The Witness for the Dead

by Katherine Addison

  The Amal’othala was an elven man of excellent lineage (a cousin of Prince Orchenis, though not on the house side). He was short and rather stout, and although his eyes were weak, he refused to wear spectacles, making his canons serve as his eyes instead. He dressed always in the bullion-stiff robes of his office (unlike the Archprelate, who wore his robes of office only when strictly necessary, most times being content with a canon’s frock coat), and his elaborately dressed and jeweled hair was almost certainly a wig.

  When he came out of the othasmeire, he looked at me blankly for a moment, then scowled. “Celehar,” he said. “We have not been hearing good things about you.”

  “It is not true, Holiness,” I said, hearing desperation leak into my voice.

  “That’s as may be,” said the Amal’othala, “when we have Mer Duhalar telling everyone who will listen that you are a fraud.”

  “Holiness, you must know—”

  “Oh, do be quiet, Celehar. What we know is not the question. It is all the people who have trusted you. Those are the people who will doubt and who must be given proof. That is the purpose of a trial by ordeal.”

  Horribly, I understood his reasoning, and I could not argue with it. My petitioners needed to trust me, or what good was it to speak to the dead? A trial by ordeal would naturally be in all the newspapers. If I passed it, Mer Duhalar would be silenced.

  If I passed it.

  “Traditionally,” the Amal’othala said, “the trial by ordeal has been a concoction of asteliär.”

  Women wore asteliär in their hair to rebuff an importunate suitor. If the dose was small enough, a person might survive swallowing the distillate of its flowers, but only after days of vomiting. And it would be terribly easy for the dose to be just that fraction too large.

  “However,” said the Amal’othala, “we do not approve of the use of asteliär. It is far too crude. We prefer a trial that in fact involves the favor of Ulis.”

  I did not know whether to be encouraged or dismayed. Before I had to decide, he continued, “We set your trial, Thara Celehar, as a pilgrimage tonight to the top of the Hill of Werewolves, there to stay until dawn.”

  “They say the dead walk the Hill of Werewolves,” I said, uncertain if I had understood the Amal’othala’s intention correctly.

  “Oh yes,” said the Amal’othala. “It’s quite true. But that shouldn’t bother a true Witness for the Dead.”

  “And the wolves?”

  “Are a folktale,” the Amal’othala said with serene confidence. “People don’t turn into wolves, Celehar. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “And you think Mer Duhalar will agree this is a sufficient trial?”

  He gave me a stern, undecipherable look. “There was a man who failed, about five years ago, one of those frauds who claim Ulis’s direct blessing without even having been so much as a novice. He was found at the foot of the hill in the morning, weeping uncontrollably and with his clothing torn to rags. It is a sufficient trial.”

  I wanted to argue several points. I said the only thing I could: “Thank you, Holiness.”

  * * *

  I was kept in the Amalomeire all afternoon—the Amal’othala suggested that I might like to practice my devotions, and even without the command semi-hidden in the suggestion, I decided he was right. I was glad to retreat to the Amalomeire’s chapel to Ulis, dark and quiet and deep in the rock of Osreian’s Spur.

  The chapel was itself a relic of a much older tradition in the worship of Ulis, in which one had to earn the honor of worshiping Ulis in a sacred space; the chapel could only be reached by descending a long, dark shaft, a natural chimney made into a ladder by means of handholds and footholds carved out of the rock. Such chapels were not uncommon, and there were still ascetics who spent their devotional hours in desolate places, carving ladders in rock, providing such chapels for those who felt they had to go even farther out of their way before Ulis would listen to them. For my part, I no longer believed it mattered whether Ulis listened to me. What was important was that I had to listen to him.

  It took me a few moments after I had reached the floor of the chapel to quiet my heart rate and breathing. The tall lanterns burned steadily in their sconces, carved elaborately with night creatures like bats and cougars. It was the job of one of the junior canons to climb down here every day at sunset and refill the lanterns and trim their wicks. In theory, they never went out, but sometimes the canon might have to make the climb by the light of only one lantern. Very occasionally, they might get halfway down and discover that there was no light at all in the chapel. That was not considered an excuse to turn back and was why the job was given to a canon rather than a novice.

