The Boy in the City of the Dead Page 2

  But I was sure: this was grace. Stunning, wonderful grace. Out of the kindness of their hearts, someone had given me back what I had meaninglessly cast away. Without any evidence, I believed beyond any doubt that this was a warm and blissful gift.

  “It’s lovely, isn’t it, Will? My darling little boy...” The voice was Mary’s.

  William. Will for short. That was my name.

  It was the name the three had given me.

  My name before dying had been swallowed by the mud. Now, this was my name. This tiny body was my body. The body and name that had felt like they belonged to someone else seemed suddenly to fit, as if this was how I’d always been.

  “Ah... Ah...” I tried to speak, and my voice filled with tears. I didn’t care. I forced my immature vocal cords to make noise.

  I told myself... This time, I was going to do it right.

  As Mary cradled me in her arms, I burned with determination. Nothing made any sense at all to me yet. I didn’t know what kind of world this was, or why I had been born here. But I had time enough to understand those things.

  My knowledge was sparse and I had no skills, but I had all the time I needed to learn. I’d had enough of stagnating, of giving in and hugging my own knees. I didn’t care if I failed. I didn’t care if I bumbled. I didn’t care how much muck I’d have to wade through.

  This time... This time, I was going to live. I was going to live in this world! I cried out my resolve with the wail of a newborn child.

  There was an angel before my eyes.

  He was a young boy, his chestnut-brown hair slightly messy, his eyes a deep blue-green, and his face a healthy color.

  “So this is me.”

  I had found an old hand mirror on a tool shelf in a corner of the temple. Eager for the chance to observe my own appearance, I stretched up and grabbed it with both hands. I found that I was cuter than I expected.

  Upon further thought, it probably shouldn’t have been surprising that I was cuter than most people, given that I was a kid. Everyone is 100% cuter during their childhood years. Even tough-looking bearded men are adorable little things when you look through their childhood photo albums.

  “Yeah...” I gently put the mirror back. I clenched my hand, then opened it. Clenched it again, then opened it.

  A tiny, soft, puffy hand. My hand.

  A year and some months had passed.

  To my surprise, after the day I accepted my current name and body as my own, the feeling that my body wasn’t working as it should quickly resolved itself. Memories of how to control my body from before my death faded. Now, it was these tiny limbs that I recognized as mine. My mind and body were operating in unison.

  It hadn’t taken me long to learn to totter about, and I was even able to speak, albeit in a faltering manner. I had devoted the past year to practicing walking constantly, and learning words and their pronunciations by talking to Mary and the others.

  I still fell flat on my face from time to time, though. Probably because of how large my head was in proportion to my tiny body. It might also have had something to do with my field of view, sense of balance, and muscles being undeveloped. As an additional complaint, I still had a low threshold of pain. As you might imagine, I cried my eyes out every time I fell over.

  But I was making progress, little by little. Progress expected of a toddler, perhaps, but progress was progress all the same. I had at least grown from the phase of crawling and crying to someone who could have attended kindergarten or nursery school. So, I thought it was time to try my hand at the next challenge.

  I had decided to live in this world. I wanted a body I could feel proud of, and I wanted to study and learn, one thing at a time. And so, first on the list was...

  ◆

  “Hmm, you say you want to learn to read?”

  We were in one of the many smaller rooms that lay deep within the temple. It featured stonework walls, a small wooden chair and writing desk, and even a comfy-looking bed set into an alcove in the wall.

  A crotchety old man with piercing eyes and a hooked nose was before me, arms crossed and stroking his jaw. His vaporous body, covered by a loose robe, was half-transparent and had no substance to it. I guess you’d call him a specter? A spirit, as they say. Y’know, a ghost.

  “Yeah. Please, Gus.” His name was Augustus, technically, but Mary and everyone else shortened it.

  At the moment, I was asking him to teach me how to read. To be honest, there were plenty of more important things I wanted to ask him about. This world, for instance, or my strange memories.

  But any question a young child like myself could have posed would inevitably have been met with an equally primitive response, using a crude vocabulary. Would anyone launch into an explanation of astronomy, physics, and the theory of nuclear fusion after a child asked, “Why does the sun shine?” Not usually. Your answer would be something like, “Mister Sun is doing his best to give us all light and keep us warm.”

  I had actually tried asking them a few quick questions about the world, but they all got brushed off. It was still too early for those questions. That talk would have to come after I built up a certain amount of academic knowledge, and after I managed to get the others to see me as someone who could hold a conversation at that level.

  “Hmm, reading. Reading. I’ll be blunt. If it doesn’t earn me coin, I’m not a bit interested. You’re too young for it anyway, kid.”

  “But I wanna understand.”

  “Too young. Shoo, shoo.” He waved a hand at me lazily.

  Unlike Mary the mummy, who looked after me at every opportunity, and Blood the skeleton, who spent plenty of time with me, the ghost called Gus treated me with indifference. He thought nothing of snubbing me, and if I asked anything of him, he would often irritably turn me down.

  He was obstinate and sometimes arrogant, and usually hard to approach. But for all his flaws, there was no doubt in my mind that he was the most intelligent of the three. From his diction to his turns of phrase, I sensed that he was quite educated.

