. . . drowning, tumbling over and over, battered, coughing on water, choking on air, arms and legs wrapped around the colt, her face pressed against his neck, white mane and black hair streaming together in her eyes . . .
. . . hang on hang on hang on . . .
Thick with debris, the river swept them on in the flash flood of its sudden release until, finally, the crest left them behind. The colt righted himself with a snort and struck out for the shore, but the water was still too deep and the current too swift.
Jame clung to him, her head spinning. No, she and the colt both were, around and around in a wide eddy. Here, sharp rocks like teeth rimmed the shore, gnashing the water to foam. The clear center of the vortex revealed stony terraces below, gaping like a vast, ribbed gullet. At the bottom, eyes as big as dinner plates reflected the moon, waiting.
It wasn't the River Snake, Jame thought, with intense if momentary relief. They hadn't yet reached that monster's abode beneath the Silver. However, Rathillien came in layers of reality. Either she had hit her head once too often or this was some new dimension of the Merikits' sacred space, from which the Four—water, air, earth, and fire: Eaten One, Falling Man, Earth Wife, and Burnt Man—ruled Rathillien in their singularly haphazard fashion.
"Great fish! Eaten One!" she cried to the maw beneath, sputtering through a face-full of spray. "What have we done to you? Spit us out!"
Bloop.
Monstrous bubbles set the water boiling around them and burst with the stink of fish breath.
Ah, why should I bother with you, who are no spawn of mine? Go your way. Go.
The whirlpool disgorged itself into a waterfall. They fell from what surely was an impossible height. Stranger still, an old man fell with them, his dingy-white beard whipping up over his shoulder. He was almost but not quite seated on a throne that fell just beneath him.
"Falling Man, South Wind, Tishooo!" Jame cried to him. "You helped me once at Gothregor. Will you again?"
"Pshaw." Needles clattered in gnarled hands. A knobby scarf laddered with dropped stitches flew upward and tried to wrap itself around his neck. He fended it off impatiently. "Knit one, purl two . . . I already did my part in blowing away the weirdingstrom. Leave me alone. I have a kingdom to rule."
"Tishooo, you're knitting your beard into your scarf."
"Well, how do you catch a dragon? Go away, girl. I'm busy."
They crashed into the pool at the base of the falls, into water throbbing with the pulse of its own descent, and were swept on. Jame could no longer feel her chilled hands or feet. Much more of this, she thought, not very clearly, and I'm off.
One last try.
"Earth Wife . . ."
WHAP.
They had tumbled into a tree's drooping limbs and one had slapped her smartly across the face. The colt snagged the bough with his curved horns. Half-dazed, still clinging to his back, she felt him swing around in the current, then clamber out of the water and up the bank. Wet, tangled roots that should have snared his hooves instead shifted, groaning, to provide footholds. At the top he stood for a moment with his head down, sides a heave and quivering legs astraddle. Then he gave himself a mighty shake.
Jame was lying on the ground before she realized that she had fallen off. Cracks of bright sky showed through a dark canopy of leaves overhead. She stared up at them, too tired to move or think. Between one blink and the next, or so it seemed, the light shifted and darkened toward a night fretted with stars. Time had passed. How much?
The air was very still, yet nearby leaves stirred.
"Talk, talk, talk." The words rustled and creaked as stiff leaves rubbed together. "Earth Wife this. Earth Wife that. Always wanting something. Always meddling. Errr-eeek. . . Wear down a mountain, you would, girl, or tear up a forest by the roots. And now this."
Jame rolled her head toward the voice. She lay not far from a large holly bush. Broad, glossy leaves edged with faintly luminous gold stirred fretfully. Some drew back, others bowed forward or curled into rolling lines. Light, shadow, and movement defined a crude, constantly changing face as large as the bush itself. It glowered down at Jame, spiked leaves rippling into a scowl.
"Said your blood was poison, girl, didn't I? What shall we do with you now, eh?"
