Living With Ghosts (26 page)

Kenan had returned and there was joy in him like a light set in alabaster. She could find no reason for it, but he had been with Quenfrida. Alarm ran in the clan-blood of Iareth’s veins. She was not Merafien. Her calm was only skin-deep. Animal-wise, her sense of impending danger ran edged with instinct. Urien would know. Urien would see beyond the alabaster chill and the new wound at Kenan’s throat to the truth, however strange.

She had warned him, her sire, her commander, of her failings, and he had chosen to discount them.

It was not for Iareth to gainsay him.

Only, perhaps, to fail.

Gracielis did not have all he needed. No incense to sweeten the air and darken his limpid eyes. No bowl of virgin silver. No wicked bone-hafted knife to slice skin and memory. Candles he did have, for the fifteen pillars of the heavens, and a half-handful of fingernail-sized bells and a grief as deep as any trance. He had repainted his eyes with gold and emerald green, replaced wool and cotton with silk. He wore no rings on his fingers. His feet were bare on the smooth wood floor. His hair was left to fall, for once uncurled, to his waist. The lovelock, retinted forest green, kissed his cheek. His pulse points were warm and perfumed with his name. In the full rite, he should have fasted two days in advance and held silence for one. His present state would have to suffice. He was as pure as his flawed nature might permit.

He had performed this ritual only once before. It was the fourth test of the seven and much to be feared, lest ghost-sight see too deeply into oneself. Full sibling to the act of exorcism, which might be performed by a lesser priest. An act not of interdiction, but of absolution.

Absolution of the condemned. He sat down cross-legged and looked into the colorless eyes of the lieutenant’s ghost. It watched him with wary amusement. Across his knees he held his one and only knife, a pretty thing intended more for adornment than use. Its blade had been honed sharp by his baffled landlord. Gracielis ran a finger along the edge and watched as his blood welled from the cut, breathing slowly to master fear.

He disliked the sight of blood. His fingertip throbbed faintly. He averted his eyes as the blood trickled toward his palm. Instead he looked at the ghost. He said, “We must be close to friendship, you and I. We have been scarcely separated at any time.” Blood from his finger dripped onto the floor. The room was quiet. No sounds drifted in from the taproom below. The ghost began to drift closer to him.

Gracielis looked back at the knife blade. “It is strange, really, since I don’t recall ever learning your name. Although you were free enough with mine, living.” He spoke a little too swiftly. He sought mastery. He drew another finger along the edge of the blade. “We weren’t friends then, I think.” The ghost was less than two feet away, watching. The knife edge was discolored. He lifted it and looked at the point. It glittered. He shivered, throat dry. “Of course, hate is very powerful.” This time, his tone was nearly level. “Strong enough to bind a living man.” The knifepoint was against the small blue vein in his left wrist. He looked from it to the ghost. “Living, or dead.”

The blade bit into flesh, deep, deeper, deep enough. Into the vein, evading the artery and the tendons. There came a white flash of pain, freezing his hand and knotting his stomach. He bit down on his lip, forced control. Then he spoke one word in another tongue.

There was a moment of stillness. It lasted just long enough for him to register that the colorless eyes of the lieutenant’s ghost were actually blue. Gracielis looked into those blue eyes, drew in one long breath, and reached.

