Chapter 2

The sky was dark for days and days.

It began as a distant haze after the quaking abated. The farthest buildings of the City of the Dead began to fade from view, and then the dust in the air grew thicker, and the light of the sun only set it ablaze in an orange fog.

The City's lights struggled through the murk. It was Fannar's third spring as caretaker, so the lights to him were beacons, but to the unfamiliar they might well be sirens, beckoning into the abyss. There were two families who had come to lay their dead to rest, and more who had come on pilgrimage to seek their ancestors' wisdom. Fannar and the others bid them not to wander.

They shouldn't have wanted to anyway. Breathing the air outside made his chest hurt, and magic failed them with the Lifestream in pandemonium. But some of them had to go in order to reach the storerooms, so Fannar wrapped a scarf about his face to protect him from the worst of it, and went.

An abnormal stillness had settled over the City. The birds had all flocked south at the first quake, before the sky darkened. The insects that had woken with the thaw seemed to have retreated back into the earth. The silence left in their wake did not evoke calm, but a child huddled in a corner, eyes squeezed shut. The Planet was terrified.

Fannar reached the shell house that was his aim, and by habit he brushed his fingers over the light at its entrance. The Lifestream itself turned to crystal, they took these tears shed by the Planet and set them in places of honor about the City. But though they called them tears, they were more often of joy than sorrow. Returning to the Planet was only a temporary separation between the living and the dead, and as a counterbalance it offered connection and oneness with a vast ocean.

Usually, touching the lights was a calming sensation, a clearer window into the peaceful flow of the Lifestream. A discordant cacophony assaulted his mind, and he drew his hand back. Even the long dead, pieces of their memory preserved in these crystals, were undone by what had happened. They had experienced nothing like it.

Sometimes when pilgrims came from the far south, they would ask why these tears were never used for anything, but Fannar did not think the Planet shed them to be tools. The purpose of memories was nothing so tangible. They were but a guide to those who still acted upon the Planet's surface.

Fannar wished they offered guidance now.

What little remained in the storeroom, Fannar could carry unaided. It was the last of what had seen them through the winter months, and they shouldn't have expected to rely on it now. Spring brought both easier foraging and pilgrims in greater numbers, with offerings to support the caretakers. But the longer the smoke choked out the sunlight, the more the plants would wither, and the animals with them.

If the Lifestream would not calm enough to support their magic, he feared they would soon be forced to abandon the City. He wasn't sure where they would go.

A voice hailed him as he stepped back outside, startling him. Fannar squinted through the haze until he made out a cluster of figures approaching from the north. He lifted an arm to acknowledge them, and they met along the path.

He couldn't recognize them with their faces likewise covered against the dust, but he could tell they had just arrived. They must have come down through the mountain caves. They carried very little.

"Come, this way," he said, beckoning with his hand to make his muffled invitation clearer. He led them on past other empty houses and into the heart of the City. They skirted the lake that normally glittered so brightly beneath the gap in the great coral canopy. Now it sat still and dark, its depths difficult to distinguish from the ground beneath their feet.

He guided them to the stair to the altar beneath, and at last he pulled his scarf loose from his face and breathed deep. It was one blessing that the magic that had created this place still held. The air within its protective bubble was clean, as was the water below. Constructed for ceremonial use, it had never been meant to house anyone, and their camp among its artful spires was already crowded.

The newcomers followed suit in baring their faces and breathing the air with murmured relief.

"This is the first clean breath I've taken in days," said a woman. "Is everyone safe down here? You haven't lost anyone?"

Fannar glanced back, recognizing the voice. Yes, he knew most of these faces; they were from his own clan. And one... No, she must have been another relative. That was all.

"Yes," he assured them, "everyone is all right so far. Do you know what's happened?"

"Something fell from the stars," answered the elderly Ragna, "and wounded the Planet. We wanted to go and see, but the air is worse the farther north you go."

"The great forests must be burning," added Indridi. "I watched the thing that fell burning through the sky."

Fannar had heard stories of wildfires from those who travelled in warmer regions, but he had never experienced one. Vast swaths of the north were covered in pine forest; how much of it was ablaze now? How many familiar paths burned to nothing? How many, to make the air so thick with their ash?

"Is there nothing we can do?" Fannar wondered.

Ragna shook her head. "If enough of us pull together, I think there must be something. If we calm the Planet, we can work together to push back the winds—halt the fire, clear the smoke."

"Are others coming this way?"

"We detoured here," said Ragna, glancing at the woman who was more familiar than she should have been. "Larus needed to see his family."

"I see," Fannar said slowly. A simple explanation on the surface, but there was something oblique in the way she gave it. He didn't know what to ask.

They reached the bottom of the long staircase, passing under the roof of the largest pavilion, the upper level of which they used to prepare and eat their rationed meals. Several of the pilgrims waited, having heard them on the stairs, and Fannar had anticipated some excitement—

But not what followed.

Horrified gasps met their entrance into the pavilion. Someone screamed. Dagrun lunged forward, only for Egil to catch her by the arms and hold her back.

"No!" she cried. "What is that!? Get that thing out of here!"

