Koenbahki was still alive. So was Little Praeda. Melsa was dead. But it wasn’t Melsa’s ghost that rode her next. It was Big Praeda, her face blooming out of the darkness. Big Praeda, who was once called Haelandri, and before that Soephelia. The ghost of Cloedeya stirred when she appeared. It welcomed her. As she entered Manrie’s consciousness, another name bloomed within her, and another before that. There was a kind of distress in this blooming, a reticence. And Manrie whispered, “I will pretend that I don’t know your other names.”
She was a child, and her father was seated on a stool in the wagon. He was half-naked and the pale light that filtered in through yellow curtains turned his skin gray. A thin man who held his body in the posture of a giant, swelling his narrow chest and extenuating his ropey neck. Only now he was in the midst of his ritual, running his hands slowly over his embroidered robe, peering intensely at the embroidery. As he worked at his inspection, he performed the other part of the ritual, and gave her a new name. “You will be Tirbahit and I will be Gralbanya. Gralbanya was your uncle’s name. Your fourth uncle on my mother’s side.”
She said nothing. She never asked about these phantom relatives. She had told a boy in Baerlahka about them, and he had said that they didn’t exist. Just to be mean. But maybe he was right. She had never met a relative, not in all the towns they’d gone to, and they had gone to most towns.
She was sitting in the shadows, having pushed herself into them as deeply as she could. She had taken to wrapping swaddling cloth around herself to hide her budding breasts. She, too, had to be half-naked for this ritual, had to hold her embroidered robes in her lap and inspect every stitch. If she found one that had broken or come undone she was to tell him, but she had started tucking the frayed ends away and staying silent.
They could already hear people gathering outside of the wagon, and she saw that her father heard them as well. He was smiling. Expectation filtered in through the open window. It almost seemed to blow at the yellow curtain. He shivered, as if expectation were caressing his half-naked skin. She looked at him and hated him, and it was the first time she truly hated him. She felt the desolation of that hate, and then noticed something quiver in the air of the room. A presence. Someone who loved her. It made her gasp and drop her robe on the dusty floor.
They were scrambling up a steep incline, small stones skittering down all around them. She was older now, and they had returned to Ibimendi Gap. They always came here in winter, when the wandering people had gone back to Ibimendi and the gap was mostly empty. They never went to Ibimendi. Her father said that the Winter Matriarch wanted to kill them. Because he hunted the igbesilaho. Because he kept the little monkeys in reed baskets and killed them in the evenings to extract their third hearts. Father was always careful to burn the corpses. But he said that the Matriarch knew, and the Summer King. They had to know. His unguents were famous. He was the most renowned healer east of the mountains, he said, and probably west of them, too, although he’d never traveled to the other side of Ibimendi Gap, not even before his daughter was born.
But how could he be renowned, she wondered, if he always had to change their names? No one was really fooled by the name changes. The children in the towns they passed through would tease her with all of her past names, would say “Everyone knows that your father’s medicines don’t work.”
“Then why do people keep buying them?” she’d ask, and they’d have nothing to say to that. But she knew. They bought them because they were desperate. They agreed to pretend that they hadn’t been fooled before, and the names assisted the pretense. Maybe Grayalain the healer had sold them a greasy balm that hadn’t cured their rash, but this healer said that his name was Zavermends, and they could pretend that he didn’t look that much like the man who had come through three years ago.
Father led her to the top of the incline, and the igbesilaho chittered on the ledges above them. They blinked down with their wide eyes. They had the prettiest fur. White, but prismatic, sending sprays of color against the dung covered cliffs. They were always innocent. They never remembered that her father had captured and killed them before. When he reached up to grab one by the tail, it came willingly and swung upside down with a quizzical look on its face, as if excited to discover what came next. She suspected that he had chosen monkey hearts as the base ingredient for his potions because the igbesilaho were so easy to catch.
A voice spoke. A soft, grieving voice, and he dropped the monkey. There was a woman standing on the ledge. She hadn’t been there before. She looked at him, and then she looked at his daughter, who straightened under her regard. She was the most beautiful woman in the world. She had onyx locks that fell past a thin brown face, and gray eyes that seemed to startle the shadows from the snow. She spoke again and reached a hand out towards them. Father took a step back, as if afraid that she would grab him and swing him upside down and bash his head against the cliff. Her voice was musical, and the words hovered very close to meaning. She glided forward. Father gibbered something, looked wildly along the ledge, and then turned and threw himself off of it. He rolled down the rocky incline and came to a stop at the bottom. His body was oddly twisted. The igbesilaho chittered happily. The beautiful woman turned her eyes on the alchemist’s daughter. She reached out a thin hand and touched her head.
