Far away, someone was shouting her name.
Jame tried to follow the voice out of the maze of pain throbbing inside her skull. She must have hit her head. No. Someone had struck it against . . . against a door-post. Yes. Jerking her out of the Earth Wife's lodge. Now she was being dragged, her knees banging on uneven pavement. When she opened her eyes, though, the bruising abruptly stopped. Beneath her lay utter darkness. Had she been stricken not only numb but blind? No. Beneath her lay the abyss of a breached sigil, through whose depths even now a ribbon of fire was unrolling.
The moment she had seen it clearly, she was falling—only to be brought up short, half-choked, by the grip on her collar. Her captor jerked her impatiently out of the void and stalked on across pavement marked by charcoal lines which his bare feet scuffed and broke in passing.
"Lady!" Graykin howled somewhere off to the right. "Where are you?"
Obviously, in the square, being hauled by Sonny to the well to serve as snake-bait. Damn.
Jame twisted out of the Merikit's grip and rolled to her feet.
"Can't we discuss this?"
In answer, he lunged at the sound of her voice. She tripped him and ran.
By now, most of the sigils were breached and reeking, the angry pulse in their depths reflecting on the bellies of the low, sullen clouds, red on red. To keep track of where she was had taken a constant, conscious effort. Jame supposed that she must now be somewhere west of the well-mouth, unless Sonny had gotten lost. North was to the right, then. Best to get out of the square as quickly as possible, hoping that that in itself didn't rupture sacred space. Ancestors knew, she had done sufficient harm already.
Huh. Yes. Bad enough that she'd let herself get stuck in this mess as the most inadequate of Challengers, like a player in the seeker's mask when everyone else had run away. Since then, not only had she failed to win over any of the Four but she had wreaked havoc on the Earth Wife's map and, inadvertently, run off again with her precious medallion. Ragga probably even blamed her for the Caineron involvement, since neither Caldane nor his daughters would have been in the weirding's way if not for her. What rotten luck to have such a trio mixed up in this . . . .
But had it been pure chance? Cattila claimed that the Chaos Serpent and its brood were a primordial part of Perimal Darkling, which had also long sought to make that fallen highlord Gerridon its Voice. If he had become a part of it, perhaps it had gained not only his scheming mind but also his perverse desire to implicate his people in the fall of this world as he had in that of the previous one. What a tool stupid, ambitious Caldane would be in such a plan—and what a mess they all were in, Kencyr and Rathillien alike, if there truly was a link between Gerridon and the Chaos Serpent.
Ahead, beyond one of the last sigil lines, veils of smoke shifted around upthrust, blackened timbers that loomed like a pair of gigantic, knobby knees. Beneath them, the cinder skull of Tungit's bone-fire rested like a scorched boulder on a pelvic cradle of half-burnt beams.
A current of fresh, cool air stung Jame's eyes, just as the smoke had at first. Inhaling, she saw the quake-ravaged square, its pattern of charcoal lines nearly obliterated by cracks and Sonny's careless stumbling, Kithorn's broken tower still crowned with Mount Alban, and Tungit's small fire a bare twenty feet away. The old shaman himself crouched by his handiwork, a gray, shaggy gnome with anxious eyes. She had forgotten that he and his three colleagues were also in the square, as invisible to her as presumably to their gods.
More fresh air. Through shifting mist, she saw that the torches in the northern corner had been knocked over by the tremors and blue smoke was bleeding out through the gap. There stood the smithy, weirding boiling out of it like smoke from a house on fire. Kirien, Ashe, and Index watched with helpless fascination while a bundle of silver-gilt fur snored at their feet. Index held something black gingerly between forefinger and thumb—the Burnt Man's bone, Jame saw with relief. So, whether he had heard her or not, he'd had the sense to remove that potential inferno from his pocket, if not to let go of it altogether. The old miser.