  There was no altar; the space itself, hollowed from the great weight of the rock, was altar enough. I did not kneel, not wanting the bruises on my shins and kneecaps, but stood barefoot in the center of the chamber, between the two lanterns and in front of the shaft leading up to the kitchens, and did my best to quiet my mind so that I might hear Ulis if he was inclined to speak to me waking. Thus far in my experience, he had spoken to me only in dreams, but that might only mean I had not been listening carefully enough.

  I moved through the Devotion of the Moon—appropriate to any nighttime undertaking—trying to let go of any thoughts besides the long-familiar prayers, a task which was significantly harder than usual. Every time I dragged myself away from wondering about the Hill of Werewolves, I found myself thinking about Mer Duhalar and the rumors he was spreading. How had he known? For he couldn’t have hit upon the scandal at random. Had it been talked about in Amalo? Surely not—Aveio was far away and isolated, and the Duhalada was not one of its houses. But he could not have known simply by looking at me that I had once had an affair with a married man.

  Here, I caught myself and returned my attention to the Devotion of the Moon. But the next time my mind wandered, it picked up right where it had left off. He could not have known. Even the fact that I was marnis was not visible on my face or clothes. If it had been, I would have suffered even more greatly as a novice, and the othas’ala of Aveio would never have let me stay long enough to prove that I could quiet ghouls. But then I remembered I was well known in Amalo for having caught the Curneisei who had killed the emperor. Who was to say what stories had not trickled north from the Untheileneise Court? Who was to say the whole city did not know my past?

  Here, I caught myself again, leading my mind like a wayward child back to the prayers of the devotions. But within minutes, my mind went back to the Hill of Werewolves and the stories I had heard about it.

  The dead walked there at night, but it was also a place of disappearances: a child runs ahead of his nurse on a twisting path and can never later be found; a young man is dared to spend the night there alone and is never seen again; a gardener, long accustomed to tending the public lawns at the foot of the hill, fails to return home one night.… And that was without even considering the stories of werewolves, the hulking half-elven monsters that guarded a fabulous treasure and that were said to go hunting in the streets around the hill on moonless nights. I had heard many different stories to account for them and the treasure they guarded—a curse, an ancient people driven underground by the advent of elves, even an experiment by a university student gone terribly wrong. I had never been able to decide how much or how many of the stories to believe, but I found I remembered every one.

  I returned my vagrant attention to the Devotion of the Moon, knowing it would not stay there.

  By the time the canon came climbing down the shaft like a blot of shadows, I was glad to see him. He bowed to me nervously, opened a hidden cupboard, and began to refill the lamps. I stayed a moment longer, trying to find some tiny measure of tranquility, then climbed back up to the kitchens, where another canon was waiting for me.

  “Othala Celehar,” she said, bowing. “We are Canon Varlenin. The Amal’othala has assigned us to witness your trial.”

  “Surely His Holiness does not intend you to accompan
y us,” I said, a little horrified.

  “No, not that. Here,” she said, and pointed me to where someone had thoughtfully left some cold chicken and generously buttered sourdough bread that would do very well as dinner. “We are to wait at the gate to the Hill of Werewolves with the key. There is only one gate.”

  I ate quickly and drank two cups of water from the kitchen spigot.

  “We regret that you are in for a long and uncomfortable night,” I said to Canon Varlenin as I put on my shoes.

  She was too well bred to shrug and too well trained to smile. She said, “It is no matter. Please follow me, for the Amal’othala wishes your trial to begin at moonrise.”

  I followed her back up through the Amalomeire, buzzing with canons and novices and prelates like a wasps’ nest. The climb down the face of Osreian’s Spur was, if anything, worse than the climb up, since it was harder to avoid the dizzying view; I stared grimly at Canon Varlenin’s back and did not fall, despite the puddles and slick stair-treads that said it had rained, and heavily, while I was too deep in the rock to hear it.

