Why else had everyone abandoned her, not once but over and over again? Why should they stay, sensing what she was?
G'ah, she thought, giving herself a shake that was half a shudder. Horses bolt and death sweeps people away, whether they wish it to or not. Am I to blame for that?
For everything, breathed the gray wind. Someone must be.
That brought her up short. "Now wait just a minute."
No. Behold those who would judge you.
Lightning flickered across the sky, illuminating it in quick jabs that made the intervals of darkness between all the more intense. A shape formed within the dance of ash, gaining definition with each flash and drawing closer without seeming to move. It was slim and elegant with a pale face under an unruly shock of black hair threaded with white. Silver-gray eyes caught each lightning flare and held it in the dark that followed. Jame couldn't clearly see his hands, but she knew them to be as fine-boned as his face and gloved in a lacework of scars. Her sudden longing for their touch was so sharp that it hurt. Here at last was someone who, surely, would not abandon her.
Then he saw her, and turned away.
It's only a trick, part of her mind insisted, but it hurt too much to ignore.
"Torisen!" she cried after him. "Brother, don't leave me!"
"Why not?" He paused to answer her but askance, not meeting her eyes. "What can you be to me but my destruction?"
"But I love you!"
"Destruction begins with love. So our father taught us. So our mother taught him. So he was doomed to dust and bitter death, all honor spent. Would you likewise doom me?"
"No! Never! How can you say so?"
"Because I know what you are."
His features shifted, his voice as well, growing harsh with anger and bewildered pain.
"Filthy Shanir." Her father turned to glare at her, as gray with ash as his name. Death had hollowed his face to dry patches of skin clinging to the skull, but his silver eyes blazed. "How dare you look so much like your mother and not be her? Tricked. Betrayed. Poison fruit of a tainted tree, where is my sword, my ring, my life?"
Before that cry of pain Jame recoiled a step, but only one. Once his rage had thrown her into panic-stricken flight. It could still made her flinch. But she remembered what she had heard at Tentir about a cadet humiliated by his lord father, tormented by his lordan brother, driven out prey to passions at which she could only guess.
There was the crux. She didn't yet know what had happened to her father that night in the lordan's quarters. Perhaps neither did who or whatever now challenged her.
"Father," she said, "if that's who you are, tell me: that night, in that hot, stinking room, what broke you? I want to understand. Please tell me."
He stared at her. What flickered through those dead eyes—surprise, chagrin, anger? Then he threw back his head and howled. He didn't want to be understood, much less pitied. What was he, after all, without his mantle of rage? Already he was changing. Gone, the patched, gray coat worn thin by years of bitter exile and the prematurely gray hair; gone, that thin, haunted face.
Sleek and smug, Greshan smiled at her, and twitched straight his exquisitely embroidered jacket with a coarse hand.
Jame's fists clenched, nails biting palms. Was this how her father had learned to live with himself, by becoming the thing that had marred him?
"No," she said to that smirking face. "He made mistakes. He hurt a lot of people, including me. But he never put hot iron to the face of an innocent, nor tormented little boys for fun. He didn't become you."
The other's smile twisted and slipped. She wanted to rip it off his face altogether, and that foul coat off his back.
"What happened in your apartment, uncle?" she demanded, both pleased and annoyed that he seemed to drift away as she advanced on him. Lightning and darkness flickered back and forth to a muffled shout of thunder. "What did you do, or try to do, that left your Randir friend nailed to the floor with a knife through his guts, your servant in flames, and you fouling yourself in a corner? Brave man. Great warrior. Daddy's boy. How did you die, and why did your death cause a man like Hallik Hard-hand to turn the White Knife on himself? Answer, dammit!"
She tried to pin him with her rage, but he slipped away, dissolving into darkness.
Again came that flicker of doubt. What was all this anyway—guilt, hallucination, or something else altogether? Who was it that must have someone to blame, who kept trying to push her in directions she didn't want to go? That had happened before, at least twice recently.
Then she knew.
"All right," she told the chaos that seethed around her. "Enough fun and games. Show yourself."
Ahhhhhhh . . . breathed the storm, and the air grew ominously still. Murky yellow light filtered down from above, gray motes afloat in it. Ash no longer fell on Jame but circled in a dark storm wall of which she was the eye. Although it was still sweltering hot, she resumed her jacket and defiantly shook out her hair, the better to face whatever was coming to face her.
A huge shape moved in the shifting darkness, ill-defined by clots and flowing streamers of ash. Here was the bulge of a great shoulder; there, the cavernous socket of an eye; and all the time gigantic paws soundless in themselves kept pace with the shuddering earth.
Jame turned with it. This was the third time in recent days that she and the blind Arrin-ken had danced around each other, if one counted the first when she had been flat on her back, half dead from blood loss and scared half out of her wits. On some level, she was still afraid—how not, faced with such a creature?—but she was also angry.
Be angry, whispered her Shanir blood. Be strong. Be like your father.