All eyes were fixed on the too-familiar woman, the woman who bore a striking resemblance to the one they had come here to bury. Fannar hadn't known her well in life, and he was more familiar with the changes that death had wrought on her face. He hadn't wanted to think— it was ludicrous to think this was the same woman.

But Larus stepped forward, settling his hands on the woman's shoulders. "Dagrun, it's her," he insisted. "It's Pala."

"That is not Pala," Dagrun spat. "Our sister is dead. You saw her. We saw her."

"She's come back to us. It's her."

The woman who could not be Pala smiled gently, cautiously. Dagrun shook off Egil's grip, but she kept her distance. Several fled down the steps into the lower level, and the rest watched uneasily.

Fannar carefully unslung the baskets from his shoulder and set them aside. "Larus," he said gently, "I know your sister's death was hard on you, and you couldn't bring yourself to come, but we laid her to rest. I tended her myself."

"But if that isn't Pala," said Egil, "then who is she?"

No one had an answer. The dead returned to the Planet. That was the way of things, and always had been. Very rarely, ghosts might linger, holding onto their strongest thoughts and emotions and forgetting all else. But you could not touch them. They could not reproduce the memory of their own faces. They did not walk and breathe and cast shadows.

Pala's image even reflected faintly in the polished stone beneath her feet. But it couldn't be Pala.

She spoke, at last, into their uneasy silence.

"I know that it doesn't make any sense," she said, her tiny smile turning rueful. "I only know that I am myself. I know all of you. Dagrun, my sister. Egil, the only man who could ever catch her eye. Even you, Fannar. I remember the day we saw you off. I never expected I would follow you here myself in a few years..."

Egil swallowed. "Do you... remember dying?" he asked.

The woman in Pala's image shook her head. "Not the moment of it, no. I feel I closed my eyes... and then I opened them again."

"You are not Pala," Dagrun insisted, tears quavering on the edge of her voice.

"Indridi," said Fannar, turning to him. "Could you take... this woman... up to the bell tower? I think this might be easier to discuss without her present."

Indridi nodded, and 'Pala' did not protest at being led away, though she glanced back over her shoulder at her would-be siblings.

"Pala died," Dagrun said again after they had gone. "She was sick with fever, and she died. We buried her. I don't know who that is."

"I was frightened, too, at first," said Larus. "But I've talked with her. She knows us. She remembers things. All sorts of things. Conversations between just the two of us, that no one else would know of."

"It's some kind of deception," said Dagrun. "Some kind of monster is reading your thoughts."

"How are you so certain it can't be her?"

"Because this isn't how it happens!"

"Maybe it's a blessing," Larus insisted. "Maybe the Planet understood she died too soon. Maybe it gave her back to us."

Fannar looked to the others who had travelled with them, with 'Pala.' "Ragna," he said, "what do you think?"

Ragna shook her head. "It's part of why I wanted to bring her here. The Lifestream is so difficult to read now, but the voices of the dead are clearer here in the City. Have you heard Pala's among them? If her voice is still in the Lifestream, then it cannot be her."

"I don't know..." Fannar admitted.

"I heard it," Dagrun said sharply. "After we buried her, I heard her."

"But have you heard her since?" Egil asked gently. "What if she did... pass back into our world?"

"How?" said Dagrun. "There are no stories of this. This isn't something that's ever happened. When we die, we return to the Planet. It's painful for those of us left behind, but by the Planet, we are still connected. We are promised a reunion."

"Is this not a reunion?" asked Larus.

"You know that isn't what I meant."

Ragna shook her head slowly. "And the Planet has just suffered such a great wound," she said. "Now would not be the time to grant such an unusual gift. It needs to conserve its energy, to heal."

"Maybe it was a mistake," Egil suggested. "Maybe in all the Lifestream's chaos these past days, she was expelled from it."

"That might make a ghost of her," said Dagrun, "but not this."

"I have never heard of a monster who could be what she is either," said Egil. "How can she look just like her, and know the things she knows?"

"I don't know," Dagrun admitted. "But it can't be... It can't be."

"But what if it is?" said Larus.

They were all quiet for a moment.

"I think Ragna has the right idea," Fannar decided. "We should listen for Pala's voice in the Lifestream. We should listen for those who may know what happened to her. And if it is a mistake, if she is alive when she shouldn't be, then is it her fault? Is it our duty to correct it?"

"Correct it?" Larus repeated in alarm. "What do you mean by correcting it?"

Fannar held up his hands, placating. "Nothing. I am not suggesting we do anything to her. If your sister has returned, then we should welcome her."

Dagrun shook her head slowly. "Pala is dead," she maintained. "That is not Pala."

But no matter how long they prayed at the altar or sat in the shell house above with their hands set against the lights, not one of them could pick out Pala's voice from the cacophony of the Lifestream. And every day the woman smiled at them, and spoke with them, and laughed with them. It went against everything they understood about their world, but the world was full of secrets they had yet to unlock.

When they were forced to abandon the City, they took Pala with them.

< Chapter 1 | Contents | Chapter 3 >