A thick, black thread stitched together a fold across the cheek of a death banner. Eye lid dragged down, mouth twisted up, that handsome, arrogant face seemed to sneer at its own deformity.
"Look at us, your precious ancestors. Are these honest faces? Are these kind?"
"Shut up," muttered Kindrie. "I'm not listening."
He shouldn't be talking, either. All that protected him was that his patient slept more deeply than he, although their dwar breathing matched. He must finish and extricate himself before she woke. He concentrated on ripping out that clumsy seam, one stitch at a time. How cruelly tight it was sewn. He worked a finger under the black thread and pulled. His nail split to the quick.
What is there here worth saving? We are a fallen house, a people utterly corrupt. Your house, your people . . . .
His torn nail caught on the tapestry's warp. The moldering strings broke and bled, like ruptured vessels, as he fumbled to retie them.
And what are you, who need us to prove your own worth?
. . . shut up, shut up . . . .
There. The warp stings were knotted back together and that damned black thread was free. It twisted like a whip-worm in his blood-slick hands, out of his grasp, up his sleeve. He felt it wriggle down to join the seething mass of scars already inside his jacket, inside the naked cage of his ribs. Fifty banners repaired. How many more to go? Row after row of disfigured faces lined the Master's cold hall, watching him askance, their rustle in the dwar wind snide with laughter.
You fatherless fool, you motherless bastard.
Kindrie slumped against the wall. He would never be able to mend them all, thereby restoring this soul-image to health. It had been mortally diseased to begin with. (A fallen house, a corrupt people—"I will not listen!") Perhaps a lifetime spent laboring here . . . but only a healer with access to his own soul would have the strength to attempt so epic a cure, though it might age and kill him in a night. Kindrie couldn't even control his own physical aspect on this level. That obscene roil eating out his guts—the symbolic equivalent of jewel-jaws in the stomach or of worms, feasting in the grave?
There it was again, that devouring fear of death which had made such a coward of him before. To enter this soul-scape, he'd had to match dwar breathing with his cousin. It still whistled in and out of him, his jacket acting as bellows to his fleshless ribs. He couldn't stop it. He couldn't wake. Without his soul's reserve, his real body would die of exhaustion in its sleep. At least it would go to a proper pyre. What if no such cleansing flames could reach here? Kindrie hugged himself, feeling the voracious churn within. His mind would be devoured inch by inch by his own fears, as real to him here as maggots in the flesh.
. . . crawling up his throat, about to spew out his mouth . . . .
"Stop it," he whispered behind clenched teeth. "Stop it, STOP IT!"
What allowed him to swallow that surge of panic, more than anything else, was a nagging doubt. He might not always like Jame, nor did he yet know quite what to make of her, but he no longer believed that she was the monster which Ishtier had claimed. If she really had come from such a vile place as this, it seemed to him that she had long since left it behind. How, then, could it still be the model of her soul? True, the death banners of these fallen Knorth accurately mirrored her injury. Any healer would look first for such a correspondence, and usually be right. They might represent her darkling fear of dishonor, but still . . . .
Had he been tricked into looking at the wrong thing? As his own soul-image consisted of an outer blind and an inner reality—the garden hidden within the priests' college—perhaps hers also was unexpectedly complex.
Think. Remember: that flash of white just before he had first been knocked out of this soul-scape and across a forest clearing—had it only been four days ago? What had struck him? What in this dark, accursed place was white?
One thing only, which he had deliberately avoided: an indistinct glimmer on the cold hearth at the far end of the hall. Graykin, he had thought, thankful that his fumblings hadn't brought that bitterly jealous spirit down on him. It occurred to him now, though, that four days ago Jame hadn't yet given Graykin's soul her grudging permission to occupy this place. What a maggot-seethe of fears that distant fireplace stirred between his ribs, the worse because he didn't know why.
Then find out, his training prompted him. An unnamed fear is an unconquerable one.
Disfigured faces grimaced at him through warp and woof as he passed. Whispers followed him down the hall: . . . but what about me . . . and me . . . and me . . . ? Healer, kinsman, come back . . . !
The walk seemed to take hours. Under his bare feet, the green-shot floor was numbing cold, but the wind that blew over it was the sirocco of human breath. Kindrie inhaled as it pushed at him, exhaled as it pulled, deep and slow. In his terror, he ached to breathe faster, but couldn't. The sense of suffocation fed his fears and had to be fought down, as did the gorge continually rising in his throat.
Three steps led up to the hearth. Over the top one hung the flayed paws and snarling masks of Arrin-ken pelts, some a ghostly silver gray, others iridescent as pearl.
That was what I saw, thought Kindrie. I can turn back now.
But he kept walking.
The black vault of the fireplace was full of charred, twisted limbs, fantastic in their deformity. The eye kept trying to make sense of them. They seemed to organized themselves around a pale block of ash and an ashy stick, lying flat as though on a table. A distorted figure as if of a man sat beside them, there one blink, gone the next as Kindrie drew closer and his perspective changed. He remembered that Ishtier had wanted him to learn from Jame's soul-image where she had hidden the Book Bound in Pale Leather. Perhaps the strange, shifting image in the fireplace could have told him, except that, ironically, he had no idea what it meant.
If he found out and dealt with it as the priest had demanded, maybe he could still regain his own soul.
. . . do it, do it! the banners whispered.
Kindrie started to mount the steps.
