THE BONES OF GIANTS

by Yoon Ha Lee

Yoon Ha Lee’s last F&SF story was “The Unstrung Zither” in our April/May issue. Now she regales us with an exotic and elegant fantasy.

Whatever else might be said of the sorcerer who ruled the rim of the Pit, he had never been able to raise the bones of giants. The bones lay scattered in the rimlands, green-gray with moss and crusted with crystals, whorled with the fingerprints of desperate travelers. The bones did not easily surrender fingerprints. The locals considered it bad luck to leave their marks on the giants’ bones.

Tamim was sitting in the lee of a rock and had raised his gun to his head when the giants’ bones embedded in the hill shook themselves free of earth. He knew that the gun wasn’t going to be of any use against the bones. He knew of only two ways to destroy ghouls: lure them past the rimlands’ borders so they would crumble into dust, or pierce them through the heart with jade.

The border was days away. Tamim had used the last of his jade bullets escaping a vulture patrol.

His finger hesitated on the trigger.

“You shouldn’t do that,” a girl’s voice, or a young woman’s, called from the other side of the rock.

He shouldn’t have let his guard down, even for a suicide attempt. Maybe especially for a suicide attempt. The sorcerer’s Vulture Corps was always happy to collect corpses.

Tamim edged around the rock. He didn’t like leaving bones at his back, but they were taking their time assembling themselves, as though unseen ligaments were growing at each joint. Their clattering made him jumpy. Assess the threat, he reminded himself, then decide.

The girl was in plain sight. She had brown skin like Tamim’s own and long black hair in tangles down to her waist, too long to be practical, the kind an aristocrat might have. No aristocrat, however, would have been caught in that high-collared black coat.

Tamim knew the rimlands’ sumptuary laws, knew what the black coat meant: vulture, and necromancer besides. He aimed and fired.

He must have made some noise to alert her. She ran toward him, ducking at the right moment. The bullet missed her by inches; a lock of hair drifted free. “I’m not what you think, boy,” she said breathlessly. She barely came up to his shoulder. Her hand, surprisingly strong, caught his and twisted the gun to point at the ground between them.

Five bullets left, but he wanted to save one for himself. Admittedly, at this range he was more likely to shoot himself if he tried again. That wasn’t even taking into account the girl’s reflexes. “What are you, then?”

“I’m no vulture,” she said. “I’m alone out here. I need help, and I’ll take what I can find, whether it comes in the shape of a giant or a boy who looks half-ghoul himself.” She stared directly into his eyes as she released her grip on the gun.

Tamim made a frustrated noise and holstered the gun. A soldier wasn’t supposed to feel curiosity, but today he had forfeited any claim to being a soldier. “You’re the one raising the bones,” he pointed out.

He had been wrong about the skeleton. There were two of them, not one, entangled oddly from aeons in the earth’s embrace.

The girl took her attention off Tamim for a moment. She laced her fingers together, then pulled them apart. In a rush, the bones separated into two skeletons. Loam, uprooted grass, and glittering gravel showered both Tamim and the girl. Dust swirled in the shape of grinning skulls, then settled. The girl paid it no heed. Apparently she was as accustomed to the rimlands’ behavior as he was.

“There,” she said with evident satisfaction. “What do you think? One’s yours, of course.”

He stared at her stonily.

“It’s not like I can ride two of them at once,” she said, as if she made perfect sense and he were the slow one. “You haven’t run screaming yet. That’s always useful.”

Clearly the world had plans for him other than suicide today. “I was reared by the undead,” Tamim said. His mother, a woman with a brilliant smile and an aristocrat’s long, slender hands, had given him into the care of a company of ghouls, reasoning that it would prepare him to survive in the rimlands and eventually take up her cause. But one by one his caretakers had fallen apart, rotting teeth and decaying eyes, a toe here and a loop of shriveled intestine there.

His mother had died attempting to assassinate the sorcerer when Tamim was a child. The undead did not fall apart immediately upon their creator’s death, but lingered for a span of years proportionate to the creator’s skill. Tamim’s mother, for all her ambitions, had not been a particularly skilled necromancer. He had a dim memory of crying when the last of his caretakers ceased to move, even the mindless, instinctive creeping of a rotted finger toward the hand. It had been the last time he cried.

The girl nodded as though his childhood was unremarkable. Perhaps it was, from a necromancer’s point of view. “Right or left?” she said.

Involuntarily, Tamim looked up at the giants. The one on the left had a long, narrow skull and cracked teeth. Curiously, spurs extended from the back, as though wings had been broken off. The one on the right had a broader visage and no spurs, and its left arm was longer than the right.

“I don’t know your name,” Tamim said. “Why should I take up with a necromancer?” He hadn’t known that any necromancers remained in the rimlands who did not serve the sorcerer. The Pit was death, and the sorcerer controlled the Pit: ergo necromancers served he who ruled death. The rest had fled to the lands beyond the Pit, or died in a hundred small rebellions. The sorcerer was not notable for his sense of mercy.

“I’m Sakera,” she said. “Pleased to meet you, I’m sure. I’ll make you a bargain, O soldier”—her eyes alighted briefly on the gun—”who wishes to die. Help me bring down the sorcerer, and at the journey’s end I will give you the death you desire.”

The gun was an unbalancing weight at his hip. He had lived with such things all his life. “How long a journey?” Then, realizing that he was actually considering it, he added, “I don’t need your help to kill myself.”

