It took Jame's eyes a moment to adjust to the gloom.
Opposite the door, a fireplace smoked and flared, throwing a fan of uncertain light on the low beams and the sunken floor. Spread out on the latter was the earth map of Rathillien, composed of materials taken from the corresponding parts of that world—hills of rock, fertile plains of black soil, sandy wastes, river and sea beds of stone and coral. With her ear pressed to any of these features, the Earth Wife could hear what was happening far away, as she had the previous winter when Marc had consulted her about events in the Riverland.
The map looked much larger to Jame than it had that day in Peshtar, almost as though she might walk into it here at Kithorn and emerge wherever else on Rathillien she chose. Well, stranger things had happened. But it also looked less stable than it had then, with sections rawly altered—the weirdingstrom's work, perhaps, or the tremors' that had accompanied it.
"Lady!" said Graykin's voice again, almost whining.
A misshapen figure crouched to one side of the hearth, out of the fire's light.
Jame stepped down to the dirt floor and almost lost her balance. At the eastern edge of the map, sink-sand was pouring down as though through a hole in the floor. A nice pit-fall for the unwary, she thought. Side-stepping it, she began to circle a room which seemed to have no walls at all, only space opening out to the rim of night, crowded with motionless, watching shapes black against a scattering of stars.
Don't look at them, don't look . . . .
Two pairs of eyes, not one, waited for her by the hearth; not a single shape but two, clinging to each other. She indeed knew that thin, sharp face, although she had never seen it before with so long a nose.
"Why, Graykin," she said, staring. "Where did you get that muzzle, or that tail?"
The Southron showed sharp, white teeth in a snarl. "Don't ask!"
The thin girl with her arms around his neck hugged him tightly, as one would a trusted hound. Her eyes gleamed with a more feral light than his did, but she wasn't the Earth Wife's imp who had given Jame the imu medallion in Peshtar. Jame snapped her fingers in the girl's face.
"Lyra, do you hear me?"
Caldane's daughter blinked, and smiled. "Oh, here you are! Will things start happening now?"
"Very likely," rumbled a voice on the other side of the hearth.
Someone very large sat there in the shadows. Fire light caught the twisted lines of a chair like a tangle of oak roots. Bone white splinters flashed and clicked in hands scarcely less gnarled than the chair, or less strong. Jame couldn't yet see what was being knit, except that it appeared to be alive.
"Earth Wife," she said, rising and giving the seated figure her most formal if shaky salute. "Honor be to you and to your halls."
The Earth Wife grunted. "Very pretty. Think you can honey-talk your way out of anything, do you? Not yet caused enough trouble, hey? The map, girl. Look at it."
Jame looked, as another tremor rippled through the fabric of the lodge. On the floor, lengths of the Silver as far away as the Cataracts twitched and shifted. All across the map, seams of unrest stirred and sink-sand poured down into hungry maws as the Serpent's Brood awoke.
"This is trouble, all right," said Jame, "but I don't understand: are you saying that it's somehow my fault?"
"Had to look you over, didn't we?" the shadowy figure muttered. Her voice was a toothless mumble, but in it lay the strength to gum mountains to dust. "All four of us, here in the north, treading on the River Snake's back . . . woke him up, didn't we? He thought he'd blown you out of our reach with his weirding breath, down to the Wastes to feed his brothers under the sand, but back you came, and your people with you, just in time to muck up our ceremonies. Now his hunger rouses all the Brood, who may wake the Chaos Serpent itself and so end all. Of course it's your fault."
Jame shook her head to clear it. Index had said that there were reasons for everything, including Mount Alban's journeys. The weirdingstrom—all to flush her out of the Riverland? And the sand which had swallowed her in the Wastes—pouring down some vast, subterranean gullet?
"No. It's too much. How can so many things hinge on me? Why should they?"
"As we are," that great voice grumbled, "so you may become. But there are three of you to our four, and different, so different! If I kill, I also give life, and I abide. That's balance. But you, what are you becoming? Pure destruction, Nemesis! Whose, girl?"
