loved each other in life, the ghouls scampered up the stairs, where together they walked merrily onto a crowded street. Aricow and Golbert Amphilliod cursed out a bewildered foreman at a barrelhouse, then sold all Aricow’s furnishings for wine, women, and emotional bets at the fighting pits. Impaired and soon hunted by lynch mobs prompted by growing rumors that a former Parilgotheum inmate had been seen carousing and caterwauling, the ghouls shed their guises and sealed the cellar dig.

  The ghoul who’d assumed Golbert was especially eager to return, not only to the underworld below the prison, but to their kind. Insanity was a tough brain to ride, tougher to operate, even when Golbert’s unhinged urges had them partaking in the ghoul’s favorite pastime: defiling sanctimonious corpses.

  A Conqueror’s Tale

  By my Lord’s twentieth year, he, once known as Conabitt Lotgard, had seen our land fractured and put in the gravest of peril.

  What unity had wobbled and teetered came crashing down in thunderous fits when the Houses all decided to declare war on each other. Ouvarnias killing the House of Huell, Rogaires slaughtering a list of now insignificant lineage out east. Orisula had come apart at her seams. We were forced to abandon the war effort in Pelat, bringing an end to that failed colonization. Further south still, only my Lord’s family, the House of Lotgard, retained any interest in Suela.

  As warring progressed and more losers emerged, fracturing only intensified. Farms were burned, lyceums of esoteric import and astronomy were leveled in some tyrant of the day’s transfer of one thrill to another. We were in free fall, heading back to an age where we tore meat from bones with loosened teeth and where symbols, as these I write now, were taken as heraldry of the demonic.

  Sensing Orisula’s vulnerability, Azad invaded through the Red Isthmus. What meager leadership remained banded together long enough to be denied help from Quinnari. Stating equal trade interest with Azad, that island’s refusal officially opened the head panel of Orisula’s casket. And it was my Lord, who emerged in his aforementioned year, who rose up to bat back the Azadi horde.

  *

  Adding perhaps, in some small way, to the misfortune that has been put on my Lord, his land, and what bleak future it may see, I compose this volume while in fear for my life.

  The Dead Kettle is a fitting district for solitary Pelats and the former scribes of mistreated rulers. This apartment is of little use. Rain is pissing in. Heat escapes like a banshee. But my stairs, old and beaten, creak and moan as if carefully fitted. For surely if one were tiptoeing, to slice my throat, my cohorts the planks would sound the alarm. Escape? No. No, I have no interest in running.

  I write with some assurance, for this tale must be told, to vindicate my Lord. My last duty. And I’m afraid my days are numbered.

  *

  There are two things contemporary historians quibble over: why our land was renamed and what prompted its unification to be done by way of stake after stake of screaming, impaled rebels.

  There is an answer to the first, which I will come to in due course. I can assure you, though, it’s not some woman’s name, clung to the heart of my Lord, as some ridiculously insist.

  Regarding the impalings, there had been questions over the style of the punishment, not the punishment itself. Pockets of territory were once wild and unruled. The farms and hill country clinging to our cities, though not wild and very much ruled, had the unfortunate habit of overlapping, spreading conflict between whichever great Houses were ready to spill blood over rocky outcroppings or a too-long twig. Eventually, many rebels required death; paling the quarrel of Houses by refusing all thought of a unified land. But why the noose and executioner’s axe were stuffed into the closets remain a mystery.

  Yet, scholastic men chronicling the past all seem to agree that when the boy once called Conabitt returned from Suela, his family never left again the comfort of the Morgeltine.

  The same cannot be said of the young man, who reportedly immersed himself in hunting game off the speeding back of a courser. There is some debate here, but I am of the majority, inclined our prodigious leader did so to learn the lay of his land.

  Later, he put away the bow to attend the University of Eight Chairs, earning a double licentiate in logic and law. A young officer in his sodded father’s Nilghordian Defense Force, he broke away from his House by allying with Oxghorde Rogaires to deliver a swift kick in the gut of Azadi troops who’d approached unchallenged from the east. It worked, better than some say even he expected. Under the banner of an ambitious new leader, Orisulans trickled out of the hills to join his growing legions.

  Over the next several years, he and a portion of his forces sailed to Pelat to deliver a crushing blow. It is important to distinguish the difference in this foreign campaign and the blasphemous one occurring now. This move was not to rape and pillage, but to beat the Pelats into an important alliance: offering them citizenship, even portions of the trade routes. The Pelats were ordered to fight Azad. They provided food for our ranks, supplies, and even the famous Vendinao, their regiment of striped, club-wielding troops.

  Offering foreigners who eat snakes homes on our peninsula, and without seeking elder Lotgard council to do so, surprised the House of Rogaire, outraged Ouvarnia, and sparked an unusual interest in the House of Ordrid. All three were seen as ill omens. Combined, a threat that could not be ignored.

  Dismayed by his son’s brash defiance and worried the House of Ouvarnia would leverage the immigration to rally a fully-formed, anti-Lotgard front, his dying father, after Conabitt refused to submit, signed off on “Conabitt Lotgard” being stricken from the family roles. Learning this, my Lord renamed himself that epithet that will ring into the centuries.

  Funny are the wheels of fate, for I had only been hired a month when I witnessed my first impaling. Law was the new way, slowly extending over the plains and forest of our land. That none were to speak his old name, nor to write it (I am only doing so now under the weighed deliberation that I am doing him the greatest of service) was best exemplified when a trusted member of the cabinet blurted out something other than “The Conqueror” in what, I attest, was a night of sword-won revelry. The brutal display I will never forget, as, it’s reasonable to expect, none else have who witnessed it.

  I believe It is worth noting that I once overheard my Lord recollecting furtive colonial practices conducted in Suela, taught to them by local enforcement. I believe stakes were among them—perhaps solving the “mystery” of previous note.

  Now formed, the Conqueror’s army rooted out domestic resistance and pushed deep into the heart of Azad.

  *

  Chapwyn priests say only a fool thinks he’ll escape his troubles by jumping from the Gahlerrion Bridge. An even greater species of fool, unwise by even secular metrics, spares themselves such dizzying heights and attracts crowds at the base of the Tower of the Waning Moon. There they wail and waylay and blather to all who’ll stop and giggle.

  No greater fool has ever taken that ill-famed stage than I.

  Merely the rise-fall of a moon and sun, my rant. A day ago. Though it feels like an age has passed since. I am relieved, relieved I said what I did. Upon this parchment, the full account, including the things the bottle or my own shameful fear at the moment had robbed from me.

  What happened to my Lord I could not bear, nor can I now, though yesterday at the tower I was at my worst, most unbridled. The drunk explosion was not apocalyptic. My audience was given a respite from that long-held standard.

  Fuming reappraisal of the past has been known to titillate, even earn the rare applause—as long as it be ancient. Raving about the recent, however, earned me grieve-stricken stares and a group of emerged scowlers who’ve haunted my tracks ever since.

  *

  After the Conqueror’s invasion, for the next twenty years the war in Azad groaned, bleeding one day into the next in a continued delirium. It got the desert rats out of our hair, though, allowing our domestic rebels to freely reveal themselves, signing their death warrants all the sooner. Orisula at last became unified, except for a single resister.