Goody’s agony pulled at Lanie like a lodestone tugging iron. From the moment she smelled lemons, Lanie knew that the doorway to Saint Death was standing open at her back, ready to welcome Goody inside it.
The world had become hard-angled citrine: very bright and very clear. The tiger rug flew on beneath her, taut and attentive, obeying Lanie’s will like her own left hand. It was warm as her skin to the touch, in no danger of crumbling to blackened sludge as soon as her blood ran dry. An improvement over the old ectenica.
She zipped through the broken gallery wall and came to a hovering stop above the ruins. Leaning over the tiger rug’s head, Lanie looked down and around for any sign of Goody. What she saw instead was rubble.
Rubble, everywhere. But surprisingly not all of it, or even most of it, was from Cracchen’s cannon blast. Goody had destroyed the place. Not a portrait on the wall remained unslashed. Not a vitrine standing that had not been powdered to glittering dust. Delirious Stones’s poison cabinet was upended; bottles and vials spilled out of it like strange innards. Weapons of every shape and size lay scattered and shattered on the parquet floor. Statues were toppled, plaques ripped off walls, mementoes shredded, and the great plinth that had once borne the weight of the Sarcophagus of Souls was cracked down the center like an altar abandoned by its god. The Sarcophagus itself was capsized on the north end of the gallery like a longboat after a hurricane, but otherwise seemed undamaged. Goody lay beneath it. Or part of her did. Lanie could not see her head.
She was so still.
Lanie did not remember directing the tiger rug to move, but suddenly she was there, floating over the place where Goody lay, and the rug was drifting down, down, ever so gently, but Lanie leapt from it as soon as she could safely do so, and half-stumbled, half-slid to her knees at Goody’s side.
Goody’s body, gigantic from its long undeath, yet seemed far smaller than Lanie remembered it. Her skin was the same slumping, spoiled gray color of a slag heap. Perhaps the apparent diminishment was an illusion, however; full half of Goody’s body—everything from the waist up, including her arms—was crushed beneath the Sarcophagus of Souls. Lanie saw how the previously impenetrable surface of Goody’s skin was pitted and chipped in places, and fractured in others, whole chunks of it flaking off like shale. Some of this was undoubtedly Cracchen’s doing, but Lanie suspected that the majority of the damage had come because Goody was no longer bound to a necromancer’s line. Over the years, Lanie’s presence—not to mention her occasional gifts of orblins and the like—had probably enlivened and reinforced Goody’s undeath. Not that Goody would have thanked her for that.
“Jhímieti,” she called out in both of her voices. She placed one hand on Goody’s leg, sent a faint thrum of her substance into it. “Jhímieti, I’ve come to free you.”
Goody, lost beneath the hateful weight of the Sarcophagus of Souls, never twitched. Lanie knew—she knew—that she had heard Goody’s groan back in the library, just after the explosion. She had felt Goody’s agony during her brief flight through the snow. But now there was nothing. Had Goody’s skull and neck been crushed? If so, was that trauma enough to unseat her memory from her accident? Had it killed her after all, if slowly? But surely Lanie would have felt that too, the whisper of Goody’s passing?
A pang of loss rose up and choked her like rotten ectenica. Hot tears splashed onto Goody’s legs; Lanie wiped her face, hating this new weakness of tears that had plagued her since autumn.
But, then, she thought, surely a necromancer’s tears, like her blood, might rouse a revenant? Give her new strength, vitality enough to cast off the Sarcophagus of Souls, and let me see her face one last time?
One last time before Lanie sang Goody into her long Undreaming…
But Goody did not move.
“Miss Lanie!”
Lanie looked up to see Scratten barreling through the hole his brother had blown through the wall. He was red-faced from the cold, and from his high-speed bolt through the knee-deep snow, from his scrabble over the rubble. His fair hair was plastered against his skull, his shoulders heaved. When his pale gaze met hers, Scratten’s relief was so great that he had to steady himself against the broken plinth. Heaving a sigh, he made his way across the room to her.
“She’s not moving,” Lanie said as Scratten drew close.
