Authors: Mercedes Lackey
Ahead of her was the river of Tuoni, and in the distance, something shimmering and white approached her. She took slow, very hesitant steps down toward the water, then stood on the shore with the cold water lapping at her bare feet. She pretended that she did not feel it, did not even notice it. This was the first test of her disguise, for this was one of the guardians of Tuonela, and on that river, in fact, heading toward her, was the most beautiful Swan that she had ever seen.
The Swan was taller than a man, and as it came closer, she could hear it singing. To the dead, this was but the background of their existence here, but it could be deadly to the living. A living person that listened too long to that beautiful, mournful dirge would be lost in it, forgetting everything else, forgetting all about life on Earth, desiring nothing more than to listen to that music forever. He would be trapped beside the river, lost in a dream of forgetfulness, until he died of hunger and thirst, or followed the Swan out into the middle of the river and drowned.
Aleksia had taken the precaution of stopping up her ears with wax. The song came to her muffled and imperfect, as the Swan approached, looking almost like a carving, gliding on the water with no sign that it was paddling itself along. Only when it neared her, did it deign to move its head to look at her, briefly. It saw nothing amiss—a spirit would not have stood there watching it; spirits did not hear the song the way that the still-living did; to them, it was lovely, but not enthralling.
Which was the point, really. No need to ensnare the dead. They could not leave.
After the Swan had passed, a faint splashing in the distance told Aleksia that the moment she was waiting for had arrived. Behind the Swan, a small, black boat glimmered out of the mist shrouding the river, poled by someone who looked very like Aleksia…perhaps younger, and not quite so corpselike.
She was very beautiful, in a kind of empty-eyed way, was the Tuonin pikka, Death’s Maiden. Like Aleksia, she wore a white, shroudlike gown of material far too flimsy to keep an ordinary mortal girl warm in this place. As she was a maiden, she wore her golden, floor-length hair unbound except for a silver-studded headband of white ribbon. Her blue eyes were curiously vacant, as if not only her thoughts, but her very soul was elsewhere.
She poled the boat with a mechanical grace; her vacant eyes were fixed on Aleksia. For
her
part, Aleksia remained where she was, maintaining a passive posture. She was supposed to be dead, her own ghost wandering for thirty days to get this far. And the dead were…
Boring.
Tuonela was the most boring form of the afterlife that she had ever heard of. The dead did nothing, wanted nothing, cared for nothing and carried out a shadow play of their previous lives, but without the passion, becoming more and more divorced even from that, until at last they moved into a state very like sleep. She wondered why any spirit would want to stay here. Well, it was better than the alternative of oblivion, she supposed.
When the Tuonin pikka’s boat bumped upon the gravel of the bank, the girl waited passively for Aleksia to step aboard. After a moment, she did so. The maiden waited until she had seated herself on the single bench seat in the middle of the boat, then pushed off from the bank, heading for the farther shore.
Halfway across, in a colorless voice, the maiden finally spoke.
“Who are you?”
In an equally colorless voice, Aleksia replied, “I don’t know.” After all, what intelligent person truly knows who they are? She concentrated on that fact, that the wisest of men will freely admit that he does not truly know himself.
“Why are you here?”
She had to be very careful not to lie here. A direct lie would definitely be something that would set the maiden off. But a shading of the truth…
“I am looking for something.” That was close enough.
“What do you seek?”
“Wisdom.” That was
safe
enough. And true, entirely true.
To her intense relief, the maiden said nothing else, presumably satisfied with what she had been told. She continued to the farther bank, and the island of Tuoni itself.
Fog and mist gathered over the surface, hiding everything that was more than a few feet from the boat. The surface of the water was glass-smooth and utterly still. The only sound was that of the pole, rhythmically splashing. It was even colder out here on the river than it had been on the bank. The damp chill, now smelling a bit of waterweed, penetrated every fiber of Aleksia’s gown. Her bare feet felt like little lumps of ice. And she was not yet anywhere near the end of her journey.
