Chapter 20
Rue
Kindness Undu had stressed that both geographical closeness to the deadlands and physiological closeness to death were important aids to any necromancer, allowing them to perform feats they would not normally be capable of.
She had often spoken about the importance of physical proximity to the corpse or corpses when seeking to work the black arts upon them.
Her remarks on the help that emotional ties to the dead individual might provide were brief.
Rue had come to believe that this was through lack of personal experience.
The Academy had never encouraged having many friends.
They were discouraged in the early years for obvious reasons.
And Undu in particular was perhaps still, of all the people Rue had encountered in a long life, the individual she had the hardest time imagining having warm feelings for another.
The fight with Treecie long ago when they had both been children, one of them fated to never be anything else, had opened Rue’s eyes to this unsung power.
Einsa’s corpse had risen in response to Rue’s unconscious will, and full of far more than just her friend’s anger, it had made an end of Treecie, saving Rue.
The control exercised had, even with Rue’s weak necromancy, far exceeded that of her more talented opponent.
This one fact presented any necromancer with a horrible paradox.
The bodies that they least wanted to desecrate were in fact the ones they could most easily make dance to their tune.
The same held true with ghosts, though in a less gruesome manner.
Anyone, even those without necromantic training, might see a phantom under the right circumstances, but the spirit that haunts them is much more likely to be that of a loved one than a stranger.
Rue’s own ghosts had haunted her down the years, wandering into many empty moments, painting themselves into the shadows, stealing whole dreams. But they rarely spoke, and then never more than two or three words.
Here by the bank of the last river anyone ever crosses, Bek and Einsa were no longer spectres struggling to be seen.
She could speak to them, even touch them, though that was still unsettling, as if their flesh—though no longer the wispy suggestion of a phantom—was still a matter of opinion, warm when the good times were remembered, cold when she recalled their deaths, and edging towards something worse if she lingered on thoughts of how long they had lain in the catacombs.
For the longest time Rue could only weep before them.
Crying for her failures and her failure to grieve them.
Weeping both for letting them go and for what she had become, how she had betrayed their memories while still in acolyte’s robes, and for what the years had wrought of her thereafter.
Though neither saw anything but the girl she had been, Rue still wore the years she’d wrapped herself within, and the shame of uncountable deeds that lay beneath her friends’ opinion of her.
As she tried to gather herself, tried to think what words she might possibly say that could cross the gulf of decades between them, the world seemed to jolt.
Although the river kept flowing within its banks and the starkly dead bushes didn’t so much as shiver, Rue was thrown to the ground. She felt it again, a lurch within her.
“They’re trying to wake you up,” Bek said.
“Get you back.” Einsa nodded. “So they can hurt you and find out what you know. Mostly it’s for the hurting, though.”
“Wh-what should I do?” Suddenly, instead of one of the oldest Kindnesses in existence, Rue felt as if she were that little girl on her first day at the Academy again, not worried by her surroundings so much as by the opinions of those around her.
She had wanted to find something better then, and still that hope was in her.
Despite all she knew about the shadow lands, some small part of her still clung to the idea that on the far shore, out beyond sight and every other sense, something good might wait for everyone.
“You’re a Kindness, Molly.” Einsa fixed her with dark eyes, water still trickling down from soaked hair.
“You saw that?” Rue felt almost shy. Within the circle of her friends she was a child again.
“We saw.” Bek nodded. She raised a hand as Rue opened her mouth. “You did what you had to do.”
“I didn’t have to—”
“We follow our fate,” Bek said. “You can’t have sought us out, here by the river, expecting to be judged.” She put her arm around Rue’s still-trembling shoulders. “We’re not here for that.”
Another jolt nearly returned her to the ground and shook the question from her again. “What should I do?”
“You’re a shadow cast by the three who punish the hubris of the gods themselves. What do you think you should do?”
“Go back.”
“Hells yes!” Einsa smacked fist into palm.
“Or stay,” Bek said. “If you go back, make it be for you, not them.”
“But wait for your moment,” Einsa said.
“You waited in that coffin, when we told you to.” Rue could hardly get the words out as guilt wrapped its hands around her throat. “And it killed you. We killed you.”