Something has happened. Jame thought, fumbling through shards of memory. What?
She raised an unsteady hand to her head. The makeshift bandages had long since unraveled and been swept away by the current; the scratches, if one could call them that, oozed. She could see white tendons laid bare and veins narrowly missed. Trinity, had she cut that deep and never even felt it? A diagonal swathe of mingled fresh blood and dried was smeared across her forearm. Vaguely, she remembered hot breath on her wrist and a sense of bitter triumph not her own. A pause. Then had come the first, almost tentative rasp of a tongue against her bleeding flesh.
Sweet Trinity. He had tasted her blood.
Somewhere, someone was crying. It was a terrible sound, compounded of grief, rage, and a helpless, hopeless despair that shook her very soul.
"D'you want to see what you've done, you wretched, wicked girl?" hissed the leaves, rasping against each other in such agitation that spines snapped and flew in a stinging shower. "Then look."
Foliage peeled back layer by layer, opening not into the heart of the bush but into the dim, earth-floored lodge of Mother Ragga, the Earth Wife. Two figures huddled on the cold hearth, both white-haired but one a naked, shivering boy and the other a woman who held him in her arms. It was he who sobbed in deep wrenching gasps through pale lips stained with blood.
My blood, thought Jame.
The woman bent her head to draw the curtain of her hair over him and across the ruined half of her face. One dark, liquid eye regarded Jame askance.
Oh Kinzi-kin, child of darkness. How much worse than your uncle you have proved.
Then she froze, ears pricking through her tangled mane.
Jame heard it too.
Something was moving in the gathering dark. With it came a crackling and the stench of burnt fur.
"Now look what you've called up," hissed the Earth Wife, closing her branches like so many leafy arms. "As if we needed him!" Then she turned her face inward and disappeared.
Undergrowth and small trees snapped beneath a heavy tread, though the footfalls themselves were felt rather than heard as slow, deep shudders in the earth. Something huge prowled and growled through the darkening wood, circling, circling. Too weak to rise, Jame turned her head to catch glimpses as it passed, now a black shape defined by a hole in the star light, now by glowing cracks that opened and closed as it moved as if some terrible conflagration still smoldered deep within its flesh.
In the Ebonbane, by the chasm, it was muttering over and over. On the hearth, in the Master's hall . . .
Its words crackled and growled in Jame's mind, impatient, hungry. If fire had a voice, so it would have sounded. There was something else in it, though, something terrifyingly familiar, but her dazed brain refused to track down the memory.
An enormous head suddenly blotted out the sky above her, blunt, feline, and very, very close. The ears were charred stubs, the eyes caverns lit by deep, internal flames, the whole face a contorted mask of scar tissue.
Huh. It breathed waves of heat and greasy smoke in her face, then snuffled in her scent. You.
Jame had been expecting the Burnt Man who, Ancestors knew, was bad enough. But this was something else, or perhaps something more.
"Who . . . what are you?" she gasped, trying to cringe away.
The great head swung above her, scarred lips rippling back from white fangs bared half in grin, half in snarl. Flecks of bitter ash stung her face and clung to her lips, rank with the taste of ancient holocaust.
On the hearth, in the Master's hall, the changer Keral burned out my eyes. So many of my kin lay dead around me. So many. And all the while the Dream-weaver smiled and smiled as she danced out the souls of the fallen. But I did not fall. Dancer's daughter, in the Ebonbane, by the chasm, you escaped my judgment. But these mountains are mine.
Trinity, of course: it was the blind Arrin-ken whose presence she had sensed in her flight from Gothregor and up the Riverland, when the entire Snowthorn range had seemed like a crouching cat that held her under its paw.
Then, he had let her go. Now . . .
You have called on water, air, and earth. Now call on me. Do you seek judgment, Nemesis? Ask, and I will give it, blind justice for blind destruction. Ask!
The pressure to confess welled up like vomit. She had done so many bad things, or at least things for which she blamed herself. The great cat's will bore down on her, his hot breath scorching her face.
