Bones of the Past (Arhel) (13 page)

Now she knew. It was simply a bigger cage for the sharsha. The priests unwove a gate in the middle of the thorn thicket, pushed the four girls through the narrow passage they created, then wove it shut again. Choufa stood on the inside, staring out.

“Keep yourselves from sight,” the Yekoi told them. “You are a stain and a shame, and if you flaunt yourselves, you will be first to feed the Keyu.”

Choufa looked up into the curving, interwoven branches of the tree. From behind the draped silks, faces stared down at her—the ugly, green-scarred faces of other girls. Some of the sharsha above were nearly as bald as she was; some had longer hair. Hands beckoned urgently; whispered voices urged her up into the tree. “Hurry,” the strangers called. “You must come hide.”

The new girls struggled up the twisty connectway into the aeries of the sharsha-tree somehow. A girl a little older than the four of them waited in the first aerie, just inside the draped silks. Her hair was short and silky, pale bright yellow. Her eyes were as green as the tattoos on her face. She must have been pretty once, Choufa thought. She had soup for them—pale thin broth not much stronger than water.

“’Loa,” she whispered, and smiled shyly, and hugged each girl in turn. “You’re safe now. Drink this slowly. Those skeruekheu never feed the new sharsha—” She reached out and pulled the gourd of soup away from one of the children. “Not too fast—if you drink it too fast, you’ll be sick.”

Choufa looked at her, wonderingly. The gentle sound of the girl’s voice shocked her—and no one had smiled at her for so long, she’d forgotten how it felt. She slurped her soup, trying hard not to drink too fast. While she worked on the soup, the girl brought thick, rough towels, and dried off each of the new sharsha.

“I’m Kerru,” she told them. “You may call me that unless the keyunu are here—if they come in, we all call each other sharsha and keep our eyes on the floor. You must look very sad when the keyunu are here.”

“I
am
very sad,” one of the sharsha said.

“You won’t be. We’ve made this a good place for us. There are some bad things here, but not so many. Just remember—be very quiet and never let the keyunu see you. Now tell me your names.”

“We don’t have names anymore,” one of the sharsha said.

All four girls looked at Kerru earnestly and nodded their heads.

“Bah! You have the same names you always had. Don’t let those skeruekkeu make you think you don’t.”

The four little girls looked at each other, eyes round and surprised.

“Dathji,” the dark-skinned brunette said first.

“Allia,” said the youngest.

“Choufa.”

“Kano.”

Kerru smiled. “I may not remember all your names today, but I’ll know all of you soon. Now, if you’re feeling a little better, come with me. I’ll show you where we live and sleep.”

It’s a safe place,
Choufa thought, and hugged herself with happy relief. She followed as Kerru led them across a silk-draped connectway into an upper aerie.
Kerru says this is a safe place.

* * *

“Hey, Roba—” There was a loud sneeze from somewhere further down the Daane library aisle. “Gods eat this damned dust! I just found the manuscripts you were looking for. They were misfiled.”

Roba stretched from her crouch and winced as both knees crunched. She took a minute to rub the pain out of her legs, then ambled down the aisle to find Kirgen.

He looked over at her and grinned, and proffered a stack of thin, dust-coated tubes. “These haven’t seen daylight in years.”

“Centuries,” Roba agreed. She took one tube, rubbed the dust off the catalog mark and sighed. “Ah, how lovely. Prodictan Era histories. The script will be illegible, the language archaic, the writing flowery and pompous—and the authors will give the full weight of fact to every myth and child’s tale.
Nobody
studies the Prodictan Era histories anymore.”

Kirgen grinned. “In other words, in the midst of all that nonsense, we ought to find some really special nonsense to make Thirk happy.”

Roba shook her head ruefully. “If you say so.”

They took the pile of manuscript tubes to the head librarian and signed them out.

* * *

Medwind sat cross-legged in front of the reawakened vha’attaye. Kirtha squirmed on her lap. The vha’attaye, minus the Mottemage, who had appeared, then vanished in a faint green puff of disgust, blinked and stared at the little girl.

