“How about this?”
They had gotten separated while they searched, and she had to follow the sound of his voice along thin avenues of grass and dust between tombs. She found him standing beside a flat slab of gray stone about two feet square, hemmed in on two sides by larger mausoleums. The faces presented to them were the rears, bald of nameplates, and she ran one hand across the smooth, gritty stone. “This is just right. If I could get that mirror?”
She set his collar in the center of the flat capstone, setting her chunk of spelled crystal at its side. She tried to roll one of the lengths of woven straw that had held their supper into a cylinder but couldn’t make it hold. When a search through her bag turned up nothing useful, she dumped all the arrows out of Havec’s quiver and stuck the crystal in its mouth. It wasn’t perfect but did at least have the effect of channeling the light mostly in one direction. She put the mirror opposite, then spent forever messing around with them, propping them up with wadded-up articles of clothing out of her bag until the light was concentrated over the collar in the empty air.
“Why no children?”
“Huh?” she asked absently.
“Why are there no children? Do they never want revenge?”
“I wish.”
“Yeah?”
Havec had taken a seat on the grave across from her, and she glanced at him. “The way I understand it, kids are too new to themselves, with too little experience. They can’t hold onto their humanity after death. The ones who die by violence or neglect deteriorate into malevolent spirits in a matter of months.”
“So why aren’t they here? Seems like their kind of gig.”
“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.’”
