Blood and Ivory-A Tapestry

by P. C. Hodgell

  "I was there," said Jame, making a face, "but hardly worshipping. It was a choice between dancing with the Baio-cainites and being taken and probably raped by the guards. They must have known that Marc has been hurt."

  "Otherwise he would have been there to take them apart piece by piece, eh? They'll have their turn when his head heals, I'm sure. But Baio-caina . . . for a moment I thought you'd finally seen reason and given up the Three-Faced God. How you Kencyrs ever came to settle on such a grim master is beyond me."

  "We didn't settle on him," said Jame sourly. "He settled on us. You have no idea what a curse it is to be a member of a chosen race. But I had better go see if Marc is all right."

  "Remember," he bellowed after her as she started up the stairs, "you dance at midnight. You gave your word . . . and try eating something once in a while. No one's going to pay to see a skin full of bones, even if it is the only senetha dancer in town."

  Jame stopped short on the steps. With the air of a street magician, she produced two overripe peaches from the wallet that hung with her belt.

  Tubain broke into a roar of laughter. "The best apprentice thief in the Brotherhood, and she uses her talents to steal half rotten fruit! What would the Master say to that?"

  Jame smile sweetly and pulled out a small leather bag. The innkeeper stared, slapped at his apron, and began to swear.

  "He would probably say that practice perfects," said the Talisman, and tossed the bag of coins down to its owner.

  Tubain knew his Kencyrs too well by half, Jame thought wryly as she bounded up the stairs two at a time. He knew it was safe to keep a thief child in his house because any Kencyr would rather lose a hand than break the laws of hospitality, and his life outright rather than break his sworn word. It was all a matter of honor, and honor, along with a fierce loyalty to each other, and a resentful but unquestioning belief in the god of the three faces, was an obsession among the people of the Kencyrath.

  Jame shared their preoccupation with this concept of honor and the code called the Law that embodied it, but for reasons of her own. With neither strength nor friends to rely on, her survival in a violent world had always depended on wits, the same unquenchable desire to learn anything and everything that had led to her apprenticeship in the Brotherhood, and a moral flexibility that most of her kinsmen seemed to lack. She suspected that the latter was due to tainted blood. Her mother, after all, had been a priestess, and every Kencyr knew that prolonged contact with the Three-Faced God resulted in a certain contamination of mind and body. All her life Jame had fought the darkness in her, the sense of power and damnation moving together under the surface of her mind. Her loyalty to the letter of the Law, if not to its spirit, was her one grip on the normal world of the Kencyrath as she understood it. If the day ever came when she found she could lie under oath, do injury to a kinsman, or break her word, for any reason whatsoever, she would know that she was lost.

  All such thoughts faded as the girl emerged on the fourth floor. It wasn't much more than a loft, with many apertures of varying sizes and the promise on this autumn night of many cold nights to come. Beneath the irregular line of windows that overlooked the market place, Marc lay face up on his pallet, snoring loudly. The big Kencyr was still in his guard's uniform except for the boot that Jame had hauled off the evening before, only to find she couldn't budge the other one. Beyond that, the only unusual thing about his appearance was the bandage wrapped around his temples. It hardly seemed enough to justify the fact that for a night and a day he had been lying as motionless as a corpse, although not as soundlessly. It had been his boast, when he came staggering home with his broken head, that he could sleep off anything short of total decapitation. Now he was proving it.

  As she checked her friend's condition, Jame wondered what he would think if he ever found out what she had caused to happen to the man who had injured him. At the time it had seemed in keeping with the best traditions of the Kencyrath, but now she suspected that she had overdone it a bit.

  Satisfied at last that all was well, she stood up. Her reflection rose to meet her on the polished surface of the buckler that hung from the support between the windows. She regarded it with raised eyebrows. Eyes too big, cheekbones too high, lips too thin. Tubain, damn him, was right: she looked like a winter famine colt. Jame grimaced at the mirrored features and turned her back on them.

  That was when she saw it. Lying on her own pallet was a small folded square of parchment. Jame crossed the room and picked it up. She frowned when she turned it over and saw the emblem stamped on it in black wax. She broke it open and read. The frown deepened. The girl stood there for a long moment with the paper in her hands, biting her lip. Then she turned back to the sleeping guardsman.

  She crouched beside him and shook his shoulder. The snoring continued without a break. Another harder shake and a light cuff were equally ineffective. Then she braced herself and began to pummel him on the chest, gently at first and then with force. The sleeper muttered and made a vague sweeping gesture with one hand as though to brush away an annoying insect.

  The girl sat back on her heels, massaging her knuckles, and regarded him thoughtfully. Of course, it was to be expected. The first impulse of any wounded Kencyr was to sleep and sleep deeply. It could easily be another two days before he woke of his own accord. Was it worthwhile to keep trying? Under the circumstances, probably not, but Marc would be more upset later if she didn't try than if she succeeded.

  Accordingly, Jame stood up, unhooked the buckler, and swung it with all her strength against the stone support. The resulting crash might not have been sufficient to wake the dead, but Marc, after all, was only asleep. His eyelids peeled back slowly.

