A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
W.B. Yeats, “Leda and the Swan”

I was in the village when the darkness came down the hills. The summer sun, still brawny in the evening, was swallowed by a greasy gloom coming from the northeast like a shiny coin falling into dark sludge. A rank aftertaste of rot slid down my throat with every breath. Miasma. The day’s warmth did suddenly thin a bit, but that's not why I shivered.

Someone had opened the gates to the Underworld.

Just a few moments earlier, I’d driven my cart through the village, waving back at the people chatting and smoking in the shade. A pretty short drive—a few hundred people's worth of champa houses, dirt paths, backyards blooming with hardy bushes and cacti, and proud chickens sauntering where they pleased. It carried the not very exciting name of Calabaza simply because everybody grew squash.

A couple of people stopped fixing a fence and came help me exchange my three baskets of produce for gourds of chicha, some alcoholic and some not. Much better than drinking the river water, and the well water was better saved for crops and animals. Sometimes my family would drop by the bar, where nearly every villager gathered every night to listen at the one radio set in Calabaza, but not on a night like this one.

The chickens marched into their coops with their heads held high. Then the dozing dogs got to their feet and slunk inside. Last and most concerning, the birds and bugs all quieted as one. If I was in the habit of being optimistic, I’d say they did so ‘cause they thought night had come early, but I knew better.

Someone had opened the gates to the Underworld.

A heavyset woman squeezed my shoulder. “Go home, Azul. Before your grandmas start worrying.”

I had to smile at that—when I was a child, the villagers were always reminding me to go home and not make my grandmas worry. After all, I was the kid without parents. Oh, I don’t mean that in a melodramatic way—nothing like my parents being lost in some catastrophic mudslide, nothing about me dramatically surviving them. I’d come to live with my grandmas all alone, nothing more. In these lonely hills—a backwater, if you want to be a jerk about it—that was pretty cursedly rare. People sure liked to gossip about me, but just for the sake of the novelty, not ‘cause they meant anything bad. Oh, that’s Azul Mamani, his Dad stayed in the capital and he came alone. No, we never even met his other parent. They didn’t even think I noticed, but I did, child or not. I simply had other stuff to worry about.

“Very well.” I climbed the cart and picked the leads. Ignoring me, Kyrabdel lifted his tail and expelled a brief spray of poop. That can’t be helped. Grandma Alba always said making a mitema learn manners would be almost as hard as teaching me to be patient. “I'll be back before the dancing vipers catch me.”

A few children poked their heads from behind their parents’s backs and blew raspberries at me. There’s no such thing as dancing vipers, a silly tale to keep the li’l ones from straying into the hills at siesta hour and catching a heatstroke. As a child, they’d made me more curious than scared, but at least my grandmas did manage to drill into my thick head the importance of always wearing a hat.

“Some kids fooling around,” an older man said. “With the silver noon and all.”

“Most likely,” I said.

“Do you need any spells?” someone else asked me from the back.

“No, thanks. I’m going straight home.”

Everyone waved and shouted wishes of a safe night for my entire family at me. I wished a pleasant uneventful night back at them as Kyrabdel picked up a trot. Of course he was a male, with the fancy tuft on his head. Generally, mitema males pull carts, being larger and all; females lay eggs and watch over the other livestock. You can also eat them if you're wealthy enough to spare a few, which we weren't, but apparently the meat’s stringy.

By the way, I’m not the one who decided to name our mitemas after adventure book heroes, my cousins were. Mitemas should have names like Blaze and Ashy instead. Otherwise’s just silly.

I drove past the clustering seedpods of the itín trees, down the path swerving left. There the hills rose into the western sky, spotted with espinillos and mossy rocks and tall pale clumps of pampas grass waving their banners in the breeze. At our right the plains went on, browned by endless tufts of ichu grass, all curled up over themselves like mice with their fur sticking up, greened by cacti bristling their arms at the sky. I only had to follow the road, a strip of powdery dust that widened at some points and narrowed at others for no reason. After a while it’d fork out in two: the one going straight up led home, the one bending to the right to Mr Garza’s farm.

