The Ghost Sister

by Liz Williams

“Oh, Jheru,” I said. “What happened to you?”

  “I don't know.” It was a whisper. “I promised myself that I wouldn't give in to it, to the bloodmind, but I knew in the end I would. Then I did, but it didn't stay; it ebbed with the tides. It seemed so simple when I left home, but now I'm sometimes human and yet …” He paused. “Don't you know how it is? Hasn't it taken you the same way?”

  “Jheru, how did you find me?”

  “The huntresses were out, along the dark line of the earth. The mehed are old enemies of the ai Staren. The clan takes the children of the mehed, when they can. This is dangerous country. You shouldn't have come here, Eleres.”

  “I didn't feel I had a choice,” I said. I rubbed my eyes. “I came to find my sister. And if I found you too, as it seems I have, to ask you to come home.”

  Wearily, Jheru said, “I'm not sure I can.”

  “I don't think you want to stay here, though. It's all very well being sentimental. I've read all those Middle period and Esteren romances, too. I know how we try and pretend.” Jheru managed a smile. I went on. “When I was younger, I used to think of all the old legends, of Erudrai traveling through the forests of Athault; Demenera ai Ered sailing to Vithien, alone, at peace, at one with the world. It's not like that. You know that, very well.”

  I saw him nod. He said, “I can hear the world calling to me at night, Eleres, while you sleep in peace. Your cousin Morrac likes the killing. I know how he feels.” The words came in a rush, and suddenly I was angry. I didn't want to be here, covered with blood and filth in the wintry wind, tired and hungry and aching. I wanted to be home.

  I grabbed Jheru by the shoulders and slammed him against the face of the cliff. “Do you?” I hissed, like a child. I don't think I even knew what I was saying, only that I was furious. But it was a human, conscious anger. “Do you? Then why don't you kill me?” I hit him hard across the face so that he fell against the frozen rock, grazing his cheek. His arms were outflung, bracing himself against the rock. His head snapped up. He looked at me. And over my shoulder, I felt the mehed pack start to turn and gaze, drawn by sudden blood. “Go on,” I heard my voice say. “What are you waiting for?” There was a roaring in my head as the mood of the pack began to rise and change. I could see it behind Jheru's eyes, ancient instinct kicking in, but as the wish to kill grew in him, so my anger ebbed in me. I stood quietly, and looked at him. “Go on,” I murmured.

  For a moment, I thought he would, and I barely cared. But an expression like that of someone old and lost passed across his face, and then Jheru said as if surprised, “No.”

  And for the first time it seemed to me that I had spoken the truth all along, in spite of my worst fears: that it might be possible to make a choice about what we were and what we did, that we really could be more than our natures dictated. I took a shaking breath. Jheru turned from me and stood gazing out across the corrie, toward the gathering clouds.

  I walked slowly away.

  Much later, when we had taken shelter in the fissures of the cliff against the driving snow, he came to find me. His coat was stiff with frost and his face was set, but he managed a smile.

  “Human again,” he said, in a whisper.

  “Human,” I said. “Sometimes. And so am I, and sometimes not.” He came to sit with me on the rocks of the ledge. After a long time I said, “You know, Jheru, perhaps if we didn't spend so much time fighting it and fretting about it, we might really be in balance, after all. Maybe it's fear that causes our desires, and not the other way around.” We sat in silence, each lost in his own thoughts. Humans may make mistakes, it seemed to me then, but the world does not recognize wrongness; it merely corrects imbalances. Animal and human, predators and prey: we are all part of the same system. Life, I began to understand for the first time, is impervious to the form it takes; it is utterly ruthless. It lies beyond morality, contemplation, love, or fear; it is satisfied only by being. And whether this is human life, or animal, or only a leech in a puddle of water, it does not matter. Life lives through us, regardless of the meaning and the strictures that we try to impose upon it, and it does not care as long as we carry it along. But what we make of that life is up to us.

  Hesitantly, Jheru reached out a hand and I took it. We sat in silence, then he said, “You asked where Morrac is. I don't know. You fell and we took you up, but I didn't see him again after that. Perhaps he ran.”

