by Liz Williams
“It's me, Shu. It's Bel.” The girl's voice was almost unrecognizable. She sounded thin and shaky, a ghost indeed. “Shu, where are you?”
“I don't really know,” Shu said. “Somewhere in the mountains. I've been trying to contact you, but I haven't been able to get through. Bel, listen. How's Mevennen? And did you get my message? About the generator?”
“The generator?” Bel said wonderingly “Yes, I got it when we came back to camp. You said something about dowsing … But the generator's going offline now. Sylvian's completed the download. It started powering down a few hours ago.”
“Bel, no! You have to stop it! Listen to me. Didn't you understand my message? The generator's more important than we realize, it—”
“Dia's dead, Shu.” The note in Bel's disembodied voice spoke of incipient hysteria.
“What?”
“We took Mevennen to Outreven,” Bel said tightly. “She stepped into the chamber where the generator's contained and something happened to her. She ran, before I got a chance to stop her. We spent hours looking for her, and Dia—Dia insisted that we leave her and go back to camp before it got too dark. She was worried about you, too—we hadn't heard and so we didn't know what had happened to you or where you were, we thought you might be dead, and we couldn't contact you from Outreven because the bio-morphic field was affecting communications and—”
“Bel, slow down,” Shu said, cold with dismay. “Did you find Mevennen?”
“No,” Bel said bleakly. “I went after her. I disobeyed Dia. I thought I'd try one last time to find her, and Dia sent Sylvian after me. Sylvian told me to come straight back, and we argued, and eventually I agreed, and when we got back—when we got back—” Her voice wavered. “Dia was dead. Something had killed her. Mevennen had killed her.”
“How do you know it was Mevennen?” Shu asked, horrified.
“Because we found footprints leading to and from the aircar, and they hadn't been there before. And I recognized them, from when I followed Mevennen up into the hills, that day. She's been wearing the same boots. Shu, Dia had been torn apart.”
“Look,” Shu said, trying to place some order on the chaos of her thoughts. “I'm sorrier than I can say that Dia's dead, but we have to try to think about this calmly. I know the generator seems to be the source of this—this mania, the bloodmind, but I think it does much, much more than that, and we have to take that into account before we do anything rash.”
“It's too late for that now,” Bel snapped. “Sylvian's downloaded the algorithms. I'm not going to abort it now.”
“All right,” Shu said quickly, for the girl sounded dangerously close to losing control. “Then get me back to camp.The second aircar's working, isn't it? I'm nowhere near a settlement, but if you can get a trace on my communicator, you can find me.”
“We'll come now,” Bel said, a little more calmly.
“And Bel,” Shu added, thinking of the huntresses who had waited so patiently in the shadows of the corrie. “Don't be too long.”
6. Eleres
Ithyris looked at me skeptically when I mentioned ghosts, and muttered something about a bang on the head.
“You haven't seen anything here?” I asked her, feeling foolish. “Anything strange?”
“The strangest thing I've seen for weeks,” Ithyris said tartly, “is your cousin Morrac hammering on the door in the middle of the night and raving about ghosts and the ai Staren.”
I stared at her.We were sitting in a room at the top of the house, with snowlit sunlight falling through the windows. She stretched her feet in front of the fire, warming them after our walk back to the house.
“That's right. Morrac's here. He didn't know where you were, however.” She paused and her face changed. “Given what he told me, I thought you were dead.”
I smiled. “Not yet.”
“You were lucky,” she said seriously. “The ai Staren are a nest of wivvets; one day someone will burn them out and their black house down with them.”
“Less of them now,” I told her. “The mehed killed the huntresses who attacked us.”
“Good,” Ithyris said shortly, and rose to put more wood on the fire.
“Morrac mentioned ghosts?” I said.
“Eleres, what's going on? He told me you'd turned into a shadowdrinker, been conjuring spirits, like Yr En Lai.” She gave me a long, hard stare. I mumbled something. “Eleres?”
“I'm not going mad, if that's what you're thinking.” Some demon made me add, “Besides, I'm not talking to ghosts. They keep talking to me.”
