The door was left open. No one passed in the hall, but there was the sense of people gathering, hushed voices sounding against the stone walls. Bahdring studied Manrie’s face. “Don’t eat or drink anything that you’re given,” she whispered.
“Why?”
“It’s how he murdered his wife. Katemzan Zinjan Bahvrue Daturi. It’s why he is so hated in Hasra. He thought that he could endure it. That he could outlast our hatred. But Hasra will not trade with Cahntada. His nobles become restless. His people are unhappy.” She was looking down at the discs in Manrie’s lap as she spoke. She was trying to distract herself from the task that she’d been given, but her gaze betrayed her anxiety. “How do they work?” she asked.
“I don’t know. The ghosts follow them. They may be doors to another world. Or keys to those doors.”
“What other world?”
“The world of the dead.”
Bahdring shuddered. “You don’t fear the ghosts?”
“I fear them. But I know them. They are like they were in life. Some are evil, or malicious. Some are sad or beaten down. Some are beautiful.”
“They have been rising in every town and city. The people are terrified.”
“Not in Ibimendi. In Ibimendi they’ve decided to live among the ghosts.”
The withered lips shivered into a smile. “In Ibimendi, they pretend that they have never done anything wrong. That the ghosts have nothing to accuse them of.”
“Are they wrong?”
The tinker sighed. “I have traveled everywhere in this land. No place is entirely innocent. But perhaps the people of the gap are right. I fear the ghosts, but I don’t know why.”
“The farmers lived among the ghosts, as well. But they didn’t want to.”
“The farmers?”
“On Baenlaez’s farm.”
The small eyes looked down. “I have heard rumors. People who steal children and old women. Who steal the unwanted.”
“They kill them,” Manrie said. “Some of them. They think it makes for a good crop. But then the dead rose, and they had to look at their victims. Only they pretended that it didn’t affect them. That their rules could protect them.”
“Protect them from what?”
“From their guilt.”
Bahdring’s gaze was drawn back to the discs. “You are very insightful, for such a young girl. But then, you were Aizdha’s companion. You wrote his bestiary for him.”
Manrie flushed. “I didn’t. He wrote it.”
“And you still protect his memory.”
Manrie turned her head and looked at the wall. The beam of sunlight was dimming as dusk came on.
The tinker watched her, then said, “You are kind to monsters. Stories are told. How you and your master would come into a village, and then go into the dark woods or the fetid swamp to seek the monsters. You would return with nothing but pictures, descriptions. No heads, no trophies. Once or twice you might slay a monster to save a village. But rarely. It makes me think that you were hunting something else.”
Manrie wouldn’t look at her. “Something else?”
“I have often thought, as I’ve traveled through the villages during these last years, that people are changing. There was a time when children mocked me in the streets. Their parents were more polite. They only mocked me in their homes. But the mockery has faded. I didn’t understand it at first. Then I realized that there was a difference between the villages that had sheltered you and your master and those that hadn’t. You improved the villages you came to. You taught people to look at the world in a different way.”
“You’re talking about Cloedeya,” Manrie said. “He does that. Not us.”
“I’m not surprised that you’re traveling together. Although it is a wonder that you found each other.” A pause. The woman’s voice was like her face. Blunt, even harsh sounding at first. But there was a prettiness within it, a note that sounded within her words. “I wonder why it is so hard for you to accept that you are good,” she said softly.
A memory flashed. A sad woman, leaning against a wall. “I don’t know if I’m good. It doesn’t matter if I’m good.”
“It might. One might have to be good, to carry the spirit stones. To face fear, and sadness. To go down into the darkness and come back again.”
“People sing for me.”
“But you don’t have to follow their voices.”
Manrie studied the wall, concentrated on the chips in the mortar. “Why would I stay in the darkness?”
“Many people do,” Bahdring said. Then she whispered. “I am afraid to carry the stones.”
Manrie turned her head and looked at her. “You don’t need to be.”
“But I am.”
“Why?”
“Because I am not good.”
