8 - The Ghost Factory
Albino Fish’s Way
The thrum and purr of street torches, and the gleaming faces of Middlemoss’s mausoleums that are homes, with their doric jugulars, their slit eyes of leaded glass, and their ivy hair, and also the cool caress of the horned moon, reaching from where she cambers by her hounding star in the heavenly velvet – all this ebbs. For, you would follow the beck of gravity. Beyond the vocal hum of Middlemoss. Beyond the fence and gate. Beyond the mausoleums that are homes.
Slowly swells the silence. Slowly, the shade.
A candlecarver has told you that a ghost is a commoner feeling deeper down the ravine walls. Your Lady wants to understand the daughter who haunts her dreams, so you have brought her this way.
The mancers of modern Middlemoss gated the path to Albino Fish’s way with good reason. A thousand things have tumbled down the gorge in this Time: resentful trunks of primitive plants, abandoned studies, golems. A quartet of mancers once threw a lich down; still-un-living. Alongside the things of former Times - things which went down with purpose, things shy of sunlight - these castoffs shaped a biome. A culture. War, treaty, the unseen rise and fall of formicoid empires, such is the climate down Albino Fish’s Way.
Your first foe appears not long after the last silver of the moon no longer lights the rock under your feet. (There is still time to turn back). As your waist-lantern lights on a pile of boulders and wood mulch, a skeleton which is missing the top of its skull will emerge from the debris. The skull is full of pumice which the skeleton will hurl at you like sling bullets. Keep that shield up.
This undead is called a Veyer. Veyers come in three varieties, each with a different oddity in their skull: pumice stone, minnows, or a yellow sun. Each kind uses a different special attack, and you’ll want to learn how to counter all three very fast. You’re going to be seeing a lot of Veyers.
With a head-action, or with their scraping finger bones, Veyers can inflict a variety of maladies.
| Amnesia Sweats Each cold bead running down your hip is a moment of a memory lost. | Cataracts Incurable. | The Haunting Cleanness Washing, washing, washing, your hands lathering the soap and the water, until your skin forgets the name of dirt, until your ectodermal raiment is frighteningly clean. | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Foot Famine Your toes become starved. | Siderophobia Though you cannot see them now, the thought of those tiny shiny holes which prick the sky, always staring remorselessly at you, following you with their gaze, makes your organs shiver. | ||
| Misoplexy Each attack of rage is sudden, violent, and ends in tragedy. | The Gaze You can’t blink. |
The best way to fight a Veyer is to whittle at it slowly with your Steel. Dealing too much bone-damage at once, unless you destroy it in one blow, will drive a Veyer in a rampage.
Eventually you’ll find retreat cut off by the swarm of skeletons rising from the ledge debris. The massing dead will try to herd you. They force you deeper down the path, toward dead-end drops.
Your only hope is a massive, ancient, dead redwood, spanning the gorge, locked between your side and a lower ledge on the opposite. Your light (hip lantern or Cat’s Eye Spear) will guide you to it, reflecting on the luminous shelf mushrooms growing against the horizontal trunk.
The Veyers will not follow you onto the branch. But if you fail to reach it you will die.
Your steel step reverberates hollowly on the horizontal vermillion trunk of the enormous redwood. Catching your breath, you and your Blue find yourselves beyond the reach of the pumice bullets.
The Trunk is wide. It is heavily stripped, but you see sinewy bark a few feet ahead.
As you look at the bark, its cordage seems to speak to your eye with a textural image.
“The creaking bridge is yet made of planks thick and sturdy. The river slides unknown and silent below its enormous span. All who step on the bridge are safe, though the night is moonless and starless and eternal. “The hoard storms on their mounts, but they know they must keep unspoiled the venerable arch, and will not stomp it with their hooves. “The bridge has its old man, not a guard, not a levy taker, only the weaver-in-residence, who weaves on the surface of the road, and waves at travelers. “As the man runs his fingers through his long white beard, he sees you. He waves. His cottonwood voice asks for your names.”
