The trail began in the crevices above the cove. It was well-worn but so narrow, threading its way westward and then disappearing in the deeper fissures, that it was invisible from the ground directly below. Grissem had known precisely where to find it.
Terris tightened the straps of his travel pack and followed Jakon along the trail. He carried food and water like the others, but also the wrapped dagger. The trail plunged into the mountain, and he had to bend to keep from hitting his head on the low roof. Before long, his neck and back muscles ached from the strain.
No one spoke, except for an occasional hushed warning about rough footing. Their panting breaths and the scuffling of their boots echoed down the tunnels. The black rock made the passages seem dark and closed-in, although they never went more than a few hundred feet without a shaft of light shining down from some hidden crack.
Terris felt along the tunnel sides, finding handholds as they began to climb. Before long he was sweating, his heart pounding. He threw back his hood and unwound his scarf, but didn’t dare take off his gloves. The porous stone was treacherously rough. It was all he could do to haul himself up the next grade or scramble through the next crevice.
They emerged into the flat basin open to the sky. The walls of the volcanic cone surrounded them, steep and high enough to cut off the worst of the wind that howled through the crevices, breaking off slivers of rock. Piles of debris collected along the base of the walls, and a few pale green fronds found root in the cracks that laced the caldera’s surface.
In the center of the caldera stood a glowing white cone, lightly flickering and yet opaque. The tip was about twenty feet high, the base wide and curved. It sat on the rock as if it had grown from it, but unlike the rock, it showed no trace of weathering.
A shiver, unrelated to the cold, shook Terris. “This...this is the Northlight?”
Jakon signaled for them to halt and put down their packs. Where the wind had scoured the ground, Terris made out the curved outlines of shaped, fitted stones, encircling the base of the cone.
Terris took a few steps toward the cone, one hand outstretched. A faint vibration reached him, tingling but not unpleasant, more intense the closer he came. The tips of his outstretched fingers burned and smarted through his gloves. He lowered his hand, rubbing his fingers, and turned back to Jakon. “Your people built this thing?”
Jakon looked surprised. His eyes turned a deeper blue, as if some reflection from the light momentarily intensified their color. “No, it has always been here. Just as my people have always come, in times of crisis and decision, to be touched by its vision.”
Jakon lowered himself to the ground, crossed his legs and pulled out the small drum from his pack. Thrum! He brought his hand flat on the stretched hide, then tapped lightly with his fingertips once, twice.
— dit-dit —
Thrum! — dit-dit — Thrum! — dit-dit — Thrum! He beat out a slow, accented rhythm, his eyes fixed on the cone, his back ramrod straight.
Grissem sat down a few feet away from Jakon. He took out his bone flute and played a sequence of tones — no melody, no discernible progression, just a high sweet descant that wove in and out of the rhythm of the drum.
Thrum! — dit-dit — Thrum!
The two northers looked as if they’d settled into a trance and could go on like this for hours. Terris felt no impulse to sit down with them. His body tingled from the nearness of the Light, making sitting still about as possible as flying.
Here I am, standing at the Light, just like Jakon said, Terris thought. And not a damned thing is happening.
He took a step closer and then another. The vibration increased, a humming along his bones. His senses swam with it. A milky veil dropped across his eyes, misting the brightness of the sky and the contours of the caldera walls. Even the drumming behind him sounded muffled. He heard Avi saying, “The sooner we’re done here, the sooner we can head back home.”
The pulling that he’d felt for the whole trip from the norther lake encampment now returned, magnified a thousandfold. Whatever this Light thing was, it recognized him for its own. His feet stumbled forward of their own accord.
“Terris!”
Kardith’s voice reached him, tinny and distant. From the corner of his vision, he saw her face like a faded shadow, the ghostly shimmer of her drawn long-knife. He thought she was racing toward him, yet she seemed to be hardly moving, a figure trapped in frosted glass. She was close enough to touch. He reached for her, even as his body was jerked forward.
Then, with a blast of eye-searing flame, the two of them burst into the center of the Light.
Chapter 31: Kardith of Laurea
I whipped out my long-knife just as Terris touched the edge of the cone. His body turned misty white and blurred, as if the light were drawing him in. I sprinted toward him, shouting his name. I caught the shadow of his face, turned toward me, and leapt for all I was worth.
The next moment, I found myself on my knees, all cramped over, without any idea how I’d gotten here or what had happened to me. Every hair on my head — eyebrows, too — crisped and stinking, my skin about to peel off and my long-knife gone from my hand.
I covered my face, my fingers digging into my flesh as I tried to keep them from shaking. I couldn’t think why I should be here in this exposed place. I should have been safe inside a jort or huddled against the flanks of a lying-down ghamel. I should have been wearing the loose coat and scarves of the Tribes, not this fur-trimmed hooded jacket. I should...I couldn’t remember.
What was it I couldn’t remember?
Whose name was it I must never speak?
o0o
I saw him coming toward me, the sunrise touching cinnamon lights in his beard. He wore a loose gray robe edged in black counterstitch and the soft fabric flowed around the muscles in his shoulders. Hard muscles, long and supple. Knife-fighter’s muscles.
