Chapter 10 Battle Plans
TALIA AND SUMI RETURNED to the library absolutely covered in moths, which had landed on them like gowns of autumn leaves, occasionally dotted with spots of blazing fire as the individual moths opened and closed their wings.
More moths fluttered along behind them, dispersing themselves around the library to land on shelves, books, and the other occupants.
The Lady of the Dead looked with delight at a moth that had landed on her outstretched hand, lifting it to the level of her eyes so she could study it more closely. “Oh, these are marvelous,” she said. “Where did you find them?”
“In the pomegranate groves,” said Talia. “They’re fruit-sucking moths. They have a specialized probiscis that can pierce the skin of the fruit and let them get at the juice. But that leaves holes in the rind, and bacteria and other pests can get in that way. They destroy what they need to survive.”
“I thought you said moths starve,” said Sumi.
“Some moths starve,” said Talia. “These ones are more about starving other people. They can ruin a whole crop if you let them. And they’re beautiful, which makes it harder for a lot of people to just squish them.”
“There’s no need to squish them when we have a whole army of hungry ghosts to feed them to,” said Nancy, sounding uneasy. “Is this really going to work?”
“The ghosts go after life and movement,” said Kade. “They took the moths first before, and it’s not like we can tell them to hold still if they don’t want to be haunted to death.”
“Moths spend a lot of time holding still,” said Talia.
“That’s not the point,” said Kade. “They’re moths. They’ll fly whether we want them to or not, and if they’re moving and alive, the ghosts will take them before they take the statues. It should work.”
“I love the word ‘should’ in there,” said Christopher dryly. “It’s definitely not doing all the heavy lifting when you’re asking me to risk myself.”
“We’re all at risk here,” said Nancy.
“Are we?” Christopher looked to the Lord of the Dead. “Because it feels like to me that the two people who started this whole statuary system are probably not in any real danger.”
“A mere ghost could not consume Me,” said the Lord of the Dead. “They would break their teeth to even try.”
“So why haven’t you been out there drawing fire for your statues?” asked Christopher sharply. “If you could distract the dead, why wouldn’t you?”
“I am the Lord of this place,” said the Lord of the Dead. “I have other matters to attend upon.”
“I think he’s scared that maybe he’s not as impossible to eat as he thinks he is,” said Sumi. “Even a jawbreaker cracks eventually. Maybe all the ghosts working at one would be able to get to the Tootsie Roll center of the eldritch being.”
They all turned to look at the Lord of the Dead, some of them more thoughtfully than others. Nancy, who had a moth perching on the tip of her nose, looked sad.
“Sir?” she asked. “Why…?”
“Oh, Nancy,” he said, sighing. “You were a favorite of Mine when you first came here. You learned Our ways so quickly, held yourself so beautifully still, and found new poses to bend your limbs against, like you were a sculptor in your own right, and your body made of finest marble. I was so sorry when you had to go, but I saw in you the potential to be a true work of art. It wouldn’t have been fair to keep you before you were ready. ”
Nancy said nothing, just frowned and watched him with shadowed eyes.
“But since your return, you’ve been willful and obstinate.
You don’t listen as I expect one of My statues to listen.
I’ve seen you adjust yourself in the middle of the day, long before the nightly bells grant their permission.
And now I wonder—are you rebelling? Do you need to be released from Our service? ”
Nancy gasped. The Lady of the Dead scowled, rounding on her husband.
“She left her world for Us,” she snapped.
“She risked her life to return there and find help, even knowing that she might not be able to find her way back again, or quickly enough to save the people she was worried about. She has served nothing but well, and You would question her because she dared to question You? We’ve never had rules against the statues questioning Us.
We never wanted them. ‘We’re not gods,’ remember?
That was what You told Me when You first brought Me here, to Your halls, to walk with You.
When I was only a wandering child from another world entirely, You told Me We were not gods, only the people who would anchor an empty world against the void, who would fill more of the universe with light and purpose.
