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VII

Jame closed the door behind her quickly, before Jorin could dash through it. Power still sang in her blood, another berserker flare successfully controlled. This could get to be a habit.

Yes: a dangerous one. If each use of her claws brought her closer to the Third Face of God, wouldn't this too? On the other hand, what she had just done to Graykin also savored of the use to which such talents were put under shadow's eaves. It was damnable, to be caught balancing between her Shanir blood and the darkling training to which the Master had subjected it—and perhaps double damned in that she understood what had been done to her.

You may still be innocent, the Arrin-ken Immalai had said, but not ignorant. If you do eventually fall, it will be as the Master fell, knowing the evil you do, welcoming it. The abuse of power will push you in that direction. On the other hand, its mere use may drive you the other way, toward our god. That is what it means to be a Shanir, to walk the knife's edge.

"But I don't want to fall either way!" she had cried, and that rich, ironic voice had answered her, chuckling deep in her mind:

Which one of us does? For us, alas, good is no less terrible than evil.

No less terrible. What a choice.

And how seductive power was. It was her birthright, no less than Ganth's tangled legacy and no easier to deny. But how long could she master it before, like wine, it mastered her? Now, there would be a terrible intoxication indeed. It had already made her hasty and cruel. What choice, though, had Graykin given her?

Trust honor, Immalai had said.

Yes. For her, balanced on the knife's edge, honor was more than life, its loss infinitely worse than death. And part of honor was taking responsibility for one's actions and choices, over and over, as long as one acted or chose. If she had to accept Gray as her servant, he must learn to understand that.

Huh. Knorth or Caineron, honor should be the same: Kencyr. But that didn't suit Caldane's ambition. Honor restricted his power. He would reshape it, if he could, to mean unquestioning obedience from his servants, while he used their services to keep his own hands clean. Honor's Paradox suggested that, ultimately, no one was responsible for anything. It was the knife's edge which Caldane would make all his people walk, if he could, hoping that when they fell (as they must, if only he pushed hard enough) this uncomfortable world would be remade in his image.

Come to think of it, that was exactly what Gerridon had done.

And there were other Kencyr, today, who winced at the choices which honor demanded, who would abjure all responsibility if they could.

"A lady's honor is obedience," the sewing instructress had so vehemently claimed. Don't ask questions. Don't even speak. Just obey.

Of course, that young teacher was very low in the Women's World, down where secrecy starved the mind as a seeker's mask did the senses. How clever of the Matriarchs to realize that the most may be written on the blankest slate. To what degree, though, did they carry obedience to their lords?

Jame shivered, the elation of the flare draining away. The Three Faced God had apparently abandoned his people. The great mission which he had given them seemed more impossible year by year. The Arrin-ken had left. The women and Shanir were powerless, the priests treacherous, the lords merciless, and her brother was taking advice from a dead mad-man. What was left except honor—and how many secret fingers there were, picking at that last knot which held the Kencyrath together.

She had been going down the corridor glancing into each southward facing room as she passed. Outside a window, finally, was the silhouette of the Director's stair.

For the first time, Jame saw how jury-rigged it was. The steps descended in a tight spiral of narrow treads and uneven risers, precariously braced against the outer wall, held together by a pine trunk newel. Branch stumps were their main supports. Whose work was this, anyway—that gabble of ancient scholars? If Brier had come this way, though, it ought at least to support Jame. She stepped out onto it, and clutched the rough barked newel as a tread tilted under her weight.

Gingerly, she descended several feet, then bent to peer into the room below. Sunset lay in fading rose rhomboids on the floor by the windows, roughed by mounds of dust. Farther in, light edged the broken lines of furniture. All the tables but one had collapsed. The floor was rotting too. Jame's foot sank into it, unnervingly, as she stepped down from the window ledge. Dust billowed up. One loud noise, she thought, choking back a sneeze, and she would find herself suddenly one story down. One soft curse might get her there even faster.

She had started quietly across the floor, watching for soft spots, unslinging the banner as she went, when she realized that she wasn't alone.

A dark shape sat on the far side of the table, slumped forward over it.

Brenwyr.

When Jame had decided to leave Aerulan in safe hands, the Iron Matriarch had come immediately to mind. This room, patently, was far from safe, Brenwyr even less so. Still, Jame trusted her impulse. She hung the banner on the wall behind the Brandan's chair and retreated on noiseless feet.

The window sill crumbled under her weight.

"Aerulan!" exclaimed Brenwyr's voice behind her.

The Matriarch had started upright at the crash, staring blindly before her. Behind, in the shadows, stood Aerulan.

It's only the banner, Jame told herself; but then she saw Aerulan's hand resting on Brenwyr's shoulder and met the dead girl's smiling, silver eyes.

