The archivist of the third tower liked children. He had chosen to speak with Manrie while walking among the refugees, whose camp was spread out around the grain silos. A pack of children swirled around him, kicking a ball, and when it came to the archivist he rucked up his robes and kicked it back, giggling with abandon. A sweet, kindly old man. But he was also looking carefully at the refugees, inspecting them as one would inspect livestock. Cloedeya had made camp just beyond the silo grounds, and Manrie could smell the soup that he and the others were endlessly brewing. She had spent the day out in the city with Melsa and Koenbahki, going from butcher to butcher, baker to baker. People that Melsa knew, who loved Cloedeya and were happy to offer a sack of grain or bones. They had not been so kind when Manrie had arrived during the famine. Then everything had been rationed. The mayor and the first archivist had set up a careful system to make sure that the food lasted, and her first task in the city was to stand in line to procure dinner for her new master. She had sometimes seen a woman in the food lines. A woman whom she thought that she had known. The woman had never looked at her.
Yoehnen, the captain of the Hasra rangers, walked beside her and the archivist through the silo encampment. He was used to the refugees, having escorted them through the foothills to Libreigia Pass. They were used to him. The children called him by name, and he had brought a little sack of ginger treats to pass out to them. He set them little tasks. “Run to the silo with the squirrel mark beside the door. The first one back will get a treat.” Between each task, the archivist asked his questions and Manrie answered.
They were different questions than the ones that the archivist of the first tower and the mayor had asked her. Those had been about the discs. Libreigia was plagued by ghosts, just like everywhere else. The city felt different because of their presence. It was summer, but it felt like it did when it was subdued by snowfall. When the sun hadn’t shown for many days, and people went about with their heads down. Even in the daylight, when the ghosts couldn’t be seen. At night, people tried to hide, or went to the many taverns and sought to become drunk enough for the spirits not to bother them. There had been many fights, several near riots. Libreigia, always a neat and well organized city, seemed to have slipped into disrepair. Litter in the streets. Abandoned clothing, trinkets, utensils accumulating in drifts against the walls. As if the whole city were to ill to attend to domesticity.
The archivist of the third tower wasn’t interested in the discs. He was asking about Lokeyn, and Manrie was wondering why she had told the captain of the rangers about Lokeyn in the first place. Yoehnen wasn’t handsome, but there was something very restful about him. Nothing seemed to bother him. On the long trail from Hiraherra, he had set his pickets and guarded the refugees with thoughtfulness and calm, seeming to see everything and predict every eventuality. Never raising his voice, never showing a moment of worry. Even when Baenlaez’s cultists began to stalk the caravan. His rangers had captured one, a hatchet-faced man whom Manrie didn’t remember from the farm. Yoehnen had questioned him carefully and then appeared at Cloedeya’s cook fire. He had squatted beside her and asked about the farmers, and she had told him. Why shouldn’t she? Told him about the fields spread out like pleats in a skirt, and the ghosts who had pinned them in place. Told him about Lokeyn’s Calm, and the farmers’ desperate hunt for it. When she had finished he had stared into the fire and then said, softly, “If you had given them the third ingredient, would they have left you alone?”
“I don’t know,” she’d answered.
Firelight flickered over his careful expression. “If it calms the land, people will live. They’ll have enough to eat.”
“Maybe.”
“The farmers used the dead to protect their fields? To keep the grains and vegetables from returning to the wild?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps they wouldn’t need to kill, if they had Lokeyn’s Calm.”
It had been an accusation, and Manrie had thought about it as the procession wound towards the pass. She had let Koenbahki hold her at night as she cried. How could she explain that Baenlaez only cared about control. The farm didn’t have to exist. All of the people in the procession, the refugees from Mueslahvin’s rebellion, they had survived without the farm. Without the murder of innocents. People could eke what they needed from the land, even if it did betray their expectations from time to time. Baenlaez claimed that no one starved on the farm, but the starving girl would have starved no matter where she lived. Baenlaez seduced people with the dream of a life of plenty. But only if they stopped being themselves.
