The platform ascended, creaking.
Kindrie sat cross-legged on it, shoulders drooping with fatigue, a shock of white hair hanging down over his face. Jame wondered how much more of this he could take. True, the Knorth were tougher than they looked, but most of them hadn't depended all their lives on a healer's talents.
For that matter, how long had it been since she herself had last slept or eaten? About forty-eight hours in both cases—not that she hadn't often gone longer than that without sleep. As for food, sore as her face had been and now was again, thanks to Ishtier, the prospect didn't much appeal. Anyway, she wasn't tired or hungry, just numb.
Empty.
She seemed to remember, a life time ago, when her mind had teemed with plans. The narrow halls of Gothregor had taught her to think more . . . modestly, the Women's World would say. Since then, the world had seemed to close in on her, prospects slamming like doors along a dark corridor down which she had run, increasingly alone with that which followed. One could never out-run one's past. Now she couldn't seem to plan ahead at all. Tomorrow didn't exist; this afternoon, just barely. She supposed, making an effort, that they should sneak back into the infirmary before their absence caused a stir.
One thing at a time.
The platform stopped with a jolt in Mount Alban's upper reaches. Jame pulled Kindrie to his feet, then threw an arm around him as he staggered. She could count his ribs by touch.
Not until they had turned into the corridor did she remember that Brenwyr had toppled a wardrobe across the infirmary door. However, it had been removed. From within came voices, one patient, the other sharp with frustration. Both ten-commands had crowded inside to listen while Captain Hawthorn tried tactfully to learn from her matriarch why they should risk war by raiding Wilden.
Graykin stood by the door, biting his nails. He nearly bit off a finger when Jame spoke softly in his ear:
"What did you do, shout for help through the keyhole?"
"Someone had to be told," he muttered, regarding her askance.
"Huh," said Jame.
"Someone," apparently, had been Brenwyr, who must have summoned the guard posthaste but now couldn't bring herself to explain why the Knorth had gone down to Wilden, much less what specific danger she was in.
Women's secrets had some use after all.
Glancing back over the heads of her restive squad, Brier Iron-thorn met Jame's eyes. The Kendar's expression didn't change, but the sharpening of her attention made others turn as well, including the Brandan captain and her matriarch.
"Er . . . " said Jame, trying surreptitiously to shift Kindrie into Graykin's reluctant arms. "Is anything the matter?"
"Suppose, lady," said Hawthorn, sandy brows rising, "that you tell us."
Jame's mind went blank. Earlier, she had broken one of her own cardinal rules by making herself forget an unwelcome fact. Now her brain seemed to have closed shop altogether, lights out and nobody home. The truth wouldn't do nor would a lie, leaving . . . what? Twenty-four pairs of expectant eyes and the hiss of rain falling past the windows—except that part of that sound came from Jorin, followed by his low, throbbing growl.
The cadets had cleared a path between her and the two principal Brandan. In the shadows behind Brenwyr, Aerulan's banner lay unrolled across the seat and back of a chair. On her tapestry lap crouched the ounce, ears flat, fangs bared, moon opal eyes aglow . . . but what was he seeing, and through whose eyes? In the room's gray, rain-washed light, Aerulan's white hands glimmered, one clutching the cat's ruff, the other pressed against the crimson line across her throat. She was staring, transfixed, at something behind Jame.
Jame felt the hair on the back of her neck rise. Someone stood behind her in the open doorway, so close that she smelled its rotten breath, but the cadets' fascinated gaze hadn't shifted from her face. Whoever—whatever—it was, only the dead girl and the blind cat could see it.
A hoarse, mocking whisper breathed in her ear: ". . . my choice, sister."
The master assassin's voice, Bane's words. "Follow, if you choose," she had said, and they had. Oh, lord. Now what?
First, clear the room.
"This is house business," she said to the infirmary at large. "Everyone, please leave."
Hawthorn's brows rose even farther, but she acknowledged with a wry salute and hustled her cadets out of the room. The Knorth cadets hesitated, hopeful, but Jame waved them out too, including Brier. The latter paused on the threshold.
"Lady, are you all right?"
Jame sighed. "Have I ever been?"
Only after the Kendar had gone did Jame realize what an insult she had just dealt her, now a Knorth herself, as good as told publicly that she wasn't trusted with family business.
Ishtier was right, thought Jame. Where are my wits? Be damned if you must, but don't be stupid.
However, this really didn't concern the ten-commander. Nor did it Graykin, who had slunk out with the greatest reluctance and would probably listen at the keyhole, if he could. Kindrie had tumbled over asleep on a pallet. What good that would do him without access to his soul-image, Jame didn't know, but still she hadn't the heart to wake him up.