  "Huh? Whazzamatter?" he said.

  Jame knelt beside him and took his gray head in her hands.

  "Marc, listen a minute. I've been summoned to the temple by Ishtier, Trinity only knows why. If I'm not back by the time you wake up again, I suppose you'll have to come after me. Do you understand?"

  "Issshtier . . . ?" Marc struggled up on one elbow. "You can't do that . . . he hates you."

  "That's no distinction. He hates everyone. Now go back to sleep."

  Marc gave his head a fierce shake as though to clear it, and immediately began to swear, one hand groping for the bandage. "God's claws," he muttered. "When I get my hands on the lad with the club . . . "

  "No need to worry about him now," said Jame, suddenly expressionless. "He . . . uh . . . had an accident early this morning. His grapnel line snapped as he was climbing out of Merchant Dazda's compound with a few borrowed gems. Your brother guards caught him. Now he, or at least what's left of him, is in the Judgment Square on the Mercy Seat. Put down that boot. You aren't fit to do anything but sleep."

  "Ha!" said Marc with a cheerful but somewhat blurry grin, climbing unsteadily to his feet and stomping to force his foot down into the heel of the boot. "You've raised the beast right and proper, and now you'll have to put up with him. I'm going with you."

  Jame swore luridly under her breath. Of course he would say that. For the first time in her life she had a genuine protector even if, at the ripe middle age of eighty-three, he was old enough to be her great grandfather, and she was worse at coping with him than with her bitterest enemy. With a sigh, she helped the guardsman find and buckle on his old cross-hilted broadsword.

  They went by way of the twisting streets that linked the southwest quarter of Tai-tastigon with the south. The passageways were full of life that night. Hawkers cried their wares. Merchants' sons strutted their finery. Men with bold, quick eyes slipped through the crowd. They passed the end of the incense sellers' street where clouds of myrrh, lavender and allentine waged war in the air and made the torches burn blue. Jame wrinkled her nose at the confusion of odors and jerked the trailing hem of her cloak out from under the hooves of a carthorse. Twice already someone had nearly stepped on it. It was of the sort favored by most thieves, voluminous and loosely fastened at the throat to tear off easily i
n the hands of a pursuer, but this particular garment was a hand-me-down from a much larger colleague. Jame swore to herself again to take up the hem as soon as she could, and promptly forgot all about it as a troupe of ophiolaters rushed past carrying the longest, limpest snake she had ever seen.

  All activity and noise died away behind them as they neared their destination. The streets were completely deserted by the time the two reached the area of the temple. All was darkness and silence and slow decay there. No one asked what had happened to the buildings that lay in the shadow of the god of the Kencyrath; no one wanted to know the answer.

  Jame and Marc paused on the steps. Above them, the front of the temple stretched up to the black sky as smooth and white as living bone. They crossed the threshold side by side, with Marc's great paw of a hand on Jame's shoulder.

  Inside, there were floors of onyx, ivory walls, and the red, fitful winking of many torches. For Jame there was also the slow, suffocating pressure without and the growing core of darkness within that told her she was very near a source of the ancient power. The hereditary currents of her blood carried her to it unerringly through many stark rooms with Marc striding behind her. When she stopped, it was done so suddenly that the man nearly ran her down. They had come to the central chamber, and the great black granite image of the Three-Faced God loomed over them, three shrouded shapes melted into one another. Two of the dark figures were turned away. The third faced the room. It was overlaid with plates of pale marble carved so thin that they almost resembled a veil. The face and all the body except for certain sinuous curves and one hand were concealed in the stone shroud. The hand reached out and upward through a fissure in the masonry as though beckoning. Each long scythe-curved finger was tipped in ivory, honed and gleaming. Jame felt her own abnormally long fingers curl into fists at her side.

  The presence of the statue was so overpowering that it was a full minute before either Jame or Marc realized that Ishtier was standing in front of it, watching them with unblinking yellow eyes. He was dressed all in white in honor of the image that towered above him, white for Regonereth, the most feared of the god's three aspects, white for That-Which-Destroys. His figure seemed sunken into the hieratic robes and the face in the shadow of the cowl was almost as fleshless as a skull's. Toward the end of most Kencyrs' lives, at some age between one hundred forty and one hundred fifty-five, it was natural for them to go into the sudden physical and mental decline that preceded death. Although Ishtier's body had been slowly collapsing in on itself longer than anyone could remember, his mind had never once been known to falter in its subtlety. Long contact with the god had been known to have even stranger effects than this.

  "You wished to see me, My Lord?" said Jame.

  "You, yes. Not him," he said brusquely. A curious humming murmur seemed to fill up the spaces between his words.

  The strange noise made Jame frown, but she had no time to consider it. At that point Marc, despite a commendably brisk start half an hour before, suddenly began to sway. Jame slipped an arm around his waist to hold him steady and punched him in the ribs to forestall a rising snore.

  "Pardon, My Lord," she said to Ishtier, getting her shoulder under Marc's armpit and heaving him upright. "We come as a set. If you try to put him out now, I shall tip him over on you."

