The peasant witch rested her axe in the mud. “All right, dead thing, stand where you are and listen, and try to remember what I say, though I know it’s not the way of your kind. You are one of Reyzmon’s ghost-slaves. I know his mark, and I see his spells all over you. Reyzmon the lord of Shenna gathered so many slaves to him that when he was killed he was able to stand fast on this side of the Gate. The nariyo say his power shrinks as the years pass, and maybe that’s how you escaped his grip. Maybe that’s how you got your own will back. But escaping your master doesn’t make you less dead.”
Part of Aleya still clung desperately to disbelief. “How can you know these things?”
“We know the story,” said the peasant. “We know it’s death to go to the city of Shenna, or to stay in that valley at night. The lord Reyzmon will eat your soul. The nariyo guard the bounds, but his creatures sometimes find their way out. We here in Ediyan don’t forget the haunted city.”
The peasant woman shook her head again. “Creature, you claimed my help. The best help I could give would be to break your master’s binding and push you through the Gate to heaven. But that seems beyond my power. I will send you to the nariyo—”
“No,” whispered Aleya. She did not know who these nariyo might be, but the word meant wise people and she did not doubt they would be terrible old sorcerers. “No, I want to live!”
“You aren’t alive now. You just remember being alive. You can keep as you are if you feed on the lives of others—”
“I’m not a monster!” Aleya wailed. “I would feel it! I would feel dead. ”
The witch sighed deeply. “Stay there, creature. I’ll fetch a mirror. Not that you’ll remember what I show you—”
The woman returned from around the corner of her porch not with the circle of quicksilvered glass Aleya expected, but a simple bowl of water. “Look in,” she said.
Terrified to look, terrified not to, Aleya took the bowl. At first she saw only sky and the outline of her head. Then—
The bowl fell to the ground. “That’s not me!” she screamed.
But as she brought up her hands to conceal her face, this time she saw her withered corpse fingers, and whatever the peasant said about the faulty memory of the restless dead, she would never, ever scour that other image from her soul, that dead woman’s face with its shadowed orbits and sunken nose, the dried lips grimacing over long teeth, black hair straggling from a scalp as hard and shiny as a steel helmet …
The image pierced her like a sword. Dry sobs convulsed her. No shame, not even that of weeping in front of a commoner, was worse than the hideous thing she had become.
The peasant knelt to pick up the bowl. Heat radiated from her flesh and her pulse throbbed like a drumbeat inside Aleya’s own skin. She thought: How easy for one like me to rip open her throat and pull out her heart.
But her anger sank away and left behind only the bitterest loathing. I could drink her blood, she thought, I could eat her soul if I knew how, if I were a great sorcerer I could even shape my appearance. But I could never again be as beautiful as even this ugly commoner, because she is alive. She has blood and tears, she has guts that turn bread into shit. I never thought that was beautiful, but oh, it’s sweeter than honey.
I couldn’t do more than rouge a corpse.
She could no longer stand the touch of her dead hands and dropped them to her side. At last her sobs fell away, stranding her in a wilderness of despair.
“I am sorry, creature,” said the peasant. “I am sure the nariyo could help. In Leyothan they could help you.”
Leyothan! Aleya knew that name: the valley of the Oracle. “The priestesses will enslave what’s left of me.”
The witch gestured impatiently. “Priestesses! A few wise old people. Let them help you.”
“No,” whispered Aleya. “Better I stay with my lord and dream.”
5
She fled back the way she had come, back toward Shenna. Oh, she could not ignore the truth now. Her bony hands, her tattered clothes, that face in the mirror—no wonder peasants and soldiers alike had fled from her, who had been the most beautiful, the most desired lady Aleya.
In Shenna, she could have her beauty back. She would let her lord bind her again and she would pull dreams over her ugliness like a veil. She would sleep away the centuries in the ghost-city of Shenna until he consumed her soul at the last.
Except—
She stopped. That wasn’t what he would do.