"If the Serpent and its brood belong to Perimal Darkling, perhaps we have the same foe. Is destruction always evil? Earth Wife, I know we haven't behaved well on this world. Our lords can be so arrogant and stupid . . . ! Trinity knows, I seldom act wisely myself. But if your enemy is ours as well, can't we also call Rathillien our home and you our mother?"
Stony silence, on which no seed grows.
"Why are you begging?" Graykin demanded in a low growl. "We're Kencyr, the Chosen!"
"Not this time," said Jame, chagrined. She felt like a whining child who had been pushed contemptuously away. This was so important, and she was handling it so badly.
"All right," she said, collecting herself. "You say this crisis is my fault. Help me to understand it. How can the River Snake be subdued?"
"Feed it."
Damn. "Is the hero at least reborn in its belly?"
"So the Eaten One says, but she seldom gives the same answer twice."
"And the Burnt Man—must he set all the bone-fires ablaze, including the one under Mount Alban?"
"Who knows what charred thoughts flake off that cinder of a brain, or what rules keep its fire banked?"
The Four didn't seem to know much about each other, Jame thought. What an odd way to run a world—if, indeed, that was what they did. Such almost human ignorance. Hmmmm. A maid eaten by the River Snake, an old man falling from a tower . . . .
"Earth Wife, tell us a story. 'There was an old woman . . . .' "
". . . who dug her son's grave. And when it was done, he buried her in it. Tcha . . . men!"
"But she didn't die. Neither did the Eaten One or the Tishooo or—ancestors preserve him—the Burnt Man, by water or wind or fire. Nor you, it seems, by earth. As I may become, so you were: a mortal, transformed. But when, and why? Did it have something to do with our temples suddenly appearing on this world? I know they raised hell with the Tastigon godlings. The New Pantheon arose, feeding off our temples' power, while the Old Pantheon of native forces declined. Was that when Rathillien's essential divinity was precipitated out into the four of you?"
Impatient huffs of wind had been coming down the chimney.
"Hooom!" it now said, as though the flue were clearing its throat, and exhaled a billow of smoke and ash into the room.
Jame slapped at a swarm of sparks determined to nest in her hair. The singed smell triggered a pang, almost, of guilt before the fact: sometime recently, she had overlooked something obvious, perhaps deadly, for someone—but who, and what?
"Huh!" said the wind in the chimney, a short, self-conscious cough that swept smoke from the hearth and made the flames there leap.
The Earth Wife's skirts rustled, or rather the ferns did, that cascaded over the cliff of her knees down to the floor. Between the fronds, as out of hidden caves, bright eyes caught the fire-light. Far above, dimly lit, was a face like a granite out-cropping with cavernous eyes and a bird's nest crown of twig-tangled braids.
"Ask a lot of questions, don't you, girl?"
"Uh . . . " said Jame. Her mind had gone blank. Who was she, anyway, to demand answers of this hanging garden that was Rathillien?
The tree-root hands turned their black knitting inside out, around the delicate bones that had served as needles.
"Quip?" said the knit-work, tentatively flexing dark, furry wings. "Quip!"—and scuttled down the Earth Wife's skirt to disappear within its leafy folds. A chorus of welcoming cries greeted it.
"Was that the foxkin that Cattila lost, investigating the weirdingstrom?" Jame asked. "She'll be glad to get it back."
"She is."
Jame shot Lyra a questioning look.
"Yes," whispered the girl. "That's Gran, or was before we got here. Isn't it exciting?"
Another substitution, the Caineron Matriarch for the Merikit "woman" who was to have played the Earth Wife, and now Ragga herself for Cattila. Puzzling was more the word, though, for the relationship between the matriarch and her sometime Ear.
"Does . . . er . . . Gran know with whom she's been dealing?"
"Yes," said Cattila, from the other side of the fire.
