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II

It was a long night.

Hour after hour, the sea broke against Mount Alban, each blow making the wooden walls shudder while moisture ran down them like cold sweat. Everything got wet except the precious scrolls, hastily wrapped in oiled silk. Soon the highest waves threatened the keep's lowest rooms—because of a rising sea or a sinking fortress, no one could say. Scholars scrambled to save their possessions until a wave surging into one room nearly swept a clutch of singers out with it. Upstairs, Kindrie and the infirmarian already had their hands full with a host of minor injuries. Finally, Hawthorn ordered the academic community out from under foot and the randon settled down to cope.

Jame stayed out of their way. She knew she should use this opportunity to rest, if not sleep, but she was far too unsettled. Index's words haunted her: "there are forces on Rathillien about which we know virtually nothing." Sweet Trinity, yes. The terror of those moments under the sand caught her again by the throat, stopping her breath.

Got you now, thief . . . .

Despite everything, she had only taken Mother Ragga half in earnest. Now how could she set foot on the earth again, anywhere, when at any moment it might open and swallow her? Had she forfeited her right not only to be among her own people but on this world altogether?

. . . a mistake, too dangerous to live, cursed be and cast out . . . .

So she wandered on about the lower rooms, aimlessly, a wet, unhappy ounce creeping on her heels and standing disconsolately on her toes whenever she stopped. If the sheer will not to drown could help, Jorin was doing his part. Then his ears flicked: they were being followed. Jame turned a corner, reversed sharply, and found herself holding an indignant Graykin at knife point.

The Southron still looked shaky, she thought, but much improved. Perhaps when she had ordered him to sleep, she had accidentally plunged him into his first experience with dwar. At any rate, the infirmarian had judged him fit enough to make room for more recent casualties.

"I'm your sneak," he said when she demanded to know why he was following her. "Just tell me who else I should sneak after and I'll get on with it. You know," he added impatiently, as if to someone slow witted. "Who's your worst enemy here? The Director? That Brandan captain?"

"Hawthorn? Sweet Trinity, why?"

He shot her a sly, side-long look. "They're in command, aren't they? But you should be. The Highlord's closest blood-kin, aren't you?"

"Yes, but . . . ."

Jame stopped, perplexed. If only custom, not law, had kept her subservient in the Women's Hall, she had no idea what her true status was. Graykin might even conceivably be right.

"Be that as it may, I can't do a better job just now than they can, so the question is moot. This is survival, Gray, not politics."

"Politics are survival," the Southron muttered, but she had already turned away.

At last the wind dropped, and then the waves. As quiet returned to the shaken keep, a stealthy rattling could be heard as all the salt water soaking walls, furnishings, and clothes changed back to glistening salt sand. Jame shook about a pound of it out of her boots, then went up to the observation deck with ounce and spy trailing after her.

The old scrollsman Index acknowledged her with a grunt as she joined him at the rail. They looked out over a featureless expanse of weirding mist level with the lowest rooms, faintly luminous under a predawn sky.

"Where do you suppose we are?" Jame asked.

"How should I know?" the old man snapped. "This whole junket wasn't my idea."

"But you think it was someone's?"

"Or something's. There are reasons for everything. Most people are just too lazy or stupid to figure them out. Which are you?"

"Uh . . . ignorant, I hope, rather than stupid. Afraid rather than lazy. About what you said in the library . . . what forces?"

"Among the Merikit? The Burnt Man, for one. Ha! Heard of him, have you?"

Jame had shivered, remembering nightmares of pursuit, a charred hand thrust up through campfire debris, a charcoal-smeared man laying fires in the wilderness. Out of her pocket she drew the cinder shaped like a phalange. Index snatched it.

"A Burnt Man's bone," he said gleefully, turning it over in his own bony fingers. "Bonfire, bone-fire. Tell you about that, shall I?"

"Please."