You remember another redwood like this one. Dead, that tree too spoke with a voice in the tapestry of its bark. You were a boy when you knew that other tree. What else comes to your mind on this matter? You heard, though your mind is not deep enough to sustain the ‘where’ or ‘when’, a mancer. His face is gone, but his words are in your memory. All souls wander, so he said, that are not put under an epitaph. That stuck. But he said this too: some souls uninterred may avert for a time the vagabond death. The mighty redwood when it dies makes space in its fibers for a single spirit. The spirit in that tree of your memory was a kind one.
As you step farther on the branch the bark expands.
“Following the shelf-lights of the mushrooms along the bridge, the eyes behold, at the crown of the arc, a shelter. In the center, in the midst of the gulf of the black night, there stands a tunnel among the ancient boards. “That is where the weaver of white hair, whose name is Arras, lives. “He sits there now on his knurled, creaking stool. The eye that is not wholly blind winks as it spots the two pedestrians. He leans forward, waiting, his throat bubbly, his chin eager to wag like the tail of a puppy. “Arras thinks of the places he may tell them the bridge leads. Its outlets are more than two. One to the silkworm tunnel. One to the forest of only roots and boulders. “One that goes down, seemingly to plunge into the silent black river, yet does not.”
Your Lady’s walk has always been the graceful padding of a stork, but you must carry your sabatons in your arms. The rich bark is soft underfoot. There is no need for your lantern. The bole is wider than any Middlemoss street, and its mushrooms spread a fair teal light.
You pass one heavy branch. It twists up in a gradual slope, easily walked, splits into narrow forks, and finally tapers into a basketlike promontory surrounded by space.
Another beam, still larger, descends on your left. The timber thoroughfare disappears into the dark, as mushrooms cease to spread along that branch.
In the deadwood hollow at the center of the redwood you find an abandoned camp, and a journal bound in bat skin.
“-one mile along the river ledge, then up the handholds by the thimble-shaped boulder. A higher ledge, narrow. Edge along for three miles, and there is the tree. Sanctuary. The factory is for sad ghosts, not mancers with lives yet- “-one ghost especially. She says she sees and remembers every living being who passes through Middlemoss far above. She says death- “-ready to depart. But Hemlock, she is such a lonely ghost. Was not my purpose- “-stay to keep Hemlock company. The hollow in the tree, my retreat. Sanctuary.”
Though the difficult geography between Arras and The Ghost Factory has fixed a soreness into your fingers and feet, you cannot rest. The moment you duck under the iron portcullis, like a fanged mouth with upper teeth of iron, which opens wide on the face of the ledge, it crashes. You and your Blue Lady will not leave the same way you entered.
The factory is staffed largely by trained dog slaves. These dogs carry buckets in their jaws. Buckets made of driftwood, filled with columbine water.
The easiest way to avoid detection is for both you and Lady to each find and carry a bucket. Search the cold basalt brick ovens near the entrance, there are usually a few buckets within. Carrying buckets will fool the slave-dogs, and they won’t alert the wood golems that patrol the corridors.
Although difficult, sneaking is not impossible. The dogs are deaf, but the white mist-light of the alcoveless halls and chambers offers little shade. If you purchased Occultation Paint from the chemist in Middlemoss, now would be a good time to use it.
You have the opportunity to “speak” with a variety of ghosts in the deeply-dug factory chambers.
| Sir Diomete This Knight fell in a duel beneath Surveillance’s Triumph. He warns you, should you ever find yourself in his position: don’t let your foe slip under that monument’s shadow. | A Sister with a Plea “Please retrieve and bury my brother’s skull. It is hidden behind a bookshelf in The Temple of Lady Horsehair.” | Mithy the Thief If you treat him kindly, he will tell you where to find a Wooden Dagger in the factory’s Shriving Fourches. |
|---|---|---|
| Wooden Dagger This dagger was the last carving of a blind artist, and varnished in his albino tears. It is useless in a physical fight, easily shattered. Yet the one who carries it may discern more in the words of men. |
Though no sound you have produced has drawn a reaction from the workers, it is still in a whisper that your Blue Lady speaks.
