IV
"Put more wood on the fire," Karidia ordered.
"Lady, t-there isn't any more," stammered a voice behind her.
The Coman Matriarch whipped about, skirt belling, to glare at the group huddled around the fire-pit in the middle of the great hall. Forty-eight frightened eyes stared back at her—the entire Highborn population of the Coman compound, most under the age of thirteen.
"You," she snapped at one of the few adults. "Go fetch a chair to break up."
"Y-yes, Matriarch," quavered the woman, but didn't move.
All the room's furniture was pushed up against its walls, well beyond the faltering ring of fire light. The first duty might be obedience, but no maxim had the strength to drive anyone here back into the dark tonight.
Karidia snorted, but didn't insist. She wasn't about to admit that nothing would get her to cross that stretch of shadowy floor either.
Even less would she acknowledge any flaw in her handling of the night's events. When word had come that the Ardeth Shanir foresaw imminent danger, Karidia had refused to listen. She knew how the Ardeth Matriarch schemed to make those precious freaks of hers seem important. Hadn't Adiraina even claimed that all matriarchs and lords must be Shanir, even if most of the latter, incredibly, didn't know it? How dare she make reference to Karidia's own mock-berserk fits in adolescence? When the Coman captain had protested Karidia's dismissal of the Shanir alarm, she had told the Kendar to go help the Ardeth herself, if she was so concerned, and to take her precious guard with her. Now.
Reluctantly, the Kendar had obeyed.
The disturbance had started almost immediately afterward. First, there had been that unearthly racket in the hallways—shouts, whistles, wails, and a sound like a dozen cats being boiled alive. Then the pounding had begun on doors. Objects flew. People were literally thrown out of bed. And in the midst of this were the shadows, sliding over floors and walls, terrifying the inmates, throwing those whom they touched into convulsions. In short order, the entire Highborn segment of the household had been roused, driven out of their rooms and herded into the great hall, from which they were now afraid to stir.
"Listen," said someone by the fire-pit. "It's stopped."
The uproar had been continuing in far corners of the compound, moving systematically from room to room, seeming to grow more violent as the invaders had run out of places to search. Now, however, the loudest sound was the wind as it threw itself against the hall's shuttered windows and rattled the smoke-trap above the pit. It had been considered bad luck to shut out the Tishooo, Karidia remembered, ever since the Knorth ladies had died in their snug quarters while the wind howled futilely outside.
A fine time to think of that.
"Look!" said the same voice again.
Three shadows had come into the hall. They lay on the floor, man-shaped, but cast by no readily seen forms. Karidia quickly circled to stand between them and the women huddled by the fire. She thought she could almost hear the intruders, almost understand their whispered council, although she would furiously have denied that it was her own Shanir gift which allowed her to do so.
"That settles it," one of them was saying in Bashti. "She isn't here. Now what?"
"Go on hunting. D'you want to tell the Guild Master that we failed?"
All three shadows on the floor wavered, as if touched with sudden cold.
" 's not fair!" burst out the third angrily. "A place this farking large, the prey not where we were told to look, nor yet this farking book we were supposed to steal . . . and then the Master's got to screw up even our blooding by limiting who else we can kill. You're in dead trouble for scragging that cadet, mate."
"Damned trick of the light," muttered the first. "Her eyes did look red."
"And she was too farking young, meat-brain. We were told to look for a matriarch."
"It's got to be a test of wits," the second protested. "Any eye will be red, if you pop it out properly."
"Farking right," said the third. "My turn to try."
His shadow slid over the flags toward Karidia. She stood her ground, glaring.
"You foulmouthed little boy," she said.
The ghost of a chuckle answered her—or was it only the rustle of dust on stone? The wind continued futilely to batter against the shutters, but here in the still hall motes of grit were rattling out of corners, out of cracks. First to its knees, then to its feet, a form compounded of dust and darkness rose between stalker and prey. It cast no shadow. Rather, it was a shadow, upright, aware. It turned toward Karidia. Why, the impudent thing: it was bowing to her.
Something long and limp twitched feebly in its hand. Turning back to the three intruders, it held the thing up . . . by the hair. It was like the flayed skin of a shadow, all essence sucked out of it but for that last flicker which kept it, horribly, alive. Its throat had been cut. Its captor slid a tenebrous finger into this slash and slowly drew it downward, ripping. The shadow-skin jerked. A long sliver of it came away in the other's hand and was tossed into the dying flames of the fire-pit, where it kindled with a thin shriek and was consumed. In that sudden blaze of light, Karidia saw the three assassins clearly, transfixed. Obviously, it had never occurred to them that someday they might encounter shadows more frightening than their own.
For some time, Karidia had been dimly aware of a disturbance going on more or less under her feet. She was still surprised, though, when the flagstone on which she stood began to tilt and she was obliged to hop quickly to one side. The counterbalanced stone overturned with a crash as a ragged figure scrambled up the stair beneath from the cellar.
"Shit on a half-shell," it said, stopping dead on the top step and regarding the shadow-man with dismay. "It must be 'later.'"
The shadowy figure dropped what was left of its victim on the floor (where that agonized face, sinking into the grain, was afterward found to have left a permanent image), bowed again as if to say, "The stage is yours," and melted back into the cracks.
By now, Karidia had recognized the errant Knorth—not by her face, which the matriarch had never before seen naked, but by the gloves and tattered remains of Aerulan's gown.
"Well!" she said, in a tone of high, moral outrage.
The Knorth gave her a quick, rueful look.
Footsteps rang on the steps behind her. She bolted up into the hall, turned, and kicked the first of her pursuers back into the arms of his fellows.
The three assassins above converged on her.
Not since the Fall had it been customary to teach Highborn women the Senethar; consequently, the Coman by the fire had never before seen one of their own fight, much less against invisible opponents. The effect was both startling and spectacular, a death-dance tracing its kantirs across the floor between firelight and shadow, fierce and beautiful. On the hall's far side, the Knorth lunged for the door and threw it open. The wind swept in around her in a triumphant whoop.
"Alli-alli-all-after-me!" she cried over her shoulder, and plunged out into the night, closely pursued.
The younger girls burst into applause.
"Quiet!" snapped Karidia. She stalked over and slammed the door.
No mask. Not even the vestige of one.
"Shameless," the Coman Matriarch muttered to herself. "Utterly shameless."