  “But I wanna understand.”

  “I heard you the first time.”

  “Come on! I wanna understand! Pleeeeease!” I pitched a fit, like the child I was. When was the last time I had pleaded with a parental figure like this? For old times’ sake, I started having a little fun with it. “Please! Please, please, please! Come on, Gus! Pretty, pretty please?!” I felt like such a kid. The age of my body was probably holding back my mental state. That made sense, come to think of it. My brain was a child’s, too. But then, why did my consciousness and perception feel so adult?

  Sensing that too much deep thought about this would leave me lost in the maze comprised by my brain, mind, and soul, I decided not to go into that, and just whine some more instead.

  “By the gods! All right, all right, fine!” After muttering something about kids, Gus sighed and looked at me. “You’re a real piece of work. So you want to learn to read?”

  “Yeah.” I didn’t really understand this world’s writing.

  “Hmmm... Well, then, first things first...” Gus extended a hand toward the bookshelf against the wall, and a single book floated toward him.

  Psychokinesis? Well, ghosts were a thing, so sure, why not. The paranormal had completely ceased to surprise me recently.

  “You’d better learn the letters.” He had opened the book to a list of letters which resembled an alphabet. But—

  “No, those are okay.”

  “Okay? What’s okay?”

  “I can read those already.” I understood this part. I had been living in this temple for more than a year now, surrounded by reliefs, looking at the pictures and text engraved in them as I listened to everyone talk.

  Comparing the frequency of the different sounds in speech to the frequency of the letters in the texts had given me a basic understanding. The pronunciation of “E” was the most frequent, followed by “A” and “T,” so I started with those and the rest quickly followed.

&nb
sp; So, I could already read these.

  “Excuse me?” Gus gawked at me.

  “I can already read them.”

  “What’s this say?”

  “It says, ‘The vibrant petals of a fragrant flower, carried on the wind. The world, like my life, is ever-changing.’ Right?”

  Easy-peasy.

  “Did Blood or Mary teach you that?”

  “No. I listened to everyone talking, looked at the letters, and figured it out myself.” Life in the temple was not very stimulating, and there was a limit to how much moving around my juvenile body could handle. I had endless time to think, so I had been spending it on this, using it like a puzzle to stave off boredom.

  “Will...” For a while, Gus seemed to be deep in thought, and then he directed a question at me in a serious tone. “What is it that you’re trying to understand, then?”

  “The nice-looking complicated ones on the gods and stuff.”

  From what I’d deciphered from the inscriptions in various parts of the temple, this world’s letters were an alphabet of phonograms. However, on the gods’ reliefs and other, similar places, complex pictographic characters suddenly appeared. Those were the ones I didn’t understand. What were they, and how was I supposed to read them? Or were they simply there for decoration?

  “Ah, the Words of Creation. They’re used in the ancient magics.”

  “Creation... Magic...” Now we’re talking creation and magic, huh.

  “Hmm. Where do I begin...”

  “The beginning,” I replied.

  Too much was better than too little. I was blessed with a pretty good memory. And anyway, if I couldn’t remember everything, I could just ask again, as many times as I needed.

  “Get comfortable, then. This is going to take a while. We start long, long ago, longer than you can imagine, when the world was just beginning. Back then, the world was still a thick, boiling pot of chaos, where the Great Mana swirled with heat, and was unable to hold a form.”

  I didn’t expect him to begin with the Creation.

  “We’re... We’re starting there?”

  “We’re starting there.” He was dead serious.

  “In the chaos, the First God appeared from a place known to no one, and God said, ‘Let there be earth,’ and mana solidified at God’s feet, and became the earth, and mana thinned above God’s head, and became the skies. And so the heavens and the earth were parted.

  “We call this God simply ‘the Creator’ or ‘the Progenitor,’ because a true name was never passed down.”

  I felt what I’d heard bore a certain resemblance to the creation narratives of Christianity and Greek mythology.

  “After this, the Creator spoke the Words and engraved the Signs, made the sun and the moon, split day from night, and gathered water to separate the oceans and the earth.

  “Fire was born, wind was born, trees were born. The gods were born, and people and animals were born.

  “And when the Creator had made the world, and was satisfied of its beauty, he said to himself, without thinking, that it was ‘good.’ But to make something ‘good’ is also to make something else ‘evil,’ just as solidifying the ground created the heavens.

  “And so it was that malice and the evil gods were born. The Creator tried to take back his word, but not even the gods can return a word to the mouth that uttered it.

  “The evil gods that were born into the world killed the Creator, and so life and death were born. And after that began the age of many gods and many legends.” Gus took a brief pause.

  “The words and signs used in this creation story are the Words of Creation,” he finished.

  Ah, so that was how it all linked up.

  “So they’re the words that made the world?”

  “That’s right. These Words and Signs... Well, let’s call them letters. Words and letters have power.”

  Power. Power, huh?

  “What can they do?”

  “Hmm, let me see...” Gus’s finger danced in the air. A mysterious phosphorescence dwelt in his fingertip and left behind a trail as it moved, drawing two flowing and complex pictographs in midair. His finger slowed, and carefully, deliberately, added the second symbol’s final dot.