A pale shape rose from among the furs and lunged at him. He was knocked back to sprawl in the floor, cringing as the other ravened over him on the end of its chain. It was naked except for a ridge of dark hair which ran from the head, down the curved spine, along the tail curled up between its legs as if for modesty. Its rear legs bent backward. Its dangling hands were half paws. The muzzle and barred teeth were also canine, but in those baleful eyes Kindrie recognized Jame's stray dog of a servant, chained to the hearth and starved by her reluctant acceptance, but grimly on guard as she had bidden him. The man-dog fell back into a crouch on the second step, slackening the chain, panting. Famine-gaunt, his bones seemed about to burst through the taut skin which covered them.
"Liddle man, liddle bassstard!" A thick growl, barely articulate, as few people are on the soul's level. "Go 'way! My hearth. My lady!"
"B-but Graykin, she needs me . . . ."
"No!" Snaggle-teeth bared. "Needs me. No one else. No one needs you, no one wants you, 'cept fed-chi priests. Go back where you b'long, priest-ling!"
The Knorth had called him that at first, with no less scorn. Kindrie hunched over, gut-sick with the remembered sense of his own worthlessness, frantic to escape from it into the garden of his soul. How could he ever have hoped to out-grow Wilden? The priests had had him too long, made him too much their own—he, who had been nothing to begin with.
"Bassstard," the man-dog was crooning, eyes bright with hungry malice. "Worthless Shanir bassstard . . . ."
All this stress on bastardy, by someone more unfortunately bred even than himself . . . . Kindrie's training pricked him again into observation. The creature was actually salivating. A self-professed sneak and mongrel, Graykin fed on other's weaknesses to . . . to hide from his own devouring sense of worthlessness.
Understanding slowed Kindrie's panic. With a jot, he realized that Lady Rawneth had played on him much the same way all his childhood, telling him over and over what trash he was, rubbing his nose in his misbirth until he could smell nothing else except in his garden where he had run to hide. From what weakness had she been trying to hide by demeaning him? What a fool he had been, to have let her do it for so long!
Indignant, Kindrie found himself on his feet without remembering having risen. He saw now what the man-dog had been trying both to guard and to hide: A second pale figure laying asleep in a nest of Arrin-ken furs, partly clad in rathorn armor. No, not armor exactly. Mask, gorget, breastplate, gauntlet and greaves all grew out of that slim white body in bands of ivory, as they would have on a young rathorn—and as on so immature a beast, not all the plates properly overlapped. Out of a gap over one cheekbone, thick blood welled. The ivory band across the small breasts rose and fell with the slow rhythm of dwar.
A-ha, thought Kindrie.
Through the halls came echoing a sound from beyond its walls, drawn out, distorted by echoes: "K . . . k . . . k . . . "
The sleeper's breathing changed. She had heard; she was beginning to wake.
The man-dog grinned wolfishly. " 's torn it. Get out while you can, white-hair!"
Louder, closer: ". . . norrrRRR . . . ."
The quickening breath of wind pushed Kindrie back a step, then dragged him forward almost into Graykin's jaws. Behind him, banners clutched at the wall with thread-bare hands.
Rrrrun! their voices cried, with the sound of ripping cloth.
"Yesss," Kindrie breathed, pushed back again, perforce exhaling. What chance had he, half-trained, against a soul-scape so complex, so malignant?
But if he ran now, he would be running the rest of his life. Where was there a corner so dark that he could hide from himself? He had no garden to escape to now. Ishtier had cut off that retreat. Run, or advance. To do the latter, though, he must master his fears, or lose them.
Bastard, worthless . . . .
No. Look at Graykin, a mongrel in his soul because he accepted that judgment in life. And he, Kindrie? A cringing coward with a belly full of death, disgracing his house, disgracing himself. The thought set his guts roiling, but this time he didn't swallow it back. He retched again and again. No more cossetting of weakness, no more excuses. Purge them all.
With a whine, the man-dog flung himself down the steps in a hunger-frenzy to snap at the seething mess. Kindrie edged past on unsteady legs.
". . . THHHHHH . . . ."
Sleeper's breath and the exhalation of sound matched in the wind hissing in his face, tearing at his hair. Arrin-ken fur rippled. Banners flailed. He touched the cool ivory of the cracked mask.
Nothing.
". . . HHHhhh . . . ." The sound died with a sigh. Then, somewhere in the distance, it gathered itself again, faster this time, like a wave rushing for the shore: ". . . k . . . k . . . knorrRR . . . "
Why hadn't his healing power engaged? What was he still doing wrong? Torn banners snickered against the wall: failure, stupid failure . . . .
Why should they be glad?
Then he thought he understood. Tricked again.
"Listen!" he cried, raising his voice against the approaching roar. "These banners aren't part of your soul-scape! Perhaps . . . perhaps none of this hall is. It's a trap, to make you think that the shadows still own you, but here you are, in armor against them. Fight, d'you hear me? Fight!"
He had to shout, but he must have been heard. Under his hands the ivory was growing together again. Behind him, banners unraveled in the wind, swirling nets swept away even as they cast themselves to ensnare him. Green light laced the dark floor. Just another moment . . . .
". . . THHHHH!"
The eyes behind the mask snapped open: mindless silver, the soul's pure reflection. A flash of white. Oh, no. Not again . . . .
CRACK!
Pain. Confusion. The blow of that ivory fist, lashing out by reflex, sent him flying sideways through a forest of charred limbs. No, into the fireplace. No, into a black room where a man with silver eyes looked up, smiling, from a pale book (—welcome to the family, little cousin—). Crashing into the iron fireback. No, through a hidden door into . . . into . . . .
Green, and white self-heal. Wild heartsease drooping against the night, white herbs abloom, white moths dancing in the moon garden of his soul . . . .
Home. Safe. Sleep now. Sleep.