And then, at last—at last!—up went that stifling glass lid—light as a bubble, etched with frosted flowers—up and off the body, granting Lanie access and communion, and then she and Canon Lir were setting the lid down upon the moss—gently, gently—and Lanie was stepping in close.
She placed her left hand upon Erralierra’s shoulder. Something deep—sweepingly, swimmingly deep—at the bottom of her belly relaxed. Her left hand tingled. She heard the deep chiming of bones. The first whiff of citrus teased her nostrils.
“Three days ago”—just three days? Lanie marveled—“when I was first preparing for this interrogation, I thought we would begin by discovering what happened to the Blood Royal on the night of her death. We will have her tell her story plainly, without interruption, then ask whatever clarifying questions we deem necessary.
“And then,” she gestured to Canon Lir with her free hand, “if and when you are satisfied, I will step away—and you may have a word with her alone.”
For a moment, Canon Lir’s bloodshot eyes grew very large and round. Though Lanie had known them since their mutual childhood, Canon Lir had never seemed anything but completely self-possessed to her, their well-educated, sophisticated gravitas defying their years at every age. But now, looking terribly young, terribly lost, they whispered, “What shall I say to her?”
“Um.”
Lanie wondered what she would have wanted from Natty or Aba, had she been strong enough at age fifteen to stabilize their ectenica. Had she bound their substance fast to their accident, and raised them up, and sat them down for an actual, honest-to-death-god conversation for once in their lives. Afterlives.
Too late for her now. But not for Canon Lir.
“You could ask her blessing?” she suggested. “Perhaps”—risking a grin—“beg that she might pass on the whereabouts of any secret caches of treasure she happened to leave lying about?”
Canon Lir’s mouth twitched.
“Or perhaps,” Lanie added more somberly, “she has some final advice for you and your brother, who must now carry on in her wake.”
The twitch blossomed into a rueful dimple. “Her not inconsiderable wake.”
She and they regarded each other, each nodding like two wise flowers in a rain. Then Canon Lir stepped back from the bier, and said, “Thank you, Miss Stones. I am ready.”
So Lanie left Canon Lir to their own internal preparations, and gazed down instead at Erralierra’s accident, sinking her whole consciousness into it. Memories of her time with the Blood Royal rose to the fore. Lanie could not regret never again encountering Erralierra’s toothy, untrustworthy smile, or avoiding those avid, calculating eyes, or hearing that trained orator’s voice lying to her. Lying to everyone, about everything, all the time. But the longer Lanie looked at her, the more kindly she felt.
And this, she knew, was dangerous. For Lanie did not want to love Erralierra, even now. And yet, she could not help it.
Canon Lir cleared their throat. Lanie brought her attention back up out of the corpse. “Yes?”
“If possible, Miss Stones, I… I would wish to arrange this conversation in such a way that Erralierra’s body, or any conspicuous part of it, does not disintegrate in a suspicious manner. If my ommer—the Eparch Aranha—discovers that their royal sibling has deliquesced into a pile of post-ectenica sludge,” they grimaced, “I fear that rumors of necromancy will inevitably follow. And since I have promised to keep your secret safe…”
“No, no. I see. Good point.” Narrow-eyed, clinical, Lanie ducked her head to study the corpse more closely. She sucked her lower lip into her mouth. Bit down, released. Which gave her an idea.
“Her tongue,” she decided. “Memory seated in the tongue will abet ectenical communication anyway. Plus, it’s hidden.”
She absently patted her trouser pockets for her syringe kit, then picked up her jacket and turned out every nook and cranny of it, only to realize that what she sought she’d unhappily left back at Queen Ynyssyll’s tomb. She sighed.
“Oh, well. It’s not necessary. It’s cleaner and more efficient, but any sharp edge will do.”
Silently, Canon Lir offered up their misericord17. The blade was slender as an icepick, with a decorative twist at the base like a small cyclone, a grip carved of ivory, and a creamy, cloud-colored pearl in the pommel. Lanie lost no time in nicking the tip of her middle finger and bending over Erralierra.
A slight, distressed sound across from her brought her glance up again. Canon Lir’s face looked sick beneath the remnants of their paint.
“No, no, you mustn’t worry,” Lanie assured them quickly. “You keep your misericord quite keen; I hardly felt a thing. This? Is nothing. You’ve seen me bleed before, most copiously! Echo-wounds always produce more juice than these incidental prickles. Though—ha!—they do heal faster. Remember when you loaned me your robe for my nosebleed? I still keep a scrap of that silk by me, in a small box of my favorite things.”
