In the mornings, when Taeslahbin left camp before the others, Manrie could feel his ghost sharpen inside of her. She would feel the tug of his spirit as he left her, insistent on following his living doppelgänger out into the woods, along the foot of the mountain, beside the streams and heavy blocks of limestone. The scout-inside-of-her knew these mountains. So he knew that the physical Taeslahbin was leading them by strange routes.
There were eighteen of them in the party. Taeslahbin, the living scout, with his black gloves and stained robes. A bird had crapped on his shoulder at some point during the third day. The ghost, the scout-inside-of-her, had seen it happen, and now the negligent drip of white against green and black linen was all she saw when she looked at him. The ghost was anxious and offended, and Manrie remembered how clean the living man had been when she first observed him. Perhaps the part of him that cared about cleanliness had vanished into the ghost as it left him.
Baenlaez, who had exchanged tapestried robes for traveling clothes, had proven to be curiously good at moving silently through the woods. As if the rotten-wood smell of his body and the fungal aura of his face were at home here. Retoebaeni, by contrast, was terrible at stealthy movement. He tripped constantly, forgot himself and sang little ditties, and often cried out when he was scratched by a branch or stubbed a toe on a rock. They had taken Zaelin from the prison behind the waterfall, leaving poor Slaeterin Moesebai alone in the darkness. Zaelin walked with his head down, barely aware of his surroundings. The rest of the men were unknown to Manrie. Except for Taeyaho.
She had wanted to embrace him when he had appeared with the other men in the predawn, on the morning that they left the farm. He had lifted his head and looked at her, then looked past her, as if he didn’t recognize her. She had felt the starving girl stir inside of her. The starving girl, who knew rejection better than she knew any other emotion, and recognized Taeyaho’s silence for what it was. As they marched, Manrie tried to walk beside him. He was not cruel to her. He didn’t seem to notice her. But he sang, and she drew comfort from that.
Trekking through the foothills was very boring, and boredom was dangerous. It invited the spirits within her to amuse her with their memories. She could feel her own memories slipping away. So every day she found a new way to remind herself that she was in a body, that it was her body, that this body had a name, and that its name was Manrie. She had a number of sharp rocks, and they each dug into her palms in different ways. Sometimes she put them in her boots. She had a quill that she had found at their third encampment, sharp and white. It was from the bharaeda bird, which shed the feathers from its quills every spring and endured a period of skeletal nakedness while it mated. When the spirits rose too strongly, she jabbed this quill under her fingernails. But pain could root her to her body only during the day time. At night, the spirits rode her, and she didn’t dream so much as disappear from herself. In the morning she would be confused. The scout would arise. He would watch his doppelgänger depart the camp and slide from her to follow. The other spirits would sit glumly beside the fire, and they wouldn’t dissipate until somebody spoke to her.
This task of saying her name, of causing her to return to herself, often fell to Zaelin. Morning after morning, she would hear his voice. Dull. Mumbling. But right beside her, speaking in her ear. She would hear him repeating her name, and it was as if his voice was the side of a tent, and she was outside of it, and she needed to push through the canvas and find herself within it. Then she would be Manrie for awhile, until the sound of men moving in unison reminded the old guardsman of his fallen companions, or Taeyaho’s indifference to her brought the bruised sorrow of the starving girl to the surface.
She did not have to worry about Lokeyn. The others enjoyed riding her, as if they were sitting in a wagon together as the oxen huffed along the road, pulling them. But they hated Lokeyn, and they pushed him from their company. His spirit wandered freely through the woods, unseen in the daylight by her captors. But she knew that he noticed everything, dipped into everything with amused interest, noted the lives of insects under the tree bark, followed the squirrels into their hidden dens, listened to the sound of the wind through the turning leaves. She knew this, because he returned to her at night along with the scout, and when he returned the other spirits became sullen and silent. As they sat beside the campfire and ate their dinner, Lokeyn would be bright in her mind. She would be unable to feed herself. The sad, slow Zelken would have to spoon food into her mouth.
