V
The Tishooo had grown in strength over the past hour. Now it was snatching up slates, casting down chimneys, and generally wreaking gleeful havoc in the upper air.
Jame skimmed along on its wings. She had come out on the south side of the Coman near its eastern end and had turned right because a gust of wind had pushed her that way. Before her lay a series of interconnected courtyards leading toward the Randir compound and the Forecourt. It suited her to be outside, where the Tishooo blew too hard for her pursuers to try their shadow-casting tricks. Let the bastards catch her if they could. Over the wind's roar she heard the brazen bellow of a horn as someone finally sounded the alarm. With luck, it was the Brandan captain, the only person she had met all night who might know what she should do next.
The Randir loomed before her. She dodged right into the covered passageway that separated it from the western end of the Coman. Ahead lay the Forecourt, with the old keep in its midst and the Brandan compound on the far side. Running feet echoed in the passage behind her. Then she was out under open sky again, racing over grass. Ahead, the Brandan horn boomed again, at last drawing together its scattered garrison. Presumably, the captured assassin was also on his reluctant way to that muster.
In that, however, she was wrong. As if by thinking of him she had conjured up his ghost, the blond boy's pale face rose in the arcade, disembodied. White ribbons fluttered down—the last of the petticoat bonds. Then he was over the low wall and coming at her. How in Perimal's name had he gotten loose? She had relieved him of both his knife and hood, although not managing to hang on to either herself. That blade in his hand—not steel: ivory. Sweet Trinity, he'd had it all the time, before she had known that it was stolen and had thought to search him for it: The Ivory Knife, whose least scratch meant death.
Jame swerved wildly, and her foot slipped on the new grass.
The blond assassin loomed over her. This close, in bright moon light, she could see him as a flaw in the rushing air, the Knife white in his mere-gloved hand. He had her cold—but he had stopped to stare in disbelief at the Knife, then at her unmasked face, then back.
Jame kicked his feet out from under him. As he fell, the Knife flew out of his grasp to land a dozen feet away. Of the three aspects carved on its pommel—hag, lady, and maiden—the third smiled back at her with a face so nearly her own. Under it, the grass began to die.
She scrambled after it, but it seemed to leap out from under her hand, kicked by a mere-shod foot. Damnation. At least one of the other ten had overtaken her. She rolled to her feet to find herself ringed by black shadows on the pewter gray grass.
At least, when still attached, their shadows were no more dangerous than her own; but there were eleven of them now, ten armed. She thought they would try to make a quick end of her. After all, this was no private place, and the alarm continued to blare out overhead. But it had been too long and frustrating a hunt to end so tamely.
"Mousie," breathed one, and darted at her.
She didn't see his knife flash until the last moment. Cloth ripped. Damn again. She'd forgotten that she wasn't wearing her knife-fighter's d'hen with its reinforced sleeve. Air wavered as the boy dodged back.
"Mousie," whispered someone behind her.
Whipping around, she felt a line like fire across her shoulder and saw the fabric darken. First blood.
"Mousie, mousie, mou . . . ."
Jame turned toward that last mocking whisper, caught the assassin's knife hand as it flashed past, and jerked him into a fire-leaping elbow strike to the chin.
"Tag!" she said.
His head snapped back and his hood flew off. The next moment he was airborne as she used earth-moving leverage to hurl him into the colleague who had just started his run at her.
Cat-and-mouse became free-for-all. The assassins hadn't trained for this sort of scuffle and couldn't see each other any better than Jame could, to judge from the curses and collisions. The latter as much as wind-blowing and water-flowing helped her to glide through their confusion. Nonetheless, she knew that her luck was wearing as thin as Aerulan's dress. The Ivory Knife had disappeared, picked up or kicked into deeper shadows. With or without it, they must try to kill her quickly now. The horn had stopped blowing. Each garrison would secure its own compound before converging here, but they would come soon.
Then she saw dark figures in the Randir arcade, silent and motionless, watching her. How long had they been there? Why didn't they help? Who were they, anyway—Randir, or some other house guard answering the alarm, struck dumb at the sight of the mad Knorth capering in the moonlight? How their eyes glowed. Couldn't they at least see the heads of the two assassins whom she had unmasked, bobbing about apparently on their own? Maybe, if she could snatch off a few more hoods . . . .
At that moment, the Tishooo intervened. It had been careening around the courtyard, indiscriminately trying to brain people with flying shingles; but suddenly it indulged in a violent updraft, taking with it torn grass, bits of Aerulan's dress, and nine hoods.
