“I have already set things in motion,” he said, looking down at the aged king’s hands. He had come down off of his stool to sit on the edge of the dais, and they had all come to sit beside him. The fire was still raging in the hearth, and its heat wrapped around them. The mercenaries who had remained were patrolling the edges of the room, as if they were afraid to come to close to the king and his odd advisors.
“You could send a messenger to bring them back,” Old Yesaera said softly.
He nodded, then looked up. “And what would happen to you?”
But Manrie had other questions. “Did you know?” she asked Old Yesaera. “Did you know that he would possess the king’s body?”
The weaver smiled. “I saw him in the crowd, and hoped. You will say that I shouldn’t have hoped. But I couldn’t let the captain out, and the captain’s men would know if the king remained mad. I could have contrived something, I suppose. I was planning to have the captain say ‘the old woman is holding me,’ or something equally pathetic. But I knew that it meant that they would kill me to free him. Most likely, they would kill me. Yet you are right, girl. He cannot stay in the king.”
“No,” Mueslahvin said slowly. “No. But I could have brought good things to this land. I was bringing good things. The fields weren’t yielding as they had, it’s true, but we built grain silos. We had stored food. Only Gaelspar’s greed got the better of him. He wanted to sell it back to the people who had grown it, and I wouldn’t let him. I thought he had agreed. I didn’t know that he was plotting with the other families. And now so many good people are dead. Will no one ever avenge them?”
Manrie felt a stirring within her. She spoke in the chaplain’s voice. “It is the old problem of mercy and justice.”
“What does that mean?”
“Mercy demands healing for the innocent. It demands that they be saved. Or even brought back to life. But mercy cannot act against justice. If mercy is unjust, if it requires that you steal bodies and refuse death, then it isn’t real mercy.” Magda’s ghost sighed inside of her. “It is what I wish I had said, all those years ago.”
The old king’s face wore an avid expression. “You have many ghosts. Are they unjust to you?”
“They are,” Manrie said in her own voice. “Or I am unjust to them. I cannot let them go. Not Cloedeya and Big Praeda. And I would have Melsa with me, if I could. And Taeyaho. But I should,” she said, turning her face to look at Koenbahki. “I should let them go.”
“But if you let them go, they will lose whatever presence they have in this world,” Mueslahvin said.
“If I don’t let them go, I’ll lose whatever presence I have.”
The fox, sitting on its haunches at their feet, turned his head to look back and forth between them. He was a man, but he was definitely fox like. His eyes seemed too luminous for his face and his nose twitched.
“So I would go mad? If I tried to hold on to my friend ‘Pesi’s body?” the king who was Mueslahvin said.
“Can ghosts go mad? I don’t know. But you would grow crueler.”
He was silent for a moment. Then he sighed. “How do I leave? How do I find rest?” The old voice cracked with despair.
“We both need a spirit stone,” Manrie said.
He looked at the fire. Its flames reflected against the sheen of sweat on his skin. “I was facing the lake when I died. Someone stabbed me with a spear. In the back. I don’t know who killed me. But I heard a voice coming from across the lake. An angry voice that cried out into the wind.”
“The witch,” Koenbahki said.
Maedreth said, “Don’t see me.”
“That’s what I thought,” Mueslahvin’s spirit said. “She’s a ghost, isn’t she?”
“She is,” Manrie agreed.
“She has haunted that lake for generations.”
“Is that what you want? To haunt Yenceyan forever?”
“I might make things better. I might whisper in a king’s ear, or sway the mind of one of the patriarchs of the great families.”
“You might. I don’t know. All the witch does is curse people.”
“Yes,” Mueslahvin said. He was silent for a moment, and then he added, “this body is very hungry.” He stood and called to one of the mercenaries. “I need food. And then we must go to Old Yesaera’s house.”
The mercenary objected. “You told Dahfic that we would be staying here.”
“One must always act upon new information.”
The mercenaries assembled a begrudging feast from jerky and dried apples and stale bread. It was all they had. Mueslahvin ate slowly, gentle in his stewardship of the king’s body. Then he smiled at the mercenary who seemed to be in charge. Manrie thought that the ruse was too simple. It couldn’t be sustained for long. All the mercenary had to do was ask if the king knew her name, and Mueslahvin would be exposed. But the mercenary watched silently. She was a young woman with an architectural nose, pleasing but oddly bumped and proportioned. She seemed to be nursing some private grievance. She looked at the king out of the corner of her eye and her mouth moved as if she were holding on to words that were struggling to get out.
When the king had finished his repast he said, “Now we must go. To Old Yesaera’s hill. We will go the back way, through Bahgkoni District.”
The mercenary didn’t like it. “More dead walk those streets than anywhere else. Ghosts from the insurrection.”
“Yes,” the king said softly. “Mueslahvin had many friends there.”