“Cracchen said he had a clear shot at her through the window. So—he took it.” Scratten sounded painfully embarrassed. “Mordda is furious; the cost of demolishing and rebuilding this part of the house in addition to your consultation fee—which we will still pay, never fear—”
“She deserved better,” Lanie murmured, her hand pressed to Goody’s motionless leg. “She deserved me to… to sing… sing to…”
“I’m so sorry.” Scratten squatted beside her. He did not touch her, though his face clearly expressed a longing to do so. “It could be,” he ventured, “that she’s just entered torpor again. She seems to do that when she’s been wounded—like with Haaken’s wards when she broke our gate. But she did it also to a lesser extent when Cracchen fired his blunderbuss at her. He used both snake shot and larger balls a few different times. In all cases, she shut down for a few nights.”
“In some ways, that might be worse,” Lanie said in a defeated voice. “She would have welcomed death either way. But that… that torpid state you describe would just prolong her misery.”
As she helplessly patted Goody’s legs, she began to notice that the places where her tears had splashed had streaked Goody’s dry gray limbs with molten ribbons of lapis lazuli. She barely registered this before Goody gave a wild buck, and flipped the Sarcophagus of Souls off her body.
The black box skidded across the floor, splitting the wood as it went. Goody scrambled upright, her frantic movements sending Lanie tumbling after the Sarcophagus. She would have slammed into it hard enough to crack a bone if the tiger rug had not inserted itself between Lanie’s body and the bulk of black stone. The rug cushioned her fall, but the breath was knocked clean out of her.
Lanie’s glasses were thumped askew. She pushed them straight. Her vision cleared in time to see Goody, now fully upright, shake herself out like a beast unchained.
No longer did she seem small and frail—quite the opposite; she was swollen in feral enormity. Her face had the look of a great gray bear in a gladiator’s pit: violated, brutalized, harassed past all bearing, and her eyes, bruised pearls with hardly any light left in them, fixed once more upon the Sarcophagus of Souls. Specifically, upon the padlock.
She did not see Lanie lying just in front of it. Or if she did, she did not register her as an object of import. Her expression, which for so many years had been so implacable, unreadable, was frozen in hatred. Her teeth were bared like the head of the tiger rug; her quarry was clear. Bending her head like a baited bull, Goody charged.
Lanie was not sure what Scratten meant to do. He had to have known he was no match for Goody; though he was almost seven feet tall himself, Goody towered over him, and was stone where he was flesh, and possessed of a far stronger accident than his own.
Perhaps Scratten thought merely to intercept her, to grapple with her just long enough to distract her and buy Lanie time to scramble out of the way. Perhaps he thought, even if Goody tossed him aside, that he would be able to find a safe way to land, and roll to his feet again, and shake off the impact, like he might after a brawl with his brothers.
Lanie was never to know.
Scratten ran to stand directly in Goody’s path, planting himself in front of Lanie. His body was her wall. Lanie hauled herself to her knees, and the tiger rug slid beneath her. It scooped her into the air, and whisked her to safety—high, higher—ten feet, twenty—until she almost bumped the gallery ceiling. Her own frightened substance, mixed with the fatal reflexes and strength of the dead tiger, fought her to keep her safe and out of Goody’s way.
When she tried climbing over the side of the rug, thinking to force it down with her weight until it dropped far enough that she could jump from it, the rug just wrapped itself ever more tightly about her lower body, cocooning everything but her arms and head. Dread made her desperate; Lanie struggled with it, but it was like struggling with herself. The more she fought, the less she was able to move. All she could do was scream:
“Scratten! Get out of her way! She can’t—”
Scratten looked up at her from the gallery floor. Goody slammed into him. She lifted him in her arms. She bent him in half, first one way, then the other, and swung him down hard, dashing him to the floor. She trampled his body to get to the Sarcophagus; her left foot flattened his chest, her right his skull.
Both of Lanie’s voices ground together in a wail of loss. The sound escaped her throat like a saw cutting through rock; she hardly knew what she was doing or how to stop herself. Her wail echoed through the gallery like a wound.
