Little sister Corpse Moth receives last words. I eat obsessions. One clan, two trades: she handles the said, I handle the knotted.
What is a knot? When a person dies, their words can ride away on a moth's wing — but some things are not words. They are rope-hitches drawn tight into the soul. Injustice knots. Love knots. Vow knots. A soul knotted too tightly cannot travel: the mouth of the next life stands open before it, and it cannot move one step — tethered in place by that hitch for decades, for centuries, tethered into a wandering shade, tethered into a wraith.
My bite exists for this: to sever the knot, and swallow it.
Don't let the name soul-devourer frighten you. I have never devoured a soul — only the rope binding one. The rope parts, the soul lightens, and drifts off by itself toward where it should go. If you have ever watched a shade tethered two hundred years come untied — how it freezes, then spins in place three times like a child, then bows deep toward the west, and floats away — you know the sweetness of my trade.
What does obsession taste like? Not what you'd think. Grievance-knots are not bitter but salt — the salt of tears. Love-knots burn hottest; three days after one, the stomach still glows. Worst are regret-knots: astringent, hard, impossible to chew; you soak them slowly in the belly's dissolving-dew.
In several hundred years of eating, there is no knot I have failed to dissolve.
Except one.
Three hundred years ago, in the first days of the black moon, a courier died on the White-Bone Ridge road. Feather-dispatch on his back, horse dead beneath him, and the message-tube in his arms empty — the letter had been robbed on the road, and the man had run himself to death on his wounds. His soul was tethered at the roadside by a knot hard as iron. It took me three bites to sever, and as I swallowed, the knot burst open in my belly into a single sentence:
"Go back and tell them — I arrived."
There lies the strangeness. He did not arrive. He died mid-road, and the letter was lost. Yet his dying obsession said I arrived.
A lie? Deathbed obsessions cannot lie. Delirium? The knot's grain was pure and true. I turned it over for years and found only one possibility: his "arrived" was never about his own errand. It was something he carried for another — he knew that somewhere, a far more important arrival had occurred, and that news of it had to be taken back. Taken to "them."
Who arrived? Arrived where? And who are "they"?
That undeliverable obsession has squatted in my belly ever since. The dissolving-dew cannot soften it. The years cannot wear it. In the still of night it still flutters — like a moth shut inside a lantern. Three hundred years: I, the eater of knots, have grown a knot of my own.
Laugh if you like. The healer cannot heal herself; the moth cannot bite her own belly.
Now the Grudge-Bone Altar has risen, and my trade has been fouled. The thing on that altar also "collects obsessions" — but it does not untie. It cultivates. It draws each knot tighter, wringing out more grievance; the grievance ties new knots; batch upon batch, a snowball rolling. Our swarm has watched old shades on the very edge of coming untied be re-tethered — dead-tight — in a single night.
The untier has met the tier of knots. This fight cannot be sidestepped.
The night the medicine-basket boy climbed the ridge, I disgorged half of my swallowed sentence for him — only half; disgorge it all and I fear it scatters. He heard "go back and tell them — I arrived," and suddenly asked:
"That courier — was he running from the west toward the east, or from the east toward the west?"
The knot in my belly leapt.
West to east. He was coming back from the west. Three hundred years ago, out of the west, running east for his life, to deliver one word: arrived.
What, at precisely that hour of history, was worth a courier's life to carry eastward?
The boy goes west. I am fastened to his path.
Along the way I will bite knots and free souls as ever. And on the day we reach the farthest west, I will find the head of that courier's route —
and deliver my swallowed sentence, intact, back to the place it set out from.
Then, at last, I will learn who it was that "arrived."