As the carriage neared the grove of these trees, Haplo noted that the air smelled sweeter, seemed easier to breathe. He saw, by the dimming of the runes on his skin, that his body was using less magic to maintain itself.
“Yes,” answered Jera, seeming again to understand his unspoken thoughts. “The flowers of the lanti have the unique ability to draw the poisons from the atmosphere and give back pure air in return. That is why the trees are never cut. To kill a lanti is an offense punishable by oblivion. One may pick the blue flowers, however. They are highly valued, particularly by lovers.” She turned a sweet smile on her husband, who squeezed her hand.
“If you took this road,” said Jonathan, pointing to a smaller highway that branched off from the major one on which they traveled, “and you continued on it almost to Rift Ridge, you would reach my family’s estate. I really should be getting back,” he added, looking at the road they were leaving behind with a longing gaze. “The kairn grass is ready to harvest and, although I left Father’s cadaver in charge, sometimes it forgets and then nothing is done.”
“Your father, too, is dead?” Edmund asked.
“And my elder brother, as well. That is why I’m lord of the manor, although oblivion take me if I ever wanted it or thought I’d come to it. I’m not very responsible, I’m afraid,” Jonathan admitted, referring to his own shortcomings with a cheerful candor that was quite engaging. “Fortunately, I have someone at my side who is.”
“You underestimate yourself,” Jera said crisply. “It comes of being the youngest. He was spoiled as a child, Your Highness. Never made to do anything. Now all that’s changed.”
“No, you don’t spoil me at all,” the duke teased.
“What happened to your father and brother? How did they die?” Edmund asked, thinking undoubtedly of his own recent sorrow.
“Of the same mysterious malady that strikes so many of our people,” Jonathan answered, almost helplessly. “One moment both were hale and filled with life. The next—” He shrugged.
Haplo looked sharply at Alfred. Because for every person brought back untimely to life, another—somewhere—untimely dies.
“What have they done? What have they done?” Alfred’s lips moved in a silent litany.
Haplo, thinking about all he’d seen and heard, was beginning to wonder the same.
The carriage left the New Provinces, left behind the tall stands of kairn grass and the lovely, lacy lanti trees. Little by little, the landscape changed.
The air grew cooler, the first drops of rain began to fall, a rain that, when it struck Haplo’s skin, caused the protective runes to glow. A shrouding mist closed in. By Jonathan’s order, the carriage rolled to a stop, the cadaver driver jumped from his post and hastened around to unfurl a screen of protective fabric over their heads that offered some protection from the rain. Lightning flickered among the trailing clouds, thunder rumbled.
“This area,” said Jera, “is known as the Old Provinces. This is where my family lives.”
The land was blasted, devoid of life except for a few scraggly rows of sickly looking kairn grass, struggling up through piles of volcanic ash, and some flowerlike plants that gave off a pale and ghostly light. But although the land appeared barren, harvesters moved among the mud pits and slag heaps.
“Why? What are they doing?” Alfred leaned out of the carriage. “The old dead,” answered Jera. “They are working the fields.”
“But . . .” whispered Alfred in a horror too profound to be spoken aloud, “there are no fields!”
Cadavers in the most deplorable condition, far worse than the army of the old dead, toiled in the drizzling laze. Skeletal arms lifted rusted sickles or, in some cases, no sickles at all but merely went through the motions. Other cadavers, flesh rotting from their bodies, trailed after the harvesters, gathered up nothing, put it carefully nowhere. Barely distinguishable from the mist around them, the phantasms trailed disconsolately after the cadavers. Or perhaps the mist around them was made up of nothing but phantasms belonging to those whose bones had sunk into the ground and would never rise again.
Haplo looked at the mist and saw hands in it and arms and eyes. It clutched at him, it wanted something from him and seemed to be trying to speak to him. Its chill pervaded body and mind.
“Nothing grows here now, although once the land was as lush as the New Provinces. The few stands of kairn grass you see grow along the underground colossus that carry the magma into the city to provide heat. The old dead, who worked this land once themselves when they were alive, are all that remain. We tried moving them to new lands, but they kept drifting back to places they had known, and finally we left them in peace.”
“In peace!” Alfred echoed bitterly.
Jera appeared slightly surprised at his attitude. “Why, yes. Don’t you do this with your own dead when they grow too old to be of use?”
Here it comes, thought Haplo, who knew he should stop what Alfred was going to say. But he didn’t. He kept still, kept quiet.
“We have no necromancers among us,” Alfred said, his voice soft and fervent with conviction. “Our dead when they die are allowed to rest after their labors in life.”
The three in the carriage said nothing, were stunned into silence. They regarded Alfred with much the same expression of horror as he regarded them.
“You mean,” said Jera, recovering from her shock, “you consign your dead, all your dead, to oblivion?”
“To oblivion! I don’t understand. What does that mean?” Alfred glanced from one to the other helplessly.
“The body rots, falls to dust. The mind is trapped within, powerless to free itself.”
“Mind! What mind? These have no minds!” Alfred waved a hand at the old dead, toiling among the ash and mud.
“Of course, they have minds! They work, they perform useful functions.”
“So does that dragonship on which we sailed, but it has no mind. And you’re using your dead the same way. But you have done worse than that! Much worse!” cried Alfred.
The prince’s expression darkened from one of tolerant curiosity to one of anger. Only his innate courtesy kept him quiet, because what he would say would obviously cause unpleasantness. Jera’s brows came together sharply, her chin jutted forward, her back straightened. She would have spoken but her husband held her hand fast, squeezed it tightly. Alfred didn’t notice, rushed headlong into an icy, disapproving silence.
“The use of such black arts has been known to our people but expressly forbidden. Surely the ancient texts spoke of such matters. Have those been lost?”
“Perhaps destroyed,” suggested Haplo coolly, speaking for the first time.
“And what do you think, sir?” Jera demanded of the Patryn, ignoring the pressure of her husband’s hand. “How do your people treat their dead?”
“My people, Your Grace, have all they can do to keep the living alive, without worrying about the dead. And it seems to me that this, for the moment, should be our primary concern. Were you aware that there is a troop of soldiers headed this way?”
The prince sat bolt upright, tried to see out the screened carriage. He stared into nothing but mist and rain and hurriedly ducked his head back inside.
“How can you tell?” he demanded, more suspicious of them now than he had been when he first encountered them in the cavern.
“I have extraordinary hearing,” Haplo replied dryly. “Listen, you can hear the jingle of their harness.”
The jingle of harness, the stamping of what sounded like hooves on rock came to them faintly above the noise of their own carriage.
Jonathan and his wife exchanged startled glances, Jera appeared troubled.