The Ghost Sister (38 page)

She tried not to think of long-lost Irie St Syre, and her comfortable, warm study, now far in the past. Tensing up, Shu scrambled through the hatch, hoping desperately that the floor wouldn't give way. She rolled sideways, coming up on the firm floor around the sides of the deck. And with an icy bolt of shock, she found herself face to face with Mevennen.

The woman's eyes were wide, her features distorted. Saliva trickled from one side of her mouth. She showed sharp teeth and snarled, reminding Shu of a Nipponese
No
mask. Evidently, the generator's closure had not yet taken full effect.

“Mevennen?” Shu said, softly soothing. Her heart hammered in her chest. She called down, “Bel Zhur? She's here. Stay there and keep quiet.” To the other she said, “Mevennen? It's all right. Nothing's going to happen.” She kept talking, murmuring quiet endearments beneath her breath as though she were coaxing a frightened animal. That analogy seemed apt; there was no awareness behind the woman's eyes. Shu inched forward, murmuring. Mevennen hissed through her teeth and lashed out at her, tearing through the sleeve of her jacket. Hastily, Shu jerked back, thoughts of Morrac spinning through her mind.

“All right, calm down, nothing's going to happen, everything's all right,” Shu muttered. Fleetingly, she wondered whether she was speaking to reassure Mevennen or herself. She edged around the platform to where Mevennen was now crouching. There, at what she thought was a safe distance, she stopped and held out her hand. Mevennen looked at it with the kind of bored disdain that a cat might exhibit, presented with a supposedly alluring toy. Ignoring the cramped discomfort in her calves, Shu sat back on her heels and waited. Mevennen was staring at her, warily suspicious.

“Everything's all right,” Shu said. “You're fine, everything's all right.” The stun gun lay across her knees, but with her arthritic joints Shu doubted that she'd be quick enough to use it. She thought:
The hunts and masques don
'
t last forever, and if the generator
'
s off… She
'
ll snap out of it at some point. I hope.

It occurred to her then that perhaps she had been wrong all along, that maybe the generator had nothing to do with the bloodmind. The thought snapped at her and she had to stifle a sudden, hysterical laugh. So she kept murmuring soothingly, and eventually the tension seemed to ebb a little from Mevennen's shoulders.

Mevennen turned her head, to gaze out across the ruins of Outreven. Shu followed her gaze, falling silent, and soon lost track of the time. It seemed as though they were sitting in some perpetual present, with the half-light changing the mountain wall to a soft mauve, and the stars at the horizon's edge almost too faint to be seen. Slowly, Shu sank into a distant awareness of her own, letting her racing thoughts pass by, stilling her mind to quietness, and as she did this, so Mevennen seemed to grow calm. Shu began to breathe, counting as she did so: ten counts in and ten counts out. And gradually Mevennen began to breathe with her, her breast rising and falling with the same rhythm. At last Shu turned to look at her, and the light was back behind Mevennen's eyes.

“Mevennen?” Shu said.

And the woman whispered uncertainly, “I'm here.
Shu?
” Panic crossed her face; she caught her lip between her teeth so hard that it bled. “The world's
gone.
I can't feel it any more. I'm
landblind.
”

“Let's go down, shall we?” Shu said, trying to hide her dismay. The moment in which she turned her back on Mevennen to go down through the hatch was an unpleasant one, and she felt the skin tense between her shoulder blades, but nothing struck. She found Bel on the platform below.
The girl stared in horror as Mevennen followed her down. Whatever change the Mondhaith woman had undergone was still plain in her face.

“Everything's all right,” Shu said, and was appalled to hear her voice wavering. “Let's go, Bel.”

But Bel Zhur had to help her down to the bottom of the tower, and as they made their unsteady way across the caldera to the aircar, Shu realized with a sudden cold shock that Outreven was indeed different. The humming had stopped.

