Seekers mask, p.46
Seeker's Mask, page 46
part #3 of Kencyrath Series
"Oh!" said Lyra, staring upward.
Above them, the nebulous, smoky skull seemed to be emptying itself out through mouth, eyes, and nostrils. Fat, smudgy fingers drifted down. A wave of heat preceded them, fetid with the pyre's breath.
"It wasn't supposed to be like this," Catilla was complaining, oblivious. "We should have lost the Riverland, been forced to mind our own business for a change. Stop tugging at me, girl! Nothing less will save that idiot father of yours. Going to Perimal in a pushcart, that boy, and dragging his house after him...."
The smoke fingers groped toward her rising voice. Foxkin, peeking out through the arm-holes of her vest, withdrew abruptly. Lyra buried her face in the old woman's gown as smoke brushed over Cattila's face, then slid past, leaving her in soot-smeared, sputtering outrage.
Sonny sprawled in the way. Smoke fumbled blindly around his fallen body, sparks scorching holes in his red pants, singeing his tattooed skin. He twitched. Loosened strands of his red hair rose in the heat's up-draft, crinkled, and stank. He would burn as though on his own pyre, alive.
"Tha," breathed the murky air, a croon of hunger. "Thaa, thaaaa..."
"Matriarch," said Jame loudly. "I won the challenge. Present me as the new Favorite."
The smoke rose from Sonny's body and drifted toward her. She went back a step involuntarily but stopped, rigid, as her heel struck the well's rim.
The fingers closed loosely about her in a stifling wave of heat. She held her breath against their stench, as though pressed face to face against the dead. Through streaming eyes, she saw the sparks dance, two by two by two. Not sparks. Eyes: the Burning Ones unleashed and circling hungrily, waiting for the first flinch. She felt them brush against her. Their charred fingers rasped, crumbling, across her face.
Don't move. Don't even blink.
"Burnt Man!" she faintly heard Cattila cry. "Stop messing around! This is the Challenger, triumphant, your true child in destruction, if ever nemesis was. Now bugger off!"
Breath scorched Jame's ear in wordless protest. A moment more, must have been that hoarse plea; just a moment more....
"Thaaa-HA!"
The command boomed like thunder too close to the lightning strike, a vast impact more felt than heard. The smoke shredded with a cry torn away into the distance: "KI-Ki-ki-iiiii...."
Jame gulped air a moment too soon and went off into a coughing fit. When her eyes cleared, she found herself tottering on the edge of the well, and the Burnt Man standing not a score of feet away with his head in his hands.
No.
That black thing was the cinder-skull, consumed to a brittle shell, already crumbling. The charcoal-smeared man let the pieces fall through his fingers. Through a profusion of singed braids, he was glaring at the erstwhile Favorite as the latter sat up with a groan.
"Somehow," Chingetai growled at his son, "this is all your fault."
What the Merikit chief meant by "all" he immediately made clear, from Sonny's failures as a mewling baby to his many short-comings as a man. It was an epic list, its details honed by repetition. Its subject rose and listened with a sullen scowl. The shaman-elders flickered in and out of sight beside their naked chief, reaching up to pat him as though to calm an enraged stallion.
"Even that," he roared, pointing at Jame, "would make me a better son!" Then he looked again. "By the Four, who is that?"
Tungit stood on tiptoe to whisper in his ear.
"My new what? The Burnt Man approved?" He made a half-choked protest as though at a world gone mad and tore at his hair. A scrawny right-hand braid, burned through near the root, came away in his grasp.
Out of the well rose a low, impatient growl, and the ground shivered. One rite might have failed, thought Jame, stepping hastily back from the quaking edge, but not the more important one. Not yet. The River Snake still hungered.
"You see?" Chingetai thundered at his son, brandishing the plait. "This was yours, started with four hairs on the day of your birth." He threw it into the shaft. The earth swallowed it, muttering, unappeased. "You're dead, boy, discarded by the Burnt Man and by me. Now do what you were born for: Jump down that damn well!"
In the midst of this denunciation, Graykin appeared breathless beside Lyra and Cattila, clutching Kin-Slayer. Jame was staring at him when Sonny grabbed her by the arms and swung her out over the well-mouth.
