But should she instead say “my lady’s room”? Or Ran’s? Or Jamethiel’s? Even now, the matter of names confused her, as if she hadn’t yet quite decided whom or what she served—Highlord’s heir, randon cadet, creature of legend, or just plain Jame, whose wardrobe always needed tending and who couldn’t remember to eat regularly.
However, her mistress had been restless of late, rising early, retiring after all sensible Kencyr not duty bound were long since in bed.
“No need for you to keep such hours too,” she had told Rue with a wry smile, and temporarily banished her servant to the barracks next door.
She just wanted some privacy, Rue had told herself with a shrug, trying not to mind. It hadn’t escaped her that the Highlord’s sister wasn’t used to being waited on.
And she had bad dreams.
Rue hastily fumbled herself into her clothes. So the day would start a few hours early. It was probably nothing.
The courtyard was empty, the only sign of life thudding in the bakery where someone was vigorously kneading dough. Soon the kitchen would rouse, too. Rue’s stomach rumbled.
Strange, she thought as she entered the tower, how the smartest people could be so stupid sometimes. Jame had to be reminded to eat on a more or less regular basis, and to dress befitting the occasion, as if neither was all that important. Perhaps those were Highborn traits. Adding to her confusion, Rue had had little to do with the ruling class before her ten-command had crossed paths with the soon-to-be lordan before the gates of Restormir. Highborn women in general were mysteries to most Kendar. They had all thought then (yes, even Brier Iron-thorn) that Jame was mad. Many still did.
Here was the familiar third story apartment. Tangled blankets lay on the floor and the clothes that Rue had carefully laid out the night before sprawled abandoned on the bed. The chest at the bed’s foot appeared to have been ransacked. Jame had packed that herself, after several pointed reminders.
(“Take what’s important to you, Lady. You’ll be sorry if you don’t.”)
No one was there.
Well, thought Rue, fighting panic, so she’s gone out. With Jorin. In the middle of the night. Wearing . . . what?
There was something on the mantelpiece, a piece of parchment tented so as to catch the eye. Rue unfolded it noting, in an abstract way, that her fingers shook. She wasn’t a good reader—few Kendar were. Her lips shaped the words.
Oh god.
She jammed the paper into her pocket and rushed out of the room.
IV
IN THE COURTYARD it was still night, although with a glimmer of false dawn. Soon the garrison would wake. Jame had gathered torches before her return to the oasis and had left them piled before a gate farther to the east along the wall. This door was secured. As Jame bent to pick the lock, someone entered the court from the tower and rushed across the flagstones to grab her arm. It was Rue, her self-appointed servant.
“I went to see if you were awake yet, and you were gone, and there was this note to Brier lying on the mantle. . . .”
In her agitation the tow-headed cadet shook Jame, probably harder than she intended. One tended to think of Rue as small, but that was only in comparison to other Kendar. She could have made one and a half of Jame, by breadth at least.
“Think! They trust you now. If you disappear, will they ever trust you again? And we’re so close to becoming a real house—well, a minor one. I want that, oh, so much. Others do too.”
Jame detached the Kendar from her arm, compelled to use a pressure point.
“Ow,” said Rue, not really noticing. “You can’t leave now! I-I’ll raise the keep if you try!”
Again, the dilemma caught Jame by the throat. She knew that she was a coward for not confronting Brier face to face. Didn’t the Southron deserve that? After all, her fate and Jame’s were now intertwined and beyond that, Brier would think of the keep itself. Well, dammit, Jame did too. In defense, for one thing she was in a hurry, which meant that she didn’t want to argue. For another, if Brier knew where she was going, the Kendar might follow. Brier loose in Tai-tastigon boggled the imagination. For a third . . .
“Rue, I would rather die than disappoint you, but other lives are at stake too. I owe them more than I do you. Or Brier. Or anyone else here. Sometimes you have to go back before you can go forward. My honor demands it.”
