Ashe's way led down into the wooden labyrinth, almost to the lower hall.
At no level did Jame see any sign of weirding. Mount Alban must indeed have regained its foundation and encasing cliff face. So, at least, Index clearly believed, pattering past without seeing them, so eager to reclaim his beloved herb shed that he again scorned the slow-moving platform. Otherwise, the college rested except for the groan of settling timber. Most of its elderly inmates had at last put aside their experiments. Their voices murmured down the stair well, then faded as they retired to their diverse lodgings in the upper levels for a well-earned late afternoon nap.
Jame knew that she should also rest. Much longer without sleep would impair her judgment, if it hadn't already. Ashe's dark figure shambled ahead of her; behind crept Bane's shadow, almost but not quite treading on her own. This might have been the descent into some dark dream, except for the brush of Jorin's whiskers against her hand as the ounce trotted close at her side.
They came to an iron-bound door, set in the college's eastern wall, hard against the mountain face. The cool, dank breath of stone met them when Ashe unlocked it and darkness waited beyond. The haunt took a torch from a bracket and lit it, revealing a rough-hewn passage. Jame and Jorin followed the singer down it for some twenty feet before it ended at the edge of an abyss. Torchlight could reach neither the bottom, nor the top, nor even the far side of that great emptiness. The drip of water in its depths echoed upward, distorted.
"Is this what you brought me to see?" Jame asked.
No answer. No Ashe. Only her torch moving to the left, apparently along the sheer wall of the chasm. Then Jame saw a walkway carved out of the cavern's side and hurried to catch up with the light.
Sometimes the walk crept under low ceilings jagged with stalactites; sometimes it careened with a perilous slant along the chasm's sheer drop. Parts of it had been damaged by the recent tremors; parts, by quakes long past. A wonder, thought Jame, that the whole honey-combed mountain hadn't collapsed in on itself ages ago. Possibly Mount Alban's ironwood skeleton had forestalled that. The tips of her gloves began to soak through as she ran them along the wall to steady herself. The stones wept continuously, tears turning to drops of fire as they caught the torch light, tumbling past the black, crumpled forms of sleeping bats clustered in fissures. Blind, white crickets the size of her fist scuttled away from the brand's heat. What if there were trogs?
The light vanished.
Jame pressed back against the stone wall, blind in the sudden dark. The emptiness of the abyss seemed to tug at her. She remembered the chasm in the Ebonbane snow field, the terror of falling, the Arrin-Kens' suspended death sentence.
Dammit, no one is going to push me, if I don't want to jump . . . .
A few feet to the left, light glimmered. Jame edged toward it, and discovered a side-cave. Down three stone steps, there was a low-ceilinged antechamber cut from living rock and at its back, an iron door scabrous with rust. Ashe had laid down the torch and was struggling with a key. It turned, groaning, in the lock. She dragged opened the door.
Jame stopped at the foot of the steps. She didn't need Jorin's senses to hear the mad scurry within, as if of countless multi-segmented bodies seething away from the light. Through the crack, she saw a bare stretch of rough stone floor, the ruins of an iron chair, and a small iron table still half obscured. All the shadows' edges blurred with the torch's flare and furtive movement.
Ashe stepped aside. "Enter," she said.
For a moment, as clearly as she had felt the haunt's impulse to shove her off the wall, Jame saw the door slam shut—behind her. Her eyes filled with darkness; her ears, with the obscene in-rush of swarming life.
"Haunt," she said thickly, "you're joking."
"Afraid of shadows . . . darkling? I remember . . . what shadow stands guard . . . behind me. Put the Book and the Knife . . . on the table."
She could refuse. Leave. Back to the stalemate that had trapped her before? No. Wherever her way led now, it didn't retreat.