He was alive. That was what the captured farmer had said. Alive, and seeking her, and he would never stop seeking her. If the rangers hadn’t come, if the caravan hadn’t found the refugees in Hiraherra, if her friends had continued to travel alone, the farmers would have found them. They would have turned Koenbahki and Little Praeda and Melsa and Big Praeda and Cloedeya into farmers. Or killed them and sowed the fields with their corpses.
The ball came bouncing back. The archivist laughed and kicked it away again. Yoehnen sent the children skirling off in search of the little mountain flowers that grew in the shadows of the silos. The archivist was done asking about the farm. “Tell me about Das Draebeye,” he said, and Manrie stopped and stared at him.
He looked back at her. His hair had gone drab with age. It had once been silver, and the metallic glean showed only at the roots, so that the part down the middle of his forehead gleamed like the blade of a knife. His kindly eyes were pouchy and skin enfolded them when he squinted. “Come, come,” he said. “It’s not so surprising that I should ask about him. He was a friend of mine.”
“How do you know about him?” Manrie asked.
“Your friend Taeyaho told me.”
“You’ve spoken to Taeyaho?”
“Oh yes. A very pretty young man. But I believe that he is going to seed. I met him in the Dust and Pen. I bought him many drinks.”
“They broke him,” Manrie said. “The farmers.”
“Yes,” the archivist agreed. He looked out over the refugees and his expression saddened. “There are many broken people in Libreigia these days.”
The children came running back. They held their flowers up to Yoehnen, and he inspected them carefully. He gave them ginger treats and sent them on another quest, then carefully arranged the flowers in a bouquet, which he handed to Manrie. She didn’t want it, but took it and held it awkwardly.
“They didn’t break me,” Manrie said to the archivist.
“No, my dear, they did not. You are special, it seems. The ghosts ride you. Did Das Draebeye ride you? What did you learn?”
She thought. When the blind scholar had left her, he had eased her misery. Taken it out of her, as if removing a tumor. Taeyaho had rebuilt it inside of her. “I learned that he knew nothing, discovered nothing, even though many years passed him by. But Catrilisa built a homestead, and people came. Did you know her, too?”
“I did,” the archivist allowed. “When she was a student, she belonged to the First Tower. She went west to collect insects in the Sand Hills, and traveled with the Lady of Hasra for a time.”
“With Lady Daturi?”
“Yes. When the lady was young. It is their custom, you know. To send the young girls of the family out on the road with the tinkers. It is because they practice sortition. Any daughter’s name might be drawn from the great bowl, so every daughter must be trained to lead.”
Yoehnen was listening closely. He was jiggling the sack of sweets in his nimble hands. “There has been another sortition. Since I left Hasra.”
The archivist patted his arm, as if trying to reassure him of something. “I am sure that she has been selected again.”
“It has never happened before,” Yoehnen said. “If she has been selected, it will have been for the fifth time in a row. When she was selected for the second time, it was remarkable. Now her cousins and aunts have grown suspicious. Very suspicious.”
“Do you mean,” Manrie said, “that she might not be the Lady of Hasra when we reach there?”
“It is a possibility,” Yoehnen allowed.
“Then our journey there might not serve any purpose?”
He sighed. “If someone else is selected, the rangers will be disbanded. Most of the Daturis hate us. They say that we are Katemzan Prahmpara Droegee’s private army. They don’t understand that we are protectors. That we protect the people from the ravages of the land.”
The children were returning. They jabbered and pulled at the hem of Yoehnen’s robes. Manrie saw the caravan up ahead. She had walked the circuit of the silos with the archivist and the captain of the rangers. Beztrae was standing beside Cloedeya’s cook fire. He raised his head and smiled at her. There was something odd about his expression, something defeated in the set of his shoulders. She hadn’t seen him since coming into Libreigia.
“Manrie,” he said, when she came up to him. He set his large hands on her shoulders. It had become his private way of greeting her, a benediction that she had received each morning of their journey from Hiraherra. Koenbahki, at work at shelling mountain snails, set down her paring knife and slipped to Manrie’s side. She smelled of dirt and slime, but the scent was sweetened by the alchemy of her presence.
“Beztrae. Is something wrong?”
His eyes flicked to the left and then back to her face. A furtive expression, as if she had found him out. “Manrie, can…” he paused, frowned, let more of his misery show. “The ghosts. Can they travel far?”
