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III

As the weirding sank, it left behind the upper portions of the cliff upon which the scrollsmen's keep normally sat. Jame ran down the main stair with Jorin on her heels, through the restored levels of the wooden maze. She could hear Graykin's feet on the treads below, but he didn't answer her call. How stupid to risk the weirding for odd bits of gear. Bad enough that she was launched on what was probably a fool's errand. Bad enough, indeed.

Below, gray mist drifted across the stair, obscuring it. Jame descended with caution, blindly, through a clammy brume more like fog than weirding, on slippery steps. Through Jorin's senses, she smelled damp earth, wet wool, and fresh dung. A muffled bleating rose to meet them. Then they were under the cloud-ceiling, looking down into the soil-filled hollow of Grand Hurlen, normally a park, now packed wall to wall with unhappy sheep. So it had been last winter too, when the city islands had braced for a possible siege by the Waster Horde. This time, the flock must have been brought in to shelter from the storm.

Looking up, she could see nothing of the scholars' college. Presumably it was still there; but when the morning sun burned off this fog, instinct told her that it would be gone. Once again she would have to scramble not to be left behind, with much farther to go than Graykin did.

Hurlen consisted of some thirty islands at the confluence of the Silver and the Tardy, not far upstream from the Cataracts. Each isle, from Grand Hurlen down to a rock barely ten feet across, had been hollowed out millennia ago and built up ever since, into a community of towers linked by cat-walks over swift water. Normally, the town would be astir by now, from the elegant confectioners on the main island down to the rowdy bargees on the wharfs at Tardy-mouth. This morning, however, the citizenry was still behind closed doors, waiting for the last storm trace to blow over. Jame and Jorin thus had the passages and catwalks to themselves, likewise the bridge over the smoking Silver to its west bank.

Jame hesitated at the bridge's end. The Upper Meadow stretched out before her to the trees at the foot of the bluff on its far side. Wisps of river fog drifted across it wraith-like under a low, gray sky. The luminescence filtering through from above was still weirding-glow, but soon it would be morning light.

Get on with it, Jame told herself, dry-mouthed, and stepped to the ground.

It didn't open under her feet. So far, so good.

She and Jorin went down the sloping field, over the stone steps called the Lower Hurdles and into the Middle Meadow. No bird sang or hare grazed. How many animals the weirdingstrom must have swept away, who would never see home again. Patches of weirding glided past, northward bound. Perhaps, though, some wildlife would be able to weird-walk back, as so few men had been known to do.

Her foot slipped on the wet grass and her heart lurched; but it was only dew. The last time she had been here, the whole dark meadow had been greased and stinking with blood, like the floor of a slaughterhouse. Hard, now, to believe that so many had died on this gentle slope, where the Kencyr Host and the army of Karkinaroth had meet the vanguard of the Waster Horde; and terrible to think that, in a way, all that carnage had been incidental. Few realized that the decisive battle had taken place elsewhere, on a far more intimate scale.

They turned right into the trees. It had been almost this dark and silent that night, despite the battle raging so close by, as she had run through this forest with Kin-Slayer in one hand and the imu medallion in the other, pulling her on, toward the sound of someone calling her brother's name and then the crash of single combat.

Here was the foot of the bluff, as before, and here the remembered host tree. Pale green leaves flexed on its boughs, filling their veins with golden sap in preparation for the spring migration to their northern host. A dead branch cracked under Jame's foot. The leaves sprang into the air, blades flashing, and disappeared into the low clouds. Beyond the now bare tree, the cliff face curved inward to enclose the Heart of the Woods.

Jame paused on the hollow's threshold. It was larger than she remembered—an oval perhaps a hundred feet wide and somewhat longer. Waist high ferns carpeted its floor. Spring run-off had transformed the encircling cliffs into a hanging garden of columbine and lace frond, gilt-edged pink and trembling green. Through the vines which obscured the heights came the soft glow of diamantine. Blocks of that precious, crystalline stone crowned the bluff, each weathered into a crude, gap-mouthed imu face. Ancient power slept here, none too deeply.

Jame left Jorin crouching under the host tree, blind eyes wide with worry. That cat had good instincts. Someday she would learn to follow them.

Entering the Heart was like walking into a green sea. Dense, dripping ferns swallowed her to the waist as she waded through them, trying not to trip over their tough stems. Last winter she had entered crawling under these fronds toward the sound of her brother and Ardeth's rogue son Pereden locked in battle. Then through clearing mist she had seen the eight darkling changers who ringed the combatants. Pereden had only been the bait. They were the jaws of the trap which had been set for the Highlord from the very beginning.

