‘I fear he may be.’
‘But why did either Vak or Artemo go to their own homes, on arriving in Ekamet? Why didn’t they go straight to the Order?’
‘Perhaps they tried. The Temple is closed at night, naturally. If they arrived in the pre-dawn, perhaps they had intended to make contact with the Order in the morning.’
‘And were prevented,’ Tasha said slowly. ‘And the eyes?’
‘Ah. I don’t precisely know what that might have been about, but it puts me in mind of… this link with Marja, it is persistent. You have consulted Marjan folklore?’
‘Didn’t think of that,’ said Tasha. ‘But now I will. I have one more question.’
‘Ask it, and quickly. Time presses.’
True; Tasha wanted all the help for Nanda that Katya could muster. Hastily she said: ‘The bone-knives must be significant. Do you think it probable that our two victims might ever have — well, murdered anybody?’
Katya’s face darkened. ‘They were not merely “victims”, they were good men. Among the best. They could not possibly have committed such a crime.’
‘Ah,’ said Tasha. ‘Forgive me, but… hardly anyone or anything is just evil. Crimes are committed by people, all kinds of people. Even good ones, under the right (or wrong) circumstances.’
‘Nonetheless, most people are not capable of murder, and those two men certainly were not. It is inconceivable.’
Tasha said no more. She might privately disagree with Katya’s personal belief — everyone was capable of murder — but her answer was emphatic enough. And she’d known both men, Artemo especially.
Katya waited for further comment, and when Tasha made none, she nodded. ‘I wish you luck, Malykant,’ she said. ‘Avenge my men for me. They did not deserve this.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ said Tasha.
‘Do better,’ Katya snapped. ‘The Malykant does not fail.’
Chapter Seven
The Gatekeeper vanished mid-sentence, again.
He’d often done so. Nanda had found it startling, at first — rude, even — until she recollected that people did not cease to expire, just because she personally had need of their Guide into the Deathlands. He had, at intervals, to go and intercept some freshly-deceased soul, and dispatch it to its destined spot.
It, no. He, or she; these were people, or recently had been. They were not featureless objects. But it could be hard to keep hold of such mortal concepts in the city of the dead. The longer she wandered those hushed streets, the more her own life receded from her mind and heart, and the more she felt like a shade herself. Insubstantial, detached, ethereal.
She had, sometimes, to remind herself why she was there at all. Konrad. She was there for Konrad.
The city was of no help. It lacked substance or continuity, shifting with every step she took. She passed an occasional soul, adrift about the city on some business of its — no, his or her — own, and the buildings around them rippled and altered in response. Did anything here have a fixed character of its own, or did it change moment to moment, sensitive to the memories of those who inhabited it? On one occasion, halfway along an endlessly curling street, she saw a small house tucked into a connecting alley. So similar was it to her mother’s erstwhile abode, the same house in which Nanda herself had grown up, she changed direction at once, and all but ran down the alley to reach it. But once she arrived upon its doorstep, the familiar dark brick walls and small, thickly-glazed windows were gone; she stared up at a simple white-washed structure which did not speak to her at all, and wondered if she had imagined it.
This, above everything else, put the fear of the Deathlands into her. For if it was responding to her as it responded to its ghostly inhabitants, did that mean that she, too, was losing her grip on life?
‘Might we hurry?’ she said, the next time the Gatekeeper reappeared.
‘We are hurrying,’ he said, walking along beside her again with his too-long stride.
‘You cannot whisk me away with you, the way you do with the dead?’
His sideways glance was amused. ‘Not unless you, too, would like to die.’
‘Oh.’
‘The living have too much…’
‘Substance?’ Nanda guessed.
‘Yes. That.’
‘Where is Konrad, then, and how far is it to get there?’
‘You grow impatient.’
‘Unsettled, perhaps.’
‘That is wisdom. Your “Konrad” waits at the Tree.’
‘The Soul-Tree?’ Nanda said, startled. ‘It is real?’
‘I do not know what the living say of it.’
‘Many conflicting things, but the tales I have heard say that it harvests memory.’
