But Jame was already absent, with no sign where she had gone. This was the second day.
Brier released the gelding’s hoof, resigned to finding a different mount.
They had to leave, whether Jame returned in time to go with them or not. After all, she wasn’t the only one upon whom the Randon Council was about to pass its verdict. All of Jame’s original ten-command faced the same trial except for Killy, who was dead. Char, too, must present himself to see if his repeated senior year qualified him to become a full-collared randon. There were several other cadets, too, from different ten-commands. With a jolt, Brier remembered that she was also up for judgment, despite a year as Tagmeth’s marshal.
So much had happened. The trip north, the ruins needing to be rebuilt, the isolation, the threat of starvation, the yackcarn stampede, the discovery of the gates, the Caineron attack . . . they had survived it all. Brier had played her part, but so had Jame, despite early fears about her ability to lead—and yes, Brier had also harbored those. Her involvement with perfidious Caineron Highborn made her a skeptic. Her previous experience with Highborn ladies was nonexistent. Judging by Jame, who knew what horrors the reclusive Women’s Halls might conceal?
But that wasn’t her business. She was bound to her lady. This was her home. These were her people. Those were her loyalties. Belatedly she thought of Torisen, the Highlord. Well, yes. She owed tribute to him too, but Jame (usually) was so much closer.
A cadet ran down the steps from the courtyard.
“It’s that Southron,” she reported. “He slipped through the savannah gate and got chased by a pride of spotted cats.”
Brier swore. Graykin had been a nuisance ever since his arrival, and not just for his Highborn pretensions when everyone knew that he was only Caldane’s illegitimate son by a Karkinoran serving wench. Jame apparently found him useful. Brier, however, didn’t approve of spies. Neither did Torisen, she reminded herself, having been watched by the Ardeth throughout his early years with the Southern Host. Kothifir was one thing, though. What good did Jame think her peculiar servant could do here in the Riverland?
Perhaps Graykin wondered about that too. Ever since his arrival, he had bedeviled Brier with his suspicions that she wasn’t telling the truth about Jame’s disappearance, as if she know what that was. He lurked and listened, all the time in the bright coats that he couldn’t seem to put aside. Brier understood his insecurity. Admit it: she was insecure too. But that didn’t make her more sympathetic to a half-breed Caineron.
Grow up, boy, she thought. We all have to.
He had been fetched back to the courtyard where he drooped next to the well, panting. His hair hung in sweaty tangles, his ornate coat in limp folds of crimson and gold. It was hot on the savannah.
“They only chased him because he kept popping up behind clumps of grass to see where they were,” the cadet said in her ear. “They’re mischievous little things, best at pulling down rabbits and small fowl. Maybe they thought that he wanted to play.”
Graykin glared at Brier. “You’re trying to kill me!”
Brier frowned. “What?”
“Why didn’t you tell me that the gates were portals to dangerous places? Where was I? What were those creatures? In Perimal’s name, what’s going on around here?”
“True, I didn’t tell you about the gates, but I didn’t hide them either.”
Had it been in the back of her mind that he might stumble through one and not come back? If so, why not?
“Now you know,” she said. “The question is this: can you be trusted to keep your lady’s secrets?”
“She thinks so. Who are you, to question that?”
“In her absence, I command here.”
He sneered at her, an effect somewhat marred by the hair flopping limply into his eyes, getting into his mouth. He spat it out. “Well, I know more than you can dream about the doings of Jamethiel Priest’s-bane, past and current. After all, she bound me first.”
Had Brier known that? If so, she had deliberately pushed it out of her mind. Moreover, giving Jame her full title felt like a slap in Brier’s face. Who was this little snot to know that? It was in her mind, on the tip of her tongue, to call him a liar. Jame’s current doings? What were they? Where was she? Not for the first time, Brier felt as if she were falling.
She didn’t trust me. Can I trust her?
“For that matter,” Brier said, pulling herself together, “she bound her ounce before either of us.” And her gaze shifted briefly to Jorin, once again napping beside one of the closed gates, not even in the sun. Why always there?