It was the week after the priests had married me off to his father, and I was still groggy from the dope they’d loaded me with for the wedding. My mouth was dry, my stomach cramping, my insides raw from the old man’s idea of lovemaking.
I looked up at his slow white smile, his eyes like
new-minted gold. And he saw me, Kardith, not just the last of old Hamnir’s kids to be taken care of somehow — Let’s marry the poor girl off to someone who’ll beat some decency into her. Not just a body to dump his spunk into whenever his dilapidated balls could manage it.
Me, Kardith.
He tipped his head, eyes and teeth shining. “Hamnir taught you.”
We both knew what he meant, and it wasn’t cooking. He was there when they found me, half dead from fever and dehydration, with my stepfather and brothers already rotting around me. He was there when the priests crawled out of their smoke jort with the vision that it was the knifeplay of a woman — me — that offended the gods and sent the water-plague, but in their wisdom, their infinite compassion — may they stink in hell forever, the whole crotting lot of them — they were going to save my soul. And now here he was, saying my stepfather’s name as if he were someone to be remembered with respect and not just a bad influence, the curse-bringer who taught knives to a woman.
My back still smarted from last night, when I forgot for a moment, picked up a cooking knife and tested its balance. We were alone, he and I, but my voice came out in a scratch: “Women are forbidden to use knives.”
He took me by the shoulders and forced my eyes to meet his. “That’s what the priests would have us believe. But I can read what it says in the Scripts for myself. It says that men and women danced the forms together. Hamnir was the best — and he taught you — and you’re all that’s left of that line.”
I saw the fire in him. Ay Mother, such a fire. And such a hunger in me.
“It’s no sin to dance the knives,” he whispered. “The sin is to waste the gift.”
Waste the gift. Waste the stolen moments as my muscles remembered the soaring joy when everything came together, every ang
le, every point of balance and momentum. Waste the memory of his laugh as I spun inside his guard, slid the edge of the wooden practice knife along his neck and slipped away before he could touch me.
“Father damn us all, woman, you’re good!”
Waste the feel of his soft scratchy beard against my breast, the tenderness of his lips. “Aram...” I said his name only once, when we lay together and something broke open in me, like a sandstorm so sweet and melting I couldn’t move or breathe or see, only his eyes — like sunlight through honey.
He put a finger to my lips. I knew I must never say his name again, nor even think it for fear I might call out to him in my dreams. How then could I tell him of his child growing inside me?
That old ghamel of a husband was so smoke-loaded he couldn’t remember the last time he speared me. Who was to say the baby wasn’t his? And who was to say what he felt when he told me Aram was dead. Shadow panther, he said. But I knew better. I knew it was the demon god of chance, come at last, as the priests would say, to take back his own.
Like flashes of light, like falling stars, the moments burst over me and seized me in those same panther claws. I heard myself crying, No more, no more!
The nights sobbing alone. The baby born early but strong — ay Mother! — and with his father’s eyes. The little wet mouth tugging at my nipple and a stabbing all through my heart so that I wept again, with joy and pain, and the priests smiled. You see how we have saved her, you see how we have made a real woman out of her.
But they were not smiling as they came to dress the stiffening body of my husband. His heart gave out one night — nobody’s fault except whatever god created old age. But the priests didn’t see it that way. They figured I’d somehow stolen his soul. I saw the creamy pleasure in their eyes, the moistness at the corners of their mouths as they spoke of monstrous sin, as they spoke of the redemption by blood, as they beat the death gongs and chanted of that woman’s evil.
We have given her every chance to redeem herself in the way of the Tribes, they said. To atone, to live in virtue. A righteous husband we gave her, a proper place among us. But you see, all of you, how she has brought only evil on her master, she and her devil’s spawn. Who can say what horrors she would unloose upon us, she who has turned her back on salvation? We cannot help her fleshly body, but we must purify her soul and protect the rest of the Tribe.
Mother, father, demon god — any god! — let me not remember!
o0o
Now I saw the funeral mount, the sky like charcoal dust, the faces I didn’t know any more, wet-looking in the flickering torchlight. I lay on my belly, hands tied over my head. The priest, the fat bald one with the cold hands, shouted but I couldn’t understand the words. The drink they forced down me earlier left my head spinning but my senses sharp. I felt every cut as he drew the hooked blade across my back, felt every drop that spilled down my naked sides, pooled around my waist, soaked into the cloth of my drawstring breeches. Beyond my head, my son whimpered softly. I thought they must have drugged him, too, or he’d be screaming in outrage at being tied down.
The priests chanted the same senseless syllables over and over. I drifted on them, in and out of a formless dream. I thought of their promises, that my sins would soon be forgiven. I prayed to the Mother-of-us-all that somehow I might see Aram again and my stepfather Hamnir and my brothers. Tears ran down my face, the last I would ever shed.
The bloodbats came suddenly, plummeting. The air churned with their stinking wings, their high insane cries. Lured by the clotting blood, they latched on to my back with their iron claws. They ripped through skin and nerve and muscle, sucking and drinking.
Agony shocked through me. I screamed and screamed, my life pouring out in blood and sound. For an instant I couldn’t breathe. The world whirled and darkened.
