by Jo Clayton
She sauntered past a lighted cookshop. The owner-cook was leaning on the counter, pots steaming behind him, tossing the bones with a single customer. The two men stopped what they were doing to stare after her, then went back to their game, talking in low tones, discussing the woman probably. A shadow drifted from behind the cookshop a moment later. A clumsy shift and Aituatea saw a part of the shadow’s face, the hulk of his body, then the follower was in the dark again. Djarko. He snorted with disgust. Took the bait like a baby. He limped after them, careful not to be seen. Djarko’s equally cretinous cousin Djamboa had to be somewhere about, they hunted as a team. He spotted the second shadow and smiled grimly. Better them than me. The Godalau grant they satisfy her so she’ll be ready to listen before she jumps me.
The woman turned into one of the small side lanes that wound through close-packed tenements of the poorer players, artisans and laborers. Djarko and Djamboa turned after her, almost running in their eagerness. Aituatea followed more warily, trying to ignore the nips in his shoulder as Hotea urged him to catch up and defend the woman from those louts. Defend her? Godalau defend me. He slowed his uneven gait until he was slipping through shadow near as much a ghost as his sister was, avoiding the refuse piles and their uncertain footing, gliding over sleepers huddling against walls for the meager shelter they offered from the creeping fog. He edged up to blind turns, listening for several heartbeats before he moved around them. Apart from the sodden sleepers the lane stayed empty and quiet. Inside those tall narrow houses leaning against each other so they wouldn’t fall down, Hina had been asleep for hours. Most of those living here would have to rise with the sun to get in half a day’s work before they left for the feteday, the players and nightpeople were gone for now, though they’d be coming home at dawn to catch a few hours’ sleep before working the streets to ease coppers from the purses of the swarming revelers.
Hotea pinched his shoulder. “Look,” she said. “There.”
“Huh?”
“On the ground there.” Hotea pointed at a filthy alley between two of the tenements. Aituatea squinted but saw nothing; choking over the lump rising in his throat, he crept into the alley.
He kicked against something. A body. He dropped to one knee and twisted the head around so he could see the face. Djarko. He pressed his fingers against the meaty neck under the angle of the jaw. Very dead. A little farther up the alley he could see another long lump of refuse. He didn’t bother checking, only one thing it could be. Both dead. So fast. Not a squeak out of them. Big men. Stupid but strong. Dangerous. Not even a groan. He got creakily to his feet and shuffled back from the body, step by step, lurch and swing, soles grating against the hard-packed dirt. Hotea touched his arm. He exploded out a curse, swung round and would have fled but for the dark figure standing in his way.
“Why follow me?” She had a deep voice for a woman, danger in it he could hear as surely as he heard the pounding of his heart.
He swallowed. His mouth was too dry for speech. Hotea jigged at his shoulder, almost breaking up in her impatience. She dug her fingers into him, spat a gust of words at him so fast it hurt his head. He jerked away from her and flattened himself on the rutted dirt in front of the woman’s boots.
She made a soft irritated sound. “Stand up, Hina, I won’t talk to the back of your head.” The sharpness in her voice warned him her patience had narrow limits.
He scrambled to his feet. “Drinker of Souls,” he said. “Will you listen to me?”
She shook her hair out of her face, that silver-gray hair that caught the moonlight in slanting shimmers as she moved her head. “Brann,” she said. “Not that other. I don’t like it. It isn’t true anyway.”
Aituatea glanced over his shoulder at the blob of dead flesh, turned back to the woman, saying nothing, letting the act speak for him.
She shrugged. “I didn’t tell them to come after me.”
“Fish to bait,” he said and was surprised at his daring.
“I’m not responsible for all the stupidity in the world.” She rubbed a finger past the corner of her mouth, frowning a little as she looked from him to Hotea standing a step behind him. “You were on the wharf watching me.”
“You saw me?”
“Not me.” She snapped her fingers.