Even Goody seemed to hear it. She dropped the padlock she was squeezing in her fist, and looked to the ceiling, her dull eyes showing their first gleam of consciousness. Her face lost its rictus of fury; she looked—just for a moment—confused, sorrowful, and much more like herself. She stood very still in that moment, opening and closing those great, bloodstained hands which hung heavy at her sides.
Then a second wail joined Lanie’s, cutting hers off. Sari Skrathmandan was kneeling by her son, who lay broken on the broken floor. She plucked at the silver fur of his bloodstained coat, at the parts of him that were still recognizable: his right hand, whole and perfect, his powerful thigh. Tan, crusted with ice and plodding from the cold, waded out of the snow and into the gallery the next moment, drawing Lanie’s shocky gaze. Crashing against various impedimenta, but heeding none of them, Tan made her way to Sari’s side. When she fell to her knees beside her, Sari crumpled against the gyrlady, and Tan wrapped her arms around her, her pale face a written record of her own dead.
Beneath the gallery ceiling, Lanie hovered.
Like one of Haaken’s wards, she thought. Like a wasp nest in winter, gray and empty.
Clinging with both arms to the tiger rug’s head, she pressed her face against it for comfort. The rest of the pelt scrolled around her body like a winding sheet. Her eyes were closed, her mouth and nose full of hard, warm fur.
She was waiting.
She was waiting for Scratten’s death to blow through her like a typhoon.
It did not. She did not know why it did not. She had been so close to his death that she might even now be breathing his last breath. It was the first death she had ever witnessed with her own eyes—she, who’d been peripheral to death her whole life.
And it was Goody, who had…
Lanie should be riddled with echo wounds: her spine snapped, her skull caved in, her organs ruptured. Instead, her body had dropped neatly and without any fuss into one of its numb depths. All she felt was the sore, sorry absence of herself. That, itself, was nothing. She was used to that.
And yet—
Below, Sari screamed, “My son! My son!” collapsed over the wreckage of his body like a castaway. Tan, who had become a whole-body embrace, pressed her cheek against Sari’s, and was whispering something fiercely to her—comfort, promise, reason, nonsense; Lanie could not hear—moving whenever Sari moved, weeping with her. The gyrlady did not interfere with Sari in any other way, not until Sari flailed, and with wild hands ripped the wig off her head, then dug clawed fingers into her sparse hair and tried to tear it from her scalp. Tan caught her hands, kissed them, began whispering something else, something new, a humming of sorts, a keening hum, part lullaby, part dirge.
Lanie recognized the melody instantly. Though she had never heard that particular line of notes, not precisely, she knew it at once:
The Lahnessthanessar.
—and yet, she thought, the numbness releasing her throat but leaving behind an awful ache—I can still sing.
She struck a fist to her chest, and knocked her sorrow into the future.
It would perforce be different from Tan’s, Lanie’s Lahnessthanessar. Tan could only sing with one voice (though were it the month of Vespers, Lanie suspected the gyrlady might sing a doubled tune), invoking the ancient ritual of grief both to acknowledge Sari’s sorrow and also, in some ceremonial way, to attempt to contain it. But when Lanie sang the Undreaming, it would move the spellsong out of the realm of ritual and into enchantment. The Lahnessthanessar, at full voices, would, upon reaching its crescendo, lay all the ghosts in the gallery to rest: Goody’s ghost, that was glued to her petrified accident like a shroud rolled in resin; the ghost of Irradiant Stones, squirreled away inside his iron padlock, feeding off the captive souls of the Sky Wizards; and last, Scratten Skrathmandan’s ghost, his substance too shredded and bewildered from the violent manner of his death to pass instantly through Doédenna’s doorway. Lanie could just sense him, lingering near his bereaved parent as she embraced his shattered shell.
Lanie knew what her song could do. But the notes stuck in her throat.
The Lahnessthanessar had always been much harder for her than the Maranathasseth Anthem. Only with reluctance did it come to her mind and tongue, like a melody recalled on the brink of uneasy sleep, its provenance unprovable, the chance of reproducing it correctly—aloud and in full wakefulness—slim. More than this, fear of grief, like the fear of falling, stopped her. So much more joy in resurrection than in its opposite: and yet—
—and yet, this was the work that Doédenna had called her to do.