Rue dragged a sleeve across her face, wiping away unnoticed tears and snot. “I don’t understand that, but . . . but if it’s that important, I’m going with you.”
“Oh, Rue. This may be dangerous.”
“I don’t care.”
Jame regarded her helplessly. She knew that Rue was apt to be in the way. Besides, she really didn’t want this trusting child to know what she had once been. She couldn’t be stopped now, though, even by love.
“All right, all right. Ancestors forgive me. You can come.”
The gate’s door swung open on darkness deeper than the night. They passed through it just as the garrison began to stir behind them and closed it in the face of a disappointed ounce.
Chapter II
The Anarchies
Spring 54
I
THE TUNNEL was long and dark. Torchlight caught the dripping walls and the albino, hands-breath crickets that scuttled across them into cracks where they froze, betrayed only by the faint glow of their chitinous shells. Sometimes the way was close and fraught with jutting rocks that must be edged past. Sometimes it led along the edge of chasms in whose depths things stirred and rustled. At one point, foxkin erupted in a black torrent from a fissure and swooped on webbed wings around the travelers. Darinby almost dropped his brand as one landed on his head and began to snuffle curiously in his hair.
“Why is this way so long?” he asked, feigning nonchalance, treading on Jame’s heels. “It was only a step into the oasis.”
“That gate was built by native architects,” said Jame. She was keeping a close watch on her friend, who seemed to be coming apart again. Truth to tell, this place was enough to unnerve even her, and she had come part way down it before. “This tunnel is the work of Chirp and his friends, imitating them. Sorry, Chirp. You didn’t quite catch their subtlety.”
The little Builder did not answer. He hadn’t spoken since their descent, only leading the way in stubborn silence, without the benefit of a torch. Jame wondered again at his insistence in coming. Surely he and his people had been back to their city in the Anarchies since its fall some three thousand years ago, but not to reclaim it. Instead, they had chosen to live far away, in the exile of their oasis garden. What had driven them out, and what lured Chirp back now?
Darinby clutched her sleeve. “What was that?”
Something below had fallen, from the sound of it into deep water. The echo bounced from wall to hidden wall into the remote distance.
“Probably a stone,” said Rue.
“We didn’t dislodge one. I’m sure of it. What’s down there?”
“Trocks,” said Jame, without going into detail. She didn’t know if the infernal creatures were animate rocks with teeth and claws or if, like omnivorous snails, they simply inhabited flinty shells. They always seemed to be hungry, though.
“Have you noticed?” said Darinby. “Our torches are burning out.”
Fire kept trocks back; so, perhaps, did Chirp. They had once been the Builders’ pets, useful because they could eat through anything, invaluable, in fact, in constructing such tunnels as this.
Jame peered over the edge of the abyss. Paired points of red light reflected back her torch’s crackling glare. However, they seemed to parallel the travelers’ course rather than rise to meet it.
The trocks had long since turned feral. Still, they might respect the old bond.
Darinby’s brand sputtered out.
“Don’t,” said both Jame and Chirp, but he had already flung its smoldering remains over the edge at the eyes. They blinked as one. Then an angry chittering rose from the depths.
The Builder e
xtended a long-fingered hand over the chasm. The stir below subsided, but the eyes didn’t go away.
They walked on, trying not to run. How long had they been on this benighted path? How far had they come on the step-forward stones? To the southern end of the Riverland? To the Oseen Hills? The Anarchies themselves lay at least a hundred miles beyond that, against the western slopes of the Ebonbane.
Jame began to feel anxious. Judging by her previous experience with such tunnels as this, she had expected a relatively quick journey. Indeed, she had counted on it. Surely hours had passed by now in the sunless dark, if not days. Had this been such a clever idea after all?
“Put out your torch,” she told Rue. Darinby, to his distress, hadn’t yet been given a fresh one. “We have to conserve our light.”
