"Korey, you idiot, put that away. I've just given you the Coman."
"Blackie!"
Torisen heard Harn's shout and saw Korey's bewildered gaze shift to something behind him. A footstep, the hiss of descending steel, and Korey shoved him aside. His sore leg failed him. He was already falling when knife and sword met with a crash, inches from his face. The violence of his swing had unbalanced Demoth. He stumbled into Korey, and both fell, catching up Torisen as they rolled down the slope. For a moment, all three were over the bank, in midair. Then they crashed to the floor of the depression, with Torisen underneath. He landed on a rather large rock. Demoth lurched to his feet, still gripping his sword.
"The Coman is mine! You can't take it away from me! I'll kill you first, I'll kill . . ."
He took a shambling step and pitched forward at Torisen's feet. Korey's knife jutted out of his back.
Harn skidded down the bank. "Blackie, are you all right? From where I stood, it looked as if that bastard nearly took your head off!"
He helped the Highlord sit up. Torisen was breathing in great, painful gasps.
"Grindarks . . . haunts . . . homicidal Highborn . . . and I do myself in . . . on a damned rock!"
"Ho, that's it, is it? Serves you right if you've broken half your ribs. Of all stupidities, to turn your back on an angry Coman. Trinity! Here comes Ardeth."
"Ardeth . . ." Torisen dragged himself to his feet, hanging on to Harn. "I've just killed your cousin, or maybe Korey has. As maternal blood-kin, what blood price do you demand?"
Ardeth stood on the edge of the bank, looking down. Torchlight turned his white hair into a glowing nimbus, but left his face in shadow. "What price?" he repeated numbly, then straightened. "Why, none, my boy. I saw everything. It probably was an accident."
"And you?" Torisen turned to Demoth's paternal kinsmen on the slope.
"None, my lord."
"Ancestors be praised. A simple solution for once. All right, everyone settle in for what's left of the night and sleep if you can. The hills should be quiet enough for the time being. By tomorrow night we'll be out of them and able to honor our dead fittingly. None are to stay here. Understood? Then pass the word."
He turned and found himself face to face with a truculent Korey.
"You haven't bought me, you know. I'll never crawl for you the way that worm Demoth would have."
"I wasn't expecting it. Just act for the good of your house; and as for owing me anything, who just prevented whose decapitation? My lord Caineron is going to be furious with you."
"So 'Blackie's luck' is still a proverb," said Harn as he, Torisen, and Ardeth walked back toward the Knorth encampment with several members of Ardeth's war-guard following at a tactful distance. "I always thought you were too lucky for your own good."
"Never mind him," said Torisen to Ardeth. "Eventually, he'll forgive me for not having gotten myself killed. Just the same, Ashe was wrong: The song was a dirge."
Harn snorted. "There could be sadder ones . . . your pardon, my lord."
"No, no," said Ardeth absently. "You're perfectly right. Demoth turned out to be somewhat less than satisfactory. Now, if I can just arrange a contract between Korey and one of my great grandnieces . . ."
At his own campsite, the old Highborn left them.
Torisen looked after him with a wry smile. "I'm beginning to think that Ardeth can survive anything if only there's a deal to be made out of it."
"And when he finds out about Pereden's role in the Southern Host's destruction?"
"I don't know. The best we can hope, I suppose, is that the wretched boy died honorably. We've got to salvage Pereden's reputation if we can, for his father's sake."
Harn stopped short. "Not if it means maligning his officers."
The Highlord turned and stared at him. "Sweet Trinity. Those Kendar were my officers too once, and the only family I knew for nearly half my life. D'you really think I would turn on them now?"
The stiffness went slowly out of Harn's shoulders. "Well, no —of course not. Damn stupid thing to say, really . . ."
"And if you say anything more, it will be even stupider. What the—"
A small figure hurled down the hill from the Knorth camp and threw its arms around Torisen. He recoiled with a hiss of pain.
"All right, Donkerri, all right. I'm glad to see you, too. Just mind the ribs."
Burr came down the slope at a more sedate pace. "We just heard about the fight and Lord Coman's death. Are you all right, my lord?"
"Ribs," Harn repeated sharply. "Here now, why didn't you say you'd really been hurt?"
"Oh, I don't think anything's broken. Cracked a bit, maybe . . ."
With that, they closed in on Torisen and bore him off, a protesting captive, to his own tent.
* * *
THE RAINS CAME, pelting the hills, running down in rivulets between the tents, pooling in the hollows. Lightning ripped, thunder boomed. Torisen lay on his pallet listening to the storm, watching the tent's framework stand out in black relief around him with each flash of light. Although his leg felt sore and cramped, he resisted the temptation to stretch it because he didn't want to disturb either Burr or the parcel of bones nestled in the curve of his arm. His side ached too, but he was fairly sure now that it was only bruised. As Harn would say, Blackie's luck still held . . . but for how long? What if, as he half suspected, his sister Jame really was on her way to him?
