The top floor of Mount Alban's upper keep was an observation deck, open on all sides except for a low wall and the arches which supported the roof. Some two dozen scrollsmen and singers milled excitedly about on it, trying to see something—anything—above the sea of glowing mist which stretched featureless to the horizon under a clouded night sky with a hint of dawn to the east. Every few minutes, someone would cry, "Look!" and there would be a stampede from one side of the tower to the other, back and forth, back and forth.
If this really were a boat, Jame thought, standing well clear, it would long since have capsized.
As the old man had predicted, the new stair had kept them safe through the layer of weirding, which had continued to rise after them sending tendrils of mist before it to lace walls and beams, floors and ceilings. Below, all must now be like the lower hall, ghost-like, its reality left somewhere behind.
Her new acquaintance, Jame discovered, was the mysterious and much sought after Index, his nickname quickly explained as the others crowded around him demanding the location of such diverse information as the history of the late Hathiri empire and the average rate of arboreal drift. Many sources, inconveniently, had gone south for the winter; others were on shelves below in the library. Index had little respect for the latter. Memory, not writing, was the true scholar's way, the title of "scrollsman" notwithstanding. Like most traditional Kencyr, he had probably never learned how to read.
Jame stood beside the southwest corner stairwell, looking warily for the Jaran Heir, ready if necessary to bolt below to the infirmary where she had left Kindrie. What she saw were Highborn and Kendar so intermixed that it was hard to tell which was which. All dressed in scholars' robes belted over skirts or trousers, worn impartially by men and women. The woolen robes themselves varied in color but not in cut, each having many deep pockets inside and out in which might be stored memoranda or lunch. Some were brightly dyed and elaborately embroidered around collars and cuffs—more a singer's flourish, apparently, than an indication of wealth or race. The singers in general seemed a more flamboyant, mischievous lot. Jame noted that it was two of them, stationed on opposite sides of the tower, whose turn-about cries of "Look!" were making their usually sedate, quite elderly colleagues run back and forth like over-excited children.
Not so the Director, however, who stood as solid as a mountain peak in the center of the deck while his people ebbed and flowed around him, occasionally bouncing off. He, without a doubt, was Kendar, and probably a former randon officer as well, judging by the savage scars about his face. Many took the scrollsman's robe when their fighting days were done. But that tall scholar meekly accepting orders from him looked very like a Highborn. Interesting.
More interesting still was the only other person on the deck under seventy—a young woman, Jame thought, although that cropped hair and profile might as easily belong to a handsome boy. Moreover, he (or she) wore no mask. When Jame had arrived on Index's heels, the other youth had given her a quick, startled look, then turned politely away when Jame had retreated into such shadows as she could find. However, curiosity prevailed.
"Excuse me," she said tentatively, approaching. "Could you tell me what's going on?"
The other turned and smiled. Yes, definitely a woman, a few years older than Jame herself. "Where shall I start? To begin with, we're successfully launched on the crest of a weirdingstrom . . . ."
"How can you tell?"
"Observation and deduction." With a sweep of her arm, she indicated the expanse of mist, cloud, and milky night sky. "What do you see—or rather, what don't you?"
Jame surveyed the unmarked cloud-scape dubiously, then said, "Ah. The surrounding peaks of the Snowthorns. Left behind?"
"Yes, presumably. How far we'll go, though, no one is sure, or how long it will take to get there. In the past, individuals have been displaced more or less instantaneously as far as the Cataracts."
"You really think that the whole keep is moving?"
"Oh, not all of it. The hill fort ruins should act as our storm anchor—an advantage we have over individual weird-walkers. From what Index reports, we've already left behind the cliff face and the lower hall, as well as half the living quarters."
"The mist level inside is still rising, like water in the hold."
"Hmmm. That could be a problem if it reaches this high, but I expect it will begin to subside before that. This upper keep should travel the farthest, being the most recently built. We think Mount Alban will come apart like a . . . a puzzle-box, and then back together again as the anchor eventually drags us home from weirding patch to patch when the storm is spent."
Jame reflected that Mount Alban might have an affinity for ruins besides its own, considering how easily the wolvers' keep had snagged it. Perhaps that was how it traveled, from shattered foundation to foundation.
"But what supports us," she wondered out-loud, "if the cliff really has been left behind?"
"The weirding itself, I suppose, and our inner wooden shell. At a guess, we aren't any closer to the ground than when we started. It's all guesswork, though. We've done our research, of course, back to the last really bad storm that changed the course of the Silver for hundreds of miles. The Bashtiri and Hathiri keeps traveled some then, which is one reason why the old empire garrisons were scared out of the Riverland. It seemed likely that the same thing would happen again some day, so we kept that in mind while rebuilding Mount Alban. I gather that the stair to the main hall has come with us. So too has this one."
She gestured over the wall nearest to hand. Looking down, Jame saw an extremely improvised affair clinging precariously to the keep's southern face, disappearing into the mist at the cliff top.
"How far down does it go?"