  Another two-wheeler, this one marked with the Amal’othala’s signet, and we rattled across Amalo in fine style and at top speed. The Hill of Werewolves was in the northern corner of the Veren’malo, and I wasn’t sure we could make it by moonrise. Our driver, though, by consistently choosing less-traveled roads—and with a preternatural ability to predict and avoid road blockages—delivered us to the gate before the first sliver of the moon rose over the horizon.

  Canon Varlenin got out of the two-wheeler with me and unlocked the gate. “We will wait,” she said. “The Amal’othala has instructed us to open the gate at dawn.”

  “We understand,” I said, trying not to sound as grim as I felt. None of this situation was Canon Varlenin’s fault. “Wait. Let us leave this with you.” I shrugged out of my coat of office; it was too valuable to wear for climbing a great stone hill in the middle of the night.

  “Of course,” said Canon Varlenin, accepting the coat and folding it neatly across her arm.

  I walked through the gate, and she closed it behind me. “Good luck, othala,” she said, softly enough that we could both pretend she hadn’t.

  * * *

  The land around the Hill of Werewolves was a public park, beautifully laid out and beautifully maintained. Despite the stories, the Werewolf Gardens were in fact a very popular promenade, although people were careful to go in pairs and everyone left well before dusk.

  I shivered and wished for the terrible mustard-yellow coat.

  The Amal’othala had specified the top of the hill, and I knew there was an ancient ulimeire up there, where once the soldiers of the Warlord of Amalo had received their burials. Some stories said that those soldiers were the dead who walked, although I had never heard a story that explained why.

  The moon was near full and provided plenty of light, at least down here on the public paths. My first task was to find the path to the top of the hill. I walked the long curves of the public pathways, looking for breaks in the ornamental hedges that ringed the hill like fortifications. I thought at first that there was no break, that I was going to have to force my way through the hedge, but then my eye was caught by a trickery of shadow, and I saw that the gardeners had done their best to both leave the way to the path open—for people made pilgrimages to the Ulimeire of Werewolves and it was illegal to block a pilgrim’s path—and to hide it so that no one not actively seeking it should stumble across it. I slipped through the opening and started up the hill.

  The path, paved in ancient flagstones, meandered a good deal; I resisted the impulse to try to take a shortcut, even in places where it looked reasonable. I was halfway up the hill before I encountered the first ghost.

  Ghosts were not as common as folktales and novels would have had one believe. In fact, it was surpassingly rare to have a spirit of the dead who could be seen by laypersons; I had never encountered one before, although I had seen a few walking spirits. But this was a ghost. I knew it as such, and I could never have mistaken it for anything else.

  It was clearly a man who had died in war. He was streaked and spattered with blood, and he wore the leather kilt of the ancient Amaleise soldiers. He was staring at his bare and empty hands and screaming soundlessly as he walked along the path. It seemed to be the same path I was using. I got out of the way, crawlingly certain that I did not want him to touch me—and that was a feeling I had never had about the dead before, not once in my entire life.

  He walked past without registering my presence; I told myself it was much too early in the evening to become hysterical and continued up the path.

  The next ghost was crouched in the middle of the path. He was covered in blood because his entrails were falling out against the desperate pressure of his hands. He might have been screaming, too; I never saw his face. I edged past him, almost shuddering with the conviction that he was going to reach out and catch my ankle, even though it was readily apparent that he was preoccupied—and that was if he could even sense my presence, which was a question I had never thought to ask before and had no answer to.

  The next two ghosts were not directly on the path, but in a stand of trees off to the right. They were locked in combat, trading tremendous blows with their short swords. Both were badly wounded, but neither seemed to have noticed; I saw nothing but hatred on their faces, animal snarls that made them look almost like twins.

