Later she would tell herself that the light was brighter on that hill, that the breeze was strangely warm, and that the sepia of the Sand Hills had turned to a warm umber. There was a monster waiting for them on the hill’s crest. They could see it as they stepped into the light. A warm, tawny, chitinous body. It lifted its thorax and rested back on many legs. It was looking at them, so it must have had eyes, but all Manrie could see was a flat stone, set where its face should have been.
The fox ran ahead of them, making a path. He stopped and looked back, and the grass seemed to sway behind him, as if he were swishing a tail back and forth. “It has been waiting to meet you. Come. It wants to speak to you.”
“What is it?” Manrie asked.
The fox looked over his shoulder at the monster on the hill. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen it before. But I know the voice that will speak from its mouth.”
A memory from Katemzan. A gangly girl, brought into the Dome House, her long hair matted and plastered to her body with mud so that it would look like fur. A voice saying, *Some trappers found her. She was living with a pack of the datakiya.* And the girl grunting and snarling and howling in a thin voice, but never speaking, not even when the curator of the Sangrahalaya took her into his care.
“How do you speak from *your* mouth?” Manrie asked the fox.
He grinned at her. “Say there was a wandering spirit, a poor mad father who had lost his family, lost his caravan, a victim of slaughter in the hills. And he found a poor animal boy, who wished to be red like the foxes that raised him. Should that ghost not enter the boy’s mind? Should he not speak with the boy’s tongue?”
She stared down at him. “Is there anything of the boy left inside of you?”
The grin widened. “I would stand like a normal man, if I could. The boy is deep in the muscles of this body. He makes me crave a tasty vole.”
“But you came to Yenceyan years ago. You brought the fleece,” Old Yesaera said.
“Oh yes. Clever. Very clever. So that the land could act. So that it could speak. Only the king wasn’t wise enough to hear.”
“You speak for the land?” Manrie asked.
“Not me,” the fox said, and went capering off towards the hill. He waited for them beside a weather-worn rock.
They came to the foot of the hill. “Does it have a spirit stone for a face?”
“It seems to,” the fox said, resting on his haunches and lifting his face towards the monster.
Koenbahki gave a tug on the string that was still tied to Manrie’s wrist. “Manrie, I don’t think we should go up there.”
But the four ghosts that rode Manrie were pulling at her, insisting that she climb the hill. She took a step forward, and the others stepped with her.
“Manrie,” Koenbahki said.
“I have to go, ‘Bahki. The spirits…they need me to go. But you should stay here. The rest of you should stay here.”
“But I must go there,” Mueslahvin said from the old king’s lips.
“One must always investigate for oneself,” Old Yesaera said in the captain’s voice.
“The ghosts are pulling you. Let them go. Stay here. I’ll go alone.”
The fox scratched at an ear with a hind foot. A very dirty foot, with splayed toes and mud caked under the nails. He gave a sudden leap, snatched Old Yesaera’s disc from her hands, and ran with it in his mouth halfway up the hill.
The old woman cried out. She fell into the grass and pulled the others down with her. They lay in a momentary tangle, then Manrie lifted her wrist to her mouth and bit through the knot. The string came undone, and she felt a moment of bereavement as her tether to Koenbahki was broken. She was standing. The ghosts inside her were focused on the monster’s face, on the patterns that swirled within its stone.
“Manrie,” Koenbahki said, scrambling to her feet, clawing at the tight yarn that still bound her to Old Yesaera and the king. “Manrie, I’m coming with you.”
“What if it kills me? ‘Bahki, I don’t want you to die.”
Old Yesaera grabbed Manrie’s arm and pulled herself up. She shook herself and gave a great sigh. “That was a terrible feeling. Did you know that would happen when the ghost left me? I feel bereft, somehow, and as if I’ve forgotten something. But also strangely joyous. I am not certain that I enjoy being the victim of such a forceful transformation. Help Old ‘Pesi up. Your lover is quite right, you know. We’re going with you. No need to meet your hour alone.”
Manrie turned and looked back at the monster. “I wish I knew what it was.”
“Yes,” the weaver said, “but it would be less of a monster if you did. Listen. We can still hear the voices of your friends. It’s lovely, isn’t it. That child has such a clear voice.”
It was true. Praeda and Maedreth’s lullaby was singing through the air. And the scent of the hill was fresh, as if it were springtime and not autumn. Manrie smelled rosemary, and Cloedeya smiled inside of her. Koenbahki took her hand. The weaver took her other hand, and her fingers felt soft and smooth.
