'Lost Sons and Lost Souls (III)' by Alyssa R George

The name of the square that the Bear and Stag faced on to was Five Spear Square. Kiraleen had always simply associated the name with some past lord’s insignia … until now.

Five grim black shafts jutted up towards the sky by the square’s southern end, bleakly silhouetted by the burning aurora. Impaled on each one, quivering at the buffets of the wind, was a man – or the memory of a man – executed for a crime or in a battle that Escon could no longer remember, and Kiraleen could hear their voices groaning out from on high over the other cries in the square: “I am not he … I am not he …”

Her flesh seethed with cold fear as she took a few faltering steps away from the familiar door of the Bear and Stag, lost in the nightmare of Escon’s past almost immediately. A flock of misty shapes all converged on her at once – some mute and barely distinguishable from fog, some wailing and begging her to ‘send them back’ with their filmy lips quivering …

Kira staggered through the mist of the Dead, her hands outstretched before her to fend off the hazy shapes, and found herself almost in the centre of the square when they dispersed. A man was kneeling nearby, screaming into the hands that hid his face, but the mere sound of the muffled words “… not him! …” were enough to sweep away all thoughts of going to his aid.

Who’s dead? Who’s not? Where’s that damned Elf? thought Kiraleen frantically, squeezing her sword-hilt hard as she stared around the clamour of the square.

While she looked northward, her eyes briefly lifting to the constancy of the light from the night-wrapped Sentinel’s Tower, a cold hand suddenly closed gently – not startlingly – around the wrist of her sword-hand. Kira turned, her breath quick, and found herself facing the blanched figure of what seemed to be a girl who had never quite reached adulthood.

The girl’s colourless eyes were huge, empty, and sad. Kiraleen looked down to the light, white fingers around her wrist, then back at the girl herself, and managed, “Can I … help?”

“Warm,” the girl whispered, her voice no more than a breath.

“Do you have a name?”

“Warm,” repeated the girl, reaching out with her other icy hand to gently hold Kiraleen’s wrist, and leaned forward swiftly to sink her teeth in Kira’s arm.

The feeling of thin fangs digging into muscle shocked a short, sharp scream from Kiraleen’s lips – just one more scream to join the other shrieks and moans of the square. With a panicked backhand blow she struck the girl-thing’s face away from her, grabbing her bleeding arm and staring wild-eyed as the creature mournfully drifted away again.

Kiraleen turned and strode hard towards the north, trying to leave the square behind, refusing to look at the shapes and faces in the gloom. Her sword was in hand now, and her grip on it twitched whenever something flickered towards her.

“Warm …” a voice breathed.

Her heart stuttered as she whirled again, shortsword raised, and saw a pale woman hovering right at her elbow. Striving to keep her breathing steady, Kiraleen levelled her blade at the woman, feeling more blood trickling down her arm.

Someone grabbed her from behind, pinning her upper arms to her sides with savage strength. “I’m not him, damn you! If you don’t show me the way back …” hissed a voice in her ear.

“Get off!” snarled Kiraleen, ducking and twisting out of the unseen ghost’s grip. She lashed out viciously at the eerie white woman, who had tiptoed further forward, and then lashed out on her other side at her other assailant – the memory of a wiry man in tattered beggar’s clothes. When she lashed out again – undirected, desperate, just trying to keep the Dead at bay – the dead beggar grabbed at her sword, trapping it in his clenched fists.

“Do you know how this feels? Do you want to know?” the beggar spat, holding Kiraleen’s blade as she tried to tug it away. On her right, the white woman timidly crept closer again, her wide eyes intent on Kira’s red-stained sword-arm. “Because I’ll gladly –”

Suddenly the beggar stumbled, struck from behind, and his grip on the sword loosened. Kiraleen acted in a jumbled mixture of instinct, panic, and training – she swung her blade in a sharp, horizontal sweep, cleanly striking the dead man’s head from his shoulders, and then leaped at the bleached, creeping woman-thing, slashing bloodless cuts across its upraised arms, forward-swing and cross-swing, until it wailed and fled.

She stood there, gasping from exertion and fear, as the beggar crumpled and faded with his severed head letting out that eerie, soughing sigh. The Eyeless from the tavern was standing behind the dissipating man, his cloth-wrapped gaze silently trained on her.

“You should not be out here,” he said.

“I wouldn’t be, but for you!” returned Kiraleen angrily, feeling her arm throb.

The Eyeless’s mouth quirked. “I am somewhat better at this than you are. The Dead are my province. Go back to the tavern.”

“I don’t care how good you think you are – it’s madness out here. Come back with me and we’ll get to the bottom of it later.”

“Look at this.” The grey-clad Elf swept out an arm to encompass the square – the shouts, the screams, the milling shapes, the hideous silhouettes of the five spitted, groaning spirits on their spears. “The living of this place will not last long among the Dead. Some are harmless, but many are not. There is no ‘later’.”

Kiraleen swallowed hard. “All right. I’ll come with you.”

“No,” said the Eyeless.

“I have as much a stake in this as you, Elf. More, probably.”

“Forget this ‘stake’ and go back.”

“No!” Kira shook her head sharply, unable to prevent her steady, years-long accumulation of guilt and frustration from breaking loose. “My son is in this town – ore someone who knows how to find him – and there’s no way that you or anyone, dead or living, is going to stop me. I will not leave this world without seeing my son. I don’t care what’s in the way and I don’t care what I have to do. Do you hear? I won’t die until I see him!”

