Bound in Blood

X Noontide Ghosts

Jame woke with a start. Her first conscious sense was one of panic: she was supposed to be somewhere else. For a moment, as if still locked in nightmare, she scrambled to remember. One urgent voice had said, “Come”; another, “Go.” Come to whom? Go where? Oh, yes. To the hills, to act as the Earth Wife’s Favorite for the autumnal equinox.

Her sudden motion caused a swirl of Index’s notes, over the bedding, over her face. She could have sworn that Rue had burned them, but here they all were, cascading onto the floor—in fact, twice as many as there had been before. They had been turning up more and more frequently over the past thirty-odd days. Presumably, some Jaran cadet had Kirien’s Shanir knack for distance-writing, although how such a flurry of notes could have found their way into her private quarters was another mystery.

The messages themselves ranged from simple reminders: “Remember the equinox,” to the latest, discovered the previous night: “Do you want the world to end?”

Index must, surely, be exaggerating. After all, the last time she had failed to attend a Merikit ceremony there had only been a volcanic eruption, the descent of the Burning Ones, and an ashfall that had effectively destroyed the Knorth harvest—all because the Merikit chief Chingetai had insisted on replacing Jame with a substitute Favorite and the Burnt Man had declared that he no longer intended to be fooled by such tricks. That, presumably, was still the case, but Jame expected no welcome in the hills. Damn Chingetai anyway for naming her the Earth Wife’s Favorite and his own presumptive heir, just to draw attention away from his own blunders.

Besides, she had her duties here as a randon cadet and as the master-ten of her barracks, both linked to her brother having taken Chingetai’s example and also having declared her his heir or lordan. He was covering for past mistakes too, if one counted dropping her into the Women’s World without so much as a decent dress to her name, let alone a mask. That, however, had led her through torturous ways to Tentir, so she wasn’t sorry.

So, which duty was more important, to the hills or to the hall? One responsibility mirrored the other. The failure of either could be catastrophic; but how could she fulfill them both?

G’ah, this heaping on of roles had to stop. What next, chief chicken sexer?

She kicked back the blankets, then stared down the length of her naked body. Some sound she made half roused Rue on her mat by the door.

“Huh . . . ?”

“Go back to sleep. It’s not even dawn yet.”

“Mmmm . . . ”

Someone had drawn patterns over her small breasts, across her flat stomach, and down her long legs with something that looked like blood. If it was a message, she couldn’t read it, but its mere presence was profoundly disturbing in a double sense.

Look how close to you I can get.

. . . ah, come closer still . . .

Before that moment of panic, she had felt the touch and had arched to receive it. Imagination put the brush into beautiful, scarred hands. Warm breath made her skin tingle. Ah . . .

Oh, forget it. The lines broke and flaked away as she rose, leaving no trace.

She dressed, quickly but quietly, in clothes still dank with yesterday’s sweat. Rue did her best, but the sultry weather had outpaced her. Also, it seemed that Graykin had nabbed the majority of her uncle’s cast-off finery—no loss to Jame’s mind, but it did make Rue’s job harder.

Jorin slept on his back on the window sill, all four paws in the air. His ears twitched. He yawned, stretched luxuriously, and fell off the ledge, luckily into the room and not out the window. With the ounce bounding on ahead, Jame stepped over Rue and went down the stairs past dormitories full of cadets fitfully asleep.

The weather had been unseasonably hot and humid all week, with tempers shortened and classes an unwelcome chore. Even a Southron like Brier suffered under the wet-blanket effect while those used to crisp mountain air drew every breath with effort.

Their only respite had been work in the orchard, at least one class session each day for every ten-command, harvesting the apples, pears, and plums that provided the college with its staple drinks, cider, perry, plum jerkum, and, for those really determined to get drunk, applejack. The lower hall was full of every container the cadets had been able to find, including the odd spare boot, all overflowing with fruit. Jame picked up a rosy apple and bit into it with a satisfying crunch. Sweet juice flooded her mouth. She pocketed as many more as she could and went out.

