The Ghost Sister (29 page)

Awareness of self and place swept over me. I felt as though I'd stepped out of a long, confusing dream. Through the open doorway of the balcony the sun poured in, and a white bird wheeled across the oblong of the sky. Someone was shouting. I heard Jheru's placating tones. Someone laughed, not kindly. Someone—Sereth?—wailed in despair. This reached me. I drew the red swathe of cloth around my waist, crossed swiftly to the door, and nearly collided with someone entering. Blinded by the sudden rush of sunlight, I stepped back and was confronted in a moment of utter confusion with my own face. I gaped. I was stupefied by the loss of the bloodmind, still not fully conscious. The person wearing my features stared back at me: my own pale eyes, sharp nose, narrow mouth, the face I saw in the metal mirror every day. Then, of course, it became obvious.

“Soray?” I said.

“Oh, you're awake, are you?” my elder brother replied. This enlightening exchange was punctuated by a burst of argument from the balcony. I heard Sereth shrieking something, but could not seem to understand what she said.

“… trying to drag me down with you, Morrac. We might be twins but we're not the same.
We
'
re not the same
—”

And Jheru, bewildered,” … think I know who you must be—”

And a third voice, soft with rage,” —and who are you to criticize me, Sereth? You killed that child because you wanted to, didn't you, not because something made you do it. Don't blame the bloodmind for your own desires.”

The argument rose to a crescendo. I pushed past my
brother onto the balcony. Sereth, her face streaked with blood, was sprawling against the balcony rail. Morrac struck at her and she stumbled. Jheru grabbed at her, missed, and— stepping between them—pushed her out of reach of a further blow. She staggered, missing her footing on the wet balcony deck and fell back against the rail. Time slowed to a long and beating pulse. In a graceful roll, she went over the rail and down. She made no sound as she fell.

I sprang to the rail to try to save her, but every movement I made seemed slow, as though the air had thickened. The light saturated everything, luminous and congealing. I could only watch her fall, the long drop from the house on the seawall cliff to the green water of the harbor far below. Sereth turned in the air as she fell through the wheeling flock of birds until, in a dazzling burst of light from the sun on the water, she was gone into the sea. I was halfway over the rail to follow, hearing a voice hoarse with despair calling her name and realizing that it was I who was shouting out, trying to summon her back. We were a good three hundred feet up, and the harbor was not deep at that point.

There was a blurred motion beside me; Morrac, crying out incoherently, was at Jheru's throat. Jheru, snarling, clawed back and laid open my erstwhile lover's shoulder. Morrac struck out, catching him in the ribs. There was not much to choose between them; they were of a similar height and age, though Jheru was, I think, quicker. These odds were evened by the blood-slick boards; Jheru hit back, grasped Morrac by the wrist and pulled him down. The bloodmind lit Morrac's face like a fire; it was riding him and it reached out to infect Soray and me. I tried to drag them apart, Morrac countered with a kick to the groin which I blocked. I seized his arms and pulled him up. We both fell back against the railing. For a dizzying moment I saw the sea swing up below me. Then Soray hauled both of us back, shouting, “Do you want to follow her down? Is that what you want? Is it? Is it?”

This brought Morrac to his senses. He stared at Soray, as if unbelieving.

“Ah, she's dead,” he said, almost conversationally. He pulled away from my grip and straightened the sleeves of his jacket. Jheru, spitting blood, was rising to his feet. Soray's eyes were wide and horrified.

“Yes,” he muttered. “She's dead, she's gone.” He leaned heavily back against the doorframe, his face slack. The dark roofs, rising up behind, were quiet in the sunlight, exhausted in the wake of the masque. The white birds of the sea called above our heads and someone, somewhere, gave a long remote cry: the
eluade
, the call that marks the presence of recent death.

“Outreven?” Mevennen said wonderingly, some time after Shu Gho had left for Tetherau. She had spent the last few days in a kind of waking dream, the aftermath of seizure, but now she was a little better again. Bel Zhur sat at her feet, hugging her own knees and gazing up into Mevennen's face. “But no one knows where Outreven is.”

