freedom and set her up in a house with servants.”
“That’s very noble of you,” said Infidel.
The wolf let out a series of low barks that it took me a second to recognize as a bitter chuckle. “Noble is not a label often applied to me. The evidence is before your eyes; I’ve surrendered to blood magic so completely, I’m no longer fully human. I’ve killed hundreds of men, too many to count, and am incapable of remorse. My sisters are both married to respectable men and have large families, but I’ve not seen them in twenty years. I send them the fortunes I earn so that they may live like royalty in the heart of the Silver City, in homes surrounded by high walls and armed guards, specifically to protect them from men like me.”
As he finished, he tilted his head. He raised his nose and sniffed the air.
“Blood,” he said.
“Whose?” asked Infidel. “Blade’s?”
Menagerie leapt across the stream and raised his ears, cocking his head from side to side.
“Do you hear something?” she asked.
“Someone running?” Menagerie said, but he sounded confused. “It might be Blade, except-”
Suddenly, a green-skinned midget shot out from the undergrowth and splashed into the stream. He was naked save for a gourd codpiece, and bleeding profusely from his neck. He slid to a halt as he saw Menagerie and Infidel. He opened his mouth to scream but only gurgles escaped his lips. His eyes rolled up into his head and he fell face first into the water as blood loss won out over panic.
“Quickly,” said Menagerie, leaping into the hole the pygmy had left in the greenery. He bounded along the blood trail, panting as he leapt over logs and boulders. Infidel chased after him, pulling out her long sword to use as a machete. They ran no more than a quarter-mile before anguished cries reached them, the sound of men dying.
In their haste, the wolf and Infidel raced right past a cluster of knotted vines laced through with palm fronds. I paused to study it; I knew this sign. It marked the edge of a forest-pygmy clan line. It announced to other pygmies that this area was off limits to all but members of a single extended family. My pygmy knot literacy wasn’t fluent, but I think this clan called themselves the Jawa Fruit.
Since the others were well ahead now, I again surrendered myself to the tug of the knife and flew to join Infidel, flowing through trees and rocks as if they weren’t even there.
I caught up in seconds. Infidel and Menagerie had stopped. I couldn’t see past them at first. I did notice, however, that the ground around them was slick with blood. Beyond them, I could hear more screaming.
“This will come out of our pay for sure,” Menagerie grumbled.
I moved to see what he was looking at. I wished I hadn’t.
Ivory Blade was slumped up against a rock. At least, what was left of him was. His head was missing from his shoulders. There was a heavy log hanging from vines, swaying back and forth. One end was wet with blood, and worse things. Remnants of white-haired scalp were pressed into the grain of the wood. Infidel had triggered one of these traps by accident a few years ago. Trip over the wrong vine, and suddenly a log swings down like a hammer. Infidel had escaped her trap with a minor headache. Ivory Blade, alas, had popped like a balloon. Despite the gore coating every nearby surface, Blade’s Immaculate Attire was still spotless.
“Whisper must be taking revenge,” said Menagerie as he tilted his ears toward the screams coming from further upslope. “Sounds like she’s tearing through some pygmies.”
“Deja vu,” said Infidel. “Still… it’s not really their fault. That damned Truthspeaker caused this.”
“She’ll get to him next,” said a voice behind me.
I turned around, and there, like a pillar of fog, stood Ivory Blade.
Blade looked down at his wispy form. Blood from his corpse was trickling down the stony ground to form a little pool, and he rose from this pool like steam. He looked at me with sad eyes, shaking his head. “How ironic. As a somnomancer, I always assumed I’d die in my sleep.”
“You can see me?” I asked.
“Can you see me?” he asked.
We both nodded. Infidel had no reaction at all to the words being spoken mere inches behind her, but Menagerie turned his head slightly, his ears twitching.
“Hear something?” Infidel asked.
“I… don’t think so. Dog ears are so sensitive, they play tricks on me. I’m picking up faint voices, but they must be coming from miles away.”
“She’s free now,” Blade said, his voice trembling. “She was my dream while I was alive. Now, she’ll be the world’s nightmare.”
“What? Who? What’s going on?”
“The Whisper,” he said, holding his ghostly hands toward the sky, watching the light filter through his ethereal skin. “I died with a heart full of rage. She’ll be trapped in this emotion. She’ll kill and kill and nothing will ever slake her anger.”
“Let’s start over,” I said. “I’m not following you. I mean, I understand she’ll be angry, but-”
“Whisper was my wildest dream, brought back from the land of sleep by my experimentations in somnomancy. Dream magic,” he said, his voice sounding choked and tight. “She’s a dream creature who pretended to be human to make me happy. She became the living embodiment of my lust and vanity. I’ve walked in the shadows for so long I grew to love the darkness. Now…” He frowned, the saddest face I’ve ever seen. “Now I will have nothing but darkness.”
He shuddered and the wispy edges of his body began to blur.
“Don’t surrender!” I shouted, offering him my hand. “You can stay behind if you hold on to something hard enough.”
If he heard me, he didn’t respond. The tower of mist no longer looked like a man; then, it didn’t even look like mist. All that was left was the pool of blood where he’d stood and the light and shadows of the forest dancing upon it.
I dropped to my knees before the pool of blood. I was desperate to bring him back; until this moment, I hadn’t known that I could talk with other ghosts. I plunged my hand into the gore. “Come back,” I cried out. “Come back, please!”
Nothing happened. Though my condition was no different than what it had been a moment before, I suddenly felt desperately lonely, like a fallen Wanderer left on a desert island. I was surrounded by the living, but was not a part of them. Were there other ghosts in the world? Or was I the only soul who’d failed to move on? Was I just as much a failure at dying as I had been at living?
I lifted my hand from the blood, expecting it to come away clean. Instead, it was coated red, the warm fluid running down my naked arm. Yet, the drops that fell didn’t ripple in the pool below. It wasn’t real. It was ghost blood. I smeared it between my fingers and it faded away.
Suddenly, there was a loud canine yelp; I turned and found that Infidel and Menagerie had pressed ahead toward the fight up-trail. Now, a gutted wolf was hurtling through the air straight toward me. It tumbled in mid- flight, trailing loops of blue-gray intestine. The wolf crashed into a tree with a sickening wet-meat slap. Menagerie shifted back to human form as he slid to the ground, still gutted. His eyes were glassy as he stared at the gore in his lap. I noticed two bloody prints on his shoulders, about the size of a woman’s hands. Infidel?
I flew to her side, tugged by the knife. She stood on a vine-draped stone platform, all that remained of some lost temple. She was surrounded by dead forest-pygmies, but, this time, she wasn’t the person who had killed them.
Instead, that was the work of the Whisper. My ghost skin crawled as I saw her. She was no longer an empty hole in space, as she had been when I’d seen her earlier. She was now a creature of flesh, though it wasn’t human flesh. Her skin looked as if it had been carved from onyx; her eyes and lips and nails were gems of dazzling ruby. In her left hand was the hilt of a sword, the blade nothing more than a jagged stump. Despite her mineral skin, she moved fluidly as she lunged toward Infidel.
I noticed that fragments of a broken sword lay at Infidel’s feet. She was looking down, confused by where the metal had come from. She didn’t seem to see the stone demon about to strike her.
The Whisper caught Infidel beneath the chin with a two-handed uppercut that lifted her from her feet and made her lose her grip on her long sword. Infidel fell on her butt as her sword spun in the air. The Whisper caught the sword with a fluid back-swipe, lifted it over her head, then chopped down with a vicious grunt, attempting to
