THE HILLS ROLLED up to the moon on slopes of wind-bent grass, crested, swept down into tangled brier shadows. Then up again and down, over and over until only aching muscles distinguished between rise and descent, climb and fall. A night bird flitted overhead. Jame paused to watch it, thinking enviously of wings. For a moment it showed clearly against the moon-silvered clouds, and then the wall of mountains to the west swallowed it. How near the Ebonbane seemed now that night had fallen. The range loomed over her, an immense presence filling half the sky, blotting out the stars. Two weeks of walking had at last brought her out of the Haunted Lands into these foothills, but that in itself was no help. Clean earth or not, this was still a wilderness. What she needed now was civilization —even a goatherd's hut—but something, and soon.
Thin, high voices called to each other behind her. Jame caught her breath, listening, counting. Seven. The haunts had found her trail again.
She tensed to run, then forced her weary muscles to relax. Flight would only weaken her. Besides, they seemed to be keeping their distance, an odd thing after so many days of close pursuit. Should she finally turn on them? They were well spread out, tempting targets for their wounded prey . . . ah, but what good would it do to kill something already dead? She would make one last bid for life, then, Jame thought as she started up the next slope. If only she could reach shelter before her strength gave out and they overtook her.
Then, suddenly, there was the city.
Jame stared down at it from the hilltop, hardly trusting her eyes. It lay well below her, cradled in the curve of the foothills as they turned to the southeast. Even from this distance, it looked immense. The outer circle of its double curtain wall was miles from edge to edge; the inner seemed to strain under the pressure of the buildings it contained. Gray and silent it stood between mountain and plain, a stone city that appeared in the cold moonlight to be more the work of nature than of man.
"Tai-tastigon!" Jame said softly.
Behind her, the wailing began again, then faded away. In the silence that followed, a cricket chirped tentatively, then another and another. The haunts had withdrawn. Not surprising with the city so near, Jame thought, rubbing her bandaged forearm. They had followed her far beyond their own territory as it was, drawn on by the blood-scent. She shivered, remembering that first encounter in the Haunted Lands before the burning keep. Dazed by fire and smoke, she had turned to find a dark figure standing behind her. For a joyful moment, she had thought it was Tori. Then she was down with the foul thing on top of her, its fetid breath in her face.
Jame looked at her hands, at the long, slim fingers and at the gloves hanging in shreds from them. Each ivory white nail lay flush with the skin now, its sharp point curving halfway over the fingertip. They looked almost normal, she thought bitterly. Trinity knew what the haunt had thought when those same nails, fully extended, had ripped the rotting flesh from its face.
Not that that would stop such a creature for long. Even if she had killed it, nothing stayed dead forever in the Haunted Lands, just as no one could live there unprotected without changing as the haunts, once ordinary men, had changed. That was the curse that the Kencyrath, Jame's own people, had let fall on the region when their main host had withdrawn from it long ago. No longer maintained by their will, the Barrier between Rathillien and the shadows beyond had weakened. Perimal Darkling, ancient of enemies, now gnawed at the edges of yet another world, poisoning the land, sucking health from the air. Still, it would have been much worse if a handful of Kencyr defenders had not remained, Jame thought; it was worse now that they were all dead. She, the youngest and last was getting out none too soon.
Or perhaps not quite soon enough. Though the Haunted Lands lay behind her, she could feel their evil growing in her bandaged arm even now.
It had taken her some time to realize that the wound was infected. Injuries rarely took such a turn among her people, for as a rule Kencyrs either died outright or healed themselves quickly and well in the deep helplessness of dwar sleep. Jame had hardly slept at all in the past fortnight. Such endurance was another trait of her kind, but it also had its limits. She was perilously close to them now. There was some time left, however, enough, with luck, to find help in the city below . . . if the city could provide it. There it lay, Tai-tastigon the Great, just as the Scrollsman Anar, her old tutor, had once described it. Only one thing was different: nowhere below was there a trace of light—not a watch fire on the walls, not a street torch, not even the dim star of a candle in some indistinct window. All was dark, all was . . . dead?