Confess. You know your guilt.
The Arrin-ken were the third of the three people who made up the Kencyrath. The Highborn ruled, the Kendar served, and the Arrin-ken kept the balance between them and their god—or had until millennia ago the great felines had withdrawn into the wilds of Rathillien for reasons still not entirely clear. However, they still sometimes used the so-called God-Voice to speak through unwilling Kencyr lips.
Oh. That was where she had last heard that terrible voice. In the subterranean Priests' College. Though the mouth of the renegade priest Ishtier.
Grief, pain, and rage had driven the great cat insane, but did that matter?
For us, the Arrin-ken Immalai had said, good is no less terrible than evil, nor were the two easily told apart. Who was to judge between them, if not those whom their ruthless god had chosen for that role? Least of all, who was she to question such a judgment?
In a moment, she would give this dark avenger what he wanted, and with it permission to burn her alive. Or would she become one of the Burnt Man's pack of the damned, the Burning Ones, with whom he hunted down those with the stench of guilt on them? An Arrin-ken's justice or the Burnt Man's? Kencyrath or Rathillien or both? It was all very confusing.
And yet again came the demand, singeing her eyelashes, rattling her to the depths of her being: All things end, light, hope, and life. This you know full well, darkling-born, none better. Why delay? Come to judgment. Come!
. . . get away get away get away . . .
She was still too weak to move, but her will to survive leaped out and seized that other mind now blood-bound to her own.
With a shriek, she/he/they burst out of the undergrowth. Before them, a monstrous darkness crouched, gloating, over its prey.
That puny thing is me? thought Jame.
Then the Arrin-ken raised its blind, smoldering face to them, and the stench of it rolled out in waves of heat that made the air quiver. The colt stopped short, appalled. Jame felt his hindquarters gather as if they were her own. The next moment, they had leaped over the great cat and were in wild flight down the riverbank.
. . . run run run . . .
The colt's terror at this sudden invasion of his soul fed on Jame's of that which even now might pursue her. Their flight was madness and mindless, an eternity in growing darkness of crashing into, through, and between things that raked their sides and snatched at their feet.
After what felt like a millennium, Jame began to gather her wits. So did the colt. She could feel his revulsion at her presence in his mind and his attempts to throw her off. If she had indeed been on his back, he would have been rid of her long ago, and she of him. As it was, she felt his hatred and rage trying to pry her loose even as she struggled to free herself from him, but they were bound, body and soul. How could one throw off oneself?
To ride a rathorn . . .
Trinity, who would have thought it would be like this?
Hush, she found herself crooning to the colt. Gently, gently. What good will it do to run yourself to death?
Good enough to kill you, came the fierce answer.
And so he would, if he could. She felt the air burning in his lungs and his heart pounding. So did her own, back where her body lay.
So this is blood-binding, she thought, sickened to the bottom of her solitary soul. No one should have such power over another being, and I don't even like being touched. Graykin was bad enough, but this . . . this is obscene. Am I too, for letting it happen?
Gorbel's moon-like face hung over her, his lower lip pendulous with dismay.
"What's wrong?" he said, as if from a great distance.
She clutched his arm, and he flinched at the bite of her nails. "Gorbel, for Trinity's sake, kill me and set us both free!"
"What?"
"Just do it! Daddy will love you for it."
"Huh. I may not be clever like some, but I'm not stupid. Caldane, Lord Caineron, loves no one but himself. We don't play for love in my house, only for power. And survival. You've made a fine mess of your wrists. Hold still while I bind them. I said, hold still!"
She barely saw his hand before it caught her in the face with a jolting slap.
"Damn," she heard him mutter as the world dimmed.
It felt as if they had been running forever, on and on and on.
Sounds came and went.
Jame was vaguely aware of hounds baying and someone (Gorbel?) shouting to attract the hunt's attention.
Time passed.