“It wasn’t until I took the picks out and pushed the panic away that the water could flow through the lock and clean it out.” Einsa smiled a smile that seemed impossible, given her memories. “I almost made it. Because I waited my moment.”
“Almost…”
Rue opened her eyes. The man who had slapped her wasn’t paying any attention, but she still hung from a hook on the wall by bound arms she could no longer feel.
Gressa and one of her lieutenants were still studying the maps on the table.
Sebrin Weaver’s head lay on its side away from the charts, eyes vacant.
The rest of the mercenaries were out of sight.
The smell of smoke hung in the air, though the hearth lay cold.
The parts of Rue that she could still feel mostly hurt.
Her mouth especially, where she’d lost teeth earlier in the day.
Returning from oblivion immediately seemed even more stupid than it had before she left the black river and the comfort of her friends’ company.
It had been Bek and Einsa who returned her to her body.
Not what they said, simply the desire to be seen as good in their eyes. And if not good, then at least strong.
It should perhaps have been a desire for vengeance or for justice.
Rue had known Jayne and Ambeth, who died in Stones Corner on the previous evening, far longer than she had known Bek or Einsa.
But they had met as old women and, though it seemed sad to say, the first friendships of young girls burned so much brighter than the companionship between those who had seen the decades flow by.
The latter was a comfortable thing, a slow delight.
The former something painful, thrilling, wonderful, and imperative, all at once.
Rue’s instinct was to speak, to accuse the man of hitting like a child, to dare them to do their worst. But long before Gressa or any of her mercenaries were born, Rue had been instructed by a maimed young woman called Akki to wait her moment.
And so, although it pained her to act as if she feared her enemy, Rue lowered her head and feigned the unconsciousness she had recently thrown off.
Where that moment would come from, Rue had no idea. Logic said there would be no such opportunity, and that bound, injured, and ancient as she was, only an agonizing death awaited her. One she had been stupid to come back for.
The mercenary, an unreasonably tall man who stood level with Rue though her feet were half a yard off the floor, remembered his task and swung again. His hard hand jerked Rue’s face around to the right and through the slits of her eyes she saw something.
“Wait!”
Many captives must have begged Rue’s looming tormentor to wait. What stayed his hand was that it wasn’t a plea: it was an order from someone who expected to be obeyed.
Rue opened her eyes fully, then squinted, doubting what she saw. Einsa’s ghost frowned back at her, standing close by Gressa and her lieutenant at the map table.
“What are you doing here?” Rue worked her jaw, wincing, then spat out a bloody mess.
“Hey!” The man with the bald head, pale eyes, and hard hand reached for his anger, trying to reassert himself.
Gressa and her subordinate had both turned to watch, surprise vying with amusement.
“What are you doing? That’s the real question,” Einsa said.
“Me? I was waiting my chance. Just like Instructor Akki—” Rue snapped her face towards the bald man, who had started to raise his hand. “I. Said. Wait.” She looked back at Einsa. “Just like Instructor Akki taught us.”
“I taught you a better lesson than that,” Einsa said.
“Did you scramble the old bitch’s brain?” Gressa asked the bald man.
“What’s she looking at?” The lieutenant was staring at Einsa as if he could see something, but not enough to be sure. A fault line in the air perhaps, twisting the light.
“You taught me to check the lock first.” Anger coloured Rue’s words. She didn’t understand why she was angry with Einsa, but she was.
“I taught you that this”—the ghost moved her hands rapidly in front of her chest, the motion towards Rue indicating some connection—“works so much better when you love the person.”
“Necromancy?” Rue blinked. “I didn’t—” She bit off the habitual denial. Of course she had loved her friends, and if that was weakness then yes, she, Mollandra Plight, had been weak.
“Necromancy!” Gressa’s amusement dropped away. “Stop her doing that.”
“I didn’t love Tamaster Sams! Wha—”
The hard-handed mercenary’s hard hand closed over Rue’s mouth.
Einsa’s dripping ghost rolled her eyes, looking for a moment like the young girl she was rather than the stern giant Rue remembered. “You love this place. All the people. Maybe not individually. But as a whole.”