“So,” Ithyris said, after a careful pause. “What do they say, these ghosts of yours?”
“That they come from another world, to learn about us, to help us. That my sister Mevennen is with them.” I remembered the strange tale Shu had told me back there in the mountains, about a ruined city. “That they have found lost Outreven.”
There was an even longer pause. I glanced up, to see Ithyris watching me warily. “You never used to be so superstitious,” she said, at last.
“Ghosts never used to come to plague me with promises, that's why.”
Ithyris said blankly, “No one's been to Outreven for hundreds of years, not sinceYr En Lai is supposed to have made the journey. If even then.”
The smoke was making me dizzy. I crossed to the window, which overlooked the bleak hillside. I paused with my hands on the sill, and the cold breath of air made me feel better. Beyond, the sky hung heavy with more snow. The brilliant light of the early morning was gone and now the clouds lay across the peaks, wreathing them like smoke. The hunters of the house were beginning to return, their faces shadowed by the approaching snow. They carried oroth slung between them on poles: dinner for the house, tonight. At last they were all within the courtyard and someone let up the defenses. The feeling was different from Aidi Mordha, a song of coldness and water, a winter song.
“Your friend's asleep,” Ithyris said, staring into the dancing flames. I knew that she would never intrude on my life; knew too that she was quite desperate to know who Jheru might be. So I told her everything.
The day darkened. Toward mid-afternoon, the leaden sky released a great drift of snow, silent and enveloping, which seemed to fall for hours. By early evening, the surrounding hills were invisible, shrouded in snowcloud, and when I opened a window to let in fresher air, a soft mass of icy crystals fell from the windowsill to land silently in the courtyard below. The mood of the household was subdued. I went downstairs in search of tea, unobtrusively conversing about commonplaces with those around me. Jheru slept like one dead. I tried to find Ithyris, but she had shut herself in some inner chamber to talk to the satahrach.
Morrac kept to his upper chamber for the rest of the day. When I looked in on him that afternoon, he was asleep as well. He looked exhausted, and pain had aged him. It seemed he too had been wounded in the huntresses'attack. He had a broken rib, and bore the long grooves of claw-marks down one arm. In sleep, he was no longer the vivid young man whom I had always known. But this impression was rapidly dispersed later on, when I came in to find him awake and irascible. He hated being ill.
“Oh,” he said, as though we'd only been parted for an hour or so, and then under clement circumstances. “It's you, is it?”
I said acidly in the Remote Formal tone, “I am delighted to note that you appear to have survived.”
“Eleres,” he said, and then his face twisted. I sat down on the side of the bed and rested there for a few minutes with his head on my shoulder. I heard him whisper, “I thought you were dead. I would have stayed, but the mehed… I saw them gather round you. There were too many of them.”
“It's all right.”
He gave a deep breath and then, just as abruptly, he released me and said in a return to his normal tone, “A good thing we weren't so far from Sephara. I don't think I'd have survived long out there without shelter nearby …”
“What happened to the ghost?” I asked, thinking of Shu with a pang of worry and guilt.
He shook his head. “I've no idea. I didn't see it again. It went wherever ghosts go, I suppose.”
Dismissively he turned his head away, and I couldn't help a rueful smile. Morrac had traveled with Shu for several days; she'd slept beside us at night and eaten food with us. I'd spent hours talking to her and he still couldn't bring himself to admit that she existed. He was even more stubborn than I gave him credit for, or perhaps he was simply afraid. We talked for a while longer. He kept demanding that I bring him things: water, snow from the courtyard. He said he was burning up, but when I laid a hand on his brow the skin was cool.
“There's nothing the matter with you, except your ribs,” I told him. “You just want attention.”
“I feel dreadful.”
“Then go back to sleep.”
“Come here,” he commanded. He took me by surprise, so I did. He leaned up from the pillows, drew me down and kissed me. His mouth was warm and familiar. Then he drew back, responding to my lack of response. “Eleres?” he whispered.
“What made you do as you did?” I asked him. “What were you thinking of?” I wasn't talking about the kiss, and he knew it. We were back to the same point, all over again, spiraling back to Sereth's death, but this time I could speak without reproach. He leaned back against the pillows, scrupulously not touching me.