Libreigia, and Chahkuhnrin was sick. She had left him in the boarding house and gone, at his bidding, through the autumnal streets to spend the day in the library towers. Seeking, always seeking. Manrie stirred uneasily as the familiar streets passed in the phantom memory. These were the slums by the Ridge Gate. The poorest area of the city. Manrie tried to close her eyes against the memory, afraid that she might see someone she recognized. But the ghost wasn’t interested in the people she passed, the shadowy figures that hid their faces beneath rough veils.
Someone had brought soup for Chahkuhnrin. Probably the landlord’s daughter, that skinny little thing. It looked like she’d brushed his hair, also. It shone silver in the light from the smoky little lamp. “You’re feeling better,” she said as she came into the room, and he grinned at her. But his eyes were looking past her, as they always did, studying his memory of the Once Again Maiden.
“Tell me,” he said.
She sighed. She put down her pack and sat cross-legged next to his sleeping pallet. The room reeked of his sweat, and it made her whole body quiver. She wanted to climb into the blankets and curl herself around him. He had let her, when his fever was at its peak. Now she contented herself with taking his spoon and eating a bite of soup.
“I met a scholar, in the Second Tower. He was like you. Obsessed.”
He didn’t deny it. He leaned closer, and watched her take another spoonful of soup. He pursed his bowed lips and she leaned a little forward, closing the space for a kiss. She could see her own wants in his eyes. She always could. It’s what made him so cruel. He knew how she yearned for him, and did nothing.
“He saw her, too,” she said. “When he was a very young man. In Ibimendi Gap, but further north, on the slopes of Prahphimkahda Mountain. Don’t get too excited. He went back again many times, and never found her again. Like us. But he remembers what she said. Not the meaning, but the sounds. He’s spent his life trying to decipher her words.”
“And what did she say?”
“He’s never figured it out.” She watched his face fall, and felt the thrill of a tiny revenge. Then she told her great lie, the lie she had invented as she walked back through the streets to the boarding house. “But he said that she’s been encountered in other places, too. Not just Ibimendi Gap. He showed me letters, journal entries, scraps of papers left by travelers who all talk about her. And he thinks he’s discovered a cycle. She appears in the Gap every three years, in winter. Which is how I saw her, and how you saw her when you were a boy. But she appears at the foot of Mount Chahnapaeya in the spring of the first year, and along the ridge of the Great Gorge in the late summer of the second year. Always in the same cycle.”
He was thinking, counting in his head. “Then this year, this spring, she’ll be in the west.”
“Yes.”
“And the scholar can lead us.”
She hesitated, her lie about to be found out. “He can’t,” she said.
“Why not?”
“He’s dying. He’ll be dead by then.”
“I want to meet him.”
She nodded. “When you’re well.”
The next day she went along the street to an apothecary and bought a new vial of chihdeisin oil, which he was allergic to. She waited on the stairwell and caught the landlord’s daughter as she was bringing up the soup. He remained sick for three more days, and then she told him, sadly, that the scholar had died. They would have to travel to Mount Chahnapaeya without him. She watched his face as she told him, and felt that strange sense of love, of compassion, that had been following her all of her life. Some entity, some being beyond herself, that saw her, and understood, and forgave her.
A different memory. She was laying in the sleeping wagon, and Cloedeya was laying beside her. He smelled of garlic, of roasted tomatoes and curry. His skin always seemed to take on the color of the food he had been cooking. Even if it was food that didn’t stain. When he roasted chickens, he seemed paler. When he sautéed onions into a rich, golden brown the skin of his chest glowed with their deep beauty. She was telling him about Chahkuhnrin, her voice shaking. She felt that she had to tell him, that if he knew and still wanted her, she could finally rest. As she spoke, she remembered Chahkuhnrin’s voice, one of the times when he had allowed his contempt for her to show. She remembered him saying, “You’re just like your father. Always mixing your concoctions. Always testing your little potions.”
“They never made me sick,” she said aloud to Cloedeya. “Whatever my father made. He would test it on me. Even when I was a very small child. They never did anything to me.”
Cloedeya stirred uneasily. “He was a very cruel man.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “I learned that, with time. We were in Mahjalnaghar, and all the children were talking about a man who had poisoned his whole family. He had put the ichor of the garahlaja fish in their stew, and watched them die. When he was captured, he said that a fish had spoken to him, had told him that he should squeeze it and drink its fluids, and that if he did so he would become wiser than any other man. But he decided to test it on his family first.”
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“How old were you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe in my tenth year. Maybe older. I knew what my father was doing, then. But I also knew that I could eat anything. Drink anything.”
“You were the medicine that he was trying to make,” Cloedeya said. “Only he couldn’t recognize it.”
