Dark of the Moon

by P. C. Hodgell

  "Right. Just as jumping out a third story window is the fastest way to the ground."

  "Oh, I've tried that too," said the big man placidly.

  Jame started to laugh, then drew in her breath sharply. Simultaneously, Jorin's head snapped up. The ounce might see quite well through her eyes, but she had only recently gained a limited use of his nose and ears. Now she heard what he heard, distorted at first, then all too clearly.

  "Wolves," she said, and scrambled to her feet.

  Marc rose almost as quickly, but his stiffened knees betrayed him and he lurched against a rock. "No, no," he said absently, pushing Jame aside as she reached out to steady him. "Always stand clear or someday I really will fall and smash you flat." He drew himself up to his full seven-foot height, towering over her. "Wolves, you say? If we're lucky."

  "Trinity. And if we aren't?"

  The howling began again, closer, unexpectedly shrill.

  "Wyrsan," said Marc. "An entire ravening of them, from the sound of it, and headed this way. They may be smaller than wolves, but they're faster and fiercer. These rocks won't protect us for long if they catch our scent. There may be better cover up near the Blue Pass."

  He stepped out into the open. Leaning into the wind, he trudged stolidly up the nearly invisible path between snowdrifts, his bulk breaking both the ice crust and the wind's force for Jame as she struggled after him with Jorin bounding along behind her in their footsteps. The worst of the storm might be over, but the wind was still savage and the driven snow blinding. Jame could see nothing of Mounts Timor and Tinnibin, which must be looming over them now, or of the Blue Pass, which cut between them, straddling the spine of the Ebonbane.

  The situation was bad enough without wyrsan on their trail. Not much was known about these beasts because they usually kept to the deep snow of the heights during the brief travel season when the passes opened. Superstition claimed that they were possessed by the souls of the unavenged dead. Rumor had it, perhaps more accurately, that they were prone to killing frenzies and could tunnel nearly as fast under the ice crust as they could run on top of it.

  The two Kencyr had risked this winter crossing largely because they had hoped to find quite a different sort of creature here among the jagged peaks. Long ago—nearly two thousand years, in fact—the first of the Three People had grown disgusted with the rest of the Kencyrath and retreated to the wilds of Rathillien to think things over. They were still at it. One of these catlike, almost immortal Arrin-ken made his home here in the Ebonbane, but Jame had been mentally calling to him for three days now without success. It looked as if she and Marc were on their own.

  Abruptly, the Kendar stopped and Jame ran into him. He shouted something, then turned and climbed the snow bank to the right. Jame scrambled after him. A sloping snowfield stretched out before them, wind rilled, sheltered by the flank of Mount Timor. Snow blew over their heads off the mountain's spine. The ice crust here was thick enough first to bear Jame and Jorin's weight, then Marc's.

  Jame drew level with him. "What did you say?"

  "I thought we might find something useful up here. The top of that mound up ahead might be our best bet for a stand."

  Not far away, Jame saw a rectangular pile of rocks about ten feet high with sloping sides and a flattened top. Suddenly, she knew exactly where they were. This was the field where Bortis and his band of brigands had slaughtered last season's first caravan, the one Jame herself would have joined if it hadn't been for Marc's unexpected arrival in Tai-tastigon. That thing ahead was the burial cairn of the victims.

  The wind moaned about it, raising ghosts of snow around its black flanks. Subsequent caravans had not only raised this monument, but, to conciliate the dead, had built into its outer walls whatever personal possessions the brigands had overlooked. Here a bride's broken mirror gave back a splintered reflection of the moon, there a wooden doll thrust a stiff arm out between the stone blocks. Jame slowed, staring. Her own people believed that while even a single bone remained unburned, the soul was trapped, but here were hundreds, thousands of bones.

  Marc had reached the cairn. "Come on, lass," he said, holding out his hand. "You first. We only have to hold on until dawn."