“I suppose. Aizdha followed me all the way to Tzurfaera.”
He studied her carefully, as if afraid that she might be lying to him. “Was he…different? Different than in life?”
Koenbahki stirred beside her and Manrie gave a little shake of her head. “You’ve seen ghosts, Beztrae. They’re insubstantial, somehow. It seems like a living person is there with you, but you know that it’s not true. They’re too silent. They don’t move enough. They don’t fidget like a living person does.”
His hands tightened on her shoulders. “Yes. But they look like they did when they died? They don’t look like they were younger?”
“Beztrae, what is this? What’s going on?”
He narrowed his eyes in a familiar way. As he did when he stared from a tower in the Pinnacle Gate down the long road into the pass. “Manrie, will you come with me? Now.”
“Come where?”
“To my home. To see Vanahiko. To see…” He paused, uncertain. Afraid. He had always been kind, but never diffident. She had never known him to beg for anything.
“Yes,” she said. “Of course.”
Koenbahki went to put her shelling knife down and wipe her hands with a wet towel. She met Manrie’s gaze. “I’m coming, too, of course,” she said.
“You don’t have to.”
“I’m coming.”
It was late afternoon. Sunlight cut through the mountain pass and divided the city, moving in a wide band down the avenues that led from the Pinnacle Gate to the library complex. The houses of wealthy merchants basked in its lingering rays. But darkness had already begun to encroach on the rest of the city. Shadows bloomed in the poor districts to the south, and among the mansions that climbed the rise to the north. Shadows were stretching towards the silos, and the children’s shouts were becoming muted, the crowd of gangly bodies and grinning faces dissipating as they ran to their parents or whoever might have taken them in. Little Praeda came running back to the caravan just as Manrie and Koenbahki were walking away. She stood at the edge of the fire and stared after them, and Manrie, glancing back, smiled and gave a little wave. Maedreth emerged from the pantry wagon. She stood beside Praeda, looking down, as always, but the little girl sensed her there and leaned back into the folds of her robes.
“They come here, don’t they?” Beztrae asked, trying to match his pace to that of the girls.
“They?” Koenbahki asked.
“The ghosts. There are reports that they come from the rest of the city and surround the wagons.”
“They’re attracted by the discs,” Manrie told him.
“Of course. The spirit stones.”
“Are they called spirit stones now?” Koenbahki asked.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
A short nod. “Their fame is spreading. I’ve heard reports. Grumbling. People are wondering why you haven’t led the ghosts to the Tomb of the Scholars yet.”
“I’m wondering that, too,” Manrie said. They had left the open space that surrounded the silos and entered a narrow street. A man with a donkey was moving slowly from narrow doorway to narrow doorway, collecting the pots of waste that people had set outside. He smelled of excrement and sweat as he went by them.
“We’ve been told to wait,” Koenbahki said.
Beztrae gave a grim nod. “Scholars deliberating,” he said.
“What do they have to deliberate about?”
“It’s the way of scholars. Someone is raising objections. Worried about what will happen. They are afraid because they don’t understand it. They don’t understand you, Manrie. They don’t understand how you can plant a spirit stone in a barrow and make the dead stay there.”
“Other people could do it,” Manrie said.
“They did come and take some of the stones,” Koenbahki added.
“They’re studying them. A group of scholars have moved into the new tower. It was meant to house the overflow from Old Ancient. But now they say that it will have its own specialty. That those who live there will study these hauntings. At least for now.”
“For now? Do you mean that they’ll get bored eventually?” Koenbahki asked.
Beztrae gave a grim laugh. “Scholars never get bored.” He paused, suddenly turning shy. “But the hauntings might end on their own?” The curving street came to a crossroads and they moved from shadow back into sunlight.
“They might,” Manrie said. She shrugged. “No one knows why it’s happening. Why the dead are rising.”
“They’re speculating about that, too,” Beztrae said.