She ducked into the room. Good as her night vision was, she couldn't see its walls, nor did she wish to: that stealthy rustling surrounded her, all too close. It was a very small room, she sensed, and was glad for the cap that protected her hair. A tall man couldn't have stood upright, even if he had wished to. She put the Book Bound in Pale Leather on the lit side of the table. The darker half seemed surreptitiously to boil. When she placed the Ivory Knife next to the Book, however, the table top emptied with an unseen, verminous cascade off its far side.
"All right, haunt. Now what?"
"Now . . . leave."
"Just like that?" Jame turned to glare at her, surprised at how cheated she felt. This was no solution after all. "Even locked, that door isn't going to keep out anyone determined. Believe me. I know."
"I didn't say . . . that there would be . . . no guard. Tell your pet demon . . . to stay."
A moment ago, disappointment had made Jame feel almost sick, but this was worse. "Ashe, no. I wouldn't confine my worst enemy here—well, maybe Ishtier, or Caineron, or Kallystine. Dammit, why does Mount Alban have a pest-hole like this, anyway?"
"Kendar builders discovered it. A secret Hathiri prison . . . perhaps for a secret prisoner. Who . . . we don't know."
"Well, I'm not going to order Bane to fill his place."
"Perhaps . . . you don't have to. Look."
He sat at ease in the rust-eaten chair, long, elegant legs stretched out before him. His black scale armor rustled with the overlapping wings of a million death's-head beetles. The spiders that had woven his fine gray boots hung inside them like ornaments. Silver wireworms ringed his long, white fingers. All the finery of the tomb . . . .
But his smile jolted her back in memory to the night she had returned to find the Res aB'tyrr held hostage by his thugs and Bane himself waiting, just so, to welcome her home. Then as now, she had come from causing a man to be flayed alive—a hanger-on of Bane's, a miserable sneak-thief who had ambushed and nearly killed her friend Marc. Her revenge, like the smell of blood, had brought the thief's master down on her, not to claim vengeance in his turn but kinship.
They had talked of honor.
It wasn't his fault, he had said, that Marc had been hurt. Nothing was his fault. Forced into the Thieves' Guild, hadn't he tried to protect his soul by entrusting it to Ishtier? Wouldn't he redeem it and honor both in the end by an honorable death? Until then:
"Better to fall. Life loses all boundaries. No one can tell you where to stop. Freedom . . . ."
Jame shook herself back to the present. Here was the dead, consumed with hunger for the living; the seducer, seduced by his own argument; the man, whose soul she had once offered to carry . . . and would again, if he asked.
"Is that what you want me to do?" she demanded, suddenly very angry. "To make myself answerable for your soul? To tell you where to stop? To order you by the blood-bond which you contrived between us? Dammit, Bane, you always try to put responsibility off onto someone else! On Ishtier. On me. Without choice, there is no honor, and I will not choose for you! If you want to sit in this hell-hole, in the dark, ancestors only know for how long, it has to be your decision. Well? D'you hear me?"
Only his smile answered her, enigmatic, infuriatingly intimate.
"Fine. Stay, then, and be damned to you!"
She stalked out. The door shut behind her, with a screech of rusty hinges cut short by a dead thud. She pivoted, full of sudden misgivings, as Ashe with difficulty turned the key in the lock. In her mind was an image which she had been too late to see: Bane's sleeve trailing across the Book Bound in Pale Leather, his fine-boned hand at rest on the Ivory Knife. Shut away in the seething dark . . . .
"This isn't going to work," she said, dry-mouthed. "Dead or not, he has to eat. We can't just let him starve."
"He won't." Ashe turned to face her, key in hand. "The door will keep out . . . only the idly curious. Keep it quiet as we may . . . word will spread of the treasure inside. From time to time . . . he will feed very well indeed."
Jame stared at her. "My God, you're cold-blooded."
"Of course. I'm dead."
She slipped the key through a slash in her robe, into the corresponding sword-cut underneath, as if into an inner pocket. The lips of the wound were shriveled and bloodless, the rib glimpsed through them, discolored white. The key's outline showed clearly through the skin, against the bone.
"Why don't you just swallow the damn thing?" Jame demanded.
"Because . . . it might fall through."
