The house was beautiful. Not in an intricate way. Not because it had been built of anything but raw timber and daubed mud. No mosaics graced the lintels and the walls were not smooth enough for frescoes. Yet there was an intention that permeated the house. As if every stroke of ax or chisel, every swirl of the trowel that had spread mud on the walls, had been focused, the workers’ minds and spirits present within each task. It was the most beautiful house Manrie had ever seen, and she felt the spirits within her lift their eyes. They, too, wanted to see.
It felt like a punishment, then, for her to send the ghost of the scout away. It surprised her that he wanted to stay, and not range across the foot of the mountain, looking for Baenlaez and the farmers. But she understood. He was a trapper at heart. He wanted to stay and prepare an ambush inside of her. She didn’t let him. She sent him out into the homestead, out onto the forested slopes. She was equally brusque with the guardsman. He was sent up to the roof of the house, to gaze down the length of the valley and watch for danger. The starved girl she sent to watch over the homesteaders, and the girl went eagerly. She wanted to return to the low room, where Manrie and Taeyaho had been fed before being led to the house. Lokeyn had left of his own accord, but she could sense him nearby. He was in the house, standing beside a secret door. He was staring down a dark tunnel, and he was afraid.
She felt all of them, like a tickling in her mind as if there were tendrils reaching back from them to where she sat beside Taeyaho and the white-haired, quavering Draejed. She seemed to have five minds, and the mind that rested inside her body, that watched through her eyes and listened with her ears seemed to be the least of them. As if all of her personality was disappearing, because she gave so much of who she was to the task of directing the spirits that possessed her.
Draejed had not wanted to come into the house. He had begun shivering as soon as they approached the entryway. He was shivering now. Sweat sat on his brow like a stagnant pool and the skin beneath it seemed slimy, somehow, as if the sweat were decomposing it. “Let me tell you about Draejed,” she said to Taeyaho, interrupting his singing. She was sorry for that. She felt that she needed Taeyaho’s song to protect her, to remind her of who she was. But she also needed her memories. She considered her friend. Sunlight had yet to penetrate the valley. The air was misty and dank. The pearlescent corona of his hair was like like a spun cloud. He watched her with wary eyes. “Can you sing while I talk?” she asked him, and he nodded. It made her sad to look at him. Where was the joyful Taeyaho of previous days, the Taeyaho who had come walking along a stream’s bank, swinging a line of bluegills?
He wanted to reassure her. He pursed his lips and then continued his song. His eyes rested on her, waiting. Draejed puffed moistly beside them. “This man,” Manrie said, “was once the Archivist of the First Tower. All the most ancient books and scrolls were in his keeping. He delighted in argument. I have watched him debate with other scholars on many occasions.” Draejed shifted. He was looking at her. He ran a hand through his white hair, shivered his shoulders, tapped anxiously at his knee. “He would stare at his opponents,” Manrie continued, “and there would be a glimmer of amusement in his eye. It was very smug. He knew things, you see, that they didn’t. He would wait for them to finish their argument, and then he would bring out some piece of secret knowledge that defeated the entire edifice that they had built. But I always thought, watching him, that knowledge shouldn’t be kept as a weapon. It shouldn’t be held in a sleeve like a secret dagger. My master, Aizdha, couldn’t stand Draejed. He never said it, but he avoided the tower debates when he could. He would only go out of politeness, when some other scholar had invited him. But never on his own.”
She turned and looked Draejed full in the face. Her feet were suddenly cold. The ghost of the scout had stepped into a mountain stream. To hide his scent, although he no longer had a scent. On the roof of the house, the watchman turned and looked sharply to the east. The sun had finally broken over the mountain, and it stung Manrie’s eyes, although the courtyard of the house was still in shadow. The starving girl was eating too quickly, and Manrie felt slightly nauseous. And Lokeyn was still standing silently in front of the hidden door. His quiet was unnerving. She hadn’t known that his skittering mind could be so still.
Draejed had no arguments left in him. That was obvious. He looked back at Manrie. He tapped his nose with one long finger. He moved his hand through his hair. He gave three short coughs. The plug of snot in his nose moved up and down, appearing at the opening of his left nostril and then drawing back up. “Look at him now,” Manrie said softly. “Tell me, Archivist, why did you leave your tower?”
“Everything you say is true,” Draejed said. His voice was clotted with mucous. “And now I am dying, here in this place of haunting. Place of despair. But I came here honestly. I, too, grew tired of the sound of my own voice. I saw my own arrogance, and I found it revolting. I had a whispering friend. He told me many things. But then he disappeared. And I found, once he was gone, that I had no knowledge of my own. No knowledge that I had discovered by myself. So I came here, because Daas Draebeye was here, and he was always a favorite of our whispering friend.”
