Chapter 11 Haunts and Havens
THE SILENCE IN THE HALLS had grown even deeper while they were removed from it.
They left the library in a straight line, the Lord of the Dead at the front with Sumi close behind him, Christopher following her, and Kade following him.
Talia came after Kade, surrounded and trailed by her vast cloud of moths.
Nancy walked in the middle of that cloud, still stuttering like a stop-motion animation transplanted into the real world, but less now than ever.
She was warming back up to normal human speeds, and soon enough the way she walked would be indistinguishable from the rest of them.
They walked past rank upon rank of living, frozen statues, and past even more empty plinths, some dusted with that same faint reddish-brown blood splatter, others fresh and clean and waiting for their next occupants. Sumi leaned forward.
“How many statues would you say you’ve got around here when things are normal?” she asked. “Ballpark figure.”
“Twelve hundred or so, sometimes less, very rarely more,” he said. “More than that and they become difficult to tend to with the staff We’re able to maintain.”
“Staff?” asked Christopher blankly.
“Not everyone who finds their way here holds the gift for stillness, but that doesn’t mean they’re ready or willing to return to the worlds of their birth,” said the Lord of the Dead, haltingly.
“When that happens, when they’re willing to take the risk of the roving dead if it means they can stay here, in whatever safety this place represents to them …
We train them to operate the kitchens and maintain the halls.
Someone has to feed the statues, to help them down when the time comes for them to bathe and … do other things.”
“Is the Lord of the Dead embarrassed by the word ‘shit’?” asked Sumi, sounding oddly charmed. “What an old-fashioned little twitch!”
He shot her a venomous look, cheeks burning red. Sumi laughed it off.
“The staff makes sure the statues can live in peace and contentment,” he continued. “And before you ask, there are four hundred or so of them, and they’ve all been moved to safety for the time being. My Lady and I have been seeing to the statuary on Our own.”
For the first time, Kade looked almost impressed by something the Lord of the Dead had offered about the way his household functioned. He nodded, small and tight, and said, “That’s as it should be, a man taking care of his people when he needs to.”
“There are too many statues when things are as they’re meant to be for Us to hide them all in our warded chambers.
And wards sufficient to bar the dead take months to construct, blood and salt and silver and tears.
We couldn’t put them all behind walls of gossamer and glass in the time we had. The attacks began too suddenly.”
“People in earthquake country don’t normally build to protect themselves from hurricanes,” said Sumi. “Story checks out.”
They were approaching an intersection. Sumi motioned for the Lord of the Dead to pause for a moment, then crept forward, looking tensely down one corridor, and then the other. Then she relaxed, sagging slightly as the tension left her.
“No ghosts here,” she said.
The procession continued on.
WHEN TALIA HAD FIRST fallen through the door in the back of her mother’s study to a world filled with moonlight and the low, steady hum of a melody she already knew in her bones, she had been startled by the first whispers of moth-song, which was very different from human-song, or even the rabbit-song performed so joyfully in the next country over.
Yuemingyuan had been a revelation that unfolded slowly as a flower, each petal presenting a new series of challenges and surprises, but sweetened the air all the more.
She’d never thought much about moths before that moment.
She knew them from her biology classes, and from nights by the back porch light with a net; her great-grandmother had always been fond of the little creatures, telling her how the silkworm had transformed China, how the moon moth could carry her secrets for her if she wanted to share them, but the stories of one elderly relative hadn’t been enough to make moths personally important to her.
Then she had found herself in Yuemingyuan, where the moths sang their own history of the world, even the ones who had no mouths—their song was in the fluttering of wings and the scraping of legs against one another, softer than cricket-song but no less sincerely part of the beauty of the night.
Passing through that door had opened her ears to the moth-song, and now that she could hear it, she could never unhear it.
Their little group moved through the Halls of the Dead, and the air was cold and harsh against her skin, unforgiving in a way she didn’t have proper words for, and she knew her companions were speaking, but she tuned them all out, ignoring them in favor of listening to the whisper of moth wings beating at that strange, unfriendly air.
