VIII
Caldane's boathouse was a chamber hollowed out of the mound at its base, dimly lit by diamantine panels. In the black water of the slip floated a ceremonial barge, some fifty feet long by twelve wide, with six oars to a side, fixed upright at rest. A small head on a long, serpentine neck arched over its prow. Its sides were figured with wings, which swept upward at the stern. Between the wing-tips, on the poop, was a raised dais and on this, a throne under a velvet canopy. Ripples of light danced on the ebon waters; shadows lay across the shining gunwales and deck. The entire craft, from avian figurehead to rudder oar, was sheathed in gold.
"Trust Caldane," said Jame, "to gild a swan."
"But what does Lord Caineron do with a boat like this?" a cadet wondered out-loud.
"Sits in it . . . ." said Kindrie.
". . . pretending to be Highlord," Jame finished.
The Shanir stared at her. "How did you know that?"
She gestured toward an embroidery worked in silver gilt on the black velvet behind the throne. It looked like a crown, but she had recognized it as a representation of the Kenthiar, a collar of ancient and mysterious origin which supposedly only the true Highlord could wear in safety. All others who donned it risked their necks. Literally.
"He must be mad!" Vant exclaimed. "To put that emblem on a boat like this, on the edge of a river that isn't even navigable . . . !"
"What?"
He shot her a sidelong glance. "Why, lady, everyone knows that river travel in the north ended a thousand years ago, after a great weirdingstrom changed the Silver's course from one end to the other. Back then, there were lots of trade cities on both banks of the Central Lands. One night, all the dogs started to make such a racket that orders were given to strangle them. After the din stopped, people could hear the earth growl. A red fog came down the Silver. It kindled lights in the air, and on the water, and under it, like whole weed forests burning."
"Catfish jumped out of the river," another cadet chimed in. To all of them except their Southron ten-commander, obviously, this was an old, favorite story. "Then the water leaped up—whoosh!—like a fountain. It swallowed its islands, jumped its banks, and flooded its cities. Whole populations disappeared—drowned, the survivors thought, although no bodies were ever found."
"Bashti and Hathir never recovered," Vant broke back in, glowering at the cadet, talking fast. "That was when they gave the Riverland to us, because they couldn't bring garrison supplies upriver by barge anymore, because it got so strange here that none of their people would stay anyway, but our priests settled it down . . . "
"Huh," said Rue. "Not so's you'd notice it. The Merikit say that the River Snake caused it all. Its tail reaches to the Eastern Sea, its heart lies at Hurlen, and its head is under the well at Kithorn keep. When it writhes, the Silver goes mad."
The others laughed.
"Stick to facts, shortie, not singers' fancies," said Vant scornfully. "Or do you Highkeepers really believe that tripe?"
Rue glared up at him. "We border brats face facts every day that would make a Riverlander like you shit in your boots. Anyway, your stories are as much hearsay as mine. Red fogs, jumping catfish, fire under the water . . . all singers' stuff, I bet. All we know for certain is that to this day any boat risking the river north of Hurlen tends to arrive without its crew, if at all . . . and no bodies are ever found."
Wonderful, thought Jame. Cattila couldn't ask for a neater way to dispose of awkward guests, if that had been her intention. She was a Caineron, after all, and a matriarch.
The rumble began again, closer, louder. Paving stones rippled underfoot; the water in the slip seethed.
On the cadets' upturned faces, Jame saw the same dread which she herself felt, not so much of the unstable earth as of the massive weight poised overhead, mound and tower and crown.
The earth bucked, throwing them all off their feet.
The back wall had split open. Rats swarmed through the fissure from the dungeons, over those Kendar not quick enough to get out of their way. Jorin squawked and bounced like a wound-up toy as they darted across his toes. Oblivious, they plunged past, into the slip, swimming frantically out toward the open river where they would surely drown.
Debris began to fall.
"Get on board!" snapped Brier.
The cadets vaulted down into the barge. Jame was poised to leap after them when without ceremony Brier picked her up and tossed her into the boat's stern. She landed awkwardly. Jorin did better despite also having been thrown—the only way to get him onto any boat.
The cadets' first action on boarding was to pitch Caldane's throne over the side and to tear down the canopy with its offending emblem. On the dais, Kindrie struggled to cushion Graykin's limp form with the velvet sway. Jame went to help, for once intending to keep out of the Kendars' way. However, as she watched the cadets plunge about in the waist, she realized that none of them had crewed a barge before or perhaps even been on one. Going down the Tardy to Hurlen, she had pestered those Southron bargees with so many questions. Why couldn't she remember any of their answers?