"That was good thinking," said Brenwyr gruffly. "They won't challenge a house secret."
"Wait," said Jame as the matriarch started to pass her. She shut the door in Graykin's avid face. "I might as well have called this sister-kin business. About Aerulan . . . ."
Brenwyr stiffened, still facing the door. "She's yours again. What more do you want?"
Jame frowned. The matriarch had been about to leave without the banner . . . er . . . Aerulan, whom Jame could still plainly see, one hand on her throat, the other raised as if in supplication.
"But I gave her to you," she protested.
The Iron Matriarch turned on her. "One does not demean a lady by giving her away! Have you and your brother no decency at all?"
Her throttled rage drove Jame back a step. Then she thought, perhaps, she understood.
"Lord Brandan asked for Aerulan's banner," she said slowly, sorting it out, "and Torisen simply told him to take it."
Of course. Any other lord would have insisted on the fabulous price which Ganth had demanded for Aerulan's contract in perpetuity, paid in full. The Knorth were poor. Torisen could certainly use the money. But he had refused to profit from old grief and his father's rapacious bargain. Neither he nor, perhaps, Lord Brandan had realized what an insult this charity had dealt to the Women's World, where a lady's price confirmed her rank. Aerulan wouldn't have minded. Brenwyr did, terribly, for her sake.
A berserker and a maledight. Of all people to have enraged.
"We meant well," Jame said awkwardly, wanting very much to be believed. "We just didn't understand. I think, now, that I do. I'll explain it to my brother. There must be some way to send Aerulan home with honor . . . to you."
The older woman had turned away again, as if better to keep her precarious self-control. Without thinking, Jame put a hand on her arm. It felt as hard under her fingertips as the Iron Matriarch's nickname. A tremor passed through it.
"Adiraina said that you would instruct him."
For the first time, Brenwyr turned to look at the banner on its chair, and gave a sharp exclamation. A hasty stride took her out of Jame's reach, but then she stopped short, hands curling into fists at her side.
"Knorth, are you trying to drive me mad?"
Jame stared. "What?"
"Taunting me with glimpses of her, then snatching her away . . . . Traveling with her, sleeping with her . . . do you think I don't recognize seduction when I see it?"
God's teeth and toenails. She was jealous.
"Lady, I swear . . . ."
"Liar!"
Jame felt her hands go cold. A terrible clarity filled her mind—what she would do to this . . . this hag, with her disheveled hair and red eyes, who had dared to impugn the only thing of worth which she had left: her honor. She wanted the release of a flare, to feel its power burn away doubt and self-disgust. She craved its intoxication. Her claws were out through her glove tips, ready.
No.
This was the onset of a berserk seizure, against a woman striking out in pain, against another berserker. She must not, not, NOT.
Brenwyr was shouting unforgivable things in her face.
"Self-restraint, endurance, obedience-be-damned!" she shouted back as she retreated, to drown words which she must not hear. "Self-restraint-endurance-obedience-be-damned!"
Brenwyr grabbed her arm just as, groping behind her, she touched the death banner. The matriarch's other hand was poised to strike. Jame knew, with detached certainty, that if Brenwyr slapped her, Jame would kill her.
But another hand closed on the matriarch's raised fist. Joined by touch, the three of them stood frozen—two alive, panting, and one dead.
"Aerulan . . . ." said Brenwyr hoarsely. "Knorth, do you see her too?"
"Yes. I have off and on for days, but never so clearly as now. And no, you aren't going mad, unless I am too."
Thunder rolled, retreating. Gray rain fell, gray light in a gray room—but there the dead stood, smiling, in her rust-red gown.
"She was given to the pyre thirty-four years ago. How is this possible?"
"I'm not sure," said Jame.
Her left arm was going numb from the older woman's iron grip. Her right hand felt the rough tapestry nap, and beneath it a shoulder which flame had reduced to ash long before she herself had been born. Had they both gone mad?
Aerulan smiled past her, at Brenwyr.
"Perhaps," said Jame slowly, "the dead are more persistent than our priests have led us to believe." The ranks of hieratic dead beneath the Wilden college. "Perhaps the rules have changed here on Rathillien." Bane, at her back, with his enigmatic smile. Where was his body? "Or perhaps . . . ." Aerulan's dress, woven of threads taken from the gown in which she had bled to death. "Can blood trap the soul as well as flesh and bone?"
"If you say so," said Brenwyr, doubtfully.
Jame felt her scalp prickle. The matriarch had not been speaking to her.
Brenwyr stiffened. "He's here?" She spun about, her fierce gaze sweeping the room.