“Clean up,” she told the spy. “There’s a bath chamber below the keep.” Yes, which will take the hide off of you, soft thing. “We’ll talk later. Maybe.”
II
IT DIDN’T COME TO THAT. Graykin avoided both the subterranean room with its channels directly to the icy river and dinner, which he ate in his tower room.
That night, the skies broke loose. Lightning glared across the courtyard. Thunder rumbled down the throat of the Silver. Brier woke repeatedly, and cursed herself for her nerves. It was only a storm.
But here was a guard, bursting into her room.
“Marshal, come quick!”
From the barracks’ doorway, she saw a figure standing in the middle of the courtyard next to the well. It seemed at first to be bulky, although its face was skeletal and its outline flinched with each crack of light and sound. Rain bounced around it on the stone flags. More coursed down the deep seams of a cloak that appeared to be struggling to escape.
Flash. Boom.
The cloak slipped off to fell with a meaty thud and a splash. At its hem, serpentine heads rose, questing. Then they slithered off in an undulating wave, their tails twitching behind them. Graykin yelped and leaped back as the thing coursed past him into the shelter of the tower.
Left standing in the courtyard was a painfully thin figure, beginning to shiver in the cold rain.
III
“THE LASS DREAMED ABOUT THIS,” said Marc. “Over and over again, coming closer each night.”
They had met in Graykin’s first-story quarters. The stranger had been installed one flight above them, under Jame’s room. He still hadn’t spoken and was sitting motionless before a newly kindled fire, ignoring the cup of mulled wine placed at his elbow and the dry clothes laid out on the nearby bed. No one had felt like touching him. Drip, drip, went his clothes, somehow audible on the floor below. Outside the rain had stopped.
“Did she say who he is?” asked Graykin. For once, he was dressed in what was probably close to his usual attire—a patched, shabby dressing gown. As if aware of this informality, he kept his arms crossed tight over his narrow chest.
“Someone out of the past,” Marc said with a shrug.
“And you mean to keep him? What if he’s an assassin?”
“Oh yes?” said Brier. “So weak that he can barely stand? You know her so well. You tell us who he is.”
“Not who but what: danger!” Water gathered between the ceiling boards. Graykin flinched from the falling drops. “At least keep him confined!”
“These are your assigned quarters, at the foot of his stairs. Shall we make you his warden?”
“I’ll tell you this,” said Marc, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. “He’s Highborn—mostly Knorth. I’ve been around the lass long enough to know that. Each house has its own savor. We’ve been hard on that family in the current age. There aren’t many left.”
Graykin gave a bark of scornful laughter. “Are you saying that this is some long-lost relation? A thrice-removed cousin? A maiden uncle? Then what was that thing he was wearing, a family friend? Where has it got to, anyway?”
“Upstairs?” said Brier. “It looked suspiciously like a set of matched, living snakes stitched together with silver thread.” Now, why did that sound familiar? “Check your bed before you get back into it.”
“Tell Jame that when she returns. Where is she anyway?”
/> Did he think that he could surprise the answer out of her? Would that he could. Brier rose, her fire-cast shadow falling over the Southron. It pleased her to see him flinch.
“Until our lady reappears, we keep him as an honored guest, just as we do you.”
With that, Brier left, feeling once again in command but at the same time uneasy. What if she had just made a terrible mistake?
Chapter IX
Gods and Demons
Spring 56
I
THE SUN HAD SET. Pink-ribbed clouds still crowned the jagged heights of the Ebonbane, but already their edges were fading. Below in Tai-tastigon, twilight lingered in glowing store windows, in the anxious faces of shoppers hurrying for the shelter of home against the swiftly falling night. Soon the thieves would be on the hunt. There wasn’t much Jame could do about that, though, except take to the rooftops again, and so she did.
Now what? she wondered.
Usually, life presented her with a series of evolving events, punctuated with disasters. One saw some shape to it, if sometimes only after the fact. So far, today had seemed almost random. Well, then, the pieces couldn’t be fit together until they were all found, and several were still missing.