But if scrollsmen weren't so tenacious, their knowledge would long since have turned to dusty rumor. Instead, Index clung to his morsel of primary research at the risk of his fingers, as single-mindedly as Kirien pursued truth or Ashe defended her humanity with songs full of terrible wisdom. Jame felt sudden gratitude to all three of them, for their basic worth. Perhaps there was a reason to go home after all, not to a place but to a people.
Or perhaps not.
Out of the mist rolling from the smithy's door walked Brier Iron-thorn, grim faced, carrying Kindrie's limp form. In her dire need she'd had the support of a Knorth, but not the one in whom she had put her trust.
I didn't keep faith, Jame thought. Neither of us will ever forget that.
At the Kendar's heels slunk a shaggy form: the Wolver Grimly, terrified, in his complete furs. After him came Torisen Black Lord.
Jame hadn't seen her brother's face at the wolvers' keep. How haggard he looked, shadows under his silver-gray eyes, black stubble blurring the sharp line of his jaw, white fretting his disordered hair. There was white, too, on his right hand. Bandages. Splints. But in his left hand shone bright, naked steel, stained with red light as though already dipped in blood: Kin-Slayer unsheathed.
Oh shit, thought Jame, stopping short.
The earth growled. Flagstones shifted uneasily in their beds, edges grinding together like teeth, pebbles spitting up from the cracks to dance around Jame's feet. The tremors were getting worse. Kithorn wavered in and out of sight as other torches fell to the east, confusing the currents within the square.
Then from the direction of the well came a disgusting noise, half scaly rasp, half wet slobber. Over her shoulder, Jame saw the well's lip rise. Under the green mottling of the serpentine rim was a band as pallid as an earthworm's belly. Then the well-mouth jammed back down again, hard.
The concussion sent an earth wave rolling outward. Flagstones tipped and shattered over it like thick ice, throwing Jame from her feet. On the shock surged, rapidly diminishing but still frightful, to scatter the bone-fire and crack the smithy wide open. Torisen tried to catch the doorjamb with his injured hand to steady himself, missed, and fell heavily. Jarred from his grasp, Kin-Slayer skidded into the square. His eyes, following it, met his sister's.
The currents shifted again. Back in sacred space, she saw Tungit's bone-fire overthrown, like the remains of some primordial giant strewn across the earth. Their fall had almost but not quite broken the last sigil, lying black between sacred space and ruin, between her and safety. Kin-Slayer flamed on the other side, out of both her reach and Tori's.
Jame lurched to her feet and turned to circle the obstacle—but here came Sonny stumbling toward her, huge and glowering. Reeking fissures cut her off to right and left. No breath of outside air disturbed the trap in which he had caught her.
Was it one, though? Before, she had only started to fall when she had clearly seen the abyss beneath her.
The Merikit advanced. Jame stepped backward without thinking. Her heel came down on empty space. She fell, mouth open in a yell of terror, eyes screwed shut. The yell became a startled grunt as the up-thrust edges of ancient paving knocked the breath out of her. She was back in real space.
No, don't look . . . . Run.
Impossible, over that shattered terrain. Jame dropped to all fours and scuttled, barking knuckles, banging knees, eyes screwed shut against the shock of each blow, against the urge to check her course. It was less than thirty feet to the north corner of the square. How far wrong could she go?
Far enough.
As she shifted her weight forward, her hand came down on air and she fell. Something stopped her with a blow to the stomach, jarring open her eyes. She was half over the edge of a broad pit. The ridge jammed into her middle was its rim, no longer smooth serpentine but green mottled and leathery. Just below her hand was a ring of yellowed spikes; below that, red, padded walls studded with down-turned, horny projections. Out of the depths came a rumble and then a hoarse sigh—haaaah—laced with wisps of weirding and an unholy stench.
Jame found herself on her feet, backing away from those scaly lips which had been the well's mouth. The River Snake's empty belly growled again, and the ground shivered.
Behind her, Sonny stumbled out of the smoke. His bare shins, seen through tattered red cloth, were bruised and bloody, likewise his feet. He kept tripping . . . on the patch of smooth plain between fissures which she saw? No. For him as for her moments ago, scrambling blind, this was Kithorn's quake-stricken courtyard. He was lurching across broken pavement which she now neither saw nor which would hinder her in a fight. For the first time, the advantage was hers.
