"You sh-should keep that a secret," Jawal blurted, looking surprised at himself. "That you're looking for Rahun, I mean."

"Why's that?" Sidri asked. "Do the people here like him?"

Jawal nodded. "He's helped out the village since the mines closed."

Jiriga rolled his eyes. "One of those," he muttered. He saw Sidri's quizzical expression. "You ever read a story where the hero is a bandit who gives what he steals to his hometown? Sometimes you get guys who think that's them. Hard to deal with them once they have the locals on their side."

"And if everyone thinks we're bounty hunters . . ." Sidri sighed.

"I can tell you where to find him," Jawal said, so softly that he might have wanted to go unheard. He slapped his cheeks abruptly and mustered the firmest look he could. "I'll tell you. Whatever that man did to Rahun has something to do with my dad's death, right? Finding him would help you with that, right?"

"It would," Sidri said.

"Okay. There's a pass that starts to get narrow about an hour north of here. It starts to slope down real gentle, a little ways after that. Right when the slope starts, that's where he likes to r-rob folks. Easy to surround them, he said."

"Do you know where he hides out?" Jiriga asked. Jawal shook his head; the boy wasn't holding back on them, so he genuinely didn't know. "Well, you've already helped us out plenty. Thanks, son."

"J-just don't let anyone find out I told you."

"Nobody will hear it from us, I promise," Sidri said. "You should get some rest now. Hopefully you'll have better sleep now that the dead have less hold on you."

"You should head along the ridge to the mines before you go back down to the village. That way, if anyone spots you, they'll just assume you were visiting your hideout," Jiriga said, leading the boy out. Once he'd shut and bolted the door, he went straight to his chair by the window. "I'm amazed he got through his whole story. Bundle of nerves, that one."

"I'm just as amazed that you held your temper with him. You almost seemed warm at times," Sidri said. "He did well, all things considered, and we should be grateful for what he's given us. With the haunting in the mines, I doubt I could spot this Rahun in a trance unless I was right next to him."

"Our best bet is to survey the area around this pass and find a spot with a good view, but hard enough to reach that it's not a viable route for people trying to get in and get out quick. We'll have to watch and wait. I know how you feel about playing bystander, but you'll have to swallow that."

Jiriga was looking at her murky reflection in the window; she could feel the sternness of his gaze weighing down on her. A memory of a house ablaze and the screams of children tried to claw its way into the front of her mind, but she buried it with prejudice.

"I'll be fine."

The burning house came to her in her dream that night; this time she was the one trapped inside, begging for someone to rescue her. Even over the roaring flames she could hear Jiriga's voice, shouting 'Leave it, he's getting away!' Smoke started to fill her lungs, and she couldn't breath. She woke with a start in the still and dark. Jiriga was asleep, which meant it must be quite late indeed. She could tell within the space of ten breaths that she wouldn't be getting back to sleep; she would have happily traded her dream for whatever hauntings Geddha and the other ghosts had to offer.

She had until sunrise to think about what Jawal had told them. She found it was hard to decide what held more disturbing implications: the idea of raising someone bodily from the dead, or that the process of doing so didn't just pull its victims across the boundary between life and death, but weakened that boundary. In the moments when she edged closest to sleep again, her mind wandered until she found herself a little girl again, holding her great-grandmother's hand.

By that time, she had lived away from her parents for years in the windowless house that her ancestors had built when the family was still great--when necromancers bore their isolation in the comfort of reverence and riches. The smooth ritual masks that adorned the walls had scared her when she'd first arrived, but nothing frightened her quite like the White Room they were walking to. She held her breath as her great-grandmother pushed the heavy black lacquered door open. White walls, white floors, white ceiling, white altar in the center, all unnervingly clean and smooth.

And there, on the altar, the lifeless body of an old man--younger than great-grandmother, but older than most would ever be.

"Today will be your first rite, dearest. You will give this man the greatest gift anyone could give: peace."

Young Sidri felt her palms sweating cold; great-grandmother must have noticed, because she squeezed those small hands gently, and crouched down beside her, stroking her hair.

"My little one," she murmured, her eyes smilng. "Do you remember what I told you your first day? About why we train in such a strange room?"

"So that we can cross the boundary and come home safely without anything to guide us," Sidri said, proud of her memory. Great grandmother cupped her cheek with her ancient hand.

"Very good, but there is another reason you weren't ready to understand then. It's to remind us that there is such a boundary, and it is sacred. In life there are the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak. Death makes us all equal; the necromancer's job is to understand this, and guide the high and the low to their rest. Nothing more."

And now, people with no respect for that boundary, whose motives she couldn't yet understand, had achieved things necromancers had thought impossible for as long as their art had been known. The anger alone would have been enough to rob her of sleep. When she heard Jiriga stir in the moments before dawn, she rose with a sigh and drew out paper, ink, and pen from a drawer. She lit a candle and sat at the table to write.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

"Couldn't sleep?" Jiriga asked.