"Nearly to the ground, with a rope ladder reaching the rest of the way. At the last moment, the Director insisted on the equivalent of a sally port. The point is, though, that no one knows how all this theory will work out in practice. Why, we could even end up stranded in the Southern Wastes. Exciting, isn't it?"
"Very," said Jame wryly.
The scrollswoman had been glancing at her askance. "Pardon me," she said abruptly, "but I have to ask: you are the Highlord's sister, aren't you?"
Jame felt her mouth go dry. Behind her, Index stammered to a halt.
He's overheard, she thought with dismay, but then realized that the old man had simply bogged down in his own material.
"Tansy tea, tansy tea . . . ." he was muttering over and over, as if trying to get himself started again.
" 'Gerridon's knee,' " she said over her shoulder. She didn't remember hearing that particular nonsense couplet, but must have as she dozed on the stair, and probably a lot more beside.
The old man stared at her. "Tansy tea; Gerridon's knee," he repeated, and was off again, only to be interrupted by another cry of "Look!" and another stampede.
"This is hardly the place for a private conversation," said the young woman. "Let's go below."
Jame's impulse was to bolt down the outside stair and keep going. Instead, she descended with the other, feeling trapped.
"What was that about Gerridon's knee?"
"Oh, just something I heard somewhere." She had apparently stumbled onto another secret, but it wasn't hers to spread, at least not until she knew for certain what it meant.
"Index is a bit eccentric, even for a scrollsman. Most of us here have at least two jobs: one manual and one academic. He tends the herb shed and does research on the Merikit. It's been nearly eighty years, though, since the north was closed to us after the Kithorn massacre. A scrollsman without an active field is like a snake without a tail. So Index started collecting facts about facts—where to find them, who knows what, that sort of thing. It's made him invaluable, and powerful. A word of warning: many scholars exchange information on a barter basis. Index may look as if he's answering questions indiscriminately, but he's keeping close track of debts and credits. At the moment, I suspect he owes you one answer at least."
"I'll try not to waste it," said Jame. Lucky for her that this young scrollswoman apparently didn't play the barter game unless, like Index, she was keeping score. Just the same, "Er . . . getting back to what you said before: why should you think that I'm Torisen's sister?"
"You're very much like him. Enough to have given me quite a start when you first came up onto the observation deck. But he's still at Kothifir, as far as I know, whereas Jameth . . . ."
"Jame."
". . . whereas Jame is (or was) at Gothregor. Aunt Trishien tells me that the Women's World has been rattled to the back teeth over your disappearance."
Jame remembered the Jaran Matriarch, serenely greeting her on her dash through the Gothregor basements. That was whom this self-possessed young woman reminded her of.
"Aunt?" she repeated tentatively, thinking, I'm missing something here. Who is this person?
"Great-great-aunt, actually."
She opened a door and gestured Jame into a high vaulted room lined with shelves. On them rested such scraps of scroll and manuscript as the scholars had managed to snatch up in their flight from the Master's House on the night of the Fall. A greater treasure saved, however, had been the memories of the scrollsmen and singers themselves, since each of them had memorized a master text to earn his or her robe. That practice still continued. Many of the scholars forced to remain here last winter were those who hadn't yet found someone to whom to pass on their knowledge.
Jorin began to growl. First through his senses, then through her own, Jame smelled something sickly sweet, something rotting.
At the far end of the room, black against the weirding glow of a window, stood a table and a chair. From them, a dark shape rose stiffly and bowed.
"Lordan . . . ." said a croaking whisper.
The scrollswoman returned the salute. "Singer Ashe."
Jame had backed up against the closed door. She knew that smell now.
The other was staring at her. "Why, what's the matter?"
"She was savaged . . . by a haunt . . . just as I was," said that hoarse voice from the shadows. "But she didn't . . . die of it."
Jame jerked her hand away from her forearm, which bore the scar marks of human teeth. "How did you know that?"
"Haunts know . . . what concerns . . . haunts."
"I'm sorry," said the young woman to Jame. "We've gotten so used to Ashe that it didn't occur to me that she might disturb you."
We're in the room with a talking cadaver, Jame thought, and I'm not supposed to be disturbed?
Perhaps she shouldn't have been, though. Everyone had heard about Singer Ashe, who had helped Torisen escape Caineron's trap at Tentir and then had marched south with him and the Host. An infected haunt bite, taken in the White Hills, had killed her three days before anyone had realized how seriously she had been hurt. If not for that, she surely would have died covering Harn Grip-hard's back at the Cataracts. The battle song she had composed afterward, from the viewpoint of the dead and dying, was something only whispered about in the Women's Halls.
Jame knew all that. Just the same, haunts came from those parts of Rathillien like the Haunted Lands where Perimal Darkling lay just beneath the surface. Their very nature reflected that shadow realm, where animate and inanimate, life and death, obscenely merged. How could you trust anything that tainted?
Then her mind skipped back to something that Ashe had said.
"The singer called you 'Lordan,' " she said, turning to the young woman. "But isn't that what they call the heir of a house?"
"That's right," said the other, smiling. "I haven't introduced myself, have I? My name is Kirien."