“The school of my father was a garden. I slept on a silk mat, beneath a trellis of woven wisteria, and learned letters, and the texture of diatomaceous earth, and the weird songs of nightbirds. “My father never taught me the service a mancer exacts from a ghost. “What service is there in this place? “My cracked cup knight, do you hear that noise like dry sticks snapping? It is a golem, I think. “I would like to hear the voice of Hemlock. The ghost in the pages of the dry redwood hollow. She had seen all those travelers and newcomers – perhaps in old decades – whose footsteps beat the cobblestones of Middlemoss far through the stone over our heads.”
Ghost factories sort the souls they acquire into castes.
| Tragic Monarchs These icons choke the inlet silos with their density and shake the stones with their howling. Once shrived and reduced, they are easily digested. | Talkative Ghosts Must be left a long, long time to mature into silence. |
|---|---|
| Cold Ghosts Such spirits are of much interest to mancers, but hard to find, and harder to bend. | The Elderly These are of no value individually. They must be gathered into a wrinkling mass to be of use in necromancy. |
You should not let your mind stray from the careful watching of these golems and dogs. Yet you cannot but wonder if some Voice you heard in life is trapped in one of these columbine buckets. It may be that your Lord- no. The Weiges ruddied their daggers with his life, it is certain. But they would have observed the etiquette of body-cutting. Your lord is buried under an epitaph. You will be fortunate to lay under a Road stone yourself, when you die finally and for ever. You hoped once to see the end of The Road of Graves, before That Particular Day. That was before you served your Lord, before the Blue Lady walking quietly with you. You do not need the old wish now. Think no more of it, call this factory of ghosts an ‘end’.
The Dome of the Written Stump
Eggshell-colored mist spreads eggshell-colored light beneath a hemisphere of stucco roof. The roof displays one sprawling profile of a cicada, with its lipstick-colored eye, and its wing like a guillotine.
The floor is dust, and pocked with a thousand holes. In each hole is a bucket of columbine water. From a monolithic stump against the curving wall, wide roots writhe across the floor, around every hole. The roots are elevated paths; the slave hounds only walk on the roots. The floor dust is undisturbed, except for one set of tiny footprints, webbed, in a pattern like shuffling, with a sideways step between each forward step.
You feel your Lady’s grip tighten on your elbow. She has stopped along a root, staring at a hollow in the floor, at a bucket.
You recognize the Voice of the ghost.
“Sir knight, I knew you would shield this soft moon of a Lady from harm, and cross much country along The Road of Graves. Such joy that you come so far, beyond the reach of your hunters. But death has stolen my social grace. “It is Magpie. “I was drawn to the censer of a mancer, and bottled with the smoke. From that greyness I- I woke. Here. “Do you hear me? Through all these sad voices? I cannot remember my own voice, not what it is like to touch. “If you hear me, please, take a handful of the dust from the floor, and drip it in my water. “I want oblivion.”
You have the option to free Magpie from conscience’s burden.
Follow the roots, with your Lady whispering the name ‘Hemlock’, and you will eventually find the driftwood bucket you seek.
Hemlock will not be as you expect.
“Oh settle down my wan friends! Settle down you there, Sedura. Quit hissing in my face. Stop jumping, Loag. Can’t you see that the high ledge is beyond reach? Settle, settle, settle on your haunches! “Why all this sudden stir? Is it The Overseer? I feel not his change in the air of our playroom. “Laurentia, please. Why should any of us want to endure your clarinet again? We have heard your yowling glissando, my dear. Heard it, and heard it, and heard it. “My friends, you are foaming sea under fleecy clouds, purblind froth. Our playroom is-”
The Voice submerges into silence - only to swell again, like the returning echo of a stone tossed down a metal silo.