For a long time, the Eyeless stared at her in silence. The chaos of the square continued to rage around them, but did not touch them, leaving them still and unspeaking in the eye of the storm.

“Go back,” he repeated, and smoothly turned away.

Kiraleen started after him, her rare temper subsiding again beneath her usual, lucid determination, and although another fog-drift of lamenting ghosts briefly enveloped her before she could catch him, she saw the direction he chose: north. He was gone when she fought free, but she set off in grim pursuit all the same, leaving the five looming spears and their ghosts behind her for the narrower streets ahead – and wishing that she couldn’t hear more wails and screams coming from that very direction.

*          *          *          *          *

“Hey! Eyeless! I’m following, so we might as well go together!”

No voice – no living voice – answered Kiraleen as she anxiously rushed down the dark, narrow streets. There were cries and shrieks aplenty, however, and the Dead thronged about in all their varied forms: most directionlessly drifting, some beating on the tightly barricaded doors where the living had shut themselves away, some taking a bleak interest in Kiraleen herself. She did not stay for the latter.

The eaves of Escon’s northern streets hung over her head, shadowy at the best of times, but the night itself was clear and beautiful. The aurora continued to softly wisp in the sky, vaguely reminiscent of the eerier, flitting ghosts themselves.

“Eyeless!”

Kira cut through Spring Square – sparing a flicker of relief that her pursuit had not taken her to the Wall of Swords, whatever bloody, ghost-filled history that old plaza entailed – and forced her way onward through all the Dead things that tried to mob her, shrieking their protests that they were ‘not him’. It was easy to become disoriented in the constant fight-and-flight, but Kiraleen had a landmark in the skyline to help her now: the glow of the Sentinel Tower, a black shape against the ripples of the Northern Aurora.

The tower itself was very close now, and only grew closer as Kira pushed on up the rising swell of Escon’s sloping north. Only when she began to draw near to its massive stone base – fenced off in iron – did she realise that this was perhaps the Eyeless’s destination.

She certainly saw no sign of him elsewhere as she jogged up the slope, shouting vainly for him to see reason and wait for her. Perhaps he meant to climb the tower and look out over the city for some hint of the trouble’s source. It seemed a long shot to Kiraleen – not to mention the fact that the tower’s sentries would have shut the place up tight when they first started seeing ghosts – but she decided to look for the troublesome Elf there anyway.

The iron gates, at least, were open. Kiraleen circled around the tower up to the old gates facing onto Tara Avenue and found them ajar, their heavy chains softly swinging with the night breeze. She stepped through, then stared upward for a moment, following the rise of the Sentinel Tower with her eyes.

It rose clean and straight from the old stones where it had been set, limned by whitish light from the shifting aurora – burning with ghost-fire. Kiraleen stared with her neck craned up towards the tower summit and the fire of the beacon there, with the tower staring back at her through its lower, dark window-eyes, remembering the days when she and Antayn had spent long hours on duty by the beacon …

Keeping the dead man’s watch, she thought, and abruptly wished she’d chosen a better turn of phrase. Shaking off the ill-timed webs of memory, she strode down the cobbles towards the door. It was open.

That was when she knew – beyond the building soldier’s feeling in her gut – that something was wrong.

It was cold inside the Sentinel’s Tower – but it had always been cold. Even the rosy tint of memory could not abolish that recollection. Kiraleen stepped into the antechamber cautiously, her steps hollow, loud and solitary in their echo. Her cut continued to warn her as she stepped towards the staircase, dimly spiralling up into the blackness above her head.

“Eyeless?”

Her voice leaped up the walls directly, bouncing back and forth away to the same shadow that swallowed the higher stairs. And then, very faintly, she heard an unintelligible voice – the fracture of an echo of a voice – calling something in response from high, high above.

Kira began to climb, her boots tolling out wary footsteps and hollow echoes in unequal measure. Around and around she paced in the near-darkness, as she had so many times so many years ago, fighting off troublesome memories and increasingly icy misgivings.

The pale light of the night outside – through the sparse tower windows – was her only illumination. Kiraleen paused after a long climb at what she knew to be the third-last window, looking out towards the colour-muted view of Escon fully a hundred feet below. The town sloped away gently down the hill to the south, sprinkled with a few scattered lights – the torches outside the Town Mint were still burning, she noted, and far beyond Escon’s southern wall was the pinprick of light that marked the near Temple of Light. There was nothing more sinister to see than the faint, natural-seeming drifts of ‘mist’ in Escon’s squares and plazas …

Suddenly two strong hands locked on Kira’s shoulders from behind, clamped down, and pushed.

Kiraleen plunged headfirst through the window – narrow enough to graze her arms in the deadly passing – with a reverberating cry, twisting and scrabbling at the window-ledge as she tumbled out. For several soul-rending moments she hung there, all Escon swinging and lurching under her struggling legs, before the unseen murderer above her slammed a clenched fist down on her shaking fingers.

Time lost all meaning. In seconds and years Kiraleen’s hands slipped away from the stone, the scream tearing from her mouth in private centuries. Cold night air flowed around her like water as she fell away backwards from the tower window, kicking and screaming still with the ends of her bound her savagely whipping her face.

The Sentinel’s Tower soared back into the sky above her flared eyes, rearing higher and higher away while she plunged into night. Her last thought was not of Escon or Antayn, but it was sharp with a regret that made her scream louder still, anguished:

I can’t die without seeing my son! I can’t die without seeing my son! I can’t die without –