The woman's smile shivered, as though about to crack, then froze again. She bowed and, like a falling star, plunged into the crevasse, only to shoot out a moment later with the changer's broken body dark in her arms. He was shrieking, in far more pain than ever the fall had caused him. Scream and light faded into the distance until the darkness of the north swallowed both.
Jame struggled up on one elbow, feeling drained. If not for the buffer of extra power, that woman would have drunk her soul to the very lees with her cold touch, not because she wanted to, but because it was her nature. But what had the Arrin-ken called her?
The great cat sat as before, his unblinking eyes on her.
Yes, that was the Dream-Weaver, although nightmares are more her lot now.
"Trinity," said Jame out loud, almost reverently. But why was she so interested in me?
You don't spend much time in front of a mirror, do you?
With this face? Of course not. But what . . .
A sound interrupted her. Jorin was stumbling toward her, even his blind, moon-opal eyes managing to look unfocused. Jame hugged him joyfully. Marc knelt beside them. His face was pale, but the arms he put around them both were as steady as ever.
"So, everything has worked out after all."
Jame looked at the Arrin-ken. Has it?
That depends. Do you still want to play cat and mouse?
"Oh, hell." Jame felt her face redden. What in Perimal's name had she been thinking of? Of course I won't fight you, lord, and neither will my friend, even if I still have to throw myself over the edge to prevent it. She swallowed, remembering the cold, lonely death that awaited her there below. At least the changer wouldn't be on hand to enliven things.
That is still your choice, as it always was. All the voices were back, purring together. You judged yourself, child. You chose the pit. We expected your power and recklessness, but not that. It seems that you are willing to take what responsibility you can for your actions. An unfallen darkling. We would not have believed that possible. Clearly, there are forces at work here beyond even our understanding.
Marc nudged Jame. "What is Lord Cat saying? All I hear is a rumble."
"I'm not sure, but I think I've just been given a reprieve."
Yes. Only the silent voice of the big cat before them answered. The best part of wisdom is knowing when not to meddle. Besides, someone has to take that accursed Book back to the Kencyrath, and it seems to have chosen you.
For lack of anyone more sensible, Jame thought.
Perhaps. Its tastes were always . . . eccentric, but I gave up quarreling with both them and it millennia ago. The great objects of power choose their own paths, and this one is returning home none too soon. A storm is brewing over the Riverland, over all Rathillien, north and south. I hear thunder, and horns blowing. And I see darkness across your path, child. Tai-tastigon was a sheltered place. Others besides Keral may be waiting for you to break cover. Beware of them, but even more, beware of yourself.
"I don't understand."
No? Then look.
The big cat opened wide his luminous eyes. Jame stared at herself reflected in them, at the high cheekbones, the sharp lines of nose and chin, the large, silver-gray eyes that stared back at her. She looked in mirrors so seldom that her own face was almost that of a stranger to her, but this time it was familiar in an unexpected way. This time, from certain angles, she might almost have thought that the Mistress looked back at her.
"I-I still don't understand."
Then you truly are an innocent . . . but innocence and even good intentions are sometimes poor protection. Take a lesson from your namesake. Jamethiel Dream-Weaver didn't understand the evil that Gerridon asked her to commit until it was too late. She never really consented to it. Nonetheless, her abuse of power opened the deepest reaches of her soul to the void beyond the Chain of Creation where Perimal Darkling itself was spawned. At first, that breach was small, manageable, but over the past few decades it has gaped wider and wider. Now souls fall into it through her as if into a vortex, and she must dance on and on at its brink or be consumed by it herself.
"B-but just now, she smiled at me . . ."
