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IV

Jame fought her way out of sleep, crying, "Who calls the Knorth? Who? Brier?"

Cold hands held her down. Over her bent a livid face, leprous with death.

For a moment, she was back before the broken walls of her old home keep, under the dead weight of the haunt about to sink its rotting teeth into her arm.

"Don't," said Ashe.

Against every instinct, Jame sheathed her claws. But she had attacked someone, she thought, still half-dazed with sleep. Who?

Jorin stretched out limp beside her.

Oh, God, surely not.

The ounce twitched and began to snore. She remembered now, how he had tried to follow her into the depths of dwar and been left, crying, in its upper reaches. Obviously, he was still there.

A confusion of legs and hands moved toward the front of the smithy, taking with it a limp form.

She had struck . . . . Someone had staggered backward . . . .

Over the haunt's shoulder, Jame saw the anvil squat on its ironwood stump. One of the horns glistened darkly.

"Oh hell," she muttered, shaking off Ashe and rising unsteadily.

In the stripped light that fell through the barred window, Kirien bent over Kindrie. "I should never have forced this!" she was saying. "A healer and a nemesis . . . don't!"

Jame's hand stopped in mid-air.

Index shoved her aside and pressed a clot of cob-webs to the back of the Shanir's skull to staunch the blood.

Kiri was right, Jame thought, sitting back. It would be dangerous for her to touch the Shanir when he was so vulnerable. Damn her poisonous soul-image, anyway!

But someone (Kindrie?) had said something about it being a trap. What had he meant? She groped after the memory as if after a rapidly fading dream. The details were already gone, but the suggestion lingered. It implied a deception on the most intimate level, a deceiver closer to her than her own skin. Just the same, if she could disown any part of that ghastly hall . . . !

Steady, she warned herself. Whatever the truth is, it won't be simple or perhaps so easily discovered.

But still . . . !

Ashe stood behind her, a hooded death-mask hovering in the shadows. "Why . . . did you attack him?"

"I couldn't help it. He was too close."

"Huh," said Kirien. "Remind me to keep my distance. That's dwar breathing, at least."

So it was, deep and slow. Trinity. She had warned Kindrie that the next time she might knock him through a wall, and she had—back into the healing embrace of his soul-image.

Then she remembered: "Did someone call the Knorth?"

As if in answer, they became aware of an approaching disturbance outside. Struggling forms passed the window. The door was flung open and a large, gagged figure was thrown in, almost on top of them. It was Brier Iron-thorn.

"Ancestors be praised," said Jame.

The Kendar lurched to her feet and stood for a moment swaying. Muffled noises came from behind the gag, which she made no effort to remove despite her free hands. Breath smoked from her nostrils in faintly glowing plumes. Her eyes were screwed tightly shut. Oblivious to their questions, she set off across the room with a determined if unsteady stride and bounced off the far wall. Slipping up behind her, Ashe whipped off the gag.

". . . north!" the cadet was crying. "K-north!" Over and over.

Her voice seemed to come from a considerable distance. Its tone, however, was no less compelling than when it had reached Jame in the depths of dwar sleep. It conveyed no fear, only a grim determination to evoke an answer.

The old shaman called urgently from his corner of the square.

"If she won't shut up," Index translated, "they'll kill her."

Jame grabbed Brier's hand as it groped past her. "Cadet, stop it. I'm Knorth!"

Brier paused, head cocked to listen. "Lady?" she said in her far-away voice. Her glowing breath made Jame's face tingle. "Where are you?"

"At Kithorn. So are you. For pity's sake, look at me!"

The Kendar's eyes opened warily. Luminous mist filled the sockets, throwing into relief her high, strong cheekbones. "All I see is weirding," she said in a tight, slightly louder voice. "The Highlord called me down into it and now I'm lost. So is he."

Jame gave a stifled exclamation, involuntarily tightening her grip.

Brier's hand closed on hers. "I feel . . . something."

She was half-crushing Jame's fingers. Her voice seemed perhaps two rooms away now instead of half a field.

"Keep calling!" Kirien said.

"I . . . no. If my brother is lost in the weirding too, he needs help. A guide. Brier Iron-thorn, do you remember how your mother came back under the sand to bring Tori safely across the Dry Salt Sea?"

The Kendar's dark face hardened. "That story. A fever dream. A sop for an orphan."

"Maybe, maybe not. When the salt sea returned yesterday and I nearly drowned in it, I-I think Rose saved me too. It was wrong of me not to have told you before, but I was unsure, and scared."

Brier's face would never be good at showing emotion, whatever she felt. "What do you want me to do?" she asked at last, gruffly, almost in her normal tone.