“Since she died, and our journey here … the call of the world hasn't been so bad. I used to like my life, Eleres. All I wanted was to live it—to pursue my political ambitions” — he paused—” to see you, believe it or not. But it was always there. It was driving me out of my life. Your friend Jheru running into the world … I was afraid of that. I still am. I didn't involve Sereth because I hoped to lure her away with me. To have her as my companion in savagery, no matter what you thought. I loved her because she was my sister and because we were so similar. And because she seemed so able to control her nature, I suppose I thought she could show me how. Help me. But the problem was that she wasn't coping with it herself. So I started to drag her in with me, which I'd never wanted, you know. Then I saw you drawing closer to her, and I thought we'd all go down together. And I was jealous.”
It cost him a lot to speak so frankly, I knew, but I wondered whether he was speaking the truth, even to himself.
“I loved her so much,” I said. “And I still love you. But I don't think anyone can help you except your own self.”
“You can't forgive me, can you?” he said.
“I have forgiven you. But it's your burden, and both our loss. Whatever we have now—well, what do we have, Morrac? A sort of affection due mainly to proximity and past sex.”
“I could give you more, if that's what you want,” he said, wearily.
“We just go back and forth. I can't take any more, if it's more of the same. We seem to have a kind of equilibrium, leave it at that, for now, at least.”
Morrac seemed to accept this. He turned his head away and sank back against the pillow. There was a shelf of books in the corner. I wanted something to read, to take my mind from my problems, and riffled through a selection. Some of them were in Ettaic, but I didn't feel up to struggling with another language. I picked out a play, a poor choice as it turned out.
“You'd rather read that than be with me?” Morrac said pathetically. He was staring at the ceiling, and so obviously trying to lighten the atmosphere that I couldn't help laughing. He shot me a sidelong glance, and then grinned, conceding. “Go,” he said. “Go to your friend. Ithyris told me you brought him back with you. I'm glad.” He may not have meant it, but it cost him something to say so, anyway.
I went out, snuffing out the lamp as I did so. I heard him settle down to sleep as I left. I did not go to Jheru, however, but found a separate and empty room. I felt that I needed a break from both of them, but as it happened, I was joined by someone else.
The play was not enlivening. I was reading in my room when there was a step at the door and Ithyris came in. She looked bone tired.
“Morrac's asleep,” she said. She sat wearily in the chair opposite me, and I watched her as she stared into the fire. She was a small woman, and slightly built, but her endurance was immense. I had been on campaign with her, during one of the frequent northern feuds. She never gave up, and her tenacity led her to threaten, cajole, and make people go on to the last lick of effort. She did not have Sereth's magnetism, nor her beauty; she was a solitary person who liked to walk in the hills and read by the fire. When Sereth and I went off adventuring, out of Sephara, she stayed behind and did what had to be done, without fuss. A small, tough person. She and I had been lovers, on and off, a long time ago. I remembered what Jheru had said about his own lost lover: a quiet place, after storms. Jheru, myself, and dead Edruen; Morrac and Ithyris and I; Sereth and Morrac and Soray Names linked in a chain, sex and love, families and friends. When one has been through so much, there is not a lot left to say. Ithyris said, abruptly, “I'm glad you've come. I'm very glad. And your friend with you.”
“To be honest,” I said, “I don't know if he'll stay.”
“Do you think that you can save him from the world, and Morrac, too? You know what they say, Eleres … When the world takes you after childhood, you don't often come home. It's just the way things work.”
“I'm not prepared to accept that any longer. Morrac's treading a fine line; he's been relying on drink to keep himself in check. Now … I don't know. Sereth's dead. Jheru seems to be in and out of madness. Ithyris, nature or not, we are all tearing ourselves apart because of our lack of balance with the world. I'm losing the people closest to me. I know it's the way we are, the way things are … I know other families seem to find it easier.”