His house lay near the crossroads of the two great arteries of the city. Many guards had positioned their homes nearby, so that they would be ready to go west to the Pinnacle Gate or east to the Cliff Gate at a moments notice, and so that they could run to the north or south in an emergency. To the north, Mahlsambat Avenue climbed past the houses of the rich, past the mayor’s manor and the administrative buildings, and terminated at the Tomb of the Scholars, high on the cliff. The two cenotaphs that created the tomb’s gateway were shining in the fading sunlight, and seemed very distant.
No one greeted them at the door of Beztrae’s house. They passed through the entrance tunnel and into the little courtyard, where a juniper tree twisted its smooth limbs over a small well. The house was strangely silent. It was nearing dinner time, but there were no cooking smells. No sound of pots and pans, banging in the kitchen. “Beztrae, where are your slaves?” Manrie asked.
His well-formed mouth flattened into a grim line. “They are cowering in their chambers. I’m told that they are casting lots, to decide who has to emerge and care for us. Someone will begin attending to their duties soon.”
“But why are they afraid?”
He rounded on her. He was suddenly angry. “Everyone is afraid, Manrie. Everyone in the city.” She took a step backwards and Koenbahki took her hand. Beztrae’s gaze dropped to their intertwined fingers, and he sighed and shook his head, embarrassed by his anger. “It wasn’t like this when I left with the rangers. The ghosts had just started to appear. People were excited, eager to hear the stories. But now…”
He turned abruptly and led them into the women’s wing. It was a modest house, and there were only three rooms on the ground floor. A short staircase led up to another hallway, with only two doors. Beztrae knocked on one. A gentle, diffident rap. He opened it without waiting for an answer.
Vanahiko wasn’t beautiful. She was tall, and she allowed her hair to fall in clean, straight lines past her narrow shoulders. Her face was compact, her features a little too small. She had a widow’s peak but it was off center. Her mouth was off center as well, her lower lip jutting even further to the right than her upper. But her skin was smooth and pretty. Manrie had only met her a few times, when sent to seek Beztrae with some question from Aizdha. She had always possessed a strange sense of freshness, as if she were one of the shoots that she grew in earthenware pots, a small tendril of potentiality that had just awoken from the soil.
She was changed, now. She was sitting on a stool by a window. Sunlight was dividing the room, falling from the south facing windows and sliding away slowly with the coming of dusk. The room was full of work benches, of sacks of earth and trays full of seeds. Dirt littered the floor boards. The clean, hopeful scent of growing things filled the air, and climbing vines had been allowed to grow from their pots and spread along the window sills. Vanahiko was holding one in her hands, lacing it between her fingers.
“Sweetheart,” Beztrae said, “I’ve brought Manrie.”
The twisted face turned towards her. The fall of hair rippled on narrow shoulders. “Manrie. You are still yourself.”
The words were surprising. Manrie wanted to step back, but Koenbahki was beside her, and her presence held her in place. “I don’t know if that’s true.”
“Still young. I have been wondering if others are shifting now. Becoming young or old.”
“Shifting? No one is shifting. People are just as they are.”
“No.”
“No?”
“My sister is changed. She is young again.”
Manrie glanced at Beztrae. His expression was grim. He was staring at a pot that was filled with dirt, as if willing the seeds inside of it to grow.
“Your sister?” Manrie asked.
“She’s returned, Manrie,” Beztrae said. “Her ghost. Only…”
“Maybe it’s her ghost,” Vanahiko said, as if resuming an argument.
“It is, darling. You know that it is.”
“Maybe it’s her ghost,” Vanahiko repeated. “But I have been wondering if she’s simply a memory. A memory that has been given flesh, somehow. No, not flesh. Yes, I know. I can’t touch her. But…presence.”
“A memory?” Manrie asked.
“She’s too young,” Beztrae explained. “She looks just like she did when they left the city. And that was twenty years ago.”
“They?”
“Idinkanya and her husband and child. They journeyed east, to the Bay of Baesakae. It was the last time she saw them.”
“We have aged, and she has stayed the same,” Vanahiko said. “Or,” she continued, with an insistent glance at Beztrae, “she is a memory, and not a ghost.”
