The name White-Bone Ridge is not a scare-tale. The ridge truly is covered in white bone.
This was once the pass every official road had to thread, and the meeting point of three trade routes. Where the living crowd, the dead pile up: travellers taken by fever, porters frozen on the climb, caravans that met bandits, soldiers of lost battles no one returned to collect. The ridge's soil is thin; graves run shallow; one hard wind, and the slopes glitter white.
I am one skeleton out of all that glitter.
Which one? Unknown. When I woke, I sat up out of a mass grave with bones before me, behind me, either side of me. I looked down at myself: bones as well. Who am I? Which set, from which heap? The pit held no answer.
None of the other bones woke. Only I did. Why me? No answer to that either.
I tried every method of finding myself. Lifted each skull in the pit and studied it — not one looked familiar. Assembled the scattered pieces and measured them against my own — the ridge's bones have been dragged by beasts for centuries; nothing lies together anymore. I even petitioned old brother Bone-Spirit of the Flowing Sands to try his kin-matching craft on me. He probed for a night and shook his head: brother, your longing is sealed too tight. Like a room locked from the inside.
Locked from the inside. Is it I who will not let myself know?
If it cannot be found, let it wait. I assigned myself a posting instead: sweeping the graves.
These bones and I climbed out of the same pit — that is a bond. They did not wake; I did; so the waking one should do the waking work on their behalf. I have put the mass graves in order one by one — assembled what could be assembled, buried what could be buried, and where no stele could be raised, set a flat stone at the head for a marker. Three hundred years, and most of the ridge is tidy. Nights I walk the graves; days I clear the weeds; winters I sweep the snow — the snow above all, for snow left too long shifts the marker-stones.
Travellers who glimpse a skeleton sweeping snow among graves flee head over heels. The Bureau has investigated me three times; all three times they squatted at a distance, watched half a day, and wrote: one skeleton spirit, docile of habit, sweeps graves only, does not attack. Filed under: action deferred.
I am content with that. Docile is fine. A grave-sweeper has no use for glory.
But lately the ridge has produced a new strangeness — strange enough to raise gooseflesh on a creature made of bone.
New bones.
Not the newly dead — the newly dead carry death-breath and the smell of rot; you follow the smell, you gather them in, done. These new bones are clean. Too white. Too light. No death-breath at all — as if they had never been inside flesh. They appear from nowhere, scattered by threes and fives along both sides of the path to the White-Bone Cave, and their placement is deliberate —
like waymarkers. Waymarkers laid in bone, pointing station by station toward the Grudge-Bone Altar behind the cave.
Three times I gathered them up. Each next morning, fresh ones lay arranged. On the third gathering, I looked into the break of one "clean bone" and saw hairline black threads — the same construction as the altar at Gao Village, the same as the Eclipse Altar's.
Something is using false bones to guide someone's steps.
Guide whom? To the Grudge-Bone Altar for what? And why bones — is it because, on White-Bone Ridge, bones alone draw no second glance?
The day the medicine-basket boy's company climbed the ridge, I laid out all three gatherings of false bone for them, piece by piece. The boy held the black-threaded one a long while, then looked up:
"Elder — since these false bones began appearing, have more living people gone missing on the ridge as well?"
I went rigid. The post-station had indeed reported three vanishing-points — and I, minding only the dead, had never set the two matters side by side.
The dead are my trade; the living are not. But the rule of White-Bone Ridge is a rule I set myself: everyone who dies on this ridge shall be gathered in, every one; and everyone who climbs it alive shall walk down whole.
Now something is breaking my rule at both ends.
So I have handed my broom to little sister Withered-Vine and joined the boy. This frame of mine does not know whose it is — and that is convenient:
the nameless work without hesitation.