In the farthest corner, a flaw moved in the shadows, dropping the mere-tattooed hand with which it had hidden its eyes. The yellow irises were as blood-shot as fertilized egg yolks from being kept open so long and the spirit in them raged with impotent fury. Bane's features overlay the whole like a shadow-spun cowl, smiling.
Brenwyr rounded on Jame. "You brought him here!"
Jame recoiled, hands clenched behind her not this time to forestall a berserker response but to keep from dancing down the matriarch's rage. Ancestors only knew what she might unleash, trying that trick again.
"It's all right," she said hastily. "Aerulan's killer is in this room and I did more or less invite him here, but he's under control."
"Control? Yours? By God, Knorth, if you've sold yourself to the Bashtiri Shadow Guild . . . ."
"Oh, don't be silly."
Brenwyr boggled, suddenly deflated. "That's what Aerulan said."
"You can actually hear her? I can't, but then I don't know what her voice sounded like."
"That's something." The matriarch glanced back at the banner, mere tapestry again without Jame's touch to bridge the gap. "Then too, at last her blood-price will be paid."
"That isn't enough. I want to know who took out a contract on my whole family."
Brenwyr blinked. She had forgotten the larger massacre whose aftermath had almost destroyed the entire Kencyrath. Kinzi, Telarien, all those Knorth women dead and unavenged . . . . But what if the old quarrel between Kinzi and Rawneth was to blame? Could the Kencyrath survive such a terrible discovery?
"It was all so long ago," she said, hearing the echo of Adiraina's warning in her voice. "After all these years, is it wise to ask?"
"Vengeance aside, it isn't just ancient history. Everyone keeps telling me that the Shadow Guild never gives up. So why did the assassins let Tieri live, and will they keep coming after me?"
Brenwyr rubbed her temples, which had begun to throb. "Tieri lived because everyone except Adiraina thought she was dead."
"But this man knew better: he's the one from whom Aerulan hid Tieri. Why didn't he enlist the rest of the casting to help find her instead of leaving his precious contract unfulfilled? What happened? Bane, make him talk!"
Out of shadows, he looked at her unsmiling, as he had under the Witch's tower with what passed for his life balanced on the edge of the Ivory Knife. Choices . . . .
"Yes," said Jame unsteadily, meeting the yellow glare of the captive set unnervingly in his captor's face. "I choose this. It's necessary."
Bane nodded.
He seemed about to speak, but instead his mouth opened wide, wider, stained teeth and coated tongue shaping a mute shriek. The corner seemed full of writhing shadows, indistinctly at war like snakes in a bag. Then staring eyes and bared teeth lunged out into the room. The distortion of a mere-tattooed body showed against the windows, naked shoulders beaded with sweat and rain. Its faint shadow danced with it on the floor, all but consumed by the darker shape which clung to its back.
"Watch out!" Jame said sharply. "If he closes his eyes . . . ."
The yellow glint vanished. Rain drops spattered on the floor. Away from them streaked the guild master's living shadow, flat to the ground, free. If the Bashtiri had made straight for the closed door, blind, he would have slipped out under it. But at the last moment his nerve failed. He looked—and bounced off the panels with an oath back into his pursuer's grip.
The sound of struggle thrashed across the floor. Brenwyr snatched Aerulan's banner off the chair and Jorin scuttled out from under it a moment before it was smashed to pieces. The assassin's cursing changed to a cry of pain. One of his eyes filled with blood, then the other. Red brimmed over bony sockets and down hollow cheeks, defining their invisible planes with bloody tears.
"What's happening?" demanded Brenwyr.
"Bane has torn off his eyelids."
"Who in Perimal's name is Bane?"
The uproar abruptly stopped. Harsh panting came from amid the chair's wreckage, then a sharp gasp. A crimson line appeared beneath the grimacing face, following the winged arch of the collarbone. Blood trickled down the incline, down the sternum. Another cut traced the major pectoral of the right breast, then the left.
Brenwyr's fingers dug into Jame's shoulder. "What . . . ?"
"He's got the assassin's mere-knife and control of his hand. The pattern of cuts is called kuth. It's used in the public execution of child-killers." It might, Jame thought, have been the last thing which Bane himself had felt on the Tastigon Mercy Seat under the flayer's knife, unjustly accused of Dally's murder. "In the Eastern Lands, it would be considered just punishment for the assassination of Aerulan, her . . . blood-price."
With a deft flick, Bane cut off the assassin's right nipple. The bastard was enjoying himself. He would stop, though, if she asked.
The assassin spat out teeth, with fragments of gum attached. Demon-ridden for two days, he was doomed what-ever she did. The left nipple . . . .
