The platform descended, creaking, through the scholars' warren inside Mount Alban's cliff. Jame rode it alone. Climbing out the infirmary window and swinging in the one below had been easy for her, but impossible for blind Jorin. Graykin, sulking, had refused even to try.
Creak, creak, groan.
By accident, she had discovered how the scrollsmen got their ancient bones up and down the vertical college in relative comfort. Having set this wretched machine in motion, though, she wondered if she would be able to make it stop. Ropes snaked past, tied at intervals with esoteric knots. Kendar craftsmen were certainly clever. The older scholars must find such a convenience invaluable, but Jame was beginning to wish that she had walked. This ponderous descent was giving her far too much time to think.
Of all the stupid things she had ever done, this was perhaps the stupidest, far worse than raiding Restormir. There, at least, she'd had help and an enemy prone to tripping over his own fat feet. Here at Wilden she faced a very different foe in Ishtier, and perhaps in the Randir Matriarch as well.
Clearly, a feud could run three generations or more since Rawneth had told Kindrie that her revenge ran through him, whom she must have believed to be the last of Kinzi's blood.
Revenge for what?
As for Ishtier, what support did he have here? What had he told the other priests about her? She had called the Priests' College a cess-pool of divinity, but, after all, it didn't contain an active temple. Maybe there was nothing to worry about.
Maybe.
Still, the nervous tightening of her stomach said, "Dumb, dumb, DUMB."
The platform sank into a layer of mist and seemed to melt. Jame tumbled down worn stone steps, for the first time missing her voluminous overskirt, to fetch up breathless and bruised at their foot in deep grass.
"Watch out for the last step," Graykin had said. Huh.
Mount Alban loomed over her, covering the sky, yet as insubstantial as the moon at mid-day. The surrounding walls of Wilden looked just as ghostly, wooded slopes showing through them as if through a misty haze. Diffuse light bathed the grassy hillock on which she stood and warmed its crown of tumbled stones, relics of the ancient hill fort around which Wilden had been built. Gap-mouthed imus were carved on the fallen blocks. She traced one with a fingertip. At her feet, tiny star-shaped flowers sprang open in the deep grass.
This is the morn of Summer Eve, Jame thought. Who knows what else may wake here before night-fall?
As she walked down the hillock, Wilden redefined itself around her. The green knoll was girt with flagstones and granite walls pierced to east and west with arches. Above and beyond, where she had seen the wooded slopes of older days, were the valley's sheer, quarried sides, cut short by an overcast sky. Mount Alban all but disappeared as she stepped off the grass at the hillock's foot. A sulfurous light smoldered down through the steel gray clouds. Was the Wilden Witch conjuring again? What this time?
Faint cloud-shadows moved over the flags between her and the eastern arch. One of them, man-shaped, seemed to pause.
Jame felt her heart lurch. Sweet Trinity. How could she have forgotten? It was near Wilden that the master assassin had attacked her and been overwhelmed in turn by Bane. Was that mere-tattooed killer still Bane's prisoner and mount? Had they ridden out the weirdingstrom here, perhaps in the very ruins which she had just left?
The shadow melted back into the flow.
Jame let out her breath in a sigh. Nerves, she told herself—or, if not, one more element in a game already hopelessly beyond her control. She had no plan except to find Kindrie and, somehow, get him out. As for the rest—well, dammit, she couldn't worry about everything at once.
The road angled upward between tall, narrow buildings. Unlike Restormir with its cantons, here each house stood by itself, gates locked, windows barred, so many fortified camps. Jame saw no one, either of the garrison or of the college. The only sound was that of falling water, which grew louder the higher she climbed. Had Lord Randir taken all his people south with him to the Cataracts? He might have, to forestall trouble at home. Randir politics were said to rival those in the so-called poison courts of the Central Lands, tangled webs of intrigue, feud, and assassination—not that anyone outside Wilden ever learned the half of it. Above all else, the Randir was a house of secrets.
