The Sea of Time

XIX A Walk into Shadows

No light, no sound. It was utterly dark inside the temple, like being stricken both blind and deaf. Even the flow of power had stopped as if dammed. Jame was at length aware of her breath, panting, and of Jorin standing on her foot. The blind ounce depended on her eyes to see and protested their mutual handicap in a low, fretful whine.

“Be still,” she told him in a whisper. “Listen.”

Silence.

It didn’t surprise her to reach back and touch nothing. Gingerly, she took a step forward, then another, wobbling. It was hard to keep one’s balance in such a void. Only her feet pressing against the floor gave her a sense of direction. Two more steps and she should have reached the other side of the hut, but there was still nothing. This also was not unexpected: most Kencyr temples were bigger inside than out.

Air breathed in her face.

Ahhh . . .

It stank of rot and of something sweet. It was also bitterly cold.

Jame followed the smell, step by step, her stomach curdling within her as if at some long suppressed memory. She knew that stench. It spoke to her at a level below the rational, beneath the skin, within the very bone, to the helpless child that she had once been.

Something ahead grumbled, like distant thunder, and the air vibrated. Coarse grass now wrapped, whining, around her boots.

Don’t go, don’t go . . .

A muted flash of light shone ahead. Against scuttling clouds, the front of a structure reared up before her, many roofed, where it had roofs at all, with dark windows and open doors out of which the rank wind breathed.

Hahhh, ah, ah, ah . . .

Darkness again, and another distant rumble, in the flesh, in the bones.

Was that thunder, or stones grinding one against another? She couldn’t see it now, but for a moment it had seemed as if that massive pile were inching toward her, out of a greater darkness. Even now, it might loom over her, poised to fall . . .

Jame swallowed panic. She was still within the Urakarn temple . . . or was she? Something like this had happened to her before, at Karkinaroth, when she had plunged deep into Prince Odalian’s palace only to emerge in Perimal Darkling, inside the House. If so again, another step might take her under shadows’ eaves.

Don’t go . . .

As she hesitated, Jorin stood on her toes, his shoulder pressed against her thigh, chirping in agitation. She was in danger enough; was it right to risk him too? But he was a comfort, here on the brink of madness. Moreover, it was important that she find . . . what? The immediate past blurred. She took another cautious step forward into darkness, onto hard pavement.

Lightning flashed again, closer, with a boom that imprinted the image on her mind of broken rafters overhead against a stricken sky. As her eyes cleared, she found that light had lingered here below. Underfoot was a floor paved with cold, dark stone, laced with veins of luminous green. Walls towered around her. On them hung the woven faces of many death banners, all of them fidgeting and grimacing in a thin wind that threatened to pry them from their perches.

Ahhh . . .

Her heart chilled within her. This was the dire hall where the Dream-weaver had danced and the Kencyrath had fallen.

Alas for the greed of a man and the deceit of a woman . . .

Here she had played as a child after her father had driven her out of the Haunted Lands keep, away from her twin brother Tori, and here the changer Keral had tormented her.

“No mementos for you, brat. This is your home now. Shall I comfort you? No? Then I will leave it to our lord and master.”

Then he had come down the stairs out of the ruined past to claim her as his own, to take her mother’s place.

“So you’ve lost a father, child,” a soft voice had said. “I will be another one to you and much, much more. Come. You know where you belong.”

The tapestry faces seemed to lean in over her.

You fool, she thought, fighting a wave of dizziness. You’re breathing too hard.

She crouched and gathered Jorin into a warm, furry hug, an anchor in a reeling world. The ounce licked her cheek with a rough, anxious tongue, then stuck his wet nose into her ear.

She was not the frightened child who had fled this hall after forcefully declining the bridal bed and hacking her way to freedom through the hand that had reached out to claim her from between fluttering red ribbons. After that had come flight from the House, leaving it in flames behind her, then nearly a year as an apprentice thief in Tai-tastigon, Karkinaroth, the battle at the Cataracts, that terrible winter in the Women’s Halls at Gothregor, and finally blesséd Tentir. When she considered all that had happened since then, her childhood seemed a lifetime ago. She wasn’t even the same young woman who had stumbled into this hall two years ago out of Karkinaroth. An old, defiant chant came back to her:

Her breath steadied. She glowered up at the banners, and realized that there were fewer of them than since her last visit here. Many now hung in tattered rags, stripped to bare warp strings that whined in the wind and tapped restlessly against cold stone. Others slumped on the floor, barely twitching.

