“Now, ladies.”
Jame sat down on the ledge overlooking the cavern, followed by Kroaky and, reluctantly, by Fang, who placed herself on his far side.
“How far back do the caves go?” Jame asked.
“Miles and miles,” said Kroaky, dreamily, “getting smaller and smaller and smaller. That’s where the Old Ones live. Oh, there are wonders in the depths—draperies of stone, cascading water, lace-thin shelves, caverns that glow with even a hint of outside light, silent pools where eyeless fish swim and nameless creatures eat them. Just think of it: all that below and above, tower on tower of marble, limestone, and travertine. They say that only the god-king keeps one from collapsing into the other.”
Fang snorted. “If so, he doesn’t always succeed. What about those rock falls this past spring? We lost one whole branch of side caves and the river nearly broke through.”
“That wasn’t his fault,” said Kroaky, with a rare show of defensiveness. “He was distracted during the last Change.”
“He always is. And it’s getting worse.”
“As I understand it,” said Jame, “King Kruin exiled the Old Pantheon Undercliff. Why?”
“His precious prophet didn’t want any competition, did he?” said Fang. “Not when he claimed to represent the one true god.”
“What prophet?”
“The leader of the Karnids, of course.”
“What god?”
“As to that, all I know is that they claim this world is only a shadow of the one to come where the faithful will be rewarded and the rest of us will suffer.”
Jame had heard of such beliefs before, and of other prophets, but this one somehow sounded different. Perhaps it was because of the black history that the Kencyrath shared with Urakarn.
“I take it that Kruin’s son Krothen doesn’t share that view,” she said. “Why hasn’t he welcomed the old gods back?”
“How many d’you think we need Overcliff?” Kroaky demanded. “Krothen is enough for us topside.”
“And the guild lords.”
“Huh. Them.”
“And the grandmasters.” Now Jame was goading him, but she was also unclear about the difference between the three lords and each guild’s individual grandmaster.
“You call them gods?” Kroaky laughed scornfully. “All right, so they have special powers, but they aren’t immortal. What’s a god without that?”
“Still,” said Fang, “you have to admit that the Changes have come more frequently and hit harder since the Old Pantheon gods were exiled. The king should think about inviting them back.”
Jame agreed. “It isn’t safe to lock up gods in your cellar, so to speak.
Kroaky harrumphed, then pointed as if glad for the interruption. “Hush. Here they come now.”
Faint music sounded from the back of the cavern and the crowd stilled. It drew nearer, echoing—pipes, flutes, drums, something eldritch that might have been the wind whistling between the worlds. Figures advanced carrying torches. Their shadows preceded them, casting fantastic shapes on the cavern’s fissured walls. The crowd drew back as the procession entered the body of the cave.
Jame was reminded of Mother Vedia’s approach on her feast day. There, in fact, she was, again seated like a living statue on an upraised litter, again surrounded by her dancing, snake-wreathed attendants, but this time without bats or followers.
Before her went a gross figure looking like a younger version of the Earth Wife but also hugely pregnant, attended by a host of waddling women in a similar state.
After them, unaccompanied, came a skinny crone carrying a box. While people cheered the other two, they turned away from this last figure, shielding their children’s eyes.
“The Great Mother in her aspects of healer, life-bearer, and hungry tomb,” said Kroaky, raising his voice over the renewed clamor of the crowd as the next god emerged from the shadows.
“What’s in the box?”
“Death, of course.”
Jame regarded the diverse figures and remembered her conversation with Gran Cyd, queen of the Merikit. Showing her a fertility figure and an imu, both representing the Earth Wife, she had said, “These images were ancient long before Mother Ragga was even born,” which made sense since the Four had only come into being with the activation of the Kencyr temples, some three thousand years ago.
Jame had wondered at the time if the Earth Wife and the other three of Rathillien’s elemental Four, while each a distinct individual, wore different, older aspects in different cultures and were subject to older stories. Here, perhaps, was the answer.
It raised a further question, however: how had the deification of the Four affected the Old Pantheon, which preceded them?