Memory shook her. Two weeks ago she had climbed another hill, had found another mass of buildings spread out lightless, lifeless below her. The keep. Home. But not anymore. He had called her tainted, a thing without honor, and they had driven her out. But. . . but that had been years ago, she thought in confusion, one hand pressed against her forehead, against the ache of thwarted memory. Where had she been since then? What had happened to her? She couldn't remember. It was as if the frightened, outcast child she had been had run over the hills into the mist and walked out again half-grown to find . . . what? The dead.
But not all of them.
Abruptly, Jame swung down her pack and began to burrow through it, throwing its contents right and left until only three objects remained inside: a book wrapped in old linen, the shards of a sword with the hilt emblem defaced, and the small package that contained her father's ring, still on his finger. Tori, her twin brother, had not been among the slain. If he had escaped, as she desperately hoped, let him call her honorless when she put sword and ring in his hands for she would accept such a judgment from no one else. "No, my lord father, not even from you," she said in sudden defiance, looking back the way she had come.
Far to the north, green sheet lightning played across the face of the Barrier. A wind was rising there that would topple the keep's burnt-out towers and whirl their ashes southward —after her. Jame paled at the thought. Hastily, she shouldered the pack and set off down the hill toward the city, trying to fix her mind on the hope that Tori had come this way before her, but all the time tasting ashes on the wind.
A LONG, GENTLE SLOPE stretched from the edge of the hills to the first out-work, an earthen bulwark of alarming size but overgrown with feather weed and breeched with many deep fissures. On the other side, the land ran down at an increased angle to the foot of the outer curtain. To the right, a ramp made of rubble work ascended to a gate set high in the wall. This structure and the half-ruined bulwark suggested a city once heavily fortified but now secure enough to neglect its own outer defenses. Perhaps this confidence had been misplaced, Jame thought as she trudged up the ramp. Perhaps those proud towers seen first from the hill and now so close at hand were nothing but shells, gutted and empty, the home of rats and moldering bones. Anar had not said so, but then neither had he mentioned the unnerving lightlessness of the city. The gateway rose dark and vacant before her. Nothing moved there but the weeds between the paving stones as they nodded in the wind.
Inside, the land again dropped sharply away, this time into a broad, dry moat. A bridge spanned it. Jame crossed and found the city gates on the far side gaping open without a guard in sight. She entered the city.
At first the way seemed clear enough. The avenue was broad and straight, lined with high walls set with many iron-barred gates. These opened into private courtyards and gardens, all dark and deserted. For several blocks Jame walked along this open way, and then the road disappeared under the remains of a gatehouse set in an ancient wall. On the other side lay the great labyrinth of Tai-tastigon.
Within six turnings, Jame was utterly lost. The streets here were laid out like an architect's nightmare, swerving drunkenly back and forth, intersecting at odd angles, diving through tunnels under buildings and sometimes ending abruptly at the foot of a blank wall. Nor were the buildings more reassuring. Tall, narrow, pinched in aspect, they presented face after withdrawn face to the street, each one locked and sealed into itself, all indifferent to anything that passed before them.
Jame prowled on, more and more ill at ease. The wind whimpered about her, rattling grit in the gutter, setting a wooden sign to creaking fitfully overhead. There was still no trace of light, no sign of life; and yet the more she saw, the more convinced she became that this was no citadel of the dead. There were indications of age all around her, but little of decay. Occasionally she even saw a flowerpot on a high window ledge and once a banner restless in the wind, showing golden patterns to the moon. Clearly, if the people had left, it had been very recently; but if they were still here, they were deliberately keeping very quiet.
Or then again, perhaps not. As she rounded certain corners, the wind bore, or seemed to bear, not only dust and scraps of paper to dance about her feet, but snatches of sound. Several times she stopped short, straining to catch a thread of song or chant distorted by distance; and once far, far away, a voice laughed or cried, impossible to tell which, before it too dissolved into the rush of the wind. Was anyone really there? Something like the patter of small, running feet made her start more than once, and a dozen other lesser sounds niggled at her attention, but not one ever quite emerged from the harping of the wind. Nerves, Jame told herself at last, and went on.
Her thoughts kept returning to the city gate, now far behind, standing open to the Haunted Lands, to the coming storm. If only she had barred the way, but how—and against what? Her arm throbbed. Strength was leaving it, would soon leave her. It was foolish, of course, to think that a closed gate could shut out the wind; and as for the haunts, surely they had withdrawn. There was nothing else out there to follow her, she told herself firmly. Nothing. It was only because the pursuit had been so long, so bitter, that she felt even now that she was not free of it.