With the emblems of my power in her hands, boy.
Yes. Torisen was virtually certain that she had taken Ganth's ring and sword. But what of that? She couldn't wield them. She was only a girl.
So is Kirien. "Nothing in the Law prohibits a lady from heading a family instead of a lord." And she has power of her own, boy. Why do you think I named her "Jamethiel"?
But she was his sister.
And your Shanir twin, your darker half. Why do you think I drove her out, boy? Now she returns, to rival, to destroy you.
But h-he loved her. He always had.
Therein lies your damnation.
The storm grumbled off into the distance unnoticed. Torisen lay in the dark, listening to the hoarse, mad voice that was both his dead father's and, somehow, his own, muttering on and on long after he had run out of ways to answer it.
Chapter 11
Into Shadows
Perimal Darkling: 14th-21st of Winter
JAME ENTERED the shadows of Karkinaroth warily. At first, though, that was all they seemed to be, just an obscurity lying over the rich features of the palace, dulling the crimson carpet, turning the purple and gold hangings gray. The light spheres burned more and more dimly. Between them, the details of the palace seemed to fade, or rather almost to melt. New depths opened up in the shadows, reaching back to distant walls. Between the circles of light, the coldness of the floor struck through Jame's thin boots. Here was pavement that had never known the touch of a carpet. Now the light spheres were only faint glows bobbing in midair. A few hints of the palace's architecture hung ghostlike about them, but that was all. Karkinaroth had disappeared.
But where was she now?
Jame went on, shivering slightly in this colder air. Outside windowless Karkinaroth there had been the warm, southern land of Karkinor. What lay beyond these walls . . . and what was that smell? It surrounded her now, vaguely sweet, vaguely rotten, like the fetid perfume of decay. The very walls seemed to exude it. How frighteningly familiar it was, and how dull of her not to recognize it.
A doorway opened between the phantom light of two spheres. Jame almost went past it, thinking it was some strange tapestry woven of shadows, but a breath of air came out of it. She entered. Her memory told her that if she had continued down the hallway in Karkinaroth and turned at this door, she would have found herself in the palace's main ballroom. This too was a room, but an even more enormous one. Jame walked out into it. Her soft boots made no sound on the dark, green-shot floor, woke no echoes in the impossibly high vault of its ceiling. Around its walls hung
rank upon rank of memorial banners. In a normal Kencyr hall, these traditionally were tapestry portraits of the Highborn dead, woven of threads taken from the clothes in which each man or woman had died. Usually, the faces were calm and the hands held low and open, crossed at the wrists in benediction. But the faces on these banners grimaced hideously. Their hands clutched tattered clothing. Dark stains as if of dried blood streaked the walls beneath.
Jame looked about with growing horror. Surely this was the big picture-lined hall that her mother had described to her all those years ago; but the pictures were portraits of the dead, and they all looked so starved because . . . because the souls had been eaten out of them. But how could she know that? Then, too, there were so many of them. Too many? Why in Perimal's name should she think that? She had never actually been in this hall before—or had she?
At the far end of the hall was a huge fireplace, the trunks of several trees piled in it. Fur rugs covered the cold hearth. More complete rugs with snarling masks, were nailed to the wall above. They were all pelts of Arrin-ken.
Her mother hadn't told her that, but she had remembered it in the dream that had first awakened her in Karkinaroth. Surely, she knew more about this place than any story could have told her. She had stood here before in her dreams, in the flesh. This was the great hall of the Master's House, where her father's cruelty had driven her so many years ago, where she had spent her forgotten childhood. She was in Perimal Darkling.
Jame turned to bolt, but the door by which she had entered was gone. She was trapped.
Jame stood in the middle of that vast hall under the eyes of the dead and began to shake. Far too many memories were pressing against that wall in her mind. If they all broke through at once, if suddenly she remembered everything . . .
No, she told herself. Keep control. Let through only what will help. You've bumbled through most of your life in stark, staring ignorance. Don't stop now. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. All right. Now stop shaking and go find your friends.
. . . and the sword and the ring and the Book and the Prince . . .
Trinity, was everyone and everything lost but her, or was she the most lost of them all? Don't answer that. Just go.
Jame went—across the hall, through an archway, into the depths of the House. As the Talisman, she had learned how to move like a shadow among shadows, and so she did now, every sense alert, every nerve taut. Everything was so big, so empty. High-vaulted passageways, broad stone stairs spiraling up or down, more corridors, more halls. Everywhere, cold stone and colder shadows. But where was everyone?
Dead, said a familiar voice as if in her ear. They're all dead.
"Marc?" She spun about, Nothing. No one. It must have been her imagination. Forget it.
Now, where might a prisoner be held? Not one of the archways she had passed so far had even been hung with a door. A cold, thin wind breathed unhindered through the twisting ways. Something kept Jame from calling. The place seemed deserted, but who (or what) might hear?