  “Or perhaps the ai Staren took him.” The words forced themselves from my mouth. I did not want to think about that possibility, and I found to my surprise that I no longer blamed Morrac for Sereth's death. It was as though our journey had wiped the slate clean, and made a new beginning for us. But the compulsive love that I had for him had died, and I thought that was better.

  Jheru murmured, “No. We killed them all.” He paused. “You were talking about ghosts, too.”

  “Did you see anything? Down there with the huntresses?” Ghost or not, I was more worried about Shu than about Morrac. I did not like to think of her wandering the world, alone and afraid.

  Jheru gave me an odd look. “No. Should I have done?”

  There seemed little to say after that. As the night drew on Jheru slipped down from the rock to sit beside me, and embracing we fell asleep. I was no longer so cold. None of the mehed spoke, or if they did, I could not hear them.

  On the following day, the blizzard died down and we were able to venture back out beyond the cliff. I was still weak from the huntress's attack, and I slept for much of the time. I learned things about these people through the course of the next day that I had not known before. There was a child with them; a small silent boy of about ten, who was taken to the fire to stare into the flames and make patterns on the ground. I learned from Jheru that this was a child of the mehed themselves, and this shocked me, for it is held that they breed rarely and their children spend time alone, as ours do. I have learned since that when a ghost says, “It was as though I were a child again,” they mean a state of innocence and purity, wonder, security. Our children walk and kill at a year old. But I wonder if we don't refer to the same thing: a state where life is simply lived, spontaneously, without reflection.

  But these were conscious thoughts, and the last ones that I had, for a time. I forgot that I had gone in search of Mevennen. The pack mind of the mehed sucked me in, so that I lost consciousness and became no more than a part of them. I had returned to my own childhood, living in an eternal, unchanging present: returning again and again to the same point upon the same cycle. “The Dreamtime,” the ghost had called it, and this is exactly what it was. We dreamed the world, and perhaps the world dreamed us, too. What the mehed felt and experienced, so did I, as I became more and more absorbed into the pack. I lost count of the time, though later I worked out that I was not with them for so very long; a few days, nothing more.

  Water found us, running from the rocks. Prey came to us, to die in the huntresses'hands. Eating seemed strange to me, but as soon as I tasted blood I became ravenous. I tore at the meat, but I don't think we ate much after that. The snows were coming as winter drew on, and the prey, the little creatures, were retreating into their holes and burrows underground. But some last event returns to me in a recurrent dream, and this is so vivid that I believe it to be true, a memory of my continued salvation.

  The huntress sits at the edge of the corrie, calling the prey in her fluting voice. The prey runs: irmit, in its winter-white coat, zigzagging across the light snowfall. The pack turns, but I am first, stumbling in the snow to catch the prey and snap its neck. I can catch prey now, I am a hunter, but I can't keep what I have stolen from life. Something small dashes beneath my arm, snatches the limp warm form of the irmit and runs. I see something small and swift, ragged beneath a mat of hair. I see a child and I am filled with fury at the loss of my prey.

  I bolt after the child, twisting around the turns of the cliffs, and I corner the small figure before a wall of red rock, dusted with snow. The child is panting. I can hear my own breat
h tearing out of my throat. The child's hands are behind its back, clutching the irmit. I feint. The child dodges, and I catch it by the shoulder and spin it round. Under my hand, in the dream, the child's shoulder is as small and frail as the wing of a bird, and there is red rage in me.Before I know it, the child is sprawled on the dusty ground and I am kneeling over it. Because it is squirming, moving, I can see it.

  And then the child stops writhing, and meets my eyes. It locks me into the moment, and in the dream I take a stealthy step back and see myself: kneeling over the bird-body of the child, staring down. I do not see the face of the child. Instead, I am looking down from a great height at bright water and a woman falling, turning in the light of the sun. Then she is gone, and I see a man with blue eyes, seeking my death and then turning away. The child is back, gazing up at me. There is no longer any fear in the child's face, and no fury in my own. And I realize, deep within, that I have no desire to kill the child; I've no need of its death.