You were probably like a dream to her. All the external world must be, now. Mind and soul, she dances and dares not stop while her body drifts on at her Master's will. Be warned, child. That could happen to you, or worse. The Dream-Weaver acted in ignorance and so bears only partial responsibility for her actions. You may still be innocent, but not ignorant—and you have already played at the very game that doomed the first Jamethiel. If you do eventually fall, it will be as the Master fell, knowing the evil you do, welcoming it. The abuse of power will push you in that direction. On the other hand, its mere use may drive you the other way, toward our god. That is what it means to be a Shanir, to walk the knife's edge.
Jame shuddered. "But I don't want to fall either way!"
A rich, rumbling chuckle answered her. Which one of us does? For us, alas, good is no less terrible than evil. We can only trust our honor and try to keep our balance. I commend you to both. Now I will escort you over the pass and as far down the other side as Peshtar. There you can refit and, who knows, perhaps find a new pair of boots.
"Boots?" repeated Marc, apparently catching this last word if nothing else. For the first time, he noticed that Jame was only half shod. "Here now, how long ago did that happen? You could easily lose a foot to frostbite up here."
Jame wriggled her toes inside the wet sock. "That's odd. They aren't even cold. Are you?"
"No."
Overhead loomed Mount Timor, stripped now of snow but ice-sheathed after the fire-storm thaw. Although a bitter wind blew off it, only traces of it reached the field below. Jame and Marc looked at each other, then at the Arrin-ken. Jorin had tottered over to the big cat and was leaning against him, eyes closed in bliss, as the great beast bent down to lick his head. At their feet, glowing faintly in the first light of dawn, lay a white carpet of star-shaped spring flowers.
Chapter 2
The Hell Hunt
Tagmeth and Kithorn: 6th-7th of Winter
THE HANGING MAN moved restlessly in the breeze under his oak bough, his feet barely clearing the tall weeds sprung up between the River Road's paving stones. His body had been encased in boiled leather, molded to his limbs and sealed with wax. Only his gaping mouth and distended nostrils remained open to the cold night air. He faced northward toward the mountains of his people. Then the wind caught him and he turned east, then south to stare with leather-blinded eyes down the road into the curving valley of the Riverland.
The two men on horseback looked at him.
"A watch-weirdling," said the younger, slighter of the two. "So this is why we had to leave our weapons at Tagmeth. What kind of a noise does this thing make when it smells Kencyr steel?"
"You wouldn't want to hear it." The burly Kendar scowled mistrustfully at the tangled shadows lining the road before them. "This is the edge of our territory, lord. The Riverland may belong to the Kencyrath, but these hills haven't been ours since Kithorn fell to the Merikit nearly eighty years ago. Another step and that thing will scent the iron in our horse gear. Turn back, Lord Torisen. Please."
"Please?" The Highlord looked at him, a glint of amusement in his tired, silver-gray eyes. "You haven't used that word on me since Urakarn. Where would you be now if I'd listened to you then?" He dismounted and tethered Storm, his black quarter-blood Whinno-hir, to a bush. The stallion snorted, his breath white plumes in the sharp air, and tried to back away from the hanging corpse as the wind turned it creaking to face him. Torisen quieted him.
"You forget," he said in the same soothing tone, looking up at Burr. "I'm on an inspection tour of the northern keeps, and Kithorn is the northernmost of the lot, except for a few like my old home up near the Barrier. Stay with the horses, if you like. I shouldn't be long."
He turned and walked up the overgrown road.
Burr shook his head. " 'Stay,' he says. Huh!" He tied
his gray horse next to Torisen's black and followed his lord.
Dry leaves crackled underfoot, cold stone rang. This was the gray margin between autumn and winter, with bare branches stark against a full moon and fat snowflakes drifting down from a nearly cloudless sky. In the distance, a fox barked. It was almost midnight, and bitter cold.
Back at Tagmeth, watchfires would be burning in the ruined courtyard while Torisen's Kendar retainers lay rolled in their blankets beside them. Burr remembered the cheerful glow fading behind them as they had slipped out into the night like a pair of thieves. He wondered if Torisen—always so quick to chill—was warm enough now, but knew better than to ask. He himself missed his short sword more than the fire's warmth. If the Highlord should be attacked here, so far from help . . .
