The Ghost Sister

by Liz Williams

  But Mevennen had never really felt the bloodmind because of her illness. She'd never known what it was like, the fever that it brought, the madness. She'd never known what it was like, to need to kill simply because you could, to hunger after prey and death. No wonder the memory of what had happened disturbed her. It certainly still disturbed me.

  She huddled farther within the blankets, and then she whispered, “A ghost was there, Eleres.”

  “A ghost?”

  “I've seen it before. It comes to the orchard sometimes, with another. I think it was chasing the child. I don't know if it saw me or not. It was hiding in the rocks. But perhaps I dreamed it. I'd only just woken up … everything hurt and it was all red, even the sky. There was a stone in front of my face. I looked at it for a long time. Then there was something watching me. I couldn't move my head. I heard the murai coming, through the earth, and then all of you were there. You moved” —she drew her knees up to her chest, curling in protection around herself—” like the mehed. I saw Sereth, but at first I didn't recognize her. I saw her kill the child.You were standing over me. You looked” —she paused again—” so interested.” Her face twisted. “I thought I was going to die.”

  I couldn't look her in the face. Instead, I stared down at the floor. The bloodmind was a natural thing. It was not something that any of us could help, nor over which I felt I had any control. But I was still ashamed. And then I felt a sudden surge of anger at the world, at whatever had made us this way: neither one thing nor the other, neither animal nor human. The force of that anger took me by surprise. It had never really occurred to me to question my own nature before, but the realization of how I would have felt if I had killed Mevennen filled me with unfamiliar horror. Just because something's natural doesn't mean you have to like it, a small cold voice said inside my mind. I reached out to stroke a hank of hair back behind Mevennen's ear and she jerked away.

  “We're all ourselves again now,” I said, hoping I sounded more convincing to her ears than I did to my own, and she started to shake. She moved soundlessly, burrowing into the cushions away from me. “Gently,” I told her. “You'll hurt your arm,” and I repeated it, gently, gently, until she stopped shivering.

  Sereth came in later when Mevennen, at last, slept. She looked exhausted.

  “Mevennen's well,” I said. No point in two of us getting overwrought. “No need to worry.”

  “I've been talking to Hessan. We've agreed on the blood-price. He wants me to go with him, return the child to her people. I'll have to go to the funeral, too.” Sereth spoke lightly, but I could tell what it had cost her. There was a note like a taut wire beneath her voice, and she would not look at me. Then she sat down on the edge of the bed and spread her hands on her thighs. They looked fragile against the dark leather, like a spirit's hands, and I felt a sudden shiver run down my spine.

  “I know how Mevennen must feel,” she said, almost to herself. “I remember a day … I was ill, and they rode out without me. I went downstairs when the hunt came back and they were still—locked in the bloodmind. It was so …I didn't know what to feel. There were all those people, whom I knew, up to their eyes in blood and death. Morrac was one of them; he always loved it.” Her voice was bitter. “He still does, Eleres.” Then she said in a whisper, “And what about you? Do you love it, too?”

  “Me?” I said, surprised. “I—well, no. I don't think so. To be honest, Sereth, it frightens me. And the way I feel afterward scares me, too. As though I've been … released, somehow. Like an arrow strung from the bow.” I paused, then asked, “And you? You're a huntress, after all.”

  She was silent for a moment. “I've never killed like that before. Only animals, or warriors. Not a human-to-be.” She used the old form of the word for child; the sacred form that the satahrachin used, and it startled me. I opened my mouth to reassure her, but she went on. “You seem to prefer the masques to the hunts.” Her voice was still steely and remote. I smiled.

  “I prefer sex to violence, yes. Don't most of us?”

  She spoke so softly that I did not quite catch what she said. I thought she whispered, “Not all of us, no.”