"This will only get worse," she said, hearing the truth in her voice, knowing how it was meant to mislead. "Talk, while you still can."
Yellow teeth bared in a ragged snarl. Parallel cuts marked prominent ribs as Bane continued to sketch in details of surface anatomy as if with a brush dripping red. A sinewy torso was taking shape in mid-air, slick with blood.
"Cut lower," said Brenwyr.
The assassin burst out cursing. The cut down his side skidded awry, into the fold of the groin.
"Bitch! Red-eyed, sodding whore . . . . D'you want to hear how I cut that one's white throat?"
"Yes," said Jame, reaching behind her to restrain Brenwyr. Her hand closed on Aerulan's cold fingers.
"Gaaah . . . . She came in with the little bint behind her, just when we'd finally pulled down the matriarch. 'Aerulan, Tieri, run!' she says—the old witch, brains half out on the floor and still squawking. They ran. I followed. Lost 'em both in that damned maze, then caught up with one again in the arcade. 'Brenwyr!' she was calling. 'Brenwyr!' You, huh, red-eyes? Came too late, though, didn't you . . . but still too soon for me, before I could make her tell me where she'd hidden t'other one. It should've been a double kill . . . ."
"What happened?" Jame demanded.
The bloody mask of a face worked. Bane never paused. Left ribs, external oblique . . . .
"Told the others both bints were dead, didn't I? The contract had been honored, I said. Get the hell out, get out, get out . . . ."
Abruptly, his voice sounded younger, the terror in it stark. Was Bane at work in his mind, slitting open the seams of memory as he did those of flesh?
" 'Shadow, by a shadow be exposed.' I felt that curse strike, sink in. Had to get away, contract be damned. Thirty-four years I waited for it to catch up with me, dreaming of red eyes, rising in the Guild. More rank, more tattoos . . . nothing is going to expose me. Then that dog-shit Ishtier sends word: The little bitch lived in hiding for years after our raid. Years! Says he'll tell the Grand Master that I lied, have me stripped of rank and tattoos . . . exposed . . . unless I do what he wants: steal a book (me, a thief!) and kill a sodding girl."
"So I didn't come under the terms of the original contract?"
The question jerked him back to the present. "Stupid cow. Had it down in blood how many to kill, didn't we? But I told the Grand Master that I wanted to go back anyway, to make a clean sweep. My turn to lead a blooding. My choice of target. Let the brats steal the book, kill the girl and all the red-eyed women they can find. No need to meet that cursing whore again, no need . . . ."
"But you have," said Brenwyr. "You son of a yellow bitch, who paid you to kill Aerulan?"
He knew where he was again, and who faced him. Bane brought him up short as he lunged forward. Jame slipped in front of the matriarch, drawing the Ivory Knife. The assassin strained inches from its point like a dog against its leash, attention fixed on Brenwyr.
"Curse me, will you?" he spat at her, spraying Jame with bloody froth. "Thirty-four years, snapping at my heels, ruining everything . . . me, the next grand master! Soil my hands with your sow's blood, should I? You should have been the brats' meat, but they failed. I won't!"
He strained forward, twisting to be free. The cuts opened red lips. Beneath, from collarbone to groin, muscles rotted by the Bane's touch tore like wet butcher's paper. Black intestines spilled out. His feet tangled in their coils, bursting them with a fecal stench. On his knees now, incredulous, he clutched at his abdomen as if somehow to cram back in its contents, but everything inside was tearing loose, falling. Then the aorta and femoral arteries ruptured. He collapsed, a look on his face of outraged disbelief. The red tide on the floor swelled twice with the failing heartbeat, then slowed to a spreading creep.
Out of the reeking cavity that had been his abdomen rose a miasma, a shadow. It stood over him, a mere thickening of the air against the windows' gray light. Then Bane raised his eyes. In their silver depths Jame saw mirrored her own pale face, her complicity. She looked away, back at the red ruin which lay at her feet.
" 'Shadow, by a shadow be exposed,' " she quoted in an unsteady voice. "That's exposed, all right."
Brenwyr made a choking sound. The next moment, she had thrust Jame aside and thrown open the door. Hawthorn and Brier Iron-thorn made way as she plunged blindly past them out into the hall, Aerulan's banner clutched to her breast.
Of course, the two Kendar would have waited beyond normal ear-shot to ensure family privacy, but not so far as to have missed the latter uproar. They entered in haste, probably expecting to find Jame reduced to chitterlings on the floor. Instead, there lay a complete stranger, completely disemboweled.
Hawthorn's sandy brows rose. "Lady?"
"Argh!" said Jame, snatched up her knapsack, and bolted out the door after Brenwyr, Jorin scrambling on her heels.