To Ride a Rathorn

by P. C. Hodgell

  Jame recognized the line that Vant—never her favorite Kendar—had taken with the young border-lander. "What stories?" she asked.

  "That something lives up here in a hidden room," Rue burst out defiantly. "That it has the paws of a bear and an axe buried in its head. That it growls and it prowls and it eats cadets who stumble into its lair."

  Graykin hooted with laughter. Rue hunched her shoulders, the tips of her ears reddening. Jame considered. Through Jorin's senses, as they wandered, she had caught whiffs of something odd, something rank, something alive.

  "The Lawful Lie notwithstanding, most songs have some element of truth in them."

  "Hah!" said Graykin. "D'you hear that, brat? Just be careful what door you open. Ugh!" He swatted at the cobweb that he had just walked into and spat out the husk of a fly.

  "Poor Gray," said his mistress. "Tentir isn't living up to your expectations, is it?"

  "Is it to yours?"

  "Oh well. This isn't the college proper. We'll see."

  Still, thought Jame, this was not auspicious. Neither had been falling off a horse practically at the Commandant's feet. Then again, it was usually her departure—from anywhere—that caused the most damage. Tai-tastigon in flames, Karkinaroth in ruins, "The Riverland reduced to rubble, and you in the midst of it, looking apologetic. . . ."

  What shape would Tentir be in when she left it?

  Speaking of shapes, it was odd how every Riverland keep was so different, as if the original builders had made a point of it. Generations of Kencyr had brought their own personalities to the task but less so here, where commandants changed by rotation and no one house had power. From the outside, Old Tentir looked straightforward, even dull. Inside, it was . . . strange. Low halls melting into twilight, right angles that never brought one back to the same place—she was fairly sure that Graykin was wrong about it being the same squeaky board: they all squeaked—someone subtle and secretive had designed this place, disguising its nature behind a bland face.

  "Jorin, stay in sight," she called to the ounce who was trotting ahead, eager to explore. Blind from birth, he only saw what she saw and remembered it, but this was all new to her.

  Lost.

  Would Tori be glad if she disappeared, gone from his life as suddenly as she had reentered it?

  Run, she thought, before he tells that alarming randon why he brought you here, before he proves himself as mad as they all fear—or hope—that he is.

  Graykin was grumbling again. "This is an insult!" he burst out. "You're the Highlord's sister, his only surviving blood-kin, but he pays more attention to that damned gray mare than to you!"

  "Brithany is a Whinno-hir, a matriarch of the herd. She's at least as old as Ardeth, perhaps older than the Fall."

  And smart. And brave. Imagine weird-walking all the way from the Southern Wastes to rejoin her chosen master, bringing her grand-colt with her. Storm, a quarter-blood Whinno-hir, was far more intelligent than the average horse, but still a moron compared to his grand-dam.

  "Damn it!" Graykin burst out, flailing at more webs. "You don't belong here!"

  Jame sighed. "That's the question, isn't it? Where do I belong?"

  "If you were a man," said Graykin, regarding her slyly askance, "you would be Highlord. I don't care if your brother is older than you are. You're stronger than he is . . . and why are you fidgeting like that?"

  "I'm saddle-sore. Don't laugh." She rubbed her buttocks, wincing. When there was time to check, she would probably find them black and blue. Her knees still felt unstrung. "Highlord, huh? Your ambition is showing, Gray, but I'm not a man and I don't want power, at least not that sort. Just give me a place to stand."

  "You're a Highborn lady," said the Southron stubbornly. "Stand on that."

  "I tried," she said, hearing the weary exasperation in her voice, trying to curb it. "All last winter, in the Women's Halls at Gothregor, I tried."

  Masked, hobbled with a tight underskirt, told over and over what a proper lady did or did not do . . . all to what end? She gingerly touched the scar ridge across her cheek, a parting gift from the Women's World in the person of Kallystine, Caineron's daughter and Tori's erstwhile limited term consort.

  "Gray, these days Highborn women are little better than fancy breeding stock, and I'm the last pure-blooded female in the Knorth stable, just as Tori is the last legitimate male. If any house gets a half-Knorth heir out of either one of us, how long d'you think we'll last?"

  For that matter, how long could Tori stand up to Ardeth pressure? Why didn't he fight back? She understood that he owed a great deal to his former mentor, without whom he would never have survived to claim his father's seat nor held it during these first, turbulent years. Moreover, he didn't want to hurt the old man. For all his drug-enhanced strength, she could sense how fragile Ardeth was, how deep into his resources he was reaching. For her brother, loyalty—yes, even love—must be at war with resentment.

  And he did resent the old lord.

  "When I was a boy," he had said to her in the ruins of Kothifir—had it been only the day before?—"I would have given anything to become a cadet at Tentir. But Adric forbade it."

  Ardeth had protested. It had been impossible. If anyone had guessed who Tori was before he came of age . . .

  "So you told me, Adric, when you dismissed my request as if it were a child's whim. So I lost my chance."

  Such bitterness, remembered and dismissed, but never forgotten or quite forgiven.