  She went to stand at the balcony door with her back to the room, gazing out over the evening land. It was a clear night; bright Telles sank in the north and out across the sea the constellations were rising up: Etrai, the hand;Temmec, the lamp of the mountain; and Rhe, the amber star which is another country, so they say, with seas of its own. The air had grown colder, too, and Sereth wrapped her arms about herself, holding herself tightly, as though she might break. After a moment, I put my own arms around her, clasping her around the waist, and we stood in this manner for a time, thinking our own thoughts which, I knew, were the same.

  “You should sleep,” I said, and kissed her throat, seeking comfort rather than love. She put her hands over mine and turned herself around in my arms, until she could rest her forehead on my shoulder. I felt her draw closer to me, then Mevennen stirred and sighed in the room behind us and she broke away.

  Downstairs, I found Morrac waiting for me, sitting in one of the alcoves of the hall, close to the fire. He motioned to the bench. I badly needed some sleep, but I felt too listless to move. We stayed in the hall until the fire banked down and the room had fallen quiet. Morrac was drinking, as usual, unobtrusively but steadily.

  “You're very quiet,” he said at last.

  “I've been thinking,” I told him.

  “Ah, enough,” he said and he reached across to take my hand. He must have drunk more than I thought, for when we stood, hands linked over the table, he stumbled, and released my fingers to steady himself.

  “I'm all right,” he murmured. “I can walk up the stairs.” When we reached the foot of the staircase, I put my arm around his waist to help him, and when we got to the landing he kissed me. His mouth was warm, tasting of wine, and I felt his sharp teeth against my tongue. “Eleres …” My name was slurred.

  “Look,” I said, exasperated. I half dragged him to my own room and practically flung him onto the bed. His eyes slid closed. I rolled him onto his side and lay beside him when I was certain he'd gone to sleep. I wasn't long in following.

  11. The mission

  Shu Gho spent much of the day writing up her notes, and then she sat and stared at them. Fragments, she thought, pieces of a puzzle to which she did not yet hold the key. She inscribed words onto the screen and idly moved them around, placing them in different configurations: children, the wild, eresthahan, the pack. The bloodmind. She scrolled through the holos that she had taken of the tower: an edge of stone and wooden wall, the lintel leading into the great hall and then the hall itself with its shafts of sunlight through a torn window. Shutting her eyes, Shu imagined herself back in that hall, in its depths of silence, and thought back to her own home, now far away in the past. Her home, that sprawling complex on the banks of the Tula River, was not silent. Three generations of Ghos were there: grandparents, sons and daughters, grandchildren running in and out after their lessons, shrieking and playing and laughing. But the tower had been silent, and empty, and there had been no very young people riding among the hunt as they returned home, only a dead child slung over the saddlebow. The young man's words, spoken so casually, echoed through her mind. Within the bloodmind. I told you, we are no longer human, sometimes. Shu closed the case of her notebook decisively and stood up.

  When she stepped out of the biotent, she found Bel waiting for her. Signs of a sleepless night were evident in the girl's face, and it looked to Shu as though she were losing weight. Admittedly, they had now been on rather less than adequate rations for some time, but even so … Bel gripped her by the arm.

  “Shu? Sylvian's been doing some comparative analysis and she thinks she knows what the machine might be.”

  Immediately, Shu's pensiveness disappeared. “Did she manage to shut it down?”

  “No, it's still running, but one of the code sequences had an output that the ship's computer recognized. She thin
ks the machine in the ruins is a biomorphic generator.”

  Shu frowned. “A what?”

  Patiently, Bel managed to explain. It was not some ancient and erratic piece of terraforming equipment that they had discovered down in the ruins. It was a device that had rarely been used on Irie in recent centuries because of the distortion effects, but which had once been employed in education and training throughout the Core worlds, a ma-chine designed to disseminate understanding. As far as Shu understood Bel's careful explanation, the concepts which it generated were rather similar to the very ancient idea of Platonic forms, which then permitted a certain kind of interpretation, and its chief use was in the alteration of behavior. Sylvian was familiar with them in theory if not in practice, as she explained when they hurried to the biotent.

  “Originally,” Sylvian said, bending over the unscrolling sequence of algorithms, “biomorphic fields were a natural phenomenon.”

