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V

At first, Jame thought that she would die. Acrid smoke burned in her eyes, and throat, and lungs, inhaled all the more deeply with each racking attempt to cough it out. Kencyr might not poison easily, but they could certainly choke.

Bit by bit, however, breathing became easier. At last she was able to wipe her streaming eyes on a sleeve and look up.

Kithorn was gone.

Sacred space stretched out before her to horizons lost in a hazy distance, pale blue below, shading upward through lavender to mauve. Above, angry red clouds wheeled in a slow vortex, centered over the well. The latter's rim of dull green serpentine loomed in the middle of that interminable plain like a volcano's mouth, half-obscured by drifting smoke. A low, continual rumble came out of it, felt more than heard. The mottled veins of the marble rim extended into cracks and some of these into quake fissures. So far, however, the latter appeared to have been stopped by a network of dark lines lying across the granite-white plain. Ah. Those must the god-sigils which she had watched the shaman-elders draw in the square, the power of the Four still containing that of the River Snake's mouth.

While the sigil lines near the well looked spidery with distance, those close at hand lay in bold strokes across the plain. Jame had nearly fallen on top of one a good twelve feet wide . . . or would she have fallen into it? It was so impossibly black. When she tried to touch it, her hand disappeared as though into sunless water, feeling nothing.

A harsh sound came from the left. At a distance, beyond two more inky bands, the Favorite doubled over as racked with coughing as she had been a moment ago. He must have plunged into the square just before it closed, driven by his blind rage exactly where he had no wish to go. Jame reached up to remove the ivy crown. Whatever Sonny's role, she needn't play the one which the Challenger had thrust onto her . . . .

"BLOOP," said something behind her.

The basin, like the square, had grown. So had its inmate. A flat, fishy eye the size of a buckler gazed down at her dubiously. The huge head in which it was set seemed otherwise to be mostly mouth and whiskers. Four of the latter rasped on the basin's edge as the creature chinned itself there. Two more extended from its upper lip like downed spars, one passing almost over her head. The thick, wide lips parted. Out of them came a small, dreamy voice.

"There was a maid," it said. "Oh, so beautiful, so proud."

Jame stared. She almost thought that she knew that voice, sleepily gloating over its new secret.

"No chief's son would do for her, oh no. When the earth shook, what must she needs try but to seduce the River Snake itself."

The monster's maw gaped wider and wider. Deep inside that pink-ribbed gullet nestled something that glimmered like a viscid pearl. Jame had heard that some catfish carried fertilized eggs in their mouths to hatch them, but this "egg" had shadowy markings under its mucous sheath—no, features, as if under a caul: a face, which Jame knew only too well, despite never having seen it before without at least a tracery mask.

"M'lady? Kallystine?"

This was moderately strange, Jame thought, but perhaps no more so than Loogan stuck in Gorgo's craw. Did aquatic relationships always end in eat-or-be-eaten? So she asked again, only half in jest, "Did this fish swallow you, or are you wearing it?"

"Poor maid," said the voice, suddenly dolorous. "Poor, pretty maid. The Snake ate her all-l-l-l up."

The Caineron device was a serpent devouring its young, but that couldn't be what Kallystine was talking about, could it? Despite the similarities (pride, ambition—downfall?), this was someone else's story.

"Who are you?" Jame demanded, leaning into the creature's mouth, hands between teeth which, on a fish of normal size, would have been small. "What are you?"

A smile made the face under the membrane shift and flow, like a changeling fetus in its embryonic sack.

"The Eaten One," it said, in a different voice, in Merikit.

"I understood that!"—but then why shouldn't she? In this space sacred to gods not her own, ancestors only knew what might happen. Keep to essentials. "Why are you here?"

"To find a hero to feed the Snake to save the world."

"Oh, that's helpful. 'To feed' in what sense?"

"Pretty maid, guess."

