She needed to rest her spirit as well as her flesh, but not just yet. And she didn’t want to fall asleep listening to Zhirin’s tears. The diamond flared as she touched it with spectral fingers, but the girl didn’t notice.
Deilin Xian appeared, lips curling. On this side, the ghost was clearer and more solid than the living. A frown replaced her snarl when she saw Zhirin. “What’s happened?”
“Khas assassins killed her mother.”
Pity looked quite ghastly on the dead woman’s face.
“Leave her to her grief,” Isyllt said. “Walk with me.”
They stepped through the wall, a queer scraping sensation that Isyllt always hated, and emerged on a narrow walkway. The building was set on stilts and wrapped around a broad and towering tree. Lights flickered among the branches, green and gold firefly flickers.
“What are you doing?” Deilin asked as she followed Isyllt over the rail, landing silently on the leaf-strewn slope below.
“Looking around. I thought I’d take a native guide.” It was all she could do not to spin around like a child; the absence of weariness and pain made her light-headed.
“You’re in my world now, necromancer. Do you think you could best me so easily here?” More curiosity than threat in the question and Isyllt turned to face her, taking in the honor-blade at Deilin’s hip, the easy warrior’s grace of her stance. She was younger than Isyllt had first thought, perhaps thirty-five when she died. A bullet beneath her right breast had killed her; the wound bubbled and slurped when she spoke and her face and hands were tinged blue. Not a quick or easy death.
“I think I’d win,” Isyllt said at last. “But it wouldn’t be easy. And if that happened, I’d never let you out again. Do you want to risk it?”
Deilin smiled; she was lovely when she wasn’t frothing mad. The resemblance to Anhai and Vienh was clear. “I won’t warn you if I do.”
Isyllt smiled back and turned her eyes to the forest sloping around them. “What do you call this place?”
“The Night Forest. The unsung dead remain here, with the spirits.”
“Where do the others go?”
“East, or so we’re told. The songs and offerings carry them to the cities of our ancestors, on the far side of the mountains.”
“But not you.”
Deilin shrugged, one hand on her knife hilt. “I wasn’t given to the Ashen Wind. The Assari left my corpse to rot, and scavengers have long since eaten my bones. I might have walked, climbed the Bone Stair, but the way is long and dangerous and I was afraid. Even if my granddaughters were to sing me on, my wounds will never heal. And I doubt they would, now.”
The soft bitterness of the last turned Isyllt’s head. “Why did you do it?”
Deilin didn’t answer for a moment and Isyllt wondered if it was worth compelling her to answer. In the silence, she heard the soft, wet sounds of the woman’s ruined lung flopping inside her chest.
“I don’t know,” she said at last. “I wandered in the forest so long—I was already half mad when Chu Zhen found me.” Dark eyes flickered toward Isyllt. “Kaeru, she called herself to you. She was the last of the Yeoh clan, or at least of those who didn’t sell themselves to the Assari. We were close as girls, but she fled south when her family died and I married soon after.
“She found me only a few seasons ago—I hadn’t realized so much time had passed till I saw how old she’d grown. She told me of the city and the Khas and the Dai Tranh, how we lost more children and warriors every year, to death or despair or the lure of Assari decadence. She told me of my granddaughters, and my half-blooded great-granddaughter. And the more she told me, the madder I grew, till my blood burned and all I knew was the need for flesh, for revenge.” She touched her wound absently; the blood faded from her fingertips as she pulled them away.
“It’s anathema, of course, for the dead to possess the living, but no worse so than for children to forget their ancestors. I remember thinking that, just before Chu Zhen broke the seals and summoned me into the house. Then the madness took me and everything was blood and hate until I woke up in your stone prison.”
Isyllt’s hand tightened around the ghostly reflection of her ring.
“You argued with her, though, on the boat.”
Another shrug. “It’s anathema, and I was calmer then. Being bound gives