Iara’s kid leaned fearlessly over the bridge railing to peer below us. I went tense and still. My generation knew what was at the bottom of the canyon. The kid’s generation didn’t. That was a good thing. It was a good thing, I told myself, that this whelp knew so little of the cost of his world that he was willing to meet an early, ugly death at the bottom of the damn canyon.
I pulled the kid off the. He stumbled and caught himself, throwing me a dirty look. Full of fire, this one. It was hard not to see Yazid in him.
“Sorry,” I said insincerely. “My hand slipped. Now keep up.”
He followed after me with a huff, not willing to call me out on my bald lie. The hospital was in sight, looming above the trees on the other side of the canyon. He could irritate me later.
Behind me, I heard the kid take in a long, steadying breath.
“Your mother will be fine,” I said, not slowing my gait. “She drew a ghost to her, that’s all. It’s a common enough ailment around here. Either the ghost will settle or it’ll leave, and that will be that.” I didn’t tell him about the third option.
“She’s always so careful,” the kid said, so quietly I could hardly hear him over the sound of our footsteps and the canyon wind.
I grimaced. I didn’t know how to tell this kid that the world wasn’t fair. He could follow the rules and still get hurt.
Thankfully, it was then that we reached the end of the bridge. As the bridgekeeper checked our papers, my eyes settled on the heavy kultarum ring adorning his finger. Even a Rothlander of his low office had enough kultarum to feed a family of five for a month.
He asked us our business and I told him we were visiting someone at the hospital. The bridgekeeper sneered at my stumbling Rothic, my thick Kultari accent, but he let us pass, handing us back our documents. He looked bored out here on the edge of the canyon, but of course Rothlanders didn’t have to worry about taking ghosts. Their bones weren’t flecked with kultarum like ours were.
Iara had told me to pretend to be her sister when I came to visit, so when we found her in her narrow hospital bed, I didn’t kiss her. A nun folded linens not too far away, a kultarum amulet hanging around her neck. Iara’s kid stayed hovering at the foot of her bed, looking at his mother with wide eyes.
“Mika,” she said softly, opening her arms to her son. “Come here.”
He went to her then. I saw his shoulders shaking in Iara’s arms and looked away to give them privacy. Iara had asked me to bring her son to her. I’d kept my promise and seen him safely across the canyon. I needed to leave them be. This thing between Iara and me was still new — I didn’t know yet how I fit into her little family.
“Don’t go, Sabine,” Iara said when I began to back out of the room. “Thank you for bringing Mikail to me. I hope he wasn’t too awful.”
“Ma,” the kid said, reproachful. Iara laughed and let go of him, and he rose to his feet with a scowl.
At Iara’s insistence, I sat on the edge of her bed. To my surprise, she pulled me in and gave me a kiss.
“Now, Iara,” I scolded, glancing around furtively. The nun had left the room. We were safe for now.
Iara kissed me again. “Missed you,” she whispered. “Sure you can’t stay the night? Warm my bed?”
I laughed against her mouth. “You must be feeling better if you’re already thinking of that.” I would have liked to kiss her for longer, but this was not the time for it.
I drew away and unpacked the basket I’d brought. Dishes of food, covered so that they’d keep. I stacked them on the table by her bed for when she felt like eating. The ghost was lodged somewhere in Iara’s belly, and it made her appetite uneven. I wanted to ask her if she knew whose ghost it was, but I was afraid I would recognize the name.
Though Iara appeared cheerful enough, asking Mika how he was and whether he minded his lessons, I could tell the ghost was tiring her out. Eventually I told Iara that she needed her rest, and that Mika and I should head back so that we could cross the canyon before dark.
She curled up in her bed and went to sleep. I noticed that she had left space by her side, like an unseen figure slept beside her.
#
I had miscalculated. The day was darkening fast, the bright sun of the afternoon covered by clouds. An icy wind began to rise up from the depths of the canyon as we crossed.
“Walk faster,” I told the kid.
He threw me a mutinous look, but he must have seen the urgency in my face because he very wisely kept any argument to himself and sped up his pace.
“You have incense?” I asked him, and he nodded. “Good. Light it.”
A small censer hung from his belt just like mine. The kid lit his incense in practiced strokes — Iara’s teaching, that — and smoke began to curl out, carried by the canyon wind.
If I listened carefully, I could hear the voices of the dead. They were just below, listening to us cross. If we kept our pace measured and smooth, they wouldn’t grow curious.
Ahead of me, I could hear the kid breathing harder. Sensing his panic, the ghosts began to whisper louder. I strained my ears, hoping to hear the voices of my friends — the ones who had descended into the dark and never returned — but it remained an incoherent cacophony.
We were almost two thirds the way across when I became aware of the ghost behind us. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. My right eye began to burn and tears began to stream from it. I wiped them away impatiently. Not now.
