Dark of the Moon

by P. C. Hodgell

  They soon came to what appeared to be the main thoroughfare. Like the other streets, it was very narrow. Unlike them, no walkways spanned it, and it was paved with the cross-sections of diamantine lithons quarried, perhaps, from the broken ring where they had spent the previous night. The glowing stones were worn down to a groove as if by the passage of many feet, or hooves. The smell of rathorn clung to the walls. At a guess, the rage had also come this way, still in full flight. The two Kencyr followed warily.

  They began to pass doorways opening into rooms lit by diamantine blocks set in the walls. The lighted, empty interiors gave Jame the uncanny feeling that at any moment some diminutive householder might lean over his door jamb to invite them in. The sense of arrested life was strong in this place, but so was the feeling that everything had stopped here long, long ago.

  Marc had also been looking about. "Now, that's odd," he said. "See that decorative band up there, the one with alternating rathorn skull-masks and imu faces? The faces parody the masks. I've seen lots of imus in my time, but never before one that was used to make a joke. Who could have built this, anyway?"

  "Apparently someone who knew how to make a step-back ring. Why seal off the Anarchies unless to protect this place?"

  The Kendar shook his head in wonder. "They had more than their share of nerve, then. Imagine laying a claim here. But what could have happened to them?"

  "Look!" said Jame sharply, catching his arm.

  In the far corner of a lighted entry hall hung something gray.

  "Oh," she said, disappointed. "I thought for a moment that it was our guide. That does look like his cloak, though."

  "Maybe he got home before us," said Marc, half joking.

  "I wonder."

  She ducked under the low lintel. White stone dust rattled down on her head and shoulders. The interior walls, she saw, were shot with deep cracks, radiating out from the diamantine blocks.

  "Careful," said Marc, bending to peer in after her.

  "I think it must be safe enough or Jorin wouldn't have come in here with me."

  She crossed over to the gray object. It looked exactly like their erstwhile guide's hooded cape, but when she touched it, it crumbled to dust. Beside the hook where it had hung was a narrow hallway that had been quite invisible from the door. It led back into the house. Jame wrestled briefly with temptation and lost.

  "Marc, I'm going to do a fast bit of exploring."

  "If you like. I'll wait out here and spare my old back the stooping. Be quick, though."

  Jame stepped into the hall. As in the first room, the ceiling was barely five feet high, forcing her to keep her head well down. The corridor seemed to extend quite a preposterous distance, one hundred yards at least, when the entire house could hardly be more than forty feet square. Her first step took her a good fifty feet down the passageway. So, whoever had built this place liked to play with spatial distortions.

  A few more steps, and here was a doorway opening into a fair-sized room with a ceiling at least twice as high as the corridor's. The only piece of furniture was a long marble table about two feet high, apparently standing on the left hand wall. Jame stared at it. Could something so massive be bolted to the wall? The threshold was at a forty-five degree angle, but it felt level as she stepped on it. So did the floor . . . but it wasn't the floor, or at least it hadn't been a moment ago. Set in the far wall was a large oval window. The right half of it was dark with the trees of the Anarchies, all horizontal. The bright left half was the misty sky. Jame shut her eyes hastily. The sense of vertigo disappeared at once. Yes, she was standing on the wall beside the table, and it felt perfectly natural.

  "What a place for a party!" she said out loud.

  In fact, it looked as if there had been one, Trinity only knew how many years, or centuries, or millennia ago. At one end of the table was a litter of small bottles. One of them still contained some clear liquid, which instantly broke down into crystals when Jame touched the glass. On impulse, she emptied the bottle's dehydrated contents into an inner pocket lined with waterproof silk. Who knew, someday she might find someone she disliked enough to test the stuff on.

  She left the room, stepping down to the hall floor, and went on up the passageway. Within a few steps, the corridor turned. Although it still looked perfectly flat, Jame felt a strain in her leg muscles as she went on and wasn't surprised, when she came to a window, to find herself on the second floor.

  Here there were several rooms that once might have been living quarters; but a window had broken, and the wind, blowing through, had long since reduced everything to dust.

  At the end of the corridor was one last door, made of iron-wood, with three massive locks. It stood ajar. Jame pushed it open cautiously and paused on the threshold, startled. The rest of the house had been bright with sunlight and diamantine reflecting off white walls. This last room seemed to be hewn out of a dark, half-familiar stone shot with luminous green veins. The moss covering the floor also glowed faintly. What little other light there was came from a large oval window set in the far wall. Like those below, it was sealed with rock crystal; unlike them, heavy bars also crossed it. Beyond was a sullen sky, the color of a bruised plum, and a deep valley overgrown with luminous vegetation. The ruins of a white walled city lay in the valley's folds. Vines had almost consumed it, but enough remained to show its resemblance to the miniature city of which this house was part.

  But those ruins clearly weren't in the Anarchies, or even anywhere in Rathillien. This entire room must be made of step-back stones, stepped all the way back to some fallen world far down the Chain of Creation, deep within the coils of Perimal Darkling. Why cling to such a dissolute view? Why, unless that distant, lost world was somehow precious. Unless, perhaps, it was home.