Jame went on. There was a sort of horrible fascination about this, as if at any minute her forgotten past might spring at her from some dark corner. A terrified, outcast child had come to this place and emerged the person she was now. Someone had taught her the meaning of honor; someone had taught her how to reap souls. Thanks to those lost years, she was a paradox, a creature of both light and darkness.
And Master Gerridon, what of him? Before his fall, the long retreat from Perimal Darkling had been bitter, but at least endurable for it had been done with honor. After, even the descendents of those who had fled his evil felt tainted by it. And that evil still existed . . . didn't it? Marc had seen at least three score of the Master's folk three years ago when they had swept down on East Kenshold from the smoking ruins of her own old home, still looking for her and the Book. In fact, Marc had even seen Gerridon himself, sitting his black horse on a hilltop, watching East Kenshold's sack.
His face would have been in shadows, Jame thought, and his upright form shrouded in a patchwork cloak of stolen souls. One gauntleted hand, the right, would have gripped the reins while the other, mere emptiness in a silver glove, rested on the stallion's ebony neck.
That left hand when it was still flesh and blood, reaching out to her between the red ribbons of a curtained bed. . . . "So you've lost a father, child," a soft voice said. "I will be another one to you and much, much more." The hand closed on her wrist. In a blind panic, she slashed at it again and again until . . .
No. Jame leaned against a wall, shaking. She wouldn't remember that. She wouldn't.
But what if the only way to find Marc and Jorin was to open her mind fully to the past? She might once have known where prisoners were held. Did she dare take the risk? And why was she so sure that it was a risk? Something here was already tugging at her. She didn't feel as frightened as she had at first, or as repulsed. Even that pervasive smell of decay was losing its disagreeable tang. Once this place had been home. Once she had been accepted here as, perhaps, she never would be anywhere else. But it could never be home again.
Remember that, she told herself with sudden anger. And remember what terrible things have happened here. Remember where you are.
Prisoners . . . something about a cage without bars, but what had that been, and where? Perhaps something farther along would give her a hint. She pushed herself away from the wall and went on, deeper into the House.
All her senses, all her thoughts began to lose their edges. She drifted, feeling half asleep, dimly wishing after a time that she could sleep or at least find something to drink. Her mouth felt full of dust. How long had she been walking anyway? It felt like days. She began to have a vague feeling that the rooms through which she wandered weren't entirely unoccupied after all. Dim light and shadow became silent figures standing ghostlike in this corner or that. Their empty eyes followed her. Perhaps to them she was the ghost.
The wind blew in her face. She had been following it for some time without realizing it, but now its strength and the curious smell borne on it half roused her. She was facing an archway, its upper curve shaped like a mouth. Once it had been walled up. Now massive blocks lay tumbled about it like broken teeth, and the wind blew through them. The smell was . . . unearthly. Something dead, something alive, many things in between. . . . The light in the room beyond was strange too, a sort of shifting green. Jame stepped between the blocks, through the archway. The light came from a window, the first she had seen in this place. The window was barred. Vines curtained it with leaves and white flowers, shaped like bloodless, pouting lips, with glimpses between them of a sickly yellow sky.
Barred windows, unearthly landscapes . . . this was like that step-back room in the Anarchies.
Jame hugged herself, shivering. Old songs claimed that the Master's House stretched back down the Chain of Creation from threshold world to world. Until Gerridon's fall, the Kencyrath had even used the House itself as an escape route during their long retreat, sealing off each section, each world, behind them when they could no longer hold it. Nothing could have shattered those seals from the far side. Nothing had. It had taken a Kencyr's treachery to break down the barriers between the worlds, to open the farthest, long-abandoned rooms of the House where shadows crawled and changers were made.
This was clearly not a good place to be. Jame backed toward the archway.
From the window came a low sigh, as if from many throats. Something white shot past Jame's face, trailing green. The vine wrapped itself around her neck. Another caught her arm, and another and another. They jerked her a step back toward the window. She clawed at those around her neck, but they only tightened. The white flower lips sighed in her ear, nuzzled against her throat. They began to turn pink, then red. Blood thundered in her ears. Vaguely, she felt the iron bars press against her back, felt the strength go out of her legs.
Then someone was beside her. A knife flashed—it was all white, hilt and blade, she noted in a dazed way—and the red lips fell away
with a whispered shriek. Leaves rained down, already withered. She was on the floor now, and someone was bending over her: a man with a face as emaciated as any on the death banners in the Master's hall.
Shouts. The man jumped up and darted away, deeper into the House.
"Terribend, you fool, wait! You three guards, after him!"
Retreating footsteps, running.
Someone else bent over her now. Fair hair, a young face, silver-gray eyes . . .
"Prince Odalian?"
He smiled. "Close enough. You had gotten yourself into a mess, hadn't you? Some things never seem to change. Let's see." He tilted her chin one way, then the other. "Not much damage, luckily, although you've probably lost a fair amount of blood. Can you stand?"
She tried and lurched into his arms. "Damn."
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