A thin, cool hand touched her brow, then held something to her lips, forcing her to drink. "I don't know what's wrong," said a voice which, surely, she should know. "These injuries are bad, but nothing that dwar sleep won't heal . . . if she lets it. This constant agitation is killing her."
You try to calm down, she wanted to say, with a bloody great cat breathing hot ash down your neck!
Yes, there had been a cat. A blind Arrin-ken. Hunting them. Somehow mixed up with the Merikits' Burning Man.
And there had been a Whinno-hir mare—Bel-tairi, the Shame of Tentir, whatever that meant. She had tried to stop their mad flight crying, Kinzi-kin! Nemesis! Do you want to kill him?
Herself, perhaps; the rathorn colt, no.
Then the blind Arrin-ken had erupted from the undergrowth, roaring, and the branches around him burst into flame. The colt jumped out of his skin, literally. One moment he was bucking like a lunatic, as if that could unseat an disembodied rider, the next he and Jame were looking down at his collapsed form. With its fierce animation gone, it had looked almost as pathetic as Jame had under the Arrin-ken's paw. And then the blind brute had come at them again, not to be fooled by mere flesh and blood.
The rathorn bolted.
. . . run, run, run . . .
But where were the mountains, and what were these hills that rose and fell, swooping on wings of withered grass under the leaden eye of the moon? In a hollow, a patch of bloated flowers burst with a carrion stench under the colt's hooves. He slowed, snorting with alarm.
Oh no, thought Jame.
There probably were ways to step straight from the banks of the Silver into the Haunted Lands, several hundred leagues to the east on the other side of the Ebonbane.
With luck, though, this was only a nightmare, or the onset of terminal delirium.
However, given past experience, it was just as likely that she had somehow stumbled into her brother's soulscape. Again.
From the crest of the next rise, they looked down on the desolate ruins of a keep, just as Jame knew they would. Every line of it was familiar to her, from the squat tower to the broken walls, from the dry moat to the cracked, moon-like solar aglow over the lord's hall. She and Tori had grown up here, and here their father had died.
Memories: helping Cook dig poached eyes out of boiled potatoes, carefully, because if they burst they poisoned the food; the randon Tigon so hungry for meat that he cut off and roasted his own toes; Winter refusing to teach her how to fight because she was not a girl but—that awful thing—a lady. Ha. She had pounced her brother after that, hoping to learn something from his reaction. Instead, she had only given him a bloody nose.
"Father says it's dangerous to teach you anything." Tori had said, snuffling into his sleeve. "Will the things you learn always hurt people?"
Jame had considered this, as she did again now, wondering if the answer had changed. "Maybe. As long as I learn, does it matter?"
"It does to me. I'm the one who usually gets hurt. Father says you're dangerous. He says you'll destroy me."
"That's silly. I love you."
"Father says destruction begins with love."
Love had destroyed their father, or rather the loss of it had with the gradual fading of their mother out of their lives and his increasingly desperate search for her.
Another memory, as sharp as a splinter of glass and as hard to forget: That day, she had played hide and seek with her brother ("You be Father, I'll be Mother"). There. Below. In the keep. And ended up dancing to entertain a warty faced death banner in the great hall.
At first, she had hadn't seen Father watching her. Then his husky voice had stopped her in mid-step.
"You've come back to me." He had looked half dazed with a relief so intense that it wiped twenty years off his face. "Oh, I knew you would. I knew. . ." But as he stepped hastily forward and saw her more clearly, the softness had run out of his expression like melting wax. "You."
I don't want to remember this, Jame thought, gripping the colt's tuft of a mane.
Simultaneously, she realized that she was not only in the rathorn's mind but on his back. Also, her hands had gone small and childish, without nails. The colt likewise had dwindled to a frightened foal, with mere bumps between his eyes and on his nose instead of those lethal horns.
Maybe this was a nightmare after all, and she was trapped in it. Perhaps this was a taste of the same terror that sometimes kept her brother awake for days on end rather than risk never being able to wake up again.
