Seekers mask, p.17
Seeker's Mask, page 17
part #3 of Kencyrath Series
Jame caught his arm. "What are you talking about?"
"A demon! Ishtier told her how to conjure it. That was the price he paid to learn how to bar me from my soul-image."
"Quonk!" boomed that strange voice again, this time with an air of self-encouragement. "Quok, quok, quok..."
Each grunting "quok" sounded closer than the last. Jame could have sworn that it had somehow gotten ahead of them again. However, she wasn't as scared as Kindrie. For one thing, she'd had some practical experience with demons; for another, it was hard to take one seriously which talked to itself, much less in that tone. The Shanir was right, though: this was no place to linger.
However, their way was barred by a pool of rain water collected in a dip of the road. Something huge was rising out of it. Two bulging eyes emerged first, round as soup plates and about the same size, with slit pupils and irises each like a golden lattice crossing a rose colored ground. An expanse of bright green forehead followed, then a broad snout circled by an even broader mouth. The snowy vocal sac inflated like a lesser moon.
"QUONK!" said this apparition, eyeing the white haired healer with evident satisfaction.
Kindrie fainted.
Jame, on the other hand, nearly jumped into the pool to throw her arms around that vast, green neck—not that they would have reached.
"Why, Gorgo, you've grown!"
Gorgo, formerly the Lugubrious, switched his goggle-eyed gaze to her, and immediately looked apprehensive. The previous year, Jame's own experiments with the so-called gods of Tai-tastigon had first gotten him killed and then resurrected in his current (although much smaller) shape. Neither, obviously, was an experience which Gorgo would soon forget.
"...quonk...." he said feebly, gulping.
Another sound came out of his closed mouth. It sounded suspiciously like muffled cursing. Gorgo yawned, wide, wider, like a toad beginning its molt, and there, snuggled in the pit of his throat, was a human face.
"I hate it when he does that," said Loogan. " 'Quonk'! What a sound, and it nearly blows out my eardrums."
Jame stared at the Tastigon priest. "Sweet Trinity. Did Gorgo swallow you, or are you wearing him?"
"I don't know what's going on," said Loogan crossly. "We were both in the temple, preparing for the evening rites, when this happened. In fact, if I squint, I can still see the sanctuary. I don't think we're really here at all—wherever 'here' is."
Gorgo gurgled.
"Ah. He says we've been sent to fetch someone—that fellow on the ground, I think. A lady wants him."
"Sorry. He's under my protection."
"Oh. Well, that's that. Overreached herself, she did, trying to snag us in the first place. We're already slipping free, none too soon."
Gorgo's attention had strayed to a flight of dragonflies hovering about a nearby clump of reeds. He turned his massive head. Loogan's tongue shot out—all three feet of it—and snapped an insect out of the air.
"Gaaah!" he said, around a mouthful of shimmering wings. "I hate this. We're going home. Now. Before he finds out that it's the m-a-t-i-n-g season."
"Loogan, wait! Is everyone all right in Tai-tastigon?"
"Hardly everyone. Men-dalis has got troubles, but I expect you'll hear about that sooner or later. All your friends at the Res aB'tyrr are fine. Goodbye."
"Wait! What happened to Bane?"
"Believe me, you don't want to know."
As he spoke, the priest's round face had been fading. Only his voice now emerged from Gorgo's throat, as if from a growing distance: "Bye-bye, duckie. Keep your feet dr...."
Gorgo's mouth still gaped wide open, frozen in what appeared to be astonishment. An iridescent sheen had come over him.
"Quo...?" he said tentatively, and burst with a faint pop, like a soap bubble.
All that remained was the puddle, with a rumpled dragonfly floating in the middle of it.
VIII
Loogan and Gorgo weren't the only ones who had disappeared. So had Kindrie and Jorin. The healer must have woken in time to hear Jame conversing familiarly with a "demon" and bolted, the ounce scampering after him.
Damnation.
