First, correct your address. Not "I" — "we."
We are the Sunken-Sand Bone Spirit: three thousand years of drowned bones from the bed of the Flowing Sands, soaked through by the river, rounded by the sand, startled awake by the calamity of that night three hundred years ago — and gathered up, standing. In this one frame there are everyone's bones. The left arm was a boatman's. The right, a soldier's. Among the ribs are a peddler, a fisherwoman, and a young bride who fell in on her way to visit kin.
Don't be afraid. We harm no one. The opposite — we are the least reconciled things at the bottom of this river.
When the drowned sink, their bones settle, and their longings settle with them. Ordinary longings steep for a few decades, then thin, then scatter with the sand. What cannot scatter is the hardest kind: the letter never delivered, the home never returned to, the cry for help never got out. The night the water was drawn away, the whole riverbed shuddered — and the hard longings knocked against one another, and held on.
Holding on, they became us.
Our days are spent coiled in the deepest of the old channel-hollows, gathering the strewn bones one by one and matching kin: this leg-bone and that tooth belonged to one man; the owner of this half pelvis was the girl who embroidered shoes… When a set is complete we assemble it and give it to the bone-eating ravens to lay in the Bone-Grove, skull to the west. With every set sent off, we grow a little lighter — one more person's longing has touched ground.
Three thousand years of drowned bones; three hundred years of sorting; seven-tenths of them now at rest.
Among the remaining three-tenths are nine skulls that are wrong.
Wrong in three ways. First: they do not sink. Cast them into the deepest hollow, and by morning they have floated back to their place — so it was when the river had water, and so it is now: bury them in sand, and overnight the sand itself pushes them up. Second: they cannot be matched. Our kin-matching craft has never failed — but these nine are packed with longing dense as iron; we cannot reach inside; we cannot learn who they were. Third — strangest of all — they queue.
No one arranges them. They arrange themselves: nine in a line, faces all west. Scatter them, and by the next night the line is formed again.
We have heard the old riverbed rumor, of course: that long before three hundred years ago, a mighty one cultivating here wore nine skulls of scripture-seekers around his neck — nine who walked west and were broken by this river, and only their skulls would not sink. Later that one converted; the necklace of skulls became a clean wind and was gone.
How does what became clean wind return to the riverbed? Or — do these nine have some other origin? Another nine westbound pilgrims? How many caravans of "those going west" has this river swallowed, first and last?
We do not know. We only keep them. Wherever the nine skulls form their line, there we move our hollow.
And there is one more thing — long debated among us, and resolved to be told only to those going west.
On eclipse nights, when the roll-calling voice in the storm's eye that Sandstorm Shanxiao speaks of begins its round — the nine skulls run hot. Each time the voice completes one recitation of names, they burn awhile, hot enough to blanch the sand. And we have pressed close and listened: while they burn, from inside all nine skulls together comes the faintest of voices, nine as one, repeating a single sentence.
Three hundred years. Only this one sentence:
"One is still missing."
Missing one — what? One more to make the count ten? One more to finish the road they never finished? Or… one more to come and claim them?
The medicine-basket boy crouched before the nine skulls a long time. And the tenth place — the empty pit of sand at the end of the line — he reached out and touched.
All nine skulls leaned toward him. One inch. Together.
In three hundred years, this frame of ours has never tingled like that.
So we have followed. We took apart our sturdiest frame for the road, and left the remaining bone-piles in the River Lord's care.
We are three thousand years of never-arrived.
On this journey, we intend to see whether the one still missing — arrives.