The Ghost Sister (15 page)

“You're Mevennen's brother? What's your name?”

The young man smiled, slow and cynical. “You expect me to give my name to a ghost? You'll have to earn that knowledge, as you know very well.”

“All right,” Shu said hastily, feeling that she was treading on dangerous ground.
If that
'
s so, why did Mevennen give her name to Bel?
“It doesn't matter. Tell me more about the hunt.”

“The hunt is the hunt. When we change. When we become like the
mehed.
”

“What are the
mehed?
”

“The people in the hills. The wild people.”

“Are they outcasts?” Shu asked.

The young man looked puzzled. “They are in the wild.”

“So they don't live in buildings, like you.”

“Of course not. They are not
bantreda
, not landed, not civilized. Not languaged. They are the
mehed.
They live within the bloodmind.” He shrugged, as if this were perfectly obvious, Shu thought with mild irritation. As indeed it was, to him, but she felt a tug of excitement at the familiar word he had used.

“What do you mean by the bloodmind? I'm afraid I am a very stupid ghost,” she added. At least it made him laugh.

“It's all right,” he said, the first time that he had addressed her as a real person and not some figment of his own imagination. He blinked, and she saw the dark membrane flicker across his eyes. It filled her with a brief, irrational revulsion: a reminder of the unknown. “The bloodmind,” he said, with a little more emphasis. “It brings us together. Makes us one, places us in harmony with one another and the world. It causes us to lose language and identity. Surely even a ghost must understand?” He put his head on one side in momentary interrogation.

“It unites you?”

“We become the pack.”

Shu felt suddenly very cold, as though a shadow had passed over the sun. “The pack?”

“Then we are no longer human,” the young man said, simply. A breeze moved through the orchard, stirring the grass. The young man rose fluidly to his feet and Shu had a moment of sheer panic. He seemed to tower over her; she had not realized how tall he really was. But he was preoccupied with brushing the loose seeds of grass from his shirt and she was able to step over the branch so that it lay between them. It gave her the illusion of safety. “I have things to do,” the young man murmured.

“One last thing,” Shu said, knowing that she was once again stepping close to the edge. “That child, the little girl who was on one of your mounts. She was dead, wasn't she? How did it happen?”

She wanted to hear his explanation; she was expecting justifications, excuses, but instead he said quite calmly, “My cousin killed her.”

“Deliberately?”

“Not entirely.” He stared unseeingly into the green dimness of the trees. “My cousin is a huntress, and she was within the mind of the pack, like all of us. Within the bloodmind. I told you, we are no longer human, sometimes.” She could hear the tension in his voice.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm just a poor ignorant ghost. I know nothing.”

“Sometimes,” the young man said, with a return to lightness, “I wonder truly whether I know anything myself.”

“Listen,” Shu said. She felt as ridiculously shy as a girl at a dance. “May I come here again? May I talk to you?”

The young man gave a kind of single-shouldered shrug. “If you wish. I know you will do so anyway. You do not need my permission to haunt me, do you?” He turned away.

“Just one last question,” Shu said, before she could stop herself. “Do you think that my knowing your name would give me power over you?”

He seemed surprised. “No. Why should it? It is the name the world gave me; it can mean nothing to you. But it is still my honor. I told you. You'll have to earn it.”

And with that hint of a promise that they would meet again, Shu had to be content.

In the morning, the house was somber. Mevennen was resting; recovering nicely, said my practical cousin Eiru.When we heal, we do so quickly. Despite her affliction, Mevennen's arm would be mended within a few days.The body of the child lay in the cold store. Having studied the child'
hands and noted the marks of birth, Sereth sent out a message with a group of passing traders.

After the turmoil of the previous day, I felt as though I needed some peace and quiet, so I went down into the orchard to walk among the trees. And there, strange to relate, I met a ghost. It spoke to me, requesting that I engage it in conversation, and despite my fear, something made me comply. I thought it might have answers for me: an accounting for the death of the child, and of the near-death of Mevennen. But the ghost had no answers, only questions. It was ignorant, it said, and knew nothing. I did not believe it. I didn't know why it had come, but there was no trusting a ghost. And I couldn't help thinking that perhaps it was here in retribution, to avenge the child's death. A ghost is the sign of a curse, after all.