Manrie frowned. She sent her mind along the fragile thread that lead to Lokeyn. He didn’t know Daas Draebeye, either. He had never been whispered to in the insidious way that Draejed’s words hinted at.“Who is this whispering friend?” she asked.
Draejed snuffled and sighed. “He has many names. He whispered many secrets. Secrets of the Previous World.”
She thought of the Man on the Mountain with his digging. “Is it so wonderful, the Previous World?” she asked, and was surprised by the plaintive tone in her voice.
The Archivist of the First Tower looked at her sadly. “I used to think so. But our whispering friend seems to have given up. He stopped visiting Daas Draebeye years ago. I discovered it when I came here. Catrilisa said that we should go looking for him. Ask him why he had abandoned us. But Daas was content to stay in his cave. Then the killings started.”
Taeyaho’s song faltered for a moment. Manrie tightened the strings. She felt the spirits turn towards her. She left the starving girl where she was, but pulled the guardsman back. “Killings?” she asked. Her voice was calm. She found herself looking at the walls of the house, the bare beams, the whitewashed adobe. It settled her mind.
“Three dead, and the house abandoned,” Draejed said. “You are to speak with them. The dead. To find out what killed them. That is what Catrilisa means for you to do. I suppose,” he said, pulling the plug of snot deep into his nose, so that it muffled his voice, “she means for me to either help or die in the effort.”
“She’s not your friend?”
He looked at her, and his rheumy eyes were intolerably sad. “I have exhausted my purpose.”
“Well,” Manrie said, standing up, “the ghosts don’t seem to be around. Maybe they’ll come out at night, but we don’t have time to wait for night. Baenlaez and the farmers are on the eastern cliff of this valley. And Taeslahbin is with them.”
The red-rimmed eyes widened. “He is locked in the harness shed.”
“No. He escaped. He seems to have found his friends and brought them here.”
“How do you know that?”
She smiled slightly. “I, too, have a whispering friend.” She didn’t say that she had four of them. But she felt the scout return to her, and the guardsman become fully present in her. He caused her to straighten her posture. She looked down at the old archivist. Her guardsman seemed to be remembering his body at its prime. He was offering its strength to her. “Let’s go look at this secret door,” she suggested.
Draejed’s eyes widened. “How do you know about that?”
She looked away. She surveyed the house’s beautiful walls with some regret. She wondered if she would ever see them again. “Whispers,” she said.
The door was in the women’s wing, in a small study on the ground floor. The study seemed to be nothing but an excuse for the door. It had a table, a chair, and a shelf that was full of scrolls. This shelf swung inwards on a secret hinge. The tunnel behind it was much wider than the shelf or the room.
Lokeyn’s ghost became visible within its darkness. Draejed gave a little cry of fear. Taeyaho’s song sharpened and grew louder. It was as if Lokeyn had cracked open a door to a bright room. A sliver of light seemed to fall through him.
She looked at Taeyaho and he looked back at her. His blue eyes were muddled with confusion. She lifted a hand and stroked his cheek, pleased by the wispy rasp of his beard against her palm. “Taeyaho,” she said, “stay here and sing. Like at Raesidae. And Tzurfaera. Make a way back for me.” He nodded. His unhappiness was plain on his face. She turned to Draejed. “I have no need of your death. None at all.”
She turned to enter the tunnel and stopped. Three shadowy forms bloomed in the darkness. Two girls and an old woman. Their faces emerged from the shadows. They were part of the shadows, but also somehow distinct from them. When Lokeyn’s light fell across them, they stepped back shyly. She glanced at the Archivist of the First Tower. “Your ghosts?”
He nodded. “They were taking food to Daas. One each day, and none returning. Catrilisa sent the first, and I sent the second. We didn’t know until the third went missing that anything was wrong.”
“And then you left the house.”
“It seemed prudent. Miesera was…quite mangled.” He glanced towards the shade of the old woman.
“You had no plan? You weren’t going to come back to the house?”
“We were trying to decide. If these three were dead, then it seemed likely that Daas, too, was dead. And without him…” the old man shrugged.
Manrie nodded. She studied the ghosts. “His spirit isn’t here,” she said. “So he lives. Or his spirit is elsewhere.”
Draejed raised a hand to his mouth. “He lives?” he asked. “After all this time?”
“How long has it been?”
“Four days.”
“Four days are not an epoch.”
The old debater reasserted himself in the archivist’s personality. “They are for one who lacks food and water.”