“Months,” Sakera said. “But I’ve seen what happens when you miss with a gun. You might live out the rest of your days as a mangled thing with less mind than a ghoul. With a necromancer, death can be certain. It can even be swift.”

“I’m not that incompetent.” He had long years of practice killing.

“No, I imagine not.” Her voice was brisk. “Let’s put it another way, then. There can’t be many necromancers left in the rimlands. If you’re no vulture-friend, I may be your best chance of getting rid of the sorcerer.”

“I don’t trust you,” Tamim said. Tact had never been one of his strengths. Among other things, it was wasted on ghouls.

“You don’t need to trust me,” Sakera said. “You just need to believe me.”

It disappointed him that she wanted to kill the sorcerer. Tamim had no fondness for the man’s reign, but he suspected that Sakera meant to replace the sorcerer. Some traitorously sentimental part of Tamim had expected better from this girl, for all that he had met her only minutes ago.

Sakera made a fist, rotated it, then opened her fingers. The lopsided skeleton knelt before her. She clambered up the bones and sat on one of the kneecaps, legs dangling. “Or I could leave you to die in the giants’ shadow, before I take this one away,” she said. “Your choice. But I hope you come with me. It will be a lonely journey to the sorcerer’s palace otherwise.”

“What is your grievance with him?” Tamim said, on the grounds that he might as well be certain.

“He raised my family as ghouls,” she said. “They’re still not at rest.”

It sounded plausible. Maybe she was a good liar. “You came here for the giants’ skeletons.”

“Yes.”

“How did you know I’d be here?”

“I may not be a vulture,” Sakera said, “but I can smell death on the wind.”

“I could have used your help when I was fighting the vultures,” he said. The company of ghouls had taught him how to fight—his mother, a pragmatist in her way, had sought out the corpses of veteran soldiers—but it had still been one against several.

Sakera grimaced. “If only. A necromancer is only as useful as the bones she can call to her service. I promised myself I would only touch giants, who are long gone from the world, and whose families will not miss them.”

“That’s an inconvenient promise,” Tamim said, without approbation.

“I came here for the bones. I’m glad you came, too. Most people are afraid.” She waved down at him. “Over here.”

Tamim craned his head and regarded her skeptically.

“Oh, that’s right.” She made another gesture. The giant began lowering her to the ground, but her hand spasmed. The giant lurched. She somersaulted clear and rolled to safety, swearing in a language he didn’t recognize.

Tamim helped her get up, more out of curiosity than politeness. Both her hands were shaking. “How long has that been going on?” he asked.

“Long enough,” she said, embarrassed. “That’s the other reason I need an ally. I can’t draw the patterns by myself anymore.”

Patterns? “You’d better show me how to work the—” What should he call it? “—the giant.” As though it were a set of tools. “Why do you need patterns?” He didn’t recall that his mother had ever drawn anything.

“Do you know how the sorcerer came to power?” Sakera asked.

Tamim shook his head. His mother had told him gilded tales of the sorcerer’s court as though it had always existed, a place where enemies’ skulls were made into banquet cups and musicians played upon lyres of bone or tortoiseshell.

“In the old queen’s court, he was her most trusted general and a master calligrapher. First he conquered the Pit, which is death. Perhaps he made some terrible bargain there. Then, in the palace archives, he discovered some scrolls on ancient fighting forms, and applied those to the corpses he raised. Thus even ghouls who were once farmers and potters and prostitutes can fight, because they are aligned with the necromancer’s patterns.

“As for the sorcerer, he had become smitten with his queen. When she refused to marry him—well. You can guess the end of that story.”

Tamim was thinking of the patterns. “This implies that if you draw other fighting forms, you could apply those to the ghouls as well. Am I correct?”

Sakera nodded. “But you have to have an accurate hand and a knowledge of inner anatomies. Writing is troublesome for me, and drawing is impossible.”

It didn’t surprise him that a necromancer would be literate. Tamim had learned the alphabet from his mother, and could read and write, if shakily. He hadn’t had much opportunity to practice. “Teach me,” he said.

Her face lit. He had never seen anything like it, on the dead or the living. Carefully, she repeated the motion that had caused the giant to kneel. Although her hands shook a little, Tamim could tell what the gesture was supposed to look like. He did it several times until Sakera nodded her satisfaction.

“How do I get the giant to respond to me?” Tamim said. “Surely it doesn’t move every time you twitch your hands. The ghouls I knew just followed orders. They didn’t require constant guidance.”

“Give the giant a name,” Sakera said, “and use the name to address it in your mind. As for guidance, it’s a thing of memory. The recent dead remember who they were, after a fashion. They remember how to do the things they did in life, for a time. Or they’re instructed by patterns. The giants have been dead so long that they do require constant guidance.”

When he died, would she raise his bones and—

“No,” Sakera said. “I wouldn’t do that. I am a necromancer, yes, but I made a promise. I told you, the death you desire.” Her tone was almost cheerful. “Come on, give it a try.”

Tamim looked at the giant with spurs. Ifayad, he thought, which meant bird of prey. He could see the letters in his head: iro-fel-alim-yod-alim-dirat. Then he made the gesture Sakera had shown him.

The giant knelt. He climbed up and up, into the skull, along the ridge of an abraded tooth in the open mouth. He wondered what it smelled like: earth, probably, and crushed flowers, and the tang of minerals newly exposed to air. His sense of smell was deadened from so many years among ghouls, and his adolescent years among the few remaining resistance fighters had not restored it.