“Can it happen, Manrie?” Beztrae asked. “Can a spirit become young again? The spirits you’ve met, do they appear to be the age that they were when they died? Or do they appear as their younger selves.” Vanahiko moved slightly, tugging the tendril of vine with her hand so that a pot shifted on a table. “Yes,” Beztrae said quickly, “yes, darling. I know that it’s possible that she isn’t dead. But if she is dead, could her ghost be young?”
Manrie stared at him. “How could I know?” she asked.
He gave a little mew of exasperation. “Who else would know?”
Was she an expert on ghosts, now? Would there be a line of scholars, waiting to consult her when they got back to the wagons? If so, would they ask the same questions that the archivist of the first tower had asked, when he came with the mayor? Would they make her repeat the story of Tzurfaera endlessly? Tell again of how she had returned the dead of Hiraherra to their barrow, and how the ghosts who haunted the refugees had entered Hiraherra’s barrow after them, so that the first families of the city were forced, at least, to accept the dispossessed dead, if not the living paupers who begged for their help?
Koenbahki sensed her distress and squeezed her fingers. “Manrie,” she said, her voice low and intimate, as if they were lying together on the roof of the pantry wagon. The entire room smelled like the pantry wagon, the scent of clean earth and growing things that she had come to associate with Koenbahki’s caresses.
“We need to leave here,” Manrie said to the room at large. “We need to leave Libreigia and continue our journey.”
“Don’t leave,” Vanahiko said, the plaintive words smothered by a held breath.
“Will you stay?” Beztrae asked. “Please, Manrie. Just until Idinkanya’s ghost appears. Just until dusk.”
He had accepted her forged note when she had fled the city. He had taken the bestiary and written a note to the captain of the Vise Tower, so that she had a pack, and food, and snares for surviving in the wild. Always kind. A man who was loved by other men. Not hated or feared. Who carried respect easily on his fine shoulders. Whose smile expected respect, not obedience.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, all right. But I don’t know the answer to your question. I saw the skeleton of the boy under the Linden tree, and it was a boy’s bones, not a man’s. And the guardsman was old, and Daas Draebeye. I think that ghosts appear to be the age that the person was, when they died.”
Beztrae’s expression was grim. He turned towards Vanahiko. “We must accept it,” he said.
Vanahiko began to shred the skin of the vine with her fingers. As if she were punishing it. “If that’s true, than she’s been dead for twenty years. All those years, I thought that she was safe. In Baesakae. I imagined her with other children. Maybe with another man. Free from Yatagadee.”
“He was her husband,” Beztrae explained. “I didn’t know him. I hadn’t met Vanahiko yet. I was still a young guard, assigned to the Cliff Gate. Every day I would watch people come and go from the city. I didn’t know their stories.”
“She was older than me,” Vanahiko said. “I was only eight when she left. Only six years older than my little nephew. I knew my father didn’t like Yatagadee. He shouted while they courted. Always shouting at her. Telling her that Yatagadee was a bad man. He drove her right into his arms. But he was a bad man. Sometimes she would stay away for days, waiting for a bruise to fade. But you could still see it around her eye, when she finally came to visit. Like an echo.”
Beztrae’s shoulders slumped. He looked weary. “It’s a story that repeats itself every day. I had a captain, once, who insisted on beating the sense into that kind of man. It didn’t help. The man would just go home and beat his wife again. As if he were getting revenge on the captain by doing so.”
“But they had the baby,” Vanahiko said. “And for awhile it helped. Yatagadee was so proud. He came with Idinkanya and the baby to visit my parents, and after they left I heard my mother say that he was a changed man. My father didn’t believe it, though. He was a steward in a merchant’s house, and all the tradesmen told him stories. He knew what happened in the city, as much as my husband does. He was often ill-tempered. Angry. Wanting to find some way of separating Yatagadee from Idinkanya and little Iko.”
“Angry, indignant, incensed,” Manrie said under her breath.