The rustle of her passage was echoed by the resonant imus above.

Shhh, they hissed through their vines, as if in warning. Ssshhhh.

Pereden had been no match for her brother nor he for the changers, even with a sword reforged in Perimal Darkling, proof against the corrosive blood of its servants. Disarmed, he had been seized in a changer's crushing embrace. Jame remembered her scream, which the imus had caught and echoed from wall to wall, shattering Mother Ragga's clay medallion in her hand, striking down all who heard it.

Here was the center of the Heart and, to her surprise, a raw, burned patch. The charred fragments of a platform suggested a pyre. Among the debris were blackened bones—not the Burnt Man's this time, but spongy, like misshapen fungi feeding off the hollow's floor. Only the remains of a changer or a haunt could be so obscenely tenacious of life. Jame did a quick count in her mind: Five of the eight changers and the severed head of a sixth had been removed by Ardeth's people, but they had not immediately found the other three bodies. Of these, one had been truly dead, slain by the Ivory Knife. The second, driven mad by the imus' scream, must perforce have been consigned alive to this pyre, to leave behind these hungry bones. The third, decapitated by Kin-Slayer, had crawled away.

He might still be here.

Jame tried not to think about that. She had come to retrieve the imu medallion, or rather its clay shards, hoping to make peace with the Earth Wife. And there wasn't much time.

Now, where had she stood when it shattered? In the area since burned, she thought, or close to it. There wouldn't be much to find after two wet seasons, except for one possibility: back in Peshtar, the imu had acquired a mask of living skin by ripping it off of a changer's face. If the pieces were still so encased, they would at least be together. She ducked under the fronds to search, in dim light, beneath a second, lower level of plants. Her gloved hands, questing, found only root-laced soil. Dammit, this was impossible.

Shhhh . . . shhhh . . . .

She reared up through the leafy ceiling, heart pounding. The rustling hiss went on and on, from all sides. It was nothing, she told herself; the upper imus were simply echoing her. No need to conjure that image of a second searcher, drawn by vibrations in the earth, headless, mindless, crawling toward her under the ferns . . . .

sssshhhHHH.

A breeze had entered the Heart. It circled the hollow, ruffling ferns, swaying vines across the imu mouths. Now everything was in motion, rustling, echoing. Was it all the wind, or were any of those cats-paws across this leafy sea the wake of a hidden stalker? Beneath the undulating leaves, something fumbled at Jame's ankle. She sprang backward with a cry, tripped, fell, was up again in a moment and plunging out of the Heart. The green sea tossed behind her.

SSSHhhhhhh . . . breathed the imus.

Then, with the dying of the wind, they were still.

Jame stood panting on the threshold. "All right, all right," she said to Jorin as he crept to her feet. "You warned me. It was a stupid idea anyway."

The light in the woods seemed stronger. Out in the meadow, it lit the fog from above, beginning to burn it off. Patches of mist rose up from the wet grass like the ghosts of the slain and drifted northward. Out of one, suddenly, trotted a weary, blackened, naked figure. In a moment, it had plunged into the next patch of weirding and disappeared.

Jame remembered to breathe. It was the man whom she had seen laying fires in the Riverland, Index's Merikit chief, carried south with the storm and now doggedly making his way home. So should she, with little time to waste.

But as she neared the bridge back to Hurlen, she found herself slowing.

Wherever else Mount Alban might stop, it was on its way back to the Riverland. Was there anything there for her but trouble? So much unresolved business, so little she seemed able to do about any of it. Why go back at all?

. . . roofless and rootless . . . .

Tori clearly didn't want her. Besides, she was dangerous to him, if there was any truth in what Kindrie had said at the wolvers' keep. Perhaps she should simply drop out of his life again.

. . . blood and bone . . . .

To be free again, ah . . . but to go where, to do what? All roads from this place would be long and lonely, to uncertain ends.

. . . cursed be and cast out . . . .

But Brier Iron-thorn hadn't run away or given up.

Jame shook herself. Brenwyr's damned curse had crept up on her again, trying to drag her down with its sink-sand grip. Interesting, that the thought of Brier seemed a talisman against it, as that of Marc had against despair in the past. The Kendar might save her from herself yet, if not perhaps from whatever waited in the Riverland.

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Framed