Whichwood(62)
“Ms. Fenjoon, will you try to appeal your case?”
“Ms. Fenjoon—Ms. Fenjoon—what do you think your father would say if he were still alive?”
“Ms. Fenjoon—how are you feeling right now?” one lady shouted as she shoved a recorder in Laylee’s face. “Do you feel the judgment was fair?”
—and Laylee latched on to the faces of her friends, unblinking, unwilling to break eye contact, as she felt her heart dismantle in her chest.
“Thank you,” she whispered, the tears falling fast now. “For everything.”
And then it was over. She was shoved into the back of a large, windowless steel carriage, and sat quietly in the corner as the roar of the crowd faded away. This was her life now. And she would learn to accept it.
That is—she would’ve learned to accept it, if the transport she’d been traveling in hadn’t been knocked over at precisely that moment. Laylee was flung suddenly to one side, hitting her head hard against the metal. A painful ringing exploded in her ears, and she winced against the sensation as lights flared behind her eyelids.
What was happening?
She was on her knees now, her hands and legs two useless clumps as she struggled to get back on her feet. Then, just as the ringing began to subside, a sudden, violent roar tore open the silence, and a single hand punched a hole through the wall. Laylee screamed. A second hand punched a second hole. And then the two hands ripped open the wall of the carriage as if it were made of paper.
Laylee scuttled further into the darkness of the overturned carriage, not knowing what was happening to her. Was someone here to help her or hurt her? And who on earth could rip through reinforced sheets of metal?
It was only when she heard the sound of the slow, happy voice that Laylee finally understood: The horrors of the day had, happily, only just begun.
“Laylee?” said the gummy, rolling voice. “Laylee joonam—”
“Baba?” she said softly. “Is that you?”
“Yes, azizam,” said her father’s corpse. “Your maman and I are here to help.”
Reader, they had risen from the dead.
FINALLY, A BIT OF GOOD NEWS
Mordeshoors did not have the power to raise the dead—this was not a magic entrusted to the living. No, only the dead could ask their fellow dead to wake, and today it was at Laylee’s behest that her six spirits had gone and raised an army. As soon as the request left Laylee’s lips, they’d been moved to action immediately, making haste to the castle they knew instinctively to be their new home. These ghosts, you will remember, had made their mordeshoor a promise—they’d vowed to stand by her, no matter the outcome of her trial—and now, having received a direct call to action, they intended to follow through on that promise. There were many tens of thousands of dead bodies planted in Laylee’s backyard, and when the ghosts explained to the quietly snoozing earth that Laylee—their resident (and favorite) mordeshoor—had asked for their help, the corpses were more than happy to interrupt their final rest for a quick adventure.
I cannot emphasize this enough: Mordeshoor magic took great care with the dead.
The rituals Laylee performed for the body carried great benefits underground; so much so that even in their coffins, the bodies were cocooned by a softness they could not see. Dead limbs were carefully bandaged in magical protections that would make their journey through the earth more comfortable. It was true that once the spirit had separated from the body it would move on to the Otherwhere, yes, but there was still an echo—a residue of the spirit seared inside the flesh—and this echo would continue to feel things, even after death. Laylee’s work was so sensitive to this understanding that even for this remnant spirit she would perform a great kindness, embalming the body in a cool, invisible liquid that made the underground passage more tolerable. It was all a gift, yes, yes, a comfort. But Laylee had not performed this magic with any thought of what it would do to the body should it decide to reanimate. She’d never once considered what it would look like to see such a body emerge from the ground.
Perhaps she should have.
Baba had ripped open Laylee’s shackles quite easily, tossing the manacles into the open snow, and helped his daughter climb out of the overturned carriage. And as she stepped into the cold, winnowing winter light, she could see the mass of dead faces staring out at her, tens of thousands of them, each body looking like it’d been dipped in many translucent layers of wax. The effect was such that their figures looked deeply distorted; it was like seeing a person through warped glass, the edges soft where they shouldn’t be, eyes clouded, hair matted, noses indistinguishable from cheeks. The sun was beginning its descent and the light shattered across the horizon, errant strokes of light spearing these milky bodies and illuminating further the oddities that distinguished them from their former selves. There was a thick webbing between their fingers and elbows, their teeth had melted into their lips, their knees bent with a strange, metallic clicking sound, and their fingers were without fingernails, having been pulled by the mordeshoor herself.
Even so, Laylee couldn’t hide a shudder.
She said nothing for a full minute, stunned and horrified and somehow—deeply, deeply moved. She didn’t know what she felt more: pride or terror, and in the end, the only thing she could think to say was this: