by Philip Reeve
They came to Coriander’s waterfront. The tide was right out now. People were walking and riding across the causeway which separated the city from Boskennack. Up in the High King’s citadel, trumpets sounded, announcing the start of the new day.
“Oh!” said Etty, delighted with it all. “How I wish I could go surveying, and see something of this big old world!”
“If you’d stop listening to that old Head of yours, you could,” said Skarper. “You could stop pestering other people and trying to take what’s theirs, too.”
“‘The Head Knows All, and the Head Knows Best’,” Etty repeated sternly. Then, as if sensing that she’d hurt Skarper’s feelings, she rummaged in her pouch again and pulled out a strange object. “Here,” she said. “Breakfast for you. Supper for me. We’ll share.”
“What is it?” asked Skarper. It looked like a fat envelope made of concrete.
“’Tis a pasty, of course!” said Etty. “Proper dwarven food. Meat and vegetables in one end, fruit in the other. Which will you have?”
“Bit of both, please,” said Skarper.
So Etty broke bits off for him and they sat together on the sea wall eating it, waving their arms occasionally to ward off hungry gulls. It was, to Skarper’s surprise, Quite Tasty. And when it was finished, Etty said that she must be getting back to her people, and Skarper agreed that he must be getting back to Henwyn, and so they parted, still not sure if they were friends or enemies.
The House of Carnglaze was quiet that morning. The previous days of Henwyn’s stay had begun busily, with Mistress Carnglaze serving breakfast, customers arriving to see Carnglaze’s wares, and even visits from Dr Prong, who seemed glad to have someone to talk to, even if it was only a former sorcerer and his friends. But that morning Mistress Carnglaze had gone to market, leaving fresh bread and a jug of milk on the kitchen table, while Carnglaze had set out for Boskennack to deliver in person another message to the High King. Skarper, of course, had gone out to spy on the dwarves, and ended up talking to Etty. Henwyn was left all alone. Or so he thought, until he walked into the breakfast room, where a large lion pounced on him.
He did not even have time to scream. He flung up his arms, as if that could ward off all that flying muscle and those dreadful teeth and claws. He knew it was a lion because he had seen pictures of lions, and he recognized that great ruff of tawny fur around its snarling face. It occurred to him, in the slow-motiony moment while he waited for the impact, that lions lived in Musk and Barragan, not in the cool, wet Westlands, but that didn’t seem to help much.
Then, just as it reached him, the lion grew vague. Henwyn found that he could see the table and the window quite clearly through it. He had never heard of see-through lions before. He felt no jolt as it hit him, either, only a strange, faint chill.
The lion passed through him, through the panelled wall behind him, and was gone.
“Tau!” shouted the girl Zeewa, padding quickly into the room on her bare brown feet, and the lion came back through the wall and went sheepishly to her side like a big misty cat.
“But – but – but – blurgle!” said Henwyn. He stared at the girl, trying to control his hammering heart, which had jumped straight up his throat when he saw the lion and now seemed to be wedged somewhere in the neighbourhood of his tonsils.
He had not seen Carnglaze’s niece since the night of his arrival. She seemed shy, and kept out of the way of her uncle’s guests, taking all her meals in her room. Her bedchamber was above the one which Henwyn and Skarper were sharing, and sometimes in the nights he’d woken to hear her pacing restlessly about up there. There had been other noises too, odd moans and whisperings, but nights in Coriander were full of strange noises, and he soon went back to sleep. Other than that, he had scarcely thought of Zeewa.
Now he pointed at the lion which was nuzzling her hand, but he could still find no words to say except, “But—!”
“Tau cannot harm you,” said the girl. She would not look at Henwyn. Her hand stroked the lion’s mane, but he did not think she was actually touching it: her fingers passed through it as if it were smoke. All around her the air was twisting and shifting, like the air above a hot roof on a sunny afternoon.
“But he’s a g – a gh – a ghgh. . .” Henwyn managed to splutter.
Zeewa looked up at him for the first time, defiance in her dark eyes. “He is a ghost,” she agreed.
And now Henwyn saw that the movements all around her were other ghosts: animals and birds which took shape and grew solid for an instant, then faded again.
