The Ghost Sister

by Liz Williams

  “Hello, Eleres,” she murmured.

  “Mevennen … you fainted. Outside the gate.”

  “I felt—it was so quick. It just took me.”

  “All right,” he said gently. “Just stay there. I'll bring you some tea and a sedative.” He brushed the hair back from her forehead and rose to go.

  “Eleres,” she said. She propped herself up on her elbows.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” She would not go to meet the ghosts. The room was hazy and it spun. “Nothing.”

  When he had gone Mevennen lay for a while, staring into empty air. Then, even though it made her dizzy, she got up and went to stare out the window. Beyond, the trees of the orchard swayed in the breeze. From the window, protected by the defense, she was able to enjoy the valley as it basked in the silence of the evening. She thought, If the ghosts ever do come back, and if they can help me, what will I do?

  She thought back to the legends of spirits, and those who had made bargains with them. Sorry bargains for the most part, resulting in trickery and lies and disaster; Mevennen had always thought that the people in those legends must have been such fools. But faced with the promise of a cure, who was the fool now? She looked down at her own thin hand as it rested on the dark wood of the windowsill, and thought, I am barely here, only half alive as it is. What would the ghosts want, in return for helping her? If the price was death, would it be too high? At least she might have the chance to live a little before that happened. The limit was drawn at her family. Mevennen would not let the ghosts touch them, but for herself—well. She would see what they had to offer, what bargain they sought to make. If they ever came back.

  Restlessly, Mevennen began to pace the room, and gradually, as the sedative began to work, the faintness passed. She had not drunk as much as usual, so she felt able to move and think. Her ancestress's sword lay where she had left it, on the box containing her few clothes. Now that the dizziness had gone, it was not so hard to pretend that she might have met the ghosts after all, down there in the orchard. She had given up too easily, she told herself. They might even be there still, among the trees and the shadows. The room was oppressively stuffy. Mevennen looked at the sword, and then through the window to where the first star sparked in the green sky. She took a long, slow breath and picked up the sword. It may very well be useless against ghosts, but it made her feel safer. Holding it in both hands, she slipped down the quiet stairs and out into the courtyard.

  6. Eleres

  Despite my misgivings, Morrac and I were still spending our nights together at the tower. He kept saying he'd be leaving soon, going back to Rhir Dath, but somehow it never seemed to happen. Even so, I was increasingly getting the impression that I was nothing more than habit on his part, and eventually I confronted him about it. He looked down at his hands for a moment, then he said, as if the words had been wrung out of him, “I'm sorry. It isn't your fault. It isn't anyone's.”

  The last thing I was expecting was an apology, and it completely took me aback. I had never heard him sound so defeated. All his brittle sophistication seemed suddenly stripped away, and he spoke as though we were at the weary end of an argument rather than the beginning.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, but he turned and walked from the room. After that, the barriers were up between us. I tried to question him on a number of occasions, but he refused to answer. I questioned Sereth, but she just shrugged and said that he'd always been moody, as I very well knew, and he'd snap out of it. But it was more than that; I could hear an edge in her voice, warning me away.

  On the night before Sereth killed the child, Morrac seemed even more remote than usual. We spent the evening drinking, though I soon realized that I couldn't match him unless I wanted to get hopelessly drunk. He drank steadily, with a kind of desperation. As evenly as I could, I suggested that he stop, but he just stared through me and poured another green glass of wine. Later, I lay sleepless beside him, making resolutions. I'd have nothing more to do with him, I told myself firmly; it was pathetic, yet another in the long line of my doomed love affairs with unsuitable people, and high time I stopped behaving like a fool.

  Just after dawn, I heard a voice calling my name. I went out onto the rickety balcony which overlooked the courtyard and saw Sereth, looking up at my chamber. She was standing in a pool of crimson sunlight, shading her eyes with her hand. Morrac was still sprawled asleep. Dressing quickly, I hurried downstairs and found Sereth coming to meet me. Drawing closer to her, I could see the lines of strain in her face, etched by a sleepless night. Her fingers drummed against her thigh with impatience.