They sang their own psalms to the man at the front of the group, told their own tales of his kindness and his cruelty.
He had planted the pomegranate groves, they whispered, had tended the trees with his own hands; the first seeds had been carried to him by a traveler from another world, far-off and forgotten, and the fruit that child had clutched so closely had been dusted with moth eggs, unseen travelers on their own journey into the unknown.
Under the care of the Lord of the Dead, the seeds had sprouted with incredible speed, had taken root and shot upward, becoming fruiting trees in a matter of weeks.
And the unseen moths’ eggs had hatched and sent their caterpillars creeping into the good green to feed and grow, becoming cocoons in time, becoming moths, and all the while safe in a world without predators, without pesticides.
The fruit had been plentiful enough for them to have their fill and a harvest still be ready for the statues, and the Lord and his Lady had walked among the trees, and it had been beautiful in all ways.
Talia could have liked the version of the Lord of the Dead who lived in the moth-song, the kindly man who planted trees and carefully moved caterpillars from one branch to another when he encountered them, rather than smashing them or flicking them away.
All the moths agreed that caterpillars weren’t thinking beings, were only delivery vehicles for a hunger that would only be sated by the long sleep of silk and the changes it entailed.
To be kind to a caterpillar was to show mercy to a future that was far from guaranteed.
In the eyes of the moths, it was the greatest act a biped was capable of.
They knew why she had called them. She had told them, of course, had explained that she was asking for their help when that help might well mean they never saw their home again.
Moths—even moths hatched and fed in the Halls of the Dead—were short-lived creatures.
Their continuity was in the moth-song, in the verses and lyrics that would be passed from one pair of beating wings down to the next.
She had promised them that when this was all over, she would return to the pomegranate groves and sing their verses of the Great Song to the rest of the eclipse, to guarantee their heroism would not be forgotten.
So she walked and they flew, and she listened to their song, and when she heard holes begin appearing in that song, she looked back over her shoulder, down the silent length of the corridor behind her, and saw that there were far fewer moths there than there had been in the beginning.
Her eyes widened as she watched a few at the very rear of the cloud dissolve into nothingness.
“Nancy!” she shouted, and her voice was a whipcrack through the quiet, ripping it into pieces and throwing them wildly in all directions.
Nancy turned her face toward Talia, eyes wide and worried.
Talia waved her arms over her head, frantic, like she was trying to guide a small aircraft to a safe landing.
“Run!” she shouted. “Get ahead of the moths! They’re right behind you!”
She was making enough noise that the others turned around, Sumi’s own eyes going wide as she saw what was coming up behind Nancy. Already swearing steadily, she began pushing her way through the group, heading for her friend.
“Hold on, ghostie-girl,” she said. “Just run and we’ll protect you.”
Confronted on the one hand by people telling her to run and her own body telling her to freeze if she wanted to be safe, Nancy did the thing she’d been working on doing for most of her life: she stopped dead where she was, freezing in mid-step.
It wasn’t merely holding still. It was something more profound, a cold freeze that seemed to settle over her like a concrete shell, stiffening and hardening her in place until she wasn’t breathing, until her heart forgot to beat.
She couldn’t see the ghosts coming up behind her.
She could hear them, though, a rushing like wind, even softer than the beating of the moths’ wings.
But without her heartbeat echoing in her ears, Nancy could hear sounds fainter than should have been possible.
She could hear the whispers of the dead within that wind, their hopes and their fears and their terror of the girl who led them, which should have been ridiculous—she was as dead as they were, she couldn’t hurt them—but was somehow tragic instead.
Some of the voices were familiar, the voices of her fellow statues, stripped of life and breath and the capacity for change, pressed flat as a butterfly under glass; others were strangers to her, the dead of other places, other stories.
And they were all rushing in her direction, and she couldn’t move.
To move would be to admit that she was done with living.