I did not want to say, even to Ithyris, that I had wondered for a long time just how much the world dictated our natures to us, and how great a choice we had. I thought of my own past inclinations to abandon my family and my life, and vanish into the restless animality of the mehed. Maybe it's easier to disappear into the wilderness than face your pain or your responsibilities. Maybe society needs the scapegoat of its own supposedly unalterable nature. I could not help wondering whether we only pretended that it was no choice at all.
But these were disturbing thoughts. I looked up to see Ithyris staring at me. “Do you really think you can help anyone?” she repeated. “You always make this big thing about being romantically unhappy, this poetic pose with someone or other—”
“I do not!”
“—but the truth of it is that you've always been self-contained. You're enough for yourself, really; you keep your own company. Even when you and I were most in love, you were always off somewhere else, thinking. That's not like most people. For most people, either their lives are enough and they've got the brief outlets of the bloodmind, which makes them a lot elated and a bit ashamed, or they go the whole way and run screaming into the hills.”
I winced, but Ithyris made no apology for her lack of tact. We sat in silence for a moment. I watched the fire burn up. A small scatter of sparks flew out of the grate to land hissing on the stones.
Ithyris leaned forward and poked the fire, sending up a sudden rush of heat. After a while she said, “Why did Morrac come with you?”
“To make amends?”
“Morrac's never been the type to atone. I think he's relying on you to save him from himself. I've watched you two over the last few years. He's playing out a part with you, Eleres. He's dependent on you.”
I smiled. “I always thought it was the other way around.”
“He likes to keep you off balance. He needs you to need him, because if you do, then you'll take responsibility for him, make excuses for him, let him continue to behave the way he does. Lovers can get that way.”
“We're not really lovers any longer.”
“Not really? What does that mean? Either you are or you aren't. And I'm not talking about sex. He can see you're slipping away, Eleres. He'll hang on to you if he can, because his sister's dead and you're in love with someone
else and sooner or later he'll be alone and then he's going to have to face up to the consequences of what he's done and what he is.”
I was silent. We sat for a while and watched the fire burn down. Ithyris's face was shadowed. The stock of that side of the family came from Gehent, and she had the Gehenter's very pale skin and dark eyes, indigo-black like her hair. At last she looked up at me and smiled, reached across and took my hand, considering it as it lay in her own. Her fingers were white against mine, banded with the tattoos of her house, and she wore a silver wire ring embedded in the skin of the middle finger. The huntress patterns were scattered across the back of her hand. She had danced when she was younger—still did, I supposed—and the ring was a custom in Gehent that marks the dance.
“Oh, look,” she said wearily. “Come here.”
I rose and knelt by the side of her chair and buried my face in her lap. We had been sitting by the fire for an hour, but her skirt still smelled of snow. Ithyris always seemed to have just come in from outdoors: in autumn, she smelled of smoke; in summer, of hay. She moved a little and entwined her fingers through mine. I felt her free hand travel through my hair and round my earlobe, over to the nape of my neck. She grasped my hair gently and pulled my head up, kissed my brow, my nose, my mouth. I put my arm round her shoulders and, standing, picked her up, a gesture which I instantly regretted because it brought a searing pain in my back, still weak from the ai Staren's assault.
“Don't drop me, don't drop me,” she said. “Put me down. Quick!”
We hobbled to the bed, where we collapsed. Ithyris started to laugh, and couldn't stop. Her shoulders heaved. But in the end it was comfort that mattered, rather than desire. She pulled the covers over us and after a while she dropped into sleep with her arms around me and her head on my shoulder, but I lay awake for a while longer, staring into the shadows and thinking.
7. Shu Gho
Shu leaned her face against the cool viewscreen of the aircar and closed her eyes. Below, the nightlands of Monde D'Isle unfolded as the aircar flew on, moonlight glittering on the snowbound peaks, mirror-smooth. Shu did not want to think of what might have happened to Eleres, or his sister. Nor did she want to think about dead Dia, or Bel. The girl seemed to have aged years in the days since Shu had last seen her. Her angular face had become haggard, and she had cut off her acolyte's braids in mourning. Cropped raggedly close, her hair had lost its amber tinge and was now the color of ash.