by Liz Williams
“Your myths say that Outreven is supposed to lie to the east, don't they?” Bel Zhur squinted back over her shoulder.
“Yes, in the mountains to the southeast of the Great Eastern Waste. But the wastelands are vast, so they say.”
“Not so vast in a boat like this,” Bel said. She turned back to the front of the boat, leaving Mevennen to gaze out over the view. They flew for a long time. Mevennen found, suddenly, that she simply did not believe this was happening. The thought crossed her mind that if she stopped believing, the boat might fall. But instead it flew on toward a legend.
2. Eleres
Later, that evening, I sat in bone weariness in the room at Temmarec. The four of us had spent the day searching the shore for Sereth's body. I had dived for her, and my hair and skin were still stiff with salt. My lungs ached. There was no sign of her in the green silted waters of the estuary; she had been taken by the tide. I had half expected to find her drifting on the current as I remembered her in the bathhouse of the summer tower, her long hair floating like seaweed, her face filled with the peace of her death. Even so, I hoped vainly that she might have survived and crawled ashore, that she would be waiting for us exhausted when, after what seemed like an age, we descended the long steps of the harbor to find her. But at last we abandoned our search and, still unspeaking, returned wearily to Temmarec.
Worst of all, the eluade rang out twice more, singing a thin note of loss through the afternoon air. After the masques, it was traditional to count the missing. The masques not only fanned the fires of desire and caused pregnancy, but released long-suppressed enmities. For the sake of our collective san-ity, it was considered a necessary purge; it was part of the bloodmind, and could not be denied. But I was beginning to wonder whether the masques too sustained madness rather than its lack.
When we returned, Jheru went in silence to an adjoining chamber. Morrac lingered in the doorway to the room in which I sat and finally, in response to my glacial stare, gave me a single ambivalent glance, then turned and left. Soray remained down in the courtyard. I sank into the chair and contemplated the shadows of the room. So it was over, I thought, Sereth and I—my cousin whom I had loved so much, fought beside, argued with, desired. I remembered her falling in love with Soray, all the early uncertainties and fights, waking me up in the middle of the night to tell me she was pregnant, hating it because she had to stay confined to Aidi Mordha and the pregnancy stopped her going on a journey with us, triumphant with the baby and then forgetting, happy to be free of the responsibility. I remembered Sereth going off on that long solitary journey to Emoen, and coming back unexpectedly in the middle of winter with a scar across her throat to wake me out of my winter sleep. I remembered our long arguments over, well, almost everything, and the day that she and I had ridden out alone to ambush Deretroyen Ameda and his sisters. Older memories and newer: the maybe-Sereth running beside me in the long night of childhood; her body warm against me on our last journey to the summer tower. Sereth gone, gliding down from the balcony, twisting in the golden air. The Gate into eresthahan opens and we pass through and are changed, devoured by the world. I would hear her in the winds of the world, passing me, not knowing who I was, a fragmented spirit in the upper air, and I would miss her so.
I sat there for the rest of the night. I had not really slept for some time, the bloodmind trance taking the place of sleep. At dawn I went down into the courtyard, and it was there that my brother Soray found me and I was able to ask the question that had been pushing so insistently at me ever since the end of the masque.
“Why?” I asked. “Why did you bring him here?”
Soray leaned against the rail of the veranda and said wearily, “We came to find you. Morrac told me about Mevennen, how she'd disappeared and laid an honor charge on you. I wanted to find out what in the name of the land is going on.”
I did not know what to say; what could I? If I told Soray what I believed to be the truth, he'd think I was mad. But he was Mevennen's brother, too; I couldn't leave him in ignorance. I took a deep breath and told him what I knew. He didn't believe me at first, but at last he grudgingly conceded that I seemed sane enough. I brought the subject back around to Morrac.
