Living With Ghosts by Kari Sperring Page B

force beneath the world. Three bindings that he must seek, trace, perhaps break. He looked into the eyes of the late Valdarrien of the Far Blays, and spoke the word which compelled a halt.
    Valdarrien could see him; that was certain. There was a grimness on his face; a flash of defiance which set the horse to a gallop. Gracielis raised a hand and made himself reach out with his ghost-sight.
    There was a roaring in his ears and veins and mind, like thunder, driving out thought. He was falling into it, or through it, soaked in its force. Pain lanced through his right shoulder. Swan wings beat across his vision, through an iron curtain of water. He gasped for breath, fighting to hold his gaze locked onto eyes that were filled with the violence of the water.
    It was the key. He fought vertigo and found his voice. Into the thunder, he spoke, softly, carefully. “Water comes to rest. Douses flame, cools heat, lays dust.” The language he used was not Merafien, but Valdarrien seemed to understand. Gracielis held on through the words, beneath the insubstantial, flailing hooves of the horse. He was drowning in the fragments of another’s memory. Disordered images flapped about him. Swan wings, and the hint of the scent of lemon, and eyes that were green and cool as jade, cool as “The river,” said Gracielis and found it there in another man’s last, lost hunger. In the memory of a green-eyed stillness that was a woman named Iareth Yscoithi.
    All around him the thunder and the violence calmed, slowed, died away. He was Gracielis arin-shae Quenfrida, called Gracieux on the streets and in the salons of Merafi. He stood in the aisle that led to Merafi’s Rose Palace and faced down the past. He felt ready to fall. Instead, he looked at Valdarrien and said, as reasonably as he might, “Monseigneur, you must give some explanation for this. You are frightening Lord Thiercelin.”
    The lieutenant’s ghost had never spoken to him, never made any sound of any kind. Valdarrien of the Far Blays looked back at him, then beyond at Thiercelin. His expression was sardonic, a little disdainful. His voice, when finally he spoke, was quite clear, only very remote, as if he must talk from some immense distance. “Tell my Iareth kai-reth ,” he said, “that she was right.” And then, more gently, “Thierry, forgive.” Raising a hand in valediction, he turned his horse’s head about and rode away down the aisle.
    Gracielis made it to the edge of the road before he passed out.
    “How do you feel?” Thiercelin asked.
    Lying on the bed, Gracielis opened one extremely cautious eye and looked at the ceiling. “Mostly dead,” he said. “Some small token would be appreciated at the funeral. Flowers. But not yellow. Yellow doesn’t suit my coloring at all.”
    “That,” said Thiercelin, “is somewhat debatable.”
    “Please don’t,” Gracielis said. And then, “I trust I haven’t been too irritating?”
    “No.”
    “Good.” Gracielis had closed the eye again. “My sincerest regrets . . . for the trouble.”
    “It would have made considerably more trouble if I’d left you in the road. Why didn’t you tell me it would do this to you?”
    “It doesn’t, always,” Gracielis said. “My apologies.”
    “Your apologies?” Thiercelin was mildly appalled. “No wonder you refused me.”
    “It doesn’t matter,” Gracielis said. “You might consider it a hazard of the job.”
    “But . . .” Thiercelin said, then shut up. There was a silence. This had not, after all, been a job, but a favor. Thiercelin had once been taught a little about Tarnaroqui ways, and his mind was busy disinterring those lessons. Gracielis de Varnaq saw ghosts. It was so like Yvelliane to possess herself of such information and to release it in fragments, unexplained. Honesty forced him to admit that it was equally like himself not to have asked.
    It was too late to ask now without having to involve himself in turn in explanations.
    He did not know. He