A Daughter of No Nation

by A. M. Dellamonica

  They still didn’t know whether their world turned into this one or, if so, when catastrophe would strike.

  You’re allowed to want things, Bram had said.

  Bram’s breathing had lengthened at long last and Verena had stopped thrumming. Sophie should have been able to sleep.

  First things first, she decided. She had to see through this tangle with Beatrice and Cly.

  In the meantime, it won’t hurt to ask Parrish what “courting” means.

  It wasn’t much of an answer; she wanted something easier, cleaner. But muddle on seemed to be all there was.

  She must have dozed, skimming over the surface of sleep without dipping in, floating back into wakefulness. It was pitch black out now; the stars were gone, and something was tugging, ever so carefully, at the lace on one of her packs.

  She had her dive light at the ready. Turning it on, she speared a raccoon in its beam. It had its paw wound into one of the nylon straps of her pack.

  It gave her a saucy, unconcerned glance and waddled away.

  Pregnant, Sophie noticed.

  She slid out of her bedroll noiselessly, grabbing up her shoes and tiptoeing into the compound. The white light of the flash formed a dense cone with the raccoon at its edge. Fog had crept in, turning the air to soup.

  She checked her camera—still tied in place, still shooting frames at regular intervals, battery fine. She left it, though the sky wasn’t likely to clear before dawn.

  You’d think in a holy place, some Obi Wan Kenobi type would materialize out of the fog and offer some cryptic but decipherable advice about sorting all this out.

  Follow your heart, weigh your choices, today’s the first day of the rest of your life, a woman’s work is like a fish … no, that’s something else.

  Fluttering shadows drew her eye—then the beam of the light—to the crypt doors. A skinny, lurking figure in new robes was caught in her spotlight. Brother No Name: he shot her a vicious glare, shook the doors, then minced up the path to the heights of the mountain.

  No more chaperone, she thought. If Parrish was awake, we could get on with some quality courting.

  The memory of that one kiss rose, making her shiver a little, putting the lie to her pretense of lightheartedness.

  She leaned against the A-frame, feeling churned up, waiting to see if he’d come out. Maybe he couldn’t sleep, either. Maybe he’d turn up, sleepy, tousled and disaffected by this homecoming. Needing comfort.

  Ha, she thought.

  She took a seat on what passed for the porch and was still out there, half-dozing, more than a little horny, when the sky began to lighten, the monuments and shadows of the monks drawing colorless lines on the white cotton curtain of morning, as if even the colors of the waxing day were forbidden in this desolate place.

  CHAPTER 25

  Tonio was first to arise the next day, maybe fifteen minutes after dawn broke. He sketched a wave and a friendly glance in Sophie’s direction, then made his way into the fog, headed for the outhouse.

  The monks sang as they emerged from their shacks, joining the lone voice who’d sung all night. The group of them built a low chord that was unmistakably a lament. Sophie was reminded of the Whos coming out of their homes at Christmas in the old Grinch cartoon, except of course that instead of cheery “wahoo and dahoo,” this was all “woe, oh, ah.”

  Sustained musical chords built in complexity as more singers came out, adding mournful notes to the chill. The song rose, rolling through the encampment and the forest, cold and damp like the fog, and even the crows and wood children seemed to fall silent as the sound permeated everything.

  The reverberations of sorrow drove the others out of their sleeping bags. Verena appeared, favoring her with a neutral “Good morning” and then balancing her leg, like a ballet dancer, on a crossbar of wood while brushing her hair, preparatory to binding it into the screamingly tight ponytail she favored.

  “Can I borrow that after you’re through?” Sophie said, just to break the silence.

  “Sure.” Short word, bitten off angrily.

  I shouldn’t say anything, Sophie thought, but what came out was “You know that monk overstated what Parrish and I—”

  “It’s none of my business,” Verena said.

  So much for rapprochement. The men appeared, one by one, Bram wide awake, as always, with no apparent need for a transition between deep sleep and full consciousness. Then Parrish, clad in his white shirt and a pair of Bram’s bike shorts. His eyes found hers just as she was taking in his bed head. He barely smiled in response. She felt a schoolgirl flutter and then, a moment later, a deeper, more internal response.

