V
It was very dark between the walls of Restormir, with air as stale as the husks of memory. Sometimes the passage expanded as though into unseen rooms; sometimes it contracted so that one must pass along it edgewise, scraping. The stone brain within that proud Crown might have been half consumed by earwigs, so full of tunnels and blind pockets did it seem.
Jame spat out a clot of spider web, with the distinct impression that she had swallowed its occupant. Forgetting the extra width of Aerulan's banner across her back, she had almost gotten stuck more than once. All she could see was the slightly blacker patch which, presumably, was Lyra, rustling ahead of her. The patch rose. A moment later her foot hit a step. She climbed the invisible stair after her guide, the others on her heels.
Six more flights, almost to the top of the Crown.
From ahead, ever closer, came a stone-muffled chant: "Food, food, FOOD!" until the walls seemed to vibrate with it. Opening off the stair shaft was a sort of blind gallery, broached with many peepholes through which spears of red light lanced. Below lay Caldane's great hall.
It was two tiers high, its roof supported by stone columns carved in the likeness of tree trunks. Fireplaces roared down one side, making the air before them ripple with heat and the cold walls sweat. Opposite, tall, arched windows stood open to the darkness of the shaft. Between, a hundred Highborn men sat at table, chanting and banging flagons.
"Food, FOOD, FOOD!"
Empty plates bounced. So did the heads of those who had passed out.
Masked, skirted figures ran between the long boards, carrying wine ewers with which they tried to keep full the flailing cups—not women but young, Highborn boys, Jame saw, as one was suddenly tripped and jerked beneath a table. The men on either side leaned drunkenly down to watch. Above the salt, Caldane's six established sons roared approval. Down in the compounds, their followers must be shouting themselves bloody raw.
All this for one pot of inedible soup, Jame thought. Maybe that will teach Caldane not to incapacitate his entire Kendar staff.
—or maybe not: M'lord was not the sort to admit mistakes, much less learn from them.
The man himself lounged in a golden chair on a dais at the upper end of the hall, wrapped in a peacock blue robe, negligently holding a wine glass. Unlike his flushed, sweating followers, he looked sleek and smug. Sated. Now and again, he glanced out the windows, at something which Jame couldn't see. She recognized that cream-fed smirk, though. It had been on his fat face when he had held her captive in his tent at the Cataracts, and in Kallystine's voice after M'lady had slapped her.
Kindrie had been watching through a different hole. When he turned toward Jame, the spot of light moving from faded eye to pale cheek to white hair, she wondered if he had also seen such a smile, that night at Tentir.
"Are we too late?" he asked in a husky voice, and she knew that he had.
This time, Graykin's pain come to her muted through barriers warily half raised. Worse, though, was that choking hold on her/his throat, through which breath barely wheezed.
"He isn't dead," she said, gulping air, realizing that even so she might not have answered the healer's question.
They climbed again, up to the ninth tier. At the stair's head, Lyra cautiously opened a panel and slipped through. A moment later, she had swung it wide and was beckoning them into Lord Caineron's private quarters.
Jame stopped short on the threshold. For a moment, she was back in her room at Gothregor, staring at her fragmented features in a broken mirror. But these mirrors were whole and the face reflected in them visored, retreating. From behind came a muffled exclamation as her booted heel came down on Kindrie's bare toes.
This is ridiculous, she thought, and entered.
Easy to see where Kallystine had gotten the idea for her chambers at Gothregor, pale reflection that they were of this mirrored wilderness where wall reflected wall and room melted into room. Rich hangings and curious statuary marched off in all directions, over inlaid floors strewn ankle deep with rare furs. A haze of incense drifted under the low, mirrored ceiling. In the midst of such bewildering opulence floated the cadets' faces, seen from every angle as they stared about them.
"We mustn't separate," Jame said, and found that she spoke to reflections.
Had Lyra led them into a trap? Did Caldane know reflective magic? There was a bricked-up house in Tai-tastigon where the owner's first wife had wandered inside one mirror after another for twenty years, searching for the reflection of an open door . . . .
Then Jame looked again, harder. Since when had she been so tall, so . . . busty? All the mirrors were subtly distorted. Caldane did practice magic, but only to reshape his own portly image. Between these flattering glasses and those heroic statues in the reception halls below, perhaps he had well and truly convinced himself that illusion was truth.
