Seeker's Mask, page 38
" 'Shadow, by a shadow be exposed.' I felt that curse strike, sink in. Had to get away, contract be damned. Thirty-four years I waited for it to catch up with me, dreaming of red eyes, rising in the Guild. More rank, more tattoos . . . nothing is going to expose me. Then that dog-shit Ishtier sends word: The little bitch lived in hiding for years after our raid. Years! Says he'll tell the Grand Master that I lied, have me stripped of rank and tattoos . . . exposed . . . unless I do what he wants: steal a book (me, a thief!) and kill a sodding girl."
"So I didn't come under the terms of the original contract?"
The question jerked him back to the present. "Stupid cow. Had it down in blood how many to kill, didn't we? But I told the Grand Master that I wanted to go back anyway, to make a clean sweep. My turn to lead a blooding. My choice of target. Let the brats steal the book, kill the girl and all the red-eyed women they can find. No need to meet that cursing whore again, no need . . . ."
"But you have," said Brenwyr. "You son of a yellow bitch, who paid you to kill Aerulan?"
He knew where he was again, and who faced him. Bane brought him up short as he lunged forward. Jame slipped in front of the matriarch, drawing the Ivory Knife. The assassin strained inches from its point like a dog against its leash, attention fixed on Brenwyr.
"Curse me, will you?" he spat at her, spraying Jame with bloody froth. "Thirty-four years, snapping at my heels, ruining everything . . . me, the next grand master! Soil my hands with your sow's blood, should I? You should have been the brats' meat, but they failed. I won't!"
He strained forward, twisting to be free. The cuts opened red lips. Beneath, from collarbone to groin, muscles rotted by the Bane's touch tore like wet butcher's paper. Black intestines spilled out. His feet tangled in their coils, bursting them with a fecal stench. On his knees now, incredulous, he clutched at his abdomen as if somehow to cram back in its contents, but everything inside was tearing loose, falling. Then the aorta and femoral arteries ruptured. He collapsed, a look on his face of outraged disbelief. The red tide on the floor swelled twice with the failing heartbeat, then slowed to a spreading creep.
Out of the reeking cavity that had been his abdomen rose a miasma, a shadow. It stood over him, a mere thickening of the air against the windows' gray light. Then Bane raised his eyes. In their silver depths Jame saw mirrored her own pale face, her complicity. She looked away, back at the red ruin which lay at her feet.
" 'Shadow, by a shadow be exposed,' " she quoted in an unsteady voice. "That's exposed, all right."
Brenwyr made a choking sound. The next moment, she had thrust Jame aside and thrown open the door. Hawthorn and Brier Iron-thorn made way as she plunged blindly past them out into the hall, Aerulan's banner clutched to her breast.
Of course, the two Kendar would have waited beyond normal ear-shot to ensure family privacy, but not so far as to have missed the latter uproar. They entered in haste, probably expecting to find Jame reduced to chitterlings on the floor. Instead, there lay a complete stranger, completely disemboweled.
Hawthorn's sandy brows rose. "Lady?"
"Argh!" said Jame, snatched up her knapsack, and bolted out the door after Brenwyr, Jorin scrambling on her heels.
IV
The rain declined into a gray drizzle as fine as the heart of a cloud. Impossible to see from one side of the observation deck to the other, much less down to the ground. Mount Alban might be anywhere. Jame thought, though, that it had probably returned home at last—everything back where it belonged except her. Appropriate, that she couldn't even see her feet as she sat on the deck's waist-high wall, legs dangling in space. What use were feet, anyway, with no place left to run?
Huh. There are always options, she told herself. There have to be.
From behind the wall came a low, reproachful cry. Jorin was not happy.
Still, thought Jame, she must be at least as wet as he, and as cold. At least her hands didn't feel the chill: the Ivory Knife had numbed them as she idly turned it over and over. Soon it would start to rot her already tattered gloves.