Most times I stared into the plains just to see if they’d call to me again. Sometimes they did. Sometimes I just wanted to leave everything behind and run into them, run until they crumbled into endless desert. An infinity of white below, an infinity of blue above. The wind would feel like hot sandpaper: into my nostrils, underneath my eyelids, between my teeth. And then, for the first time in my life, I’d be free.

I knew it didn’t make any sense—the desert was pretty far away. Running on foot I’d collapse in exhaustion long before I reached the sands. And as you’re probably thinking, dying of thirst or whatever couldn’t be pleasant at all. I didn’t think it’d be, but deep down I suspected being free was worth it; dying as the myriad stars rose into eternity over me, being eaten by the sands, drying up until only a bit of leathery skin and strands of hair and marrowless bone remained. Swallowed into eternity.

It really wasn’t worth making my grandmas worry, though.

I thought I'd heard something at my left, almost like a gleamwolf’s low scurrying about. However, that night they'd be hiding in their dugholes like everyone else. Sometimes they'll come after your sheep and mitema chicks, but even a child can chase them away with a few simple spells. A mitema can send a gleamwolf flying into the air with a single kick. Whatever was out and about that night? Much worse.

See, I didn’t really think this was the result of some kids fooling around. Not unless something had gone horribly wrong. I’d been one of those fool kids once, when I was eleven or so. Me and a few other kids from Calabaza. Prying into the Underworld is a really bad idea, so kids will always try it. It's not a big deal. What happens is this: you’ll go far enough to find out it's a bad idea, you’ll see something you really didn’t want to and break the spell in a hurry and run back home as fast as you can, pretending nothing had happened. This scummy gloom had lasted far too long for something like that. The door had to have been open more than just a crack. That meant someone who knew what they did, or didn't care, or both. Either way, a necromancer.

Despite myself, I ended up glancing at the hills more and more often. They still looked so bare to me, and I wasn’t sure if that made things better or worse. ‘Cause I had far better chances of seeing something coming, but also—I had far better chances of seeing anything at all. Maybe this was one of those situations when it’s safer not to know. Though I’ve got to say I’m biased, as I hated the bareness of the hills.

Some five years ago, some asshole whose name I don’t want to remember had gotten a concession from the governor and started digging among the hills. We never really found out if they really hoped to find something of value or if this was some kind of money laundering scheme, and we didn’t care. We still spent all that spring cleaning up the garbage they’d left behind and replanting all the trees and bushes we could before the heatwaves and dust storms and floods ruined our crops.

That’s why so many saplings sprinkled the hills. Trees must take their time to grow, like children do. In nights like this one, though, their skinny trunks looked like helpless sticks about to be blown by a strong wind.

Just as I thought that, the northeastern wind rolled down the hills once more. That rarely happens during the dry season, when the wind blows mainly from the western desert. But then, this clearly wasn’t a normal wind. Not exactly cold, but a musty chill that seeps right into the marrow of your bones. If I’d still harbored any doubts about what was happening, I didn't anymore. Luckily, it happens no much more often than every couple years. The wind would hit you like it blew straight from the charnel house, and the dark would deepen until it seemed you could fall into it, and you'd start hearing noises that made your skin crawl—voices, even. Anybody caught in the open was entitled to ask for shelter anywhere they could—only the worst person in the world would refuse you in a night like that. Or be refused in turn. It'd all be over in half an hour or so, anyway.

If you open the gates of the Underworld for good, the King of the Dying Sun will come to get you. And that’ll be the end of you.

I'd never seen them. I'd never even met someone who claimed to have seen them. All the same, everyone knew who they were. Not a ruler of anything—their title was a leftover from a much older time, from before the Megarchon and the Protectorate. The King of the Dying Sun, my grandmas said, was the reason we weren't all overrun by things from the Underworld we didn't even have names for.

 

“When a mortal who meets their end

Loses their path, loses their way,

Loses the thread of their own fate,

An iron blade shall win them back:

The gates shall open by the hand

Of the King of the Dying Sun.”

 

Kyrabdel made that low sound mitemas make when they find a weird thing.

