THE WHITE STAIRS that led up to the Shrine of the Unspoken were buried under feet of snow, the shed skin of an entire winter. That route would not be passable for months, so Tal and Tsereg landed their cutter higher up on the mountainside and trudged down toward the plateau.
Below them, the hungry forest lapped around the House of Silence, cloaking it in pine boughs and settling snow as if to hide what had been done to the only temple of the Unspoken One.
It was a ruin. What was visible from above resembled the body of a beached whale: a huge grey bulk, rotten and collapsing, with rows of pillars standing out like ribs. The roof of the Great Hall had fallen in, leaving it open to the sky.
The Shrine itself was nothing but a dark hole in the mountainside. Tal thought it was a bit of a letdown. It was just the entrance to a cave, cold and dark, ominous and probably dangerous, but there was no crackle of power, no magnetic draw, no sense of an immortal presence reaching out to grasp you. Tal had experienced quite enough immortal presence to know what it felt like.
“So do we just—” he said.
Tsereg had been very quiet on the walk down, eerily so. Tal couldn’t see much of their face behind the scarf, but what was visible was a fretful combination of reverence and anticipation and frank ambition, all simmered together.
“Yep,” they said, and strode into the cave.
Tal had to hurry to keep up, faster than he would have liked, given that the passage was icy and sank rapidly into total darkness. They had stopped on their way to scavenge clothes from an abandoned village, so now Tsereg was wrapped in a padded coat of bright yellow wool that made them look spherical. The bobble on their woolly hat bounced with every step. They should have looked out of place here; Tal should have found the whole thing funny, or at least sad, but in fact there was nothing incongruous about it at all. Tsereg was meant to be here.
As they emerged into a larger chamber, the last of the light from the entrance faded altogether and Tal reached into his pack to light a torch.
“No,” said Tsereg. “No light. Listen. Watch.”
Tal did as he was told. There was silence. The distant plink of water. The pressure of the dark all around him.
“Think we need to go down deeper,” said Tsereg. He felt them take his hand and squeeze his fingers through two layers of mitten. “Don’t worry,” they added.
This ought to be frightening. It was all absurdly ominous, and Tal didn’t like enclosed spaces at the best of times, and he ought to make some crack about yeah, let’s stumble around in the dark until I trip over and break my neck—but he didn’t. He wasn’t scared at all. He felt certain, in a way he had not felt certain for a long time, that everything was under control.
“Follow me,” said Tsereg. “I know the way.”
Fear had filled him up for so long, a great bubble occupying most of his skull. Walking into darkness and doubt, he had expected the bubble to swell to bursting, but instead it felt more like finding your way through your own house at night, certain of the path, and returning securely to your warm bed.
“I’m going to let go of you for a second,” said Tsereg. “Stay still, or you’ll fall.”
Their footsteps moved softly away. The two of them were in a larger chamber again, to judge from the echo and the way the air moved. Still Tal wasn’t scared. The future was as open and as unreadable as the black void ahead of him. When he had been very young and the whole world had hummed with possibility, this had been a good feeling.
A soft light gleamed up ahead, illuminating the cavern. It was vast, and longer than it was wide. Tal was standing at one end, and all around him—in heaps, like drifts of fallen leaves, like so much ossuary debris—were hundreds of shrivelled corpses. Most of them were little more than bone, held together by shreds of shrunken skin and wisps of hair and the tattered remains of white dresses.
—and still Tal wasn’t scared. The bodies were whole, not scattered. From the way they lay, they seemed to have curled up together to sleep, except that they were all of them holding hands. They made a great chain that ribboned through the chamber toward the far end, where Tsereg stood, holding a single flame in their hands, before a tall, rectangular hollow cut into the back wall.
Tsereg climbed up onto the lip of the hollow and sat on the edge, as if waiting for something to happen.
“You sure you should be doing that?” he said, with a prickle of true alarm, as though he had woken and seen for the first time where he was standing.
They didn’t reply. And then, abruptly, they began to sing. There was no warning of this; it sounded as though they had perhaps been singing for their entire life and someone had just removed a bag from over their head.
The spectacle of someone else bursting solemnly into song was one of those things which should have made Tal’s insides shrivel up biliously with secondhand embarrassment. It should have been all the worse because it was Tsereg, who never had any idea that what they were doing was appalling. Tal shouldn’t have known where to look.
In fact, he couldn’t look away, not from Tsereg’s solemn little face nor from the great yawning space above them, the empty hollow, which he now recognised for what it was: an immense granite throne. A throne, with Tsereg sitting upon it, in their yellow coat, feet neatly tucked in.
He didn’t recognise the song. It had the thudding repetition he associated with something religious. Tsereg’s singing voice was, if nothing else, strident. Then, just as abruptly, they stopped.
The song did not. Elsewhere, out of the darkness, in the other hollow places of the Shrine, it continued, in voices rough and scratching, small and high and piping, in whispers and in echoes.
“Tal,” said Tsereg, with the slightly wheedling briskness he had come to recognise and dread. “Something’s happening. Try not to panic.”