If something went wrong and the great jaws closed, he would be crushed. It comforted him. “Now what?” His voice echoed oddly in the space of the skull.

“How are you supposed to see anything from in there?” Sakera said. He couldn’t tell whether she was laughing or exasperated. “Come down again and we’ll learn to ride the giants properly. Then, when we have paper, I can show you how to scribe your own patterns.”

Tamim lingered a moment longer, drawn to Ifayad in spite of himself. Despite the restricted field of vision, he appreciated that the skull would provide protection against enemy fire.

Tamim climbed down, bemused at himself for having any sort of faith in the necromancer. She would betray him in the end, and surrender to the sorcerer, and he would have to kill her. Until then, he would learn what he could.

Tamim had always been quick with his hands, quick of reflexes, even as a child. It had taken him a while to appreciate this. He had thought it was something ordinarily true of people, as opposed to ghouls.

Ghouls were unrelenting once they had a goal, but dexterity was not one of their virtues.

Sakera was methodical in her lessons. They started with stances and moved on to simple motions—an arm lifting, a hand opening, a foot shifting—then compound motions. Familiar with the precepts of arms training, Tamim accepted this as necessary. They did everything slowly: gesture followed by the giants’ motion. Tamim’s hands became callused from clutching Ifayad’s ridged teeth to keep from rattling around inside the skull.

He and Sakera went hunting together. Sakera was good at tracking animals, even the tricky, shadow-colored animals that lived in the rimlands. “Every life is a potential death,” she said when he asked her about it, since she didn’t seem to pay much attention to the usual cues, such as tufts of fur snagged in the rimlands’ scraggly foliage, or scat, or scuffed tracks in the dirt. Tamim was good at making snares, although a certain percentage of the animals that he caught that way were half-ghoul themselves, and had to be released. The problem had only grown worse over time.

Between the two of them, they often had a full stew-pot. Sakera tended to pick at her food; sometimes he wasn’t sure she ate at all. When he pressed her on the topic, she ate the better portion of a rabbit, just to show him she could.

“I’ve been thinking about our rides,” Tamim said to her over this night’s stew. “Have you ever ridden a horse?”

Sakera shook her head. “No,” she said. “Hasn’t it been a long time since the rimlands saw anything but ghoul-steeds?”

“Probably,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about the horses themselves, but of harnesses. Do you think we could create some kind of harness for riding the giants? That way, if something goes wrong”—he couldn’t help but think of Sakera’s unsteady hands—”you won’t be thrown.”

“Interesting,” she said.

“Something with buckles, maybe?”

“We’d have to find a smith,” Sakera said drily. They had approached a settlement last week, leaving the giants behind, crouched behind some hills. The settlement’s buildings had been intact, but corpse-colored fungus grew from all the doors, releasing pale spores. They had retreated in haste. Sakera had been withdrawn for the rest of the day. “I don’t have any power over metal. Maybe we’re better off with some carefully chosen knots.”

“With your hands?” Something else occurred to him: he had once seen a trader trapped under a fallen horse, back in the days when horses were to be found in the rimlands. “You’d want to be able to get out in a hurry, in case something went wrong.”

“A slipknot of some sort?”

He considered it. “It might work.”

Unfortunately, Sakera was not any good at finding trees. It took them several days to track down a stand of widely separated willows by following one of the rimlands’ black rivers. Sakera drank the water fearlessly, although she grimaced at its taste.

Tamim showed Sakera how to strip the bark and plait it into cords. Once they had enough rope, it took them more time to devise a system of knots that would work on the giants. Sakera knew an amazing number of knots. “They’re a kind of magic from the sea-folk,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen the sea.”

Supposedly there was a black sea on the other side of the Pit’s boundary, with ships of rotting timbers and ghost-fabric sails. “No,” he said. “There’s nothing magical about knots, either, no more than a gun is magical.” He still had five bullets, although they were of iron rather than jade. Death and undeath were the only magic he recognized.

Sakera flexed her fingers, grimacing. Her skin was torn from working the bark. She washed her hands in the river, then dried her hands on her coat. “If only things were that simple,” she said.

They made more rope, just in case, and took the opportunity to bathe and wash their clothes. Sakera’s coat was beginning to look more gray than black. Tamim suspected it was losing its dye. Sakera insisted on going around in a ragged blanket while the coat dried.

“Do you really get that cold?” Tamim said.

“Death is cold,” Sakera said. “It’s the absence of warmth and the absence of light.”

All Tamim could think of was the grave he had dug for the last of his caretaker ghouls. All virtue had gone from their bones, and no necromancer would raise them again. But he had wanted to do them that honor anyway, to offer them the peace that his mother had denied them. He had wanted to lower himself into the grave, too, but then no one would have been left to cover them with earth.

“These are not entirely bad things,” she said, more kindly. “What would day be without night, a candle without the shuttered room?”

“It’s been years since I’ve seen a candle.”

“There we go, missing the point,” she said, but she didn’t sound offended.

It wasn’t until Sakera was satisfied with Tamim’s control over the giant that she began to teach him the alphabet. He had been looking forward to this until he realized that the shapes she was showing him didn’t resemble the ones he knew. “They’re wrong,” he said stubbornly as he stared at the two figures she had drawn in the dirt.