Manrie declined the argument. “Stay here,” she said.
Lokeyn’s ghost lit her way into the tunnel. It was as if a crack had opened in him, and there was a wide plain that could be seen in flashes as lightning struck a herd of small deer. Yet his very presence seemed to want to silence this vision, and if she tried to look through the crack it was like trying to remember something that was teasingly elusive. She sent Taeslahbin’s ghost ahead, to scout the way down the long tunnel. The old guardsman wanted to step from her and take the vanguard. But she held onto him, needing his strength, his craftiness, to be fully present inside of her. She was afraid. The walls were scored with markings. They were clear in the sudden flashes of light, and she recognized them. She had stood in a cave in the Gaendolin Hills, looking up at similar markings as the Lady Daturi held a lamp. And ahead of them, in that vast cavern, the carapace of the giant insect had collected dust in the darkness. She wanted to turn back to Taeyaho and say, “It’s a lace hole,” just to see if she could say it without a quiver in her voice. But she didn’t. She strode on, the guardsman’s strength filling her limbs. She wished that she had one of the Man on the Mountain’s discs.
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She could hear Taeyaho singing behind her. His voice became loud in the darkness, so loud that she almost missed the rasp of a body moving in the tunnel ahead of her. She stopped. She reached out and found the scout and brought him back to her. She could feel his interest quicken inside of her. But he wasn’t facing outward, towards the sound in the tunnel. There was something in her that he wanted to explore. She made the guardsman stand in his path, blocking him from tracking her into the hidden dens inside of herself. The scout knew nothing, had found nothing in the tunnel. She sent him forward again. Lokeyn’s odd lightning caught his spectral form as he advanced. The cave markings leered down from the walls.
She stood still, waiting. The ghost of Taeslahbin saw nothing. Yet the rasping sound, the scrape of limbs against dry stone, was coming closer to her. She found that her heart was pounding, and reminded herself that she was inured to fear. She had been hunting monsters since she was a child. But she didn’t like that scraping sound. The sound of many limbs. As if many things were alive in the cave.
Lokeyn’s ghost was oddly passive. He, who was like an inquisitive finger, parting the guts of the world to find out how everything worked, suddenly didn’t want to know. As if the thing in the tunnel ahead of them was eating his curiosity. The three ghosts of the dead servants stood with their heads bowed, as if someone were berating them.
Then the scout was coming back. He had found a door at the end of the tunnel, and it was closed. There was someone living beyond it. He passed through the odd skittering sounds without seeming to note them.
Manrie took a step forward. And then another. Her dead companions stepped with her. The guardsman tensed inside of her. Lokeyn’s light flashed through the tunnel, and she saw the monster.
She had seen it once before. She had written about it in the bestiary. She had drawn it, with Aizdha’s hand on top of her own, the only time they had drawn in that way. The monster that they had met in the cliff city of Lacermae. It was standing in the center of the tunnel, and it did not want to be described. Long limbs extended from its mouth, like overgrown teeth, each ending in a hand. Yet its face was a mask of darkness, and she did not know how she could see its mouth at all. Its eyes seemed to float in the gloom around it, and each one was a pebble that had been pitted by the sea. Yet the air around it was solid with shadow, and nothing floated there, nothing that she could know. It had no legs, but a great wheel, and yet the wheel’s spokes were legs, and they drifted downwards to clutch the tunnel floor, but at the same time they seemed woven together to make the wheel, like rattan. There was no creature and there was a creature. She had drawn an image of it. But she couldn’t have, as there was no image that her mind could make sense of.
She was alone, and she was unarmed. She and Aizdha had faced this beast together, but they hadn’t defeated it. It had simply regarded them, and seen that they saw it, and then turned and moved up the mountain slopes, disappearing back into the high peaks. They had returned to Lacermae and told the people that they were safe. But they hadn’t really known that. When she had asked her master whether this was right, he had said, “We are none of truly safe. Not forever. More people will die in Lacermae from childbirth and accident in this year alone than the monster ever killed.”
She chose Lokeyn. It was unkind of her. His shade turned and stared at her, and she could sense his hurt. She hadn’t thought that he was capable of being hurt. But she sent him, anyway, into the body of the unseen beast. She felt his movements along the thread. The pulsing lightning weakened as he came into the sphere of the creature’s darkness. The monster’s many arms snaked from its mouth to seize him. Its legs turned and turned, moving it backward down the tunnel. She was afraid that Lokeyn would blink out, that true death, death beyond any haunting, was seizing him. Then she felt the spark of his interest. He couldn’t help himself. He was walking through the creature’s head, and it was as if he were netting butterflies.
