Seekers mask, p.14
Seeker's Mask, page 14
part #3 of Kencyrath Series
"Dammit!" said Jame, exasperated. "Didn't your precious master teach you anything?"
Jorin had been slinking around them, chirping anxiously at the copper smell of blood. When a muzzled lymer erupted from the undergrowth behind him, he rose on his toes and bounced into the hound's face through sheer fright. The beast retreated, trying to shake him off, uttering muffled yelps as feline claws raked his eyes.
Down the slope charged the second lymer, the Molocar bitch roaring on his heels like an avalanche.
With a cry to Jorin to follow, Jame bolted toward the stream. She heard the assassin thrash panic-stricken in the thorns, where he hadn't the sense to lie still, then his scream cut short by the crunch of jaws.
She burst out on a cliff's lip. The river curved beneath in a gorge, its northward course obscured by an opposite rock spur crowned with undergrowth.
Where was that willow? The air had thickened with twilight, all edges blurring, all colors melting in a molten haze. Downstream to the west, nothing. How fast could the damn thing travel, anyway? When she turned again to look eastward, the tree loomed over her like a shimmering hillock. An upper branch swooped over her head. Its trailing leafage swung into her. She found herself tangled up in it, off her feet, off the cliff. Golden leaves flattened against her eyes; supple wands fumbled about her throat.
Something crashed though them, knocking her free. Jorin. Falling, she grabbed for the ounce but caught a bough instead and clung to it for a moment, breathless. Then she scrambled inward to throw her arms around the trunk as to a mast, just out of the wands' hissing reach, as the tree swayed again like a ship in stormy seas. Looking down, she saw that the pale Shanir clung to a section of trunk well below her while Jorin balanced on a branch near him, wailing. Below, the burnished bole plunged down to the writhing serpent's knot of its roots.
Someone had scored the golden bark at eye-level—to mark this tree for spring harvest? Such resilient wood must be much prized. It would probably long since have been cut if the Riverland weren't so stripped of workers. Small wonder, then, that when the sap had begun to run, so had the tree, hell-bent on escape. The creek bed must simply have provided the easiest route.
The willow's draperies swung forward, then back, far enough to give Jame a glimpse ahead. She saw the Silver a bare sixty feet away and something else, much closer.
"Oh, my God," she breathed, and then shouted in warning to those beneath her, "Low bridge!"
The willow swayed forward again, more violently, gaining momentum. Its upper wands cracked against the water's surface like whips. It reared back, trunk groaning, foliage a golden blur, over and down.
The second forward swing had nearly dislodged Jame, who had only kept her grip by wrapping her legs around the trunk and sinking her nails into its sensitive bark. When the upper boughs crashed over backward, she was pinned beneath them, under water whose coldness shocked out her breath.
The trunk quivered against her like a bent bow, its water-laden foliage keeping its crown submerged. The bridge which spanned the creek's mouth, carrying the River Road on its back, must be overhead by now. Yes. Here came the swift current of the Silver, striking her from the right, nearly plucking her loose. Above, the water glowed with the molten light of the sky, willow wands streaming black against it. Below, leaves shone gold against the pebbled darkness of the river bed.
Don't panic! she told herself, fighting the desperate compulsion to breathe. It can't stay bent like this for long...!
Under those pebbles seemed to be a pattern as if of overlapping shields. A trick of light and water? They couldn't be rising and falling as though with some monstrous, slow respiration.
Then suddenly she was flying upward, through water, through leaves, through air, flung by the tree's recoil across the river—straight into the boughs of a giant white cedar which leaned out from the opposite bank.
Her impression afterward was that the evergreen had carefully rolled her from branch to branch down to the ground. At least, that was where she found herself an unguessed-at time later, sitting on a bed of pine needles, looking at her hands. Half-frozen fingers stung as sensation returned to them and the nails ached. The stitching at the gloves' tips had been ripped out.
