by Liz Williams
4. Eleres
After Jheru's attack, they told me, Hessan and Soray had found me and taken me back inside Tetherau. I woke speaking Jheru's name.
“No use calling,” a voice said. I opened my eyes. Morrac was sitting by the side of the bed.
“Where's Jheru?”
“Where do you think?” He gestured toward the open window. “Out there. Gone.” I leaned back against the pillows. If I didn't move, the pain that currently thundered through my head lessened a little.
“Leave me alone,” I said, and after a moment, he did. Still trying to ignore the pounding headache, I got up and went across to the window. It was twilight now; the town lay blue beneath. “Shu?” I asked into the darkness, but there was no reply. I had not seen the ghost since the masque. Her name seemed to ring down the air and my skin prickled. I thought of Yr En Lai and his own bargain with ghosts, how it had led him far from home and into the unknowable realms of the world. Ignoring the ache in my head, I got up and made a circuit of the house, looking for her, but at last I gave up and returned to my room where I collapsed back onto the bed and slept. My last thought was that, in the morning, I would head out and go in search for Mevennen, but I had no idea where she might be. Then, whether I found her or not, I'd have to return to Aidi Mordha for the return of Sereth's daughter. I could not break my promise. I'd have to travel on foot; the next boat was due in a week's time. I felt torn in two directions at once, by my promises to the dead and the demands of the living. If the ghost spoke to me, I did not hear it.
The morning dawned cool and gray, and just after first light I went downstairs to find Morrac in the courtyard. He looked as though he'd slept badly. There were shadows around his eyes and his forehead was damp in the morning wind. Hangover, I thought. I hardened my heart.
“You're leaving,” he said. It was not a question.
“I'm going to look for my sister,” I said.
I had expected scorn or discouragement, but instead Morrac said, “Then take me with you.”
“What?”
My incredulity must have been plain in my face for he snapped, “You seem eager enough to be rid of me.”
“Frankly, I am eager to be rid of you,” I said. “I'm tired of all this. I want to find Mevennen, and pick up the pieces of our lives. Leave me alone.”
“Well,” he said softly, as to himself. “Do you think I'm proud of what I've done?” And when I looked at him I saw the hurt in his face.
“Why would you want to come?” I asked. “To escape? To make amends?”
He said simply, “Because I don't want to lose you, too.”
Everything you dislike in yourself, you cast onto me as the villain of the piece. His accusation echoed in my head. And there had been love, once, and perhaps still was—behind my anger. That was enough to make me say, wearily, “Very well then, come, if you're so set on doing so.”
“Wait here. I need to get a few things together.”
He went back into the house while I stood impatiently by the gate.
“Eleres?” The voice came from behind me, and it spoke in a whisper. I turned to see the ghost standing there. Her face was pale. Shu looked disarrayed, somehow, and unlike her usually neat self. There was a long tear in the shoulder of her coat, and I could smell the stale odor of old blood.
“Shu?” I asked, bewildered. “What happened? Where have you been?”
Wearily, the ghost rubbed a hand across her eyes. “During the masque, I ran into your cousin. Morrac, I mean. He— well, he attacked me. I don't think he meant to … he didn't seem quite in his right mind.”
“Neither was anyone else,” I said, but I was horrified nonetheless. Shu still seemed like a ghost to me; I could not sense her in the right way. Yet she had tried to help me, I believed, and she had healed Sereth. And as she stood before me now, with a bloody rip in her jacket and anxiety in her eyes, she looked nothing more than a frightened, elderly woman. For that moment, she could have been Luta, or any of the old people in my household. I reached out and touched the tear in her jacket, and saw her try not to flinch. “You bleed,” I added, wonderingly She nodded.
“Ghosts don't bleed, do they?” she asked, with a wan smile. She added, “I ran away, Eleres. I hid in the attic, and I must have passed out, because I kept … dreaming.” She shivered, suddenly. “I think something must be the matter with me.”
“Are you feeling ill?”
She nodded, again. “Sort of feverish, and light-headed. It wasn't Morrac's doing, though I think that shook me a bit. More than a bit. I've felt like this ever since I stepped into the house defense.”
“I'm sorry, Shu,” I said, and it was true. She had haunted me, involved herself with all our lives—simply to learn, if what she had told me was true—but it seemed to have caused her as much grief as it had the rest of us. I was startled to see sudden tears in her eyes.
“Well,” she said, with a return to her usual brisk manner. “Never mind that. What's been happening with you?”
So I told her. Her face grew slack with shock.
“Oh, Eleres,” she said. “Not Sereth.” She reached out and took my hand. Her fingers felt frail in mine, old, and real.
“There won't be another funeral,” I said. “We can't find her … I think she must have been taken by the tide.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I want to find Mevennen,” I said. “And then I made a promise to Sereth that I'd go back to Aidi Mordha in time to see her daughter back from the wild.”
“Aidi Mordha—that's your Clan House, isn't it? Mevennen told me.” She frowned. “And Sereth's daughter's due to come home? When?”
“Not so long, now,” I said. I glanced up at the sky, which looked bright and brittle. There was a welcome edge to the wind after the heat of the last few days.