Then the sound of falling water reached her, and she went forward eagerly into a small square where a fountain played merrily by itself. This was the first clear running water Jame had seen in weeks. She welcomed its coolness as she scooped it up with one hand to drink, then splashed more on her heated face. Her arm also felt hot. Gingerly, she unwound the makeshift bandage, hissing with pain as skin came away with the cloth. Beneath, the teeth marks still showed clearly, white-rimmed against a darkness that had spread out from them like some kind of subcutaneous growth. Her fingers twitched briefly. There was still life in them, but it was no longer entirely her own. Jame swallowed, tasting panic. She had suddenly realized that if the healing process was delayed much longer, she might have to choose between her arm and the living death of a haunt. Oh for the chance to sleep, but not here, not out in the open. She must find shelter, must find . . . light?
Yes! Jame sprang up, staring. On the other side of the square, under a shuttered first story window, was a bright line. She crossed over to it and scratched on the window-frame. The light at once went out. All the other cracks, she now saw, were stuffed with rags from the inside. In fact, every nearby door and window was similarly secured. If this was true throughout the city, then the people were indeed here after all, but they were in hiding, barricaded inside their homes. Therefore, whatever it was that they feared, that all of Tai-tastigon feared, was out here in the streets—with her.
Jame stood very still for a moment, then cursed herself with soft vehemence. Fool, to have let her attention wander. For the first time since entering the city, she opened all six senses fully to it, and what they told her chilled the fever heat in her veins: she was being followed—no, stalked—and it had nothing to do with the Haunted Lands or the keep, whatever she had done there. No, this threat was new, and its source already far too close for comfort.
Then the pattering sound began again. Before, confused with distance, it had woven in and out of her hearing; now it was rapidly growing not so much louder as more distinct, like the approach of rain over hard ground. Jame couldn't tell from which street it came. When the noise seemed almost on top of her, out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed something white running close to the ground. She spun to face it, but already it had gone to earth. In the sudden silence, a pair of yellow, unblinking eyes stared at her from the deepest shadows of the street that led eastward.
A cat, Jame thought with relief.
She had actually taken a step toward the thing when she saw the cracks. They were coming toward her down the moonlit side of the roadway past the yellow eyes, shoving some cobbles apart, uprooting others. At first their progress was slow, almost tentative; but as they entered the square, the multitude of small cracks abruptly combined into five major fissures, which lunged forward, splitting everything in their path.
Jame backed up rapidly. She neither knew what would happen if one of those cracks opened under her feet nor particularly wanted to find out. Turning, she fled westward.
The quick footsteps followed her, and after them came the crack of cloven stone.
She took refuge in a doorway. There were the eyes staring at her from across the street, and the lintel over her head split in two. She fled again. The labyrinth should have been her ally, but turn and twist as she would, she could not lose her pursuer.
Then, suddenly, the eyes were ahead of her.
Jame darted down a side street and skidded to a stop. Before her, in the shadow of an ornate gateway, lay a broad, inky pool of water that stretched from wall to wall. She was about to splash across it when something huge surfaced with an oily gurgle. For a second, moonlight glistened on a broad, leathery back, and then it was gone again.
From behind came the sound of splitting rock. It had almost overtaken her. Swallowing hard, Jame stepped back and waited. A moment later, as the water again broke open, she sprang forward, one foot coming down on the sleek back, the other on the far shore. The fissures, however, plunged straight into the pool. For a heartbeat nothing happened, and then the waters went mad. Spray lashed the walls, soaked Jame as she shrank back into the archway. For an instant, she thought she saw a huge, blind head rearing up, gape-jawed against the moon, and then it was gone. The water gurgled down into the cracks. The pool, it seemed, had been all of an inch deep.
Across the wet cobbles, Jame once again met the yellow stare. For a moment their eyes locked, then the thing turned and rapidly pattered away. It ran not on paws but on small fat hands like an infant's, and no shadow kept pace with it on the moon-washed pavement.