“It’s where our house was,” Koenbahki murmured. “And our bakery.” Manrie squeezed her hand.
“We should go another way,” the mercenary said.
Mueslahvin straightened the king’s body. “Nonsense. One must always confront one’s fears. One must never be intimidated by one’s enemies.”
The mercenary gathered her cohort, but she didn’t like it. Her hard eyes kept creeping to the king’s face. Manrie was aware of the soldier’s swords as they closed in around the king and her friends. Those swords, she thought, could be turned against them so quickly, if the ruse was exposed. Katemzan Daturi could hear their thoughts. One had spent years in a scabbard, neglected while its rival was drawn in battle. Its resentments filled Manrie’s mind. Another felt that it was very old, even though it had only been forged two years before. Old and very tired. It had never wanted to be a sword. It could have spent a happy life as a threshing fork. She pushed Katemzan away. Instead she listened to Cloedeya fret about the king’s diet as they slipped out a side door of the palace and went along a moonlit street. The fox had disappeared.
Ghosts were everywhere. It felt as if half the city were recently dead, but there was little to distinguish an old ghost from a new. Yenceyan was three hundred years old, a city that had known its generations, that had shown its violence and its greed as it grew. The dead here were different from the dead in Cahntada or Libreigia. Each city seemed to form its citizens to its character. When she had brushed against the ghosts in Libreigia, they had been abstracted, thoughtful, their minds flitting away into philosophical conundrums and taxonomical schemes. In Cahntada they had been full of old jealousies and angers, held prisoner by their resentments. The ghosts of Yenceyan held an odd and tenacious hope. They saw their descendants spreading out through the Sand Hills and onto the plains, generation after generation, until each rock and blade of grass was touched by human hands, and ownership extended over every mile.
This sense of expansion didn’t lessen as they moved away from the palace grounds and into a warren of streets trapped between two hills. It grew. As if the royal family and their servants had been mollified and captured by the demands of the city, but the citizenry dreamt of homesteads, of ranches, of trade routes and far vistas. The spirits who clogged the road were poor. They brushed up against the mercenaries, who bend forward, as if walking into a stiff wind. They brushed up against Manrie and her companions.
Little Praeda was riding on Maedreth’s back. She would lift her head to look at the dead, then bury her face in Maedreth’s shoulder. Koenbahki had an odd expression on her face. When Manrie caught her eye she said, “I know they didn’t die here, but if other ghosts can return to the city, why not them? We didn’t see them in Hiraherra.”
“Help me look for them,” Manrie said.
Koenbahki nodded. “Father was big, like a baker should be. He had strong arms, and he was always looking down. The heat from the ovens made his cheeks rosy, and his hair was as white as the flour. Mother was much smaller, and very round. She always made the dumplings for the solstice. She wouldn’t let him into the bakery when she was working, so he would come and play with us, and take us to the river to fish.”
“You had siblings.”
“My younger brother was named Cloedeya. I told you that, when we met. And I had a sister. Draefa. She was too young for marriage when the people rose up in support of Mueslahvin. They called it a revolt, but it wasn’t that. The people didn’t want a change of king, or anything like that. They were standing up to the First Families, who had jailed Mueslahvin on false charges. My father was with the men who went to Kriyahn Hill and freed Mueslahvin from that cage. They took him to the palace to restore him to his position as seneschal, but the First Families had already hired mercenaries. We sat all night in the bakery, waiting for father to return, and when he did he said that there had been a massacre, that Mueslahvin was alive but that we had to flee.”
“Quiet,” one of the mercenaries hissed.
But Mueslahvin, riding King Pesijhalaeya’s body, said, “Let her talk. One must always listen to the conversation of prisoners.”
Koenbahki, however, decided that she had said enough. She squeezed Manrie’s hand and fell silent. The street was winding up a hill. The houses clung to the rise, derelict and leaning precariously, as if they were coming unmoored. Manrie imagined them filling with ghosts and the ghosts somehow lifting them into the air, as if the dead were a gust of wind that would push against the ceilings and send the houses floating like seed pods. A large shadow blotted out the stars at the top of the hill, and Manrie realized that it was the camphor tree at the same moment that she felt the tug of the spirit stones. The night had strengthened their pull. She had been barely aware of them as she had sat in the weaving room that morning, and thought that the sense she had of them came up through the hole in the floor. But now they tugged at the ghosts inside of her, and she found that she was walking quickly, almost outpacing the mercenaries.
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The other buildings fell away as they came to the hill’s crest, and Old Yesaera gave a sigh of satisfaction. They all stood for a moment, hidden under the shadow of the camphor tree. Spirits crowded around, brushing at them with their memories. They looked out over the city. There was the glow of fire to the east. “The Zahrakeid compound is burning,” Mueslahvin said, and there was an odd mixture of regret and satisfaction in the king’s stolen voice.