A log had burst into brief glory. In its glare, the Matriarch perched on the oak-root throne, blinking like a toad, tiny, arthritic feet dangling well above the ground.
"Well enough, anyway," she amended, gumming at the admission as though at something not quite palatable. "Ragga hears the most amazing things through earth and stone. Oh, what gossips we two old women have had! That fool Rawneth, trying to compel and control with her hedge sorcerers and rogue shamans, when all that's needed is a love of talk—oh, and a gift or two."
"What gift?" Jame asked, with deep misgivings.
Cattila glowered. "Think I'd do anything to harm our people, missy? The reverse, if anything. Ragga can only enter a Kencyr keep by invitation and me, I don't get around as much as I used to. So I made her my Ear, for both our sakes. That's all."
"All? To make an outsider privy to the Matriarchs' Council? You didn't even warn them, did you?"
The old woman squirmed. "As if they have much by way of secrets these days! Anyway, once she's inside, no tricks by earth or stone work, do they? Ragga has to use her own ears, like any silly maid, and maybe risk her own silly neck too. Hasn't figured a way around that one yet, has she? Well, for once she gets to listen through me."
"As the Eaten One does through Kallystine, the Falling Man through Caldane, and maybe the Earth Wife's imp through Lyra. Quite a family affair. I understand your involvement now, matriarch—more or less—but theirs?"
"Huh. Another damn trick of the weirding, to have put them in the right place at the wrong time. The Snake's meddling, I'd almost think, if it had the brains. How're Wind and Water supposed to think straight now?"
"They aren't," said Jame, remembering how both kept losing control of persona and power. "Your kin—our Kencyr people—have meddled with this world's balance and now we're confusing its soul. We don't belong on Rathillien, much less in its sacred space. Only you were invited, matriarch. Only you know how to play seeker's mask with a god. What are we going to do?"
The Earth Wife's rumble answered her like distant thunder: "What do you mean, girl, 'we'?"
The fire had sunk. Cattila had melted back into a shadow which had again become the substance, like a cliff upreared against the night. No. They were circled by cliffs with a glimmer at their heights, under a roof of southern stars. Ferns sighed. Jame, Lyra and Graykin stood on the pyre's blackened ground, beside a false-fire that was the efflorescence of spores on the bones of a darkling changer.
"Where are we?" demanded Lyra.
Her sharp voice echoed from cliff to cliff, a volley of blows rebounding from rock to flesh to bone.
Jame grabbed both girl and man-dog, a hand clamped over each mouth. "This is the Heart of the Woods at Hurlen," she breathed in their ears. "This is killing ground. For pity's sake, shut up."
As debris rattled down from above, pale imu faces weathered out of diamantine emerged all around the summit, half obscured by vines as though by hanging hair. The Earth Wife's indignant voice muttered down from all their gaping mouths.
"Look at the mess you've made in my heart—just look! Fire and fungus, death and decay . . . Give me one reason, Nemesis, why I should let you leave this place alive."
"Well, there is this," said Jame, almost apologetically. "If you shout me to death, Lyra will die too, for which her Gran will hardly thank you."
"Ohhh!" Lyra said, not listening. She had picked something up from the ashes.
"Nice of you to remember me as well," Graykin snarled. "A fine lot you've involved me with!"
"And you such an innocent. I did warn you, Gray."
A tremor made them all stagger. If Ragga's heart lay here at the Cataracts, so did the River Snake's, in strong contention. The shaking had set loose spores like a cloud of sparks from the changer's bones, diminishing the false-fire glow. When it died, they might well find themselves stranded.
(But oh, what was it about bones and fire that she couldn't quite remember?)
"Look," she said, scrambling after her wits. "Here and now, I am not the problem."
"THIEF."
"Present," said the Earth Wife's imp, out of Lyra's mouth. Grinning, she thrust the ash-covered imu medallion into Jame's hand.
Jame stared at it. Her first thought when she had searched the Heart earlier had been right: the imu had fallen near the center of the hollow; but she hadn't considered that its sheath of changer's skin might resist the pyre's flames, much less that it would restore clay as it would have flesh. For whatever reason, the imu was whole again.