  Jame still hesitated. This was ridiculous. She had dealt with bones before, and with the dead themselves, if it came to that. They simply obeyed their own rules. Once you found those out, you could usually cope, however messy things got. Besides, in a sense, she and Bane had already avenged these poor folk in that before the massacre, he had put out one of Bortis's eyes protecting her; and after it, she had gotten the other one defending Jorin. No one had seen Bortis in Tai-tastigon since. She wondered fleetingly what had become of him, then put him out of her mind and began resolutely to climb the cairn's sloping side.

  The stones were slick with ice under her hands. She thought she felt a vibration deep inside the cairn. Then, suddenly, a stone gave way under her weight and her right leg plunged into the mound up to the knee. Something inside grabbed her foot. Her startled yelp turned into a grunt as Marc's arm shot around her waist and jerked her back. Something white furred and slobbering was wrapped around her foot. It let go, plopping back into the hole. Marc swung her down to the base of the cairn where she collapsed breathless in the snow. Her boot hung in shreds.

  "What in Perimar's name was that?" she gasped.

  "A wyrsan kitling. It looks as if they've converted the entire mound into a ravery."

  "But wouldn't it have been pretty solid?"

  "Not after they'd eaten the bodies out of it. Jorin!"

  The ounce had been warily sniffing the edge of the hole. He jumped back as a shrill, yammering cry came out of the mound, immediately echoed by other voices down wind.

  "That's done it," said Marc. "The adults will be all over us in minutes. Run."

  They ran. Some distance ahead, the field ended in a steep, rocky slope that, if they were lucky, the wyrsan would not be able to climb. Suddenly Marc floundered. Jame grabbed his arm as the white expanse before them split open, great chunks of it thundering down into darkness. They stared in dismay at the gaping crevasse. Behind, the yipping grew rapidly nearer.

  "Now what?" said Jame.

  "Too late to turn back. I might be able to catapult you across."

  "And leave you here to have all the fun? Forget it."

  "As you wish. But for future use, let's make a pact: Whatever you can't outwit, I hit. That should take care of most contingencies."

  "It's nice to know you think we still have a future," said Jame, watching as he dropped his pack and unslung his double edged war-axe. "Just the same, I'm more likely to start hitting things than you are."

  "Not wyrsan," said the big man firmly.

  The howling began again, much closer this time. It was a sound that slid the thin knife edge of panic between thought and action. Hearing it, one only wanted to run and run. Then, in the midst of that shrill chorus, one voice wavered and broke into hysterical laughter.

  "That was no wyrsa," said Jame.

  "A haunt?"

  "This far south of the Barrier? Well, maybe, but I've never met one yet who thought that being dead was funny."

  "It's not," said Marc. "Stand behind me."

  Jame stepped back nearer to the crevasse and reached for the knife usually sheathed in her right boot. She touched only shredded leather. Damn. The blade must have fallen out during the kitling's attack. She stripped off the remains of the boot so as not to trip over them and stood stocking footed in the snow. Her toes began to ache with the cold.

  The outline of the cairn moved as the wyrsan swarmed over it. Then clouds swept over the moon, bringing a fresh flurry of snow, and Jame could no longer see the mound. Jorin pressed against her knee, protesting the loss of their shared sight.

  "Too bad there's nothing here to burn," said Marc, peering into the darkness. "A bit of fire, now, that would be useful."

  Jame stood still a moment. Then she dropped to her knees and began to rummage frantic
ally through both their packs. In her own, she touched a broken sword with a defaced hilt emblem, a ring, and something warm, but bypassed them all for things more suited to their present need.

  "My spare pants weren't exactly what I had in mind," said the Kendar, skeptically regarding the clothes she was hastily laying out in a semicircle around them. "That lot won't burn very long."

  "What we need are some ashes. I'm going to try a kindling spell."

  "Careful. Remember what happened the last time you tried a piece of Tastigon magic."