‘It has been known to do that.’
‘And once all the memories have been taken, and weighed, then a soul may pass on.’
‘Weighed?’ said the Gatekeeper. ‘Judged? No. But the memories are taken, yes. Or what else did you think this place is made of?’ He swept out a long, thin arm, indicating the entire city of the dead in its eerie half-light.
‘If we do not hurry, Konrad will have no memories left.’
‘We are hurrying,’ said the Gatekeeper again.
And his body will die, Nanda added privately to herself. Her fae would do their best to keep his mortal shell from succumbing to decay, but they were but minor spirits, not gods. There was only so long they could hold him.
‘I do not think the concept of hurrying exists here,’ she said, tension making her snappish.
‘Ordinarily,’ said the Gatekeeper, ‘I go nowhere, save to fetch and carry. This is refreshing.’
‘You are sight-seeing.’
‘Are not you?’
She had been; she could not deny it. ‘Where is the Tree?’ she said.
‘I believe we will reach it in a year of your days.’
‘A year!’
That amused, sideways glance again. ‘Or perhaps an hour.’
‘You do not know?’
‘Perhaps I don’t. Perhaps there is no such thing as distance, in the Deathlands.’
That made a horrible kind of sense. Nanda’s heart sank.
‘Or perhaps I indulge myself at your expense.’
‘You are teasing me.’
‘I admit to amusing myself. I have not had company in some time, either.’
Nanda, swallowing a rising wrath, reminded herself that she was dependent on this odd person’s goodwill. ‘I am grateful for yours,’ she said, instead of the curses that had risen to her lips.
‘My what?’
‘Company.’
‘Oh.’ He seemed startled at that, for his glance this time was surprised, and then appraising, and he said no more.
She sought for something else to say, some other way of hurrying him along without simply repeating might we hurry, for that had done no good. But a wisp of light caught her eye, a familiar glimmer; how could that be? Nothing could be familiar to her in this place.
But it was. A clear, ghostly light, and with it a sickly green glow…
‘Eetapi?’ she gasped. ‘Ootapi! Say that it is you. I do not imagine this, too, do I?’
The twin lights drifted nearer. You give yourself too much credit, said Eetapi tartly. Could you imagine anything half so beautiful?
We are beautiful, said Ootapi, with a kind of wonder, as though the idea had seemed impossible to him before. And so are you, Nanda.
Not knowing how to take that, Nanda let it pass. Whatever these bloodthirsty creatures considered beauty to consist of, probably it was nothing she wanted to resemble. ‘Tell me Konrad is with you,’ she said.
He is! carolled Eetapi.
But Nanda looked and looked, and did not see him. Ahead of them stretched yet another bland street, cobbled and wide and winding, and empty.
He was, said Ootapi, stopping in mid-air. He turned about, and soared back down the street. Eetapi followed.
Abandoning all thought, Nanda ran too.
/> She found him almost at once, just around the next turn in the road. There was not much left of him; as a ghost, he did much resemble the person he had been when he was alive. But she knew him anyway, would know him anywhere.
He had turned aside, and stood staring up at the façade of a humble house. Out of step with those around it, this house was shorter, narrower, meaner, shabbier; a meagre abode for an impecunious dweller. Konrad, though, was arrested by it. Before Nanda could reach him, he had drifted through its front door — which, suddenly, hung open — and faded from view.
Nanda dashed after him.
‘Konrad,’ she panted, reaching the bottom of a narrow set of stairs. She set her foot upon the first step — and the stairs dissolved into smoke. The air shimmered, and reformed itself. Where a narrow passage had been, there now came another house, another hall: her own mother’s. Nanda had strayed into her own memories, and had lost Konrad to his.
‘Konrad!’ she shouted. ‘Konrad.’ She stopped, breathless and exhausted and weak, and laid her forehead against the cool wood-panelled wall of her own childhood home. ‘Konrad,’ she sighed. ‘Do not again go wallowing in the past, I beg of you. Not now.’ Regret would strand him in the Deathlands forever, for the one place Nanda could not follow was into the depths of his own past — those years before she had ever known him at all.