A soft whirr overhead, then two large horned owls swooped past him, low enough he could smell the fog-dampness on their feathers. They beat up again to perch on the eaves of a house across the street, blinking yellow eyes fixed on him. He knew, then, what had happened to the children. He straightened out of his defensive crouch, keeping his eyes on the woman’s face so he wouldn’t have to look at the owls. “The man on the mountain said you would come ashore tonight.”
“Ah. Then he’s still there?”
“Someone is.”
“You want something.”
“Yes. I want you to do something for Hotea and me. I’ve got something the old man says you want; I’ll give it to you if you’ll do a thing for us.”
“What thing?”
Aituatea fidgeted, slanting a quick glance at the owls. One of them hooted softly at him. “Not here. Not safe.” He dropped onto a knee, bowed his head. “Honor my home, saхri Brann. There will be tea once the water boils.”
“Tea?” A raised brow, a warm chuckle. “Well, if there’s tea. I’ve an hour or so to kill.” She smoothed her hand over her hair. “And who’s waiting for me in your home?”
“A few ghosts, that’s all. Do you mind?”
“Ghosts I don’t mind.”
He nodded and started back down the lane,, walking slowly and trying to minimize his lurch, the woman walking easily beside him. “They’re family in a way,” he said. She made him nervous and he spoke to fill the silence. The owls whirred past, gliding low then circling up until they were lost in the fog.
“Family?”
“All my blood kin except Hotea died in the plague. Ten years ago.” He turned into a side street heading more directly north. “They’re company, those ghosts, though they’re not actual kin. They go when their time’s up, but there are always more drowned and killed and suicided to take their places.”
“They won’t like me.” A corner of her mouth twisted up. “The dead never do.”
“They’re ready for you. I told them I was going to bring you if I could.”
“Old man been busy about my business?”
“Hotea and me, we went to see him about our problem.”
“This mysterious problem. Mmmh, I thought no one would be left to remember me.”
“We asked him for help.”
“And I’m it?”
“That’s what he said.”
They walked in silence past the crumbling houses, Hotea drifting beside him. The tenements degenerated into crowded hovels built of whatever debris their dwellers could find or steal. In the distance a baby wailed, two men were shouting, their words hushed and unintelligible, a woman shrieked once and no more, but the street they were on was sodden with silence. “There’s a story about where we’re going,” Aituatea said. “A score of years ago there was this silk merchant. Djallasoa. He built himself a godon up ahead not far from the Woda-an Well. He sold Eternity Robes. Know what those are? No? Well, you find yourself some young girls without a blemish on their bodies to weave the silk, then get enough strong and healthy pregnant women to embroider the robes so the force of the new life will be transferred to them. A thousand gold pieces is cheap for the simplest. Hundred-year robes, that’s what old Djasoa’s robes were called. Even the Temueng Emperor bought from him. Talk was you never even caught a cold wearing one of his robes.” The fog wrapped the three of them in a dreamlike world where the ragged huts on either side of the lane faded in and out with the shifting of the mist. “Djallasoa’s eldest son was a bit of a fool, so the story goes, kicked a Woda Shaman or something like that. Old Dja tried to smooth things over. Didn’t work. The Woda Shaman came ashore, built a fire in front of the godon and slit the throats of Dja’s
wife and seven children, then his own. After that there were nine angry ghosts infesting the place. No Hina priest of any sort could drive them off, not even those belonging to the Judges of the dead. The gods refused to get involved…” The lane ended. He circled a thornbush and began picking his way through the scrub along an unmarked path so familiar he paid little attention to where he was putting his feet. “And the other Woda Shamans sat out there on the water enjoying the fuss and refusing to interfere. All the Eternity Robes Djallasoa had stowed in that godon, no one would chance buying them, not with a woda curse on them.”
The wasteland they were passing through was a mixture of thornbush, bamboo, scattered willow thickets and a few stunted oaks. With the fog obscuring detail an arm’s length away, the silence broken only by the drip of condensation from limbs and leaves, the crackling of dead branches and weeds underfoot, it was like walking through one of the Elder Laksodea’s spiky ink paintings come alive in a dream. Aituatea had a fondness for Laksodea and had several of his paintings, souvenirs of successful nights.
