Jame woke the next morning, disoriented.
Surely it had all been a dream, and not a very good one at that. The Burnt Man and the Dark Judge, the Earth Wife and the creeping mountain, a green mare and a half-knit foxkin . . .
". . . quip . . ." said something furry under her chin, and snuggled down again with a sleepy kneading of claws.
All right. She would grant the foxkin.
And the mountain. It was rather hard to miss in that it now loomed overhead, taking up most of the northern sky. If it had looked any closer, she would have been under it. Around that ridiculous spine at its top it was smoking like a chimney, assuming anyone would want to burn brimstone and rotten eggs. The ground under her head rumbled steadily—rock's equivalent of a warning growl: Just you wait.
Then she remembered. The wait was almost over. This was the summer solstice. That also rattled her, coming as it did a day before she had expected it, again like a bad dream.
But I'm not ready.
A sudden blare of horns made her jump and the foxkin dig in its claws. Distorted by hill and mountain, the ruckus presumably came from the Merikit village hidden by a turn farther up the Silver. A cloud of ash-laden vapor drifted eastward toward it from the volcano's peak, some settling to darken the summit snow, some lifting back into the air to distort the sunrise before the prevailing north wind caught and pushed it south. The solar rim had just appeared between two eastern peaks, a bow of improbable sharp blue spiked with turquoise rays in turn edged with shimmering green. So began the longest day of the year, in a haze of smoke, a discordant blat of horns, and a stench of sulfur.
For a moment, Jame wished that she had acceded to Index's demand and brought the old scrollsman with her. He might have had some idea what she should expect, at least from the Merikit. She felt like someone on the edge of a great pageant, knowing that she had an important role in it and fretting that she wasn't there. At the same time, no one would thank her for stepping forward to claim her part. The Earth Wife had as good as told her to leave. If she had any sense, she would have saddled Chumley last night and ridden away as fast as his great, galumphing hooves would take her.
She rose and began in a distracted way to break up camp as the foxkin rummaged, chittering, in a saddle-bag, looking for breakfast. Over the past few days, Jame had forced herself to eat a bit of this or that—hard bread, a crust of cheese, some withered apples, even the squishy little sprout heads, although those had come back up faster than they had gone down. Not much remained. However, the foxkin's busy quest reminded her of the other bag of provisions, still sunk in the icy water. She waded out to retrieve it.
The contents were, of course, wet and cold, but also well-preserved. Jame extracted the roast chicken and sniffed at it suspiciously. To her surprise, it smelled good. Since when had anything done that? She tore off a leg and was about to take a gingerly nibble when the rathorn's head snaked over her shoulder and snatched it out of her hand.
Jame sprang to her feet, aghast. She tried to grab it back before he swallowed any bone splinters, but the colt backed away, raising his head out of reach like a horse refusing the bit. Then he spat out a mouthful of intact bones, gulped down the meat, and made another dive at the carcass. Both suddenly ravenous, they wrestled over it briefly before it tore apart. Jame tumbled over backward, clutching a pair of wings. The colt retreated, snorting, with the rest.
Gnawing on her prize, she watched him pin his to the ground with a dew-spur and frantically rasp flesh from bone with his tongue. The latter must be barbed, as with some large hunting cats. All this time, she had only needed the proper treat to break his stubborn resistance, but how could she have guessed that he had a passion for cooked meat? For that matter, it seemed to have surprised him as much as it had her; after all, there weren't many roast chickens running about loose in the wild.
The last scrap gone, he shoved his nose into the wet saddle back looking for more, then jerked it back with the foxkin clinging to his nasal horn. As he backed in a circle, trying to shake the creature loose, Jame gathered the chicken bones before Jorin could get at them and threw the lot into the stream. It too was beginning to steam and stink; ground water as well as run-off must contribute to it. She had retrieved the saddle-bag none too soon. Meanwhile, Chumley, the painted mare (where had she come from?), Bel, and Jorin were lined up, accidentally according to height, watching the rathorn's wild gyrations with wary fascination.
As the foxkin scuttled over his ivory mask, the colt's red eyes crossed, trying to follow it.
"Quip!" it said, popping up between his ears and sticking its sharp, inquisitive nose into one of them.
The colt squealed, reared, and went over backward, scattering his audience but not shaking his tormenter. He lurched back to his feet and careened off, bucking, across the meadow.
Meanwhile, Jame had dumped the contents of the bag onto the ground. Was there anything left to tempt the colt or, for that matter, herself? Ah. Some beef jerky and a few slabs of smoked ham, perfect for a picnic under an active volcano.
Before she could decide what to eat and what to offer, the sun lifted clear of the mountains and drums in the Merikit village greeted its ascent.
"BOOM-Wah-wah . . . BOOM-Wah-wah . . ."
The sound was approaching, gaining definition as the procession cleared intervening hills, but she couldn't see it from the meadow. Nor was there any reason why she had to, Jame told herself. She couldn't do any good although, given her nature, she might inadvertently do harm. Still, the drums called.