But still something made her hesitate. She was remembering all the times in the past when she had been mistaken for easy prey. "A baited trap," her friend Darinby had once called her, too slight for some men to take seriously or to forgive when they found they were wrong. Unlike those bullies, though, Sonny was an overgrown, not very bright child. The scowl distorting his face squeezed all his features toward the center, like those of a small boy in a tantrum. He must have always gotten what he wanted through sheer size and strength. He was trying to bull his way through now, in near panic, against odds he couldn't begin to understand.
Just then, with a startled grunt, the big Merikit toppled forward.
A shift in the air revealed Tungit standing over him, the Burnt Man's cinder skull raised to strike again, if necessary. The other three shaman-elders flickered in and out of sight as they trotted up, goat-udder breasts swaying under gray hair. Jame heard their words in snatches.
". . . too ambitious, too dangerous," Tungit was arguing. ". . . can't even walk the Way of the Four . . . for the best."
". . . you mad? . . . will make the Challenger the new Favorite, and he isn't Merikit."
". . . not even a 'he.' "
"Quiet! . . . in trouble enough already? Only men . . . allowed here, so he's a man."
"You are mad! What will Chingetai say? What about next year?"
Graykin would love this, Jame thought. Local politics at their most ruthless: the choosing of a scapegoat. Should she be glad that Tungit preferred to sacrifice Sonny? And what about next year?
Another hungry growl came from the River Snake's belly. The elders looked at each other. Then, with one accord, they grabbed the young man and dragged him, stumbling, dazed, toward the well. Jame found herself in their way.
"No," she said.
They had stopped, staring at her, when far off to the south the bone-fires began to ignite.
At first, Jame thought that they were only sparks. Everything was red—the clouds ribbed with flame, the conflagration in the ground, the tongues of lightning flickering between earth and sky—but those distant points of fire multiplied like glowing rubies added to a string, one after another, faster and faster, flashing up the Silver's curve.
The elders had dropped Sonny and were groping frantically for the bells which they had stowed in their goat-udder breasts. Out came the leather anklets, to be strapped in haste to skinny legs.
Ching! went the bells as the old men stomped, already far behind in the count, dancing like maniacs to catch up. Ching, ching! How many bones in all? One hundred? Two? All the Burnt Man's disjointed body, rising out of the earth in living flame, out of winter and night . . . . Ching, ching, ching!
Jame glanced up at Mount Alban, still hovering ghost-like above Kithorn's ruined tower which the quakes had not yet overthrown. All the old scholars sleeping above, the irreplaceable knowledge locked in their memories as in the most fragile of scrolls; and below, waiting for the first spark, the inferno . . . .
The bells jangled to an uncertain halt. The progress of the fires had stopped.
Why? thought Jame, peering southward. Where?
Somewhere between Falkirr and Wilden. Sweet Trinity. That was where she had removed the Burnt Man's bone from the Merikit's bonfire.
She found herself counting, as though between lightning and thunder, to gage the distance. One, two, three . . . . No more sparks appeared, but something still might be coming up the valley in a dark, vengeful rush. Seven, eight, nine . . . .
With a hollow boom, fragments of kindling blew out the doors and windows of Kithorn's tower to rain down on the square. Billowing smoke followed. Tungit yelped and kicked the cinder skull away, its eyes and mouth trailing fire. A faint cry from Index outside the square echoed him as the old scrollsman at last perforce gave up his prize.
Jame began to laugh. All that worry about Mount Alban and she had caused this debacle days ago, without even realizing it. How typical.
Then laughter died.
Black smoke had been pouring from the Burnt Man's skull. Now it stooped over them under the low, red sky. A sooty shape half-emerged, as confused as Tungit's scattered fire—the jut of a knee, a leg bone becoming the knotted ridge of a spine, smoke streaming down into ribs, gathering in a domed darkness which rose slowly on a disjointed neck, hollow sockets searching the ground beneath . . . .
