She didn't want to. It was wrong, wrong, but now one of them had slipped off the cloak again, and the rest were darting around her with avid golden eyes, their shadowy fingers barely touching her skin in phantom caresses. She didn't want that, and yet she did. Her skin glowed. Almost despite herself, she began to move, tracing the first kantirs of a dance that she had never brought to consummation. Its power unfolded in her. To shape the dance, to be the dance! At first shadows glided with her, touching and touched, but then she moved alone, reshaping the very air with her passage.
On the edge of the dance was a presence. The ghost. The dance reached out to him, tantalizing, seducing. It sensed what he wanted most—to belong, finally to have both a place and name of his own. The dance gave no promises, but oh, what hints it made. Sway, turn, the hands moving just so. He couldn't conceive of how thoroughly he could belong. The soul was a small price to pay for such utter acceptance, such intimate satisfaction. What good was a soul anyway? It only weighed one down. She could take it oh, so easily. She hungered for it. But . . . but . . . but it was wrong.
The unbound energies of the dance spun outward to dissipate in the hall. Tapestried faces crumbled at their touch. Jame came back to her senses with a gasp to find Graykin lying in her arms, pale, ready. She dropped him.
"Ancestors preserve me. What did I almost do? Graykin, are you all right? Graykin?"
He blinked up at her for a moment, and then burst into tears.
Jame felt like crying herself. "Oh, hell. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." She sat down with a thump beside him, suddenly too dizzy to stand. The immediate past was rushing back in on her, jumbled up with scraps of those now-not-entirely-lost years that she had spent in Perimal Darkling—spent here. The nightmare hadn't let go yet. She felt its cruel pull and tried desperately to anchor herself to the present with questions.
"Graykin, what are you doing here? Has something happened?"
"Happened?" He sat up and glared at her. "Why, what could happen except that the Prince has bolted shut the last palace door on the outside and the whole temple has started to disintegrate, and now there's some farking giant of a man I've never even seen before sneaking around with an overgrown cat while the palace begins to collapse around our ears—and what are you laughing at?"
"It's Marc and Jorin. It has to be. Graykin, men his size don't sneak. They aren't physically equipped for it. So at least he and Jorin are free. Ancestors be praised for that. But you said the palace was sealed off now from the outside. So the Prince has left it. When does his army march to join the Host?"
"Four days ago. It's the twenty-fourth of Winter, you skinny twit. You've been cavorting around in here—wherever 'here' is —for ten days."
Ten days. Was it possible? Between dwar sleep and the slower passage of time here, yes, damnit, it was. And Tirandys, impersonating Prince Odalian, had already marched off to meet her unsuspecting brother. She must warn Tori. She must . . . must . . .
"Hey, stop that!"
"Stop . . . what?"
"Fading, damnit!" Now Graykin looked indignant and more than a bit frightened. He was also beginning to take on some aspects of a rather dirty window.
"You're fading too, Graykin."
Trinity, what was happening? Jame had assumed that whatever images of the past she saw, she herself was still in the House's dusty present as she apparently had been all the years she had been growing up here. But she had been here ten days longer than Graykin this time. Had her present become subtly dislocated from his? Or had she finally learned how to move in the past? Or . . .
The wyrm's venom wrenched at her mind. She couldn't tell any more what made sense and what didn't. Under her panicky efforts to think, the fear grew that she would never leave this place again. Just the same, Tori had to be warned.
"Graykin, listen."
Rapidly, she told him about the changer, Odalian, and the trap set for the Kencyr Highlord. He listened, his sharp features becoming less and less distinct, his expression less readable.
"And that," she concluded breathlessly, "is why you have to carry word of all this to Torisen. Find that giant and tell him what I've told you. He can break you out of the palace if it's humanly possible and help you and Lyra to reach the Host. Well?"
He hesitated. "Are you sure about all this?" His voice sounded thin and distant. "I mean, if you've really been poisoned, you might have dreamed a lot of it. It all sounds so fantastic."
"Sweet Trinity. Is it any more fantastic than this?" She jabbed a finger at his now almost transparent chest. It sank in up to the first joint without hurting either of them. Graykin drew back with a gasp.
"All right, all right, I believe you! But will the Highlord believe me?"
She hadn't thought of that. "Proof. He's got to have proof. But what . . . Graykin, up those stairs over there, left around the corner and down the hall, there's a room with a furnace in the shape of a huge iron face. On an anvil in front of it is Kin-Slayer, the Knorth heirloom sword, reforged. Take that to the Highlord and . . . and tell him his sister Jame sends it. Then he'll believe you."
Graykin stared at her. From his standpoint, it was as if a ghost had spoken those incredible words in a voice as faint as a whisper from the tomb. He could hardly see her at all now.
"Promise me you'll warn my brother, Graykin," she was saying in a desperate tone, holding out phantom hands pleadingly to him. "Promise. . . ." And she was gone.
Graykin jumped up. He didn't like this place. There were things here he could never understand, could never control. That strange girl had promised him . . . what? Something he would almost have given his soul to possess. Almost? But what she had given him was information, and that was power.