At the moment, ancestors be praised, some of the night’s relative coolness lingered. As the day’s heat grew, however, many would come the way that she did now, down through cloud-of-thorn bushes toward rushing water and clouds of mist.

It didn’t surprise Jame, therefore, to find herself not the first one at the swimming hole, despite the early hour. As she threaded through clutching brambles, she heard the sound of someone crying.

Narsa crouched, naked and dripping, on the spray-slick edge of Breakneck Rock.

At the sight of her, Jame remembered the nightmare which had woken her. She had been watching Timmon draw red patterns on a supine female body.

“Come to me. Come,” he had been whispering.

His eyes, raising, had widened as he noted her presence.

She had never before seen that young, handsome face so haggard, so wretched. The next moment he had vomited copiously over his living canvas, Narsa, who had leaped up and ran.

“I came to you,” said Jame, blankly. “Not to him.”

The Ardeth Kendar sprang to her feet and turned as if to attack, but slipped on the wet rock.

“It’s all your fault!” she wailed, clutching her bruised knee. “Without you, he would love me, me, me!”

Water and blood pooled under her. Jame saw that the latter was menstrual. At least Timmon hadn’t gotten her into that particular sort of trouble. Yet.

“What in Perimal’s name is Timmon playing at?”

“You’ve bewitched him!”

“I haven’t, but someone has. Since when do we Kencyr play at blood magic?”

The other glared at her through a fringe of dark, dripping hair. “Since forever, you . . . you idiot! We’re all bound in blood, to our god, to our lords, to each other, and none of us can get free, ever, never, ever . . . ”

With that and a hiccup, she collapsed into a sodden heap.

Jame sat on her heels, regarding her. She knew that Timmon had taken Narsa as a lover that summer in an attempt to make her, Jame, jealous and so she had been, a little; but Kendar females were so vulnerable to Highborn wiles that it was hard not to feel sorry for the girl.

Briefly, Jame wondered if it ever happened the other way around, between Highborn females and Kendar men. If any lady should so transgress, though, the Women’s World would surely never speak her name again.

“Look. If you don’t like what he’s doing to you, don’t let him do it.”

Narsa raised a tear- and snot-stained face. “D’you think it’s that easy to say ‘no’?”

Jame started to say “yes,” then hesitated. Beyond his natural charm, Timmon possessed a Shanir power that she didn’t fully understand. Probably he didn’t either. He had certainly never felt the need to take responsibility for it, any more than his father Pereden had before him.

Narsa glared at her. “It just slides off you, doesn’t it, you icy bitch? You bewitch them—ancestors know how—without trying, without wanting to, then leave them without a backward glance. You can’t or won’t be touched. He’s finding that out, and it’s driving him crazy. It’s never happened to him before. He swears it would never have happened to his father.”

Pereden again, damn him. He and Greshan seemed like two of a kind, and no less pernicious for both being dead.

“Timmon looks up to his father,” Jame said. “All his life, he’s tried to imitate him and now, suddenly, the magic won’t work, at least against me. While he goes on thinking that way, he will never be himself. Narsa, can’t you help him to break free?”

The Ardeth cadet mouthed something at her, then sprang up and fled, howling.

“I guess not,” said Jame to Jorin.

She stripped, took a running leap from the rock to avoid the submerged shelf that gave it its name, and swam in the icy water until she felt clean again and was beginning to go wrinkly around the edges.

By the time Jame returned to Tentir, the college was astir. This was its one free day out of seven, so there had been no morning clarion call. However, the growing heat and long habit discouraged sleeping in.

As she approached the Ardeth quarters along the board walk, Timmon stumbled out.

“You came!” he croaked.

“I did not. Stop making a fool of yourself and put on some clothes.”

Farther along the walk around its northward bend, Vant had been talking to Higbert and Fash before the Knorth quarters. All three fell momentarily silent to enjoy Timmon’s discomfiture, then started up again, ignoring Jame’s approach.

“So, how do you mean to spend your bit of free time?” Higbert asked Vant, a little too loudly.

“Well, my lady seems to think that Tentir is about to be ravished by Merikit marauders. Perhaps I’ll go hunting.”