Then I heard my baby cry. Shrill with pain but also fury — fighting for his life. Too late —
NO!
All the passion still in me came boiling up, all the cold dead numbness turned to fire, set off by that single voice...
I twisted on my side, jammed one knee up, sank my teeth into the scab-crusted hide of the nearest bloodbat. The skin on my wrists shredded as the ties, meant to hold a drugged and willing victim, gave way. My hands free, I rolled off the altar stone and landed on my bare feet. Wounded bloodbats flapped on the sand with others latching on to them, a few still clinging to my back.
...and silence except for the beating of the wings, the piercing, inhuman cries...
I screamed again as I grabbed them, snapping the long bones in my hands. My fingers ripped through the leathery membranes and hot reeking blood spilled over my skin.
...his little body, torn and so covered with blood he looked clothed. His eyes gone, mouth open, one ear ripped half off. Delicate ribs splintered white, and guts spilling like a rope of pearls over the slick red stone...
And still. Ay Mother, so still.
o0o
Slowly I came to my body again, my real body, crouched under a blanket of shifting light, my throat scraped raw. Not the same body that kicked and clawed its way past the ring of priests, not the same body that somehow got its fingers round the hilt of a knife. Mother knows how many I killed before I bolted free of them. This I truly didn’t remember.
Why did I wait so long to live? A few moments sooner and I could have saved him —
Why didn’t I die instead?
o0o
“Kardith?”
At first all I saw was light, a borealis of white and gray and shimmering blue, constantly changing and bright enough to burn through to the back of my skull. Squinting, I made out shadows like trees or mountains, buildings, spinning globes, wild fantastic animals.
But yes, there was something there, something shaped like a man, more and more solid as he moved closer. The light seemed to radiate from his body.
For an instant my vision cleared and the man looked strangely familiar. Beyond him lay the source of the light, so bright I could hardly bear to look at it. Beneath my knees lay smooth stone, carved with the pattern of a doubled circle around a single dot. It seemed familiar, yet I couldn’t think where I’d seen it before.
The man knelt in front of me and I caught the details of his face — his face washed colorless and hazy, his hair and beard no more than shadows. Eyes pale like ice. He took one of my hands and pulled it gently from my face. Put in it the hilt of a long-knife. For a moment I stared at the knife, caught by the ripples in the tempered steel. New strength surged from blade and up my arm. My heart beat fast and steady.
I remembered.
Everything.
All the years of running, torn with guilt and pain, dead-and-alive until Pateros gave me back my life. Now he was dead and I couldn’t save him, either.
I remembered Avi touching my scarred back and weeping for me. I owed her, too, but what? Loyalty, gratefulness, perhaps — shame that I loved her more for loving me than for herself.
I remembered the norther chief Jakon, and what I saw in his eyes. And the boy from Laureal City, Avi’s brother, bringing life and death and something bigger than any of us.
“Kardith?”
He took my other hand, pulled me to my feet. The long-knife glided into the worn-smooth leather sheath on my thigh. Then he headed for the center of brightness, slow as a blind man feeling his way and sure as a moth drawn to a flame. I turned my back on the funeral mount, on the bloodbats and the priests and the years of forgetting, and followed him.
Chapter 32
As we drifted through the light, our boots made no sound on the rock floor, not even the squeak of leather or scuffling on the fine volcanic grit. Even my breathing seemed muffled. The air got thicker and harder to push through, or maybe that was just my imagining.
The cone seemed much larger than it had from the outside. I saw no walls behind the layers of shifting brightness, nor had we way to tell the passing of time or distance or any landmarks except the glowing heart of the cone.
> Terris dropped my hand and gestured me to stay behind. Me, I’d rather go on than risk becoming separated. But some instinct made me stop. He traveled on a few paces and paused, his back to me. As I watched him, my fingers curled automatically around the hilt of my long-knife. Solid, cool even through the leather bands wrapped in my own pattern, it welcomed my touch.
My eyes burned and watered. I couldn’t stay focused on Terris and yet I couldn’t look away. He stood in the very heart of the light, no more than a blurred shadow against the glare. He waited there, still as rock in the shimmering brightness, hands out, head high, body shrouded in his thick norther parka, and for a moment I thought — I hoped — nothing was happening.
The edges of his body began to glow.
At first I noticed just a few splotches of red, like heated furnace iron. Then the colors changed to yellow and white, white-blue, hotter and brighter, rushing over his arms and legs. The separate spots flared and melted together. They spread over his body until he was covered by a halo of jagged spikes. The air crackled with unspent lightning. Sparks shot from his fingertips.
Terris shook like a scrap of hide caught in the edge of a steppe twister. His head jerked, turned back toward me. His eyes gleamed white, the irises rolled up in his skull.
I grabbed my knife and lunged for him, but my hand wouldn’t move. My feet stayed rooted to the rock. My heart pounded with the effort.
From the whiteness around us, bolts of piercing brightness showered Terris like shooting stars. I screamed out a warning, but he made no move to dodge them. Where they touched him, the burning outline around his body blazed up like tinder catching flame.
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