  “Mevennen?” I asked her, the first thing that came to my mind. I felt the cold clasp of fear at my throat.

  “She's gone. She must have gone out last night, and she's nowhere to be found.” Sereth punched her fist into her palm in frustration.

  The summer sun in the trees, and a darkness prowling among the blossoms. A predator from the hills, running the valley of the river Memmet unseen, looking for life? The memory made my mouth become suddenly dry. Sereth met my eyes. I went to wake Morrac.

  Downstairs, I found my cousin Eiru tense and anticipatory as she saddled the murai. I could sense the bloodmind change beginning within me as I slid up onto the mur's back, the same feeling that came over me in the face of Mevennen's vulnerability, but growing stronger all the while. It came swiftly, in a rush; I'd suppressed it for too long and its onset made me sway in the saddle, calling me to the hunt. My senses were searching for prey, even though I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that it was my sister we sought. In one hand Sereth was holding a long swathe of material, dark green and brocaded at the hem: Mevennen's scarf. She held it briefly to the nose of the mur. The animal's wedge-shaped head cast about blindly, confused by a conflict of odors. It tried to turn back toward the tower, then veered sharply toward the river and the orchards. I heard Eiru say softly behind me, “A good tracker, that one.” The words hardly made any sense. The world hummed in my ears and the world became dark for an instant.

  The mur ridden by Sereth trod delicately among the trees. It stopped abruptly, causing her to fidget impatiently in the saddle, then brought its long head up. Twisting about, it headed south toward the hills, away from the river. The other beasts stepped forward, following. The mur had picked up Mevennen's scent, but its evident unease and the direction in which it was heading only increased my own tension. As Sereth's mount became sure of the scent, it picked up speed, increasing to a steady canter. With it, the mood of our party became increasingly changed, sinking deep into the packmind, the bloodmind. Consciousness dropped away. Now, memory returns to me in fragments, which I am only able to shape into inadequate words supplemented by imagination: the pounding sun, the heavy, slow shift of the earth below me, the animal beneath me, furious to be half-tamed, its rage fueling my own. Most of all, I was aware of my family riding at my side, linked by our shared blood.

  The sense of them flowed through the air, a language on the wind. I recall Sereth's face, the eyes narrowed to a burning slit, her nose wrinkled like the muzzle of an animal, her lips drawn back from her teeth. I felt the hammering heart of the hunt, the pull of the bloodstream, and the thin air of the mountains in its lungs. Later, retracing our path, I found that we must have ridden up the narrow valley pass called the Mouth of Themar, and into the lower ranges. The Mouth is red with iron; you can smell it in the soil and its metal taste lies on the tongue. I remember the smell of it in the air most clearly, and also I know that we passed a post marking the entrance of the Mouth, pitted and cracked with age. It carried the mark of an eye, and as we passed it sang out, ringing like a bell out across the mountain slopes.

  Sereth's mount raised its head and gave a long cry. It slowed to a halt, balking, and Sereth slid down from its back. I could smell blood. I followed her, with Morrac and Eiru. The beasts stepped back and the hunt spread out in a fan. This is very clear in my mind: a little picture preserved in memory l
ike an Etarran miniature. I was no more then than a killing thing, I was filled with a long and sensuous pulse. There was movement among the boulders to the right; Sereth went down on her haunches and gave a seductive, fluttering cry. The movement ceased. She cried again, softly, luring it to her. It was a huntress call. I wanted to go to her, to respond to that soft cry, to die willingly beneath her. But I did not go, for something ran from behind the boulders, squealing, and she took it down. She rolled over and over with it on the stony ground. The squalling stopped abruptly, and Sereth was suddenly covered with blood. The scent of it enraptured my senses. I looked down, and something fascinating moved at my feet. It vanished from my view, and I tried in vain to see it, then it moved again and it was so enticingly vulnerable. I could think only of blood, and its pain. It was making sounds, and through my captured sense the sounds became a word, and then became my name as the desire to kill ebbed. I looked down with wonder into Mevennen's distorted face.