They walked up the hill, the three women first, the old king trailing behind them. The fox scampered through the long grasses, and the colors of the stone that the monster wore for a face flowed quietly from pattern to pattern. The four ghosts inside of Manrie leaned forward eagerly, but she forced her pace to match those of her friends.
They came to the crest and the monster shifted backwards, extending long, tenuous legs into the grass. The stone face looked down at them, and then, as if it were delicately plucking a stem of sweet herb, it summoned Magda the chaplain to the front of Manrie’s consciousness.
Manrie found herself standing on another hill, one that was crawling with insects. They hadn’t been there a moment before, and they were frightened, writhing about, a spasm of legs and chitinous bodies. Sunlight beat down on them and exposed a color that the land had never seen before, an alien color, and the scrape of insect legs against the ground was an obscene intrusion. This wasn’t a memory. Magda had never been here before. But she was the chosen witness. And as she watched the scramble of panicked shapes she felt fear and loathing, but also compassion. She understood. It was as if she were floating above Hasra, watching the moment when human beings came into the world. Only this had happened long before, and the insects were stronger than the humans had been. They didn’t have to tend to their dead. But they were equally lost, equally sojourners in an alien land.
The scene shifted. A great humped insect sat at the top of the hill, and others of its kind moved slowly along the horizon. Other insects loped among them. A different species, apparently. These had long bodies and many legs, and hairs that lifted from their backs and seemed to feel the air. Sharp needles extended from what might have been their foreheads, and Magda gasped when she saw them, and Manrie reverberated with the memory. Ray and Tuân Binh had carried one into camp. The Immortal had held a needle in his hands. The sun was setting and the insects were distressed. One of the humped insects was trying to crawl up a nearby hill, but it kept sliding back down, scrabbling horribly with useless feet. *It’s dying,* Magda said. The loping species came towards it. *The unicorns,* Magda called them in Manrie’s mind. They swarmed over the dying insect and stabbed it with their horns. Manrie gasped and Magda was weeping inside of her. Then they turned and scuttled across the valley, coming in a rush at the hill where Manrie stood beside the great humped insect. It waited for them patiently, and sat placidly as they stabbed it. It didn’t die. It turned its face towards the sky and shook slightly, then returned to its indefatigable waiting.
Another shift in scene, and Magda was gone from Manrie’s mind. As if she had stayed on the hill with the humped insect. Mountains loomed above them, and a line of insects were making their way across a valley floor. Manrie seemed to float above them, drifting on a high breeze. But it was Katemzan who looked down at them with her. Katemzan wanted to float closer. To listen to the insects. The world was too quiet. There were no people here. No one to take clay and make bowls, to take ingot and make iron. None of the objects that could speak in Katemzan’s ear belonged to the world yet. Katemzan was shocked by the silence, unnerved by it. Yet there was the thread of a voice, murmuring up from the line of insects. They had made something. She insisted that Manrie drift lower.
There was a new insect, traveling in the center of the line. It was surrounded by the unicorns, as if they were guarding it, and the familiar humped insects from the hills led the column and scuttled along at its end, like vanguards and rearguards. The new insect walked on wobbling legs. It spasmed as it walked. The land would not speak to Katemzan Daturi, but it pervaded Manrie with its knowing. They had bred a new beast, established a new species of invader in the world. The land watched, its great, distracted mind concentrated on this new thing. There was a pack of anekalori in the foothills, only a mile or so away. The land tried to nudge the mind of the pack leader, to bring the scent of the insects through the breeze and fill the anekaloris’ mouths with the taste of yellow flesh. The anekalori had been hunting the invaders in the great gap between the mountains. They lifted their heads and followed the scent, but when they came to a ridge and looked down at the line of insects, they turned away. The pack had lost too many as it hunted. These insects were not like other prey. They were careful and wouldn’t let stragglers get separated from the herd. They could not be hunted like agorabehn.
The line of insects came to a dry river bed at the foot of a mountain, and Manrie gasped as she floated closer. She recognized the shape of the valley and expected to see a house at its top. Katemzan grew excited, stealing from Manrie’s memory and expecting to hear the voices of bowls and plates, the pleasing and reassuring murmur of chairs and cutlery. But there was no house. Only the scar of the vanished river. The new insect, the quavering, wobbling thing, lay down in the scar, and the humped insects surrounded it. They lifted their heads to the sky as if they were keening. The new insect began to shake. Its exoskeleton began to fissure and crack. The shaking increased, and the land shook with it. Trees thrashed along the ridges. The riverbed began to fracture. And the new insect fell apart, shattering as if it were a glass jar full of pebbles. The spirit stones poured out of it, and the great humped insects looked down at them, as if in expectation. The stones started to speak, and Katemzan pushed past Manrie’s consciousness to hear them, and was gone.