Wet weather had somehow allowed the Wilden Witch to snatch an Old Pantheon rain god and his priest in the midst of their ritual lavations. She hadn't been able to hold them, but with that sort of power she was bound to try again, this time maybe conjuring something less ambitious but more effective—like a real demon. And it would be after Kindrie, whom Jame had just sworn to protect.
"It never rains," as Loogan might say, "without drowning someone."
At least the tracks of both Shanir and ounce showed clearly in the soft earth, heading upward from the road. Jame followed at a trot. Overhead, the clouds went from gray to black, edged by that unearthly yellow light which still spread out from the towers of Wilden. The weirding mist trailed down in darkening veils.
At first, Jame thought that the diminishing light was to blame when the prints of Kindrie's bare feet seemed to distort. She crouched, peering. No. The outer toes did splay at right angles to elongated feet, with indentations at the end of each toe that suggested claws.
Something ran after the Shanir, treading in his footprints step by step.
As she rose to follow, the back of her head seemed to explode.
Ancestors be praised for long hair was her first dazed thought thereafter. Once again, the thick, coiled braid under her cap had saved her skull from fracture or worse.
Then she became aware of weight, pinning her to the ground, and of cool air, moving across her face. Someone had removed her mask. She rather thought, too, that she was being sat on.
All she saw at first, though, through cautious, slitted eyes, was the nearly empty food sack bobbing over her. Withered apples flew out of it as if by themselves. Above and behind it hovered angry eyes without a face—bloodshot whites, yellow irises, hardly ever blinking. When they did, the pressure on her eased and the food bag sagged, as if for a moment her assailant became the shadow after which his guild was named.
The empty sack went flying. Crooked, yellow teeth bared at her in a snarl, which she smashed with a handy rock.
Free. On her feet. Running, closely pursued.
Tripped by a root, Jame turned her stumble into a lunge for the nearest sapling, bearing it down with her weight, then rolling off to let it whip back. Yellow eyes hastily shut. The slender trunk passed between where they had been. She tried to rise, but a freezing numbness had seized her legs. The assassin's shadow swarmed up her body, ending in two very real if invisible hands about her throat. Yellow eyes glared down at her, unblinking.
"Where is it?" a thick tongue hissed in midair, like an adder in a cage of rotten ivory, spitting blood and fragments of broken teeth in her face. "The book, you witch, the Book Bound in Pale Leather. Where?"
"I-I don't have it." Sweet Trinity, who had told him about that? Marc, Graykin, Kindrie.... "Ishtier?"
The grip on her throat tightened. "That priest-spawn! What has he told you, bitch? What?"
What could Ishtier have told her, except perhaps how he had forced a master assassin to attempt theft for him? If the guilds of the Central Lands were like their eastern counterparts, the Bashti thieves would howl over this.
Broken teeth sneered. "Bluffing, weren't you? As if a whore's-daughter ever knew anything."
White flashed. The Ivory Knife. Oh lord, where had he found to hide that?
"Guild Master," she heard herself croak. "I know this much: why the blooding at Gothregor failed."
The Knife hesitated. Her neck felt cold, where the blade so nearly touched it.
"Why, bint?"
"The 'prentices were unprepared and under-trained."
He slapped her, hard, across her injured cheek. "One of them gave you that, at least."
"No," said Jame, through sudden pain, tasting blood.
"Then not. Kencyr are too stupid to lie. Under-trained, how?"
"Not enough fighting experience." Amazing, how she found herself reporting as a journeyman to a master, if of different disciplines. "Too much dependence on shadow-casting techniques, under adverse conditions."
"Unprepared for what?"
"Partly, for me."
He struck again, harder. She almost lunged upward into the sharp ivory, a risk she might have taken with any other knife.
"Why don't you put that thing away, master, and try your own luck with me?"
He gave a sharp bark of laughter. "I tested your sort thirty-four years ago, sow. Soft throats and soft kills—except for the one who led me such a chase and the other one who cursed. Red-eyed whore...!"
A red-eyed maledight....
"Brenwyr?" Jame said, stupidly.
"That was the name. Unprepared for what else, slut?"
"For Old Man Tishooo, who blew away their souls, and for a shadow-demon named Bane, who fed on them. In fact," she added, carefully, "if you were to look above you now...."
