The flames rushed back to Ruby’s hands. She absorbed them, and they all saw: there was no body now beneath her palms, no orchids, no cinnamon hair. The bower was untouched, though; the white blossoms all remained. They were anadne, Letha’s sacred flower, from which, before all this chaos, Sarai’s lull had been brewed to keep her safe from dreams. Their pale petals were tinged pink from bloody bathwater, but they lived, while where the body had lain there was naught but absence, like a gap in the world where something precious had been and now was lost. Even the scent of singed flesh was weak, the immolation having been so hot and fast, and the breeze was already sweeping it away.
Sarai sobbed. Lazlo stepped up behind her and wrapped his arms around her, holding her against him. She twisted so she was facing him and wept against his chest. Everyone clustered close. No eyes were dry.
“There, now, love,” said Great Ellen. “You’re all right. You’re still with us, and that’s what matters.”
At least the dissonance of two Sarais had resolved. There was only one now. Her body was gone. Only her ghost remained.
. . .
The Ellens shepherded them to the table. They weren’t hungry, but they were indisputably empty. It had been many hours since they ate or slept, and in their numbness, they let themselves be led.
They cast wary glances at the head of the table, but Minya still did not appear.
It wasn’t a proper meal. With the events of the night and morning, the Ellens hadn’t prepared one. There was only a loaf and a pot of jam, representing their two inexhaustible resources: kimril and plums. The others took slices and spread them with jam, but when the tray came to Sarai, she just looked at it. She could no longer consume food, but she was still prey to the habitual sensations of life, and a feeling like hunger stirred in her. Before she had time to feel sorry for herself, Great Ellen came up behind her.
“Watch,” she said, reaching for the bread. She cut a slice, and picked it up—or seemed to, anyway. It came away in her hand, and yet remained where it lay. She had conjured a phantom slice, upon which she proceeded to spoon phantom jam before lifting it to her mouth and taking a dainty bite. If you weren’t watching closely, you wouldn’t even notice the real food had stayed on the plate.
Sarai did as Great Ellen did, and took a bite of phantom bread. It tasted just as it always had, and she knew she was eating her memory of it. She watched Lazlo’s face as he took a bite of the real thing, encountering kimril for the first time—the nutrient-rich tuber that was their staple—and laughed a little as his expression registered the startling absence of taste.
“Lazlo,” she said with grave formality, “meet kimril.”
“This...” said Lazlo, striving to keep his voice neutral, “is what you live on?”
“Not anymore,” said Sarai, a wry twist to her lips. “You’re welcome to my portion.”
“I’m not very hungry,” he demurred, and the rest of them laughed, enjoying this acknowledgment of their private torment.
“Wait’ll you try it in soup,” Ruby said. “It’s purgatory in a spoon.”
“It’s the salt,” lamented Great Ellen. “We’ve herbs, and that helps, but with salt running low, there just isn’t a lot you can do to help kimril.”
“I think we might manage to procure some salt,” ventured Lazlo.
Ruby pounced on the notion. “And sugar!” she said. “Or, better yet, cake. The bakeries must be empty now, cakes going stale in the cases.” They had all witnessed the exodus from Weep. “Go and get them.” She was deadly serious. “Get them all.”
“I didn’t mean right now,” said Lazlo, laughing a little.
“Why not?”
“Ruby, really,” said Sarai. “Now’s hardly the time for raiding bakeries.”
“It’s fine for you to say. You could turn that into cake if you wanted.” She indicated the phantom bread Sarai held in her hand.
Sarai looked at it. “You make a good point,” she said, and transformed it. In an instant it was cake, and Ruby gasped at the sight. It was three layers tall, white as snow, with a froth of cream filling and the palest pink icing piped into flowers. Sparrow and Feral gasped, too. It seemed so real, as though they ought to be able to reach out and take it, but they knew better, and just stared—or, in Ruby’s case, glared. “I deserve cake,” she sniffed. “After what I just had to do.”
“It’s true,” said Sarai. “You do.” Though she felt that the ravid’s share of pity was hers in this situation. “All things considered, I’d rather have real bread than imaginary cake.” She took a bite. They all watched hungrily, as though they could taste it by witnessing her expression.
“How is it?” Sparrow asked, yearning in her voice.
Sarai shrugged and vanished it, feeling a little wicked. “Nothing special, just sweet.” She looked to Lazlo with a secret smile. “Like eating cake in dreams.”
He smiled back, and they all could see that there were memories shimmering between them. “What dreams?” asked Feral.