In the moment of windless calm which followed, Jame saw three shadows streak across the grass toward her. She leaped back—not quite in time. One of them clipped the shadow cast by her left arm, and her whole left side went numb. She staggered, but it was the assassins who fell as their shadows collided on the spot where hers had lain. Other boys, darting forward, tripped over their mere-clad colleagues and went down in a heap of swearing heads. Turning, fighting to keep her balance, Jame found herself face to face with the only assassin between her and the keep door. Stripped of his anonymity along with his hood, he looked very young and very scared.
"Move!" she snapped at him.
He moved.
She lurched past, threw open the door and pitched head first into the dark interior. The Tishooo, returning belatedly with a roar, slammed the door shut behind her. She pulled herself to her feet, hanging onto the door handle. Extending a nail, she fumbled about inside the ancient lock. The bolt creaked home just as a weight hit the outer panels. The door was made of well-seasoned ironwood, proof even against a battering ram, but the lock was old and rusty. It wouldn't hold long.
It wouldn't have to, thought Jame, leaning against the door. Surely now those guards in the arcade would realize that something was wrong and come to the rescue.
The door shuddered again and again. Something inside the lock groaned. Dammit, where were . . . .
They weren't coming.
Jame knew that as suddenly and surely as she had that the assassins had been told exactly where to find her room. She kept forgetting that someone in Gothregor wanted her dead.
So. There wouldn't be any rescue after all. Well, there seldom was.
She pushed herself away from the door, groped for a candle, and lit it. Stumbling, she crossed the death banner hall to the door which would have opened into the inner ward, except that it was secured by a lock which would take more time than she had to pick. She made for the northwest spiral stair, saluting Aerulan as she passed.
Her left foot hit the risers as she climbed, but she could only tell because she kept tripping. She was tempted to slam her left hand into the wall to try to wake it. The Bashtiri had made her a prisoner in her own body, as surely as if she had been stricken with apoplexy.
Below, the door crashed open.
On all fours, Jame scrambled up into the third story chamber of the High Council. Ah, this was no use: they could run her down with ease now, however high she climbed.
Don't panic, she told herself, pausing to gulp down air. Think. If they have tricks, so do you, and knowledge, and the will to use it.
The judgment of the Arrin-ken came back to her: Child, you have perverted the Great Dance and misused a master rune, a darkling in training if not in blood, reckless to the point of madness . . . .
"Shut up," she muttered, hearing the slur in her voice from a half-frozen mouth, hating it. "Shut up, shut up! You ran away, left us all to make our own judgments. I'll do whatever I damn well have to, to survive."
And yet . . . and yet . . . they had given her an idea.
In the middle of the chamber stood a massive ebony table. Jame dripped wax on the western end of it and fixed the burning candle upright in it. Then she clambered up to stand on the smooth, black surface. Those gorgeous stained glass windows soared up thirty feet all around her with moonlight streaming through them. Three of the walls displayed the crests of the nine major houses, separated by stone tracery. On the fourth, facing eastward, was a map of Rathillien, jewel-colored even in this light, if with subtler hues.
A thin breath of air had followed her up the stair to ruffle the candle's flame, but now the breeze abruptly died. They had closed the lower door. Stealthy footsteps sounded in the stairwell behind her, climbing slowly, cautiously. Jame smiled. At least she had finally taught them to respect their prey, and so bought herself a few precious minutes.
She cleared her mind.
What she needed was a certain master rune; but no one could carry any of them for long in memory and she didn't have the Book Bound in Pale Leather for reference. She thought, though, that given its nature she might be able to reconstruct this one from the Senetha's more esoteric kantirs. If only she could have danced them . . . but not in this lead-footed state. Instead, she stood there, filling her mind with their airy movements as her body would have traced them, waiting for the rune to emerge from the dance.
A face floated up the dark stairwell, looking first wary, then confused. Whatever the assassin had expected, it wasn't this motionless figure standing on a table with its back to him, black against the amber gold of the map's Southern Wastes. Nonetheless, he ascended to the hall. Ten pale faces came hesitantly after him, splitting to right and left, blocking the entrances to all four towers, surrounding their prey. A moment's uncertainty followed, with a rapid exchange of glances.
This wasn't the hunt which they had been led to expect—a soft kill like the others here thirty-odd years ago and the glory of closing the Guild's second oldest contract. Through all their minds were running other stories, told of the only open contract older than this, which also involved a Kencyr Highborn, if of a different house. How many of their fellows had vanished utterly over the years while trying to close that account? The Guild shouldn't have accepted a second contract against the Kencyrath, however lucrative. It would never take a third.
