Seeker's Mask, page 31
As the library cleared, Jame stopped Hawthorn. "About Cadet Brier. Rue tells me that you relieved her of command for endangering her squad. Well, she came south to help me, and then . . . ."
The captain raised a hand in warning. "This sounds like house business. Tell your lord brother, not me. So, you were acting as your lady's escort?" she asked, stopping Brier at the door.
The Kendar gave Jame a brief, unreadable look. "I . . . suppose so, ran."
"Why didn't you say so before? That puts your actions on equal footing with mine, escorting the Brandan Matriarch—for which, ancestors have mercy on us both. Take back your command."
That's one thing set right, at least, Jame thought as Brier acknowledged, expressionless, while Rue grinned at Vant's sour face.
As for telling Torisen, though . . . First, let him damn well ask.
II
It was a long night.
Hour after hour, the sea broke against Mount Alban, each blow making the wooden walls shudder while moisture ran down them like cold sweat. Everything got wet except the precious scrolls, hastily wrapped in oiled silk. Soon the highest waves threatened the keep's lowest rooms—because of a rising sea or a sinking fortress, no one could say. Scholars scrambled to save their possessions until a wave surging into one room nearly swept a clutch of singers out with it. Upstairs, Kindrie and the infirmarian already had their hands full with a host of minor injuries. Finally, Hawthorn ordered the academic community out from under foot and the randon settled down to cope.
Jame stayed out of their way. She knew she should use this opportunity to rest, if not sleep, but she was far too unsettled. Index's words haunted her: "there are forces on Rathillien about which we know virtually nothing." Sweet Trinity, yes. The terror of those moments under the sand caught her again by the throat, stopping her breath.
Got you now, thief . . . .
Despite everything, she had only taken Mother Ragga half in earnest. Now how could she set foot on the earth again, anywhere, when at any moment it might open and swallow her? Had she forfeited her right not only to be among her own people but on this world altogether?
. . . a mistake, too dangerous to live, cursed be and cast out . . . .
So she wandered on about the lower rooms, aimlessly, a wet, unhappy ounce creeping on her heels and standing disconsolately on her toes whenever she stopped. If the sheer will not to drown could help, Jorin was doing his part. Then his ears flicked: they were being followed. Jame turned a corner, reversed sharply, and found herself holding an indignant Graykin at knife point.
The Southron still looked shaky, she thought, but much improved. Perhaps when she had ordered him to sleep, she had accidentally plunged him into his first experience with dwar. At any rate, the infirmarian had judged him fit enough to make room for more recent casualties.
"I'm your sneak," he said when she demanded to know why he was following her. "Just tell me who else I should sneak after and I'll get on with it. You know," he added impatiently, as if to someone slow witted. "Who's your worst enemy here? The Director? That Brandan captain?"
"Hawthorn? Sweet Trinity, why?"
He shot her a sly, side-long look. "They're in command, aren't they? But you should be. The Highlord's closest blood-kin, aren't you?"
"Yes, but . . . ."
Jame stopped, perplexed. If only custom, not law, had kept her subservient in the Women's Hall, she had no idea what her true status was. Graykin might even conceivably be right.
"Be that as it may, I can't do a better job just now than they can, so the question is moot. This is survival, Gray, not politics."
"Politics are survival," the Southron muttered, but she had already turned away.
At last the wind dropped, and then the waves. As quiet returned to the shaken keep, a stealthy rattling could be heard as all the salt water soaking walls, furnishings, and clothes changed back to glistening salt sand. Jame shook about a pound of it out of her boots, then went up to the observation deck with ounce and spy trailing after her.
The old scrollsman Index acknowledged her with a grunt as she joined him at the rail. They looked out over a featureless expanse of weirding mist level with the lowest rooms, faintly luminous under a predawn sky.
"Where do you suppose we are?" Jame asked.
"How should I know?" the old man snapped. "This whole junket wasn't my idea."
"But you think it was someone's?"
"Or something's. There are reasons for everything. Most people are just too lazy or stupid to figure them out. Which are you?"
"Uh . . . ignorant, I hope, rather than stupid. Afraid rather than lazy. About what you said in the library . . . what forces?"
"Among the Merikit? The Burnt Man, for one. Ha! Heard of him, have you?"
Jame had shivered, remembering nightmares of pursuit, a charred hand thrust up through campfire debris, a charcoal-smeared man laying fires in the wilderness. Out of her pocket she drew the cinder shaped like a phalange. Index snatched it.
"A Burnt Man's bone," he said gleefully, turning it over in his own bony fingers. "Bonfire, bone-fire. Tell you about that, shall I?"
"Please."
"On Midwinter's Day the Merikit burn the biggest log they can find, then bury whatever remains of it along with everyone's hearth ashes. 'Burying winter,' they call it, or 'burning the Burnt Man.' It's meant to hurry on spring, you see. Then these cinders start to turn up in their fireplaces. Not just finger bones; all different sorts. They collect 'em until they have about two hundred, a complete skeleton. Just before Summer Eve, fires are laid along the borders of the land which the Merikit claim, each with a 'bone' in it. During the festival, the chief strips naked and smears himself with charcoal to personify the Burnt Man. When he jumps over the first fire, the 'bone' in it bursts into flame. All the 'bones' in all the fires ignite at the same time. The shaman-elders claim that he passes over the whole lot simultaneously."