“No Overseer, no Overseer. There’s a texture in our space, however, which is unusual. Is someone there? I can’t hear over this cacophony. Quiet down, friends, please! “It is difficult, but I can orient your shapes and your sounds and your smells. “There you are. “Who are you? You have a… smell, which is like someone I… spoke with? Once. The pungent musk of a huge fallen trunk. I wonder if I have seen you pass through the town far, far, far above. Do I remember you? “No, no, no, I can’t remember, I can’t remember anyone in this noise. “You have no anchor, no fixed place in the white ocean.”
In the second silent lull your Blue Lady asks the ghost of Hemlock how she came to the factory.
“New friends are leashed first, then led (or dragged) into our playroom. It is so crowded now. “Some are brought by masters. Others, lured by the fake Road stones, the sunny counterfeit epitaphs, in rings around the chimneys. Caught, sucked, then they are shorn. Spayed and neutered. Domesticated. “Desire, Motive, Energy; The Overseer’s factory strips it all off. He cures us, cures us slowly in this playroom. “We stop being, stop being separate buckets, become the hissing white ocean. “Only then is the foam within ready for sale.”
The V**oice softens to a tremble, still enormous in the silent Dome of the Written Stump.
“Oh please, let the hiss and motion stop! “Friends, friends, friends - calm yourselves. It is only some stranger spirits in our room. They are new, they are still too colorful for you, I know. “The Overseer would bring his dreadful silence if he came now. “But I am still too much myself to have my driftwood bucket of columbine water sold. “Who are you two?”
Your Blue Lady starts to ask Hemlock about Middlemoss, but the Voice cuts your Lady off.
“After life, it is always like I am standing on a thin, rusted scaffold, over a vast cliff, under a new moon. “The scaffold is so, so, so very rusty. Under numb toes it is ever creaking and groaning. “Starlight, small and cold, glares over a desolate landscape far below. Sharp rocks, and the sawtoothed stump of ill-cut trees. “The only warm place is the feline foam. “The ocean. “Hissing it beckons, and drowns the voices of the living.”
Your Lady looks at you. She shakes her head sadly.
As you turn to go, however, Hemlock burst forth, hurried, frightened.
“He comes. He comes! “The Overseer is coming down the hall. “Can you see how the white foam settles? Can you see how the hairs, the white hairs, of our spines stands on end? “Come my friends, huddle now. Huddle. Settle into our stone pockets. Lay low on your bellies. “Hide, my friends, my clowder. “The death-spider comes clicking.”
Nightlichen - “The Overseer”
A skull of chromatic absinth judders low over the sweeping stone floors. It’s permanent grin is dyed in ink, its two sockets smile bright with blacklight joy. This skull sits on a circle of jade, a tray, which is attached to eight pumping, syncopated, articulated spider legs. the joints are solid steel, but the struts of each leg are all cut from the scapula of a once-sacred cow.
When The Overseer appears, do not be tempted by his small stature into a fight. The Overseer is a lich. You cannot kill him; like The Stillbreather you may one day meet, his death is hidden in a sapphire hen’s egg, in a coffin which is elsewhere. Your only option is to flee.
There are several openings back to the outer world, but only one real option. The gorge gate is locked, the main door (hidden in Twice Measured Tohmb) is guarded by dog-head statues, and the ghost chimneys are slickened with candle wax.
That leaves The Bracken Flue.
To reach The Flue you’ll need to navigate the factory without stopping to fight wood golems more than twice. Otherwise The Overseer will catch you. The optimum path to The Flue from The Dome of the Written Stump is: left, left, right, up, straight, down, right, straight.
The second ‘act’ of this chase begins once you reach the scrollwork lintel of The Flue. (At that point the lich-spider will be a hundred feet behind, no matter how brisk or tardy was your arrival. If he gets within twenty feet, he can catch you in a web of indecision; paralyzed, you will die.)