She had shown that she could pass through the spells that confined him. And his strength was waning, the witch had said.
He would send her out to replenish his larder. She knew who she would kill for him. They would be the ones she had loved in life: laughing children, the young men with their strong limbs and unguarded hearts, the ones fated to ride to war and never return. The ones she had most wanted to protect from hurt. She could not bear to feed them to Reyozem Ahon.
But if she did not go to Shenna, hunger would overwhelm her eventually. She might feel horror now at the notion, but soon she would murder to assuage her own appetite.
In Leyothan, the priestesses could no doubt help her die for good, if they chose. But she could not bear, either, to surrender the semblance of life she now possessed.
Perhaps she could bargain with Reyozem Ahon.
The mere thought turned her knees to jelly. But there were ways, she recalled from long-ago lessons, to extract favors from an unwilling sorcerer—not that she had ever tried them in life.
She started walking again, more slowly. Both mages and priests dealt with the divine realm, and whatever that fundament of creation touched, it governed. The divine power that imparted efficacy to a mage’s spells or a priest’s prayers bled into all his words, acts, obligations, and affections, infusing them with a reality separate from his own being and resistant to his will. The more magic a mage worked, the more he had to suffer that governance. If a mage tried to withdraw from a promise or ignore a passion, he might choke off his magic, perhaps fatally. Even the lowly peasant had found herself ruled by an obligation to Aleya, simply because the witch loved her brother’s family and Aleya had rescued them.
Thus an ordinary person, if careful and lucky, could sometimes find the means to compel a mage. Of course mages guarded assiduously against such plots, and Aleya could not think of any clever traps or obligating favors except for that service, purveyor of fresh provisions, which she could never suggest. And surely she did not have the luxury of time to consider the problem. Her wakefulness might end as abruptly as it had begun, and then she would sink once more into the dreams of the dead.
Aleya paused, thinking she had heard a voice call out. But when she looked around, she was alone on the road.
No, of course: Someone was trying to spell her. Reyozem Ahon must be summoning her back.
The bed of the old road, here entirely unused, began to climb in steep switchbacks. The high, treeless ridge she had crossed last night came into view, but standing almost south of her now. This was the road she had turned away from before, the one that ran past the boundary stone into Leyothan.
Which meant Aleya must be walking inside Leyothan now.
But the witch had said she lived in Ediyan, which Aleya recalled as the country south of Leyothan and southeast of her lord’s domain. The road must wander back and forth between Leyothan and Ediyan, with the border marked only at the stone. The priestesses would have known the moment Aleya first stepped over their boundary. Still, they did not seem to be hindering her passage back to Shenna.
She trudged onward, groping for a plan. She should have conquered her fear of her own magic long ago, her fear of discovery by the Oracle. She was tired, so tired, she wanted only to lie down and sleep in darkness, but the almost-heard call grew louder, now unmistakably summoning her, and her bruised feet bore her forward.
At last the tip of the Oracle’s boundary stone reared above her. As she rounded the last switchback, a horse whinnied, and the next moment she walked
right into a barbarian camp.
Soldiers cringed from her; their horses reared and plunged at the end of the picket ropes. The soldiers were the very men she had encountered last night, but today they did not flee. One shouted over his shoulder.
In panic, and full of shame that these savages should see her ugliness, Aleya started to hurry past them over the rough ground. But the horses, who had been picketed just beside the road, were plunging and sidling, blocking her way, and then a man came striding down from the boundary stone. “Stop!” he shouted.
The command jerked Aleya’s body as if with a leash. “Stay, revenant!” the mage shouted as he approached her. “I, Guribast, your master am who summon you! I to you ask question!”
Aleya stared at him, heart pounding. First peasants, now barbarians owned such magic?
Powerful this Guribast might be, but his lisping was almost unintelligible. And so pompous in his ignorance, thinking he had summoned her!
His commands did hold her, though, at least for the moment. She tried to step away from the panicking horses but could only shuffle her feet.