"BOOM-Wah-wah-BOOM!"
She stuffed a greasy slab of meat into a pocket and set off at a trot down the meadow. By the time she reached the bottom and dived among the ferns under the shadow of overhanging boughs, she was running. Before her, the stream leaping over a cliff into the torrent below. On the other side of the Silver's chasm rose sandstone bluffs, still deep in shadow, with the ruins of Kithorn on their summit. Could she snag her grapnel on the opposite heights and swing over? No. Too far. Then climb.
Of the trees offered to her, a black walnut some two hundred feet downstream loomed the tallest. She stripped off her gloves and tucked them into her belt, wishing for the first time that she had clawed toes as well as fingers. The corrugated bark gave good hand-holds, though, as did sturdy boughs. Her hands soon stank of the bruised leaves' distinctive, astringent scent. The trunk bifurcated, once, twice, and again into a limb stretching over the Silver. Jame crawled out on it.
A good thing I'm not afraid of heights, she thought, then froze as the branch dipped, groaning, under her weight. From below rose the thunder of water and mist that wrapped the tree in wet, slippery moss. She was a long, long way up.
At least from here she could see over the broken wall and tower, which her brother had accidentally burned down the previous fall. How strange, as it were, to be looking into Marc's past. After all, he had grown up in the shattered keep now spread out below her. Like a score of minor keeps dotting the edges of Rathillien, all but forgotten, Kithorn had kept watch on the Barrier with Perimal Darkling according to the Kencyrath's ancient trust. Yes, she had been here before, but too close really to see how small a place it was, how desperate its defiance against the dark must have been.
In the center of its inner court was a wide well-mouth, rimmed with serpentine marble, the relic of a time long before Hathir and Bashti had laid their arrogant claims to this ancient land. All the Riverland keeps were built on the sites of Bashtiri or Hathiri fortresses, but these in turn had been raised over the ruins of still older hill forts. However, none of the latter were more potent than this one.
From her perch, Jame couldn't quite see over the well's lip down to the ring of teeth within or the muscular red throat below that, but she knew they were there. After all, on Summer Eve she had been dropped down it and had had to climb back up, fast, for this was the mouth of the River Snake whose vast length ran beneath the Silver from one end to the other, whose restless stirrings could throw the land into convulsions.
Although Marc's lord had allowed the Merikit private access for their rituals, he had not known what they were doing until he had accidentally learned, in a year of violent quakes, that they meant to throw a hero down the well to fight the snake. This he had forbidden. Afraid that their world was about to be shaken apart, the Merikit had tried to take the garrison hostage to prevent its interference, but someone had panicked, ending with the slaughter of every Kencyr there except for Marc, who had been off by himself, hunting. And so the hills had been closed.
If the Earth Wife had spoken true, the terrible irony was that the Kencyr and the Merikit shared a charge to maintain the Barrier against Perimal Darkling here at the Riverland's northern end. Instead, the Merikit cut Kencyr throats and the Kencyr—at least in Lord Caineron's case—spread flayed Merikit skins on their floors as trophies of the hunt. What a waste on both sides, thought Jame, and what a potentially fatal error.
The drums stopped. A number of Merikit were already in the courtyard, hanging back around the edges, but all attention focused on the four bizarre, gnarled figures who now entered. Ash-smeared, with goat-udders swaying under their long, unbound hair, the shamans trotted around a square drawn in charcoal on the flagstones, at whose center was the well-mouth. Jame couldn't hear them over the water, but she knew that the bells strapped to their ankles were going chink-chink-chink in unison with each step. Interspersed between them were three other Merikit made up to represent Earth Wife, Falling Man, and the Eaten One—earth, air, and water. Last of all came fire, the Burnt Man, muffled in a cloak. That, undoubtedly, was the chief, Chingetai, pretending to be invisible until his time came to take center stage.
He entered the square with the rest of the Four, each at his own corner, and the shamans prepared to close it. That left two, the Favorite and the Challenger, the first in red britches, the second in green.
It seemed that Chingetai meant to enact the entire solstice fertility rite, just as if he hadn't already done so, prematurely, on Summer Eve, and gotten saddled with her, Jame, as the Earth Wife's current Favorite and his presumed heir. Jame recognized the substitute Favorite as the former Challenger—the one who had jammed the victor's ivy crown on her head and shoved her into the square in his place. He didn't look any happier in red than he had in green. His opponent also seemed reluctant to enter the square, only doing so when poked from behind with a spear.
Bloody, stupid Merikit, the Dark Judge had said. Think they can fool us, do they? Not again. Never again.
The hillmen had good reason to be nervous. In trying to change the rules, Chingetai was literally playing with fire, and with their lives.
Tied to the smithy door was a goat, who would hardly have looked so bored if it had known what role it was about to play. At least the loser wasn't going to share Sonny's fate, which had almost been Jame's own.
Now should come the closing of the square and the opening of sacred space, but nothing happened.
Of course, thought Jame. They were already in sacred space, or what passed for it this time around.
