VII
Cold drops stung Jame's face, while Kindrie hunched thin shoulders under the rain-darkening cloth of his borrowed shirt. Only Jorin seemed unperturbed. He was taking this wretched weather unexpectedly well, Jame thought as she watched him trot on ahead. Some ounces enjoyed getting wet, but the blind Royal Gold had hated water ever since his breeder had tried to drown him as a kitten.
Strange. He didn't even look damp now.
When he returned, grumbling, at her call, she found that his coat was quite dry. So was the road ahead, and the leaves of trees a dozen feet away weren't dripping. The rain, it seemed, was exclusively for her benefit.
It came down harder, laced with hail. No. With tiny, green frogs.
"Do you mind?" she demanded, extracting a wriggling froglet from deep inside her shirt. It clung to her finger tip with anxious toes.
"Geep, geep, GEEP!" cried a growing chorus, doing agitated push-ups on her shoulders; but if they were trying to tell her something, Jame wasn't interested.
"Will you stop that?" she shouted up at the roiling clouds.
The shower of frogs stopped. A moment later, rain began again—in a circle around them.
"This place has the damnedest weather," Jame muttered, flicking off her clothes and proceeding, carefully, over the lively ground, with Jorin bouncing like a wound-up toy at her heels.
Kindrie stared after her. She was mad—and so was he, to be following her. His experience with Highborn women was limited to the Randir, whom he thought abominable, but at least they didn't wander about the countryside being rained on by frogs.
Why was he still in this lunatic's company? The last thing he remembered, before that suddenly silent bush, was challenging the Knorth about her Shanir blood. Then had followed the long nightmare of running, running . . . . No. Walking, stumbling . . . how far? His feet throbbed and he felt a sickening fatigue alien to his healer's nature. Where in all the names of God were they?
The naked slopes across the river were ominously familiar. So was the roof of a watch tower glimpsed ahead over trees on the west bank.
"That's Shadow Rock," he said in a stifled voice. "Wilden . . . . You've lured me back to Wilden!"
He turned and fled, blindly, blundering, only to trip and crash down on the New Road's hard stones.
"Steady," said the Knorth, over him. "What is all this? Surely you realized that we were going north."
"No! I-I didn't notice."
"Huh. I should have let you go on sleepwalking. Listen: we're going farther north still, all the way to Restormir."
"Restormir! Why?"
"Because a friend of mine has fallen into Lord Caineron's hands. He needs rescuing. He'll need a healer too, if dear Caldane starts on him."
As simple, as insane as that.
For a moment Kindrie lay speechless, shaken like a cage by his own heartbeat.
Only someone who had never seen Restormir would propose such a thing. He remembered his brief time there the previous autumn, after his initial flight from Wilden, when he had taken service with the first Highborn he had met, needing protection from the priests, naively hoping it would lead to contact with the lord whom he really wished to serve, not knowing that Torisen and Caineron were mortal enemies. He had tried to help the Highlord anyway, and Caineron had repaid him for it. Remembering that, Kindrie shook even harder. His back still bore the marks of the corrector's scourge because he couldn't forget.
No one had come to his rescue then, anymore than over this past winter.
Torisen couldn't have, he told himself. Either time. Otherwise, it would have been the natural thing for a Knorth to do—as it was now? No. Not for a female, however wellborn. Yet this unnatural creature would have led him in a daze all the way to Restormir.
She sat on her heels two paces away, regarding him scornfully, expecting him to refuse. That stung. Dammit, wasn't he part Knorth too?
"All right," he heard himself say.
"You're sure?"
"Yes!"
He rose, stiffly. Flesh and bone, but he ached, with a sudden copper taste in his mouth. His nose had started to bleed. That shouldn't be. He was a healer, whose first subject was his own body—except that he was shut out of his own soul-image. He could still enter the soul-scapes of others to help as far as his limited strength allowed, but as for healing himself . . . . Frail as he had always been, for the first time he tasted his own mortality.
No. Don't think about that. Don't think.
Stiff-shouldered, trying not to snuffle, he limped past the Knorth toward the two places which he least wished ever to see again.
Jame rose and followed him, frowning. Pleased as she was that the healer had decided to go, she didn't understand why. In the last few minutes, she had watched him flip through a dozen emotions, frantically, like a gambler with a losing hand. This bravado probably wouldn't last long either.