I have indulged the dead. I have followed the rules of Our world as it formed around Us, and I have never questioned why that world works so constantly to devour itself.
Perhaps I should be questioning more. Perhaps I should be questioning You. ”
The Lord of the Dead shot her a stricken look. “My love, she is only a statue.”
“Half Our subjects are ‘only statues.’ We owe them better than We are showing them now.”
He sighed heavily and turned to Christopher.
“Why have I not attracted the dead with My own flesh to spare the weaker? Because the candy girl is correct. I don’t know how many would break themselves against Me before they began making headway, before they could chew through My skin to the bone beyond.
I was only a man when I found this place, and I have grown to something near godhood as a grain of sand can grow into a pearl. ”
“That’s actually a pretty common misconception,” said Talia.
“Pearls happen around any sort of irritant, usually caused by injury or the presence of parasitism. Sand is a relatively rare trigger for the process…” She gradually trailed off, noticing how many people were looking at her, and her cheeks flushed red.
“But that wasn’t the point. It works as a metaphor, I guess. ”
“Thank you for the approval,” said the Lord of the Dead dryly. “Regardless, I do fear that the dead might devour Me if given the opportunity to try, and this world needs Me to keep it working as it does.”
“Not every world has a genius loci, but the ones that have them need to keep them if they want to stay the way they are,” said the Lady of the Dead.
“Like our Baker?” asked Sumi.
“Or our Scribe?” asked Talia.
The Lady nodded. “Without knowing them, I assume the answer. Yes. So My Lord husband avoids the danger for the sake of the world, and I … I have been lax in My duty of service. I should have sheltered more of Our residents, not only helped them to escape. This is their home as much as it is Ours. More, in some ways, because they have chosen it recently enough to continue choosing with every dawning day.”
“What do you mean?” asked Kade.
“I mean that once a choice has been made for long enough, it is a choice no longer,” said the Lady.
“The door that might have taken Me back to My beginnings, had I chosen to leave this place for any reason, closed itself many years ago. The world that was is now no longer, and I have nowhere else to go.”
There was something unutterably sad about the idea of someone’s original home being lost that completely, even if it wasn’t home anymore. For a moment, silence claimed the room, filling it with melancholy. Kade was the first to turn toward the door.
“We have a plan,” he said. “We leave here with the moths, and Talia keeps them with us until the dead show up. Sumi can tell us when the ghosts are coming. As soon as they arrive, Christopher begins playing them into a line, and Nancy leads us to the room where they’re meant to stay.
They can eat the moths to keep themselves calm and away from any statues we pass.
Does that sound right to everyone else?”
“It does,” said Nancy.
“I am incredibly unhappy about this plan, but yes, that sounds about right,” said Christopher. “I’ll do my best to keep the invisible army from eating us all.”
“I believe in you,” chirped Sumi. “But one question, still. How are we supposed to keep them inside the room once we get them there? Christopher can’t just stand outside playing his flute forever, and if we stop and try to walk away, the ghosts are just gonna come out and swallow us all up like bonbons. ”
The Lord and Lady of the Dead exchanged an unhappy look.
“We thought you would know,” they said.
Sumi stomped her foot. “I’m resurrected but that doesn’t mean I know everything! If resurrected people knew everything, Jill would have been smart enough not to steal her sister’s body in the first place! She’d have known it was never going to work.”
“You’re not resurrected,” said the Lord of the Dead. “I look at you and I don’t see a prior death.”
Sumi looked poleaxed, turning to stare almost accusingly at Kade, who put his hands up defensively.
“Hey, don’t look at me in that tone of voice,” he said. “I was part of the little clown parade that brought you back. You were deader’n a doornail when we started out.”
“But we didn’t resurrect her,” said Christopher, voice slow and thoughtful. “That implies using the body you’ve already got. We just took the pieces of her that still existed to the Baker, and got her a whole new body. She’s the Sumi of Theseus.”