Someone stood behind her.
Bane, she thought, and said, without turning:
"So. Just what did we gain by that little exercise below? You, of course, enjoyed yourself. As for me, well, I already knew that Ishtier was behind this last raid on Gothregor. He bragged about it to me at Wilden. Presumably, he learned about Tieri from the Randir Matriarch when they traded information. A nice lever to use on an ambitious guild master, caught in a lie."
At a guess, she thought, Rawneth didn't know that Tieri had survived until Adiraina was obliged to tell all the matriarchs after the poor girl's death. Some council meeting that must have been.
"As for the original massacre, would we have found out who contracted for it even if Brenwyr hadn't precipitated matters? Now, I'm not so sure. That wretched man would only have been an apprentice then. He probably wasn't told. Perhaps he learned later, as he rose in the Guild—but 'perhaps' is a thin excuse for a death like that, Aerulan's blood-price notwithstanding."
A death you chose for him, she almost said. Was I to blame for that?
But she hadn't stopped him, and now she couldn't hide behind his actions. Honor's Paradox was a pretty thing in theory; in practice, it bit. Nor did recent revelations free her from it. Damned or not, she couldn't turn her world upside down the way the priests had their college. Honor was still honor.
"Wait a minute," she said. "Honor and obedience . . . ."
She had fled from Bane all winter, but what had he done except answer her summons? Now, down in the infirmary, he had obeyed her again, if in the most gruesome manner he could contrive. That was his style, after all—but since when had obedience been?
"Perhaps . . . ." said Ashe behind her, "since you blood-bound him."
Jame's start almost dislodged her from her perch. Unconsciously, she had depended on Jorin's senses for warning. What a time for the bond to fail. But Ashe was Torisen's friend, she told herself—and her enemy, instinct told her. In Kindrie's case, though, "instinct" had turned out to be another word for "prejudice." Maybe so again.
"Do you read minds, singer . . . and what in Perimal's name d'you mean, I bound him? I'm no blood-binder!"
Even as she spoke, though, she remembered Bane's mocking whisper: "Blood binds," and felt her heart sink.
Could one be a binder and not know it? Her brother Torisen was, and didn't. The trait was said to run in particularly potent Shanir families. Like the Knorth. In the old days, before the Fall, it had allowed them to bind more Kendar more tightly than the mere mental discipline commonly practiced today. It had been the ruthless parallel to their god's binding of the Three People as a whole to his service, the antithesis of honor because it was said to abolish choice.
"I don't think," she said mildly, "that I can stand much more of this. When did I blood-bind Bane? How?"
"To answer . . . first questions first, I don't read minds. But some thoughts . . . are louder than others. Then too . . . haunt-sickness nearly killed you once. That forms . . . a bond. So did Bane's farewell kiss . . . in Tai-tastigon. Your blood in his mouth . . . his in yours. He was trying . . . to blood-bind you."
It was said to run in families. Of the three of them, only Bane had played with blood and knives enough to make such a discovery on his own.
Then the implication struck her.
"Why, you bastard!" she said, twisting about to search for his amused eyes in the shadows. "You wanted me any way you could get me, to the very last!"
The ghost of a chuckle answered her, from the opposite direction in which she had looked: . . . worth a try . . . .
"So the hunter got caught, uh? Like Tirandys with Torisen."
"Not quite," said Ashe. "Not between . . . two binders."
"Snakes with similar venom," Brenwyr had called destructive Shanir, with limited or at least unpredictable responses to each other. Perhaps that was why she hadn't seen any sign of binding in Bane at the Sirdan's Palace. Even now, how affected was he, really?
"Wait a minute," she said again. "How do you know these things, Ashe? 'Haunts know what concerns haunts,' you said once. Is Bane dead?"
"His state is . . . peculiar. Did you know . . . that the Brandan Matriarch thinks he is . . . a projection of the nemesis in you?"
"Brenwyr. How is she?"