“Prime pelts on some of those hillmen,” said Fash, with a wide, white smile and his cold eyes sliding sideways as she came up to them. “I reckon they’re wasted where they are.”

Jame was used to Kendar who loomed over her—scarcely one didn’t—but these three were doing their best to make her feel it.

“Move,” she said, glowering up at them. They did.

Where to now?

She still felt restless and displaced, worse than at the solstice when she had at least been in sight of the Merikit rites, such as they were, before the Burnt Man had blown up a mountain and dropped a fair-sized chunk of it in the middle of Kithorn’s courtyard. What he might do this time made her profoundly nervous.

Worse, Chingetai was one of the few among his people who apparently couldn’t see the truth behind the ancient rituals. To him, Burnt Man, Earth Wife, Falling Man and Eaten One were just old shamans outrageously dressed, self-important for a day, even if he had taken them seriously enough to make a grab for the entire Riverland. Yes, while scrambling up the seasonal rites and setting in motion the mess with which they were all still trying to cope. Maybe she should take a horse and see how far north it could get her by the folds in the land before dusk. Bel could probably make it all the way. But surely it was too late for that. Chingetai must manage on his own, as dangerous as that could be.

Do you want the world to end?

Her wandering feet carried her into Old Tentir and up the stairs. The second floor contained the Map Room, guest quarters, the mews, the infirmary, and various classrooms mostly clustered around the outer walls or the great hall which rose through all three levels up to the sooty rafters.

The third floor was largely abandoned, as if to avoid the architectural strangeness that rose throughout the structure, growing worse the higher one went. Jame had encountered many mazes, but never one so full of subtle, seemingly innocent misdirection. While appearing straightforward, even dull, the corridors here slightly dipped or rose, and bent around each other so gently that one’s senses were seduced. Here, hidden ways led more directly than public ones, but she didn’t have Graykin with her to show her the entrances, nor had he yet fulfilled his promise to teach her where they were.

The thought of her half-breed servant pricked her conscience. She knew she wasn’t looking after him properly, but how could she when he remained holed up in Greshan’s private quarters, the one place where he apparently felt at home? That he had been wandering the college dressed in her uncle’s moldering finery she didn’t doubt, although why that should upset Harn, she had no idea.

Away from the outer windows, the third floor was dark enough to require a candle and dank enough to make one shiver even on so hot a day.

Here at last was the hall she sought, even though every time she seemed to approach it from a different direction. The door, however, was new, banded with iron; and the flap through which the inmate was fed had been replaced by a slot too narrow to wriggle through, as she had in the past. Not for the first time, she probed the lock with a claw, but failed to pick it. Kendar work was annoyingly effective. It didn’t seem to matter that Bear had broken out on the night of the ambush in the stable in answer to his brother’s silent call for help; no one was taking any chance that he might escape again.

Jame dripped wax on the floor and set the candle upright in it. Stretching out on the floor, she peered through the slot. The air that breathed out of it into her face was hot, stale, and stinking. Firelight lit the interior. More than ever it resembled an ill-kept cave, although she knew that it contained all the toys and luxuries that might once have delighted its inhabitant. Something momentarily eclipsed the fireplace. A large, shaggy figure was shuffling from one end of the room to the other, back and forth, back and forth. Caged. Trapped. Pacing.

“Bear,” she whispered. “Senethari.”

“Humph?”

His face suddenly appeared in the slot, eyes nearly lost in a wild mane of graying hair.

“Huh!”

A shift of position, and firelight glared through the chasm in his skull that plunged down nearly to the ledge of his shaggy eyebrows. It was an old injury, one that should have killed him, but his constitution had proved too strong. Instead of his life, it had robbed him of his mind.

Huge claws fumbled at the slot. Jame touched them lightly with her own much smaller ones. They no longer let him out to teach her the Arrin-thar, considering him too dangerous. No one had asked her opinion. She drew an apple out of her pocket and carefully impaled it on one of his nails. He was enthusiastically devouring it when something nudged her in the ribs. She rolled away into a fighting crouch, then relaxed, flushing both with embarrassment and growing anger.

