King of the Hollow Dark

By Cat Hellisen

Georgina Skyler Carey is not a necromancer. She's the daughter of one.

 

And now she's dead.

 

George has grown up hidden away, trying to live a normal life after her mother was executed for a ghost uprising which killed millions. Every year, the Anti-Necromantic Unit drags her in for testing, while the Empress of Life watches. And every year; nothing.

 

Until she turns twenty, and the wards which were hiding her and binding her are finally erased, and Georgina discovers that she's still not a necromancer, just the immortal body designed to host the soul of an aeons-old goddess.

 

Ousted from her meatsuit and trapped in the afterlife, George is determined to get her body back.

 

It's not going to be that simple. George discovers that the afterlife is nothing like she could have imagined and the only people who might be able to help her have bigger issues to deal with. She's trapped in an afterworld that is slowly being consumed by the Hollow Dark which waits at the end of all things. There's a lot more at stake than one life - the entire realms of life and death will fall to the endless nothing of the Hollow Dark if the King of Death isn't returned to hold his throne. The worlds are crumbling all around her, and George is going to lose more than just her body if she doesn't find the King, and with him, the truth about her creation.

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cat Hellisen
• Release date: Dec 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393692980

Cat Hellisen

Cat Hellisen lives by the sea and writes stories full of the dark little things that don't fit anywhere else.

Book preview

For all the girls who remake themselves

Umma

THE FESTIVAL OF UMMA BEGINS tomorrow. And living in the capital city of Umma-Lukaya means there's no avoiding it. It's the seat of the Empress of Life. Her festival, her city, her worship. For three days and nights the streets will boil with a relentless mess of celebration. There will be parades and feasts and cultural events and wine and beer overflowing like burst sewage pipes. Cattle shows in the provinces, car shows in the city, sweets for the children, and more expensive gifts for the grown-ups. Strangers will kiss strangers, and hand out the tiny pink coconut-covered ummabik which taste like almonds and shreds of paper and dried roses.

We will pretend that constellations are not slowly vanishing from the skies.

At night, the city will burn with fireworks, candles, and strings of electric lights that have been shaped into giant figures of flowers and animals and stars to replace the ones we have almost forgotten. There will be seemingly endless parades of floats—every single one of them a bridge of flowers. There will be prizes for the most elaborate, the most colourful, the most original. And then we will set fire to them all so that the night skies are orange with fire and smoke. For three nights my fat 6" Starwatcher will squat useless in the corner.

This year the festival will be even bigger; it's eighty-five years since Lemnan's Comet last graced the final day of the festival. Even I'm looking forward to that.

Eleven days after the Empress's Gratitude ends the festival, the anniversary of my mother's death will go unmarked. The city will celebrate Praeter instead.

The 19th has a big red circle around it, as though either my dad or I are going to forget that Umma is coming. And although my dad has zero desire to go take part in any of the festivities, he knows it looks odd if we don't. They're still watching us, you see. The people who killed my mother.

A shrill sound cuts through our apartment—the phone ringing. My father sits slumped on the couch, but he doesn't even raise his head at the noise. I leave the kitchen with a sigh and lift the receiver. Hi, I say, because I already know who it's going to be.

George, you need to get to my house, like right now, before I have a nervous breakdown and do something I regret, like strangle my mother with her own headscarf, says Thalema. Her voice is rising into a shriek, very unlike her regular calm self.

Um, no matricide, I tell her. I'll be over in a few. I cradle the phone. Dad?

He’s watching a game of katill on the screen, but I don't think he’s really paying the little men in their white uniforms much attention. He just barely looks up. I think it hits him worse than it does me. He has more memories of her, and I have—well. I clench my fists. I have what I have. I'm going to Thalema's, I'll be back around midnight.

He nods. If he were less caught up in his own misery, he might care that I'm wandering around the city at night, but I've been doing this for so long it seems normal. When I was younger he treated me like a small strange adult who shared his apartment but didn't pay rent. Now that I’m twenty, nothing much has changed. I have a shitty job at the local supermarket, and I give him most of my pay. But that feels like the only thing which has actually changed. We live in a relentless limbo. Neither of us are capable of moving on.

Some days he tries harder at the whole parenting thing, but mostly, his only daughter is less a joy than a depressing reminder of everything he lost. It's probably a relief to him when I go stay over at Thalema’s place.