  Jame grimaced. Early in her stay at the Res aB'tyrr, Cleppetty had tested her culinary skills by presenting her with a lump of unleavened dough and the household book of spells. She had indeed gotten the loaf to rise, but when Cleppetty had sliced into it, they had discovered that its expansion had been due to the growth of rudimentary internal organs. After that, Jame had left Tastigon magic alone. Now, with some trepidation, she called to mind the spell Cleppetty used every morning to start a new kitchen fire from the ashes of the old.

  "Listen," said Marc suddenly.

  "I don't hear anything."

  "They're running silent. It's now or not at all, lass."

  Jame hastily set fire to the semicircle with steel and flint. The clothes burned grudgingly. Wondering if she wasn't about to do something profoundly stupid, she recited the charm.

  Instantly, a great cloud of fire-shot smoke billowed up around them. Choking, half-blind, Jame heard Marc's shout, then a meaty thunk. A wyrsa shot out of the darkness to land heavily at her feet. Snarling, it gathered its stocky body to spring at her, but then the terrible wound left by Marc's axe opened, spilling blood and bowels into the snow. She stared at the creature. The coarse white fur down its back was smoldering.

  Now the smoke seemed full of hurtling bodies. The war-axe sang somewhere ahead of her, parrying what looked like flung torches. The spell circle was apparently kindling anything that passed over it. Jame sidestepped a blazing wyrsa. Were these creatures really so single-minded that they didn't realize they were on fire?

  The snow crust in front of her erupted. For half a heartbeat, Jame stared down the throat of the beast springing up at her. Then Jorin met it in midair. Ounce and wyrsa disappeared into the smoke, snapping at each other, rolling over and over. Jame ran after them.

  "Down!" roared Marc's voice almost in her ear. She fell flat. Axe and wyrsa met over her head with a crunch and a spray of blood.

  "That's nineteen," said the Kendar, scooping her up. "Stand clear." And he pushed her to one side out of his weapon's reach.

  She could hear Jorin and the wyrsa still thrashing about somewhere nearby but couldn't find them. The ounce would be fighting blind without her eyes to guide him, but then, despite her excellent Kencyr night vision, she herself could barely see anything in this chaos of smoke, snow, and darkness. Where was the crevasse? Sweet Trinity, to step over the edge of that in the dark . . .

  A wyrsa charged her, all the fur down its back ablaze. No time for evasion. She went down backward, caught the beast in mid-spring with her foot and flipped it over her head. Its wailing cry faded in the distance before ending abruptly. So that's where the crevasse was.

  Jame was just thinking that for a street fighter she wasn't doing too badly when the snow beside her exploded. She barely saw the wyrsa before it landed on her. Its weight drove her head and shoulders through the weakened ice crust. The powdery snow beneath filled her eyes and mouth. Bent over backward with fifty pounds of maddened wyrsa on her chest, tearing at the heavily padded arm, which she had thrown up to protect her throat, she fought back in mindless terror, slashing, clawing. The night was red, red, and stank of blood.

  Only exhaustion finally made her stop. The wyrsa sprawled on top of her, its teeth still locked in the reinforced sleeve of her knife-fighter's d'hen, its face a gory, eyeless mask. It was quite dead. For a moment she lay there gasping, then, with difficulty, heaved the beast off and sat up. Her gloves hung in blood-soaked rags. She stared numbly at her hands, at the fingernails, razor-tipped and edged, still fully extended. Oh God, she had used them again.

  No one at her old home in the Haunted Lands had realized what she was until her seventh year. They had thought it odd that she had no fingernails, but no one had been prepared for the retractile claws that suddenly one day had broken through the skin on her fingertips. Then her father had known what to call her when he drove her out:

  Shanir, god-spawn, unclean, unclean . . .

  There was blood under the nails. She plunged her hands into the snow again and again until common sense stopped her. She could never wash away the taint in her blood that made her what she was.

  Something breathed in her ear. Jame started, then turned and threw her arms around Jorin. The ounce nuzzled her face as she ran anxious hands over him, looking for serious wounds, finding none. Ancestors be praised for that, at least.