The shaman in Chingetai's corner—probably Tungit, Index's old friend—tried to build a bone-fire, but it kept falling apart. He spoke urgently over his shoulder to the chief, but a sharp gesture silenced him. Jame suddenly wondered if, like his dead son, Chingetai couldn't see the changed landscape around him. Some people were like that, psychically blind. Perhaps, to him, the smoking mountain was still a bump in the distance. Perhaps that would even save him if it exploded. She guessed, though, that both Tungit and the substitute Favorite could see all too clearly what loomed above, and that it made them very, very nervous.
When the Challenger glanced away for a moment, the Favorite snatched off his ivy crown, popped it onto the other's head, and threw himself on the ground. He had deliberately forfeited without a fight. Again.
A moment's stunned pause, and then Chingetai surged out of his corner, roaring with rage. The Burnt Man's bone-fire scattered before him.
WHOOP.
The earth leaped, throwing everyone off their feet.
Jame's tree shook as if hit solidly in the trunk by something massive. She scrabbled to maintain her grip in a hail of falling leaves and unripe nuts, slipped, and found herself hanging upside down by her knees, cap gone, hair tumbling free. Through the quivering canopy overhead, she saw snatches of the mountain top as it exploded. The spine disintegrated into a black, billowing cloud, out of which shot chunks of red-hot rock, trailing fire.
A trick of the wind brought a crash and a horrified shout from Kithorn. Twisting around, still upside-down, Jame saw that a boulder half the size of the smithy had smashed into the square beside the well. There was Red Britches, still curled up like a hedgehog, and Chingetai, and Tungit, but where was Green Britches, the new Favorite? Silly question. Smashed to bloody pulp under the boulder, of course. What very bad luck, or what very good aim.
A whistling sound made her look up.
"Oh schist," she said, as another flaming rock punched through the upper branches.
It struck the limb from which she dangled and smashed it. She fell, snatching at leaf and stem, twig and branch, until a sturdy bough seemed to leap up at her. It hit her in the side, or rather she hit it, and there she hung for a moment, stunned and breathless. A huge splash and a jet of steam up through the leaves marked the fireball's plunge into the river. Would she follow it? River or ground, broken neck or back?
Neither.
She slid off the bough and fell again, into someone's arms. For a moment, dazed, she looked up into the pale, hooded face of the man whom the Merikit called Mer-kanti.
"Run," he said, in a voice rusty with disuse, and dropped her.
More fiery stones fell, incandescent against a lime-green rain of leaves and unripe walnuts. Jame lurched to her feet, trying to gather her wits; even for her, that had been a jarring fall—three of them, in fact, in rapid succession. She limped toward the meadow, met by Jorin as he bounded toward her through the ferns, chirping in alarm.
They emerged down-meadow from the stream, to a sight that stopped her in her tracks. A huge, black cloud towered above the shattered mountain top. Vivid pink lightning snapped within it, its crack almost swallowed by the volcano's roar. As the cloud rose, flattened, and spread, the morning light dimmed to a murky yellow. Underfoot, the ground shuddered continuously.
Jorin pressed against her leg, his terror as clear as speech. Time to leave. Now.
"Not yet," she told him.
She set off slant-wise across the field, going as fast as she could with a hand pressed against a savage stitch in her side. Please Trinity she hadn't broken a rib. Or two. Or three. Something white drew her. There stood the Whinno-hir Bel-tairi, trembling, with one foot barely touching the ground. She must have tried to run with her over-grown hooves and pulled up lame. Yes, dammit. Drawing closer, Jame saw the bulge between knee and pastern of a bowed tendon.
A white-haired boy, stood at her head, trying to coax her forward. As Jame approached, he turned a stricken, desperate face toward her and mouthed a plea for help that came out as a half-strangled bleat.
Jame knelt and ran her hand down the mare's leg. It was already hot and swollen, unusable without the risk of permanent damage. Now what?
She shot a glance over her shoulder at the mountain. Perhaps the worst was over. However, black clouds still billowed from the ragged heights and sections of the upper slope were giving way in massive landslides of melted snow and mud. Trinity, Jame thought, watching two hundred foot tall ironwoods topple like pins. How clear and close it all seemed. If the Merikit village was anywhere near the foot of that monster, it would be swallowed whole, yet the Earth Wife had said that she could protect it. How?
The answer came from high up on the south-west flank of the volcano. There, a broad area bulged outward, then split open in an even greater explosion than the first. For a moment, molded in shifting chaos, Jame saw the Earth Wife's face, mouth hugely agape, vomiting fire. Ten seconds, fifteen . . .
BOOM!
The concussion made her stagger and Jorin skitter sideways, while mare and colt cried out as if with one terrified voice.
