Blood Ties (14 page)

It was autumn. The days were bright and crisp, the sea was glowing ultramarine, as it did near festival time, and crashing higher against the cliffs at the full of each tide. It seemed a time of clarity and light. But his mind kept returning to that yellow and blue room.

Other thoughts of the boy kept coming back — of his dark eyes and smooth skin. They were eyes like his own. Ash slept badly and, when he did sleep, he dreamed of Doronit standing by smiling while he killed the boy. By festival night he was twitchy and couldn’t concentrate. Doronit dismissed him to the stonecaster’s with a frown that made his stomach drop into his boots.

“Go on, then, get yourself quit of these spirits. Come to the Town Moot as soon as you can.”

She was dressed for the festival, her face painted with expensive silver tint, her clothes ghost-pale and flowing. She looked very beautiful, he thought, staring helplessly at her. She ran her hand down his arm, making his skin tickle and his eyes burn.

“Come soon,” she said.

He walked through the streets to Martine’s, resenting that he couldn’t go with Doronit. He walked with desire running through him and no end to it in sight.
Very well,
he thought. After he finished at Martine’s, he’d find himself a brothel and do something about it. If he couldn’t have Doronit tonight, he’d have someone else. She didn’t have to know. Then he thought of all the things Doronit knew that you didn’t expect. All the people who sold her information, or owed her favors. She
would
find out. And then what? Either she’d laugh at him or be angry — he didn’t know which was worse.

The streets were full of people enjoying themselves, painted like ghosts, wearing white, or silver if they could afford it. It was a city of happy ghosts. He hadn’t wanted to dress up. It wouldn’t have been very respectful to the ghosts he was going to meet. Of course, that was the point of the festival, held on the anniversary of Acton’s victory over the city, to show the ghosts that no one was afraid of them.

He had been to the festival once before, when he was seven and his parents came to Turvite to perform for the merchants. He remembered that night vividly. The whole city was full of ghosts, it had seemed to him. He hadn’t realized that some silver shapes were actually people in costume. He hadn’t understood why he could see through some and not others, why some made so much noise, laughing and singing the “Fly Away Spirit” song, while others drifted silently, shrinking into corners as the revelers careered by.

He remembered his parents practicing in the courtyard of Merchant House earlier in the day. His mother had sung “The Taking of Turvite,” while his father played the flute.

Acton killed them all,
she chanted.

All on the streets of Turvite

Their spirits rose up with a soundless cry

Their spirits rose up to cry to their gods

The faces of death stalked the streets of Turvite

The faces of death haunted the killers

Then she swung into the chorus, with Alured, their drummer, picking up the beat so that Ash hopped from foot to foot in time.

And the killers laughed!

Yes, they laughed!

And Acton laughed loudest of all.

He had tried to sing along, but, as always, his mother had laid a finger across her lips, not before he had seen a spasm of pain pass over his father’s face. Looking back, he realized that that was the last time he had tried to sing for his parents. It was the day he had understood that he would never be a singer, as he yearned to be. If he was going to be a musician, he would have to play the flute like his father.

The sun was setting when he reached the stonecaster’s house. There was only one ghost left there, a thin, old wraith who looked as if he had seen a thousand festivals. Ash nodded to him and the ghost nodded back. Behind the ghost, the sky was a mixture of orange and gold, a real autumn sunset. It cheered him and he knocked at the door with more energy than he’d felt for days.

Martine let him in. The bloodstained rug had been replaced by a mat of lambskins, gleaming white in the lamplight. Martine sat cross-legged on the edge of the mat, and gestured for him to sit beside her. He sat aware of her long hands and hooded eyes. There was a darkness in the way her blood moved in her veins, as though she carried a secret.

“It’s not always three days to the minute,” she said. “Sometimes it takes a few hours. But then, this isn’t the first quickening you’ve been to, is it?”