The sight made the leader of the mercenaries impatient. “Why are we here?” she asked brusquely.
“You shouldn’t be,” Mueslahvin told her. “Something has gone wrong with Dahfic’s raid. Go and help him.”
She turned to him with full suspicion on her architectural face. “And you, captain?”
“Baethlen,” he said softly, “I have a task to perform here. It won’t take long, but you are not needed for it. Go, my friend, and help Dahfic.”
Her face softened. She reached out to touch his hand. “Where will we reunite?”
“At the palace. Look for me at the palace.”
“I cannot leave you here alone.”
“Did anyone accost us as we came through the streets? Go, my dear. No one will notice an old man who already looks like a spirit.”
She led the other mercenaries off, pausing at the edge of the rise to look back at him. Then she and her companions disappeared into the darkness. The crowd of spirits that had followed them up the hill parted to make way for them.
“How did you know her name?” Koenbahki asked.
“She was with the party that came to parlay with us in before the battle. I have been struggling to remember what Seerlahk called her. I believe that they were lovers. It would have been bad if I got it wrong.” He smiled ruefully, then turned the king’s gaunt face towards Old Yesaera’s house. “I feel it,” he said. “I feel the stones. As you must. Where will you take me, once I am fully in their power?”
Manrie said the words that she had been dreading. “Into the lace hole.”
“Manrie, no,” Koenbahki said quickly.
“‘Bahki, I have to. It’s where the dead can rest.”
“But the Immortal.”
“If the Immortal is still down there, I must confront him. Mueslahvin will help me.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“Koenbahki, you can’t. Someone has to stand at the entrance and sing.”
“I can sing,” Little Praeda said. “And Maedreth sings. She sings me lullabies.”
“I’m coming,” Koenbahki insisted.
“As am I,” Old Yesaera said. “The ghost of the captain is very uncomfortable.”
“I knew your father,” Mueslahvin said to Koenbahki. “I don’t know if you remember, but I would come and speak with him sometimes. In the early morning, when the buns had just come out of the oven.”
“I remember.”
“I heard you as we were going through the streets. I don’t know why his ghost isn’t here. Or your mother and your brother and sister. There were many dead left at the fort.”
“But you came here.”
“Yes.” The ancient face turned to Manrie once more. “Perhaps I will be able to resist the stone. Perhaps I will return with you to the city.”
“Perhaps,” Manrie said. “The witch could ignore the stones. Some ghosts can. I don’t know why.”
They all looked at the open doorway of the weaver’s house. Manrie could sense the stones, hidden in the chest. And she could feel the breath of the lace hole on her cheek.
Maedreth began singing. She had a very sweet voice, but it was soft, like an old cloth. Little Praeda looked up at her and said, “You’ll have to sing louder. Like this,” and she began caterwauling. Manrie couldn’t help smiling. She walked forward into the darkness of the house, strengthened by a sense of the ridiculous. The ghosts made a way for her. She could feel their attention as they turned their bereft faces towards the house.
After fetching the stones from the chest the six living companions stood over the hole. “Perhaps we should each carry a stone,” Old Yesaera said with a small smile.
“No,” Manrie said. “Bahdring tried to carry one in Cahntada. She disappeared.”
The weaver’s eyes twinkled in the darkness. “I am very sad to hear that, of course. But if you are the only one who can do this, the world is doomed. We must have enough courage to try again. I will carry one, and Mueslahvin should.”
“What if it doesn’t work?” Manrie asked. “When I made the shrines at Tzurfaera and Raesidae, I wasn’t possessed by any ghost. I wasn’t possessed in Libreigia, nor in Cahntada. At least,” she said, and grief came unbidden into her voice, “not until afterwards. But when we went into the lace hole at Hasra, I was carrying two ghosts. Maybe that’s why it didn’t work, why I couldn’t create a shrine there.”
“Then I should carry a stone,” Koenbahki said.
“No.”
“Yes, Manrie. I should. If it needs a free mind to do it, it has to be me.”
“I can’t let you disappear.”
“We will tie ourselves together,” Old Yesaera said decisively. “I will remove the beam and drop it down. It can be our ladder, and then we’ll pick the weft from the end. Perhaps it will do.”
“Yes,” Koenbahki answered. “Yes, let’s do that. Praeda, will you sing for us? Will you sing and sing? You and Maedreth?”
The little girl nodded. She was already singing, and her childish, lisping voice filled them with a sense of possibility. Old Yesaera went to the loom and fiddled with its back. The width of the cloth was wider than the hole, and she had to unwind it and pull the beam across the room so that she could twist it to drop it down the hole. “Best if you sit on the bench,” she told Maedreth, and the old woman moved to obey. Praeda climbed into her lap. Manrie wondered if their weight would be enough to hold the loom in place. Old Yesaera seemed to wonder the same thing, for she regarded the darkened room with a look of shadowy regret before she dropped the beam into the hole. The wide, flat cloth unrolled from it, twisting into the darkness. The silvered portion that Manrie had woven that morning was taught across the floor. It seemed to catch what light there was and hold it in a plane of shining foil, a pathway into the darkness.