Finally, the keel of the boat grated against rock; the maiden expertly poled the boat parallel to the bank. Moving slowly and deliberately, as if she had all the time in the world, Aleksia stepped out of the boat, into ankle-deep, cold water. She did not even flinch. She did not pick up the skirt of her gown. She simply waded ashore as if this were all of no consequence. And she thought that out in the fog, she’d caught a flicker of movement of something very big, and very black. She thought she’d detected a hint of a fishy odor. But there was no way to tell for certain, and the maiden poled the boat away to the other side, to wait for her next passenger. She suppressed a shiver; she knew what that large black thing might well be—the giant pike-fish that was said to eat those that did not belong here. You could spend eternity in the belly of the fish if you could not convince the maiden that you, too, were a spirit.
Without seeming to look around, Aleksia meandered up the bank. At least the vegetation wasn’t dead here, although it certainly was lifeless-looking. As she had been led to believe, Tuoni was essentially a duplicate of life on the living earth, an endless series of identical villages going deeper and deeper into the fog. Those who had died the most recently were nearest the river, and the marks of what they had died of were still visible on their bodies. It could have been gruesome, had their wounds not been bloodless and their bodies as pale and chill as the maiden’s. It was said, by the sources that Aleksia had studied, that the longer a spirit remained here, the more of its death it forgot. Signs of wounds and injuries and illness vanished, severed limbs reattached and the spirit looked more and more as it remembered itself, in its prime of life. It would move away from the bank and deeper into the island, finding a home for itself, beginning a kind of passionless second life that was a mirror of its first. It would push the memories of that first life into the depths of its mind, unless it was asked. But then, if it was questioned too closely, or in the wrong way, all those memories would come rushing back, and with them, all the remembered pain and pleasure of living. Then it would turn on the questioner—and that could be fatal. Eventually, the spirit would come to a place where it would just lie down and sleep. It could be awakened, but if it was not, that was how it stayed—in a state of endless slumber.
Fortunately, questions were more common, here on the shore. The spirits wandered, looking for loved ones, looking for answers, looking for a purpose. She wandered among them, also looking. In her case, she was looking for the victims of the Icehart. They should be obvious enough; an entire village worth of people that had all died at once should stand out.
There was a strange feeling to this place. It was not despair; it was too dull for that. Apathy, perhaps. It seemed to permeate everything, lying over Aleksia’s spirit like a gray pall.
It made it hard to move and hard to think. She had armored herself as best as possible against this very thing, and still the all-pervasive melancholy made it hard to move and think. And this was the second trap, this terrible lack of anything but ennui, this leaden weight on the soul that made it tempting, so tempting, just to lie right down and never move again.
This place did not need monsters to keep it free of the living. And it did not need guards to make it deadly. Not all traps were violent, or needed to be. This was why the spirits of the dead stopped moving, stopped thinking, and went to sleep.
Aleksia kept moving, staring at the faces of the dead, until she became inured to what she saw there, and to some of the terrible things they had died of. What was perhaps the most disturbing about them was how they went about perfectly ordinary tasks with the signs of terrible deaths on them, or wrapped in shrouds instead of clothing. They moved slowly, dreamlike, in and around the ghostly houses and buildings that were only half there, chopping wood, cooking, washing and yet, not really accomplishing anything.
And then, finally, she saw what she was looking for, the signs that these people had been victims of the Icehart. An entire village full of people, many of them, men, women, children and even infants in the arms of some of the women. All of them with ice-rimed faces and hair, skin frost-covered, and wearing, not shrouds, but ordinary clothing that was also ice-coated.
She drifted closer to them, letting the eddies of the crowds carry her toward them. Finally she was in among them, and paused, then stood completely still, her eyes on her feet. It was very cold among these people, as if they still exhaled the freezing breath of the thing that had killed them.
One of the men finally noticed her. He sat knotting a net, or seeming to anyway, although the net never got any bigger. Of course it didn’t. Nothing ever changed here. Nothing ever would.