Because you're scared half witless, she told herself, and took a deep breath.
"First," she said, to no one in particular, "we have to cast off."
Brier gave her a black look. "Throw off the front moorings!" she shouted to the cadet nearest the prow, and turned aft to deal with stern lines herself.
The barge had begun to roll with the water's surge, snubbing itself sharply again and again. Left, right, left . . . .
"Wait," said Jame, but the Kendar brushed past her.
"Too . . . damn . . . tight," she grunted, working her thumbs between the two inch thick port hawser and its cleat.
Rolling to the right again, the heavy rope coming taut . . . .
It parted with a bass twang under the Ivory Knife. Half-freed aft but not fore, the barge swung its stern with a crash into the right hand pier, snapping oars, throwing everyone from their feet except Jame, who hung on to the cleat, hacking at the slack, starboard hawser. It gave way as Brier lurched to her feet, staring.
"What . . . ?"
"I do have my uses," said Jame, sheathing the knife. "You might remember that."
Meanwhile, someone had taken an axe to the prow lines.
The tremor subsided. The barge, freed, rocked uneasily in its berth. Into that taut silence came the crack of stone overhead, giving way.
Cadets grabbed the surviving oars and half-rowed, half-poled the boat forward. The slip gave way to a tunnel bearing left, fed through gates to the right by the river. As darkness and the current seized them, they heard the crash behind them of the ceiling giving way.
Something overhead chittered and whirred. They burst out of the tunnel under a roof of bats in panic-stricken flight.
Jame had a moment to note that they had emerged on the mound's southeastern side, just short of where the encircling arms of the river moat rejoined. Then the reunited might of the tributary seized them and they hurtled down it between Grotley's compound on the right and M'lord's on the left.
They shot under the bridge which they had crossed earlier, barely clearing it with their swan's head prow and the helmsman's crows-nest in the stern. Jame thought she glimpsed Ran Quickfoot's broken-doll figure. The water beneath glinted and flashed. Overhead hung a midnight sky tinged with an opalescence not that of dawn.
The roar of the swollen stream redoubled between the high, narrow walls. Over it, though, Jame thought she heard cries. Some of Caldane's people must have woken up—enough, she hoped, to anchor Restormir against the coming storm. As to Caldane himself, the foxkin wouldn't let him float away altogether—worse luck. Still, perhaps this hadn't turned out so badly, she thought, shooting a defiant look up at Brier Iron-thorn in the crows-nest as the Kendar clung to the rudder oar.
Brier was staring up at the wall which bounded M'lord's compound, at the fresh cracks which laced it. The sound coming from the other side was shriller than Jame had at first realized, disturbingly like an echo of Caldane's screams. Ahead, the wall bulged outward, fragments of it tumbling into the water. Suddenly the whole gave way. People fell with the masonry, clinging to it and to each other as though to anchor themselves even as they were dragged down. The barge plowed into them and over. As it plunged past the breached wall, its riders glimpsed a street within whose buildings seethed like kicked ant nests as desperate hands clung to walls and doors to stop their lord's tumbling world. The uproar leaped outward at the Knorth. Its madness stared blindly up from the white faces caught in the gold-plated welter of their oars.
Ahead raced the Silver. The barge plunged out into an eddy and was spun around by it, dipping and careening. The white faces in the water disappeared in rapid secession, mouths still agape, as if jerked down. Then the boat shot on its way again, going downstream stern-first.
Bits of barge-lore were coming back to Jame.
"It's no use trying to steer backward," she shouted up at Brier. "Better ship the rudder oar before it gets broken. We need people on the stern with poles to ward off obstacles—not that there are any at the moment," she added, glancing at the broad stretch of river which they had entered after the eddy, "but there will be. Then too, this boat may only have a three or four foot draft, but it will ride deeper as we pick up speed, so watch out for shallows that may rip the bottom out of her."
Brier stared down at her from the crows-nest, set high enough to have had a clear view over the canopy before it had been torn down. Spray plastered dark red hair to the strong bones of her face and clothes to the lines of her powerful body. As a figurehead, she was much more impressive than the one on the boat's other end.
"Anything else, lady?"
