Spirited (33 page)

Swinging a club carved from a sliver of the Dragon’s rib, Late leapt out of his hiding place. The dead man lunged at him, knocking away the weapon, because, in truth, the boy had never fought before. They grappled and fell, the dead man’s teeth too close to Late’s throat for comfort. Late grabbed the man’s skull in his too-warm hands and crushed it like an eggshell.

The dead man fell and crumbled into dust.

Late gasped, staring at the powder that coated his palms. “What have I done?” For a moment, his skin turned the pale gray of the people who filled his world.

The dead child joined him and asked innocently, “He is gone?”

The dust swirled in a sudden breeze, and the eldest of them all, the Caretaker, whose job it was to open the gates to the Sacred Soils at the start of the world and close them at the end of time, appeared. Tall and pale, he had hair that curled in the wind, which touched him alone. His heels sparked fire from the ground when he walked.
What happened here, Young Late?
The Caretaker dragged one of his pointed toed boots through the dust.
This was one of my servants
.

Late fell to one knee, bowing his head. “I was attacked, Greatest of Us All. I had to defend myself. He sought my… blood.”

The Caretaker narrowed his eyes in what might have been anger, or possibly sorrow. He had known this day would come. Late had what no one else had in all of the city—a soul. And to have a soul in the Sacred Soils could drive the Dead mad. It had been tolerable when Late had been a child, for little children are often soulless, but now he was eight and ten years old, and he had become a danger to himself.

It is time, Late. It is time that you go into the world of men. You must join your people in the Land of the Living
, the Caretaker said.

Late leapt to his feet, his already pale face growing chalky. “No, no, Caretaker, please, do not send me to that world. I do not know it. I do not belong there.”

Ah, but you do, my Darling Boy, until the day you die, the day you lose your soul.

“Then, tell me. Tell me how to do that,” Late begged. “And then I will do it, so I can return home. If I need to, I will cut my soul from my body and throw it into the pit.”

I cannot say, but I will tell you that once you have seen the world that is your true home, you may never wish to return here. Do not so lightly dismiss the Sunlit Lands. Few who have seen their beauty long for the gray of the Dark City. They fight. They kick and scream, and curse my name.

“That will never happen. This will always be my home. You… you’re the only father I have ever known.”

The Caretaker smiled and placed his hand on the boy’s head.
Because I love you as you love me, I will give you three gifts to help you in the Living World. I see it in the stars and in the dust that you will have need of them. Use them well
. The Caretaker gave Late the teeth from the Dragon’s skull, an eye from the dead child, and the wings from the raven.

“What will I do with these things?”

You will know when the time comes
, the Caretaker said. Then he sent the boy into the Sunlit Lands.

~*~*~

Late stepped outside the Bone Gates, and for the first time in his memory, the gates closed behind him. He drove his carriage to the edge of Sacred Soils, and with a sob, stepped over the borders. He prayed with all his heart that he might see it again soon.

Then, as if the darkness had never existed, the world exploded into brilliance. Late managed three full steps before his senses were overwhelmed. The Sunlit Lands beyond were too bright, too noisy, too full of colors that Late had never seen before. For the first time in his life, he had an empty place in his stomach, and his eyelids drooped in exhaustion. He collapsed beside the road and lay there for a full day and a full night, before Tresska, the Night Dancer, and her companion, Bontlo, happened upon him.

“Look. Highwaymen have taken another. This forest grows more dangerous with each day,” said Bontlo to his pretty charge.

“No, he still lives, but he is so thin and pale,” said Tresska. “We must take him to the Doctor-Man.”

Bontlo was a big man, and he lifted the boy as if he were thistledown. “He’s nothing more than skin and bones,” he exclaimed.

Late’s eyes fluttered open as Bontlo was placing him in the back of the Night Dancer’s wagon. When Late spied Tresska, he murmured in an oddly echoing voice, “An Angel has come to take me home.” And then he passed out again.

Bontlo smiled at the Night Dancer. “I think the young buck is in love.”

~*~*~

The Doctor-Man fed Late thin soup and nursed him to health, because no one could refuse a request from the Night Dancer. By the time the boy was well, the Doctor-Man loved him as a son, for there was much in Late to love.