She watched with satisfaction as a look of delight and warmth returned to Canon Lir’s face.
“Miss Stones,” they said. “I am moved.”
Lanie smiled at the tone of that ‘Miss Stones.’ She suspected Canon Lir of a gallant attempt at flirtation—even though with the greatest will in the world, neither of them was any good at flirting.
Still, it spiked the smell of citrus in the air, as well as her confidence, and Lanie thought she’d attempt a flirt herself.
“Well, it’s only a very little scrap, Canon Lir. That’s all that was left—after my very big nosebleed!”
“The biggest,” they murmured.
But now the middle finger of her left hand was singing, ready, ready, ready, and Lanie became all business.
“Now if you will, Canon Lir—with all due reverence—open your mother’s mouth for me? Thank you. All right, now you might want to look away while I… Yes, that’s it. And now… Now, I’ll just sing her a refrain of the Maranathasseth Anthem, shall I? Goody Graves taught it to me. An old Quadoni spellsong. The first ever uttered. A cry to Doédenna against death itself. Of course, I don’t know if that’s all true, but the song’s origin is certainly of unfathomable antiquity.
“I learned its companion song first—though, like you, it was born second: the Lahnessthanessar, the Undreaming. Also called the Great Lullaby—for it can sing the undead to sleep again. But the Maranathasseth Anthem, which I will now attempt, is called the Dreamcalling, for it summons the dead back to their dream of life. Or so Goody says.
“All I know is, the melody focuses my death magic, and adds stability and durability to my ectenica—not to mention, oh, you know, oomph. It’s how I finally perfected my orblins.”
Lanie realized she was babbling, decided not to anymore, and bent to examine the blood spatter on Erralierra’s tongue for ectenical change. Perhaps the slightest shimmering?
“It’s… it’s such a slippery little tune,” she muttered, more to herself than to Canon Lir, who bent closer to hear her. “Like trying to isolate your earliest memory when you’re not sure it even happened—but there’s no one to corroborate it for you, so you can never be sure. Or like describing a dream; it’s never quite the same in your mouth as it was in your mind. Even Goody only recalls the tunes in tatters.
“I will say that singing the melodies—or rather, remembering them—is effortless on a surge day. But, oh dear, in ordinary time, let me tell you… But no matter. Humming a few notes for you—I mean, for Erralierra—is my greatest honor.”
She calmed her nervous babble, channeled it into silence, and the moment she did so, the ectenica caught. Cold-star snow-ember moon-frost kindled in the mouth of the dead Blood Royal of Liriat. The sight of it cooled Lanie’s fevered thoughts, focused her mind. She breathed out.
Where is breath?
In the stillness.
What is stillness?
Sothaín.
In the stillness at the end of her breath, just prior to her next inhalation, Lanie tuned in to the twittering of her living bones, where the music lived. Ah, the tail of a trill! She hummed it back. The first four notes. Then the next four. Then the next. Twelve notes in all—barely a phrase—but surely as she was a Stones, that phrase was ANTHEM! was WELCOME! was WAKE!
Lanie doggedly kept the hum alive on her lips, like a bumblebee caught buzzingly between her teeth. Her deep voice sang counter to it, a sound only the dead could hear. Both her voices hummed, her whole body humming along, substance and accident together, until the blood throbbed in her newly cut finger.
Throbbed, too, where it flecked Erralierra’s mouth, painted her cold tongue.
That tongue was now crawling with low blue light, the same spectral glow that illuminated Goody’s eyes and clung to the padlock of the Sarcophagus of Souls. It quickened, an animating luster that took hold of its accidental fuel until it had lashed the tongue entirely.
And then, it became the tongue.
The ectenica writhed, wormlike, irate, in Erralierra’s mouth, fast-flopping in every direction at once, scrabbling and squirming against the corpse’s stiff cheeks like feet kicking at a confining blanket.
Lanie sucked in air like a swimmer at the plunge, then stuffed her left hand all the way into Erralierra’s mouth. It stretched for her like obedient putty.
She caught the wriggling tongue in her fist, stilled its struggles, and began to pull. Stretched it. Worked it like luminous blue caramel. Shaped it.
Soon the thing she held no longer resembled ‘tongue’; it hadn’t been a tongue since the moment Lanie’s blood met with the dead matter. No more flesh but ectenica: at once material and ethereal, dead matter and living blood combining into the third state, undeath. Ectenica swam up Lanie’s fingers, twisted around her knuckles, her wrists. Cold electric cobwebs, popping and crackling in their eagerness to communicate.
