“Are you fucking kidding me? What part of this can we possibly explain to a stranger?”
“We aren’t doing anything wrong.”
“Other than, you know, me being here.”
“Fine, we won’t tell them—”
Havec had lost the last of his patience and tipped his head back, shouting at the ceiling through his teeth. “Oh my god. Qanath. If you find a necromancer, they’ll want to look at the ghosts, don’t you think? Which will lead them right to…?”
“You,” she supplied, wishing he didn’t have a point.
“Besides, if there was someone here who was qualified to deal with,” he waved a hand at the empty dark, “they probably would have. Don’t you think?”
“But I don’t know what to do,” she protested again.
“You’re going to have to figure it out,” he told her bluntly, making it clear the discussion was at an end.
Qanath didn’t like it, but someone had to do something and Havec wasn’t going to be much help. She chewed on her lip while her mind raced, eyes on the man across from her. He had his arms wrapped around his chest, and she had the sense he was fighting hard not to start rocking. He kept his gaze fixed on her like a lifeline, and with those dark circles around his pale eyes in his pale face, he looked more than a little spectral himself.
“I have an idea,” she said after a few minutes. “Do you have anything of Xar anKebbal’s?”
“Everything I own?”
“Something of particular value to him that had meaning beyond the purpose it served. Your socks don’t count.”
Havec’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“I think I might be able to convince them they have the wrong man.”
He reared back from her. “That is monstrous. You mean to leave them like this?”
“I don’t know what else to do. You’re asking me to do something it takes people years of study to learn, I can’t just wing it. I don’t even know where to begin and what if I make it worse?”
She reached a beseeching hand toward him. She had meant to go on, but the expression on his face distracted her: his mouth was open slightly, eyes fixed on her arm, and his brows were twisted in such a way that she couldn’t tell if he would laugh or puke. When she realized why, a chill ran across her flesh. “Is my arm through one of them? Please say no.”
“No,” he replied, voice strangled. His eyes remained fixed on her forearm.
Only then did she think to jerk it back, turning her face away because she didn’t want to know what his face looked like while he watched her do it. Drawing a steadying breath, she made herself say, “I’m not saying we should leave it like this forever. Just until we can let someone know that something more permanent needs to be done.”
Havec turned away without comment, reaching for his bag. He rummaged through it, and there was a definite pause when he went still, no longer searching, but not drawing the item out. She held her breath as it flashed through her mind that in less trying circumstances, he would never have admitted he had this memento. He had told her on the night they left that his training was the only memory he meant to carry away, but of course it wasn’t that simple. Nothing ever was.
“You didn’t say it needed to have nice meaning, right?”
“Just something Kebbal would recognize.”
“Oh, it will recognize this.”
He pulled the item out of his pack and tossed it to her in one motion, and Qanath was so startled the object almost hit her in the face. She managed to snatch it out of the air at the last second, then she gazed upon the length of supple leather in her hands, high-quality, lined by felt on the inner face, with a metal buckle: a collar small enough it wouldn’t fit on most dogs. It was hard to be sure in the limited light, but it looked as if there was a web-work of ancient dust in the leather’s creases, as if it hadn’t been touched in years.
“You know I’ll have to leave it here,” she said quietly, not looking at him.
“Good.” He didn’t give her time to say anything else, had she dared. “What’s the plan?”
“We’ll want to find the cemetery.”
“Great,” Havec replied. Although she knew he meant it sarcastically, he hadn’t been able to summon the tone.
They gathered up their things, packing away the few remaining bites of supper to eat for breakfast. It was only a matter of minutes before they set out again, each of them carrying a light in hand. Havec had seemed to be impervious to the spookiness of this empty place and he probably still wasn’t paying the echoes much mind. “Are they following us?”
“And showing no sign of giving up before time comes to an end.”
It took them a long time to find the place, casting back and forth along the endless dusty vacant streets. Havec was silent, stiff in the jaw and wide at the eyes. She wasn’t sure if he was frightened of the ghosts or just overwhelmed by the barrage of need, but she almost lost him more than once when he took the wrong turning or stopped walking. Eventually she took to towing him along by the sleeve.
It must have been midnight when they came around a corner to find a lower wall between them and the walls of the city, miniature minarets and spires peeking over it. She had meant to cut sideways until they found the gate, but Havec woke from his fugue, marching straight to the fence. When Qanath joined him, he grabbed her around the waist and picked her up.
She squawked in alarm and would have argued, but by then she had no choice but to fling her arms over the length of brick. It scraped against her barely-healed welts and she felt heat on her belly as she began to bleed. He hoisted himself up a moment later, and while she was still struggling to get her butt underneath her, he had already twisted about and hopped off the far edge.
There was a quiet thump, then a less quiet: “Fuck!”
“What happened?” she asked nervously.
“The ground’s uneven,” he replied, appearing out of the gloom with his arms upstretched. “It’s almost as if people buried stuff here, very strange. Take my arms, let me…”
Grasping her under the elbows, he braced her when she pushed off the wall, easing her to the ground. Qanath opened her mouth to thank him, then wondered if the unexpected gallantry were a side effect of stress and commenting would make him retreat. He had already turned away anyway. “What do we do?”
“If you could help me find a nice flat space? And then I need to borrow your mirror.”
They set off amongst the graves together, dodging between the mausoleums crammed cheek by jowl like tenements in the neighborhood where she’d grown up. A night bird called and Qanath almost shed her skin. It was silly to be frightened of a graveyard when you’d brought the angry dead yourself.