Gray and white debris boiled out of the cleft mountain and rolled down the face opposite the Merikit village with a rumble that shook the earth. Unlike the first eruption's storm cloud, this was a dirty, spreading avalanche. Both, however, seemed to move slowly—a trick, perhaps, of distance. After all, despite how close the mountain appeared, it had taken that massive concussion some time to reach her. Mother Ragga had turned the major eruption away from the Merikit. Perhaps those in the meadow were also safe, but somehow Jame doubted it. The Burnt Man had been thwarted once. He would not be again, if he could help it, especially not with the Dark Judge muttering vengeance in his charred stub of an ear.
"Bel can't run," she said to the boy, "but perhaps she can ride."
Understanding lit his face. In a moment, he had reverted to the equine—if, in fact, his quasi-human appearance had been real at all—and Bel sank down on the grass with a cry of pain. Jame caught her cold, white hands.
"Lady, please. You must."
She helped her rise, and was very relieved to find that she was as light for a woman as she had been for a horse. It still took an effort to lift her onto the rathorn's back against the savage throb in her side.
The colt lunged away as soon as he felt his rider's weight, but then he swerved to circle Jame. She felt his confusion as he cantered past, just out of reach. His instincts were screaming at him to run, to escape, to save what he valued most. Under that like bile lay long cherished hatred. If he couldn't kill his dam's slayer outright, he could leave her to her fate, except that the bond between them held as strongly as the chain that had trapped him in the riverbed. Under that in turn was something else, something new, furiously denied but still there.
No time to explore that now.
"Go," she told him. "Get m'lady away from here, as far as you can." When he hesitated, she told him again, unwilling to force her command on him but ready to do so if she must. "I'll find another way. Go!"
He tossed his head—Huh. If you insist—and was gone, a swift, pale shadow across the darkening grass.
Jame turned back to the stream. It surprised her how much she wished she had gone with Bel—not just to escape, either, but to race the wind on that splendid creature. To ride a rathorn might be madness, but what divine folly, worth any cost. Well, not quite. She feared that the colt's legs weren't strong enough to carry two, at least as far and fast as necessary. Besides, there by the water stood Chumley, whose great hooves could still surely take her to safety.
More rocks fell, trailing smoke and fire. Most were no bigger than a clenched fist, but some roaring past overhead were huge, and shattered on impact, leaving great craters in the soft ground. At least their fall now seemed random and they were easy to dodge if one kept an eye on their flight.
As she neared the river bank, Jame saw that Chumley wasn't half screened by grass as she had thought but by the painted mare. Mer-kanti stood between the two horses with a hand on each, steadying them. Several paces in front of him was a large, smoldering boulder, half-buried in the stream's gravel margin. Jame slowed, staring, then approached cautiously. The rock's crust was laced with fiery cracks, and some pieces had fallen away like unusually thick bits of shell from a gigantic, boiled egg. Out of one crack protruded a scrap of burnt material. In its filigree of ash, clearly preserved, were the loops and whorls of knit-work.
Jame fell to her knees beside the boulder, close enough to feel the waves of heat rolling off of it.
"Mother Ragga? Earth Wife? Are you in there?"
Another bit of lava-shell fell, hissing, onto the wet river pebbles. The thing was hollow. Inside, something moved, and coughed.
"Well, what are you waiting for?" said a thin, peevish voice. "Get me out of here."
Jame incautiously grabbed a patch of shell to pull it loose, and her gloves burst into fire. She plunged them into the steaming stream, then sat down abruptly on the stony bank with her scorched hands jammed into her arm-pits, and swore while Jorin slunk around her, chirping urgently. Dammit, that had been her last pair of gloves.
"What are you staring at?" she demanded over her shoulder. "Can't you help?"
The hooded man lifted a hand from Chumley's shoulder, then quickly dropped it again to stop the enormous horse from bolting. The message was clear: if he lost physical contact with either beast, instinct would throw it into blind flight. Presumably they needed both if he, Jame, and the Earth Wife all must flee.
". . . water . . . waaater . . ."
The odd, gargling voice came from the stream. There, dead trout floated past, silver bellies up, but one particularly large fish had caught on the rocks broadside to the swift current. Its back was steel blue speckled with black, its eyes already glazed and turning white as the water boiled it alive. From its gaping mouth came again that desperate plea:
". . . waaaater . . .!"
All right. A talking fish. This was, after all, still sacred space, home also to the Eaten One.
"I can't make the stream run clean again, or cool it down," Jame said, exasperated. "I can't save you. Sweet Trinity, who do you think I am?"
"Water." This time the croaked word came from Mer-kanti, and he nodded toward the lava-shell.
"Oh," said Jame.
She grabbed the empty saddle bag, dipped it into the stream, and dumped its contents on the hot shell, which exploded, knocking her over backward. She heard Chumley scream and through the steam saw him rear above her, looming higher than the mountain, it seemed, all flared nostrils, bared yellow teeth, and eyes rolling white with terror. Mer-kanti's thin, strong hand slid up the chestnut neck as far as it could reach and the gelding came down again with a snort, enormous hooves crashing to earth on either side of Jame's head. Belatedly, she yelped and scrambled clear.