To the song, there was added a sound as soft as rain falling, and all throughout the chamber the dead unlaced their shrivelled limbs and began to rise.
“Try not to panic?” said Tal. He didn’t move. Couldn’t, in fact. He’d heard of being frozen in terror, but he’d always assumed it was just an expression, because when he was terrified he only wanted to move, preferably away—but he couldn’t think straight enough to make his legs move.
The skeletal fingers uncurled from one another and reached up like new shoots, pale and pointed. Gradually, and then all at once, as though they had been playing a game and now it was over, all the dead children rose to their feet.
“Try not to panic, Tsereg?” said Tal. The false sarcasm cracked like old paint.
“Yeah, for once in your life!” called Tsereg.
Hundreds and hundreds of Tsereg-sized ghouls, and as they rose, they all let go of each other’s hands and turned to face the throne. They were singing too. The voice of each was no louder than the sifting hiss of sand, but hundreds of them together were dreadfully audible.
Another light flared, just behind him, and he jumped. Two revenants, much bonier than the others, without even a shred of lingering cartilage, came past him and on down toward the throne. One of them had a single candle on a stone dish. The other was carrying a long and fraying length of embroidered yellow silk, folded many times and tattered at the edges.
The other revenants formed up into rows on either side of the chamber, and the chanting song grew louder, somehow more purposeful. Tal had the sense that he was about to witness something of awful spiritual import and prepared to be bored as well as terrified.
Then he noticed that the cloth was the same colour as Tsereg’s coat, and he was back to being terrified. He had been so sure that Tsereg knew what they were doing, that they knew all about the Unspoken and would be able to avoid its pitfalls. He’d forgotten how the cult habitually treated its children.
“Leave them alone!” he said, but the revenants continued to pay him no attention. “Don’t you dare—”
It wasn’t just fear that held him to the spot. He tried to move now, really tried, but it was as if Tsereg’s injunction to stay still had fixed him in place. He would have drawn his sword if he wouldn’t have ended up waving it around like a statue with its feet stuck to a plinth.
The two revenants reached the centre of the chamber, still facing Tsereg on their throne. Ceremoniously they set down the cloth and the candle, so that the flame cast up flickery shadows, shining up through their rib cages.
And then with a suddenness that made Tal throw up his hands to protect his face, they exploded.
There was no detonation. There was no sound at all. The bones floated in the air in two small clouds, illuminated from below by the light of the single candle. The small bones glittered: metacarpals, phalanges, teeth. The two skulls and four femurs tilted slowly among them like larger fish within a shoal.
Then there came a faint, sandy grinding noise as the bones began to reconnect. They danced in bony constellations, turning and wheeling in place or in great arcs. The vertebrae locked into solid curves and the loose limbs began to articulate themselves. There was a soft rattling, like wind in dry reeds.
A single skeleton stepped out of the cloud, adjusting its skull on the fragile stem of its neck. It pressed its second tusk back into place with an indescribably unpleasant pop.
Tal had watched all of this in the assumption that he had finally gone mad, that all this bone stuff had been the last straw for one T. Charossa, and that that was it, thanks for nothing and goodnight. The reconstituted skeleton did nothing to dispel this impression by turning and walking toward him. Its bony feet crunched on the stone floor, sounding like someone walking on dry bread crumbs.
Tal leant back as the thing approached. He did not want it to touch him. He was sure it had more bones than it ought to. It was slightly taller than either of the original two, for one thing. It held out its hands to him and gave him what was unmistakably an expectant look.
“What?” he said.
It just kept holding out its hands. The smallest finger on each was no more than a stump.
Its empty eye sockets seemed to reproach him. It made sense that this might be the last thing he saw—stared into passive-aggressive oblivion by a corpse—but he didn’t have to like it.
“What?” he said. “You missed a spot, it’s not my fault.”
He looked at his own hands, still not understanding. Tsereg had picked out these mittens for him. They were lumpy and orange and matted with melted snow.
The yellow robe on the ground floated up around the revenant’s shoulders, and fastened itself into place. The revenant pulled up the hood of the robe and drew it down to veil the gleaming cranium. The fabric was translucent, embroidered with some swirling design, and it framed the fleshless grin with a fringe of tiny pearls.
All the while it looked at Tal, apparently watching for his reaction. Then it lifted his chin with two bony fingers, and a familiar voice said:
“Well, you look much better than you have any right to.”
The freezing hold on him collapsed and his legs seemed to turn into bags of water. Only the fact that it would have been incredibly fucking embarrassing to fall on his face at this point kept him upright.
Tsereg stood up on the edge of the throne to see over the crowd of revenants, quicker on the uptake, as ever, than Tal had ever managed to be.
“Mum?” they said. Just in case Tal’s heart had needed breaking again, there was an undisguisable hitch in their voice. They hastily pulled off the woolly hat and stuffed it into their coat pocket.
“Oh, well done, Talasseres,” said Oranna, and—proving there was a first time for everything—she sounded completely sincere.
Tal toyed with a series of smart responses from what the shit to what the fuck and eventually, with great poise and deliberation, sat down on the floor.