"Will you go back into the weirding to find Tori? No, don't move." She pushed the Kendar down to sit against the west wall, next to Kindrie and the still sleeping Jorin, and knelt before her. "Just think about doing it. The Senetha can be done purely in the mind, perhaps this too. Will you try?"

Brier had squeezed her eyes shut again, like a child afraid to see. She was afraid. Jame could feel it through her grip. Never before had she been asked to do something so much on faith, for a girl whom she must think half-mad and a house which she had only begun to trust. Then she gave a curt nod and began again to call: "K-north, K-north . . . !"each cry more faint than the last, as though she were resolutely walking back into the mist which enveloped her mind.

Kirien shivered. "I wouldn't care to do that, even with an anchor. For God's sake, don't let go!"

She had been stealing sidelong looks at Jame. Now, abruptly, she said, "Forgive the rudeness, but I have to know: would you please take off that mask?"

But Kiri had just seen her face, when she had used it to cut short the scrollswoman's berserker flare. It couldn't be such a treat as all that . . . .

Then Jame remembered. Kindrie had been in her soul-scape.

Not daring to think, much less to hope, she fumbled at the mask with her free hand. It came loose. She took a deep breath and turned to look at Kirien.

The Jaran regarded her critically. "A few minutes more would have been better. Still, not bad. Not bad at all."

Jame touched her cheek. Apprenticeship to the best thief in Tai-tastigon had trained her fingertips to abnormal sensitivity, even when gloved. As Kirien had said, a few moments more had been needed and lost, thanks to Brier's call. There was still a scar. It was so faint, though, that she could hardly feel it. Kindrie had done his work well enough: she was no longer disfigured.

Outside, someone cried in alarm, echoed by Index. Kirien hastily joined him by the front window, Ashe only a step behind her. Red light flared across their startled faces.

"Oh!" said Kirien, staring.

Jame tried to rise, but couldn't break Brier's grip. "What?" she demanded.

"The weeds in the courtyard's cracks . . . they're bursting into flames from the inner square out. Watch it!" She jerked Index back as lines of fire laced the windowsill, following the mossy cracks. In a moment, they had burned out, without spreading to the interior.

Outside, Sonny's voice rose again.

"Huh," said Index. "The fool acts as if he's never seen a purification before. He claims that the fires show the Burnt Man's disapproval. The chief isn't coming, he says, but someone's got to represent the Burnt Man here tonight, or the entire Riverland may be torn apart. Guess who volunteers."

"He may have a point," said Kirien. "Whatever they're up to, annoying the powers that be can't help. I wonder where that precious chief of theirs is, anyway."

"Four days ago," Jame said slowly, "he was near Falkirr, laying a bone-fire. Then he went on southward."

"Don't be a fool," snapped Index. "I told you: the silly bugger is off defining the Merikit borders for Summer Eve . . . ."

"Right down the Silver," Jame finished, as her wits finally woke. "He's preparing to reclaim the entire Riverland."

Index and Kirien stared at her. "Impossible!" they burst out. "The lords . . . the priests . . . ! They'd never permit . . . ."

"The lords have been gone all winter," said Jame. "So has most of the Kencyrath. You don't realize how empty and strange the valley has become. And the priests have been . . . preoccupied. Now they can barely draw in the power they need to maintain contact with their temples. The Merikits' plan only takes things one step farther. They probably haven't had so good an opportunity since they closed these northern hills to us eighty years ago. How did they do that, Index?"

"My God." The old man stared at her. "With bone-fires."

It could have been more thoroughly done, Jame thought. After all, here she and others were. In her travels through Rathillien she had encountered areas such as the Anarchies so strong with native power that they could literally eat an unwary Kencyr alive. These hills were hardly as voracious, but she doubted that her people would ever live here again. And now that might become true for the rest of the Riverland as well? How ironic if the entire Kencyrath was about to become as roofless and rootless as she herself had been made to feel.

She remembered the dinner party at the Cataracts, those self-satisfied lords so sure that they had every right to dispose of her as they wished. The Kencyrath was theirs, wasn't it? Of course, they could do with it whatever they wanted. But what did they know about the blood feud between the Knorth and the Randir, still festering like an abscess after all these years, or the priesthood malignant in its foul hole, or the secret life of their own women? Nothing was as sure as they blandly assumed, not even their suzerainty over this northern land, perhaps about to be snatched away from them forever.

And these were the people who had told her that she could only belong to the Kencyrath if she played the role which they decreed, living in public and private behind the mask of their conventions.

And she had accepted that, even when she had fled Gothregor, just as she had been prepared to live with Kallystine's handiwork as the mark of her failure.

Jame looked at the mask still in her hand. Seeker, seeker . . . the children's taunt. That damned game of confusion and lost identity.