That did it. What was this but another game of seeker's mask, one victim substituted for another? But when she tried to tear off the ivy crown, its leaves were so entangled in her hair that it might have sunk rootlets into her skull. Perhaps it had. No wonder the Challenger had been loath to put on the damn thing. Now, short of scalping herself, she was stuck with it—and with the victory which it implied?

Not if Sonny could help it. He had recovered from his coughing fit and was groping toward her, drawn by the sound of her voice. Whatever blindness had prevented him from seeing the Burning Ones now kept the blue smoke in his eyes. He came to a sigil stroke and stepped into it—except that for him it was still only a charcoal line drawn on the flagstones. On he came, stumbling across the abyss.

". . . such very, very good friends . . . " murmured Kallystine's silken voice.

Huge pectoral fins surged out of the water, hooked on the basin's rim, and pulled. The leviathan rose over Jame like a ship's prow about to dash itself on rocks, then crashed down. She found herself flat on her back, her head over the sigil's void, surprised not to be smashed flat. The darkened sky was vaulted with ribs, from which hung an improbable moon with Kallystine's distorted face.

". . . eat you all-l-l-l up," it crooned.

A rumble swallowed her voice. It came from behind, approaching fast, accompanied by a rending crack. Jame clutched the monster's chin whiskers for support as the stones beneath her back split and fell away. Looking down over her shoulder, she saw a seam of glowing red open deep in the darkness below. Then a rising wave of heat took away her breath.

"Let . . . me . . . up!" she gasped. "Dammit, it's . . . not . . . your turn!"

The moon-face shifted, pouting, and the great fish surged backward into the basin, hauling Jame with it and displacing a wave which almost swept her away. The vast mouth snapped shut: WHOMP. Steaming water seethed around it, red-lit from beneath. Looking behind her, Jame saw that a quake fissure had breached the sigil, running from the distant well-mouth almost up to the basin. The ground shook again.

"How do we stop this?" she demanded.

A sulky, Merikit voice answered from within. "I told you: feed the Snake."

"Ugh," said Jame. "There's got to be another way. Where can I find the Earth Wife?"

"In her lodge. Where else?"

"In Peshtar?"

"Dumb, dumb, dumb."

"Listen, chowder-head: you're the one in boiling water."

Or perhaps they both were. Here came Sonny, groping toward them through the steam. Damnation. Could he walk straight over fissures too?

The thick catfish lips parted slightly, the voice inside grumbling: "Someone has to feed that damn Snake. Here, boy, here, here!"

"Oh, go stew," said Jame, disgusted, then turned and fled.

On reflection, she thought she knew where to go, if not exactly how to get there.

The enormous sigils sprawling across this plain and complicating her route were made up of many lines, some connected, others not. Whatever their other properties, they clearly served as a series of entrenchments. The quake fissures must thus break through each in turn in order to breach the square, as one had already so nearly done in the western corner by the basin. Others had broken lines closer to the plain's well-mouth center and spewed into them the Serpent's hot blood. Rising heat met the cool breath of the sigils in smoke and stream, turning the expanse into the semblance of a burning battlefield—which, in fact, it was. The prospects south and west appeared only intermittently through a drifting haze. North and east had disappeared altogether.

Of course, it was some consolation that Sonny couldn't see anything at all; but then neither was he hindered by the sigil lines nor, much, by the fissures, which must be no more than cracks in the real courtyard. He was also stumbling around in an area only some fifty feet square, while the plain which Jame had seen before this last tremor had looked as if it would take days to cross, or months, or a life-time.

However, she'd had some experience in Tai-tastigon and the Anarchies with the quirks of distorted space, including their deceptive distances.

What she wanted lay to the east. She set off as nearly as she could in that direction, guided by her memory of the sigils' shapes and by the vortex flow of the clouds above, hoping for the best.

It was hard, hot going. A dozen fissures now laced the plain, reaching ahead through the branches of the sigil strokes which they had overwhelmed. Veils of smoke and wavering heat rose from the red fires in their depths. If they did indeed break open the square, would sacred space itself be breached? A cataclysmic thing, certainly. Perhaps this plain was Rathillien's soul-scape. In that case, events here might reverberate across an entire world.