"Yes," said Jame. "Never, ever spit into the wind."
"You are mad!" Kindrie burst out. "D'you realize we're heading back toward Wilden, not to mention Falkirr, Gothregor, and half a dozen other keeps we weird-walked past on the way north? What are we going to do?"
What, indeed? At Gothregor, her future had looked bleak enough. Now she was going back not only with a clear case of Knorth lunacy but also with a face that could start a war. Then too, there was Graykin. Madness, war, and scandal, if word of his bonding got out.
She looked down at the Southron. A scruffy, little half-breed, and the Kencyr half of that pure Caineron. At the Cataracts, his desperate need to belong had bridged the gap between them like a spark, surprising both. He was the last person on earth she would have chosen deliberately. And now that she had him, what next, when she couldn't even provide for herself? Perhaps she should break the bond, let him go free . . . .
He began to moan.
"Do something!" she said to Kindrie.
But the healer shook his head. "I've done all I can. His soul-image is . . . odd. He's like a—a ghost, haunting someone else's soul-scape."
"Whose?"
"You should know."
Graykin's eyes fluttered open, then widened as much as his puffy, bruised face would allow. He stared up at Jame, bewildered, close to panic.
"W-who . . . ?"
Her mask confused him, Jame thought. "Do I have to undress?" she demanded, with a sidelong glower at Kindrie's expression. Be damned if she was going to explain that the first time she and Graykin had met, she hadn't been wearing so much as a pleasant expression.
Graykin was still staring. "It is you! B-but where are we?"
"In a stolen barge, going down the Silver backwards—which is fairly typical of any rescue I undertake. You might remember that, the next time you need one."
But Graykin had stopped listening. "I w-waited," he stammered. "In Hurlen, all winter, cold and hungry, guarding It, a-and you didn't come. Caineron's agents caught me, dragged me north to Restormir. Caldane t-tortured me, and you didn't come. I could have told him where I hid It, could have brought his favor again, but I didn't tell . . . I didn't tell . . . and you didn't come!"
His voice had risen to a thin wail.
"Stop that!" said Jame, exasperated, and slapped him.
He crumpled back onto the velvet.
Kindrie bent over his still form. "Why did you do that?" he demanded of Jame; then, in perplexity, "What did you do?"
Why and what indeed. It had felt like the edge of a berserker flare, not a tool or intoxication this time but an arrogance, to hurt because she could. And she didn't yet know if she was sorry.
The rumble began again, behind them. Birds rose in flocks from the wooded crest of the east bank, black against the milky haze which now permeated the sky. Jorin scuttled under the velvet swag.
"Why, we're slowing down," someone in the waist exclaimed.
They were. The shore had been sliding by as quickly as a horse might trot; now, walking, a rider would have passed them. The water was rising. It topped the low right bank and spread out over the meadow beyond, a sheet of glass under which grass floated. Ripples from the slowing hull broke it, kindling red witchweed beneath the surface. At the meadow's far edge, trees began ever so gently to sway.
"We've stopped," said someone. "No . . . we're going backward!"
And so they were. Waves began to slap against their stern. The current had turned, so that the river seemed to be pushing them back toward Restormir and the coming storm.
"The Snake is drinking up the river," Rue said, awed.
More likely the cause was quake-sunken lands to the north, Jame thought.
Beyond the gilded swan's head, the northern sky glowed. Then, around the valley's curve, came the vanguard of the storm: spheres of flickering light, yards wide, rolling down the Silver toward them.
Jame leaned over the gunwale. "This is the Earth Wife's turn, not yours!" she shouted down at the racing water. "River Snake, River Snake, let us GO!"
The waves subsided. The barge stopped, then began to move southward again as the current turned.
Jame shrugged, shamefaced. "Whatever works," she said.
This may have worked too well. They moved faster and faster, from a walk to a trot to a gallop. Jame clapped a hand to her cap to keep it from blowing off.
"Waah!" said Jorin, under the billowing velvet.
The east bank collapsed, casting down its crest of pine trees like spears. Spray drenched them all. The cadets rowed furiously to keep in the center of the channel—no easy matter without the rudder oar, which Brier had out of its lock to fend off debris. At this pace, thought Jame, they would reach the other keeps much faster than expected, if they didn't come to grief first.
The barge careened around a point.