Her words fell into a vast and spreading silence. The entire keep had gone silent. As if all the courtiers were holding their breaths. Manrie listened, hoping to hear the jingle of spurs, the thud of spear shafts along the ground. Troops should be assembling in the barracks. Troops should be marching out to the woods, to surround the rangers’ encampment. She wished that she could send ahead to Koenbahki and the others. A warning that they should lock themselves in the wagons until the violence was over.
“Bahdring,” she said softly, “I don’t remember coming here. When I was a child, I mean.”
Bahdring nodded. “I could see it on your face.”
“It’s what happens to you, if you let a ghost ride you. You lose memories. Parts of yourself.”
The tinker shuddered. “Will they ride me?”
“Bahdring, why do you say that you’re not good?”
A sigh. “She traveled with me, when she was on her roving. I knew that there was something odd about her, but I didn’t report it. She was just a girl.”
“Who?”
“Katemzan. The old Lady of Hasra.”
“I met her,” Manrie said. “She did not strike me as evil.”
“She is not evil in any ordinary way. Objects speak to her.”
The discs had begun to glow, and there was the sense of a growing presence in the room. But Manrie kept speaking, to keep the fear away. “What objects?” she asked.
“All objects. Bowls. Clothing. Swords. I told Katemzani Plaesahlet Restraed. I told her three years ago. I told her how Katemzan Prahmpara Droegee was winning the sortition.”
“How was she winning?”
“She was speaking to her name in the great bowl. To the slip of paper that had her name on it. She was ordering it to fly into the hands of the selector.”
“She can control objects?”
“Sometimes. I don’t know how. Plaesahlet Restraed should have killed her. But we bury swords in Hasra.” She paused, then whispered, “The queens are here.”
“I know,” Manrie said.
They were like the three dead servants at the homestead. Their postures held the same servile urgency. They looked at Manrie with great sorrow, as if it pained them to be walking through the world again. She studied their faces for a moment, looking for the one who had tried to hold her in her lap. She did not recognize any of the ghosts.
Bahdring bent and took one of the stones from Manrie’s lap. She raised her face and the red and brown pattern of the disc reflected off of her neck. Manrie stood. “Don’t invite them in. Don’t give them permission to ride you. Walk beside me. I will protect you.”
The tinker nodded. Manrie turned to the door. Torches had been lit in the hallway. Their light fell on the faces of the dead. They had all come here, all sensed the spirit stones and rushed to this place. Their expressions were patient, mournful, as if each of them contemplated some moment of loss. A memory flashed. Aizdha, sitting at his table, before he had sent her to Hasra. The same shadow of defeat had lain across his face. He had gazed out of the window, seeing nothing.
“Why did you despair?” she whispered to herself.
“I will try not to despair,” Bahdring said, thinking that the comment was meant for her.
Manrie shook her head. She stepped out into the hallway and the crowding dead turned with her as she began to walk. Bahdring kept pace at her side. There were living people standing pressed against the pillars. Terrified people, sent to spy on her. She led the procession past the great hall, and it was empty. Blocks of shadow fell across the wide floor. Down a flight of stairs and into a courtyard, and a quavering voice rose up, singing. The singer was standing on the wall, looking down at her. She wanted to call to him, to tell him that he didn’t have to sing yet. Not until she reached the tomb. But his eyes were shut, his whole body concentrated on standing there as the ghosts passed beneath him. She thought that if she called to him, he would collapse.
Through the city, with its one wide avenue and rambling streets. The dead emerged from alleyways. They walked through walls. There were singers on the rooftops. They were each singing the same song. The battle hymn of Cahntada. As if they thought that Manrie was leading the dead to war. Their voices blended with each other as she passed, and she felt as if she were walking along a bridge of song. She and Bahdring passed the guardhouse and she saw the face of the captain she had spoken to that morning. The captain peered out at her, a look of avid concentration on her face. There were guards stationed at the gate, their bodies held rigid with fear. Manrie passed them slowly, and one of the queens brushed against her. Her mind was flooded with images. The bruise on a yellow apple. A little wax doll, half-melted in the summer sun. A boy slapping her and cursing her. The warm, damp smell of her nursemaid’s robes after she had been crying into them. The king’s shadow, looming over her in a dark room, his naked skin gray in the light from the window.
