III
The moment he had spoken, Kindrie felt the heat in his face chill with dismay. Anonymity had been his last defense. But then he had felt perilously off balance ever since encountering this masked stranger, in a way which had nothing to do with subsequently being tossed into a tree, swept across a river, and dumped in a bog. His first impression that he had run into the Highlord was, of course, ridiculous. Somewhere, though, he had met this peculiar boy before, under alarming circumstances.
"Kindrie," the other repeated, as if he too were fishing for memories. "I've heard of you. You were with the Kencyr Host at the Cataracts. What in Perimal's name are you doing here?"
"Sinking."
"Uh . . . yes." The stranger glanced down at the rock on which he stood. "So am I, if not quite as fast. Look, I think I can pull you up here with me, and then it's an easy jump to the far side. Give me your hand."
Kindrie hesitated. Under the split tips of the other's glove, something glowered bone-white. Reluctantly, he reached out, and was caught in a grip like sheathed ice.
The shock of it made his senses lurch.
Cold. So cold . . . and dark.
Overhead, not the canopy of sumac leaves but far, far up, a fire-broken roof with verdigris lightning lacing the sky's greater darkness above. Beneath, a vast hall, paved with stone whose green veins pulsed cold with each sullen, silent flash. Death banners lined its walls, rank after rank. Threadbare hands clutched together tattered clothing; slashed, disintegrating faces regarded him slyly askance, snickering against cold stone.
Got you now, healer . . . .
Ancestors preserve him. The touch of those bare finger tips had plunged him straight into the other's soul . . . but he hadn't the strength to deal with an image so complex, so foul. He hadn't the courage. He must get out. Now.
The flash of something white . . . .
CRACK.
He found himself lying on the ground a dozen feet beyond the willow's wake, staring up at cracks of twilight between black oak leaves. His jaw throbbed. The stranger was staring at him, fists still clenched but forgotten.
"Sweet Trinity. I can't have hit you that hard."
Kindrie struggled up on an elbow. He saw that he had not only been knocked across a clearing but clean out of his boots, which the sumac had kept.
"You didn't," he said confusedly. "That is, you did, but . . . ." How to explain the tremendous power of that soul-image to protect itself, or his own involuntary response, as though to a lightning strike? "God, you've got strong defences!"
"I should hope so. Touch me like that again, priest, and I'll knock you half way to the Cataracts!"
"I am not a priest . . . and what's the matter with your face?"
They stared at each other.
"You're the healer that the Priests' College was sending to Gothregor."
"And you're the mad girl I was sent to heal."
"Mad? God's claws, I begin to think so! Here I am, on the run from a Wilden healer, and he runs bang into me. Likewise an incompetent assassin, a wandering death banner, a shadow demon, a Randir search party, and a walking tree. What is this place—the crossroad of the worlds?"
Kindrie didn't know what she was raving about, or care. It was the rising level of her voice which scared him. "Oh, please!" he cried. "We aren't far from the river. They'll hear you!"
That sobered her instantly. "I doubt they'll guess that we forded by tree, but still . . . ." She hesitated, then said grudgingly, "It will be dark soon. You can make camp with me tonight, if you like, as far from here as possible."
Kindrie's impulse was to run until he dropped, away from both his pursuers and this unnatural female; but daylight was fading rapidly, and this wilderness terrified him. He gave a small, reluctant nod.
"All right, then," said the other, and jumped to solid ground.
The ounce had been waiting with growing impatience on the far side of the drifting grove. He didn't attempt to cross, however, until his mistress turned to look at him . . . no, at the tricky path which he must negotiate. Kindrie suddenly realized that the beast was blind, that he was using the girl's eyes to see his way. He was bound to her. Of all the damning things which Kindrie had been told at Wilden about the Highlord's sister, no one had mentioned that, like Kindrie himself, she was Shanir.
Above the willow's path, they struck the west bank's New Road and followed it northward until a ravine opening above it provided shelter sufficient to hide a fire.
While Kindrie held thin hands out to the small blaze which she had kindled, the Knorth draped her sodden jacket over a nearby rock. Then, to his surprise, she unrolled a death banner and also spread it out to dry, its gently smiling face turned toward the warmth. It seemed to watch them benignly as they sat on opposite sides of the fire, regarding each other warily over the flames and eating winter-shrivelled apples. The ounce, offered cheese, scratched the ground around it and trotted purposefully off into the dark. Watching the cat's mistress gingerly chew her own dinner, Kindrie remembered the host of disfigured dead in her soul-image and shivered.
"I heard about you at the Cataracts," she said, so suddenly that he jumped. "You grew up in the Priests' College at Wilden, but ran away to serve first Lord Caineron and then Ardeth. You were free. Why did you go back?"
"It wasn't my idea," snapped Kindrie, despite his resolve to keep quiet. "Tending the wounded, I-I overtired myself and collapsed. When I woke, I was back at Wilden. It seems that Ardeth's people didn't know what else to do, with their lord off bone-hunting in the Southern Wastes and a sick healer on their hands."
"And Ardeth let you stay there all winter?"
Kindrie winced. "H-he had other concerns, I suppose. His dead son Pereden, your brother, and Kothifir is so far away . . . ."
"Awkward to apply pressure at a distance, I agree, but still . . . ! And Tori had nothing to say about this either?"
"The Highlord owes me no debts if he isn't willing to pay!"
