She was awake, and Taeyaho was sleeping beside her. She only knew this because the ghost of Daas Draebeye knew it. He had heightened her sense of smell, and she knew that she was breathing in Taeyaho’s scent. The blind scholar had given her a way to know a person by the measurement of their body, a deep sensitivity to the space that a person’s form occupied in a room. She reached out in the darkness and touched Taeyaho’s face.
His breathing was very soft, but peaceful. The secret door that led into the house must be open. Perhaps it was daytime in the world outside, or perhaps it was night. She reached for the threads of the other ghosts, but they were gone. The scout was gone. The starving girl was gone. Lokeyn had left with the unseen monster. Only the guardsman remained, and Daas Draebeye. But Daas was a very restful ghost. She felt him settle inside of her, composing himself for the quiet waiting that had marked much of his life. She felt the low thrum of his speculations, but he didn’t need her to pay attention to them. She was tired, and strangely sad.
Taeyaho stirred. His breathing shifted, and then he gave a little grunt, and came awake. “Manrie?” he asked in the deep darkness.
“I’m here,” she said. Her voice was her own.
He seemed to listen to it for a moment, as if he were testing it. As if he were trying to decide whether she was herself. “Are you hungry?” he asked.
She thought about that. She wasn’t hungry. She didn’t seem to remember ever being hungry. Perhaps the starving girl had taken hunger with her when she left. Cloedeya would be so disappointed. “How long have I been here?”
“A day and a night. You slept and slept. I was worried that you were sick.”
“Not sick,” she said. “Taeyaho, what’s happening outside?”
A silence. Then he sat up and fumbled with something at the foot of the sleeping pallet. Sparks snapped in the air. She could see. Daas Draebeye hadn’t made her blind.
Taeyaho’s face appeared in pulses as he worked the flint and steel. The tinder caught, and warm light flooded upwards to reveal the deep hollows of his eyes. She watched him take a candle and dip it above the tinder box, then move it into a lantern. The little room wavered with candle light.
She sat up and pushed her back against the wall. Taeyaho had a backpack, and he was rummaging inside of it. “Where did you get that?” she asked.
“It was on the other side of the door,” he said, nodding at the barred door that led deeper into the tunnels.
“You opened the door?”
He nodded again, the candle light drawn deep into his pearlescent hair. He was cutting slices of cheese, and he had an apple. Manrie watched his hands without feeling any hunger. “We need to go that way,” he said at last.
She felt fear, and it surprised her. She had gone into caves before, with Taeyaho singing behind her. Only in this cave he had disappeared. He had left her alone. “Where did you go?” she asked.
He looked up, and there was pain in his eyes. “A man came. He struck me.” Taeyaho bent his head, and she saw the wound beneath his hair.
“What man?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see him. When I came to, I was tied up in an upper room of the house. I could hear everything from there.”
“What did you hear?”
He closed his eyes. “Screaming. Fighting. People crying. Most of the homestead is burned. All the outer buildings.”
“Is there anyone left?”
He looked at her and his mouth trembled. “The scout freed me. But then he went away. I don’t know why. I came down the stairs, and there were bodies everywhere. The homesteaders tried to make a stand in the house. The farmers killed them. They’re still out there. They almost caught me, but I hid in the cellars. They don’t know about the secret doorway.”
“They killed everyone?”
He nodded. “But Baenlaez was hurt in the fighting. He may be dying. Everyone is angry. They yell at the alchemist, telling him to heal him.”
“And Taeslahbin?”
“He’s gone. They’re angry about that, too. They say he led them into a trap. But Manrie, I don’t understand why he would do that.”
“Maybe…maybe he was connected to the spirit, somehow. Maybe the fact that I had his spirit inside of me meant that he was on our side.”
An odd look flickered across Taeyaho’s face. Almost an expression of relief. “Maybe so,” he said. Then he held a piece of cheese out to her. “You must eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Eat anyway. We might have a long way to go.”
She looked at the barred door. “You think it goes somewhere. The tunnel.”
He nodded. “Like the hole that Ahlo and Rue Enriegho went through when they were children.”
“But they came from a different time. Taeyaho, if we go through that tunnel, we might never see the caravan again.”
“I know. I don’t want to. But if we go back up into the house, the farmers will kill us.”
