Ghostlight (The Reflected City Book 1) by Rabia Gale (i can read with my eyes shut TXT) 📗

drifted closer, wondering what manner of fish existed in the Shadow Lands.

The fisherman reached out and held the line several inches above the writhing creature. The fish had silver scales tinged with rainbow colors, but what drew Arabella’s attention was the membranous frill at its tail and fins and around its neck.

That, and its eyes, round specks of startling blue, as if it bore chips of turquoise in its head.

“What sort of fish is it?” she whispered to the fisherman. In profile he looked quite normal, a sturdy man with weathered skin and ruddy cheeks and the shadow of a beard on his cheeks and chin. His hair curled black under the felt cap and his dark eyebrows were thick and straight.

“Lover’s Last Words,” said the man. Gently, he detached a silver hook from the gasping fish’s mouth and tenderly, he held the creature in one hand. The fish wriggled weakly as the man lowered his lips to kiss it.

And then he tilted his head up, opened his mouth, dropped the fish in, and swallowed it whole.

Arabella skipped back in alarm. She could see his neck ripple, oddly loose, as the fish slithered down it. The front of his yellowed shirt billowed, then settled.

The fisherman licked his lips with a tongue much too long and pink, like a cat’s. He grimaced. “She told her lover she loved him, but her affections were tempered with resentment. Resentment that she was dying while he still lived, resentment because she knew that he was young and would someday find another to love. It leaves a bitter aftertaste.

“It always does.”

Once again he cast his line, the silver hook, unbaited, flying through the air.

“Are you sure,” he said again, craning to look at Arabella, “you have no lover?”

“Very much so,” said Arabella, her mind thoroughly made up by the fisherman’s strange actions.

His dark eyes were curiously blank, the irises swallowed up by the pupils. His mouth was twisted with regret. Words unspoken and words unheard seemed to linger around him. Arabella felt them, a scrape of bitterness, like vinegar splashed across her soul.

“Someday,” said the fisherman with ageless patience, “someday, I’ll taste words that are sweet and joyous, like honey.” And with that he turned his face away and took notice of her no more.

Arabella tip-toed away from the lake and the odd man, rustling through dried grasses. Frost-limned bracken snapped underfoot. Withered flowers of silver and lavender, still clinging to the heather, crumbled as she brushed past them.

Pools of water, like shards of a broken mirror, gleamed here and there in the grass. Arabella stayed away from them, afraid of what she might see.

A path appeared in front of her, packed hard and brown, skimmed with a milky layer of ice. Arabella stepped on it gingerly, but it felt waxy rather than slippery. She quickened her pace towards the building she had seen from the grove of skeletal trees.

Up closer, the structure reminded Arabella of a sadly lopsided layered cake. It had a softened look, the architectural features—balconies, casements, turrets, molding—all running together. The castle, or so she thought it had once been, hadn’t crumbled so much as melted.

Yellow lights flickered in shapeless windows. Arabella climbed up the steps, brown and sticky; through a portico that smelled like yesterday’s baking; and into the open doorway.

She crossed a short stretch of what she hoped was only red carpet and stood at the top of a grand stairway, looking down into an immense ballroom filled with people. The chamber stood open to a cloudy night sky, moon and stars veiled from sight. Men and women, dressed in costumes of all kinds, from straight white robes to hooped skirts to knee-length tunics and sandals crisscrossing over bare legs, swirled around. Their chatter and laughter filled the space with a kind of tiny roar, like the sound of the ocean in a sea shell.

Arabella descended the stairs, each step rounded and hard like fossilized bread. It was covered in velvety green carpeting that on closer inspection resembled furry mold. The balustrade was riddled with holes, and Arabella could’ve sworn she saw something wriggle in one of them. She lifted her skirt and walked carefully, trying not to touch anything.

The floor of the chamber, when she got to it, was spongy, with many dimples and rises. Groups of partygoers stood gossiping and eating around small tables draped in cobweb and piled with bruised fruit, rancid meat, and stale bread. The guests themselves wore tattered clothes, and their substance was worn so thin, Arabella could only see some of them if she squinted.

They ignored her as she passed, each one holding a separate conversation.

“And so I told Gehenna-bai…”

“The rains are late this year…”

“I do so love a tea made from broken hearts steeped in the tears of the disinherited!”

“Has the messenger come? Tell me, has the messenger come?”

The last was spoken by a ghost so transparent and agitated that he was a mere flutter in the air. Arabella could barely make out a middle-aged man with staring eyes and care-lined face, wearing a loin cloth and a tiger’s skin around his shoulders, his body smeared with paint.

For a moment, Arabella’s eyes connected with his. A jolt ran through her. Then the ghost faded away entirely, leaving only a small insistent, “… the messenger come?” before it, too, dwindled into a sigh and was gone.

No one else had noticed. They continued their prattle, in voices that were higher, louder, and faster than before.

Shaken, Arabella followed that inner pull to the shadows on the other side of the ballroom. A cavernous gloom shrouded this end, and the few guests nearby stood with their backs turned towards it.

The darkness exhaled a warm breeze that smelled of wet earth and wild grass. Arabella glanced at the chamber behind her, a place safe in the same way a prison was. It was a roadhouse that everyone was petrified to leave.

She didn’t want to end up like that barely-there ghost who had winked out