“I’m sorry, does my singing—fine, humming, displease Your Magnificence? Or maybe it’s that you’re a modern birdie and don’t care for antiquated ditties. What do you like, anyway? Is ‘Down by the Shore’ recent enough for you?”

I hadn’t thought about that ditty in years. Well, at least it distracted me from my unpleasant surroundings.

I wondered, though. Did the King of the Dying Sun ever miss a necromancer or something? Did they ever arrive too late? A single person couldn’t be in two places at once, so if two necromancers ever acted at the same time, one would likely get away.

My hand went to my neck, recognizing my spell necklaces by touch, just to make sure I’d brought some useful ones along. A string that tingled with the energy of fire spells, never my strong point. One of wind spells that could very well be useful. Light spells, handy if the gloom didn't clear. Reinforcing spells, probably not. And nothing else. That's what I get for thinking it’d be a regular boring day and I could just skip to the village without bringing any barrier spells along.

Spells aren’t that different from other skills. Some people are best at working the wood, others at tooling the leather, sewing, baking, and so on. You make up for your own deficiencies with other people’s proficiencies. The world needs all sorts, Grandma Alba always said. It’s the same with spells. Most people have a few kinds they’re better at. So they seal them on clay beads and string those beads on necklaces and trade them for other people’s.

In moments like this, though, I wished the spells I was best at weren't so underwhelming: sharpening stuff and peeling stuff, mostly. It was just me and my birdy out in the open, creaking our steady way home. With all wild animals keeping their chirps and croaks to themselves, I wouldn't be surprised if anybody could hear us coming from the other side of the hills. If only a hot dry wind from the desert would carry that gloom away.

I was looking at Kyrabdel, so I noticed right away. His curved neck turned into an exclamation point; his head swiveled to the left. I followed his eyes. A shape of nearly translucent silver flitted shakily across the hills. A ghost.

My neck felt damp. That wasn't what had darkened the sky. There was something more out there.

As if summoned by my thoughts, sickly yellow lights lit up all over the hills, like lamps seen through the fog. Some were pretty close to the path. A high-pitched whine rose through the gloom. It sounded as if a dog and a violin were being murdered at once. Even worse, it seemed to come from behind us, though I couldn’t see anything when I turned back despite myself. Kyrabdel leaped, nearly bolting out, but I tugged at the leads.

Mitemas are too strong to be scared of regular animals, or even regular things. Once I’d seen our other male try to charge an incoming train rather than getting off the tracks.

“Don't panic! We'll be home soon. My grandmas will know what to do.” I leaned over and patted his back with a sweaty hand. He seemed to calm some. More than myself, at any rate.

Though a mitema wouldn’t know, our farmhold was surrounded by a bespelled fence and we had a small arsenal's worth of spell beads. My family would be all right, at least. What worried me was something else. If there was a ghost in the hills, then somebody had died. No, that's not quite right. Somebody had been murdered, so that their death could tear the gates open. Necromancers will do that so they can let—things into our world. To kill for them, mostly. That’s what those things do best. They just like killing. And if they find a human soul, even better, ‘cause they can keep tearing into it forever. The last thing I wanted to think of in a night like that one was an endless circle of fangs and claws clamping on you even after there’s nothing left. Naturally, the less I wanted to think about it, the less I could push it out of my mind.

The ghost’s silver shine was harder to make out now, but I could still see them hurrying south, not quite toward the village. Of course they wouldn’t know about Calabaza. They only wanted to escape from something, didn’t they?

Nobody was chasing me, at least not yet. I could take this chance to race home. After all, none of this was my business.

That was another person, though. All alone in this darkness with those things.

“I'm sorry, Kyrabdel.” I crawled on his back, loosening his harness from the leads. Emboldened, he gave a little jump that almost made me slip to the ground; I held his harness tight and he lowered his head in acquiescence.

I pulled Kyrabdel's head toward the hills. I had to touch my heel to his flanks a couple of times before he made up his mind to run on that direction.

“Don’t worry, boy.” I stroked his neck fluff. “We’ll be home in no time.”

I almost convinced myself, too.