When it was out of sight, Jame turned to regard the gateway. It was set in a high wall, which extended a considerable distance in both directions and appeared to set off an entire district from the rest of the city. Beyond the gate, the shadows cast by overhanging buildings lay black and unbroken across the way until far ahead faint lights appeared suspended in the gloom. The air that breathed in Jame's face was heavy with incense. She hesitated, then drawn by those distant lights went warily forward into the shadows.
It was not as dark inside as she had expected. Here the buildings fit together like a gigantic puzzle-box, interlocking in the oddest ways and yet each standing by itself with no shared walls. Moonlight filtered down from above. This, in addition to her excellent night vision—the racial legacy of far dimmer worlds than Rathillien—brought Jame forward until she came to a street where light spheres hovered at intervals by the walls.
She had had to force herself to get this far. Out in the city, her sixth sense had merely tingled with the presence of those odd beings that had stalked her. Here, she flinched under waves of raw force that gained strength with each step that she took into the district. All around her, a hundred, a thousand hearts of power were beating feverishly in the night. Anger, defiance, and fear—gigantic, inhuman— crashed down on her rapidly weakening defenses. The ground and air seemed to shake. I'm a mouse caught in an earthquake, she thought in sudden panic, shying back against a wall. It vibrated under her hand. Those beings whose home this was had no thoughts to spare an uninvited guest. They could crush her flat and never know that they had killed. She must get out.
Jame fled back the way she had come, blindly, headlong. Just when she felt that she must stop or die, the gate to the district appeared before her. Gasping, she threw herself down on the damp pavement beyond it. After a moment, she sat up unsteadily and leaned back against the wall, cradling her injured arm.
Fool, fool, fool, to spend her dwindling strength so recklessly. Soon she might call on it in need and none would come. Already she had forfeited her sixth sense, temporarily deafened by the unheard cacophony that she had just escaped. Was this the way she always behaved, rushing about like a total lack-wit? What a cursed nuisance to have mislaid so much of her past. . . or to have had it taken from her.
"Damn," she said suddenly, lowering her head onto her arm.
She must be mad to joke about that. Lost, lost, all those years, her home, her family, almost herself. It wasn't the frightened child she remembered who must cope with this night-stricken city but the stranger that child had become. All she had now were shreds of her Kencyr heritage. Very well. She would cling to them and, idiot that she apparently was, force herself to be wise, to conserve her strength. She got carefully to her feet, then froze.
The wind was turning. Fitful gusts of it, foul with the breath of the Haunted Lands, brushed past her face, toyed with her hair. The gate to the north was open. Through it had come the outriders of the storm, but who could say what might follow in their wake? Jame shivered and turned away. Stepping over the still quiescent fissures, she walked hastily southward along the wall with the wind catching at her heels. She did not look back.
At length, the winding roads brought her to the edge of a vast open area where every street in the city seemed to meet. Jame walked out into it toward the large marble throne at its center, glad for such freedom after so many dark ways, glad even for the boisterous wind, which here had still more of the clean western mountains about it than the northern wastes. A flash of white caught her eye. A flurry of papers was bounding toward her across the pavement before the wind. All whirled past except one that plastered itself against her boot and refused to be shaken free. She peeled it off. It was covered with marks that she recognized as Kessic, the common-script of Rathillien. It read:
Nurk Lurks In Doorways.
Who or what, Jame asked herself, is a nurk?
Curious to see if the other blowing papers carried the same message, she caught as many as she could. Some did, but most were as different as the languages in which they were written. After five minutes, Jame had collected specimens of Nessing, Globvenish, Skyrr-mir, and several other even more exotic tongues. She had also been warned away from streets, alleys, squares, rooftops, and even window ledges each with its own peculiar occupant. It seemed that no place out-of-doors was considered safe, although from what exactly she had no idea until one paper, covered with lines that looked like an incredibly complex knot hacked apart at random, announced quite simply:
Beware The Dead Gods.
The wind snatched the paper away and sent it tumbling off after the others. Jame let it go. Gods? Caught in the grip of the Kencyrath's own deity, it had never occurred to her that other people might think there was more than one.
Gods? Was that what these Tastigons called such creatures as the baby-handed beast and the puddle-dwelling leviathan, for surely there was nothing else half so odd loose in the streets tonight. She began to laugh at their foolishness, and then stopped abruptly, catching her breath.