Guribast himself stopped at a safe distance from the horses. Although the peasant witch had called the men-at-arms the Governor’s soldiers, Aleya did not think this mage could be the Governor. While his clothes were cleaner than the soldiers’, they were plain and worn. He was somewhat stout, with several days’ beard on his chin. Smile lines creased a good-humored face, but his eyes seemed to belong to an entirely different person. The air around him had a greasy sheen.
And he smelled of fresh blood. A spray of droplets spotted his cheek. Guribast had just sacrificed, or else set out still-living bait for the unquiet dead like her … Perhaps he had come here to steal her lord’s food.
“You to me will answer!” he commanded.
He spoke the language of his betters so laughably. But his voice was rich and compelling. She loathed his necromancy, she hated the touch of his commands. Nevertheless, deep inside her, the sight of him brought a strange relief.
Memory stirred. Aleya had heard his voice before. Guribast had spoken into the darkness of her dreams.
He had summoned her.
He had awakened her.
Her lord had bound her soul in death, but this mage had raised her out of the tomb. And called her here today.
Awe and fear struggled with anger, and anger won. At least she had once owed the lord of Shenna obedience. This barbarian was nothing but a trespasser and a thief.
“What do you want?” she asked.
Guribast frowned. After a long moment he said, “I for vanished wisdom am seek, for hidden wisdom of nariyo.”
“Why did you call me?”
His frown deepened. “I to you am give the question—”
“Why me?”
He stared at her a bit longer, then turned to shout at the men-at-arms in the barbarian gabble. The men had been cowering by the pickets, trying to soothe the horses. Now they retreated down the road Aleya had come along, further into Leyothan. When they had disappeared around a bend, Guribast spoke again:
“Given to our temples is a prophecy,” he said to Aleya. “In Leyothan a secret, a weapon lie, will undo the plan of all who it oppose. My divining to this place led me, to call up the one who can the treasure reveal. Now answer, revenant! And to me this secret tell!”
His command was like a hand poking through all the cupboards of her mind. She felt a compulsion to reply even though she had no idea what he was talking about.
She did not want to help this blood-spattered savage loot the treasures of her people, even if the people in question were the prophetesses of Leyothan whom she had always feared.
Fortunately the commands of mages were like their promises. What compelled her was not his desire but the divine power Guribast had placed in his words, which gave them their own existence in the world, a reality as solid as a stone’s. If he had spelled her to find the treasure for him, she would have no choice but to search until she discovered it. But he had said, Answer, tell me the secret.
“Speak, revenant! Your master answer!”
“Master,” she began, doubting he would notice the irony with which she spoke the title. “Master, my lord was Reyozem Ahon and I died at the fall of Shenna, his city. I was never in Leyothan! Reyozem Ahon offended the Oracle with his sacrifices and his necromancy, and the priestesses raised the boundary against him and all his people.”
“But where Leyothan lie, you know.”
“There is the boundary stone between the three domains,” she said. “You have found that, master. Here we stand at the edge of Leyothan. To the southeast is Ediyan, and westward, over there, is the valley of Shenna.”
“But where,” demanded Guribast angrily, “lie the great Temple of the Oracle of Maro, all-seeing goddess of truth?”
At that, Aleya almost laughed out loud. The rudest peasant in Ediyan could doubtless have informed him, but he, self-styled seeker after wisdom, thought he had to interrogate the dead.
Absurd or not, his words squeezed her mouth and lungs, compelling her to answer something.
From those long-ago lessons in her father’s sunlit manor, she remembered: “The sanctuary of Maro has no roof or walls.”
“You claim the Oracle was not?” He punished her with those words so painfully that she regretted her evasion.
Still, she did not want to enlighten his ignorance in any little thing. She was not going to tell him that the Oracle of Leyothan was not a place but a person, or rather, people—the Abbess and the other prophetesses who sat in the Oracle’s chair.
