“You must open the door, Liezhae,” Ahlo demanded.
Liezhae’s voice was muted by the thick wood. “Where is my husband?”
“He is dead, Liezhae. I am your protector now.”
Silence from the other side of the door. Ahlo lifted his gaze from his cupped hands, stepped forward, and gave a swift, authoritative knock. “You will open this door.”
After a moment, they heard Praeda’s voice. Small, whispery, afraid. “Manrie?”
“I’m here, Praeda,” Manrie called back. Ahlo gave her a sharp glance. “It’s all right,” she said, although she didn’t believe it herself. “You can open the door.”
More silence. Manrie’s heart began to beat too quickly, and she felt tears come into her eyes. Her whole body felt like a rag that had been run out and left to mildew in a corner. Exhaustion was disintegrating her.
Maybe out of concern for her, or maybe as a reaction to Ahlo’s sharp glance, Uku stepped forward and spread his hand across the door, as if to learn something about the wood. “Can you break it down?” Ahlo asked him.
“Yes,” Uku said loudly, while shaking his head to indicate that he couldn’t.
A scrambling sound from within the cave. Cloedeya, who, with the others, had been behind Manrie on the path, stepped around her. “Liezhae, it’s all right. We are going to cook a meal. A wonderful meal. It will bring peace. Come, open the door, and delight in it.”
“Open the door, Liezhae,” Tafaemi muttered in a low voice from a little further down the path. It wasn’t meant to be heard by her rival. Her son gazed past her at the door with terrifying avidity.
The door shook slightly from the inside. There was a scrabbling, clumsy sound. Then Praeda’s voice. “I can’t lift it.”
“Lift what?” Manrie asked.
“The bar on the door.”
“Where’s Liezhae?”
“She went through the other door. At the back of the cave.”
Ahlo sucked in a breath. “Little girl…” he began, but Uku interrupted him.
“Step close to it. Put your hands up by your shoulders. Bend your knees, and push up with them.”
A clanging sound, and a yelp. “Praeda!” Manrie yelled. But then the door cracked open, and Praeda’s little face peered out. Ahlo pushed past her into the cave. He stood for a moment, surveying the stairs and the platform, the four poster beds and the fire pit.
“So this is how they came to live,” he said to himself. Then he seized Praeda’s shoulder and turned her. “Show me the door.”
His men tried to enter the room after him, but Uku blocked them, a door himself, that only opened for Manrie and her friends to pass through. The giant followed them and kept his body as a screen between them and the Enriegho miners, who didn’t protest but moved slowly, with a kind of dumb solidarity, Malekeisae in their midst, as if he had joined them. Up the steps and across the platform, to the door that led deeper into the cave. This door had a keyhole, and the key was missing.
“She took the baby and went in there?” Ahlo asked. Praeda nodded, and winced, as he was still clutching her shoulder. “And is that where they’re keeping my brother?”
“Your brother?” Praeda asked.
“Listen child,” Ahlo said, “if you know, you must tell me.”
“She doesn’t know,” Manrie told him. “How would she know that you even have a brother?”
Ahlo turned to Uku. “Knock it down.”
Again the big man stepped forward and laid a gentle hand against the hard wood. He shook his head. “You need some tools.”
Ahlo nodded. He turned and looked back at his men. “Take one of the posts from the beds.”
They set to work dissembling a bed, putting their axes and hammers to good use. Farahzin, the wounded man who had survived the ambush, sat on the bed opposite, his bandaged arm curled against his stomach. He cast surreptitious glances at Manrie as the others worked, as if he were afraid of her. In the fog of her exhaustion, Manrie’s mind confused him with someone she knew. A slave of the Archivist of the Third Tower, perhaps? Why not? Uku had come from Libreigia, after all. She wouldn’t be surprised if everyone she met had a secret origin in the library.
Tafaemi came huffily up the steps and stared down at him. “You are sitting on my bed,” she said.
Farahzin looked up at her. “Everyone here belongs to Ahlo now.”
“No,” Ahlo said, and there was danger in his voice. “Not to me. To me and Rue.”
They brought all four posts to the door, as if they expected to wear each one out with their battering. But it only took three strikes with the first post to shatter the lock, and the door swung open into darkness. The men hesitated.
