The Wraiths of Will and Pleasure - By Storm Constantine Page 0,81

upon her old home, hands on hip. ‘We were attacked, as many people warned us we would be. Nearly everyone was killed. They took my brothers, as Pell had been taken, but one I managed to help escape.’

There was a silence, which Ulaume intuited Mima wanted him to fill. He had a history and answers that she desperately wanted too. ‘Did you take him after he’d been incepted?’

She made a sound of exasperation and kicked the dirt. ‘They had done something to Terez, yes, if that is inception. He was very ill. We’d heard months before there might be some physical change involved in becoming Wraeththu, but I’d not believed it. Not until I was forced to.’

‘I think I’ve seen him,’ Ulaume said. ‘You shouldn’t have done that. Do you know what you have done?’

‘Know? I tried to save someone I loved, after everyone else was dead. Is that so wrong?’

Ulaume stood up also. ‘Yes, in this case. If you have lived in a dark world, then he exists in a grotesque half world. I shudder to imagine.’

‘Do you! What happened to Terez, what happened to me, to my parents, to my sisters and brothers, it is beyond understanding, beyond hell. I had to leave it all behind.’

‘Yet you survived,’ Ulaume said. ‘In that, you are very similar to Pell.’

Mima grimaced. ‘He chose that life. I hated him for it. I hated him for leaving us.’

‘You shouldn’t. The alternative might have been another Terez. At the very least, you would have lost him anyway, and probably to a barbaric tribe. You should know that he received the very best and most gentle inception. He was trained well, so well in fact, it appears he may have survived physical death. He still cares about you, when so many hara have cast off their human past completely. He has spoken to me of you.’

‘Did he send you here?’

‘No, it was coincidence, if such a thing exists. But perhaps not. Pellaz certainly inspired me to leave my tribe, and if I had not done so, Lileem might well be dead now.’

Mima’s eyes were round. ‘Tell me. Everything.’

‘We have much to speak of,’ Ulaume said. ‘In essence, it is difficult to know where to start.’

‘The beginning,’ Mima said. ‘The truth about Wraeththu, what you are. All I know is what travellers told us. I look at you, and at Lileem, and I can see you are different to those who murdered my people. It is of this I want to know.’

‘Let’s go inside,’ Ulaume said. ‘Lileem should be with us while we talk.’

Later, Ulaume reflected that Pellaz, had he been Mima, would very probably have reacted in the same way his sister did to the enormous and stultifying catalogue of revelations and unbelievable fact. After hours of discussion, she went quiet, then announced she needed time alone. Not once, during the proceedings, had she revealed anything about herself or her new condition. Ulaume realised she was not self-obsessed. In some ways, her body was incidental to her. She knew she had learned things that the majority of humanity never had nor ever would. She sensed the responsibility of this knowledge and also the fact that Fate had plucked her from madness and/or death. She was too bright and aware not to realise this was a second chance, for which, whatever the circumstances of it, she should be grateful. But unlike those hara who had initially resisted inception, only to wake from althaia and realise they would be stupid not to make the best of it, Mima did not have the support and guidance of others like herself. She was, to Ulaume’s knowledge, unique. She had learned what Wraeththu was. She had yet to learn how she fitted into the picture, and for the answer, she would look within herself. As she left the house, Ulaume could only admire her courage.

Mima became part of their household, and a very useful part, as she had domestic and farming skills Ulaume did not, and was familiar with the terrain and its flora and fauna. Despite her earlier hostility, she was clearly grateful to have companions once more, and because they lived apart from the world, it did not matter what kind of creatures they were: how different or how similar. Ulaume learned they lived in the house Mima’s people had called the Richards House, or simply the White House, and that it had once belonged to a hermitic landowner named Sefton Richards. The Cevarros had worked for