Blood welled up in the letters, as though she had cut them into the flesh of some sleeping beast. It bubbled briefly, then soaked back into the dirt. It was not an uncommon phenomenon, this deep in the rimlands, away from the sections that the sorcerer had reclaimed for human use.

Sakera, who was crouching next to him with her coat hitched up over her knees in an unsuccessful attempt to keep it from getting soiled, sighed. “There’s more than one alphabet in the world. There are even things more complicated than alphabets.”

Tamim tried to look receptive to the idea of learning something more complicated than an alphabet.

Sakera burst out laughing at his expression. “You’re quick-witted. A little practice is all it would take.”

“Thank you,” he said dourly.

“As to why this alphabet and not another: it’s the oldest one in the rimlands. It was used by priests to gods now unnamed.”

He leaned back and scowled. “How is it that you say the most preposterous things as if you knew them absolutely?”

“Because I do, of course.” She grinned at him. “Really, Tamim, what kind of necromancer would I be if I didn’t gather knowledge?”

“If my mother had spent more time gathering knowledge,” Tamim said thoughtfully, “maybe she would have been better prepared when she tried to assassinate the sorcerer.”

“Come on,” Sakera said, clearly deeming it better to skirt the subject, “alphabet. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll have it memorized.”

Tamim drew an awkward copy of the first one.

“No, no, no,” Sakera said, laughing again. He didn’t mind it as much as he thought he would. “There’s an order to these things.”

“I can’t see why it makes any difference, so long as you get the shape right.”

“Hit me,” she said.

“What?” Sometimes he wondered about her sanity.

“It won’t land,” she said, “if that’s what you’re worried about. Come on, hit me.”

He got up, settling his balance solidly over each foot, then threw a punch. He kept his fist several inches away from her even at full extension.

“Oh, Tamim,” she sighed, “you don’t have to be so careful. But you see? Notice how all the parts of your body moved in a particular order, the way you twisted your fist at the end and not the beginning? There is a logic to these things.”

Tamim should have known that complaining about it would elicit one of Sakera’s incomprehensible explanations. “Just tell me how to get it right.”

“If you’d rather,” she said. She drew the letter again, slowly, imitating his strokes. “You went from left to right, and it’s right to left. That’s the first thing to remember.” And again, except this time from right to left, as she had said. “Do you see how it’s shaped, how the strokes flow into each other?”

He tried a few more times until he could feel the flow that she spoke of: not so different from the alphabet he knew, even if the direction was different. “Shouldn’t it have a name?” he said. The letters of that other alphabet had names.

“This one is tilat. If we spelled out your name, it would be the first letter.”

“Tilat,” he repeated. “What’s the other one?”

Sakera showed him how to write it correctly. Dirt collected under her fingernail. “Meneth,” she said. “Tilat-meneth-meneth spells your name.”

Tamim frowned. “Aren’t there letters missing, the breath-sounds?”

“Vowels, you mean? You don’t write them in this alphabet.”

“That sounds terribly confusing.”

“There is power in empty spaces,” Sakera said. “Call it another part of the lesson.”

Tilat-meneth-meneth. Tamim wrote it three times so the letters aligned, forming a three-by-three figure. “Show me—show me how to write your name.” He had a good memory. He would prove it to her.

She showed him senu, and kor, and ras. If he looked at all the letters sideways, he could see a faint resemblance to the ones of his childhood alphabet. Were they related somehow?

Tamim didn’t write the name he had given his skeleton, Ifayad, for he had a premonition that it would alter some necessary relationship. Power in empty spaces, Sakera had said.

Numbers came after letters. This time the numerals looked more similar to those he already knew, and the lessons went more quickly.

Sakera was in the middle of teaching him yush, one hundred, when the ambush came. Their days of training in the hinterlands had made them careless. The rimlands had never been friendly to human existence. Under the sorcerer’s reign, they had become less so. The sorcerer might have built edifices of slate and dark marble and delicate bone, but each year fewer and fewer people were willing to dwell under the banner of the vulture. So it was that Tamim and Sakera had not run into travelers or traders. Thanks to the giants’ conspicuousness, they had also gotten into the habit of avoiding villages.

Tamim was watching Sakera’s hand draw the numeral in the dirt when she made a fist. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Run!” she said in a low, fierce whisper. Her hands went through a sequence of motions punctuated by pauses, like a language in itself. The ground thundered as her giant hauled itself out of the nearby copse of trees and walked toward her. The trees’ limbs knotted themselves around the giant’s arm. It pulled free. Hand-shaped leaves flew everywhere, writhing and clutching at the air. The giant crouched down so Sakera could vault up to its rib cage. She climbed until she reached the safety of its skull, then guided it back toward Tamim.

Tamim had Ifayad pick him up and place him in its eye socket. His stomach lurched as he climbed down, into the harness. He hated the moments of absolute helplessness as he secured himself. He could practically hear his heartbeat echoing in the skull.

Through Ifayad’s open maw, he could see the vultures’ red banner. There were six vultures: two necromancers in their black robes and four gray-fleshed ghouls in dull armor. The necromancers gaped at the moving giants. Even with its massive limbs, Sakera’s was faster than the ghouls, although Tamim was far from reaching her level of control.

Sakera’s giant loomed over the vultures and swept the banner to the ground, crushing it under one foot. Then it stopped. Tamim guessed that her hand tremor had started up again. The necromancers scrambled out of the way, out of his field of vision, shouting orders.