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She pushed the memories away, steeled herself against the spirits. The rigid guards were convulsing as the dead moved past them. At her side, Bahdring had begun to shake. The light from the spirit stone wavered against the ceiling of the gate tunnel.
Along the road, and now the singers were sitting in the trees. A different singer every hundred paces or so. Some had ragged voices, some beautiful. As if anyone who could carry a tune had been enlisted to this task. They watched her. Or they watched the three queens. Waiting for one of them to disappear. Bahdring was shaking and gulping at the air.
They followed the singing. Perhaps Bahdring knew the way to the tomb. Manrie did not. Yet she could feel it whispering to her through the darkness. She could feel the woods conspiring to point the way. The breeze blew at her back. The bracken revealed a path. For a while a fox came out of the darkness and slunk along beside them, looking up at them with its glowing eyes.
Where was the caravan? Somewhere in these woods. She scented the air for the smell of wood smoke. She smelled loam and attar and musk. She was afraid.
A gateway had been built in front of the tomb entrance. Iron gates, the bars twisted into patterns, as if they, too, had been batiked. A singer was seated on top of one of the gate posts. His voice was beautiful, rising clear and sharp from the shadows. A drum owl glided across the sky, and the singer twinned his song to its reverberations. Manrie glanced back. The woods behind her were full of the dead. Thousands of dead. Like in Libreigia. Not the scant handful of the west, where people barely lived. Generation after generation had died here. She thought of the people that the old guardsman had murdered when he was a boy. He and his companions, creeping into their rivals’ barracks at night. They must be here, that murdered company. The people the guardsman had never told her about. The people he was afraid to remember.
She and Bahdring entered the tomb. The song followed after them. A song of marching, a boast of slaughter. She hated that song by now. She would have hated it even if she hadn’t heard it repeated a hundred times as she walked. Not a song for laying the dead to rest. She wondered if it would echo in their ears in the grave.
The tomb was a lace hole. Her certainty grew with every step she took. She could hear Bahdring breathing beside her. Vast, heaving breaths. “Count them,” she whispered. “Count your breaths. It will help.”
She wondered if there was another way out of the cave, somewhere in the darkness ahead of her. If it would take her out onto the shores of the Previous World. Maybe she had stood there in Raesidae, and not known it. She was glad, now, that she had told no one about that dark shore, about the souls of the dead spinning with the disc above the waves. The souls of the dead sinking into the depths.
The space opened up around her, as it always did. There was no echo, no drip of water. Only the sense of eternity, of the cave going on and on, spreading out, until everything was consumed within its darkness. “We put the discs down, now,” she said to Bahdring.
There was no reply. No sound of breathing. No sense of another person standing beside her.
“Bahdring?” she hissed. “Bahdring?”
The tinker was gone, and her spirit stone was gone as well. Manrie was alone in the echoing darkness. Only the song from the gatepost remained with her. A distant voice, singing for her. She bent to place the stone on the rock floor, and as she did so, the song changed. The battle hymn ended, shifted into a different melody. She listened, wondering why the singer had changed tunes. But he hadn’t. This was a different singer. She recognized the voice.
She turned and ran towards it. It was Taeyaho’s voice, and for a moment she forgot. She forgot that he was dead. Could it be that his ghost had come here. That his ghost was singing for her? The tunnel tilted upwards, and she fought for breath as she ran up it. His voice grew stronger. He was singing an old song, one she didn’t recognize. She could see the glow of blue light, the tunnel entrance, framing the night.
She stopped running. Taeyaho was dead. His ghost was at the homestead, or wandering somewhere in the west. If his voice was singing from the gatepost, it meant only one thing. She stood very still, looking down at her hands. She could barely see them in the dim light from the entrance. She turned and looked back down the tunnel. She had left the spirit stone. She had created the shrine. She was tempted to return to the vast cavern and the company of the dead. But she thought of Koenbahki. Of Cloedeya. Of Little Praeda. She couldn’t abandon them. She couldn’t walk alone through the echoing darkness until she found another door. Not now. Not while her friends lived in this world.
So she turned and went forward, out into the night air. The Immortal was standing before her, accompanied by three of the rangers. The man who had sang from the top of the gate post was dead. His corpse was laying in the dirt. His ghost had risen and was looking at her. She stared at it, then turned her gaze to the Immortal.