The top had blown off the hollow rock, leaving a rough bowl full of something at first impossible to identify. Then a bony hand rose from a pale welter of flesh, clutched the edge of the bowl, and raised a thin arm drooping with loose skin. A face turned upward, and what a face. Sagging flesh hung off the skull except where eyes, nose, and mouth pinned it in place. Only by those ancient, gummy eyes did Jame recognize the Earth Wife's formerly plump features. The lava's heat had made her fat run like melting wax within her skin, settling to swell the lowest points. She stared at her wasted arm, festooned in rolls of hanging skin, and her toothless mouth gaped in a wail.
"Just look at me! Damn you, Burnie, was this fair? Was this right? Oh, bury me quick! I want to die!"
She dropped her face back into the folds of her flesh. Steeling herself, Jame reached in, rummaged about, and pulled the Earth Wife's head up again by its thin, gray braid.
"You can't die," she said. "You're Rathillien, or one quarter of it, anyway. Pull yourself together!"
"I'm blind!" Mother Ragga howled, and indeed at the moment she was: the tension on her hair had caused her skull to sink within its sack of skin and her eyes with it to the bottom of deep, indrawn dimples.
Jame could have shaken her, but was afraid that she would slosh.
Hot ash stung her face. It had started to descend unnoticed, as a fine dust growing rapidly thicker. This would be fall-out from the first eruption. The roiling clouds of the second still churned down the mountain side—closer, it seemed, and picking up speed.
"Listen," she said desperately. "You like my horse, don't you? I'll give him to you."
"Present?" said the sunken mouth, suddenly hopeful. Nothing, it seemed, could quell the Earth Wife's greed for gifts.
"Yes, but you've got to accept him now. Come on. D'you want . . . er . . . Burnie to win?"
She left go of the braid and Mother Ragga's skull rose to meet its features. She stared avidly at Chumley who stared back at her, ears pricked, fascinated by this strange creature with the peep-a-boo face.
"Nice horse," she crooned. "Big horse. My horse."
Mer-kanti slid his hand up to the gelding's withers and pressed down. Chumley sank ponderously to his knees.
When the Earth Wife rose and leaned, reaching eagerly for him, she looked like a skeleton wearing a half-collapsed tent of skin, and a small skeleton at that, coming barely to Jame's chin. It might have belonged to a child, weighed down by an old woman's mortality, anchored by it, too: liquefied fat had settled in her legs and feet, swelling them to grotesque proportions. Jame struggled to lift one leg from the lava shell. It squished in her grasp like a thin boot full of mud. Raising the White Lady had been hard. This was like trying to shift the foundations of the earth.
She heaved, the shell tipped, and Mother Ragga spilled out on top of her. Jame found herself buried under folds of hot, sweaty skin, inside of which anonymous organs oozed, gurgling. G'ah, what a smell, like all the old women in the world baked in a pie. She struggled to her knees. Sharp bones dug into her back. After an agonized, fumbling moment, the mass lifted and she could breathe again.
"Next time . . ." she gasped, staggering to her feet, "bring your own . . . damn mounting block."
Mother Ragga had indeed gotten one leg over Chumley's broad back. Now she was slowly toppling off the other side. Up came her near foot, a bloated bag of skin with thick, yellow nails half-sunken at one end. Jame grabbed it and pulled down to center the ungainly rider. As she did so, the sudden stab of sore ribs caught her in the side like a dagger thrust.
She found herself back on aching knees, trying to catch her breath. The world had gone gray for a moment, more likely for several. She thought she remembered Chumley lurching to his feet with a squeal and the Earth Wife's shriek trailing off into the distance. Yes, they were gone. Her claws were out and bloodied. Without meaning to, she had raked the gelding's side, trying to stop her fall. No wonder he had bolted.
So had the painted mare.
Jame looked up just in time to see her plunge away across the meadow with Mer-kanti on foot beside her, gripping her mane. How beautifully he moved, barely touching the grass, wind-blowing Senethari at its finest. Just before both vanished into the deepening twilight, he swung up onto the mare's back.
Jame shook off her dazed wonder. "Wait!" she cried, struggling to her feet. "Come back!"
But he too was gone.
The world was still gray, and growing darker by the second. Ash fell thickly now, like a hot, dirty snowstorm stinking of sulfur. Jame shrugged off her jacket and draped it over her head. The improvised hood protected her eyes as did the curtain of her loose hair, but it was now impossible to see more than a few feet ahead. Then for a dazzling moment lightning shattered the sky, followed by a crack of thunder. In the stunned blindness that followed, panic reached her through senses not her own.
"Jorin!" she cried, and without thinking took a deep breath of the ash-laden air to call again. When her convulsive coughing stopped, she reached out to the ounce with her senses, but there was no answer.
Lost. Gone.
That meant nothing, she told herself. The link between them often broke at the most inconvenient times. But what would he do in this thickening nightmare? Curl up in an ash bank and wait for her to find him or for the storm to pass? Small chance of the former, unless she tripped over him. If the latter, he would die. Worse was coming. She knew it.
It's all your fault.