The ghouls were armed with repeating crossbows. Tamim heard an initial burst of bolts clattering against Sakera’s giant, and cursed all the small gods of the rimlands. He got Ifayad moving. A sweep of its forearm knocked two ghouls to the ground. One ghoul leapt for Ifayad’s hand and clung to a finger. He heard it laughing creakily. Tamim pivoted Ifayad and smashed the ghoul against a tree. Its arm separated from its body and the ribcage collapsed.

Tamim lifted Ifayad’s arm. It probably looked ridiculous from the outside, but he had to see—there it was: the ghoul’s severed arm was climbing toward Tamim. He didn’t fancy the thought of struggling with it while trying to control Ifayad.

He tried for a tense minute to use the giant’s fingers to pry the severed hand off and fling it away before he realized he knew no commands that would accomplish that end.

Cursing, he raised Ifayad’s arm to bring the target closer and put the giant in a stable stance. Then he unknotted himself from the harness and reached for his gun. Five bullets left.

The ghoul’s hand continued its relentless climb.

He crouched against the base of Ifayad’s jaw. It was lucky for him that the giant’s teeth, besides being chipped, had irregular alignment.

He aimed through the gap between two teeth. Fired. The ghoul’s hand was blown backward and landed on the ground, twitching, before righting itself.

Four bullets.

However feebly, the hand was scrabbling toward him. But at least it wasn’t on Ifayad.

Sakera had gotten her giant to respond again. In a display of entirely characteristic ferocity, it intercepted one of the necromancers and stomped. The sound of crunching bone was palpable.

The necromancers meant them no good; no one who served the sorcerer could. He retied the harness and set off after the second necromancer. Ifayad’s hand closed around her.

“Kill her!” Sakera said.

The necromancer wheezed out something.

Tamim hesitated for a long moment.

The necromancer said rapidly, “I can tell you of the death at your heels—”

He had agreed to support Sakera, not to ask questions. He took a deep breath, then pinched his thumb and forefinger against each other.

The giant’s fist squeezed tight. The necromancer screamed.

Tamim didn’t stop until the screaming cut off. Then he dropped the body.

Sakera had dismembered the rest of the ghouls. “That will hold them for a while,” she said. “We can travel faster than they can.”

Tamim turned Ifayad to face Sakera’s giant. “That wasn’t so difficult,” he said.

“Only two necromancers and their ghouls for now,” she said. “We don’t know how long they were following us. We haven’t exactly been subtle. That’s my fault. I thought—” Her voice sounded hollow. “This place has been my home for so long. I thought it would protect me, somehow. But I should have known better. It’s not as if land has any loyalty.”

Tamim focused on the part of her speech that had made sense. “So we should expect more pursuit. Let’s get our gear and run.”

“We can only run so far,” Sakera said. “We’ll end up at the gates of the sorcerer’s palace with the undead nipping at our heels. There’s no help for it.”

“We could head out of the rimlands instead,” Tamim said. He was accustomed to the idea of dying, but surely Sakera felt differently. The thought of her felled by the vultures made him ache in a way he had no name for.

“No,” Sakera said firmly. “This has to be done.”

Two villages later, Tamim discovered why Sakera was so desperate to take down the sorcerer.

This far into the rimlands, they had expected the village to be abandoned. Tamim had suggested that they might be able to find cloth or soap or needles left behind, small necessities. “Unless it bothers you to scavenge,” he added.

“Not at all,” Sakera said. “If they’ve left, they’ve left.”

They paused at the crest of a hill to peer down at the village. There were no cook-fires burning, and the crops in the nearby fields had withered. Yet people walked around the village’s perimeter and through its streets.

The pattern they traced was chakath, one of the letters of the alphabet, except with the beginning and ending points joined.

“They’re ghouls,” Tamim said, looking at Sakera for an explanation. “But why—?”

“The vultures didn’t raise them,” Sakera said. “They’re too practical to have ghouls spelling out alphabet lessons. No: something came to this village and killed its people, and the people simply failed to die.”

“What force moves them, then?”

“The sorcerer’s control of the Pit is not a natural thing,” she said. “It is affecting the balance of life and death in the rimlands. Necromancy is one thing: it too has its limits. It’s another matter for everything that dies to rise on its own. We must kill the sorcerer before he warps the purpose of the Pit any further.”

“I can try to go salvage what I can,” Tamim said. “Or would that catch the ghouls’ attention?”

Sakera watched the ghouls walking, from stoop-shouldered old men to children dragging shapeless dolls. “As long as you don’t interrupt their chakath. We’ll go together.”

“All right.” For the purposes of walking past the ghouls, her hand tremor shouldn’t make a difference.

The procession of ghouls had gaps in odd places. It was simply a matter of seeking out the gaps and slipping past. The ghouls’ rotted eyes tracked them, but the ghouls themselves did not deviate from their path.

Together, Sakera and Tamim raided the village for luxuries they had not seen in their time together: fruit preserves, bolts of ramie dyed in muddy colors, beeswax, hemp slippers. No guns or bullets, but that would have been too much to hope for. Tamim found some reasonably intact sacks for them to carry away their haul in.

They stepped outside with two sacks each. Tamim froze. “The pattern’s changed,” he said. “They’re no longer going down that trail to the left. It’s now the one to the right.”

“I wonder what letter of the alphabet they’re tracing out now,” Sakera said. “We’d better leave.”