“It only looks like the entrance to our barrow,” Ahlo told them. “Macbrau’s people aren’t buried here.”
“Where then?” one of the men asked.
Ahlo glanced back at Tafaemi. “Where?” he asked.
She shrugged. “You’re wrong. They’re in that cave.”
Ahlo shivered. “He slept beside his dead?”
“They never stir. The door is solid.”
“And yet you chose him.”
Tafaemi looked up at him, and Manrie was surprised to see tears gleaming in her big, heavy-lidded eyes. She looked about for her son, and saw him standing in the entrance to the tunnel, his back to them, his thin shoulders tight with fear, or perhaps excitement.
“Bring torches,” Ahlo said quietly, and turned to face the tunnel entrance, an almost wistful expression on his foxy face.
Uku turned and picked up little Praeda, and somehow absorbed Manrie into the orbit of his big body as he stalked back across the platform. The caravaners followed after. “Where are you going?” Ahlo called.
“To sleep,” Uku called back.
Ahlo didn’t protest. Manrie glanced back and saw that he had turned his face to the darkness of the tunnel. His posture was tense with waiting, and something else. Longing? She could not understand it. He was so officious and brutal. Where did this stance of yearning come from?
They were halfway down the ridge path when Manrie noticed that Tafaemi was with them. It didn’t matter. She would have gladly fallen asleep with her head against the woman’s pillowy bosom. Uku was carrying Praeda, and Manrie wished that he could carry her, too. When they got to the tea house she had to sit on the porch where she and Raeflin had sat the night before. It didn’t matter that Macbrau’s corpse was hanging there, turning at the end of the rope, his puckered scar finding her gaze again and again and staring at her, unblinking. Taeyaho kept her company as the others went to fetch the caravan from the Enriegho’s compound. He sat on the edge of the porch, and Tafaemi came to sit beside him. None of them spoke.
But Cloedeya was aware of Manrie’s plight. The caravan came up the street, Uku leading one of the horses, still carrying Little Praeda in one arm. Cloedeya, leading the other horse, stopped beside Manrie and said, “Go into the sleeping wagon. We are going to cook. We won’t disturb you.”
Gratefully, Manrie climbed into the wagon. There were mattresses and pillows, and they bore the intimate scents of her friends. It was reassuring, an entirely human smell, slightly musty and cloying, but very close to being held in Melsa’s or Big Praeda’s embrace. She turned to pull the side wall of the caravan shut, but Uku loomed there. He deposited Little Praeda beside her, and the child nestled into her arms.
“You were very brave,” Manrie murmured to her, as the giant man closed the wall and allowed them the protection of darkness. The little girl made a small sound, but nothing more. They slept.
She was woken by someone crying. Not an alarming cry. A low, self-pitying keening that might have been going on for a very long time. She would have ignored it and gone back to sleep, if she hadn’t heard a voice murmuring and recognized Taeyaho’s soft condolences.
“It’s not my fault,” Tafaemi said, her voice damp and sulky. “It’s because the witch cursed me.”
It was Uku’s voice that answered her, and Manrie thought that he must be sitting beside them, still at the edge of the porch. “Curse, jinx, blight,” he murmured.
“Yes, jinx!” Tafaemi said loudly. Loud enough to make the clanking of pots and pans pause momentarily. “Yes, blight!”
“She’s still there, then?” Uku asked.
“Of course she’s still there. She’s always there. On her island.”
“Had an uncle who was cursed by her. He had to make and fulfill a vow everyday. Oath. Pledge. Promise.”
“Well my curse is worse,” Tafaemi pouted.
A pause. A well-meaning murmur from Taeyaho. Then Uku’s voice. “What is it, then?”
“You don’t know?” Manrie, half-asleep and annoyed, could imagine Tafaemi’s swell of outrage.
“No,” the giant said simply.
A small, dramatic sob. “She cursed me with never getting the kind of love that I want.”
“Many people love you,” Taeyaho said.
“Yes, but not with the kind of love *I* want. *He* didn’t love me, even though I gave him a son. *My father*…well, my father. And Rue didn’t love me as anything more than a sister. I *amused* him.”
“Why did she curse you?” Uku asked with mild curiosity.