Now the creature was afraid. It didn’t want to be caught. It didn’t want to be seen. And Manrie felt compassion. She understood it. It was as if she were looking at a secret place within herself, and the creature that lived there. A shy creature, not a beast. But it would kill anyone who dared to look at it.
Only it didn’t have to kill. Big Praeda’s face swam into her mind. A memory, so strong and fragrant that it rooted her to herself. The pantry wagon, and Big Praeda mixing ham and mustard and herbs in a bowl. Manrie heard her own voice saying, “I think that she hated me, because I had lived, and was a little child, and found ways to be happy when everyone else was very sad. She wanted me to be a slave.” She remembered the way that Big Praeda’s hands had moved through the salad, mixing, her fingers wet with the mustard and plastered with pieces of torn oregano. Then she saw her own hands, spooning the food into Uku’s mouth as the storm raged at his back.
She didn’t know why, but she sent this memory along the thread. She watched it take root in Lokeyn’s broken mind. She saw him turning to it, and she felt the swell of love within him. She thought that he had only ever loved his tortoise. But now she knew that this was what his tortoise had been to him. The repository of his deepest self. No wonder he had been hiding in the plates of its shell. She loved him, then, although she hadn’t thought this was possible. The poor, wandering ghost, who had first been a wandering man, who had wanted to tame the world but had given himself to it instead. Or at least to one part of it, the part that walked slowly along the plains, its great feet stirring the dust, its shell cresting above the long grasses.
They looked at each other. She saw Lokeyn and Lokeyn saw her. And then the unseen monster was gone. She blinked. The tunnel went dark. She couldn’t hear the rasp of legs. Perhaps it had gone through a wall, or up some secret passageway. But she thought not. It had dissipated, and Lokeyn had disappeared with it. A new tortoise. She imagined him riding on the unseen monster’s unknowable back, somewhere in the world.
Then she staggered, because Lokeyn had taken part of her with him. She felt it, an absence like a missing tooth, lurking in one corner of her mind. What had been there before? What had he drawn away with him? She couldn’t remember. She had been sitting with Big Praeda in the pantry wagon, and they had been making food. She had been very hungry. She had been talking about something, someone. And Praeda had said something wise. And then, for some reason, she had gone outside and stuck her hand in Uku’s mouth.
She felt lighter, somehow, without the thing she was missing. But she didn’t like it. She was afraid, for a moment, that its absence meant that she was dead. But no, she had a body, and that body was cold because the cave was cold, and she was supposed to rescue an old man. She could feel the three dead servants regarding her. She felt naked to their gaze, as if she had taken off her undergarments. She stepped forward to shake their attention away from her.
There was a door built across the tunnel, just as Macbrau had built his door in Tzurfaera. She couldn’t see it with her own eyes, but the scout could see it, as if the tunnel wasn’t dark at all. It was very solid, but the three dead servants hurried towards it, relieved that they could finally complete their chore and bring the old man his meals. She stood with a hand pressed flat against the wood and called through it. “Daas Draebeye, if you are still alive, you should open this door.”
A movement in the room beyond. A bolt being slid back. The door opened inwards into darkness. But the scout stepped forward and shared with her the vision of an old man, very thin, the lips nearly curled into nothingness above wide and yellowed teeth. He tried to speak, but the words were an empty rasp. She should have brought water.
“Come,” she said, “it isn’t far. I can help you back up the tunnel, and we’ll get water from the well.”
He fell forward and she caught him. He was so fragile. One thin arm went around her shoulders, and she felt that she could lift him and carry him in her arms. His breath rasped and smelled of decay, of starvation and thirst. The starving girl came rushing back into her mind with a sense of alarm, of fear. All the food had vanished from the table in Catrilisa’s low room. But the girl hadn’t been curious enough to follow Catrilisa, to see what was happening in the homestead. She had sat miserably at the table, and had tried to pick at the unreachable crumbs that were left littered on the plates. Her presence in Manrie’s mind was ravenous. It staggered her with its need to eat. She hurried up the tunnel, moving too quickly for the old man. His feet dragged, but he was too deranged by hunger and thirst to protest.
Someone had closed the secret door. She walked right into it, and fell onto the ground, tangling herself with the old man. She reached out a hand in disbelief and felt the solidity of the wood and the iron bands that crossed it. Taeyaho was gone. When had she last heard his voice? Her hand was shaking as she began to hammer at the door. Did she hear a movement in the room beyond?
“You will learn the language on the walls,” a voice said. It was very distinct, sharp, familiar yet not familiar. Cruel.