Tan had already done the hardest part by beginning it. All Lanie must do was sing one line—one note!—and the Great Lullaby would do the rest, inexorable as an onrushing tide.
That was what Goody had taught her. Goody, whom Lanie trusted above all people in Athe. Jhímieti, who had learned the oldest spellsong but one from her own gyrlady’s lips.
Lanie closed her eyes. She drew in a breath. It came as a sob—ah! The first note.
How it formed in her throat perfectly. How its shadow shaped itself from the depths of her substance: a twinned note, one light and quavering, one gruff and relentless. Behind her voices and beneath them, a long chain of melody was already lining up in readiness, a whole symphony if she wanted it, hers to summon. All the eternal and ineffable music of the god of Death would ring at her request, if she but asked it.
The tiger rug relaxed as she relaxed. Lanie’s substance, both without her body and within it, synced back with itself. They began to move as one. Her hands rested lightly on the tiger’s head. Lanie raised her face to the ceiling, her eyes shut in concentration. The striped pelt uncoiled from her lower body. Together, they began their slow drift down.
And then came Cracchen Scratch, roaring.
“Stones! You look at me! Look me in the eye.”
Lanie blinked, opened her eyes. She and the tiger rug were on a level with Cracchen’s face. Or rather, on a level with all four barrels of his blunderbuss.
The gun was at full cock. Cracchen’s eyes were wide and unblinking, with a sort of laugh in them, as if he had passed with a viper’s speed through grief, punched through into rage, and out the other side into a strange glee.
His expression was familiar—Lanie had seen it often enough on Nita’s face—a smile as thin and white as a razor’s slash before it begins to bleed.
His intent moved through her like buckshot; Lanie could feel her body wanting to form blisters in all the places Cracchen sought to send his projectiles. But these sensations passed as quickly as a forgotten desire to sneeze. Above her, in the high gloom of the rafters, she heard the piercing killy-killy-klee of a hunting kestrel.
“You don’t want to do that,” Lanie said grimly.
The tiger rug trembled beneath her, not with fear but with rage. With readiness.
“Oh,” he said. “I do,” and fired.
The tiger yowled.
No sound but a flash of blue light.
The lead shot disappeared—disintegrated—and then, the tiger bit the blunderbuss in two.
Cracchen’s face became all gape. The tiger rug reared its undead head, ready to rip off Cracchen Scratch’s face with its undead fangs, and Lanie was about to let it, not knowing if her allergy would punish her later or if she had somehow moved beyond it.
She did not what she would have done, for the next second, a naked woman came tumbling out of the air.
The weight of Duantri’s body sent Cracchen crashing down. He fell against the bust of Even Quicker Stones, sculpted of shining anthracite in the first generation of the Founding. The bust had fallen on its side during Goody’s rampage, but the stand it rested upon remained upright. But when Cracchen fell against it, stand and bust both tumbled with him to the floor. The bust did not survive.
Cracchen pushed himself up, tossed down the remains of his blunderbuss on the floor, and rounded on Duantri. He looked, if anything, even more wildly gleeful. Here, at least, was a thing of flesh and blood. Something he could fight.
The Gyrgardu herself had landed in a one-legged squat, all her weight on her right foot, her left leg stretched before her, heel pressed to the floor. She held her arms out in front of her body, her right arm bent slightly more than her left. It was a variation on a sothaín gesture from the fourth set: ‘The Four-Faced Harvest Goddess Falls to Rise.’
Cracchen moved in on her like a siege engine, legs kicking and fists swinging. It seemed a single blow from any of his limbs would crack Duantri like Goody had cracked Scratten. But as soon as he was close enough, Duantri seemed to fly up his body in a series of quick punches, as if each blow that landed lent her new wings. She caught his kicks in the dancing trap of her bare legs, tangling him, slithering her body around his like a snake until every way he turned he was turning against himself.