  Some pieces of the puzzle began to click together. The Anarchies had been sealed off some three thousand years ago by people who knew how to use step-back stones and who quite possibly weren't native to Rathillien. Neither were the mysterious and elusive Builders, who at approximately the same time had been erecting the Kencyr temples using a host of architectural tricks including both step-back and -forward stones. It seemed very likely, then, that this city too was Builders' work. It might even have been their headquarters on Rathillien, despite its distance from all of their building projects. The seclusion of the Anarchies would certainly have appealed to them, and they might well have believed themselves more than a match for the land's strangeness.

  But if so, what had happened to them? When their work on Rathillien was complete, had they simply moved on to the next threshold world as they had done so often before? That was possible, but it hardly explained the odd atmosphere of this city, as if life here had stopped suddenly, unexpectedly.

  Jame shrugged. The puzzle still lacked too many pieces, and perhaps always would. She turned to go, and stopped short. In the corner, in the door's shadow, lay a pile of bones. They looked nearly human. The skull wasn't quite the right shape, though, and the entire skeleton reassembled would barely have come to her waist. So. Wherever the rest of the city's diminutive occupants had gone, here was one at least who hadn't gotten very far.

  Jame knelt by the bones, feeling awed. Could this possibly have been a Builder? In all the long history of her people, no Kencyr had ever even seen one before, much less come so close. The dark behind those large eye sockets was like the darkness of this room, as if it held the secret of an entire race, obscured now forever.

  Looking closer, she saw that most of the bones were shot with hairline cracks like those that fissured the walls. She touched the skull tentatively. It fell into fragments. The rest of the skeleton followed, crumbling bone by bone. Jorin sneezed, and bone dust filled the air. Jame sat back on her heels, rueful. She'd done it again, destroying where she had only meant to investigate. But then among the ruins she spotted one bone that hadn't disintegrated. It was a third phalange, the tip of a finger, twice as long as her own. She picked it up gingerly, marveling at its delicate structu
re. Here was something, at least, saved for the pyre. She carefully wrapped it in a handkerchief and slipped it into her pocket. Now to rejoin Marc, who probably thought she and Jorin had fallen down a hole somewhere.

  But down in the narrow street, there was no sign of her friend.

  "Marc!"

  Echoes answered her, and wisps of mist drifting around the next corner. The silence rang. Jorin pressed against her knee, uneasy. Other doorways opened off the street, their interiors glowing softly, invitingly, but with no sign of life.

  "Marc!"

  This time she thought she heard an answer, toward the heart of the city. She followed it, calling again, hearing the same faint, distorted reply. The mist grew denser with each turn. Jame ran one hand along the nearest wall while keeping the other on Jorin's head to guide him. Suddenly he slipped away. She called after him with voice and mind, but neither brought a response. Damn their mind-link anyway for being so unreliable. But a moment later there he was again, chirping anxiously, running nose first into her knee. She took a firm grip on his golden ruff.

  "Hush, kitten. Listen."

  That voice called again, closer now. It did sound like Marc, but there was something odd about it, something almost mocking.

  Jame felt Jorin's fur bristle under her hand. He knew that voice, and suddenly so did she. Bortis. They went on, stalking more than seeking now, but still blind in the swirling mist. The glow of the diamantine pavement faded away underfoot, and then Jame's hand lost contact with the wall. She groped for it, without success. The city must be built around some kind of open space. A half-dozen more blind steps and her foot struck something a ringing blow. Someone nearby chuckled.

  "Brave Talisman, pretty eyes," crooned that hated voice, making no effort now to disguise itself. "How does it feel to be lost and blind?"

  The sound seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Jame felt her sense of direction slip away. She heard stealthy movements in the mist, growing louder, nearer, seeming to surround her. She crouched, arms around Jorin. The cat's ears pricked, but he clearly had no idea which way to turn. Hopefully, neither did Bortis, but if he still had the Grindark tracker and they were approaching from downwind . . .

  A low, wailing cry cut through the opaque air; its shrill double note echoing sharply back as though from close-set walls. The nameless thing that had put to flight an entire rage of rathorns was in the city, drawing closer. Someone almost at Jame's elbow gave a hoarse exclamation. Two pairs of footsteps crashed away, apparently in all directions at once. She and Jorin must flee too, but which way? A black despair, not her own, gnawed at the edges of her mind. The closer that thing came, the more likely that they would run straight into it. What to do? The cry came again, closer, paralyzing in its misery. In a moment of near panic, Jame felt again how out of place she was here, how unable even to understand this land's threats, much less to cope with them. But she still had the imu, whose power was somehow linked to this strange place. She drew the medallion out with unsteady fingers.

  "Help us," she whispered to it.

  Nothing happened. Had it lost its potency or had she forgotten something? Yes, damnit: the thing had to be fed. She thrust the edge of her hand against the imu's mouth. A sharp pain made her gasp and she jerked her hand away. A small crescent had been bitten out of it right through the leather glove. For one startled moment, she watched blood well out of the tiny wound before wondering why she could see it so clearly. The mist swirled as densely as before around them, but not in front of the imu. She turned the medallion's face outward. A path opened before her as if a beam of light had transfixed the mist and burned it off, but there was neither light nor heat, only a shaft of clear air lit through the mist by the morning sun riding high above.