An answer to their dilapidated state came to her out of the past: the souls have been eaten out of them.

Blood trapped a Kencyr’s spirit in the weave of its death. Gerridon, the Master, needed these souls, reaped for him by his sister-consort Jamethiel, in order to maintain his ill-gotten immortality. (There: she had spoken his name at last, if only to herself.) Now that the Dream-weaver was gone, he needed her, Jame, to take her mother’s place. In the meantime, he had been subsisting on Highborn leftovers, as it were, but it looked as if he had nearly run out of them. What next? He could turn to the fallen Kendar and to the changers, as the latter had feared when they had started the revolt that had led to the Cataracts. He could accept what Perimal Darkling offered and become at last its creature, its Voice. Or he could try again to win her to his side, to reap new souls among the Kencyrath’s Highborn of whatever house. It was no good, she told herself, turning solely on the Knorth, where only she, Tori, and Kindrie remained.

So think. This is now. You are here. What else in this seemingly ageless House has changed?

Her eyes swept the hall, flinching at half-remembered memories. There were the death banners which scrabbled fretfully against the walls, the luminous floor, the stinking wind, the cold hearth at the end of the room piled high with pelts of the Arrin-ken slain during the Fall . . .

But something else rested on the hearth, something small and black. Jame crossed the floor to investigate and found a tiny, obsidian pyramid nestled between a pair of flayed paws. It was all of three inches high. Well, she had said that the Kothifiran temple might be reduced to the size of a grain of sand. This was at least bigger than that. Gingerly she picked up the object, rather surprised that it didn’t weigh more. If she tilted it, what would happen to the priests within? A temple inside a house inside a temple . . . the very thought made her head spin.

Some catch in the wind caught her attention. A dark figure stood in the middle of the silently pulsing floor, watching her. From what she could make out, it looked like a Karnid. Damnation. Had one of them followed her into the temple and from there into this hall? Now it was advancing toward her, unwrapping its cheche as it came. Jame slipped the miniature temple into a pocket so as to free her hands, aware as she did so that it tipped and fell on its side. Oh well. The approaching figure had bared its face—square and dark, with piglike close-set eyes, but it changed as she watched. Even before it had settled into familiar lines, Jorin was trotting forward to greet it. Jame followed the ounce.

“Shade.”

The Randir stood before her in oversized robes which nonetheless showed lengths of bare, slender ankle and wrist.

“I can change shapes, but apparently not my basic weight,” she remarked, regarding the pale gleam of her limbs with disapproval.

Jame caught her in a hug. “I looked for you everywhere!”

“Er . . . yes.” Shade hesitated, then gingerly returned the embrace before disengaging from it, but not before Jame had felt Addy’s warm length coiled around the other’s waist within her robe and heard the serpent’s sleepy, warning hiss. “You didn’t find me because I had assumed this form and didn’t dare break cover to communicate. Do you know that Karnids are secretly gathering in Kothifir? Well, they are. This was one of them until I took his place.” She frowned, remembering. “There was a lot of blood. While it helped me to make the change, I find that I don’t particularly like killing.”

“I would worry if you did. But what are you doing here?”

Shade tugged at her sleeves as if this would lengthen them. “I’m still looking for Ran Awl and the missing Randir, of course,” she said. “They weren’t in Kothifir and no word came from Wilden of their arrival there. Given the number of Karnids in Kothifir, that suggested Urakarn. When a courier returned here to report to their prophet, I followed him. That was a strange trip, underground and surprisingly fast.”

“The step-forward tunnel.”

“Is that what they call it? Well, I’ve been here for more days than I care to count, poking around, finding nothing. Only the temple remained to be searched. Most Karnids avoid it as a sacred site, so when I saw you dart in . . .”

“You followed again.”

