I
The Riverland: 55th – 58th of Spring
The Riverland stretched out along the upper reaches of the Silver, bracketed by the Snowthorn Mountains—a rugged country, over two hundred miles long but scarcely ten across at its widest. The Silver was the frontier between those two giants of the Central Lands, Bashti and Hathir. At the height of their power, a thousand years ago, they had built rival fortresses up the length of the river from the Cataracts to Kithorn. Supplying the northern garrisons had always been difficult, however. After a massive earthquake disrupted the Silver from end to end, destroying all travel on it, they had given up and ceded their mountain keeps to the Kencyrath in exchange for military aid. Kencyr troops had served as mercenaries in the Central Lands ever since, the Riverland having proved too poor to support them either.
Meager strips of arable land surrounded Gothregor, most of them lying fallow. Thanks to Torisen's long absence with the bulk of his troops, it would be a thin harvest for the Knorth garrison and a worse winter. Black cattle grazed between the furrows. A bull stamped at the smell of strangers, but more to be feared were the horns of the cow suckling her calf behind him.
Beyond, the land was almost untouched except for the ancient River Road running along the Silver's east bank and the New Road occasionally glimpsed through trees on the west. To leave either was said to be dangerous. No reliable map existed of the reaches between the keeps—because all cartographers were incompetent, the lords said. The scrollsmen themselves simply couldn't agree on details, leaving some to complain in disgust that the terrain must differ for each traveler who crossed it.
Nonetheless, not wishing to be overtaken, two fugitives followed a hunter's path about a quarter of a mile up the mountain side with trees above them and a sweep of wild flowers below. So far, though, no one had passed by on the River Road, coming or going.
Odd, thought Jame. Maybe the priests weren't going to send their precious healer after all.
Morning slid into afternoon. The sun was in decline when they came to a brook plunging down through trees into the steep meadow below. While Jorin lapped avidly, Jame sat back on her heels with a sigh, feeling the pull of tired muscles. A winter of roaming halls had ill-prepared her to tackle mountains. Still, she should grow accustomed to it quickly. The same, alas, could not be said for Kallystine's handiwork. Gingerly, she touched her face. Beneath the mask, her cheek felt swollen and hot. At least it didn't hurt, the numbness of the assassin's touch having long since merged into her own pain control. It was hard, though, to keep the wits clear during such a sustained effort. Lulled by the stream's voice, she let her senses drift.
The day turned luminous around her. High overhead, snow blew off the western peaks in sparkling veils. Below, set against the darkness of pine forests, panicles of meadow grass floated in a golden shimmer. Down on the valley floor, birds flew up in a wave along the River Road, as if disturbed by someone passing by, northward bound. White wings gleamed in the upper air.
"Wah!" said Jorin, and dropped a half-eaten fish in her lap.
The sight reminded Jame that her own last meal had been sometime the previous day. However, she wasn't hungry. Damn Kallystine anyway, if this light-headedness was in part her fault. It was difficult to poison or infect a Highborn, but M'lady could be counted on to have tried her best.
Wait a minute. Those disturbed birds. Had someone passed by below?
She didn't think so, but couldn't be sure. At least, no one could have seen her as she knelt behind this waving screen of grass. Anyway, it was time to move on—higher up the slope, if she couldn't trust herself within sight of the road. She drank deep, splashing icy water on her flushed face below the mask, then rose and left the path for the trees above, Jorin bounding on ahead.
They found themselves in a forest of straight, pale trunks, floored with silver-edged ferns, roofed by spring foliage. Unseen doves were calling at a distance. A breath of air ruffled frond and leaf.
It was beautiful, Jame thought, but in an odd way it reminded her of the Anarchies or the Heart of the Woods at Hurlen—both areas of native power, intolerant of any alien presence. Marc had told her that his old home was much like that too—but Kithorn Keep lay nearly sixty leagues to the north, in Merikit hands. Here, she was still in the heart of the Riverland, which the Kencyr lords had claimed as their own for a thousand years.
Roofless and rootless . . . .