Here and there, fallen debris made the path treacherous. Worse, at more than one point they had to scramble over landslides. Worst, though, was a section where the path had been totally obliterated, forcing them to crawl along a near vertical rock-face for an endless space with the void gaping at their heels. By now, Darinby was panting. Jame felt the pull of muscles in her own legs. Rue said nothing, but seemed to radiate dogged determination. Throughout, Chirp never faltered. Without him to keep them on the true path, they would have been lost a dozen times over.
The last torch failed. In the dark that fell, there were the ever-present eyes and a distant rectangle of pale gray light that grew as they approached it.
Stepping through, they found themselves in a subterranean chamber lined with stone and gaping doorways on whose lintels glowing runes were carved. Last season’s dry leaves crunched underfoot. More littered steep stairs that led upward toward a brighter light.
“Where are we?” Rue asked. Her voice, even hushed, raised echoes that seemed, oddly, to come from above.
“This is the nexus under the Anarchies,” said Jame, also speaking quietly. “Chirp, what door leads onward to Tai-tastigon?”
For the first time, the Builder pushed back his hood. Darinby stared at the little man’s bald gray head laced with protuberant blue veins, at his child’s face creased with anxious wrinkles. Jame had seen it before.
“Well?” she said.
“Please. You must come with me.”
“Chirp, you know that I haven’t time. Come with you where?”
“Into the city. To search.”
“For what?”
He began to pace, the hem of his robe stirring leaves, brushing patches of moss and causing them briefly to luminesce. An ill-contained anxiety seemed to devour him.
“We returned,” he said. “Over and over and over. Our kin had crawled into corners, against walls, under stairs, as if to hide. Their flesh sagged on shattered bones. The lucky ones were dead. What had happened to them? What?”
“I think I know,” said Jame, still keeping her voice down. Her mind had flashed back to what she had learned or at least had come to suspect the last time she had been here, years ago. “Your people claimed the Anarchies and closed them to native powers, but this land is home to the rathorn. They returned. The diamantine imus above us caught their scream and magnified it. That sound is . . . terrible. Few that hear it survive.”
The little Builder made a dart toward her and seized her hands with his long, cold fingers. “But you lived. I was right: you are special, a thing of power. Your people sense this too, but they fear to admit it. You, child . . .”
He spoke to Rue, who had shifted forward at his sudden approach and was now looking apologetic if uncertain. Had she met a Builder before? The small folk shared their oasis with the Caineron yondri, but kept out of the latters’ way in a wary truce. Word of their existence must have seeped back to Tagmeth, though. The Builders had been presumed dead for millennia, a lost piece of the ancient past. Surely the discovery of such a surviving pocket community couldn’t be concealed forever.
“What do you mean?” Rue demanded.
“He thinks that I may be one of the Tyr-ridan,” said Jame. Had she admitted that before to any Kendar but Brier? It came hard to acknowledge even to herself. “The avatar of That-Which-Destroys, to be exact.”
“Oh,” said Rue, blinking. “That explains a lot.”
It did? Jame thought that she had done a fair job of suppressing her destructive proclivities, no easy thing while helping to resurrect an old keep or, putting it differently, to build a new one. Someone had told her once that all three aspects of their god would manifest themselves within the Tyr-ridan until its representatives settled into their final roles. Was she destined, in the end, to destroy all that she had worked so hard to create? No, she didn’t look forward to that at all.
Ah, think of it later.
“You haven’t explained yet,” she said to Chirp. “How am I supposed to help you?”
“We never found my mate. That has been hard. For me. For her. Without the final rites, how can either of us obtain peace? So many empty years, feeling the hollow ache, yearning for the lost . . . You must help me find her. Please.”
Darinby grabbed her arm. “Think. You can’t do this.”
Chirp still held her hands. It only lacked Rue seizing her too. Jame bit her lip. She herself felt torn, not just by their demands but by her own gnawing sense of guilt.
Tagmeth depends on you, she thought, Brier not least. Have you let her down on a fool’s errand?