“I don’t know where the Temple lies, master! I was never there. Everything I knew in life lies in ruins, and wilderness has swallowed the ruins. How could I direct you, even if I once knew the way? Go east from this boundary stone. I can give you no better guidance than that.”
From his expression, she could tell that he still did not like her answer. Perhaps the priestesses retained power to keep the likes of him from penetrating further into their domain. She would be happy if that were so.
The horses had not ceased their agitated milling. She glanced at them. In life, she had always been a little afraid of all but the gentlest mounts: so big, so unpredictable. But she was not alive. Strong men quailed in her presence. What could a horse do to her now?
She tested the strength of Guribast’s commands and this time managed a step toward the horses. “Stay,” he ordered.
“I have answered your questions, master,” she said, moving even closer to put them between her and the mage. The resulting whinnies and thudding hooves nearly drowned her words.
She took a few more quick steps. Horses reared and screamed all around her; pickets snapped or pulled from the ground. Then they stampeded.
Since it was she the horses fled from, she was able to herd them like sheep toward the mage, slapping rumps, waving her dead hands in their faces. Guribast shouted, but he seemed to own no horse-magic and had to scramble to escape their sudden headlong galloping. It broke his concentration, releasing her completely.
Aleya ran over snow and stone, crossing the top of the ridge. And then she was scrambling down the far side into the valley of Shenna. She felt Guribast’s commands (Stop! Stop!) flying after her like crossbow bolts, but every one of them missed its mark.
She skidded down a bank and found herself on a traverse of the road. A stream of rampaging horses bore down on her. She waved her arms and was secretly thrilled to see the great animals rear, whinny, and gallop back the way they had come.
6
Aleya ran down the road until she could no longer suck in breath (although, she reminded herself, she only dreamed that her dead lungs needed air). She did not allow herself to rest even then. Guribast was still calling her back, a silent voice shouting in her ears. She hoped that winter’s early sundown would protect her from pursuit; the peasant witch had said that it would be death for the living to come to Shenna’s valley at night.
It occurred to
her then that if Reyozem Ahon could, in the nighttime, send his power beyond the city, she could not have escaped last night. He must have let her go, confident that Guribast would not be able to hold her.
Darkness was falling when Aleya reached the city gate. No snow had melted here. Somewhere she had lost her stolen blanket, and now, as she stared up at the iron-dark mountains, at the tower under the cliffs, she began to shiver in the evening chill. Did the walking dead always feel so cold?
Only the thought that she was one of Shenna’s dead made her able to step through the gate.
Her lord did not greet her at the gate. As she climbed the avenue, limping and exhausted, wind began to pour down from the heights. By the time she reached the plaza, she was so cold it was as if she no longer had any flesh, dead or alive, and there was only pain where her body had been. She walked along the citadel wall that bounded one side of the plaza. When she reached the shattered citadel gate, a jangle of harness caused her to turn in panic. But it was not the barbarian men-at-arms. Shenna’s soldiers were returning from battle with bowed heads.
Phantoms—but already more real-seeming than the true city.
She shook her head to clear it. She had to stay awake to bargain with Reyozem Ahon.
Inside the wall the fortress was reassembling: companies of soldiers hurrying; horses, goats, hay, clanging anvils, glowing foundries, shouts and curses; slaves hauling charcoal; wagon-loads of fallen soldiers awaiting the pyre; and in the distance, temple chimes ringing, ringing.
Plumed guards wordlessly swung open a gate in front of her. Aleya entered, wondering why she had come to the inner fortress. She looked down at herself: brocaded skirts, fresh lace at her bodice and on her wrists, rings adorning her smooth and slender fingers. She wore her beloved necklace of tourmalines. Of course: the annual feast of the court of Shenna. But where was her maid, or even the few doddering lackeys the lord had not required her to release to the defense of the city?
Or, no—the feast would not be held this year, because of the siege—
No, the city had already fallen.
She wrenched herself out of the dream, made herself see the rubble. Wind skittered a leaf over old bones.
Lightspeed Magazine - January 2017 Page 17