Out the window, down the stair, run away, run . . . .

. . . until a step turned underfoot, and Jame found herself again clutching the shaggy newel, all nails out, staring at a drop below her of several hundred feet.

A trick of the light, she told herself, thinking of the room above. Then, Sweet Trinity, what have I done now?

Whatever it had been, though, for good or ill, Aerulan was no longer her responsibility.

But Brier Iron-thorn still was.

The plain spread out below her, utterly flat to the southern horizon. Across the western prospect, half obscured by Mount Alban's bulk, stretched a range of purple clouds like distant mountains, veined with fire as the sun sank behind it. Red sand muted to rose and coral. Dusk flooded the desert land, beautiful, unearthly . . . lifeless? Had Rue been mistaken, or perhaps had Brier changed her mind? Somehow, Jame didn't think so.

The climb down seemed endless, one newel-trunk succeeding another, a denuded forest laid end to end. At first, the stair descended past the wooden walls of the upper keep. Below that, as Kirien had guessed, was weirding mist where the cliff-face should have been. yet the cliff hardly seemed absent, so exactly had the weirding taken its form. Sculpted cloud gave the illusion of rock grain and feathery fern. Windows opened into vanished rooms, furnished with fog, waiting for ghosts, all aglow with pale weirding light.

The stair ended in a rope ladder dangling some nine feet short of the ground. Jame hesitated, then dropped. She would have trouble getting back without help, but then she didn't intend to return alone. Her own falling weight barely disturbed the sand crust. Beside her feet, though, were the prints of someone much larger and heavier, tiger tread to her hunting ounce. Ah.

Down the mist flank of a Mount Alban that wasn't there, out free of its phantom western side . . . .

Voices?

Jame paused, listening. The cadence of human speech, at least, if not words, threading in and out of the desert silence. The weirding-strom stretched obliquely back from Mount Alban's northwest corner, a billowing tidal wave held restlessly in check. The cliff's ghost shape strained forward out of it like a figurehead . . . anchored? Were there ruins here that could snag them as the wolvers' keep had in the Grimly Holt? She had heard of the deserted cities of the Wastes, constantly appearing and disappearing at the whim of wind and sand. If so, it must be back under the weirding mass. Was Index's herb shed still there too, trolling on its long line, catching . . . what, or whom?

A hum rose again as if of voices, faded, was gone.

It was no business of hers, Jame thought, turning away. She couldn't do anything about it anyway, while the shed remained weird-bound and unreachable.

Brier's tracks led due west, when Jame could find them. At first there were none except where the Kendar had walked across one of the glittering mineral deposits that laced the plain, leaving a trail of powdered crystal. She couldn't be far ahead—walking, with not that much of a head start—but Jame couldn't see her.

Sink-sand? Surely no Southron would accidentally blunder into that, not that Jame herself knew what it looked like on the surface, much less what other traps the Wastes might set.

Underfoot now, the sand crust had developed corrugations like frozen ripples. It was softer too, Brier's footprints showing clearly. The ridges got bigger, their purple shadows striping the plain. Soon she could feel the pull in her muscles as she climbed them. Dunes? How could she have missed seeing these from the ladder, when everything below had looked so flat?

Then, over the crest of one, suddenly, she found Brier Iron-thorn.

The Kendar knelt, sunset light threading her dark auburn hair with fire. White grains shifted through the fingers of her raised, clenched fist, spilling back into the desert.

"Sand," she said. "Nothing but sand."

Jame stopped on the crest, feeling awkward. "Did you expect something else?" she asked, diffident.

"Expect? No. Hope . . . for what? This isn't even the right place."

"What place?"

"Maybe the sink-trap, where she died; maybe at the stone boat, where she returned."

"Who?"

For a long moment, Brier was silent, staring blindly at the far horizon. The purple clouds were closer, larger. The sun, shifting down behind them, traced their edges with gold, while inside tarnished silver lights flickered and distant thunder rumbled. A breath of wind rustled the raw silk of the Kendar's hair. Then, in a low voice, as if talking to herself, she said:

"They had escaped from the dungeons of Urakarn and were fleeing across the Dry Salt Sea. Rose stumbled into sink-sand. He tried to hold onto her, but Karnid torture had half-crippled his hands. All that long, terrible day, staggering northward, afraid to stop for fear of pursuit, he kept thinking that she was somehow still alive down there, under the sand. At dusk, they found the petrified remains of a boat and collapsed into it. In the night, feverish, he thought he saw the water return . . . all that flat sand plain changing back to the sea it had been, and the stone boat afloat on it. Under the surface, he saw Rose and reached down to her. She took his hand, pulled it down into the stinging salt water, pulled the whole boat across the sea . . . in a dream, he thought, born of fever; but in the morning there they were safe on the northern shore, with nothing behind them but sand . . . .

