To Ride a Rathorn

by P. C. Hodgell

  Plump little fists pounded on the door. "You selfish, glass-eyed, book-loving snob, let me in!"

  "The window it is, then," said Torisen, and swung his legs over the sill.

  The wall below was thick with ivy, but he was still three stories up, and he only had one good hand. His feet scrabbled for purchase in the tangle of tough vines. Stiff leaves poked him in the eyes. The trick was to step down, secure a foot, then let go and grab a lower handhold, quickly, before gravity pulled him off the wall. Above, the pup leaned out the window yipping with distress. Torisen was about half way down when she lunched herself after him. Instinctively, he let go to catch her and they both fell, straight into Burr's arms. The burly Kendar set Torisen on his feet and the pup leaped to the ground.

  Trishien laughed down at them. "I do believe that you and Lady Jameth are related after all. Now please excuse me, my lord. Someone is at the door."

  "Run," said Torisen to Burr, and followed his own advice.

  VI

  They stopped in the forecourt, hard against the stone flank of the old keep.

  "Trinity," said Torisen, laughing, holding a stitch in his side. "I'll never regard a stag hunt the same way again." Then he saw Burr's expression. "What's the matter?"

  "My lord, Steward Rowan has found the Kendar Mullen."

  His formality set Torisen back. "Found who? Oh. Of course. Where?"

  "In the death banner hall."

  They were almost at its door. Torisen hesitated a moment, his hand on the latch, then entered, followed by Burr. They left the pup, forgotten and rigid, on the threshold.

  The hall took up the old keep's first floor, a low-ceilinged, unfurnished, windowless chamber. A torch set in a bracket by the door brought flickers of false life to the gallery of faces crowding the walls. There hung the Knorth dead. Most were Highborn with the family's sharp, proud features, not a few of them betraying the mad twist that ran also through the Knorth blood. These were portrait banners, but also sometimes caricatures; in death if not in life, all Highborn faced the judgment of those over whom they had had power. Also among their serried ranks were a few Kendar, mostly noted randon, scrollsmen, or artisans. Every banner was woven out of threads unraveled from the clothes in which each, man, woman, or child, had died. The air stank of cold stone and old, moldering cloth, laced with the unexpected reek of fresh blood.

  Rowan sat in the middle of the floor, cradling the head of a missing Kendar. When she looked up, her scarred face, never expressive, seemed less animate than the dead that surrounded her.

  "I looked here first, my lord, and found him."

  Torisen knelt beside her. It took a moment to realize what he was seeing.

  The Kendar's broad face was relatively unmarked, but whatever ruddy color it still possessed now came from torchlight alone. Below that, the broad chest and gnarled arms seemed to hang in dark, clotted tatters, as if he had started cutting the wavy lines of the rathorn sigil into his clothes and gone on to the skin beneath, slicing deeper and deeper except where old battle scars had turned aside the blade. Much of the blood had long since dried. Some still welled in sluggish surges from his throat, where the white hilted knife had at last cut too deep. The blood in which Torisen knelt was still warm. He could feel it seeping through his clothes.

  The man was still breathing, but just barely. His eyes half opened like those of a tired child reluctant to wake. Then he saw who bent over him and smiled.

  "My lord."

  Torisen gripped the Kendar's worn hand. "Mullen. Welcome home."

  The smile remained, but the eyes lost their focus and no breath returned.

  Torisen sat back on his heels, feeling dazed. He stared at the pattern of blood, fresh and dried, spread out around him in a pool, then running dark into the flagstone's cracks. "This took time."

  "Probably most of the day," Rowan agreed. She regarded her lord steadily. He could also feel Burr's eyes on him, and a weight as if all his dead ancestors lining the walls also watched in judgment.

  "You want me to understand," he said to them all, "but I don't. Why here? Why like this?"

  "D'you mean why'd he turn himself into the raw material of a death banner?" Burr asked gruffly. "To be remembered, of course, and what better place for it than this?"

  "My lord . . . Blackie . . . " Rowan spoke gently, as if to a slow-witted child. "Did you have any sense that this was happening?"

  "Of course not!"

  "You would have if he had been one of your people dying at the Cataracts."

  Torisen started to answer, then stopped. He remembered that restless and, to him, inexplicable urge that had driven him out after the battle to search through the carnage for the mortally wounded of his house, to bring them honorable death and release from pain by the white-hilted knife.

  "Are you saying that he did this, and took so long about it, hoping that I would come to find him?" He looked from one impassive face to the other, appalled. "Trinity! You know I didn't cast him off on purpose!"

  "We know," said Rowan. "You just forgot his name, and the bond broke. But you did remember him in the end." She paused, then asked carefully, "Will it happen again?"

  Torisen rose, greatly perturbed. He started to run a hand through his hair, then stopped, seeing that it was still wet with Mullen's blood. "I don't know. I don't know why it happened this time, unless I took too many new Kendar into my service at the Cataracts and just couldn't hold on to them all."

