The ghost of the starved girl kept her from sleeping. She was so insistent that Manrie should know her miserable story that she told it again and again, forcing Manrie back into the same strangling set of memories. Praevid’s husband, who chewed with his lips curled back, so that you could see the food as it was ground and sliced by his yellow teeth. A sneer that he also wore when he was singing, or laughing, or smiling, or doing anything that involved his mouth. And Praevid, whom the starved girl loved, never seemed to notice.
Another memory. The first time the starved girl had seen Praevid. She had been sitting on a rock, and the starved girl had seen her shadow first. So plump, her breasts so full that they seemed to make the flat, craggy surface of the rock round and smooth. *That could be my shadow,*the starved girl had thought. And she had decided to possess Praevid. When her friends mocked her she would say, “You cannot decide who you fall in love with.” But it wasn’t love. She knew that, somewhere inside of her.
*You have a parasite!* Manrie wanted to yell at the starved girl’s memories. *You want to possess Praevid’s body because you think that it will make you feel full.* But the starved girl couldn’t see that. She barged into Praevid and her husband’s little shack. She insisted on cooking for them, and then reveled in inward disgust as she watched Praevid’s husband eat. She made herself their slave, but always felt superior to them.
She battered Manrie with the memory of the night she tried to kiss Praevid, to hold her. The memory of the plump flesh trying to squirm away beneath her grasping arms. The shouts of Praevid’s husband as he came through the door. The mewing of a little kitten in a basket beneath the window. She was driven out, and all her old friends were gathered around the well. But they didn’t comfort her. They mocked her. Driven out of town, she wandered. Starving. Looking at shadows. Hoping to see in them the shape of full breasts, a round belly. Wandered until the farmers found her. The winnowers. The men in tapestried robes, whom the elders had warned about, who were known to steal children and old women. Who would take you if you became unwanted.
The same round of memories, again and again, until Manrie appealed to the guardsman for help, and he began to tell stories of his company, his companions who were all dead. Sad stories, but lacking the fervency of the starved girl’s obsessive scenes, and so Manrie was able to swim upward, back into her own self. She found herself in a cage. In a cave. One wall of her cage was a sheet of falling water. It roared and splattered the stone floor with moisture. The other three walls were bars, and a man who was drowning in hair sat on the other side of the bars, cross-legged, his hair fanning out from his body and spiraling across the ground in wet tendrils. The only light came from smeared luminescence on the cave walls. A greenish glow that she recognized as the tracks of ghonkadari, the cave snails that carried daylight within them.
“They will return soon,” the man who was drowning in hair called to her.
“They’ll return?” she shouted above the waterfall’s roar.
“The masters of this place,” he shouted back. “They came to ask you questions, but they couldn’t rouse you from sleep. But I know from bitter experience that they always return.”
He had a reasonable voice. Gentle. The kind of voice that had been absorbed by the pages of books and scrolls over many years, so that even when he was within the stone walls of a wet cave it was still mellowed by paper. A scholar’s voice. “Are you from Libreigia?” she asked him, scooting closer to him so that she could hear him above the sound of the waterfall.
“Not Libreigia,” he told her. “The Sangrahalaya.”
“What? The Tinker’s House?”
“Yes,” he said. “The Tinker’s House.”
A memory from the guardsman. A tinker on the road. She took Inchy’s sword. She wanted to take his sword as well. She was going to Hasra, to bury them in the Sangrahalaya.
“You bury swords!” She told him.
A movement in the hair over his mouth. Perhaps it indicated a smile. “Among other things.”
She looked around at the cave. There was another cage beyond the hairy man’s. She thought she saw a figure sleeping against the wall. “Why have they imprisoned a tinker?”
“I am not a tinker, although tinkers are the best servants of the Sangrahalaya. I am, sadly, the curator.”
“The curator of the Sangrahalaya? But then, you knew Aizdha.”
A pause. The hair-covered face jutted forward in the darkness. “Aizdha of the bestiary?”
“Yes. I was his…assistant. I was in Hasra in the spring. I met with Lady Katemzan.”
A twitch of his mouth within the nest of mustaches. “The good lady cares little for the Sangrahalaya these days. She has turned her attention to the library city. And perhaps she is right to denigrate us. Or to denigrate me. I am, I admit, the poorest of curators.”
“But why are you here? Shouldn’t you be burying swords in Hasra?”
“I should,” he admitted. “But I had to find Lokeyn.”
“Lokeyn? The one who says that wildness always returns?”
A long pause. “You know of Lokeyn.”
“He wrote a scripture. One of the texts that these people read from. I heard it in the infirmary.”