But fear only sharpened memory.
There in the hall, Father had stuck her hard across the face and slammed her back against the wall.
"You changeling, you impostor, how dare you be so much like her? How dare you! And yet, and yet, you are . . . so like." His hands rose as if by themselves to cup her bruised face. "So like. . ." he breathed, and kissed her, hard, on the mouth.
"My lord!" Winter stood in the hall doorway.
He had drawn back with a gasp. "No. No! I am not my brother!" And he smashed his fist into the stone wall next to Jame's head, speckling her face with his blood. Then he had raged out, shouting for his horse, hell-bent on storming the Master's House itself to reclaim his lost love.
Winter had knelt beside her. "All right, child?"
Jame remembered nodding, and not being able to stop until the randon touched her shoulder. Then Winter had risen but paused, briefly, looking down at her. "It isn't entirely his fault." she had said, and gone out to ready her lord's gaunt, gray stallion before someone got killed.
If not his fault, Jame had wondered as a child, then whose?
Now, the half-grown part of her mind caught the glimmer of an answer, and felt an unexpected stab of pity. From the miseries of his own childhood, her father had risen to the pinnacle of power, only to fall with the loss of the one thing he had ever wanted. Love.
And for all his flaws, he was not like his brother, although Greshan had shaped him in ways that she was only beginning to understand.
So, who is the monster in the maze?
The question sprang into her mind as if asked by someone else. She recognized the test it posed, and the importance of the answer. Who was her true enemy?
Trinity. There were too many possibilities. Master Gerridon, the Witch of Wilden, Ishtier, Caldane, Torisen . . .
No, she told herself fiercely. Not him. Never.
Here and now, or rather down there in the keep that had become her brother's soul-image, the enemy was a mad, muttering voice behind a locked door.
"Tori!" she cried. Both she and the foal flinched as her shrill, child's voice cracked the leaden silence. Every nerve in her body cried, Shut up, you fool! Run! Hide! But she tried again, louder. "Daddy's boy! Come out, come out, wherever you are!"
The rathorn shook as the sky rumbled, or perhaps it was the earth. The sour wind shifted, this way and that, and the grass rustled like so many ribbons of dry snake skin.
Someone stood in the keep door, a thin, dark-haired boy her own age, give or take a minute either way. A white wolver pup crouched at his heels, just out of reach. The twins stared at each other. It was then. It was now. All they had had together lay between them, close enough to touch and yet years out of reach. The wind blew hard and the grass cringed, beginning to whine.
"Tori, get out!" she cried down at him, into the teeth of the rising gale, across the abyss of time. Could he hear her at all? "Go somewhere, anywhere, as far from here as you can!"
The wind veered again, now pushing at her back. It brought with it an all too familiar smell of must and dust and ancient sickness. She knew what was there before she turned to face it, but heart and stomach still lurched at the sight.
The Master's House loomed over them. Mist obscured its lower stories but the upper leaned as if poised to topple. Ashes of the dead blew in veils off its many roofs and gables, clouding the moon, thickening the air. Darkness stared out of a thousand broken windows and the reek of dull hunger exhaled—HHAAAaaaa . . .—through a hundred gaping doors. From the shadows within came the grinding of stone on stone as at a glacial pace the whole massive pile edged forward, for this was only the blind head of the House. The rest of it stretched back into Perimal Darkling and beyond, from fallen world to world, down the Chain of Creation. All those rooms of darkness drove it forward with a vast, inhuman momentum while its shadow rolled before it over the hills, and the grass wailed under it.
Jame gulped down nausea. If Tori's soul-image was bad, hers was worse. In the House was a hall with a green-shot floor. There, the woven eyes of the dead and the damned stared down from the walls at a sleeper huddled on the cold hearth, on a pile of Arrin-ken pelts.
And when the Master, finally, enters his hall, what then, Dancer's daughter? Will you rise and fight, or open your arms to him as you so nearly did once before? For what else, after all, were you bred?