From a world away, under the gatehouse, came the welcoming cry of the Burning Ones: "Tha! Tha! Tha!"
Tungit crouched, cowering. The other elders seemed to have melted into the ground. Jame wished she could.
"What next?" she hissed at the shaman, wondering if he could understand her as she had him. "It's all gone wrong, but there's got to be something we can do. Tungit?"
With the return of sacred space, he had disappeared.
Cattila hobbled out of the mist, supported by Lyra, surrounded by darting foxkin. When the latter saw what loomed over them, they dived inside the old woman's loose, outer vest. She approached, seething physically and mentally.
"A fine mess! Can't anyone do anything right these days?" The presence above had turned at the sound of her shrill voice, still blindly seeking. A muted growl as though of distant thunder came out of it. She glared up. "You—burnt-breath! Where's chief Chingetai?"
Lyra tugged at her sleeve. "Gran!"
"All right, all right. What's the point of a mummery, though, if the real thing barges in? Faugh! Now the Earth Wife is supposed to present her lover, the new Favorite, to her consort, the Burnt Man, as their son. Life out of winter and ashes, d'you see? Spring fertility and frolics. It's called 'fooling death.' Not too bright, our friend up there. Of course, once in a while he catches on and the Favorite spontaneously combusts. Charming, eh?"
"Very," said Jame, with another futile tug at the ivy crown.
"Oh!" said Lyra, staring upward.
Above them, the nebulous, smoky skull seemed to be emptying itself out through mouth, eyes, and nostrils. Fat, smudgy fingers drifted down. A wave of heat preceded them, fetid with the pyre's breath.
"It wasn't supposed to be like this," Catilla was complaining, oblivious. "We should have lost the Riverland, been forced to mind our own business for a change. Stop tugging at me, girl! Nothing less will save that idiot father of yours. Going to Perimal in a pushcart, that boy, and dragging his house after him . . . ."
The smoke fingers groped toward her rising voice. Foxkin, peeking out through the arm-holes of her vest, withdrew abruptly. Lyra buried her face in the old woman's gown as smoke brushed over Cattila's face, then slid past, leaving her in soot-smeared, sputtering outrage.
Sonny sprawled in the way. Smoke fumbled blindly around his fallen body, sparks scorching holes in his red pants, singeing his tattooed skin. He twitched. Loosened strands of his red hair rose in the heat's up-draft, crinkled, and stank. He would burn as though on his own pyre, alive.
"Tha," breathed the murky air, a croon of hunger. "Thaa, thaaaa . . . "
"Matriarch," said Jame loudly. "I won the challenge. Present me as the new Favorite."
The smoke rose from Sonny's body and drifted toward her. She went back a step involuntarily but stopped, rigid, as her heel struck the well's rim.
The fingers closed loosely about her in a stifling wave of heat. She held her breath against their stench, as though pressed face to face against the dead. Through streaming eyes, she saw the sparks dance, two by two by two. Not sparks. Eyes: the Burning Ones unleashed and circling hungrily, waiting for the first flinch. She felt them brush against her. Their charred fingers rasped, crumbling, across her face.
Don't move. Don't even blink.
"Burnt Man!" she faintly heard Cattila cry. "Stop messing around! This is the Challenger, triumphant, your true child in destruction, if ever nemesis was. Now bugger off!"
Breath scorched Jame's ear in wordless protest. A moment more, must have been that hoarse plea; just a moment more . . . .
"Thaaa-HA!"
The command boomed like thunder too close to the lightning strike, a vast impact more felt than heard. The smoke shredded with a cry torn away into the distance: "KI-Ki-ki-iiiii . . . ."
Jame gulped air a moment too soon and went off into a coughing fit. When her eyes cleared, she found herself tottering on the edge of the well, and the Burnt Man standing not a score of feet away with his head in his hands.
No.