However, her own people felt much the same as Chirp did about the lost bones of their kin, whom they believed to be trapped in the wastes of the Grayland until fire freed their souls. That was a terrible thing. To refuse assistance, in a similar case, now that she was already here, would be a shameful thing.
“All right,” she said to the little Builder, freeing herself. “But I can’t stay long. Anyway, Darinby, d’you want to go on in the dark? We need to find replacements for the burnt torches. You can wait for us here, if you want.”
He looked around at the circle of dark doorways. Cold, earth-laden air breathed out of them like the ghost of distant sighs. Ahhhh . . .
“I’ll go with you.”
II
THEY CLIMBED THE STAIR, emerging at the top into a circle of standing stones. Each was a nine-foot high lithon of diamantine, that translucent mineral that is one of the hardest substances on earth. In the heart of each, revealed by erosion, was a gape-mouthed imu. Each, therefore, appeared to be a tall narrow head with its chin sunk into the ground.
These were not Builders’ work. Old, old, they were, erected even before the little people had come here, and each was subtly aglow with stored sunlight. The sky over them was a close, misty lid lit from below and, perhaps, from above. Impossible to tell what hour of day or night it was.
Jame remembered the last time she had been here. The blind brigand Bortis had lured her into the circle by imitating Marc’s voice—not well, but she had been desperate to find her lost friend. Then the bandit’s weight had fallen upon her and his foul breath had giggled in her ear.
A darkling changer had watched from where he sprawled helpless with exhaustion on top of a lithon.
“And now I think that friend Bortis will amuse himself.”
The arrival of the young rathorn Death’s-head had saved her but not the life of his dam, encrusted in crippling ivory, whom she had slain for pity’s sake.
Trinity. She hadn’t thought about that in a long time. Rathorn ivory continued to grow throughout the life of its host. Mares became encased. In stallions, unless it was whittled down, say, against a block of diamantine, the major horn looped back eventually to split the skull from behind. Death’s-head had been very young when his mother had died. Did he know to trim his?
The stone mouths echoed the scuff of their feet through leaves so that they seemed to be surrounded by stealthy lurkers.
Then came a flurry of pinions.
A gray bird fluttered down on top of a stone and spread its wings. On each, picked out in shaded feathers, was an eye, the only ones that it possessed. These fanned, then turned to fo
llow them as Chirp led the way out of the circle into the city.
Things there were much as Jame remembered. The streets were lined with low white buildings, no more than fifteen feet high, encompassing two or three stories. Oval, opaque windows glimmered. A decorative band marched above them composed of imus alternating with rathorn masks. Open doorways led to diamantine lit interiors. One had to look closely to see that the walls were laced with cracks. It seemed that a breath of wind would crumble them, but the air was motionless. Time here appeared simply to have stopped, oh, so many years ago.
With a whir, another gray bird landed on a rooftop, then another, and another. Wings spread. Feathered eyes blinked down on them as they passed. Like the stones, like the rathorn, such birds were part of the Anarchies’ deeper nature, never tamed by the usurping Builders. This orderly, alien city sat in a wilderness where the native powers of Rathillien now held unchallenged sway.
Jame wondered where they were going. Chirp kept glancing anxiously at her. For Trinity’s sake, what did he expect her to do?
The clouded sky seemed to dim, but that might have been a trick of the light. The city continued to bask in its cool diamantine glow, reflected back by the mist. Then the moment passed, like the retreating shadow of an eclipse.
From somewhere, distorted by echoes, came something that sounded like breathy, snickering laughter.
“Heh, heh, heh . . .”
The birds blinked their wings at each other and flew off.
“Look,” said Darinby.
On the threshold of a nearby doorway lay a pathetic sprawl of feathers. Jame stirred it with the toe of her boot. The bird’s head flopped to one side, its neck broken.
“Maybe it collided with the wall,” Rue said.
By Demons Possessed Page 3