Ah, but that time had not yet come.
"Hush," Jame breathed to the foal, her hand on his quivering neck. An ear flickered back to listen, then forward again, then back. "Hush. The Master is still in his house, the monster in its maze. In the end, either he will come out to meet us or we will go in after him. There. Aren't you glad now that you tried a taste of my blood?"
Perhaps she had spoken too soon.
A clot of darkness detached itself from the shadow of the House and rushed toward them over the swelling hills, glimpsed and gone and glimpsed again. Part of the rumble separated into pounding hooves.
"Oh no," said Jame.
The Master's gray stallion burst over the next rise and roared down on them. Its gaping jaws spewed foam and its steel-shod hooves threw up divots of turf that turned to dust in midair. The foal shrieked for his mother and bolted.
They dodged away among the rolling hills, the foal running in blind panic, Jame trying to keep him in the hollows, out of sight. This was hide and seek with a vengeance. It was also that buried childhood nightmare only recently unearthed by her abysmal attempts at horsemanship.
If you fail the Master, we'll just have to feed you to Iron-jaw, won't we?
She remembered the gray stallion charging her, ears back and teeth bared, when he had been only a horse and she only a child who had strayed into what might laughingly be called his pasture, given the noisome herbage of the Haunted Lands. Another time, Tori had dared her to ride him and, of course, she had been thrown, hard. There. That was the origin of the sick fear that cuddled her stomach to this day every time she put foot to stirrup and herself at the mercy of such a strong, unpredictable creature. Then her father had ridden the stallion to death and the changer Keral had claimed the haunt that it had become for his master.
The foal skidded around a mound, his hind legs nearly flying out from under him, and they swept down on a lone, white-haired figure on foot.
"Stop, or you'll kill yourselves!" he shouted, then jumped out of the way as they hurtled past.
"If we stop," Jame yelled back over her shoulder, "we'll die!"
Around another curve and there he was again, directly in their path with his thin hands up, terrified but determined. "I'm not joking!"
"Neither are we!"
The foal ran into him, stumbled, and fell head over heels. Thrown clear, Jame scrambled to her feet and spat out a mouthful of wriggling grass before it could take root.
The cause of their fall sat holding his head and groaning. Belatedly, Jame recognized her cousin Kindrie Soul-walker. Of course. That was the other voice she had heard in her sleep or delirium or whatever this was, and those were the thin, sensitive hands that had held a cup to her lips. Now he had entered the soulscape as a healer to help her, and been trampled for his pains.
"Sorry," she said to him, then "Run!"
The ground was thrumming like a vast drum. Over the crest came Iron-jaw and hurtled down on them, roaring. Kindrie stared, aghast, then abruptly vanished. The foal shied, squealing, directly into the stallion's path and went down under his hooves. The haunt wheeled and went for him, teeth bared. If he caught the young rathorn, he would shake him to death or snap his neck.
Jame leaped at the haunt's head. She meant to go for his eyes with her claws; however, her fingertips were still without nails. Instead, she found herself clinging to the stallion's neck, his hot breath reeking in her ear. One dead, white eye rolled toward her. He reared and tossed his head, trying to throw her off. If she fell, he would surely kill her.
So, she thought with an odd detachment, do I die a helpless child or, finally, accept what I am and grow up?
Her body seemed to decide for her. Skin split and bloody claws erupted from the tips of her fingers, just as they had when she had turned seven and faced her father over the dying Kendar Winter. She wrapped her legs around the haunt's neck. When he reared again, swinging her upward into his face, she drove her claws into that white marble of an eye. It burst, spraying an arc of black blood that clotted as it hit the air. Up he went and over, crashing down on his back. Jame sprang clear and ran. She heard him thrashing behind her, trying to roll away from such agony.
So some haunts can still feel pain, observed part of her mind. Interesting.
Another part, the one that wanted to live, thought only . . . run run run . . . and so she did, on and on and on, too scared to realize that she ran alone.