“Morrac!” said my brother bitterly. “Don't talk to me about Morrac. Your lover's addicted to the bloodmind, if you ask me; it will be the ruin of him. If he can't overcome it, he'll be off into the hills with the mehed and that will be the last we'll see of him in this life.” Something in Soray's face suggested that he thought this to be no bad thing, and behind that was a flicker of what might have been pity. “He's always been obsessed with his sister. He convinced Sereth that she had the same problem, and she thought that perhaps he might have been right. She was coming to be afraid of the hunt, especially after the child's death. She was afraid of her own desires, or what she feared them to be. Morrac tells me she was beginning to fear the masques, as well. And he confessed to me that he went on and on at her because he thought that if she could fight it, then it would give him strength to do so, too. Or because he wanted company in misery, as I'm beginning to think.”
I agreed, numbly. I would have liked to think that I had suspected for a longer time, cued by all the little incidents: the overheard argument, which had told me everything I could have wanted to know if I'd only been able to face the truth; Morrac's uneasy interrogation of me over my friendship with his sister; her guilt after the old man's prediction. But I'd really only known it by the memory of the two people at the masque, that so-familiar face transformed by savagery and desire, glimpsed over a glistening shoulder, her wounded hand gripping the back of his neck. His face had been alight with triumph. Sereth and Morrac.
Soray brought me back to the present. His face suddenly seemed old, collapsed in upon itself. He looked more defeated than I had yet seen him.
“I always thought Morrac was more addicted to drink,” I said. “I didn't want to see.”
Soray looked at me sadly. “Of course he is,” he said. “He drinks to keep his darker nature at bay, which leads me to think that he's not as far gone as he might be. He's afraid of it, which is an encouraging sign. I suppose.”
I looked around the courtyard. The summer was unbroken, golden, clear, not a cloud in the sky. For a moment, blinded by the coppery sun, I saw everything reversed, black and white. Where does cause begin? I had asked Sereth. We sat in silence for a while. Soray was thinking his own thoughts, I was facing a conflict of grief and rage. I was furious with Morrac, whatever the reason for his actions, but most of all I was angry with myself. I remembered the conversation I'd had with Sereth in which I'd told her about overhearing her argument with her brother. If I had not been so afraid to face facts and bring everything out into the open, then Sereth might still be alive. And the crux of it all was that everything the others feared to confront was to be found in myself. I could have killed Mevennen that day of the hunt, and I remembered wanting to, and maybe worse. And I had tracked Morrac down through the days of the masque because I was bound to him, still sexually in thrall, and it had nothing to do with love. I had not seen the ghost since the beginning of the masque and I didn't know why. Perhaps I had proved myself unworthy of her attention, and I still had to find Mevennen.
“Where is Morrac?” I asked my brother.
He looked at me for a moment as though he did not know me. “I don't know,” he said at last. “He left earlier. He said he was coming back.”
Morrac returned later that afternoon. I had gone into the room that Sereth had occupied and was sorting through the bags with her things, mainly for something to do. A decision was beginning to preoccupy me, but I was not yet ready to give it form. I sorted absently through cosmetics and clothes, finding the long gray funeral robe that she had worn to witness the girl's passage into eresthahan. If we ever found Sereth's body, perhaps she could wear it for her own voyage. I trailed it through my fingers. It was finely woven and felt as heavy and cold as the sea that had taken her.
“The
last of her?” Morrac's voice said, from the doorway. When I had thought of confronting him, I had expected to find him sarcastic and defensive, but his face was somber, half in shadow as he stood in the doorway, and drawn with fatigue.
“Eleres,” he said in a whisper. My name was a plea, but I was having none of it.
“I'm going to talk to Jheru,” I said.
He looked away. He said, wholly unexpectedly, “Your new friend killed my sister.”
“In an accident. As he was trying to get her away from you, as you very well know. What would you have done if Jheru hadn't intervened? She was weak from her illness, and I'm beginning to wonder if she wouldn't have let you hurt her. You seem to have a talent for it.” I had begun to goad him. “You can't contain it, can you? You thought you could love the bloodmind and live with it, and now it seems it's ruling you.”
“Be quiet,” he snapped. “You know nothing about it, of Sereth and me.”