"On Midwinter's Day the Merikit burn the biggest log they can find, then bury whatever remains of it along with everyone's hearth ashes. 'Burying winter,' they call it, or 'burning the Burnt Man.' It's meant to hurry on spring, you see. Then these cinders start to turn up in their fireplaces. Not just finger bones; all different sorts. They collect 'em until they have about two hundred, a complete skeleton. Just before Summer Eve, fires are laid along the borders of the land which the Merikit claim, each with a 'bone' in it. During the festival, the chief strips naked and smears himself with charcoal to personify the Burnt Man. When he jumps over the first fire, the 'bone' in it bursts into flame. All the 'bones' in all the fires ignite at the same time. The shaman-elders claim that he passes over the whole lot simultaneously."

"This would be to draw death out of the ground, I suppose, in preparation for summer."

The old man made a face, not pleased to be anticipated. "For that, and something else besides."

"What?"

"Ha! Used up all your credit and then some, haven't you?" He pocketed the bone, looking smug. "Always keep count, my girl, and a question in reserve."

Damn. Index was a bastard and a crank, Jame decided, but not as much of the latter as his colleagues supposed. His nothing-by-chance theory paralleled her own determination to learn the rules of any game which she found herself playing. Like Index, she wanted facts, so as to understand cause and thus (hopefully) avoid being whacked on the head by effect. She had thought, after a year's research in Tai-tastigon, that she could safely dismiss all native godlings as mere by-blows of her own god. That still was true of the so-called New Pantheon. Clearly, though, Index was right that there were other powers on Rathillien of such the Kencyrath chose to remain ignorant. Tai-tastigon's Old Pantheon, now—had it evolved from something more native to this world and not limited to the Eastern Lands, something more . . . elemental?

The Burnt Man and the Earth Wife, fire and earth. The Tishooo and the River Snake, air and water.

Seek the Four, the God-voice had said.

No. It couldn't be that simple—and yet not really simple at all. If the Snake was a left-over bit of Perimal Darkling, as Cattila claimed, it wasn't really part of this world either. That catfish, though—what had spoken to her through it? And how was it that, according to Kindrie, the Arrin-ken had sought the Four presumably without success for centuries while she seemed to attract them like flies to honey? It was one thing to imagine oneself the center of the world, another to find that it might be true.

Rathillien is watching me, she thought, with a shiver. Why?

"As it happens," said Index, regarding her askance, "tonight is Summer Eve. Odd things always happen in the Riverland then, and nothing by chance, there or here. Keep track of where we stop on the way home. There'll be a pattern, you wait and see."

"Fine," said Jame wryly, looking down at the anonymous cloud-plain below them. "Just tell me where to look."

"There," said Graykin, pointing southward.

Emerging from the mist was a scrap of red cloth tied to a stick. At first Jame thought that someone was thrusting up this jaunty, improvised banner, but then she realized that rather than it rising, the mist around it was slowly sinking. An upright board appeared, to which the stick was fixed, then several bits of lumber haphazardly nailed together, and so on down, a rickety tower of debris.

"That," said Graykin proudly, "is the tallest structure in Hurlen. The tower waifs erected it last winter so that for once they could look down on everyone else. I . . . er . . . suggested it."

Jame grinned. How like Graykin, incurably ambitious.

"Hurlen?" Index demanded. "It can't be. We only snag on ruins."

So he had thought of that too.

"It's no ruin," Jame agreed, "but its island foundations are very, very old. Maybe that's the attraction."

Or maybe it was something else, not in the city but close by, one of the last places on Rathillien she had ever wanted to revisit, now shoved practically under her nose. Nothing happens by chance . . . .

"I left some things in Hurlen when M'lord's thugs snatched me," said Graykin. "Maybe the waifs still have them." Before anyone could stop him, he had turned and darted down the southwest corner stair.

Jame started after him.

Index grabbed her arm. "Where d'you think you're going, missy?"

"Sorry, no credit," she said, wriggled free, and ran.

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