A slope of feathery ferns stretched from the river's edge up to a band of sumac, a wide swath of churned earth cut through it by the willow's passage. Something was coming down toward her under the fronds. Jorin's head popped up, all long neck, pricked ears, and wide, anxious eyes. The moment she saw him, he gave an excited bleat and bounded down to her. She hugged him, noting that his silver-gilt fur was barely damp. Presumably, the lower section of the willow's trunk had remained in an arch above the water. Her own god might not give a damn about her, but something in the universe apparently looked after cats and idiots.
Speaking of the latter, where was that pale, young man?
They found him a few minutes later, in some difficulty. Dismounting from the willow, he had stepped into its muddy wake and was now being slowly carried off by the sumac as it took advantage of the disturbed earth to seek sunnier slopes.
"I had no idea that the Riverland could be so lively," said Jame, regarding him across the crawling belt of trees. "Not taking root, are you?"
"I-it's more a case of the roots taking me. I sank in a-and they wrapped around my ankles."
He tottered, waving thin arms to keep his balance, a half-naked scarecrow all bones and pale skin with a preternaturally white thatch of hair.
A Shanir. A priestling. She ought to let him drift on with the arboreal tide until his own people fished him out—but if she had understood correctly, what debt could her brother owe such flotsam as this which he hadn't been willing to pay?
Jame sighed. "Hold on a minute."
The hillside was studded with large rocks, some of which had been thrust aside by the willow and were now slowly sinking in its wake. The sumacs' runners snaked around them. Jame began to thread her way through the maze of slender trunks, jumping from stone to stone. Forgetting Aerulan's extra width on her back, she became wedged between close-set trees and freed herself by pricking their thin bark. As they recoiled, the runners of the whole clump writhed like serpents in the earth. The Shanir bit back a cry of pain.
"I'd come to think," said Jame sourly, "that my house had first claim to any situation this absurd. Who are you, priest-bait, to trespass?"
The pale young man flushed.
"Kindrie," he blurted out defiantly. "My name is Kindrie."
III
The moment he had spoken, Kindrie felt the heat in his face chill with dismay. Anonymity had been his last defense. But then he had felt perilously off balance ever since encountering this masked stranger, in a way which had nothing to do with subsequently being tossed into a tree, swept across a river, and dumped in a bog. His first impression that he had run into the Highlord was, of course, ridiculous. Somewhere, though, he had met this peculiar boy before, under alarming circumstances.
"Kindrie," the other repeated, as if he too were fishing for memories. "I've heard of you. You were with the Kencyr Host at the Cataracts. What in Perimal's name are you doing here?"
"Sinking."
"Uh...yes." The stranger glanced down at the rock on which he stood. "So am I, if not quite as fast. Look, I think I can pull you up here with me, and then it's an easy jump to the far side. Give me your hand."
Kindrie hesitated. Under the split tips of the other's glove, something glowered bone-white. Reluctantly, he reached out, and was caught in a grip like sheathed ice.
The shock of it made his senses lurch.
Cold. So cold...and dark.
Overhead, not the canopy of sumac leaves but far, far up, a fire-broken roof with verdigris lightning lacing the sky's greater darkness above. Beneath, a vast hall, paved with stone whose green veins pulsed cold with each sullen, silent flash. Death banners lined its walls, rank after rank. Threadbare hands clutched together tattered clothing; slashed, disintegrating faces regarded him slyly askance, snickering against cold stone.
Got you now, healer....
Ancestors preserve him. The touch of those bare finger tips had plunged him straight into the other's soul...but he hadn't the strength to deal with an image so complex, so foul. He hadn't the courage. He must get out. Now.
The flash of something white....
CRACK.
He found himself lying on the ground a dozen feet beyond the willow's wake, staring up at cracks of twilight between black oak leaves. His jaw throbbed. The stranger was staring at him, fists still clenched but forgotten.
"Sweet Trinity. I can't have hit you that hard."
Kindrie struggled up on an elbow. He saw that he had not only been knocked across a clearing but clean out of his boots, which the sumac had kept.
"You didn't," he said confusedly. "That is, you did, but...." How to explain the tremendous power of that soul-image to protect itself, or his own involuntary response, as though to a lightning strike? "God, you've got strong defences!"