He laughed again, harshly. "Kencyr never lie, but 'if' cuts no bread."
"This time," said Jame, "it does."
Bane dropped on the assassin out of a tree, like a coat of shadows. The guild master gasped. His frantic efforts to shrug off his tenebrous assailant became the jerky movements of a man being clothed against his will. His shoulders twitched as the other settled over them. His arms stretched and his hands flexed into gloves of living shadow. The Ivory Knife wobbled in his loosened grip, directly over Jame's face.
"Watch it!" she said.
Bane looked down at her. What Jame saw was the shadowy mask of his features, through which the assassin's eyes stared wildly. What he saw, for the first time, was her injured face, freshly bloodied. His grip on the guild master tightened. The man shrieked, and dropped the Ivory Knife.
"Eeee!" said Jame.
How she managed it, she never knew. A moment later, though, Jame found herself sprawling a dozen feet from where the Knife quivered upright in the sod, the grass dying around it.
Something unseen was blundering away through the trees, trailing a thin wail as much of rage as fear. The master assassin had bolted. Now there was a mount which would need some taming, even for such a rider. With luck, they would break each other's neck, Jame thought sourly, wiping her face. So much for Kindrie's first aid.
Sweet Trinity. Kindrie.
She snatched up the Ivory Knife and ran back the way she had come. Here was the clearing where the assassin had jumped her, her mask, cap, and linen bandage laying where he had dropped them. Beyond, those curious, composite footprints led on upslope. She followed, toward the sound of raised voices.
IX
"It's weirding up something fierce, Ten," the cadet on point called back, a plaintive, disembodied voice out of the dark, dripping forest. Muffled thunder rolled down the valley like a boulder wrapped in flannel. "And I think it's going to rain again."
"We should have turned back two days ago, when the ghost-walkers passed," the tall cadet in Five's rear-guard position muttered. "All patrols should, when it starts to weird up like this."
His voice carried, as he meant it to. The new ten-commander turned to look back at him over the seven intervening heads.
"Standing orders," he muttered defiantly, but his eyes fell.
Brier Iron-thorn could almost smell the slow burn of his resentment. Before her arrival at the college, a new Knorth cadet with a battlefield appointment, he had been provisional Ten.
In fact, none of the young cadets looked happy. All but one of them Riverland bred, of old Knorth stock, they had come to Tentir that spring thinking themselves the cream of its new crop, only to find how hard it was to serve the Highlord in a college dominated by his enemies. Worse, older cadets looked down on them both for having missed the great blooding at the Cataracts and for taking the place of friends killed there. Then, in the crowning insult, they had been put under the command of an upstart Southie of Caineron yondri stock.
To Brier, their discontent looked like the pout of spoiled children.
How old were they? Fifteen? Sixteen? At their age, she had already been in the field with the Southern Host for years, first with her mother, then on her own after Rose Iron-thorn's death in the Wastes after the debacle at Urakarn. Life was hard for the many Kendar who had lost their natural lord and must seek a new one. Nicknamed yondri-gon or threshold-dwellers, they could serve a house for generations before its master deigned to take them into regular service, especially if that house was the Caineron and its lord Caldane, who deliberately swelled his ranks with the desperate displaced who would do anything to gain his favor. Two years ago, when she had turned seventeen, he had at last given Brier her chance as a randon candidate—if she passed his private initiation.
The cadets, watching, were suddenly still. Under the helm of mahogany hair, the Southie's expression hadn't changed: as always, that hard, handsome face might have been carved from teak and those green eyes from the same malachite as the stud in her left earlobe. But for a moment the cadets had seen something there which had frightened them very much indeed.
Brier turned away. "Point, wait there. We're coming down to you."
Near mutiny returned to the ranks. "Down" meant farther south. Their assignment had been to check out the rumor of a naked Merikit seen near the college—just another dirt job for the Knorth rookies, they had thought, as well as an oblique insult to their new leader, since only Caineron hunted Merikit for sport and were said to treat them no better than wild animals when they caught one. This Merikit would, of course, long since have gone, assuming he had existed in the first place. They had expected to cover their assigned territory in time for supper. Instead, Iron-thorn had led them out of it, southward.