“She curses everyone,” Tafaemi said dismissively.
“Manrie, who are they talking about?” Praeda whispered.
“The Witch of Zaira Lake. Now go back to sleep.”
“Oh. Her,” Praeda said, and nuzzled against Manrie. Her breath was sweet on Manrie’s cheek.
“But why did she curse you?” Uku insisted.
“It was my father’s fault. He thought that he had created a concoction that could protect against the curses. And he had heard of the shieroeno flower that only grows on her island.”
“He took you to the island?”
“No, of course not. But the witch knew that he had a daughter, somehow.” A sniffle. “The concoction didn’t work.”
“Elixir, philter, nostrum,” Uku said.
“Why did she punish *me*?” Tafaemi sniffled. “Why *me*, and not my father? Even my own son can’t love me.”
Cloedeya’s voice, then. “Here. Eat this. We are all sad and afraid. This will help.”
“What is it?” Tafaemi asked suspiciously.
“A delicate soup made of the petals of the rienoro flower. It is like the shieroeno flower, except that it protects against complaining.”
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Tafaemi seemed to miss Cloedeya’s obvious joke. She fell silent, and Manrie tried to drift back into sleep. She had heard of the witch of course. Yet she hadn’t thought of her as they were traveling along the bank of Zaira Lake. She remembered Aizdha talking about her. “Maybe she is a monster,” her master had said, “but if we start looking for monsters in human guise, then we must suspect many people, and the bestiary will lose its purpose.” She had left the bestiary in the saddle bag, leaning against the askew hitching post at the base of Macbrau’s ridge path. Perhaps someone would find it and take it away with them. She had buried it, and now she felt strangely afraid for it, as if it would be a tragedy to lose it. And yet she could not force herself to rise from the blankets and go and search for it.
The next thing she knew, the side panel of the sleeping wagon was being lifted, and Cloedeya was smiling down at her. He waited for her to blink awake and come up on one elbow, then handed a bowl across Praeda’s dozing form. “Rienoro flower soup?” she asked.
He smiled and shook his head. “We ate it all before noon. This is dinner.”
The bowl was full of herbed dumplings. “Dinner? I slept all day?”
“Yes. But nothing has happened. Ahlo has disappeared into the tunnel. Him and Malekeisae. His people are afraid, but they won’t go in after him.”
“Why not?”
“It is a grave.”
“But the ghosts don’t leave their graves. Not here.”
“That doesn’t mean that they want visitors. Here, I fetched your saddle bag.”
He lifted it into the wagon and set it down, oblivious to the dirt that showered down onto the pillows. She picked out a dumpling with her fingers and put it her mouth. It tasted like spring. She regarded the saddle bag hopefully. “Will we be leaving, now?”
“Soon. These people are suffering. They are afraid, and they don’t know who will lead them. We need to feed them.”
“Even though they tried to imprison you?”
A look of worry flashed across Cloedeya’s mismatched eyes. “Ahlo did. I won’t blame his people.”
“But you would feed Ahlo, too.”
He sighed, then climbed into the wagon and sat on a pillow beside her. He picked a dumpling out of the bowl and ate it. A flash of memory. Cloedeya and Melsa and Big Praeda embracing each other on these pillows. Manrie felt warm and consternated. But the side of the wagon was open. There were people sitting at tables only a few paces away. And Cloedeya wouldn’t touch her. She was sure of that. He was like Aizdha.
She ate another dumpling. “Poor Ahlo,” Cloedeya said. “What Macbrau said is true, although it was a great secret for many years. I came here, you know, after I left Raesidae as a very young man. I cooked with one of the caravans, and I met Ahlo and Rue. They were just boys, then. One night they came to my cook fire. We were alone, the rest of the caravan slumbering around us. They told me. I don’t know why. Perhaps they trusted me. They had helped me throughout the day, fetching water, chopping herbs. They told me how they came through one of the lace holes. Years ago. They were boys, and they’d been playing in caves beside the ocean, and got lost, and came here.”
“The ocean? But that’s…”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s hundreds of miles away. They don’t know how long they were wandering in the darkness. But they weren’t thirsty when they emerged. And they weren’t starving.”