"I should hope so. Touch me like that again, priest, and I'll knock you half way to the Cataracts!"
"I am not a priest...and what's the matter with your face?"
They stared at each other.
"You're the healer that the Priests' College was sending to Gothregor."
"And you're the mad girl I was sent to heal."
"Mad? God's claws, I begin to think so! Here I am, on the run from a Wilden healer, and he runs bang into me. Likewise an incompetent assassin, a wandering death banner, a shadow demon, a Randir search party, and a walking tree. What is this place—the crossroad of the worlds?"
Kindrie didn't know what she was raving about, or care. It was the rising level of her voice which scared him. "Oh, please!" he cried. "We aren't far from the river. They'll hear you!"
That sobered her instantly. "I doubt they'll guess that we forded by tree, but still...." She hesitated, then said grudgingly, "It will be dark soon. You can make camp with me tonight, if you like, as far from here as possible."
Kindrie's impulse was to run until he dropped, away from both his pursuers and this unnatural female; but daylight was fading rapidly, and this wilderness terrified him. He gave a small, reluctant nod.
"All right, then," said the other, and jumped to solid ground.
The ounce had been waiting with growing impatience on the far side of the drifting grove. He didn't attempt to cross, however, until his mistress turned to look at him...no, at the tricky path which he must negotiate. Kindrie suddenly realized that the beast was blind, that he was using the girl's eyes to see his way. He was bound to her. Of all the damning things which Kindrie had been told at Wilden about the Highlord's sister, no one had mentioned that, like Kindrie himself, she was Shanir.
Above the willow's path, they struck the west bank's New Road and followed it northward until a ravine opening above it provided shelter sufficient to hide a fire.
While Kindrie held thin hands out to the small blaze which she had kindled, the Knorth draped her sodden jacket over a nearby rock. Then, to his surprise, she unrolled a death banner and also spread it out to dry, its gently smiling face turned toward the warmth. It seemed to watch them benignly as they sat on opposite sides of the fire, regarding each other warily over the flames and eating winter-shrivelled apples. The ounce, offered cheese, scratched the ground around it and trotted purposefully off into the dark. Watching the cat's mistress gingerly chew her own dinner, Kindrie remembered the host of disfigured dead in her soul-image and shivered.
"I heard about you at the Cataracts," she said, so suddenly that he jumped. "You grew up in the Priests' College at Wilden, but ran away to serve first Lord Caineron and then Ardeth. You were free. Why did you go back?"
"It wasn't my idea," snapped Kindrie, despite his resolve to keep quiet. "Tending the wounded, I-I overtired myself and collapsed. When I woke, I was back at Wilden. It seems that Ardeth's people didn't know what else to do, with their lord off bone-hunting in the Southern Wastes and a sick healer on their hands."
"And Ardeth let you stay there all winter?"
Kindrie winced. "H-he had other concerns, I suppose. His dead son Pereden, your brother, and Kothifir is so far away...."
"Awkward to apply pressure at a distance, I agree, but still...! And Tori had nothing to say about this either?"
"The Highlord owes me no debts if he isn't willing to pay!"
"Proud," she said, considering him, "and devious, to imply and deny a debt in the same breath. Whatever he owes you, priestling, he owes. But that's his business. So. Winter passes, a call comes to Wilden for a healer, and you take the opportunity to bolt."
For a moment, she was silent, absently combing out tangled hair with long, black-sheathed fingers. One hand stole to her injured cheek.
Don't ask me to heal you, he silently pled. Don't, for both our sakes!
The hand dropped.
"So. You're free again. What next?"
"I...don't know."
From that terrible waking in Wilden the previous winter, he had fled to the most secret corner of his soul-image to hide, to wait for the rescue which had never come. Three years ago, the priests would have left him alone, mistaking his blank stare for that of the half-wit which they had always believed him to be. Now they knew better. Was it only yesterday that they had finally tricked him into emerging? And then...and then....
Yes, he was out of their hands, but free? Not after what they had done to him. Perhaps never again.
"Stop that!"
He blinked, surprised to find the Knorth kneeling in front of him, gripping his clenched fists through the protection of the food sack. His head hurt.
