A trick of the wind brought a crash and a horrified shout from Kithorn. Twisting around, still upside-down, Jame saw that a boulder half the size of the smithy had smashed into the square beside the well. There was Red Britches, still curled up like a hedgehog, and Chingetai, and Tungit, but where was Green Britches, the new Favorite? Silly question. Smashed to bloody pulp under the boulder, of course. What very bad luck, or what very good aim.
A whistling sound made her look up.
"Oh schist," she said, as another flaming rock punched through the upper branches.
It struck the limb from which she dangled and smashed it. She fell, snatching at leaf and stem, twig and branch, until a sturdy bough seemed to leap up at her. It hit her in the side, or rather she hit it, and there she hung for a moment, stunned and breathless. A huge splash and a jet of steam up through the leaves marked the fireball's plunge into the river. Would she follow it? River or ground, broken neck or back?
Neither.
She slid off the bough and fell again, into someone's arms. For a moment, dazed, she looked up into the pale, hooded face of the man whom the Merikit called Mer-kanti.
"Run," he said, in a voice rusty with disuse, and dropped her.
More fiery stones fell, incandescent against a lime-green rain of leaves and unripe walnuts. Jame lurched to her feet, trying to gather her wits; even for her, that had been a jarring fall—three of them, in fact, in rapid succession. She limped toward the meadow, met by Jorin as he bounded toward her through the ferns, chirping in alarm.
They emerged down-meadow from the stream, to a sight that stopped her in her tracks. A huge, black cloud towered above the shattered mountain top. Vivid pink lightning snapped within it, its crack almost swallowed by the volcano's roar. As the cloud rose, flattened, and spread, the morning light dimmed to a murky yellow. Underfoot, the ground shuddered continuously.
Jorin pressed against her leg, his terror as clear as speech. Time to leave. Now.
"Not yet," she told him.
She set off slant-wise across the field, going as fast as she could with a hand pressed against a savage stitch in her side. Please Trinity she hadn't broken a rib. Or two. Or three. Something white drew her. There stood the Whinno-hir Bel-tairi, trembling, with one foot barely touching the ground. She must have tried to run with her over-grown hooves and pulled up lame. Yes, dammit. Drawing closer, Jame saw the bulge between knee and pastern of a bowed tendon.
A white-haired boy, stood at her head, trying to coax her forward. As Jame approached, he turned a stricken, desperate face toward her and mouthed a plea for help that came out as a half-strangled bleat.
Jame knelt and ran her hand down the mare's leg. It was already hot and swollen, unusable without the risk of permanent damage. Now what?
She shot a glance over her shoulder at the mountain. Perhaps the worst was over. However, black clouds still billowed from the ragged heights and sections of the upper slope were giving way in massive landslides of melted snow and mud. Trinity, Jame thought, watching two hundred foot tall ironwoods topple like pins. How clear and close it all seemed. If the Merikit village was anywhere near the foot of that monster, it would be swallowed whole, yet the Earth Wife had said that she could protect it. How?
The answer came from high up on the south-west flank of the volcano. There, a broad area bulged outward, then split open in an even greater explosion than the first. For a moment, molded in shifting chaos, Jame saw the Earth Wife's face, mouth hugely agape, vomiting fire. Ten seconds, fifteen . . .
BOOM!
The concussion made her stagger and Jorin skitter sideways, while mare and colt cried out as if with one terrified voice.
Gray and white debris boiled out of the cleft mountain and rolled down the face opposite the Merikit village with a rumble that shook the earth. Unlike the first eruption's storm cloud, this was a dirty, spreading avalanche. Both, however, seemed to move slowly—a trick, perhaps, of distance. After all, despite how close the mountain appeared, it had taken that massive concussion some time to reach her. Mother Ragga had turned the major eruption away from the Merikit. Perhaps those in the meadow were also safe, but somehow Jame doubted it. The Burnt Man had been thwarted once. He would not be again, if he could help it, especially not with the Dark Judge muttering vengeance in his charred stub of an ear.
"Bel can't run," she said to the boy, "but perhaps she can ride."
Understanding lit his face. In a moment, he had reverted to the equine—if, in fact, his quasi-human appearance had been real at all—and Bel sank down on the grass with a cry of pain. Jame caught her cold, white hands.
"Lady, please. You must."
She helped her rise, and was very relieved to find that she was as light for a woman as she had been for a horse. It still took an effort to lift her onto the rathorn's back against the savage throb in her side.
The colt lunged away as soon as he felt his rider's weight, but then he swerved to circle Jame. She felt his confusion as he cantered past, just out of reach. His instincts were screaming at him to run, to escape, to save what he valued most. Under that like bile lay long cherished hatred. If he couldn't kill his dam's slayer outright, he could leave her to her fate, except that the bond between them held as strongly as the chain that had trapped him in the riverbed. Under that in turn was something else, something new, furiously denied but still there.
No time to explore that now.
"Go," she told him. "Get m'lady away from here, as far as you can." When he hesitated, she told him again, unwilling to force her command on him but ready to do so if she must. "I'll find another way. Go!"