  But there was more to it than that. They all sensed it, without knowing what it was, much less what to do about it.

  Ha, boy. I told you: you're weak.

  Torisen looked from Burr to Rowan and back again. After everything the three of them had been through together, over nearly two decades, they trusted each other with their lives, their souls, and their honor. But then so did every Kendar sworn to him. Where was the flaw that had let this man slip away?

  Didn't you abandon me, your father and lord, to my death? For that I died cursing you. Lack-faith, oath-breaker, do you wonder that your title rings false and your people fall away?

  Words echoed in the hollow shell of his soul, and he still couldn't turn to answer them. The dead watched, their judgment hanging over him like the blade Kin-Slayer, bane of the unworthy.

  I must find my own way, he thought, steeling himself. For my people's sake if not for my own. The old times have passed, but not honor.

  "I swear to you," he said, swinging around to address all the watching faces, alive and dead, "I will find out why this happened and I will never let it happen again. My word on it."

  A shiver went through the hall, as if all in it had been holding their breath.

  "What of this man?" Rowan asked, Mullen still limp in her arms.

  "He deserves to be remembered, as he wished. Let his body be given to the pyre and his clothes to the artisans, that his banner may hang here forever with his peers."

  Noble words, Torisen thought as he watched Burr and Rowan gather up the corpse. With his broken hand, he couldn't help even if they had let him, nor would it have been his place to do so. Mullen had passed into the care of his own people. Noble words indeed, but with a muffled echo in this place of the dead that chilled his heart. If he couldn't make them good, the Third Face of God, Regonereth, would have precious little mercy on his soul.

  Nor you either, he thought. My sister. My nemesis.

  On the threshold, the wolver pup threw back her head and howled against the coming of the night.

  Chapter IX: School Days

  Summer 6-32

  I

  And so randon training began at Tentir.

  After the first testing, roughly a thousand cadets were left at the college—still too many, but more were expected to fall prey to the autumn cull. As expected, the Caineron had lost the most candidates in the first few days, but with Lord Caldane's eight established sons adding their numbers of sworn Kendar to his, they were still the largest contingent at the college. Following them in numbers were t
he Ardeth, the Randir, and the Brandan, all houses with Kendar bound to more than one Highborn. Lord Hollen's little Danior could only muster three ten-commands. The Knorth mustered nine, just shy of a one-hundred command.

  For the most part, school days followed the pattern established in the testing. The horn usually sounded at dawn, although sometimes earlier to surprise those who still depended too much on dwar sleep. Following breakfast and assembly, there were four two-hour lessons—half before lunch, half after—then a free period, then supper. Evenings were spent studying, mending gear, or attending to other house business.

  Sometimes, after a particularly dismal lesson or because an instructor had had an especially bad day, a ten-command was obliged to repeat a class far into the night.

  Often, depending on the season, cadets were called on to perform one of the thousand or so chores that the college needed done to function properly.

  Every seventh day they were free to do whatever they pleased.

  While each house ate and slept in its own hall, cadets continued to train together, two different ten-commands at a time under whatever randon or sergeant was best suited to teach them. In this way, the college hoped to forge bonds between houses that even their lords could not easily break. Whether this stratagem would work or, indeed, ever had, was a subject of perennial debate in the officers' mess.

  To Jame's relief, most of the classes began with reviews of the basics—to correct bad habits, the randon said, and they found much to criticize. However, she had no habits whatsoever in many disciplines and so was glad for the chance to learn whatever she could, as well as to regain the physical edge that a winter in the Women's Halls had badly dulled. It was hard, muscle-aching work, but she enjoyed it.

  The situation in the Knorth barracks was less to her taste.

  From the start, Vant barely consulted her in the running of her own house. He assumed she knew nothing about such matters, which was true, and proceeded to arrange things to suit himself. For the most part, Jame couldn't fault his competence. For example, it would never have occurred to her to detail cadets to guard the doors to the inner, common corridor when they stood open. Like any other house the Knorth could always gain access to either half of their first story by going up the stairs to the second floor landing (which straddled the corridor) and descending on the other side, but it was considered rude to seal off the barracks during the day and positively hostile to obstruct the corridor itself, as any house could by closing the great gates at either end of their section.

  Other house duties included cooking, cleaning, and serving at table, done by rotation. Unlike the Caineron or the Ardeth, the Knorth had no Kendar servants, its lord having none to spare. Whatever needed to be done, the cadets had to do.

  And then there was house discipline.

  Vant could assign individuals or whole ten-commands such necessary but unpleasant chores as mucking out the Knorth stables, de-worming the hunting pack, and unclogging the kitchen well after a seething of eels set up residence in it.

  The boot-polishing incident turned out to be the first of many for Jame's ten. Vant was always finding fault with one or another of them, for example when Erim tripped over his own feet and more or less threw a bowl of soup in Vant's face (Jame wondered about that: Erim might be clumsy, but he had very good aim), or when Niall, Kest's replacement, woke the whole barracks by screaming in his sleep.