  However, if Ardeth was vulnerable now, so was Tori, and not just with exhaustion. Something about that good-looking boy Timmon had hit him hard, something to do with the boy's father, Pereden.

  Worse, something deep within Torisen himself was closed off, withdrawn . . . dead? His Kendar felt it. So did she, and it frightened her.

  Graykin hunched his thin shoulders as if against a cold wind. If he could have run away from her words, he would have. He wasn't stupid. Far from it. However, bastard and half-Kencyr that he was, his need to belong consumed him like a ravening hunger. At the Cataracts she had accidentally bound him, mind to mind, her needs at that moment matching the strength of his. Now there was no easy way to shake him off, nor should she want to. Ancestors knew, over the past winter he had earned his place in her service with scars that he would bear to his pyre, and he hadn't yet begun to re-grow (assuming he had enough Kencyr blood to do so) his lost teeth. Things were going to be hard enough, though, without him clinging fiercely to her sleeve, measuring his importance by hers every step of the way.

  One last try:

  "Gray, listen. I can't promise you anything. Not even a crust of bread every other week. Least of all protection. And you're in danger here. M'lord Caineron doesn't give up his playthings easily, much less those he considers he owns by right of blood."

  "You are strong," he muttered, not looking at her, repeating his one article of faith as if by itself it would protect him. "I've watched. I know. Nothing stops you."

  She could have shaken him.

  Jorin sniffed, then dug at the lower edge of a heavy oak door. Whatever he smelled was too faint to reach Jame's senses, but she felt his interest, and his unease.

  "The right door at last," said Rue with relief and tried the handle. "Damn. It's locked, and I don't have a key."

  "Let me try." Jame slid between the cadet and the door, screening the latter. She extended a claw and probed the ponderous lock.

  Her gloves' slit fingertips had been Marc's idea. At first she had rejected it, not wanting to use her hated nails at all, for anything, but many pairs of ruined gloves later she had had to admit that the big Kendar was right.

  It still amazed her how casually he took her deformity. When her nails had first emerged, betraying her Shanir blood, her father had cast her out into the Haunted Lands, with no place to go but across the Border. Into Perimal Darkling. Into the Master's House. She had been seven years old at the time.

  Then again, pure-blooded Kendar like Marc were never Shanir. Perh
aps that made them more tolerant than the vulnerable Highborn.

  If only Marc were with her now rather than this opportunistic half-breed—but she wasn't in a position to provide for her old, dear friend any more than for Graykin. Marc was better off with her brother. She wondered if Tori had yet offered the old warrior a place in his household. He had better, and no one deserved it more. But still . . .

  Lost, she thought again, with a sudden wave of desolation. I've lost Marc, and Tirandys, and Tai-tastigon, and now here I am where no one wants me.

  Then she gave herself a shake. Graykin was right, darkness take him. Nothing stopped her, not despair, not loss, least of all not common sense. This was a new life. She had started over before, many times, and would keep on doing so until she damn well got it right.

  Tumbles ground in the lock. "There."

  The portal swung slowly inward, grating on its hinges. From the darkness within came a breath of hot air—Haaaaah . . .—and streamers of cobweb floated out into the hall. With them came a sharp, acrid smell, intensified for Jame through Jorin's senses. She only realized that she had backed away when the other side of the hall stopped her. The ounce also retreated, then turned, crouched, and sprang into her arms. Her knees nearly buckled. Almost full grown, he was very heavy.

  Rue and Graykin were staring at her.

  "That smell . . ." Jame said, and sneezed violently.

  "What smell?" asked Rue, too mystified for once to look away.

  "The room is musty," said Graykin, impatiently. "That's all. You. Light my lady's chambers."

  Rue made a face at him and disappeared inside.

  "What's wrong?" hissed Graykin.

  "I . . . don't know," said Jame, shifting the ounce's weight, and she didn't . . . quite.

  Inside, steel rasped on flint, and candlelight danced out into the corridor. Rue gave a stifled exclamation. Without thinking, Jame dropped an indignant ounce and brushed past Graykin, into the apartment.

  The cadet stood in the first room of three, holding a candle, looking about her in amazement. The low-ceilinged chamber was full of heavy furniture indistinct and sulking under filmy shrouds: a massive chair beside the fireplace, a table, a glimpse into the next room of an enormous, shadowy bed, its counterpane disordered and bulging.

  " . . . haaahhh . . ." sighed the open vents to the fire timber hall three stories below. As the suite exhaled into the hall, its hot breath stirred walls and ceiling swathed in translucent, faintly glowing white.

  "Ugh," said Graykin, peering in. "More spiders."

  "I don't think so," said Jame.

  She ducked, wary of the filaments that drifted down toward her as if blindly groping for her face. Not all of them were spun in single strands, she saw, but some in the round, like boneless fingers, merging higher up into flaccid sleeves. The walls and ceiling of the suite were festooned with intertwined, insubstantial shapes, afloat in the flickering light. Stirred by the hot breath of the vents and the draft from the door, they seemed languidly to grapple with each other about the room's upper margins.