Ash shook his head and was aware, by the lift of Martine’s eyebrow, that the answer had made him seem more of a killer than he really was, but didn’t want to explain his past any further. He didn’t want to talk about his parents. Musicians were often asked to quickenings in the far west of the country. There, the people believed that soft music helped the spirit on its way, especially the spirits of those killed by accident or violence or sudden illness. These were the ones who quickened back into the waking world. His mother had taught him that the other spirits, who had nothing left unsaid, went on to be reborn straightaway. Although the ghost was said to quicken three days after its death, his parents had often played through the night or through the day before the ghost had appeared. Outside Turvite, a quickening was the only time that most people could see a ghost, not that those spirits had been as . . . vivid as they were in Turvite. Turvite had the strongest ghosts in the world.

“You have old blood in your face,” Martine said, studying him. For a moment he thought she meant real blood, branding him a killer. She saw his confusion. “I mean, you have the look of the ones who were in this land before — the original inhabitants.”

He felt forced into an explanation. “I’m a Trav — my parents was, were, Travelers. Musicians. They say that when Acton and his men came, a lot of the old people took the road, having no land of their own left to them.”

“Yes,” Martine said, brooding. “That is so. Did you know that that is why you can see the ghosts?”

“Everyone can see them here!” he protested. He had no mind to be any more set apart than he already was by his dark hair and eyes.

Martine smiled at him and shook her head. “No. In Turvite, where the ghosts are strong, everyone can detect . . . something. A shimmer in the air, a scent on the wind, a paleness where there should be darkness. Sometimes they catch a glimpse of eyes, hair, a hand. They feel cold as they pass. That’s all.”

“But the Turviters talk about the ghosts all the time. They’re so clear here! It’s like looking at . . . at white people.”

“That is so for me, for you. I think for Doronit. For one in a thousand, perhaps. And only one in a thousand thousand can make them speak, as you did three nights ago. I cannot.”

Ash believed her and was saddened. One of the things he loved about Turvite was that everyone else could see ghosts; he’d spent his whole life seeing things that others couldn’t. But he had never understood how the people of Turvite could just walk straight through ghosts as if they weren’t there. They seemed proud of their ghosts and proud of their indifference to them. The children of Acton, they called themselves. Acton, who had been faced by the ghosts — thousands upon thousands of the slaughtered Turviters whom he and his men had killed — and had laughed them down. “If we could vanquish you alive,” he had said, “why should we be frightened of you dead?” And his people had moved into Turvite and taken it over from cellars to attics, had lived ham by haunch with the spirits of the dispossessed and had grown proud of it.

Ever since then, those who died in Turvite, even Acton’s people, had strong ghosts. Ash’s father had told him that it was a relic of the spell used to call up the Turviters’ ghosts after the battle with Acton and his men. An enchanter who lived in Turvite had tried to give the ghosts physical strength, so that they could continue to fight. “She failed,” his father had said, “but the ghosts became strong in other ways — they persisted, they could be seen or sensed by everyone.” Acton’s men cornered her on the cliffs north of the harbor, but Acton forbade anyone to kill her, in case that made the ghosts fade. He wanted his people to live with a reminder of their victory. He laughed as he said it, and she cursed him — he would never have what he most wanted — but he shrugged and said that he already had it, and gestured to the city. Then she shook her head and smiled a smile of sweet revenge and jumped off the cliffs.

No one knew her name now, and Ash supposed it didn’t matter anyhow, because she was wrong. Acton lived for years afterward and by all accounts was a happy man. It was he who started the Ghost Begone Festival at the autumn equinox, when they found that the enchanter’s death hadn’t made the ghosts go away after all, and there were more every day as Acton’s own people died, until there was no corner of Turvite inhabited by more people than ghosts.

Outside Martine’s, the sound of the festival was growing louder. A party of young women went by singing “Fly Away Spirit” in high, sweet voices. Ash thought of his mother, who could see spirits just as he could, and sang higher and sweeter than any other voice on the Road. His throat tightened. He wondered where she was singing tonight, what accompaniment his father was providing. He wondered if they felt freer, happier, without him . . . and thought they probably did.

Then the ghosts quickened.