I did not see the ghost again, though I watched for it, but late one afternoon, a day or so later, a man from a House in Tetherau rode up through the eastern gate. He wore a black coat and dark red armor beneath it; he wore also a dull crimson sash which marked him as a blood claimant. It seemed he had been traveling nearby, and received the message about the death. We dropped the defense to let him in and received him with ceremony. Once the ritual responses had been exchanged, we knew him for one Hessan ai Tem-marec, and the uncle of the child.

“You must be most relieved that your sister lives,” he said to me, speaking in the Remote Plural tense to mark the formality of the occasion.

“Marked only by our sorrow that your niece does not.”

The child was young and unnamed, not even close to the season of its return to its family. But it seemed that the child was the only one of its brood, and the blood-price would be heavy. Whatever it was, we had no option but to pay it and I wasn't going to argue. Most of all, I was grateful that I had not killed Mevennen.

I went in to see my sister once I had paid my respects to
Hessan. Mevennen was lying on her bed, propped up with cushions. She gave me a wan smile as I came in, and I saw that she had remembered what had almost befallen her.

“It's only me,” I said.

She turned her head away. After a moment, she said accusingly, “I remember now. I moved, so you saw me. You would have killed me, wouldn't you?”

“Perhaps I would,” I told her, with a sinking heart. “But you called out my name; you reminded me of who I was, that I was human. You brought me back to myself. You acted properly.”

But Mevennen had never really felt the bloodmind because of her illness. She'd never known what it was like, the fever that it brought, the madness. She'd never known what it was like, to need to kill simply because you could, to hunger after prey and death. No wonder the memory of what had happened disturbed her. It certainly still disturbed me.

She huddled farther within the blankets, and then she whispered, “A ghost was there, Eleres.”

“A ghost?”

“I've seen it before. It comes to the orchard sometimes, with another. I think it was chasing the child. I don't know if it saw me or not. It was hiding in the rocks. But perhaps I dreamed it. I'd only just woken up … everything hurt and it was all red, even the sky. There was a stone in front of my face. I looked at it for a long time. Then there was something watching me. I couldn't move my head. I heard the murai coming, through the earth, and then all of you were there. You moved” —she drew her knees up to her chest, curling in protection around herself—” like the
mehed.
I saw Sereth, but at first I didn't recognize her. I saw her kill the child.You were standing over me. You looked” —she paused again—” so
interested.
” Her face twisted. “I thought I was going to die.”

I couldn't look her in the face. Instead, I stared down at
the floor. The bloodmind was a natural thing. It was not something that any of us could help, nor over which I felt I had any control. But I was still ashamed. And then I felt a sudden surge of anger at the world, at whatever had made us this way: neither one thing nor the other, neither animal nor human. The force of that anger took me by surprise. It had never really occurred to me to question my own nature before, but the realization of how I would have felt if I had killed Mevennen filled me with unfamiliar horror.
Just because something
'
s natural doesn
'
t mean you have to like it
, a small cold voice said inside my mind. I reached out to stroke a hank of hair back behind Mevennen's ear and she jerked away.

“We're all ourselves again now,” I said, hoping I sounded more convincing to her ears than I did to my own, and she started to shake. She moved soundlessly, burrowing into the cushions away from me. “Gently,” I told her. “You'll hurt your arm,” and I repeated it,
gently, gently
, until she stopped shivering.

Sereth came in later when Mevennen, at last, slept. She looked exhausted.

“Mevennen's well,” I said. No point in two of us getting overwrought. “No need to worry.”

“I've been talking to Hessan. We've agreed on the blood-price. He wants me to go with him, return the child to her people. I'll have to go to the funeral, too.” Sereth spoke lightly, but I could tell what it had cost her. There was a note like a taut wire beneath her voice, and she would not look at me. Then she sat down on the edge of the bed and spread her hands on her thighs. They looked fragile against the dark leather, like a spirit's hands, and I felt a sudden shiver run down my spine.