My only friend is in the main dance for Umma, like she has been every year. Thalema's been dancing in The Birth of Lukaya from the Shroud since she was twelve so she could probably dance it in her sleep, but she's been phoning me in panic once every seven minutes. This is hardly the first time this month I've had to head over to her to try and keep her from cutting up her veils or breaking her foot with a sledgehammer or whatever brilliant plan she's come up with for getting out of her performance. I think the added stress of her college projects are getting to her. I know she has a History of Design exam coming up just after Praeter.

For a moment, I feel intense relief at being a useless failure of a human whose only stress is making sure the shelves are stocked and the floors swept.

I grab my messenger bag, double-check that I’m not scheduled for any shifts (not for a while, because the festivities are so intense that the shop owner basically takes a holiday for the next two weeks, but it’s a habit.), and head into the city evening. I'm happy for any excuse to get out of the apartment. These days before Umma are the worst; just a grinding reminder of everything that's coming. Dad and I paste on our smiles and we make paper flowers to symbolize the life that the festival celebrates. We burn our rows of candles on the windowsills, we add our prayer-ribbons to the city bridge. But it's an act, and both of us know it. I'd rather be with someone who knows nothing about my past and my mother, and just thinks I'm plain old Georgina Skyler Carey—who is terrible at pretty much everything, has no future, and can name and point out every constellation we have left—than be with someone who remembers that once I was Georgina Caulfield, the little girl whose mother brought back the dead.

I WALK TO THALEMA'S HOUSE under the stars, the Ghost Rat lighting my way westwards. The moon has long since set, but I know she's waxing. By the time Umma ends, she'll be full. The sky is a deep blue that feels soft against my face, and to my right the hills are hump-backed shadows. Thalema's family live at the foot of a hill in a quiet little cul-de-sac where all the gardens look like they're trimmed with nail scissors. Her house is in a much nicer area than my apartment, though we're not so bad that we're living in the stretch of narrow tenements and slums where the Untouchables are forced to go. I swing open the little side gate and cross over the wet grass to ring the doorbell.

Most of Thalema's family will still be out, preparing the last few things that need doing before the festival starts. Her mother always has a hand in helping with the high school float, but at least we don't get roped into that nowadays. Thalema decided to stay home after school so she could study further, and in a way I guess she has been stuck in her own little limbo.

Hers is nicer.

Her littlest brother opens the door and says, Rather you than me, and scampers back into hiding just as Thalema comes clanking down the stairs, squeezed into the yellow and umber costume of the shroud dancers. She jangles with every stamp—her usually braided hair has been combed out and straightened and set with rollers and probably enough goop to varnish a house. Bangles and bracelets and drippy earrings and strings of gold necklaces cover every piece of exposed skin. Her muscled arms glint with a fine shimmering cover of body glitter.

One word, George, Thalema says as she waves a single finger menacingly at me. One word.

I said nothing.

Mom did my hair.

I—it looks great. I suck on my lower lip in an attempt to not laugh at her mulish face. Thalema has never been into dressing-up, and her mother lives for her annual chance to haul out all the costumes and make-up and fake jewels, and magic Thalema into her little princess.

If little princesses are statuesque dancers whose bodies are rippled with lean, deceptively powerful muscle. Never make the mistake of underestimating the sheer strength of someone who has been dance training since they were eight. They will kill you with the arch of their foot and a flick of a wrist.

You can't lie to save your life, Thalema says. Help, help, I'm trapped in this hideousness and cannot escape. She sticks out her tongue. And I'm almost serious. I'll need you to help me with the zip in the back. I swear this year my mother is determined to have me sewn into this thing for good.

I follow her up the stairs. So how did the dress rehearsal go?

Disastrously, which is always a brilliant sign. The fear of failure and public humiliation is now firmly entrenched in the hearts and minds of the new intake. They'll know their choreo backwards by the last day.

She jabbers away about the dance, the return to college and the up-coming final exams, as she pulls off the bangles and bits and pieces, shucking this strange disguise until finally she's almost back to herself in her faded cargos and black racer-back vest. Only her hair looks like a helmet she hasn't been allowed to remove. I don't get why the college is so ridiculously stupid with their timing—you'd think they could pick a better time of year to start with the exams than right after Umma and Praeter. The whole month is a wash, basically.

I stiffen at the mention of Praeter, and Thalema catches my quickly hidden discomfort. Ugh, sorry. I'm a troll, whining like this. We should do something for your birthday.