When he sensed the ghost’s presence, Mika stopped walking. I put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed firmly. I could feel him shaking.
“Whatever you do,” I said, “don’t turn around.”
We stood still, the bridge swaying gently beneath our feet. The ghost did not come any closer. We were safe as long as our incense still burned.
“What if it’s my father?” Mika whispered.
“Aye, it might well be,” I told him. “What then? Will you turn and let him carry his death straight through your eyes and set it down in your heart? You see what happened to your mother. She is strong enough to nurse her ghost into calmness, but you, my boy, would be eaten up. Do you understand? Your father he may be, but in his loving of you he will destroy you just the same.”
Mika shuddered. The kid was twelve, perhaps thirteen. He’d never known his father — had been too young when the mine collapsed.
“Yazid was a good man,” I said, and now sadness cracked my own voice. “But he died a cold death yearning for warmth. We have to let him be.”
Mika took one step, then another. The ghost mirrored our movement, following us all the way across the canyon before finally letting us go.
#
By the time we made it back to Kultar, it had gone dark, and Mika couldn’t stop shivering.
I didn’t have the heart to send the kid back to the home where he was sleeping — Kultar had many orphans after the collapse, and they were well looked after. The nuns had tried to run an orphanage themselves, but the matriarchs hadn’t wanted Rothlanders staying on this side of the canyon.
The nuns still came twice a week to teach the children Rothic. We couldn’t keep them from that. The world was changing. One day, Rothland’s railroads would reach right up to the lip of the canyon, all the better to plunder its treasures. One day, Kultar wouldn’t be on any map. The only sign that it ever existed would be the name of the stone that it had once sat on.
Then, perhaps, our dead would finally rest, with no one left to remember them.
When we reached my house, I built the fire up. I was a little ashamed of the state of my home — I had been to Iara’s many times and it was much better kept than mine. Mika said nothing. The fight had left him on that crossing back to Kultar, and I was sorry for it. I told him to make us some tea, and was glad when he wrinkled his nose and said he preferred milk.
I told him to make us tea anyway. Tea would warm him up, and besides, I didn’t have any milk.
After we had drank our tea and eaten, Mika did the washing up without having to be asked, setting his jaw stubbornly as if daring me to make a point of it. I hid a smile and let him be. Our temporary truce held up well until he asked me about the mine collapse.
At first I thought I had misheard. “You want to know about what?”
He turned red but held my gaze. “You were there, weren’t you?” he said. “Ma wasn’t. She doesn’t like to talk about it.”
“You already know what happened,” I said, my voice hard. “The tunnels that Rothland had us dig weren’t safe. They didn’t tell us that, of course. One day, the tunnels collapsed. Your father was inside.”
“Why hasn’t his ghost ever spoken to me?” asked Mika. It was clear that this was a question he had been wanting to ask for a long time.
I looked away. I didn’t know what answer to give him.
Long before Rothland came to mine our canyons for kultarum, we knew the stone in Kultar was special. It kept the lingerings of the dead. That was how it had always been.
Rothland believed that kultarum let them speak with their god. Perhaps it did. Perhaps it was their god that collapsed the tunnels twelve years ago. I lost many friends that day, including Mika’s father. I was crushed almost entirely by rubble, and in my anguish I drew the ghost of one of the dead to me.
My body healed. The ghost remained.
In all the weeks that followed the collapse, in all the grief and horror and pain, I didn’t even notice that the voice crying out in my head wasn’t my own. It was only my own stubbornness that kept it from consuming me. By the time I was myself again, the ghost had settled, lodged deep in my right eye.
The ghost was that of a miner I hadn’t known very well, hailing from a town north of Kultar. It rarely spoke to me these days.
“The dead have nothing to tell us,” I told Mika. “You want to know what happened to your father? He died a slow death unable to breathe, trapped in that canyon. He doesn’t speak to you because all he remembers are those final moments of agony and terror. He doesn’t remember loving you.”
“You’re wrong,” Mika said, his eyes burning. “Ma said — Ma said he can still hear me when I speak. She said that remembering the dead brings them closer to us. If I went into the mines, I bet he’d be there. I bet he’d—”
“Enough!” I said. Mika flinched at the thunder in my voice.
“No one’s going in the mine,” I said, forcing myself to speak quieter. “Certainly not you. I don’t know what Iara’s told you, but there’s nothing in there but death.”
I took a long breath. “Now, we’ve both had long days. You can sleep here. You have school with the nuns in the morning.”
I turned out the lights and got into bed, but it was a long time before I could fall asleep.
#
After Mika went off to school, I crossed the canyon again to visit Iara at the hospital. I meant to tell her what Mika had said, but when I found her, she was pale and wincing with pain. As soon as I sat down by her bed, she took my hand and squeezed it so tightly my bones creaked.