  Then, for the first time, she noticed how quiet everything was. The semicircle still smoldered, but most of the smoke had blown away to reveal a battlefield lit by the burning carcasses of some thirty wyrsan, all in various stages of dismemberment.

  Marc might hate killing, but if need be, he was certainly good at it. But where was he?

  She scrambled to her feet, cold with sudden fear. Only his footprints remained in the trampled, bloody snow, indicating that he had been driven backward several paces by the fury of his assailants. The trail ended at the edge of the crevasse.

  Jame threw herself down on the snow and peered into the abyss. It was too dark for her to see more than a few feet, and her voice woke only echoes, cracking off icy walls farther and farther down. Sweet Trinity, if he had fallen all the way to the bottom . . .

  Behind her, beyond the firelight, someone chuckled softly. "Jamethiel!" called a husky, sweet voice from the darkness. "Child, I've come for you."

  Jorin backed into Jame, the fur down his spine rising. She felt her own scalp prickle. Whatever was out there, it knew her real name, and she almost felt she knew what to call it, too. Where had she heard that loathsomely familiar voice before? Not in Tai-tastigon, not at the keep . . .

  "Dream-Weaver, Snare-of-Souls, Priest's-Bane . . ."

  The voice chanted the epithets softly, mockingly. Only the last was one that Jame had ever used. The rest belonged to the first Jamethiel, her namesake, who some three thousand years before had danced out the souls of two-thirds of the Kencyr Host at the bidding of her brother and consort, Gerridon, Master of Knorth.

  "Soon the spell-circle will weaken. See, already the fire is dying. Do you remember the Master's House, burning, burning, the night he called you to his bed?"

  . . . she was climbing the twisted stair, naked under a cloak of serpent skins sewn together with silver thread. The snake heads thumped on each step at her heels. A man was waiting in an alcove . . . who? His face was like a refleshed skull, his fingers cold, so cold, as he slipped a knife into her hand, and she was climbing, climbing, toward a door barred with red ribbons, toward the darkness beyond . . .

  Jame flinched away from that splinter of memory, all that was left of so many lost years. The Master's bed? But it was the first Jamethiel who had been and, for all she knew, still was the arch-traitor's consort. What on earth did all this have to do with her?

  But you were in Perimal Darkling yourself. The thought breathed cold on her. She wanted to deny it but You have the Book Bound in Pale Leather, kept in darkness by Gerridon when he fell. There isn't any place you could have gotten it but in his House, under shadows' eaves.

  Damn. The spell-circle was weakening. Eyes gleamed across the dying flames, and that soft, gloating chuckle came again. "Soon, Jamethiel, soon."

  It was as if her entire lost past waited there in the darkness ready to pounce. What would hold it back? All Jame could think of was fire . . . and the Book. Trinity, that was it. She scrambled for her knapsack and dug into it. Her cold hands closed on something warm. She drew out a package and hastily unwrapped it to reveal the Boo
k Bound in Pale Leather. It throbbed in her grasp as if shaken by a slow heartbeat. Then it seemed to shiver. Goose bumps rose on the soft skin of its binding as the cold air hit it.

  There was a sudden movement beyond the still smoldering semicircle. Something pale and curiously lopsided shambled forward, its exact shape hidden by the thickening snow.

  "What are you doing?" it demanded, its voice rising sharply. "You little fool, stop!"

  Jame wrenched her eyes back to the Book. On the page before her was the rune she wanted. She stared at it with horrified fascination as its power began to unfold in her mind. Lanes of vermilion, lines of gold. . . . Heat grew, and with it, pain. Jame slammed shut the Book, but the rune seemed etched on the inside of her eyelids. The images began to blur, to expand, going out of control. Jame grimly forced the power generated by the rune back into its proper shape. Then, when it felt as if the top of her head was about to blow off, in the language of the Rune-Masters, she said: