The Ghost Sister

by Liz Williams

  I turned to see what she was looking at, and received a shock almost as great as the landblindness itself. My sister Mevennen was standing in the doorway.

  She stood straight, dressed in strange green clothes, and there was an indefinable air about her, a new confidence. Then I realized what it was. Mevennen no longer seemed like a ghost, and I knew then that it was because there was no longer any difference between us.

  “Mevennen,” I breathed, and next moment her arms were around my neck. Ithyris was gaping in amazement. I whispered, “I thought I'd never see you again … I thought it was all a lie … Oh, Mevennen. How are you?”

  “Different,” said Mevennen, into my ear. “And cold.” She stepped back to look at me, still clasping my hands. “Eleres,” she whispered. “They've changed us. They've done something to us, I know it.”

  “I'm landblind,” I said. The words rang down the air.

  “Eleres … I've been to Outreven. It's real; I've seen it. And there's something there, something underneath the ruins … A room that looks empty, but isn't. And the ghosts did something to it.”

  “Ghosts?” I said. “Have you seen Shu?”

  She nodded. “Yes, I've seen her. Eleres, that room healed me. Suddenly I was human, and the bloodmind—I don't remember much. But Shu found me. And then I was land-blind again.”

  “When was this?”

  “Today.”

  “Today?” And then I remembered Shu telling me of the flying boat, which could take people swiftly from place to place. I put my hand to my head, trying to make sense of it. “Shu. Is she all right? She tried to help me, and then when the ai Staren attacked …” I sat down heavily on a nearby ledge. I was still finding it difficult to keep my balance. I felt vertiginous, as though I were standing on the edge of a precipice.

  “She told me about that,” Mevennen said. “When she found me, she took me back to the camp. She wanted to do something to—the thing in the room, but Bel—another ghost—had sealed it off. Shu told me that we were taking the boat, without Bel and the third woman. Shu said she needed help, that she couldn't do it on her own.”

  “Do what?”

  “I don't know. I said I'd go with her, but only on condition we came to find you. Shu argued, but I insisted. Eventually she agreed—they've only got one boat now; the other's in Tetherau where she left it, and her companions can't get to Outreven without a boat. So I told her we had time. We didn't even know if you were still alive. But she'd heard you talk about Sephara, and it's the nearest settlement, so we came here. The boat's down on the shore.” She added, bitterly, “I might have known my healing would never last.”

  “Do you have any idea why we're landblind now?”

  “No, not really. Shu tried to explain it to me, but I don't understand the words. It has to do with the magical book, which the legends say lie under Outreven. That book connects us to the world, somehow, and now the book has been closed.”

  Ithyris shivered, suddenly. “It's cold out here,” she muttered. She wrapped her arms around herself. “Let's go inside.”

  It was still strange, walking without my normal senses. I kept reeling as though I were drunk, and Ithyris was the same. Only Mevennen walked without hesitation and it was an irony, that of us all she should be best prepared for disaster because of her long illness.

  At last we got back indoors, where we found Morrac still sitting blankly in front of the fire. The stunned expression on his face must have mirrored my own.

  “Mevennen?” he whispered.

  Mevennen sat down on a footstool, fiddling with her long braid. Morrac, never one to spare others'feelings, leaned forward and for once I was glad that he'd stepped into the breach.

  “What happened to you, Mevennen?” he said incredulously. “And what's happened to us?”

  So, haltingly at first as though she might not be believed, Mevennen told us the whole of her long, strange story. She told us how she had journeyed to Outreven in the boat flown by the ghosts. She told us of a labyrinth beneath the settlement, and a place that makes you dream of what is not there and changes you. She told us of the presences she had sensed in the labyrinth of passages, and she said that she believed now that one of them had been the Jhuran: the first ancestor of our kind. Mur and man; animal and human, crouching in the shadows.

  “I don't know if it was really there or not,” she said, frowning. “But I've dreamed about it since and it talks to me in my dreams. It's old and wise and a ghastly mistake.”

  “A mistake?” I asked. “How's that?”

  “I don't know. But there's a wrongness about it, as though it should never have been created.”

  Like us, I thought.

  Morrac snorted.

  “I know of one who should never have been,” he snapped.

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “Her,” he hissed, pointing at Mevennen. “Your sister and her sickness and her ghost dealings. No wonder we're all cursed. Kill her and let's have an end to it.” He was rising from his seat. The landblindness which had paralyzed him had fallen away; he was sinuous, dangerous. And this was not the bloodmind, I realized with dismay. This was human rage. I reached for my sword, but the firelight picked up a blur of light, lancing down onto the table. Ithyris's blade was between them. I didn't even see her draw.

  “Not in my house,” she said. “Not here.” And I stepped between Morrac and my sister, as I had once done long ago.

  “Mevennen,” I said, reaching for her hand. “Come with me. We're leaving.”

  They all stared at me. “Where are we going?” she asked. “I told Shu I'd come back.”

  And I said, “I know. We're going to set things right.”

  Ithyris was behind me as I went through the door, steering Mevennen before me, but I could feel Morrac's eyes on my back.

  As we hurried down to the shore, blurred in the twilight, I went over what Mevennen had said. It was hard to think clearly, now. I did not know what to think of Mevennen's story, but I was sure of one thing. I wanted to believe her. I wanted to believe that it was possible to change, to be in balance with the world, to be healed. Especially now. I had encouraged the ghosts, engaged their interest, and now it seemed that we had all been cursed as a result. But there was an exception. Shu had never lied to me, and the stories that she had told to Mevennen and myself were consistent. This did not mean that she might not seek to trick us in the future; perhaps she was patient in her cunning. But even then I had to admit to myself that, ghost as she was, she did not strike me that way. If answers lay in Outreven, then that was where we would go.

  At last Ithyris and Mevennen and I finished our stumbling, halting way down the long slope, toward the Eye of the Sea to where that strange, familiar thing rested with its vanes outspread across the snow, and I found that it was true. The ghost boat was really there. It was like Shu's boat, the thing that I had seen resting on the hillside above Tetherau, except that this was darker. And Shu herself was waiting for me.

  9. Shu Gho

  It was very cold, as though summer had never been, and Shu shivered in her thick thermal coat as she stepped out of the aircar to confront the Mondhaith. Three people were now walking down the snowfield to meet them. Through the dying light Shu picked out Mevennen, and then Eleres, and another whom she did not know: a small, dark woman in a crimson coat, like a splash of blood against the snow. Shu waved, and after a moment's pause, Mevennen raised a hand. Eleres was stumbling through the snow, ahead of the others. His eyes were narrowed against the cold. He looked older, Shu thought. His face was stripped of its earlier amiability and had become a mask of taut bone and sharp planes. But then, much to her surprise, he smiled, and she recog-nized the young man whom she had first met in the orchard of the river valley. The smile was not, however, a happy one.

  “Well, ghost,” he said, self-mocking.

  “It's good to see you,” Shu said, and found that she meant it. She stepped forward and took his cold hands. The woman in the c
rimson coat was staring at her.

  “You took Mevennen away from her family and her home,” she said, accusingly. “And now you've brought her back again, and the curse of her landblindness with it, which afflicts us all now. Why?”

  “We thought only to help,” Shu said, too loudly. Even through the translator, the defensiveness in her voice was clear. Suddenly, the atmosphere was growing as frosty as the day.

  Mevennen said hastily, “I went willingly. I went with them because I feared they would harm my family if I did not” —here Shu opened her mouth to speak and Mevennen gently, but firmly, closed a warning hand over her arm— “and because I was tired of my life, and I wanted …” Mevennen paused. “I wanted change.”

  The woman in red snorted. “You certainly got that.”

  Mevennen said impatiently, “All my life, ever since I came home from the wild, I've been treated as though I could never really understand things or know how it was for normal people. And I wanted to make a decision about my life, even if it was the wrong one. I wanted some say in events. I have not been entranced or beguiled by these people.”