Manrie was suddenly afraid. The scene was shifting, and she could not lose Cloedeya. She couldn’t loose Big Praeda. For a moment she wavered back into her body, and felt Koenbahki holding her hand. The monster with the spirit stone face was looking down at her. That stone pulled at the ghosts inside of her. She felt a whispering of consciousness all around her, and knew that the hill where she stood with Koenbahki and Yesaera and the mad king was full of spirits. That spirits were coming out of the lace hole in a rush, a multitude of them, as if the darkness had connected every grave in the world and brought the dead in a great migration to this place. There were too many for her to find a single spirit in the crowd. She was looking for Melsa as the spirits whispered around her, sure that she could find her somehow. Melsa and Taeyaho. And Aizdha. And then she would be complete.
Cloedeya stepped forward in her mind, as if to help her. But all he brought was memory. A night in the woods. Melsa had snared a rabbit and Cloedeya was cooking it slowly on a spit. Haelandri had found some wild blackberries, and they were eating them from a folded kerchief. They tasted sour and the seeds stuck between Cloedeya’s teeth, and he resented Haelandri for bringing them. Resented and suspected her. She could eat the berries without being poisoned by them, but did that mean that he and Melsa could eat them as well? Until this evening he had taken it on faith. Haelandri somehow remade the world by eating. She made it palatable. She took its toxins into her body and transformed them, not just for herself, but for everybody. He had found it so beautiful, but now he wondered. Her skin had broken out. A line of acne swelled on her nose. She wouldn’t look at him as she ate. Melsa wouldn’t look at him, either. They were right not to look at him. He had been lying to himself, to them. The world wasn’t wonderful. There was no grace of beauty in it. The taste of the meal that they had made in Ineshashar still clung to the top of his mouth, like sour grease. Nothing could dislodge it. They had cooked a beautiful meal, and then the First Families had tried to claim it for themselves. That matriarch with the red face, shouting, demanding that her people eat first, telling her clients to block the streets, to keep the starving masses away. When Cloedeya turned over the tables and spilled the food onto the ground, she had descended upon it with a desperate cry, scooping up handfuls of the stew, thrusting it into her mouth with the dirt and excrement of the street. The sight of her had driven Cloedeya mad. He had grabbed a torch and thrown it into the pantry wagon, as if by doing so he could burn away the sight of her terrible mouth, gaping with spilled stew and earth.
She had locked them in a cellar. In the darkness of their prison, they had heard the weeping of starving people. And then a terrible silence. When food had finally come from Libreigia, they had been let out into the daylight. Cloedeya could barely summon spit into his mouth. He wanted to eat the grain raw. But the streets were full of hungry faces. People staring at him, begging him to cook.
That was three nights before. They had fled Ineshashar as soon as they could, as soon as the great, starving banquet was ended. Fled with the taste of the food in their mouths, its grease haunting them. The wagons were gone. They slept on cold ground. They could barely look at each other.
Stolen story; please report.
Melsa spoke the fear in his heart out loud. “Do we hate each other, now? Because we let people starve in Ineshashar?”
“It was that matriarch,” Haelandri said. Grease from the rabbit smeared her purple lips.
“I turned the tables over,” Cloedeya said. “I spilled the stew from the cauldron. I burned the wagon.”
“Yes, and you were right,” Haelandri answered. “If you hadn’t, we would have watched that fat bitch eat with her children, while all the other mothers begged for a scrap of food.”
Cloedeya picked at a bit of meat hanging from a bone. “Was I right, Melsa?” He couldn’t look at her as he waited for her to answer.
He heard her put her bowl down. She seemed to be looking for something inside of her tattered robes. “Now?” Haelandri asked in a conspiratorial tone, and Cloedeya realized that he was the object of a plot.
“I found it in an apothecary shop, after the feast,” Melsa said. Her shyness had come into her voice and was shaking it. “Everything had been looted, but there was a locked box, tucked away in the rafters.”
“Everything had been looted,” Cloedeya muttered, and he imagined starving people ripping the shop apart, eating dried insects and mushrooms, gulping tinctures, anything to find sustenance. He imagined their hair falling out, their nails turning blue, their bodies poisoned by the medicines they’d consumed.