“You didn’t have to kill him.”
“He was a spy. A vicious man in his own right. One of the king’s many poisoners.”
“He had a beautiful voice.”
The Immortal shrugged.
“Where are the wagons?” she asked him.
“You did something very foolish,” he told her.
“What did I do?”
“You spoke of me to the King of Cahntada.”
“Did you kill Bahdring?”
“The tinker? She walked with you into the tomb.”
Manrie looked down. “Maybe she turned aside.”
“No. We watched her. It seems that you are the only one who can carry the spirit stones.”
“If that’s true, then the world is doomed.”
“Doomed?”
“If I die, there will be no one who can lay the dead to rest.”
“It will not matter,” the Immortal said. “Not when we get to Hasra.”
He turned, and the rangers came and flanked Manrie. Her guard. Her mind flashed to the cliffs above Raesidae. To how she and Praeda had tried to run from Laenrid and his men. How the Immortal had ridden out of the woods. There was no escape in the dark forest that surrounded her.
There were other dead along their path. Other singers whom the rangers had murdered. Their ghosts stood beside their fallen bodies, a silent witness to her passage. “Were they spies?” she asked. “Were they poisoners?”
Other rangers were emerging from the woods. Silent eyes watched from the shadows of the trees. The Immortal led them away from the main path, down the slope of a long hill. The forest was alive with sound. Tree frogs trilled from their secret perches on the trunks of the hemlock trees. The brush rattled with some small animal’s passing.
The dim glow of firelight, growing stronger. A break in the trees, and there were the wagons. Yoehnen was standing nervously beside the fire. Other rangers stood about him, their bows drawn. They were looking at a figure who faced them across the flames. A familiar figure. As the Immortal stepped into the clearing, the figure turned and Manrie gave a cry. Then the figure rushed towards her, and she let him enter her.
The taste of an apricot. So sweet, the warmth of the sun having driven the tartness from its flesh. Its skin was so fragile, so smooth. He took a small bite and passed it to a girl, and she nibbled at it, then past it to another child. There were seven of them, and the apricot had come all the way from Bahslahgana. When it came back to him, there was one small bite still clinging to the pit.
A storm in the pass, lightning flashing against the sides of the mountains. The rain so fast and hard that he could barely breathe. The guards were trying to soothe the panicked horses. The tents were blowing away in the wind. He ran to the picket and grabbed at swinging reins. The big bay horse, rearing above him. And all he could think of was the soup that he would make, with barley and mushrooms and some of that rich port wine that he had been keeping secreted in the depths of the cook wagon. A soup that could warm them and restore their spirits, when the storm finally passed.
She had such broad shoulders and she was so shy, her eyes always turning down, as if they were trying to fold her gaze protectively over the rest of her face. She wouldn’t speak to him or anyone, she just brought the plates to the table and then walked away again as quickly as she could, swinging her shoulders as another woman might swing her hips. When someone stumbled into her path she stopped abruptly and her whole body shook. He made a sugar cake for her and brought it back to the tavern. She looked down at the cloth it was wrapped in. He left her alone so that she could eat it privately. The next day he brought her another one, dusted with cinnamon. That night she came to the caravan. He saw her watching from the trees. He went to the little pool beside the waterfall and she emerged from the shadows of the rocks. He had made a small tart with blackberry jam. It smeared her lips as she ate it.
The wagons moved over rough ground, with no road to follow. The foothills had emptied into a great valley, so large that it could barely be called that. But if you looked north you could see the peaks of the Maeldaparras, smudged by distance. And if you looked south you could see Zahamaendas, squatter, more worn than the northern range, covered, at their feet, with a mange of jungle. The slim baker in Afonghata had told them that purple rice grew wild in the valley. The water mice would weave the rice stalks into braided patterns, and this would alter the taste, would make the rice citrusy and bright with a hint of rose hips. When they found the water meadow, there was a woman sitting on a dry hummock, watching the mice as they worked. She had purplish lips and a flush of acne across her cheeks. She turned and watched them come to the edge of the meadow, then stood, and the rags fell away from her body so that she faced them in her nakedness. That night they fed her noodles in a salty brown sauce with cut tubers.