That black thing was the cinder-skull, consumed to a brittle shell, already crumbling. The charcoal-smeared man let the pieces fall through his fingers. Through a profusion of singed braids, he was glaring at the erstwhile Favorite as the latter sat up with a groan.
"Somehow," Chingetai growled at his son, "this is all your fault."
What the Merikit chief meant by "all" he immediately made clear, from Sonny's failures as a mewling baby to his many short-comings as a man. It was an epic list, its details honed by repetition. Its subject rose and listened with a sullen scowl. The shaman-elders flickered in and out of sight beside their naked chief, reaching up to pat him as though to calm an enraged stallion.
"Even that," he roared, pointing at Jame, "would make me a better son!" Then he looked again. "By the Four, who is that?"
Tungit stood on tiptoe to whisper in his ear.
"My new what? The Burnt Man approved?" He made a half-choked protest as though at a world gone mad and tore at his hair. A scrawny right-hand braid, burned through near the root, came away in his grasp.
Out of the well rose a low, impatient growl, and the ground shivered. One rite might have failed, thought Jame, stepping hastily back from the quaking edge, but not the more important one. Not yet. The River Snake still hungered.
"You see?" Chingetai thundered at his son, brandishing the plait. "This was yours, started with four hairs on the day of your birth." He threw it into the shaft. The earth swallowed it, muttering, unappeased. "You're dead, boy, discarded by the Burnt Man and by me. Now do what you were born for: Jump down that damn well!"
In the midst of this denunciation, Graykin appeared breathless beside Lyra and Cattila, clutching Kin-Slayer. Jame was staring at him when Sonny grabbed her by the arms and swung her out over the well-mouth.
"No!" she and the Southron cried simultaneously, he at Sonny, she at him as he stumbled forward, swinging up the sword.
Too late. With a butcher's dull thunk, the war-blade sank into the Merikit's side. Sonny staggered, and dropped Jame.
She fell a dozen feet down the well's throat before her nails caught on its red wall. The surface shuddered and bled as she hung from it. Her boots skidded on its slime. From below came a swift up-rush of foul air—haaaAAA . . . —and a sense of something vast, rising fast.
Her foot gained purchase on a down-turned projection, then another. She clawed her way between the stained spikes, feeling the wall begin to bulge as its sheath of muscles contracted. Here at last was the lip . . .
And there stood Sonny, swaying, arms wrapped around himself to stop a tide of blood. Graykin had somehow disengaged Kin-Slayer and fallen back, aghast. From the dumbfounded look on the Merikit's face, he couldn't believe that such a thing had happened—to him, of all people. In shock, he hadn't yet felt the bite of his own death.
"HaaAAAAA . . . !" said the River Snake rising, ravenous, to the smell of blood.
The rim surged upward. Jame launched herself off of it, over Sonny's head, into Graykin's arms, nearly onto the sword. As they rolled, a terrible impact bounced them off the ground and down again, hard, in a cloud of dust. Into the ringing silence which followed came a shrill but oddly muffled sound: a scream that seemed to go on and on, until a rasping slurp cut it short.
All too close, something massive scraped over stones . . . questing? No. Receding, gone with a viscous gulp as the earth swallowed it back.
"Another fine lot . . . you've involved me with . . . ." Graykin gasped, choking on the dust-thick air.
"So quit! Or at least . . . get off of me. Matriarch? Lyra?"
Coughs answered her, then Lyra's voice, shaking and piteous: "Here, both of us. Will things please stop happening now?"
Perhaps they would. The last upheaval had overthrown all the remaining torches and the blue smoke had dispersed. The square was left quake-wracked, still partly obscured with dust, under red clouds beginning to unravel with dawn. Had everyone really come through this alive? No. Beside the well was a circular indentation as wide as the well-mouth and two spans deep. The pavement inside had been crushed almost to powder. At its center, however, in solitary splendor, were a pair of large, hairy feet, sheared raggedly off at the ankles.
A rumble not unlike a belch came from the depths. A hero had fed the Snake to save the world.
"I hope he gives you gas," said Jame.