Jame sat down abruptly on the stone step. No sleep, no food, and now this.
"All right, kitten, all right," she said to Jorin, whose fore-paws were on her knee, his nose anxiously touching her own. But inside she was raging at herself.
How easily she had let Ashe and Bane manage her. Should she have given up the Book and Knife, when they had chosen her as their guardian over and over? Should she have agreed to Bane's living burial, assuming he was still alive? Only now did she realize how desperately she had wanted to be rid of both them and him—enough to have let herself be tricked into consent?
"That knife may have been given to me to use," she said. "What if I need it someday?"
"Then call. I think . . . he will bring it to you . . . with help."
Jame shuddered. Into her mind had come the image of that "help": a trail of disintegrating victims, chosen at random, ridden and discarded as Bane ate the soul out of each in turn.
"More guts on the floor," she said, shaken. "Perhaps across the breadth of Rathillien and beyond. Sweet Trinity. Whose responsibility will that be?"
"His, who feeds," said Ashe, clouded eyes merciless with the logic of honor. "And hers, who calls."
A rumbling tremor passed through the stones surrounding them, followed by a series of loud cracks and crashes outside.
"Bloody hell," said Jame. She found herself on her feet, without remembering having risen. With one hand she was steadying herself against the wall; with the other, clutching Jorin's bristling ruff as he stood on her toes. "Haven't we had enough of this?"
But she spoke to herself, in abrupt darkness. Ashe had snatched up the torch and darted out of the antechamber. Swearing, Jame scooped up Jorin and followed.
The brand already bobbed far ahead, throwing contorted, confusing shadows behind. Jame called on her trained memory to show her the way, but memory didn't encompass the changes wrought in the past few minutes. Echoes crashed farther and farther away, as if a dozen unseen cave-mouths had caught the sound and were gnashing it to pieces. Sections of the ledge had fallen. Others shifted, grating, under her feet as Jorin wriggled with fright in her arms. More light would have been welcome. Ashe might hesitate to push her, Jame thought grimly, but clearly wasn't above letting her fall.
The earth growled again deep in its throat, as though trying to clear it. Bats exploded from a crevice almost in her face, a black cataract ascending. Ten feet, five, and here, ancestors be praised, was the lip of the tunnel.
"Earth Wife, Earth Wife," she cried, turning, shouting into the abyss. "Leave us alone!"
"That," said Ashe, behind her, "was not helpful."
Darkness swallowed the haunt's hoarse voice, but Jame's still echoed from wall to wall, down to the depths, up to the heights. From far, far above came an answer—a crack like the splitting of worlds and then a massive downward rush. The wind of it threw Jame back into Ashe and sent the latter's torch flying, a moment before something smashed off the tunnel's shallow lip. Jame had the dazed impression of a giant's jaw full of ragged teeth, savagely biting down. No. A plummeting section of cave roof, studded with stalactites. The echo of its fall crashed off into the distance, starting more rock-falls farther and farther away. From above, light filtered down, full of dust and broken bat wings.
Jame disentangled herself from the haunt faster than was strictly polite.
"The tremor must have breached the cliff-top," she said, leaning perilously out to peer upward. "But why is it getting brighter?"
The answer came billowing down the opened shaft.
They bolted down the tunnel with weirding on their heels and tumbled into the college. Too late to shut the door. Mist rolled in after them, over them, a soft, sighing avalanche. Jame clung to the floor, all her nails out, Jorin pinned squawking under her. She could see and hear nothing else, except the pounding of her own heart.
Then the mist began to subside. It drained between floor boards into the supports beneath; it twined up load-bearing piers and across ceiling beams like tendrils of dry rot. Whatever ironwood it touched, it sank into and replaced. The bones of Mount Alban were becoming ghosts of their former selves which still, hesitantly, upheld the college's weight. The floor boards beneath Jame shifted uneasily, like a raft launched on a troubled sea.
"Adrift . . . again," said Ashe.
She sounded pleased.