The big man roused first, solidifying on the floor as he had lain in the first moment after death. Ash saw the pale shape grow before him: white, transparent, but recognizably the same burly, hairy figure who had crashed through Martine’s door. He sat up and struggled to his feet as though he still had a body. New ghosts were always like that. They acted as though they still had muscles and bones attached to their will. The older ones just floated, drifted wherever they chose, from floor to ceiling.

The ghost looked around, searching for his friend. The new rug confused him. He tried to touch it, saw his hand pass through the white tufts, and screamed. His mouth opened, the muscles of his face in a rictus of horror. But no sound came out.

Ash was crying hard, hot tears. There was too much pain in this face. He forgot, for a moment, that this man had been a killer for hire and had tried to kill him.

The ghost saw them. He stilled then moved for his dagger. It was gone. He held up his hands to show them he was unarmed. It seemed he thought they were still in the middle of the fight.

“It is three days later,” Martine said quietly to him. “You are dead. This is your quickening.”

“No,”
he mouthed, and shook his head.

“Yes,” Martine answered. “This is your killer.”

Remembrance flooded over his face as he looked at Ash —remembrance and hate and grief. He looked again, frantically, for his colleague, then turned to Martine with pleading hands.

“He will come. Wait.”

So they waited, Martine and Ash sitting still, the ghost rubbing his face against his hands, shaking his head, crying without sound, mouthing
no,
and what looked like
Dukka,
over and over.

Dukka came. He formed and solidified just like the first, but then rolled and jumped to his feet, his dagger ready in his hand. They had not been able to pry it from his grasp before the mootstaff took him away.

“Wait,” Martine said. She rose and confronted him, pointed to his friend. “Look. He is dead. You are dead.”

Dukka turned slowly to his friend.

“Speak to him, oh gods,
speak,
” Ash whispered to himself. He couldn’t bear any more silent screaming.

“Hwit,” Dukka said, the harsh ghost voice grating on the nerves as it always did. “Oh, my boy.”

The two spirits moved toward each other and attempted to touch. But even a ghost cannot touch another ghost. Their hands passed through each other’s faces. They cried aloud.

They turned to him.

“You,” Dukka spat. “You killed him.”

Martine intervened. “You were, if you remember, trying to kill him.”

Astonishingly, Hwit let out a laugh. “True for you,” he said, and his voice was the same, exactly the same, as the dead voice of the smaller man. Even though Ash was expecting it, it was always hard to hear that the voices of the dead were all alike, as though identity could not survive past the door of death.

Hwit grinned at Dukka. “Fair’s fair,” he said. “At least we’re together.”

For a moment Hwit held his friend’s gaze, and the anger seemed to drain out of him. “Fair’s fair. Knife cuts knife,” he said.

They both turned to Ash. He had been to enough quickenings, so he knew what to do.

“I am your killer,” he said to them. “Lo, I proclaim it, it were I who took your lives from you. I am here to offer reparation — blood for blood.”

He pushed up his left sleeve and held out his arm, then took his dagger and cut the skin just above his wrist. His hands were steady, but his body was shaking as though with cold. The blood welled out slowly, dark red. It caught the lamplight.

Dukka moved forward and bent his head to the cut. Hwit laughed and joined him so that the two pale tongues reached his flesh and touched, granting their bodies only enough solidity at this moment to taste the blood of their killer, and enough to touch each other, once more.

The burial cave smell arose around Ash and he almost choked. The touch of the ghosts’ tongues was ice, hot ice, cold fire. He trembled.

The ghosts raised their heads. As soon as they left contact with his blood they were wraiths again and the final drops of blood fell from their lips straight through their bodies to the rug.

“I release you,” Dukka said.

“And I.” Hwit leaned forward. “One day you’ll follow us, lad.”

The dead voice made it sound like a threat, but was it? Martine bared her arm and raised her dagger, but Dukka shook his head.

“It was because of me Ash was here. I am responsible,” she said.

Dukka shrugged.

She snapped at Ash, “Get him to s
peak
to me
.
”

“Speak,” Ash whispered.

“We release you,” Hwit said. “We don’t need any more. Blood must be spilled, but one killer’s blood is enough.”