For the third time, Gauri found herself thanking the strange demon horse.
***
The hallway leading to the Gate of Grief might have looked just like the one that she had just left save for a disturbing difference.
There were people in the walls.
Bodies tipped forward like the eaves of a building. Grieving faces and streaming hair and reaching hands formed a dome above those who wandered here. This place had wiped away the color of their skin, and left them the color of milk. But though they had no skin color to speak of, something grew across their features…
At first Gauri thought it was decay.
It unnerved her how beautiful decay could look. Ages ago, it had been her thankless task to join the scouts of Bharata after a war. They would walk through the battlefields days or sometimes weeks after a victor had been declared. Sometimes they were there to recover a soldier’s armor, or retrieve coded messages left behind by a felled spy. On those trips, it was not uncommon to find a body in a state of unravelment. And though it disgusted her, she couldn’t look away from the strange life that sprouted where another life had vanished. Fistfuls of mushrooms with satin caps. Mold with exquisite frills that were every shade of cream. Fungi like a nest of pearls.
The closer she looked at the faces above the hall, the more she saw that it was not decay at all.
But frost.
Gauri rose up on her tiptoes, straining. From a distance, the frost looked furred. If she had been in a fanciful mood, she might haveimagined that these were beings in the middle of a transformation. Any moment now and great wings would shake loose from their shoulder blades and they would turn to swans.
That was not how death worked here.
Where the wall joined the floor, Gauri saw the final transformation of the faces. They were merely shapes of polished ice. All features smoothed away. A darker thought crossed Gauri’s mind. Perhaps it was not frost that she was seeing, but the shape of forget spasming across the features of the long dead. This was their fate. If forgotten entirely, they would become no more than building blocks set to something greater than them.
The night pillars lined against the hall were less dark than they had been before. Now, golden daylight streamed down them in rivulets. In their new glow, Gauri was disturbed to see how much of the people’s faces were see-through. Their skin was thinner here, and the light went through it as if it were a veil. She hesitated to look down at her own arms, scared to catch the glint of her own bone.
“Do you like happy things?” asked the horse, trotting at a fast clip.
“I’m no different from anyone else,” said Gauri. “Of course I do.”
The horse’s ears swiveled. She could feel its withers rippling beneath her leg. Something likepityrolled off the creature.
“When you get to the gate, snatch your happiness by the teeth and do not let it go.”
Strange, she thought. Then again, the horse never said anything of sense to her. Gauri looked around, bored. In the previous hall, Kamala moved as fast as the speed of thought. Now, however, shetrotted at a fast clip but did not gallop. “Out of respect” it had said primly when Gauri asked why.
No one moved fast here.
There were less people marching toward the Gate of Grief than there were people wandering through the Gate of Names. But those who were here moved as if they walked through water. Every action exaggerated. Every expression twisted to extravagance. Gauri felt laid bare by their own rawness. And she hated it.Close your heart and move forward,she wanted to scold. But grief was a private world, and that was how it manifested here. She could yell and jump in front of a person. They would not notice.
“Why can I see them and they can’t see me?”
“Family privileges,” harrumphed Kamala.
Once more, Gauri just rolled her eyes. When Kamala said bizarre things, there was no use trying to decipher it.
“How much longer until we’re there?” she asked.
“Oh, an eon and a blink!” laughed the horse.
She was trying her best not to let the thinning night pillars frighten her, but with every rivulet of gold dripping down the base, all she felt was that blissful memory pulling away from her. She wasn’t even sure whether she was doing this right. Go past the two gates, and then what? Would Vikram’s last breath be waiting for her? Would she recognize it? Would it be like a plume of smoke or… orhimbut pallid and rendered ghostly?
Ahead of her, someone screamed.
The sound of it made the hairs on the back of her neck rise. Kamala broke her trot for only a moment.
“Do not look too long,” she said.
At what?Gauri wondered silently.