"Here I am."
"Where are you?" reflected faces whispered, turning to look in the wrong direction, echo answering echo. "Five? Ten?"
Iron-thorn's dark visage and the Shanir's pallor moved silently among the silvered planes, caught for a moment and then gone.
"Gricki?" Lyra's light voice called off in the distance. "Gricki!"
The floor vibrated with the clamor from the hall below, muted by stone and fur. Mirrors seemed to ripple in their frames. So very hot and close . . . .
Statuary like the death-molds of men and women, cruelly altered; wolver pelts and mock Arrin-ken; a two-headed ape, stuffed; a great green parrot nailed to its perch, alive; potbellied bronze burners, belching clouds of incense to make the mind reel; Caldane's smell of rich perfume underlain with stale sweat, to make the stomach seethe . . . .
A vast bed, and under its counterpane, face covered, a still form.
"G-Graykin?"
But no. What strange figure was this, its body laid open and velvet coils of intestine spilling out, liver and lights strewn about the bed like stuffed toys? A doll, designed to be nightly disemboweled . . . and it had her face.
Jame threw the cover back over it.
Standing almost on her foot, Jorin sniffed and cowered. She smelled it too: the faint stench of burned flesh. The ounce slinking unhappily on her heels, she followed her nose.
Ahead, she thought she saw Graykin's face, oddly stiff and distorted. Another damned reflection . . . but this time it was that of a death banner, which she tracked from mirror to mirror back to a small room illuminated like a shrine by innumerable candles. Brier Iron-thorn stood staring at the tapestry, oblivious to the overturned incense pots at her feet whose hot coals were singeing the pelts of mottled leather which covered the floor.
"Genjar," she said, without turning.
Jame regarded that sharp face, caught forever by Kendar weavers in a sneer which the wavering smoke turned almost into a snarl. So this was Caldane's favorite son, who had led the Southern Host to slaughter at Urakarn, where a young Torisen had been taken prisoner and tortured. Hadn't there been some mystery about Genjar's death afterward?
"A damned strange way to commit suicide," she had heard somebody say.
Caldane had never forgiven Tori, although for what, exactly, no one seemed to know.
Iron-thorn was staring at the tapestry face with that particular woodenness which, for her, indicated strong emotion.
"Surely you were too young to have served at Urakarn," Jame said involuntarily.
"I was. My mother wasn't. She died escaping."
With that, the Kendar turned abruptly on her heel and stalked away.
Oh, lord. What have I put my foot in now? Jame wondered.
The pelts still smoldered in spots, between blue and black markings which looked almost deliberate. Jame had no objection to burning Caldane's roof over his head, except that she was under it too. She beat out the coals with gloved hands. The hides hadn't been entirely scraped bare, as she had thought at first. Each still had a mop of black, braided hair . . . .
Jame rose abruptly and backed to the door where Jorin waited, having refused to enter. She had been standing on the flayed, tattooed skins of Merikit hillmen.
Outside, the stink of burning grew stronger.
"Here!" Lyra was calling. "Here! Oh, hurry!"
Jame arrived last, still following her nose, to find her way blocked by the broad backs of the cadets. Water-flowing between them, she emerged in the cooler air of a balcony overhanging the shaft. To one side was a small furnace, sullenly aglow, in a litter of tools, bits of wire, and hooks. Several feet away, a Kendar stood on the very edge of the abyss, looking down. In his hand, forgotten, he held an awl from which wisps of rank smoke still rose.
"Well, candidate," said Brier Iron-thorn.
The man looked up. He was very young, hardly more than a boy, and would have been handsome if not for his haggard face and bloodshot eyes.
"Well, cadet," he said, with a rictus smile. "Is Tentir worth M'lord's price?"
"I refused to pay."
He blinked, refocusing. "So you did"—with a sneer that didn't quite stick. "Went the soft way through the little High-lord, didn't you? Solved Honor's Paradox by turning your back on it." He glanced again over the edge and swayed, gulping.
Not just height-sickness, Jame thought, going forward a step, stopped by Iron-thorn's back-flung, restraining hand. A grisly hangover. Caldane, you son of a . . . .