“Let me get someone for help,” I said, alarmed.
“No,” she said, gasping. “It’ll leave. It’s leaving. Give it time. I can do this.”
I was helpless, watching Iara grapple with her ghost, locked in a private war. Every so often, she let out a whimper, and I offered to get one of the nuns. Every time, Iara turned me down.
She knew that the nuns would not be gentle. Even though it could kill her, Iara did not want the ghost to suffer that fate.
If the ghost didn’t settle, if it clawed its way toward her heart, she would die. I’d watched it happen to many of my friends. After the collapse there had been a great number of ghosts, and a great number of survivors who were all too willing to welcome them.
The nuns had left Iara one of their kultarum amulets to help draw out the ghost. I’d always thought the way Rothland refined their kultarum made it ugly. Raw kultarum was more silver than blue — only in bright light did it reveal its hidden colors. On sunny days, the spires of the canyon blazed.
Purified kultarum, meanwhile, was the milky blue of cataracts, all of its gleam gone dull. It wasn’t to my taste, to say the least.
As I watched, Iara’s body went stiff and tense. Her face turned towards mine slowly. Her eyes bulged open; her mouth stretched so wide it became a caricature of terror. She looked like she was screaming, but all I could hear was a low, guttural moan.
I let go of her hand. I said, “What is your name?”
The ghost did not reply. It stared at me, unblinking, and continued making that awful sound.
“You’re hurting her,” I said. “I know you’re scared. I was scared that day too. But this body does not belong to you. It belongs to someone I love.”
I wrapped the kultarum amulet around my hand and pressed the stone into Iara’s belly. Her body jerked violently, nearly throwing itself off the bed, and the moan turned into a shriek. I kept the amulet pressed to her belly as best as I could. My right eye began to weep, and I ignored it.
Eventually, Iara went quiet. One way or the other, her war had ended.
I wept from both eyes now, my grief mixing with my ghost’s. Iara was so still, so pale. She wasn’t breathing. I bowed my head, unable to watch her die. How many vigils had I kept? How many friends had I mourned? An entire canyon’s worth, and yet this never got easier.
Open your eyes, Sabine.
I looked up just in time for Iara’s chest to rise in a breath. Color began to return to her face, and then her eyes fluttered open. I must have looked like a fool, tears and snot streaming down my face, because Iara laughed at me, and then she frowned, as if trying to remember a dream.
“The strangest thing,” she said slowly. “I heard our friends, Sabine. I heard them singing in the stone. There was one I could hear, out of place in the chorus.”
Iara looked at me with horror. “It was Mikail,” she whispered. “He was crying in the canyon.”
#
In Kultar we have a saying. Trials come in twos.
I thought of it as I left the hospital and crossed the canyon. The matriarchs of Kultar, in my opinion, needed to revise that particular proverb. Kultar seemed to have far more trials than two.
The nuns at the school hadn’t seen Mika since the morning. Sister Oleander turned up her nose at me and informed me that he was probably getting into trouble, and that truancy was an early warning sign of deviant inclinations. It was a good thing that Zoya came up to me when she did, because I was about ready to start a brawl and perhaps a war with Rothland at the same time.
Zoya was of strong stonemason stock. She manhandled me away before I could do anything stupid.
“What’s this about, Sabine?” she said. “Why do you look like an ox ready to charge?”
“It’s Iara’s kid,” I said. I repeated what Oleander had told me about Mika, and Zoya spat on the ground, eyeing the nuns with fresh hatred.
“I can’t stand the way they look at us,” said Zoya. She did not bother to lower her voice. “Marking us for whatever sins they deem we’ve done. Treating our kids like criminals. And meanwhile how many of us died for their god and their greed?”
A crowd was gathering in the plaza. There was something sour brewing in the air. The nuns retreated back into the school, and two Rothlander soldiers took their place, their knuckles plated in kultarum, pistols at their hips. They stared us down as if goading us into an uprising.
It would never happen. Ever since the collapse it always felt like Kultar was one war cry away from revolt, one stirring speech away from sedition. This would probably die down just like all the other times. We couldn’t risk our kids’ lives. They were still inside the school.
I didn’t have time for this. I needed to find Mika, and there was only one place left he could be. Unfortunately, it also happened to be the last place I wanted to go.
I pushed out of the crowd and made my way down the canyon path, trepidation making my guts roll. I hadn’t been down here since the collapse. Since they dragged my broken, bloody body out of the tunnels.
At the mouth of the mine, I lit first my lantern, then my incense. The dark swallowed both light and smoke immediately, like it was hungry for it. I stood frozen at the threshold.
In my head, a clamor rose. No. No. Not in there. Don’t take us in there, Sabine. Anywhere but there.