“Are you telling me you loved her? Why bother with me, in that case? Why didn't she feel able to talk about it? Because you managed to persuade her, for reasons that completely escape me, that she was as addicted to the darkest part of her nature as you seem to be? And even if she was, it was your betrayal, not hers. I wouldn't have judged her.”
“No, but you'd damned well have blamed me. I have become the repository, Eleres, of all your fears and weaknesses. Everything you dislike in yourself, you cast onto me as the villain of the piece.” He ran his hand across his face. “Why can't you understand? I loved her, and I didn't want to lose her to you as I was beginning to, you know. Never wanted to lose her to Soray Always detested your brother. Never wanted to lose you, either …” And here he looked at me miserably. He was drunk, I realized; I hadn't noticed it before, but he still couldn't tell me he loved me. So resentment carried me beyond the pity I would have otherwise felt when he said, “It terrifies me. I'm eaten alive.”
“You courted it,” I said. “You invited it in. Most of us try to bar the door. I told you once before: we have to try to be more than we are.” And I turned away and left him standing in the middle of the room, knowing that for perhaps the first time he had told me the truth, and I hated him for it. For not lying to me, for making himself real.
I went to find Jheru. He was nowhere in the house. I searched from room to room with an increasing sense of foreboding, at last running out into the courtyard. He was standing by the gate and I could see it in his face. He was leaving.
“Jheru?” I asked.
And he said in a whisper, “Enough. I've had enough and the ethien's not working any more. First the funeral and then the masque … I can hear it calling, Eleres. I can hear the wild and it's summoning me back. And Sereth's dead, and if we hadn't—succumbed to it, maybe she wouldn't be.It's always the same thing, isn't it? I'm no different from your cousin Morrac. I can't live in both worlds. I have to make a choice.”
The perfect excuse, I thought; to run, to escape into a dream more potent than that delivered by any drug. But I was not prepared to let him go so easily. I had seen too many people whom I loved slip back into the embrace of the world: Morrac, drowning out the voice from the blood; Sereth, pulled into his despair and half hoping to die, now dead at last. And now Jheru. Unable to shut out the voice which said, Come back, you were mine once, return again. Or perhaps able to shut it out after all, and only using it to avoid facing responsibility. Did it come to us all, such temptation? Whatever the reason, it was too soon to lose anyone else.
I looked out into the world beyond the gate. The peaks of the Otrade were very close now. They filled the sky, impossibly clear, each rock so distinct that I felt I could reach up and touch it. It was shortly before sunset, the red coin dropping from the world's edge and the sky as green as water. Against the last brightness of evening, Jheru's profile was predatory and sharp. Turning to meet my gaze, he held out a hand and I took it. With difficulty, as if language were slipping away, Jheru said, “I have to go.”
“No.” I said. “No, you don't.” I began to argue, then, giving the most persuasive case that I could. In the end I begged. I don't even think he was listening. The same as Morrac, and the same as Sereth: guilt and atonement and shame. I thought of Sereth, hacking off her name in penance not for the death of a child, but for the desires which had caused it to happen, and this was no different.
“There's no other way,” Jheru said finally, and his light voice was serene.
I said, “Do you know what you mean to me? Do you even still know who I am?”
I was expecting assent, but Jheru just said, “You come and go.”
I suppose I wanted to be told the usual parting things: I'll never forget you; I'll love you forever. But in a few days all memory of me, of family and name, of the old life in Tetherau, would be gone. The person who had been called Jheru ai Temmarec would be swallowed by the world, by the eternal animal present. Jheru smiled slightly, and submitted to my despairing embrace. Then when I knew that it was no longer my friend that I held, I looked into his eyes and, in the last of the light, what I saw made me let go and back away. I had the memory of the human still with me: soft hair against my face, gentle hands. I reached out, and grasped his arm. He struck me down, moving so fast that I didn't even see it coming. And the world became dark as the deeps of the sea.