"I'll take it easy," Sidri said, dashing off a quick note to the steward explaining why he'd find the place empty, asking him to hold it for their return and leaving advanced payment. Jiriga went about his own preparations, and they were taking the road north out of the village before even the goatherds were awake. Jiriga spurred his mule on ahead as the path began a gentle descent between two ridges, veering off it to follow the line of the western ridge. He returned with that look of maps drawing themselves in his head.

"There are small passages that cut into the eastern rise that seem likely places for bandits to hit from. Western rise looks solid for at least an hour's steady ride. Not much plant cover, though. We'll have to hide the mules a ways back from the ledge, approach on foot, and lay flat to keep watch," he said. "We won't be in any sort of position to give chase, but we can at least confirm where they're coming from."

That last part was solely for her benefit; Jiriga might have been impatient about their larger goals, but when on the scent of a target, he could wait as long as the stones themselves, the needs of others be damned. She let it lie, and followed him in silence off the main road. They made a small camp by an old moisture trap and decided to take shifts watching the road. Sidri's exhaustion overtook her and she slept in the shade of the moisture trap until shaken awake for her shift.

They waited for two days. Sidri read and re-read the chronicle of the shrine, carefully committing names, times, events to her memory. Jiriga scouted out the surrounding area when not on watch; it was near the end of Sidri's shift when a caravan approached. A line of laden yaks ambled through the narrows guided by men with wary faces. Each man was armed with a rifle, and they watched the ledges as though they expected to be attacked at any time. She wondered for a time if the bandits would come at all, seeing so many weapons, but sudden gunfire answered her promptly, echoing off the canyon walls.

One man in the caravan was hit in the shoulder and thrown from his mount with a cry, and the rest readied their guns. Jiriga came without a signal, the shot loud enough to reach his ears; he settled in next to her, both watching through a gap in the brambles as four men rode up to the edge of the eastern ridge, aiming down into the gulley. The men in the caravan raised their rifles, but their faces fell as they saw nine others emerge from the narrow pathways, some behind them, some in front of them, all with their sights trained.

Jiriga clicked his tongue against his teeth. "Fools should never have been taken such a vulnerable route in the first place," he whispered. Sidri shook her head and tried to clear it so she could feel anything strange. As she'd feared, the haunting in the mine was powerful enough that it was hard to focus on anything else. And yet, ever so faintly, she could sense something down in that gully. It was that telltale unscratchable itch of an Undying presence. There was no way she could push the haunting aside enough to fine tune that sense and determine who it was.

One of the bandits started speaking; only faint echoes unrecognizable as words reached them, but he had the people in the trade caravan looking at each other uncertainly. A big man near the front barked back defiantly, and the bandit who'd spoken replied briefly and let out two short whistles. Sidri saw one of the gunman on the ridge opposite her fire off a shot; noone fell, but the big man fell quiet, staring at the ground at his feet. The bandit spoke again, and this time the men of the caravan lowered their rifles and started to hand their goods over to the others surrounding them.

When they'd taken all that they could carry, they turned back up the narrows from which they'd come and rode off at a gallop, the men on the ridges standing watch with easy smirks on their faces. One shouted and fumbled with his rifle; Sidri saw the big man below had taken aim and fired off a quick shot into the back of the bandit who'd spoken. For his trouble, he was shot thrice by the men on the ridge, and he fell onto dirt spattered with his own blood. The bandits were gone before anyone else thought to return fire, leaving them to gather around the shoulder-shot man still groaning, and the big man utterly still.

"Well?" Jiriga asked. Sidri needed a moment to detach herself from the scene below. Cries of pain intruded on her thoughts--someone trying to remove the bullet from the man's shoulder?

"He's definitely here. I just couldn't tell who it was."

"It would have helped if that lot down there had gone a few rounds, we could have seen for ourselves who didn't mind the bullets," Jiriga said. "Even so, Rahun is probably the one giving orders."

"That's hardly low profile," Sidri said. Not that they hadn't met exceptions, but most Undying went to great lengths to fade into the background; Jiriga was usually the first to raise suspicion of seeming innocents and caution against getting stuck on the obvious folks, but he spoke with surety now.

"If it's true that he was entirely unaware of what happened to him like the boy's story suggests, then he wasn't given the offer like the others. No offer, no warnings. If he's really so fixed on being the village hero, the implications of his change probably haven't occurred to him yet."

"If it's all the same to you, I'd like to help put the soul of that man to rest," Sidri said, crawling back from the shrub-lined ledge and dusting herself off as she stood. "I'll change outfits and you can follow a ways behind. It shouldn't take very long."

Unable to find grounds to protest, he silently accepted her plan and let her go ahead to change into her traveler's coat and pants in privacy, donning her mask last. The members of the caravan had loaded the big man's body onto a cart pulled by one of the yaks, and their fear at the sight of a necromancer was tempered by relief. When she got the dead man's name and history and set his soul at ease, they thanked her profusely--she hated herself a bit for lying to them that she had just happened to be going the opposite way, and foregoing a fee for her services did nothing to blunt that.

She could hear her great-grandmother’s admonishment. ‘Lay them to their rest, nothing more.’ She wished it were still that simple.