Shut up, I said, and stepped into the dark.
I never remembered it being this cold in the mine. It had always seemed almost unbearably hot when we had worked in these tunnels, the smell of our sweat mingling with the dust in the air. Now it was cold enough to see my breath, and all I could smell was incense and the stink of my own fear.
The tunnels had sat in disuse for many years, excavated only enough to recover the bodies that weren’t too deep in the wreckage. There were still parts of the mine that remained caved in, that had been too dangerous to unbury. I really hoped that the kid hadn’t somehow found his way there.
I had to stop several times to make myself breathe. Panic kept threatening to take my wits from me, and I needed to keep sharp. I couldn’t lose my way here. It didn’t help that my ghost kept screaming in my head to turn around and leave.
He’s dead already, the ghost said. Just turn back.
I made the mistake, once, of steadying myself against the wall. I felt something there in the stone and when I raised my lantern to look, I saw scratches that could only have been made by someone’s fingernails. I had reached the part of the tunnel where the miners had slowly suffocated.
Where Yazid had suffocated.
It was like time had never passed. It was twelve years ago and I was back in the collapse, dust and fear choking me. My legs locked up. My right eye seared with pain and then went blind. I curled over myself in the cold mine, and my ghost’s fear amplified into the roar of blood in my ears.
I died in this mine, said my ghost. I died here.
I know, I said. I was here. I know.
The two of us became a loop, recursive, relentless. I could hear the pathetic noises I was making like it was happening to someone else, some other coward. The ghost kept sounding a litany of terror in my head that overwhelmed everything else.
I should never have come down here. The tunnel seemed to grow darker around me, the heavy misery threatening to press me into the stone. It would be so easy, I thought, to lie down and just give up. After alI, I should have died here that day. Then I wouldn’t be so torn all the time, caught between all that death and all the living we had to do afterwards.
And yet, even then, some part of me refused to die.
I raised my fingers to my right eye and pressed my nails into the curve of my socket until the pressure built to discomfort. If I gouged out my ghost, would I finally be able to master this? It would hurt, yes, but perhaps the pain was what I needed. I was so desperate to be free of this fear that it began to feel almost like bravery.
Get out of here, my ghost screamed. Go back.
Not without Mika, I said, and I dug my nails in.
#
My ghost’s name was Kasim. Before he died, he was just another miner. We probably exchanged no more than a few words. But after he died, he became my closest companion. His last moments, his fear, his suffering — I carried them with me for twelve years.
As I stumbled to my feet, bleeding from the hole in my face, trying not to scream from the pain, I realized I would miss him. That didn’t mean I regretted letting him go.
When I finally found Mika, there was a circle of ghosts bent over him. Breath rose from his lips, but it was a weak, faint thing. He was unconscious.
The ghosts parted for me as I approached. The incense smoke drove them away, though it did nothing against the oppressive cold. I fell to my knees by Mika and numbly took off my coat, wrapping it around him.
In his hands, Mika clutched a little stone tiger. Yazid had carved it himself, I remembered. Yazid had been so proud that day, showing all of us the tiger that he’d give to his son when he was born. I wondered if Mika had been able to speak with his father after all.
There were ghosts all around us, waiting outside the radius of my incense. I’d never seen them so clearly. They looked like distortions in the air, the shimmering outlines of them vaguely human-shaped.
“Yazid?” I called, tentatively, but there was no response. I wasn’t sure if I felt relief or disappointment.
Color began to return to Mika’s face now that the ghosts had retreated. He opened his eyes, and when he saw me, he yelped and sat bolt upright.
I knew I looked like an apparition myself, covered in my own blood, my right eye a wreck. I raised my hands.
“Easy,” I said. “It’s just me.”
To my surprise, he launched into my arms, hugging me so hard the breath went out of my lungs. After a moment of shock, I hugged him back.
“I just wanted to know him,” he said, muffled.
“You don’t come down here for that,” I told him. “You don’t go chasing ghosts to learn about your father. You ask the people who knew him. You ask your ma. You ask me. You have the right.”
Mika sniffled. “I tried to ask you.”
He was right, of course. He had tried to ask and in all my stubborn grief I had refused him. My heart broke a hundred times, a thousand times. “I know you did,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
He stiffened with surprise. It was clear he hadn’t expected an apology. Not from me. And why would he?
I was being given a second chance now. I had to be better.
“Come on, kid,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Mika got up first and then helped me to my feet. I think we were both surprised when I didn’t immediately fall back down on my ass. It was still bitterly cold, but the ghosts had melted away, and it was at least bearable.
“Can you walk?” asked Mika.
“Of course I can walk,” I said, but I didn’t dare let go of his hand, not until we both stood outside. There, the sun shone down onto us, and all the spires of the canyon gleamed.