But the game's object wasn't to find out who you were. Rather, you escaped the eyeless mask by catching someone else and taking her name, which the next seeker might in turn take from you. Well, in trying to play by their rules she had damn near lost herself altogether.

No more of that, Jame thought, letting the mask drop. Thanks to Kindrie, she had her own face back again, and by God she was going to wear it.

"It could really happen," Index was saying. "We could really lose the Riverland. Sweet Trinity, what a catastrophe!"

"Why?" Jame asked.

They all turned to stare at her.

"I mean," she said slowly, thinking it out, "we've tried to make it home by ignoring its true nature, by . . . masking it, as it were. But it's always been a sort of trap, hasn't it? We can't support ourselves here, so we have to hire out our people as mercenaries—prostitute them, almost. Then too, it keeps the nine major houses preoccupied with the High Council's idiotic political games while isolated minor families near the Barrier guard against Perimal Darkling alone. If you look at it that way, life in the Riverland is perverting everything that makes us what we are, or should be."

Index snorted. "You sound like crazy old Cattila, always harping on how we're failing our trust, as if that damned god of ours hadn't failed us first."

"Does that change our responsibility? Why is it that no one can keep in mind what we Kencyr are supposed to be doing?"

"Perhaps," said Ashe, "because none of us . . . are as close to it . . . as you are, . . . nemesis."

"You might also consider this," said Kirien tartly: "To lose the Riverland now would tear the Kencyrath apart. I admire your brother. He's a far better man than we deserve, and the only one who could have held us together so far. But not in the face of this. Besides, remember that success for the Merikit tonight means the immolation of Mount Alban. Are you now in favor of that?"

Jame stared back at their suddenly hostile faces, dismayed. They were seeing her unmasked, the outsider, the potential destroyer. And so, perhaps, she might be. All the weaknesses which she kept uncovering among her people, all the secrets—for a moment, the whole Kencyrath seemed to lie in her gloved grasp, flawed and fragile.

Some things need to be broken . . . .

But it was Brier Iron-thorn's hand which she actually gripped, or rather which gripped her with a mute desperation that threatened to break her bones. She owed it to Brier, and Marc, and yes, even Tori, not to do anything stupid.

I will think first, and take responsibility afterward, she told herself, trying to ease her fingers in Brier's grip. I will, I will, I will.

Outside, there was a muffled whoof and a flare of blue light, then another and another. The moment's startled silence after the first broke with a babble of urgent voices, Sonny's rising above the others.

"What is it?" Jame demanded, then, getting no answer, "Scrollswoman, describe!"

"Spontaneous, sequential ignition of torches," Kirien reported, obedient to her training. "Cyanic flames and smoke, indicative of unknown properties. Conclusion . . . . Damn. Ready or not, here we go."

Index crowed with excitement. Whatever the outcome, he would have his treat after all. "The elders are ordering Sonny and the Challenger to get into the square before it closes. Green-britches looks ready to shit in 'em. Sonny is arguing. He's stripping naked. He's picked up a lump of charcoal . . . no, he's dropped it. Got his fingers singed, the idiot. Talk about the Burnt Man's disapproval! Tungit is pointing . . . ."

The three scholars watched with deep interest.

"What? What?"

Index cleared his throat. "It . . . er . . . has to do with those missing right hand braids."

The old fool. Whose innocence did he think he was protecting, anyway?

"D'you mean," said Jame, "that he's more impressive with his pants on?"

A shriek of laughter answered her. The ragged boy leaped up from beneath the window where he had lain eavesdropping and shouted to the big Merikit.

"Damn," said Kirien again. "D'you suppose that brat knows Kens?"

In answer, the smithy door crashed open. Sonny stood on the threshold, a naked, black hulk against the courtyard's glare. His head turned rapidly, searching. Before, a masked female had dared first to hurt him—him, the Earth Wife's Favorite—and now this . . . !

Only one mask was in sight. He lunged at Kirien.

Ashe stepped in front of the young scrollswoman. The Merikit elders had taken the singer's iron-shod staff, so she met the big man's charge with a water-flowing move that sent him careening into a dark, back corner. From the complicated crash which followed, he had blundered into the smithy's scrap heap. Yells of rage mingled with the clatter of rusty iron and the rip of rotten bellows. Any moment, though, he would extricate himself.

"You're the nemesis," Index shouted at Jame from across the room. "Do something!"

Jame growled. She would at least have liked the freedom to maneuver, but Brier still clung to her hand, so far into the weirding that only wisps of luminous mist came from her moving lips. How could Jame betray the Kendar's trust or, for that matter, break her grip?