“They won’t kill me,” she said. “I’m the only one who knows Lokeyn’s secret.” Then she stopped. She saw the look on his face. “I won’t let them kill you,” she said.
He studied her. There was an odd tinge of frustration in his eyes. She didn’t know if she had ever seen Taeyaho frustrated before. Then she thought that maybe it was fear. Something had scared him in the house, in the violence he had seen in the homestead.
The guardsman stirred inside of her. A memory. Sitting on a rampart beside a new recruit. Fire in the valley below, and voices shouting. The recruit had just peed himself, and was crying with shame. The guardsman talked softly, deliberately keeping his back to the rest of his company, making sure that the boy didn’t look back and see them watching. Arrows struck the wall below them. Acrid smoke filled the air. The guardsman petted the back of the boy’s head. Like he was petting a frightened animal. As if the boy could take his kindness and transmute it into courage.
She leaned forward and stroked Taeyaho’s cheek. He reared back, then caught himself and allowed his face to come forward again. The down of his soft beard tickled the palm of her hand. “It will be all right,” she said. “There is nothing that they can do to us.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he drew his face back from her hand. “But Manrie, would it matter? If we left this time and place? If we went somewhere else?”
“I’ve been somewhere else,” she said, and he went very still.
“When?” he asked in a small voice.
“In Raesidae. There’s a lace hole beneath Jahnajeel House. It leads to the seaside. Somewhere.”
It was as if he had forgotten how to breathe. The only movement on his face was the flickering of the candle light. “You went there and came back?”
“Yes, I guess I did.”
“So it didn’t take you through time.”
“Or it stayed open for me. It seems to be always open. That’s where the Jahnajeel get the salt that they sell.”
“Of course,” he said. And then he seemed flustered. He looked down at his hands. He was still holding a piece of cheese. He put it in his mouth and chewed. “We could go through the tunnel, and come back when it’s safe.”
“We don’t know what kind of tunnel it is.” A mulish look overtook his expression. It was entirely foreign to who he was. “Listen, Taeyaho,” she said, “I know you’re scared. But we have to get to the Man on the Mountain. To find Cloedeya and the others.”
He gave her a long, lingering look. Then he nodded. He made to stand. He winced, and she looked and saw that he was injured. His boot was stained with blood.
“You’re hurt,” she said.
He looked down. “Yes. When I was coming downstairs, after Taeslahbin freed me. We passed one of the homesteaders on the stairway. I thought he was dead, but then he reached out and stabbed me in the foot. Then he died.”
“Why did he do that?”
A shrug. “Maybe he thought that I was one of them. A farmer.”
“He should have stabbed the scout.”
Taeyaho said nothing. He was lifting the backpack, settling it on his shoulders. She pushed herself from the wall and made to stand. She was wobbly and light headed. “Do you have water?” she asked.
He nodded. “In the pack.”
He turned so that she could rummage in it. It was curiously full. Flat bread and dried meat and fruit, and three rounds of hard cheese. Like someone had been planning on going on a journey. Only Daas Draebeye had no memory of anyone putting a backpack on the other side of the inner door. It would have to have happened recently, as nothing was spoilt.
The blind scholar’s senses sharpened her own as they made their way up the tunnel. The lantern light played across the strange markings in the stone, and she paused to put her fingers in them, knowing that she might be disturbing part of the language that was hidden in the texture. It didn’t matter. Daas Draebeye had never discovered the answer to the riddle, and now he was dead. They found his corpse at the top of the tunnel, beside the door. She looked down at his sunken cheeks. Already a layer of thin stone dust seemed to have settled over him. She supposed that he would become an insect, after all. Insects would eat his corpse and he would be in their bodies. Only those were different insects than the ones he had tried to know.
She was afraid for a moment that the door would be barred. Taeyaho struggled with it clumsily. But she pushed him gently to one side and pressed with both hands and the door opened easily enough.
“Let me go first,” he whispered, “to make sure that the coast is clear.”
She didn’t mean to ignore him. Only she was looking into the little room, with its small desk and chair, and it seemed strangely empty. She had expected the ghosts to be there. The scout. The starving girl. The three dead servants. Light was shining in from the corridor. It was a pleasant little room, and nothing had disarranged it. Looking out at it, it was hard to imagine that there had been any violence in the house.