“Yes,” the soft voice was sad. “Yes, he wrote a text. But he was already mad by then. And he was dead by the time I came here.” The hair-shrouded head lifted and moved. The masked eyes seemed to be looking about the cave. “I sometimes think that this place amplifies my grief. That my mourning should be ended by now. That it would be, if I were in the Sangrahalaya, and bothered every day with a thousand little tasks. Here, all I do is sit and mourn. And remember.”
Manrie shivered. She could not sit here, day after day, with her memories and the memories of the ghosts. It would kill her. “Isn’t there a way to escape?”
“Perhaps for you. Not for me. Not now that they’ve found the tortoise. I don’t know why they keep me alive.”
“Tortoise? What tortoise?”
Again his hair moved as he smiled. “It is why they imprisoned me here. They thought I would know about the tortoise. And I did, in a way. Word came to me at Hasra. Lokeyn was in Yenceyan, and he was traveling with a giant tortoise.”
“Did it have two giant teats beside its eyes?”
The curator’s head jerked. He scooted back from the bars, as if Manrie were dangerous. “How do you know that?”
“Cloedeya met him. Cloedeya and Big Praeda and Melsa. When they went far to the west, all the way to the banks of an enormous river. They met a man in a wide brimmed hat who had a tortoise. He ate all of their potatoes.”
The curator hesitated. Spray from the waterfall created a sheet of droplets in the air between them. The luminescence from the walls shimmered off of it, like a sunbeam falling through dusty air. “That tortoise,” the curator said softly. She could barely hear him over the water’s roar. “That tortoise ruined Lokeyn.” Then he shook his head. “Perhaps he was ruined already. He should have been the curator, not me. Even as a child, he was the cleverest among us. When I met him, he was trying to read the secret script that teikenbura birds weave into their nests. And he was so brilliant with the ingawahr. But they proved to be the seed of his destruction.”
“Ingawahr?” Manrie asked. She knew the yappy little dogs from her travels through the Copper Hills.
“He bred them from ingakaen, who mate so frequently and grow so quickly that you can have ten generations in a couple of years. We were just boys, but patient, and we bred the wildness out of them. They became a different creature entirely. A lap dog that would never think of stealing a chicken. Only they didn’t stay that way. Perhaps it was because other people started breeding them. I don’t know. But we were grown, and no longer thought of our childhood experiments, accept with regret when an ingawahr snapped at us from some rich merchant’s coddling lap. And then an old woman came to our chambers and showed us her dog. Only it wasn’t a dog anymore. It had returned to being an ingakaen. Gone feral. The wilderness had come back into it.”
“Just as an aurochs will return to a cow.”
This seemed to confuse the curator. He frowned, but nodded. “Yes, I suppose. It sent Lokeyn off on his wanderings. And I was left to become curator. The remaining member of the famous pair who had dazzled Hasra in their youth. But I was only famous because of Lokeyn. I am a fraud in my own right.”
“But what did they want the tortoise for?”
The curator turned his head and looked at the sleeping figure in the far cage. He turned back to her. “It is possible, very possible, that you are their spy. They do that, you know. They send children to talk to me. Inquisitive little beasts. They pretend to be innocent, pretend that they’ve snuck in to look at the prisoner. They’re very good at it. But Zaelin has warned me against them. And your robes are very white.”
Manrie sighed. She nodded past him, at the figure in the other cage. “That’s Zaelin, I suppose.”
“You’re not going to pretend that you don’t know?”
“That would make me seem like an idiot. Zaelin is the only other person here. If he’s here. Are you sure that he isn’t dead?”
“He sleeps often. He is guilty of the Fourth Disobedience of Hopelessness.”
Manrie startled herself by saying, “To believe that your work has no value.” She felt the guardsman stir inside of her.
The curator was disappointed. “So you are one of them.”
“They tried to make me one of them,” Manrie said dismissively. “Why aren’t there any ghosts in here?”
The curator was startled in turn. “Ghosts? Ah, yes. I seem to remember reports of spirit sightings. We received them before I left Hasra. But I have seen no ghosts.”
“Hasn’t anyone ever died in here?”
A shrug. “I don’t know. I was here, and then Zaelin was added to this little menagerie. And now you.”
She didn’t like the thought that she was in a menagerie. That this cave was just a larger version of the room in the wheel house. It made her skin prickle. She thought of the alembic and the pestles on the long table in that room. Now it was the starved girl’s turn to stir inside of her. As if she knew something, or had observed something without knowing it. Memory covered in whitish haze. As if she were looking through a veil.
But Manrie didn’t want the starved girl to come back in full, so she said, “You haven’t answered my question.”