Late never told him where he came from, and the Doctor-Man never asked. He figured that the boy had run away, and Late, for his part, repaid his guardian by driving him in the wagon when his patients lived too far away to walk, and it was almost like being back home again.

Eventually, the boy stopped squinting in the sunlight, and he stopped weeping for the dark places whenever the night made him homesick. He ate strange things such as fruit, bread, and cheese, and grew strong. His pale skin tanned to a golden color, and the girls of the village quite admired him.

But his heart belonged to the Angel he had first seen when he entered this world.

~*~*~

“Ah, you mean the fair Tresska, the Night Dancer,” said the Doctor-Man when Late asked about her. “Yes, she will be back in town tomorrow night for the Festival of Destiny. If you go into the square, you will see her dance.”

Late vowed that he would be there. Did the Angel remember him at all?

~*~*~

Tresska and Bontlo did indeed remember young Late.

“Looks as if our injured young buck grew into a handsome stag.” Tresska smiled as she took his strong hand in her dainty one. “You’re called Late, I’m told.”

Late’s mouth seemed strangely dry, and he had to swallow more than once before he found his voice. “Yes, Miss Tresska, that is my name.”

Tresska cocked a perfectly formed eyebrow. “My, child, but you do have a peculiar accent. There is a strange echoing to your voice.”

“It is how everyone talks where I am from,” Late said. “If you do not like it, though, I will change it.”

Bontlo laughed. “Why, Lady Tresska, my first guess was right. I do believe the young buck is in love with you.”

Tresska smiled gently. “Are you, young Late? Tell me, what do you think of when you look at me?”

“I think of nothing when I see you, except you,” Late said, which sent Tresska and Bontlo into peals of hysterical laughter.

“Well, my dearest boy, tonight I dedicate my dance to you.”

Late’s head spun with feelings indescribable to him, for he had never experienced such tender emotions as adoration and admiration. “My lady, I am honored.”

That, of course, sent Tresska and her companion away clutching their stomachs and wiping their eyes.

~*~*~

Lady Tresska danced that night, and watching in the crowd was a man who thought to have her for his own. He whispered a spell beneath his breath, and the crowd sank into a deep trance.

Then this man, the sorcerer Tartucket, spirited the Night Dancer away.

But one remained awake to see the crime. One who had been born in a land where magic had flooded his blood and his every breath.

Late saw the disappearance of the lady and vowed to find her.

As the wisps of Tartucket’s magic vanished, Late cried out to the awakening crowd, begging for their help. “It was sorcery.”

“Ah,” said the others, clucking their tongues in sorrow, “if the Night Dancer was taken by magic, the living can do nothing to bring her home.”

The living could do nothing.

But, didn’t Late have gifts from one who had never lived? The Caretaker had promised these gifts would help
him
. Could they help
her
?

In his rooms that night, Late spread out the gifts he had been given and stared at them for a long time. Wings? No, they could fly, but without knowing where he was going, they were of no use. Teeth? No, though they could bite, nothing needed to be torn. Ah! The Eye. Wasn’t it said that Dead Men see all?

Sitting cross-legged on his bed, Late took out his knife and popped his own eye from his skull, replacing it with the eye of the child. Closing his living eye so as not to confuse his sight, he said, “Help me to see.”

Then… he saw…

The Lady Tresska locked in a tower, high, high at the top of a mountain on the other side of the world
.

He set out without a word of goodbye to Bontlo or the Doctor-Man and rode for a year to reach the mountain peak where stood the Castle of Tartucket, though his hair grew long and wild, and his mismatched eyes grew haunted.

But his horse could not gallop to the top of the mountain without a path, so, despairing, Late slumped at the foot of the mountain, certain his quest had come to an end. He glared up at the rocky peaks and cursed their inaccessibility, wishing that he could be like the careening birds.

Wait! Wings. The Caretaker’s gifts. Filled with new hope, Late pulled the raven wings from his knapsack and stuck them to his shoulder blades. He flapped his new wings like a butterfly crawling from its cocoon, and with each stroke they grew larger and wider until they were sixteen feet across and strong enough to carry him to the top of the mountain, though their weight bowed him over so he could not stand straight.