The animals were dying. The chickens in the farmsteads, and then the geese. Their feathers turned a silty gray and their beaks became fragile and shattered against the ground. If only they could be taught not to peck. The chicks were naked when they came from the eggs and blinked furiously against the light, as if they were offended by it. They never grew a down, never sprouted feathers. They died naked, like tiny lizards, the beaks shattered on their faces.
The caravan moved north, through stunted fields, where the grain stalks had become fragile and collapsed under the weight of the spikes. The spikes themselves had spilled their seeds, which scattered, flimsy and still green over the dark field rows. They tried to find some way to cook the grain, but the seeds turned hard as pebbles when boiled, and turned to paste when they tried to grind them. Even Soephelia grew sick when she tried to eat it. She was calling herself Haelandri, but he still thought of her by the first name she had given them. He held that name within himself, a secret, a seed, and as they moved through the stricken countryside he imagined it sprouting within him.
It was spring, and they were moving westward over the expanse of never ending plains. Ineshashar was far behind them, but the memory lingered. The anger. The hatred. The smell of the wagons burning. These news wagons were better. Larger, but also lighter, as they had been built of the wood of the shaktibalsa tree. The horses didn’t have to strain so hard to pull them. The horses were happy here. They would stand for hours amongst the bending grain stalks and eat daintily, huffing with delight. The boy would come at dusk and stand beside them, his hand on their flanks as they ate, as if they were teaching him how to breath. How to be content and warm in the summer night. He allowed Melsa to approach him, first. She brought him a bowl of smooth porridge, and he ate it hungrily. That night she told them how he sang. A beautiful voice, she said. “He comes from people,” she said. “Maybe the People of Skies and Visions.”
He couldn’t teach his songs to them, as his songs were never the same. But they liked to listen to him sing, and sometimes they sang back at him, making up their own words. Their songs were about food and feasting. His songs were about the rain, the sunlight, the arc of a flight of longspurs over the grasses. Soephelia named him Taeyaho, and he smiled at the name, and asked what it meant. But she wouldn’t tell them. She only smiled, and hid the memory of some past Taeyaho she had known behind her smile.
Those were happy days. The land provided everything that they needed. Even the rain water tasted better on the plains. As if it had been sieved by the enormous sky. Melsa’s body was warm at night, and Soephelia often joined them. Sometimes he would get up in the dark and leave the sleeping wagon to sit by the fire. The boy would come and join him. They spoke sporadically, but mostly they just fed the fire, sharing its warmth.
“You are bound to me in love,” he whispered to the women in the darkness, and they held him. And he fell asleep, night after night, thinking that this was a love world. A world of plenty. A world of joy.
Manrie came awake. She was in darkness, and the floor was moving beneath her. The wagon, rattling along a road. There were people around her, and for a moment she knew them with a different kind of intimacy. She knew the sound of Melsa’s breath, the way that Soephelia - Big Praeda - shifted restlessly in her sleep. There were others here as well, small movements and scents that Manrie knew better than the ghost that rode her. Little Praeda. Koenbahki, curled against Manrie’s side, her leg hot and heavy against Manrie’s knee.
Manrie lay still, listening to the darkness. There were tears running across her temples, moisture pooling in her ears. Koenbahki came awake. Manrie felt her body tense.
“You’re here?” she whispered.
“I’m here.”
A little sob. Then Koenbahki was gripping her, possessive and insistent. “I thought I’d lost you.”
“No.”
“Manrie, Cloedeya is dead. There was a fight. Guards from Cahntada. He was shot with an arrow. It was an accident.”
“It wasn’t an accident,” Manrie said. “It was my fault.”
“No.”
“I made it happen. I asked the king to send the guards.”
Koenbahki was silent for a moment. Then she said, “You were trying to rescue us.”
“Is it night time?”
“Yes.”
“But the wagons are moving.”
“We move all the time. Day and night. They stole extra horses from a farmstead. They killed the farmer and his family. They said that they couldn’t leave witnesses.”
“Are we being pursued?”
“Yes. The king of Cahntada has sent patrols. But the rangers know secret ways through the Gaendolin Hills. We are almost to Hasra.”