Safi nodded before beginning to work with her group to herd the ghosts away.
We, too, needed to hurry.
More ghouls ventured in to disturb us as we continued to move from chamber to chamber, hauling out as many ghosts as we could. But the jinn made sure they didn’t come near the ghosts, allowing us to focus on our task of gathering them. Our greatest resistance came from the ghosts themselves. We were moving so slowly due to our efforts to convince even the most stubborn ghosts we were here to help them that I feared we might not even be finished by the time the rest of the ghouls returned. We had to speed up, which—regrettably—meant that those who required persuasion and hesitated at risks started getting left behind.
After emptying the upper levels, we began moving further down. These ghosts, as was to be expected, were ten times more difficult to get through to. Of all the pools, we only managed to salvage twelve ghosts. This number only dwindled further the lower we sank until we were plunged into black. I was sure we had reached the very bottom floor. The jinn had to spark up fires in their palms to give us light.
“Would be a miracle if we rescued a single person from here,” Lucas murmured. His face looked strained as his eyes roamed the deathly-still ponds.
As I looked at my uncle, I took a moment to appreciate the fact that he’d been willing to come down here to help us. After all those years of hell, he shouldn’t have wanted to come within a thousand miles of here.
Then, as the jinn began to mutter about our job being done, a thought struck me. “Where is The Necropolis?”
Lucas’s eyes widened. “Uh… further down still, I guess.”
“You have never seen the place.”
Lucas shook his head, shuddering slightly.
“How do we know it even exists?” I asked.
“It exists,” Marcilla spoke up, half scoffing. “Where else would the ghouls throw out the motionless ghosts?”
I paused, running my tongue over my lower lip.
“What are you thinking?” Aisha asked, scrutinizing my face as she leaned on her bloodied sword.
“I’m thinking that we’re here now, and will likely—and hopefully—never be here again… I would like to see The Necropolis for myself.” If not now, I’d wonder for the rest of my life what it really was.
“Are you serious?” Chantel gasped.
I nodded grimly.
“I’ll come with you,” Aisha offered.
“I’ll come, too,” Horatio blurted, a little too quickly after Aisha. They slanted glances at each other at the same time, before meeting each other’s gaze and averting their attention awkwardly.
“And I… will not come with you this time,” Lucas said, grimacing. I certainly could not blame him for having drawn the line here.
To my surprise, Nolan did put himself forward, much to his wife’s chagrin.
When we had no more offers after his, I cleared my throat. “All right… Let’s do this.”
Ben
We sank through the floor—deeper than we’d ever sunk before—and passed through dozens of feet of solid rock. When we finally emerged on the other side, a faint moaning sound met my ears, like high wind against a loose window. Sprawling beneath us was a most bizarre sight. I had been expecting perhaps another chamber—an enormous one to house all the faded ghosts. Instead what I saw was a sea of graves spread out over rolling hills. Strangely, the ground was soil rather than the stone I’d been accustomed to in this place, and gaping dirt holes had been dug in front of each gravestone, none of them covered over. The ceiling was jagged with rocks, and now that I looked up at it, I realized the source of the pale blue light cast down over the landscape. Hordes of swarming glow worms. At least, I assumed they were glow worms. They were some type of insect and their bodies were luminous.
“Whoa,” Nolan breathed.
We lowered closer to the gravestones. They were all black and roughly cut, as if no thought had been put into them other than to mark where one grave ended and another started. And the holes themselves… I crept closer still and soon realized that they were not empty. They contained ghosts. I had not been able to spot them from afar, because they were cast in shadow; their forms no longer possessed even the slightest bit of aura. They were as dark as the soil that surrounded them.
So this is what a dead ghost looks like. I was still trying to wrap my mind around the notion when Horatio whispered, “What is that sound?”
Leaving the edge of the grave we had been staring down into, we rose up again, straining to make out where the noise was coming from. It sounded like it was drifting from the other side of the hills. We began flying toward it and the closer we got, the more I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was not howling wind—where would wind come from anyway in this place, genius?
No. It sounded more like… some kind of ghastly singing. And it was getting louder.
Aisha stopped short and pointed to a cluster of gravestones to our far right.