When she reached the colt, she slid into the roiling water, onto his back. His red eyes snapped open and he began feebly to thrash, but already they were sinking again. Jame took a deep breath. Opaque water, almost liquid mud, closed over her head. Eyes squeezed shut, she slid her hands up the rathorn's neck and down his mask to the trapped horn. There. She began to work the link back and forth, inch by inch, up the length of ivory. The air in her lungs was turning to fire when the slack went out of the chain and they rose again.
Above water, she clung gasping to the colt's neck. He hung limp. She drove her nails into his crest.
"Wake up, dammit! You can't kill me if you die first!"
VIII
Gorbel wondered if the Knorth madness was indeed contagious and if so, whether he had caught it.
After all, here he was on top of a bloody big rock (don't think how far off the ground you are; don't think), trying to break a Trinity-be-damned chain with an ancestors-cursed boar spear, while trying to fend off a swarm of willow saplings. The boulder's face seethed with them as if with so many leafy snakes (ugh), all industriously rooting themselves in stone. Debris rattled down on all sides, along with occasional larger chunks.
Father had told him clearly enough what to do with the Knorth bitch: humiliate her; make her suffer; show the entire Kencyrath how insane both she and her brother were for thinking that a Highborn girl could ever become a randon.
But it wasn't so easy. She kept throwing him off-guard.
This . . . this was insane.
She had killed a rathorn mare. There, he envied her. She felt she owed a debt to the rathorn's foal. All right. He could see that, vaguely. But to a tree?
Madness.
And what about that sudden flash of . . . memory? . . . back in the clearing when the rathorn had let off that god-awful cry? Father beating Mother, smashing her skull, spattering blood and brains . . . no. His mother had died when he was still only a squalling brat. He didn't remember her at all, and he cried for no one. But his nose did run. It was running now.
Sudden pain lanced through his foot. A sapling had crawled onto it unnoticed and had sunken its roots through the boot into flesh. He yanked out the leafy wand as if it were a weed, but only the top part came. His foot continued to throb as if splinters had been driven deeply into it.
The willow swayed back and forward again with a rush. The chain around the boulder tightened. Its length rose, bringing with it a muddy mass that resolved itself into two figures, one clinging to the other. The rathorn hung by his horn like a slaughtered hog on a hook. Then he snorted mud out of his nostrils and again began struggling weakly to free himself. He had guts, that one. So (face it) did the Knorth.
But Trinity, what a way to ride a rathorn!
Stone shifted under foot. Gorbel wobbled, terror clutching his heart. One side of the rock sheared away, trailing saplings, and hit the water with a great, drenching splash. The rest of the boulder was breaking apart, the chain paying out link by link, faster and faster, as the willow pulled and its anchor gave way.
Jump. Jump!
Gorbel did, and nearly fainted on impact from the stabbing pain in his foot. He limped to high ground and clung to a tree, watching, as the boulder disintegrated. Set loose, the dammed stream crested in a muddy flash flood. Two figures tumbled with it, around a curve in the river bed, out of sight.
Chapter XIV: To Ride a Rathorn
Summer 45 - 53
I
. . . drowning, tumbling over and over, battered, coughing on water, choking on air, arms and legs wrapped around the colt, her face pressed against his neck, white mane and black hair streaming together in her eyes . . .
. . . hang on hang on hang on . . .
Thick with debris, the river swept them on in the flash flood of its sudden release until, finally, the crest left them behind. The colt righted himself with a snort and struck out for the shore, but the water was still too deep and the current too swift.
Jame clung to him, her head spinning. No, she and the colt both were, around and around in a wide eddy. Here, sharp rocks like teeth rimmed the shore, gnashing the water to foam. The clear center of the vortex revealed stony terraces below, gaping like a vast, ribbed gullet. At the bottom, eyes as big as dinner plates reflected the moon, waiting.
It wasn't the River Snake, Jame thought, with intense if momentary relief. They hadn't yet reached that monster's abode beneath the Silver. However, Rathillien came in layers of reality. Either she had hit her head once too often or this was some new dimension of the Merikits' sacred space, from which the Four—water, air, earth, and fire: Eaten One, Falling Man, Earth Wife, and Burnt Man—ruled Rathillien in their singularly haphazard fashion.
"Great fish! Eaten One!" she cried to the maw beneath, sputtering through a face-full of spray. "What have we done to you? Spit us out!"
Bloop.
Monstrous bubbles set the water boiling around them and burst with the stink of fish breath.
Ah, why should I bother with you, who are no spawn of mine? Go your way. Go.
The whirlpool disgorged itself into a waterfall. They fell from what surely was an impossible height. Stranger still, an old man fell with them, his dingy-white beard whipping up over his shoulder. He was almost but not quite seated on a throne that fell just beneath him.
"Falling Man, South Wind, Tishooo!" Jame cried to him. "You helped me once at Gothregor. Will you again?"