They dashed for the giants. There was no pursuit. Tamim would have felt better if the ghouls had come after them. He understood enemies that stared you in the face and fought you. He didn’t understand this business of ghouls that—

“Sakera,” he said as they loaded up, “most people in the rimlands can’t read.”

“Mmm?”

“And they especially wouldn’t be able to read this strange old alphabet you taught me. Of which chakath is the sixth letter, or that’s what you said.”

They gazed down at the ghouls’ new letter, liyut. The seventh.

Tamim said, “What happens when they make it all the way to the end of the alphabet?” In his mind’s eye he traced the strokes that comprised qaref.

“What do you think?” Sakera said. “Qaref is also the word for ‘end’ in various dead languages.”

“How much longer before we reach the sorcerer’s palace?” Tamim asked.

“A while,” she said. “He isn’t the only one with a citadel deep in the rimlands.”

“Someone else to fight?” he said, both dismayed and determined.

“No,” she said. Her smile was crooked and not a little rueful. “Mine. Or did you think we were going to find paper and ink by raiding the villages of people who never had the fortune to learn to read?”

In actuality, Sakera’s citadel was a small fort atop a hill deep in a tangle of woods and vines. Tamim was astonished by the proliferation of vegetation. “Is any of this safe to eat?” he asked, especially after he saw the half-dissolved bones of birds beneath one tree with lush purple fruit.

“The fruit’s all safe,” Sakera said offhandedly. “It’s getting it without making the tree angry that’s the problem.” To demonstrate, she threw a rock at one of the trees.

The wood splintered open with a screaming sound at impact, and fingers of barkless wood stroked the stone before hurling it back toward them.

“Don’t catch it!” Sakera said, as if Tamim had to be told. Streaks of sap marred the stone’s surface.

“What good is a fort without guards?” Tamim said, uneasy that they had had to leave the giants back a little ways. He supposed the trees were worth something, but….

“So maybe I exaggerated when I called it a citadel,” Sakera said. “It’s more like a supply depot.”

He sighed.

Sakera drew out a key of blackened iron and opened the fort’s gates. It was built of concrete and dark granite, which had to have been brought from somewhere else. Sakera lit a small candle—one of their spoils—and led the way to a room down the end of the hall. She opened it with a smaller key.

Inside the room were stacks and stacks of paper, and in one corner, an escritoire. “This,” said Sakera, “is where you are going to learn to draw your own patterns.”

“Why is this necessary?”

“Do you remember the encounter where you couldn’t get rid of the hand?”

“You noticed?” he said.

“Please,” she said. “It was a dead thing climbing up another dead thing. I couldn’t help but notice. If we can draw the necessary motions, that won’t happen again. We must prepare as many maneuvers as we can think of.”

“It’s been years since I’ve used a brush and ink,” Tamim said.

“I taught you to use the giant, didn’t I?” Sakera said.

He looked pointedly at her hands. “The tremor’s getting worse.”

She averted her eyes. “I know. But food first. I bet you’re famished.”

They made a meal of leftover pemmican and fruit preserves. Then Sakera went to give herself a sponge bath with water from the cistern. Tamim waited patiently. Her long hair took forever to wash, and he knew that when he returned from his own bath, she would still be working out the tangles with a broken-toothed comb.

Tamim kept watch while Sakera drowsed in the sun outside the fort, letting her hair dry. At last she got up and danced across the ground, arms outflung, face lifted. “Time to learn drawing,” she said.

After learning the alphabet and numbers by drawing them in the dirt, Tamim felt frustrated at returning to the beginning. Sakera was relentless, however. She made him review the basics: how to hold a brush, how to make perfect single strokes. Then she made him learn each letter all over again, with the initial, medial, and final forms that she had omitted the first time around.

“Couldn’t you have taught me all the forms to begin with?” Tamim said.

“You wouldn’t have sat still for it,” she said.

When she deemed him ready, Tamim wrote out a passage she dictated to him, words that had no meaning to him and probably had no meaning to anyone but Sakera.

“It’ll do,” she said when the ink had dried and she had a chance to inspect it minutely. “We’re running short on time. I hope you have a good eye for motion.”

She brought out a chart of the human body, except it was boxed off and marked with numbers. “What do you make of this?”

At first he was bewildered by the sheer number of lines and curves. Then, as he studied the chart, pieces came clear: notes on the proportion of head height to body height, head width to shoulder width, the range of motion of the major joints.

“I can memorize this,” Tamim said.

“You have to do better than memorize,” she said. “You’ll have to draw. This is the kind of thing you’ll have to produce.” She brought out another chart—no, a sheaf of drawings on translucent paper—and showed him how to flip through them. Each paper in the sheaf was numbered.

The drawings showed something very simple: a man—no, woman, from the wider pelvis—walking, the motion depicted in painstaking detail, from the lift of the feet to the shift in balance.

Tamim closed his eyes and visualized Sakera walking, although she had a peculiarly straight-hipped stride for a woman. How would he draw a diagram for Sakera? He opened his eyes. “We can already make the giants walk,” he pointed out.

“That’s true,” Sakera said, “but walking is the fundamental thing. If you can master walking, the rest will follow.”

“Do we have time for this?”

“We have to make time. I don’t want to take any chances with the sorcerer.” She bit her lip. “I’ve already underestimated him once; how do you think I got this tremor?”