  Her own ten didn't want Jame involved in the punishments earned by these mishaps.

  "Don't you come with us, lady," Rue insisted as the ten-command geared up during what should have been their free time to tackle a trog-infested latrine. "He's got it in for Five, sure, but he's also trying to get at you. He thinks if he makes things nasty enough, you'll give up and leave." She laughed. "Doesn't know you yet, does he?"

  He knew her well enough to have put her in a fix, thought Jame glumly, watching her ten go. Whether she went with them or not, should she submit without comment to Vant's unfair punishments and look weak, or complain and look petulant, or pull rank and tell him to lay off them altogether? Being a master ten was awkward to begin with, not (presumably) like being a one-hundred commander with clear-cut lines of authority. If she hadn't come to Tentir as a lordan, Briar would be master now and Vant her second in command. Briar would know how to run the barracks. Jame didn't. If this was another test, to see how each master ten handled his or her house, she was failing miserably.

  As it happened, that afternoon she couldn't have gone with them anyway. At breakfast, a sergeant had arrived and called out a dozen names including Jame's with orders to report to various randon after classes. A bit nonplused (after all what had she ever had to do with birds?), Jame went off in search of the Falconer.

  The mews occupied a long second story room in Old Tentir, overlooking the inner square. Half the windows were screened with oiled cloth to keep out drafts. Rank after rank of goshawks, peregrines, gyrfalcons and eagle owls rustled on their perches in the subdued light, the bells tied to their legs ringing softly. Their hooded heads jerking toward the door as Jame paused on the threshold, waiting for her eyes to adjust.

  "Well, come in, come in!" a shrill voice called from the other end of the room. "D'you think we have all day?"

  The far window was uncurtained. A misshapen figure stood black against it in a shaft of light smoky with dust. This half of the room seemed as messy as the other half was obsessively neat. As Jame made her way forward, stumbling over debris and colliding with work tables, she saw that a dozen cadets from various houses had arrived before her and were perched precariously on stools around the cold fireplace, watching her progress. She found an empty stool off to one side. It rocked under her on uneven, rickety legs.

  The Falconer had spoken to her as sharply as to any tardy cadet. He must not know who she was. Good.

  "Right," he said as she gingerly settled. "We were discussing how bonds form between Kencyr and animal."

  Jame felt her tension ease. She had worried how Tentir would regard someone so clearly aligned with the Third Face of God, That-Which-Destroys, especially given the chaos her house had already caused along those lines. However, of all her Shanir traits, this surely was the one least apt to get her into trouble.

  Seen momentarily in profile, the Falconer's hooked nose looked like a beak, and there was something strange about his eyes. His apparent hunchback consisted of a small, alert merlin and the padded shoulder that served as its perch. As the bird's head jerked to and fro, so did its master's.

  "A select few," he was saying, "have always had this ability. Perhaps we all did, in the beginning, but lost it with the thinning of the Old Blood. You, sirrah!"

  A Danior cadet straightened abruptly on his stool, nearly falling off of it.

  "How did you and that beast come to be bound?"

  Squinting against the light, Jame saw that the great, sprawling mass at the cadet's feet was alive. It raised a massive head, yawned with cavernous, nearly toothless jaws, and went back to sleep.

  "W-we were born on the same day," the boy stammered, "and b-both our mothers died. The old lord valued his Molocar as much as his Kendar. Torvo and I were suckled by the same wet nurse."

  That meant the hound was fifteen or sixteen years old, a great age for his breed. He began to snore in great, gusty sighs, with an unnerving catch between breaths.

  "We've been together forever," said the boy, bending to stroke the gray muzzle.

  "Well, now," said the Falconer, not unkindly. "You have the talent. There will be others."

  "It won't be the same!"

  "No. Alas, that we should out-live so many of those whom we love."

  He ruffled the breast feathers of his pretty little merlin. The bird raised its tail and squirted a white stream of excrement out the window. Someone below cursed.

  "And you, boy?"

  The cadet addressed didn't answer, didn't seem to have heard. His dreamy face was turned toward the window, eyes unfocussed. The Falconer stalked over and sla
pped him. He came back to life slowly, like a sleeper waking, and sat there stupidly rubbing his cheek.

  "Cast your mind after your companion, yes, but, never, ever, lose yourself! All of you, take note: some of us never come back.

  "And you, girl?"

  The Randir cadet whom he had addressed scowled sullenly at the floor. Like many of her house with some Highborn blood, she had thin, sharp features and hooded eyes. "I don't know what you mean, ran. I don't even know why I'm here wasting my time . . . and yours."

  "The answer is up your sleeve." He whistled, a sweet, wavering sound that made the hound twitch in his sleep. "Ah. Here it comes."

  The Randir's jacket bulged and rippled as if with new, strangely placed muscles. Something golden flowed out of her sleeve onto her lap. There it collected itself in thick, molten coils and raised a triangular head with glittering orange eyes. At its soft hiss, the others drew back and the merlin bated, screaming.