  “Natural?” asked Dia, doubtfully. “I've never come across them.”

  “That's possibly because creatures on Irie don't have to work so hard to survive these days—we put so much effort into environmental support that they might have lost the need,” Sylvian said, pushing her damp blond hair out of her eyes. The cold weather had passed again, bringing blazing sunshine in its place, and the heat baked up from the stones like a furnace. “I'll give you a simple example. Think of a bird which learns to use a twig to extract insects from bark. Within a couple of generations, even though no explicit teaching has taken place and even though there may have been no contact between the clever bird and others, most birds of the same species will also be using twigs in the same way. This phenomenon used to be a bit of a mystery until the idea of biomorphic fields was proposed way back in ancient times, on Earth. Once an appropriate technology was developed to generate such fields, they were used for training—mainly by the military of the day, and abuse wasn't far behind. The generators could disseminate delusions as well as knowledge, and the military wasn't slow to cotton on to that. When they were used on Irie, of course, they were employed more responsibly, but they had some odd side effects on the neurology of the people who used them and eventually they were phased out.”

  “This device must be pretty effective if it's lasted all this time,” Bel said, doubtfully.

  “The technology is reflexive: it generates and feeds from its own power,” Sylvian explained. “And since no one appears to have interfered with it, it's obviously been quietly running along ever since the day it was set in motion. That holographic being you saw is probably some kind of defense, an image generated by the field itself.”

  “So what are we going to do?” Bel asked.

  “Investigate it further,” Sylvian said. “Upload the database into the ship's computer. We'll still have to shut the field generator down to do that, though—it won't upload while it's still activated.” She glanced round at the circle of women. “After all, we might as well try and find out why someone set it up in the first place.”

  “It would make sense for Sylvian to handle the generator, since she at least has a passing acquaintance with the technology,” Dia said.

  Sylvian nodded. “I'm familiar with the theory, anyway. It'll take a while to figure out how to shut it off, but I'll start working on it right away. I can take one of the aircars out there.”

  “But why go to all the trouble of setting up a teaching device and not ReForming technology?” Bel wondered aloud. “If anywhere needs terraforming, it's here.” She glanced out over the wild land and frowned.

  “We may just have landed in a particularly inhospitable part of the world,” Shu answered. “Remember, we've only seen a fraction of it.” Time to do some more exploring, she thought.

  Later, Shu found Bel sitting on the steps of the biotent, staring into space and shredding a strand of grass between her fingers.

  “Shu? I've been thinking. About Mevennen.”

  Shu sat down beside her, and waited for the young woman to say what was on her mind. After a moment, Bel murmured, “I'm convinced we should bring Mevennen here. To the camp. I think Sylvian should take a look at her, see if she can figure out what's wrong. Because it might be something really basic, something like epilepsy, that can easily be cured.”

  “I'm certainly not in principle opposed to bringing her here,” Shu said carefully, “if she really wants to come. If she doesn't, then we can't force her.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “And we don't have any idea what's actually wrong with her. I don't think I understood her explanation of her illness. She could have been talking in spiritual terms.”

  “Maybe,” Bel said doubtfully. “But she doesn't look well—she's so thin. And her hands shake. Shu, if I'd met someone on Earth thousands of years ago, and they'd told me they were possessed by some spirit when it was obvious that they were suffering from something physical, then I'd have a duty to try to help them. Dia agrees.”

  Shu reached out and put her hand momentarily over Bel's.

  “I told you, I'm not opposed to her coming here. I'm not arguing with you, Bel, just giving a gentle hint that we can't force our will on her even if we think it's in her own best interests. Unless she wants to come. And” —she stood up, straightening—” we won't know that until we ask her, will we?”

  The journey to the tower was undertaken in silence. Evening fell slowly, the sky deepening to viridian, and then to a soft smoky blue. The trees of the orchard were full of the long winged insects, and the evening air was pungent with the smell of the ripening fruit. The fallen ones had burst where they struck the ground. Above, a thin crescent moon hung over the fruit trees, laced with cloud, and the long grass was damp with dew.