“Listen, Eleres,” the ghost said. “I told you—I know where Mevennen is. And I have to get back there.” She paused. “Now that the masque's over, will the town's defense be down?”
“Yes.”
Shu reached out and grasped my sleeve. “Then we have to leave, as soon as we can.”
“How far are your people?”
“A long way away, but that doesn't matter now that I can finally get out of this place. Eleres, listen to me. I have— something. A—a flying boat that can take us to places very swiftly.”
“A flying boat,” I echoed. It sounded utterly fanciful, a story from Outreven, but then I remembered the vaned star that I had watched fall over the Attraith, back at the start of the summer, when Sereth was still alive. And not so long after that, the ghosts had appeared.
“Very well,” I said, taking a deep breath to hide my fear. “We'll go to your flying boat. But Morrac's coming with us.” Whatever he'd done, I thought now with a pragmatism that surprised me, he might as well take a share in the consequences. And the risks. Shu looked worried. “Don't be nervous,” I told her. “He won't hurt you.”
She did not look reassured. The expression on Morrac's face when he came out of the courtyard to find me talking to a ghost is one of the few memories that I probably will treasure to the end of my life. He stared at Shu for a bewildered moment, then turned to me and said, as if absolutely nothing had happened, “I've packed a few things. I don't know if it's enough.”
“If what I'm told is true,” I said, “we won't be gone for as long as all that.”
He gave a sidelong glance in the direction of the ghost. “Eleres,” he murmured. “Something's watching us.”
“I know. It's here to help us.”
His eyebrows rose. “You conjured it up?” He stared at me with sudden suspicion. “I didn't know you were a shadow-drinker.”
I didn't say anything. I merely smiled. Shu made an impatient movement.
“Well, then,” I said. “Let's get going.”
5. Mevennen
Bel may have called out, but Mevennen did not hear her. She stepped forward, and the room folded in upon her. Pain rippled t
hrough her from head to foot, singing down her nerves. She could feel the cold rushing within her, traveling upward, following the meridians of her body, the wells of her heart, lighting her veins with brightness. Mevennen gasped, trying to catch her breath. The rush subsided, and she looked about her. Everything seemed very clear, sharply edged. And just beyond the limits of hearing the air hummed still.
She was standing in the orchard at the summer tower, but even though everything was so sharp and clear, she knew instinctively that it was not real: an illusion conjured by her mind to help her to make sense of the inexplicable. But she sank to the floor taking refuge among the cool greenness of the fruit trees, huddling with her arms around her knees at the foot of the tree and listening to the silence, broken by the occasional thud as a ripe fruit dropped into the long grass.
She could still hear a whispering at the edges of the air, very faint and indistinct, and at first she hardly noticed it. Gradually, it grew louder: a wind that roared through the branches of the orchard and should have sent the trees tossing like masts in a gale, but the orchard was quiet, somnolent in the afternoon sun, and she realized that the sound was in her head. Clapping her hands to her ears, Mevennen got dizzily to her feet and the world spun around her, the sky dark as pitch and the branches of the mothe tree lightning white, searing against her eyes, and all of it turning. Unable to stand, she slumped back against the tree and slid to the ground until at last everything grew still.
A glimpse of sudden elsewhere—and then she was lying with her cheek against the hot, dusty earth of the orchard. She could taste soil in her mouth, and the sensitive skin around her eyes was gritty and sore. She could smell blood, and when she put her hand to her face she found that she had scraped her cheek when she fell. Far beneath the dry earth of the orchard she could hear something, almost see it, a thin current which drew her down. Her awareness was sucked within it like iron to a magnet, and she ran along it, a single pulse of consciousness extending out in two directions. From this one line she was aware of others which ran into it and crossed it, a web of energy and, not so far away, a long drop in the world, a sink of color and darkness, into which the lines ran. In the distance, ran a wider, slower flow and she could smell the river, winding through the lightning currents of earth.
Mevennen's consciousness was painfully stretched, elongating until she was ready to snap. There was a single electric moment of stasis in which she could go no further, and she was sent back down the line and into the body that lay on the floor of the orchard, gasping for breath. A twining, black line of current ran under her cheek from the roots of the tree, spiraling down into the earth to meet the waterline. The world seemed suddenly very quiet and ordered. The confusing whirl of impressions which so frequently rose up to overwhelm her was gone; instead, everything seemed to have fallen perfectly into place and her once overwhelmed senses were expanded outward to encompass what someone without her disability would always have known.
The orchard faded from view. Stone surrounded her: the cliffs from which Outreven had been carved. Mevennen could differentiate the stones as clearly as though she stood in a room with many distinct individuals: sandstone and granite and quartz. To the immediate southeast, she was aware of a great rainwater sink beneath the earth, but it was the stones themselves that seemed most distinct to her. Beyond, out on the far steppes, the great meridians of the leys ran, the Ottara Path, crossed at the foot of the Attraith by the east-west Gehent Band, the grid of the lesser lines imposed above and below it. All the elements suddenly fell into place for Mevennen like the pieces of a puzzle: water and earth, fire and blood, air and wood, and the seventh part of the world, the satahr energy that composed the great landlines of the leys. Dimly she could hear the pulse of the tide building in the earth, the tides of the world growing toward evening and drawing the year around. She could feel a thread of moisture twisting through the soil, the underground passages of water that flowed from the spring at the head of the cliffs.
