The Inn Ch. 14

Commitment.

I unscrewed the pen's cap and tucked it between a couple of fingers on my left hand, then opened the book to its waiting, blank end.

"What do I do?" I asked Lismada, journal in one hand and the uncapped pen in the other.

"Write this," she said. "'Thenceforward, for a single hour of her choosing each day ...'"

I scribbled it across the top line of the page.

"'... Lismada of Umulth, the Mistress of Beadle's Bog ..."

Scribble, scribble.

"'... could put aside the forty-two days, threescore and two hundred years of her bodiless undeath ...'"

... of ... her ... bodiless ... undeath ...

"... and become solid, feeling flesh."

... solid ... feeling ... flesh.

The last two letters of 'flesh' came out light, and as I traced over them to darken their lines, it became obvious the ink had gone. I shook the pen by my ear and heard nothing within its little reservoir.

"Is that all?" I asked. "Because I think it's run dry."

"Let us see," said the ghost, extending one hand.

I hesitated, then held the journal out to her. As it touched the hazy stuff of her palm, humanity rushed out of its pages and into the spectre who took it. In a flash, Lismada stood before us as corporeal and warm-blooded as I was. Leyna sucked her breath in.

"Oh." Solid and real and surprisingly dark-skinned, the Mistress of the Bog looked up and down her own body, at her arms, her feet, the long flow of her legs. "Oh."

A laugh broke out of her, flung her arms to either side, put her feet in motion. Stirring up the mist with every step, she skipped and then ran around us in a circle, giggling and delighted. If not for the gravity of our business and a certain concern that her returned humanity might evaporate her magic and plunge us all into the lake, I could have watched her for an hour. She gave off an aura of pure joy.

"Oh, goodness," she said, coming to a halt, her breath quick and uneven, her eyes now brown and moist with tears. "Oh, you don't know how much you miss this until you've gone so long without it."

Then, before I could think of anything to say, Lismada stopped herself and opened her brown eyes still wider.

"We need to get about the business of raising this coffin and having a look," she said. "There's only an hour before the flesh leaves me for the day, and I need to get back to our friends in the clearing and fuck something."

Her wrists rotated then and she made upturned claws of her hands, shoulders and arms tensing as though dragging up on a heavy weight. Before her, the mist boiled and fumed, then fell away in a circle. Bare water churned there as her hands clawed higher and higher - and then a shape burst up and settled upon the surface.

A coffin.

Beyond it, the bed of mist broke wider still, revealing an islet with a mucky, low shore. It swam toward us until the box came to rest. Lismada strode around the open water to the land, keeping the fog beneath her as she went. My two companions and I looked at one another before following quickly after her.

"Seize the handles and pull it up here where the ground is level," she said. One hand remained raised, fingers spread and grasping empty air. I stepped carefully through the mud, took hold of a leather strap nailed into the wood. Yilma trotted around to the far side and grabbed another. Unsurprisingly, Leyna held back, her arms folded nervously and her face tight with concern.

The casket might as well have been an air mattress, for all the resistance it gave when we pulled at it. But once we maneuvered it up to the island proper and Lismada relaxed her hand, an instantaneous weight yanked the strap downward so hard my grip broke.

"It's ... in awfully good shape," Leyna said, still not approaching. She'd called that right. After ten years submerged in swamp water, the box ought to have been waterlogged and rotten at the very least. But if you'd asked me, I would have said it was nailed together and sealed with pitch yesterday, then just left out in the rain overnight.

"All remains consigned to my watch become things of the swamp," Lismada said. "And all things of the swamp have my protection. Holding back the agents of decay from them is little matter."

I watched Leyna choose her next words with caution. "So she's the same as the box? Inside?"

"Yes. And now I will take my leave, I think. What happens next may take up a great measure of my hour, and the clearing and my friends there call to this newly solid body. May I check in with you later and learn how it has gone?"

"Yes, of course," I said, not sure why opening the casket and taking out the brooch would be the work of an hour. But I'm not inclined to argue with someone if I'm their guest, and I'm even less inclined to argue with a ghost. Except that a thought rushed into my head and then out past my lips before I could stop it. "Can I ask you something though?"

Lismada nodded.