  She was covered with blood and dust. She was holding a sword defensively out in front of her, but the blade was wavering as her hand shook. One side of her face was blackened with bruising and her left arm looked as though it were broken, but she was alive. She was alive. I had not killed her, after all. The memory of my dreams seemed to spin and mock me. The other of our prey, small in death, lay before the crouching figure of Sereth with its face twisted up to the bowl of the sky. It was dressed in a worn scrap of blanket. I estimated it to be seven or eight years old. Sereth wiped her hand across her mouth and straightened. I looked around, and there we were, in the corrie in the mountain pass: people who loved one another, an injured girl, and a dead child.

  Sereth and I splinted Mevennen's arm, and although we tried to be careful, she fainted on the journey home. We took the body of the child with us, too, strapping it across the saddlebow of Morrac's mount. The mur did not like this; with the hunting mood having passed, the presence of death made it skittish. It danced and pirouetted, kicking up small whorls of dust. Morrac, losing patience, dismounted and led it the rest of the way back. At the riverbend, Morrac reached up and grasped my wrist for a moment. For the first time in a long while, I saw peace in his eyes, the kind that comes from satiated desires. I suspect that another emotion showed behind my own. I did not want to think about what had happened. We returned to the tower in silence. I went with Sereth and the others to wash, and then the hunting party slept the sleep of the exhausted. I didn't wake until late in the evening. The defense remained up, I noticed vaguely, blurring the summer stars.

  7. The mission

  Dia and Shu had gone back down to the tower, but Bel remained sitting inside the aircar, staring sightlessly into the dusk. She had succeeded at last in finding the child that day, and because of that, the child was dead, and Mevennen injured. And, Bel Zhur thought with renewed horror, it was all her fault.

  Mevennen had not come to the orchard as she had promised. On the following day, Bel returned along with Shu and Dia, to look for Mevennen and the child, thus killing two birds with one stone, as the savage old expression went—an expression which seemed bitterly ironic, now. Dia and Shu had remained in the orchard, taking plant samples, but Bel herself had gone to look for Mevennen. The gates of the tower were closed, but she had found footprints leading from the gate, toward the slope of the hills. The footprints were small and blurred and wove erratically across the earth as though whoever had made them had not been quite sure where they were going. Bel had no way of knowing when they had been made, but for want of any other sign, she trusted the Goddess and followed them.

  They led her up the slope, and after twenty minutes or so she found herself in the foothills beyond the river. High in the rocks was a spring, flowing cold and clear out of the earth, and there were more footprints around it. Bel looked around, but could see no one, only a group of animals drifting across the floor of the valley below. According to the early reports, there was only one major predator on Monde D'Isle's northern continent: the riding animal. There were other animals, but they were smaller and not so fierce. Bel did not want to meet one of the predators; she'd seen pictures. They had sharp teeth and their eyes seemed to burn, yet they were beautiful in their own fierce way, as all animals were. But the footprints around the spring were human, so Bel waited, to see what might happen.

  As she was crouching beside the spring, she heard something coming up through the rocks. Nervously, she spun around, half expecting one of the predators themselves to have crept up on her, but to her astonishment it was the child. At least, Bel thought it was the same infant; she wasn't really sure. She could see that the child was a girl. She was in the same dreadful state as the child glimpsed in the orchard—filthy, barely clad, her hair a matted mass—and Bel's heart went out to her. The child stopped dead when she saw Bel, who crouched down again and held out her hand.

  “It's all right,” she said into the lingua franca.“I'm not going to hurt you.”

  The child glanced quickly behind her, then turned and bolted up the slope. Scrambling to her feet, Bel went after her.