Insidious whisper, borne on an uneasy, shifting wind. Who or what spoke, if not her own guilt?
You destroy everyone who trusts you, everyone whom you love.
"No," she said, denial ash-bitter in her mouth, parching her throat.
But what if it were true?
As if called, the dead came to her on the swirling breath of distant fire: Dally, dragging his flayed skin behind him; Prince Odallian, melting into a puddle of flesh corrupt through no sin of his own; Tirandys, smiling on his pyre. Ash they had all become, because of her. As ash they returned.
"If I become Regonereth, the Ivory Knife incarnate," she had told the Earth Wife, "I'll do what I was born to do, break what needs to be broken, and then break myself."
Then break and die.
"No," she said again. Blink hard, and they were gone. A trick of the mind. Besides, as much as she regretted their deaths, none of them had been her fault.
Or were they? Think.
Between the stab and crack of lightning, the gray world was unnervingly quiet, the ash a blanket that muffled the senses. In that dead silence there was far too much time for thought.
True. However good her intentions, around her things happened. Even her most innocent action could become a pebble cast into the pool of events, with ripples far beyond her control. Then too, not all her actions had been inconsequential in themselves, as witnessed by the string of ruins that she had left in her wake.
Still, buildings didn't necessarily fall down or burn up whenever she walked into them, as she had told Timmon.
No, just most of the time. And how much worse it would surely become as her god-cursed nature worked its way to the surface like a festering wound.
Then lance it and die. You know you are poison.
Why else had everyone abandoned her, not once but over and over again? Why should they stay, sensing what she was?
G'ah, she thought, giving herself a shake that was half a shudder. Horses bolt and death sweeps people away, whether they wish it to or not. Am I to blame for that?
For everything, breathed the gray wind. Someone must be.
That brought her up short. "Now wait just a minute."
No. Behold those who would judge you.
Lightning flickered across the sky, illuminating it in quick jabs that made the intervals of darkness between all the more intense. A shape formed within the dance of ash, gaining definition with each flash and drawing closer without seeming to move. It was slim and elegant with a pale face under an unruly shock of black hair threaded with white. Silver-gray eyes caught each lightning flare and held it in the dark that followed. Jame couldn't clearly see his hands, but she knew them to be as fine-boned as his face and gloved in a lacework of scars. Her sudden longing for their touch was so sharp that it hurt. Here at last was someone who, surely, would not abandon her.
Then he saw her, and turned away.
It's only a trick, part of her mind insisted, but it hurt too much to ignore.
"Torisen!" she cried after him. "Brother, don't leave me!"
"Why not?" He paused to answer her but askance, not meeting her eyes. "What can you be to me but my destruction?"
"But I love you!"
"Destruction begins with love. So our father taught us. So our mother taught him. So he was doomed to dust and bitter death, all honor spent. Would you likewise doom me?"
"No! Never! How can you say so?"
"Because I know what you are."
His features shifted, his voice as well, growing harsh with anger and bewildered pain.
"Filthy Shanir." Her father turned to glare at her, as gray with ash as his name. Death had hollowed his face to dry patches of skin clinging to the skull, but his silver eyes blazed. "How dare you look so much like your mother and not be her? Tricked. Betrayed. Poison fruit of a tainted tree, where is my sword, my ring, my life?"
Before that cry of pain Jame recoiled a step, but only one. Once his rage had thrown her into panic-stricken flight. It could still made her flinch. But she remembered what she had heard at Tentir about a cadet humiliated by his lord father, tormented by his lordan brother, driven out prey to passions at which she could only guess.
There was the crux. She didn't yet know what had happened to her father that night in the lordan's quarters. Perhaps neither did who or whatever now challenged her.
"Father," she said, "if that's who you are, tell me: that night, in that hot, stinking room, what broke you? I want to understand. Please tell me."
He stared at her. What flickered through those dead eyes—surprise, chagrin, anger? Then he threw back his head and howled. He didn't want to be understood, much less pitied. What was he, after all, without his mantle of rage? Already he was changing. Gone, the patched, gray coat worn thin by years of bitter exile and the prematurely gray hair; gone, that thin, haunted face.
Sleek and smug, Greshan smiled at her, and twitched straight his exquisitely embroidered jacket with a coarse hand.
Jame's fists clenched, nails biting palms. Was this how her father had learned to live with himself, by becoming the thing that had marred him?
"No," she said to that smirking face. "He made mistakes. He hurt a lot of people, including me. But he never put hot iron to the face of an innocent, nor tormented little boys for fun. He didn't become you."
The other's smile twisted and slipped. She wanted to rip it off his face altogether, and that foul coat off his back.
"What happened in your apartment, uncle?" she demanded, both pleased and annoyed that he seemed to drift away as she advanced on him. Lightning and darkness flickered back and forth to a muffled shout of thunder. "What did you do, or try to do, that left your Randir friend nailed to the floor with a knife through his guts, your servant in flames, and you fouling yourself in a corner? Brave man. Great warrior. Daddy's boy. How did you die, and why did your death cause a man like Hallik Hard-hand to turn the White Knife on himself? Answer, dammit!"