“Let us out! The old man is dying!” she yelled.
“You will learn the language on the walls,” the voice repeated. It was the strangest voice she had ever heard. The voice of a person who was indifferent to death. Indifferent to her. Not a predator or a manipulator. A voice that simply happened. Like an avalanche.
“Let us out!” she screamed. Her heart was thumping. The starving girl rode her. She wanted to seize control, to blot Manrie out with her hunger and her fear. The guardsman was alert. He was looking around, sensing danger. The spirits of the three servants went through the door, their duty discharged, their task completed. She seized the scout and pushed him after them, into the room beyond. The thread seemed to break. She screamed again. She pushed the starving girl out. She had to see what was happening. She had to see the face that spoke with that voice. The starving girl stepped through the door and was gone. Entirely gone. Yet the fear and anger didn’t leave.
She found that she was sobbing, collapsed on the floor of the tunnel. “Stay with me,” she whispered to the guardsman, and his spirit nodded inside of her.
“I have nowhere to go,” the scholar, Daas Draebeye whispered.
“Not you,” she said.
“Very well,” he said, and he died. She felt his death in his body. The arm that grasped at her shoulder slackened. His head dropped against her with a thud. But she didn’t release him. She clung to his corpse, as if she could somehow find the last spark of departing life and draw sustenance from it.
His ghost stood in the tunnel. The ghost was not so frail as the old man. Not starved. Not dying of thirst. She looked at it, without knowing how she could see it. It didn’t look back. Its eyes were unseeing. She raised a fist and pounded on the door again. “Let me out,” she called, and the panic was gone from her voice. “The old man is dead.”
“You will learn the language on the walls,” the voice said. It was unaltered.
She pounded on the door with both fists. “Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!”
She collapsed on the stone floor. The guardsman was standing watch inside of her. She felt his wariness. Maybe it was his movement and not her own that drew her hand to the side of the door. She felt the hinge there. The door opened inwards. Her body went still. Then she stood and collected herself, regarding the door, her head lowered, her face hot with tears.
She turned back down the tunnel, back to the dead scholar’s room. Daas Draebeye’s shade came with her. She stood in the darkness, wishing that the scout would return. But there was no thread. No thread to him, no thread to the starving girl. As if they were well and truly dead. She moved forward, her hands stretched in front of her, until she reached a desk. She felt the objects on it, not knowing what they were. There was something tacky and pitted. And a thin, spiked tool. A stylus. Something soft was thrown across the back of the chair. A shawl, perhaps. Her hands kept exploring. There was a bookshelf, but it didn’t have books on it, but was stacked with thin wax tablets, the kind of tablets that scholars took notes on so as not to waste paper. She nearly tripped over a sleeping pallet that was pushed against one wall. Then she found the other door.
She thought, for a moment, that she had done a circuit of the room. She panicked, thinking that someone had closed the door she had come through. But no. The bookshelf was to her left. She could reach out her hand and feel the spines of the wax tablets. And the wood of this door was different. Softer. Older. It was banded and bolted, and made of thick wood. She leaned her face against it. She could hear an echoing space beyond it. A lace hole that could go anywhere.
For a moment she was tempted to open the door and go through it. Maybe she would emerge hundreds of years in the future, or the past. Maybe she would find herself standing beside the sea, or in a deep forest, or on an island in a river. Maybe there would be people there, or maybe there wouldn’t. She did not know which she would prefer.
But Taeyaho was somewhere in the homestead. Something had happened to him. And Uku was lost somewhere along the shore of Zaira Lake. And Cloedeya and the caravan were winding their way east, towards the Man on the Mountain, where she should go. She had been so clever. She had convinced Baenlaez to take her there, so that she could find them. And she had refused to divulge her secrets to him, so that he would have to treat them well. Lokeyn’s secrets. Lokeyn who was gone now, so that she was the only one who knew anything about tortoises and gorpsarra and lightning-struck agorabehn. A plan. She had made a clever plan. And now she was in this room, and there were only the blind scholar’s simple tools, scattered on the desk. No chisel. No axe. No heavy tool that could be used to pry the hinges from the door that led back into the beautiful house.
She stood with her ear pressed against the door that led deeper into the lace hole, and accepted the inevitable. Daas Draebeye’s ghost was standing at the desk. She could sense him there. She gave a shuddering sigh and turned. She moved slowly across the room, feeling her way in the darkness to his little sleeping pallet. She lay down. The blankets smelled of unwashed skin and incontinence. She pulled them about her. Then she invited the old man’s ghost into herself.