“Watch out!” But her shout was swallowed by a pistol’s crack. Fei Minh’s lips parted in shock and she stumbled into Zhirin’s arms. She threw a clumsy arm around her mother and flinched; the moisture soaking her back wasn’t rain.
“Mother!”
They both fell to their knees. Fei Minh gasped, mouth moving, but Zhirin couldn’t hear the words over the roar of her heart. Blood slicked her hands as she tried to stanch the wound, but already her mother was crumpling in her arms, her grip on Zhirin’s hand falling away.
She might have screamed, but she couldn’t hear that either.
People were shouting. Jabbor knelt beside her, trying to tug her away. Isyllt rose shakily from beside Jodiya’s still form. Mau fell to her knees beside her mistress, mouth working. Water rolled down Fei Minh’s face, soaking her hair and tangling in her lashes as her eyes sagged closed. Zhirin could hardly see through the blurring rain.
Jabbor’s words finally began to make sense. “We have to go, Zhir, now. We have to go.” She couldn’t fight as he lifted her up, could barely keep her knees from buckling. Rain ran down her face, hot and cold, washing the blood on her hands rusty pink.
“Go,” Mau said, her voice harsh and cracking. “Get out of here. We’ll deal with this.” Mau tugged a ring off Fei Minh’s limp hand and pressed it into Zhirin’s. Her fingers curled around it reflexively, blood smearing the gold. She couldn’t draw breath around the pain in her chest, as if the ghost of the bullet had passed through her mother and struck her.
“Come on,” Jabbor said, tugging her away. “I’m sorry.”
They only made it a few yards before Isyllt collapsed onto the rain-soaked road.
Chapter 18
Even unconscious, a trained necromancer was never truly helpless. It certainly felt that way, though, as Isyllt watched Jabbor carry her limp body into the forest. She was lucky he didn’t leave her in the mud, especially since Zhirin was in no condition to argue for her safety.
On the other side of the mirror, Sivahra’s forest rose thick and dark. The sky was a low ceiling of gray and violet clouds, twilit gloom. Spirits chattered in the trees and the breeze twisted through the leaves in silver and indigo ribbons, beautiful and disorienting.
Vertigo struck quickly, the familiar dizziness that came of casting her spirit free. On its heels came the wild rush of freedom, the longing to run and fly unfettered by meat. It was the most dangerous part of ghostwalking, more dangerous than any lurking spirit-if she abandoned her flesh too long, she might never return to it. She held on to the echo of her heartbeat until the urge passed. At least, she thought bitterly, as a ghost she had two good hands.
At the Tigers’ safe house, Jabbor carried her inside and laid her body on a bedroll, less gently than she would have liked. The living glowed blue-white with heat and life, distorted as if she watched them through water. Her own flesh was clearer and dimmer, the light drawn in. She hadn’t realized how awful she looked, blue as milk and hollow-eyed. She could return to her body, perhaps even wake, but she needed rest and this might be the safest place to find any.
Zhirin sank onto a pallet in the far corner. Jabbor tried to speak to her, but she wouldn’t answer and after a moment he left her alone, closing the bamboo door behind him. When he was gone, she began to cry.
Isyllt turned away from the girl’s grief. She’d known Jodiya wasn’t dead but hadn’t acted in time. And while it was true that she’d been so exhausted she could barely walk, that wasn’t a particularly good excuse. Not one Zhirin would want to hear, at any rate. Even the memory of the assassin’s heart stilling beneath her hand was a hollow one.
She made sure her pulse was steady and wrapped her body in webs of wards. 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.”