"This would be to draw death out of the ground, I suppose, in preparation for summer."
The old man made a face, not pleased to be anticipated. "For that, and something else besides."
"What?"
"Ha! Used up all your credit and then some, haven't you?" He pocketed the bone, looking smug. "Always keep count, my girl, and a question in reserve."
Damn. Index was a bastard and a crank, Jame decided, but not as much of the latter as his colleagues supposed. His nothing-by-chance theory paralleled her own determination to learn the rules of any game which she found herself playing. Like Index, she wanted facts, so as to understand cause and thus (hopefully) avoid being whacked on the head by effect. She had thought, after a year's research in Tai-tastigon, that she could safely dismiss all native godlings as mere by-blows of her own god. That still was true of the so-called New Pantheon. Clearly, though, Index was right that there were other powers on Rathillien of such the Kencyrath chose to remain ignorant. Tai-tastigon's Old Pantheon, now—had it evolved from something more native to this world and not limited to the Eastern Lands, something more . . . elemental?
The Burnt Man and the Earth Wife, fire and earth. The Tishooo and the River Snake, air and water.
Seek the Four, the God-voice had said.
No. It couldn't be that simple—and yet not really simple at all. If the Snake was a left-over bit of Perimal Darkling, as Cattila claimed, it wasn't really part of this world either. That catfish, though—what had spoken to her through it? And how was it that, according to Kindrie, the Arrin-ken had sought the Four presumably without success for centuries while she seemed to attract them like flies to honey? It was one thing to imagine oneself the center of the world, another to find that it might be true.
Rathillien is watching me, she thought, with a shiver. Why?
"As it happens," said Index, regarding her askance, "tonight is Summer Eve. Odd things always happen in the Riverland then, and nothing by chance, there or here. Keep track of where we stop on the way home. There'll be a pattern, you wait and see."
"Fine," said Jame wryly, looking down at the anonymous cloud-plain below them. "Just tell me where to look."
"There," said Graykin, pointing southward.
Emerging from the mist was a scrap of red cloth tied to a stick. At first Jame thought that someone was thrusting up this jaunty, improvised banner, but then she realized that rather than it rising, the mist around it was slowly sinking. An upright board appeared, to which the stick was fixed, then several bits of lumber haphazardly nailed together, and so on down, a rickety tower of debris.
"That," said Graykin proudly, "is the tallest structure in Hurlen. The tower waifs erected it last winter so that for once they could look down on everyone else. I . . . er . . . suggested it."
Jame grinned. How like Graykin, incurably ambitious.
"Hurlen?" Index demanded. "It can't be. We only snag on ruins."
So he had thought of that too.
"It's no ruin," Jame agreed, "but its island foundations are very, very old. Maybe that's the attraction."
Or maybe it was something else, not in the city but close by, one of the last places on Rathillien she had ever wanted to revisit, now shoved practically under her nose. Nothing happens by chance . . . .
"I left some things in Hurlen when M'lord's thugs snatched me," said Graykin. "Maybe the waifs still have them." Before anyone could stop him, he had turned and darted down the southwest corner stair.
Jame started after him.
Index grabbed her arm. "Where d'you think you're going, missy?"
"Sorry, no credit," she said, wriggled free, and ran.
III
As the weirding sank, it left behind the upper portions of the cliff upon which the scrollsmen's keep normally sat. Jame ran down the main stair with Jorin on her heels, through the restored levels of the wooden maze. She could hear Graykin's feet on the treads below, but he didn't answer her call. How stupid to risk the weirding for odd bits of gear. Bad enough that she was launched on what was probably a fool's errand. Bad enough, indeed.
Below, gray mist drifted across the stair, obscuring it. Jame descended with caution, blindly, through a clammy brume more like fog than weirding, on slippery steps. Through Jorin's senses, she smelled damp earth, wet wool, and fresh dung. A muffled bleating rose to meet them. Then they were under the cloud-ceiling, looking down into the soil-filled hollow of Grand Hurlen, normally a park, now packed wall to wall with unhappy sheep. So it had been last winter too, when the city islands had braced for a possible siege by the Waster Horde. This time, the flock must have been brought in to shelter from the storm.
Looking up, she could see nothing of the scholars' college. Presumably it was still there; but when the morning sun burned off this fog, instinct told her that it would be gone. Once again she would have to scramble not to be left behind, with much farther to go than Graykin did.
Hurlen consisted of some thirty islands at the confluence of the Silver and the Tardy, not far upstream from the Cataracts. Each isle, from Grand Hurlen down to a rock barely ten feet across, had been hollowed out millennia ago and built up ever since, into a community of towers linked by cat-walks over swift water. Normally, the town would be astir by now, from the elegant confectioners on the main island down to the rowdy bargees on the wharfs at Tardy-mouth. This morning, however, the citizenry was still behind closed doors, waiting for the last storm trace to blow over. Jame and Jorin thus had the passages and catwalks to themselves, likewise the bridge over the smoking Silver to its west bank.