None spoke, until the silence in the dark, spice-scented b’dabba grew unbearable. Then, with a creaking hiss, Inndra Song asked, “Has it then been so long, child of my children’s children? And are you so ashamed of us that you did not present us to your newborn at her birth?”

“I am not so faithless,” Medwind said. “This is Kirtha—daughter of my friend and comrade.”

Kirtha looked up at a Medwind when she heard her name, then resumed staring at the vha’attaye.

The vha’attaye hissed. “Not your flesh and blood?” the matriarch whispered and her jawbones clicked. “Then you have adopted her?”

“No. Her mother still lives.”

Bone-creaked murmurs skittered spiderwise in the darkness—slow, brightening green glowed from the ghostflesh faces—and the bones snarled, hissed, snapped in growing, building anger. “Not satisfactory,” Troggar Raveneye said for all of them. “The child must be bound to you, and only you, so that we may be sure she will bear your burdens after you are gone.”

Medwind snarled back at them, “So do you expect me to steal a child?”

The vha’attaye quieted. Haron River said, “That would be acceptable. It has been done before.”

“Well, it won’t be done by me!” Medwind broke a drumstick and hurled the pieces over the heads of the vha’attaye.

“Uh-oh,” Kirtha whispered.

The vha’attaye hissed, and an icy wind rose in the b’dabba, and began to swirl around the warrior and the child. The wind shrieked with deadsoul anguish, spun and clattered the hanging drumsticks against the drums overhead. Cold, wet ghostflesh hands gripped Medwind and Kirtha, shook them, slid cold dead fingers from living arms to living throats—

Kirtha shrieked and hit at the huge ghost hands with her tiny ones. She struggled against them for only an instant, then closed her eyes. “Go away,” she howled.

Power surged from the child, uncontrolled and unchecked.

The wind died with a “pop.” The hands vanished. The vha’attaye disappeared—not the gradual melting of line and form they chose for themselves when returning to the dark places between the worlds, but with a loud, sucking, tearing sound, and so suddenly that they might never have been.

In the sudden silence, the last clicks of swinging drumsticks overhead made Medwind jump. She exhaled and shivered.

Kirtha looked at the suddenly bare bones and shook her head slowly from side to side. She stared into the face of the Hoos warrior again and pursed her lips.

“Uh-oh,” she said. “All gone.”

“Uh-oh,” Medwind agreed, staring at the child. The sensation of wild power that had banished the vha’attaye still clung to Kirtha. A feeling very like the vha’attaye’s icy fingers played up and down Medwind’s spine. Kirtha’s mother, at the age of nineteen, had accidentally reduced a stone village to molten slag. Kirtha was very much her mother’s daughter.

Kirtha hadn’t destroyed the waking dead—Medwind was certain of that. Annihilation of a soul was a work of extreme effort and terrible malice. The child had neither the strength nor the depth of hatred necessary to destroy the Hoos ancestors. But the child had sent them somewhere—and Medwind had no idea where among the places of the dead they might have gone.

It didn’t matter, though. She was both guardian and servant of their souls, and as such, she was going to have to find them. She was going to have to enter their realm.

She remembered a fragment of an old ballad.

Onto the paths of the dead I ride,

Seeking ghosts who have not died

With hell’s hounds hunting at my side.

And if I falter, if I fear

The dead who mock and the ghosts who leer

And the hounds that hunt will hold me here—

Such a pity,
she thought,
that I don’t know any comforting ballads about traversing the paths of the dead.

First, she needed to get Kirtha out of the way.

Medwind picked the little girl up and carried her back to the house and her mother. Faia was explaining the details of a house-guard system to a customer in the public room. She waved to her daughter and Medwind as they came in, but continued with the villager.

“No,” Faia was saying, “this guard will not kill your intruders. It will decide how much threat the intruder poses, and react according to that. You do not have to kill thieves to make them stop stealing from you. Believe me, you will not have any problems once word gets out that you have this.”

Faia gave the man a reassuring smile. He smiled back uncertainly—then his eyes flicked from Faia to Medwind and Kirtha, and back to Faia again.

“What if one o’ my family comes in late?” he asked.