  After a long moment I stand up, and in an old mechanical gesture, I begin to brush the snow from my coat. The child scrambles to its feet and in silence, like a ritual, it hands me the stiffening body of the irmit. From the east, there is a long, fresh breath of wind, bearing more snow. And it seems to me that there is a name carried on the wind, but perhaps it is only the sound of my unused voice. I have come out of the long second childhood, out of the dream. I am human again, and the cry of loss and relief that I hear ringing down the icy air is my own.

  Human again. Sometimes. And sometimes not.

  A while later, the tides of energy which ran beneath the leys of the Otrade changed, turning with the year as we drew closer toward the equinox. The mehed began to become livelier, their eyes bright, their movements brisk. Jheru, in one of his lucid moments, said that they would soon move on. Words sometimes failed my friend, who would spend long periods of time staring into the empty air. After the on-off relationship with Morrac, it was the longest spell that I had ever spent in the constant company of a lover.

  Enforced proximity had its usual ironic effect: once the euphoria of having found my lover had worn off, we began to get on each other's nerves. The qualities that had made Jheru most attractive—that vague sweetness, inconsequen-tiality, silence—now started to irritate me. But slowly I began to realize that, forced together, we had a chance to see one another as we really were, under the most basic circumstances. Finally I had the wisdom to understand that love, instead of ceasing, had only grown, like a seed under the snow. I stopped taking out my frustration on Jheru, who wasn't listening anyway. And then everything changed.

  3. Mevennen

  Mevennen felt restless and on edge, as though someone had honed her senses down like a sword in the fire. She had gone deeper and deeper into the maze of Outreven, at last finding her way out into the twilight. She wandered to the edge of the caldera. The world seemed to ebb and flow like a tide, but there was something there that, dimly, Mevennen thought she ought to know. The thing was large and curving, as green as an insect's wing. It meant something to her; she could smell people who were familiar. There was an opening in its flank. Lithely Mevennen slid inside. A person with iron-gray hair was sitting on the edge of the crash couch, staring at her. A sound floated into Mevennen's mind. Dia. But the sound meant nothing.

  “Mevennen?” the woman said. The sounds she made seemed to come from very far away. “Bel went looking for you. I sent Sylvian after her. Did they find you?” She paused. “Mevennen, what's wrong?” —but Mevennen did not know. She shook her head, trying to clear it. Something was pulsing inside her head and she could feel the growing tide of unconsciousness, a blurring at the edges of her mind. She turned around and saw only the four walls of the aircar. The door was closed, and the fear of being confined produced a fluttering of panic in her stomach. She tried to stifle it, but the panic fed back into her newly altered senses. She pressed her hot cheek against the wall and closed her eyes.

  “Mevennen? Are you all right?” The voice was insistent, grating. The sounds swam in and out of focus. “You don't look well. You're so flushed. Would you like some water?”

  The words seemed to ring in Mevennen's ears until the meaning fell away and left only discordant sound. She murmured something, but the words were in the wrong order. The ghost made sounds again, now sounding high and shrill. Mevennen stared at her. A slow pulse began within her, spreading from her crotch to her belly. The whole world seemed to beat to it. She felt suddenly as though she had all the time in the world; it was a most luxurious sensation.

  Without haste, Mevennen stood up. Cool air flowed across her face; she felt its passage against every point of her skin. She raised her hand for the pleasure of moving it, and air flowed like water through her fingers. It went on and on. The ghost appeared in front of her, mouth agape. Immensely curious, Mevennen put her fingers into its mouth and wrenched its jaw around. Dimly, she heard sounds. This was mildly entertaining, like trailing a hand through water, or some soft yielding thing. So this was what a ghost feels like, the thought occurred to her. Why not try it again?

  So she did, and her hand, tipped by the sharp nails, went into the flesh like a knife through curds. Something struck at her and Mevennen brushed it aside. Within, the ghost was hot, pleasingly so. Mevennen's nails grated against something and she gripped it. It felt like the branch of a tree. Not so pleasant, perhaps, so she drew her hand back into the mass of flesh and warmth and comfort. There was a sound like a high wind in the trees. Something stroked her across the shoulders, like a breath. Mevennen turned and let the ghost fall to the floor.