There was the Earth Wife, at any rate, in three of her earlier native aspects.
Next came a cauldron seething with river fish. Fingerling trout crept over the edge of the pot and pulled up a figure glittering with scales. Cold round eyes regarded the crowd through a net of green hair and pouting lips parted over needle teeth in a smile meant to entice.
The Eaten One, thought Jame, or some variation of her, probably linked to the Amar. Did she also take a human lover? Where was Drie now, still blissfully in his beloved’s arms or deep within her digestive tract?
The goddess of love and lost causes walked behind her, backward, gazing into a mirror whose surface rippled like water. Around her feet, threatening to trip her, swarmed a host of green and yellow frogs.
“Geep!” they chorused. “Geep, geep, GEEP!”
Rain pattered in their wake.
Gorgo, thought Jame, happy to see an almost familiar face, or faces. She wondered how he and his priest Loogan were doing in Tai-tastigon. Sooner or later, she would have to find out.
The last frog hopped frantically past, followed by a long, low, dark shape with a scaly tail on one end and a cruelly toothed snout on the other, waddling on the plump, pale limbs of a human baby.
More followed. Those clearly aligned with the Four seemed to fare the best. Others passed as phantoms of their former selves, and received little recognition from the crowd. Who now worshipped that dog-faced being or that drifting tatter of silk, that murky orange glow or that thing of clattering bones?
A dazzling light entered the cavern.
“Ooh!” breathed the crowd, and covered their eyes.
Jame peered through her fingers at the sun in all his glory. She could almost make out a figure at the heart of the blaze, a man in red pants stumbling forward supporting a giant, swollen phallus with both hands. It was this member from which the light emanated.
The moon circled him, her face alternately that of the maiden, the matron, and the hag, just like the pommel of the Ivory Knife. She looked up with shifting features and saluted Jame.
“Sister, join us!”
Was this also a mortal who had undergone at least a temporary apotheosis—like the guild lords above? Like Dalis-sar in Tai-tastigon? Like she herself, eventually, if she became That-Which-Destroys?
Heat washed through the cavern, worse than when the sun had come among them but without his dazzling light. A woman carrying a hearthside firepot, a martial figure clanking in the redhot armor of war, and then came a stillness. Heat gave way to a sudden, mortal chill. Jame felt the sweat on her brow turn cold.
“I won’t look,” said Fang, and hid her face against Kroaky’s shoulder.
A cloaked and hooded figure had entered the cavern. He made his way forward slowly, feeling ahead of him with an iron-shod staff. Why should he cause such dread? Perhaps it was the smoke seeping from within his garments. Perhaps it was the stench of burned flesh. Perhaps it was because he came alone, without attendants, and all turned their backs on him.
“Nemesis,” said Kroaky, glaring down defiantly although his voice shook. “I had nothing to do with the old man’s death. Ask Tori. He was there.”
“Wha…” Jame started to ask him, but memory caught her by the throat.
My father, na
iled to the keep door with three arrows through his chest, cursing my brother and me as he died.…
“It wasn’t our fault,” she said out loud. “D’you hear me, Burnt Man? Neither one of us was there!”
Wind frisked into the cavern. It swirled around the dark figure, teasing apart his robe, releasing streamers of smoke until with a flick it twitched away the garment altogether. For a moment, a man-shaped thing of soot and ash hovered there. Then the wind scattered it.
The crowd cheered.
“They think he’s gone,” said Kroaky in an oddly husky voice, “but he always comes back. Like sorrow. Like guilt.”
The wind remained, now tumbling about the onlookers, snatching off this man’s hat, flinging up that woman’s skirt. Laughter followed its antics, all the louder with relief. A figure appeared whirling like a dervish in a storm of black feathers, long white beard wrapped around him, feet not quite touching the ground.
“Who…?” asked Jame.
“The Old Man,” said Kroaky, almost reverently, holding down his ginger hair with both hands. “The Tishooo. The east wind.”