"Better. She is a strong woman . . . for all that you've seen her . . . only at her worst. She should be stronger still . . . if Aerulan stays with her."
"We'll work something out," said Jame, absently.
Stronger? Maybe. But Ashe didn't know that Brenwyr thought she had killed her own mother. The Brandan had learned to live with that, apparently, but if Jame were to dredge up her guilt again . . . .
A shiver ran up Jame's spine. For the first time, she knew exactly what spot to touch, to destroy someone.
"You are a nemesis . . . aren't you?" said Ashe softly. "But are you . . . the definite article?"
"The Nemesis, Regonereth, That-Which-Destroys?" Jame held up the Ivory Knife, the Maiden's cold, white face on the pommel so like her own under the mask, before Kallystine's handiwork. "You tell me."
"I can't. Not . . . without tests."
The shiver nestled between Jame's shoulder blades, light as the touch of a phantom hand.
"You're thinking about pushing me off this wall, aren't you, haunt? Why?"
"Because . . . I mistrust your blood. Because . . . you have the darkling glamor."
Bred to darkling service . . . .
Could that have been in Gerridon's mind when he sent the Dream-weaver across the Barrier to Ganth—to breed a nemesis, perhaps the Nemesis, bound to serve him? The abyss within her plunged down and down, to the cold hall, to the banners of the dishonored dead . . . .
Ashe caught her by the collar. "Not . . . yet."
Jame found herself leaning forward against the other's grip, staring down into milky nothingness. Almost over the edge . . . .
She reared back, appalled (how far to fall? a hundred feet? a thousand?), swung her legs inward over the wall, and stepped on her knapsack. The Book within shifted under her weight. She staggered, an inadvertent lunge with the Ivory Knife that sent Ashe hastily backward. The singer's iron-tipped staff swung up on guard. Bane rose behind her, a thing of clotted mist and cold eyes, reaching.
"No!" said Jame.
Haunt and demon stood still, the former almost enfolded in the latter's arms. Ashe could have been said to hold her breath, if she'd had any.
Let him take her, Jame thought. A crumbling dead thing, half sunk in shadows already . . . how could a haunt be anything but her mortal foe? Then she remembered the dead in the Haunted Lands keep, rustling. Which one of her childhood friends had attacked her outside the keep's broken walls, its mind decayed to gray scum, its rotting teeth buried in her arm?
"Haunt-sickness nearly killed you once," Ashe had said.
. . . the darkness of infection under her skin, in her blood, festering, undeserved . . . .
Who was she to judge Ashe, anymore than Bane?
"Let her go," she said. "D'you hear me? Now."
If Bane didn't agree, at least he obeyed, melting back into the mist with the ghost of a whisper: . . . 's your pyre, lady . . . .
Ashe leaned on her staff, the hood overshadowing her haggard face. In a mortal woman, the slump of her shoulders would have looked much like vast weariness.
"Whatever he could have done to me . . . perhaps would have been only a mercy. That too."
Jame realized that she was still clutching the Ivory Knife, that she had almost used it on Ashe—inadvertently? The damn thing had killed as if by accident before. It always had been and would be avid for death.
"Dammit," she burst out, "how can I survive Honor's Paradox saddled with things I can't control?"
Ashe straightened slowly. "What . . . things?"
"This." Jame held up the Knife. "And this."
A kick slid the knapsack within the singer's reach. Ashe flipped back its cover with her staff and stared at the contents.
"Ancestors preserve us. Carried around like a . . . change of underwear." She looked up sharply. Light caught her sunken, death-clouded eyes. "And the third object of power . . . the Serpent-skin Cloak?"
"Last seen slithering back into the Master's house. It didn't seen to fancy my company."
"No," said Ashe, as if to herself. "It wouldn't. Argentiel never favors Regonereth, preserver . . . against destroyer. See here. This is dangerous. Without the Cloak, the other two are seriously out of balance. The Knife . . . is bad enough, but the Book . . . ! You don't know how to read it, of course . . . but if it should fall into the wrong hands . . . ."