“Which one? You’ve asked so many.” It was said gently, in a tone that Aizdha might have used.
“About the tortoise. What did they want it for?”
Another hesitation. Then the curator said, “Well, if you are one of them, you must know, so no harm in telling you. They want it for Lokeyn’s Calm.”
“What’s that?”
“He solved it, you see. His great conundrum. Why does the wild return to domesticated animals, or return to spoil a crop, or turn edible grains inedible again? It didn’t used to happen. Why is it happening now? He created his wonderful Calm. An elixir. When fed to an animal that has gone feral, it returns that animal to domesticity. He was happy to tell the farmers how he made it. But he held something back.”
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
“What did he hold back?”
A shrug. “I do not know.”
“Why does the wild return, anyway?” Manrie asked, pushing away a memory. She had asked Cloedeya a similar question, there on the bridge at Raesidae.
A shake of the enormous cloud of hair. “I don’t know that, either. Lokeyn didn’t answer the question. He only found a solution. And then the farmers captured him. And then he died.”
“Why wouldn’t he tell them?”
“Again, I am ignorant. He died before I got here. But you have met them. Would you tell them all of your secrets?”
“They tried to poison me with their lists.”
“Yes.” The eyes narrowed. “How did you escape? How did you keep your mind for yourself?”
Now it was her turn to hesitate. The roar of the waterfall was very loud, and the stone that she sat on was very cold. “It could work in reverse, you know,” she said. And then, when confusion was somehow conveyed through the mass of hair, “You could be one of them, posing as a prisoner.”
The mustaches quirked. “Yes. Yes, I suppose that is true. You are very clever. But hush, now. I believe I hear footfalls.”
She couldn’t fathom how he could hear anything above the roar of the waterfall, but still, figures appeared from the shadows beside the farthest cage. They came into the huge cavern, walking over the uneven stone beside the straight walls of the cages. Three of them. Karkriesha, the little infirmary mistress with her yolk of golden hair beneath the improbable folds of her head dress. The field mistress, Naiklora of the ponderous voice. And the little, quick moving alchemist, Retoebaeni. They ignored the curator and went directly to Manrie’s cage. Naiklora fumbled with a ring of keys. The door swung open, and she said, “Come.” It was as if the earth was speaking.
“We are quite hungry, you know,” the curator said pleasantly. “Perhaps someone will bring us dinner soon?”
“It is long past dinner,” Naiklora said shortly. “Come, girl.”
“Come where?” Manrie asked.
The infirmary mistress butted in. “What have you done to Taeslahbin?” she demanded in her high, childish voice.
“Taeslahbin?”
“Don’t play dumb. You have pulled his spirit from his body. He is very close to death.”
“Never mind that now,” Naiklora said, her voice heavy with authority. “Come, girl. We are taking you to your friend.”
“Taeyaho?”
“Yes, yes,” Retoebaeni said, “to him. Come. It’s all right. Don’t be afraid. All is well.”
She got up from the stone floor. She glanced back at the curator as she stepped through the door of the cage. “What about him?” she asked.
“He doesn’t have a friend,” Naiklora said shortly.
“But you’ll feed him. You’ll send him food?”
Naiklora sighed. “If that’s what it takes.”
“I thought that nobody starves here.”
“Is he starving? How could you tell?”
“He says he is hungry.”
“We will send him food.”
Talk of food caused the starving girl to turn inside of inside of Manrie and try to crawl back to the surface of her mind. She almost tripped and grabbed the shoulder of the little alchemist. He gave a yelp. But then she had the starving girl under control, and released him before the others could react. Naiklora gave her a hard look, then turned to lead her away. Karkriesha said in her high, whining voice, “There is something wrong with her. She is guilty of the disobediences!”
“Never mind that now,” Naiklora repeated, and they made their way back across the expanse of the cave.
There was a sloping tunnel at one end. It, too, was smeared with ghonkadari slime, and she saw one of the snails on the ceiling, making its slow, strangely observant way towards the cavern. She had eaten them with Aizdha, once. On the slopes of Mount Ingbimoesa, after they had chased an amatahimapaht far beyond the nearest village. The great leopard had curled itself into a cave to sleep, and Manrie had squatted in the opening, watching its dark, dappled chest rise and fall. They had built their camp further down the slope, and she had sketched beside the cooking fire as Aizdha roasted the snails. Their teeth had glowed for days after eating them. The amatahimapaht’s teeth glowed in the same way, and Manrie had been able to make a note in the bestiary, showing that the great cat’s fearsomeness was due, in part, to its diet. She had hoped, at the time, that this would prove reassuring to the people in the mountain villages, who lived in fear of the amatahimapaht, and told many dire stories about it.