  Something was screaming in her ears. Her skull rang like a bell and she stumbled along the wall of the aircar until there was a soft hiss and an opening appeared. Mevennen stumbled through it and ran, out into the cold air of the canyon. She sped through the maze of the cliff wall, up the path to the heights as if pulled by the sun, like rising mist. She did not stop running until she reached a place that seemed safe to her, and there she hid.

  4. Eleres

  I stood looking out across the snowfield, touched by the first light of dawn. The ground was rocky and uneven, sloping in a sequence of folds and chasms. The silence seemed to ring through the morning air. The mehed were gone. I had awoken that morning to find myself alone. With the pack mind no longer influencing me, I could be myself again. Whoever that might be. Feeling hungover, I sat down on a nearby rock, but then I sensed someone behind me. I turned. It was Jheru.

  “You're still here,” I said foolishly.

  “They did not want you with them. You are not the same as they. And I told them I'd stay with you.” He gave a raw smile. “I don't know how long I'll last, like this.”

  “None of us do,” I said. “Come with me, Jheru.”

  “Where are you going? Back to Aidi Mordha?”

  I shook my head. “No.To find my sister. And a ghost. But first we'll go to Sephara.”

  The look on his face suggested that I'd gone raving mad at last, but I think now that it provided him with the excuse that he needed to try again at being human. Or maybe—a more flattering explanation—he simply wanted to stay with me. I don't know, but when I began my journey to Sephara that morning, Jheru came with me.

  It took a while before I located our path once more, but once I had done so, the way was not so hard. The road to Sephara wound up through the mountains. It was the old droveway, the ore-bearing road which led through the abandoned mine workings of the Ettic lords. Their day was gone five hundred years before, but the mineshafts still scored the hillside, hidden beneath the snow. We traversed this road for two days, and the weather held. At last we came out of the gullies to the north of the Tongue. At the foot of a scarred slope, the Eye of the Sea spread smooth and unruffled by ice in this more sheltered valley. In the distance, white against the dark waters of the lake, a flock of ailets flew, wheeling like a single bird against the lick of the wind. And at the far end of the lake, the solid tower of Sephara rose up from the shore li
ke a splinter of ice in the morning sun. We walked down toward the fort, the sun's light strong in our eyes.

  And as we walked, a woman rode from a burst of sunlight as it scattered the last of the morning mist. I could hardly see for the light and put an arm across my eyes to shield them. The beast she rode was gray, a fleecy, shadowy animal which raised its head and belled. She wore a crimson coat, the color of the sun, and her hair spilled down her back in a dark fall.

  “Eleres?” she said, and I let the sword slowly drop.

  “Ithyris.” We had been found by a friend.

  5. Shu Gho

  Shu woke to a ringing in her head. She was lying beneath a crag of rock, in cool shadow. Cautiously, she raised her head. She could see the slope and the corrie where the women had been waiting. Her head ached, and there was a lump beneath her hair that was the size of a small egg. Her scalp felt tender and bruised. Very slowly, Shu crawled out from the rock and looked up, half expecting to see one of the black-clad huntresses perched like a raven above her, but there was no one there. Down in the corrie, the rocks were red with blood in the dying sunlight. Holding tightly to the edge of the rock, Shu hauled herself to her feet. A bird sailed up on a spiral of wind: carrion. She felt as though a long time had passed, but it was impossible to tell.

  “Eleres?” croaked Shu, but there was no reply. Clutching her stun weapon, she searched the corrie for as long as she dared. There was no sign of anyone, and at last Shu climbed back up the slope to find the path. She walked a few paces, before finding a low shelf of rock. Her head pounded and she sank to her knees, then slowly curled back into unconsciousness.

  When she awoke, it was morning. And someone spoke her name, out of thin air. Shu turned, gaping. Nothing.

  “Shu? Are you there?”

  It was another moment before she realized that the voice was coming from her wrist communicator. Raising it to her mouth, Shu flicked the activate switch and whispered, “Bel? Is that you?”