Then, as she stepped into the room, she smelled smoke on the air. “Please, Manrie,” Taeyaho said, “let me go first.”
“No, no,” she said distractedly. “They won’t harm me. Or you, if they think they can use you to manipulate me. But let’s try not to get captured by them at all.”
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Draejed’s corpse was by the cistern in the center of the courtyard. His was leaned up against it, almost as if he had been arranged there. Catrilisa’s corpse was in the entrance tunnel, with seven homesteaders, including the bodies of two boys, still clutching at the shovels that they’d tried to use as weapons. There was no sign of the farmers.
“Perhaps they’ve moved off,” Manrie suggested, peering out of the entrance tunnel at the ruined homestead.
But Taeyaho was looking back into the house. “I think someone is coming down the stairs from the upper level.”
So they ran out into the homestead, turning as soon as they left the tunnel and running along the wall of the house. The ground in front of it seemed flayed by fire and violence, the earth churned into mud. As if a bigger battle had taken place than a mere skirmish between scholars and farmers. There were bodies sprawled on the ground, and she recognized Zaelin’s among them. She wondered if the ghost of the boy that had risen under the linden tree had died a second time when Zaelin was killed. Would the guardsman inside of her, and Daas Draebeye, die again if she were to die? Or would they simply leave, without a goodbye, as Lokeyn and the scout and the starving girl had?
With the scout gone, she didn’t know the way. It was as if a map of the world had disappeared from her memory. Aizdha had never brought her this way, even though they weren’t far from Libreigia. Maybe. Her sense of distance seemed oddly distorted. For one weird moment she thought that Libreigia might be by the sea. But then she remembered that it couldn’t be. Daas Draebeye would have smelled the sea while he worked within his tower rooms. She shook herself. Why did she need his memories to remember Libreigia? She had lived there for most of her life.
There was a little path that meandered out of the valley to the north, skirting a stream. Manrie paused when they came to the top of it and looked back. There was no sign of movement in the homestead. “Maybe they left,” she said. “Maybe they’re taking Baenlaez back to the farm.”
“Maybe,” Taeyaho said. There was something mulish in his expression. As if he resented her for something.
“How many days do you think it is to the Man on the Mountain’s house?”
“I’ve never been there,” he said. As if she should know this. As if she were accusing him of not knowing the way.
They turned and started up the trail. The sun was low in the east. Morning. It was morning. And they were going north, which was surely the right direction. “Taeyaho,” she asked, “did a ghost enter you? When you were in the house?”
He was walking ahead of her and he paused, his shoulders rigid. “No. I am me.” He said it without looking back at her. He was limping, and the pack looked heavy.
“Let me carry that,” she said.
Then he looked back at her. His expression was hard, but it softened when he met her eyes. “Please,” he said, and she thought *He’s angry because he thought I would make him carry the pack all the way to Libreigia. That he would have to bear all the weight on his own.*
She shrugged into the pack and wobbled a little under its weight. But it settled, and they started moving again. The pack didn’t smell musty, like it had spent a long time in a dark tunnel. She wondered why Taeyaho wouldn’t tell her where he had really gotten it. Perhaps he was ashamed. Maybe he had snuck into the homestead’s stores and felt that he was stealing from the dead.
They traveled all day. The path leveled out eventually and skirted the foot of the mountain. They came around its western escarpment at dusk, and she saw Mount Maenokae rising in front of them. They were almost to Libreigia Gap. They would reach it after one more day of walking.
The old scholar and the guardsman were easier to carry than the scout and the starving girl had been. Daas Draebeye seemed to want nothing of her. And the guardsman seemed to like the blind scholar. A genial air of protection settled over Manrie. They made camp. Taeyaho built a fire and dug some roots. There were snares in the backpack and she set them and caught a hare. She wasn’t hungry, but she ate, and the food tasted good. The setting sun laid flat beams across the mountainside, and she felt that she could see far to the west, that the sunlight was carrying the essence of the distant plains. She felt happy. Something had lifted within her. Some worry had disappeared. Some buried sadness. She wished that Taeyaho would sing, but he was silent. He picked at the hare with greasy fingers and his pearlescent hair seemed to dampen the sun’s light. So she looked past him, off into the world, and thought about the great river that bounded the plains somewhere beyond any horizon that she would ever see.