At the moment, though, the stray piece that worried her the most was Rue. She had brought the cadet to Tai-tastigon and was responsible for her. How was she faring in this strange city? Where was Patches likely to have taken her? Back, perhaps, to her home in the Lower Town?
Therefore, Jame soon found herself in that desolate district. Night hadn’t quite fallen there, the ruins seeming more wretched as a result. Doors stood half-open, scruffy children loitering on their thresholds, reluctant to leave their play in the streets, but voices began to call them in.
Here was Patches’ house. One of her siblings stood on the step, holding open the door for the wobbling toddler. Both were so wizened that it was hard to tell if they were boy or girl. One of each, Jame thought.
“Is Patches here?” she asked the older. A girl, surely. “Or my friend Rue?”
The girl shook her head. Then, almost stealthily, she closed the door in Jame’s face.
Jame was left on an empty street, the last soft thuds of doors sounding down it, farther and farther away. Light showed through cracks, then disappeared inch by inch as each in turn was stuffed from inside with rags. A thin wind rattled dust down the road. Some stars were coming out, but the moon, shrunken by now to its last quarter, would not rise for hours yet. Besides, there were the massing clouds to the north, through which silent lightning stitched. It was becoming very dark.
Opposite her, someone stood in deepening shadows, leaning against the wall. Did he even breathe? She couldn’t tell. His folded arms crossed his chest tightly, as if to hold himself together. His black hair hung in shaggy locks over his downcast eyes, from which came the sliver of a silvery glint. He didn’t cry, but she was reminded of the little boy she had seen before. This stranger, however, was several years older, almost a young man.
“Are you still here?” she asked him, tentative in her approach, unsure of her instincts.
“Still.”
His voice seemed to come from a great distance, and it was as bitter as the dust banked at his feet.
“Did your father turn out to be a king?”
His thin lips twisted in a smile, the gleam of white, bared teeth between them. “No. Nor even my true father.”
“Then who are you? What is your name?”
He laughed, and told her.
“Oh,” said Jame, blankly. “I . . . see. I think.”
“I have . . . urges. Look.”
He shoved back a sleeve. His bare forearm was crisscrossed with cuts. The skin hung down from it in looped ribbons.
“The man who called himself my father told me what to do when I hurt, to ease the pain. And so I do. If I can’t hurt others, I hurt myself . . . or is it the other way around? Either way, it . . . calms me. I must have done something wrong, to be the way that I am. Father—Abbotir—says so, anyway. But the priest says that I needn’t be damned. I have been cut adrift by circumstances, but my true people have rites, rituals. That man who calls himself my father . . . he wants, he orders, he demands. . . . Skin is nothing.”
He tore away a strip and grimaced. Blood spiraled, black, down his wrist, dripping off his fingertips to smoke on the ground. He grinned. More teeth.
“See? It comes off. However, honor runs beneath, to the core, if one cuts deep enough. If I am forced to compromise, I will never stop. Then I am damned indeed.”
Jame took an impetuous step forward. “Don’t trust that filthy priest with your soul. He will only betray you.”
However, the other was already drifting back into the shadows.
“Bane!”
She tried to grab him, but her hand scraped against the flaking paint of an empty wall on which someone had drawn the stick figure of a hanged man.
“I will do what I must,” breathed the wind. “Honor is all.”
II
THE KENCYR TEMPLE stood close by. Jame felt drawn to see it although she expected no comfort thereby. It rose into the night sky, white, cold, unfeeling. Here was a god who gave no hope but the oblivion of fire and ash. And honor? What was that to the dead? Bane, perhaps, could answer—if he was truly gone, which she now doubted.
That thought haunted her. She had her people’s horror of the unburnt dead, trapped between life and death. Things should be one way or the other. This in-between state was like the taste of vegetables in the Haunted Lands that shrieked in boiling water and screamed when pierced with fork or knife, but whose savor was only that of watered blood. Tai-tastigon seemed to be experiencing something similar. Was that what she had tasted in her dinner’s onions? What did it all mean?
