The Ghost Sister (33 page)

The next few days fell into a rhythm of travel. We saw no sign of the
mehed.
By now, I had half hoped to have found some evidence of Jheru, who was likely to have followed some of the same paths, but it was as though the world had opened up and swallowed him and all life. I remembered the house of the ai Staren with dread. To while away the time, I had long conversations with the ghost, whom Morrac still preferred to ignore. Shu avoided him, and even though her shoulder was healing, I could understand why. We spoke of all manner of things: places, legends, families,
ourselves. At length I began to forget that Shu was a ghost at all, merely a different kind of being, but one that was not so different from myself. One who was, slowly but surely, becoming a friend. Morrac and I spoke little, but there was peace of a sort between us. Once, however, I glanced across the path to look at him. His hair whipped in the rising wind, and his eyes were narrowed against its blast. He did not look human at all, at that moment, and the hair at the nape of my neck prickled.

As we traveled the weather grew colder. By the afternoon of the fourth day, thin drifts of snow had begun to spiral down from the mountain slopes, born on a wind that spoke of winter. Down in the lowlands, summer still lay across the land; here, in the heights, winter prevailed. This far up into the mountains, the skies were blindingly clear, for the formidable winds scoured the cliffs and crevasses clean of mist and revealed a translucent sky, pale as glass washed by the sea. The stars of twilight and sunrise were bright at these altitudes, hanging low over the peaks and casting curious moving shadows visible only out of the corners of the eye. Toward late afternoon, they withdrew from sight behind the mountains, and their evening companions, Eldem and Aro, rose up to lie rosy over the distant peaks. It was a strange, silent journey, with no sound but the soft shuffling of our feet through the light snow save sometimes, at evening, when the ground mumbled to itself far beneath the earth and sent whispers up through the cold air. It was a dry cold, pinching the skin and burning the lungs, but without the shivering aches that the lowland dampness produces in winter, and it was bearable, even invigorating. We slept under canvas now, one of the small light bivouacs typically taken on campaign, which Morrac had—with more foresight than I might have expected—brought with him.

On the fifth day, we gained traveling companions of a kind, a group of the
mehed.
Anxiously, I scanned their ranks for Jheru, but there was no one among them whom I knew.
There were four of them. They came out from a narrow crevasse in the rocks, creeping like animals and bundled in ill-cured furs. Two were women, and two men; their leader was a huntress in middle age, straight backed. They did not lack dignity. The leader reminded me of the old
mehedin
that Sereth and I had met that day on the road to the summer tower, with a similar sense of pain carried uncomplaining and long. The group did not greet us, but stood and watched our progress for a time, then fell in behind us. They followed us all the way up the pass, and camped when we camped. Morrac and I walked with our hands on the hilts of our swords; Shu kept close behind with her own strange weapon drawn.

We chose an open place to camp, under the circumstances, but had difficulty lighting a fire in the strong wind that flew up the pass. Getting the spark to catch distracted me, and when at last I looked up I saw that the party had been joined by a fifth person, a girl. Her face was pale and peaked; she did not seem well and she shivered in the cold wind. She crept closer to the fire, her gaze on Morrac and me. Shu came round the corner of the rocks and stopped dead. The girl's companions made soft clucking sounds of alarm.

“Put up your blade,” I told Morrac.

He grinned. “If you say so,” he said, mocking.

The girl came closer. Her mouth worked, but she made no sound. She huddled in her furs close to the heat, and soon the others joined her, one by one. I knew that they sometimes made fires of their own; I presumed that they came to ensure her safety. They did not eat with us, though we offered them cooked rations, and remained sitting, their glassy gaze upon us. Morrac and I remained wakeful. Shu crawled inside the bivouac.

As the night wore away, Morrac said, “You sleep. You're more tired than I am; you're yawning. I'll keep watch.”

“It's all right,” I said. “I can stay awake.”

“Don't you trust me?” he asked.

I said nothing. Unless he was even more devious than I'd given him credit for, he hadn't touched a drop of alcohol since we left Tetherau. I wondered how loudly the world might be calling to him.

“Get some sleep,” he said irritably.