  Shu said quickly to the woman in red, “You said you were landblind. Does that mean you're like Mevennen, now?”

  The woman gave her an angry glance. “I don't know what's befallen me or my family,” she snapped. “I don't know if this is some curse, or some game that spirits like to amuse themselves by playing, but suddenly we are all only half h ere.”

  Dismayed, Shu could only say, “I think I know what's happened to you. I'll try and put it right if I can. I have to go back to Outreven.”

  “What for?”

  “To open a door,” Shu said. “But I'll need help.”

  “I won't go with you,” the woman said. “Why should I trust you?”

  “You've no reason to trust me at all,” Shu said patiently.

  “But I have,” Eleres said. He stepped forward. “You healed Sereth, even though you couldn't save her. I believe you tried to help us. If there's a chance to undo whatever curse your people have laid upon us” —for a moment, he looked utterly desolate—” then I'll go with you.”

  The woman in the red coat looked at Eleres and said grimly,” RememberYr En Lai.”

  “I'll remember,” he said.

  “And don't make any bargains that you're not prepared to keep.”

  That drew a smile from him, but it was a wry one. “I'll try not to.”

  “We should go,” Shu said. “The weather's turning.” She shepherded Eleres into the aircar and showed him how to attach the seat belt, then took the controls. The aircar lifted in a flurry of snow. And as they banked out over the glassy lake, Shu looked back to see a tiny figure in red, watching them as they flew up into the dark.

  10. Eleres

  They say you learn something new every day, and I discovered on this particular occasion that flight and I were not suited to one another. I felt like a small, unstable boat without an anchor, tossed on uncertain seas. I leaned back into the unfamiliar contours of the chair and closed my eyes. A moment later I heard Shu's voice in my ear.

  “Eleres? Are you all right?”

  “No, I don't think I am. I feel very strange,” I murmured, without opening my eyes.

  “It's not uncommon.” Shu's voice was sympathetic. “It's called airsickness.”

  “I don't feel sick. Only strange, as though I've been detached from my feet. And I can see lights behind my eyes.”

  “I can get you something that might help, if you like.”

  The lights sparkled behind my eyes in a nauseating confusion of colors. “Anything,” I heard myself say, and Shu brought me a small vial of water and a little blue tablet, which I swallowed after a moment's hesitation. I remembered dimly that one was supposed not to take gifts from ghosts, nor to eat with them, but I felt already too compromised—and too unwell—to care.

  After a few minutes, the pressure in my head subsided and I sank into an uneasy, muffled state, like the kind of dream that you have very early in the morning, and which you can never quite shake from your mind until you wake. Like the dream of Outreven, long ago in the summer tower …

  The boat flew on, and Shu moved around me. In the confusion of my dream, I decided that the ghosts had escaped from the world beyond the world, that they were seeking refuge in new flesh. I lay back down and began to make up stories about them: they were the children of the demons Mora and Ei; they had come to the world in their childhood and would soon return home. Shortly, after a conversation filled with words which I could not understand, the boat turned and banked like a ship at sea and began to sail higher into the heavens, but even in my dream I could not countenance such a thing. I pretended it wasn't happening, which is an easy thing to do, in dreams.

  Shu gave me food, a sort of tough substance. I focused on the bits of the boat I could understand, and ignored those that I couldn't. The light was strange, with a grayish tinge,and it pulsed. We were nowhere that was real. I felt dead, and said so.

  “Probably the sedative,” replied Shu's disembodied voice. Someone reached out and took my hand; I think it must have been Mevennen. The pain in my head was never far away. I could sense nothing that approximated to land, but oddly, I could grasp the dimensions of the boat itself, and I could feel the stars, which spun around me, their magnetic pull compellingly disorienting. If I had considered for one moment that this was real, the thought would have terrified me: that I was traveling in a boat through the heavens, falling like a burning star through the skies.

