walls.
We joined a clot of gray-tinged spirits moving along the road, which forked into the distance until it shimmered out of existence at the horizon.
“Souls,” Ian murmured in my ear. “The new dead. Just walk with them.”
“Won’t they realize we’re not like them?” I whispered.
Ian shook his head.
“They don’t notice much of anything. Some of them don’t even realize they’re dead yet.”
The figures were in various states of decay and decomposition. I looked at Ian, who appeared as he must have in life, suit and tie and all. “How come they’re in such bad shape?”
“Your soul manifests your true face when you die,” Ian said. “Good or bad. If you’re rotten to the core in life, your soul rots in death. Some of them hang on long enough to learn how to alter themselves so you can’t see all the things they did in life.”
Here and there, I picked out faces that were relatively normal-looking, but there were so many who were little more than skeletons with bits of flesh and cloth hanging from their bones that I focused on my feet, moving over the white ribbon of road. It crunched under my shoes.
“This isn’t sand, is it?” I realized.
“No,” Ian confirmed. “Ossuary Road is the bones of the things that lived in the Deadlands before men. The first creatures in the living world, the first to die. Eventually, even death grinds you down.”
The white dust all over my feet and legs took on a new weight. Who knew what came before the Fae, before men? “The Old Ones, you mean?” I said. “Things like that? I thought they were eternal.”
“ ‘That is not dead which can eternal lie, yet with strange aeons even death may die,’ ” Ian said. “I don’t know, Aoife. We had as little to do with the Great Old Ones in my day as we possibly could.”
We had nearly reached the gates of the city and I looked up at the archway, carved with an open, lidless eye.
“Welcome home,” Ian muttered. “Can’t believe I’m walking back into this place.”
Two black-clad figures stood by the gate like Proctors, making it seem almost like home. Their faces were shadowed with cowls, however, and I couldn’t attest with certainty that they even had features to hide. Their robes reached the ground, and the only extremities I could see were hands, which held long, clicking devices that spun like oversized pocket watches.
“What are they?” I murmured, careful not to make eye contact. I knew how not to draw attention to myself, and I didn’t
“Guards,” Ian said. “Jailers. Protectors. Different things to different people.” He steered me past a group of souls in Crimson Guard uniforms, their faces burned beyond recognition above their high collars.
“Those devices don’t look friendly,” I said, nodding to the contraptions in the guards’ hands. As the needles on the faces of the things spun, one of the black figures stepped forward and snatched a soldier out of line. I gasped as the figure got close enough to me to twinge the shoggoth venom that still lived in the bite on my shoulder, and Ian grabbed my arm, keeping me upright and moving.
“They’re meant to pick out things from the outlands that try to creep into the city and steal souls,” he said. “The decayed, the screaming sands, things like that.”
The figures surrounded the soldier, more of them melting in from the shadows as if they’d dripped like inkblots from a pen, and the soldier began to scream. The appearance of a human soul sloughed away, and underneath was a skeletal thing with long legs that bent the wrong way and arms that scraped the ground. Its hands ended in long, bladed things that lived where fingers should on a person, and its jaw was elongated like a cricket’s, underslung and full of teeth.
I braced myself to see carnage fly in every direction at the thing’s exposure, but the four figures simply pressed closer, and after a moment the skeletal creature screamed and slumped to the ground, nothing but a pile of bones.
“Decayed,” Ian said, and shivered as we walked on. “Hate those things.”
I was glad I couldn’t breathe, because I would have been hyperventilating with nerves. The figures had made short work of the monster disguised as a soldier’s soul, but knowing things like that could be creeping among us made it difficult to keep walking, never mind keep my cool.
“The guards didn’t seem too bothered by it,” I ventured. “The Decayed, I mean. If they protect the souls from creatures like that, they can’t be entirely bad news.”
“Oh, no,” Ian said. “They don’t protect a damn thing but themselves. The Faceless are the worst thing in this place, by far. They feed on the energies of the souls. That’s why they keep the monsters out—so the souls are all theirs for the taking.”
He turned us away from the flow of new souls, which headed toward a central square much like Banishment Square in Lovecraft, where more of the Faceless waited. I craned my neck and saw the Faceless packing the souls in, shoulder to shoulder.
“Get deep enough into the Catacombs and the Faceless disappear,” Ian said. “The old souls outnumber them, and they can fight back. They tend to stay up top, where the pickings are easy, and suck down the last little bit of life in a soul for their master.”
“Master? You mean someone controls those things?” I said, casting a wary glance over my shoulder. I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet such an individual.
“Some
“Sounds like a charming fellow,” I said as we made a dozen more turns through a rat’s maze of alleys that took us deeper and deeper into filth and squalor.
“I wouldn’t know,” Ian said. “I’ve never met him and I’m never going to. It’s hard enough to dodge the Faceless without antagonizing them.”
“Has it always been like this?” I asked as the sky blinked out, replaced by rooftops and smoke. “Is this really all that’s waiting after you die? Torture and things like the Yellow King?”
Ian wrinkled his nose against the stale air. The smell was incredibly awful—one part butcher’s shop, one part burning slag and many parts human filth and misery.
“People talk, of course,” Ian said. “They say it wasn’t always like this, that it was a land like any other and if you had a good life, you’d have a good death. An afterlife. But the Yellow King is all anyone knows now.” He shrugged. “It’s not like I can pick up and leave.”
The idea of this being the end of the line made me sick to my stomach, so I changed the subject. “How far are we going?”
“Deep down,” Ian said. “The guts of this place. That’s where she lives.”
He twitched at every sound, as rats—or something—ran over our feet, and I tried to put aside my own doubts and fears and reassure him. I was better at that than reassuring myself.
“I do appreciate your coming with me,” I said. “More than you know.”
“I just don’t want you to get hurt when you figure out this insane plan of yours won’t work,” Ian muttered. “I told you, Aoife—dead is dead. The Deadlands can change you, but you’ll never escape them.”
“And I think differently,” I snapped. “I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.”
“Until you realize that your Dean is stuck here,” Ian grumbled. “And you might be, too, living soul or no.”
“You must have been the life of every party before you expired,” I told him. “Just a joy to be around.”
“Archie had the same smart mouth,” Ian said. “Nice to see you take after him so much.”
We walked in silence after that, a silence that was thicker and tenser than before.
After a time, we reached a tumbledown brick well house, rife with rats and stink. A soul dressed in garb several centuries out of fashion dozed in the mud, snoring, with a bottle spilling sticky green liquid across the cobbles. Roaches scattered from the puddle when we approached.
“Finch,” Ian said, kicking the man’s foot. “Wake up.”
Finch grunted and sniffed, red-rimmed eyes slowly rolling from his considerable gut to Ian’s face. “You!” he