  I got past them only to be confronted by another pair, a soldier dragging a Ulineise prelate. The soldier looked identical to the others I had seen, but he was clearly the enemy; he had what had to be an excruciating grip in the prelate’s hair and was jerking him along the path as if he were tugging the lead rope of a recalcitrant donkey. The prelate, scrabbling to keep off his knees, was pleading with the soldier—I could see his desperate expression and his mouth moving although I could not make sense of the words—but it had no effect. I stayed frozen a moment too long, and the soldier dragged the prelate directly through me.

  I lurched off the path and was violently sick in the bushes. I stayed there for some time, gasping for breath, before I wiped my face with my handkerchief and got to my feet. It took an intense effort to make myself regain the path, and my heart was hammering when I did.

  The path was empty of ghosts.

  I proceeded gingerly, as if the earth might open and swallow me with my next step. I knew I was being ridiculous, but it was simply beyond my capacity to stride confidently ahead as if there were no ghosts at all. And anyway, I said bleakly to myself, I had all night.

  I traversed two switchbacks and found myself at the foot of a set of stairs carved into the hill. The stairs were very steep and the treads very narrow, so that the effect was almost more like a ladder than a flight of stairs. The middle of each step was deeply bowed, which did not make them easier to climb.

  I struggled up the stairs, cursing the slick soles of my shoes. Even court shoes as plain as mine, with no tooling and buckles instead of ribbons or laces, were not meant for this sort of exercise (which was precisely why I had taken them off before descending to the chapel in the Amalomeire). Once I nearly fell and had to clutch at the stairs, scraping my palms raw. Between fear and exertion, I was panting by the time I achieved the top.

  I had gone no more than five steps from the stairs when I was suddenly surrounded by ghosts. There were dozens of them—or perhaps it was more accurate to say that there was one ghost and that the ghost of a battle. Everywhere I looked men were killing each other. The fighting was terrible, made worse, much worse, by the complete silence. I did not wonder at the man who had been found weeping at the foot of the hill.

  I certainly preferred this trial to asteliär and it was by any fair measure an ordeal. But the Amal’othala was wrong. These ghosts had nothing to do with my calling or the favor of Ulis. Anyone could see them and no one could talk to them, and whether one made it through the night without going to pieces was purely a matter of courage and steady nerve. Th
e ghosts were caught in their repeated motions, this same agony played out over and over again. Or perhaps the Amal’othala was more subtle than I thought, and the trial was not getting to the ulimeire, but staying there the entire night, surrounded by death and unable to do anything about it, unable either to ease the suffering these men had gone through or to stop the endless performance of their deaths.

  I watched the path, not looking up, and only twice had to stop to avoid walking through a ghost. Much as I tried not to notice anything about them, I saw that both sides wore the same style of armor, so that there was no way even to guess at the identity of the aggressor. My knowledge of the history of Amalo was not sufficient to provide any clues, and I had no idea what victory would mean—had meant—for either side.

  I reminded myself that whatever this battle had been about, and whoever had won, it had happened centuries ago. I could not change what had happened, could not stop the brutal slaughter surrounding me.

  I watched my feet and presently came to another set of stairs, these broad and shallow and curving in a slow spiral toward—I dared a glance up—the top of the Hill of Werewolves.

  I was too exhausted to run, but I climbed the stairs as fast as I could.

  The ulimeire that had stood at the summit of the hill was in ruins; the ghostly battle going on around me was probably why. It had been round and almost as small as a chapel. If there had ever been an altar, it had been torn down so thoroughly that no trace of it remained. There was just the rocky, mostly barren crest of the hill and a circle of stumps where the columns had been. It would have been a desolate place even in daylight, even without the ghost of a dying man lying across the threshold.

  I slowly skirted the perimeter—unable to convince myself that it was safe to cross the open space—looking for the pilgrim’s cache, where the tokens of pilgrimage would be kept. It wasn’t uncommon for the cache to be concealed as a last station on the pilgrim’s journey; usually I would have enjoyed the challenge, but tonight I kept turning to look at the ghosts, as if they might be reaching for me, even though I knew full well the idea was ridiculous.