“Yes,” Melsa said. “But they missed this box. When I opened it, I found this.”
He looked down. A withered, unappealing shape, which she laid on a stone in front of the fire. “What is it?”
“Haelandri recognized it,” Melsa said.
“It’s an okubrahchi,” Haelandri said.
“What’s that?”
“It’s used in love potions. Very powerful love potions. My father had one once. He kept trying to dilute it, to make it right. He was afraid to have me taste it. So he had no way to test it. He had never made anything that made him afraid before that. I’d swallowed all of his potions and tinctures. I was curious, wondering why it made him afraid. He kept throwing the love potions away. Not pouring them out, but digging holes and burying them. As if he was afraid that they might get into river water, or foul wells. It was so strange that I stole one. Just a few drops. I took them. That was the night I met Chahkuhnrin.”
Cloedeya scraped at a rabbit bone with a dirty fingernail. “It affected you,” he said.
She gave a sarcastic little laugh. He didn’t like her sarcasm. It filled him with sadness. “All of the potions affected me. Every one that my father made me drink. They didn’t kill me, but I felt them. They made me happy or sad or angry or nauseous or light-headed, or like I could do anything I wanted to, that the world belonged to me.”
“I mean,” he said, “it made you obsessed. With Chahkuhnrin. Who didn’t love you.”
“Yes.”
He looked at the withered object on the stone. “What would it do to us?”
It was Melsa who spoke. “It would bind us to each other. Okubrahchi mate for life.”
Tears came into his eyes. He looked up into their faces. “You want to be bound to me?”
“Yes,” Haelandri said softly. “Cloedeya, we love you.”
Melsa was suddenly there. Not by the campfire, but on the strange hill, where the stone-faced insect loomed above Manrie. Her spirit distinguished itself from the stampede of ghosts and Manrie opened herself wide to her. But she wouldn’t let Melsa flood her with memory. She had to stay in the moment. She saw glimpses of an inn, of platters of food, of a village boy with rough hands, of a fat man’s anger and a plate thrown against a wall. She saw Cloedeya, young, smiling awkwardly, the cook of a passing caravan. She noticed the way his expression narrowed with concentration as he stared down into a pan. She took a loaf of bread wrapped in a towel and walked with it along a path, away from the town, to the little pool beside the waterfall, and there he was, naked, wading in the water, picking berries from the lily pads among the flowering ferns. Manrie wanted to laugh with joy, but she also pushed the memory away. *Welcome, Melsa,* she thought, *welcome home*.
But above her, the stone face moved slowly back and forth, as if it was shaking its head. And before she could stop him, Cloedeya stepped out of her consciousness and became the thread along which a vision of the past could travel.
The insects had captured a rinchonyan and herded it onto the dry river bed. There were other captured creatures there. Manrie saw a prahnivasha, the wide mouth on its back open to the sunlight. She saw a tentacled ram. It was as if she were turning the pages of the bestiary. There was a bashabeshi. The insects had severed its wings from its body, and it flapped its stumps uselessly, calling out its distress. There was a ghigeedahti, its brown, stippled body flattened against the ground in fear. Three of the great humped insects sat on a ridge, looking down at this menagerie. The unicorns scuttled about their captives, their needles flashing in the sunlight. The sun reached its zenith, and the three humped insects raised their heads and screeched. As one, the unicorns fell upon the captured creatures and began stabbing them with their needles. Then they streamed up the sides of the ridge to stab the humped insects. The great humped shapes shivered, and Manrie understood. They lifted their heads and their jaws dropped open, their faces stretched, leering at the sky. As if they had eaten ghosts.
Cloedeya was gone, and Big Praeda, once called Haelandri, once called Soephelia, was going after him. Manrie tried to grab hold of her, to keep her ghost inside of her. But more memory was flowing out from the spirit stone face and traveling to her along the chain of Big Praeda’s being.
They had bred a new insect, long and beetle-like, with a strange leg appended to its back. She recognized it. She had seen its carapace in that cave in the Gaendolin Hills, almost a year before. It was poised at the entrance to a cave, and the unicorns scuttled about it, their sharp needles flashing. Again, three humped insects sat on a ridge and looked down. Manrie was reminded of the farmers in the wheelhouse. Of Retoebaeni the alchemist. She understood that an experiment was underway. The scribe borer was snuffling at the entrance of the cave. Its appended leg was stretching forward to etch the stone of the cliff wall with its sharp tip. *They are making their escape,* Manrie thought, and remembered Daas Draebeye’s speculations. A code. A language. An invocation. Some way of tightening the fabric of the world and piercing a hole through it. She sensed the land’s attention. It was learning through watching them. It was anxious for them to go.
