It's all coming loose, Jame thought as she followed Ashe through the maze toward the presumed safety of the main stair.
Underfoot, floor boards bobbed. Overhead, the ceiling rippled. Weirding glowed and smoked through every crack like cool fire smoldering inside the walls. Nothing was settled, after all, nothing finished. Was she disappointed, or relieved?
At least, Bane had definitely been left behind. And the Book. And the Knife. She had done without all three often enough before. Why did their absence now make her feel so vulnerable?
Having to trust a haunt didn't help, even in so small a matter as finding a flight of stairs. Moreover, it seemed to her that Ashe was deliberately going as slowly as she could.
Some thoughts are louder than others . . . .
Over her shoulder, the singer gave her a rictus grin. "D'you want . . . something to fall off me?"
The deceased she could deal with, thought Jame, or even the demented, but the decayed? Fragments of Ashe's thoughts crawled through her mind like maggots. The haunt was glad not to see Mount Alban's journeys end with unfinished business, not when she still had the right test to find.
The right test for what?
More glowing beams, studs, and stanchions, their reality elsewhere, their boards left resting uneasily on weirding support. Before, the college's main framework had resisted much longer, the softer woods melting away first. If this replacement held true throughout, Mount Alban had been boned like a fish.
The rooms of the lower maze were mere attics for the Bashtiri halls below or cellars for the keep far above. At least, they seemed never to have been used for anything but storage. Strange shapes loomed out of corners. Rotting crates spilled their contents across the floor, centuries' worth of scholastic pack-rattery hidden under a gray pelt of dust.
But here was a room where the muddled stacks had been pulled apart—recently, by the torn webs still fluttering about them. Something in their disarray suggested curiosity rather than a deliberate search, and a certain amount of disinterested vandalism.
The dust on the floor was roiled with foot prints. Jame bent over them. In the soft light streaming through the door from the landing beyond, she saw that the feet that had made them were naked, one set huge, the other no bigger than a child's.
"Ashe," she called. No reply. "Ashe!"
The haunt singer stood looking up at the main stair. It glowed, treads, risers, supports, all sculpted in the finest detail in weirding mist. The spine of the college, gone too.
"We . . . are not alone," said Ashe.
The ghost of a snicker seemed to answer her.
Crooked halls opened off the landing in all directions. A murmur of approaching voices came from one, but which?
Kirien and Kindrie emerged from a doorway behind them.
"Ashe," said the former. "Ancestors be praised. Have you any idea where we are?"
"Dislodged from the Alban cliff. Upstream . . . given the weirding's northward flow. Probably caught . . . on the ruins opposite Restormir, or at Tagmeth beyond that. And the upper keep?"
"Left behind. We were on the stair coming down when the weirding surge rolled over the cliff top. The curtains weren't up to keep it out. It came down the stairs, sinking in and changing them. Brier Iron-thorn was right behind us, but before she could jump clear it lapped over her feet. Odd, but I could have sworn that I heard someone below call her name. Anyway, she set that ironwood jaw of hers and just kept walking down into it."
"L-like a ghost," said Kindrie, obviously still shaken. "More of her insubstantial with each step. T-then she just vanished. Ancestors only know where she is now."
"With the stair, presumably," said Jame, "wherever that is."
She spoke lightly, but her stomach had tensed. They had been incredibly lucky to weird-walk in one piece all the way north from Wilden to Restormir. Their sheer number—ten cadets, two Highborn, and a cat—might have helped. Now Brier was on her own in the mist, perhaps several places simultaneously if the stair had displaced in steps.
"What about you?" she demanded of the Shanir healer, dropping her voice. "You should still be safe in the infirmary, asleep."
"I woke up." Kindrie shot her a pale-eyed look, frightened but defiant. "Captain Hawthorn was trying to decide what to do with that . . . that mess you left behind. Brier said she had better go after you. I-I followed, and met the Lordan Kirien looking for Index. I thought . . . ." He swallowed and tried again. "I thought you might need me."
Jame bit back a sharp reply. In the past few hours, she'd had to acknowledge bonds with both a demon and a haunt. Now here was another connection, just as strong, twice as natural. All winter, searching for her dead family, and she couldn't stomach a live first cousin simply because he had fallen into the hands of priests?
"I did need you," she said, rubbing her tired face with a gloved hand, feeling the scar ridge like a knotted cord under the mask. "I still do. But I don't trust myself or my reflexes. I'll hurt you, Kindrie Soul-Walker. I can't help it. Stay away from me."
"This little side-trip may not amount to anything," Kirien was saying to Ashe. "My guess is that we well and truly hooked onto the Mount Alban fort ruins before the tremor and this last surge of weirding swept the college core temporarily northward. We're like a . . . a plucked bow string, vibrating, the middle out of line with both top and bottom—or the upper keep and the lower halls, in our case. Everything should snap back together again soon."
"Not soon enough to prevent visitors," said Jame.
She told them about the disarranged storage and the naked foot prints in the dust. For a moment, they looked at each other in dismay, then up, as someone above suddenly bellowed, in a voice trained to carry:
"If you lot of egg-heads can't sleep, we singers can. Shut up!"
For the first time in Mount Alban's travels, the academic community wasn't been in the upper keep, prepared, safe—nor, apparently, did it realize that the college was on the move again.
"Where are the two randon ten-commands?" Jame asked.
"All in the upper keep, except Brier Iron-thorn," said Kirien, still looking upward, a frown drawing together her fine, dark brows. Her house was the protector of Mount Alban; its safety, her personal responsibility as the Jaran Heir.
"In that case," said Ashe, watching her, "we had better find out . . . where we are."