  Verena broke their gaze by walking between them, proffering the hairbrush. “Your turn.”

  Sophie took it. “Thanks.”

  “There anything else of mine that you want?”

  “Ahhh.” She felt herself coloring. “I think I’m good.”

  “Yes, you sure do.” Verena didn’t move, just stood there between her and Parrish.

  Sophie ran the brush through her curls. “I need a haircut,” she said, inanely, just to make a sound.

  “Done?” Verena held her hand out pointedly.

  Sophie returned the brush. “I appreciate it.”

  “Verena,” Parrish said, and she turned, rapidly, teeth all but bared. “Might I?”

  “Keep it.” She shoved it blindly into his hand and took off.

  Tonio bit his lip. “Someone should—”

  “I’ll go after her,” Bram said. “Garland. Will they feed us?”

  “Not in any way we’re likely to appreciate.”

  “I have protein bars,” Sophie said.

  “Let’s resurrect the saboteur, charm the truth out of him, and get going, shall we?” Tonio said.

  “Agreed,” Garland said.

  “Where’s your governess?”

  Sophie laughed. “If you’d like Brother No Name to reappear, I’m sure all Parrish and I would have to do is step into one of the cabins together.”

  “He crept out, late,” Parrish said. “He may find sleeping under a roof uncomfortable, after living in the wild.”

  They repacked their things. Bram returned with Verena, who threw them all a sullen “Sorry,” and went inside to sort her bags.

  The chorus was wrapping up the morning etude when the monk Sophie had spoken to yesterday, named Brother Piper, approached.

  “Fortunate morning to you all,” he said, breaking the somber mood with a great, beaming grin that suggested that, given the slightest encouragement, he’d hug them. “How was your night?”

  His Fleet accent was different from Brother No Name’s—he said nicht for “night.” His arm bore scars from some terrible long-ago accident, hooks and drag marks that had left his hand twisted so it hung backward. He had holes in his ears, marks left by piercings, jewelry he no longer wore. Not a native, Sophie deduced—he’d come from another island.

  He rapped on the red lacquered crypt doors and a white-robed monk pushed them wide, letting them into a stone atrium little bigger than a cloakroom and lit by torches. The room was bare, and its floor was carved with words in a hundred or more languages. Those she recognized seemed to be words and phrases of farewell: “good-bye,” “safe journey,” “good luck to you.” At the end of this textual carpet was a path leading down into a narrow corridor, so steep that the wooden rungs or stoppers had been hung or affixed to the stone, making of it an amalgam of staircase, ladder, and path into blackness.

  She could hear Bram breathing heavily, slowly, controlling his not-so-latent claustrophobia. It wasn’t usually so bad, but … ah, he was drawing Verena’s attention, obliging her to caretake a little.

  Saint Bram, taking her mind off Parrish, Sophie thought. I don’t deserve you.

  The air coming up from the shaft was fresh, cold, and ever so slightly wet. Cave breath, she called it: the moisture that permeated systems that lay atop fast-moving underwater rivers.

  “We’ve had th
e Sylvanner brought to an audience chamber,” Brother Piper said. “Follow me.”

  Sophie raised her light and camera, capturing the text on the floor before stepping eagerly onto the incline. The stone underfoot was slick and the passage led down a good long way—about thirty vertical feet, she estimated—then ended in a shaft that might have been a train tunnel, lined on both sides by regular round chambers, each barely illuminated.

  Brother Piper managed the incline nimbly, smiling encouragement up at the others before leading them along the corridor. It was punctuated by random boulders, above and below, and he’d utter a cheery “Watch your head!” or “Mind your toes” with about every third step.

  They arrived in a space that was brighter by several orders of magnitude than the corridor, dominated by a pool on the floor that appeared to be filled with bioluminescent dinoflagellates in—Sophie dipped a finger for a taste—fresh water. The glow emanated upward, bouncing off a big silver bowl, newly shined, set into the ceiling. There were candles, too, set at one-foot intervals on a ledge that encircled the chamber.

