The dark pressed in on all sides, loosening, tightening, like the guts of some great snake that feels the swallowed prey stir. Eaten alive . . . .
But I can still breathe, thought Jame. That terrified panting almost in her ear was her own. She fought to control it. I can still move . . . .
Just not very well. By the pain in her bruised knees, she located the floor. So that way was down. Her hands could feel it too, after a fashion. Now, get up. Slowly, slowly . . . .
The floor seemed to tilt. She hit it, sprawling, before her senses warned her that she had lost her balance. Like being drunk, she thought, remembering the last and only time.
What had happened? Kindrie had opened the door and then . . . and then . . . .
The force dammed outside had rushed in, taking them with it. Where? Clearly, not into the Shanir's moon garden. That had slipped back out of his reach, into some sealed off corner of his soul. In the priests' inverted world, this room was the deepest, the most secret and important, the very bowels of power. And it had swallowed her with one gulp.
Nearby, someone laughed softly.
"Who's there?" she demanded, trying again to rise, again falling. Her voice sounded flat and muffled. "Kindrie?"
"You suit me better," said a dry, thin voice, "on your knees. Greetings, thief."
"Ishtier." She must not show fear. She must not. "You suit me better trying to gnaw off your own hand. I hear, though, that you stopped short with a finger . . . ah!"
The darkness around her had seemed to constrict. For a moment, she couldn't breathe. No doubt about it: her old enemy had power in this place—not the mindless maelstrom of a temple but something more considered, perhaps more dangerous, with intelligence behind it. The other seven high priests must be close by, listening.
"Renegade," she said, raising her voice. "Have you told the College how you abandoned Ganth, your lord, in the Haunted Lands to die?"
"Priests have no lords, thief. Our houses abandon us, when they send us here. We owe them nothing."
The rancor in his voice scraped as though against raw flesh. Such bitterness, after so many years . . . . It must be true.
"B-but then why did you go with Ganth into exile?"
"Now, why would I tell you a thing like that? You used to be sharper witted, thief."
He was taunting her, but he was also right. Her mind seemed full of slow moving eels, brain-suckers, eating their way out . . . .
No, dammit. All these images of eat and be eaten . . . the priest was using the Great Dance to play games with her as she had earlier with Brenwyr. Knowing helped, some.
Don't be distracted. Attack.
"You betrayed Bane, when you used his soul to create the Lower Town Monster."
"Experimentation. You indulged in it too, theocide."
"Yes, I accidentally killed Gorgo, but I also helped his priest Loogan resurrect him afterward. That wasn't to disprove our own god's monotheism, though, as you tried to do with the Monster; and I never gave my allegiance to Perimal Darkling, as you did."
Darkness hummed. "That I deny."
"You boasted that you would bring down the Barriers and restore the Kencyrath to Gerridon, whom you called its rightful lord, under shadow's eaves."
"That I didn't."
"Liar."
The insult hung in the dark, throbbing air like a curse. Somewhere nearby, someone (probably Kindrie) gave a half-swallowed sob of fear. Jame held her breath. Despite all she knew about Ishtier, it unnerved her that he would lie so easily. In the back of her mind, thought, something whispered:
Idiot. He forced that charge out of you before you were ready. Now all your arrows are shot.
Darkness chuckled again, as dry and rustling as claws at work inside a shroud, as obscenely triumphant.
"Always nosing after the truth, aren't you, little thief? Like a bitch in heat. Shall we show everyone the truth about you? Yes, oh yessss . . . ."
Jame lurched to her feet. "Oh, no . . . oh, God!"
Intolerable dizziness had seized her. He's turning me inside-out, she thought wildly, then stumbled and fell again, retching, to the floor.
She could see it now, though the thin vomit of an empty stomach: dark stone, veined with green. Her hands shone white against it, fingers sheathed in articulated plates of ivory. Weight bowed her head, ivory helm and mask. So it had been when contact with the injured Graykin had jolted her into . . . into . . . .
"No," she said again, half moaning, as the memory surfaced. "Oh, no . . . ."
"Yessss . . . ."
The hiss brought her head up. Around her opened out Gerridon's monstrous hall in his house in Perimal Darkling, her soul-image. Thread-bare eyes watched her from the death banners of fallen Knorth; singed sockets from the pelts of Arrin-ken piled high on the hearth. The cold air stank. Always nosing after the truth . . . . This was what she had tried to forget, to deny, but could never escape: the abscess at her soul's core that made cruel mock of hope and honor. Bred to darkling service . . . . She wanted to curl into an ivory ball, to hide from herself forever and ever.
"So this is where you come from," breathed Ishtier. "So this is what you are."