  Ishtier regarded the swaying giant sourly for a moment. Then, abruptly, something flickered through his expression. It was gone too quickly to be recognized. When his eyes turned back to Jame, they were as hard and unreadable as before.

  "I have an assignment for you, thief," he said coldly.

  Jame stared at him. "You want something stolen? For six months you do your best to make life impossible for me because I'm temporarily one of the Brotherhood, and now you want me to steal for you? Priest, you have a strange sense of humor."

  "Hunzzaagg," said Marc.

  "What?" snapped Ishtier.

  "Never mind him," Jame said hastily. "He thinks he's awake. It's a common delusion."

  "Humph!" the priest said. "Listen to me, wench. I said nothing of stealing. Look here." He stepped aside. There was a small altar behind him, with a fine silver chain lying shattered upon it. Jame caught her breath. "You see?" said that strange humming voice. "The Scroll of the Law is gone. Stolen. In this temple, until it is returned, only I the priest stand between the people of the Kencyrath and their god, all dread be to him. I want you to retrieve it."

  Jame struggled with an answer. The murmur was no longer only in her ears but in her mind as well. It had slipped between her thoughts, deadening as heavy folds of cloth. The air of the room had suddenly become too thick to breathe. There was nothing before her but the monstrous image of Regonereth. The ivory tipped fingers were reaching out . . .

  Then Jame realized what was happening. She threw back her head and shouted with all the breath that was in her. Beside her, she felt Marc jerk awake and heard his startled snort, but her eyes were locked on Ishtier. At last she knew why the priest had been attacking her so long and so viciously over the past months. He had seen the darkness in her. He had suspected that she was closer to his god by right of blood than he could ever be. The test had come and gone before she was aware of it, and she had betrayed herself by breaking free from his will. The face that flared back at her was contorted with hatred and jealousy. Now it would be war between them to the end, for he would never again let her live in peace.

  But there was something else at stake now, she remembered, still struggling with the fading wisps of mind mist. It was neither priest nor god that she was being asked to serve, but the Law. If she refused, the one link that she had chosen to acknowledge with her people would be broken. An abyss had opened; if she turned her back on that empty altar, it would be beneath her feet. There was only one way to go.

  "Where is the scroll?" she asked in a low voice. "Do you know?"

  "I know. It has been taken to the temple of Gorgo. Promise before our god that you will bring me the scroll that lies in the arms of the false image there. Your word on it, thief!"

  "Priest," said Jame grimly, "death break me, darkness take me, the scroll will be in your hands within three hours. My word on it."

  "What in the three worlds," said Marc as they left the temple, "was all of that shouting about?"

  "He tried to whisper the power down on me," Jame said with a gesture of contempt, although she still felt rather shaken. "The old fool. If much more of it had come, he might have whispered the building down on us all. But you had better go home now. This next bit of work calls for my talents, such as they are, not yours."

  Marc only snorted.

  The one-sided argument continued street after street, past the subtle fire of the opal market, the crystal temple of Jacarth, and the Judgment Square, which Jame was careful to skirt by several blocks. Several times the girl considered slipping away. Even with his wits fully about him, Marc could never have caught her in the alleys and on the rooftops. But he knew where she was going. It would only mean that he was likely to come shambling in at some awkward moment, if he didn't fall asleep in some doorway first, and Tai-tastigon at night was no place for an unconscious man. It wasn't until they were crouching in the shadows outside the silver-streaked temple of Gorgo the Lugubrious God that she finally accepted the inevitable.

  The sound of ritual mourning was rolling out of the wide gate and down the steps to them. Marc stared up at the bright entrance and the stream of celebrants passing through it. His eyes had a suspiciously unfocused look to them.

  "How do we get in?" he asked.

  Jame took a deep breath. "The most obvious way," she said. "Put your hood over your head like a proper worshipper, and try to wail a bit."

  They went up the steps together and joined the crowd within. All were gathered in the outer chamber, waiting for the evening ceremony to begin and working themselves into the approved tearful state. There were seven tall pillars spaced around the edge of the room. Loogan was perched precariously on top of the one nearest the
door to the inner chamber with his long silver gray robe flowing down to the floor on all sides of it. From below, one might have supposed him either to be a very tall man with a very small head or a street performer on stilts. The combination of his loud, simulated grief and the wild circling of his arms every few minutes to maintain balance added a good deal to the liveliness of the assembly.

  The young thief began to edge her way across the packed floor. Behind her, she could hear a sound vaguely like the hoarse bellowing of a love-starved bull. Marc, who had never wept out loud in his life, was valiantly doing his best. Jame began to wonder if she was doing something profoundly foolish. There was an apprehension growing in the back of her mind that refused to take on a definite shape. Something about the expression on Ishtier's face . . .

  A sudden pain in her hands brought her back to the present with a start. She had been holding her fists so tightly clenched at her side that the sharp nails had actually broken the skin. It was then that she realized she was not holding up her cloak. She made a quick grab for it a second too late. Marc's foot came down on the trailing hem. The clasp at the throat immediately let go, as it had been designed to do, and the whole garment fluttered down out of sight even as she twisted around to catch it.