"It is a paradox, isn't it?" the boy said, with a cracked laugh. "Where does obedience end and personal honor begin? Nowhere, M'lord wanted me to say. Obedience is honor. Then he ordered me to do that." He gestured helplessly toward the shaft, realized that he still held the awl, and threw it away. "I was drunk. I did his bidding. And it broke the bond between us. No more lord. No more honor."
"And now?"
"Why," he said, again with that terrible smile. "I redeem honor, of course. I was only waiting for a witness."
With that, he stepped over the edge and fell without a sound.
"My God!" said Jame, and started forward; but Brier stood in her way.
"Better not to look, lady."
Jame slipped around her. "Honestly, Ten, I probably have a better head for heights than you do . . . ."
From below, the figure hanging in the shaft had seemed only a blot against the stars. From here above, it appeared violently foreshortened, the thin, naked body dwindling to invisible feet, the whole swaying fish-pale in the light spilling from Caldane's hall. Peaks rose from each shoulder where hooks took the body's weight, stretching the skin upward. More fleshhooks pierced ears, and wrists, and knees, to make the puppet dance. Oh, Graykin . . . .
Jame struggled to breathe, to stay calm. It won't help to flare. Caldane is right below us, looking out his window at his toy, smiling . . . it won't help anyone if I flare . . . .
Someone touched her shoulder. She felt the berserker rage leap down her nerve-ends, through flesh and fabric, lightning in search of the ground. In its sudden glare, to her amazement, she saw the white flowers of the tapestry which hung outside Gothregor's secret garden. The thunderclap made her gasp, but it cleared her head. The rage was gone. She hadn't moved, but Kindrie had been hurled backward into the cadets, two of whom he had knocked down. His white hair stood on end. Ball lightning rolled off his shoulders like hail to bounce crackling on the floor.
"I did warn you, priest," she said, shaken.
"How many casualties d'you want up here?" demanded Iron-thorn. "Behave . . . lady."
"Y-yes, ran. B-but my friend . . . he's choking."
A boom had been swung out over the shaft and lowered, with a makeshift puppeteer's crosspiece fixed to it. The two support wires were secured to the former. Control wires ran up through the latter, back ready for the puppet-master's hands. Cadets raised the boom and gingerly swung the dangling figure back over the balcony, wincing with every jolt for fear that it would tear loose. There was little blood: the hooks, inserted red hot, had finished the cauterizing begun by the heated awl. Nor need they have worried about ripping flesh: muscle as well as skin had been pierced. But between shock and near-strangulation by his own drawn-up skin, the Southron was in uncertain shape.
"Help him!" Jame said to Kindrie.
The healer had been hanging back, random sparks still snapping in his hair. "I'm not sure I can," he said unhappily. "He looks enough like a Caineron to be Genjar's younger brother—but he isn't pure Kencyr, is he?"
"He's a Kencyr-Southron half-breed," Lyra chimed in. "His name is Gricki."
"'Gricki,'" muttered Brier, translating the Southron word: "'filth.' D'you mean we've gone through all this for some Southland's mongrel?"
The Knorth shot her an impatient look. "We can't pick and choose with whom to keep faith."
Brier blinked. A Caineron would have laughed at such a naive statement: there was always some way consonant with honor to avoid such inconveniences. And yet . . . and yet . . . .
Values, Caineron and Knorth, shifted under her feet until with a jolt she landed on something solid: Keep faith.
Yes. Perhaps she could make a stand on that.
"Of course I don't object to his bloodlines," Kindrie was saying to Jame. "Who am I, to do that? But I've never dealt with a non-Kencyr's soul-image before, assuming he has one. A-and besides . . . ." He gulped, looking suddenly both miserable and desperate. "L-Lord Ishtier has barred me from my own. Just now . . . the door behind the tapestry . . . . You almost smashed through it, almost got me back into my garden. C-Can't you try again? Please?"
"You mean you can't heal anyone? But you helped that cadet on the stair!"
"A bit. As much as I dared. Don't you see? I-I can't draw on my own soul for strength, or retreat into it to heal myself."
"Sweet Trinity," said Jame, blankly.
Back at Wilden, he had told her how the Randir Matriarch had bartered that knowledge to Ishtier. She should have realized that the priest had made use of it. Instead, she had brought the healer into this danger blithely assuming that he was, essentially, indestructible. And he had come without complaint, knowing that he wasn't. Who, therefore, had kept faith with whom? Just the same, should she try to help him as he asked? Did she dare?