Lanie smiled, just as eager—ecstatic—to oblige. “Erralierra Brackenwild. We wish to talk to you. We have questions, Erralierra Brackenwild.”
Carefully, millimeter by millimeter, she released the ectenica back between Erralierra’s lips. Ells and ells of it, a long ribbon of blue light unspooling from her left hand to coil tamely and snugly between the floor of Erralierra’s mouth and her hard palate, like a snake in a shaft of sunlight.
When the ectenica was all in place, Lanie asked it, “Are you ready to talk, Erralierra Brackenwild?”
“I am ready to talk,” the ectenica replied.
Lanie glanced up at Canon Lir, whose hands had tightened on the wooden frame of the bier. Their face was stoic, but their body was visibly shaking—from the beaded burls of black hair on their head to the gilded sandals on their feet.
But they gave a curt nod, so she began, “Tell us about the night you died.”
The ectenica’s report was pretty much what Lanie had been expecting: Erralierra had been reading in bed. A feeling—something like sleep, a lot more like drowning—overcame her. She could not move. Breathing was difficult. A sweet molasses stickiness between her and her next heartbeat. Two birds flew in through the window. A third bird, large and black with red markings, perched on the sill outside. The two birds inside the room vanished. In their place, two women stood over Erralierra’s bed. Both of them bore the wizard marks of Rook. The tall one Erralierra knew, for they had met before. She would have spoken her name aloud—“Bran Fiakhna”—but at no time was released from that sensation of slow-squeezing sleep. Bran Fiakhna bent over her bed, whispered, “Two-and-twenty,” and blew an iridescent dust from off the palm of her hand into Erralierra’s face. What followed were hours of agony—or perhaps minutes, the ectenica corrected itself—and then, nothing. And now, this.
Lanie stood back. “Are you satisfied?” she asked, no longer addressing the corpse.
Canon Lir nodded without speaking.
“Do you have any more questions?”
They shook their head.
She hesitated, then asked, “Would you… would you like a private word with her?”
Hesitation. A quick jerky nod.
Lanie stepped away from the bier. “I’ll let you say your goodbyes, then.”
The glassed-in garden was not large, but Canon Lir’s voice dropped to a whisper as they knelt beside their mother’s bier, put their head next to the corpse’s, and greeted it by name. The ectenica returned the greeting:
“Lir.”
Lanie politely plugged her ears with her index fingers. But even that, though it stopped her from accidentally hearing Canon Lir’s questions, did not mute Erralierra’s responses.
Despite her best intentions, Lanie could hear every word uttered by the undead; it was a sound she received in her bones, not her ears.
Thankfully, Erralierra’s responses to her secondborn were short and soothing. Yes, she loved them. Yes, she was proud of them. Yes, they had her blessing; she was confident they were clever and wily, wise and deep, would do their hard work remorselessly and well. Times boded to be dark and difficult for Liriat, the ectenica predicted, but it knew that Lir would keep the good of the realm foremost in their mind—as Erralierra had not.
After a quarter hour of this, Canon Lir bowed their head, said something that Lanie tried not to make out—“Thank you,” perhaps, or “Goodbye”—and laid a kiss upon Erralierra’s naked knuckles.
Lanie started making her way back from the fountain at that point, but Canon Lir was not quite done. They looked up suddenly, their troubled gaze meeting Lanie’s. She replied with a tentative smile, and jerked her chin at Erralierra. This called their attention back to the ectenica that had been Erralierra’s tongue, which was beginning to crumble at the edges. Lanie could almost taste the char.
She flashed a five-fingered warning. Canon Lir smiled crookedly, lifted a single finger in response, and turned to their mother’s corpse. This time, they angled their shoulders so that Lanie could neither see their face nor read their lips, even if she’d wanted to. Bending low over Erralierra’s body, they whispered something just above its mouth, before turning their ear toward its lips to hear the ectenica’s whispered response. Whatever the question and its answer, they wanted to keep it as private, as secret, as possible.
But the ectenica’s response rang throughout Lanie’s whole body like the horns that heralded a high holy fire feast.
“Marry her.”
17 The fire priests of Sappacor always carried this weapon with them as part of their vestments, though over the centuries its purpose had become more traditional than functional. It used to be that every fire priest was also a Bright Knight: a warrior who fought to drive the worship of the Triple Flame into every unbeliever’s heart. Often forcibly. These days, fire priests were better known for their hedonism and peace-loving ways, and Bright Knights—at least in Liriat—were an elite force of priestly bodyguards for the highest-ranking clergy and their noble allies.