"Now that I have your attention," she said, hardly knowing if fear or rage shook her voice, "I have a question. You are a judge. Trinity knows, the Kencyrath need justice. So why don't you go after bastards like Lord Caineron, who would corrupt all that we are, or that lying priest Ishtier? Where were you when the Witch of Wilden made her pact with the Shadow Guild to slaughter my family or when my dear uncle Greshan played his filthy game with Bel?"
A flame-savaged face turned toward her, baring its fangs.
The innocent are not my concern. She flinched involuntarily as his voice snarled in her head, like teeth scraping the inside of her skull. I judge only those of the Old Blood with destruction ripening in their veins, if their own kind are too cowardly to judge them first. Such as you. Dare you call yourself innocent? Dancer's daughter, you were born guilty.
"That I deny, nor am I yet damned."
Liar!
His terrible face snapped at her out of shifting shadows, itself a shadow but ravaged with such hunger that it seemed ready to devour itself for want of other food.
A surge of near-berserker rage made Jame stumble. Careful, she thought, fighting to regain both control and balance. Fall now and you fall forever . . . like your father. But you know who you are and what you may become.
"Liar?" she repeated as levelly as she could, hearing her voice quiver, catching it. Without thinking, she began to move in the kantirs of the Senethari, wind-blowing with a touch of water-flowing, gliding around the savage eddies of his anger. "That too I deny."
The dance imposed its own discipline. Move the hand just so to cup the wind. Dip and sway around an errant coil of ash as hot as thwarted vengeance, as cold as lost hope. Such self-devouring anger! Such despair! Here were fires that might consume the world, yet hunger for more. Ah, gently, gently. Feel the cool flow of water over scorched skin. Spill the wind through spread fingers and comb it with the heavy silk of black hair until all flowed smooth. There. Let it go.
"I am not like you, burnt cat, blind judge. I came from the darkness, but I do not embrace it. What is there in the Master's House but dust and ashes? You were burned there, so you make yourself a fire to burn others. Does their pain ease your own?"
Yes!
Such deadly vehemence, causing even ash to flare in fiery motes, but the dance threaded through it, c
atching him unawares. God's claws, this was dangerous. Don't think. Dance.
The great head, half-seen, swung . . . in assent, denial, confusion?
No. If I hurt, if I burn, it is to make me what I am, to do what I must. What other reason can there be?
"Must everything have a reason?"
YES! How else are we to endure such misery if in the end there is no one to punish for it?
What did one say to that? If you can't live with a run of bad luck, stop whining and die? Or was he right? Cause and effect. One understood that. But effect without cause? What if, after all, the world was nothing but random chance, without justice or sense? Better madness than to believe that.
Never mind. He was answering questions despite himself. Ask more.
"You say you judge those Shanir allied with the Third Face of God, That-Which-Destroys. Whom have you judged?"
Arrrr . . . not Greshan. He would have been my meat, ripe and rich, but his own kind judged him first.
Jame blinked. What?
The Brandan matriarch, Brenwyr, a maledight and matricide. Despite that, however, she is still innocent. Soon, soon may she fall. You have pushed her hard, little nemesis. Already she totters on the edge of her doom. The Witch, ah, the Witch. I will have her in the end, when she uncloaks and her defenses at last fall. But they are nothing, nothing, while the Master lives and so does his servant Keral, who burned out my eyes.
"There you name true evil," said Jame, and heard her voice begin to purr with the seductive power of the dance.
Ah. That was better. Her ribs no longer hurt, nor did she feel the weight of her own body. Doubts, too, began to fall away. Why have such power if not to use it?
"You name your failures, Lord Cat. What have you accomplished in this great crusade of yours? What are you but a stinking shadow to frighten children if you cannot strike at evil's root, there, under shadow's eaves?"
He howled and raked at his own flesh as if to punish it. The air thickened with flakes of charred skin.
Do you think I have not tried? Year after bitter year, I have prowled the Barrier, seeking a way through, but no Arrin-ken may enter Perimal Darkling until the coming of the Tyr-ridan, and that is never, because our god has forsaken us.
If he and the Kencyrath managed to kill off every destructive Shanir, they guaranteed that failure. Jame suspected she wasn't the first potential Nemesis, only quite possibly the last. She was about to say as much, but the great cat still spoke as if under bitter compulsion, and his words stunned her.
Once, only once, he came within reach. I felt him cross into this world, into a garden of white flowers, but by the time I arrived he was gone, leaving yet another marred innocent. I would have judged her, punished her, but she had license for what she did. She showed me. The one I should have judged, the one who had doomed her, was then long dead, and he her own father! All things end, light, hope, and life. All come to judgment—except the guilty.
Trinity.
The dance flew out of Jame's mind, and its power spiraled away. Up to that moment, she hadn't realized that she was air-borne on its wings.
Dammit, she thought, spitting out grass and trying to catch the breath that surprise and the ground had slammed out of her. I've got to stop falling from great heights. It's unhealthy. But what did he say?
Fire and ash roared up in a shape that towered above her, an awakened holocaust with flame raging in its jaws and the deep pits of its eyes.