The main stair being unavailable, they used another, older one nearby, which cork-screwed drunkenly down a narrow shaft into what should have been a minor Bashtiri hall. Wooden treads gave way to fire-blackened stone. The well opened out. They were now descending a mural stair, circling a stone walled chamber some forty feet across past the charred stumps of floors. Mount Alban roofed them, its under-structure a seeming chaos of wooden planks and phantom, weirding beams.
More wood filled the bottom of this stone structure—logs, branches, brush, piled promiscuously together, red tinged by the light falling from narrow apertures above. Jame paused to look out one. The cloud ceiling had lowered again, almost to within reach of this third story window. A setting sun had kindled the weirding inside it, brightest above the hidden mountains to the west but already deepening to blood ruby with the fall of night. Crusts of snow sheltered under boughs on the opposite bank of the Silver. How far north had the weirding taken them? There was no sign on that dark slope of Restormir or the ruins opposite Tagmeth.
"This," said Ashe, looking over Jame's shoulder, "does not . . . bode well."
"What?" Kirien demanded, instinctively keeping her voice low. "You think you know where we are, don't you . . . . What's that?"
Ching! went a jangling bell-tone. Ching, ching, approaching from the left, passing by out of sight beneath the window. Ching, ching, ching, on to the right, northward and then east, circling the outer wall.
They followed its progress clockwise down to the tower's second story front door, which stood open. At the foot of a flight of stairs lay a flagstoned courtyard, an open well shaft gaping at its center. Most of the surrounding buildings, like the tower keep, had been touched by fire, rain, and long neglect. The barracks to the left in particular had been gutted, its roof collapsed, trees growing up through the ruins. Wild grape vines sighed against the wall behind it. Faint lines showed on the weathered stone, nearly washed away—a series of circles, each with three smaller circles inside, like so many round eyes and mouths gaping.
"Kithorn," said Ashe.
Then Jame recognized it too, not because she had ever seen this sad place before but because her Kendar friend Marc had described it to her so clearly—his childhood home, until Merikit had slaughtered everyone in it almost eighty years ago. That, and Marc's revenge, had closed these hills to the Kencyrath ever since, except for boys slipping up to these ruins on a dare to search for relics of its garrison. Last winter, her brother had come here on a similar mission and accidentally left the old tower in flames behind him.
A shiver ran down Jame's spine. From these walls, Tori had seen the Burnt Man face to face.
She ducked back. Seven figures had trotted into the courtyard through its eastern gate, one after another. Four of them were not the Burning Ones, as she had for a moment feared, but half-naked Merikit elders, smeared white with ash, each carrying a sack. Breasts made of goat udders swayed under gray hair loose to the waist.
Ching went the bells strapped to their ankles. Ching, ching!
Between them came three figures if possible even stranger: an overpadded parody of a woman with a hard, male face framed by a wig of straw; a dripping wet youth festooned with bladder weeds; an incredibly hairy man, aflutter with black feathers knotted to every elflock.
The whole procession jogged solemnly sunwise around the courtyard, ching, ching, ching.
"First close the outer circle," said Ashe softly, "then circle the inner square . . . to create sacred space. The summer rites begin."
"And we," said Kirien, "are inside the circle."
The first shaman-elder and the "woman" stopped at the eastern corner of the square which their perambulation had defined. The second elder halted with the feathered man to the south; the third with the wet boy, to the west; the fourth by himself to the north. While the three squatted patiently in their corners to wait, the four ash-smeared elders emptied their sacks respectively of clay, wicker, bucket, and kindling. Along with this last came tumbling out what appeared to be a crude, black skull. The solitary elder began to arrange the kindling around it, crooning softly in an age-cracked voice.
Jame recognized that chant. Four days ago, north of Falkirr, she had heard the charcoal-blackened Merikit sing it as he laid a Summer Eve bonfire. The Burnt Man's bone which she had taken from that site was no longer in her pocket. Now where . . . . Ah. She had forgotten to reclaim it from Index.
Index, who had come down here before them. Sweet Trinity, where was he?
Other Merikit emerged from the surrounding ruins—a good dozen of them half-naked like their elders and intricately tattooed. A nervous young man in green homespun appeared last, with obvious reluctance, gingerly holding an ivy crown.
Kindrie made a stifled sound. A huge, young Merikit stood close beside them, wearing scarlet drawers and nothing else. His long, fox-red hair was all combed to the left into a dozen or more braids. His heavy arms and chest were black with tattoos. He must have come down from Mount Alban, for surely those big, bare feet matched one set of the prints which Jame had seen above. Green, slightly crossed eyes widened in wonder as he touched the Shanir's white hair. He gave it a tug. Kindrie gasped, almost falling. The big man grinned and took a firmer grip.
"No," said Jame, as if to a large, chancy dog, and put her hand on the Merikit's elbow.
Her nails found the nerve. He let go of Kindrie with an exclamation, eyes bulging at first with astonishment, then with outrage. He was, thought Jame, looking up, very, very big.
Something crashed down the Mount Alban stairs: a storage crate, disintegrating as it fell. Butterflies caught perhaps a hundred summers ago shimmered azure and amethyst, gold-veined and bronze, their wings turning to dust with the first frantic beat. The crimson moss that had preserved them rained down like a shower of sparks. From above, quite clearly, came a snickering laugh.
The big Merikit laughed too, but the grin which he turned down on Jame was bright with malice. He juggled one of the moss clumps from hand to hand, as if it were as fiery as its color, then tossed it onto the jumble of dry branches below.
"Oh my God," breathed Kirien, staring down at the wood pile, then up at Mount Alban's vulnerable underpinnings.
More bonfires than one had been laid for Summer Eve.