“Why are you telling me all this?”
He turned to stare at her, startled by the acerbity of her words.
“Have we much farther to go? I have better things to do with this night than spend it wandering through drip and scrub.”
He pointed at the thinning growth ahead. “To where this stops, then a bit farther.” He rubbed at the side of his neck. “Your pardon, saхr, and your patience, if you will, but no one knows where Hotea and I live. It’s safer that way. And I merely thought to help pass the time with the story. If you don’t want to hear more…”
“Oh, finish it and let’s get on.”
He bowed, started walking again. “Guards wouldn’t stay around the godon at night. The silks inside were safe enough, not even Eldest Uncle wanted to face those ghosts and he was the wildest thief in Silili. Finally old Djasoa and the rest of the clan fetched a gaggle of exorcists and deader priests waving incense sticks, hammering gongs, popping crackers, making so much noise and stink they drowned out the ghosts for long enough to haul out the silk. The Eternity Robes they burned in a great fire by the Woda Well, the rest they took away to sell to foreigners who’d haul them out of Tigarezun, the farther the better. And the godon was left to rot. Old Djasoa wanted to burn it, but the other merchants raised a howl, it was an extra dry summer and they were afraid the fire’d get away from him, so he didn’t burn it. So there it sat empty till the plague. You know about the plague?”
“You said ten years ago?” She shook her head, pushed aside a branch about to slap her in the face. “I was half a world away.”
He stepped onto the crescent of land picked clean of vegetation. “We turn east here. It was bad. The plague, I mean. The Temuengs ran like rats, but they made sure no Hina got off Utar-Selt. Ships out in the bay rammed anyone who tried to leave and they put up barricades on the causeway.” He pointed out a low broad mass, its details lost in the darkness and the fog. “The Woda Well. This is Woda land. No one else comes here now. When there was sickness in a house, the authorities burned it. Temuengs sent orders in and Hina ass-lickers did the work. So when our family started getting sick and oldest grandmother died and Hotea knew it wouldn’t be long before someone came with fire, she sneaked me out and brought me to that old godon, figuring the ghosts wouldn’t get sick, being already dead, and would keep snoops away. They were getting ragged, those Woda ghosts, already been around longer than most earth souls, it’d been what? ten years, more, but they made life hard for a few nights. We couldn’t sleep for the howling, the blasts of fear, the cold winds that blew out of nowhere, the stinks, the pinches and tickles, but nothing they could do was worse than what was happening outside. We’re almost there, you can just about see the godon now. Hotea had to go out and leave me alone a lot so she could scare up food and clothes for us. With nothing to do, shut up in that place, I started playing with the child ghosts even if they were Woda-an and after a while we made our peace with the adults, and by the time the Woda-an ghosts wore out, others moved in with us. No one likes ghosts hanging around, it’s a scandal and a disgrace. If they can affird it, they have the exorcists in to chase the ghost away, a loose ghost about the house makes gossip like you wouldn’t believe. So there are usually a lot of homeless ghosts drifting about. They hear about us and come to live in the godon.” He heard a scrabbling behind him, swung around. Two mastiffs came trotting from the fog and stopped in front of him, mouths open in twin fierce grins, eerie crystal eyes laughing at him. With a shudder he couldn’t quite suppress, he forced himself to turn his back on them and start walking toward the small door in the back wall, but he couldn’t forget they were there; he could hear the pad-scrape of their paws, imagined a rhythmic panting, convinced himself he could feel the heat of their breath on the backs of his legs.
He shoved the door open and went inside. There was a narrow space between the guardwall and the godon itself, space filled with clutter slowly rotting back into the earth, bits of bone, boxes, rope, paper, silk scraps, fish bones, scraps of canvas, old leaves. The godon itself was a hollow square with red brick walls and a roof of glazed black tiles shiny with wet. Drops of condensation dripped from fungus-blackened endhorns, plopped desultorily into the decay below. Aituatea dealt with the puzzle lock on a small side door, held it open for Brann and the mastiffs, followed them inside.