He tossed his head—Huh. If you insist—and was gone, a swift, pale shadow across the darkening grass.
Jame turned back to the stream. It surprised her how much she wished she had gone with Bel—not just to escape, either, but to race the wind on that splendid creature. To ride a rathorn might be madness, but what divine folly, worth any cost. Well, not quite. She feared that the colt's legs weren't strong enough to carry two, at least as far and fast as necessary. Besides, there by the water stood Chumley, whose great hooves could still surely take her to safety.
More rocks fell, trailing smoke and fire. Most were no bigger than a clenched fist, but some roaring past overhead were huge, and shattered on impact, leaving great craters in the soft ground. At least their fall now seemed random and they were easy to dodge if one kept an eye on their flight.
As she neared the river bank, Jame saw that Chumley wasn't half screened by grass as she had thought but by the painted mare. Mer-kanti stood between the two horses with a hand on each, steadying them. Several paces in front of him was a large, smoldering boulder, half-buried in the stream's gravel margin. Jame slowed, staring, then approached cautiously. The rock's crust was laced with fiery cracks, and some pieces had fallen away like unusually thick bits of shell from a gigantic, boiled egg. Out of one crack protruded a scrap of burnt material. In its filigree of ash, clearly preserved, were the loops and whorls of knit-work.
Jame fell to her knees beside the boulder, close enough to feel the waves of heat rolling off of it.
"Mother Ragga? Earth Wife? Are you in there?"
Another bit of lava-shell fell, hissing, onto the wet river pebbles. The thing was hollow. Inside, something moved, and coughed.
"Well, what are you waiting for?" said a thin, peevish voice. "Get me out of here."
Jame incautiously grabbed a patch of shell to pull it loose, and her gloves burst into fire. She plunged them into the steaming stream, then sat down abruptly on the stony bank with her scorched hands jammed into her arm-pits, and swore while Jorin slunk around her, chirping urgently. Dammit, that had been her last pair of gloves.
"What are you staring at?" she demanded over her shoulder. "Can't you help?"
The hooded man lifted a hand from Chumley's shoulder, then quickly dropped it again to stop the enormous horse from bolting. The message was clear: if he lost physical contact with either bea
st, instinct would throw it into blind flight. Presumably they needed both if he, Jame, and the Earth Wife all must flee.
". . . water . . . waaater . . ."
The odd, gargling voice came from the stream. There, dead trout floated past, silver bellies up, but one particularly large fish had caught on the rocks broadside to the swift current. Its back was steel blue speckled with black, its eyes already glazed and turning white as the water boiled it alive. From its gaping mouth came again that desperate plea:
". . . waaaater . . .!"
All right. A talking fish. This was, after all, still sacred space, home also to the Eaten One.
"I can't make the stream run clean again, or cool it down," Jame said, exasperated. "I can't save you. Sweet Trinity, who do you think I am?"
"Water." This time the croaked word came from Mer-kanti, and he nodded toward the lava-shell.
"Oh," said Jame.
She grabbed the empty saddle bag, dipped it into the stream, and dumped its contents on the hot shell, which exploded, knocking her over backward. She heard Chumley scream and through the steam saw him rear above her, looming higher than the mountain, it seemed, all flared nostrils, bared yellow teeth, and eyes rolling white with terror. Mer-kanti's thin, strong hand slid up the chestnut neck as far as it could reach and the gelding came down again with a snort, enormous hooves crashing to earth on either side of Jame's head. Belatedly, she yelped and scrambled clear.
The top had blown off the hollow rock, leaving a rough bowl full of something at first impossible to identify. Then a bony hand rose from a pale welter of flesh, clutched the edge of the bowl, and raised a thin arm drooping with loose skin. A face turned upward, and what a face. Sagging flesh hung off the skull except where eyes, nose, and mouth pinned it in place. Only by those ancient, gummy eyes did Jame recognize the Earth Wife's formerly plump features. The lava's heat had made her fat run like melting wax within her skin, settling to swell the lowest points. She stared at her wasted arm, festooned in rolls of hanging skin, and her toothless mouth gaped in a wail.
"Just look at me! Damn you, Burnie, was this fair? Was this right? Oh, bury me quick! I want to die!"
She dropped her face back into the folds of her flesh. Steeling herself, Jame reached in, rummaged about, and pulled the Earth Wife's head up again by its thin, gray braid.
"You can't die," she said. "You're Rathillien, or one quarter of it, anyway. Pull yourself together!"
"I'm blind!" Mother Ragga howled, and indeed at the moment she was: the tension on her hair had caused her skull to sink within its sack of skin and her eyes with it to the bottom of deep, indrawn dimples.
Jame could have shaken her, but was afraid that she would slosh.
Hot ash stung her face. It had started to descend unnoticed, as a fine dust growing rapidly thicker. This would be fall-out from the first eruption. The roiling clouds of the second still churned down the mountain side—closer, it seemed, and picking up speed.
"Listen," she said desperately. "You like my horse, don't you? I'll give him to you."