Another voice had cut across her own. For a moment Jame thought she had imagined it, but there it was again, faint with distance, screaming. Before the second cry died away, she was running toward the mouth of the street from which it had come. In her haste, she did not see the small dust devil that had momentarily caught up the last of the loose papers and was now traveling slowly after her across the flagstones, against the wind.
The narrow ways closed about her again. She paused at a crossroads under a hollow crown of arches, unsure of which way to turn, then plunged into the right-hand street as the shriek sounded again, much closer this time. Broad ribbons floated from the upper windows here, silently braiding and unbraiding themselves in the air, masking the entrance to the alley until Jame was almost on top of it.
Inside, an old man was backed into a doorway, gripping his staff and snarling toothlessly at two young men who stalked him. As Jame entered the narrow lane, he shrieked again. There was no fear in that sound, only pure, frustrated rage, reinforced by the heavy stick, which he swung with unexpected vigor, causing his assailants to leap back. Youth and endurance, however, were on their side, as would be the final victory if only they were patient. Their aged prey knew this all too well, as his impotent fury showed. So did Jame.
Without thinking, she darted forward and, with a Senethar fire-leaping kick, neatly dropped the attacker on the old man's right. The second man spun about to find his friend crumpling to the ground. He didn't see Jame, who was already parallel to him in the shadows, poised to strike again. The blow never fell. As Jame paused in surprise, the man stared wildly past her, apparently at nothing, then turned and bolted. Another figure detached itself from a doorway farther down and fled after him, glancing back with a pale, horror-stricken face. Then both disappeared around the far corner.
Jame had actually started after them when a wave of dizziness struck her so suddenly that she thought the cobbles had lurched beneath her feet. When her mind steadied, she found herself clinging to a doorpost for support, with the old man gleefully hammering on her shoulder and repeatedly shrieking, "Run, you buggers, run!" almost in her ear.
"Eh, that was smart work," he said, turning to Jame at last, his cloudy eyes almost luminous with delight. "They'll think twice before bothering old Penari again. But who are you, boy? What's your name?
"Jame . . . Jame Talissen," she stammered, automatically giving a name that, up to that moment, she had not remembered she possessed. "But I'm not a—"
"Talisman . . . Talisman," the old man repeated querulously. "Odd name, but then you Kennies are odd people. You are Kencyr, aren't you? Ah, you can't fool me, boy, not with that accent; but then it would never occur to you to try, would it?" All his wrinkles suddenly slid into an expression of extreme craftiness. "You're a Kencyr, and that means you're so honest it probably hurts. Come see me later, boy. I may have a job for you." And with that he scurried off down the alley, leaving Jame half-collapsed on the doorstep, weakly finishing the protest he had not waited to hear.
The effort brought dizziness surging back. Jame fought it desperately, feeling control begin to slip away. Images flashed through her mind: the darkened keep, faceless figures in the gloom, the snap of. . . twigs? no, of fingers breaking.
"No!"
It was her own voice, echoing sharply back from the opposite wall. Once again she huddled on a doorstep in a silent city, near the body of the man she had just struck down, far from the northern wastes and their vengeful ghosts. Trinity, another slip like that and she would be gone for good. Forget the past, she told herself; it could no longer hurt her without her consent, but the present, ah, the present could kill.
Somewhere, something was burning.
Jame's head jerked up. The alley was clouded with smoke. Ten feet away, the body of the fallen man had begun to burn.
Numb with shock, she watched as tongues of thin blue flame licked up around the still form. The skin on the back of the out flung hands blackened and fell away. The hair went up in a sudden blaze, revealing for a moment a beautiful heliotrope tattoo behind the left ear blooming in the heart of the flames. Garments, skin, muscle, and bone, each crumbled in turn as the black, greasy smoke rolled upward, teased a few feet above the body by the sudden presence of a small whirlwind in the passageway.
Then Jame saw that a large, indistinct form was taking shape before her, and without consciously willing it, she found herself on her feet again, pressing back into the shadow of the doorway. A vague head-shape on top of a long column of smoke swayed back and forth at the level of the shuttered second story windows. There was also the hint of a very long tail, defined only by a small cloud of soot that swept from one wall to the other, leaving dust devils in its wake. The creature fed slowly, sensuously, then belched and wandered off down the alley, leaving behind only ashes and a greasy spot on the cobbles.