Priests! she thought. You couldn't depend on them for anything.
They were close to Shadow Rock now, the home keep of Hollens, Lord Danior. Although only a bone relative, Cousin Holly was the closest kin Torisen had on the High Council and therefore his heir presumptive—not that the young man relished that distinction. Lord of the poorest house in the Riverland, he could barely maintain his own council seat, much less hope to occupy the Highlord's for long, should Torisen's death put him there.
Jame had met him at the Cataracts' dinner party. A nice boy, she had thought, if rather too much in awe of her brother.
More of Shadow Rock came into view. The original keep had only been a Bashtiri outpost, built to keep an eye on the much larger Hathiri fortress across the river. The Danior had marginally expanded it, limited by the defile which it occupied under the shadow of a balanced rock which someday would probably smash it flat. Today, its lord absent in Kothifir, it looked abandoned—the outer gate locked and all its windows tight shuttered except for one high up in the watch tower, which stood open.
Out of this last, a little girl leaned to peer across the river. Then someone pulled her back in and closed the shutter, quickly but quietly.
So Shadow Rock was garrisoned after all, by people in hiding. From what?
They rounded a corner and, for the first time, saw Wilden on the opposite bank.
It filled a valley much larger than its sister keep's, widened farther by quarry-work which had left sheer, surrounding walls of live granite. These the low clouds cut short. Judging from a distant rumble, the overcast also hid a considerable waterfall at the valley's upper end. Streams plunged down on either side of Wilden between the mountains' granite flanks and the inner walls of the fortress. Wilden itself angled down the valley's floor, presenting tier after jagged tier of its internal structure, tower after terrace after tower. Between the trapezoidal jaws of its double outer walls, it looked like a mouth full of sharp, ragged teeth. The streams had been dammed before it to form a brimming moat. From this, runoff driveled down the steep outer ward toward the curtain wall that sealed off the valley, toward the River Road and the Silver below.
As they crept past, Jame saw that the doors of the upper gatehouse stood open. Through them, white glimmered in the premature twilight: the ruins of the hill fort around which Wilden had been built, carefully preserved on a tiny hillock in an inner courtyard like white bones cradled in Randir jaws.
The Priests' College was somewhere in there too.
"Is there a temple in the College?" she asked Kindrie.
"Of course not. That much raw power would burn out the novices' minds."
"But they are drawing power in, from Tai-tastigon and beyond. I can feel it. A cesspool of divinity . . . . How many priests in residence, priestling?"
"I am not . . . . Nine of the first rank, when I left. Maybe a score of others, as well as acolytes and novices. Oh, my God. Look."
Although it had stopped raining, heavy clouds roofed Wilden's valley in a ponderous eddy. The hub of their slow circling was the fortress's farthest tower, whose heights they obscured. Above that hidden summit, a sulfurous yellow light grew, glowering down through the wrack's thinner patches. It spread. The moat reflected its progress, then the rivulets, then the Silver itself. The water smoked sullenly in its wake.
"The weather around here may be peculiar," said Jame softly, "but this is getting downright spooky. What in Perimal's name have we walked into?"
"Lady Rawneth is conjuring," the Shanir said in a taut voice.
Jame stared at the approaching light. As Kindrie had said, Kencyr power came indirectly from their god through the temples and the Shanir. This felt . . . different. She knew that some of Rathillien's so-called magics were accessible to anyone who knew the proper formulae, while others required the catalyst of faith. The latter was impossible for the average Kencyr, compelled to believe solely in his own absent god. However, she herself had accomplished two acts of it in Tai-tastigon, saving one native godling and killing another, through her faith in the truth of her own research. That had been nothing, though, compared to the natural forces unleashed here.
"But what do the priests think of Rawneth conjuring on their doorstep?"
"Knowledge is knowledge," said Kindrie, as if quoting hieratic dogma. "Besides, s-sometimes they trade information. She told Lord Ishtier h-how she kept me locked in my own soul-image m-most of my childhood."
"What?"
"Her revenge, she called it, although I never knew for what. S-sometimes she let me out, when she wanted s-someone to try her spells on who wasn't apt to die of them."