  Sophie took a slow circle of the room, recording everything, before homing in on the body.

  Highfelling had been laid on a carved stone couch angled much like a recliner, with a chest strap to hold him in place. Under the belt, he was clad in a long white robe. Beside him was a low table with bamboo cups of cold water and a steaming urn of what smelled like rosehip tea.

  He was unmistakably dead but, as advertised, he had not decayed; the smell in the air reminded Sophie of something in a butcher’s shop, meat nearing its expiration date but not quite past it.…

  Tonio took a position as far from the corpse as he could, quietly muttering what Sophie guessed was a prayer, in Erinthian.

  Brother Piper rang a bell, held his hands over the dinoflagellate pool, then washed them in a nearby basin before holding them over the body. “It is no small thing to restore the murdered,” he intoned. “Who would take responsibility for such a portentous choice?”

  Before Sophie could respond, Verena said, “I am the interested party here.”

  “You will feed Wevvan Highfelling, clothe him, take him where he wishes to go? Answer his questions, hear his travails, seek his loved ones?”

  “I will.”

  “You will face with him the censure of the living and the wrath of those who fear the lately dead?”

  Verena did a decent impression of Annela’s placid Verdanii smile. “I will.”

  “You’ll want gloves,” he said, handing her a long black set. Donning a pair of his own, he produced a thick length of felt, stitched with hair to a pair of what looked like human ribs, or what human ribs would look like if they had been straightened from their natural curve.

  “The deceased, Wevvan Highfelling born of Sylvanna, rejected the nation of his birth and never took another. His resurrection is encumbered by no request or law. He has no surviving family and left no will. Does anyone stand in opposition to this fell deed?”

  “Fell,” Sophie thought. Now there’s a word out of Tolkien.

  “Speak now or forever hold your peace.”

  Bram whuffed softly at that, probably hiding a reaction to the misplaced wedding-ceremony language.

  Brother Piper turned to Verena, nodding, and she yarded on the two rib bones, stretching the fabric between. Crimson words appeared on the fabric, neat embroidered stitches that pulled at the felt, resisting the pressure.

  The shredding sound filled the room, a raspy tearing, as of ships’ sails or machine belts. A stench of boiled blood and sour mash, cabbagey and rotten, gusted out from Verena’s outstretched hands. Tonio gagged, quietly. The monk had a wet towel at the ready, and he grabbed at the remnants of the inscription, which were wet and suddenly stringy.

  Like guts, Sophie thought randomly.

  Sophie looked at Highfelling. He had been quiet as a waxwork figure, with that strange absence, almost fakeness, that the dead possessed.

  Now he was breathing.

  The corpse opened his eyes and began to cough. He accepted a glass of water from Brother Piper before falling back against his seat, looking from one of them to another.

  Choking awfulness all but overcame her. She remembered being on a dive once with a student videographer whose oxygen supply had failed, and that oh no, oh no, please stop this from happening feeling. Then, and now, it was an almost physical sensation, like having a stomach full of fresh blood.

  “Do you know where you are, Kir?” Piper asked. His face was drawn but his tone was kind.

  “No…,” Highfelling began, but before he could say more a number of things happened, all at once.

  “I stand opposed!” shrieked a teakettle falsetto that rang off the chamber walls. “There’s no making peace with this!”

  Parrish turned, saw something, and yanked both Sophie and Verena sideways, pressing them against the cave wall. Candle flame cooked her neck on one side; his breath warmed the skin on the other.

  Something whisked past them.

  A javelin caught Highfelling in the chest, piercing his heart.

  “Uhhh!” His eyes bulged. Blood spread across his white robe.

  The sense of awfulness broke, like thin glass. Suddenly Highfelling was a man, mortally wounded, suffering.

  Sophie disentangled herself from Parrish, running to the stone chaise. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. We didn’t mean to—”

  “Hes, it’s best,” the man said, speaking in a thicker version of Cly’s Fleet accent. “LoBanning?”