“And found myself here, wherever this is.” She caught Jame’s arm with a sudden hiss of warning. “Look.”

An errant breath of wind had brought something translucent into the hall. It drifted across the dark floor, gliding and bending with aching grace, trailed by white, floating drapery. Delicate feet moved to an unheard melody. A pale face fragile as the new moon turned in their direction without seeing them, locked in dreams. Oh, how sweet its faint smile was.

“So beautiful . . .” breathed Shade and took an involuntary step toward it, but Jame held her back.

Then the air changed . . . ahhhhh . . . and the apparition was gone.

Shade turned on Jame furiously with a glint of tears in her eyes. “Why did you stop me? Who was she?”

Jame drew a ragged breath. It had taken all her own self-restraint not to rush across the floor to clutch at that diaphanous skirt like a lost child.

Mother . . .

“That was the Dream-weaver,” she said unsteadily. “Perhaps that was how she danced the night the Kencyrath fell. Perhaps it was on some other occasion. Time moves in different currents here.”

“Was she a ghost, then?”

“Not exactly. Her world is as real to her as it would be to us if we got too close to her.”

Shade gave Jame a hard look. “You obviously know more about this place than I do.”

“I told you once before: we’re both unfallen darklings, you thanks to your changer blood inherited from your grandfather Keral, I because of where I grew up. Here, in fact.”

“And where exactly are we?”

Jame told her.

“Oh.”

Lightning threw the hall into sudden, stark relief, and Jorin crouched, squalling in protest. Thunder roared. Some banners lost their perilous grip on the surrounding walls and plummeted, shrieking, to the floor. A cold, hard rain began to fall through the shattered roof beams, giving way after a moment to hail. The ounce scuttled back toward the hearth, into the shelter of the partial roof. The two young women followed him, both shivering, their breath puffs of cloud.

“Now what?” Jame asked.

Shade clenched her teeth to stop them from rattling, and not only because of the cold. Like most Kencyr, she had previously thought little about Perimal Darkling as a living entity. The worst stories of her childhood were coming to life around her.

“I still need to find Ran Awl,” she said with a gulp, committing herself to nightmare. “And there was something else I overheard among the Karnids—that she and the others had been taken ‘where changers are made.’ What?”

Jame had sworn under her breath. With the Kothifiran temple in her pocket, she had hoped that her mission here was ended. After all, what did the depths of the House offer her except bitter memories best forgotten and perhaps a very real current threat? If the Master was here, in any level of the structure’s past, her presence would call to him.

“I know that place,” she said reluctantly. “It lies deep within the House. You’ll need help to find it.”

“And you will give me that help.”

Jame sighed. Shade wasn’t giving her a choice. Anyway, Awl was a fellow randon and a good woman, even if she was Randir. Whatever was happening to her now, she didn’t deserve it.

Jame led the way across the hall and through an archway. The House opened out around them in a seemingly endless procession of high-vaulted passageways, broad stone stairs spiraling up or down, more corridors, more halls. Everywhere lay cold stones, colder shadows, and desolation. At length they came to an open archway whose upper curve was shaped like a mouth. It had been walled up, but the massive blocks now lay tumbled about on the floor like broken teeth through which the wind blew.

“What is that smell?” Shade asked, speaking barely above a whisper.

Something dead, something alive, many things in between . . .

And there was a faint, sickly light within, coming from a barred window curtained with vines and white flowers shaped like swollen, pouting lips.

Jame stopped Shade from going for a closer look. “Those blossoms are vampiric,” she said.

Was it her imagination, or for a moment did the wisp of a figure hang in their obscene embrace? They had caught her once and had nearly drained her dry before Tirandys and his brother Bender had come to her rescue.

Ah, Tirandys, Senethari, who taught me honor by your bitter mistakes . . .

Although he had died at the Cataracts, the victim of Honor’s Paradox, he would be here too in some fold of the House’s past, perhaps no more than a breath away. She wanted to see him, to warn him against what lay ahead.

But “The past cannot be changed.”

Who had said that? Ah. The Master himself, explaining why he could not reap souls in the past. What happened there happened only once.

Shade had been cautiously maneuvering to peer out the window between the bloated white flowers.

