Haunted Legends by Ellen Datlow, Nick Mamatas Read Free Book Online Page B

but all those people, all those animals . . .” Terry sighs. “A few years up here and they just plain ran out of water.”
    She sighs. “The city died.”
    “Pretty much. It’s just tourists now.” He turns to face her, adding, “And pilgrims.”
    Pilgrims, yes. Sara twitches like a horse plagued by a bluefly, desperate to shake it off. Pilgrims who want. “What pilgrims?”
    Instead of answering, Terry leads her out of the covered walkway, into the open. The light is blinding. White sunlight brings every outline into sharp relief—the cornices, domes and turrets, passages and intricately carved screens of red sandstone that set the margins of the emperor’s ghost city. The great courtyard is alarmingly still. Nothing moves; there are none of the expected tourists dutifully shuffling through the shady corridors or striking poses for point-and-shoots or digital cameras; there are no guides for hire struggling to be first, no hopeful little hangers-on smiling their hardest, and no vendors offering food or water; parched as she is, she won’t find either here in the deserted city. The silence is profoundly troubling. She touches his arm. “Terry, where is everybody?”
    “What do you care? The place is ours!” With that laugh, he locks her fingers in his like a child begging her to come out and play. He leads her into another passageway screened by lacy red sandstone. “Look!”
    When Terry finally lets go she steps back, studying the man who brought her to this beautiful, deserted place: familiar face, dark hair blowing, same Terry and yet she is thinking,
Do I know you?
They stand for a moment, looking out through stone fretwork at the surrounding desert.
    “Everything Akbar had is ours!”
    Her mouth is dry; her skin is dry. Even her eyeballs are drying out. “It is,” she says, because he is waiting.
    She doesn’t know what the problem is yet, but there is a problem: Terry’s urgency, the bizarre sense that the stones or something trapped within the stones is speaking. She is listening hard, but Terry’s voice drowns out whatever she thought was speaking. “It says here that Akbar had five thousand concubines.” He points. “I think that’s the
zenana,
where he kept them all, but you know, of all those wives . . .” He considers. Decides it isn’t time yet and doesn’t finish.
    He wants.
    Alarmed, she looks here, there,
What could he want? I give him everything he wants.
She’d like to face the mysterious figure that seems to whisper but doesn’t have a voice. She needs to argue. If she could catch someone following, some helpful soul keeping pace behind one of the intricate sandstone screens, some living human who seems to be telling her things only she can hear, she would feel better. At this point she’d even take an enemy bent on her destruction. A person.
That,
she thinks,
I could handle.
But there is only Terry.
    She puts it to him. “What do you want, Terry?”
    He is running on ahead and doesn’t hear.
    Weird,
she thinks.
This is so weird,
in spite of which she finishes, “Some kind of sacrifice?”
    More. Words float into her head—a warning. They always want more.
    “What?”
    Typical Terry: he deflects questions with information. “See that platform out there in the water? That’s where Akbar sat when he was holding court outdoors. You had to go over the little bridges to talk to him. I bet it was hot!” Studying the book, he points.
    “See those steps? Sometimes he sat up there, on that platform? And played games, using humans as pieces. We’re standing on his game board.” He leads her up the steps. “See the squares?” He turns her so they are side by side like a pair of dancers looking at the courtyard, where Akbar’s design is laid out in stone. On the downbeat, he will spin her out. “He moved people around like living chess pieces.”
    Like the objects of his desires.
    Terry finishes wistfully, “And he always won.”
    What?
It isn’t the wind she hears