“Hello, Jorg,” she said. She stood too far away for me to hear but every dead mouth whispered her words.
“Go to hell, bitch.” I would rather have said something clever.
“No harsh words on our wedding day, Jorg,” she said, and the dead echoed her. “The Dead King is risen. The black ships sail. You’ll join with me. Love me. And together we will open the Gilden Gate for our master and set a new emperor on the throne.”
The dead of Gelleth came then, wandering through the marsh as if lost, ambling one way and the next. Ghosts these, but looking real enough, with their burns and their sores, teeth missing, hair and skin falling away. Hundreds of them, thousands, in a great ring of accusation. They pressed so hard that at the back some of the bog-dead were pushed aside and trampled under.
“So,” said Rike. “Marry the bitch.”
“She’s going to kill you all either way, Rike. She’ll have your corpse walking beside her. Price on one side, you on the other, the brothers back together again.”
“Oh,” he said. “Fuck that then.”
“Come now, Jorg, don’t be a baby,” Chella said, and the dead spoke with her. She spoke again, echoed this time by just one voice, from a corpse woman close by the edge of our mound. A muddy corpse, one arm chewed to the bone, her skin stained, lips grey and rotting, but something of Ruth’s lines in her face. “The Dead King is coming. The dead rise like a tide. They outnumber the living, and each battle makes more corpses, not more men.” The dead woman’s tongue writhed, black and glistening, Chella’s words slipping from it. “Join with me, Jorg. There’s a place for you in this. There’s power to be taken and held.”
“There’s more to this,” I said. Even the high esteem in which I held my own charms didn’t allow me to believe her so smitten as to cross nations for this. And if vengeance drove her then she could take it easily enough now without this charade. “The Dead King scares you.” She sounded too eager, desperate even. “What does he want with me?”
Even with so many yards between us I could read her. She didn’t know.
I made to step forward but something caught my foot. Looking down I saw teeth, a dog’s skull half-buried, half-emerged, gripping my foot. Another ghost, but it pinned me even so.
I looked out across the dead horde, scanning the packed crowds of ghosts behind them. Chella couldn’t know about my dog, Justice. She couldn’t have gathered all the dead of Gelleth or learned their stories. Somehow this came from me. Somehow Chella was pulling the ghosts of my past out through whatever hole it was I made in the world. And not even the ghosts I knew of but the ghosts of those whose end I caused. I felt the corner of an idea, not the whole shape of it, but a corner.
The skull brought my gaze back to the ground at my feet. “You shouldn’t have done that,” I said. I tore free. I felt him rip me but Justice’s teeth left no marks upon my boot. It was just pain, no blood. It was just my mind that trapped me. The ghosts couldn’t harm us or we would have died in Ruth’s house, we would have burned with them when the Builders’ Sun lit. Chella brought them only to torment me.
“Let’s get married, dear-heart,” Chella said. “The congregation is assembled. I’m sure we can find a cleric to perform the ceremony.”
And pushing from the other ghosts came Friar Glen, a shade wavering in the daylight, less clear than the other spirits, as if something tried to keep him back. At my hip the box of memories grew heavy. I hadn’t known Friar Glen to be dead, but perhaps I knew it once and chose to forget. He came with a slow step, hobbling, though I could see no wound upon him, and he didn’t look well pleased. In one hand he held a knife, a familiar knife, red with blood. When a dead man shambled into his path the friar stabbed him in the neck. The creature toppled with the knife still in him. Ghosts couldn’t hurt the living, but apparently they could hurt the dead plenty. Friar Glen hobbled on until he stood at Chella’s side.
I wondered how the friar’s ghost came to be here, watching me with such hatred. I could feel it from fifty yards. But more than that—more than I wondered about Friar Glen—I circled around the words Chella spoke before she called him.
The congregation is assembled.
The quick-dead moved closer though I heard no instruction. They took slow steps, their hands ready to grab and twist and tear. Against so many we would last moments.
“It’s no kind of wedding if my family can’t attend.” I sheathed my sword.
“Some ghosts I can’t summon. The royal dead are buried in consecrated tombs and lie with old magics. If I could have made your mother dance for you I would have done so long ago,” Chella said. The whisper reached me through the crowd, writhing on the lips of the quick-dead as they stepped ever closer.
The congregation is assembled, but some ghosts she can’t summon.
The remaining horses nickered behind me, nervous, even the grey.
“I was thinking of my Brothers,” I said. I opened a hand to the left and right to indicate Makin, Kent, Grumlow, and Rike.
“They can attend,” Chella said. “I will leave them their eyes.”
“Will we have no music? No poets to declaim? No flowers?” I asked. I was stalling.
“You’re stalling,” she said.
The congregation is assembled. Aside from those she can’t summon. And those she does not wish to.
“There’s a poet I’m thinking of, Chella. A poem. A fitting one. ‘To his coy mistress.’”
“Am I coy?” She walked
