desiring nothing more than to listen to that music forever. He would be trapped beside the river, lost in a dream of forgetfulness, until he died of hunger and thirst, or followed the Swan out into the middle of the river and drowned.
Aleksia had taken the precaution of stopping up her ears with wax. The song came to her muffled and imperfect, as the Swan approached, looking almost like a carving, gliding on the water with no sign that it was paddling itself along. Only when it neared her, did it deign to move its head to look at her, briefly. It saw nothing amiss — a spirit would not have stood there watching it; spirits did not hear the song the way that the still-living did; to them, it was lovely, but not enthralling.
Which was the point, really. No need to ensnare the dead. They could not leave.
After the Swan had passed, a faint splashing in the distance told Aleksia that the moment she was waiting for had arrived. Behind the Swan, a small, black boat glimmered out of the mist shrouding the river, poled by someone who looked very like Aleksia…perhaps younger, and not quite so corpselike.
She was very beautiful, in a kind of empty-eyed way, was the Tuonin pikka, Death's Maiden. Like Aleksia, she wore a white, shroudlike gown of material far too flimsy to keep an ordinary mortal girl warm in this place. As she was a maiden, she wore her golden, floor-length hair unbound except for a silver-studded headband of white ribbon. Her blue eyes were curiously vacant, as if not only her thoughts, but her very soul was elsewhere.
She poled the boat with a mechanical grace; her vacant eyes were fixed on Aleksia. For her part, Aleksia remained where she was, maintaining a passive posture. She was supposed to be dead, her own ghost wandering for thirty days to get this far. And the dead were…
Boring.
Tuonela was the most boring form of the afterlife that she had ever heard of. The dead did nothing, wanted nothing, cared for nothing and carried out a shadow play of their previous lives, but without the passion, becoming more and more divorced even from that, until at last they moved into a state very like sleep. She wondered why any spirit would want to stay here. Well, it was better than the alternative of oblivion, she supposed.
When the Tuonin pikka's boat bumped upon the gravel of the bank, the girl waited passively for Aleksia to step aboard. After a moment, she did so. The maiden waited until she had seated herself on the single bench seat in the middle of the boat, then pushed off from the bank, heading for the farther shore.
Halfway across, in a colorless voice, the maiden finally spoke.
“Who are you?”
In an equally colorless voice, Aleksia replied, “I don't know.” After all, what intelligent person truly knows who they are? She concentrated on that fact, that the wisest of men will freely admit that he does not truly know himself.
“Why are you here?”
She had to be very careful not to lie here. A direct lie would definitely be something that would set the maiden off. But a shading of the truth…
“I am looking for something.” That was close enough.
“What do you seek?”
“Wisdom.” That was safe enough. And true, entirely true.
To her intense relief, the maiden said nothing else, presumably satisfied with what she had been told. She continued to the farther bank, and the island of Tuoni itself.
Fog and mist gathered over the surface, hiding everything that was more than a few feet from the boat. The surface of the water was glass-smooth and utterly still. The only sound was that of the pole, rhythmically splashing. It was even colder out here on the river than it had been on the bank. The damp chill, now smelling a bit of waterweed, penetrated every fiber of Aleksia's gown. Her bare feet felt like little lumps of ice. And she was not yet anywhere near the end of her journey.
Finally, the keel of the boat grated against rock; the maiden expertly poled the boat parallel to the bank. Moving slowly and deliberately, as if she had all the time in the world, Aleksia stepped out of the boat, into ankle- deep, cold water. She did not even flinch. She did not pick up the skirt of her gown. She simply waded ashore as if this were all of no consequence. And she thought that out in the fog, she'd caught a flicker of movement of something very big, and very black. She thought she'd detected a hint of a fishy odor. But there was no way to tell for certain, and the maiden poled the boat away to the other side, to wait for her next passenger. She suppressed a shiver; she knew what that large black thing might well be — the giant pike-fish that was said to eat those that did not belong here. You could spend eternity in the belly of the fish if you could not convince the maiden that you, too, were a spirit.
Without seeming to look around, Aleksia meandered up the bank. At least the vegetation wasn't dead here, although it certainly was lifeless-looking. As she had been led to believe, Tuoni was essentially a duplicate of life on the living earth, an endless series of identical villages going deeper and deeper into the fog. Those who had died the most recently were nearest the river, and the marks of what they had died of were still visible on their bodies. It could have been gruesome, had their wounds not been bloodless and their bodies as pale and chill as the maiden's. It was said, by the sources that Aleksia had studied, that the longer a spirit remained her, the more of its death it forgot. Signs of wounds and injuries and illness vanished, severed limbs reattached and the spirit looked more and more as it remembered itself, in its prime of life. It would move away from the bank and deeper into the island, finding a home for itself, beginning a kind of passionless second life that was a mirror of its first. It would push the memories of that first life into the depths of its mind, unless it was asked. But then, if it was questioned too closely, or in the wrong way, all those memories would come rushing back, and with them, all the remembered pain and pleasure of living.
Then it would turn on the questioner — and that could be fatal. Eventually, the spirit would come to a place where it would just lie down and sleep. It could be awakened, but if it was not, that was how it stayed — in a state of endless slumber.
Fortunately, questions were more common, here on the shore. The spirits wandered, looking for loved ones, looking for answers, looking for a purpose. She wandered among them, also looking. In her case, she was looking for the victims of the Icehart. They should be obvious enough; an entire village worth of people that had all died at once should stand out.
There was a strange feeling to this place. It was not despair; it was too dull for that. Apathy, perhaps. It seemed to permeate everything, lying over Aleksia's spirit like a gray pall.