  Time went on and on, slowed down, speeded up. I couldn't get a grip on the hours. Sometimes time seemed to pass in minutes, at other times it seemed like months. Eventually I lay back in my seat and dozed off. It was with a considerable sense of horror that I came round to find myself still in the boat. Mevennen was asleep; even Shu lay curled in her chair, but the boat was flying on. Cautiously, I allowed myself to consider the possibility that this was not a dream. Something vast was pulling me down, riding on gravity's lure. Shu woke and went to sit in the chair at the front of the boat. There was an immense pressure in my lungs, and my mind whirled. When this sensation of descent ended, there was a long period of darkness and waiting. Slowly, I began to sort out the information that was coming through to me. My senses were returning. There was water close at hand, and gratefully I let my awareness sink into it and be carried away, traveling on its unfamiliar taste all the way to a saltier sea. Landblind as I was, I now think that I passed within myself, and that the hallucinatory tide on which I was carried was nothing more than the motion of my own blood through my veins, but then it seemed to encompass the whole of the world. The boat rocked and slowed. At last the world began to make sense, and I found that I was sane. And not dreaming, unfortunately.

  Gradually, I withdrew myself from the world, back into the boat, which was now still. Mevennen was leaning over me, and I couldn't take my eyes away from her familiar, loved face. She too looked white and ill. I was so thankful not to be moving any longer.

  My sister said, “Eleres? We've landed. We're in Outreven.”

  The ghost came forward and helped me up from the couch. She too looked pale.

  “Wish I was a better pilot,” she said, but I didn't understand. My legs did not feel like my own, and I staggered. Mevennen's arm was around my waist and I leaned on her, as she had so often leaned on me. Now we were reversed, each the mirror image of the other. Distantly, I heard myself starting to cough and it annoyed me. I shook my sister's hand away and leaned against a wall. When the coughing passed, I could see from the little answering smile on her face that she understood.

  “Sorry,” I muttered, as she had so often apologized for herself.

  Shu said briskly, “Nothing to be sorry about. Come along. Let's get down to the generator.”

  In my muddled state, her face blurred before me. “You,” I said, not knowing why I thought to ask such a question. “Do you feel pain?”

  Shu snorted. “Young man, you could
place bets on where I'm likely to ache next, and win every time.”

  She put a hand on my arm and to my dim surprise it was warm and firm. With Mevennen supporting me, she led me outside the boat and into a twilight place. Cliff walls surrounded us. I looked up, blinking, and the summits of the cliffs were catching the last red light of the sun. Then it was gone as the world turned, and the land became shadowed and cold. I felt hungover, but everything was back in its proper place. I was on the ground.

  From behind me, Mevennen's voice said fervently, “I have never been so glad to greet cold earth. Ever.” I knew how she felt. And selfishly, and even though I could not sense it properly any more, I was glad it wasn't just me.

  “What happens now?” I asked.

  “Good question,” Shu said. With uncertain steps, I followed her toward the gates.

  I still found it a little difficult to believe what was happening to me, even when I was standing before the gates of Outreven. And I still find it difficult; I go there in dreams, and it's always the same. It makes me wonder—not for the first time—whether there is any significant difference between reality and dream.

  “Look,” Mevennen breathed. “Outreven. This is where the Ancestors are.” She seemed delighted by her newfound knowledge. I suppose that as someone who must always have felt so peripheral to events, she was reveling in being the one to take the lead. I couldn't blame her, and in my landblind state I was happy enough to follow. I glanced at Shu and I saw that her round face was pinched and somber.

  I said, “You do not look glad.”

  And she replied, “To be honest with you, Eleres, I am afraid.”

  “Of what? Of us?”

  “No, not of you. Well—” She gave me a quick glance. “Perhaps I am. I am afraid of this place, Eleres. What it has become, and what it has allowed all of you to become, too.” But I did not understand her, not then. She led us through a maze of passageways that sang of their age and of the things they had seen. Faces rose up from the past: half human, or not human at all but the visages of spirits and demons. And though my senses were flat and dead I could sense a darkness at the heart of Outreven: something ancient and alien, something unknown. It did not speak of healing to me.