“In the Riverland, we call him the south wind.”
“Well, he would come at you from that direction, wouldn’t he? In fact, he moves about pretty much as he pleases, the tricky old devil. Some say that he governs the flow of time itself in the Wastes, don’t ask me how. Here we most often get him direct from Nekrien. He keeps away the Shuu and the Ahack from the south and west, from the Barrier across the Wastes and from Urakarn. We don’t honor those here.”
“What about the north wind?”
“The Anooo? That blows us the Kencyr Host and occasional weirding. Blessing or curse? You tell me. Without the east wind and the mountains, though, Kothifir, Gemma, and the other Rim cities would be buried in sand like the other ancient ruins of the Wastes.”
The procession wound around the cavern until it reached its center. Here torches were set in holes drilled in the limestone floor and the avatars of the Four joined hands within the circle. They began to rotate slowly sunwise. Their worshippers formed a withershins ring around them, then another going the opposite way, and so on and on, alternating, to the edges of the cave. Jame grew dizzy watching their gyrations. Everyone was chanting, but not the same thing:
“There was an old woman…”
“There was an old man…”
“There was a maid…”
“There was a lad…”
The circle next to the gods slowed, swayed, and reversed itself. One by one, the rest corrected themselves until all were revolving the same way, those innermost going slowly, those outermost running, panting, to keep up. The world seemed to shift on its axis. Torches flared blue, casting shadows across an open space grown impossibly wide, split by fiery sigils.
They had opened Sacred Space.
Into it stepped two figures, one dressed in loose red pants, and the other in spangled green. Jame recognized the former as the engorged sun god. The latter was the redhead into whose arms she had thrust the gilded boot, the winner of the boys’ run. So that was how they chose the Challenger, which she nearly had become. Again.
The boys bowed to each other, then crouched and began to glide back and forth, sweeping alternate legs behind them. At first their movements were slow, almost ritualistic, and incredibly fluid. One swung his foot at the other, who ducked under it, then swung in his turn. Thus they pinwheeled across the open space between fiery sigils and back again. The Favorite in red aimed a leg sweep at his opponent. The Challenger in green jumped over it. In the middle of a cartwheel, the Challenger launched a roundhouse kick at the other’s face. They were seriously going at it now, weaving back and forth, striking and dodging in a fury of limbs.
Jame watched intently. She had learned the basics of Kothifiran street fighting from Brier, but had never before seen two experts engaged in it. They barely used their hands at all except to block foot strikes, and their legs seemed to be everywhere in graceful, swinging arcs. Some moves were like water-flowing and some like fire-leaping, but in surprising combinations. No wonder first Brier and then Torisen had beaten her at the beginning and the end of her college career, both knocking out the same tooth now barely grown back.
The Challenger leaped and twisted. His foot, scything through the air, caught the Favorite a solid blow on the jaw that dropped him where he stood.
The crowd roared. All the women in it rushed into Sacred Space, collapsing it, converging on the new Favorite whose smug look turned to one of dawning horror. A moment later they had overwhelmed him.
“There,” said Kroaky, patting Jame on the back. “Aren’t you glad you didn’t win the run?”
CHAPTER IV
Red Dust
Summer 100
I
The archery butts were manikins made of twisted straw, mounted on the backs of giant racing tortoises. Each tortoise had a handler and spiked collars that prevented it from drawing in its head or limbs. There were two dozen of them in all, straining with slow, ponderous strength against their leashes. Two cadet ten-commands waited on their mounts with bows strung while the handlers wrangled their unwieldy charges into a loose battle formation.
It was a hot, windless afternoon on the dusty training field south of the Host’s camp, and one of many such lessons there. Jame wiped sweat off her forehead with a sleeve. Like the other cadets, she was wearing a muslin cheche as protection against the sun. Her burn had peeled away and a tan was starting in its place. Still, she wasn’t used to the southern heat.
Timmon nudged his horse closer.
“You should be riding that precious rathorn of yours, Jamethiel, not a Whinno-hir.”
Jame made a face. Timmon kept teasing her with her true name until she almost wished that she hadn’t revealed it. On the other hand, while other Highborn had been horrified, Timmon seemed merely amused that she had such a dire namesake, commenting at the time, “Oh, well, that explains everything.”
She stroked Bel-tairi’s silken neck. “True, Bel is an easier ride, but we’re supposed to perforate, not decapitate. Besides, Death’s-head is off hunting.”
“You did warn him about the local livestock, I hope.”
“He never preyed on the herds near Tentir, and he prefers his chickens roasted, not raw.”
Timmon’s mount sidled and tossed its head, sensing his mood.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Everything. Look, they’re ready.”
The handlers had unleashed their charges and were backing away. Behind the ten-commands was a pile of bruised fruit. The tortoises started for it, necks outstretched, snapping at each other to gain room.
“Go!” said the sargent in charge of the exercise.
A Knorth and an Ardeth spurred forward. They wove through the oncoming mass, one shooting to the right, the other to the left. With both hands occupied, they had to steer with their knees, making this also a test of horsemanship. The Knorth, Niall, scored two hits; the Ardeth, three.
“Beginner’s luck,” said Jame. “Wait until Erim’s turn.” She glanced sideways at the Ardeth Lordan, whose horse was again fidgeting. “Are you going to tell me?”
“You’ll laugh. No one here takes me seriously.”
Jame thought about that. All his life, Timmon had tried to measure up to the hero that he had believed his father Pereden to be. Peri had been her brother’s second-in-command and then leader of the Southern Host, but he had never been a randon. His reckless sense of entitlement had led him to march the Host into disastrous battle against the Waster Horde before he had betrayed it altogether. Timmon had only recently learned about the latter, to his chagrin. Now he was among randon who had served under his father and knew his fickle nature only too well, measured by the lives he had squandered.
Timmon hadn’t helped the situation by his lackadaisical attitude at Tentir. Not that he had done badly there, but he had used his Shanir charm to slip out of any duty that didn’t interest him. People had notice
d.
The trick now was to hit fresh straw targets, preferably in the head or breast. The cadets were also being timed: twenty seconds to loose three arrows each. Distracted by the pound of oncoming hooves, the tortoises began to scatter. The horses swerved around them.
Jame cheered a hit on Damson’s part and groaned when she missed the next two.
Damson worried her. The Kendar girl could shift things in people’s heads, in one case having caused the cadet Vant to lose his balance and fall into the firepit where he had burned to death—all because he had teased her about her weight. Worse, the memory of her deed gave her pleasure. On the whole, she seemed to have no inborn sense of honor at all. If she passed her second year of randon training, she would become at least a five-commander, responsible for other lives. At the moment, she was Jame’s responsibility, and Jame didn’t know what to do about her.
G’ah, think of that later.
“I suppose you’ll have to prove yourself,” she said to Timmon, returning to his problem.
“How?”
“Take your duties seriously, for one thing. No more slithering out of things.”
Timmon grimaced. The habits of a pampered lifetime were proving hard to break.
A thought struck her. “D’you know the names of all your cadets?”
“I know my own ten-command,” he said defensively.
“And the rest of the second-years, not to mention the third-years and randon?”
“Now, be fair. There are over one hundred and forty second-years alone here at Kothifir.”
“And only eighty Knorth,” said Jame, proud that she had only lost one to the last cull compared to the Ardeth’s twenty. “But I know them all, and am learning the rest. Tori remembers every Kendar sworn to our house, alive or dead.”
Timmon gave her a sidelong, defiant glower. “All two thousand of them, among the living alone? I heard that he forgot some.”
“Only one. A Kendar named Mullen, who killed himself to make sure that Tori would remember him forever. He hasn’t forgotten anyone since.” As far as she knew, and as she devoutly hoped. Kindrie’s genealogical chart should come in handy on Autumn’s Eve, if Tori chose to avail himself of it. “The point is, would you fight, perhaps die, for a leader who didn’t know who you were?”
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