When he tried to lift her up and sling her away from him, she somehow managed to get under him, moving into his momentum, and launching him—or helping him launch himself—across the room.
He landed, much as Lanie had, near the Sarcophagus, but stopped short of crashing into it. Duantri had known just how to throw him, how hard, how far, even avoiding most of the broken glass on the floor, or the larger jagged objects that might have seriously injured him. Cracchen’s breath was knocked out of him for the moment, that was all.
Straightening from her fight crouching, the Gyrgardu wiped a thread of blood from her mouth. She casually picked up Ham-Handed Stones’s sparth ax from the floor, and shifted her grip on it. Her gaze tracked Cracchen’s every twitch and groan. Lanie had no doubt that Duantri would blur back into action the moment he gave her cause.
But the sound of iron scraping stone swerved Lanie’s attention away from Duantri and back to the Sarcophagus of Souls. It was flipped on its back like a monstrous cockroach, and Goody was straining against it, her legs braced against its black stone belly as she gripped its iron padlock in both hands. Arms rigid, she leaned back with all her weight, pulling like she would pull her own body to pieces before she’d let go. A final crack, and Goody staggered backwards. She held aloft the padlock, now ripped from its embedment, not in victory, but as if she wished to thrust it as far from her body as possible without losing her grip on it.
Goody regarded the thing with loathing as it pulsed in her hand like a violent star. Then she stuffed the whole padlock into her mouth.
Her granite-like teeth crunched on the metal. The padlock’s radiance began to bleed from between Goody’s lips, spilling its blue-white leakage out of her eyes, and from her nose and from her ears. The ghost of Irradiant Stones, shucked of his prison shell, began to expand into his new shape.
“No,” Lanie shouted. “No!”
The doubled song of her deep voice faltered in fear. Even the tiger rug wrinkled beneath her, losing some of its tautness.
But Duantri caught Lanie’s elbow, and whispered, “Sing, Lanie.” Here, at last, was the true Duantri: the warm and coaxing teacher who had taught Datu to play the cavaquinho. “Sing the Lahnessthanessar with us,” she said.
The Gyrgardu lifted her strong, young voice, with all its joyous training, to harmonize with Tan’s keening.
Lanie’s deep voice came in strong with the next phrase, a series of bass-bottom notes that shook the ground at Goody’s feet. It was a divergence from the Lahnessthanessar—or perhaps a bridge—percussive with command:
Release the things that are not you. Let others bear the freight of chaos. Come unburdened to Doédenna. Let go.
Goody crashed to the floor like a titanwood falling, fist-deep in the splintered parquet tiles. Her head hung hung low. She retched and gagged and spat until every piece of the chewed-up padlock came clumping out of her mouth. No longer a single object, the foul pile gleamed and steamed, but the ghost of Irradiant Stones yet clung to its remains and not to Goody.
The hot glow faded from Goody’s burnt-out eyes as she curled up in torpor, where, it seemed, the Lahnessthanessar could not reach her. But now, at least, Lanie knew how to wake her—with her tears, her touch, the pulse of her substance. And when the moment was right, she would wake her once more, if only to lull her back to sleep. Sleep, which, for the undead, was death. But not now. There was something she had to take care of first.
Crumpled, sundered, and deformed, up blazed the padlock once again, like druzy agate set aflame. From the blue dazzle, the faded silhouette of Lanie’s great-grandfather began to take form: round spectacles, drooping whiskers, cruel mouth, unmistakable air of mockery.
Lanie bent over the tiger rug’s head, her teeth bared like a tiger’s teeth, and sped them both across the smithereened floor. She flung out her left arm to scoop up the ruined padlock. She was going to sing its occupant all the way back through Doédenna’s doorway.
But the ghost was old. The ghost was ambitious. The ghost was afraid. And anything—anything—was better than the end promised by the gentle Lahnessthanessar. What Irradiant Stones found, nearest to hand, was Cracchen Scratch.
But Lanie, alive, quicker than he, moved at speeds no ghost could hope to match. He never would have made it—if the Sarcophagus of Souls itself had not decided to act. No more than Irradiant did the Sarcophagus want him lulled to his Undreaming so easily. Not without a chance for justice. For vengeance. With nothing left to fasten it down, the lid of the Sarcophagus blew off the top of the black basalt box.