Commandant Sheth Sharp-tongue stood above her, scratching Jorin’s ears as the ounce rubbed, purring, against his knee.

The words boiled out of her:

“Ran, does he really need to be shut up in there like . . . like a wild animal? You know he only broke out because you called him.”

Without answering, the Commandant of Tentir went down on one knee. Snuffling came from within, then a grunt of recognition. Despite herself, Jame held her breath as Sheth reached inside to stroke that wild hair. Before the White Hills, Bear had been the Caineron war-leader, a great randon. Afterward, Sheth had seen him move on the pyre, among the flames, and had pulled him out. Did he regret that now? To lose a revered older brother in battle was a grief, but to live with him afterward, reduced as he was by his terrible head wound to a shambling hulk—that was heartbreaking horror.

“Better that he should burn,” a voice breathed as in her ear, out of the opposite wall.

Sheth withdrew his hand and rose, his swirling black coat knocking over the candle. Without a word, he strode off. Jame stomped out the flame before it could spread. For an instant, as clearly as if it had actually happened, she had seen Sheth offering the light through the slot to his brother, and the fire spreading within, a pyre too long deferred, this time uninterrupted. She followed the white glimmer of the Commandant’s scarf, a slow, tight rage growing in her.

Behind her, the prisoner resumed his endless, mindless shuffle, back and forth, back and forth.

They entered the Map Room. With the sun barely risen over the fortress’s eastern face, the canvas shades on the west windows were a deep shade of peach verging on apricot and the room itself was dim. Cool air from the interior of the old fortress soughed in the door by which they had entered, to be answered by fitful puffs of warmth through the slits in the shades.

The walls were covered with intricately detailed murals depicting all the major battles that the Kencyrath had fought on Rathillien from the early days over three millennia ago to the most recent at the Cataracts. Cabinets beneath contained scrolls ranging from official reports to eyewitness accounts by common Kendar and a few mere bystanders. Jame had spent many hours here, both with her ten-command and alone, studying the records. To her, this room was just as sacred as the upper galleries of the great hall where the collars of the honored randon dead hung, rank on rank.

Then she hesitated, sniffing. Through her own senses, as well as Jorin’s as he crouched by the door, she caught a whiff of sour sweat, almost but not quite familiar. Certainly, it wasn’t the Commandant. Hopefully, it wasn’t her. She also had a sense of being watched, something that the blind ounce was unlikely to register.

The Commandant paced between the central table and the windows, back and forth, back and forth, long coat flaring as he turned. It was hard not to compare his feline grace with his brother’s ursine shamble but pace they both did, trapped alike in their separate cages.

“You know why we confined him in the first place,” he said, not looking at her.

“Yes, Ran. He mauled some cadet stupid enough to taunt him.”

“Yes. The fool did it repeatedly over the course of a long winter, and none of us noticed. I didn’t notice. It wasn’t just a mauling, either; it was a dismemberment. Bear is no berserker. After the first burst of rage that broke the cadet’s neck, he went about taking him apart as calmly and precisely as I’ve seen him plan many a campaign—this, with half a dozen randon trying to pull him off. He isn’t safe, child. He never has been.”

That dark face in hawklike profile was unreadable, but under the flat words lay cold horror. No need to tell her that he had been one of the randon trying desperately to pry loose Bear’s prey from that deliberate, deadly grip.

Jame began to pace with him now, around and around the table. She walked in his shadow, nailing it to the floor despite the changing light. Her voice was his conscience, speaking out of darkness. While he hadn’t bidden her to come, neither did he tell her to go, so she walked at his shoulder, thinking, questioning from the heart of an innate power that must be answered.

“If you thought he was so dangerous, why did you make him my teacher?”

“That was my Lord Caineron’s will.”

Was it, by Trinity, Jame thought.

She suddenly remembered a certain life-sized doll that Caldane kept in his bed so that he might nightly disembowel it. Was he playing at being Bear? Had he hoped that the brain-damaged randon would deal with her as he had with that unfortunate cadet so long ago?

“Was it also his will that Bear be confined?”

