Ghoulish Song

Fifteenth Verse

THOUSANDS OF DROWNED BONES fit themselves together to form a single figure, using the song as both muscle and sinew. Claws of carved fishhooks made deep grooves in the wooden floor. Several skulls sat on its wide shoulders, each jaw open, each one singing.

The ghoul paid no mind to its new audience. It went on singing its own discordant version of the flood song. The sound scraped the ceiling and tumbled across the floor. It spread across the bridge to strike sideways at all other Fiddleway music.

There must be several former bridge musicians in there, Shade whispered. They all know the song. They know how to sing it. They know how to twist it.

“Why?” Kaile whispered back. “Why would it want to bring down the Fiddleway?”

Listen, Shade insisted. There’s pain and grief and despair and regret all jumbled into those notes, and now it wants to share that misery. It wants the rest of the bridge to drown with it, and feel all the pain that it can still remember feeling. Can’t you hear it? Listen! The same music can bind or break. This song holds the ghoul together, and it will shake the bridge apart.

Kaile heard it. She did not want to hear it, but she did. The sound of raw and open pain surrounded her.

Not her, the other shadow said. Not Iren. She isn’t in there. She never despaired.

“We could try to drive it away again with ‘The Counting Song,’ ” Kaile suggested, her voice very small. “One for the buns now overdone ...” But this time it was the ghoul’s voice that drove her own away. She faltered and fell silent.

That won’t be enough, Shade whispered.

“Guess not,” Kaile whispered back.

She looked at the flute in her hand. You jumped from here, she thought. Maybe you jumped from this room and this window. But it wasn’t for grief and heartbreak. You made a choice, a horrible choice. Stay and burn, or jump and probably drown—but maybe not. Maybe live. I’m sorry that you didn’t.

The ghoulish thing raised its arms, and it raised up the agony and violence of its voice. Robes of cloth and weeds billowed around and behind it as though underwater and moved by rough currents. Kaile cowered at the sound and shape of it.

“I can’t fight that,” she told Shade, her own voice hushed and hardly there.

You don’t have to, Shade told her. Redirect it. Guide it sideways. Make it a part of everything else.

Kaile took up the flute and played.

It was the same song, always the same song. She played a duet with the ghoul, and tried to make the music match all the sounds that bridge and River made.

Not enough, Shade whispered. Still not enough. Bind or break. Bind us together, or break the whole bridge down.

Kaile felt a shiver. It traveled up from her feet to the tips of her hair.

She poured more of herself and her breath into the music.

She heard the fluid strength of floodwaters roaring, and that became part of the song.

She heard the bridge shift the weight of its stones, and that became part of the song.

She heard strains of music from each and every musician on the Fiddleway, passed through the air and between shadows. She heard Iren’s lost shadow singing nearby. Kaile played alongside all of them.

Separate threads of sound braided together. The River and the city and the bridge in between, the drums and the strings and the voices and the footfalls all became one song—and that song swelled to include the ghoul.

Kaile held the bridge together. The dead thing fell apart.

It screamed, shrieked, and collapsed as thousands of separate bones fell. Skulls and ribs, combs and dice, fishhooks and finger bones clattered at Kaile’s feet and were finally still.

Kaile kept playing. The song held for as long as the flood lasted—which wasn’t very long. The River’s force ebbed, slowed, and finally passed downstream. The danger faded. The bridge stood.

She lowered her flute. Then she raised it again and tried the first few notes of “The Counting Song.” The flute played it willingly, no longer bound to a single piece of music.

“Oh good,” Kaile said, relieved. “I was hoping you’d let me play something else.”

She looked for the shadows, and saw neither one of them. The lantern had already burned out. The only light streamed in through the broken window.

“Shade?” Kaile asked the empty room.

She heard nothing. A long and silent moment passed before Shade whispered back.

I’m here.

“Where?” Kaile asked. “I can’t see you. And where is Iren’s shadow?”

Gone, said Shade. The word sounded like a closed door, or the closing note of a song. It sounded like good-bye. Kaile didn’t ask where the lost shadow had gone.

“I still can’t see you,” she said, looking around.

You have to let me lead sometimes, Shade told her.

Kaile remembered the shiver in her feet, just before the music wove itself together into one solid thing, and she began to understand.

“I will,” she said. Her voice caught in her throat and stumbled a little.

You have to listen, Shade whispered.

“I know.”

And try not to drag me through oily puddles in the road, or over dung piles.

“I’ll try. I will. I promise.”

Good.

Kaile stepped away from the fallen bones. She saw her shadow stretched out across the floor, moving when she moved, tied to her own two feet.

“Thank you,” she said. She tucked lantern and flute into her satchel, and went downstairs.

All of the Fiddleway music-makers stood outside the wreck of a house, waiting for Kaile.

Luce stood with them, leaning casually against a lamppost and grinning wide.

Master Nibbledy stepped forward. He took Kaile’s hand in both of his own.

“Musician,” he said in his high, solemn voice.