He was forty-two years old. A soldier all his life, an officer on merit, not through birth. Tough and too proud of it, contemptuous of gentleness, of need, living to be seen to be strong; drinking hard, brawling, brutalizing where he might have been tender. And inside a bitter hollow, soured by desires that might find expression only in violence and disdain. Filtered through that bitterness, Gracielis could see himself, also, younger, foreign and vulnerable in his first days in Merafi.
I remember
, murmured that part of him which remained discretely Gracielis,
I remember the cheapi nn, the soldiers who mocked and bullied and sometimes paid
. . . But he had surely never been so beautiful? A heart-searing loveliness of grace and silken charm the lieutenant hated and resented and feared and wanted with an aching intensity. Looking back at himself, Gracielis said, “I never knew.” Felt the agreement, the confirmation of desire denied. Desire soured by fear and control into a furious contempt that burned the tormentor almost as much as the victim. In borrowed memory, Gracielis watched his own eyes grow wide with alarm and shuddered with the fierce pleasure of it. So fragile. How sweet a bruise would be, worn along that high cheekbone. The lieutenant’s hand was raised to strike and Gracielis fought for control. To show kindness instead of foreign disdain. In memory, he redrew understanding and desire upon his features, in place of fear. This was almost beyond him. He lacked the strength, swamped in ancient dislike and water falling in swan eyes . . . His hand clenched about the knife blade and he rocked back with the pain, forcing clarity. Holding out the bloody hand to the lieutenant’s ghost, he said, “Forgive me. Forgive me my blindness, that I did not realize that I should come to you.”

He felt shoulders that were not his shrug and start to turn away. Heard his own voice, all silvered over, say, “The fault is mine. Won’t you let me atone?” Felt his foreign body turn again and step forward into arms that were warm and open and then suddenly absent with the wrench of bonds tearing.

He was flung back abruptly in on himself, temples pounding, cold, alone. The lieutenant’s ghost was gone. Blood from his wrist and hand dripped upon the floor. His eyes were muzzy and unfocused. Rain drummed against the closed shutters like a reminder. He forced himself to stand. The candles must be extinguished, and he should find a bandage for his hand. He had to wait for Quenfrida. He had to hide from her the full extent of his weakness. He expected at any moment to lose consciousness, fought it with what strength remained to him. The thin silk clung to him, clammy, uncomfortable. One by one, he managed to put out the candles, to tear a strip from a shirt to bind his bleeding hand.

A chair stood nearby. He fell into it, locking his good hand about the arm to hold himself upright. He had to wait for Quenfrida. The room felt very empty. In all the last six years, he had never been wholly alone.

He realized with dull surprise that he was crying.

The river ran slowly. Across its surface, mist formed and congealed. Its patience surpassed that of mortal things. It encompassed its own disturbances and admitted no conscious knowledge of human action. In the shantytown the air tasted foul. Debris lapped at the fringes of the settlement and the inhabitants shivered as night fell. In the embassy on the hill, Kenan looked up from his book and did not smile. Pain cramped through his hand. He rubbed it and touched alarm.

Dancing, Quenfrida pulled away from her partner and gasped. Across her palm was a deep gash fully three inches long.

Gracielis had forgotten that he was afraid of the dark. He had forgotten how it felt to be utterly alone. It was too cold in his room, and he shivered. Quenfrida would not come. He had transgressed and she would not come. She knew him too well.

The light was fading. Behind heavy clouds, the sun set. The moons rose unnoticed. He sat with his back to the shuttered window. He could think of nothing. His mind was empty of everything save the fear and the knowledge that he must wait.

She came into his room at deepest night. She perfumed the darkness. She encompassed all that lay within it. She was too beautiful. He gazed on her in need and yearning, while her sky-blue eyes held him in contempt. He reached out to her with his bloodied hand.

She ignored it. Softly, she said, “I should kill you where you sit.”

He said her name because it was necessary. She looked at the blood on the floor and said, “What have you done?”

“I needed you.” He was desperate. “
Chai ela
, Quenfrida. Quena, the air is full of death.”

“I do not,” said Quenfrida, “require you to teach me that. I am not blind.”

“It frightens me.” Death in the air and the taste of a power he almost knew. Honeysuckle and a strange face in his cards. He said, “You frighten me.”

“Do I?” She held his gaze until he was forced to look away. “Do you think that matters? You forget yourself. You broke your vow.”

“I had no choice.”

“You had every choice. You elected to do that to which you have no right.”

He was crying again, humiliated before her. He said, “The city will die, Quena. The people.”