In the morning, I woke early to a pearly gray light filtering through the window: the winter sun reflected from the snow. Ithyris was gone. I dressed, putting my coat on for the room was cold, and went downstairs. People came in and out, and greeted me. Someone gave me breakfast. I meandered about, went outside to look at the weather: a clear morning with frost sparkling across the flags but surprisingly no more snow. The roofs were covered, however, and occasionally a load detached itself and slid in an eerie rush to the ground. Along the stable roof sat a row of birds, fluffed up against the cold and whispering, more arctic migrants. Their ruffled feathers were the color of earth: a rich, dark brown.

Under the stable roof, someone was working an anvil, sending showers of sparks to fall across the frosty ground. The hammer tapped methodically, making the flinty sound that is called the “voice of
eresthahan.
” I did not recognize the woman who stood above it, but she seemed to know me for she smiled as she plunged the hot metal into a pail. Steam rose up, and there was an astringent odor of burning.

Ithyris was in the storerooms, going over sacks of grain. She would do this, obsessively, every day throughout the winter until the time when she slept. She ran Sephara, as
Luta ran Aidi Mordha, and Eluide is a kinder country than Munith.

“You'll be all right, this year?” I asked her.

“Until the time when we're not,” she replied grimly. “I think we will be, though—as far as the sleep, anyway, and after that we can hunt. We worked hard this summer, up on the high fields. Sephara's so isolated. It's down to us if we live or die.” She sighed and straightened up, then she stiffened. Her face twisted. She said in a frightened whisper, “Eleres?”

My skin prickled with static. There was the sudden taste of metal in my mouth, and a blinding pain at the back of my eyes. The light that streamed in through the open doorway was suddenly black as night. It was as though the world had been turned upside down. Someone cried out. The ground was rough and cold beneath my hands and knees. At last, through the pain, I realized that I could see again. And I knew that the world had changed. All at once, over the course of a lightning moment, the color and the life had drained out of it and it seemed as lacking in dimension as a picture.

As if in a nightmare, I reached out with my usual senses, seeking the presence of the world around me, but those senses were gone as if they had never been. The storeroom was full of ghosts, staring wide-eyed and aghast at one another, and I was one of them. It was as though I'd been suddenly struck blind, and then the little part of my mind that hadn't retreated into shock realized why; that was exactly what had happened. I was landblind, just like my sister Mevennen. Ithyris was ashen faced, and leaning against the wall for support.

“Eleres?” she whispered again, and even my name sounded strange. Numbly, I sat down on a block of stone. I heard Ithyris say, in utter grief, “It's
gone.
The world's gone.”

I had always wondered what it would be like to be dead, and now I knew. “What happened?” I whispered.

Ithyris's eyes were wide and frightened in the dim light. She glanced wonderingly down at her hands and answered, “I don't know.”

I don't remember much about those next hours.We made our way back into the house, though it was hard to walk even that short distance. My balance was wrecked. As we stepped through the door, it started to snow again. But when I stumbled to the window and gazed out, the landscape beyond was nothing more than a moving image—like shadow puppets on the firelit wall. There was no longer any connection between myself and the world. Nor could I sense the presence of anyone else. I could see and hear them, but something vital was lacking.

Toward dusk, Ithyris rose from her huddled position by the fire and said unsteadily, “Whatever curse has befallen us, someone's still got to feed the mur and the birds. I'm going out.”

“I'll come with you,” I said, anxious for something to do and telling myself that it might not be so bad once I got outside, perhaps it would wear off… But it was exactly the same as before. Our feet rang hollowly on the frozen ground. Numbly, Ithyris and I threw grain to the birds. Ithyris turned to reach for another handful, and I heard her gasp.

I turned to see what she was looking at, and received a shock almost as great as the landblindness itself. My sister Mevennen was standing in the doorway.

She stood straight, dressed in strange green clothes, and there was an indefinable air about her, a new confidence. Then I realized what it was. Mevennen no longer seemed like a ghost, and I knew then that it was because there was no longer any difference between us.

“Mevennen,” I breathed, and next moment her arms were around my neck. Ithyris was gaping in amazement. I whispered, “I thought I'd never see you again … I thought it was all a lie … Oh, Mevennen. How
are
you?”

“Different,” said Mevennen, into my ear. “And cold.” She stepped back to look at me, still clasping my hands. “Eleres,” she whispered. “They've changed us. They've done something to us, I know it.”