“The sky is green,” she said.

“We aren’t on Rathillien anymore.”

The Randir gave her a blank look. “Where, then?”

“The House spans the entire Chain of Creation, from threshold world to world. Each time the Kencyrath has fled, it has walled up the older apartments behind it except when we came to Rathillien. The Fall happened too quickly; there was no time. Since then, the Master has smashed all the barriers, laying the House open from end to end.”

“Has Rathillien been breached?”

“After a fashion. This sort of invasion has happened before, where this world is ‘thin.’”

She was thinking of Karkinaroth, the Moon Garden where Tieri’s death banner had hung, the Haunted Lands, and the White Hills. She had thought at the time that Karkinaroth was unique. Apparently not.

Shade scowled. So much new information obviously disturbed her, and she was inclined to blame Jame for enlightening her. “Then why doesn’t Perimal Darkling burst into Rathillien and overwhelm it?”

Jame remembered standing in the Moon Garden before that gaping hole into the House’s shadows while the threads that had been Tieri’s death banner wove themselves into an obscene semblance of the dead girl. Then as now, the Master hadn’t seemed ready to take advantage of this sudden breach into Rathillien, any more than she had been prepared to carry the battle to him.

Besides, Jame suspected that there had been a change in Gerridon’s plans since the Fall. He still wanted immortality, but on his own terms, not as a consuming gift from the shadows. She remembered the rebel changers who had wanted to seize this world as a bastion against their former lord. Perhaps they had gotten the idea from Gerridon himself. If he was to defy Perimal Darkling, he needed a place to stand. Where else if not on Rathillien, the last threshold world to which the Kencyrath had access?

“Come on,” she said to Shade, adding, when the other hesitated, “You want to find your Senethari Awl, don’t you?”

They walked deeper into the House, trying to stay close to the outer wall and whatever windows it supplied. Dim light seeped from above and sometimes from below. The rooms grew progressively stranger as life and death, animate and inanimate, intermingled more and more. That was the nature of Perimal Darkling, Jame thought, sidestepping a soft, crusty spot on the floor that looked and smelled like a weeping ulcer. It had occurred to her before that the shadows weren’t so much evil as antithetical to human life, so that contact with them perverted it. The Master had used them to pursue his own selfish ends and now was trying to avoid paying the price. Did that make it any less necessary to fight them? No. They were a spreading blight on reality whose triumph would change everything. She could only hope that defeating the Master would also defeat them.

Shade looked more and more nervous, and her face began to twitch. She had only started to show changer characteristics within the past year and didn’t yet have full control over them. Worse, despite Jame’s reassurance about unfallen darklings, she apparently thought of herself as compromised, if not tainted. Jame began to question her, as much to distract the Randir as to gain information.

“You’ve spent a lot of time now with the Karnids. What have you learned about them?”

Shade slipped Addy out of her robe, looped the serpent around her neck, and traced the gilded scales with nervous fingertips as the snake tasted the foul air, its black, forked tongue darting. Finally, absentmindedly, she began to talk.

Some of what she told Jame was familiar: the Karnids had originally been a nomadic desert folk who worshipped Stone, Salt, and Dune. Then a holy man had come to them preaching of a true world beyond the harsh one evident to their senses, an eternal place where death itself would die. The gateway to it, he said, was a black rock on the shore of a vast inland sea. Then he had died. His people continued to make pilgrimages to the rock for a millennium, waiting for his return, even after a trading city had grown around it.

That would have been doomed Langadine, Jame thought, remembering the metropolis’s cheerful bustling, nighttime streets in contrast to the sullen black rock around which the king’s palace had been built. Few had known that the rock was actually a Kencyr temple and that its activation had destroyed the city. Fewer still knew that a grief-stricken Tishooo had subsequently smashed the Langadine temple.

“The Karnids wandered for a long time after that,” Shade was saying. “Eventually, they settled at what came to be known as Urakarn. Why here . . . there . . . wherever . . . I don’t know.”

“Probably because they found another Kencyr temple,” said Jame, thinking out loud. “It may have been a lot smaller to look at than the one at Langadine, but it also seemed to be without a door, perhaps solid.”