One secret, though, had slipped out. The wrong lord ruled here, women at Gothregor whispered (for one did whisper about the Randir, even in their absence). The old lord's choice had been one of those Shanir who, born apparently normal, change as they mature. By the time he had earned his randon's scarf at Tentir, the Randir Heir had changed to much. Rawneth had her own grandson Keran declared lord. The whispers said that she had tried to kill the deposed Lordan and, failing that, had set assassins on his trail—much luck they'd had against a randon trained weapons-master. The contract was still said to be open, more than three decades later.
One more link between Wilden and the Bashtiri Shadow Guild, thought Jame, resisting the temptation to look behind her.
The road ended in a high terrace almost in the clouds, its flagstones wet with spray from the cataract which plunged down beyond the fortress's back wall to form the arms of its river moat. Earth and air shook with the continual roar. Puddles quivered. Black against this sheet of white water rose the Witch's tower. Glimmers above in the clouds suggested lit windows. Was Rawneth indeed at home, thinking what thoughts after her demon's failure to retrieve Kindrie? That pervading sulfurous light owed little to the rising sun, although it did throw the tower's shadow westward, almost to Jame's feet.
Huddled against the tower's southwest side as a plain, stone building, about the size of a modest stable: the Priests' College, Jame's sixth sense told her. Clever. Most people would walk straight past, while those who did know would find nothing threatening in so humble a structure. Away from their temple strongholds, in a society which tolerated them only as necessary evils, the priests were wise to take such precautions.
Why, then, had they left their door wide open?
With Ishtier involved and Kindrie in his hands to use as bait, it was very likely a trap. What choice did she have, though, except to bite?
Still, she hesitated.
Ishtier was only one member of this community, and a rogue at that. Jame didn't like the Three-Faced-God (what Kencyr did?), but he (or she, or it) had created the Kencyrath, and this was where Shanir trained to serve him. Likewise, she had always felt obscurely superior to his priests (what Kencyr didn't?); but what had her own half-remembered training in Perimal Darkling been but a perversion of the Great Dance which they did by right and necessity? Who was she to look down on them? Look what harm she had already done to Kindrie . . . through sheer prejudice? Had she been as irrational as . . . as Tori in his blind hatred of the Shanir?
No, she thought, not very clearly. I'm better than that. I've got to be.
Still, it was hard to cross that terrace under Rawneth's hidden eyes to that open door.
As her eyes adjusted to the darkness within, she saw a plainly appointed room, taking up apparently the whole interior. So, this wasn't one of those structures larger inside than out. Presumably a minor priest should be on duty to receive visitors and guard the inner door. However, neither priest nor door was in sight. Nor was anyone behind her, when she steeled herself to look—no foot prints across the terrace but her own, no empty man-shape by the balustrade defined by beads of mist, no glint of eyes, Bane's mocking silver or the assassin's cruel, bloodshot gold.
Jame stepped over the threshold and walked around the edge of the room, running her fingertips along the wall. At the back, her hand went through what had looked at a distance like rough stone. Instead, the bare warp threads of a tapestry hung there like a dense curtain. Anyone, slipping through it in the dim light, would seem to have walked through a solid wall. Clever, clever, clever.
She parted the threads, stepped inside and, for the second time that morning, fell down a flight of stairs.
Too damn much practice at Gothregor, she thought sourly, picking herself up at the bottom.
A corridor stretched away in front of her, curving downward into the earth, lit sporadically by guttering torches. Jame descended warily. As the curve widened into a spiral, doors began to open off its outer wall into what appeared to be novice dormitories, dark and dank, not much better than dungeon cells. Farther down, straw mattresses and dirt walls gave way to the cots and stone of the acolytes. Many of these cultivated mushrooms in far corners and multicolored molds on the walls, the latter forming intricate murals of unpleasant design. By their sickly glow alone, these chambers were lit. Doors began to open off the spiral's inner curve into claustrophobic classrooms. Below that was a dismal kitchen, moldy bread in discolored mounds on its tables. Under cauldrons of pale soup, its fires were all burnt out.
Dank, sour, mean. How could anything good come out of such a place?
But Kindrie had. True, he had made some spectacular mistakes since, and she had often wanted to kick him out of his sudden trances. Still, from hints that he had dropped, she gathered that he had as incomplete a memory of his childhood here as she did of hers in the Master's house. She should have remembered how many false steps one could make, stumbling out of such darkness, what courage it took even to try.