At that point, it didn't matter to Jame if this was a god, an hallucination, or the local form of street sanitation; she was out of the alley the way she had come before the creature had turned the far corner.
Beyond, the wind stopped her. It had risen again and now came in sharp blasts that lifted the ribbon like banners away from the walls and set them to warring in midair, one side of the street against the other. Ruby and amethyst veined with gold burned in the cold moonlight; silver flashed against emerald and turquoise. Then all colors dimmed. Tattered clouds, forerunners of the storm, had crossed the moon's bright disc. Behind them, rolling down from the north, from the keep, came the mighty storm-rack.
Jame stood shivering in the blast. She tasted ashes, felt them gray on her face, her lips, a death-mask for the living; but Nothing stays dead forever, whispered a thin voice in her mind. She dragged a jacket sleeve over her face, as though to wipe off the skin itself, and felt suddenly naked. Without her sixth sense, numbed as it still was, how could she know what even now might be searching the darkness for her? The gate to the north was open. Beyond the city, beyond the hills, among the toppled towers shadows were stirring, crawling, snuffling along the trail of blood and guilt. He would follow, for there were things he would want back from her, things he would come great distances to reclaim. Even now she thought she heard his tread. It shook the ground.
Dreams, all fever dreams, Jame told herself desperately, making one last effort to break free.
But the ground still shook.
It was as if something very heavy had been dropped some distance away. There was another vibration, and another and another, evenly timed, forming a slow, ponderous beat of increasing strength. It was getting closer. Then Jame saw a strange sight: all the banners down the street were tearing loose and coming toward her. They seemed, by the shape they had assumed, to be plastered against a huge form, but she could see nothing behind them. A fourth story balcony crumpled against the wall. Ribbons caught in the wreckage. Then, briefly, moonlight flooded the street once more, and Jame saw dust mushroom up around a large, circular patch on the ground. The stones beneath her lurched again. When the next footprint appeared, twenty feet closer, she saw the cobbles at its center sink a good three inches into the earth.
She was just thinking in a numb sort of way that whatever else this thing was, it was damned heavy, and wondering what, if anything, she should do about it, when the bone-jarring beat suddenly picked up speed and the dust surged toward her, leaving a trail of crushed stone in its wake.
"Oh no," said Jame out loud, and bolted.
She turned left at the crowned crossroads and raced on into the city through streets that echoed with her passing, around corners, under walkways, and finally over the river by a stone bridge, which gave a fleeting glimpse of steel gray water and boomed behind her as the other swept over it.
All too soon, the air began to burn in her lungs and her eyes to blur. She was running quite blindly, near the end of her strength, when her foot struck something and she fell. Training made her roll over outstretched arm and back rather than sprawl, but the pack jolted her spine cruelly, and as she came up again, her legs gave way. The thing must be almost on top of her. She scrambled to her feet, gasping and half sick, but driven by the pride of her warrior race to meet death honorably.
To her amazement, nothing happened.
The pursuer was indeed there, hardly five paces away, sweeping first one way and then the other as piles of debris, boards, and fragments of masonry all turned to powder under the heavy tread. It seemed to be pacing rapidly back and forth before her, turning with an abruptness that suggested bafflement rather than some elephantine attempt at cat-and-mouse, almost as if it had run into a barrier even more invisible than itself. Then, without warning, the huge pug marks turned and stalked back the way they had come.
Jame found herself face down on the pavement without distinctly remembering how she had gotten there. There were bits of broken cobblestones pressing into her cheek, and her knees hurt badly. That was it: the ground had seemed to leap up at her, and she had gone to meet it—knees first, by some miracle, not straight down like a diver. As her heart slowed, she sat up unsteadily and rested her forehead on her aching knees for a long moment. Then she looked up.