The ground around the scribe borer’s feet was littered with spirit stones. They were not in the dry river valley, but somewhere else. As if this experiment had taken place all across the land, as if the insects had been looking for the place where the world’s fabric was thinnest. Or as if they needed many sites, a constellation of places that could make a shape in the universe that they could depart through. The glowing spirit stones pulsed as the scribe borer entered the cave. Their colors swirled as the unicorns poured into the darkness, following the scribe borer. The three humped insects descended from their ridge and made their slow way forward. The light of the stones reflected along the bottom of the carapaces. The light was growing sharper, brighter. As if the stones were a fire, and they were softening reality with their heat. A haze seemed to hang over everything, and all the animal sounds of the earth, the bird song, the whisper of the breeze through the trees, had fallen silent. The three humped insects disappeared into the cave. The light grew and grew. Then, in an instant, it flashed out.
Big Praeda was gone, and Melsa was following after her. *No,* Manrie cried, *no, don’t leave me!* Melsa’s spirit half turned, as if to reassure her. But she smiled back at her with the long face of a fox.
Wind rustled through the grass of the plains, and a tortoise was slowly making its way through them. A thin man reclined on its back. His weathered face was tilted up to the sun. *Hello, Lokeyn,*Manrie thought, and felt an odd reassurance. As if she was recognizing a sibling she had never liked but always known. He seemed quite peaceful, riding on his tortoise’s back. A fox stood on a nearby ridge and watched him.
She saw the storm come up, and lighting flash along the bodies of the agorabehn, a scene she knew. But now she was watching it from the land’s perspective. From the angle of the bent over grass, the resonance of the earth as the agorabehn’s hooves drummed across it. She saw Lokeyn, feeding the orphaned fawn from the tortoise’s great dugs, and she saw the fawn die. She saw the blue shards of the gorpsarra descend upon it and eat, and when the fox slipped down from its ridge and ate the vomit, she felt the attention of the land tighten, and electricity build at the horizon, as if that attention were summoning another storm.
“So that’s why,” she said out loud.
Koenbahki said, “Manrie, I’m here. We’re here.”
Old Yesaera squeezed her hand. For a moment she was empty. All of the spirits had left her. The hill rustled with the horde of ghosts. She could feel the whisper of their memories move across her consciousness. But they were focused on the stone. They had no desire to possess her.
The monster still loomed above her, and it had more to tell her. It seemed to be searching among the dead, and it found a woman to bring forward. A small woman, with a frightened and resentful face. Manrie felt an affinity for her, although she didn’t recognize her. Encountering her spirit was like hearing a song for the first time and feeling that you’d always known it. A sad song, that you didn’t like, but would become stuck in your head. The woman stepped into her. There was a glimpse of memory. Of a mill. Of water rushing through a paddle wheel. Of Manrie’s father, big and always concentrated, as if each task that he engaged in was the only thing that had ever happened. Manrie wanted to hold on to the memory, but the woman was already turning, as if pulled by a string. The monster was tugging her away so that it could send another vision down the chain of her being.
An island on a windswept lake. The few scant plants that grew there had grown from seeds that had been blown from other places. They seemed to dislike each other, or dislike the soil, or dislike the ghost who wandered across the island’s single dull hill. There was an old and tangled apple tree at the edge of the water. A snake was sunning itself on the grit of the beach, its long body looped lazily about. The ghost had made clothing for itself. It was draped in tattered shreds. Snake skin and spider floss and tree bark and lake weed. When Manrie had seen it in Raesidae it had seemed like cloth. But here on her island it relaxed from any pretense of craft or weaving and revealed the base materials of the earth.
