2.

 

Zaifyr’s second descent into the mineshaft was worse.

He had focused on the light that burned dimly like a piece of the sun the first time, allowing it to navigate the unknown as if he were in a dream, the dark cold around him a murky promise of threat from the Quor’lo that he could ignore with the light. This time he had no globes. He was alone, having instead broken through the seal the two old men had placed over the mine entrance. Minutes before he dropped into the shaft, with the two suns warming his back, Zaifyr crouched and picked the lock securing the heavy wooden covering in place. He could have lifted it or broken it, if he were honest with himself; he certainly could have spared himself the fumbling and inaccurate pushes and twists of a skill he had not used in centuries, but he wanted to keep his second trip a secret.

His failure to quickly pop the lock spoke of a distraction in his mind, a loss of focus that would become even more apparent the moment he let go of the rotting wooden ladder he clung to. The cold, murky water was a shock, but the sudden appearance of haunts, swarming around him as he submerged was more so. Tiny and spectral, each a faint burning glow, they swarmed around him, the haunts of insects trying to catch his eye in the filthy water. Focusing on his downward strokes, Zaifyr pushed them from his mind, succeeding only as the murky dark closed over him and his hands navigated the filthy tunnel to the second ladder.

The reprieve did not last long. Out of nowhere a drowned haunt appeared in a white burn of melted, waterlogged skin, crying out in a waterlogged voice.

Zaifyr emerged with a mouthful of awful water, the haunt beneath him, its voice trapped beneath the fetid surface.

Pulling himself out, he sat on the edge of the hole and tried to regain his focus and shut out the haunt from his vision. It was Jae’le’s fault. The mix of concern and chiding brought back memories, both good and bad, and undid much of the self-control he had relearned while being locked up. He had been able to command his sight, but now he was forced to wait trying to gather his focus neatly and concisely, as a fisher might drew together nets of fish. It was also why, when he stepped through the green-lit crack thinking he had done just that, he was assaulted by layers of haunts. They were a thick, burning glow: generations of men and women packed tightly together, their individual limbs merging and overlapping with others, their bodies morphing into each and every one of them in an awful tapestry of loss and sin.

Zaifyr closed his eyes.

He had not seen the sheer mass of haunts the first time he entered the City of Ger because of his focus. He needed to return to that if he did not want to be overwhelmed. He knew, from past experiences, that if he allowed that to happen, it would take him weeks, perhaps even months, to get to the point where he would not hear their entreaties to him. The solution was to focus on one of the dead, to focus his attention and power on that one so that it would overwhelm the others, and leave him with but one haunt that he could rebuild a fuller concentration around, before dismissing it from his sight.

At first he struggled to distinguish the voices, the whispering complaints of cold and hunger blurring so that it took him time to identify one that was different, that had an inflection, a sound that he could separate from the others. He had not struggled to find that edge of a voice for years and he had to return to his earliest memories on how to pick up an inflection, how to search for the roll of a vowel in a haunt’s voice, an accent that they had carried in life and, now, in death. The voice he found was that of a woman. She paused between whispering the word cold and the word hunger, as if another thought persisted, as if she were trying to find a way to articulate the two constants in her world.

He opened his eyes.

She was not tall. She was white, dark-haired and no taller than his chest. In appearance, she was the same age as he and the fleeting thought that he may have lost his mortality when she lost her life occurred to him. But the design of the linen gown was not one that he recognized and he put the thought and the haunt from his mind. With the sound of the river the only noise echoing around him, Zaifyr began walking down the street, in control of his sight once again but for the haunt that stood in the middle of the square, the figure he allowed himself to see to anchor his reality, to push the thoughts of the man he called his brother from his mind.

Jae’le would worry if he knew what he had done.

He would say—

“Cold,” she whispered, and paused, before saying, “hungry.”

He would say that Zaifyr had to be careful, that he should not answer the dead, that to do so would bring him to madness again.

It had been a hundred years since he had last talked to the dead. He had reached a peace with them, an understanding that they were part of the world and that he could do nothing for them. The tower in which he had been imprisoned had been small, a tall, narrow construction twice his height and long enough for him to lie in. It had been made by hand, made from the tainted dirt and poisoned river that ran in the valley behind the Eakar Mountains. Linae, the Goddess of Fertility, had done that in her death. The horror of a god’s demise had been revealed as the land, the water, the trees, the animals, and the people all followed her into her dark embrace. So scarred was the land that, even though no trace of Linae remained, no person or community had returned to it.

For a thousand years, the spirits who had died alongside her had been his companions. For a thousand years, he had their presence to teach him that his power was one of abuse, and that if he wished to leave his narrow, crooked tower, he would have to put it aside.

“A wise choice, brother,” Jae’le had said when, finally, the crude door opened. He offered his hand. “The living are more important than the dead.”

Outside, the midday’s sun had lanced painfully into Zaifyr’s eyes. Placing his hand against the wall, he rose slowly, stiffly.

“Brother?”

His eyes were weeping now.

“Brother, do you understand what I am saying?”

Jae’le stood alone, dark and faceless. Despite all of what Zaifyr had thought and done to arrive at this moment, he thought of the word jailer involuntarily and said, “Yes.”

“I do not need to close the door, do I?”

“I would not…” His voice hoarse with disuse and he swallowed dryly. “I would not let you.”

That was not what his brother wanted to hear.

Ahead, the river crashed over the ledge, toward the violently lit Temple of Ger and the still water at the bottom. Behind him, though he had not turned once nor indicated for her to follow him, was the haunt from the city.