Zeewa darted forward, grabbed some slices of bread, and made to leave again.
“No!” said Henwyn. “Don’t go! I don’t understand! Where have all these spectres come from? Is this house haunted?”
“The house is not haunted,” replied the girl. “I am.”
She came from the Tall Grass Country, west of Leopard Mountain. She was a huntress and a daughter of warriors. Her father was King Ushagi, lord of ten thousand buffalo, and she had been proud and queenly and certain of herself for all her life, right up until the day she let her shadow fall across the wizard G’angooli as he sat in the evening sun outside his hut.
Why G’angooli should have been so offended, Zeewa did not know. Maybe because he was old, and he relished the sun’s warmth so much that he resented even that little flick of shade as she walked past him. Maybe because he was thinking deep thoughts, and her passing shadow had distracted him. Or maybe it was just because he was a mean old man who had grown used to terrifying people with his conjuring tricks and mumbled spells. Maybe the dreadful curse he had shouted after her was only meant as bluster.
(The truth was, old G’angooli was no more a sorcerer than Fentongoose or Carnglaze. He had never expected his curse to work. But the light of the slowsilver star had fallen on Leopard Mountain and the Tall Grass Country just as brightly as on Clovenstone, and things had woken in Musk as they had in the Westlands. The dark powers that G’angooli called on were actually listening, for once.)
What he shouted after Zeewa was this:
“Insolent girl! May the spirits of all you’ve ever killed come back to haunt you!”
And they had!
Zeewa had not noticed them at first, out in the bright sunlight. It was when she was back in the darkness of her father’s hall that she began to hear them. The whisperings and the flutterings. The buzzing. The ghosts of everything she’d ever killed had risen, and found their way to her.
Zeewa was fifteen, and a girl can kill quite a lot of things in fifteen years, especially if she’s a huntress and a daughter of warriors, living in the Tall Grass Country west of Leopard Mountain. Most of her ghosts were insects: a cloud of swatted wasps and mosquitoes that whirled about her head, a smoky tide of stomped spiders and squashed scorpions that washed around her feet. Through the fluttering storm of the wings of ghost flies she glimpsed the larger spirits: ghost antelopes, ghost birds, a ghost hyena or two, and the big old lion she’d speared at Two Rivers Meet the summer before.
Last of all, as if his shade was the hardest to summon from the afterworld, there came a man; the young enemy warrior she’d killed that winter when he and his companions had raided her father’s cattle pens. He still looked just as surprised as he had at the moment when she stuck her spear through him.
“I could not stay in my father’s house,” Zeewa told Henwyn, sitting by the window in Carnglaze’s breakfast room while the ghosts swirled whitely round her. “Everyone was scared I’d bring bad luck. The animals took fright and ran from me. The buzzing of the ghosts kept everyone awake. The children were afraid.”
“It’s no fun for us, either,” said a tall young warrior, appearing at her side and making Henwyn jump. He carried a leaf-shaped oxhide shield and a broad-bladed sword, and there was a hole in his middle where Zeewa had speared him: Henwyn could see clear through it to where seagulls twirled in the sk
y outside the window.
“There we were,” the ghost complained, “minding our own business in the afterlife, and suddenly we were dragged back here and made to follow you around!”
“Be quiet!” shouted Zeewa angrily, rounding on him and slapping at him with a hand that went straight through him. “Leave me alone!”
The ghost shrugged, dissolving away into smoke and shadows. “That’s the point! We can’t leave you alone! We must follow you everywhere, Zeewa, until this curse is lifted.”
Henwyn scratched his head, feeling sorry for Zeewa and her ghosts. “How awkward!” he said.
“Awkward,” agreed the girl.
“Could you not go back to this G’angooli fellow and get him to lift the curse? Perhaps if you asked really nicely. . .”
“That was the first thing I did,” said Zeewa. “Unfortunately, when G’angooli saw the cloud of ghosts that he’d raised, he was so frightened that he dropped down dead. I was afraid his spirit would come haunting me too, but wherever he fled to, he is not among my ghosts.