She craned her neck and could see the lace holes on the Enriegho’s cliff through the opening in the side of the wagon. She noticed that the man Farahzin was sitting at a nearby table, watching her, his head slightly bent, as if he had been listening. His stubble had grown more lush throughout the day and sprouted high on his cheeks, as if he were a boar. “But Aizdha and I explored those holes,” she said. “The longest tunnel only goes on for five thousand steps or so. Maybe eight thousand at most. There are branching tunnels, but they all connect.”
“I have…” Cloedeya began, and then stopped. He ate another dumpling and looked at her shyly. “I met a man once. A speculative gentlemen. I suspect that he was a scholar from Libreigia. He asked me why I thought that we were the only ones who ever came into this world. What if other doors have opened at other times? What if other doors are opening now?”
“Doors to other worlds?”
“Or doors through this world. Rue and Ahlo might have come from some other world. But I think they came from this one. After I left here I went east, traveling across the mountains with a series of caravans. I made it all the way to the ocean. The cliffs at Doelenara might be the cliffs that they described to me. And the people there told me a legend. Of two boys who went into the caves and found their way back to the Previous World.”
Manrie stared at him. “But if you found where they came from, why didn’t you take them back there?”
“Because it was a legend. The two boys, if they existed, disappeared more than a hundred years ago.”
A wave of sadness washed over her, and Cloedeya, seeing it, leaned forward and kissed the top of her head. “It is why I must feed Ahlo, too. If Rue isn’t dead, if Macbrau told the truth, then his brother will never return. He is lost somewhere. In this world. In another world. In another time. Ahlo will never see him again.”
“But why didn’t Rue take him along?”
Cloedeya’s face clouded. The sun was setting outside. The figures at the tables were mere shadows. “I don’t know. Rue was always the clever one, the industrious one. Ahlo only wanted to delve in the caves. And yet, a few years ago, they switched places. Rue became obsessed with the caves, and they had words. Ahlo knew that one of them had to maintain their authority in the valley. Had to deal with the caravans and recruit miners. All of the things that Rue was good at. Ahlo floundered. He allowed the Butcher of Hareramanda to join his company, after all.”
“Why did he do that?”
“They were old friends. Laenrid came here when he was just a boy himself. He learned from Ahlo. That’s how he found his own claim, further to the east.”
“And Ahlo didn’t care that he had murdered an entire village?”
“I don’t know if Ahlo believed it. Macbrau was always spreading lies about the Enrieghos. Trying to damage their reputation. Perhaps Ahlo thought that the story of the butchery was a lie as well.”
Manrie ate another dumpling. “Have you known who Praeda was this whole time?”
“No. I refuse to be curious. I know nothing that someone hasn’t told me themselves.” He plopped another dumpling into his mouth and smiled. “Come. If you’ve rested enough, you can help me make a wonderful pancake. I make the batter from milled corn and fragile onions, and the pancake tastes like a harvest moon.”
Praeda woke as Manrie was stepping out of the wagon, so she turned back and gathered the little girl in her arms. She set her down in the street, which had been filled with tables, brought from the tavern and tea house and the shanty homes that made up the town. Men and women sat at the tables, the townspeople and the Enrieghos people sitting together. She turned to look towards Macbrau’s compound, and her eyes met the gaze of the man Farahzin. He quickly looked away. There was an expression of pain and shock on his face. A scar left by the ambush, she thought. An expression he would wear for the rest of his life.
Melsa came by and took Praeda away with her, but Manrie didn’t go immediately to help Cloedeya with the pancake. Instead she perched on the edge of the wagon and pulled her saddle bag to her. The jar of pickled cabbage was still there, and the bestiary, and the two strange discs. She opened the bestiary at random and found herself looking down at the picture she had drawn of the strange carapace found in the Gaendolin Hills. The last picture she had drawn before fleeing Libreigia. There was the Lady Daturi, drawn beside the carapace to show scale. And Manrie’s notes, neatly written beside this image. The tunnel that the carapace had been found in had been strangely marked. As if the giant insect had inscribed it with its odd and superfluous nineteenth leg.