I am as bad as Tori, she thought bitterly. No, worse, because I knew better.
Where was Kindrie, though, not to mention everyone else? The College had an air of arrested life, almost of sudden disaster. It wasn't just the empty rooms and cold soup, either. On the hall floor was a mosaic of colored tiles, designed to help the downward spiral of power, with tessellated eddies like catch-pools in each room. She hadn't expected the savage current of a temple—as Kindrie had said, constant exposure to that would erode any half-trained mind. Even two days ago, though, standing on the far side of the Silver, she had sensed more activity than this. Had something happened to the distant temples, sources of their god's power on Rathillien, or was the problem here in the Riverland, perhaps in the College itself?
Still, there was something. As she had followed the trickle of power through Wilden to find this place, so now she felt drawn downward with it. The hall's spiral widened. From below came a rhythmic shuffling sound, massive, as if in its deep den some huge beast were dancing. Before she was aware of it, her feet had caught the pattern: step, turn, glide . . . down and down to where the others wove the Great Dance, round and round on the tessellated floor, straining to draw in power, passing it down and down . . . .
Jame stopped short with a gasp. She stood on the threshold of the College's main hall, and she had found its community.
Innermost stood a high priest, still eye of the storm, yet its master. Around him like black clouds circled lesser priests, feet barely touching the floor, robes astream in wind-blowing Senetha. Water-flowing acolytes girt them with gray, and brown-clad novices with the kantirs of earth-moving. The whole wove a pattern of great power, each dancer caught in it, oblivious to all else.
His back to her, a young, white-clad scullion shuffled in step. His movements puzzled her until she recognized them as fire-leaping, consumed as it were to cinders by his exhaustion. How long had they all been at this, anyway?
The dance jerked the boy around. His eyelids dropped over burnt-out sockets. His gaping mouth was full of dried blood. He had been dead for days.
This isn't my business, Jame thought, sickened, backing away. I can't let it be.
But what about Kindrie? She could still feel the mindless pull of the dance which had sucked her down to fill the gap where that corpse jerked and twitched. Had the healer been snared before her? No. Of all the white-haired Shanir here, he was not one.
The stair led on, downward.
Below was the priests' domain. The lesser orders lived simply, if in cleaner, drier cells than the acolytes above. They also had better light, from diamantine panels glowing on the walls. In the high priests' quarters farther down, more diamantine filled all but the farthest corner with soft, stolen sunshine. It was as if the world had been turned upside down, the sun below and dank earth above. Jame passed austere but well-appointed rooms, many with scrolls piled high on tables. They reminded her of Ishtier's obsession with a certain pale book currently in her knapsack in the Mount Alban infirmary. These shelves weren't apt to contain anything half as priceless, but what she glimpsed looked valuable enough. She had never considered how the priesthood supported itself. An allowance from the Randir, perhaps. But that would hardly extend to this fortune in diamantine and arcane literature, or to the book chests faced with rathorn ivory which she noted many rooms. Clearly, the high priests had access to great wealth. Where did it come from, and on what else did they spend it?
Ever since the main hall, the corridor's spiral had been contracting. No more doors opened off of it, but still it continued to descend into dimmer light, past empty niches. A curious, musty smell rose from the depths, vaguely and disagreeably sweet.
Then came a niche which was not empty. Jame thought at first that a statue stood in it, clothed in crumpling finery, wearing a mask of beaten gold. Then she saw the white of bone under the cracked maroon flesh of long-dead fingers. On the lintel was carved an unfamiliar name, a date long past, and a rank: high priest. Each niche from then on had a similar inscription, and a similar inmate.
Jame had seen something like this, descending to the secret library under Gorgo's temple in Tai-tastigon. That had been distasteful. This was . . . obscene. Kencyr dead were given to the pyre. While one bone remained intact, the soul was believed to be trapped in it, naked before the three faces of God. To escape that hated divinity and the contract which it imposed was a Kencyr's last act of defiance, as honor was his first in life. The priests, it seemed, felt differently. Jame did note, however, as she gingerly descended between the grim ranks, that no one new had joined them in the past thirty or forty years.