Ahead, a rocky islet abruptly sank, swallowed whole by a fissure in the river bed. Water roared into the chasm. The barge swung around its rim. The velvet slid off the dais into the waist, taking with it healer, patient, and bitterly protesting ounce. The same lurch sent Jame reeling toward the side. Something flew in her face. She threw up a hand to ward it off, and found herself gripping the end of a crows-nest guy rope, torn loose from its mooring. The next moment, she was over the gunwale, swinging out above the whirlpool. Water thundered down into it over what looked like stone teeth, into an earthen gullet twisting down out of sight.
"River Snake!" she shouted down into it, her voice swallowed by the roar. "Behave!"
The barge swung and so did she, back onto the dais. Brier stared down first at her, then at the hole in the river, as if unsure which she found more preposterous. The barge plunged on downstream, prow first.
"Better?" Jame shouted up at the Kendar.
Brier had turned to look back. "No."
Behind them, the fissure closed. A great gout of water and red mud vomited up from the river bed. Its wave hurtled the barge on, out of control.
As the Silver had descended, its gorge had cut deeper and deeper into the mountain granite so that now they were careening down rapids between high cliff walls. Oars smashed on rocks, knocking cadets to the deck. Catfish fell on them. To either side, bewhiskered shapes were leaping as if in flight from the water to the rock face, where some of them stuck and clung. Looking over the side, Jame saw red, mud-stained water, with flashes of white under it—rock slabs, or scales? Were they sliding down the River Snake's back?
The Silver widened as another stream joined it from the right, the confluence a boiling cauldron. Jame thought she glimpsed keep walls up the stream's gorge. The Jarans' Valantir already? Ahead, the river split around a wooded island much larger than the last. They were swept to its left into the narrower channel.
From her vantage point, Brier bellowed down at them, "Falls!"
The swan barge leaped out over the first drop as if trying to take wing. The dais fell out from under Jame's feet. The waist seemed to leap up at her. Velvet, cadets, and fish broke her fall. The deck tilted again. This time she didn't leave it, but everything else seemed to, all coming down on top of her. Stunned, she lay on the bottom of the boat, under sodden cloth. Something scraped along the hull on both sides. People were shouting and stepping on her. Then all sounds grew strangely distant.
Something wet tickled her ear. You're drowning, said a whiskery voice in her mind. Get up. This isn't my turn.
Jame gasped and choked. Her face was under water, pressed down by the masses of wet velvet. The bottom of the barge was awash. Sputtering, she clawed her way free, and found that she had not been alone: beside her lay an enormous catfish, its whiskers rasping against the planks, its thick-lipped mouth agape.
From the other end of the barge, near the prow, Brier Iron-thorn stared at her. "I thought you'd been thrown out," she said.
Everyone else was gaping at her from the shore. The rocks on which the boat was snagged had provided easy stepping stones to the east bank. Brier apparently had stayed behind to gather discarded backpacks, which now dangled in clusters from her big hands.
The barge teetered, groaning. Jame scrambled back onto the dais, fetching up as far astern as she could go. They were balanced again, but precariously. Any moment, the rush of water from behind would dislodge them. Jame didn't dare move to look, but from the way the land fell away before them, she guessed that they were on the edge of at least a twenty foot drop.
"Get off the boat," said Brier.
The deck shifted slightly forward, making Jame press back against the foot of the crows-nest. "You first," she said.
"Get off," the Kendar repeated, implacable. "Now."
The iron will in her voice almost made Jame obey; but if she did, both barge and cadet would go over the falls, and where would a Southie like Brier ever have learned how to swim?
Dammit, they hadn't time for games. In exasperation and anxiety, she reached for an overriding tone of command such as she had never used before. It rose, compounded of innate Highborn power and something utterly ruthless, like the edge of a master rune.
"COME HERE," she said—and realized with horror, the moment she spoke, whose voice she had unconsciously imitated.
The Kendar's eyes went blank. As in the Crown at Restormir, she started to obey, but then staggered.
"No!" she said hoarsely, and lurched backward.
With a screech, the barge fell.
Jame was thrown off the tilting deck, the catfish flying beside her. She slammed into water as hard as she had half-expected to hit rock. Deep, dark, very, very cold. The weight of Aerulan's banner slung across her back pulled her down. There would be blood in the water if all of this had reopened Kallystine's handiwork. Cold, hard lips pressed briefly against her own. Whiskers tickled. Her thrashing feet hit bottom, kicked off from it. An endless moment later Jame surfaced, sputtering.
