Chapter 1 Screams Against Silence
SILENCE HELD SWAY OVER the Halls of the Dead.
It extended from the pomegranate groves that welcomed all travelers, living or dead, all the way to the fields of asphodel beyond the palace proper.
When it was broken—which was more rarely than most people would assume—it was quick to cover the cracks, restoring them to perfect quiet.
But despite the silence, and despite the name the place had chosen for itself, the Halls of the Dead were very much alive.
The trees in the pomegranate groves put forth green leaves and new fruit, and they never bowed their heads to winter; instead, they were somehow caught in an endless cycle of growth and harvest, flowers budding even as the ripe pomegranates fell to the grass and scattered garnet seeds in all directions.
If anything, they were more alive than their counterparts in the supposedly realer worlds from which their travelers came, and their fruits were tartly sweet in a way that left no need for augmentation or accessory.
One of their pomegranates was a full meal unto itself, and could satisfy any hunger.
The flowers in the fields of asphodel were much the same.
They blossomed and withered, only to be immediately replaced by fresh, sweet-scented buds, their petals forever straining to reach the sky.
Their perfume could cure any mortal ill, heal any wound, and the physicians of a thousand worlds would kill for a single petal.
The Halls of the Dead were bursting with so much life that it seemed they must split their seams, overflow their foundations, and pour through the Doors to every world that was.
Most damning in the eyes of the unfamiliar, however, were the living statues who attended on the Lord and Lady of the Dead—for make no mistake, all the life that filled the Halls did not cancel out the presence of the dead, who were a constant reminder that all life must one day end, and all flesh must one day decay.
In the parts of the Halls most favored by the Lord and Lady, in the grounds where they walked together, the living statues stood.
They were the children of the Doors, the ones who had been lured to a place that masked its endless, teeming life in a shell of silence and serenity, and the Halls had given them the gift of stillness.
Those who managed to make a home for themselves in the Halls did so by becoming so motionless that they appeared to have been carved from marble, assuming beautiful poses and holding them so absolutely that their very cells forgot the process of growing older.
The living statues breathed perhaps once an hour, and this was twice as frequent as the beating of their hearts.
When they ate, it was wafers of sugar slipped between their lips by attendants, or sponges soaked in pomegranate juice pressed to their mouths until the juice trickled down their throats without the need to swallow.
When they slept, it was in elegant poses draped like lace around the bases of marble plinths, their arms and legs akimbo.
Some of the statues had been there for centuries, refining the art of their motionlessness.
The Halls of the Dead had no real dangers, not the way some worlds did: no dragons to fight, no evil empires to bring low.
What they had was time, and peace, and a place to be silent and still while you thought your way through all the troubles of your life.
Their greatest cruelty was also their greatest kindness, for many, when they finished thinking their way through everything that needed to be considered, would find that the lives they had left behind were decades in the past, their names added to the rolls of those lost to the danger of the Doors.
Nancy had been in the Halls of the Dead for years.
She could hold herself so exquisitely still that her blood slowed in her veins, her breath stopped in her throat, and only her mind was left to race ahead, thinking as quickly as it ever had.
She was one of the Lord of the Dead’s most beloved statues, for she bent herself into beautiful shapes whenever she was given the word to move, finding new ways to angle her chin, to lift her arms, until she looked like she truly was carved of flawless marble, created by some unknown artisan’s hand.
She had no regrets. Even in the moments when her mind trended toward the melancholy and memories of the friends she’d left behind in her world of origin, she had no regrets.
Her time before the Halls had been fast and frantic, filled with people who wanted things from her that she was ill-equipped to give.
Here, she had the time to consider the world in more depth, to truly understand herself, and she treasured that.
In time, she thought, she might tire of it, and seek to go back to where she’d come from.
Everyone she’d ever known would be long dead of old age by that point, and she would still be herself, exactly as she was now.
Somehow that thought was exhilarating, rather than terrifying. They had been so sure that she was dreaming of death when she said she wanted to go home, when she’d been dreaming of living all along. Living the better part of forever, unmoving and unbroken. Perfect, forever.
She was standing on her daytime plinth, one foot kicked back so that only her toes touched the marble, the other foot flat and stable, giving her a firm base to rest upon.
She had her eyes tilted toward the heavens, her chin canted ever so slightly upward, and her arms were raised as if she were going to embrace some descending companion, holding them close and safe when finally they reached her.
She had been in that position for six hours, and would hold it for another four before the bell rang for evening positions and she adjusted herself into the appropriate pose.
Nancy had been contemplating her evening position for the last several hours.
The evening position was the shortest of the poses, held for barely four hours.
Evening was the time to try new things, experimental things, without the fear of overbalancing that could attend on trying new positions during the day.
Most daytime positions began as evening experiments, tested in the short term before they were adopted in the long term.
Nancy was very proud of the fact that three of her evening poses had spread through the other statues, becoming common sights during the day.
She did wonder, sometimes, what her friends back at school would think if they could walk the Halls and see the living statues bending themselves into silent mirrors of their own posture.