That made her cry. When she was done crying she lay still as he stroked her naked back. Eventually she said, “I killed Chahkuhnrin. I didn’t mean to. Only the water was different, in the rice fields. I boiled rice, and I added the chihdeisin oil, like I did when I needed him to be still, and he died.”
He was silent for a moment. Then he kissed her head. “It’s all you’ve ever learned. How to use this world to get what you want.”
“Doesn’t everybody do that?”
A pause while he thought. “I don’t think that I do.”
“You do, though. Only the things you want are different.”
“How are they different?”
“You want people to be well fed. To celebrate together. It’s beautiful, but it’s not that different from my father. He wanted people to be well. He wanted their money, but he also wanted to heal them. That’s why he kept doing it, even though it was dangerous.”
“I don’t think I’m like your father.”
“You never knew him.”
“No.”
Again, silence, and the wagon rocking slowly back and forth in the wind. Melsa had gone walking in the hills. She would come back soon, and they would go out into the breeze and try to start a fire for their dinner. After awhile she asked, “Do I still have a place here?”
He seemed surprised. “Of course you have a place here. With us. You always will.”
“Why?”
He laughed then, a startled sound. “Sweetheart, you are unused to love. But you’ll learn that it has its own reasons.” And she felt it then. The sense of compassion that she had known as a child, had always known, perhaps. Only she thought that maybe she could name it now. Maybe it had been Cloedeya, always, from the very first. A premonition of him.
Or a memory, Manrie thought, as she swam back into herself. She was cold, and became aware of a great thirst, and hunger lumbering along beneath it. A voice was shouting. Furious and panicked. And her hands were gripped. Little Praeda was gripping her left hand, and Koenbahki her right.
There was lantern light, but it was in the distance, and it was swinging back and forth wildly. “Where is it?” the voice was crying. “Where is it?” There were spirits circling the light, flitting about it like moths.
A face bloomed at her side, peering around Koenbahki. Yoehnen, and he looked mad. His hair was mussed in an arc over his head and his eyes were wide. “Did she want this?” he asked, urgently. “Is this what she wanted?”
“Who?”
“The Lady. Katemzan.”
Manrie felt the ghost of Katemzan stir within her. It overtook her, as if it were scrambling up her shoulders and thrusting its face forward to speak from her mouth. “Not this,” she said. “Not like this.”
A dark, determined look came into Yoehnen’s face. “I will kill him, then.”
“How many of you are left?” and it was Katemzan Prahmpara Droegee Daturi who was speaking.
“Just me. He will die, now.”
Objects spoke in the darkness. Little Praeda’s robe was shivering with her body. It was angry. It would tighten its fibers if it could, turn its cloth into a shell to protect the little girl. Koenbahki’s robes wanted to be caressed. They were aware of their own heaviness, downtrodden by the dirt that was caked to them. The lantern was speaking, crying out at the monotony of revealing nothing but stone, day after day. The backpack had a tear in its side, and no one had noticed, and soon the discs would break through it and spill out on the ground. But the sword that Yoehnen carried spoke loudest of all. The shell sword. It spoke of the ocean, of the deep, heavy silence of the waves, and it liked the lace hole, the endless tunnel that led nowhere.
“You let him kill you?” Manrie asked. “You rangers, you accepted your deaths?”
“Two he took in the night. We could not all stay awake. And some of us couldn’t quite believe that he wasn’t the face that he wore. Others…went willingly.”
“What is he looking for?”
“The needle,” Koenbahki breathed. “Someone has stolen the needle.”
“Then if you kill him,” Manrie said to Yoehnen, “he will surely die.”
“Yes,” Yoehnen whispered, and stalked towards the light.
Katemzan Daturi watched out of Manrie’s eyes, and flooded Manrie with memory. The gaunt, sad man who came out of the woods and stood in the Dome House, smelling of beech trees and leaf mold. The eyes he raised to her were weary and grieving and she went to him and took his face in his hands. He was wearing a string of beads at his wrist, and the beads remembered a matching bracelet, but it was gone, and his earrings remembered a wail of grief.
The scene caught at her and held her only for a moment, because the chaplain was pushing forward, a calm presence, and it was telling Manrie that the ranger should not kill. Insisting that Manrie see the Immortal as precious, unique, and loved in a way that no one could understand. Her mind filled with the sound of grass, moving in a breeze that blew across the plateau, and sunlight beating down, and someone singing, and someone else playing a drum. Manrie took a step forward, but Koenbahki and Little Praeda held her back.
“How are you still alive?” she whispered.
“We told him that you would not help him, would not open a door, if we died,” Koenbahki said.
“Yes,” Manrie said, and knew that she could die in the darkness. She was more ghost than person, now.