Kissed by a catfish. Sweet Trinity, what next?
She yelped as a golden, serpentine neck reared up beside her, then splashed over on its side. The swan figurehead. Other fragments of the barge bobbed up all around her, their gilding too thin to hold them down. This was a small backwater, she saw, blocked off from the Silver's main current by a beaver dam.
But where was Brier?
Near the shore, a dark head broke the surface. The big Kendar was still carrying the cadets' heavy packs, as well as wearing her own.
"They took me straight to the bottom," she was saying to Vant as Jame floundered up on the bank beside her. "From there, I simply walked ashore."
Jame couldn't meet her cold stare. That she, who hated her Highborn blood so much, should have used such a voice on someone like Brier . . . . What difference was there, after all, between her and a pig like Caldane, if they were both capable of such a thing?
"Look!" said cadet, pointing.
The trees on the island stood black against the light growing behind them. Then fingers of luminous mist crept down the stepped falls, tentatively, as if feeling their way. Their tips fumbled around the figurehead, which vanished soundlessly. They groped on toward the shore.
"Climb," said Brier to the cadets. "You too, lady."
The Knorth didn't move. "The Earth Wife wants her imu," she said, without turning. "Perhaps she'll settle for me instead."
Brier swore under her breath. This was too much. She grabbed the Highborn's arm and started to swing her into a slap which would knock this latest idiocy out of her with a vengeance.
The blow never fell. Brier's hand was channeled aside in a perfect waterflowing move that ended abruptly in an earth-moving thumb-lock. Surprise more than pain shocked her into an off-balanced immobility.
"Someone slapped me not long ago," said the Knorth in a distant voice. "Never again."
Brier glared at her sideways, through the wet fringe of her hair. "Then stop asking for it . . . lady."
She was released so suddenly that she nearly fell into the river. The Knorth was laughing. "Wise Brier-rose. You and Marc should get along splendidly. C'mon."
They scrambled up to join the others on the River Road, fingers of mist combing through the trees after them. Beside the road ran fragments of an ancient wall. Clearly, the same hands had built both, but only the foundations remained of the latter like old, worn teeth fused into their sockets. Beyond them, the land rose in terraced foothills to the base of the cliffs. One towering white rock face stood out from the others. Many windows were cut into it, all dark and shuttered, but on top perched a keep blazing with light.
Mount Alban, the Scrollsmen's College. It must be.
"We've got to take refuge," Jame said, looking up. Underfoot, the earth shivered.
"Lady, you don't go indoors during a quake."
"And you don't stay outside in weirding. Take your choice."
Brier looked down at the mist tendrils that had begun to twine about her boots. "Up," she said to the cadets.
The ruins of a hill fort lay scattered at the cliff's foot, before Mount Alban's main door. Closer at hand was a sturdy wooden building set into the northwest side of the hill. It was locked. Brier and Vant put their shoulders to the door. Looking back, Jame saw mist well up against the broken wall, higher than it now stood, respecting its ancient dimensions, and she remembered what Cattila had said about the resistance of such work to the weirding effect. If they had stayed on the River Road, they might have been perfectly safe.
Mist rolled over the top of the wall which was no longer there. Behind it, mountains high, came the weirdingstrom.
The door suddenly gave way.
Brier rolled to her feet inside, but Vant sprawled, tripping his comrades as they rushed in on his heels. Last over the threshold, Jame hesitated, still looking back. A wizened scrollsman stood beside her—the same, apparently, who had unlocked the door. Now he jerked her back and slammed it, in the very face of the mist.
With a sigh, the weirdingstrom swept over them.
The wooden floor lurched. Dried herbs hanging from the low beams swayed while down one long wall hundreds of jars rattled on their shelves and many fell off. All the walls groaned. Clay seemed to melt out of their chinks, leaving each board outlined with light. Jame staggered. It felt for all the world as if she stood in the hold of a ship launched into heavy seas.
The old scrollsman had been darting up and down the long wall, catching jars as they fell, bleating with distress at each one missed. Now he stopped, arms full, listening.
"Why, we're adrift," he said.
The next moment he had shoved his burden at the nearest cadet and bolted to the back of the room, where he threw open a door and plunged through it, up stairs. They heard his voice, first in the passageway, then in some echoing open space beyond, shouting:
"We're adrift, everybody, we're adrift! Hurray!"