His white face hovered over her, more skull-like than she remembered after his winter of illness, eyes alive with scorn in a death's-mask. "Listen to me, you abomination. You have something of mine. I sent the assassins to fetch it, but they failed. I sent that whey-faced healer, but he ran away. Nonetheless, I will have it. Where is my book, thief? My Book Bound in Pale Leather. Tell me, or as surely as I locked that cringing bastard out of his soul-image, I will lock you into yours. Think about it: your mind trapped here forever; your body mine, to do with what I will . . . ."
"No!"
She drew the Ivory Knife with clumsy, ivory-gloved fingers. He slapped it out of her hand. It clattered on stone into shadows by the door.
"Call me renegade, will you? Did you really think you could defy our master in his own hall? Swear allegiance where you please, Priest's-Bane, but this is where your soul lies and rots. Fool, to think that arms or armor can save you here!"
His second blow caught her on the side of the head, making her ears ring.
. . . the white rathorn colt, felled by her kick just where she herself had now been struck. Too immature, both of them, too unprepared . . . .
Blood splashed on the floor between her hands, Kallystine's cut reopened beneath the ivory mask. At its touch, the green marble veins began to pulse, cracks of verdigris light spreading out around her to the hearth's edge. The flayed paws of Arrin-ken flexed stiffly.
Screee . . . went their claws on the hearth-stone. Screeeee . . . .
Jame clapped hands over her ears. Inside her skull, panic babbled:
He'll let you out if you give him the Book. You never wanted to be the filthy thing's guardian, anyway. And this time, surely, it will kill him. Give him the Book.
Yes.
A ripple ran through the hall, like wind over water. Arrin-ken claws and rathorn ivory melted. Grimacing, the banners unraveled. Walls redefined themselves around her, closer than the hall's had been, under a low roof supported by massive, squat columns. Mosaic covered every surface, lapis-lazuli and ivory. Green serpentine throbbed like the veins of some great heart. No. That was up in the hall, pounding itself to death with the exhaustion of its dancers. Here that gathered power was stored, in the bowels of the earth, the foul cloaca of divinity . . . .
A dark bundle with Kindrie's pale face stared at her across the tessellated floor. "What did you do?" he whispered, aghast.
What, indeed?
But the black clot of priests huddled by the far wall were staring over both the healer's head and her own. So was Ishtier. She hadn't admitted her defeat out-loud, Jame realized. Neither the priests nor her soul-image was responding to it. Someone had opened the door.
An indistinct figure stood on the threshold. Mold-glow glimmered on the gold mask which it held before its face. Rotting finery crumbled away from it. The unburnt dead always return . . . . But behind the mask as it fell, nothing . . . or was there? In the shadow of the hood, someone smiled at Jame, planes of darkness shifting around the eerie flash of stained teeth. Yellow eyes or silver, assassin's or Bane's? Whichever, they lifted, and the smile in them died.
"No . . . ." croaked Ishtier, recoiling. "You're dead on the Mercy Seat, flayed alive and crawling with flies . . . . No!"
His maimed hand rose. Fingernails scraped the low ceiling, raking together lines of power, jerking them down. A massive weight settled on the room. Walls groaned. Columns crumbled at the top. With a report like the earth's back breaking, the lintel cracked. The figure standing under it disintegrated in a puff of acrid dust.
"You'll bring the roof down on us all!" someone wailed.
Good idea, thought Jame.
After all, was anyone here worth saving? These fool priests, who had put such power in a madman's hands? The demon in the doorway or his half-sister, who had dreamed of walking in the light? Kindrie, who had deserved protection from so many and received it from no one?
Well, yes. Dammit.
She struggled to her feet, feeling as if the whole college rested on her shoulders. Once before, she had dealt with m'lord Ishtier, in his own temple, with an act of appalling recklessness. No helping that. Her black gloved hands were already rising, clenched in challenge not of the priest but of the god whom he feigned to serve.
"Lord," she cried, "a judgment!"
Ishtier's wild stare snapped to her face. Tendons stood out under the loose skin of his throat as he strained to keep his mouth shut. It opened anyway, muscles creaking. The God-voice boomed out through the nine spider-thin fingers which he clamped to his face, biting into them with each word:
"TRUST NOT IN PRIESTS . . . ."
What in Perimal's name?
". . . NOR YET IN ORACLES."
That was the Voice which she had evoked from Ishtier before, and yet not quite, as if some undernote in it now dominated. She hadn't thought before of her god's voice as a chorus, like . . . like . . . .
She seized the priest by the shoulders. He felt bird-fragile in her grasp. Sinking to his knees, he drew her down with him.