  It wasn't easy going. The shale slid under her feet, throwing her forward onto the slope, and she cut her hands, but she gritted her teeth against the pain. She glimpsed the child ahead of her, running fast and easily up the steep slope. Breathlessly, Bel followed until they reached a corrie in the rocks. From this point, she could see the whole of the estuary, somber under the cloud shadows with the bright line of the sea in the distance. The child stopped. Bel kept out of sight, not wanting to frighten her further. She noticed that the breeze was blowing her hair back from her face. She was downwind of the child, who was looking carefully around,ignoring the panoramic view. The girl seemed to be listening to something that Bel could not hear.

  When she realized that Bel was not coming after her, she gave a sudden smile. She looked very pleased with herself, like a child who had found a favorite toy, but the expression was not quite human, all the same. She lifted her head as though she were scenting the wind, then scurried to the edge of the rocks and began plucking at something that lay there. Cautiously, Bel stood up, trying to see, but it was hidden behind the rocks and she couldn't tell what it was. The child looked up, uneasily, and now Bel could hear sounds from farther down the slope. She turned.

  There were four people riding up through the rocks: two men and two women. Bel thought that one of them might have been Mevennen's brother. The dreadful mounts seemed to glide up the slope on their clawed feet, their long heads casting about them. They hissed, and Bel saw their tongues flicker between the sharp teeth, but they were no more terrifying than the people who rode them. The riders did not look human any longer, if they ever had. There was something behind their eyes, like light, but their faces were without expression. They rode past Bel, into the corrie, close enough that she could have reached out and touched the thick manes of their mounts.

  They closed in on the child, who snarled and spat. The tall woman who rode the first mount slipped down from the saddle and strolled toward the little girl. She walked like a cat, with a slow, lithe stride. The child froze. Bel did not stop to think. She scrambled to her feet, sending a scatter of stones down into the corrie. The woman's head jerked around, quick as a startled animal, and the child turned to run. But the instant the girl moved, the woman struck, nails scoring across the girl's face, and she sprawled to the ground.

  The woman growled. Bel had never heard a human being make a sound like that; she'd only ever experienced something like it once before, watching a pack of dogs close in on a hare in an old horror holovid—the worst thing she'd ever seen, except this. The child tried to get up. And then the woman killed her. It was so quick that Bel barely saw her move. She broke the child's neck.

  Bel kept telling herself, now in the sanctuary of the camp, that there was nothing she could have done. She was not combat trained. She carried no weapons. Dia would not permit it; better that they died, she'd said, and Bel agreed. Even now. But if she had not chased the child int
o the cor-rie, if she had left the girl alone in the more open ground, the child might have been able to get away. Instead, Bel had fled, all the way back down the slope.

  8. Mevennen

  To the people around Mevennen, the bloodmind spun electric in the air, pulled at blood and sinew: connecting them with the world and with one another. But Mevennen felt only sick and faint and bewildered. She did not know how she came to be here, riding down to the tower on the back of Sereth's mur like a sack of roots. She blinked, trying to make sense of things. The mur swayed beneath her. Her arm burned with pain. She looked up and glimpsed her brother's face. It was alight. The usual patient, amused expression had vanished, consumed by the fire that burned behind his eyes, and he wasn't even deep within the bloodmind now, only on its edges.

  I'll never know what that's like, Mevennen thought bleakly. All that had stopped for her at the end of her childhood, when she had returned wet and shivering to Aidi Mordha, and although she had not learned to speak until later, she remembered lying wrapped in blankets by the fire and thinking without words that she would never leave home again. So much for that hope. This was the closest she had since been to those beneath the bloodmind, and there was something she could not remember, something to do with Eleres from which her mind shied away. Her brother carried her inside the tower without a word and placed her on her bed. Then he turned abruptly, as though he could not bear to look at her a moment longer, and was gone.