"Why did you just want an hour a day? Why didn't you ask for it to be permanent?"

The deep brown of her eyes settled on me, and despite her new solidity and humanity, I saw something old in them - older than any human's age.

"If you could return to what you were," she said, "and lose what you are now, would you do it? The sweetness of this long-past shape is a delight. But it is not who I am - who I have been for so much longer than the span of my mortal life. It's a gift and a wonderful indulgence, and that is what I want it to remain: rare, measured, and therefore to be treasured."

And then she went up on her tip-toes, danced down the shore to the waterline, and hurried away across a bridge of fog.

With her departure, the mists around our ankles fell, and the ghostly blue light vanished as well. Yilma fished in her bag for something, brought out a talisman, whispered a word to it, and perched it in her horns - a star with four points carved of wood or perhaps of stone. I couldn't tell which from the moonlight. As it hung there, a glow started and swelled within it, and soon we had warm, golden light to see by. I found it a surprising relief after so much time in Lismada's ghostly blue and Loonce's spritely green.

Which was good, because the object that it let us see, the thing we were here for, inspired no relief at all.

"Do you have anything in that bag for opening up caskets?" I asked Yilma.

"I might," she said, holding it up before her with the flap all the way back, the better to rifle through its contents. Though the thing wasn't much bigger than a laptop bag or a large purse, her arm went in almost all the way to the shoulder as she dug. "Aha!"

She pulled out a toolkit, a leather bundle that unrolled to reveal a bunch of woodworking implements slung through loops. Handing me one, and Leyna another, she said, "Don't cut yourselves on these. They're very sharp."

"Thanks."

"Yes, I'll have a care."

Kneeling by the casket, I watched Leyna stand, still looking at the tool in her hand as Yilma trotted around to the other side to work on the pitch.

I reached out to take Leyna's fingers in mine. "You don't have to help with this, you know."

Her response was to immediately step over and kneel beside me.

"It'll go quicker if I do," she said, "and I think quicker and helping will sit better in my heart than pacing and waiting."

I nodded and bent to scrape at the thick, black seal along the casket's seam. But the blade of my tool just landed and stuck. Putting some of my weight behind it, I cut a thin furrow along the seam. The stuff had a density and resilience that made working it loose a pain in the ass. A few cuts later, I found that once you got a hunk off, it stuck to the blade and was even harder to wipe away on the grass.

Maybe it's a good thing this crap is so annoying, I thought after struggling at it a few minutes. Better than thinking about how creepy it is that we're ...

I crinkled my nose and refocused on the annoying part. Beside me, Leyna scraped and gave little growls of effort, pausing occasionally to wipe her forehead with a sleeve.

After one of those pauses, she bit her lip and then opened her mouth. "Simon," she asked, "where in the world are you from, that a ghost that rules a whole swamp thinks you can't get back to without magic?"

I glanced at her, and she glanced at me, but she didn't hold the look.

"I'm not saying you have to tell me, of course," she went on, leaning into her work. "Rrf. It's just ... well, I knew it must be far off, only I thought a caravan or a ship or something would do the trick like it would for anyone else."

We scraped on in silence long enough that the distant, murmuring sounds of the swamp by night filtered in to make the pause obvious.

"Yeah," I said. Another few seconds of staring at the stubborn, tarry seal of the casket and I turned to her and pushed myself into the subject. "The thing is, it's not anywhere in the world. Not this world. It's another plane of existence entirely. One where everything works differently. There's no magic at all, just machines a whole lot more complicated than anything in Phaeland. Machines to fly, machines to send messages from one side of the world to the other ... even machines to do a kind of thinking."

She gave me an expression of piercing skepticism, like she thought I might be joking. "So ... a whole other world, with no magic at all? Does that mean, when you told me you wrote stories about the people here ... are you saying you thought you made the whole place up?"

"I know it sounds crazy, or egotistical, but ..."

Her laugh and the shake of her short, blonde locks kept me from finishing. "No, Simon, it just sounds daffy. A whole world where no one believes in magic? But that pen brought you here, the Mistress said, so obviously there has to be magic, and that means you and everybody else there just bumble around overlooking it for, what, your whole lives? Honestly - it's no wonder you need me looking after you, coming from a place like that!"