Shade turned to stare at her. “What are you talking about?”

“But it wasn’t solid, because the Prophet finally emerged out of it, which was proof enough for them of his identity. How many years has he been back?”

“About fifteen, but . . .”

That would be roughly the same time that Tori joined the Southern Host and was taken prisoner at Urakarn, thought Jame.

“Let me guess,” she said. “Before that the Karnids weren’t particularly hostile to the Kencyrath. After it, they were. So we can pretty well guess who their reborn prophet really is.”

Shade stopped. “We can? Who?”

“Gerridon, the Master.”

“But why?”

“Among other things, because the Karnid temple has a link to the House.”

“So was the Master the first prophet as well?” Shade asked, trying to keep her voice level.

“I don’t think so. The Karnids’ holy man came to them long before the Kencyrath arrived on Rathillien. Maybe he really was a prophet. Of course, the Builders were already here erecting the temples. It’s a good question, anyway.”

The Randir took a step away from her. Like a nervous tic, one of her eyes fluctuated between her own and the porcine orb of the Karnid whose form she had assumed. “You know too much.”

“I’ve been asking questions for a long time, in many strange places. What’s wrong?”

Shade retreated another step. “Everything is too much. The Master, the Prophet, you, me . . . is anyone what they seem to be?”

They had stopped in a room where every surface was crusted with luminous lichen. Flat leaves, scales, and hairy clumps of ochre, rust, chartreuse, and leprous white crawled around them like sluggish thoughts trapped in a bad dream.

Shade backed into a wall. When she tried to step away from it, she couldn’t. Fungus crept up over her shoulders and down her arms, holding her as she strained to free herself. Jame unsheathed her claws, but hesitated to use them for fear of ripping the other’s skin off. Filaments inched across Shade’s startled face and took root. Addy struck at them, drawing blood, until fungus encased her too. The wall sucked both in with a dry rustle and closed over them. All that remained was a blurred image shaded with lichen, in the process of dissolving.

Jame raked the wall with her claws, calling Shade’s name, answered by the flat echo of an enclosed space. Lichen flaked off under her nails. The gouges bled. A section of the wall bulged, then expelled gas between fungal leaves in a flatulent cloud. What if Shade had emerged on the other side? She darted up and down the wall’s length, looking for some turn that would bring her to its far side. None appeared.

Jame stepped back, panting.

“Shade!” she cried again.

No response . . . or was there one, muffled, somewhere in the distance?

If one called here, who knew what might answer?

Fool, thought Jame. Now it knows where you are.

No wind blew, but the halls around her seemed to breathe.

Ahhh—a long, slow exhalation. Ha, ha, ha, ha . . .

In its wake came a pressure against the ears and against the heart, as if the air had thickened with a taste of corruption. With Shade beside her and the conversation between them, she hadn’t felt this intolerable isolation. Trinity, to be alone in the House . . .

But Jorin was with her. She knelt and buried her face in the ounce’s rich fur. Its feeling and the familiar clean smell of it anchored her.

“Oh, kitten,” she whispered to him. “What have I gotten us into?”

Haaaah . . . , said the House, and again there was that distant echo:

. . . help, help, help . . .

Jame looked around. She had drifted away from the exterior windows into the heart of the House. What world was this on the Chain of Creation? The walls seemed to expand and contract about her like the bowels of some great creature that had swallowed her whole. Who had called?

Go to them, said one voice in her mind. Stay away, said another.

The House tended to take one where it chose. Jame began to drift, listening for distant voices. Shadowy arches, halls leading nowhere, great, intricately muraled domes admitting strange, filtered light . . .

Shadows and movement began to catch the corner of her eyes. Others walked with her or shied away as if she were the ghost. Some wore elaborate court gowns of a style millennia out of date. Others were draped in dark robes similar to those of Kencyr or Karnid priests. The latter were chanting:

“Do you recant . . . do you profess . . .”

The voices tugged at her. She followed them. Here was a corridor lined with rooms flexing like the harsh breath in her lungs.

“Do you recant your belief in your false, triune god? Do you profess the Prophet of the Shadows to be your true lord and master?”