“You've only the mur and your own feet,” Bel Zhur said. “And there's too much of the world to explore. But we have the—the flying boat. What would take you months would take us only a few hours.”

“How did you find it?”

“Remember the story, Mevennen? Outreven is the first place, the place where answers are to be found. We had a message, the last message ever sent from this world. We followed it, and it led us to Outreven. And we can take you there, show you what lies beneath it.”

Mevennen though for a moment. She did not know whether she really believed in Outreven. And although her fits seemed to have gone into remission, the prospect of being cured seemed once again so unlikely and remote that she could not bring herself to believe in it. It was true that she no longer feared some terrible reprisal at the hands of
the ghosts. She had learned to treat them almost as though they were real, and it was true that they had been very kind to her. She had grown to like Shu Gho and Bel, though she preserved a mutual and rather chilly respect with Dia. There was something so insistent and driven about the woman …

But here she was again, thinking about them as though they were human. Her third day had come and gone and no one had said anything. Mevennen herself had kept quiet. She did not really want to admit to herself that things were more interesting here than at home. Here, she was treated as though she were of interest and significance, rather than just the sick sister. She dragged her mind back to the present. Flying to Outreven seemed like an insane plan, but what she found hard to resist was the thought of a trip in the boat: to see so much of the world all at once, so swiftly. She had spent so much of her adult life cooped up indoors that the prospect of venturing out was like a craving, and it was for this reason that she replied, as she had done once before, “Yes. Very well. I'll go with you.”

“Good,” Bel said. She smiled, and reached for Mevennen's hand. “I'm glad you came here, Mevennen. I'm glad you could trust us enough to do that.” Her grip tightened. Mevennen looked down at their linked hands, and Bel reached up and gently brushed a strand of hair from her face. “You're beautiful, Mevennen.”

“Thank you,” Mevennen said, embarrassed. No one had ever said such a thing to her before. She was a ghost. And anyway, in their family, Sereth was the beautiful one. She glanced up at Bel Zhur. The girl's eyes were fixed intently on her face.

“Bel?”

“You remind me of someone,” Bel Zhur whispered. “Someone I loved long ago. A woman who died.”

“I'm so sorry,” Mevennen breathed, for Bel's eyes had filled with tears. “How—I mean, what happened?”

Bel blinked and gazed into the distance. “Her name was
Eve. She—she was like you. She saw ghosts and she was often ill. She was always speaking to the dead; I used to hear her laughing at what they'd say to her. She had dreams. My mother tried to interpret them according to our faith, but they didn't seem to fit, somehow. I tried to understand, but I could tell she was drawing further and further away from me. We started to quarrel—or I did, anyway. And one night we had an argument. I said she was mad, that she preferred dreams and the dead to me. She wouldn't say anything … she just went outside and walked down to the beach and I ran after her, but the Weather Monitors had summoned rain and I couldn't find her. The tide brought her in next morning. She'd been caught by the sea, or walked into it. The world took her, you see.” Bel was gripping Mevennen's hand so hard that it hurt, and her face twisted.

“Bel,” Mevennen murmured.

“And you remind me of her …” Bel said, in a tight, tense voice. “You remind me of her so much.” She pulled away and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “I just want to put things right,” she whispered.

Mevennen said the first thing that came into her head. “Then let's find Outreven.”

A few hours later, they were on their way. The boat quivered as it rose, and Mevennen expected to travel fast across the land as they had done before, but this time the boat continued to rise. Nervously, Mevennen peered through the window and saw an edge of wing that had not been there before, curling up like the edge of a glistening leaf. The wing shimmered into translucence and the world fell away below. She could see the whole curve of the Memmet, widening out into the estuary and the glistening sea beyond. If she looked in the other direction, she saw the folded white crests of the Attraith, twisting in a serpentine coil until they became the higher peaks of the Otrade. Much farther to the north she could see another, even higher, spine of mountains and after a moment's thought
she knew that this must be Ember ai Elemnai, with the notch of Achen Pass clearly visible. Mevennen had never dreamed of seeing so far. She swallowed sudden tears.

“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.

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.”