  “Uh…” Did he mean was she a Banning? “Sort of.”

  “Seek my … plans.”

  A glugging exhalation, and he was dead. Again.

  Leaving them with a profusely bleeding corpse and Brother No Name.

  Brother Piper seized the monk by the scruff. “What have you done?”

  “Sorry I’m late,” he whistled. “Brother Stinking Stodgepot wouldn’t let me into the crypt, so I had to climb up from the weasel hole where the water pours out the mountain.”

  CHAPTER 26

  After the second murder of Highfelling, Brother Piper hauled Nameless out to the compound. By the time he returned, two younger monks had appeared and were already shrouding the body in a long, heavy wrap. They took the gory shreds of the spell that had killed him initially and the javelin that did the deed the second time.

  “We’re going to be arguing about his action for some weeks,” Piper said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “What happened?” Bram demanded.

  Piper said, “Resurrection is an issue of contention among the brothers. Brother Pict—the nameless brother, that is—tried to enter the crypt last night but was barred. There’s disagreement there, too. Anyone who wishes to object to a resurrection should be given a chance.”

  “Why wasn’t he?”

  “The brother is … he’s very holy. Devout. His commitment to the penitential duty of the island is extreme. But he’s also…” He opened his hands. “Ahhh…”

  “A pain in the ass?” Bram offered.

  “We are men, flawed and petty like any,” Brother Piper said. “The brother has become a thing of the forest; he comes and goes as he pleases. He offended the night keeper and was barred. Then, as he said, he found his own way into the tomb through the sewer.”

  “I bear some responsibility,” Parrish said. “We tried to hide our purpose, but—”

  “There are no secrets in a tomb,” Piper said. “Kirs, are you all right? It’s a troubling thing, to witness a revivification and then—”

  “A murder?” Bram snapped.

  From his expression, Piper didn’t quite see it that way, but he spread his hands, acknowledging Bram’s words.

  Sophie was surprisingly unstirred by having seen Highfelling stabbed. The feeling of awfulness that accompanied his waking, tense and lurking wrong, had seemed to fill the room, choking and lethal as smoke. It was only when he’d been fatally wounded that she’d felt able to approach, much less speak to him.r />
  But now they were back to square one with Cly.

  Or were they? “He had things, didn’t he?” she said. “Someone … Langda said the evidence from his murder was here.”

  “Yes. I’ll have his possessions brought,” Brother Piper said. He vanished immediately into the crypt and, about fifteen minutes later, four younger men came in bearing a quartet of heavy trunks with smashed locks.

  “Seggin bale,” Parrish said to them, in a tone that hinted that this was monkish for “thank you.”

  They stared at each other over the trunks. Then Bram yanked at the nearest lid. Its stonewood hinges crumbled and the lid came off in his hand.

  Sophie pried hers open more carefully. It contained a bundle of letters, all in Fleet. She browsed them, finding correspondence among the Haversham Crime Office, The Fleet Judiciary, and Brother Piper’s predecessor, the managing brother of the crypt here in Ossuary.

  She read one page aloud: “‘He died suddenly, falling to his knees in the garden in his hiding place on Zingoasis, bending backwards in an impossible fashion.’”

  “Like John Coine,” Bram murmured.

  “Yeah,” she said, remembering. Two captured prisoners gasping, helpless, eyes bulging. Twin death rattles …

  “Sofe?”

  She returned her attention to the letter: “Highfelling died about a week after Cly’s duel with Cordero. The Judiciary had named him as a possible witness in the ongoing dispute with Haversham.”

  “The throttlevine thing,” Bram said.

  She picked through the next batch of pages. “The next is just delivery arrangements, getting him here. The scroll Verena just shredded”—she, Tonio, and Verena all shuddered “—turned up years later in a … I guess you’d call it a raid? On some kind of rogue inscription house?”

  “Yeah.” Verena peered over her shoulder. “The scribe might know who hired him to kill Highfelling.”