“Manrie, pick me up,” Little Praeda whispered, and Manrie reached down. The girl scrambled into her arms. Her unwashed hair was greasy against Manrie’s nose. She straightened and Koenbahki leaned against her, and they watched Yoehnen’s wavering form stalk through the pattern of swinging lantern light. The ghosts made way for him. The frantic, searching figure turned, and the light shone on Yoehnen, casting his hard silhouette against their sight, and then the light went out.
A scramble in the darkness. Manrie’s heart was beating with Magda’s anxiety, Katemzan Daturi’s anticipation. “Why did he ever think that there was a doorway out of death?” Manrie wondered.
A cry. It reverberated through the dark, and Little Praeda gave a sob and buried her face in Manrie’s shoulders. It was Big Praeda who held her, who whispered, “You won’t remember this. You won’t have to remember this unless you want to.”
Then there were sparks, flashing against the blackness as someone used a tinderbox. The lantern light flared up again, and a figure bent over it. It straightened, a shard of light that cast no shadow. The ghosts were drawn to it as if it were magnet. It parted them as it walked towards Manrie. It was carrying a long, dripping blade. The ghosts inside of Manrie had caught her breath and were holding it, unwilling to release it. The face of the figure swam into detail. Not Yoehnen. One of the other rangers. The singing one. Jaskra. Now dead.
“Who did it?” he asked, and his eyes were insane. “Who stole the needle? Which one of you?” He lifted the sword and pushed the blade at Koenbahki’s neck. “Speak, or she dies.”
There was a scrambling sound off to the left. Then something rolled into the sphere of lantern light. They all stared down at it. A peach, its yellow fuzz warmed by the light. Impossibly beautiful, singing of breezes and leaves and sunlight. Cloedeya rose to the surface of Manrie’s consciousness. She saw a soup, made of peaches and white wine and cinnamon. The flavor filled her mouth.
The Immortal glared into the darkness and seemed to see something. He gave a cry and charged off. A voice came echoing out of the darkness. “Run!”
Koenbahki stooped and swept the peach into her robes, and then they ran. They were very weak. Every step seemed to shift the thirst inside of Manrie, so that it spread through her like a poison. But they could not stop. They stumbled over uneven rock, but their footsteps had nothing to echo against. The only sound was the rasp of their breathing.
Koenbahki tripped and Manrie allowed exhaustion to overtake her and flopped onto the ground beside her. They huddled together, panting. Little Praeda whimpered softly in her arms, and Manrie resented her. She felt a sudden, angry fury, a sense of injustice that she should be burdened with this child. It didn’t come from any of the ghosts. It was her own. Or not hers, but something she had seen once, something she had known.
A shattering sound, somewhere behind them, and a deeper darkness surrounded them. “Who is it?” breathed Koenbahki.
“I don’t know,” Manrie said, “but we should eat the peach.”
Koenbahki agreed. “It might be the last thing we ever eat. I’m glad that it’s a peach. I’ve always loved peaches.”
“Little Praeda should have the first bite.”
“Yes.”
The scent of the peach came closer. It was right under Manrie’s nose. Little Praeda’s head shifted, and Manrie could feel her searching for it with her mouth. She knew the moment when the girl bit into its flesh. The smell of its juice flooded her like sunlight. Then the smell of the peach was coming closer, and she opened her mouth and took a dainty bite, afraid of biting Koenbahki’s fingers. Cloedeya gave a groan of pleasure, and Big Praeda’s ghost joined him, and Manrie felt her entire body flush with embarrassment. But the embarrassment was warm, and full of life, and she knew that she didn’t want to die in the lace hole.
Footsteps were coming back towards them, and they tensed. “Eat quickly,” Manrie hissed at Koenbahki. The peach was withdrawn from her mouth, and she could hear the slurp of Koenbahki’s bite. Then there was another presence beside them, breathing raggedly.
“I broke the lantern,” a voice said, and Little Praeda said, “Maedreth.”
“Run,” Maedreth hissed. And then she whispered, “Don’t see us. Don’t see us,” as if she were begging the darkness.
They were standing again, and running, and there was a sense of something chasing them. A harsh breath, sounding in the darkness behind them. Manrie thought she could feel the pressure of the spirits, like the rumble of a landslide, bearing down on them. But then the ghosts were moving past her, and they were more like a stampede, and her mind flashed to agorabehn, dodging shards of lightning. There was a light ahead of them. An impossible light, and it formed a square in the empty darkness. The ghosts were flocking to it. Little Praeda cried out at the sight of it, and then they were beneath it, and staring up, and a face was staring down at them. An old woman’s face, her eyes wide with surprise. It disappeared for a moment, and Manrie stared wildly around, afraid that she would see the Immortal loom up out of the darkness. But then the face was back, and it was holding something, and a skein of cloth came shimmering down into the cave.