“For a long time after that, I wandered alone. I thought that perhaps if I walked for many miles I might leave the ghosts behind, but they always kept up with me. I tried running through brakes of thorn trees, in the hope that the ghosts would get caught on the thorns and I could leave them there, but although I scratched myself half to pieces, they were still with me when I stumbled out all bloody on the far side.
“It was then that I remembered my uncle Carnglaze. I had never seen him, but I had heard it said he was a powerful sorcerer in the far-off, outlandish place called Westlands. ‘Perhaps he can find a cure,’ I said. I walked to the coast, and tricked my way aboard a ship. The ghosts do not show up so much in bright sunlight, so the sailors did not notice them when I went aboard. When they found out about my haunting we were already in the middle of the sea. They set me adrift in a small boat, but luckily Kosi knows something of the stars, and helped me steer my way to Coriander.”
“Kosi?” asked Henwyn.
“That’s me,” said the warrior ghost, reappearing.
“Oh! Pleased to meet you,” said Henwyn.
Zeewa shook her head sadly. “But my journey has been in vain. Uncle Carnglaze knows no magic, and nor does anyone in these Westlands, it would seem. My curse cannot be lifted. I am doomed.”
“Oh, don’t say that!” said Henwyn, wondering what on earth he could do to help. “I know! There is a new sorceress in town! Madam Maura and her Oracular Bathtub: Fortunes Told! Genuine Magick Work’d! Skarper and I saw her setting up her tent the night we arrived. Have you tried consulting her?”
Zeewa shook her head again. “They are all frauds, these Westlands wizards. They know nothing.”
“Madam Maura might be different,” Henwyn said. “You never know. Things have changed since the star came. And look, the sun is shining as brightly as anything outside! We can go and consult Madam Maura and nobody will notice all your see-through companions.”
Zeewa was about to say no, but she looked at him and changed her mind. Henwyn had that effect on people. He was so optimistic and so eager to be helpful that you didn’t like to disappoint him. So Zeewa fetched her cloak, and, still barefoot, ventured out with him into the streets of Coriander.
It was true; in the bright sunlight her ghosts were almost invisible, and the noises of the busy city masked the buzzing of the phantom flies. But a strange chill went before her where she walked. Dogs sensed the presence of the ghosts at once and fled, yelping. Horses reared and whinnied as Zeewa passed, and people shivered and moved out of her path without knowing why.
They soon came to the place where Madam Maura’s tent was pitched, on a patch of greensward above the harbour. Seen by daylight it was a shabby thing. Madam Maura was standing outside it, telling a small audience of onlookers the things she had foreseen. All sorts of visions of the future had come to her since the Lych Lord’s star rose, but they were so strange that it was difficult to make anyone believe her.
“Men and women will fly across the sky in birds made of metal which soar high above the clouds!” she prophesied, as Henwyn and Zeewa approached.
The onlookers shook their heads and grumbled. It sounded a bit unlikely to them.
“People will talk to each other across great distances, by means of magic boxes which they shall carry in their pockets!” Madam Maura added. “And lo! These magic boxes shall have Personalized Ringtones!”
The audience sighed, unimpressed. “She’s just making it up!” someone said.
“A popular celebrity chef will be arrested for stealing cheesy pancakes from the freezer section of Morrisons in Cleckheaton!” Madam Maura foretold. But her audience had never heard of such a place, and couldn’t imagine what a celebrity chef might be. Besides, many of them had started to sense a strange, unearthly chill. They started to drift away, and soon the sorceress was left alone with Henwyn and Zeewa.
“Hello, dears,” she said, sitting down on a barrel and mopping her large face with a spotted handkerchief. “Oh, it takes it out of a body, this here prophesying. It used to be much easier in the old days when I was just making it up. Now I gets these visions all the time, and they shows me the strangest things. Talking boxes and moving pictures. Boats that move with no sails and lamps that shine with no flame.”
“Does the future really hold such things?” asked Henwyn.
“Who knows, dearie? I just tell what I see. Maybe the visions are showing me the future of some other world. Anyway, what can I do for you? I suppose it’s about these here ghosts, is it?”