"No!" she and the Southron cried simultaneously, he at Sonny, she at him as he stumbled forward, swinging up the sword.
Too late. With a butcher's dull thunk, the war-blade sank into the Merikit's side. Sonny staggered, and dropped Jame.
She fell a dozen feet down the well's throat before her nails caught on its red wall. The surface shuddered and bled as she hung from it. Her boots skidded on its slime. From below came a swift up-rush of foul air—haaaAAA...—and a sense of something vast, rising fast.
Her foot gained purchase on a down-turned projection, then another. She clawed her way between the stained spikes, feeling the wall begin to bulge as its sheath of muscles contracted. Here at last was the lip...
And there stood Sonny, swaying, arms wrapped around himself to stop a tide of blood. Graykin had somehow disengaged Kin-Slayer and fallen back, aghast. From the dumbfounded look on the Merikit's face, he couldn't believe that such a thing had happened—to him, of all people. In shock, he hadn't yet felt the bite of his own death.
"HaaAAAAA...!" said the River Snake rising, ravenous, to the smell of blood.
The rim surged upward. Jame launched herself off of it, over Sonny's head, into Graykin's arms, nearly onto the sword. As they rolled, a terrible impact bounced them off the ground and down again, hard, in a cloud of dust. Into the ringing silence which followed came a shrill but oddly muffled sound: a scream that seemed to go on and on, until a rasping slurp cut it short.
All too close, something massive scraped over stones...questing? No. Receding, gone with a viscous gulp as the earth swallowed it back.
"Another fine lot...you've involved me with...." Graykin gasped, choking on the dust-thick air.
"So quit! Or at least...get off of me. Matriarch? Lyra?"
Coughs answered her, then Lyra's voice, shaking and piteous: "Here, both of us. Will things please stop happening now?"
Perhaps they would. The last upheaval had overthrown all the remaining torches and the blue smoke had dispersed. The square was left quake-wracked, still partly obscured with dust, under red clouds beginning to unravel with dawn. Had everyone really come through this alive? No. Beside the well was a circular indentation as wide as the well-mouth and two spans deep. The pavement inside had been crushed almost to powder. At its center, however, in solitary splendor, were a pair of large, hairy feet, sheared raggedly off at the ankles.
A rumble not unlike a belch came from the depths. A hero had fed the Snake to save the world.
"I hope he gives you gas," said Jame.
IX
"My boy, are you quite sure that you're all right?"
"Yes, Adric," Torisen said patiently, for the third or fourth time in as many minutes. He wiped Kin-Slayer on Ardeth's proffered handkerchief and sheathed it, to everyone's ill-concealed relief. "You seem almost disappointed."
Shamelessly eavesdropping with Lyra at her elbow, Cattila chortled at Ardeth's protest. Even from the far side of the well, Jame had heard the wistful note in the old man's voice. A mad Highlord would have been easier to manage than her unpredictable brother, given his family penchant for absurd situations.
This time, though, it seemed to her that the Ardeth had rivaled the Knorth. Adric had been explaining, with a shade less than his usual aplomb, how he had been overtaken in the Southern Wastes by the weirdingstrom. Why he had been there in the first place, he hadn't cared to make quite clear, except that he had apparently expected to find Torisen there before him. Finding Index's herb shed instead had inclined him to question his own sanity, nor was he particularly grateful for the timely shelter which it had provided.
"I don't know how long we were storm-bound in that wretched little shack," he was saying peevishly, while Index sputtered with indignation in the background. "Two days, at least. As well to have been lost at sea in a closed dinghy, all groaning timbers and swaying herbs and seams leaking mist. My Kendar servants were hideously sick. Then we fetched up where Mount Alban should have been and I at last emerged, only to be swept up again by more weirding. Someone in it was calling your name, my boy. Such a forceful voice! I simply followed it here."
That would be Brier Iron-thorn, thought Jame, now with the Wolver on Kithorn's crumbling battlements, keeping watch northward for the Merikits' imminent return.
She wondered if she would ever win back the cadet's trust. After this, Brier would return to Tentir to resume her ten-command and training, no doubt glad to put this whole insane adventure behind her. Perhaps she would eventually become one of the great randon, whose memories live in song for generations. She had the potential. But she was also as much a prisoner of her past as Jame had been of hers—no, more, since Brier only knew how to fight what the Caineron had done to her with its own weapons of cold distrust.