Lokeyn was not a pleasant companion. He showed her the sights of his day, but gave her no knowledge. He sang a little sing-song up and down tune that repeated and repeated and repeated, and yet she could never quite make out the words. The stasy flates? The wazy blates? It didn’t matter. It was madness. It was not meant for her understanding.
And yet, she knew how he had made the calm. He had shown it to her in the moment when he had leapt from the tortoise shell into her body. Had shown her a night out on the western plains. Perhaps his last night of lucidity. A night when the storm had come up, and lightning had struck the herd of agorabehn and the little deer had panicked, running together, sweeping around him as he stood balanced on the back of the tortoise. At any moment he could have fallen. He would have been trampled to death. But what he remembered most was their breaths. How soft and warm they were, as the agorabehn stampeded around him. When the storm was gone he came upon a doe, lying in the grasses. She was pregnant and giving birth. She had been abandoned by the rest of her herd. He watched as her fawn struggled out of her body, and he led it to the tortoise, and showed it how to drink from his friend’s wonderful teats. The little fawn traveled with them for a day and a half, and then it died on the plain. And in the morning a gorpsarra dropped from the sky and feasted on it, as he sat on the tortoise and watched. The gorpsarra’s blue beak was long and thin, and it dipped into the side of the fawn again and again. Then it turned its head and vomited the spew of its second stomach into the grasses.
The tortoise moved very slowly. That day it hardly wanted to move at all. As if it were mourning the fawn. And so they were only a hundred feet away at evening, when the grass jackals came and lapped up the gorpsarra’s vomit. And they weren’t even over the next rise in the morning, when a small dog came and played in the grass as they made their slow way east. So close to the place where the fawn had died that Lokeyn got down from the tortoise’s back and went and collected the vomit in a jar. And as the days went on, he fed it to the creatures he met along the way, so that he came to the valley by the waterfall with a menagerie of friendly snakes, tiny cats, and two deer that he had harnessed to the tortoise to speed his friend’s slow passage across the earth.
He had shown this memory to Manrie like it was the last gift from his disappearing mind. As if ghosts could continue the slide into insanity that had begun in their living bodies. Manrie didn’t really believe it. It seemed impossible to her, like something out of a nursery tale. Something her mother had made up to amuse her, long ago, on the other side of the mountains, before the famine came. But then, she was learning from the spirits that rode her that no human life was entirely believable to another. If humans could believe the full extent of each other’s yearning and hope and pain, there would be no cruelty left in the world.
And none of the farmers knew that she had lied. That they were going in the wrong direction. On a mission for her, and not for themselves.
They came upon the child’s skeleton in the midafternoon of an otherwise indistinguishable day. They were moving along the western slopes of Mount Maenokae. Two days earlier Manrie had felt a small prick of excitement when she had made out its broken peaks and the rock formation that jutted like a tooth from the mountain’s side. They were near Libreigia pass. But the excitement had ebbed after two days of trudging along the foot of the mountain, their way blocked by rockfall and tumbling streams.
The skeleton was lying against a linden tree, as if the living child had simply lain down there to die. The starving girl was immediately interested. It was a fine place to die. If the child had lain there in spring, his corpse would have been covered by fragrant flowers. The starving girl had once imagined such a death for herself. A surrender. A soft disappearance into the earth.
Baenlaez ordered them to make camp. The guardsman’s ghost was confused, and stirred inside of Manrie. It was too early. They could cover many miles in the daylight that remained. The scout would be looking for them far to the north when darkness came, not here, in this eerie place beside the linden tree. But the mushroom man seemed indifferent to these considerations, and his people obeyed him without question. Camp was made, and the farmers busied themselves with little tasks. They patched their clothing with needle and thread. Someone found a pool nearby, and they slipped off in pairs to go and bathe. They ignored Manrie, who sat by the campfire with Zaelin beside her. The air was chill and the fire added little heat. She dug a sharp stone into her palm. “Say my name,” she said to Zaelin, and he obliged, murmuring it, so that she stayed rooted to herself.