At first, he flew crookedly, and only for a few moments, before he tumbled to the earth, but by the end of the day, he became sure enough to reach the top of the mountain. Exhausted, but never more determined, he began his ascent. “I’m coming, my lady,” he said as he soared. “Your Late is coming to your rescue.”

Ahead of him was the castle of the Sorcerer Tartucket, surrounded by a thicket too strong for sword to cut or fire to burn. Nothing, though, is stronger than a dragon’s fangs, so Late, knowing now that the Caretaker had chosen his gifts carefully, plucked his own teeth from his jaws and put the dragon’s fangs in their place.

In moments he had bitten through the thicket, though the thorns tore his flesh to the bone, and his lips were red with blood.

At the top of the tallest tower, Lady Tresska slept in a satin bed, her stomach swollen with child.

Late folded his wings as he landed on the windowsill.

Awakening, Tresska screamed when she saw him. “A gargoyle!”

“I have come to save you,” Late cried, though a mouthful of blood and dragon’s teeth turned the plea into a monstrous growl.

Lady Tresska gasped. “Save me? From whom? My dear husband? Nonsense. Go away, you ugly thing!”

“Your husband?” Dread filled Late from his head to his toes. “Your kidnapper, you mean?”

“Oh, that.” Tresska laughed gaily. “He was shy. It was the only way he could make his love for me known.” She stroked her round stomach. “I am a wife and about to be a mother. Why would you take me from my True Love?”

“But I love you,” Late whispered. “I have from the moment I saw you. Could you never love me back?”

“Love you, you awful monster? How could I?”

At those words, a glowing ball of light ripped from Late’s chest as his soul was torn away, and his eyes rolled back in his head.

Someone tall and pale with spikes of long curled hair and boots that sparked the floor offered the gargoyle his hand and bore the soulless creature away.

~*~*~

Time passed in the Sunlit Lands, and Tresska bore Tartucket a daughter named Dahla. As the years flew by, Dahla became as beautiful as her mother, but she was a magician like her father, so she grew up knowing the secrets of the world in a way the Night Dancer never had.

Dahla was seven and ten years old when she found the small globe of light in her mother’s wardrobe, and she knew it for what it was. “Mother, why do you have a soul?”

“All living creatures have a soul,” Tresska answered airily.

“But you have an extra one.” Dahla held up the ball of light.

Tresska took the ball from the girl and mused, “Oh, is this a soul? It was left behind by a gargoyle that flew in the window one night and tried to steal me from your father.”

Dahla shook her head, “No, Mother, this is not a monster’s soul. I have been looking at it all day, and it is beautiful.”

Tresska shrugged. “I remember what I saw.”

Dahla sighed and took the ball into her bedchamber to study.

The more she looked at it, the harder she found it to believe that this was the soul of a monster. The light was too bright, too beautiful. Whoever had lost it, he was surely no gargoyle, and he would want it back. But everything she knew about souls said that when a person lost one, there was only one place for him to go.

The Sacred Soils, the Land of the Dead.

That night Dahla lay down on her bed, and, with the soul in her hands, drank a sleeping potion to bring her as close to death as she could get.

~*~*~

She woke before the Bone Gate.

A tall thin man with curled hair and dead eyes greeted her.
Welcome, Little Dreamer, but this is no place for you. Have you a purpose here?

“I seek the one who lost this.” Dahla held up the soul.”I wish to return what he lost.”

The Caretaker looked at the soul, and a strange smile creased his face.
This belongs to Late.
He dwells at Dragon’s Skull. Go and bring this to him. Do not fear. None of the dead shall harm you. You are protected in this place by my blessing.

“I am not afraid,” Dahla lied. She followed the pathway up to the Dragon’s Skull whose empty eyes looked down upon the dark and colorless city. “Hello. Is anyone at home? It is unkind to keep a guest waiting.”

A shadow appeared at the gaping jaws.
Who are you?
You are not one of the Dead.
The misshapen figure did not emerge, but stood in the darkness, one eye shining with discontent and suspicion.
There is a glow about you that I almost remember.