She was leaning closer to study the minute details of her drawing when there was a commotion all about her. Glancing up, she saw that the crowd had divided its attention, heads turning to the north and the south. She looked towards Macbrau’s compound, expecting that it was Ahlo, returning from his search. There were wavering forms on the ridge path. The dusky blue of the crepuscular sky made them indistinct, a ripple of mist moving down into the valley. She turned her head and saw that shapes were coming down the cliff above the Enriegho’s house as well. Spirits. And the first thing she thought of was Praeda’s blindfold.
The people were scattering, running into the houses. Cloedeya, standing over his little grill, had just turned the pancake and was straightening up, contented with the results of his concentration. Then he saw that the street was abandoned, and looked around in confusion, and met Manrie’s gaze. Uku came around the side of the wagon, carrying Praeda, who had buried her face in his chest. He was followed by Melsa and Big Praeda. Tafaemi pushed past the others, and pushed Manrie aside, and vaulted into the wagon, giving a little cry of terror. She threw herself down onto the pillows and pressed her face to the wagon wall, her back to the opening.
“Get in, Manrie,” Melsa said.
“But the spirits don’t walk abroad in Tzurfaera. And we’ve seen them before. They’ve never hurt us.”
“Something has happened,” Melsa insisted. “Ahlo did something.”
Manrie looked at Cloedeya. He refused to panic. He took his pan off of the grill and slid the pancake onto a plate, which he carried to her. Taeyaho appeared at the end of the street, just as the first of the ghosts reached the Enriegho gate. They seemed to be following him. But he was walking quickly, frightened by them, or as if he needed to fetch something. He came up to Cloedeya and took the plated pancake. “We must cook for them. All of them.”
“We have tried,” Cloedeya said. “The spirits won’t eat.”
“They’re coming to us. We must make them welcome.”
Cloedeya nodded, and glanced at his friends. “Give Little Praeda to Tafaemi. Close the side of the wagon. There is no reason for them to be frightened.”
Uku was looking to the south, towards the corner where the road met the street. Figures and come around it, and were joining the mass of Enriegho dead. “Aestahana?” he said softly.
A small woman, a shade whom Manrie had seen many times before, her back bent from labor. Her face bore no expression as she came to a stop a few yards from them. All of the ghosts had filled the street, but none came closer than Uku’s sister.
“I see Old Riman,” Cloedeya said softly. “And both of Macbrau’s dead daughters. And there is Joenhri, who sang so sweetly. He always loved my honey cakes. Melsa, we still have that honey we procured in Gatizar, don’t we?”
But Manrie was looking down into her saddle bag. The two discs had begun to glow, as they had in the Man on the Mountain’s house. A shifting pattern of blue and yellow. Her hand touched the bestiary, and she paused, wondering. She looked up and found Aizdha, standing among the spirits. His hands were crossed in front of his plump belly. His expression was wistful, as he sometimes was at evening time, and particularly in summer. “Not the bestiary,” she murmured to herself. “I had the bestiary when I left Libreigia, and I didn’t see you until I got to that house.”
She picked up one of the plates, and felt a sharpening of attention on the spectral faces. “Uku,” she whispered, “I think I can take them back. To the tunnels. I think I can make them stay there.”
“She was never in a tunnel,” he said. “A barrow. A grave. Her body was left to rot by the well.”
“I should take her to Macbrau’s, then. Not the Enrieghos. Not the place where her killer was hiding.”
“Not to Hareramanda? She can’t go home? ”
“I don’t know. I only have two discs. What if I need one for each side of the valley? I don’t know.”
“May I walk with her?”
“Yes. Of course.”
Manrie glanced at her friends. Melsa and Cloedeya were digging in the pantry wagon. Taeyaho was trying to offer the pancake to the ghosts. Big Praeda had been listening to her talk to Uku. She stepped forward and embraced Manrie. She smelled of sweat and rosemary and fear.
Manrie set the saddle bag down in the dirt. She placed one hand on the side of the sleeping wagon and whispered, “Be good, Praeda. Be good. I’ll try to come back for you.” In the other hand she clutched the two discs. She stepped forward and turned to the left, and began to make her way along the ramshackle street.
The spirits followed. Uku fell away from her, and she looked back to see him keeping pace with the ghost of his sister. His robes seemed bleached, like her own. She walked to gate where she had first met him, and felt a hysterical laugh rise up from within her as she said “Gate, door, portal.” Past the shanties and to the akimbo hitching post, and up the narrow path.