Tamim bent his head, studying the diagram some more. He didn’t miss Sakera’s hum of satisfaction.

In the days that followed, Tamim learned to draw the human form with graphite sticks. He grew accustomed to having greasy, gray-smeared fingers. “Does it matter whether I’m drawing the living or the dead?” he asked.

“You’re showing the giants the pattern of the motion,” Sakera said. “That’s what matters.”

He stared down at his latest tracing of one of Sakera’s beautifully inked drawings: a woman in the midst of a leap. The vast quantity of her papers was daunting, but when he wasn’t drawing—everything from butterflies to murderous trees to doomed birds, everything but Sakera herself—he was studying them. “How do you decide the interval of motion?” Sometimes the difference between two drawings in a sequence was fractional, and he had to hold both up to the sunlight to see what had changed.

“Think of it as equal intervals of time,” Sakera said. “You don’t need to be this meticulous to draw the motion for the giant; you’ll be mediating the action through your hands. All it needs are the distinguishing moments. But it’s useful to know the motion’s rhythm.”

“How many drawings like this does the sorcerer have?”

“Too many.”

“You can’t just burn them?”

She gave him a pained look. “Once they’ve been painted in ink—anything permanent—by the necromancer’s own hand, they’re available to every ghoul he raises. He’s probably burned them himself, to keep others from stealing his knowledge.”

“Ink,” Tamim repeated.

“Why do you think I’ve been having you work in graphite even though your calligraphy’s passable?”

“I had been wondering, yes.”

“You can start working with ink tomorrow,” Sakera said, as though she were granting him a favor. “Try not to mess it up.”

“I wish I could do something for your hands,” Tamim said.

She grimaced, and he regretted bringing it up. But she said only, “I can still do most necessary things. But a brush is sensitive to small motions. I can’t risk it anymore. Why don’t we organize the sketches that you want to do in ink, so we can increase your giant’s range of motion?”

“How much longer do we have?”

Sakera looked away, her eyes distant. “You remember that village? They’re on uth.”

Three to go. “You should have pushed me harder,” he said. “How often do they change the letter?”

“About once a week,” she said.

He could have asked earlier, and he hadn’t. “How far is it to the sorcerer’s palace?”

“From here? A week’s hard journeying.”

“Let’s start organizing,” Tamim said.

Tamim was never going to get all the ink out of his fingernails from painting maneuvers. Then again, it was cleaner than grave-dirt. Sakera’s fingernails weren’t much better, although Tamim had done his best to trim them for her. He missed the days of sketching with graphite. He had even attempted a portrait of his mother. It hadn’t come out very well, but considering that he hardly remembered her face, that was only to be expected.

They had re-rigged the giants’ harnesses using their best rope, their most cunning knots, loaded up the giants with supplies. “Once we’re out of the immediate area,” Sakera said, “expect more of the vultures’ patrols. We are not concerned with their total defeat. They’ll know we’re coming. The point is to get to the palace as quickly as possible.”

“The ghouls will swarm us,” Tamim said.

“I know,” she said. “Once we get close enough, your job will be to distract the sorcerer’s armies as long as you can. I—” She hesitated. “I may have to go in alone, if he doesn’t come out to greet us.”

“How are you going to keep them from tearing you apart?”

“I’ll be fast,” she said.

“You call that a plan?” he said incredulously.

She grinned.

“I will never understand you,” Tamim said.

“You will someday,” she said. “It’s time to go.”

Forever after, Tamim remembered that week in nightmare snatches, despite an ordinarily orderly sense of time. They passed statues that had been overgrown by violet-gray crystals that luminesced in response to the giants’ footfalls, roads that liquefied into vortices of glittering sand. The wind muttered at them, perhaps in words from extinct languages, perhaps in the universal language of nightmare. They passed more villages, some inhabited by the living, who fled their approach, others inhabited by ghouls marching the alphabet’s path in its countdown to qaref.

Curiously, there were few vultures. When asked, Sakera said, “They’ve probably been recalled to the palace for the sorcerer’s protection.”

“Does he fear the giants?” Tamim asked.

“Wouldn’t you?” She sounded cranky. It seemed sleep deprivation could affect even her.

At last they reached the sorcerer’s high road, paved at the sides with dark, gleaming stones. An army of ghouls awaited them. The banner of the vulture flew high in the distance, along with the standards of individual companies. Tamim had Ifayad crane its head back so he could glimpse the black-and-iron palace high on its hill.

“Do we charge?” Tamim said.

“Wait,” Sakera said implacably.

The ghouls parted. Down the road came the sorcerer, mounted on a blood bay horse with a skull for a head, although no other part of it had decayed. The sorcerer was tall, and he wore ornate lamellar lacquered red and black.

The ghouls bent their heads to the sorcerer in unison. For his part, the man removed his helmet and shaded his eyes, looking unerringly at Sakera’s giant. “You are brave to return, Sakera,” he said. He had a low, resonant voice, and he sounded respectful but unintimidated.

“I have an ally this time,” she said.

Tamim said, “Ghouls may require jade bullets, but he’s only human. Let me shoot him.”

The sorcerer raised a spyglass and fixed it on the giant’s maw. Tamim held still; he had nothing to hide. “You must be Liathu’s son,” the sorcerer said, almost fondly. “It’s in the shape of your face. She was brave, too, in her way.”

To Tamim’s dismay, Sakera had the giant lower her to the ground. It took her a while to disentangle herself from the harness. “It’s been a long time,” she said.