Lokeyn returned at dusk. He had been to the pool and observed the men bathing. He had slipped close to them, to study their scars. Several had been whipped at some point in their lives. Slaves, Manrie thought, or maybe it was the old guardsman who thought it. Escaped slaves, who had found the farm and been taken in. And made slaves again, in a different way. The fire crackled. Gradually its heat began to color the air around it, as blue shadows fell across the camp.
Baenlaez came and stood over her. Retoebaeni was beside him, looking down with his sharp little eyes. “You will come with us,” Baenlaez said. The starving girl moved to obey, but the old guardsman tilted his head and looked up at them. Lokeyn didn’t like this. He had been enjoying looking at the threads of smoke that rose from the campfire. Baenlaez turned away. “Bring them,” he said, and hands grabbed her from behind. Someone grabbed Zaelin as well. They didn’t have to, Manrie thought, he would have come on his own. But the old guardsman didn’t think this was cruel. Sometimes you had to get a little rough to get a man to move quickly.
They were hustled over to the linden tree and made to face the skeleton. Retoebaeni darted back and forth, fussing, making Manrie take a step back and Zaelin take a step forward, as if following some careful prearrangement. Baenlaez looked away in seeming disinterest, studying the sky. The last of the daylight leeched from it, and the mushroom man lowered his gaze.
The ghost of a boy had risen up from the skeleton. It stood, looking at them. It was very thin. Its cheeks were sunken and the shape of its skull was visible beneath its skin. It was wearing cast off robes, and they were too big for it, and their flop to the ground emphasized the ghost’s emaciation.
“Let it possess you,” Baenlaez said in an offhand way, as if he were telling a slave to make a fire.
“No,” Manrie said.
The mushroom man turned his lazy gaze to her. “Girl, you will do as I say.”
*I can’t have another starving child inside of me,* Manrie thought, and it was her thought, and she was glad. She tightened her fist so that the rock bit into her skin. She summoned the guardsman. If he could let people in, he could keep them out. She felt him come to attention. He slipped from her, and stood before her. There was a wary, scrambling sound as men stepped back. Good. They were afraid.
Baenlaez seemed indifferent to the guardsman’s spectral form. “Bring the boy,” he said.
For a moment she thought he meant the ghost of the boy under the linden tree. But then Taeyaho was pulled forward. Retoebaeni was clucking, distressed and agitated. “Please,” he said to Manrie, “please just do as he says.” His words came to her as an echo from the guardsman’s mind.
Baenlaez nodded to one of the farmers and the man stepped forward and struck Taeyaho hard across the face. Taeyaho’s head snapped back, his golden hair vibrating with reflected fire light, and then his head fell forward. She could see his chest heaving, all of the energy of his shocked body concentrated in his breath.
“Don’t do that again,” Manrie said, and it was the guardsman’s voice she heard in her mind.
“Do as I say,” Baenlaez said. He sounded bored. “Let the child possess you.”
It was like the time that Doenblaet had threatened to rape that merchant’s daughter unless the man paid his taxes in full. Fat little merchant, with damp, flappy hands. Doenblaet would have done it, if the man hadn’t shown them the secret compartment in his counting desk. He wanted to even after they had collected the tax, but the captain would have killed him for it. A good lesson to learn. Never ignore the threats of an evil man.
Manrie shook her head, trying to clear it of the guardsman’s memory. His ghost was in front of her, wavering in the flickering fire light. But his memories were still inside of her. She felt a flash of despair. Even if they got to the Man on the Mountain, she might not be released. The spirits were entangled within her. They left threads of themselves inside of her mind even when they went out into the world.