“What were you doing out there, when Cloedeya and Melsa and Big Praeda found you?” she asked. Taeyaho said nothing. She looked at him. The mulish expression had come back onto his face. She regarded him a moment, then looked away. The setting sun seemed to be draining the heat from the land. They were high enough in the mountains that it would be a cold night. She wanted Taeyaho’s closeness, not this hard, judgmental bitterness.
“I wonder,” she said, trying again, “if the ghosts have risen in Libreigia. Imagine all of those dead scholars, wandering in and out of each other’s chambers. I suppose they’re holding symposiums, to try to figure out the reasons for it.”
She glanced at Taeyaho, and saw that his eyes were wide, as if with shock. It made him look more like himself, somehow. “The scholars…” he breathed. Then he said, “I didn’t consider that. I wonder if they’re rising in other places.”
“Well, I don’t know if the mountains would stop them. Why would they? Although they’re…” she paused. “When I first met Little Praeda,” she said, “a rock moved. In a meadow, where a zaizectu was attacking us. I thought…I thought it might have been the ghost of Praeda’s mother. That she moved it. But I haven’t seen the ghosts move anything else. They don’t seem to affect this world. I wonder what the scholars would say.”
He made a little sound deep in his throat. Like he wanted to sing, but had forgotten the words and the melody. “There have been so many of them,” he said.
“The scholars? Yes, I suppose. When was Libreigia founded? More than four hundred years ago. And they never can agree on anything. The living scholars, I mean. It will only be worse, if the dead scholars start chiming in.” She was babbling. Talking to herself, since Taeyaho knew nothing of Libreigia, or scholarship. She wondered, for the first time, whether Taeyaho could read.
“Do they talk?” he asked.
“Who? The ghosts?” She looked at him. His beautiful features were shadowed. The sun was down, and the sky was smudging from deep blue into blackness. “They speak through me,” she said. “But we know that they can possess anyone, don’t we?”
He kept hold of her gaze. She was the first to look away. She didn’t know what had changed between them. She didn’t know if she seemed different now, after the ghosts had started to ride her. “Taeyaho,” she said quietly, because she wanted to say her worry out loud, “what if I stop being myself? I have two ghosts riding me now. And another three before. Each time they’ve left, they’ve taken something with them. But I also learn things from them. You’re sitting there in darkness, but I can smell you. I know the smell of you, in a way that I didn’t before. And I think I would know it was you just from the sound of your breath.”
“Why do you know that, Manrie?”
“Because Daas Draebeye was blind.” She looked up. She couldn’t tell if his stillness meant that he was confused. “Daas Draebeye,” she said. “The scholar in the tunnel.”
“He’s riding you.”
“Yes. Him and the old guardsman.”
“Does he…does he speak to you?”
“It’s not like that. They take me into their memories. I can sense their moods. I can become them, for a little while. But I don’t want to. When I’m them, I’m not myself.”
Another pause. Taeyaho didn’t move to comfort her. She wanted him to sit beside her, to put an arm around her. Instead he bent forward and threw another log on the fire. “What does he say?”
“I just told you. He doesn’t speak.”
“But what has he shown you?”
His voice was a little too casual. As if he were just passing the time. He didn’t sound like himself. He sounded old. Weary. “Taeyaho, are you sure that there isn’t a ghost inside of you?”
He looked up sharply. Then he looked away. Sunlight played across his eyes. They were wet with tears. “There was an old woman. In the room where I was bound. She died there.”
“And she entered you.”
He didn’t want to say it. Instead he picked up a stick and drew on the dark ground. “She had been a slave. She escaped and came to the homestead. She was very content. She would weave in her room and look out the window at the others working. No one paid her much attention, but they fed her and kept her warm. She loved them for that.”
“And she’s in you now.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
He looked up at her. He sighed and threw the stick in the fire. “I don’t want her there.”
She watched the stick catch, its tip glowing red and turning to embers within moments. “I don’t know if I want them, either. I suppose it depends on who they are. I like the guardsman and Daas Draebeye. I didn’t like the starving girl, or the scout.”
“And Lokeyn?” he asked, and then paused, as if he had said something foolish.
“Do you know about him?”
“That’s his name, isn’t it? The strange one. The ghost that was always going into the trees, or disappearing under rocks.”
“Yes. That was his name. I don’t know if I liked him. He was insane. But also…I have a feeling that he did something for me. But I don’t remember what.”