“Very well,” I said. I intended to lie down, nothing more, but Morrac was right. Sleep overtook me quickly, and I remember seeing him sitting by me, his eyes as golden in the firelight as the blade of his sword and the stars bright about his head.

In the morning, I again awoke to find all around me sleeping, except Morrac, who was perched on a rock nearby, whittling at his nails against the edge of his sword—a habit that always set my teeth on edge.

“I told you I wouldn't sleep,” he said, without looking up.

I wrapped myself more closely in my coat; the morning air was bitter cold. I could tell he was watching me, but I did not look at him. I kicked the embers of the fire into life; caught up by the wind they smoldered and flamed, sending a smell of charcoal into the morning air. Our companions began to stir, rising swiftly like animals, straight into wake-fulness, and Shu emerged sleepily from the bivouac.

Morrac coughed, and his breath rattled in his throat.

“You're not coming down with something, I hope?” I asked him, in some alarm. We were days from anywhere as far as I knew, in a wintry wind. And besides, he was intolerable when he was unwell.

“No, I'm perfectly all right,” he snapped. “Stop fussing. It's the smoke, that's all.”

He gathered up the bedding. We left the little band silently, looking after us, and walked on.

It was as well that we moved when we did. The clear sky of the previous few days had gone, and a great bank of cloud was beginning to build up over Etrery the mountain
that they call the Hall of Storms in Ettaic. It wore the towering anvil mass of cumulus. Shu said uneasily, “That carries more snow,” and she was right.

“You read the weather well,” I told her.

She smiled. “Where I come from, Eleres, it's barely necessary. The Weather Monitors take care of all that.” She'd told me about the spirits that governed the weather at whim in her world; it seemed very strange to me, to live in a place that was so controlled. Then she spoke once again into the charm at her wrist, and stood listening. She had done this regularly ever since we had begun our journey, but her companions had been silent.

“Nothing?” I asked.

“Still nothing. Eleres, I think something might have happened to them. It's been ages, now.”

And Mevennen was with them …

“You still haven't told me why this is so important,” I said.

She sighed, with evident frustration. “I'm sorry, Eleres. I can't explain it very easily; I think it's better if you see with your own eyes.”

I was going to press her but the wind was rising and the first snowflakes swirled down from the heavens. Hastily, we camped in a lee among the rocks, well away from the cliff face. We secured the bivouac fast to the hard earth, and sheltered beneath it to wait out the storm. The snow hit soon after, accompanied by a driving wind that drowned out all other sound. We understood the cold in the north, and knew how to avoid its seductive dangers. Morrac and I lay close together, backs against the rock, our breathing shallow. Shu lay by my side, fast asleep with her back to me. It was relatively warm in the bivouac, and shortly I drifted into a doze. When I awoke, Morrac's head lay against my arm, and he was embracing me. Despite the circumstances, he was aroused and his face in sleep wore a strained distractedness.
Then he woke up, groaned, and twisted his face into my shoulder.

“We haven't made love for so long,” he murmured.

“Well, we're not about to do so now,” I told him. It wasn't that I didn't want to, but I was exhausted and I didn't want to wake Shu. “It's not from choice.”

Soon after this incident, the snowstorm blew itself out in a last flurry of icy wind and we emerged from the heavy canopy of snow that had gathered upon the bivouac to find a bright and searing world. The skies were aquamarine, the color of a clear sea in summer, and cloudless; the red light of the sun spilled over the snow. Morrac stamped down the snowfield, kneading cold hands. His breath streamed out behind him. He seemed elated by the glittering world. Against my better judgment, affection for him welled up in me. Catching him up, I slipped my arm across his shoulders and he leaned against me for a moment. In spite of the frost that dusted his coat he was warm and solid and comforting, but we had to get on the move. Shu and I packed up the bivouac and we headed on into the hills.