Child of darkness, Dancer's daughter, you dare play your filthy games with ME?
Clearly, the dance had released him too. What had she been trying to do, anyway? Not reap his soul. Not quite. But the dark thrill remained of searching an Arrin-ken for weakness as for cracks of bitter honey in his soul, like Rawneth in Brenwyr's soul-image.
I could have shattered him, she thought, amazed, appalled. He almost came apart in my hands.
Did that, finally, make her guilty and thus subject to his judgment? But he hadn't broken, and neither had she.
The ash storm ignited into a hurricane of fire that ringed her, roaring with his voice. Green grass withered and kindled; strands of her hair, lifting, sizzled and stank. Her face stung. He would burn her alive through sheer mindless fury, justice be damned, and in doing so he would damn himself.
"Lord!" she cried. Heat had almost closed her throat. Was that feeble croak her voice? "A judgment! Am I fallen? If not, are the innocent now your meat?"
The great cat sprang at her, and the flames rose with him.
This is my pyre, she thought, staring up as the fiery wave crested above her. Incandescent orange and glowing red, laced with gold and a deep, luminous blue . . . How beautiful.
At the top of his leap, a blast of scorching wind caught him. He fought it, howling, but it shredded him. Jame fell flat on the ground, claws out to anchor her against the gale. What in Perimal's name . . .? In a lull of sorts, she raised her head and saw that the Arrin-ken had vanished, but what was coming in his place?
The wind had whipped away most of the low-level ash, leaving the newly-risen sun a pallid smudge in the sky. Movement to the north caught Jame's eye. Very, very close, boiling clouds from the second irruption rose from the valley that converged just below Kithorn with the Silver. The head of the avalanche had momentarily disappeared behind a high bluff, but now it rolled back into sight at the northern end of the meadow. Its vanguard appeared to be not clouds but huge, tumbling figures, gray, black and white, veined with fire. A raised, baleful head, the stump of a foot, a hand with charred stubs for fingers, reaching, then over it would go as another took its place and another after that in a seething, eager muddle.
"Wha, wha, wha?" came their questing cry.
Then they saw her.
"HA!"
Jame had leaped up. Their booming, triumphant shout and a second tempest blast struck her almost simultaneously, bowling her over. She rolled to her feet and fled, all but flying before the wind with the Burning Ones hot on her heels.
There was no way that she could outrun them. Belatedly, she remembered the cliff over the waterfall, high enough perhaps to take her above their reach, but that lay behind her now. When she turned her head to gauge how far, the wind smacked her hard in the face. Through a blur of stinging tears, she saw the Burnt Man's host roar across the stream, which exploded into stream at their touch.
Run, run, run . . .
Immediately in front of her stood a door, surrounded by the seared meadow, half sunk into it. Serpentine forms and gap-mouthed imus rioted over its wooden posts and lintel. It hadn't been there before.
Jame couldn't have stopped if she had wanted to. She crashed into it and it gave way, spilling her down a step onto the dirt floor of the Earth Wife's lodge. A large shape took up one entire end of the room—Chumley, whickering in alarm and hitting his head against the low ceiling. The room was full of animals, sleepily growling, squawking, and squeaking in protest at her sudden arrival. Jorin pounced her in delight before she had stopped rolling. On the other side of a smoky fire sat Mother Ragga herself, lumpen in her chair with the half-knit foxkin bright-eyed in her lap.
"Well?" she said, sounding petulant. "If you're staying, shut the door."
Jame did.
Chapter XIX: Darkness at Noon
Summer 66
I
Below Gothregor, the Silver bent to the east before resuming its southward course. Long ago, the low-lying ground within this angle had been cleared and enclosed along the edge by an earthen dike. Every spring part of the snow-swollen river was diverted into the resulting three hundred acre meadow and then drained out its lower end, leaving a new, rich layer of silt through which the early grass soon shot vivid green blades. On the far side, where the land rose to meet the Snowthorn's foothills, long terraces supported bright ribbons of flax, barley, rye, oats, and wheat, all ripening toward the Great Harvest at the end of summer. At midsummer, though, attention fixed on the lower meadow and the haying, which took every hand that the Knorth co
uld muster to bring in the harvest before the weather turned.
First came a line of reapers with a hiss and flash of scythes, the hay falling in swathes at their feet. The next line of workers turned over these sheaves with rakes to loosen them for proper drying. Twenty great wains, drawn by horse or oxen, lumbered behind them between the rows. Onto these the hay was pitched under the expert eye of the load-masters. When a wain was full, it pulled aside to one of the growing stacks. The hayricks themselves were meticulously constructed and, in their way, things of beauty. Each sat on a stone foundation which in turn was covered with a deep layer of green bracken, both to raise the hay off the damp ground and to protect it from rats, who could no more chew through the tough branches than through horse hair. Set on top of that was a wooden structure in the shape of an open-sided pyramid, against which the hay was stacked, again under careful supervision.
To Ride a Rathorn Page 39