The Bracken Flue is a drainage tunnel up which broken, defective ghosts are expelled from The Factory. It’s a slanted causeway, with walls veined by the sharp roots of fossilized trees, and a floor of ash.
The Flue is twisting but monodirectional, no need to worry about turns. You will need to worry about the shrieking of one soul currently crawling in the shaft with you. It rises slowly, like the lowing of a cow from some heavy chest chamber. When you hear this, you must think of some better place. The Road. Or the sky. You must drown out the shrieking in your thoughts.
Take care of the roots too; they are sharp and hard enough to cut steel plate.
If you keep ahead of the lich and aren’t caught by roots or shrieking madness, you’ll come to the last obstacle: a chasm, and the choice of three bridges.
| Bridge of Stone Haunted. A ghost latches onto your back. | Bridge of Snow Frostbitten. The toll is your toes. | Bridge of Graveclothes Guilt. Only you and the necromancer-gods know what you tread on, but that is enough. |
|---|
Choose swiftly, or perish.
a”Be still a moment. Listen…
“The taptaptap of those eight legs against the stone has ceased. Over the bridge we have pushed through and beyond its web. “The airs tastes like the first flush of Spring. Do you see the spreading silver light beyond our lamp? I feel a shudder even still, for the fingers of these roots seem to stretch desperately in the light. “My Cracked Cup Knight, thank you. The weight on my bones which drew me down into that place was fool’s gravity. I dreamed- “Oh! What a gentle sight.”
Like the bottom of a dry well, yet sweet with the smell of forest undergrowth, the small basin, no larger than the grinding room of a tower mill, embraces you in round walls of unworked, fine-grain, blue-grey limestone – all of it striated with lumpy ribs of banded calcite. The wall soar all the way to the night sky above. Moonlight dribbles down the opening, sparkling where it slides over microscopic crystals in the stone.
If there is matter left when a ghost disintegrates, like ash, then then the factory’s ash has here gathered. The ground is a carpet of fuzzy, silver, almost luminous moss.
Against the limestone wall across from you is a statue. A luthier, thin, his bare chest showing each of his stone ribs, mirrors with his spine the curve of a budding fiddle, as he nurtures it with his rasp. One strong beam of moonlight washes the head and relaxed shoulders of the musician-maker.
But what is that other translucent which shimmers now before the statue? You know; it is Her. Your Lady’s daughter. Her ghost. Mark clear the furnace pyre that is this daughter’s look, you cracked servant of her mother. No more than does hissing fire forgives the water which it boils, shall this daughter forgive her mother. Forgive for her death. Forgive for her life. The face of this daughter-ghost seems to ask your Blue Lady: would the mother love her daughter, though she is a ghost, now that there are no others to love? No sons? Or would the mother exorcise the daughter even now? This daughter will never allow it.
Though you know this basin must open to the heath around Middlemoss’s gorge, the limestone walls are a hundred feet high. Smooth rock, few handholds.
Fortunately, flanking the statue, two other tunnels lead from the basin.
The right tunnel goes for a hundred narrow, twisting feet. It ends in a dead-end ledge overlooking a fissure. There is a Beaker-bound Tree sitting on the ledge.
Beaker-bound Tree The entirety of this dwarf juniper’s root system is trapped within a narrow-mouthed glass flask of water. Aside from a pale scar of deadwood on its lower trunk, the tree appears nonetheless healthy.
The left tunnel leads back to town. After miles of shallow tunnel, passing through several layers of historic earth, the tunnels ends at a secret door behind the portrait of Lord Lerch at Painted Fingers’ Boarding House.
Your Lady looks through the ground at her feet, holding her lips together. You wonder now if she saw the ghost before it vanished. You wonder too what were those ruminations of yours, when you beheld the slain daughter. How much of those impression was the cracked knight’s? How much, the ghost’s?