* * *
TAGMETH, from which the two had come, had been empty for a long time. Like all the paired keeps that faced each other across the Silver at twenty to twenty-five mile intervals down the length of the Riverland, it had been built nearly a thousand years before to guard the northern frontier between the ancient kingdoms of Bashti and Hathir. Both the Riverland and the keeps had eventually been ceded to the Kencyrath so that it might serve as a buffer state here in the far north. Tagmeth had been claimed once, then abandoned as blood feuds and foreign wars thinned the ranks of the Highborn and the great houses began to gather their strength in keeps farther south. Now frost-blackened brier roses scrambled in and out of Tagmeth's shattered walls and owls roosted in what was left of its rafters.
Its semi-ruined state had intrigued the Highborn boys who had come there with Torisen. They had clambered all over it at the risk of their necks, hunting relics of its past life, disturbing bats and foxes. Then, that evening they had sat around the fire in its solar above the hall, under the open sky, sipping hot mulled wine and trying to sound like seasoned warriors on campaign. They had quite forgotten that the Highlord of the Kencyrath was in the same room. Torisen had withdrawn to a window ledge just beyond the light, where he quietly sat, warming his hands on his wine cup, watching the boys' flushed faces.
Every six months, he summoned nine different Highborn youngsters from various houses of the Kencyrath to serve him. Some, one day, might become the heads of their respective families; others might die in the vicious blood feuds that still wracked the Highborn even after three years of relative calm under Torisen's rule. He wanted these boys to know him, and each other. If the Houses ever became as linked by friendship as they were by blood, perhaps at last the killing would stop. But that was years in the future.
Still, he reminded himself, when this lot first assembled at Gothregor a month ago, he had thought it might take decades, if not centuries. These boys were the Highborn in microcosm. Four came from major houses, five from minor ones; most were only distant or bone kin to each other except for Morien and Brishney, half-brothers; and nearly all had some blood feud festering at home. There was even one of Lord Caineron's numerous grandsons here: Donkerri, a timid, pale-faced boy who had clearly been reared to think of Torisen as Grandpa's greatest enemy, which he probably was. The Highlord had brought the whole troop on this inspection tour largely to keep them from each other's throats. And it had worked. The leisurely two-week trip up the Silver, with its hunting and camping—not to mention visits to all the keeps north of Gothregor—had brought most of them closer than he had dared hope, even if they were still a bit shy of him. Now as they sat around the fire sipping wine and talking, he regarded them one by one, remembering all the good men lost to blood feuds over the years, wondering how long these boys would honor their campfire fellowship.
Their voices began to blur. Torisen jerked his head up, shying away from the ambush of sleep. Burr was watching him. He forced himself to concentrate on the boys' chatter.
"We're close to Kithorn here," Morien was saying.
"Brishney, remember when we went bone hunting on a winter's night like this four years ago and nearly got caught by a Merikit hunting party?"
Brishney laughed. "I remember. It's a good thing we brought back that tibia for the pyre or Father would have finished the Merikits' work for them."
Torisen raised his eyebrows. "Explain," he said quietly to Burr as the Kendar refilled his cup.
The boys started at the sound of his voice and exchanged glances. Burr shook his head.
"He wouldn't know about it, lord," said Brishney. "It's . . . well, it's a kind of open secret among us boys. You see, Kithorn fell through treachery. One night, a Merikit hall-guest opened the gate to his kinsmen, and every Kencyr there, Highborn and Kendar alike, was slaughtered."
"Surely that's no secret."
"No, m'lord, of course not. You've probably heard that most of the bodies were recovered the next spring when word of the massacre filtered south. But some couldn't be found. Boys started slipping into the hills on bone hunts. Our grandfathers started it, and our fathers went, too. Now we go, although there's precious little left to find, and we get beaten at home if we're caught at it; but, well, it's become a sort of ritual, and Trinity help the boy who doesn't visit Kithorn at least once before he turns fifteen."