“What cake?” demanded Ruby.
But Sarai had no will for storytelling. She wished, rather, to spend whatever time she had left, if not living, then at least doing and being and feeling. Never before had time seemed so like currency, each moment a coin that could be well- or ill-spent, or even, if one wasn’t careful, wasted and lost. She looked to Minya’s chair at the head of the table. Even empty, it seemed to reign over them. Ominously, the quell board was there, all set up and ready for a game. I’m good at games, she heard in her mind. She wanted to dash the board to the floor.
If only it could be that easy to put an end to all of Minya’s games.
“You must be tired,” she said to Lazlo, rising from her chair. “I know I am.”
“Tired?” asked Ruby. “Can ghosts sleep?”
Feral shook his head at her, his expression sour. “How can you have lived your whole life with ghosts and never wondered that before?”
“I’ve wondered. I’ve just never asked.”
“Ghosts can do everything the living can do,” Sparrow told her, looking to the Ellens for confirmation. “As long as they believe it.”
“And,” Sarai added, “as long as Minya lets us.”
But she wasn’t thinking of sleep in any case. As she took Lazlo’s hand and led him from the gallery, sleep was the last thing on her mind.
Chapter 11
Cannibals and Virgins
“We should come back with some rope,” said Thyon, eyeing the crumbling edges of the sinkhole.
“While you do that,” said Calixte, “I’ll just go down and open the door.”
“It isn’t—” Safe, he was going to say, but there wasn’t much point. Calixte had already jumped into the hole.
Thyon let out a hard breath and watched her, seeming weightless as she passed between handholds or simply leapt, landing on narrow ledges with virtually no sound of impact. In a matter of seconds she was down in the pit, crossing it in little skips, like a child crossing a stream on stepping-stones. Except the stepping-stones were veins of mesarthium gleaming amid chunks of broken rock and shifting piles of earth, beneath which an underground river raged.
Thyon held his breath, watching her, half expecting the ground to give way and suck her into the dark. But it didn’t, and then she was scaling the far side of the sinkhole, if possible even faster than she’d descended. She paused, only yards below the door, to look over her shoulder at him and call up, “Well?”
Well indeed. What to do? Go for rope, knowing she’d open the door while he was gone and have the discovery to herself? Or follow her and take the risk of plunging into the Uzumark to be swept away flailing and drown in the dark?
Neither choice appealed.
“If you’re afraid,” called Calixte, “I can just tell you what I find!”
Gritting his teeth, Thyon paced the edge, looking for a place to go over. Calixte had made it look easy. It wasn’t. Where she’d leapt, he skidded, kicking off a minor avalanche, only to slide into his own dirt plume and choke on the laden air. He reached out to catch himself on a protruding rock, but it came away in his hand and he pitched off balance, only saving himself from tumbling headlong into the pit by sprawling out like a starfish. Lying there hugging the dirt, his mouth full of grit, he seethed with resentment for the bounding girl who’d lured him into danger, as though his life were worth no more than hers, to be thrown away on senseless risk.
“Get up,” she called. “I’ll wait for you. Go slow. We aren’t all so blessed to be descended from spiders.”
Spiders?
Thyon picked himself up—sort of. He kept on hugging the slope and made his way down like that, getting dirtier with every step. Crossing the pit, he found leaping unnecessary. He set his feet on a seam of mesarthium and followed it, windmilling his arms for balance. Calixte’s leaping had been showmanship, he concluded, or else the sheer joy of motion. Reaching the slope below her, he looked up and saw that she had, indeed, waited.
She was pretending to have fallen asleep.
Peeved, he picked up a pebble and threw it at her. He missed, but she heard it plink against the ledge of rock and cracked open an eye
midsnore. “You’ll regret that, faranji,” she said with equanimity.
“Faranji? You’re a faranji, too.”
“Not like you.” She picked herself up from her pretend-slumber slump and dusted the dirt from her behind. “I mean, there are faranji, and there are faranji.” On the second faranji, she grimaced and raised her eyebrows, indicating a specially pernicious breed of outsider, in which category, clearly, she placed him. She helpfully pointed out a foothold to him while saying, “There’s the kind of guest who’s honored to be invited, and the kind who believes he’s bestowing honor by accepting.”
He stepped on the foothold and reached for a rock she indicated next. “The kind who expresses interest in the culture and language,” she went on. “And the kind who disdains it as barbaric, and insists on an entire camel to carry foodstuffs from their own land, as though they might perish on native fare.”