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The ninth meeting of the Lighthouse Book Club was just descending into chitchat when Davrin showed up in the library with a bottle. The clink of glasses brought Taash out of their room to investigate; before long they'd pulled up a chair. The conversation drifted idly until after a couple of rounds Bellara piped up with a question.
"What was your most regrettable crush?"
It did not escape notice that she had posed the question while quietly drawing a pen and notebook out of her pocket.
Neve, whom none had ever called a fool, declared she had pressing work and made herself scarce; Taash lost no time laying claim to her vacated seat on the couch beside Harding. The rest held their ground and one by one they told their tales, which ranged from the wistful to the hilarious.
"What about you, Emmrich?" Davrin asked as he poured himself another glass of whiskey. "I've got you pegged as a romantic. You must have stories."
"Oh, many," he said with a sly smile. "None I'd qualify as regrettable, however. I do not regret any of my loves, however brief they may have been."
"You're deflecting," Lucanis said, dark eyes seemingly boring into his very soul. "I recognize the technique."
"You would," Davrin grumbled amiably before turning back to his target. "Come on, Emmrich. Spill."
Emmrich looked down at his drink and noticed that it was nearly empty. He'd had two, then, in the space of an hour. Which might explain why Davrin's persistence had him entertaining a rather foolish notion. An old story had risen to mind and as he tried to remember the last time he'd told it, he realized it was likely no one living had ever heard him do so.
With a sigh, he drained his glass and held it out for a refill. "I may not look it now, but once I was… oh, so very young. Younger than any of you, I think, except perhaps dear Taash."
There was a grumble from Taash's corner of the couch that stilled abruptly when Harding laid a freckled hand on their thigh. "That's just how time works, Emmrich," she said with a grin. "You're born. You're young. You get older. Are you going to tell us the story or not?"
He gave her a quelling look but knew that it lacked conviction. Was he really going to tell this tale? Now, after so many years? It would be easy enough to find another; he really did have plenty of material to choose from. But it didn't feel right to dissemble. After all, the others hadn't quailed from sharing their stories. Lucanis had been quite vulnerable in admitting his lack of experience. Even Davrin had been uncharacteristically heartfelt describing his infatuation with the Warden who'd administered his Joining ceremony.
"I suppose it's only fair," he said after a moment.
He sipped his whiskey, felt it slide like a hot coal over his tongue and down his throat. "I was twenty-three. I'd completed my formal coursework and was working on a monograph that I hoped would earn my appointment to associate professor in a few years."
Bellara began to vibrate in her chair. "Wait, are you talking about Mapping Etheric Fluctuations Along Multilinear Spatial Transects?"
"The very one!" Emmrich agreed brightly. "I had no idea you were familiar with the work."
"Familiar? I've read it like fifty times! The way you were able to use the path of energy flows along ley lines to triangulate—"
"Don't get sidetracked," Davrin said. "We haven't got all night."
"Right," Bellara said, containing her excitement. "Go on, Emmrich. Tell us about your crush."
"Yes, of course, my dear."
He took a breath and picked up where he had left off. "I was venturing into one of the deeper parts of the Necropolis — mapping changes in the ether flows, as Bellara noted — when I came across an isolated sarcophagus, engraved all over in intricate floral motifs. The lid had been shoved aside and lay half-smashed on the ground and when I looked inside, I saw the skeleton of a young woman."
Harding's brow furrowed. "How did you know it was a young woman if it was just bones in there?"
Emmrich smiled at her. "A glance at her cranial sutures in comparison to her very elegant clavicle told me she was likely in her mid-twenties. Did you know the collarbone is the last of the endochondral bones to undergo fusion of the epiphysis to the diaphysis?"
"The what to the what?" Harding asked, squinting quizzically. "Never mind. Forget I asked."
"Elegant clavicle," Davrin repeated with a snigger.
"Very elegant, yes. Perhaps you'd have to see it to understand," he said. "As to her being a female, one can make an excellent guess at the sex of most skeletons if the right bones are present. The pelvis, in particular, is quite telling. The angle of the pubic arch, the curvature of the sacrum… they tell a story."
"But you couldn't be sure," Harding pressed.
"Not entirely. In this case, however, there was corroborating information carved into the lid of the sarcophagus."
"A name?" Lucanis asked.
"Exactly right. Though I could not make out the surname due to the damage, the first part of the engraving was still clearly legible." Emmrich paused, remembering how he'd traced the letters with the pad of his forefinger. "Her name was Lenore."
"Beautiful," Lucanis said. "And uncommon. Did you try to find out who she was?"
"I did, of course," he replied. "But as you can imagine, without a family name or even a clear idea of what Age she belonged to, the task proved fruitless."
"It's sad, isn't it?" Bellara said in a soft voice. "Thinking about her lying there, all alone. Forever."
"Precisely my sentiment," Emmrich said. "I found it impossible to drive her from my mind. I had to go back, if only to sit in silent communion awhile with the remains of the vessel that had housed her in life."
"Creepy," Taash muttered. Harding elbowed them in the ribs.
"It was peaceful, Taash," Emmrich said in a stiff tone. "Not at all 'creepy,' as you so bluntly put it." He ought to have known how Taash would react to his story. They had an unreasoning dislike of even the most mundane aspects of the Necropolis.
"Sure," said Harding. "Peaceful's good. Everybody needs a little peace sometimes."
"I'm glad you understand."
"And it's not like you spent all your time hanging out in some dusty old forgotten burial chamber." She paused, looking at him more closely. "Right?"