What things we could teach each other, thought Jame.
Then with a jolt she remembered that Bane had once said something similar to her. What wisdom had she to impart less dark than his? The best thing she could do for Brier Iron-thorn, probably, was to leave the Kendar alone.
As for herself, though, what now?
Kirien and Ashe had withdrawn to the edge of the courtyard where Kindrie lay in dwar sleep with Jorin curled snoring in his arms. The scholars' low voices had half-woken the ounce, through whom Jame had overheard a conversation never meant for her.
"So you didn't try a test after all," the Jaran Lordan had said to the haunt singer. When the latter hadn't replied, Kirien had stared hard at her for a moment and then sworn under her breath. "So that was it. According to the old songs, only a Kencyr can destroy a Tyr-ridan. When you pointed Jame out to Sonny, you thought that he would prove she was a false nemeis by killing her. Trinity, Ashe, that's cold-blooded...and lame-brained. His failure doesn't establish anything, except that she's damned lucky."
"Next time," the haunt had muttered, "I'll do better."
Even her own people wanted her dead. No wonder she felt safer with the well-mouth between her and any of them.
Seeker, seeker....
She had thought that it was enough to drop the mask, to be only herself. But who was she?
Maybe she should complete her withdrawal, run away to become the "son" that the Merikit Chingetai had proclaimed her, the first Kencyr in eighty years with free license to roam these hills. Jorin would love that.
Yes, but then what would she do about Graykin, now skulking around the edges of the courtyard as if afraid either to draw more attention to himself or to be left behind?
And if she did flee up into the hills, whom might she encounter there? According to Merikit beliefs, she was now also the Burnt Man's son, or was that the Earth Wife's lover, or both? This was getting not only complicated but potentially messy.
Anyway, Mother Ragga must still think of her as a thief. That damn imu. She took the medallion out of her pocket, as always feeling its power tingle unpleasantly through both her gloves and its covering of changer's skin. But this time something had been added to it. Eyes, mouth, ears....
Ears, framing the crude imu face like bits of leathery, dried fruit.
"If I give you Mother Ragga's favor, girl, what will you give me?"
Not Graykin's ears or her own, after all, but the imu's, to be carried into Kencyr houses where the Earth Wife feared to go, to listen for her as she had for Cattila at Gothregor....
"Is that it, Ragga?" Jame whispered into one of the shivelled flaps. "Have I your favor after all?"
The imu's lips moved against her face. She jerked the medallion away, unsure if it had meant to bite or kiss.
"We'll just have to see, then, won't we?" she muttered, slipping it back into her pocket.
A descending cry and a great splash drew all eyes to the basin at the square's western corner. In it floundered a great welter of wet skirts, making angry noises. Out of this confusion emerged Kallystine. Water weeds crowned her straggling hair and inch long catfishlings cascading from her clothes. She clawed a slimy caul from her face. Under it, her wet mask clung to her features with unbecoming fidelity.
Lyra, after a moment's open-mouthed gawk, burst out laughing.
By then, Kallystine had caught sight of Torisen. However, her half-sister's laughter made her pause, furious, to try ineffectually to set herself to rights.
Torisen had also recognized her, with difficulty and dismay.
His expression would have amused Ardeth, except that as the old lord's gaze had swept across the square toward the newcomer, he had for the first time noticed Jame on the other side of the well. Fifteen decades had made his far-sight unusually keen. Still, he hesitated to believe what he saw.
"My dear boy! That can't be...but the family resemblance...it is!"
"What?" said Torisen, his attention wrenched from the sight of his consort angrily shaking fish out of her bodice. "Oh. Yes, I'm afraid so."
"But...but this is appalling! A Highborn lady in this place, bare-faced, in that indecent garb.... See here, my boy, this must never become common knowledge! When I think how difficult it was to explain away your eccentric departure from Kothifir...."
"How did you, by the way?"
"During my years as a diplomat, I earned a singer's right to the Lawful Lie. I told the High Council that trouble in the north demanded your immediate attention...which seems, after all, to have been no more than the truth. I tell you, though, your reputation won't survive another scandal!"