“And then one day Idinkanya came to see us,” Vanahiko continued. “She said that Yatagadee wanted to travel east, to Baesakae. The King of the Marshes was building a port city, and there was work for able-bodied men. My father said that there was work here, for those who wanted to work. That being in a new place wouldn’t change Yatagadee’s disposition. He would find ways to avoid work, ways to continue being angry at his poverty. Send him off on his own, my father begged. Be sweet to him. Convince him that he should go ahead of his family, make a homestead, and then send for them. He convinced her. Or he thought he did. But then a messenger boy came to tell us that they had left the city, the three of them together.” Her slim fingers snapped the vine and she held the frayed piece in the palm of her hand. “And we told ourselves that she would find her way. She and little Iko. My father always asked the traders about them, the ones who came to the city from the Bay of Baesakae. He and my mother planned to journey there. But then the plague came, and my mother died, and then my father. And I pretended that Idinkanya had survived. I told myself that she must have, or if not her, Iko, or some of her other children. I imagined that she had a great family. Many, many children. All the babies that I couldn’t have.”
“The sun is setting,” Koenbahki said, and they all went still. An unbidden memory of Pumpkin floated into Manrie’s mind. She had told the girl stories. To pacify her. To keep her in place. Now she had been trapped in a similar way, and must face the ghost that haunted Beztrae and his wife.
“It will be in the courtyard,” Beztrae said quietly.
“But how did it find you?” Manrie asked. “This isn’t your parents’ house.”
“No,” Vanahiko said. “No, it isn’t. But why would she go there? It’s owned by a chandler, now.”
Beztrae made a move towards the door. Manrie said, “What do you expect me to do?”
“You can talk to her, can’t you? You can ask her what happened?”
She stood still, not moving as Vanahiko got up from her stool and moved passed her. Koenbahki stayed at her side, her fingers interlaced with Manrie’s own, as if she were Vanahiko’s vine. “I won’t,” she said softly.
“What?” Beztrae asked, turning back from the darkened doorway.
“I won’t let her ride me, Beztrae. I am done with being ridden by ghosts. They take too much away from me. And leave parts of their memories that I can’t separate from my own. It will destroy me, if I keep doing it.”
“You know what happened,” Koenbahki said quietly. Manrie glanced at her. Her beautiful face was tight with strain. With a sense of loss. “You know that he killed her, before he left the city. He must have taken the child, or the child’s ghost would be here, too. Manrie shouldn’t suffer so that you can face the truth.”
Vanahiko had half-turned to listen to them. Her long hair fell across the side of her face, making a screen. She was very still, and then her shoulders started to shake. Beztrae stepped back from the doorway and took her in his arms. He buried his face in her hair. She shook with sobs as he held her, but she was so slight that her shaking resembled the rustling of leaves. A slight breeze was blowing through the windows. Dark shadows spread across the room.
“Come, Manrie,” Koenbahki said. She led her past the captain and his wife, and Manrie reached out and touched them as she went past. Vanahiko didn’t seem to notice, but Beztrae raised his head and looked at her. His face, in the gray light, showed relief. He nodded, then lowered his head to his wife’s hair.
The ghost in the courtyard turned to look at them as they came out of the women’s wing. A plain woman, with her hair plated in an old-fashioned style. She watched them as they walked past the juniper tree and went to the entrance tunnel. She didn’t move to follow.
“We should have brought a disc,” Koenbahki said as they emerged onto the street. “A spirit stone.”
“I don’t know why it stays here,” Manrie said, distressed. “Why doesn’t it come to the caravan, like all of those other ghosts?”
“Maybe it will, now.”
“I wish we knew more about them.”
They came out onto the crossroads. It was strangely abandoned. She had never known it to be silent, empty of carts and vendors. She looked to the east and saw the library towers. They rose above the wall, where Aizdha had lived in one of the many scholar’s chambers set within the cold stone. Lights flickered in the tower windows, and Manrie imagined the scholars, leaning towards each other and jabbing the air with rigid fingers, locked in fierce debate. She decided. She would take a spirit stone to the tomb tonight, where she had permission to or not. She wanted to be free of Libreigia. She wanted to be on the road to Hasra.
“Koenbahki,” she said, as they made their way back down the winding streets, “I would do it for you. If we found your father’s ghost. I would let him ride me.”
Koenbahki was silent, and Manrie glanced back to find her looking down at her hands, bunched into the folds of her robes as she strode along. “No,” she said. “No, I wouldn’t want that. I don’t want you to see me through my father’s eyes. And I know what must have happened to him. I don’t want you to feel his death.”