“You are destroying the realm I would have built,” said the sorcerer. “What good is the Pit when everything in the rimlands is becoming an extension of death? This could have been a prosperous realm, if not for your revenge. I did not think even you were so cruel.”

Sakera’s revenge? What revenge?

“Not death,” Sakera said, “but undeath. You misunderstand the nature of the problem. There’s only one way to reverse what has happened to the rimlands. Abdicate. Else there are two giants, and there will be more. All the old bones of the land will rise up against you, extinct though their race may be, when the ghouls write qaref.”

“You know better than to expect me to listen,” the sorcerer said, “especially after you took away the woman I loved.”

“She was not yours to have, not that way,” Sakera said quietly. “A ghoul can do as it is told, but it cannot love, not the way the living do.”

Tamim didn’t want to hear any more of the sorcerer’s history. He sliced his hand through the air. Ifayad’s hand moved correspondingly.

The sorcerer said, unfazed, “Has it never occurred to you, son of Liathu, to wonder why I didn’t raise the giants as ghouls myself? Do you know who it is you have been allied with all this time?”

Tamim stopped. The hand stopped short of the sorcerer and his uncanny mount.

Once it would not have mattered. But if he didn’t find out now, he would never know.

“Go ahead,” Sakera said to the sorcerer. “Tell him.” She raised her chin as if in challenge. Her hands were trembling. For once, Tamim thought it was out of anxiety.

“It is perhaps unforgivable that Liathu’s child should be so ignorant of necromancy,” the sorcerer said, “but she was never much of a teacher. A necromancer can only raise people who died during his life-span. And the giants became extinct before any humans came into being. They were possibly the first to walk the world. What does that tell you about the woman you have been traveling with?”

Sakera was certainly no giant.

Then he knew. “Death,” Tamim said. “Death is the oldest necromancer of all.”

“Would you rather be ruled by Death,” the sorcerer said to Tamim, “or by someone who is likewise human?”

“The Pit was never meant to be ruled by mortal man or woman,” Sakera said. “Did you think your conquest solved anything? There must be a place in the world where Death has a home, and that is the Pit, else there is no rest for anyone when the last breath flees, when the heart finally stills.”

“Choose,” the sorcerer said harshly. “Choose by numbers, if nothing else: fight and fight though you may, even after my death, the Vulture Corps will track your every footstep.—Do you make no argument, Sakera?”

“It has to be a real choice,” Sakera said. “His choice, because he is a child of life and death both.”

Tamim didn’t believe in facing violence with his eyes closed. He knew what he had seen, all his life in the rimlands, the unclean animals and the countdown ghouls, bleeding earth and ashen fruit. Once he would not have had the courage to imagine something better—if not for himself, then for whatever generations might follow.

He twisted both hands and stabbed his fingers into his right palm. Ifayad’s hand lunged down. The sorcerer spurred his mount, charging slantwise forward. Tamim moved Ifayad to block him; Ifayad swept the sorcerer from his mount.

The sorcerer screamed as he fell. His rage shook Tamim, even though Tamim was safe inside Ifayad. The man landed upon the spears of his own ghouls, despite their efforts to move aside. They were too densely packed.

Tamim stared down at the man’s broken body, thinking, Was that all?

“There will be no rest for—” said the ghouls in one voice.

Sakera knelt and pounded her fists against the ground. All the ghouls fell silent, then shuddered and collapsed. It seemed to Tamim that the clattering sound went on halfway to forever.

“You couldn’t have done that before?” Tamim demanded.

“Not while he ruled the Pit, no,” she said. She stared out over the fallen bones. “That was your part. Do you know how many his vultures killed?”

Tamim almost said, I didn’t think it would matter to you. But she was Sakera. He had come to know her. Of course it mattered to her.

In no hurry at all, he made Ifayad lower him to the ground so he could stand next to her. “Now what?” he said.

She raised her face to him. The expression in her eyes was uncharacteristically solemn.

I will give you the death you desire, she had promised. In their time together, he had forgotten his original purpose.

Sakera was Death, the Pit made flesh. There was one promise Death always kept.

Tamim squared his shoulders. “I’m ready.”

“Silly,” Sakera said affectionately, standing. “I never said the death you wanted had to be right now.”

“I was going to kill myself.”

“Why do you think I came for you, out of all the people in the rimlands?” she said. She stretched up on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. Her lips were cool, though not unpleasantly so. “You may not know my face when I come for you next. But I will come, at a time of your desiring.”

“I don’t know how to live.”

“But you do,” she said. “It’s all about the distinguishing moments. It’s about going from one to the next, no matter how small the interval of time, or how long. As for me, I have a home to return to. You can’t follow me yet.”

“I could—” Tamim stopped. Did he want to follow her?

“I think the hesitation is answer enough,” Sakera said.

“The giant?”

“That’s up to you,” she said. “Choose wisely.”

“Good-bye, then,” Tamim said.

“Good-bye, Tamim,” she said. Her hands shook, but less than they had. Or so he liked to think. She returned to her giant. It strode off into the horizon beyond the palace, toward the Pit.

Tamim stood for a long time, watching. Then he wrote Ifayad’s name on its right tibia with his fingerprints. “Just a little longer,” he said, “and you can go to your rest.” He reentered the giant and began the long task of burial, a grave for the fallen—but not for himself.

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