"Proud," she said, considering him, "and devious, to imply and deny a debt in the same breath. Whatever he owes you, priestling, he owes. But that's his business. So. Winter passes, a call comes to Wilden for a healer, and you take the opportunity to bolt."
For a moment, she was silent, absently combing out tangled hair with long, black-sheathed fingers. One hand stole to her injured cheek.
Don't ask me to heal you, he silently pled. Don't, for both our sakes!
The hand dropped.
"So. You're free again. What next?"
"I . . . don't know."
From that terrible waking in Wilden the previous winter, he had fled to the most secret corner of his soul-image to hide, to wait for the rescue which had never come. Three years ago, the priests would have left him alone, mistaking his blank stare for that of the half-wit which they had always believed him to be. Now they knew better. Was it only yesterday that they had finally tricked him into emerging? And then . . . and then . . . .
Yes, he was out of their hands, but free? Not after what they had done to him. Perhaps never again.
"Stop that!"
He blinked, surprised to find the Knorth kneeling in front of him, gripping his clenched fists through the protection of the food sack. His head hurt.
"God's teeth and toenails. I've never met anyone so determined to beat in his own brains. What is wrong with you?"
"Leave me alone!"
He wrenched free, lashed out at her clumsily, and fell on his face as she slipped aside.
"Leave me alone," he said again, his voice muffled, and began to cry.
"Sweet Trinity," he heard her mutter. "And I thought I was a mess." A moment later, she dropped her still damp jacket over his bare shoulders.
Kindness, he thought. If I accept that, I'll break down completely.
He rolled over to look up at the Knorth. "How does your brother feel," he said, "about you being Shanir?"
Silver flared in the gray eyes above him. Kindrie flinched, guessing too late that the ability to mind-bond with an ounce might be the least of the other's Shanir attributes. If her powers were great, however, so was her control. Silver tarnished to gray.
"What do you think?" she said flatly, and returned to her side of the fire.
Kindrie answered her silently, in the darkness behind his squeezed shut eyes: I think it may kill him.
FRATRICIDE.
The God-voice had broken its silence of over two thousand years to call the Highlord's sister that, or so the priest with the skull-like face and the maimed hand had told Kindrie yesterday. Kindrie hadn't disbelieved it—how could one doubt the Voice of God when it burned its way like acid out of some unwilling throat?—but now . . . !
On the march to the Cataracts, Torisen had fallen into one of his mysterious nightmares and no one had been able to wake him from it. At Ardeth's insistence, Kindrie had entered the Highlord's sleeping mind to try to help. There he had stumbled across the soul-image of the blighted house with the vast death banner hall which he now realized had not been Torisen's at all but his sister's. It had apparently been poisoning the sleeping man. Kindrie had exorcised it, but he didn't trust his power to banish such a thing indefinitely. Given Torisen's violent antipathy to all Shanir, he might have been stricken by the mere knowledge that his sister was one. That prejudice, after all, was what prevented him from honoring his debts to Kindrie. Those he might shrug off, but not a sister's claims. And then . . . and then . . . .
"She will destroy him," that death's-head Ishtier had hissed, leaning close, breathing the dregs of his winter-long sickness into Kindrie's face, "unless you . . . er . . . render her harmless, shall we say? Yes, you, boy. No one else had been able to get close enough. But a healer's touch, ah, nothing comes closer than that."
B-but he was a healer. How could he ever hurt someone the way he himself had been hurt?
"Just a little change in your soul-image, boy. It was clever of you to choose the Priests' College itself as the external metaphor of your soul. My colleagues thought they had you locked up here, mind as well as body. They didn't know about that image hidden within an image, that secret garden where Lady Rawneth confined you most of your childhood when the rest of us thought you lack-witted, But now m'lady has traded that secret to me. I could destroy your pathetic little bolt-hole—uproot the comfrey and heart's-ease, sow the ground with salt. Instead, I will give you a chance to regain it. We have taught you how to read soul-images, boy. Read the Knorth's to learn where she has hidden the thing which she stole from me, and then deal with her as she deserves, or you will never be at peace again."
Then they had sent him out with an escort of priests and Randir guards, bound for Gothregor, so confident he was broken that they hadn't bothered to watch him. What that skull-faced Ishtier had done to him was obscene, but so was what the priest wanted him to do. So he had run—straight into the very person he had been trying to avoid just as she, for some reason, had been fleeing him.
In his mind, he was still running. The outer dimension of his soul was that long corridor which spiraled down into the subterranean Priests' College, past dim classrooms where masters had beaten him, past dank dormitories where he had learned all shades of violation but one. None of that had mattered, though, while his inner spirit remained a refuge, inviolate. Behind one of the imagined doors was the secret room where the Randir Matriarch had confined him as a lesser woman might have locked a child in a dark closet. Where he had gotten the idea for the moon garden which had transformed Rawneth's prison into a sanctuary and the source of his strength, he didn't know. He might gladly have stayed there forever, even after his jailer stopped bothering to lock him in. However, three years ago he had overheard angry voices outside the door of his secret soul, saying that a Knorth was Highlord again.
"But I'm part Knorth too," he had said, blinking at the astonished priests.
Now Ishtier had hidden that door, and he was trapped in the outer dimension of his soul, in that corridor with its stale stench of warped, wasted lives down which he endlessly ran, pursued by the fear that to save Torisen he might have to do the terrible thing demanded of him, beating his fists against locked door after door as he passed, searching for the one that opened into peace.
Let me in, let me in, let me in . . . .