You lost him, she heard Eetapi hiss. How could you lose him?
I didn’t, snarled Ootapi. YOU lost him, you were—
‘Serpents!’ Nanda snapped. ‘This isn’t the time. Can you get him back?’
The Gatekeeper, absent a moment before, was at her elbow. ‘It takes people that way,’ he said, making her jump.
‘What does?’
‘Memory.’
‘Regret,’ said Nanda bitterly. ‘Konrad is amazing at it.’
‘A singularly futile pursuit.’
‘Try telling him that.’ She paused, drew in a breath. ‘Maybe you can tell him that.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes. I cannot follow him, but you can. Please. Go drag him out of the ocean of self-reproach he’s hurled himself into.’
‘I cannot,’ said the Gatekeeper.
‘But all this way, you’ve—’
‘I cannot, unless he wants to be retrieved.’ The Gatekeeper shrugged, looking curiously about at Mother’s house. ‘If he has found his appointed place here, I cannot change that.’
‘You’re the Gatekeeper. Of course you can.’
‘You must have me confused with someone else.’ The Gatekeeper, or the Guide, turned cold eyes upon her, and she remembered that, whatever his manner, he was not her friend. He was not even human. ‘I am not The Malykt, only His servant. I ensure the deceased reach their appointed places in the Deathlands, and that is all.’
‘This is not his appointed place.’
‘He seems to feel differently.’
Nanda abandoned the argument. What if he’s right? whispered her heart. What if Konrad doesn’t want to come home?
What if, this time, he truly wants to die?
Nanda squashed the traitorous voice. ‘Serpents,’ she said. ‘It’s down to you. I cannot follow Konrad, but maybe you can. You’ve known him for longer than I have.’
‘And you are dead,’ softly said the Gatekeeper. ‘This place has no love for the living.’
We will try, said Eetapi.
‘Don’t try,’ said Nanda tightly. ‘Do it. Find him. Bring him back.’
***
‘Konrad,’ said a dear, dear voice, achingly familiar, so long lost as to be almost forgotten.
Almost, but never quite.
He’d looked up.
There she was, leaning out of an upper window in the house they had once shared. Enadya. Her hair, black and wavy like mother’s, hung in a loose, tangled mass; she was always impatiently scraping it back, binding it up, and still it fell down. She wore her favourite shade of red, and it became her, but her dress was faded and beginning to fray. He ought to get her another, somehow.
‘Kon!’ she said, waving and smiling, and he smiled back, feeling the weight of too many years drop away like empty air.
‘Ena,’ he whispered. ‘You’re — all right.’
‘Of course I am all right,’ she’d said, laughing. ‘Though I’ve missed you. Are you coming in?’
Was he? Yes, of course. Why not? Had he been doing something…
The door of the little house swung open, and he heard his sister’s voice again, calling him from within.
Konrad went through the door.
She waited for him at the top of the narrow stairs, the wooden ones that creaked with every step. And her arms went around him and he held her again, little sister, whom he had so terribly failed. Apologies spilled from his lips, and the tears would have poured from the eyes he no longer possessed, had he substance enough to make them.
She said nothing. Why wasn’t she saying anything? He pulled back to look at her, and wished he had not, for all her laughing welcome was gone. ‘Where were you?’ she said, cold now. ‘Where were you that day? How could you leave me alone? How could you let them hurt me?’
The same words he had so often reproached himself with, only in her beloved voice, her beautiful dark eyes hard and unsympathetic as she looked at him.
‘I didn’t mean—’ he gasped. ‘I had no idea— if I’d known I never would have left you alone—’
She said nothing, only looked at him.
It wasn’t enough. Whatever excuse he came up with, it was his fault she had died. He’d stolen and he shouldn’t have. He had transgressed, and she had paid the price.
He had avenged her, but it hadn’t mattered. Nothing had changed, and nothing ever would.