“That, or killed; now, as then. It is a little . . . test that my lord has set me. The first time, the decision was relatively easy. I couldn’t kill my brother, nor could I advance in my lord’s service without obeying him. This was some three decades ago, you understand. I was young, and ambitious. It isn’t easy growing up in the shadow of such a man as my brother was then. Yet how could I have known how hard it would be to wall him up alive for so many years? Now we are held fast in our respective cages, by my will.”

“Rather, by your lord’s.”

Jame felt anger grow in her again, that cold flame of her Shanir nature that consumes unclean things, that force that breaks that which needs to be broken. She knew all about Lord Caineron’s “little tests.” One of them had caused a Caineron cadet candidate to thread red-hot wires under Graykin’s skin so that Caldane might make his former servant dance again at his will. He would have reasserted his control over Brier just as ruthlessly, if Jame hadn’t intervened. Caldane wanted honor to mean obedience to him, following his orders, however nasty, while he himself kept his hands clean. For all she knew, that long-ago cadet’s test had been to provoke Bear until he did what he had done. The choice Caldane had forced upon the Commandant wasn’t dishonorable, but it had created a double misery and compromised Sheth in his own eyes. If Caldane could break such a man, he could break anyone, and so would end honor as the Kencyrath had always known it.

One thing at least she believed she could set straight here and now. She halted and turned, so that in his restless circling he was obliged to stop, face to face, her gloved hand on his chest.

“I think I know why Bear tore that cadet apart. I’ve seen him do something similar when he accidentally breaks one of the toy soldiers you carve for him—and he can’t help but do that sometimes, you know, because his claws are so overgrown and clumsy. Then he takes it apart trying to find the flaw that allowed it to be broken. That’s the randon way, isn’t it?” She gestured toward the maps, to the countless scrolls analyzing every detail of battles long since won or lost. “We analyze. We dissect. We try to understand. What Bear doesn’t realize is that the fault is within his own damaged mind.”

The Commandant took her hand, his touch surprisingly gentle. “And if he comes to believe that the flaw lies within someone else—say, within you, child—what then?”

She answered him steadily, holding his eyes as he held her hand. “You said it yourself, Commandant: none of us is safe. We never have been.”

As she turned to go, she heard him say softly, under his breath, “And all this time I thought he broke my carvings because he was angry at me.”

Jame was almost out the door when she caught another whiff of that stale sweat. Simultaneously, she saw a familiar face peering around the corner of the door to the Commandant’s office, which opened off the Map Room. Instead of leaving by the main door, she slipped aside at the last moment and slid through the suddenly vacated crack with Jorin at her heels.

Inside, she barreled into someone and trod heavily on his foot. He gave a half-stifled yelp of pain. In shifting her weight off, she stepped first on Jorin, who likewise squawked, then on something that crunched under her boot, pitching her sideways. She barely saw the desk in time to catch herself on it rather than hit it chin-first. Her eyes rapidly adjusted to the dim light of the windowless room. She was leaning over drifts of paper, under shelves swept bare.

“What in Perimal’s name are you playing at?” she demanded of the room’s other occupant, who was sitting on the floor nursing his sore foot. It would have been hard to avoid, shod as it was in a boot at least three sizes bigger than its mate.

No one had seen Gorbel for some time. Now Jame understood why.

“You hurt my foot,” he said through clenched teeth.

“I should have stomped harder. Gorbel, why have you ransacked the Commandant’s office? God’s claws, I’ve seen a blind thief leave less of a mess.”

“What d’you know about thieves, blind or otherwise?”

“Never mind that. What were you looking for?”

“Keep your voice down! D’you want him to hear?”

“He has already, unless he’s deaf.” Gingerly, she pushed herself upright, and tottered again as something rolled underfoot. “Answer me.”

“I need a rock called the Commandant’s Seat. The Wood Witch won’t cure me for anything less. But it’s not here.”

“Quiet.”

Outside in the Map Room, someone had spoken, and it wasn’t the Commandant. The voice, like the smell, raised the short hairs on Jame’s arms and set Jorin to growling softly.

