I stepped toward the door, but Jas shook his head. “It’s too warm out. We’ll go the other way.”
He creaked and groaned, but bent down enough to touch the earthen floor. He groped around in the dirt.
“Can I give you a hand?”
“Sure.” He pointed out a bronze ring mounted on a wooden trapdoor, hidden under a layer of dirt. I never noticed that it was there.
I pulled on the ring, and as the dust and grime cloud settled, I saw a rickety ladder leading downwards. “Where does it go?”
“To other houses… everywhere. It’s nicer to travel underground, cooler.”
That explained the scant traffic on the surface. I let Jas descend, and followed him. It wasn’t nearly as dark as I had expected—strange fluorescent creatures darted to and fro among the weakly glowing walls of the tunnel, and sick, gangly dead man’s birches illuminated the way with their dead light.
There were ladders everywhere, and the deaders too—the underground seemed a much more animated place than the surface. I mimicked Jas’ shambling gait, eager not to attract attention. “Should I even be here?” I asked Jas.
He stopped and mulled it over for a moment. “Don’t see why not. You’ll move here, sooner or later. As long as you don’t hurt the deaders, you’re all right.”
I was moved that he never even considered the possibility of my betrayal; then again, perhaps it was one of the deaders’ limitations. Just as they forgot their relatives, so perhaps they lost their understanding of the ways of the living.
He led me deeper into the labyrinth. The passersby grew less frequent, and the light—weaker. I could not discern the direction, but guessed that we were close to the river once I noticed drops of moisture seeping along the support beams through the earthen walls.
He stopped and looked around, as if getting his bearings. Then, he sat down on the earthen floor.
“What now?”
“Now we wait,” he said.
We didn’t wait for long. I did suspect before that the deaders could communicate with each other through some unfathomable means. Soon, four deaders showed up, then three more. All of the newcomers sat down on the floor and remained quiet, as more of them kept arriving.
There were all kinds of them there—young and old, and even one child. Some were dead long enough to lose most of their skin and flesh—at least two hundred years; others were quite fresh. Even the girl I met earlier showed up; I noticed with a pang of guilt that the purple bruise on her forehead was spreading. Despite my repeated application of the wintergreen ointment, the air grew putrid with their smell, and my heart was uneasy. There I was, underground, surrounded by a throng of deaders. If they turned on me, I would never be able to fight through them— or find my way back to the surface. The trust I attributed to Jas was actually mine.
Underground, I had lost the sense of time, and only knew that it was passing—slowly, like water weeping from the walls. The sounds of soft, dry voices of the deaders mingled with the dripping of water; while the monotony of it was somewhat lulling, the content was certainly not.
I learned that the cherrystone in question was cursed. A traveling warlock passed through our town, many years ago. When the Areti came to the warlock, demanding that he lend his talent to them, they were met with a refusal. They sent their thugs to make him pay for their humiliation, but the thugs were never heard from again. The warlock was nonetheless angry with the Areti. Before he left, he hid the cherrystone somewhere in town, and told them that as long as the cursed stone was within the town walls, our dead would walk the land.
When his prediction came true, the Areti looked for it. They looked everywhere—on the bottom of the river, under every rock, even in the catacombs under the deaders’ town. After a few years they stopped looking—old legends are easy to forget. The cherrystone was left be, until the present Mistress of the Areti clan realized her mortality. The search for the cherrystone had become an obsession, and she sent her goons and hirelings to look for it. It took her awhile, but she had learned that it was in deaders’ town.
“Why does she want it?” I said.
“To end the curse,” said one of the oldest deaders. I nodded. I could understand that desire, and yet I wasn’t sure why the Areti were so concerned about it.
“It’s their family’s curse, or so they see it. It’s the matter of honor for them,” said the child. “They don’t care what will happen to us. They only know that they don’t want to become us.”
There was no good way to ask this question, but I asked anyway. “Do you… do you like being like this?”
They whistled and chortled, their laughter akin to scratching of nails.
“You’ll see when you’re in my shoes,” Jas said. “It’s more life, even though you might not see it as such. See, I don’t relish being what I am, but I still prefer it to lying still in the ground, being eaten by worms.”
“Do you know where that cherrystone is?”
The crowd grew silent, and I felt their eyes on me, judging, weighing. “‘Course we do,” Jas said. “That’s the first thing you learn as a deader—it’s important, see. And we tell it to each other every day, so that we don’t forget—about the Areti, about their snooping goons…”
The appearance of two more deaders interrupted him. One was tall and dark, one-handed. The other, a teenager, seemed young enough to be his son, but his light hair belied this conclusion. His nostrils were torn open, and a slow trickle of pus trekked across his pale lips and down his chin.
“You came to kill us,” the youngster said.
Once again, I grew aware of the precariousness of my situation, and protested my innocence with as much sincerity as I could muster.
“The Areti sent you,” his companion said. “Just like they sent us.”
I shrugged. “So? I find things; I never killed anyone.” Jas’ heavy hand lay on my shoulder. I could feel through my jacket how cold and clammy it was. “He wouldn’t do something like that,” he said to the gathering. “He knows better.” I nodded. “I do. Only others don’t. You think people across the river would listen to me? Or to you, for that matter. Far as everyone’s concerned, if the stone is gone, so much the better.
The Areti won’t leave you alone. Not with the present Mistress.” Everyone nodded in agreement.
“She won’t stop,” the bruised girl said. “Not until she’s one of us.” She gave me a meaningful look. “Will you help us?” “Whoa,” I said. “You’re not asking me to kill her, are you?” They murmured that it wouldn’t be a bad idea, and after all, it wouldn’t be all bad for her. The deaders’ town was a nice place. “I’m not a murderer,” I said. “But I think I can help you. The stone needs to stay in town, right? Doesn’t matter where?” “No,” Jas said. “But she won’t stop looking.”
“I think I know a good place for it,” I said. “Just give me the stone, and don’t worry about a thing. She’ll never find it.” Their silence was unnatural—not even a sound of breathing broke it. Dozens of dead eyes looked at me, expressionless, weighing my proposal in their oozing, ruined skulls. I asked a lot of them—to put their very existence into the hands of an aliver, a being as alien to them as they were to me.
If I were in his shoes, I doubt I would’ve done what Jas had done: he pointed at the girl with the purple bruise. “Give it to him,” he said.
The girl stepped back, away from me, and I reached out, afraid that she would stumble and fall again. She remained on her feet—I supposed she was getting a hang of her new limitations.
“Why do you think he’ll help us?” she asked Jas, but her hand was already reaching for her chest.