"Present?" said the sunken mouth, suddenly hopeful. Nothing, it seemed, could quell the Earth Wife's greed for gifts.
"Yes, but you've got to accept him now. Come on. D'you want . . . er . . . Burnie to win?"
She left go of the braid and Mother Ragga's skull rose to meet its features. She stared avidly at Chumley who stared back at her, ears pricked, fascinated by this strange creature with the peep-a-boo face.
"Nice horse," she crooned. "Big horse. My horse."
Mer-kanti slid his hand up to the gelding's withers and pressed down. Chumley sank ponderously to his knees.
When the Earth Wife rose and leaned, reaching eagerly for him, she looked like a skeleton wearing a half-collapsed tent of skin, and a small skeleton at that, coming barely to Jame's chin. It might have belonged to a child, weighed down by an old woman's mortality, anchored by it, too: liquefied fat had settled in her legs and feet, swelling them to grotesque proportions. Jame struggled to lift one leg from the lava shell. It squished in her grasp like a thin boot full of mud. Raising the White Lady had been hard. This was like trying to shift the foundations of the earth.
She heaved, the shell tipped, and Mother Ragga spilled out on top of her. Jame found herself buried under folds of hot, sweaty skin, inside of which anonymous organs oozed, gurgling. G'ah, what a smell, like all the old women in the world baked in a pie. She struggled to her knees. Sharp bones dug into her back. After an agonized, fumbling moment, the mass lifted and she could breathe again.
"Next time . . ." she gasped, staggering to her feet, "bring your own . . . damn mounting block."
Mother Ragga had indeed gotten one leg over Chumley's broad back. Now she was slowly toppling off the other side. Up came her near foot, a bloated bag of skin with thick, yellow nails half-sunken at one end. Jame grabbed it and pulled down to center the ungainly rider. As she did so, the sudden stab of sore ribs caught her in the side like a dagger thrust.
She found herself back on aching knees, trying to catch her breath. The world had gone gray for a moment, more likely for several. She thought she remembered Chumley lurching to his feet with a squeal and the Earth Wife's shriek trailing off into the distance. Yes, they were gone. Her claws were out and bloodied. Without meaning to, she had raked the gelding's side, trying to stop her fall. No wonder he had bolted.
So had the painted mare.
Jame looked up just in time to see her plunge away across the meadow with Mer-kanti on foot beside her, gripping her mane. How beautifully he moved, barely touching the grass, wind-blowing Senethari at its finest. Just before both vanished into the deepening twilight, he swung up onto the mare's back.
Jame shook off her dazed wonder. "Wait!" she cried, struggling to her feet. "Come back!"
But he too was gone.
The world was still gray, and growing darker by the second. Ash fell thickly now, like a hot, dirty snowstorm stinking of sulfur. Jame shrugged off her jacket and draped it over her head. The improvised hood protected her eyes as did the curtain of her loose hair, but it was now impossible to see more than a few feet ahead. Then for a dazzling moment lightning shattered the sky, followed by a crack of thunder. In the stunned blindness that followed, panic reached her through senses not her own.
"Jorin!" she cried, and without thinking took a deep breath of the ash-laden air to call again. When her convulsive coughing stopped, she reached out to the ounce with her senses, but there was no answer.
Lost. Gone.
That meant nothing, she told herself. The link between them often broke at the most inconvenient times. But what would he do in this thickening nightmare? Curl up in an ash bank and wait for her to find him or for the storm to pass? Small chance of the former, unless she tripped over him. If the latter, he would die. Worse was coming. She knew it.
It's all your fault.
Insidious whisper, borne on an uneasy, shifting wind. Who or what spoke, if not her own guilt?
You destroy everyone who trusts you, everyone whom you love.
"No," she said, denial ash-bitter in her mouth, parching her throat.
But what if it were true?
As if called, the dead came to her on the swirling breath of distant fire: Dally, dragging his flayed skin behind him; Prince Odallian, melting into a puddle of flesh corrupt through no sin of his own; Tirandys, smiling on his pyre. Ash they had all become, because of her. As ash they returned.
"If I become Regonereth, the Ivory Knife incarnate," she had told the Earth Wife, "I'll do what I was born to do, break what needs to be broken, and then break myself."
Then break and die.
"No," she said again. Blink hard, and they were gone. A trick of the mind. Besides, as much as she regretted their deaths, none of them had been her fault.
Or were they? Think.
Between the stab and crack of lightning, the gray world was unnervingly quiet, the ash a blanket that muffled the senses. In that dead silence ther
e was far too much time for thought.
True. However good her intentions, around her things happened. Even her most innocent action could become a pebble cast into the pool of events, with ripples far beyond her control. Then too, not all her actions had been inconsequential in themselves, as witnessed by the string of ruins that she had left in her wake.
Still, buildings didn't necessarily fall down or burn up whenever she walked into them, as she had told Timmon.
No, just most of the time. And how much worse it would surely become as her god-cursed nature worked its way to the surface like a festering wound.
Then lance it and die. You know you are poison.
To Ride a Rathorn Page 38