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Baenlaez misunderstood her head shake and Taeyaho was hit again. This time by a balled fist in his stomach. He fell to his knees, gasping. “Stop!” Manrie said. “Stop! I’ll do it.”
“Wait, wait,” Retoebaeni cried out. He jittered back and forth between her and Zaelin, double-checking his arrangements. He nodded to someone beyond her line of vision, and a big farmer stepped up beside Zaelin and placed his hands on his shoulders. As if Zaelin had to be held in place. “Good, good,” Retoebaeni said. His eyes flickered to Baenlaez. Then he looked at Manrie. “Do it now.”
The guardsman stepped aside, and the ghost of the boy came forward, stepping quickly but shyly, like a child about to steal a sweet cake. A grunt, a sudden violent movement, and Zaelin was thrust into his path. Zaelin cried out and fell to the ground. The ghost of the boy was gone. Zaelin writhed in the dirt. His mouth was stretched very wide, as if he were screaming. His robes, mottled by grass stains and leaf rot, bleached to a bone white. Then he subsided.
Retoebaeni stepped cautiously up to him. “Bring me a lantern,” he demanded in a sharp, workaday voice. A lantern was brought and he dipped it low, cutting through the dusk. Zaelin looked up at him, blinking. “Tell me, old friend,” the alchemist said, “do you have a guest inside of you?”
The voice that Zaelin spoke with wasn’t his own. It was high pitched and frightened. “Why am I in this cage?” it asked.
“Cage? What cage?”
“There are bars all around me. They go on and on. In every direction. Bars. Why is it so dark? Why have you covered me in darkness?”
The alchemist glanced up at Baenlaez. The mushroom man was calm. “I have often wondered what it was like inside of Zaelin’s mind.”
Retoebaeni bent low again. “Don’t worry, my friend. We are very close to finding it. The calm. We will return you to happiness.”
“But I was happy,” the child’s voice said. “It is so beautiful under the linden tree. Only I am lonely. Where are the others? The old man and the girl, and the man with spokes coming out of his head?”
“What does he mean?” Baenlaez asked sharply.
They both turned and looked at Manrie. “It must be the spirits,” Retoebaeni said. “It saw the spirits that ride the girl. It wanted their company.”
“And the experiment?” Baenlaez asked after a moment. “It seems successful. The girl is not unique.”
“Not unique, no. As we suspected. She learned it from the triplets in Raesidae. From the evidence, it is not hard to learn, once you know that it can be done.”
This seemed to frustrate the mushroom man. “Then anyone could have taken Lokeyn’s ghost.” He turned to Manrie and pushed his face close. “Give him to me,” he said.
“What?”
“The ghost. I want him.”
“You don’t want him.”
“I do.”
“He is mad.”
Baenlaez considered. “One of the others, then.” He turned to the man who had hit Taeyaho. “You,” he said. “Come here, Sloedahn.” The man was afraid. He slouched forward uncertainly. “Now,” Baenlaez said, “give him the ghost.”
Manrie pretended to concentrate. She scrunched up her face. “He will not leave,” she said. She opened her eyes. “How do you know that they can leave, once they’ve moved in?”
The moist lips pursed. Baenlaez didn’t take his eyes off of her, but he tilted his head. “Retoebaeni?”
“Well, we don’t know that, of course,” the little alchemist said. “We know so little about possession in general. A ghost might kill its host when it leaves. Or the host might be damaged in some way.”
“The three in Raesidae,” Baenlaez said, and his tone was of one speaking to a fool.
“Yes, of course, there is that,” Retoebaeni said. “Yes. I don’t suppose that the dead stayed with them. But we know nothing about them, except for what this girl has told us.”
Baenlaez turned to Zaelin, who was still lying in the dirt, looking up at the canopy of the linden tree. “Release the boy,” he ordered.