At the end of a cold musty passage, moonlight was a pearly flood lighting the open court beyond, playing on mist that had crept inside or been sucked in by the breathing of the old godon. Brann stood silhouetted against it a moment as Aituatea pulled the door shut and barred it, but was gone by the time he turned around. When he reached the end of the passage, he saw her standing in the center of the court looking up, the moonlight dropping like watered milk on her pale porcelain face. The ghosts were diving down at her, bits and fragments of mist themselves, flicking through her and dashing away. She stood quite still, letting this happen as if it were a ritual that bored her but one she was willing to endure for the calm she expected afterward. The mastiffs were chasing each other and any rats they could scare up in and out of the swirls of fog, in and out of the dank caverns of the ground floor bins. They came and sniffed at his knees, then flipped around and went to circle Brann.
“Second floor to your left,” Aituatea said and started for the stairs. The mastiffs trotted past him and went thumping up the stairs, dog mastiff, bitch mastiff paw matching paw on the soggy slippery wood.
Aituatea went a short way along the second floor gallery, unbarred a door and swung it open. The room inside was dark, warm, odorous-cedar and sandalwood, lacquer and spices, smoldering peat and hot metal from the covered brazier. He bowed, spread his arms. “Enter my miserable rooms, saхri Brann.” He swung around and went into the dark, turning back the shutters on the window opening on the court, lighting the lamps scattered about on wall and table. He dipped water from the covered crock, set the kettle on the coals, blew them alive, came back to his guest.
Brann was settled in a low armchair, one leg tucked up under her, the other stretched out before her, her hands resting on her thighs. Her hair was darker in the rosy lamplight, more gray than silver, her eyes were a clear light green like willow leaves in early spring. The mastiffs were children again, sitting crosslegged at her feet, staring with the owl-eyed directness of real children. They had ash-blond hair, one a shade darker than the other, bowl-bobbed, fine, very straight. As he’d thought before, they looked like twins, so asexual in these forms that it disturbed him to remember one of the mastiffs had definitely been a bitch.
“My companions,” she said. “Jaril.” She leaned forward and touched the head on her right. “Yaril.” She stroked her hand lightly over the paler head on her left. “This is a nice little nest. T’kk, friend Hina, it’s more than enough to hang you.” Her eyes moved over the scrolls on the walls, the jewel rugs on the floor, the other fine things visible in the lampglow.
“I’ll be dead anyway if
the Temuengs get this far.”
She tapped fingers on her thigh. “It’s rather crowded in here.” He dropped into the chair by the brazier and sat watching her. She saw them all, that was obvious. Moonfisher drifting in rags near the ceiling, used to be a powerful fishcaller, brought in heavy boatloads until a storm caught him and drowned him in sight of land. Eldest Grandmother crouching by the door, a tattered patchy ghost, she’d fade out soon, poisoned by a daughter-in-law who was tired of being run off her feet. Elder brother sitting in front of the window, strangled by a Sister of the Cord when he blundered into a forbidden ritual. Little brother, drowned, hovering behind the chair, peeking out at the shape-changers. The headless woman no one knew about, the gambler, the dancers, the several whores, the little sister, even the crabby old Temueng who sat in gloomy silence in the corner. Though Eldest Grandmother started muttering angrily beside the door, glaring at Brann, who ignored her after a flicker of, a smile in her direction, the others came drifting around her, circling gradually nearer. One by one they darted to her, stroked her, tasting her through their fingers. As if the taste pleased them, they quieted, grew content, the frazzled edges smoothed away.
Aituatea checked the pot but the water wasn’t close to boiling, then he sat staring down at his hands, reluctant, now the time was on him, to speak the words that would commit him to the attack on the Kadda witch. The ghosts gathered around him, his family, patting him, murmuring to him, giving what strength and support they could. Why not get it over with. “I don’t know why you came to Sill.”
“No.” She smiled, drew her thumb along her lower lip. “You don’t.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter. There’s a Kadda witch in the Tekora’s Palace. His wife.”
“Then the man’s a fool.”