"Pshaw." Needles clattered in gnarled hands. A knobby scarf laddered with dropped stitches flew upward and tried to wrap itself around his neck. He fended it off impatiently. "Knit one, purl two . . . I already did my part in blowing away the weirdingstrom. Leave me alone. I have a kingdom to rule."
"Tishooo, you're knitting your beard into your scarf."
"Well, how do you catch a dragon? Go away, girl. I'm busy."
They crashed into the pool at the base of the falls, into water throbbing with the pulse of its own descent, and were swept on. Jame could no longer feel her chilled hands or feet. Much more of this, she thought, not very clearly, and I'm off.
One last try.
"Earth Wife . . ."
WHAP.
They had tumbled into a tree's drooping limbs and one had slapped her smartly across the face. The colt snagged the bough with his curved horns. Half-dazed, still clinging to his back, she felt him swing around in the current, then clamber out of the water and up the bank. Wet, tangled roots that should have snared his hooves instead shifted, groaning, to provide footholds. At the top he stood for a moment with his head down, sides a heave and quivering legs astraddle. Then he gave himself a mighty shake.
Jame was lying on the ground before she realized that she had fallen off. Cracks of bright sky showed through a dark canopy of leaves overhead. She stared up at them, too tired to move or think. Between one blink and the next, or so it seemed, the light shifted and darkened toward a night fretted with stars. Time had passed. How much?
The air was very still, yet nearby leaves stirred.
"Talk, talk, talk." The words rustled and creaked as stiff leaves rubbed together. "Earth Wife this. Earth Wife that. Always wanting something. Always meddling. Errr-eeek. . . Wear down a mountain, you would, girl, or tear up a forest by the roots. And now this."
Jame rolled her head toward the voice. She lay not far from a large holly bush. Broad, glossy leaves edged with faintly luminous gold stirred fretfully. Some drew back, others bowed forward or curled into rolling lines. Light, shadow, and movement defined a crude, constantly changing face as large as the bush itself. It glowered down at Jame, spiked leaves rippling into a scowl.
"Said your blood was poison, girl, didn't I? What shall we do with you now, eh?"
Something has happened. Jame thought, fumbling through shards of memory. What?
She raised an unsteady hand to her head. The makeshift bandages had long since unraveled and been swept away by the current; the scratches, if one could call them that, oozed. She could see white tendo
ns laid bare and veins narrowly missed. Trinity, had she cut that deep and never even felt it? A diagonal swathe of mingled fresh blood and dried was smeared across her forearm. Vaguely, she remembered hot breath on her wrist and a sense of bitter triumph not her own. A pause. Then had come the first, almost tentative rasp of a tongue against her bleeding flesh.
Sweet Trinity. He had tasted her blood.
Somewhere, someone was crying. It was a terrible sound, compounded of grief, rage, and a helpless, hopeless despair that shook her very soul.
"D'you want to see what you've done, you wretched, wicked girl?" hissed the leaves, rasping against each other in such agitation that spines snapped and flew in a stinging shower. "Then look."
Foliage peeled back layer by layer, opening not into the heart of the bush but into the dim, earth-floored lodge of Mother Ragga, the Earth Wife. Two figures huddled on the cold hearth, both white-haired but one a naked, shivering boy and the other a woman who held him in her arms. It was he who sobbed in deep wrenching gasps through pale lips stained with blood.
My blood, thought Jame.
The woman bent her head to draw the curtain of her hair over him and across the ruined half of her face. One dark, liquid eye regarded Jame askance.
Oh Kinzi-kin, child of darkness. How much worse than your uncle you have proved.
Then she froze, ears pricking through her tangled mane.
Jame heard it too.
Something was moving in the gathering dark. With it came a crackling and the stench of burnt fur.
"Now look what you've called up," hissed the Earth Wife, closing her branches like so many leafy arms. "As if we needed him!" Then she turned her face inward and disappeared.
Undergrowth and small trees snapped beneath a heavy tread, though the footfalls themselves were felt rather than heard as slow, deep shudders in the earth. Something huge prowled and growled through the darkening wood, circling, circling. Too weak to rise, Jame turned her head to catch glimpses as it passed, now a black shape defined by a hole in the star light, now by glowing cracks that opened and closed as it moved as if some terrible conflagration still smoldered deep within its flesh.
In the Ebonbane, by the chasm, it was muttering over and over. On the hearth, in the Master's hall . . .
Its words crackled and growled in Jame's mind, impatient, hungry. If fire had a voice, so it would have sounded. There was something else in it, though, something terrifyingly familiar, but her dazed brain refused to track down the memory.
An enormous head suddenly blotted out the sky above her, blunt, feline, and very, very close. The ears were charred stubs, the eyes caverns lit by deep, internal flames, the whole face a contorted mask of scar tissue.
Huh. It breathed waves of heat and greasy smoke in her face, then snuffled in her scent. You.