“I'm landblind,” I said. The words rang down the air.

“Eleres … I've been to Outreven. It's real; I've seen it. And there's something there, something underneath the ruins … A room that looks empty, but isn't. And the ghosts did something to it.”

“Ghosts?” I said. “Have you seen Shu?”

She nodded. “Yes, I've seen her. Eleres, that room healed me. Suddenly I was human, and the bloodmind—I don't remember much. But Shu found me. And then I was land-blind again.”

“When was this?”

“Today.”

“
Today?
” And then I remembered Shu telling me of the flying boat, which could take people swiftly from place to place. I put my hand to my head, trying to make sense of it. “Shu. Is she all right? She tried to help me, and then when the ai Staren attacked …” I sat down heavily on a nearby ledge. I was still finding it difficult to keep my balance. I felt vertiginous, as though I were standing on the edge of a precipice.

“She told me about that,” Mevennen said. “When she found me, she took me back to the camp. She wanted to do something to—the thing in the room, but Bel—another ghost—had sealed it off. Shu told me that we were taking the boat, without Bel and the third woman. Shu said she needed help, that she couldn't do it on her own.”

“Do what?”

“I don't know. I said I'd go with her, but only on condition we came to find you. Shu argued, but I insisted. Eventually she agreed—they've only got one boat now; the other's in Tetherau where she left it, and her companions can't get to Outreven without a boat. So I told her we had
time. We didn't even know if you were still alive. But she'd heard you talk about Sephara, and it's the nearest settlement, so we came here. The boat's down on the shore.” She added, bitterly, “I might have known my healing would never last.”

“Do you have any idea why
we
'
re
landblind now?”

“No, not really. Shu tried to explain it to me, but I don't understand the words. It has to do with the magical book, which the legends say lie under Outreven. That book connects us to the world, somehow, and now the book has been closed.”

Ithyris shivered, suddenly. “It's cold out here,” she muttered. She wrapped her arms around herself. “Let's go inside.”

It was still strange, walking without my normal senses. I kept reeling as though I were drunk, and Ithyris was the same. Only Mevennen walked without hesitation and it was an irony, that of us all she should be best prepared for disaster because of her long illness.

At last we got back indoors, where we found Morrac still sitting blankly in front of the fire. The stunned expression on his face must have mirrored my own.

“Mevennen?” he whispered.

Mevennen sat down on a footstool, fiddling with her long braid. Morrac, never one to spare others'feelings, leaned forward and for once I was glad that he'd stepped into the breach.

“What
happened
to you, Mevennen?” he said incredulously. “And what's happened to us?”

So, haltingly at first as though she might not be believed, Mevennen told us the whole of her long, strange story. She told us how she had journeyed to Outreven in the boat flown by the ghosts. She told us of a labyrinth beneath the settlement, and a place that makes you dream of what is not there and changes you. She told us of the presences she had sensed in the labyrinth of passages, and she said that she believed now that one of them had been the Jhuran: the first
ancestor of our kind. Mur and man; animal and human, crouching in the shadows.

“I don't know if it was really there or not,” she said, frowning. “But I've dreamed about it since and it talks to me in my dreams. It's old and wise and a ghastly mistake.”

“A mistake?” I asked. “How's that?”

“I don't know. But there's a wrongness about it, as though it should never have been created.”

Like us
, I thought.

Morrac snorted.

“I know of one who should never have been,” he snapped.

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“
Her
,” he hissed, pointing at Mevennen. “Your sister and her sickness and her ghost dealings. No wonder we're all cursed. Kill her and let's have an end to it.” He was rising from his seat. The landblindness which had paralyzed him had fallen away; he was sinuous, dangerous. And this was not the bloodmind, I realized with dismay. This was human rage. I reached for my sword, but the firelight picked up a blur of light, lancing down onto the table. Ithyris's blade was between them. I didn't even see her draw.

“Not in my house,” she said. “Not here.” And I stepped between Morrac and my sister, as I had once done long ago.

“Mevennen,” I said, reaching for her hand. “Come with me. We're leaving.”

They all stared at me. “Where are we going?” she asked. “I told Shu I'd come back.”