“I know how Mevennen must feel,” she said, almost to herself. “I remember a day … I was ill, and they rode out without me. I went downstairs when the hunt came back and they were still—locked in the bloodmind. It was so …
I didn't know what to feel. There were all those people, whom I knew, up to their eyes in blood and death. Morrac was one of them; he always loved it.” Her voice was bitter. “He still does, Eleres.” Then she said in a whisper, “And what about you? Do you love it, too?”

“Me?” I said, surprised. “I—well, no. I don't think so. To be honest, Sereth, it frightens me. And the way I feel afterward scares me, too. As though I've been … released, somehow. Like an arrow strung from the bow.” I paused, then asked, “And you? You're a huntress, after all.”

She was silent for a moment. “I've never killed like that before. Only animals, or warriors. Not a human-to-be.” She used the old form of the word for
child;
the sacred form that the
satahrachin
used, and it startled me. I opened my mouth to reassure her, but she went on. “You seem to prefer the masques to the hunts.” Her voice was still steely and remote. I smiled.

“I prefer sex to violence, yes. Don't most of us?”

She spoke so softly that I did not quite catch what she said. I thought she whispered, “Not all of us, no.”

She went to stand at the balcony door with her back to the room, gazing out over the evening land. It was a clear night; bright Telles sank in the north and out across the sea the constellations were rising up: Etrai, the hand;Temmec, the lamp of the mountain; and Rhe, the amber star which is another country, so they say, with seas of its own. The air had grown colder, too, and Sereth wrapped her arms about herself, holding herself tightly, as though she might break. After a moment, I put my own arms around her, clasping her around the waist, and we stood in this manner for a time, thinking our own thoughts which, I knew, were the same.

“You should sleep,” I said, and kissed her throat, seeking comfort rather than love. She put her hands over mine and turned herself around in my arms, until she could rest her forehead on my shoulder. I felt her draw closer to me, then
Mevennen stirred and sighed in the room behind us and she broke away.

Downstairs, I found Morrac waiting for me, sitting in one of the alcoves of the hall, close to the fire. He motioned to the bench. I badly needed some sleep, but I felt too listless to move. We stayed in the hall until the fire banked down and the room had fallen quiet. Morrac was drinking, as usual, unobtrusively but steadily.

“You're very quiet,” he said at last.

“I've been thinking,” I told him.

“Ah, enough,” he said and he reached across to take my hand. He must have drunk more than I thought, for when we stood, hands linked over the table, he stumbled, and released my fingers to steady himself.

“I'm all right,” he murmured. “I can walk up the stairs.” When we reached the foot of the staircase, I put my arm around his waist to help him, and when we got to the landing he kissed me. His mouth was warm, tasting of wine, and I felt his sharp teeth against my tongue. “Eleres …” My name was slurred.

“Look,” I said, exasperated. I half dragged him to my own room and practically flung him onto the bed. His eyes slid closed. I rolled him onto his side and lay beside him when I was certain he'd gone to sleep. I wasn't long in following.

Shu Gho spent much of the day writing up her notes, and then she sat and stared at them. Fragments, she thought, pieces of a puzzle to which she did not yet hold the key. She inscribed words onto the screen and idly moved them around, placing them in different configurations:
children, the wild, eresthahan, the pack. The bloodmind.
She scrolled through the holos that she had taken of the tower: an edge of stone
and wooden wall, the lintel leading into the great hall and then the hall itself with its shafts of sunlight through a torn window. Shutting her eyes, Shu imagined herself back in that hall, in its depths of silence, and thought back to her own home, now far away in the past. Her home, that sprawling complex on the banks of the Tula River, was not silent. Three generations of Ghos were there: grandparents, sons and daughters, grandchildren running in and out after their lessons, shrieking and playing and laughing. But the tower had been silent, and empty, and there had been no very young people riding among the hunt as they returned home, only a dead child slung over the saddlebow. The young man's words, spoken so casually, echoed through her mind.
Within the bloodmind. I told you, we are no longer human, sometimes.
Shu closed the case of her notebook decisively and stood up.