She tried to pin him with her rage, but he slipped away, dissolving into darkness.
Again came that flicker of doubt. What was all this anyway—guilt, hallucination, or something else altogether? Who was it that must have someone to blame, who kept trying to push her in directions she didn't want to go? That had happened before, at least twice recently.
Then she knew.
"All right," she told the chaos that seethed around her. "Enough fun and games. Show yourself."
Ahhhhhhh . . . breathed the storm, and the air grew ominously still. Murky yellow light filtered down from above, gray motes afloat in it. Ash no longer fell on Jame but circled in a dark storm wall of which she was the eye. Although it was still sweltering hot, she resumed her jacket and defiantly shook out her hair, the better to face whatever was coming to face her.
A huge shape moved in the shifting darkness, ill-defined by clots and flowing streamers of ash. Here was the bulge of a great shoulder; there, the cavernous socket of an eye; and all the time gigantic paws soundless in themselves kept pace with the shuddering earth.
Jame turned with it. This was the third time in recent days that she and the blind Arrin-ken had danced around each other, if one counted the first when she had been flat on her back, half dead from blood loss and scared half out of her wits. On some level, she was still afraid—how not, faced with such a creature?—but she was also angry.
Be angry, whispered her Shanir blood. Be strong. Be like your father.
"Now that I have your attention," she said, hardly knowing if fear or rage shook her voice, "I have a question. You are a judge. Trinity knows, the Kencyrath need justice. So why don't you go after bastards like Lord Caineron, who would corrupt all that we are, or that lying priest Ishtier? Where were you when the Witch of Wilden made her pact with the Shadow Guild to slaughter my family or when my dear uncle Greshan played his filthy game with Bel?"
A flame-savaged face turned toward her, baring its fangs.
The innocent are not my concern. She flinched involuntarily as his voice snarled in her head, like teeth scraping the inside of her skull. I judge only those of the Old Blood with destruction ripening in their veins, if their own kind are too cowardly to judge them first. Such as you. Dare you call yourself innocent? Dancer's daughter, you were born guilty.
"That I deny, nor am I yet damned."
Liar!
His terrible face snapped at her out of shifting shadows, itself a shadow but ravaged with such hunger that it seemed ready to devour itself for want of other food.
A surge of near-berserker rage made Jame stumble. Careful, she thought, fighting to regain both control and balance. Fall now and you fall forever . . . like your father. But you know who you are and what you may become.
"Liar?" she repeated as levelly as she could, hearing her voice quiver, catching it. Without thinking, she began to move in the kantirs of the Senethari, wind-blowing with a touch of water-flowing, gliding around the savage eddies of his anger. "That too I deny."
The dance imposed its own discipline. Move the hand just so to cup the wind. Dip and sway around an errant coil of ash as hot as thwarted vengeance, as cold as lost hope. Such self-devouring anger! Such despair! Here were fires that might consume the world, yet hunger for more. Ah, gently, gently. Feel the cool flow of water over scorched skin. Spill the wind through spread fingers and comb it with the heavy silk of black hair until all flowed smooth. There. Let it go.
"I am not like you, burnt cat, blind judge. I came from the darkness, but I do not embrace it. What is there in the Master's House but dust and ashes? You were burned there, so you make yourself a fire to burn others. Does their pain ease your own?"
Yes!
Such deadly vehemence, causing even ash to flare in fiery motes, but the dance threaded through it, catching him unawares. God's claws, this was dangerous. Don't think. Dance.
The great head, half-seen, swung . . . in assent, denial, confusion?
No. If I hurt, if I burn, it is to make me what I am, to do what I must. What other reason can there be?
"Must everything have a reason?"
YES! How else are we to endure such misery if in the end there is no one to punish for it?
What did one say to that? If you can't live with a run of bad luck, stop whining and die? Or was he right? Cause and effect. One understood that. But effect without cause? What if, after all, the world was nothing but random chance, without justice or sense? Better madness than to believe that.
Never mind. He was answering questions despite himself. Ask more.
"You say you judge those Shanir allied with the Third Face of God, That-Which-Destroys. Whom have you judged?"
Arrrr . . . not Greshan. He would have been my meat, ripe and rich, but his own kind judged him first.
Jame blinked. What?
The Brandan matriarch, Brenwyr, a maledight and matricide. Despite that, however, she is still innocent. Soon, soon may she fall. You have pushed her hard, little nemesis. Already she totters on the edge of her doom. The Witch, ah, the Witch. I will have her in the end, when she uncloaks and her defenses at last fall. But they are nothing, nothing, while the Master lives and so does his servant Keral, who burned out my eyes.
"There you name true evil," said Jame, and heard her voice begin to purr with the seductive power of the dance.
Ah. That was better. Her ribs no longer hurt, nor did she feel the weight of her own body. Doubts, too, began to fall away. Why have such power if not to use it?