"Who's in there?" she demanded of his blank eyes, of pupils so huge with shock that they looked like holes burned in parchment. "Dammit, what game are you playing?"
. . . not eyes at all but scorched sockets fringed with burnt fur, opening into greater darkness . . . .
For a moment, Jame thought that she was back in her soul-image, that her spilt blood had animated an Arrin-ken pelt from the hearth to hood this wretched man, as Bane had the master assassin. Then a second possibility struck her: twice now, she had demanded a judgment and received it, perhaps not from her god at all but from his appointed judges, the Arrin-ken, whose plaited voices in the Ebonbane had also forced her to judge herself. There, Immalai's mercy had prevailed; but the Riverland was the blind cat's territory.
Ishtier grinned at her around his bleeding fingers. "In the Ebonbane, by the chasm, you escaped my judgment," he said in a voice like a winter's pyre, frost and bitter ash, "but these mountains are mine. Child of darkness, do you want my judgment now?"
She recoiled. "No!"
A rush of priests thrust her aside to get at Ishtier. The oldest, smallest of them grabbed Jame by the arm.
"Do that again!" he cried, trying to shake her, only shaking himself. "Evoke the Voice!"
"N-not damned likely," said Jame, attempting to free herself. The little priest barely came to her shoulder and looked more frail than some of his late colleagues out in the hall, but he had a terrier's grip. "You want it, you talk to it."
"God's teeth and toenails. Don't you think we've tried? All winter, ever since we learned that the Voice had spoken again after all these years . . . . Oh, if only we weren't so starved of power, now, when we need it most!"
"Why? What's happened?"
"Too few of us here, too few Kencyr in the Riverland overall . . . who knows, except that we're being cut off from the temples. The closer to Summer Eve, the worse it gets. Not even the Great Dance is pulling in enough power to keep the valley ours."
"The Dance. You're killing your own people, priest."
"So? There are always more unwanted Shanir."
A harsh sound came from Ishtier.
The little man let go of Jame and darted over to join his peers, all shouting questions at the Voice which had just deigned for the third time to speak through the Tastigon priest. In their midst, Ishtier hunched jealously over his hands, tearing strips of flesh off them with his teeth and growling.
Jame pulled Kindrie to his feet. The healer's nose was bleeding freely, as surely it would not have if he had regained control of his soul-image. A fine pair of Knorth they were, or perhaps a trio. Discarded grave clothes lay strewn on the threshold, blind flies seething out of the eyes and mouth of the golden death mask. The pavement beneath had been smashed to powder. The assassin must have blinked in time for the shock to pass harmlessly through him. Was he still Bane's prisoner? Where in Perimal's name had they gone, anyway?
At least, there was no sign of them on the way up.
Kindrie faltered at the door of the main hall, staring at the carnage inside wrought by Ishtier's last, ruthless pulling down of power. Jame tugged him away.
"Think about it later," she said, herself white-faced beneath mask and drying blood. The Priests' College would need many new Shanir.
At the doorway of the little stone house, they paused to look warily out at the terrace. Judging from the growth of the puddles, it had rained. Now, however, the lower cloud level was beginning to dissipate.
Jame swore softly. "When this weirding haze lifts entirely, Mount Alban will be gone, if it isn't already. No time to lose."
But Kindrie caught her arm. "Wait."
The shadow of Rawneth's tower had moved since Jame had entered the College. Now it slanted southwestward, entirely across their way, where no northern sun would have thrown it.
"Don't tell me," said Jame. "The Wilden Witch can shadow-cast."
By the balustrade, a shaded puddle quivered. Out of it came groping something dark to fumble at the pool's rim and grip a flagstone's edge. A lumpish figure surfaced, out of water at most an inch deep. Gold embroidery glimmered on the muddy shoulders of dress grays. The lower half of its ruined face split into a white-toothed grin, framed by chipped, bleeding incisors.
Kindrie swayed.
"Don't faint!" Jame said sharply. "So the Witch's pet demon wasn't destroyed after all. So it still wants you. Things could be worse."
"H-how?"
"Bane could be behind us." She glanced over her shoulder. "Damn."
She had hoped that he had stayed below to deal with his betrayer—not that much more could be done to Ishtier, short of killing him. For that final mercy he could hardly depend on Bane, who in his darker days had flayed children alive for sport. Now his shadowy figure stood just behind the tapestry at the back of the room, watching her through its hanging warp threads.
Better the demon you know?
Kindrie gasped.
Still grinning, Rawneth's creature had heaved itself out of the puddle and was crawling toward them. Oily, black water streamed off its clothes, off the trailing, limp cuffs of its pants. It had no feet. The tower's shadow crept forward to give it cover, swinging in on the doorway where they stood like the closing of a massive gate.