Emmrich drew himself up. "Of course not. I was busy with my research and her resting place was rather off the beaten track. But somehow I found myself returning again and again, whenever I could spare a few hours. I would sit with her, studying her mortal remains. One can learn a great deal from a corpse's osteology, you know. So much of our daily experience is etched into our bones. It was easy for me to lose myself in imagining what she had been like in life."
"Not my idea of a fun evening, but to each his own," Davrin said, taking a slug of his whiskey.
"I think I was quite lonely in those days," Emmrich mused. "I was no longer a student, but hadn't yet joined the ranks of the faculty. My old social circles were fragmenting, and my new endeavors were squeezing out what little time I had for leisure pursuits."
Emmrich idly toyed with one of his bracelets, seeing again in his mind's eye the clean ivory bones lying moveless in their marble sanctum. "She had the most exquisitely gracile humerus. And her zygomatic arch! I could compose sonnets upon its perfection."
"Emmrich." Lucanis was giving him a wary look. "Did you fall in love… with a skeleton?"
He sighed ruefully. "I'm afraid that I did."
The room went quiet. Lucanis and Davrin exchanged glances. Bellara scratched something down in her notebook and then chewed the end of her pen.
Hey," Taash said, breaking the silence. "Is that why you got so mad when I called you skullfu—"
"Taash!" Harding cried. "He didn't give you any grief about your story."
"Having a crush on your boss isn't the same as messing around with a corpse."
"Just… leave it, Taash, okay?" Harding's voice was strained, but she patted Taash's arm affectionately.
"It's all right, Harding. Taash isn't precisely wrong." He pursed his lips. "I wouldn't have described my infatuation as 'messing around with a corpse', though I admit it was a rather unusual relationship."
"Not sure it actually qualifies as a relationship," Davrin muttered.
"So what finally happened, Professor?" Bellara asked. "I mean… something had to happen. To break the crush. That is… you're not still together." She blinked. "I assume?"
"They were never together, Bellara," Lucanis said. "You cannot be together when the other person does not even know you are there."
"Like what happened with your crush on that other Crow," said Davrin.
Lucanis glared at him. "Fuck off."
Emmrich ignored the little exchange the same way he might ignore the petty squabbling of two familiar house cats. "No, we're not still 'together', and Lucanis is right. We never really were. But she was important to me for a time — deeply important. I truly did love her."
He took a sip of his whiskey, old feelings welling up and leaving a sweet ache in his chest. "So it was quite a shock indeed when, after more than a year, I paid her a visit only to discover that she had disappeared."
"What?" Bellara gasped. "What happened to her? Did you ever see her again?"
"How would he know?" Taash asked. "There's like ten thousand skeletons in that place."
"Not quite right," Emmrich said. "There is no precise way to number the remains — human and otherwise — housed in the Necropolis, but the Mourn Watch puts the estimate at over ten million."
"Ten… million?" Bellara said. "That's… a lot."
"Indeed," Emmrich agreed. "But I would know her anywhere."
Bellara made a high-pitched sound and began to scribble frantically in her notebook. "That is SO romantic."
"Romantic?" Davrin asked, incredulous. He said more, but by then Emmrich wasn't listening.
He was thinking about a day long past when he'd led a group of students — surely by now all graduated and gone — to observe the excavation of a ritual chamber in the Unspoken Valley. Undead laborers had swarmed over the stone like so many ants. From somewhere too far up to identify, pale sand fell endlessly, sifting down like snow.
He'd seen her, then.
Leaving the students to catalogue the progress of the excavation, he approached. There could be no mistaking her. He had memorized the lines and landmarks of her bones, mapped them by sight and by touch. She was unchanged but for the addition of a bronze crown, now graced by the wisp that animated her. As he watched he saw her pause, her pickaxe falling idle by her side.
They regarded one another, his gaze sliding helplessly over the delicate curve of her ribs, the flare of her ilium. He had always believed that although the spirit provides animation, there is something in the body that remembers what it was — that the flesh knows itself and through that knowledge, colors the undead's actions.
If that were so, then did not some semblance of Lenore herself stand before him?
He could not be sure how long they lingered so. In the Necropolis, time itself feels eternal. What he did know is that after an interminable moment, she had reached across her body toward her own shoulder, plucking something away before holding out her hand. Extending his own instinctively to meet hers, he felt the weight of something small and slender on his palm.
Then she had turned away. As if waking from a dream, he'd become aware of sound again — the chatter of his students, the sharp metallic clang of tools on stone, the unceasing hiss of the sand.
"Professor?"
He blinked. "Yes, Bellara?"
"Did you ever see her again? Was that the end of the story?"
He tried to gather his thoughts, pushing aside the distracting knowledge that they were all looking at him. There was, he decided, no easy way to explain the full truth of the matter. Taash already found him unsettling and he suspected Lucanis and Davrin's opinions were only a few degrees more charitable. He wasn't sure any of them would even believe him, much less understand.
Still, he had to say something. "Bellara, my dear, in all honesty I think that—"
He was interrupted by the bang of the front door and the sound of an excited hiss. Everyone turned toward the newcomer and Emmrich gave a tiny sigh of relief.
"Ah, Manfred!" he said. "It must be past time for your evening alchemy lessons."
Manfred nodded, pointing emphatically toward the stairs.
"I'm sorry everyone, but you will have to excuse us," Emmrich said, rising from his chair and moving toward his ward. "Perhaps there will be time to tell more of the story on another occasion, should you wish it. As to the end, though… I must say that I'm not convinced the best stories truly have an end. They simply beget new stories."
At this, Manfred gave another delighted hiss. With a faraway smile Emmrich laid his hand on his ward's shoulder, his thumb tracing the slender curve of the clavicle.
It was an exceptionally elegant one, still.