She thought of this while walking down the sloping tunnel, and she felt the spirits inside of her grow quiet, as if they were listening to the memory. Both the guardsman and the starving girl seemed jealous. The guardsman of a companionship that he had lost. The girl of a companionship that she had never known. *But I have lost my comrade as well,* she whispered inwardly to the guardsman. *Many comrades,* she thought, as the faces of the caravaners floated into her mind.
The tunnel emerged beside the waterfall. It was night, but something was moving in the fields. Each row seemed to have captured a wavering shape. She looked closely as they move along the trail down to the wheel house. She was certain that the shapes were people. Spirits. Each standing as if they were planted at the edge of a field row.
“Why are there ghosts in the fields?” she asked.
“You should know, ghost trapper!” Karkriesha snapped.
“Hush,” Naiklora said. “We will start with the nest.”
The descending trail came even with the roof of the wheelhouse, and Manrie looked for nests under the eves, but couldn’t see any. The great wheel was turning, and the spume of mist from the waterfall probably made the roof too damp for birds. The whole house seemed to be creaking and juddering, moving with the wheel. It was fragile, like a paper boat set on a rushing river. It had seemed much more substantial in the morning light.
The three masters led her to a different door of the house than she had entered before. It was wider, and the lintel was lower. It was built into the side of the house that faced the cliffside, as if it were a secret. There was a vast room beyond it that smelled of straw. They paused just inside the door and seemed to be waiting for something. The walls dampened the roar of the waterfall, and Manrie could sense that the room wanted to be silent, despite the ever-present sound of the cataract.
Something shuffled in the darkness. A scrabbling at the straw that seemed to sharpen its smell. Manrie could make out a low shape moving along the floor. She felt her pulse quicken. But she knew how to stand still in the presence of a monster. She knew not to prejudge it, not to panic at a danger that wasn’t there. The guardsman had taken a defensive stance inside of her consciousness. The starving girl had started to scream. She pushed them away. She found a memory to remind her of herself. That low-ceilinged room in Pahyangoeda. The strange monster that leered down from the rafters. Four arms and a head, without body or legs. A terrible face. Flat snout, long tusks, malicious eyes. She heard Aida saying, “It is only a taotzi. A monster of order. They come to make sure that the walls are straight.”
The shifting figure on the floor came forward. She made out a wide mass, a curved back. A wizened face jutted forward from the darkness. A tortoise, with a long dug beside each eye. Lokeyn’s tortoise. Only she knew that its shell was Baenlaez’s throne. For a moment she thought that they had stripped the shell from the poor creature, but then she saw the square pattern rising up above the weaving neck. This was a different tortoise, a replacement for Lokeyn’s companion.
“Look around the room, please,” Retoebaeni told her. “What do you see? Besides the tortoise? What else is here?”
She looked. “Straw,” she said. “Rafters.”
“But nothing else?” he couldn’t keep the disappointment from his voice.
“No.”
“I told you,” Karkriesha said. “If we can’t see his ghost, why would she be able to?”
“Whose ghost?” Manrie thought, and then she knew. Lokeyn, of course. Lokeyn, who hadn’t told them how to make his potion. Hadn’t told them every ingredient. But his ghost would know.
“They travel,” Naiklora said. “Without the grounding practice, they can go anywhere.”
“Are we to search the entire farm?”
“The likely places,” Naiklora said.
“Where is Taeyaho?” Manrie asked. “You said you were bringing me to him.”
“You are lucky that he is still alive!” Karkriesha spat. “He won’t be, if you don’t heal Taeslahbin.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Manrie said.
“You lie! We saw the ghosts go into you. When you were supposed to be doing the grounding practice. First the ghost of that old man. Then you stole a ghost from the field row! That entire row is corrupted, now! The beans won’t grow!”
“Enough, please,” Retoebaeni said. “This is not to the point. We must search the farm before the sun rises. Where would he have gone? He died here. Surely he wouldn’t wander far from this place.”
“His precious tortoise died here as well,” Karkriesha said, “and its ghost has wandered.”
“Enough words,” Naiklora grumbled. “We will go to the shell.”
The little alchemist agreed. “Yes, that makes sense. He would want to be by the remnants of his friend.”
“But you must have seen him before,” Manrie protested. “If he’s still on the farm. Someone would have seen him.”
They ignored her. They were already turning to go back through the door. Manrie spared a glance for the tortoise as she left the room. It was weaving its wrinkled head back and forth and rolling its eyes within the concentric circles of their sockets. Distressed, but slow even within its unhappiness. As if it had learned to accept its captivity with patience. She had never felt more separate from another living being.