"You name your failures, Lord Cat. What have you accomplished in this great crusade of yours? What are you but a stinking shadow to frighten children if you cannot strike at evil's root, there, under shadow's eaves?"
He howled and raked at his own flesh as if to punish it. The air thickened with flakes of charred skin.
Do you think I have not tried? Year after bitter year, I have prowled the Barrier, seeking a way through, but no Arrin-ken may enter Perimal Darkling until the coming of the Tyr-ridan, and that is never, because our god has forsaken us.
If he and the Kencyrath managed to kill off every destructive Shanir, they guaranteed that failure. Jame suspected she wasn't the first potential Nemesis, only quite possibly the last. She was about to say as much, but the great cat still spoke as if under bitter compulsion, and his words stunned her.
Once, only once, he came within reach. I felt him cross into this world, into a garden of white flowers, but by the time I arrived he was gone, leaving yet another marred innocent. I would have judged her, punished her, but she had license for what she did. She showed me. The one I should have judged, the one who had doomed her, was then long dead, and he her own father! All things end, light, hope, and life. All come to judgment—except the guilty.
Trinity.
The dance flew out of Jame's mind, and its power spiraled away. Up to that moment, she hadn't realized that she was air-borne on its wings.
Dammit, she thought, spitting out grass and trying to catch the breath that surprise and the ground had slammed out of her. I've got to stop falling from great heights. It's unhealthy. But what did he say?
Fire and ash roared up in a shape that towered above her, an awakened holocaust with flame raging in its jaws and the deep pits of its eyes.
Child of darkness, Dancer's daughter, you dare play your filthy games with ME?
Clearly, the dance had released him too. What had she been trying to do, anyway? Not reap his soul. Not quite. But the dark thrill remained of searching an Arrin-ken for weakness as for cracks of bitter honey in his soul, like Rawneth in Brenwyr's soul-image.
I could have shattered him, she thought, amazed, appalled. He almost came apart in my hands.
Did that, finally, make her guilty and thus subject to his judgment? But he hadn't broken, and neither had she.
The ash storm ignited into a hurricane of fire that ringed her, roaring with his voice. Green grass withered and kindled; strands of her hair, lifting, sizzled and stank. Her face stung. He would burn her alive through sheer mindless fury, justice be damned, and in doing so he would damn himself.
"Lord!" she cried. Heat had almost closed her throat. Was that feeble croak her voice? "A judgment! Am I fallen? If not, are the innocent now your meat?"
The great cat sprang at her, and the flames rose with him.
This is my pyre, she thought, staring up as the fiery wave crested above her. Incandescent orange and glowing red, laced with gold and a deep, luminous blue . . . How beautiful.
At the top of his leap, a blast of scorching wind caught him. He fought it, howling, but it shredded him. Jame fell flat on the ground, claws out to anchor her against the gale. What in Perimal's name . . .? In a lull of sorts, she raised her head and saw that the Arrin-ken had vanished, but what was coming in his place?
The wind had whipped away most of the low-level ash, leaving the newly-risen sun a pallid smudge in the sky. Movement to the north caught Jame's eye. Very, very close, boiling clouds from the second irruption rose from the valley that converged just below Kithorn with the Silver. The head of the avalanche had momentarily disappeared behind a high bluff, but now it rolled back into sight at the northern end of the meadow. Its vanguard appeared to be not clouds but huge, tumbling figures, gray, black and white, veined with fire. A raised, baleful head, the stump of a foot, a hand with charred stubs for fingers, reaching, then over it would go as another took its place and another after that in a seething, eager muddle.
"Wha, wha, wha?" came their questing cry.
Then they saw her.
"HA!"
Jame had leaped up. Their booming, triumphant shout and a second tempest blast struck her almost simultaneously, bowling her over. She rolled to her feet and fled, all but flying before the wind with the Burning Ones hot on her heels.
There was no way that she could outrun them. Belatedly, she remembered the cliff over the waterfall, high enough perhaps to take her above their reach, but that lay behind her now. When she turned her head to gauge how far, the wind smacked her hard in the face. Through a blur of stinging tears, she saw the Burnt Man's host roar across the stream, which exploded into stream at their touch.
Run, run, run . . .
Immediately in front of her stood a door, surrounded by the seared meadow, half sunk into it. Serpentine forms and gap-mouthed imus rioted over its wooden posts and lintel. It hadn't been there before.
Jame couldn't have stopped if she had wanted to. She crashed into it and it gave way, spilling her down a step onto the dirt floor of the Earth Wife's lodge. A large shape took up one entire end of the room—Chumley, whickering in alarm and hitting his head against the low ceiling. The room was full of animals, sleepily growling, squawking, and squeaking in protest at her sudden arrival. Jorin pounced her in delight before she had stopped rolling. On the other side of a smoky fire sat Mother Ragga herself, lumpen in her chair with the half-knit foxkin bright-eyed in her lap.
"Well?" she said, sounding petulant. "If you're staying, shut the door."
Jame did.