Jame had been expecting the Burnt Man who, Ancestors knew, was bad enough. But this was something else, or perhaps something more.
"Who . . . what are you?" she gasped, trying to cringe away.
The great head swung above her, scarred lips rippling back from white fangs bared half in grin, half in snarl. Flecks of bitter ash stung her face and clung to her lips, rank with the taste of ancient holocaust.
On the hearth, in the Master's hall, the changer Keral burned out my eyes. So many of my kin lay dead around me. So many. And all the while the Dream-weaver smiled and smiled as she danced out the souls of the fallen. But I did not fall. Dancer's daughter, in the Ebonbane, by the chasm, you escaped my judgment. But these mountains are mine.
Trinity, of course: it was the blind Arrin-ken whose presence she had sensed in her flight from Gothregor and up the Riverland, when the entire Snowthorn range had seemed like a crouching cat that held her under its paw.
Then, he had let her go. Now . . .
You have called on water, air, and earth. Now call on me. Do you seek judgment, Nemesis? Ask, and I will give it, blind justice for blind destruction. Ask!
The pressure to confess welled up like vomit. She had done so many bad things, or at least things for which she blamed herself. The great cat's will bore down on her, his hot breath scorching her face.
Confess. You know your guilt.
The Arrin-ken were the third of the three people who made up the Kencyrath. The Highborn ruled, the Kendar served, and the Arrin-ken kept the balance between them and their god—or had until millennia ago the great felines had withdrawn into the wilds of Rathillien for reasons still not entirely clear. However, they still sometimes used the so-called God-Voice to speak through unwilling Kencyr lips.
Oh. That was where she had last heard that terrible voice. In the subterranean Priests' College. Though the mouth of the renegade priest Ishtier.
Grief, pain, and rage had driven the great cat insane, but did that matter?
For us, the Arrin-ken Immalai had said, good is no less terrible than evil, nor were the two easily told apart. Who was to judge between them, if not those whom their ruthless god had chosen for that role? Least of all, who was she to question such a judgment?
In a moment, she would give this dark avenger what he wanted, and with it permission to burn her alive. Or would she become one of the Burnt Man's pack of the damned, the Burning Ones, with whom he hunted down those with the stench of guilt on them? An Arrin-ken's justice or the Burnt Man's? Kencyrath or Rathillien or both? It was all very confusing.
And yet again came the demand, singeing her eyelashes, rattling her to the depths of her being: All things end, light, hope, and life. This you know full well, darkling-born, none better. Why delay? Come to judgment. Come!
. . . get away get away get away . . .
She was still too weak to move, but her will to survive leaped out and seized that other mind now blood-bound to her own.
With a shriek, she/he/they burst out of the undergrowth. Before them, a monstrous darkness crouched, gloating, over its prey.
That puny thing is me? thought Jame.
Then the Arrin-ken raised its blind, smoldering face to them, and the stench of it rolled out in waves of heat that made the air quiver. The colt stopped short, appalled. Jame felt his hindquarters gather as if they were her own. The next moment, they had leaped over the great cat and were in wild flight down the riverbank.
. . . run run run . . .
II
The colt's terror at this sudden invasion of his soul fed on Jame's of that which even now might pursue her. Their flight was madness and mindless, an eternity in growing darkness of crashing into, through, and between things that raked their sides and snatched at their feet.
After what felt like a millennium, Jame began to gather her wits. So did the colt. She could feel his revulsion at her presence in his mind and his attempts to throw her off. If she had indeed been on his back, he would have been rid of her long ago, and she of him. As it was, she felt his hatred and rage trying to pry her loose even as she struggled to free herself from him, but they were bound, body and soul. How could one throw off oneself?
To ride a rathorn . . .
Trinity, who would have thought it would be like this?
Hush, she found herself crooning to the colt. Gently, gently. What good will it do to run yourself to death?
Good enough to kill you, came the fierce answer.
And so he would, if he could. She felt the air burning in his lungs and his heart pounding. So did her own, back where her body lay.
So this is blood-binding, she thought, sickened to the bottom of her solitary soul. No one should have such power over another being, and I don't even like being touched. Graykin was bad enough, but this . . . this is obscene. Am I too, for letting it happen?
Gorbel's moon-like face hung over her, his lower lip pendulous with dismay.
"What's wrong?" he said, as if from a great distance.
She clutched his arm, and he flinched at the bite of her nails. "Gorbel, for Trinity's sake, kill me and set us both free!"
"What?"
"Just do it! Daddy will
love you for it."
"Huh. I may not be clever like some, but I'm not stupid. Caldane, Lord Caineron, loves no one but himself. We don't play for love in my house, only for power. And survival. You've made a fine mess of your wrists. Hold still while I bind them. I said, hold still!"
She barely saw his hand before it caught her in the face with a jolting slap.
"Damn," she heard him mutter as the world dimmed.
III
It felt as if they had been running forever, on and on and on.
To Ride a Rathorn Page 28