She skirted yet another sigil line, trying to remember if one side or the other led to a dead-end. Another damn maze. Sometimes, her whole life seemed like one huge labyrinth whose key kept changing.

It was getting very warm. Oh, for a breath of wind.

One came, as if in answer to her wish, fretted with black feathers. Hundreds of these, the spoils of entire flocks, had been tied to the hairy Merikit. More fluttered past, many of them broken. She turned her face into the fitful breeze and followed it.

Ahead loomed a skeletal structure: the wicker cage, like the basin, grown huge. Loose feathers swirled inside it, vast, disorganized wings flailing at the bars. In their midst, an indistinct shape plummeted toward the earth . . . .

No. Jame's heart had leaped, anticipating the smash of flesh to bloody ruin on stone. Her nerves still flinched at the expected impact, but the figure seemed to fall on and on, as though through infinite space, without ever reaching the ground.

"Who are you?" she demanded.

A voice answered inside the cage, speaking a sing-song language which she had never heard before and yet, somehow, understood. "There was an old man," it said, "oh, so clever, so ambitious that he claimed to be a god. To prove it, his followers threw him from a high tower. Now he falls, forever and ever. He helped you at Gothregor, little girl. Help him now!"

Jame stared, remembering that storm of black wings above the old keep's broken roof at Gothregor. "Tishooo? Old Man, you nearly got me killed! What do you want?"

"Out, out, OUT!" Frenzied feathers beat against the bars, broke, and hurled their fragments forward again. "Oh, those foolish priests, to have whistled the wind into this cage when only he can blow away the Serpent's Breath! Oh, let him out of . . . HIC!"

The half-obscured figure began to rise, frantic, hiccuping. Hands thrust through the feathers to clutch at the bars, golden rings half-embedded in rolls of fat.

"No, no, NO!" babbled a different voice, in Kens. "Whoever you are—HIC!—out there, open that door and I'll have the living hide off of you!"

What door?

Going back a step, Jame saw a hinged panel on top of the cage, secured by a latch. From the latter, a string hung down outside the cage, swaying in an errant breeze. She caught it.

The plump hands tried to shake the bars, ineffectually since by now the other's heels had risen well above his head. "Answer me! Damn—HIC!—you, don't you know who I am?"

"Yes," said Jame, and pulled the string.

The trap door fell open. A riot of wind-born feathers streamed joyously out of the cage, in its midst a pudgy figure tumbling up into the sky. The angry red clouds swallowed them all. Caldane's wail, trailing after, faded into the distance.

"Damn," said Jame.

The overcast showed no sign of dispersing. So much for the Old Man's boast to blow away the Serpent's weirding breath and so, incidentally, to send Mount Alban home.

Time to move on, quickly, before M'lord's clamor brought Sonny down on her again.

More weaving through the maze, more fissures like ruinous, blind fingers groping outward. Finally, here was what she sought: the house of clay slabs.

At first, it seemed as small as when the shaman-elder had built it in the square's eastern corner, no more than a model. As Jame approached, however, it grew. The walls which had appeared so low were half sunken into the ground and lined by imu faces whose mouths gaped wide enough to swallow her whole. Serpentine forms rioted over the lintel and down the posts. For days, traveling northward up the Riverland, she had caught glimpses of that door standing farther and farther ajar. Now it loomed over her as though over the smallest of children, gaping wide open into darkness.

"E-earth Wife?" she called, flinching at the loudness of her own voice.

An earthy, musky smell flowed out into her face, as if of some animal's lair but massively, indefinably, female. If only Marc were here, as he had been at the lodge in Peshtar. Him, at least, the Earth Wife had liked.

"Mother Ragga?"

A faint voice answered, sounding incredulous: "L-lady?"

Jame frowned. Graykin? What in Perimal's name was he doing here? Eh, no helping it now: She entered.

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Framed