Mevennen pulled herself to her feet and walked unsteadily forward. Again, her mind conjured reality up. She stood before the spring in the orchard of the summer house. The water was very cold, bubbling thinly out of the iron-red soil, and around the edges of the little basin grew the fleshy plants—tope, er-ren, sadiac—and the ground was spongy with moss where the rusty water seeped between their stems and vanished under the earth.
Mevennen plunged her hands into the bitter water and washed the blood and earth from her face. She could have drawn a map of the underground course of the spring as it passed beneath the orchard. Like Eleres, the water-sensitive. Like Eleres, she thought, staring down at her hands, banded with paler skin where her rings had been. She needed new names, she thought—and then the well, orchard, sky, and grass all grew thin as paper and faded from her sight, leaving only a darkness starred with lights and Bel's tense, anxious face gazing down.
Bel seemed strangely insubstantial.To Mevennen, she appeared to have lost a dimension: something that was neither sight nor smell nor touch, and yet was missing. She had become a ghost at last.
“What happened to me?” Mevennen heard herself whisper. Bel put an arm around her shoulders and helped her to settle against the wall.
“I don't know.” Translated into Khalti by the speaking box, the words still made little sense.
“Bel Zhur,” Mevennen murmured. “I can sense the world.”
“What?”
“The landlines underneath this place … and there's water, too. I can feel it,” Mevennen said, and the sudden sensation of belonging, as though she were the last piece of a puzzle to be slotted into place, was so strong that her eyes stung with tears. She could sense others in the ruins above her like dim lights floating through the shadows. But she could not sense Bel at all.
Something was tugging at her, an insistent presence at the corners of her mind, and all at once she felt an immense curiosity. Around her, Outreven was changing. It was no longer the bleak ruin that she had first known: it was filled with presences. They were not only human. The others she could sense were insubstantial and impermanent in comparison, almost as distant as Bel herself. They were the presences of the place itself, as though another dimension of the landscape had become revealed. Instead of being a world perceived from the outside, through eyes and ears and nose, this world was perceived from within. Mevennen felt as though she had been opened up, as though there were no longer a distinction between the world and herself. She was aware, for a few moments, of her consciousness receding, as if she watched a beam of light travel into the distance, dwindle to a point and vanish. It seemed for a flickering instant that there ought to be something she should remember: a name, perhaps her own. Then there was only the world, seamless and unseparate, and Mevennen turned and ran.
6. Eleres
The town, clouded by the smoke of the masque, fell away as we climbed into the foothills of the Otrade. The mountains ran high before us; there, Jheru had gone, moving unhindered through the dry summer grasslands of the lower slopes, perhaps here and there leaving a footprint in the parched soil. Morrac and I toiled upward, and neither one of us said a word. Shu followed behind, and I had to keep looking back to check whether she was still with us. At last I asked if I could do anything to help her, for she seemed to be finding the path difficult, but she brushed my offer aside. Perhaps, like Luta, she didn't enjoy being treated as though she were old.
At last we came to the place where the flying boat was supposed to lie, according to Shu. I wasn't really expecting to find anything there, but the boat lay in plain view: a strange thing, all glossy wet curves and folds like the skin of the small creatures which live in ponds.
Morrac stopped dead. “What,” he said, “is that?”
“It is a boat,” I told him. “Ghosts use it to travel from place to place.” I have to admit that I was rather enjoying my unaccustomed supernatural authority. “As will we.”
“You're not serious. I've no intention of going anywhere near that
thing.”
“Then stay behind.”
“Eleres …” he said uncertainly. I didn't answer. Shu was walking around the boat, and she was frowning again. I walked across to join her, and could not resist reaching out and putting my hand cautiously on the boat's side. It felt warm, but not like metal that had lain in the sun. Gently, Shu moved my hand away.
“I shouldn't have touched it,” I said.
But she murmured, “That's the problem, Eleres. You shouldn't be able to.”
“Why not?”
“Because this boat has a defense of its own. Or had, anyway. You shouldn't be able to get near it; it should deflect you. But something's happened. Wait here.”
She pressed her own hand against the side of the boat, and an opening folded back. It looked damp and organic within, like a plant of some kind. I'd never seen anything like it before. I glanced at Morrac, who was hovering on the edges of the little plateau.
“What's it doing?” he called.
“I don't know.”
“Come away, Eleres. Leave it.”
“No,” I murmured, looking up at the curved side of the boat. “Not if it can take me to find Mevennen.”
“What does your sister have to do with this?” he asked blankly.
“She went with the ghosts. Remember her note?”
“Eleres, that was just some fantasy, that's all. Your sister's mad,” he said, but he did not sound too sure.
Shu reappeared, and her face was full of dismay. “It isn't working,” she said. She sounded almost as though she couldn't believe her own words.
“Why? What's wrong with it?”
“I don't know. I can't get anything to respond—the controls, anything. It's just dead.”