Then they tensed, thinking that their prey had begun to move; but it was only her hair, stirring slightly about her face and shoulders. Loose strands of it flexed in the air. The braid started to unravel, as if combed out by invisible fingers. A slashed sleeve suddenly flared wide. The ribbons of her skirt began to plait themselves about her bare legs. It looked for all the world as if she stood in a rising wind . . . but at the other end of the table, the candle flame rose without a tremor in the still air.
The blond boy made a strange sound in his throat, turned, and bolted down the stair. They heard his feet slap on the steps in panic-stricken flight.
With a sharp gesture, the oldest stopped the others from following. He had to signal twice more, though, before their shadow-souls detached and flowed—across the floor, up the table legs, onto its top . . . .
Jame didn't notice. Her mind was full of a great wind, on which her soul balanced precariously like a fledgling on the storm blast. To this stage the dance had come. She hadn't yet the skill to pursue it further, or the immediate need. The master rune had come to her piece by piece in patterns drawn on the air. She wouldn't be able to hold it long, though. Her thoughts plummeted to earth. She found that all this time she had been staring blindly up at the stained glass map, at the spot where the artisan had depicted a storm of black wings over the mountains of Nekrien. How appropriate: the Witch King of that southern land was said to have ruled the winds for more than a thousand years. Still looking up at the map, she brought the rune hovering to the tip of her tongue, wrapped in the words which would unbind it. Then, because the last time, in the Ebonbane, the result had exceeded expectations, she barely whispered:
"Wind, blow."
There was a frozen moment, then a gigantic inhalation outside. The windows exploded, jewel-bright slivers scything outward. Ten wisps of darkness were snatched off the table and sucked, wailing, into the night. Inside, ten bodies crumpled to the floor. The Tishooo kept inhaling. Jame dropped flat and clung to the table top as half of the roof disappeared with a death shriek of timber. The wind roared up through the gap. Shapes like great, soft-winged bats swarmed up the four stairwells from the lower hall, pale faces flashing past, white hands flailing, as the death banners took flight. The air was full of them, caught in the swift, upward spiral of the wind, a storm of ancestors ascending.
One of the ancient tapestries had snagged on the corner of the table, held by a disintegrating weft while its upper warp strings flew bare. They seemed to be weaving into a new shape in midair, or rather weaving around something. String ligaments gave form to the shadow of an arm, a shoulder, a face with the deep glimmer of eyes. Bane looked at her through the web of another man's death. The threads of his mouth shifted. He was smiling at her.
Then his head tilted back as he followed the other banners' flight, and the smile died.
These were the honorable dead. He had staked everything on death restoring his own lost honor, squandered in games of cruelty and despair. That gamble might have won, if not for Ishtier's treachery and Jame's bungling. How much did he blame her for that failure? Why was he here now, if not to collect his own blood-price? Some of the threads had worked free of the corner. They streamed up between shadow fingers as he reached for her.
"Don't!" she cried.
A moment later, without thinking, she had grabbed for that phantom hand as the rest of the anchoring weft gave way, but caught only a tangle of flying threads. The thing that had given them shape was gone, sucked upward with the rest of the dead into the beating darkness.
Beating?
Jame twisted to peer upward. Her own loosened, flying hair half-obscured her view, but through it she thought she saw the air above the keep full of vast black wings flailing against the moon. In their midst, far up, an old man fell and fell, never to reach the ground.
Then the man, the wings, and the wind all vanished, as suddenly as if some door in heaven had slammed shut.
Jame lay still for a moment, hardly believing that it was over—but what in Perimal's name had she seen, there, above the keep? It must have been an afterimage, brought on by staring too long and hard at what flew above the mountains of Nekrien on the map.
Oh, hell. The map. The windows. She sat up to gaze in dismay at the broken traceries, empty of glass, and the hole in the roof, with a few banners snagged on the shattered beams.
Tori was not going to be pleased.
Then she heard voices below, speaking softly in Kens. At last, the guard had begun to take an interest . . . unless these were the strangers with glowing eyes whom she had seen in the Randir arcade, come to see how the Shadow Guild had fared. Jame slid hastily down off the table, noting that her foot could almost feel the floor although otherwise her left side remained numb. She located the first assassin by falling over him. He was dead. So were the other nine. That surprised her: she had thought that they couldn't die when separated from their shadow-souls, but this separation had apparently been so abrupt that not one of them had survived the shock. Worse, none of them had the Ivory Knife. Also missing was the blond boy.
A Brandan cadet paused on the final turning of the stair, clearly startled to find the missing Knorth in such a place. More guards of her house came up behind her. Their captain staggered up the steps after them, leaning heavily on a cadet.