“Do I know you?” he asked, with a vague frown.
She took care not to show any interest. That would point her out as being different, and that would be bad. “Do you?” she replied dully. “I do not remember…” Not remembering was a safe answer.
“Are you from my village?” He looked around at the others like him. “We all seem to be here. I think something happened, although…” Now it was his turn to trail off his words as uncertainty washed over him.
Hmm, he might not even remember dying.
“What village is that?” she asked as if she really did not care.
“Inari,” he said promptly. “This is Inari. Although…it does not look like Inari.” He faltered. “I do not remember Inari having this much fog.”
“I am not from Inari,” she replied quickly. “I do not think you could know me.” She sidled away from him before he could ask many more questions, leaving him staring at the half-finished net in his hands.
She moved farther along, down something like a path, to the next village. The people here displayed similar signs of death by freezing. With luck, this was the second village that had been the Icehart’s victim. This time, her quarry was a woman doing laundry, washing out shirts that showed no sign of dirt, spreading them to dry on gray-leaved bushes,
Once again, she waited until the woman herself asked, “Do I know you?” It seemed this village had been named Purmo. Again, the villagers had no idea what had killed them, or even that they were dead. It was enough to make anyone weep with the pathos of it, but Aleksia did not dare show any such signs of emotion.
The third time, although the village was obviously the third victim of the Icehart’s power, it took several tries before she could find anyone to talk to her. These villagers were already forgetting who and what they had been; most of them ignored her as if she was a buzzing fly. Finally, one of the children spoke to her; its little face contorted into a mask of concentration as it tried to remember just where it was supposed to be. This was the village of Kolho, or rather, this was what the villagers thought
should
be Kolho.
Now she had the names of all three villages. Unfortunately, no one had seen what it was that had killed them. For that matter, most of them were not yet aware that they were dead.
She made her way back to the riverbank, slipping around the villages, avoiding the spirits as much as she could. Now was the time to run, and swiftly, before she was unmasked; she had gotten what she came for, but this was the hardest part of the quest.
Getting back. Because the things guarding Tuonela were not to keep things out, they were meant to keep things from escaping. Why should the guardians here be concerned about anything getting in? Whoever tried would only end up dead and remain here anyway.
Not always true…but true enough. Some of the great Heroes of Sammi legends had tried to come here and had died here. Of course, being great Heroes, according to the legends, they did not necessarily remain dead—but that was legend and not fact.
Now if
she
ran afoul of Tuonela’s guardians…it would not be good.
She was going to have to deal with them and get past them without actually fighting them; the point was that she not be surprised, that she meet them on her terms and not theirs.
This would take some very careful maneuvering.
She went as far as the edge of the river before pausing. The moment she set so much as a toe into the water, the guardian would be alerted, but according to all three of the stories she had read, it was at the cave’s mouth that she had to beware the most. Carefully, she looked around, made sure that there were no spirits nearby to catch her at what she was about to do, then took one of three tiny bundles that appeared to be a packet of leaves wrapped up in white thread out of her sleeve. She set the first down at the water’s edge.
“Blood of my blood, my semblance be, Let them see you and not me.”
A kind of pillar of smoke arose from where the packet had been. A moment later, it was not a pillar of smoke anymore. An identical twin to Aleksia stood there, regarding her thoughtfully, as she was regarding it. It
looked
uncannily intelligent—thank goodness it was not—it was nothing more than a mindless, soulless copy that would do exactly what she directed it to. But this was good, because she was about to be very, very cruel to it.
“Dip a toe into the water,” she whispered to it, as she passed her hands across her own face, rendering herself invisible. “Then, when the spirits come to tear you apart,
run
.”
She withdrew a little way, and watched as the simulacrum obeyed her. As if the contact with the water had been a signal, spirits, eyes bright with anger, swarmed out of the fog to converge on the hapless duplicate. And, as directed, she ran.