All right, my lad, he told himself. Let's not falter now. One, two, three . . . !
He dashed across the hall, up the marble stairs, around the corner, down the hall, and fetched up gasping on the threshold of a room. There was the rusting, iron face and there lay the sword. Even with its hilt emblem smashed, it was beautiful. He touched it almost reverently and snatched back his hand with a gasp. The blade might still be hot, but the hilt was so cold that it almost burned his hand. He dropped his handkerchief over it and picked it up. The pride of the Kencyrath, in a half-breed's hand. He would show them. Oh yes, he would show them all. Now, one, two, three . . . !
He dashed back the way he had come. On the second flight of stairs, he almost thought that he passed someone. A coldness went past, and a glimmer of something white like the profile of a blanched face. Graykin almost followed before he checked himself. No one had ever stood by him. Why should he stand by anyone else? But she had refused to call him by that hated name and had trusted him with her own. Yes, but again, there was no way he could help her now, even if he wanted to.
He ran down the stairs and across the hall. At the far side was the door that opened into the palace's corridor. You couldn't see it from this side, but it was there. He had checked. Graykin paused on the threshold, looking back at the hall. He still didn't know where he had been, but he did know what he had gained: the Highlord's sister had put Kin-Slayer in his hands, and he hadn't given her his promise.
* * *
JAME CLIMBED the stairs. They seemed to rise forever, twisting this way and that. Sometimes the uneven stone treads ran up between narrow walls, sometimes one side or the other opened up into echoing depths. A cold wind blew down from above. The serpent skin cloak lay dank and heavy on her shoulders. Every time its trailing heads bumped up another step at her heels, the tails, coiled together under her chin, twitched in protest.
She tried to think what she should do. Was everything going to happen just as it had the first time; or by some cruel twist was this the first time, different only in her foreknowledge of it? Ancestors preserve her, to be trapped in the same round of events, years' worth of them, happening over and over . . .
An alcove by the stair and in it, waiting, the man who had scratched on her door in the palace and later rescued
her from the leech vines, whose ravaged face had haunted her dreams for years.
"Bender? Terribend? What's going to happen? What should I do? Please tell me!"
He pressed something cold into her hand. A knife. It was all white and all of a piece, hilt and blade, as if hewn from a single bone. Its pommel was carved with the faces of three women, or perhaps of one woman at three different ages: maiden, lady, hag. It didn't warm to Jame's touch. When she looked up again, the skull-faced man was gone.
She began to climb again, knife in hand, moving slower and slower with each step.
At the top of the stair was a doorway opening into darkness. Red ribbons tumbled about it, plaiting and replaiting in the wind that blew through from the other side. Jame stopped, just out of their reach. Oh God, now what? Was he waiting, just beyond the light, waiting for her to cross his threshold? She had once before, armed as she was now, intent on . . . on . . . what?
Jame sat down abruptly on the steps, on the cloak. The serpent heads rose hissing in protest, but she ignored them. Earlier she had felt this memory rising and in near panic had thrust it back into darkness. Now it lurched to the surface despite her.
The last time she had come here and the Master had reached out from the beribboned bed, had started to draw her in, she had slashed wildly at him, not because she feared him but because she was afraid of herself. She had wanted to go to him. He would have given her power, security, love—all the things she had never had before. Priest, father, lover. There was no wish, no desire he could not have fulfilled, or so it had seemed.
Even now, the lure drew her. Her desire to belong was at least as strong as Graykin's, and her chances of acceptance among her own people perhaps just as slight. They would shun her, she thought, for the very things that the Master would prize: her darkling training, her Shanir blood, herself. What chance did she have among her own people? What chance had they ever given her? But here she was offered acceptance, power, yes, even a red ribboned bed, velvet shadows, the touch of a hand in the dark . . .
She put her own hand to her cheek and felt its flushed warmth even through gloved fingertips. Lost, lost . . . but not perhaps quite yet. This was the way the first Dream-Weaver had gone, taking the pleasure, never counting the cost—to herself or to anyone else. This was the end of innocence, of honor, and perhaps, finally, of the Kencyrath itself. Nothing was worth that.
All right, then, she thought, trying to force her chaotic thoughts into cool, logical patterns. If you're not going to let yourself be seduced, then what?
First option: kill the bastard.
She had tried that before, without success. Could she trust herself to strike the man now, to kill him? No. Not with a mere knife. Especially not with this damn poison slowing her reflexes, muddling her thoughts, yes, perhaps even her loyalties.
Second option: run away.
That too she had tried and bought herself several years of freedom before coming back full circle to this threshold. This time, however, the venom in her blood trapped her in this place, at this time.
Third option: . . .
Her mind scrambled for it, stumbling over half-formed ideas, groping for a solution that refused to take shape. Only one thought remained brutally clear: If she went through those ribbons now, she would be lost forever, knowing the evil she did, welcoming it.