They began to compare notes. All had their own stories of search if not success and, often, of narrow escape, for the hills were well guarded. Only Donkerri was silent. When at last someone asked him what his luck had been, instead of answering he turned suddenly toward the shadowy figure seated on the window ledge.
"How old were you, Highlord, when you went up into the hills?" he demanded.
The others stared at Donkerri.
"Donkey, you ass . . ." hissed Brishney urgently.
"How old?"
At fifteen, half a life time ago, escaping the nightmare of his father's keep, the terrible trip south through the Haunted Lands, Ardeth's Riverland keep . . . "Sir, I am Ganth Gray Lord's son."
"If you stay here, boy, the other Highborn will kill you. Join the Southern Host under my name. They'll think you're some bastard son of mine I'm trying to get rid of, but never mind. Here's your commission, and a servant, Burr." At fifteen, learning to fight, to command and, at the red ruin of Urakarn, to survive.
The boys were staring at him, Caineron's grandson white-faced, his hands clenched together as though to hold him in his seat.
"I didn't grow up in the Riverland," Torisen said quietly. "Your grandfather must have told you that." Children, he thought, looking at them. They're all children. You can't make them stay up all night just because you're afraid to sleep. He rose and stretched. "That's enough for now. Yes, I know it's still fairly early, but remember that we start back tomorrow at daybreak. Now go to bed."
They filed out, still subdued. Burr collected the wine cups.
"You should send that brat home," he said over his shoulder.
"Donkerri? The boy just didn't want to admit that he'd never been to Kithorn."
The Kendar snorted. "His grandfather's keep is close enough. You could ride from Restormir to Kithorn in four hours."
"Let it rest, Burr." Torisen rubbed his stinging eyes. "We all find our own rites of passage."
"You should rest. It's been four nights now."
"So you've kept count."
Burr froze, his hand inches from a cup.
"And to whom will you pass that information now that Ardeth is no longer your master? Poor Burr, after all those years of spying on me and now no one to accept his reports. Oh hell," said Torisen abruptly, in quite a different tone. "Sorry. Get some sleep yourself. I still have work to do."
The Kendar bowed silently and left the room.
Torisen sat down by the firepit. When he held his cold, scarred hands out to the flames, they shook. You're weak, boy, his father's voice jeered at him out of the past. As weak as your sister. But Jame had never been weak, even as a child. They won't teach me how to fight. Tori, but you will. I'll make you. And she had tried, pouncing on him when he least expected it, learning snatches of the Senethar from his counter moves. Trinity, but he had been furious. How
long ago that had been . . . and why was he thinking of it now? Forget the past, he told himself. You have no time for the dead. Now, to work.
He drew a sheaf of papers from his saddlebag. The first was a formal note from Prince Odalian of Karkinor, an ancient princedom far to the south near the Cataracts. The Prince congratulated the Highlord on his third year of successful rule. Torisen snorted. Successful, perhaps, in that he hadn't yet managed to get himself assassinated. But Odalian didn't mean that. His family, the Agontiri, had always had close ties to the Kencyrath because their capital city—in fact, their very palace —was built around a Kencyr temple.
Odd how other people so often seemed drawn to those nine houses on Rathillien of the Three-Faced God. Kencyr preferred to avoid them, partly because they shunned everything connected with their hated god, partly because no one, not even the priests, fully understood the temples. Kencyr hands hadn't even built them. Every time the Three People had been forced to retreat to a new threshold world, the temples had simply been there, waiting for them. Because all the temples on all the worlds bore the same architectural signature, as it were, scrollsmen suggested that their god had bound or at least commissioned a fourth people and sent them ahead to prepare the way. For lack of a proper name, these hypothetical folk were simply called the Builders. Their work was certainly impressive, but also unnerving, at least to Kencyr.
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