Jame hesitated at the bridge's end. The Upper Meadow stretched out before her to the trees at the foot of the bluff on its far side. Wisps of river fog drifted across it wraith-like under a low, gray sky. The luminescence filtering through from above was still weirding-glow, but soon it would be morning light.
Get on with it, Jame told herself, dry-mouthed, and stepped to the ground.
It didn't open under her feet. So far, so good.
She and Jorin went down the sloping field, over the stone steps called the Lower Hurdles and into the Middle Meadow. No bird sang or hare grazed. How many animals the weirdingstrom must have swept away, who would never see home again. Patches of weirding glided past, northward bound. Perhaps, though, some wildlife would be able to weird-walk back, as so few men had been known to do.
Her foot slipped on the wet grass and her heart lurched; but it was only dew. The last time she had been here, the whole dark meadow had been greased and stinking with blood, like the floor of a slaughterhouse. Hard, now, to believe that so many had died on this gentle slope, where the Kencyr Host and the army of Karkinaroth had meet the vanguard of the Waster Horde; and terrible to think that, in a way, all that carnage had been incidental. Few realized that the decisive battle had taken place elsewhere, on a far more intimate scale.
They turned right into the trees. It had been almost this dark and silent that night, despite the battle raging so close by, as she had run through this forest with Kin-Slayer in one hand and the imu medallion in the other, pulling her on, toward the sound of someone calling her brother's name and then the crash of single combat.
Here was the foot of the bluff, as before, and here the remembered host tree. Pale green leaves flexed on its boughs, filling their veins with golden sap in preparation for the spring migration to their northern host. A dead branch cracked under Jame's foot. The leaves sprang into the air, blades flashing, and disappeared into the low clouds. Beyond the now bare tree, the cliff face curved inward to enclose the Heart of the Woods.
Jame paused on the hollow's threshold. It was larger than she remembered—an oval perhaps a hundred feet wide and somewhat longer. Waist high ferns carpeted its floor. Spring run-off had transformed the encircling cliffs into a hanging garden of columbine and lace frond, gilt-edged pink and trembling green. Through the vines which obscured the heights came the soft glow of diamantine. Blocks of that precious, crystalline stone crowned the bluff, each weathered into a crude, gap-mouthed imu face. Ancient power slept here, none too deeply.
Jame left Jorin crouching under the host tree, blind eyes wide with worry. That cat had good instincts. Someday she would learn to follow them.
Entering the Heart was like walking into a green sea. Dense, dripping ferns swallowed her to the waist as she waded through them, trying not to trip over their tough stems. Last winter she had entered crawling under these fronds toward the sound of her brother and Ardeth's rogue son Pereden locked in battle. Then through clearing mist she had seen the eight darkling changers who ringed the combatants. Pereden had only been the bait. They were the jaws of the trap which had been set for the Highlord from the very beginning.
The rustle of her passage was echoed by the resonant imus above.
Shhh, they hissed through their vines, as if in warning. Ssshhhh.
Pereden had been no match for her brother nor he for the changers, even with a sword reforged in Perimal Darkling, proof against the corrosive blood of its servants. Disarmed, he had been seized in a changer's crushing embrace. Jame remembered her scream, which the imus had caught and echoed from wall to wall, shattering Mother Ragga's clay medallion in her hand, striking down all who heard it.
Here was the center of the Heart and, to her surprise, a raw, burned patch. The charred fragments of a platform suggested a pyre. Among the debris were blackened bones—not the Burnt Man's this time, but spongy, like misshapen fungi feeding off the hollow's floor. Only the remains of a changer or a haunt could be so obscenely tenacious of life. Jame did a quick count in her mind: Five of the eight changers and the severed head of a sixth had been removed by Ardeth's people, but they had not immediately found the other three bodies. Of these, one had been truly dead, slain by the Ivory Knife. The second, driven mad by the imus' scream, must perforce have been consigned alive to this pyre, to leave behind these hungry bones. The third, decapitated by Kin-Slayer, had crawled away.
He might still be here.
Jame tried not to think about that. She had come to retrieve the imu medallion, or rather its clay shards, hoping to make peace with the Earth Wife. And there wasn't much time.
Now, where had she stood when it shattered? In the area since burned, she thought, or close to it. There wouldn't be much to find after two wet seasons, except for one possibility: back in Peshtar, the imu had acquired a mask of living skin by ripping it off of a changer's face. If the pieces were still so encased, they would at least be together. She ducked under the fronds to search, in dim light, beneath a second, lower level of plants. Her gloved hands, questing, found only root-laced soil. Dammit, this was impossible.
Shhhh . . . shhhh . . . .
She reared up through the leafy ceiling, heart pounding. The rustling hiss went on and on, from all sides. It was nothing, she told herself; the upper imus were simply echoing her. No need to conjure that image of a second searcher, drawn by vibrations in the earth, headless, mindless, crawling toward her under the ferns . . . .