It's okay. It really is. My birthday is not exactly the most celebrated event in my household. Twenty will be even worse; thirteen years since my mother was led away. A monumental sort of day.

No, no, we can go out— there’s a great club I found. They make the most lethal cocktail, it’s called a carcrash— Her face falls. Um, forget I spoke, we can go to the mall and watch a movie. I dunno. Something. Anything you like.

Yeah. Her room is controlled chaos. Clean where her mother has a handle on the it, and a disaster where her art supplies have taken over. The walls are covered with sketches, with first-year projects she’s long since forgotten about. I can chart her artistic progress, the cleanness of her lines, the boldness of her colour. But it’s still organised disorder, so it takes me a moment to notice the stack of tissue papers in various colours spread out over her giant bed. You haven't even started?

I've been dancing, she says with mock anguish. Empress! Help me?

And it's good to do something with my hands, folding the fine paper into intricate six-petaled flowers. Even if my fingers look like someone-else's, and the flowers I fold are not the ones we learned in school as children.

Those are pretty. Thalema squints. Is that a new fold?

I quickly unfold the flower and smooth it, as though that will make the fine creases disappear. Huh, no, um, maybe, I think I saw it on the television? Which is a complete lie. I have never folded flowers in this pattern before.

But my mother has.

Later Thalema's mom feeds me some of their weird healthy food before she gives me a lift back to the apartment. My dad is already asleep when I turn the key in the lock. He's left a pile of unfinished flowers for me on the kitchen counter, but I ignore them. My hands are cramped from all the ones I made with Thalema, and I've pricked myself too many times while we were stringing them on thread to have any inclination to start up on them now. I head to my room where Huxley's scrabbling about the three-tiered cage that takes up most of my remaining floor space.

Huxley is—was—my mother's Mikesh Barbed Rat. I inherited him mainly because Dad couldn't bear to let him go but also didn't want to see him, which probably makes sense. So now Huxley's mine. He's a little on the old and cantankerous side and there have been more than a few times where I've considered making the trek down to the temples on the outskirts of the city, where the Mikesh rats are fed by quiet priests who believe the rodents to be the symbols of the equinox when all things are in balance, and setting him free.

He'd probably just follow me home again, the spoilt thing.

Shut it, you, I say softly to the cage, and a small hunched shadow pauses, and I can just see him in the greyness now, his black eyes fixed on me, large ears cupped forward in quivering attention.

Some of us, I point out, actually prefer to sleep at night. We've had this conversation before. I whine, he shuffles a little quieter for the next five minutes or so, and then the noise builds in tempo as he plays with his branches and his toys, and burrows for the seeds scattered through his straw. He jiggles the cage door with his tiny pink hands.

Fine, I say, as if we are actually continuing a conversation. But you have to promise not to wander too far or bring back any strange women. I flick the latch on the front door of his cage, smell straw and wood shavings and nuts and a sourness that means I need to change his toilet area tomorrow. Huxley responds by slipping out and running quick and quiet up to the top of his tower and surveying his land. He nods at me, whiskers bristling, then slips off, up to the windowsill and out into the night.

Perhaps I should feel guilty, because anything could happen to him—cars, city owls, cats—but every time I've let him have his freedom I wake to find him curled happily in his hammock, his tufted tail tucked over his face like an eye-mask on an exhausted traveller. And even if one day he doesn't come back, I reassure myself with the knowledge that he's led a long life and would rather die free and running, than curled up in a cage. I glance out the window to see him skitter down a nearby drainpipe, and I stiffen.

Parked below is a white van, ANU painted in black on its sides. The Anti-Necromantic Unit.

They're still watching us as if we're criminals, as if I'm raising the dead in my sleep. A shiver of hate races under my skin and I grit my teeth. They will not frighten me. I am not my mother. With a jerk, I close the curtains and pretend that I never saw the van.

I change in the dark, then go brush my teeth before completing my final ritual. My hands trace over the little collection of artefacts that are all I was allowed to keep after my mother was arrested. Three meaningless things; lumps of glassy rock that in the day will catch the light in shifting mercurial ways. I touch each three times, tap the shelf they're on, and clamber into bed.

Tomorrow is Umma, and I will remember whether I want to or not.