“That will not be a problem. The guard will always recognize your family. And it will not harm any friends you bring into your home. If your friends, or anyone else, try to sneak through your windows in the middle of the night, though, it will change them from men into women, or women into men. If they persist, it will give them long fur. If they still will not stop, it will turn their arms and legs into tentacles that cannot support their weight.” Faia grinned at Medwind.

The Hoos warrior gave her an impatient grimace.

Faia said, “With you in a moment. I want to know how it went,” then returned her attention to her client. “If they are armed, or the guard senses malice toward you or your family, it will immediately turn them into tentacled mice. You can scoop them up and take them to the town hall in the morning.

The man smiled broadly. “I like it. But the effects are fully reversible?”

“I can reverse them. If I am not available, then whoever you have caught will have to spend some time as whatever they become.”

The man chuckled and looked down at his gnarled hands. “No more Warreners stealin’ me blind—” He glanced up at her, and pulled a battered leather pouch from his belt. “I want it. How much?”

They finished their dicker, and the villager left.

“Turning thieves into mice seems excessive,” Medwind remarked.

“The villagers wanted something that would turn them into little smears of ash on the floor. This was the best compromise I could manage.”

Medwind sighed. “The villagers will simply kill the mice, you know. Or their cats will.”

Faia shrugged. “So this will add an interesting element of risk to armed thieving. I do not see anything wrong with that.” She finished tallying the new money into the account ledger and closed the book. “How did your ancestors like Kirtha?”

“Not too well, but that wasn’t the real problem.”

“Really? There was a problem?” Faia frowned.

“Kirtha didn’t like my ancestors. She disappeared them.”

Faia stared at Medwind, eyebrows rising. “She did
what?
”

Medwind put Kirtha down, then leaned on the worktable. “The vha’attaye got upset—they want someone who’s bound to me, who can be forced to serve them.”

“That sounds unreasonable.”

Medwind shrugged and idly fingered the corded fringe of the drop cloth on the table. “I guess your perspective changes when you’re dead. Anyway, they got angry, and Kirtha told them to go away. No. Let me rephrase that. Kirtha
made
them go away. The vha’attaye don’t do anything they’re
told
.”

“I do not imagine you will want to have Kirtha back in your b’dabba again?”

Medwind snorted. “No, I don’t think so. They were angry with me before; I can’t imagine how they’re going to be once I find them again.”

“Bad mans,” Kirtha said, and frowned, and tossed her red curls. “All gone.”

The Hoos warrior arched one eyebrow and studied the child out of the corners of her eyes. “Your daughter,” she told Faia, “scares me. A lot. Much worse than you did, in fact, and you nearly scared the life out of me.”

“As family traits go, I think I will keep that one. Being able to scare a Hoos headhunter seems useful to me.”

In spite of herself, in spite of the fact that she was once again without a child to teach for the vha’attaye, in spite of the sure anger of the waking dead when she brought them back—assuming she could find them—Medwind laughed.

“I have to go after them,” she told Faia. Her smile faded.

“Go after them?”

“Go to the place between the worlds. My ancestors and enemy will be there somewhere. I have to bring them back.”

Faia’s eyes lost their laughter. “The living do not belong in the spirit realm.”

“I have no choice. This is my duty.”

“Then let me come with you. Let me help.”

Medwind smiled slowly. “Thank you—but I cannot. The place I go is sacred to the vha’attaye. It is a Hoos place. I have to go alone.”

Faia shook her head. “They demean you, they despise you, they treat you terribly, they demand things, and they are completely unreasonable. I would leave them wherever Kirtha lost them, if I were you.”

Medwind started to get angry, then forced her anger out of the way. The hill-girl did not understand the depth of commitment a Hoos took on who vowed service of the Ancestors. She did not understand that the bonds of the vha’attaye were the prime bonds of Hoos family—that a Hoos who served the vha’attaye served them first before husbands and children and parents. She took a deep breath. “Faia,” she said, “Kirtha is your responsibility, no matter how she behaves. Yes?”

Faia tipped her head to one side, then nodded. “Of course.”

“Of course,” Medwind said. “You ask no questions—you simply accept the burden. In that same way, the vha’attaye are my family and my burden.”