“It would seem that you have mice in your closet, Sheth Sharp-tongue.”

“None that will do much harm,” replied the Commandant’s cool voice, “although, from the sound of it, they’ve created rather a mess.”

Jame peered around the doorjamb with Gorbel breathing heavily down her neck as he also craned to see. This close to the Caineron, Jame realized that although he stank of pain and cold sweat, his wasn’t the stale, sick odor that she had smelled in the Map Room.

“So,” said that almost familiar, wholly obnoxious voice. “You betrayed your brother to feed your personal ambition. Now that you have all you want, how does it feel to have him still here, like a guilty conscience, buried alive? What would you give to be purged of him forever, eh? Fire is said to be the great purifier.”

Jame shivered, remembering her vision of Bear burning alive in his close, hot room. Without doubt, the thought had been in the Commandant’s mind, but he had rejected it as he did again now.

“I would not thank anyone who helped my brother to such a death.”

“True,” purred the other voice, “the flames are terrible. Did you know that even the dead feel the pyre gnawing their bones? I who was dead tell you this. A pleasant thought, is it not?”

Jame thought that the speaker stood by the opposite wall, against a particularly vivid map half in shadow. Certainly, something moved there, and again was still.

“But what is the betrayal of a brother compared to that of your precious Highlord? What did you think his son would give you for what you and Harn did?”

“We did nothing for him.”

“Only secured him the Highlord’s chair. Is that ‘nothing’?”

Another movement. The speaker wore a garish jacket that camouflaged him against the map’s busy details while shadow fell across his face. Nonetheless, Jame suddenly knew that stink all too well, having been almost intimate with it in the form of the Lordan’s Coat.

Ignoring Gorbel’s muffled protest, she burst out of the office and stormed across the room.

“Graykin, what in Perimal’s name d’you think you’re doing?”

For a moment she hesitated. Was that Gray after all, or someone larger, turning toward her an arrogant, coarsely handsome face that she had only seen in nightmares?

“Greshan?” she breathed.

Her servant flinched away and seemed to shrink within the gaudy coat, eyes wide with shock.

“Oh,” he said in his own voice, taking them all in, seeing where he was. “Oh!”

With that, he bolted, stumbling, out the door. Jorin started after him, but Jame called him back. She turned to the Commandant who all this time had stood by the table, seemingly at his ease.

“I’m sorry,” she said, profoundly embarrassed. “He will never bother you again.”

“No. I prefer that you do nothing.”

“But, Senethari, he’s been pestering Harn too, and upsetting him.”

Why? she wondered again. What did Sheth and Harn do for the Highlord, and which Highlord? Dammit, Gorbel was right: I shouldn’t have interrupted.

Sheth opened his office door, out of which the Caineron lordan tumbled, and surveyed the chaos within.

“Very thorough,” he remarked. “Out of idle curiosity, my lord, what were you searching for?”

Gorbel turned dusky red and tongue-tied.

“Ran, he needs to give the Commandant’s Seat, whatever that is, to the Wood Witch so that she will heal him.”

Both contemplated Gorbel’s foot. He was wearing something more like a leather bucket than a boot, with white rootlets wriggling through the seams. As if aware they had been observed, they tried first to burrow into the floor, then to scuttle away, taking Gorbel’s foot with them. When he grabbed himself by the ankle, they snaked back into their leather container, causing him to hiss in renewed pain.

“You only had to ask,” said Sheth mildly.

He waded into the shambles of his office and from the table picked up a chunk of clouded quartz.

“Workmen found it when they were laying the foundations of New Tentir, oh, long, long ago. Ever since then it’s been gathering dust on one commandant’s desk after another. Here.”

He tossed it to Gorbel.

The Caineron stared at the rock, outraged. “This thing? But it looks nothing like a chair!”

“Not chair. Seat. Look again.”

Gorbel did, and blushed even deeper.

Jame regarded the two, joined, moonlike lobes. “Why not the Commandant’s Bottom?” she asked.

“Too obvious. And besides, it could be worse. Now take it and go . . . unless you’d like to stay and clean up this mess.”

They left hastily.