THE SUN STREAMS IN through the blinds, striping my dark blue duvet with panels of golden-white. From far away rises the sound of a city preparing to celebrate, like a deep breath before a scream. The coffee grinder whirs, drowning out everything else. I pull the cover over my head and count to ten in fractions, but I can't pretend the day is going to go away, and from the kitchen comes the rich, almost chocolatey smell of coffee filtering.

My dad is going through the motions, whistling and pouring.

I slump out after checking if Hux got back last night, and head down the passage. Dad has abandoned his usual armour of faded blue shirt and crimson tie, and has dressed himself in belted jeans, his tee shirt tucked neatly in. Dad fashion. He tips the milk into our mugs in a small stream.

Ngh, I say, as he shoves my cup across the counter.

Will you be going to anything else besides Thalema's performance? he asks after I've fortified myself with a few sips. I think he hopes I’ll start having a normal adult life; go clubbing, meet someone, get a better job, grow the fuck up and move on.

I sigh. It'll look odd if Dad and I don't go to the festival and do normal people things, and I can't pretend that I didn't see the ANU van parked outside our apartment building last night. Yeah. The floats. It won't be all bad. There's plenty to admire in the skill that goes into those bridges of flowers that celebrate the Empress of Life and her hold over us. There will be dancers and giant puppets and drummers and stalls selling all kinds of greasy delicious junk food. We can go together?

He nods, stirs more sugar into his coffee. That's a good idea.

That way the ANU can be sure both of us are out there, being happy and grateful. I scratch at a rash on the inside of my wrist, then quickly lick at the dry skin. It's not like me to get rashes, and I wonder if it’s a nervous reaction to the coming day, a stress-thing. With the last of my coffee finished, and a square of dry toast dutifully eaten, I head back to my room to clean out Hux's cage and get dressed.

You wanna join in the fun? I ask the rat but he just curls deeper under a pile of straw he's constructed into some complicated structure, and pretends I'm not there. For a rat, you're very rude. I tell him, but I leave a small corner of my breakfast toast in his food bowl anyway.

My eyes are dry and itchy too, my whole skin uncomfortable, like it's a suit I sent away to get clean and it came back too tight, mysteriously altered. It's starting already and Umma is not yet done. Every year, I remember more, and every year I am scared of what I see.

I see things that never happened to me.

THE VISIONS ALWAYS GET WORSE around Umma, so by the time Dad and I hit the streets, I'm jittery and nervous. We pretend to have fun—this is part of our Good Citizen charade. We buy ice-creams flavoured with walnuts and petals, and stand in the crowd wearing our Good Citizen disguises. We look just like everyone else in our jeans and our tee shirts. Dad has a garland of paper flowers that I made for him, but I've lost mine already in the heaving crowd. Under our feet paper roses are trampled into a soggy mess. We're in the Old Quarter of Umma-Lukaya, webbed with woodblock roads in a twisting maze. The old roads are carefully maintained—every year ruined hardwood setts are re-pitched and replaced so that it's almost impossible to tell the difference. I've always thought it rather stupid that they don't just replace the whole lot with something more practical, but I guess it's a part of history or something. And it's only some roads. The very oldest, our History teacher said. The woodblock roads were the original streets that marked out the borders of the temple grounds, before the new one was built. And when I say new, I mean the one built almost eight-hundred years ago. So, I doubt there's a single original wood block left in this entire city. I scuff my trainer against the grain of one, angrily.

The sun is high above us and I’m already sweaty. The streets in Old Town are packed, kids running around unsupervised, their parents drunk on summer wine. People are singing, arms linked, or calling out time on impromptu dances, couples whirling. The original roads of the city have been marked out with fresh borders of painted red verge-stones, and the wooden cobbles look polished and slick, almost like black stone.

I want to be able to enjoy it. I really do. But mostly I'm just gritting my teeth and trying not to think too much, and hoping that I'll be able to make it through Thalema's performance without doing something stupid like crying. I try to blank my mind, and think about nothing except the floats, the parades, the music, I lose myself in drum beats.

It's only when all the floats have passed us by that I see the man watching me from the crowd. My first thought is that I'm amazed I'm so interesting that the ANU even has someone tailing me now, until I get a better look at him.

Unless the ANU has started employing scruffy homeless people as terrible spies, he's not affiliated. But he is following me. I back up a bit, and he steps forward, like we are tied together by a strand of invisible silk. Skinny and pale, with sharp bones like a starved bird, he looks up and his gaze connects with mine and even though we are in a huge teeming crowd of thousands of cheering celebrants, for a moment the world goes utterly silent.