Until then, Henwyn and Zeewa had both suspected her of faking her strange powers, but now she looked straight at Kosi, Tau and the rest of Zeewa’s spectral retinue, and it was clear that she could see them.
“Can you get rid of them?” asked Henwyn. “I mean, exorcize them? I mean, lay them to rest?” (He did not want to offend the poor ghosts.)
Madam Maura sadly shook her head. “I’m sorry, dearie. Not up my street, that sort of thing. I do prophesies mostly, and a few love potions and things like that. But. . . Ooh yes! Oh, dearie me! Yes, I do see something. . .” She stood up and beckoned them to follow her into the purple tent. “Come in, dears; come quickly!”
They followed her in through the heavy canvas flap, into darkness and swirls of smoke from an incense burner which hung from the ridge-pole. The ghosts became visible as they stepped in out of the sun: frail antelope with soaring horns; spotted hyenas; the big lion padding; Kosi looking as wary and intrigued as Henwyn and Zeewa.
Beneath the incense burner stood a bathtub; an ordinary copper bathtub of the sort that you could find in any merchant’s house in Coriander or Adherak. It had been filled with clear water, and the water’s surface reflected the swirlings of the smoke above it. Madam Maura waved her plump hands above the tub, and suddenly the reflections grew brighter, forming dim and shifting pictures. A greenish landscape, misty and uncertain; ruined buildings; towers. . .
“That’s Clovenstone!” said Henwyn.
“Far to the north must you go, Zeewa of the Tall Grass Country!” said Madam Maura. Her voice was deeper and clearer than before. In the light from the glowing water they saw that her face was slack, like a sleepwalker’s, and her eyes had rolled upwards so that only the whites showed. She spoke again. “There, among the Houses of the Dead, shall you find the freedom that you seek. But great dangers loom! ‘Loom! Loom!’ they go. You must depart soon, or all will be in vain!”
The images in the water trembled and changed. Henwyn saw fire; the fall of great buildings; the vague shapes of battling warriors. For a moment he thought the enchanted bathtub was showing him visions out of Clovenstone’s past; the last, dreadful clash of men and goblins when King Kennack’s armies defeated the Lych Lord’s hordes. Then he saw that it was not against men but dwarves these goblins battled: massed ranks of dwarven warriors, masked and armoure
d. Great diremoles moved among them, with more dwarves riding on their backs, shooting crossbows and raining down fire from dreadful weapons.
Then the image changed again. For a moment all was drifting smoke. Then the smoke cleared, and Henwyn saw Princess Ned. She was lying on a lawn of soft green grass, and he knew at once that she was dead.
“No!” he cried, and reached forward to touch her. But as his hand brushed the surface the image broke apart, and there was only the water lapping at the bath’s sides, and a yellow toy duck which his lunge had dislodged from the soap rack, bobbing out into the middle.
“Well, dearies,” said Madam Maura, her face and voice returning to normal. “Was that any help at all?”
“What did it mean?” asked Zeewa. “What are the Houses of the Dead?”
“Was that the future?” demanded Henwyn. “Was it the real future? Or was it just a vision of the future as it might be?”
“Search me, love,” the sorceress said. “That one didn’t stick in my mind for some reason. They don’t always. It’s just a blur to me. Did you see anything you thought you recognized?”
“Yes!” said Henwyn. He was so upset that all the ghostly insects caught his mood and swirled in a buzzing whirlwind of wings under the tent’s roof. “Yes! I saw Clovenstone burning, and Princess Ned. . . Oh, I must go back to Clovenstone at once!”
“And I must come with you, I think,” said Zeewa. “At least, that is what I think the vision said. I must go far to the north, and seek the Houses of the Dead.”
They said their goodbyes to Madam Maura. Henwyn’s hands were trembling as he crossed her palm with silver. All he could think of was getting home to Clovenstone. He had waited too long in Coriander. For all he knew, the dreadful things that he had seen might be happening already! In silence he made his way back to the Street of Antiquaries, while Zeewa and her pale ghosts followed. I shall start for Clovenstone this very day, he thought. It is useless, waiting here. The High King will not even see me, let alone lend me his warriors to fight against the dwarves!