They were silent for a few minutes. Then she said, “I don’t want to go to Libreigia.”
“Why not?”
“There are ghosts I don’t want to see.”
He shivered. His whole body seemed to spasm, as if rocks of memory were avalanching inside of him. “Manrie,” he said, “is there a lace hole at Libreigia?”
“A lace hole? I don’t think so. There’s the Tomb of the Scholars, on the cliff above the city. But I’ve never been there. I suppose that Aizdha’s body is there, now.”
“Wouldn’t you like to see him again?”
“Aizdha? I did see him. He followed me from Libreigia. He saved me from the bounty hunter. Or at least I thought he did. His spirit is in the lace hole at Tzurfaera.”
“At Tzurfaera,” he said softly. “His ghost didn’t stay with his body.” Then he said, “Should we go there?”
“Back to Tzurfaera? Cloedeya said that he wanted to go to Yenceyan. When he had more discs.” A thought occurred to her. “There were discs at the homestead. Draejed brought them for Daas Draebeye.”
“What did he…” Taeyaho seemed suddenly shy. “What did he know?”
“Know? What do you mean?”
“Well, he was a scholar, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. He studied those markings in the tunnel.” She shivered. She remembered the voice beyond the door, saying, *You will learn the language on the walls*. Only Daas Draebeye hadn’t learned it. No one could learn it.
Taeyaho kept looking at the fire. “Why?” he asked.
“He had a master. Catrilisa called him ‘the Immortal.’ I saw him in a memory. Well, not saw him, since Daas Draebeye is blind. But he was there. He talked of Taokiehla.”
“Taokeihla?”
“Yes. It’s a city on the other side of the mountains. The Immortal was the tyrant there, once. He was convinced that there was a door back to the Previous World, at the bottom of the Soemohngea River. He designed a giant drill, and forced slaves to turn it. They turned it and turned it, day and night, and the drill bit deeper and deeper into the bottom of the river. But they never broke through to the other side.”
“I wonder why he thought that,” Taeyaho said softly, as if he were lost in a memory. His face was fire lit but it seemed to attract shadows, as if he wanted his expression to remain obscure.
She studied him, then moved to add a log to the fire. The grease from the hare was still in her mouth, and she wished that she had a sprig of mint to chew. “The Man on the Mountain has the same idea. He’s been digging in a pit, trying to break through to an underground river. He says that there’s another world on the other side of it. An upside down world.”
She thought that he might be amused by this, but he remained glum, thoughtful. It was as if the conversation was a ridge that he was walking on, and he needed to go carefully if he didn’t want to fall. “An upside down world,” he said softly. “But he found the discs, while he was digging.” It was a statement, not a question.
“I suppose. They were trying to become insects.”
His head shot up and the firelight seemed to pull his features forward, as if he had been startled by something very dangerous. “Insects?”
“It was the only way to read the markings. That’s what Daas Draebeye thought. That in order to read insect language, you had to be an insect.”
“Why would that be?” he asked softly.
“Taeyaho,” she asked, “am I talking to you now, or the old woman?”
He blinked. He seemed embarrassed. He shook his head. “It was her for a minute. I’m sorry.”
“Was she a scholar? No, you said she was a slave.”
“You were a slave. And you’re a scholar.”
“Well, it seems like you’ve been possessed by an older version of me.” She said it too lightly. She saw him flinch. “Do you want me to answer the question? Do you want the old woman to know?”
“Know what?” he asked, as if he had forgotten.
“About the insects. About how Daas Draebeye thought he would have to become one, to read the language.”
“Does it matter what a ghost knows?”
“I suppose not. Daas Draebeye thought the markings needed to be read by touch, and maybe by smell and by taste. But the insects didn’t have human hands. They would have touched things differently. And smelled them and tasted them differently too, I suppose. So the markings won’t mean anything to us.”
Taeyaho said nothing. His head was lowered, as if he were close to falling asleep. She wondered if he was weeping. Why did this trouble him so much?
She looked up at the stars, which were sweeping over the mountains and covering the entire sky. “Don’t worry,” she said to him. “Tomorrow we’ll reach the Man on the Mountain. Maybe Cloedeya will be there. If not, we’ll wait for him there, or if he’s already been there, we’ll go and find him. We’re almost home.”