  “Wait here while I go and see if I can find her,” Bel said, at the edge of the trees. She disappeared into the shadows.

  Shu sat down on the fallen remains of a fruit tree and looked up at the moon. In all its elements, the scene could have been one of old Earth, a world that Shu had never seen except in the holovids, but surely someone from that planet would find its essence was indefinably different, a subtlety of place that the mind could detect and appreciate, but not express. It was very quiet. The rosy fruit could almost have been apples in the half-light: a barbed and thorny Eden. Absorbed in her thoughts, Shu failed to hear the light footsteps behind her in the orchard. She turned and saw Mevennen herself. The woman's eyes gleamed in the uncertain light.

  “Mevennen?” Shu said. Bel appeared at Mevennen's shoulder, smiling with something that could have been triumph.

  “She's coming with us,” Bel said, to Shu's amazement. “She's coming back to the camp.”

  12. Mevennen

  Left alone by her brother, Mevennen could not help but blame herself. If she hadn't been so weak, so out of balance with the world, then none of this would have happened. The family would be better off without her, especially Eleres. And behind that thought lay anger. She remembered her brother standing over her in the hills. He would have killed her, and maybe no one would have blamed him because they knew what it was like, to be in the grip of the bloodmind, to be a thing that killed. But Mevennen did not know what that was like, she hadn't been able to use the sword even in her own defense, and suddenly she was angry and afraid all over again. He would have killed me. Is that how he really feels? They all say it's the bloodmind, but what if it's just an excuse? She sat up in bed and wrapped her arms miserably about her knees. She could leave, but where could she go, landblind as she was? Ghost as she was? A thought sparked in her mind and she remembered speaking to Luta, years ago now.

  “If a ghost has chosen you,” the old woman said, “there is very little you can do to change its mind. Remember the stories ofYr En Lai, who also spoke with ghosts to save his lover Eshay from the wild?”

  Mevennen smiled. She said, “Yes, you used to tell me the tales, when I was not long returned.”

  “Then you will remember too that he had to make a hard bargain: to give up his lands and to m
ake a migration east with Eshay—the hardest passage of all—to a land the ghosts showed him. The stories say that they found their way to lost Outreven, the first place of all, and there Eshay found healing and peace in the hands of the Ancestor.” She and Mevennen looked at one another bleakly, both well aware that Mevennen would never have been able to make such a journey.“But then again, Yr En Lai was the greatest of all the Ettic lords, and a famous dowser.”

  “Whereas I'm landblind, and can't do a thing.”

  “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Yr En Lai was a cold man whose family schemed against him all his life before he found peace with Eshay.You, at least, are loved.“The old woman put a hand on Mevennen's sleeve to soften her words.“If you should ever be unlucky enough to meet a ghost, tell it to go back where it came from. Tell it that it has no welcome here.”

  Now, Mevennen reflected bitterly that those words were all very well for those who weren't sick, but because of her illness a child had died and she herself had been hurt. She would go to the ghosts, and whether they killed her or cured her, it didn't much matter. Carefully, with much thought, she began to write a note. She didn't want Eleres to come after her, not this time, and if she just vanished he wouldn't rest until he found her. But if she could convince him not to follow, somehow get him out of the way … Sereth was going to have to travel to Tetherau for the funeral, and this gave Mevennen an idea. She did not like ing to Eleres, but perhaps what she was writing might come true after all …

  She addressed the finished note to her brother and slipped it inside one of her books. Then, before she had a chance to change her mind, she packed up a robe and her ancestress's sword, and made her way down the stairs. Eleres was in the main hall, with Morrac. Mevennen slid through the door and out of the gate to the orchard. She waited queasily among the trees, hoping and fearing that the ghost would come, but the sun had sunk down into the twilight sky before there was a rustle in the leaves at the orchard's edge and Bel Zhur Ushorn was standing before her. Mevennen studied the ghost, taking her time. Bel Zhur's face seemed paler than usual, and her strange eyes were rimmed with red.