The door to the first lace hole was standing open. There was a dim glimmer from the platform, where the last embers of the fire struggled to breathe. She passed it, passed the dismantled beds and thrown aside blankets. The spirits filled the cavern with a blue glow. As if they were the reflection of rippling water. The door to the tunnel was standing open.
“Manrie,” Uku said, as she was about to step through it, “all of the spirits have followed you here. They make no distinction. Laenrid walks among them.”
She turned and looked at the crowd of faces that filled the cavern. She felt a deep expectancy, and a deep sadness. She found her master’s face. He stared back at her with scholarly interest.
“Aizdha,” she whispered. “Will you rest here? Are you content?”
He gave her no answer. It was familiar. As if he had set a problem for her, and would not shift the blankness of his expression to give her some clue to its solution. But she knew the solution. Why couldn’t they all rest together? Those who loved each other. Those who hated each other. Why couldn’t they all be united in death?
She turned and stepped into the tunnel. She felt breathless, and light, and she moved forward through the deep darkness, feeling as if she had been struck, as if she were suspended in the moment of shock before her body crumpled to the ground. Step after step, and the light of the spirits dimmed, but she could feel them with her, feel their breath on the back of her neck. The tunnel seemed wide, as if it were a cave. Her footsteps echoed all around her. It did not resemble the lace hole that she and Aizdha had once explored on the other side of the valley. She half expected to hear the shuffling of an enormous insect, and feel the prickle of many legs seize her out of the darkness.
She stopped and stood for a moment, breathing shallowly. All was dark, such a deep darkness that she didn’t think she could emerge from it. She squatted and placed a hand against the ground, and felt the reassurance of uneven rock. She set the disc down and removed her hands from it, and knew that she wouldn’t be able to find it again in the darkness. So she stood, and turned around, intending to go back the way she had come.
Only, after she had taken a few steps, she felt disorientated. She might have only made a half turn, she might be angling off into some deep recess of the cave. Her pulse began to pound in her ears. Maybe she was to be lost here forever. She thought of Little Praeda, cowering in the wagon. She thought of Taeyaho, with his ridiculous plate of pancakes. She wanted to weep. She wanted them to be all right, to be happy, to walk through a world without death or spirits.
Then she heard a voice. It was singing. It came from in front of her, slightly to her left. She turned towards it and walked, and then ran. The voice became stronger. A high, piercing melody. Each note as clear and kind as sunlight on water. She saw a flickering light, and then the entrance of the tunnel, and there was Taeyaho, framed in the doorway, singing.
She fell into his arms, and he caught her. He pulled her back into the room, and Uku closed the door. There were torches, and flame wavering across the faces of her friends. Cloedeya was there, and he immediately held a plate to her, and she tasted the cake, and it tasted like the harvest moon. Melsa gave her an awkward embrace, and Big Praeda held her for a long moment, and cried softly into her hair.
There were others there. Ahlo stood by the ruin of the beds, and Liezhae stood beside him, holding her baby. And the boy, Malekeisae, kicked at the bed clothes with a disinterested foot. “How?” she asked, looking at them.
“They came out after you went in,” Uku said. “Emerged. Resurfaced.”
“Why is it light outside?”
“It’s dawn,” Cloedeya said. “You were gone for hours.”
She blinked tears from her eyes. “Taeyaho, did you sing all night?”
“He did,” Melsa said. “He sang and sang.”
“And did they all go in? All of the dead?”
“They did, Manrie. But Taeyaho said that you wouldn’t stay with them. He insisted that you would come back.”
“Where’s Praeda?”
“Where we left her. Asleep in the wagon.”
“And Ahlo? And Liezhae? What happens now?”
“Now?” Cloedeya said. “Now Ahlo will rule the valley. Or Liezhae will. None of them have spoken. Not even the boy. And the baby has been silent, although he breathes, and nurses.”
“And Rue? He wasn’t in the tunnel, was he?”
“No,” Cloedeya told her. “No. He is gone. Maybe someday a door will open here again, and Ahlo can walk through it. Or maybe you opened a door last night, and now we have shut it forever.”