A mass of roiling shadows tentacled out like a many-fingered hand. It grabbed for the ghost just as Lanie snatched up his padlock. The force of the flying lid flung her across the gallery. In panicked protectiveness, the tiger rug once again cocooned her almost entirely, leaving only a bit of her face exposed, so that she could see and breathe.
Of course, she dropped the padlock. The ghost fled its iron, jumping like a flea from it into Cracchen’s stunned flesh, where he burrowed in through the center of his chest. The rack of black shadows, whose only wish was to detonate Irradiant Stones, to atomize him, recoiled from Cracchen’s supine form. It wavered, split into filaments of uncertainty, as if the Skaki Sky Wizards who made up that terrible tangle were loathe to harm a single hair on the head of one of their own descended sons.
Writhing to work herself free from the rug, Lanie watched as a spot, invisible to everyone else in the room, began to form at the center of Cracchen’s chest.
It glittered like an evil jewel, a luminous ellipsoid unfurling outward over his whole body in waves of sickly light. Soon, the creeping glow suffused him entirely, the way ectenica overtakes dead accident when a necromancer’s living blood is spilt upon it.
But a ghost was not ectenica. A ghost was pure substance—memory and will—attached, not to its original accident, but to an object for which it bore some special sympathy: the object in this case being a Skrathmandan of Skakmaht, scion of a fallen Sky House that Irradiant Stones had once helped destroy. Sympathy enough.
The ghost stepped into Cracchen Scratch with the brazenness of a thief claiming an occupied house for his own. He thundered in, a hundred years undead, arrogant, more assured with every passing second. His substance dominated the terrified occupant, driving Cracchen into the very depths of himself, where Irradiant locked him in the dark, like he had the Sky Wizards deep into the shadows of the Almasquin.
Sari’s cry when the Sarcophagus of Souls erupted was the only sound that had penetrated the protective layer of hide shielding Lanie from damage any worse than bruises. Sari shouted again when Cracchen—now mostly Irradiant—rose, glimmering, into the air. His feet dangled. His pale hair drifted up around his head like a halo. One eye had melted out of its socket, filled instead with blue flame. The other eye was still his own: icy aqua-green, mortal, and terrified.
Without the deep sight of death magic to call upon, Sari could not possibly know what was happening to her son. She could not see or hear the ghost. She could not see the glow overtaking Cracchen’s body—only the effect it had on it: the levitation, the empty eye socket, the expression of pure terror. Nor could Sari see the shadows of the severed Sky Wizards that encircled her son like a tribe of lions. All of these events were invisible to her.
But Sari knew that her son was in peril. She tried to crawl across the floor to him, but she could not bear to let go of Scratten, whose corpse weighed her down.
Finally Lanie managed to battle herself loose of the tiger rug’s panicked embrace. Spurring it back into the air, she rose to face the ghost. Her deep voice took up the Lahnessthanessar again. Her ravaged singing voice echoed it. Lanie looked directly into the blue-flame eye, and sang the Great Lullaby for her great-grandfather.
Her song was like a fishhook; the lure it dangled was irresistible; it would call the ghost out of Cracchen’s sheltering body, as surely as the slow decay of the universe, and he would at last enter Doédenna’s cloak for good.
Irradiant’s face, clad in Cracchen’s handsome accident, convulsed with fear. His body twitched uncontrollably. The blue flame flickered wildly in Cracchen’s fire-scoured eye socket. His other eye, the human eye, rolled up in his head. The ghost knew that he could not stay within range of the Lahnessthanessar and not succumb to it. So he whipped his newly possessed self out of reach of Lanie’s voices, out of the ruined gallery, out through the blown-out wall that Cracchen’s cannon ball had made.
Flying as one body, Irradiant Stones and Cracchen Scratch fled the god of Death, pursued by a swarm of vengeful shadows, to a place where Sari’s wail of despair could not follow.
Into the snow. Into the hematite sky. Into the north.