Jame turned away. The wretched creature was calling her ignorant and irresponsible—with reason. The Book had gone astray three times since she had become its guardian. Ishtier, the Sirdan Theocandi, and Graykin had all possessed it briefly, the first two with the knowledge to make fearful use of it. And she had almost given it back to Ishtier, to save herself. As for her own misuse of its master runes, the less said, the better. If the Book and the Knife were intended for her, patently she didn't yet have the wisdom or strength to wield them responsibly.
Jame sighed. "If I could safely put them aside, I would."
"I think," said the haunt singer, "that I know . . . a way."
V
Ashe's way led down into the wooden labyrinth, almost to the lower hall.
At no level did Jame see any sign of weirding. Mount Alban must indeed have regained its foundation and encasing cliff face. So, at least, Index clearly believed, pattering past without seeing them, so eager to reclaim his beloved herb shed that he again scorned the slow-moving platform. Otherwise, the college rested except for the groan of settling timber. Most of its elderly inmates had at last put aside their experiments. Their voices murmured down the stair well, then faded as they retired to their diverse lodgings in the upper levels for a well-earned late afternoon nap.
Jame knew that she should also rest. Much longer without sleep would impair her judgment, if it hadn't already. Ashe's dark figure shambled ahead of her; behind crept Bane's shadow, almost but not quite treading on her own. This might have been the descent into some dark dream, except for the brush of Jorin's whiskers against her hand as the ounce trotted close at her side.
They came to an iron-bound door, set in the college's eastern wall, hard against the mountain face. The cool, dank breath of stone met them when Ashe unlocked it and darkness waited beyond. The haunt took a torch from a bracket and lit it, revealing a rough-hewn passage. Jame and Jorin followed the singer down it for some twenty feet before it ended at the edge of an abyss. Torchlight could reach neither the bottom, nor the top, nor even the far side of that great emptiness. The drip of water in its depths echoed upward, distorted.
"Is this what you brought me to see?" Jame asked.
No answer. No Ashe. Only her torch moving to the left, apparently along the sheer wall of the chasm. Then Jame saw a walkway carved out of the cavern's side and hurried to catch up with the light.
Sometimes the walk crept under low ceilings jagged with stalactites; sometimes it careened with a perilous slant along the chasm's sheer drop. Parts of it had been damaged by the recent tremors; parts, by quakes long past. A wonder, thought Jame, that the whole honey-combed mountain hadn't collapsed in on itself ages ago. Possibly Mount Alban's ironwood skeleton had forestalled that. The tips of her gloves began to soak through as she ran them along the wall to steady herself. The stones wept continuously, tears turning to drops of fire as they caught the torch light, tumbling past the black, crumpled forms of sleeping bats clustered in fissures. Blind, white crickets the size of her fist scuttled away from the brand's heat. What if there were trogs?
The light vanished.
Jame pressed back against the stone wall, blind in the sudden dark. The emptiness of the abyss seemed to tug at her. She remembered the chasm in the Ebonbane snow field, the terror of falling, the Arrin-Kens' suspended death sentence.
Dammit, no one is going to push me, if I don't want to jump . . . .
A few feet to the left, light glimmered. Jame edged toward it, and discovered a side-cave. Down three stone steps, there was a low-ceilinged antechamber cut from living rock and at its back, an iron door scabrous with rust. Ashe had laid down the torch and was struggling with a key. It turned, groaning, in the lock. She dragged opened the door.
Jame stopped at the foot of the steps. She didn't need Jorin's senses to hear the mad scurry within, as if of countless multi-segmented bodies seething away from the light. Through the crack, she saw a bare stretch of rough stone floor, the ruins of an iron chair, and a small iron table still half obscured. All the shadows' edges blurred with the torch's flare and furtive movement.
