I knew that she was right, and felt wretched. I didn’t mean to shorten her time, I didn’t want to speed up her decay.
She finally looked at me. “It’s not your fault. It was an accident.”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
“You’re an aliver. What are you doing here?”
“I came to see your neighbor,” I said. “The one who lives in that house.”
“I know him. I think. A tall young man, right?”
“Yes, that’s the one. I guess I’d best be going.”
“Why do you want to see him?” I was certain now that she hadn’t been among the dead for long—she asked too many questions. The deaders were usually more reserved, less curious.
Of course I wasn’t going to tell her the exact truth; but I wasn’t going to lie either, not after I hurt her. “He’s my brother,” I said. “Used to be, I mean.”
Her mouth opened in awe. “And you still see him?”
“Why not?”
“No one else does.”
She was right, of course. I opened the gate, all the while feeling her curious stare at the back of my neck. Before I stepped into the street, I turned to face her again. “I know. The alivers prefer not to think about the folks here. And I can’t stop thinking about them . . . you.”
I knocked on the dingy, peeling door of the house with red shutters. It gave under my knuckles, and I stepped inside. My teeth started chattering as soon as I crossed the threshold.
“It’s you,” Jas said.
“It’s me. How are you?”
He sat slouching on the floor, his back propped against an ice chest. It was half-full of dirty water and pellucid ice shards. He had changed little since last I saw him—perhaps a bit more decay darkening the skin around his eyes and on his temples, perhaps more sinking around his mouth; but he was still in good shape— as good as one can expect after ten years of death. “All right, I suppose. You?”
“Same.” I sat by the door, the warmest spot of this one-room house. “Want me to fetch an ice merchant for you?”
“Nah. What do you want?”
I gave a laugh that sounded unconvincing even to me. “Do I need a reason to see you?”
He coughed, and it sounded like something came loose in his chest with a sickening tear of wet tissue. “Nah. But you usually have one. I’m not as dull as you think.”
“I don’t think you’re dull. You’re right; I do have a question. I’m looking for two deaders—new ones. One is tall and dark, has only one hand. The other is medium height, light hair, no beard. Young.”
The ruin that was my brother nodded. “I know them. Still, it wouldn’t kill you to come and just visit.”
“I didn’t think you wanted me to. Every time I come you act like you don’t want me here.”
“I don’t want. I can’t; I’d like to, but I can’t. And I forget a lot, y’know?” His tongue turned awkwardly in his mouth, scraping against blackened teeth. “When you come, you remind me. And I don’t want to forget. So please come. To remind me.”
“Jas . . . ”
“Lemme finish. Other deaders, they don’t remember squat. Who they were, and they tell me, they tell, ‘How do you know you even have a brother? Who can know such a thing? You can’t remember about the alivers.’ But I do, because of you. I’m lucky—everyone else, they’re alone. But not me, not me.”
“All right, Jas.” My voice shook a bit, but I didn’t think he’d noticed. “I’ll come more often. But now I need to know about those men.”
“Why?”
I hesitated; not that I mistrusted Jas, but the deaders had loyalty to their own kind, not to the alivers—even if they were kin. “They might know something that is of interest to me.”
Jas shook his head. “You’re still dealing in secrets. Dangerous trade.”
“I know. I almost had my hand broken the other day.”
Jas sat up. “Like the man you’re looking for.”
I felt a chill, and it didn’t come from the icebox. “I thought his hand was missing.”
“They broke it first, then cut it off, then slit his throat.” Jas spoke with relish. I noticed it before; the deaders seemed to enjoy the details of death.
“Who?”
Jas shrugged. “The Areti goons, who else? I sure hope they don’t want anything from you; they and the deaders have been fighting for no one remembers how long.”
“You know why?”
He nodded. “Every deader knows. It’s about a curse, and a cherrystone.”
“Areti’s cherrystone?”
His lungs whistled a bit—the sound that signified laughter. “Is that what she’d been telling you? No, that’s ours. It’s our curse, see, and we’re keeping it, Areti or not.” Jas stood. “C’mon. There’s someone I want you to meet.”
I stepped toward the door, but Jas shook his head. “It’s too warm out. We’ll go the other way.”
He creaked and groaned, but bent down enough to touch the earthen floor. He groped around in the dirt.
“Can I give you a hand?”
“Sure.” He pointed out a bronze ring mounted on a wooden trapdoor, hidden under a layer of dirt. I never noticed that it was there.
I pulled on the ring, and as the dust and grime cloud settled, I saw a rickety ladder leading downwards. “Where does it go?”
“To other houses . . . everywhere. It’s nicer to travel underground, cooler.”
That explained the scant traffic on the surface. I let Jas descend, and followed him. It wasn’t nearly as dark as I had expected—strange fluorescent creatures darted to and fro among the weakly glowing walls of the tunnel, and sick, gangly dead man’s birches illuminated the way with their dead light.
There were ladders everywhere, and the deaders too—the underground seemed a much more animated place than the surface. I mimicked Jas’ shambling gait, eager not to attract attention. “Should I even be here?” I asked Jas.
He stopped and mulled it over for a moment. “Don’t see why not. You’ll move here, sooner or later. As long as you don’t hurt the deaders, you’re all right.”
I was moved that he never even considered the possibility of my betrayal; then again, perhaps it was one of the deaders’ limitations. Just as they forgot their relatives, so perhaps they lost their understanding of the ways of the living.
He led me deeper into the labyrinth. The passersby grew less frequent, and the light—weaker. I could not discern the direction, but guessed that we were close to the river once I noticed drops of moisture seeping along the support beams through the earthen walls.
He stopped and looked around, as if getting his bearings. Then, he sat down on the earthen floor.
“What now?”
“Now we wait,” he said.
We didn’t wait for long. I did suspect before that the deaders could communicate with each other through some unfathomable means. Soon, four deaders showed up, then three more. All of the newcomers sat down on the floor and remained quiet, as more of them kept arriving.
There were all kinds of them there—young and old, and even one child. Some were dead long enough to lose most of their skin and flesh—at least two hundred years; others were quite fresh. Even the girl I met earlier showed up; I noticed with a pang of guilt that the purple bruise on her forehead was spreading. Despite my repeated application of the wintergreen ointment, the air grew putrid with their smell, and my heart was uneasy. There I was, underground, surrounded by a throng of deaders. If they turned on me, I would never be able to fight through them— or find my way back to the surface. The trust I attributed to Jas was actually mine.
Underground, I had lost the sense of time, and only knew that it was passing—slowly, like water weeping from the walls. The sounds of soft, dry voices of the deaders mingled with the dripping of water; while the monotony of it was somewhat lulling, the content was certainly not.
I learned that the cherrystone in question was cursed. A traveling warlock passed through our town, many years ago. When the Areti came to the warlock, demanding that he lend his talent to them, they were met with a refusal. They sent their thugs to make him pay for their humiliation, but the thugs were never heard from again. The warlock was nonetheless angry with the Areti. Before he left, he hid the cherrystone somewhere in town, and told them that as long as the cursed stone was within the town walls, our dead would walk the land.
When his prediction came true, the Areti looked for it. They looked everywhere—on the bottom of the river, under every rock, even in the catacombs under the deaders’ town. After a few years they stopped looking—old legends are easy to forget. The cherrystone was left be, until the present Mistress of the Areti clan realized her mortality. The search for the cherrystone had become an obsession, and she sent her goons and hirelings to look for it. It took her awhile, but she had learned that it was in deaders’ town.