  “Whoa!” I scrambled backwards. The letters drawn in midair had suddenly become a leaping flame that burned a brilliant red. The flame hung in midair, and I could feel its heat. It was real fire.

  “Enough for a demonstration, I hope?” Gus muttered one or two melodic, rhythmic verses under his breath. The burning flame vanished entirely, as if it had all been nothing but an illusion.

  I stared, enchanted.

  It was magic. Not some trick! Real magic. This world had magic in it.

  Amazing. Amazing. I was genuinely excited by what I had just been shown.

  You might ask what’s the big deal after ghosts, mummies, and reanimated skeletons, but I would argue that a proper magic system is an entirely different thing than horror and supernatural elements.

  “Was that clear to you? Drawing the pictographs for Ignis defines fire to exist in that place, and the air will instantly burst into flame. If you speak the Word of Erasure for extinguishing fire, the flames will vanish.

  “This is what I mean by the Words of Creation, and what is most commonly referred to as magic.”

  What came to mind then was not “magic” as I knew it from computer games, but from your more old-fashioned fantasy novels. Not simply another skill to be casually fired off if you had enough points to expend, but one of the world’s most ancient secrets, never to be handled without careful forethought.

  That was the atmosphere this hook-nosed old ghost evoked in this dimly lit stone room as he spoke with pride about mysterious powers.

  “It’s important to understand that the Words of Creation are inconvenient things. Their power is a hindrance to both writing and speech. It was the Creator’s own use of the Words that led to the evil gods which took the Creator’s life.”

  Yeah, no kidding. Even taking notes would be a risky endeavor if the paper could burn up in an instant just by writing “fire.” That would be inconvenient in the extreme, and would have to be an obstruction to the advance of civilization. It would even have to get in the way of ordinary people’s daily lives.

  “In consideration of this, the one-eyed god of knowledge, Enlight, selected twenty consonants and five vowels. In order that the Words of Creation should not exert their power, he simplified the characters and their pronunciations, and created the corrupted language we call the Common Tongue.”

  Got it. To draw an analogy with Japanese, the Words of Creation would be the complex kanji characters. Writing the kanji carelessly was dangerous, and could cause fire to erupt and things to explode. To avoid this, a wise god simplified the characters, and made the other Japanese character set: the kana, which represent sounds.

  There was a difference in that the Common Tongue used phonemic characters, not syllabic ones. It was more like an alphabet than the kana, really.

  In any case, I now understood that those characters were not from an entirely different language family, and had not just been thrown in for symbolic purposes. They belonged to the same language, similar to the way Japanese was a mix of kanji and kana.

  “What you were reading was the Common Tongue, and what you could not read were the Words of Creation, written in the Signs of the gods, and used for the great magics of ancient times. The ones engraved around the temple were written so as not to activate. Some struck through, others intentionally mistaken in places, and yet others incorporated into elaborate designs.”

  I see. If corrupting the symbols prevented them from activating, then it made sense that you could engrave them in a form just wrong enough to still be able to identify the original.

  I wondered why they needed to go so far to record the Words of Creation, but the more I listened, the more I felt like I understood.

  “The Words of Creation bring a man closer to God than the Common Tongue
, you see. It stands to reason that the Words should be engraved in a temple for revering God and praying to God. Do you understand this?”

  “Yeah, I get it.” I nodded repeatedly. It made perfect sense.

  “Hmm. All right, Will, how about this. Do you know why the Words carry such power to begin with?” Gus posed the question with a grin on his face.

  Uh, so what Gus was trying to make me think about here was...

  “So like... why we think a stool is a stool, right?” I asked. “Hmm...” I had the feeling I’d read about it somewhere. It was something I had heard even in my previous world, in a place where they had talked about perceptions, representations, and concepts.

  Basically, when we look at a four-legged wooden stool, no matter what color it is, or what wood it’s made of, we think, “This is a stool.” We think that even about stools that aren’t, on the whole, identical. Inside our heads, we categorize it by sticking a “stool” label on it.

  We don’t normally perceive it as “four legs and a board,” nor do we think “table,” even though a table has four legs and a board. Moreover, if we see a person sitting on a stool, we don’t think “a combination of wood and a human.” We perceive it as “a stool and a human.”

  Of course, it is possible to see the stool as “four legs and a board” instead, if we deliberately try to look at it differently, or even as “a mass of wood fibers.” We’re also capable of distinguishing “this stool” and “that stool,” telling apart different things in the same category.

  In any case, what it boils down to is that we affix these labels we call “words” to things. That lets us categorize this chaotic world, conceptualize it, and break it into parts to make perception easier. It wouldn’t be possible for us to survive without that ability.

  Language is the power that separates the world from indistinct chaos, just as it was in the creation myth I’d just heard.

  It was time for me to sum up my rambling thoughts.

  “It’s because Words are what separate parts of the world and set out the way it is,” I said.

  Gus seemed greatly surprised by my answer. His eyes were opened wide, and his mouth flapped open and closed.