Trapped

These ruins were overrun with winter-shrunk weeds-mostly lemon verbena and mint-scented geraniums. The plants were escapees from some garden center four days' journey to the east; they'd been bioengineered for extreme hardiness, and when OldTech culture imploded, the plants had seeded themselves and spread from the greenhouses where they'd originally been developed. Native vegetation couldn't withstand the encroachment: thistles and milkweed and purple loosestrife gave ground before the onslaught. Much of Feliss province was now taken over, anywhere that wasn't kept clear by farmers or gardeners… and on hot summer nights, the tangled smells of lemon and mint would hang thick in the breezeless air.

We rode past it all in silence. There was nothing to say; or if there was, no one wanted to say it. Our horses clopped rhythmically along the age-degraded pavement, pausing now and then when a sound or a scent disturbed them. But nothing attacked us from the darkness-it was still cold enough that coyotes and lynx were mostly hunkered down in their dens, and the few that might be hunting stayed well away from the flame on the Caryatid's shoulder. The sky was a patchwork of clouds and stars with no threat on the horizon…

…until we were a minute away from Death Hotel.

Lovely name, isn't it? Death Hotel. It was a rural landmark halfway between Simka and Dover, one of the few OldTech buildings that was one hundred percent intact. The place was made of granite blocks, carefully chiseled and fitted together into a box-shaped edifice with a halfhearted attempt at a dome on the roof; if that doesn't give you enough of a picture, think, "Big, gray, and ugly." Add to that four centuries of passers-by slathering graffiti on the outside, mostly of the M.G. LOVES S.T. variety, and you've got the idea. At the very front, however, on the wall facing the road, some long-ago hand had painted DEATH HOTEL in big black letters; and over the years, local kids had repainted the inscription whenever it got too faint, in order to preserve the place's "charm."

Death Hotel had a story behind it. In fact, it had many stories, but only one I actually believed. Once upon a time, the place had been built as a mausoleum for some well-off family. Something went wrong-folklore suggested many possibilities, from believable problems like the family going broke, to extravagant hypotheses like a Romany curse or a prophetic vision warning of dire consequences if the tomb was ever used-but whatever happened, no corpse was ever interred within those thick gray walls. Instead, the place became a popular spot for transient workers to sleep while they waited to get hired in the local harvest. Those workers called the place Death Hotel… and eventually one of them painted the name on the outside.

For several years, the hotel grew in fame; on rainy nights, dozens of people took shelter inside, a few sleeping in the wall niches meant for coffins but most just lying on the floor. They never caused any trouble… and most Simka residents were amused by the idea of people sleeping in an empty mausoleum. Alas, a handful of loud-voiced fuddy-duddies called it a "desecration of sacred ground," especially since many of the transients had dark skins or foreign accents. In the end, the party-poopers prevailed upon authorities to brick up the entrances with cinder blocks; and the bricklayers had done such a good job, no one had got inside since.

That didn't end the hotel's popularity with visitors. Folks continued to drop by and write their names on the walls. A few even claimed to see ghosts in the neighborhood. It didn't matter that the place had never contained a single corpse: a mausoleum is a mausoleum even without dead bodies, so why shouldn't people see phantoms there?

Before that night, I'd laughed at yokels who thought Death Hotel was haunted. But after my experience in the music room, I wasn't so ready to smirk… and the closer we got, the itchier I felt. What bothered me most was that we wouldn't be able to see the mausoleum until we were almost upon it-there were tall stands of spruce on both sides that shielded the site, even in winter. For all I knew, an entire un-dead orchestra could be planted on the snowy front lawn, just waiting for us to come into view before they struck up the funeral march from Beethoven's Third.

A hundred meters short of the hotel, I caught myself clutching at Ibn's mane, grabbing so hard the poor horse turned his head to look at me, wondering what I wanted him to do. "Sorry," I whispered, letting go and giving his neck what I hoped was a reassuring pat. Of course, there'd be no ghosts at the mausoleum-as a man of science, I could prove it by probability. The odds of seeing a single ghost must be a million to one, so the odds of seeing two in a single night were so immensely astronomical…

At that moment, something filmy and white streamed down from the sky.