Between Ghosts and Gods

Chapter One Kasu

It was OFTEN said that entering Camellia House was harder than ascending to the heavens.

To get into the heavens, you simply had to be talented and virtuous.

These days, you didn’t even have to be dead – lately, the gods had made a habit of plucking remarkable humans from the mortal realm while they were still alive and putting them to work.

After all, there was simply no end to the number of gods who needed scribes to record their noble deeds, handmaidens to wait upon them, and stable boys to feed and water the herds of celestial horses.

This was not the case for Camellia House.

Firstly, you definitely had to be dead. Horribly dead.

Shamefully dead. Preferably painfully and violently dead, but dead all the same.

Your soul had to be wretched enough to have ended up on the streets of Ghost City, yet fortunate enough that you hadn’t yet become prey to the meat-market butchers or caught in the webs that the charming spider ladies of Shadow Street wove to catch unsuspecting spirits.

Next, you actually had to find the place.

Though Camellia House was the only high-stakes gambling parlour in all of the under-realm, the streets leading to its doorstep were an ever-changing maze of lantern-lit roads and narrow alleyways.

Threads of firelight wove their way through the air, creating illusions to distract and confuse you.

If by some stroke of luck you did find yourself at Camellia House, you still had to get past Banse and Manzu, the dog-headed bouncers who only accepted bribes in the form of human limbs.

Finally, once past the guards, there was Kasu.

It was Kasu’s job to hand out the gambling tiles needed to place a bet in Camellia House.

Rumour was you could trade anything you wanted for them – money, limbs, dreams – but whether Kasu would give you even a single tile depended on two things: how much you valued the item you wanted to trade, and her mood.

Today, she was not in a good mood.

Kasu had polished her cherrywood counter so many times her reflection was starting to unnerve her.

She tried not to look down at the girl reflected in the desk: tall and scrawny, with braided dark hair and wide-set eyes that gave her nose too much prominence on her face.

She tried not to be disappointed by what she saw.

Kasu had already woken fifteen minutes late, forgotten her morning prayers and snapped at the girl serving breakfast – she did not need to add vanity to her growing pile of failures.

The gods were very clear that those who did not obey the six hundred and fifty-seven guiding decrees set out in the book of Heavenly Principles would never earn the respect of the heavens.

“Take care in your appearance as a courtesy to others” – Kasu recited Principle six hundred and thirty-one as she continued scrubbing the counter – “but do not place too much pride in your looks.”

Kasu had no idea what qualified as “too much pride”, but perhaps she ought to try avoiding her reflection altogether, just in case.

As she wiped her rag over the counter one more time, the front doors flew wide open.

“Miss Kasu! Miss Kasu! I’ve done it – I’ve finally done it!” A slender man burst through the entrance to Camellia House, his shoes squeaking against the polished wooden floor as he staggered towards Kasu’s exchange desk.

Banse, the on-duty bouncer, trailed behind the desperate man with a bored look on his face and a human leg tucked under one arm. Kasu discreetly peered over the edge of her counter, but she could not be sure where it had come from. The man standing before her still had all of his limbs.

“I’ve done it!” The man slammed his hands against the cherrywood counter, leaving a smear of oily fingerprints behind.

Kasu regarded the stain with a slight twitch of her eye and gripped the rag even tighter. She swallowed the urge to wipe away the smear and waited for the man to catch his breath. There were fifty-six Heavenly Principles regarding the virtues of patience and only twenty-nine about cleanliness.

“I’ve done it!” he cried again. “I have mastered ten thousand songs on the zither! I have played ballads that lasted seven hours and melodies that made the spider ladies on Shadow Street weep. My hands … they’re worth something to you now, aren’t they?

Won’t you let me exchange them for some tiles? ”

Kasu glanced at the huge cabinet behind her.

It was made of the same wood as her counter and divided into compartments.

Each shelf was filled with the possessions customers had exchanged for gambling tiles – a childhood dream, the memory of a lover, a topaz necklace passed down for generations.

Below them lay a crooked drawer containing the tiles Kasu would give to the gamblers, and beneath that stood several misshapen boxes filled with all sorts of tools for extracting payment.

She looked back at the man’s hands and sighed. She really didn’t want to get the hacksaw out again.

“Who do you work for? Does your master know you’re here?”

The man puffed out his chest. “What I do in my free time is none of his business.”

A bold claim, Kasu thought, for someone whose food and shelter – indeed, his very un-life itself – depends upon the whims of the higher demon who owns him.

There were two types of dead in Ghost City: ghosts, like Kasu and her customer, who had made contracts with demons during their lifetimes – contracts that now had to be fulfilled in death – and the restless, hungry kind of ghosts who held grudges or hurts so deep they could not move on to their next life.

It was always the former that Kasu met at her exchange desk.

You could buy your way out of a contract if you had the money, and nothing paid as much as winning it big at Camellia House.

“I’ll hit the jackpot today – I know it,” the man insisted. “I woke up feeling lucky, and when I had my morning tea there was a leaf standing upright in my cup! That’s surely a good sign! If I win, I’ll be free.”

Free. The word struck a chord hidden deep inside her.

Lady Camellia treated her staff much better than most, but Kasu could still understand that bone-deep yearning for freedom.

The years of standing behind the same counter doing the same thing day after day wore at her; she was a stone slowly weathered by the constant beat of rain.

The under-realm’s relentless darkness was stifling.

Kasu could not remember much of her mortal life, yet she knew she missed the sun.

She missed the smell of fresh air and the feel of the warm earth beneath her toes.

She missed the comforting cycle of mortality – to live and die and be reincarnated over and over again.

She looked at the man – at the zither player – and wondered what it was that he missed. What he longed for.

Pressing her lips into a thin line, Kasu placed a handful of tiles onto the counter.

“Don’t gamble it away all at once. A healthy restraint is the nineteenth Heavenly Principle.”

“Thank you! Oh, thank you!” The zither player clutched the tiles to his chest.

“Don’t thank me yet.” Reaching for one of the boxes behind her, Kasu hefted a large axe onto the counter. “I still need one of your hands.”