"God's teeth and toenails. I've never met anyone so determined to beat in his own brains. What is wrong with you?"
"Leave me alone!"
He wrenched free, lashed out at her clumsily, and fell on his face as she slipped aside.
"Leave me alone," he said again, his voice muffled, and began to cry.
"Sweet Trinity," he heard her mutter. "And I thought I was a mess." A moment later, she dropped her still damp jacket over his bare shoulders.
Kindness, he thought. If I accept that, I'll break down completely.
He rolled over to look up at the Knorth. "How does your brother feel," he said, "about you being Shanir?"
Silver flared in the gray eyes above him. Kindrie flinched, guessing too late that the ability to mind-bond with an ounce might be the least of the other's Shanir attributes. If her powers were great, however, so was her control. Silver tarnished to gray.
"What do you think?" she said flatly, and returned to her side of the fire.
Kindrie answered her silently, in the darkness behind his squeezed shut eyes: I think it may kill him.
FRATRICIDE.
The God-voice had broken its silence of over two thousand years to call the Highlord's sister that, or so the priest with the skull-like face and the maimed hand had told Kindrie yesterday. Kindrie hadn't disbelieved it—how could one doubt the Voice of God when it burned its way like acid out of some unwilling throat?—but now...!
On the march to the Cataracts, Torisen had fallen into one of his mysterious nightmares and no one had been able to wake him from it. At Ardeth's insistence, Kindrie had entered the Highlord's sleeping mind to try to help. There he had stumbled across the soul-image of the blighted house with the vast death banner hall which he now realized had not been Torisen's at all but his sister's. It had apparently been poisoning the sleeping man. Kindrie had exorcised it, but he didn't trust his power to banish such a thing indefinitely. Given Torisen's violent antipathy to all Shanir, he might have been stricken by the mere knowledge that his sister was one. That prejudice, after all, was what prevented him from honoring his debts to Kindrie. Those he might shrug off, but not a sister's claims. And then...and then....
"She will destroy him," that death's-head Ishtier had hissed, leaning close, breathing the dregs of his winter-long sickness into Kindrie's face, "unless you...er...render her harmless, shall we say? Yes, you, boy. No one else had been able to get close enough. But a healer's touch, ah, nothing comes closer than that."
B-but he was a healer. How could he ever hurt someone the way he himself had been hurt?
"Just a little change in your soul-image, boy. It was clever of you to choose the Priests' College itself as the external metaphor of your soul. My colleagues thought they had you locked up here, mind as well as body. They didn't know about that image hidden within an image, that secret garden where Lady Rawneth confined you most of your childhood when the rest of us thought you lack-witted, But now m'lady has traded that secret to me. I could destroy your pathetic little bolt-hole—uproot the comfrey and heart's-ease, sow the ground with salt. Instead, I will give you a chance to regain it. We have taught you how to read soul-images, boy. Read the Knorth's to learn where she has hidden the thing which she stole from me, and then deal with her as she deserves, or you will never be at peace again."
Then they had sent him out with an escort of priests and Randir guards, bound for Gothregor, so confident he was broken that they hadn't bothered to watch him. What that skull-faced Ishtier had done to him was obscene, but so was what the priest wanted him to do. So he had run—straight into the very person he had been trying to avoid just as she, for some reason, had been fleeing him.
In his mind, he was still running. The outer dimension of his soul was that long corridor which spiraled down into the subterranean Priests' College, past dim classrooms where masters had beaten him, past dank dormitories where he had learned all shades of violation but one. None of that had mattered, though, while his inner spirit remained a refuge, inviolate. Behind one of the imagined doors was the secret room where the Randir Matriarch had confined him as a lesser woman might have locked a child in a dark closet. Where he had gotten the idea for the moon garden which had transformed Rawneth's prison into a sanctuary and the source of his strength, he didn't know. He might gladly have stayed there forever, even after his jailer stopped bothering to lock him in. However, three years ago he had overheard angry voices outside the door of his secret soul, saying that a Knorth was Highlord again.