Now, there was a thought not without irony: suppose the Kencyrath itself had none too secure a grip on this land which it called home? After all, her people were alien to this world despite their long sojourn here. What if it saw them as invaders, as unwelcome as Perimal Darkling had been to the entire series of overlapping universes which made up the Chain of Creation? What had the Earth Wife of Peshtar called her and Marc?
"Stepchildren, if even that."
The loamy smell of the forest reminded her of Mother Ragga's low-beamed lodge and of the Earth Wife herself, that fat, old woman stuck together like a jackdaw's nest. On the floor of her house had been a map composed of dirt and rocks brought from all over Rathillien. By pressing her ear to this ridge or that hollow, she could hear what was happening on a mountain or in a valley half a world away. Listening to Marc's little bag of Kithorn soil, she had even heard the weightless feet of his long dead sister running across the keep's abandoned courtyard.
Kithorn . . . from whose ruined battlements Torisen had seen the Burnt Man hunt a kin-slayer with his pack of Burning Ones. Now some claimed to have heard the latter in the Riverland itself. Easy enough, safe within Kencyr walls, to dismiss them as bogies to frighten Merikit children. Not so here, under green leaves. Presumably, the Wilden priests should keep such things off Kencyr territory, including Old Man Tishooo from the south and weirding from the north. Patently, they had not.
This land is unguarded, Jame thought with a sudden shiver. Anything can happen here.
The light changed as the sun set. All shadows merged into a misty twilight, with a gilt glimmer edging each leaf. One by one, the birds fell silent. The wood seemed to hold its breath, then let it out in a long sigh as the wind passed between the trees. So like the Anarchies . . . but there she had been protected by the Earth Wife's imu medallion, which now lay shattered in the hollow at the Heart of the Woods near the Cataracts. A shiver slid down her spine. They were absolutely alone, and yet they were being watched.
Jorin's ears pricked. The faintest of sighs, somewhere above . . . .
Pale faces stared down at them through the foliage; white hands hovered as though in precarious benediction. The Knorth death banners hung there in rows on twig and bough, arranged just as they had been in the lower hall of the old keep. A breath of wind stirred them, so that for a moment the dead seemed to move restlessly in their tapestry webs. Then all was still again.
"Old Man, Old Man," said Jame softly, admiring the Tishooo's parting prank.
She could see, though, that for some of the banners this had been no joke: those too old for such a flight hung in shivering knots of warp threads, the identifying woof stripped away. Who would remember those Knorth dead now? Would Torisen know what names to chant on Autumn Eve to the empty places where their banners had hung?
"There are fewer of us left than I realized," said Jame to Jorin.
But as always she only looked for one, there, on the western side of this airy gallery. The familiar face smiled ruefully down at her through the fading light.
"Hello again, cousin," she said to it.
All the banners would eventually have to be rescued like so many treed cats, but only Aerulan was her immediate concern. How to get her down, though? Her banner hung on a small branch some thirty feet up, nothing between it and the ground but slick bark and air.
Hmmm . . . . Treed cats. Cats climbed trees. With claws.
Jame looked at her hands. She loathed even the sight of the ivory nails beneath those black gloves, the most obvious of her Shanir traits and the source of so much past grief. Moreover, she had been taught that to use them in any way whatsoever strengthened her bond to the third face of God: Regonereth, That-Which-Destroys. As when faced with a locked door at Gothregor, however, practicality won.
"Right," she said, stripping off her gloves and tucking them into her belt. "Here goes."
Soon she was well off the ground and climbing. How much farther? Tilting back her head to look, she saw Aerulan about ten feet above her . . . no, closer: the branch was bending, the banner's cord slipping.
"Aerulan, no!" she cried up at it. "Don't jump!"
The death banner plunged down on top of her. She scrabbled at its blinding folds with one hand, trying to hang on with the other, but the impact had jarred her loose. The next moment, she was slithering down the trunk with bark shredding under her nails, then in the air, falling, crashing through the silvery undergrowth, hitting the ground.
Darkness.
Well, that's it, thought Jame, I'm dead.
Then she realized that the tapestry still covered her face. Pushing it aside, she found herself nose to nose with an anxious ounce.
