“Well they’re laid to rest differently so they can’t come back, because it’s guaranteed they’ll try. Don’t ask me how.”

“How awful. Here’s your reward for a too-short life filled with unpleasantness: eternity locked in a cage like a rabid animal.”

She glanced at him again, take of note of the unexpected empathy. A quality he carefully disguised in less trying circumstances. “You said yourself there are gods to take them in. They’re spirits of compassion, not punishment. Just, the funerals are done a little differently to keep them there.”

At this point, she had her stage set up and took a minute to chafe her hands across her hips, reminding herself this was a stupid thing to do. And what would they do if it didn’t work? Havec obviously couldn’t go on like this; he leaned up against one of the nearby tombstones breathing hoarsely, and he had begun to twitch.

“Are you ready?”

He didn’t answer.

“Havec,” she said more sharply, and she saw the way he jumped.

His voice was unsteady when he answered, “Yes?”

“Are you ready?”

“Please.”

“I need you to think about the, the thing you gave me. Why it was meaningful to Xar, and to you, and why you think Kebbal would recognize it.”

She had expected a lengthy session of questioning followed by a lengthier fight, but he only said, “Alright.”

Nonplussed, she knelt in the weeds and reached for another conjuring-stone, this one dull. Holding it up before her, she said, “Ready when you are.”

He had been practically shouting at her all night, but she barely heard him when he said, “I’m good.”

She closed her eyes briefly. Then she opened them and murmured, “Please don’t be angry,” as she filled this crystal too with light. It wasn’t the vibrant heat-light of the sun that brought warmth and life to physical reality, but the viscous misleading memory-light that illuminated the realm of souls. There was one swift pulse of something, felt more than seen, that left writhing etiolated afterimages streaked across her vision.

“What did you do?” His voice was downright shaky.

“I tried to—Did it work?”

“No, nothing’s—” He stopped. It was a moment before he went on, making no attempt to disguise his relief. “They aren’t leaving, but one by one they’re turning away. Then they start to fade…”

“Praise to Bol, goddess of benevolent waters, and Siruphan, patron of inquisitive minds.”

“I can hear myself think,” he murmured wonderingly, sinking onto the edge of a tomb. A pause, then his head rose. “What did you do?” The same question, more intent.

“Kebbal is going to be interested in anything you’re interested in, especially if it plays to Kebbal’s favorite subject.” She was too tired and frazzled to mince words and said honestly, “It must drive you crazy that the last interaction you ever had with him, you killed someone for him, and he kissed you. How do you think Kebbal feels?”

He drew in a deep breath, then released it in a sigh.

“You invited it out to look at what you were looking at. I captured an image of it with ghost-light.”

“What?” He said the word flatly, as if she had spoken a foreign tongue.

“Come here.” When he knelt beside her in the dirt, she pointed at the blank rear face of the sepulcher behind the belt and lights. “You may need to squint.”

He squinted; leaned forward; leaned abruptly back, fast enough he reared onto his toes. A moment later he was back on his hands and knees, peering at the shadowy stain on the stone. “It looks like a ret.”

Qanath frowned at him, then squinted into the light again. She had been thinking more of ghastly monsters with too many limbs, but now he mentioned it, it did kind of look like a capital Ret. There was no way the primal cosmic force inside him could be reduced to this simple two-dimensional scrawl, which opened a number of fascinating and unsettling questions about why it looked like that to them.

“Why did we do that?”

“Now Kebbal’s out in the open, so to speak, the ghosts aren’t bothering with you anymore, they’re trying to talk directly to it.”

Beside her, Havec let out a faint groan and let his head hang wearily between his shoulders. “I have been dying to see you do real sorcery since the instant Xar told me you were moving in.” For the first time in hours, he didn’t sound like he was holding in a scream. “Now I know what you consider science, I don’t ever want to see what you call ‘witchery.’”

Qanath was exhausted from stress and lack of sleep, the sorcery on top of it; she had only ever been allowed to conjure spirit light a few times, always in a controlled environment under the eyes of a knowledgeable teacher. And although Havec didn’t understand this, it had been risky to prod at Kebbal. Havec was its helpmate and partner, and it would probably tolerate most anything from him. Qanath was not the Avatethura Master, and it could very easily have taken offense.

It had let her go forward with her plan, though, and it looked like Havec was free from his entourage of ghosts. She did the only thing there was to do at this point: sat down in the dirt with a thump and laughed. After a few seconds, he joined in.

Two Routes Leading North

The day they left Dareh, they traveled slowly, because both of them felt like shit. They were tired anyway, and the fact that they were forced to waste the entire morning walking in a circle didn’t help. Dareh only had the one gate; the others had long since been bricked up. The cemetery lay in the northern half of the city, but they must go all the way south to get out. Then they spent the next several hours treading the path that traced the circumference of the walls in order to get back to the north-bound road, perhaps a quarter-mile away from where they began.

As the day drew to a close, thunder sounded on the southern horizon. The girl stopped walking and cast her eyes at the cloudless heavens, seeking the sound’s source. Havec was forced to grasp her wrist and tow her off the road, where she lay down on her belly reluctantly when he told her to get down.

The land north of the deserted city was a gently-rolling quilt of farmland, pasturage, and scattered patches of trees. None of those trees, fences, or newly-sprouted crops were anywhere near them, though, and they had nothing better to work with than the limited concealment of knee-high scrub. Kneeling beside the girl, he grabbed grasses and brambles by the fistful, tearing them loose and casting them onto her back and head.

When he threw himself onto the ground at her side, the girl hissed, “What is that?”

The rumbling wasn’t thunder but the reverberations of an approaching parade; other than that, he couldn’t say. “I don’t know.”

“Then why are we hiding?”

“Because I want to learn before it sees us.”

‘It’ turned out to be a cavalry unit, a mounted band of what had to be several hundred soldiers riding in ordered ranks. The soldiers mostly had their eyes fixed forward, and the slackness of their expressions suggested they were bored. Unlike the pair they had encountered right before a chegu almost ate them, this was no patrol meant to ensure that the roads remained safe; these weren’t peacekeepers but soldiers on their way to war. They were dozing in their saddles, and he had the sense they had come a long way.

Mostly they weren’t talking, but they made an incredible amount of noise. It wasn’t just the muted thunder of the horses’ hooves on the packed dirt of the road, but the clatter of a hundred suits of armor jouncing as they rode. Their breastplates were sheets of overlapping discs rattling like cymbals, reaching down onto the thighs. He squinted, noticing that all of them carried bows on their backs in addition to the swords. The sunlight glinting off all that bronze dazzled his eyes.

“That is awesome,” he whispered fervently.

Qanath glanced at him sidelong.

“Can you imagine that bearing down on you in the open field?”

“I don’t want to.”

He grunted. “Why do you want me to teach you to fight?”

“Was this what you wanted as a child?”

The question startled him enough that he briefly tore his eyes off the passing troops. “What boy doesn’t dream of becoming chattel to a scary old man possessed by a demon?”

“Kebbal isn’t a demon.” She cast her eyes uneasily side-to-side as if the thing might be eavesdropping on them.