Old Yesaera stared at it, then sighed, lifting and dropping her shoulders with great exaggeration. “I have sat in this room for nearly fifty years,” she said softly. “I hope it’s still here when we get back.” Then she clutched a spirit stone to her chest and squatted to grip the woven cloth firmly. She lowered herself down into the hole. The loom shuddered with her weight and strained with the pull of cloth. But it didn’t shift. Maedreth and Praeda were heavy enough to hold it to the floor.
“I’m at the bottom,” Old Yesaera called after a moment. “All is well. I will start unraveling the cloth.”
Mueslahvin went next. The king’s body seemed too weak for the climb, and yet he went, slipping into the darkness in a way that Manrie didn’t like. It was if the darkness was eating him. But before she could voice this thought Koenbahki had turned to kiss her lightly on the cheek before sliding into the hole.
Manrie found that there were tears in her eyes as she turned to Little Praeda. She went to the loom and bent to kiss the girl’s forehead, and Praeda sang into her hair. Her voice was very loud in Manrie’s ear. She could not hug Praeda without also wrapping her arms around Maedreth, so she did. For a moment the two lives beat in her arms, their hearts making a small but subtle rhythm as they sang. “Thank you,” she whispered, and the child and the crone seemed to acknowledge her thanks, although it was hard to see their faces in the dark, and their song didn’t falter.
“Manrie, are you coming?” Koenbahki called from below, and Manrie straightened. She wiped her eyes and went to the hole.
“I’m coming,” she called, and grasped at the cloth, and entered the darkness.
The weaving room was a bluish shadow above them. Praeda and Maedreth’s voices filled the cavern with surprising clarity. Something touched Manrie’s hand and she flinched away. Old Yesaera spoke in her ear. “I am tying the end of the yarn to your wrist. We’re all lashed together, you see.”
“It makes me feel like a slave,” Mueslahvin said grimly.
“Nonsense,” Old Yesaera said.
“We need to be careful,” Koenbahki reminded them. “There are ledges, cliff sides. We could fall down them.”
“I can feel the ghosts,” Manrie said.
“Yes. They are following us down. I’m afraid my poor cloth has turned quite pale. They seem to have some bleaching quality. I did wonder how you kept your robes so impeccably white.” She tutted. “To think I spent hours designing this cloth’s pattern, and got so upset when I made a mistake.”
The cloth seemed to glow with an ethereal phosphorescence. It made Manrie think of the farmers, of the veiled faces under starched white wings. She pushed the memory aside and started forward. She felt the yarn tug at her wrist, but held her hand steady on the spirit stone. The sense of space opened up before her. Praeda and Maedreth’s song filled the air. She waited to feel another presence, to feel the stab of the Immortal’s needle. Was he here, somewhere? Had he become aware of them, was he striding towards them through the shuddering darkness?
She advanced, step after step, the fear growing in her. The yarn remained taught, the singing voices remained strong. A vast, echoing space. She would not allow herself to become distracted, not allow her mind to flit to thoughts of the past, or an escape into the future. Not as she had in Cahntada, when she had lost Bahdring in the lace hole. “Are you here?” she asked.
“I’m here,” Koenbahki told her.
“I’m here,” Old Yesaera said.
“As am I,” the old king’s voice murmured.
“Koenbahki, is the darkness opening to you? Does it seem to go on forever?”
“It seems very wide. But there’s a door up ahead.”
“A door?”
“Yes. Look.”
Manrie looked. An arc of light. Bright but strangely flat, casting no light into the cave. She found that she wanted to go towards it. Her pace increased, until she was almost running. The yarn tugged at her wrist. “Koenbahki, can you keep up, are you still with me?”
“I’m with you,” Koenbahki called, her voice very close.
“I’m with you, too,” Old Yesaera called. “But remember that I’m an old woman. And poor ‘Pesi is stumbling along.”
Manrie couldn’t slow down. The arc beckoned. The dead began to stampede around her.
It was a doorway, and beyond it there was a sunlit hill. She stopped before it, breathing hard, and the dead rushed past her, disappearing into the light. Praeda and Maedreth’s voices were strong in her ear, as if they were standing right beside her.
“Manrie,” Koenbahki said.
“Do we go through?”
“We should go back.”
“Don’t go back,” a voice said. The fox had appeared in the sunlit opening and was looking in at them. “Come through here. It is only a few hours later, here. Only a little after dawn. You will not lose much time.”
“Here?” Manrie asked.
“You are only a few miles from the city.” The fox’s face shifted into a vulpine grin. “Did you think you were looking at the Previous World?”