Jame remembered Ishtier's experiment with Bane's soul which had resulted in the Lower Town Monster. Perhaps it hadn't been as freakish as she had supposed—except that Ishtier had been trying to break the Kencyrath's monotheism by creating a genuine god.
I bet he hasn't shared that bit of failed research with his peers, she thought.
Kindrie started. "What was that?"
Something very close and, for the sound of it, very large, had just said, "Quonk!"
Out of the corner of her eye, Jame saw a green lump flash by in the river. That wailing, honking roar drifted back up-stream, sounding quite distraught: "Quoooooonk . . . !"
If the unknown lump had been upset, however, Kindrie was beside himself.
"She's really done it!" he babbled. "W-we've got to get away from here! It will do whatever she commands a-and then it will please itself . . . "
Jame caught his arm. "What are you talking about?"
"A demon! Ishtier told her how to conjure it. That was the price he paid to learn how to bar me from my soul-image."
"Quonk!" boomed that strange voice again, this time with an air of self-encouragement. "Quok, quok, quok . . . "
Each grunting "quok" sounded closer than the last. Jame could have sworn that it had somehow gotten ahead of them again. However, she wasn't as scared as Kindrie. For one thing, she'd had some practical experience with demons; for another, it was hard to take one seriously which talked to itself, much less in that tone. The Shanir was right, though: this was no place to linger.
However, their way was barred by a pool of rain water collected in a dip of the road. Something huge was rising out of it. Two bulging eyes emerged first, round as soup plates and about the same size, with slit pupils and irises each like a golden lattice crossing a rose colored ground. An expanse of bright green forehead followed, then a broad snout circled by an even broader mouth. The snowy vocal sac inflated like a lesser moon.
"QUONK!" said this apparition, eyeing the white haired healer with evident satisfaction.
Kindrie fainted.
Jame, on the other hand, nearly jumped into the pool to throw her arms around that vast, green neck—not that they would have reached.
"Why, Gorgo, you've grown!"
Gorgo, formerly the Lugubrious, switched his goggle-eyed gaze to her, and immediately looked apprehensive. The previous year, Jame's own experiments with the so-called gods of Tai-tastigon had first gotten him killed and then resurrected in his current (although much smaller) shape. Neither, obviously, was an experience which Gorgo would soon forget.
". . . quonk . . . ." he said feebly, gulping.
Another sound came out of his closed mouth. It sounded suspiciously like muffled cursing. Gorgo yawned, wide, wider, like a toad beginning its molt, and there, snuggled in the pit of his throat, was a human face.
"I hate it when he does that," said Loogan. " 'Quonk'! What a sound, and it nearly blows out my eardrums."
Jame stared at the Tastigon priest. "Sweet Trinity. Did Gorgo swallow you, or are you wearing him?"
"I don't know what's going on," said Loogan crossly. "We were both in the temple, preparing for the evening rites, when this happened. In fact, if I squint, I can still see the sanctuary. I don't think we're really here at all—wherever 'here' is."
Gorgo gurgled.
"Ah. He says we've been sent to fetch someone—that fellow on the ground, I think. A lady wants him."
"Sorry. He's under my protection."
"Oh. Well, that's that. Overreached herself, she did, trying to snag us in the first place. We're already slipping free, none too soon."
Gorgo's attention had strayed to a flight of dragonflies hovering about a nearby clump of reeds. He turned his massive head. Loogan's tongue shot out—all three feet of it—and snapped an insect out of the air.
"Gaaah!" he said, around a mouthful of shimmering wings. "I hate this. We're going home. Now. Before he finds out that it's the m-a-t-i-n-g season."
"Loogan, wait! Is everyone all right in Tai-tastigon?"
"Hardly everyone. Men-dalis has got troubles, but I expect you'll hear about that sooner or later. All your friends at the Res aB'tyrr are fine. Goodbye."
"Wait! What happened to Bane?"
"Believe me, you don't want to know."
As he spoke, the priest's round face had been fading. Only his voice now emerged from Gorgo's throat, as if from a growing distance: "Bye-bye, duckie. Keep your feet dr . . . ."
Gorgo's mouth still gaped wide open, frozen in what appeared to be astonishment. An iridescent sheen had come over him.
"Quo . . . ?" he said tentatively, and burst with a faint pop, like a soap bubble.
All that remained was the puddle, with a rumpled dragonfly floating in the middle of it.