Would Sumi recognize herself in the position that looked like the statue was tensing to jump, weight precariously balanced on toe tips and counterweighted by the long, elegant stretch of the arms?
Would Jack know her own stiff, unyielding posture when it was divorced from her clever hands and sharp tongue?
Would it matter if they did? She was never going to see them again.
Practicing and releasing their echoes was the closest she could come, and that would have to be good enough, because she had no regrets.
None at all. She was sure, and she would remain sure, for as long as the pomegranates fell, as long as the asphodel bloomed.
It would have been natural, when a scream split the silent air and echoed through the Halls, to turn toward the sound.
The statues were preternaturally still and composed, but they were still human—most of them, the ones who had been human to begin with—and they could still have their attention caught by the unexpected.
From her position atop the plinth, Nancy saw several of the statues wince or tense, the sudden tightness of their jaws and shoulders betraying their weakness.
Only the older statues remained perfectly composed, as if the sound of screaming were no more unusual than the bell for change of posture. Nancy was proud to count herself among their number, even as she felt her heart beat twice, all out of sync with what she had worked so hard to achieve.
The screaming was followed by the sound of running footsteps, bare flesh against marble floors, and Nancy wondered who was running, whether they were worried about falling, whether they feared attracting the attention of the ghosts who haunted the Halls.
The statues hadn’t come about to please the Lord and Lady’s whims. The practice had evolved, beginning with the first child whose Door had led them to the Halls, as a form of camouflage and self-protection.
Because the Halls of the Dead were filled with life and the living, yes, but their name came from their original occupants.
The dead. Ghosts from a hundred worlds flowed through the Doors to haunt the Halls.
Some of them were at peace with what had happened to them, silent shades who went voluntarily to cloistered chambers full of endless darkness stolen from the end of all things.
They manifested there as dancing motes of silver light, and lingered for a time, before they went back through the Doors to be reborn in some other world, some other time and place.
Very few of those silver specks chose life on the same world twice in a row, and according to some of the oldest statues, if Nancy held her peace for long enough, she would see the same dancing motes over and over again, lost children who couldn’t resist the call to adventure even long enough to rest. Those ghosts were harmless.
They avoided contact with the living, and lingered only long enough to decide their next destinations.
But there were other ghosts. Angry ghosts who resented what had become of them, who thought they still belonged among the living—who hungered to return to what they had once been.
They were mostly corralled, contained in special rooms carved not from void, but from the explosive birth of stars.
In that crucible of birth and destruction, they could be reforged into something kinder, something less all-consuming.
When those ghosts ran free, the living died. They were attracted to life, heat … motion. All the things possessed by the living, all those things tamed and controlled by the statues, who had trained their bodies to mimic not death but inanimation.
The first statue had been a traveler who, when they saw their companions cut down and devoured by the dead, had frozen rather than fleeing for their own life.
The dead had swept over and around that long-gone guest in the Halls of the Dead, leaving them unharmed, and the Lord and Lady had seen a way to protect the children who stumbled through the Doors and into their care.
To protect them, and to honor their need for the quiet of the Halls, the pair taught the children who followed to embrace the stillness.
They became sculptors of living statues, shaping and encouraging them, making their silence a barrier against the angry dead.
But now there was screaming in the Halls.
It began with a single scream, rising to a terrible crescendo before it was cut abruptly off.
There was a wet sound, a squelching horror, and the silence returned.
Where it had been a warm, comfortable silence before, it was now echoing and terrible, like the pause before some great beast attacked.
Nancy reached for the stillness, forcing it through herself until her recalcitrant heart calmed and returned to its customary tempo, beating so slowly that any doctor would have declared her dead and gone.
But she lived, as she had always lived, and she was not going to allow that condition to change, not if she had anything to say about it.
She calmed herself, even as another scream rang out in the distance, and another after that, and another, until she could hear the rushing of an impossible wind in the pauses between the screaming, the susurration of a million ghosts rushing through unsealed chambers.
The statue across from her slipped.
Not much; not enough to fall. His heel simply turned out of true, and he stumbled.
He recovered his composure quickly, but the damage had been done, and as sweat broke out on his temples, the rushing sound drew closer, skirling around him like the autumn wind.
Like the autumn wind, it was tinted with frost and with decay.
It wrapped tight, and Nancy watched, absolutely still, as it brushed against his skin.
He screamed. The rushing grew louder, and he came apart in the impossible wind, dissolving into a fine mist of skin, blood, and bone that stained the white chiton he’d been wearing in an instant, leaving the now-tattered garment to drop discarded to the floor.
Surprisingly little of the red mist fell alongside it; most of the cloud that had been a living statue was carried away by the wind, whisked into the depths of the Halls.
Nancy watched the chiton fall, and did not move.
Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes, and she did not move.
One broke free and ran down her cheek, and for a moment, Nancy felt the phantom lick of the wind upon her own cheek.
Then the sensation was gone, and the tear was falling, and she was alone.
Endlessly, absolutely alone.