Master, shrieked a distant voice, incongruous in the midst of this house, this pain. It was… other. It did not belong. Jarred and disoriented, he blinked and stared, turned about. Where had it come from?
Master! came the shriek again, thin and distant, and the floor shook under him.
Two shapes shot out of the skies — skies where the ceiling had been — twin shapes like blazing arrows, bound straight for him.
Twin impacts, knocking him sideways, driving the non-existent breath from his incorporeal lungs. Silly, that, he distantly thought. Dead, and still he tried to breathe.
The floor shook again, and the walls, and when he turned in a panic looking for Enadya, he found her gone. ‘Ena!’ he screamed.
It isn’t her, shrieked the shrieking thing. Master, come with us. Come now!
‘It is her,’ Konrad wept. ‘It has to be.’
Why, so you can wallow in misery forever? A different voice, that. The other one. The tones chimed in Konrad’s mind, splintered ice and funeral bells; distantly, they struck a chord. How refreshing, said the second voice, with a scorn to cut Konrad to the quick.
Nanda’s waiting, said the first voice, still at screaming volume. She’s waiting and she has risked everything to bring your sorry hide home and you are coming. WITH. US!
Konrad wanted to speak, to say — something — protest — memory — apology — no time. Twin forces, freezing and implacable, took hold of what passed for his limbs and walked him back down those narrow, creaking stairs and out into the street, and no matter how he called for Enadya she did not come back, and she did not stop them.
Nanda was indeed waiting. She looked… wondrous. Brimming with life in so pale a place; vibrant with colour; all red-rimmed eyes and drawn face and an expression of thunderous fury.
‘Do you have to make everything so impossibly difficult?’ she said.
He swallowed something bitter. Regret. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It seems I do.’
Nanda held out her hand. She wore an ornament there, a jewel that shone like the sun. Mesmerising. Familiar.
‘You’re missing a bit,’ she said. ‘Do you maybe want it back?’
Konrad stretched out a hand. His fingers did not, could not, touch hers, but something else caught at him. A little bit
of himself, tangled up in the jewel there.
Knowing Nanda, she had probably saved all the best bits.
‘Are you coming home?’ said Nanda.
‘If— if you are going to be there.’
‘No ifs,’ she said sternly. ‘No buts. Are you coming or not?’
Better say yes, Master, said Eetapi. Or she’ll kill you herself. Again.
I’ll help, added Ootapi.
‘Yes,’ said Konrad. ‘Let’s go home.’
‘Good,’ said Nanda. ‘It’s never going to get any easier, you know. Living, I mean. But it’s infinitely superior to the alternative.’
He smiled at that, then winced as his snakes disentangled themselves from whatever was left of him. You are hard work, muttered Eetapi. But you’re ours.
Chapter Eight
Nuritov found it first.
‘Curse you,’ scowled Tasha, slamming down her much-resented tome. ‘What was I even here for?’
The inspector simply put his book into her hands, amid soothing noises. She liked those no better than she’d liked his infuriating cry of jubilation. Victory for the dull, old policeman! She should’ve left him to get on with it, while she did… something more useful. And maybe entertaining.
‘Look,’ said Nuritov, pointing to the musty page before her.
‘This isn’t about Marja.’ Tasha flipped it upside down, glowering at the title inscribed upon the cover. Death Rites and Rituals.
‘No,’ said Nuritov. ‘I knew you had that covered, so I chose a different topic. Read it.’
His experience was showing. Well, just because she hadn’t set foot in a library in years… ‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘I knew there had to be some advantage to being old.’
‘There are a great many, which I hope you’ll have the opportunity to learn for yourself. Meanwhile, read.’
‘Couldn’t you just—’
‘Read.’
Tasha sighed, turned the book right way up again, and applied herself to its contents.
She turned a page, and then another.
‘Eyes,’ she said, looking up. ‘In the hands of a gifted ritualist, the eyes See far beyond the mundane. They may See beyond the borders of life itself, and glimpse into the shadowed realms of the Great Spirits of Death.’ Tasha looked up. ‘Spirits above, is that what Eetapi and Ootapi have been doing?’
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