"Sand," she repeated, again regarding the grains which trickled through her fingers.

"Torisen told you that story, didn't he?" When? Jame wanted to ask. Why? Instead, she heard herself say, "How did he look?"

"Dazed. Sick. The Karnids and infection had almost cost him his hands; but he said he couldn't sleep until he had told me how my mother died."

For her mother's sake, Tori had said, accepting Brier's bond.

Jame had wondered what her brother had been like at her age. Now she had a sudden, vivid image of him, young and haggard, wondering if Rose Iron-thorn's impassive, red-haired child understood the news he had brought, not guessing that she would never forget a word of it.

"I suppose he thought you had a right to know."

"That's what he said."

Brier let the remaining sand fall and stood up. The quickening wind lifted her hair at the temples in glowing, short-pinioned wings. Thunder growled closer.

"Storm's coming, lady," she said. "Time to be getting back."

The Kendar had always meant to return, Jame thought, humbled, as she turned to follow. Not for Rose Iron-thorn's daughter, the self-destructive, almost petulant gesture which Jame herself had made all too often. Brier was tougher than that, too professional simply to give up. Likewise, apologies meant nothing to her. If Jame's presence here didn't convey her regret, words wouldn't help. Whether the gesture itself had, she couldn't tell.

Strange. Instead of diminishing, the dunes were growing bigger and softer the farther east they went. All Jame could see now from their troughs was the darkening sky above. On the crests, a rising wind had begun to whip sand from rise to rise. It stung her face as she glanced back. The storm-rack rolled close on their heels, black against the sky's deepening blue, blotting out the stars. Bolts of searing white leaped between it and the ground. Ahead, the faint glow of the weirding cliff seemed farther away than ever.

At the foot of a slope Jame tripped over a stone . . . no, over the top of a shattered wall, scoured clean by the swooping wind. All around, masonry fragments jutted out of the sand like so many decayed teeth. If these were the ruins on which Mount Alban had snagged, the on-coming storm must have dislodged it. If so, not only did it seem farther away, it was.

"Run," said Brier.

Jame tried. The dunes were mountainous now, though, and her feet sank into them to the ankles. For all her weight, Brier was well ahead of her, travelling fast.

Be damned if I'll call for help, Jame thought, struggling to catch up. Be damned . . . .

Salt stung her eyes like sea spray. Across her shoulders, her jacket felt heavy and damp with sweat. She floundered up the highest range of drifts yet and saw the weirding beyond like a glowing cliff against which the dune was poised to break. High above glowed the lights of the scrollsmen's keep. Below, the rope ladder swung wildly in the wind. Brier had almost reached it.

"Don't stop!" she called back sharply.

But Jame already had, panting. The slanted edge of the storm had overtaken her to the north. As it closed with the weirding, lightning leaped between them, flash on booming flash. The shock rolled southward toward the keep. In the flickering glare, the far end of the ridge on which she stood seemed to be cresting like a wave and crashing down in salt white.

"Move!" shouted Brier.

Jame took an almost involuntary step forward, and sank up to her knees. She could feel sand melting away under her. Up to her thighs, her waist . . . .

"Brier . . . ." she heard herself cry, in a voice so thin with fear that she scarcely recognized it. Up to her chest . . . .

. . . and down, mouth and eyes closed barely in time, sand pressing in on them, stopping ears suddenly against the thunder's boom. Her up-thrown hands writhed free for a moment—Here I am, here . . . .—then the earth gripped them. Squeezed, the breath trapped burning in her lungs as she was in this sandy grave, buried alive . . . . How deep did Rose sink? How long did she live?

Got you now, thief, Ragga's voice seemed to grate in her mind.

But the sand was changing. Her frantic hands moved again, as if through mud, then water. Eyes opened, shut again hastily against the saline sting. Then suddenly she was tumbling forward in darkness, over and over, hammered by a muted roar. No air. Which way was up? Drowning . . . .

Cold hands seized her, shoved her . . . downward, she thought, and struggled feebly. Cold words bubbled in her ear: Don't, you fool. For your brother's sake . . . .

The roar burst full-throated around her. Air, thick with salt spray; waves, throwing her up against the glowing cliff. Underwater again, then shoved back to the surface where a strong hand grabbed her by the collar and jerked her upward. Her fingers closed on shaggy wood. She clung, gasping, still in Brier's powerful grasp. On the Director's fragile stair, in the tumultuous darkness, they listened to the boom and crash below them of the returning salt sea.

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