Sonny emerged from the shadows and stumbled toward the front corner where Ashe stood guard before Kirien. The singer spoke a word in Merikit and pointed at Jame.

Damn all haunts anyway, teeth and toenails.

Jame pinched the nerve in Brier's elbow. The Kendar's grasp involuntarily loosened as her fingers went numb. Her unheard voice faltered. Jame pulled free and scooped up Kindrie's limp hand. Brier's grip clamped like a vice on the Shanir's thin wrist, with an audible crunch of bones. She began again soundlessly to call "K-north, K-north," but now sweat shone on her dark brow and weirding poured from her lips with each strong exhalation.

Sweet Trinity, thought Jame, recoiling. What have I done now?

No time, though, for second thoughts: Here came Sonny with a roar. He hadn't learned from Ashe's water-flowing move; possibly, he hadn't seen what had sent him flying into a far corner and now into a wall. Jame was out the door before the crash.

A row of torches burned blue down the northeast side of the square. Their pale, glowing smoke, drifting inward, filled the enclosed space like a box, from the bottom up. Blossoms of flame seen through the haze marked the progression of fire from torch to torch down the southeast side. Inside this closing perimeter stood the elders' indistinct figures. Their anxious voices sounded as thin and distant as Brier's in the weirding.

Hurry, they must be calling. Hurry, hurry!

Jame had paused for a moment to stare. Behind her, she heard big, bare feet slap on stone. The Merikit's arms swept over her head, snagging off her cap, as she ducked and kicked backward, as it were, at the bone of contention, connecting. Free, she bolted toward the court's eastern gate. If she left Kithorn, the outer circle would at least be broken. If Sonny followed, the rites might fail without him and Mount Alban be saved by default.

The ruddy light from above mixed with the blue glower of the torches to cast violet highlights on Kithorn's shattered timbers, shading to deep purple—a glowing world except in the velvet shadows under the gatehouse where indistinct shapes waited. Some rose at her approach to stand hunch-shouldered in the gloom. Others only gained knees and elbows, their feet and hands having long since fallen off. Blackened skin cracked with their movement. Red fissures opened in seams of blood and fire. From their huddled mass came a long, questioning sigh:

"Whaaaaa . . . ?"

Jame stopped. A breeze under the gatehouse brought to her the stench of burnt flesh and its taste on her lips in charred flecks.

"Thaaaaa . . . " breathed the Burning Ones, disappointed, settling back down outside the circle, like hounds at bay, to await their master.

A shuffling sound behind her and a furious curse. Here came Sonny, hopping on one foot as he pulled his red britches back on. Made him feel vulnerable, had she? Good. Oh, but what a fool, to be playing such games before such an audience . . . if he was aware of it. Ancestors knew, he was close enough now for the black specks of that terrible conflagration to freckle his fair-skinned face.

A thought struck her: Maybe he was one of those people who simply couldn't see certain things. She had met a few in Tai-tastigon, oblivious to its teeming supernatural community and contemptuous of their neighbors' belief in "such nonsense." If so, he literally couldn't see the reality behind the ceremony he was being compelled to perform.

Still, he wasn't the real problem. The ways north and east blocked, Jame veered southward along the square's southeast side, to gain time, to think.

The breeze followed her. Overhead, glowing clouds began slowly to wheel as though around the axis of the now invisible well. Blue smoke swelled up within the enclosure to met them, undisturbed by the wind except at the edges, where a few wisps were teased loose. One of these blew in Jame's face, and her senses lurched.

She was following the path which the elders had taken earlier, circling sunwise to close the square. Her feet fell with the remembered beat of theirs, the memory of their bells ring-ching-chinging in her mind—no, millennia of feet, and bells, and power called up from the earth, down from the sky. The Merikit clustered at the south corner stared but let her pass: they would as soon have stopped their own elders, treading the sun's path. It seemed to Jame that she was pursuing suns, one after another of them born in bursts of blue flame, one for each day of the summer to come.

Then she had out-paced them and was slowing, shaking her head to clear it. The wind seemed to keen in one ear and out the other. No. That whistling came from her right, inside the square, and the wind swerved inward at the west corner to answer it. What had she been doing, and where bound? In a damned circle, back to where she had started with nothing gained, nothing changed . . . .

But it had.

Ahead lay the smithy, with light streaming out of it. Index burst out the door, pulling Kirien with him. Jorin wobbled on their heels. A shape of darkness followed—Ashe, backing out. After her, billowing out the door, came weirding.

Jame stopped short. "My God," she said to the Challenger, who had just come up beside her. "Now what?"

In answer, the Merikit clapped the ivy crown on her head and shoved her between the torches, into the blue smoke of the square.

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