“So we could offer to make Jill a whole new body to move into?” asked Sumi. “I know I’m not always the best at predicting consequences, but that sounds like a real bad idea to me. I’m pretty sure Jack would kill us all for even thinking about it too long.”
“Do you have salt here?” asked Kade, returning his attention to the Lady. “Salt can work pretty good at keeping ghosts back. On Prism we mostly used crystals, and we only needed those in certain areas, but I’ve heard good things about salt.”
“As have We, which is why We don’t keep very much on hand,” said the Lord of the Dead. “The dead belong here. We’ve never needed to seal doors against them before.”
“Why don’t we ask Nadya?” asked Sumi abruptly. “I remember you said she came with you when you came here to get me back, and she stayed behind. Well, Nadya’s a Drowned Girl. Her whole door was about water. There’s salt in water. I bet Nadya would know how to get salt out of the water.”
The Lady of the Dead made a complicated face. “I’m sorry, but that won’t be possible.”
“Why not?” asked Kade.
“Your friend did remain here when the rest of you moved along, this is true,” said the Lady of the Dead, in the halting tone of an adult telling children things they might not be happy to hear.
“But she vanished only a few weeks later. We believe she returned to Belyyreka. That her willingness to stay here for the sake of your quest succeeding was enough to tell the doors that she was truly sure the world where she had been born was no fit home for her. At any rate, We found her tracks by the water, and no sign of her, either breathing or body, and it seems most likely that she was able to go home.”
For a moment, everyone in the room stared at her, except for the Lord of the Dead, who had become suddenly very interested in the moth resting on his sleeve. Then, almost explosively, they all began to speak at once:
Nancy: “You didn’t tell me she was missing! I thought she was just down by the water, and would come to see me when she got around to it! I would have—”
Christopher: “—looked for her? Or did you just go ho-hum, expendable teenager from another world, who gives a crap if she’s drowned in our low-rent version of the River Styx? At the very least—”
Kade: “—you should have told us as soon as we got here. You had to know we’d ask about her eventually! Can you really expect us to save your world when you couldn’t even save Nadya?”
Talia: “But I thought going back through our Doors was a good thing.”
That was enough to stop the rest of them yelling. All save Sumi, who was just getting her thoughts back together:
“Part of why we came at all was to make sure Nadya was okay,” she said.
“We didn’t want her getting ghost-gobbled, especially not when she wouldn’t be here if not for me getting all murdered and stuff.
Nancy knew that. You should have known that.
It feels a little weird that you didn’t say anything until just now, like you knew we wouldn’t be as happy to help if we weren’t going to save Nadya by doing it. ”
The Lord of the Dead looked away.
“But the statues who live here don’t deserve to get eaten either, especially not when it’s just because they don’t have really obnoxious friends who can see dead people and talk to moths and stuff.” Sumi shrugged. “So I guess we’re doing this.”
The Lord of the Dead looked back, staring at her. “You were always going to do this,” he accused.
“Yup,” said Sumi.
“Are you just being unpleasant because you can?”
“I think not enough people have been unpleasant to you in a very long time,” said Sumi amiably. “You need to be reminded that sometimes it just sucks to suck. So you suck, sir. Congrats on that. Now take us where we need to go.”
“I cannot—” he began, and paused as the Lady of the Dead lifted one eyebrow silently. He sighed. “I suppose I will walk you to the room of containment. We may not pass the dead along our way. If we don’t, I will return here, and you will search for them.”
“Translation: you’ll get yourself to safety, and leave us to play the canaries in your coal mine,” said Kade coldly. “Not very lordly of you, sir.”
“In this place, I set the rules of lordly behavior,” said the Lord of the Dead. “I am terribly sorry not to live up to your vaunted standards.”
“Oh, great, the boys are fighting,” said Sumi with a layer of vicious delight.
“Let’s go,” said Christopher, and started for the door.