"But you just said that you successfully concealed my...er...eccentricity," said Torisen, a glint coming into his eyes which his old friend would have done well to notice. "As for our reputation, everyone knows we Knorth are as mad as a gelded rathorn, to use Harn's elegant phrase."
But Ardeth wasn't listening. The Highlord's affairs had obviously gotten out of hand, as he had always predicted they would, and must be saved by an older, wiser head. If he felt satisfaction that events could finally be turned to his own advantage, he dismissed the thought. After all, it only made sense that Knorth honor should be saved and his young friend's position strengthened by an alliance between their two houses. If his son Pereden wasn't alive to oblige, grandsons were. It only remained to decide which.
Torisen tried to stem this tide of plans, without so much as fully getting the old lord's attention. He himself impatiently brushed aside Kallystine when she swept down on him, her remaining charms in full if dank display.
"Lady, please. Not now."
Kallystine recoiled with a venomous hiss. "Jameth. Always Jameth...."
She swung back her hand to slap him. In her palm, steel flashed.
"No!" Jame cried, starting forward, but she was much too far away.
Lyra caught her sister's back-flung arm, pulling her off-balance and bearing her to the ground. Kallystine's hand, striking the pavement, sprang wide open.
"Why," said Ardeth, staring, "that's a razor-ring."
"You slapped my sister," said Torisen slowly, "with that."
Lyra hastily rolled away. Kallystine was left crouching like a toad in her sodden finery, mask askew, perfect teeth bared behind wrinkled lips. The Highlord stood over her.
"Caineron," he said, in a voice through which the cords of his power ran like steel. "I curse you and cast you out. Never come near me or mine again."
His words drove her backward, yammering, on hands and knees. Then she was on her feet and would have bolted out of the courtyard if Cattila hadn't stood in her way. The Caineron Matriarch opened her voluminous vest, dislodging foxkin, and wrapped her great-great-granddaughter in it.
"There, there," she said as Kallystine buried her face against her ancient bosom and burst into tears. "There, there." Her rheumy eyes met Torisen's over the bowed head, power speaking to power. "A poor, disgraced thing, Highlord, but of my blood. I will care for her."
"That was well done," said Jame softly to Lyra. "You'll need a new title soon: 'Lack-wit' doesn't seem so appropriate anymore."
"Actually, it is," Lyra whispered back. "Tackling Kallystine like that...it wasn't exactly on purpose: I...sort of tripped."
"Huh. Just the same, in future I'd keep out of M'lady's way if I were you."
"Now what?" Torisen demanded.
They all heard it: another shriek that seemed to plummet out of the sky, although no one saw any falling body. It ended with a crash. At the southern corner of the square, the wicker cage which had held the Tishooo had been smashed flat. On its ruins sprawled a fat, glittering figure. Graykin ducked out of sight as Lord Caineron sat up with a groan. Ardeth went to help him rise under the weight of his golden accouterments which, nonetheless, had not prevented the Tishooo from carrying him off. He rewarded the old lord's assistance with a blurry snarl.
As the two made their way back across the broken pavement, Jame decided that shaken and confused as Caldane undoubtedly was, he would have been much more so if he'd had a clear memory of the past few hours. For him and Kallystine both, their possession respectively by the Falling Man and the Eaten One must now seem like bad dreams, rapidly fading.
Meanwhile, Ardeth was taking this opportunity to inform Caldane about the new alliance, making "Jameth" sound at best a poor bargain. If he hoped to slip this news past the lord of Restormir when he was in no state to protest, however, he underestimated the Caineron will, if not the wits.
"Wha' do you mean, a contract with your house?" Caldane demanded, stopping short. "The young fool's already contracted to my daughter, isn't he? Can't keep his hands off her."
"Not with Torisen. With his sister. Anyway, M'lady Kallystine has...er...rather badly disgraced herself. She just tried to slash the Highlord with a razor-ring. In front of witnesses. I'm afraid," Ardeth added smoothly, with no evident sorrow, "that he had quite sufficient grounds to cast her off."
"What?" Glaring around him, Caldane caught sight of his daughter cowering in Cattila's arms and advanced on her. "Here, girl, what's all this nonsense...and what in Perimal's name has happened to your face?"