3. Mevennen
Mevennen was still finding it difficult to believe what she was seeing. Perhaps none of it was real, she thought. Perhaps she merely dreamed that the ghosts had stolen her away, that she was now traveling in a flying boat across the Great Eastern Waste. And then Mevennen realized with a shock that she was no longer thinking of them as ghosts at all. The realization made her turn away and lean her forehead against the cool translucence of the window. If her companions were not ghosts, then they must either be telling the truth, or engaging in some other elaborate and improbable lie. Mevennen had taken to listening carefully to their conversations, and though she did not understand a great deal of what was said, it seemed consistent: the same words and terms were repeated over and over again.
Their claim to reality had further been borne out on the previous day when Mevennen smelled blood and realized that Bel Zhur was menstruating. Bel murmured something rueful about it being the most awkward possible time of the month, which Mevennen did not understand. Surely they didn't come into season every few weeks? The masques were every three months, at least. And why weren't they all in sequence? She wondered how it would be, to be able to bear a child at any point, independent of the masques. That surely wasn't very practical—you'd have to follow your cycle with obsessive detail, because it would be terrible to risk pregnancy every time you felt like sex. Unless of course you kept to intercourse with your own gender, but few people were so single-minded. Everyone Mevennen knew moved between men and women. And what if you gave birth when no one else did, and your milk dried up? There would be no one else to nurse the brood, then. And how could you plan anything?
The boat dipped and turned. A great barrier of crimson rock rose up, filling the window, and Mevennen leaned back in alarm. She squeezed her eyes tight shut, and could not bring herself to open them until the boat had stopped moving. She stepped wonderingly from the flying boat, into the red rock basin of Outreven or wherever this place might be. The world spun about her dizzyingly, and she reached quickly into the pocket of her coat for the small blue pills which the ghosts had given her. They had told her not to take too many, but if the pills kept the fits at bay, Mevennen did not really care what other effects they might have. She tasted bitterness on her tongue and her vision steadied itself. Bel came up behind and tentatively took her by the arm.
“Mevennen?” Sylvian's cool voice came from the other side. “How are you feeling?”
“All right,” Mevennen mumbled. “This place—is this really Outreven?”
“We think so,” Dia said. Mevennen looked at the three women, seeing a mixture of anxiety and eagerness and ap-prehension. There was nothing of trickery in t
heir faces, but they were ghosts, after all.
She stumbled then, realizing with a shock that she was standing in the middle of the labyrinth of Outreven. The blood-colored walls reared above her head, yet for the last few minutes she had seen nothing of it. She had been lost in her own compelling thoughts. Perhaps the ghosts were right, and it would be better not to take so many of the little blue pills. Her mind seemed to whirl, as though it had been detached from the rest of her.
“Mevennen, are you all right?” Sylvian's voice echoed in her ear. “Would you like to sit down for a minute?”
Gratefully, Mevennen nodded and after a few moments the disorientation passed. She rose and they walked in silence down the winding passageways, heading into the heart of Outreven. The place seemed filled with a humming note; uneasily Mevennen wondered what it might be. She gazed with interest at the walls, seeing faces out of distant legend. It reminded her of all the stories she'd heard, and all the dreams she'd had. The carvings depicted stories that were familiar to her: the ancient creation myths of the north. But there were characters that she did not know, and the events seemed out of order somehow. At the far end of a long corridor she stopped and traced with a gentle finger the carved stars, the constellations that had given birth to the first pack. The sound seemed louder: echoing along the high walls of the ruins, seeming to fill the blood.
Still in silence, Bel stepped through a doorway and they made their way through the reverberating halls. It seemed likely that this building had been some kind of meeting place, high-ceilinged and raised at one end. Mevennen and Bel walked on. The humming sound was beginning to pulse, and Mevennen now knew where it was coming from. Stepping ahead of Bel, she headed to the end of the hall and found another stone gateway. This time, the door was closed. A slab of something pale, shining faintly in the light of Bel's torch, filled it. Bel put out a hand and the slab swung upward, slowly enough for her to step out of the way. Mevennen's skin seemed to prickle with the possibility of answers, as though she were a flake of iron drawn to the magnet of the north. She stepped swiftly up to the doorway. “Mevennen, wait—” Bel's voice cried in sudden alarm, but it was too late. Mevennen stepped through the door.