The street about her was strewn with rubble and lined by empty, half-collapsed buildings. Moreover, the farther ahead she looked, the worse the general decay became, until the roadway itself at last wholly disappeared under the debris that had flaked away, scab like, from the rotting façades that overlooked it. It was like standing on the edge of some great urban sore, born of an unknown and unmentionable disease whose symptoms were ruin and desolation. Not only that, but the source of infection itself was close by . . . and it was still very, very active. Jame had thought her sixth sense numb, and perhaps it still was to such small teasings as she had experienced before, but this was altogether a different matter. She could feel the power flowing about her—cold, deep, impersonal—like a mighty river that wears the rocks in its bed to pebbles and eats away its banks. Now it began to find channels through her own mind. Unable to run, she turned at bay, at last drawing fully on that core of resistance bred into all her kind by long exposure to powers beyond their control. One by one, her mental barriers went up.
The effort left her spent, almost stripped of her will. As if in a dream, she felt herself rise and walk, drawn toward the source of the power even as its currents buffeted her. The mounds of earth and debris loomed before her. She began to climb, sneezing at the dust from boards that disintegrated under the weight of her hand. Splintered wood, chunks of plaster, a broken clay doll, and then she was on the crest, staring down at the temple.
It rose tall, stark and windowless above a sea of ruins.
Those buildings farthest from it still contrived to stand; but the closer they came, the more total was their collapse, until those that had once stood beside the temple itself were now reduced to bulwarks of dust piled high against its gleaming flanks. Nothing entered that poisoned circle by choice. Bats sheared away when their flight brought them too close. Rats swarmed through the buildings beyond, but none descended into that greater desolation. Nothing moved there that the wind had not touched, and even it seemed to sicken and die in the presence of that sullen edifice, whose shadow alone had crumbled granite and reduced mighty oaken beams to a handful of dust.
The source of all this destruction, the temple itself, was not large, although it gave the impression of occupying a great deal of space. Jame knew instinctively that its interior would also seem immense, just as she knew, without ever having seen anything like it before, to whom it was dedicated.
This was a dwelling of the Three-Faced God. Torrigion, That-Which-Creates; Argentiel, That-Which-Preserves; Regonereth, That-Which-Destroys: names rarely spoken out-loud and never all at the same time, names whose very mention could bring down a power that few men could now control and whose potential even for casual destruction was all too clearly shown by this graveyard of homes and hopes. This and none other was her own god, the one who had taken the Three People—Arrin-ken, Kendar, Highborn— and made them one against the enemy from outside, Perimal Darkling, Father of Shadows. For thirty millennia, three thousand years on Rathillien alone, the Kencyrath had fought the long retreat from world to world, down the Chain of Creation, waiting for their god to manifest himself through them in final battle. Chosen they were and proud, but bitter, too, over long delay, and angry that, the task being set, their god had apparently left them to accomplish it alone.
And finally, for what? A lie?
The power that flowed around Jame now, she suddenly realized, was different only in degree, not kind, from that which she had sensed in the puzzle-box district and again in the streets among the so-called dead gods of Tai-tastigon. Was there only one god, as all Kencyrs believed, or many? If the latter, then her people had been cruelly deceived for longer than one could bear to think. Had the Kencyrath been used? Very well. It had been created for use—but not to serve a lie. Honor would not endure it, nor would Jame. The mere suspicion of betrayal—now, when she most needed all the reassurance that her Kencyr heritage could give—acted on her like the deadliest of insults. Fists raised, wrists crossed, she silently challenged the temple before her: let it be war, then, until the truth was known. It was a mad gesture, as mad as to spurn the one place in this haunted city where she could be sure of help; but she was beyond reason now. Let it be war, or at least a clean end far from this seething abscess of divinity. As she turned away, darkness fell again and did not lift. The storm had broken at last.
MEN SAID afterward that no blacker night had even fallen on Tai-tastigon. The wind roared through the city, ripping up slates, clawing at the houses until those within feared that not a wall would stand until morning. They thought they heard voices wailing high above the earth, and those who peered out swore that they saw terrible things as the north wind, the demon wind, bore southward the nightmares of a dying land.
JAME STUMBLED on, wrapped in feverish dreams, oblivious to the chaos around her. It seemed to her that she was back in the keep, a child again slipping silently through the hallways, looking for something. It was very late. If anyone saw her, there would be hard words in the morning, especially if he learned of it; but she was too anxious to care. It was important that she find . . . what? Her feet were very cold, and the night was very dark. Nearly everyone must be asleep. Jame hurried on, wondering why she was so nervous, wishing she could remember what she was searching for. Then, suddenly, she knew. There was a space beneath a certain staircase, a favorite hiding place, and she was not looking for something but someone. Tori. There were the stairs now. Why was she so afraid to look beneath them? It was what she had come for, wasn't it? A dark recess, and in it, yes, a dim figure.
