Ilona had left her gifts for Mistress Danae there before. It was the only real building up here, as most of the graves were either sealed or shattered. The tower stood roofless and doorless so in the winter it would likely be even more miserable than the leeward shelter of one of the mausoleums.
I headed upward in long, ambling switchbacks across the slope. The air was clear and sharp, as if it had abided upon some higher, colder mountain before blessing my lungs. Grasses nodded in the wind. The fat red bees also did their patient work here. I startled up quail, rock doves, and swift little green snakes as I strode among the graves.
As always, those were interesting in their own right. Much like the miniature Smagadine temple I’d noted the day before, these mausoleums, monuments, and cenotaphs constituted a condensed history of architecture and ornamentation of Copper Downs. Several sported tiled domes of a style that were almost certainly imported from Selistan somewhere down the long ages. That lent a flush of pride to my sunstruck southern heart.
Very few of the graves were marked to tell who lay within. This seemed odd to me-most cemeteries I knew of featured little biographies of their inmates, as if knowing the year a baby had died would make the child more real to a passerby of a later generation.
Markings or not, these graves were decorated in a manner that had clearly once been lavish. Jewels and metal chasings had for the most part vanished uncounted generations past. Carvings remained. Details. Images cast in tile, or painted underneath a sheltering roof. That a person was buried here at all stated “I am wealthy” in the manner of distant Copper Downs long before the rise of the Dukes. These graves dated from the time of Kingdoms, and some from the Years of Brass prior to that, when the mines beneath the city were active and stranger things had walked the streets than did today.
At least for the most part, given that Skinless and Mother Iron inhabited the city now.
Wordless, the graves still offered their tales. This one featured small bat-winged children, like demon messengers, with a hint of torment on each tiny, wind-worn face. That one’s pilasters were bundles of sheaves, wrapped in vines, as if the dead had been overlords of some great swath of farms or vineyards. In this manner, each crypt told its silent story. Some were little more than threadbare memories; others shouted from beyond death’s veil.
The whispers I ignored. I was not here to treat with ghosts. Nothing of my experience with the Factor after his death lent me any desire to pursue their fickle company.
I paused a few dozen yards from the battered tower. Up close, the structure looked as if it might at one time have been besieged. Why anyone would invest a grave site with force of arms was beyond me, but fire scars surrounded the narrow tunnel of the door, while shallow dents in the stonework testified to the impact of projectiles hurled in blunt anger. Nowadays moss and tiny grasses grew in those hollows, a scattering of eye-blue flowers lending them a melancholy air. The top was eroding, only a third of the crenellations remaining. The remainder of the circle of stone dipped like a dancer beneath her partner’s arms.
“Mistress Danae,” I called in a gentle but carrying voice. My judgment was that it would not be meet to shout, either for the dignity of the place or for the sake of her fragile mind. “Green is here.” I took a deep breath and uttered a word I’d long ago sworn away amid blood, pain, and murder. “Emerald. You knew me as Emerald. Of the Pomegranate Court.”
I received no answer but the wind, which took little note of my name-either of my names. A bird trilled nearby. Clouds sighed slowly across the sky, dragging their shadows behind them here upon the ground. Flowers and seed-heavy grass stalks nodded. In time, I tried again with cupped hands and raised voice. “This is Emerald, Mistress Danae. I am here. Ilona sent me.”
Then I picked up my bundle and trudged to the tower’s broken entrance. I could leave the food in the shadows within the shattered door, look about for any sign of her as news to bring to Ilona. After that I would be free to return to the necessities of my life, those violences and demands that I’d had no business bringing into these High Hills and laying upon my hostess’ quiet hearth.
The tower’s interior was a domain of bats and spiders. Something occluded the open roof above, though my eyes could not make out what within the shadows. A crosswork of sticks and branches, up here so far from the trees? The dirt floor was scuffed and tamped down, confirming Mistress Danae’s at least occasional presence.
I had bent to lay the bundle just inside the door when I realized the floor was not dirt, but rather soil scattered over stone. Washed in by generations of rain, spread by the tracks of animals, and finally carried upon the feet of this broken woman I sought.
Tracing my fingers through the layer of grime, I found marble beneath. Of course this was a tomb-everything was in the grave-meadows of the High Hills-but instead of a mound or a mausoleum, whoever was buried here had caused a tower to be built in his name. This left no doubt that he was a man.
“Erio,” croaked a voice in the inner darkness. I jumped so hard I banged my shoulder against the rocky jamb of the doorway.
“Erio?” I slipped my long knife free from my thigh scabbard.
“That is who abides here.” The voice…
“Mistress Danae,” I gasped, fears of ghosts slipping from me with an overwhelming sense of having simply been silly.
“She has died.”
My eyes were already adjusting to the shadows within. A small, pale figure huddled bent-limbed and askew not four yards from me, at the back wall of the tower, surrounded with lumpy mounds of scavenged belongings.
“Ilona sends food, and needful things. Stockings for your feet at night, and a small comb.” After a moment I added with a shyness that surprised me, “I baked the bread for you.”
Some insect whined close to my ear for a moment before she replied. “Danae is dead.”
“I-I’m sorry to hear that.” I didn’t know what more to say. My failure of words shamed me. I could not thank this woman, or apologize to her, or heal her in any way. A gulf opened in my heart then, as I realized once again that some wounds were too deep to treat. “Mistress Danae was kind to me when I was young.”
Her voice flashed, the broken, growling quaver momentarily fading to return me to afternoons in the still air bent over the classics of the city’s literature. “You are still young.”
And you will never be young again, I thought, but halted the words before they passed my lips. Thus is the foolishness of youth, to think such things, as if I would be immune to the ravages of time. As yet uneducated by the years, I bent down to lay the bundle on a piece of broken masonry. “Whoever you are, take this offering in peace.”
“None of it is mine.”
That was almost an aphorism from Alimander’s Booke of Thought, which she and I had spent several weeks studying. “Nothing belongs to any of us but the breath in our lungs,” I replied, quoting the ancient philosopher back to her.
This was an old game, and it must have caught at some corner of her memories of herself. “If we do not hunt, we do not kill.”
I supplied the next line of that quatrain. “If we do not kill, we do not eat.”
“If we do not eat, we do not live,” she answered.
The closing line was “If we do not live to hunt, why do we live?”
“I don’t know, girl,” Danae said. “I do not know why we live.” That was when I knew beyond doubt that she was my old mistress of letters, and that, furthermore, she knew exactly who I was.
“I am so very sorry,” I whispered. My eyes stung with unshed bitterness. But for my deeds, she would still be hale and whole. “I lit the white candle and the black for everyone I could name within the walls of the Factor’s house, and also more for those whose shades were beyond my knowing.”