Zaelin stared up at him with moist eyes. Manrie found that she was holding her breath. The guardsman was alert, worried. Lokeyn was delighted. He was picturing Manrie dying. If she were to die, she would be a ghost with ghosts inside of her. The madman traveled through this thought, seeing one ghost wrapped inside another, layers of ghosts that disappeared into infinity.
“It won’t leave,” Zaelin said in a slow, defeated voice.
Baenlaez cursed. He stamped the ground, and Manrie thought she could see spores rising from the dust around his feet. “Keep them together,” he barked to his men, and then went pacing off under the trees to exhaust his ire in the darkness.
*Would it kill me?* Manrie wondered. *Would I die if the ghosts left me? Lokeyn seems to think so. But the Jahnajeel didn’t die. Of course, they were possessed for moments, and I have been possessed for days.* She could picture the four spirits departing from her, each of them taking a part of herself as they went. She saw herself as a shell, with nothing left inside of her. She was led back to the fire and left there, and when she remembered that she was Manrie, she was very afraid.
The scout returned in the depths of the night. He came suddenly into her dreams. He was agitated, angry, even. She could see him in a forest, and knew that this forest was herself. He was trying to open the jaws of a trap, only they were rusty and the hinges wouldn’t move. He kept looking over his shoulder, as if he were pursued. But she knew that the trap wasn’t for his pursuer. It was for her. To keep her in place.
A hand shook her from sleep and she looked up into the scout’s face. The living scout. He held a finger to his lips and gestured for her to get up. She looked about. Men were asleep in their blankets, curled on the beaten earth around the fire. They had set a picket, but she couldn’t see anyone standing at the edge of the circle, looking out into the night. She spotted Taeyaho’s pearlescent hair, mussed and emerging from his blankets. She pointed at him. Taeslahbin frowned, but Manrie made a face and pointed more emphatically. The scout stood and moved quietly through the sleeping figures. He touched Taeyaho’s shoulder and bent and whispered in his ear.
Then they were walking away from the fire, the three of them together. The ghost of the scout was protesting, loud in Manrie’s mind. He was trying to make her feet drag, trying to make her trip so that she would wake the farmers. The guardsman grabbed him and forced him to be still. The starving girl was delighted. She was being singled out. Being treated as if she were special. Manrie followed the living scout silently, concentrating on the stain of bird shit on his shoulder.
Morning found them moving through mountain mist, far to the east of the encampment by the linden tree. The rising sun reflected off of the mountain side, blazing out against the silvered stone so that it hurt her eyes. She dug a stone into her palm and spoke her own name, over and over again. Beside her, Taeyaho was quietly singing. He was echoed by Taeslahbin, who seemed to be trying to learn his song. This surprised Manrie. It surprised Taeyaho, too. His voice faltered, and he looked at the back of the scout. She had never seen him look offended before.
They came through a stand of trees and found themselves in a wide valley. A river ran through it, and the mountain extended long tendrils of stone on either side. There was the smell of smoke in the air. The valley was cold, still in shadow, and the thick grass that they walked through was blue with cold. There were houses ahead, a homestead, and someone was cooking breakfast.
They walked between the outbuildings and surprised a young girl who was drawing water from a well. She dropped her bucket and ran off, her breath misting the air. Taeslahbin went to the well and calmly lowered the bucket again and drew it up. He picked it up by its handle and moved towards the large house in the center of the homestead, Manrie and Taeyaho following. He didn’t seem surprised when men issued out of a low building and surrounded them.
They said nothing, just lowered staves and pitchforks, waiting, keeping their captives in place. Another door opened in another building, and a woman came out. She was dressed in thick wool and her hair was the same dark color as her robes, but streaked with gray. She paced forward and stood before the scout.
“Come to steal more children, have you?” she asked.
Taeslahbin shook his head. “I bring you children instead.”
The woman inspected Manrie and Taeyaho. “These aren’t ours.”
“But they are escaping from the farmers.”