Our passage along the string of lakes that star the mountains gradually became easier, and more familiar. Gradually, I realized that this was country I knew: lands not far from the House of Sephara, which had close ties with Aidi Mordha. Ithyris lived here, my long-ago love and present friend. As soon as I realized that I knew where we were, my spirits lifted a little. I suggested moving on to Sephara and Morrac readily agreed. Snow lay lightly along the lakeshores, and we drove a hard pace, skirting the higher, harder country. Summer had not lasted long in these heights. The lakewater had already frozen, and glossy sheets of ice stretched from shore to shore. When we camped again that evening, we watched the waterbirds sliding along the ice to search for a place thin enough to break and drink through. As darkness fell from the snow-lit sky they clustered along the edges of the icy shallows, to make easy hunting.

As we ate, and the mountains darkened against the virid-ian sky, Morrac said, “What of the
mehed
, in all this snow and the winter yet to come? Where do they go, do you think?”

“They know where to go. Some don't survive the winter; many do. They go wherever we went in the cold, when we were children.”

“I don't remember.”

“Just as we sleep for the whole of the darkest month, so do they, like the beasts.” I saw Shu's eyes widen at that. I went on. “I recall that time in Gehent—there was a cavern where a group lay sleeping. Do you remember, Morrac?” I could see it clearly: the bodies clustered together for warmth like the birds on the shore, wrapped in a rancid mass of furs, faces deformed by hard living, age, and disease, but closed and quiet now in the long winter sleep. And ourselves, too: fighting the urge to join them, lie down, go into the dreams of earth until the breath of spring on the wind led us to rise again and resume our lives. We had to keep moving or perish, and at last I remember that we had come to Sephara and spent the depth of winter sleeping there. It was the longest time that Morrac and I had ever spent together, both dreaming the same dreams, and that was the beginning of our affair. He remembered that, I knew, from the way he was looking at me now, and I turned away. We rose early in the cold light.

From Eil ai Heirath a pass called the Tongue leads over toward Sarthen. It is a narrow, meandering crack in the mountains, fringed in winter with frozen waterfalls, and it was necessary to tread softly and slowly so as not to bring the tall icicles down on one's head. We traversed the Tongue all day, looking forward to reaching Sephara. Before us, the shadow of a star ran and danced over the snow, driven by the high wisps of cloud that flew between its source and the world. At the top of the ridge, we stopped and looked back. I could see the land that emerged from the Tongue, a faded
blue in the distance, ridge after ridge disappearing into shadow at the end of the world. We were close to the ore mines, land that had been ruled by the Ettic lords five hundred years before. Yr En Lai was among them, a man who had also spoken with ghosts. From his next words, Morrac's mind was running along similar lines.

“How do you think they thought, the Ettic lords?” he asked idly.

“Much as we do, I suppose. They weren't so reflective, from what I've read. Pragmatists. They were ghost speakers, too. Yr En Lai's diaries are in the library at Sephara. He spoke with ghosts, hoped they could help him win power over the north.” Shu was listening intently, I noticed, and there was a frown on her face. I went on. “And it's said he went to Outreven. His ghosts promised him a lot, delivered his lover from the grip of the world, so they say.” I was silent for a moment. “He died at Tjara, long after.”

“He was a madman. He led his family into destruction; there's no one left now. No wonder he called on spirits.”

“They didn't help him in the end. He said they were very tall, and couldn't look at bright light.” I glanced at Shu, but she shook her head.

“I don't know who they could have been,” she murmured.

Morrac said nothing. We turned from the white distance and walked on. There seemed to be no one else in the world, but when we crossed a second ridge we saw a covey of mahar in the distance, running along the valley floor. They were hunting, for they belled and called in their human voices. But they were heading away up the valley toward their herd ground. We watched them as they ran, the long necks stretched out, powerful hind legs drumming the snow, and their whiplike tails whirled in the air.

“What are they after?” Shu said, straining to see.

“I can't tell. Maybe oroth … they'll be winter-white now, so you won't be able to see them.”

The sun sank behind cloud, a sudden smudge on the horizon. I could smell snow on the wind, blowing down from the northern heights. We walked on, into disaster.

It started as a prickle at the edges of awareness, a shiver down the nape of my neck. Giving Morrac a warning look, I did not stop, nor did I give any sign that I knew that we were being watched.

“Eleres?” Shu whispered, puzzled. “What's wrong?”

“Something's following us.”

“Are you sure?”