Now it was dusk two days later, under dark trees and a weirding overcast, with no food, no Merikit, and the prospect of more rain.
They were long overdue at Tentir. Commandant Sheth, no friend to the Knorth, could have their token scarves for this as it was. Had that, perhaps, been his purpose in assigning them to a former Caineron? What was the Southie playing at, anyway?
It would not have reassured them that Brier herself didn't know. She only sensed that something was tugging her. It felt like her new bond to the Highlord, but how could that be when he was still in Kothifir, over four hundred leagues away? Normally, Torisen's grip on his Kendar was so light-handed that her former mates dismissed it scornfully as limp. But how could Brier know what he might be capable of? The Knorth were so different from the Caineron, upon whom all her previous experience was based.
Different, and mad.
She had been brought up to believe that, too. Hadn't Ganth Gray Lord's insanity infected the entire Host, leading to its near massacre in the White Hills? Didn't his son sometimes shun sleep until his wits half turned? What was she to think of a Highborn who at the Cataracts had offered her sanctuary from Lord Caineron's wrath as if he actually cared what happened to her? That show of concern was only the Knorth glamor, she told herself, useful for binding gullible randon like Harn Grip-hard as tightly as blood could have done. Her own decision to change houses had been based entirely on ambition, since she could now never hope for advancement under the Caineron. She would use Knorth influence and the Knorth would use her ability. Pure self-interest, on both sides. It was mad to think that Highborn and Kendar could deal with each other on any other basis.
And madness was contagious.
Is that what pulls me southward? she wondered. Have I gone mad too?
The scout suddenly reappeared, with an urgent gesture for silence. Whatever he had found, though, defied his ability to describe by sign. Brier cut short his efforts with a brusque *Show me,* then followed him down to the edge of the trees, the squad close on their heels.
They emerged under black clouds so low here that they seemed to tangle in the branches overhead. An unearthly yellow light filtered down through them. Below, the river's pale breath was slowly flooding the valley to the height of the lowest trees. Between roof and floor of mist lay a slope strewn with large boulders, knee deep in grass, across which veils of weirding silently drifted. It was this middle ground to which the scout pointed.
A Randir ten-command was playing hide-and-seek among the boulders—if "play" was the right word for that silent, furtive activity. The strange cadets seemed almost to slither through the grass, supple as serpents, long-skulled heads and many jointed hands weaving as though in quest for a scent. Flushed from cover, a white haired Shanir stumbled into the open. The seekers surrounded him. They began to play him back and forth, still in that unnerving silence, as he floundered with exhaustion in their midst.
It was no affair of hers, Brier told herself. As a Caineron, the first lesson she had learned was to mind her own business.
The Shanir tripped and fell. The Randir crouched in a circle around him. One drew a fingertip delicately down his cheek, leaving a thin, red line.
"Stop that!" Brier Iron-thorn roared.
Her own cadets jumped, then nervously followed as she strode down the slope. Below, ten pale, blank faces turned toward her, ten pairs of ghost-lit, glimmering eyes, but still no one spoke.
"What in Perimal's name d'you think you're doing?" she demanded of them, then stopped short.
A Randir captain had stepped between her and the group crouching around the fallen Shanir. Brier blinked. She didn't recognize any of the ten-command, but this gaunt woman was a Tentir instructor, currently posted to the Gothregor Women's Halls and still wearing her dress grays with gold stripped shoulder embroidery. What in hell was she doing here?
"Minding our own business, cadet," said the captain, smiling. The other Randir rose and silently ranged themselves behind her, still surrounding the Shanir. "We suggest that you do the same."
Brier blinked again. To hear her unspoken thoughts answered was unnerving. Worse, she suddenly realized that whatever was going on here, she couldn't just walk away from it. The rules she had followed as a Caineron no longer seemed to apply, but how was a Knorth supposed to react? For the first time in her life, she didn't know what to do.