"I can't," she said, helplessly. "The last person you should consort with just now is someone who keeps knocking you across rooms by sheer, bloody reflex. Next time, it will probably be through a wall. Just do what you can, as quickly as possible. Any minute now, M'lord is going to miss his plaything.
"We're lucky he didn't see that boy fall," she said in an undertone to Brier Iron-thorn, as Kindrie gingerly bent over his charge.
"He was probably expecting it."
"Ugh. Trust Caldane to test Honor's Paradox with the moral equivalent of a meat axe. Does he put all randon candidates through ordeals like this?"
"Only the best—to prove their loyalty to him, he says. And to see how strong their stomachs are. 'That boy' failed. Sometimes, doing counts less than living with the consequences."
Jame regarded her curiously. "If he had given you such an order, cadet, would you have obeyed?"
Green eyes turned to her, malachite set in ironwood.
"That," said the Kendar, "was not my test."
Behind them, someone gave a startled exclamation. They turned in time to see a Caineron Highborn bolt back through the apartment, throwing aside the jewelled slippers which he had apparently been sent to fetch.
"Yours," Ten snapped at Five, and was off in pursuit faster than seemed possible for someone so big.
"Right," said Vant with satisfaction, assuming command. "Up gear, Kennies. We're going."
"Where?" Jame asked.
The other cadets hesitated, obviously feeling that this was a good question.
"Er . . . ." said Vant, not looking at her. "Somebody, wrap that Southie up in something."
"Who?" demanded Rue, pugnacious. "In what?"
"Anything, dammit! Here." He tore down a silken hanging and threw it at her.
Jame helped bundle up her unconscious servant. He looked awful, marked not only with his fresh injuries but with the blackened eyes and broken teeth of a previous beating while his bruised ribs stood out like those of a half-starved dog. A hard winter he must have had of it.
"Father will kill me!" Lyra wailed.
"Calm down!" said Jame over her shoulder. "You're probably the only one of us that he won't."
"He will, he will! Listen . . . they're on the stair! Gran, help!"
With that, she snatched up her hem, betraying no underskirt whatsoever, and fled down the long balcony.
"Follow her!" Jame snapped at the others.
"Er . . . ." said Vant again, to the air above her head. "That isn't such a good idea, lady."
Jame sat back on her heels, regarding him. He was trying to put her in her place, as he saw it, as tactfully as he knew how. She remembered the battle of wills between Kallystine and her captain, Highborn power against randon discipline. "Perhaps your ten-commander could override me," she said, "but not you. Ever. Now go."
Not waiting to see if he obeyed, not needing to, she and Jorin went in search of Brier Iron-thorn, whom they found at the head of the main stairs, outrun by the fleeing Highborn. Nonetheless, Lyra had been premature: no one was yet on the steps. Nearby, multiple reflections gave back the image of the secret passage, open for a hasty exit. The Kendar glanced at her, then past, impatiently, for the cadets.
"I sent them after Lyra," said Jame. "She's run back to Gran—whoever that is—so there's another way out of here—presumably."
No need to be told that she had made a mistake.
Brier turned back to the stair, grim-faced. Trust a Highborn to muck up. "Then, lady, you had better go with them."
"You're drunk!" said someone at the foot of steps.
"I tell you, I saw them!"
"Didn't."
"Did."
"Didn't!"
"Did!"
Now the speakers were coming up, followed by a crowd loudly making bets.
"Go," said the Kendar, with such force that Jame fell back a step, treading on Jorin's toes.
Trinity, but that was power, and in one who had barely begun her training. The feeling almost overwhelmed Jame that it wasn't her place to interfere in randon affairs. Tori would hardly think so. Neither would any other Highborn whom she had ever met. But Marc would understand. Very well: If she couldn't coerce, she would blackmail.
"I won't leave," she said, "without you."
Brier gave the Highborn a hard look. She had been prepared to fall into Caldane's hands herself to delay pursuit, to keep faith with her new lord—a bitter but simple choice. A premonition touched her now, though, regarding her lord's sister, that nothing from now on would be so straightforward. Stepping back, she closed the panel leading to the hidden stair.
After you, the ironic sweep of her hand said.
They went quickly back through Caldane's quarters, drunken voices slurring on their heels. At the end of the balcony, a stair spiraled upward. They climbed, petals drifting down the open well to meet them.