Lyra blinked, the feral light fading from her eyes.
"And that," said Jame, gesturing at her, "is exactly how I acquired the damned thing in the first place: as a gift from your imp. Here."
"You make me a present of my own property?" Despite everything, greed crept into that gravel voice, Ragga's master passion beneath the Earth Wife's stone. She leaned forward out of her root-chair, drawing them back to lodge and hearth-side by her covetousness. "If I give you Mother Ragga's favor, girl, what will you give me? Eh?"
"I-I don't know," said Jame. The Earth Wife might be offering her exactly what she had begged for before in vain, or "favor" might mean the medallion itself. Either way, she understood from Cattila the importance of exchanged gifts. "What do you want?"
"Mmmm. You left behind more than one mess, girl."
Ragga nodded toward the hearth, where a moment ago the darkling false-fire had danced at the Heart's core. They might almost still have been there: on the iron fire-back in high relief was wrought a pattern of fern fronds that seemed to wave in the flickering light. Among them, motionless, crouched a grotesque figure, without a head—the changer whom Kin-Slayer had decapitated.
"It's been long ages since I last had a pet. On the whole, though, I'd prefer one able to hear—say, a dog. Give me yours."
Graykin cringed.
Jame gulped. To lose the Earth Wife's favor in any sense of that word could be disastrous, for the entire Kencyrath. If Rathillien became actively hostile, they had no place to go except back into Perimal Darkling. And if they did finally defeat the shadows that lurked there, what was the point without a home to return to—for, as with the hills above Kithorn, she doubted that her people would ever live on the fallen worlds again. Compared to all that, what was the life of one scruffy half-breed?
Then she meet Graykin's scared eyes, and sighed.
"The only ears I have to offer," she said, turning to Ragga, "are my own. For whatever good that is to you."
But there was that nagging fear again: if she made a present of herself to the Earth Wife, she would be letting someone down (who?) by not warning him (of what?) Fire, bones . . . Sweet Trinity, Index! The old fool still had a Burnt Man's bone in his pocket.
"I'll be right back," she said, and ran for the door.
"The map!" cried Ragga behind her.
But Jame had already stepped on the nearest rocky ridge. A blast of cold air hit her in the face. Through watering eyes, she saw white peaks spread out before her under the sliver of a moon and under her leading foot, a sheer drop. Over and down, falling, stepping on a rocky slope among bitter scented flowers, floundering in a morass among flies, stumbling up a hill . . . .
". . . sorry, sorry, sorry . . . ."
The Earth Wife's voice roared after her like an avalanche: "GirrRRLL . . . !"
. . . treading on the River Snake's back . . . .
Icy water up to the knee. The Silver's bed twisted under foot, throwing her sky high in a moon-spangled spray. Beneath, she saw another mountain chain, then plains, then the Eastern Sea, leaping up at her. At the water's edge, swallowing it, was the vast maelstrom known as the Maw, a hundred miles across—the mouth of the Chaos Serpent itself? For a moment, she thought that she would fall into it, but it was dirt onto which she crashed: the lodge floor beyond the eastern edge of the map, where sink-sand poured down as if into a hole. Still, the ground rippled under her like water, while the beams overhead groaned and the nearby steps cracked. Another tremor.
"Woke the River Snake, didn't we?"
If the Four hadn't, she now surely had.
"Nemesis," muttered Ragga, holding down her skirt as its hem seethed with the black wings of terrified foxkin.
"Sorry," said Jame again, staring at the five indentations her feet had left across west and central Rathillien, trying to remember if any cities had lain in her path.
She stumbled up the cracked steps and grabbed the door's edge for support as the lodge shook again. Chittering foxkin streamed into the square over her head. She leaned out after them.
"Index! Take the bone out of your poc . . . uh!"
A yelp of warning from Graykin, too late: a big hand closed on her collar.