"Some fox hunt," she muttered, as disconcerted guards stumbled about the chamber, tripping over invisible bodies. Then she caught sight of Jame's bare face, and quickly looked away.
All winter, people had been lecturing Jame about the impropriety of going unmasked, but she had never really understood how they felt—until now.
"What took you so long?" she demanded, her voice sharp with sudden embarrassment.
The cadet had helped her captain over to the ebony table and left her leaning against it. "Lady," she said, still not looking at Jame, speaking very low, "it was a right mess. That maid you sent for help managed to knock herself silly falling downstairs. It took me nearly an hour to haul myself down to the guardroom."
"And then you had them sound the alarm."
"Yes. Trinity!" Her gaze, turning upward, had seen the moon through shattered rafters. "D'you always have this drastic an effect on architecture?"
"Fairly often," said Jame with a sigh, remembering the state in which she had left Tai-tastigon and a certain palace in Karkinaroth. "But what about Brenwyr? Why didn't she raise the alarm much earlier?"
The captain didn't know. Jame remembered her last glimpse of the Iron Matriarch, standing motionless over the captured assassin, that strange red light simmering in her eyes. Had Brenwyr moved at all until the alarm had broken in on her, just before Jame's arrival in the Forecourt?
An irate voice sounded in the lower hall, then in the echoing throat of the southeast stairwell. The Caineron captain. Damn.
"Look," Jame said hastily to the Brandan. "Are you sure there are always thirteen assassins in a casting? I only count one dead in the nursery, ten here, and a twelfth who, I think, ran away."
"For a blooding, the thirteenth would be a guild master." This time she did look at Jame, sharply. "D'you mean to say that he's still on the loose?"
The Caineron captain stalked into the hall, her cadet guards trailing cautiously after her. "So, lady, here you are at last," she said to Jame. "The next time you're scared by a little wind, try to show some gumption instead of scuttling off."
Jame opened her mouth, then shut it again.
The captain had already turned away with a startled oath, having just seen the pile of naked, white bodies which the Brandan cadets had begun to collect and strip.
Let her think what she liked. Explanations would hardly help.
Suddenly, Jame felt the hair prickle on her scalp. Brenwyr stood at the mouth of the northwest tower, staring at her with eyes as red as a cat's by fire light. Sweet Trinity, now what?
"Pardon, lady," someone mumbled at her elbow.
The next moment, two Caineron cadets had seized her arms, in the manner of hastily securing a fugitive. The reason was Kallystine, who had just entered the chamber.
Her guard must think it worth their lives to let me slip away again, Jame thought, watching Caldane's daughter sweep across the floor toward her as if they were the only two people in the room.
Instead of her usual daring mask, Kallystine wore a heavy veil, which her rapid progress flattened against her hidden features. Jame stared. Those lines of cheek and chin of which M'lady was so proud—could they possibly be . . . sagging?
"Lady," she blurted out, "what's happened to your face?"
Kallystine slapped her.
Jame saw the blow coming, with something in the other's hand that flashed cold in the moon light; but the cadets' grip held her fast, so that she could neither block nor dodge. It struck her numb left cheek, hard enough to jolt back her head. She heard the others gasp. Belatedly, the cadets released her and backed away, looking shocked.
"There," said Kallystine's honeyed voice, the smile audible in it. "Now you also know what it feels like, to lose face."
Jame touched her cheek. There was still no sensation in it, but to her finger tips it felt . . . odd, like a mask of soft leather with a great tear in it. Through the tear, she felt something hard and wet. Then she knew. That flash in Kallystine's hand had been the blade of a razor-ring. The wetness was blood; the hard thing under her finger tips, her own cheekbone, laid bare.
As that afternoon a slap had made her berserker blood flare, so it did now. Jame fought it. Her nails were out, sheathed in the palms of her clenched fists, and everyone was backing away. Not long ago, she had spoken a master rune. Now she again felt the power rise, seeking a half-remembered form—something from the last pages of the Book, to rip apart the senses of all who heard it, to rupture ears and burst eyes. It clawed its way up her throat like a live thing as she struggled to master it, half-succeeding at the last moment. Still, it burst out with terrible, wordless force.
The first thing the Kendar heard afterward, when their ears stopped ringing, was Kallystine's babbled complaints and orders. When their eyes had cleared sufficiently and the worst nosebleeds had been checked, a Caineron guard bundled her lady off to her quarters with far less ceremony than she was accustomed to.
The Brandan Matriarch sat on a step with her head on her hands.
The Knorth had disappeared.
"Oh no," said a voice among the remaining Caineron. "Not again."