A fox had gotten onto the island somehow. It stood at the crest of the hill and watched the ghost. When it turned to look at Manrie, it had a man’s face. Manrie sat down in the grass beside it, and it didn’t flinch away. “You want us to leave. Like the insects did.” The fox spread its wide mouth into a grin and nodded its small head. “They had the needles,” she said. “From the unicorns, or whatever they’re really called. One of their leaders died, and they transferred its being to another leader. To another of those great humped insects. Not like the Immortal did. Somehow the insects could absorb another’s being and not loose themselves in the process. Maybe you thought that we could do the same, when the Immortal found the needle and started using it?” The vulpine eyes flicked to her. The tail wagged. “But Daas Draebeye was right. They were too different from us. Too alien. We would have to become them, for it to work on us. But it gave you the idea, didn’t it? If a whole world can even have a single idea. What are you? The mind of everything that’s alive. A bunch of separate minds, or one mind? Are you like a room full of scholars, arguing? Never mind. We don’t speak the same language. But I think I understand. You’ve watched us for more than eight hundred years, and we aren’t like the insects. We weren’t passing knowledge from one generation to the next in the same way. We weren’t even sure that we wanted to leave. And maybe you decided to let us stay, although you weren’t shy about sending famines to kill us. But maybe those are just part of your life, like the way we get sick sometimes. Never mind. You were close to accepting us, until Lokeyn discovered the calm. And then you knew that if we stayed we would change everything to suit us. That you wouldn’t be you anymore. You’d become our slave.”
The fox lowered its head and snuffled at something on the ground. It raised a back paw and scratched its ear. But Manrie could tell that it was listening. She could feel the force of its attention. “The farmers were right, I suppose. You are our enemy. Only you’re more like a woman trying to shoo a mouse out of kitchen without killing it. You don’t want to kill us. You just want us to go away. And despite all of our books, all of our knowledge, we’re not very good at finding a door. So you tried to help us.” She glanced at the tattered witch, who was standing beside the water with her head lifted, as if she were shouting something over the lake. “We don’t have needles, but we have ghosts. You thought you could use them. Help us collect the wisdom of the past. Help us direct it towards making an exit, like the insects did. All of this, this spirit plague, it has a purpose. Only we tried. The immortal forced us to walk through the tunnels that the insects left, all the way from Hasra to Yenceyan. And it didn’t work. I couldn’t open the door, even though I had the spirit stones. They’re like water under a waterwheel, aren’t they? They give the energy for opening the door. But it didn’t work. And I think I know why. I was carrying ghosts, you see. I wasn’t when I made the other shrines. I wasn’t at Tzurfaera, or Raesidae, or Libreigia, or in any of the little towns and villages east of the mountains. Not until Cahntada. Not until Cloedeya died. I was carrying ghosts, and the ghosts don’t want to find a way back to the Previous World. The ghosts want to stay. We want to stay.”
The fox turned its head and looked at her. The island faded away. She was standing on the hill outside of Yenceyan, and Koenbahki and Old Yesaera and the mad king were standing beside her. The monster loomed above her, looking down. The hill and the hills around it were full of ghosts. Drawn through the lace holes to this place. As if they had come to plead their case. “You tried to make our spirits into slaves,” Manrie said out loud. “Or addicts. They couldn’t turn away from the power of the stones. But they could refuse to build your doors for you. And they refuse to find the other side of the lace hole. They’d rather linger in darkness than leave this world.”
She turned her head and looked out over the hills, seeking a particular presence. She felt him tugging at her from the great horde of the dead. She had left him in Tzurfaera, and regretted it ever since. But he was here now, and she pulled him to her. He entered her, and she thought *I cannot be distracted. This moment is a manuscript, Aizdha, and you must let me study it without asking questions.* He agreed. His presence was inside of her but he held his memories, his essence, in check. It was a gift. An act of love. Yet when she spoke her voice was different. All of the cleverness had fallen from it. She was no longer reciting the answers like a good student. She was grieving, and her voice was both a stutter and a howl.
“We love this world, you see,” she said to the monster. “There’s so much beauty in it. Even the things that frighten us are beautiful. Even the monsters. They have meaning. They help us know the boundaries of the possible. They make us real to ourselves. Some of us live in this world without wanting to defeat it, or enslave it. Without wanting to enslave you. Won’t you let us stay?”
The colors on the disc that was the monster’s face shifted. It stared down at her. And she felt Aizdha being drawn from her. But it didn’t send a vision along the chain of his being. It sent an assent. And a demand. It sent a covenant.
She staggered back. Aizdha was gone. The ghosts of the caravan were gone. All of her friends, the people who had protected and loved and taught her. But someone caught her. Someone eased her to the ground. The spirits were gone. The hills were empty. The sun was shining down. The monster was gone, and there was a camphor tree where it had been standing. “They’re gone,” she gasped, “they’re all gone.”
“We’re here,” Koenbahki whispered in her ear.
“Koenbahki. Koenbahki, I’ve lost part of myself. They took part of myself away. Koenbahki, I don’t know who I am.”
“That’s all right,” Koenbahki whispered, and her breath was fragrant, like rosemary. “We’ll remind you.”
THE END