They went around the wheelhouse and across the bridge, and Manrie thought about tripping so that she could retrieve another sharp rock. But the same force of logic that had controlled her before controlled her now. If they had Taeyaho, she couldn’t escape. She couldn’t beat the three masters senseless and abandon him. And anyway, she didn’t know how to get out of the valley. It was surrounded by cliffs on four sides. There must be tunnels, secret ways in and out.
The fields were spread like skirts around each of the tall buildings, and each row was like a pleat. A ghost stood at the head of each row like a pin, holding the garment of the farm together. Naked ghosts, looking down. As if their whole beings had been given the task of monitoring the earth. Baenlaez had said that the earth was tamed by human bodies. Manrie was certain that each spirit stood over its own corpse, buried beneath the loam. She turned, inwardly, to the starving girl, but the girl refused to remember the moment of her death. A vague memory of the grounding practice itself swam up from the depths of Manrie’s being, the starving girl kneeling and studying the row, convincing herself that the clumps of turned earth looked like the face of her beloved Praevid. But Manrie could not force her beyond her obsession. She turned to the guardsman out of curiosity. She had been by him when he died, there in the cradle. But he couldn’t remember his own death, either. Perhaps no one could. Perhaps it was a blessing.
They were passing through the fields beside the refectory. Karkriesha had deliberately pushed forward so that she was leading them. She turned down a row, and Naiklora sighed. Manrie heard her mumble, “if you must.” They came to the edge of the field and passed between two spirits, a plump woman and a young man, each staring down at the earth before them. An empty space, and then a path between another pair of ghosts, as they entered the fields that surrounded the infirmary.
“No, no,” Retoebaeni said, “no need to go in there. We are going out of our way. And Lokeyn was never in the infirmary. The Master wouldn’t allow it.”
“Let her, Retoebaeni,” Naiklora sighed. “She has to know.”
They entered through the wide doors into the gaping room with the pillar in its center. Manrie shivered. She knew, now, what that pillar was for. She could hear a voice speaking within it. “To believe that you should be permitted the exercise of the will. To believe that your body is your own. To put yourself in the place of the Master, and pretend that you have your own wisdom. To believe in the goodness of the Previous World. To believe that your past matters…”
Karkriesha led them in a swoop around the center pillar, and there was Taeslahbin’s spirit, standing beside the outer wall, staring down at his hand with a look of great surprise. The ghost of the infirmary matron Graecelle was standing beside him. She stared at his hand with the same expression of bewildered wonder.
Karkriesha stopped before this duo and said, “There! Now tell me, what did you do?”
“But they’re ghosts,” Manrie said.
“Taeslahbin isn’t!” she protested. “His spirit is still inside of him. He is languishing on a bed. He can barely open his eyes. But he still speaks. He knows his name. He knows mine. He is alive!”
“He can’t be alive. His ghost is here.”
Karkriesha turned and slapped her. Naiklora caught her hand and prevented a second slap. The mistress of the infirmary was shaking. The wings of her head dress were flapping like the clipped wings of a caged bird. “Not his ghost!” she spat.
“It is true,” the alchemist said, stepping a little closer to Taeslahbin and tilting his head to examine the spirit. “The man lives but the shade, or part of the shade, is here. Perhaps Graecelle’s ghost is keeping it here.” He shivered. “I have never heard of such a thing. I have never heard of ghosts trapping the spirit of a living being.”
“Could it happen?” Naiklora asked Manrie. Her voice seemed to gather all of the shadows in the vast circular room.
“How would I know?” Manrie asked. “I’m no expert on ghosts.”
“Nonsense!” Karkriesha spat. “You have two inside of you right now. Don’t pretend that you don’t. We all saw!”
“But I don’t know why,” Manrie said. “The Jahnajeel triplets in Raesidae, they could channel ghosts. It was like the ghosts were riding them. And they rode Laenrid, when we ambushed him outside of Tzurfaera. But he killed himself.”
“Triplets?” Retoebaeni asked. “How odd. Although it is not uncommon for things to happen in threes. Many alchemical compounds are based upon just this principle. Which is why we must search for the third ingredient…”
“Quiet, Retoebaeni,” Naiklora said. She turned to Karkriesha. “You see that the girl knows nothing. Let us go back to our task.”
“She knows something. She did something,” Karkriesha insisted.
“No,” Manrie said. Karkriesha rounded on her and pushed her sharp little face so close that the wings of her headdress brushed Manrie’s cheeks. “No, I did nothing to him,” Manrie insisted. “I don’t why he’s like this. I can do nothing for him.”
But then, as if she had lowered her guard, the spirit of the scout rushed into her, and she fell on the ground.