  At Jame's feet lay the skeleton of a rathorn. She had accidently kicked one of its ivory belly plates, which still curved around emptiness to meet the cage of overlapping ribs. The skull mask was twisted toward her, the impotence of death rendering its frozen fury all the more savage. Its massive horn had curved all the way around the beast's head and split its skull open from behind. There was another skeleton beyond it, and another and another, a fortune in ivory, a wilderness of death.

  Jame picked her way through them, her hand again on Jorin's head. She saw a glow in the mist before her, and a few moments later came up to a pair of diamantine stones each a good nine feet tall. Stepping between them, she found herself in a circle some fifty feet across, ringed with standing stones. No mist came here. It formed a shining roof over the circle and walled it, but Jame could clearly see the huge, gape-mouthed imu faces on the far side, thrusting out of the diamantine lithons. Each stone's internal cloudiness had been freed by nature to take its natural form so that she seemed to stand in a ring of tall, narrow heads, their chins sunk in the ground. Only two were different. One had a sort of leathery caul on top of it. The other's mouth had been hollowed out so deeply that darkness gathered in the heart of the shining stone.

  Something moved in the shadowy maw of the second stone. Bortis and the Grindark emerged. The latter crouched like some hunted thing brought to bay at last. Bortis stood beside him, keeping a cruelly tight grip on the hillman's surviving forebraid. The blind brigand chief was grinning. Saliva ran down from one corner of his mouth to hang in a glistening thread from his chin.

  Jame approached him slowly, moving on the balls of her feet.

  "What have you done to Marc?"

  Bortis leered crookedly. "So you miss that decrepit boyfriend of yours already, do you? You had young suitors—Bane, that fool Dally—and you killed them. You killed me. Why, Talisman? Are you that afraid of a real man?"

  They were circling each other now. The Grindark scuttled sideways, retreating from Jame, but kept in the ring of stone by the bandit's ruthless grasp. The hillman's teeth had begun to rattle together. He could both see and sense what Bortis could not: the inhuman, silver sheen growing in their opponent's eyes, the darkness gathering around her.

  "I never went out of my way to hurt you, Bortis." The voice was low, almost purring. "You attacked me. Three times. Does it threaten your manhood that your prey fought back and won? That wasn't supposed to happen, was it? Oh no, not to the great bandit chief. Well, I blinded you once, and by God, I can do it again."

  She sprang at them. The tracker recoiled, jerking his captor off balance. Jame caught the brigand's thumb and wrenched it away from the Grindark's hair. Bortis howled. He made a wild grab for her, but she tripped him, and he fell sprawling. The Grindark scrambled clear. Clutching his remaining braid with both hands, he scuttled out into the mist.

  Jame circled the fallen brigand. "Now, what have you done to my friend?"

  Bortis lay face down on the ground. His shoulders began to shake. He was laughing.

  "Oh, it was funny! H-he thought you were calling him.

  " 'Marc, oh Marcarn. . . .' " He gave a fair imitation of Jame's voice, spoiled by an attack of giggles. "I lured him into that doll's house and—and pushed a wall over on him. The floor gave way too. He fell down, then sideways—if that whoreson Grindark wasn't lying—straight through another farking wall!" The brigand jerked up his head, wet mouth rimmed with dirt. "You've killed another one!" he crowed. "Get yourself a new lover, Talisman. The old one's worm-bait!"

  Something colder even than her building rage chilled Jame. A trick step-back room. Even she wouldn't trust her reflexes, falling into something so unexpected. And Marc, as Bortis kept saying, was no longer young.

  Jorin had cowered away from her to the edge of the circle. She remembered how he had darted off minutes before, and felt suddenly sure that it had been because he had caught the Kendar's scent. She had called him off then. Not now.

  "Find him," she said to the ounce. "Bring him here . . . if you can."

  Blind Jorin gave her a wide moon-opal stare. Then he was gone in a flash of gold.

  Jame circled Bortis again, feeling the cold berserker rage rise, savoring it.

  "Dear Bortis. W
ho's worm-bait?"

  Someone on the edge of the ring laughed softly.

  Jame spun around, Bortis temporarily forgotten. The caul on top of the first stone had raised its head. Diamantine light cast into even greater relief the angry scars that formed the shape of an inverted imu burned into its face. The eyes on either side of it glittered, and the misshapen mouth lifted in a smile.

  "Ah, child, how you love your work. What a reaper of souls you will make someday."

  Jame recoiled a step. Then she quickly drew out the medallion covered in the changer's skin and held it up as if it were a protective charm.

  "You came back, maybe, for your face? Here it is."

  "So I see. And you've been feeding it, too. How . . . considerate."

  The changer gathered himself as if to spring, then collapsed, panting. His face was gray with exhaustion. Jame slowly lowered the imu. The changer's smile twisted, distorting his warped face even more.

  "Quite right. Even if this accursed place wasn't killing me by inches, after two days aloft with barely a breeze for support, I'm in no shape to harm you."