VI
Jorin trotted back into camp just before dawn, smelling of nothing worse than catmint and bringing the conciliatory gift of a dead vole.
Day broke, with no visible sunrise. Clouds cut short the mountains, pushed along by a steady wind from the north. White birds ghosted southward under the overcast and deer drifted after them across the upper meadows, in and out of clouds. At some point, morning became afternoon. Day had begun almost imperceptibly to wane when veils of luminous mist came sailing down the valley, some low enough to brush along its floor.
"That's weirding," said Kindrie nervously. "You don't want to touch it."
A bank drifted past, leaving empty a bush which a moment before had been raucous with quarreling blue jays.
"Uh, right," said Jame.
She was glad that the healer was taking notice again, if only because his sleepwalker's pace had driven her half wild. Graykin's crying had haunted her dreams again last night, as forlorn as that of a lost child. Time was running out. Therefore, when Kindrie stumbled back toward somnambulance, she ruthlessly prodded him awake again with questions.
"You told the Highlord that you had a Knorth grandmother. What was her name?"
"Telarien, I think," he said vaguely.
"You think?" she demanded, silently swearing: The name meant nothing to her.
Kindrie flushed. "Lady Rawneth said that once, when she didn't know I could hear her."
Now, that name made Jame's eyebrows rise under her mask. Rawneth: the Randir Matriarch, Kallystine's great-aunt, the so-called Witch of Wilden. High company for a lowly acolyte.
"Did she name anyone else? Mother, father, family cat?"
"No! You aren't supposed to have any kin at all when you're a b-b . . . ."
"A bastard?"
Kindrie turned and limped hastily away, the tips of his ears scarlet through the white thatch of his hair.
Hmmmm, thought Jame, following him. That was the second case of bastardy she had heard about in the past four days, among a people who rarely misbred. Wouldn't it be curious if he were Tieri's unfortunate child, the Knorth Bastard? But no: one maternal grandmother didn't make a Knorth. Fortunately. The last thing she wanted, less even than a semi-demonic half-brother, was a priestling first cousin.
Still, she wondered briefly who Tieri's mother had been.
Ugh. Tori was right: better not to know. Change the topic.
To her own surprise, she heard herself ask, "What can you tell me about the God-voice?"
The Shanir turned and stared at her. "Why should you ask about that?"
Why indeed? Because . . . because sometime since Ishtier had passed on the Voice's judgment to her in Tai-tastigon, she had heard something like it again. Recently. But what . . . and where?
"All right," she said, dodging his question, "this is what I do know: It's the Voice of God—supposedly; it speaks through whomever it pleases, often in riddles; it never lies. What else, priest?"
"I am not a priest!"
"D'you mean, then, that you don't know anything?"
"I bet I know more than you do!" Kindrie snapped.
That might even be true, he thought. Locked in the garden of his soul, listening at the door, he had eavesdropped not only on Rawneth but on the priests as they discussed secrets which they never dreamed he overheard, much less understood. Suddenly, he couldn't bear that this hateful Knorth should think him as stupid as the Priests' College had.
"Of course," he said, trying to sound superior, "we've always had indirect contact with our god through the Shanir. Oracles, maledights, berserkers . . . ."
"Healers?"
"Er . . . yes, I suppose. But the first time the God-voice spoke was on this world, just after the Fall. The Arrin-ken had made Glendar Highlord in place of his brother Gerridon, Master of Knorth. The priests dissented. They claimed that all the lords had failed in their duty by letting such a disaster happen and that we should start afresh on Rathillien, as a hierocracy."
"Ancestors forbid!"
"It might not have been so bad a thing. Whatever the priests are like now, on other threshold worlds they used the power of the temples to help the Shanir defend our people. They were champions."
"Ha!"