Rolled up, the banner made a long, surprisingly heavy bundle, which Jame slung across her back by its cord, shifting the food sack's strap so that the latter rode on her hip. She always seemed to be carrying around relics of the dead—although not as ostentatiously as her brother who, the previous fall, had ridden all the way to the Cataracts with the bones of Marc's sister in his saddlebag. Maybe no one could escape the past, but most people didn't get stuck with such tangible fragments of it. Still, this time Jame was glad of the company.
By now, dusk was falling. The air thickened with shadows which cloaked the color of the forest and hid whatever paths might run through it. With difficulty, Jame chewed a handful of dried fruit while Jorin grumbled over cheese rinds. Then she curled up among the roots of an oak and fell into a troubled sleep, the death banner spread over her for warmth, the ounce in her arms.
Dwar sleep would have been natural now. By fleeing the healer, she had tacitly decided to live with the face which Kallystine had given her. Still, every time the velvet dark yawned, she jerked back from it, half into the waking world. Confusedly, she remembered the last time she had fled injured, southward from her old home, the poison of a haunt's bite already at work in her savaged arm.
Poison: Had Kallystine's blade been tainted?
Betrayal: Who had sent the shadow assassins after her?
The moon rose, on the wane toward the quarter, faintly aglow through night mist in a cage of white branches. Dead wood against the lunar disc, white on white . . . she had dreamed of such a thing, sitting in her brother's chair. Darkness had flowed down those pale limbs, was there still, leaning against the trunk. No. That was only the last of the tree's bark. Where it had peeled away at eye level, however, two points of light glimmered mockingly.
Luminous moss, she told herself. It feeds on decay.
However, moss seldom has a face.
Out of the shadows, Bane smiled at her.
She knew she should be frightened, but Aerulan held her. Their eyes met over her head, Bane's silver-gray and Aerulan's too, like her own. It was, after all, a family trait. The shadow-man sketched an ironic bow, as if to say:
"If not now, later. I can wait."
The patches of light that had been his eyes seemed to blink. Then they fluttered away. Not moss. Moths.
"Later, what?" she cried after him. "Dammit, Bane, you're my b . . . ."
But the word died on her lips. She had evoked him by it before, but did he truly know that they were half-siblings? She had only guessed it herself during her last confrontation with Ishtier, after the mob had taken Bane off to the Mercy Seat.
"He trusted you!" she had shouted at the priest. "Because you brought his mother, the Gray Lord's mistress, down out of the Haunted Lands, because he thought—and you let him think—that you were his father. But Ganth Gray Lord was alive when you deserted him, wasn't he? You're betrayed not only Bane but your lord as well. Coward, lack-faith, renegade . . . ."
"And who are you to pronounce sentence on me?" the skull-faced priest had spat at her. "Thief, whore, outcast . . . ."
"The lord you betrayed was my father, the man consigned by you to torture on the Mercy Seat, my half-brother, and I—I am Jamethiel Priest's-Bane . . . ."
". . . WHO SHALL YET BE THY DOOM."
Somehow, for the second time, she had caused the God-voice which never lies to speak through the false priest's mouth, against his will. The boom of it filled her head. What had it called her?
"CHAMPION, FRATRICIDE, TYR-RIDAN."
. . . no, no, no . . . .
Then memory merged into nightmare as she slid uneasily back into sleep.
In the grip of his god, Ishtier had lost control of his temple. The power, set loose, spiralled outward, spreading fire and madness. Everything was burning—houses, people, the very air. In Judgment Square, the holocaust wind blew away piles of ash—all that remained of the mob that had stormed the Thieves' Guild palace in search of Dally's murderer. On the Mercy Seat sat a figure, charred black, the greasy smoke still seeping out of fissures in its skin. Its cinder-lump of a head was cocked as if listening.
From the hills about the immolated city came a yelping cry: "Wha, wha, wha?"
"HA!" boomed back the answer—and the thing on the Mercy Seat, the Burnt Man, rose to summon his pack of the burning damned so that they might hunt down one more to join their number, while the fratricide's blood trail was still fresh.
"No!" Jame gasped, waking with a start.
Aerulan's death banner, wrapped warmly about her, was covered with a dusting of snow which the wan sun had already begun to melt.
It was morning.