  "Careful," she said, touching Rue's arm to make the cadet hold the candle lower. "Let's only set fire to the keep as a last resort."

  Graykin snorted.

  They all felt the need to speak softly except for Jorin, who leaned in from the hall anxiously chirping at Jame to come out. When she didn't, he slunk in and crouched at her feet. A moment later Graykin nerved himself to join them in a rush that caused a momentary wake in the sea of ghosts overhead.

  Jame loosened her collar, feeling sweat trickle down inside it. She didn't like heat. As for that smell . . . . Although it had faded somewhat with the influx of fresh air, she could still almost taste it in the back of her throat, like the sting of old grief. Then she knew what it was.

  "Rue, how long has a darkling crawler been loose in Tentir?"

  The cadet gaped at her. "How did you . . . who told you . . ."

  Another hot room, another house where monstrous shadows crawled . . .

  "Senethari, y-you've poisoned me."

  No wonder Tirandys had been in her mind.

  "Someone once gave me wine infused with wyrm's venom. I drank it. It had that same sharp smell and taste."

  The cadet sighed, almost with relief. "Most don't believe it was ever here at all. How long? Since last fall, when m'lords Caineron and Knorth stopped here on their way to the mustering of the Host at Gothregor. A darkling changer came hunting the Highlord and would have killed him, sure, if Singer Ashe hadn't pushed the changer into a fire-pit down in the fire-timber hall. His blood kindled and he more or less exploded—a proper mess all around, or so I've heard. As for the wyrm, no one saw that but the Highlord, and afterward the Caineron claimed that he'd imagined it."

  "The poor, mad Knorth."

  "That's it . . . lady," she added, remembering herself and of whose house she spoke. "They tried to say the same about the changer, but too many had seen it including my cousin, who was on duty that night outside Commandant Harn's quarters. We border brats take these things seriously."

  She said this so pugnaciously that Jame laughed. "I know. I'm a border brat myself and so is Tori, if he isn't too grand these days to have forgotten."

  Her eyes kept drifting back to the ceiling. The figures that floated there were as empty as a spider's egg sack in the spring, but hot air from the vents breathed fitful definition into the flaccid forms. Here a head rose, inflating. For a moment there was the suggestion of a fine-drawn chin and an arched brow that seemed to frown. Then all features swelled grotesquely and the figure turned away with a sigh, deflating. Elsewhere limp gloves of web became elegant lace-work hands, became veined, translucent sausages, vented, and collapsed.

  They were like the fitful images of a troubled dream, but whose?

  Two figures emerged over and over, interacting at different points in what appeared to be a prolonged conflict. One, better defined than the other, was always turning away.

  The other, more nebulous, kept changing as if trying to hold a true shape—any shape—while at the same time unraveling around the edges. Nonetheless it . . . no, he had the sharper presence of the two, a thing fiercely clung to even as errant drafts teased him apart. All over the room, his multitude of heads were turning toward her as if aware of her thoughts. Filaments floated around each like a cloud of wild, white hair.

  Jame brushed a tendril of web from her neck. It left a thin, stinging line.

  . . . are you the one?

  "Careful," she said to the other two. "There's still a trace of venom in these threads."

  There was also that ghost of words, echoing faintly with impotent rage.

  . . . are you the one who made bitter ash of my life?

  No, Jame wanted to say. You did that to yourself and, thanks to Tori, you got what you deserved.

  She was stopped, however, by the memory of another pyre, another changer's shape melting into flame, and her eyes stung with remembered tears.

  Ah, Tirandys, Senethari. Did you deserve what happened to you? Damn Master Gerridon, honor's paradox, and all three faces of our god, for giving us impossible choices, then damning us when we choose wrong.

  "So the changer died," she said, collecting herself, "the wyrm fled, and everyone marched south to fight the Waster Horde which, incidentally, was led by other rebel changers. Meanwhile, the crawler spent the winter at Tentir, maybe in these rooms. Ancestors know, it's hot enough. Well insulated too. A proper nest."

  Highborn and Kendar looked at each other.

  "We should get out of here, lady."

  "Good idea," said Graykin, starting for the outer door.

  Jorin sat up, ears pricked. Then he jumped to his feet and trotted purposefully through the opposite door, into the bed-room. When he didn't return at Jame's call, she went after him. As they hesitated, Rue and Graykin heard an exclamation followed by a sharp summons: "Come see this, both of you."

  The second room was hotter than the first, its ceiling a floating m
ass of loose filaments especially thick over the bed. Jame had thrown back the coverlet.

  "I want witnesses to this," she said.

  They stared at the bed's contents.

  "A broken shell?" said Rue. She poked the pearly fragments gingerly. They dissolved with a faint hiss into a pool of viscous fluid.

  "More likely a cocoon," said Jame, "or perhaps a molt. What do I know about the life cycle of a wyrm?"

  The liquid began to eat its way through the sheets, then through the mattress.

  "Ugh," said Graykin. "Whatever was in here must just have broken out—now, of all times. Why does everything always happen to me?"