The Lower Town’s wasteland opened up before her. A cloud of dust hung over it, raised by the feet of those who stumbled, lost, across its expanse. How many there were. Why were they here, and where were their shadows?
Two figures walked toward the temple, a man holding the arm of a woman. The latter wore a glittering veil that she held with a trembling hand across her face as if to shield herself. When she tripped over debris, the man jerked her back to her feet. That, surely, was Heliot. In the gathering dark, his armor gleamed crimson at the cracks as if it floated on a volcanic lake, and his red beard fluttered up against ruddy cheeks.
“Onward, my dear,” he was saying, with a savage grin. “Just a few steps more . . .”
The dust before them stirred. Something rose out of it, to a knee, to its feet. The stars dimmed above it, tangled in its hair. It swayed over their heads like a column of smoke fretted with fire. Aden drew back, but her guide still gripped her arm.
“I want you to meet someone,” he said.
“Will he help my sons?”
“Not ‘he.’ She. Did you think you were the first to catch the eye of a sun god?”
“Let me go!” She twisted helplessly in his clutch. “I came here for Dally and Men-dalis!”
“That doesn’t matter now. Your lover is weak. He can’t lie. I can. What is the truth but a bright bubble upon the air? Prick it and poof: it is gone. My darling Kalissan, I have brought someone to meet you.”
The shape of the dead goddess bent over them. Aden screamed. It seemed to swoop down on top of her, rapidly condensing and gaining substance as it descended, knocking her off her feet. When she tried to rise, it batted her with the huge, smoky paw of a hand and tilted its head to watch her stagger as a cat might its prey. Even Heliot fell back a step, but then steadied himself.
This, Jame supposed, was his chosen consort, undoubtedly of the Old Pantheon with more than a touch of the demonic, accustomed to human sacrifice. Her lineage must be far more ancient than his own, compared to which he was but newly come to divinity. Could Heliot possibly feel . . . insecure?
“Oh yes,” he said softly, regarding the fallen woman. “This one is not another empty husk. Observe her shadow, which you
have made dance, oh, so charmingly. Hush, lady. Is this not your proper fate?”
“Dalis-sar, save me!” Aden cried, and tried to run.
Another tap. She fell again and cowered, weeping, as Kalissan crouched over her. With the tips of long nails and surprising delicacy, the goddess drew aside Aden’s veil. A third eye opened in Kalissan’s forehead, clearer than her other two that were so blood-shot they glowed like monstrous carbuncles.
“Yes,” said Heliot as Kalissan bent to peer down and to sniff. “She has borne a god’s son. So pretty once, now so old . . . ah, mortals. You and I, my love, have seen millennia pass, yet we are coming once again into our prime. Is she acceptable?”
The goddess gathered the mortal woman, rigid with terror, into her arms. Aden gasped. Kalissan held her, crooning into her ear, and licked her eyelids with a barbed tongue that drew blood. Aden’s shadow tore loose and was dragged, struggling, to pool at Kalissan’s feet. With a sigh, Aden went limp. The goddess let her slide to the ground.
Heliot offered Kalissan his hands and drew her up. She rose in the shape of a woman, if with preternaturally sharp features, pointed teeth, and a belt from which hung the flayed skins of babies. Her nostrils flared. Her third eye quested—for the living, Jame thought. She felt it lock on the ruins of a wall behind which she crouched. Such hunger. . . .
Heliot reclaimed the newborn demon’s attention with a chuck under her chin, to which she responded reluctantly, her eye straying back to the spot where Jame hid.
“You are my queen now,” he told her, “and thus I am at last a true king. That creature’s soul will support you in your new state, but you must still feed to gain strength. Come. Let us hunt.”
They walked off, she stumbling a bit in his supporting grip, still looking back over her shoulder, but growing steadier with each step.
Jame emerged from hiding and ran to Aden’s side. Dalis-sar’s consort wasn’t dead as she had feared, but when she opened her eyes they were blank in a ravaged face, and her shadow was gone.
By Demons Possessed Page 12