"Quick," said Jame. "Its soul belongs to a Randir captain, late of Tentir, more recently assigned to Gothregor. What's her name? You used to live here. Tell me!"
"I-I don't know."
Jame swallowed her exasperation. After all, she had spent the entire winter in the same halls with the wretched woman without learning what she was called. Now she had made Kindrie feel as stupid and helpless as she did. Nonetheless, they must not be caught between two demons. As the shadow closed on them, she took a deep breath and shoved Kindrie out into it.
It was very cold under Rawneth's tower. They could see the white plumes of their breaths, the Shanir's so rapid that he was almost panting, her own hardly less so. Eerie twilight surrounded them like that of a solar eclipse. The splash of their feet, even the cataract's roar, sounded curiously muffled and far away. Jame wished that she were. The creeping figure had turned to follow them, sodden dress tunic bulging, pants legs now drained and flat. It left a foul, black trail behind it and sent a hideous stench on before. At least it would never overtake them before they reached the shadow's far side.
In the demon's path lay another puddle, beginning to mantle with frost. It pulled itself over the edge and sank, gurgling, through shattered panes of ice. Dark water closed over it.
Jame and Kindrie stopped, staring. Bubbles, then nothing.
"It's under the pavement," she said suddenly. "Run!"
Kindrie shot her a terrified look, then bolted. She floundered after him through such water as lay in her path, too much in haste to detour. The Shanir's bare feet scarcely cracked the growing sheet ice, but her boots crashed through it, sinking with each step from ankle to shin to knee.
Fifteen feet to the light, ten, five . . . .
Kindrie burst out into it.
Jame lunged to catch up and fell heavily, half on mist-chilled pavement, half up to the waist in freezing water. Something had grabbed her foot. Now it pulled. Her nails rasped on icy stone, clawing for a grip. Kindrie clutched her wrists. Behind her, something surfaced, stinking like a week old corpse, chuckling thickly.
"C-cum an' play, liddle girl . . . ."
Kindrie nearly let go. He was staring up at something, aghast. The grip on Jame's foot broke. She shot forward into the Shanir's arms, both of them going down in a heap.
Bane stood on the other side of the puddle into which she had nearly sunk. Out of it he had fished the demon, which he now held one-handed by the scruff of its dress gray neck, fastidiously, at arm's length, as it squirmed and mewled and stank. In his other hand was the Ivory Knife. With great care, he began to slit the uniform's seams. As each gave way, black liquid filth poured down. Those grinning teeth fell last, bloody at the roots as if just pulled. For a moment they floated white in the befouled pool, then sank. Bane held out the coat like a trophy skin and dropped it at Jame's feet.
She had risen and was standing just barely within the light, close enough to touch him or to be touched.
Not since that last night in Tai-tastigon had she seen him so clearly. Never before had she realized how much like Torisen he looked, especially in the elegant lines of his face and hands. But although his eyes mirrored the true Knorth silver, almost luminous in this half light, they hadn't the depth either of Tori's self-doubt or of his intrinsic strength. Bane had always believed that in the end he could defeat his own damnation, that an honorable death would wipe away stains even as black as his. How often she had seen the arrogance of that faith in his lazy, mocking smile.
He wasn't smiling now.
In his hand he held the Ivory Knife, gripped perilously by the flat between thumb and forefinger, its point resting lightly on his palm. He was offering it to her, hilt first.
Could the dead die? Was Bane dead? Perhaps he himself didn't know. A scratch from the Knife would make certain. It might even be the honorable death which he had sought, if given by her hand—or then again, it might not.
His voice didn't carry beyond the shadow's pall, but she saw his lips move: ". . . your choice, sister . . . "
Choice. She had been so proud of her ability to choose and to live with the consequences. That had been her honor, or rather her arrogance, more than a match for any of Bane's. But what did any choice matter when under it lay that cold, dark hall, that predestined damnation?
"Who am I," she said bitterly, "to judge you?"—and, with great care, she took the Knife from his hand. "Follow, if you choose."
Behind her, Kindrie caught his breath. He was staring up at the Witch's tower, at a low balcony just now cleared by the wispy, thinning clouds. Yellow light streamed from the interior, silhouetting the tall, slim figure motionless by the rail. Come out to see the fun, had she? Let her fish for her servant's teeth, then, in foul puddles and the rain which had again begun to fall. Jame sketched the proper salute—more insulting under the circumstances than a rude gesture—and turned her back on the Witch of Wilden.
"Time to go," she said.
They did.