The odor was getting stronger but, somehow, less disagreeable. That wasn't necessarily good. After sharing Jorin's senses intermittently for the past two years, Jame had begun to find the smell of some fairly nasty things quite appetizing. This was more of a green scent, though, as if of growing things. So far underground? Had the priests turned their world that much on its head?
Then she heard a slow, thumping sound and a voice, thick with exhaustion and hopelessness.
"Let me in," it was mumbling over and over. "Let me in."
A narrow hall curved left at the stair's foot. Around it shone a light. Jame advanced warily, then stopped, staring. At the hall's end, Kindrie huddled against a door, weakly beating against it with bloody knuckles. Above him hung a tapestry, aglow with flowers as white as the Shanir's hair. The light shone from it . . . no, through it. It wasn't fabric at all, Jame saw, but a window set in the door. On the other side, in full spring glory, was the secret moon garden at Gothregor.
Impossible, unless . . . unless . . . .
Tieri had died in that garden, where her tattered death banner still hung, and there the Knorth Bastard had been born. Kindrie had been locked out of his soul-image by Ishtier, hence his inability to heal those bleeding hands. Jame wasn't trained to enter others' soul-scapes, but she apparently had walked into her brother's at the wolvers' keep, perhaps because they were twins. Kindrie must also be very close to her in blood, as she had guessed, since here she was, uninvited, on the threshold of his soul.
"Please . . . ." the Shanir moaned, striking feebly at the closed door. Blood tricked down his thin wrist. "Oh, please . . . ."
Jame stepped forward, then froze as cracks radiated out from under her foot. They weren't real, she told herself, any more than that lightning flash had been in Caineron's tower which had first shown her a glimpse of Kindrie's soul-garden . . . and almost knocked the healer off the balcony.
Remember that, she warned herself, looking down at the broken floor.
Everything that happened on this level had repercussions in the physical world, hence a healer's power. But this was almost the opposite: some dangerous antipathy seemed to exist between her soul and Kindrie's, however good her intentions. She didn't dare go a step closer.
"If you want to reclaim that garden," she told him, "you've got to help yourself. Come on. Get up."
"Please, oh, please . . . ." he moaned again.
She could have shaken him. Always whining or retreating into trances . . . hadn't the idiot any pride at all? But the only thing which he thought he had to be proud of was his "trace" of Knorth blood. All right.
"Kindrie, tell me again the name of your grandmother."
His bloody hand wavered in mid-air. "T-telarien . . . her n-name was Telarien . . . ."
"Good. Now, who was her daughter? Go on. Ask me."
He frowned, muzzy, as if her voice had begun to drag him out of deep sleep. The light dimmed, no longer shining through the door but only from the tapestry which hung against it.
Damn, thought Jame.
As he roused, he was drawing them both from the metaphysical level back toward the real. Maybe this entrance to his soul would disappear altogether if he woke fully. Obviously, dream- and soul-scapes were closely related.
"Ask me!" she said again, with more urgency.
"W-who?"
"Tieri, your mother, who was also my aunt. And what does that make us?"
"F-first cousins," he stammered, sitting up, blinking at her. "Blood-kin. A-and the Highlord?"
"Him too."
And what would Tori think of that, or of her having told Kindrie? His skin was going to crawl off his bones. But that didn't change facts.
"You may be a bastard," she said, "and as wet as a fresh-dropped calf, but you're Knorth, all right, if ever there was one. So stop shaming our ancestors. Get up and open that damn door!"
He was looking full at her now, pale eyes at last focused behind white lashes. "Yes," he said, climbing stiffly to his feet. "Yes."
A tremor made Jame almost fall. She saw that the cracks underfoot now lay between mosaic tiles which shifted like the sullen mull of dammed waters, serpentine and lapis-lazuli, green and blue, fretted with foam-lines of ivory. Of course, the power gathered above must go somewhere. She had descended into a pool of it, channeled down to press impatiently against the sluice gate toward which Kindrie was now reaching. Couldn't he see that the only light now came from the molds which mottled its surface? Their spores burst, sickly luminous, under his hand. He was lifting the latch.
"No!" she cried, stumbling forward.
Too late.