Damnit, it wasn't fair! She hadn't asked to be dealt into this game, much less born into it. Think of all the lives it had shattered over the past three millennia, all the honor and joy lost; and if the Master finally won, so did Perimal Darkling. How did the old song go? Alas for the greed of a man and the deceit of a woman, that we should come to this! Gerridon's greed, the Dream-Weaver's deceit, or rather her willful ignorance that had brought her to such shame. And she was Jame's mother? She thought Tirandys had said so, but that wasn't an idea she felt strong enough to cope with just now. No, better to think of her only as someone else whom Gerridon had used, just as he wanted to use her now. Well, she wouldn't let him, not while a single option remained. But what options were left? Sit here until she turned blue? Find a good book to read? Take up knitting snake cozies?
"Oh hell," said Jame, and put her head in her hands.
The poison's grip was tightening. Soon there wouldn't be a coherent thought in her mind, probably just about the time the Master got tired of waiting and came to look for her. A fine mess she had made of everything, as usual. Tirandys was right: She should never even have been born. But perhaps he was also right about the next best solution.
A stillness came over Jame, as if for a moment her heart forgot to beat. Yes, of course. The final option. It had been there all the time, waiting for her to recognize it.
Your choice, Jamethiel.
In Tai-tastigon, she had chosen to take responsibility for her own actions, whatever the cost. In the Ebonbane she had chosen the pit rather than see Marc fight an Arrin-ken in her defense. Perhaps it wasn't her fault that she had originally been given a role in Gerridon's game; but if she went on, she might soon become responsible for deeds so terrible that nothing would atone for them. Best not to take the chance.
She leaned back against the wall. Poison might flow in her veins, but it was life pounding there that she felt now. How much she had wanted to accomplish with it. So much to do, so much to see; yes, and so many mistakes yet to make—great, thumping big ones, if the past was any guide. Oh well. One couldn't have everything. She didn't have a mountain crevasse or another cup of venom, but what she did have was even better.
Jame looked at the white knife. Her fingers were numb from gripping it, and her hand had begun to shake. But it was very sharp. It would do. She raised it and laid its keen edge carefully against her bare throat.
* * *
"I DON'T LIKE THE LOOKS OF THIS," said Ardeth.
He gently wiped Torisen's forehead with a piece of silk scarcely whiter than the Highlord's face. Torisen lay motionless. One had to look carefully to see that he still breathed at all.
"For a moment, I thought he would wake up," said Burr in a husky voice.
"He came close," growled the Wolver. He padded over and sniffed at his friend. "Now, this is bad, very bad."
"I think," said Ardeth, "that you might try your hand at this, Kindrie. After all, you are a healer."
The Shanir had withdrawn to the far corner of the tent out of the light, out of the circle of friends around the cot. "You need a fully trained healer for this," he said in a stifled voice. "I'm not qualified."
Burr turned on him. "You helped that boy in the fire-timber hall at Tentir."
"That was only first-aid."
"You drew the hemlock out of that glass of wine," murmured Ardeth.
"That was only wine. My God! You don't know what's involved in deep healing. You have no idea how far into his very soul I might have to go and, more to the point, neither do I. My lord, listen! He can't even stand the sight of me! What if I get lost in there? What if his being and mine become so intertwined that we can never be separated? What will that do to his sanity?"
"Lord, I could go for another healer," said Burr. "Lord Brandan has one who could be trusted . . ."
"That would be too late." Ardeth's tone, quiet as it was, made them all turn sharply toward him. "I really think, Kindrie, that you should try something. We're losing him."
The Shanir stood stock still for a moment, then thrust both hands into his white hair. "All right," he said through the bars of his thin forearms. "All right." He stood there a moment more, collecting himself, then dropped his hands. "Where is the child?"
The others looked in surprise at white-faced Donkerri, but Burr immediately went to a pile of clothing and drew out from under it the saddlebag full of bones. He put it on the table. Ardeth started when he saw the child's shadow cast on the tent beside the shadow of Torisen's head. The Wolver growled.
"You bring death to the dying, healer?"
"I'll do whatever I think will help," snapped Kindrie, pushing the shaggy man asid
e and taking Ardeth's place on the edge of the cot. "She helped me find him once. Perhaps she will again."
There. Everything was set. Kindrie reached out to touch the Highlord's face, and hesitated.
For each act of deep healing, the healer had to reach down to the very roots of his patient's being. At that level, it was possible to do much good, but even greater harm. The safest way was to discover what metaphor each patient was currently using, consciously or unconsciously, for his own soul. For those concerned with growing things, for example, the botanical image of root and branch often worked very well. On the other hand, scrollsmen could often be reached through the metaphor of a book, which must first be unlocked and then deciphered. Hunts, battles, and riddles were other common metaphors. Once the healer sensed which one to use, he could deal with his patient's illness or injury through it in a way that was at least compatible with the other's basic nature. Kindrie had only done this before in practice. He had the innate power—almost too much of it, one instructor had sourly remarked after Kindrie had accidentally almost reanimated the man's sheepskin coat— but the thought of dealing so intimately with Torisen almost paralyzed him.
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