There is no one but us, alone in an empty road edged with a bright red so alive it seems to pulsate. A fierce wind blows the litter and debris of the celebrations about our feet in a river of discarded paper. The flowers made by a million hands, fallen from floats and throats, they are a torrent of colour. The paper petals catch flame, burning bright around me. The wooden blocks shimmer with heat, and the whole road is a river of fire. I stagger back to crash into a family of laughing revellers and just as suddenly the street is full again and there is nothing burning.

The dark-eyed white man is gone, but I'm sweaty-cold with fear. This doesn't feel like one of my stupid visions, but something worse.

Perhaps I'm really losing it, perhaps the ANU has a damn good reason to wait outside my apartment and follow me around.

I need to blend in better, not give them any reason to pay me more attention. I duck behind a stall selling garlands of paper flowers, and broad straw sun-hats decorated with a profusion of more folded flowers. They're cheap, the paper already tearing, but since all the flowers are meant to be burned tonight, no one cares. I grab a hat and garland, pay, and dress myself up like all the others before slipping into the massed crowd heading slowly toward the stadium to go watch the dancing. The air smells of spilled beer, buttery popcorn and spun sugar. Cinnamon and cardamom. Children shriek past with balloons, and the cordoned-off roads have become a heaving mass of people. I've lost Dad, but I'm not worried about that. We've each got our tickets and I'll see him inside the stadium, but I have lost my dark-haired follower and whatever storm he's bringing with him.

Good.

I let the crowd carry me along like a wave that will break on the steps of the stadium.

Dance in the Change

THALEMA'S GROUP PERFORMANCE GOES OFF without a single error. Obviously, she's terrified all the other dancers into utter robotic obedience. When the rest of the shrouded figures draw back to allow her to dance the Birth of Umma-Lukaya, I can feel the stadium around me draw a collective breath. Thalema might have been doing this dance for years, but it's the first time she has the solo. The Birth is an intricate, controlled series of steps and poses. The dancer must be as fluid as the veils she dances with, and there are moments where I am certain Thalema has to be using magic or something to get the veils to billow and hold just so.

Not that she is, of course. Thalema's about as much a witch as I am a necromancer.

As she dances to the peak of the piece, my stomach begins to cramp. It's a sharp occasional pain, almost but not quite like the start of my period. It's not the right time for it—I mean, I know my cycle almost as well as I know the phases of the moon—so this is a fact. It must have been something I ate. I’m not used to pain. I basically never get sick or hurt. I’m careful. Or too boring.

But it seems as though my luck has run out and I'll be ending off Umma with food poisoning. It seems appropriate enough. Vomiting through the finale of a festival that celebrates the woman who had my mother killed is perversely satisfying.

And she is just a woman. A girl, even. The current Empress is not that much older than me, and no one really believes the line of the Empress is truly divine. Not in these enlightened days. The Umma festival is just an excuse to have a party.

The Empress doesn't protect us from anything. She—or her mother—certainly didn't protect us from the deaths that came before Praeter Day.

My stomach convulses, the pain like an axe chop against my midriff. Ungh. I pant a little, and next to me my dad shifts in his seat.

Are you all right? He whispers, concern making his voice sound more alive than it has in years.

Fine, I say. Which is not strictly true. The pain is fiercer now, the cramps closer together, making it harder to breathe and my skin has gone cold and clammy, sweat covering me like a damp silk shroud. My hands clench into fists in my lap, and they are narrower and darker than normal; the nails manicured neat ovals. The skin under them itches, and I feel the urge to just stand and get out, to run screaming from all the lies of Umma-Lukaya and our ridiculous goddess. Our fake protector. What is she protecting us from, anyway? There are no more bridges to the Hollow Lands. She was the one who destroyed them.

A shuddering breath and the thoughts that are not mine are gone. The hands in my lap are mine again; square and short-fingered, with chewed nails and the scabby remains of Thalema's black nail polish.

This has to stop.

Slowly, ignoring the pain, I look up to see the final part of the dance, where the man who dances as the King of Death parts from Umma-Lukaya, the goddess of creation and life, and the bridge between the worlds goes up in flames.

Thalema glistens like a golden statue, the sequins of her costume reflecting the carefully-controlled fire of the bridge of flowers. The Death dancer is supposed to bow to her now, and the two realms are parted for all eternity.

A peaceful ending.

Instead, Thalema glances to