"Tori?"
No response. Jame crouched lower, peering into the shadows, then jerked back with a hiss. Oh God, Anar. Pressed against the far wall, she fought down nausea. No time for that now. She must look in all the places that Tori might be, hoping desperately that he would be in none of them.
The dead were everywhere, huddled in doorways, crumpled in corners, stretched out on the floor as though trying to crawl to safety, tendons like taut wire along the bone, bones held together with a bit of skin and desiccated flesh. Jame made herself look into every face that sword, fire, and decay had left recognizable. She knew them all but never found the one she dreaded most to see. But if Tori wasn't here, where was he? Once Anar had told her that if she walked long enough to the south, she would come to another sort of land where the wind smelled sweet and the soil was untainted. Tori had heard that story, too. Was that where she would have to go to find him?
She was still looking for Tori; but now there was a pack heavy on her back and she was trying to find her way out of the keep. Something had frightened her—no, she had done something terrible, and now she must get away. But where was she? The passages wound on and on, twisting, turning, leading nowhere. Had she lost her way? No, don't even think that. Keep going keep going keep going . . .
There was someone walking behind her.
You were gone so long child; now will you leave us again so soon? It was Anar's voice, faintly mocking, hardly more than a whisper.
What? No word for your old tutor? Look at me, child,
She would not. No one at the keep had been kinder to her, but never again did she want to see that face from the dark of the recess.
Then she heard other voices echoing in the hallway behind her. At first they were only a soft-textured murmur, one sound running into another, but then strands began to separate. An accent here, an inflection there . . . Jame felt her heart lurch. They were all coming. Shambling feet scraped on the floor, rotten clothing ripped as bodies stumbled against the rough stone walls, but the voices that called to her were sweet and wheedling.
Where are you going, child? Come back to us. We love you.
But once they had let her go easily enough, Jame thought bitterly. He had said that she was tainted, a thing without honor, and they had let him drive her out into the wilderness. Now they said that they wanted her back. It was a lie, of course, but to what purpose? Then she knew. They wanted her to hesitate, to delay because he was coming too, coming to get her, coming to make her pay for what she had done.
She heard his footstep overhead.
I must run, Jame thought wildly, and found that she could not move. The crash of iron boots grew louder. He was coming down the stairs from the battlements.
"It's a dream, all a dream!" she cried out loud in helpless protest.
For an instant, the city street again lay before her, with a metal sign high overhead banging against the wall. Then it faded into the keep's upper corridor. A black figure strode down the hall toward her, brushing aside the indistinct crowd that swarmed there, crumbling flesh from bone with his touch. Three broken arrows still nailed the gray jacket to his chest. His mutilated hand reached for her.
Child of Darkness! The voice was the sound of bones grinding, cracking. Where is my sword? Where are my . . . "father!"
The hated word stopped him.
Nothing stays dead forever: but "I gave you fire!" she cried at him, at them all. "Fire and final rites, such as I could manage. Even when your hands twitched in my grasp. Even when I saw your dead eyes open. Did you want to become haunts?"
They stared at her. She could read nothing in their faces. Then they were covered with ash. They were falling apart.
"Nooo!" she wailed, clutching at them, seeing her childhood again in flames.
The wind whirled them away.
Her legs betrayed her, and she went down, too spent to remember her bad arm until she tried to break her fall with it. Pain dazed her, spiraled her senses toward darkness. "Don't go!" she heard someone cry. "Don't leave me alone, not again!" Yes, it was her voice, but this time no one answered. For a moment she clung to the image of that empty hallway, the last of her old home that she would ever see. Then it too slipped away.
The cobbles beneath her hand were hard and cold, glazed with ice from the bitter rain that had begun to fall. She lifted her face to it. It seemed to wash away everything—icy street, shuttered windows, even, at last, itself. Jame let them all go. Numbly, like a sleepwalker, she rose and stumbled on, beyond guilt and grief at last, moving blindly forward until the night swallowed all.