And I realized she had it right. If I was here, if this wasn't just a long and bizarrely vivid dream, then there had to have been magic back on Earth all along. And it didn't matter whether it was a magic that let me imagine this place into existence, or a magic that gave me subconscious knowledge of things I only thought I was imagining. Either way, the magic had been there all along, and I'd ignored it.

"I don't know how you manage to make me feel like an idiot and also make me feel happy about it at the same time," I said. "But you do."

"It's because you already know you're an idiot, silly." She smiled that wonderful smile at me, with those soft, pink lips. "All the smart ones do - it's only stupid folk don't know they're idiots. Me showing you you're an idiot - it's just proving you're right about something you already think yourself. And it's letting you know you don't have to pretend any different. I know you're an idiot, and I love you anyway. Just like you know I'm a fluff-headed yokel girl and you love me anyway."

I lifted my hand to her chin and brushed the thumb and forefinger along either side of it. "You're not fluff-headed, that's for sure. Thank God there's something you're wrong about and I'm right about."

She laughed again. From across the casket, Yilma Greenwarden cleared her throat and said, "Almost done with my side over here ..."

Leyna gave me a pat on the cheek and got back to work, and after a moment longer watching her, I did the same. Another quarter-hour or so digging and gouging at the pitch got the seal clear enough that Yilma took a pry-bar out of her bag and handed it across to me.

The thing felt cold in my hand, cold and heavy as the silence that closed in on our little island and the three of us spaced around the rough-hewn coffin. I found myself glad the Mistress of the Bog had left when she did - confronting a corpse would be bad enough on its own without a ghost hovering nearby to cast a shroud of fog over everything. Leyna gave me a nod when I looked at her, her face nervous but determined.

I got to work with the pry-bar, and with no little effort made my way around the perimeter of the coffin loosening nail after nail. By the end, Leyna had moved back several paces. Yilma and I waited for her to signal that it was okay, and then lifted the lid and shifted it aside.

Leyna sucked in a breath.

I looked at her first, saw her hand before her mouth and wells of tears at the corners of her eyes. Then I turned my gaze down into the coffin and saw her mother.

The resemblance struck me instantly. Leyna's mother had a gaunter face and none of the rosy life in her cheeks and lips that her daughter had. But their noses and chins could have been cast from the same mold, and despite ten years under the surface of a swamp, the body's long, golden hair shone just like the living woman's beside me. If you'd told me they buried her an hour ago, I'd have believed it. The clean youth of her features startled me. Somehow I'd expected her to be middle-aged - a peer to my own parents, not a woman in her mid-thirties barely older than I was myself. But of course she didn't look like the mother of a twenty-year-old. She'd died when her daughter was ten.

"Oh, Mama," Leyna said. She moved to the casket in a rush to heavily on its side, looking down at her mother's face and spilling tears from her cheeks onto the dead flesh.

When I followed the drop of those tears, though, my eye hung up on something that tugged me away from the human emotion of the moment.

The brooch.

Pinned to the elegant blue dress the body wore, it glittered and gleamed in the light from Yilma's talisman. The color didn't want to sit still, more violet one moment and more blue the next, with a hint of deep sea-green that came and went. I tried to focus back on Leyna, but it kept sucking at my eye. And the longer I looked at it, the more colors I saw - until I realized that every color was there at once. Because the gem was black.

Sitting there, still, on the breast of a dead woman, it spoke in a language of darkness, the magic tongue of death and undeath - its vocabulary the power of a necromancer as great as any the world had ever seen. Chill march air closed in around me, a vice squeezing from my body all the warmth of my recent exertions prying and scraping at the coffin.

"The gem ..." Yilma's voice, hushed with awe, brought me out of my frozen stare and turned Leyna's glance finally away from her mother's face.

"Oh," said Necromanata's daughter, looking down wide-eyed at the long-buried essence of all her father's black sorcery. Her hand moved as if beyond her will, slowly, steadily descending toward the brooch - and then stopping.

Because another hand had seized her wrist.

Leyna gasped. I'm pretty sure I gasped. Maybe even Yilma Greenwarden gasped.

Within the coffin, Dwinvara Lovio Eltespernon opened her eyes.