“Merafiens. They are no concern of ours.”

“They live.”

“Death is the right of everyone.”

“But not this death. Their river . . .”

“Why not?” Quenfrida laughed, showing her teeth.

“They have chained it long enough. Now it takes its turn.”

It should not be possible. It was against the nature of the place. He said, “Stop it, Quena. Please.”

She smiled. “Stop what?” He made no reply. “Do you reproach me for my anger with you? Is that it?” He shook his head. “What, then?”

“Last night . . . I felt your hand, working.”

“So?”

He inhaled and forced himself to look at her. “You and someone I don’t know. Another of your making. I, too, am not blind.”

She regarded him curiously. There was a short silence. Then she said, “So I see. But how are you sure it’s only two?”

“I know you.” He could barely bring himself to say it. He could not quite keep the fear from his voice. “I know your history. The hierarchs distrust you. And I have seen . . . I have seen your second acolyte.” She was smiling now, but there was menace in it. Too late to back down. He said, “I read your past.”

Her eyes narrowed. Softly, viciously, she said, “You could not.”

“I did.”

They looked at one another in silence. Then he said carefully. “Forgive me. It was cards . . .”

Her smile broadened. “Cards?” He nodded. “Cards only? And what did you see?”

“The other one. I saw you had taken another.”

“Is that all?” She studied him for a moment. “Yes. You will not lie to me at present. So I have a new acolyte. What of it?”

He looked down and said, “Stop this working. I beg you.”

“Why?” She came closer, so that her perfume made him dizzy. “Tell me, my Gracielis. Our kind are banned from this city. If we are found here we risk death, or worse. Not death of our own device or selection, but the dishonorable death of strangers. Why, then, should we trouble ourselves over them?” He was silent. “This city is not our concern.” Her voice was no longer angry. Rather, it was patient and weary.

He caught her hand and drew it to his face. “There are those who have been good to me . . .”

She smiled. It was not a kind smile. “You are free to warn them. I grant you that much. If they will believe you.”

He looked down, no longer able to sustain the sight of her. He said, “Why not?”

She began to stroke his hair with her free hand. “We need them to be weak, my Gracielis.”

Almost inaudibly, he said, “I don’t.”

Her heard her sigh. Her lips brushed his brow. “Always so gallant. But the truth is that we must consider the wider political need.” She took her hand from his and sat on the chair arm. “Have you thought about what I said to you?”

He was lost, he was reeling. He said, “I don’t understand.”

“The seventh test.”

Magnolia and the chiming of silver bells. Water falling and a man with swan wings beating in his eyes. The cold smile on the lips of a redheaded stranger . . . He said, “I don’t know. I don’t think I can.”

She put an arm around him, gentling the pain. He wanted so much to turn his face into her shoulder, to hold on to her and never let go. She said, softly, sweetly, “I offer you a bargain, my Gracielis. Undertake and overcome the seventh test and join me. And then perhaps I may lighten my hand on this city, if you still wish it.”

His hair mingled with hers. Through the mixed curtain, he said, “But how . . . ? We have no temple here.”

“None is needed. I’ve learned other ways.” He could hear her smile. “All you have to do is kill someone for me in the right place and fashion. You have the access. It will not be as hard as you think. One death only.”

“Who?”

“Yvelliane d’Illandre of the Far Blays.”

He shook his head, tried to pull free of her.

She said, “You have the access.”

He found his voice. “No. No longer. I don’t see her or any of her family.”

Despite his resistance, her hands were on his shoulders. Such small hands, such strength. She said, “Two things, my Gracielis. First, Thiercelin of Sannazar spent last night in your room. And second, you’ve corresponded with Yvelliane since your eighth month in Merafi. You have no secrets that I don’t know. You are mine to your soul.”

He said, “No,” although whether to the deed or the knowledge was unclear.

She leaned against him. “But I wish it.”