“Escaping from you, you mean. I know you, Taeslahbin the Scout.”
“And I know you, Catrilisa.”
The name made Manrie look more closely. The woman was familiar to her. Older than the last time she had seen her. A memory flashed into her mind. A scholar sat at a long table in the fourth tower, scowling at a scroll. She turned and snapped at Manrie, telling her that she did not have the information that Aizdha had sent her to enquire about. This was Manrie’s own memory, and she clung to it. It made her bold. “We’ve met before,” she said, and she was glad to hear that her voice was her own. “In Libreigia. I was Aizdha’s slave.”
The woman looked at her sharply. “Was?”
“My master is dead. He was killed by Baenlaez. Baenlaez is on the mountain. We fled his camp in the night.”
Catrilisa scowled and stared at Taeslahbin. “You have turned against his cult?”
The scout inside of Manrie was howling, but the scout outside of her said, “I have. They have begun playing with ghosts.”
The woman paled. “Ghosts? What do you know of ghosts?”
“They’re rising all over the west,” Taeslahbin said. “Surely they’re rising here?”
The men with their staves and pitchforks shifted uneasily. They cast glances at the big house in the center of the homestead. Manrie noticed that there was no smoke issuing from any of its chimneys.
“What do you mean, ‘playing’ with them?”
“This girl here, they made her eat a ghost,” the scout said. Catrilisa hissed and stepped back. He hurried on. “It can be done. They say that it happened in Raesidae as well. Spirit possession.”
The scholar’s sharp eyes returned to Manrie. “You are possessed?”
The words came slowly. They were laden with defeat. “Yes. I am possessed.”
“And what does the farmers’ cult want from you?”
“They were taking me to the Man on the Mountain. He has something they need. And I’m the only one who knows exactly what it is.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t torture it out of you.”
“They’re afraid of harming the ghost I carry.”
The scholar touched her stomach inadvertently. She saw Manrie notice, and was angry. She glanced around at the men. “Take the scout and chain him in the harness house. The girl will breakfast with me.”
“What about Taeyaho?” Manrie asked quickly.
Catrilisa inspected Taeyaho. His head was lowered. Gray shadows were tangled in his pearlescent hair. “I don’t know him. Who is he?”
“He was part of Cloedeya’s caravan. Baenlaez captured him when he captured me.”
A sharp nod. “Then he can eat, too.” She turned and walked back to the building that she had emerged from.
Taeslahbin was curiously docile as the people of the homestead lead him away. As if he knew something. As if he had laid a trap and was waiting for someone to step into it. Manrie and Taeyaho were taken in hand, jostled between two burly men who hadn’t washed for days, and smelled of hay and manure. Manrie dug the rock into her palm and turned to the scout in her mind. *What are you planning?* she asked it. But the scout had no answer. He was furious, enraged by his doppelgänger’s actions.
They were led into a low room where a man sat at a table. He had a blunt face and a wide nose, and Manrie could hear a clog of snot going back and forth in one nostril. He glared at her and then shivered and looked away, then tapped the table three times, then ran a hand through his white hair, then wiped a tear from his eye. “Quiet, Draejed,” Catrilisa said gently, going to sit beside him.
Manrie knew that name, too. Draejed, who had been archivist of the third tower. Who had left Libreigia years ago to seek knowledge in the west, and who had never come back. He was no longer haughty. He was like a frightened child who couldn’t sit still.
“You are in danger,” Manrie told Catrilisa. “I don’t know what Taeslahbin is planning. I don’t why he brought us here. I am happy to have escaped, but Baenlaez and twenty men are less than ten miles away, and they will be looking for us.”
Catrilisa nodded. She glanced at one of the men who had brought Manrie into the room. “Go. Set a picket. Sent Iyerud and Lompis to scout.” Then she turned her attention back to Manrie. Her eyes were very gray, and her expression was merciless. “So,” she said, “you can eat ghosts.”