Bones of the Past (Arhel) Read online

  She watched the other children as they tottered along together in the wake of the priests—ugly, nearly bald stick figures covered with green designs. The fuzz of their hair growing out made them look hideous as newly hatched birds. Choufa wondered if she looked as bad as they did. Probably, she decided. She discovered it no longer mattered. Once they fed her to a Keyi, who was going to notice?

  That thought struck her as funny, and she giggled.

  Keyu voices whispered into her head. The thoughts were cold and probing, horribly inhuman—laced with insatiable hunger.

  She felt them inside her, the Keyu—rummaging around in her self, poking and fondling with obscene delight. And she felt their hunger—their blinding, lusting hunger. For an instant, she was back at the Tree-Naming ceremony again. That awful Keyi’s gelid white palps wrapped around her, and it gleefully claimed her, screaming “Mine! Mine! Mine!” into the core of her mind.

  She whimpered. All her courage and all her strength disappeared. The Keyu waited for her. They wanted her. And they were going to get her. She found that she could still be frightened after all.

  After that, everything became a meaningless blur to her. The keyunu held a ceremony at the river, poured sickly sweet oils over the sharsha, and stood them in the muddy water in a slow back eddy. Choufa did what they told her to. She knelt, rubbed the sweet oil into her skin, then struggled back to her feet. Most of the other sharsha did the same. One of the boys, however, moved into deeper water, suddenly dove under the surface, and swam out into the main current. Choufa watched with detached curiosity as he was swept into the racing stream, smashed against boulders, and drowned.

  How lucky for him, she thought, and felt a dull stab of envy.

  At his death the Keyu roared in frustrated rage. Their voices outboomed the thunder, and the keyunu blanched. Deprived of one of their meals, Choufa thought, and wished that she had been clever enough to drown herself. But the green-and-gold men were herding the sharsha out of the water, and the priests were separating the boys from the girls.

  The green-and-gold men half-marched, half-dragged the boys away from the riverbank. Choufa felt the Keyu, wherever they were, begin clamoring for the treats that were coming to them.

  My turn next, she thought. She would have prayed as she’d been taught—prayed for deliverance, or at least peace. But how could she, when the gods she would have to pray to were the gods from whom she hoped to be delivered? So she did not pray. Instead, she wept.

  The girl who stood next to her hugged her. Choufa put her arm around the stranger’s waist, and the two of them stood, crying in the pouring rain, waiting to be fed to the God trees.

  The priests were singing another of their songs, this one about glorious gifts to the gods and what wonderful things the gods would do for them because they were so good and holy. When they finished, one of the Yekoi swaggered over and stood in front of the girls and lifted her arms.

  “Consecrated are you now to the holy purposes of the Keyu, and though you are evil beyond measure, yet will your lives serve Keyu and keyunu for the good of all.”

  She lowered her arms, the keyunu sang again, and then the Yekoi spoke.

  “Sharsha girls, listen to me carefully. You have been consecrated to the God trees, and to them you will go like the boys who were consecrated with you, unless you leave your evilness behind you. Your are fortunate—we are giving you a chance to repent. We will take you to the sharsha-house, and there you will stay until the Keyu demand you.”

  The priest wrapped her arms in front of her and glared at the little flock of girls.

  “If you purify yourselves daily, however, and bring forth a child—which is the duty of every keyuni—the Keyu will refuse to swallow you when you are brought before them. And if they refuse to swallow you, you will rejoin the keyunu, and we will rejoice that one of our children has been reborn to us.”

  One of the sharsha, braver than the rest, asked, “How do we purify ourselves?”

  The priest glared at her. “Only you know why the Keyu would not permit you to have names. Repent of those evils, and the Keyu will forgive you. Otherwise, you will die.”

  Then, in the distance, the slit drums rumbled, and the Keyu began to speak. Choufa heard, not only their sound-voices, which demanded sacrifice, but also their thought-voices, which rejoiced in the coming of new food. And she heard, by thought-voice only, the moment when each boy who had been marched away became one with a Keyi. She heard each individual scream of horror—for the briefest of instants, she felt the pain. Then the boys’ voices were—swallowed, perhaps, or drowned—and the larger swell of the Keyu overcame them.

  Choufa looked around at her three fellow sharsha, to see if any of them shared her terror at what had happened. Their faces held only relief that they would not be sacrificed that instant. Choufa wondered if they had not felt the boys being sacrificed, or if they simply didn’t care.

  Then the drums rumbled, “The Keyu are honored, praise the Keyu!” and the priests prodded the girls along the dirt track back to the village. They stopped again in front of a large, twisting tree grown all around with heavy thorns. The silks that draped the tree were dark and sad-looking. Choufa knew the place well enough—she’d walked past it on the days when it was her turn to get water. She had never known who lived there or why they draped their silks so tightly, and she had never found anyone who would tell her. “It doesn’t matter, little one,” the keyunu always said, and looked at the tree and shook their heads.

  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 yo
ur 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.”