"You've got to understand," he heard himself plead, as if defending his tormentors somehow made bearable when they had done to him. "Once it was a noble thing to be a priest. They performed a vital service, without which we would long since have been destroyed. Then came the Fall and flight to this world, with the lords blaming all Shanir, hieratic and secular, because Gerridon and the Dream-weaver were of the Old Blood. Worse, every other time we've had to retreat, we've found the Kencyr temples waiting for us on the next threshold world. This time, for some reason, their construction was incomplete. So the priests found themselves not only under attack by the High Council, which had always wanted them out of politics, but also cut off from the full power of their god. How were they supposed to defend themselves?"
"Apparently, by trying to replace the Highlord with a High Priest. Your people have never lacked nerve."
"My people . . . ! Well, nerve was no defense against the Voice, which spoke for the first time through the High Priest to denounce his ambitions, destroying him in the process. The College thinks that since this world's temples were never finished, the god-power found a different channel—one that, for a time, actually listened and gave judgments wrapped in riddles, which the Arrin-ken tried to solve. Then came one that they couldn't: 'Fear the One, await the Three, seek the Four.'"
"Oh, that's helpful," said Jame. "Nearly everything in the Kencyrath comes in threes: The faces of God, the Tyr-ridan, the three times three major houses and temples."
The One might conceivably be Gerridon, she thought, under pressure to become the Voice of Perimal Darkling, darkness articulate, as the Tyr-ridan might ultimately become that of the Three-Faced God.
"But what on earth," she wondered out-loud, "comes in fours?"
"That's the big mystery. The Arrin-ken set out to solve it two thousand years ago, and haven't been heard from since. Neither has the Voice, until recently."
"I thought they left out of disgust with the Highborn."
"That was part of it. The God-voice offered an excuse to decamp, but they also took it as an order. Two thousand years without justice . . . . I wish they would come back."
Someday, Immalai had said, someone will call us. It might even be you.
Jame thought of the blind Arrin-ken, and shivered. Some judgements were best deferred.
"The One, the Three, and the Four," she repeated. "What comes in fours, besides the Senetha and Senethar?"
"The elements," Kindrie suggested. "The seasons, the phases of the moon from full to dark, the fingers on Lord Ishtier's left hand . . . ."
"What?"
He flinched away, as if from a blow.
"Look, I apologize for shouting more or less in your ear, but what in Perimal's name do you know about that forsworn renegade, Ishtier?"
"L-lord Ishtier has been at the Priests' College all winter, ever since the mission returned from Tai-tastigon with him. H-he was ill until recently. D-did you say 'renegade?'"
"Sweet Trinity, yes. Don't the other priests know?"
They don't, Jame thought, reading Kindrie's confused expression. Ishtier must have regained sufficient wits to lie to them. The mind boggled at that. The loss of honor was in itself so unthinkable that one forgot how dangerous a thorough rogue like Ishtier could be.
Kindrie regarded her askance. "Did you . . . er . . . abstract something from Lord Ishtier?"
"Steal it, d'you mean? No. He . . . er . . . abstracted something from me. The last I saw of him, he was trying to gnaw off his own hand after having touched this thing, which must be how he lost the finger. A pity he stopped short of the elbow. Sweet Trinity. You said that the God-voice spoke again recently, for the first time since the Arrin-ken left. Was that through Ishtier in Tai-tastigon?"
From his expression, she knew that it had been. Oh, lord. Now she was really in the dunghill, neck deep. What the Voice had said to her was alarming enough, without whatever frills Ishtier might add. The other priests must think that, in her, they had a real monster on their hands, against whom all measures were justified.
But was it really their god who had spoken through the renegade priest after so long a silence? Where had she heard something like the Voice since, not obviously, perhaps, but in its under-notes? If the Tastigon oracle proved false, what happened to its dire prophecies then?
Eh, this was hopeless. After all, Ishtier had accepted the Voice as genuine, and he was the poor goop through whom it had chosen to speak.
Stop clutching at straws, she told herself. Whatever is, is, and you've got to live with it.
But oh, lord—FRATRICIDE . . . and TYR-RIDAN.
It began to rain.