. . . no, no, no . . .

“Then we must convince you, for your own good.”

Someone screamed: “Oh god, my hands, my hands!”

They were hurting Tori. She wouldn’t allow that. But her steps seemed as slow as if caught in thickened honey. Shapes passed, carrying the glow of a furnace.

“Do you recant . . . do you profess . . .”

That was Rowan, crying out as the incandescent iron seared her forehead, and beyond that, there was Harn with his cracked skull, breathing in, breathing out, as stentorious as a drunkard.

What can I do? What can I do?

She found herself on a threshold, peering into a dim room. Someone hung from the far wall, his wrists secured too low for him to stand, too high for him to sit. His hands were enflamed with suppurating burns and infection ran down his arms in red streaks. A swathe of black hair covered his bowed face. His coat gaped open over a boy’s wiry chest, over the bars of unmoving ribs.

“You can save him,” said a voice behind her. She knew those deep, rich tones with their underlying touch of mockery, and her very bones shook. “He is worth nothing to me, but you . . .”

Jame licked dry lips. She wouldn’t turn to face him. She couldn’t.

“Tell me, girl: for what were you bred?”

“To replace the Dream-weaver, my mother.”

“Well, then. Come to me.”

He was standing so close behind her that she could feel his breath stir the short hairs on the nape of her neck.

“Blackie,” someone called from a neighboring room. “Blackie!”

The boy shuddered and gasped.

What if he stopped breathing again? His hands were already a frightful mess, possibly beyond the power of dwar sleep to heal. Could he survive without them? Would he want to?

“Decide,” said the Master. “Dear child, think what I can offer you. You will never be alone again. The Shanir power that you curse will find its true use. I wait to embrace you.”

For a moment she swayed. What had she ever wanted except to belong? Her god had impressed that need on all of her people, even if the way led through a different concourse than himself. Not even her father had wanted her.

However, she had won a place at Tentir, dammit. The Master was speaking to the outcast child whom she had been, not to the young woman whom she had become.

But Tori . . . could her sacrifice save him, or was this just another of Gerridon’s tricks?

The past cannot be changed. The Master had said so himself.

Yet Tori had somehow escaped this trap and gone on to become Highlord of the Kencyrath. That was his destiny. Nothing she did now could alter that . . . or perhaps her next action would allow that future to exist.

“Will you let your brother die?”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his hand—the right, of course—glide down her arm without touching, but so close that she could feel its heat. She stepped away from it, into the room, across it, and knelt before Torisen.

When she brushed the hair aside, his face was pale with a sheen of sweat and his eyes were closed. He looked impossibly young. The gyves from which he hung were secured by threaded bolts and the bolts by pins out of his reach, but not out of hers. She drew one.

“Don’t,” said that voice by the door. Had it changed in timber, becoming almost petulant? As it grew fainter, it was hard to tell.

The bolt unscrewed and Tori’s hand fell. She caught it, flinching at the heat of its infection, then freed the other one. He sagged into her arms. For a moment she held him, then laid him down on the floor and kissed his clammy brow.

“Wake. Live.”

She wanted to tell him more: that she missed him, that she loved him, that he must trust her. His eyelids flickered, but already he was fading, the outline of the flagstones under him showing through. He was slipping back into the past. That was the way with the House, where time shifted at will. Others had escaped with him, all of those years ago. She hoped that he would regain his wits enough to free them—but then he must have, because Harn, Rowan, and the rest had survived.

Jorin crouched in the doorway, chirping anxiously.

His prints and hers marked the dust, as did a larger set of footsteps almost overlapping her own. Damnation. Gerridon, or someone, had stood that close behind her, breathing down her neck. She could see where he had turned away, the signs of his passing trailing off within a few steps. Had he also retreated into the House’s past, or had he gone into its future to wait for her there? What game was he playing, anyway? As twisted as his plots had become, did he himself even know? Time would tell. With Jorin trotting at her side, she retraced their path.

Here again was the lichen-splotched suite of rooms, crawling with subdued, leprous color.

Jame stopped. She couldn’t leave without Shade, but where was the Randir? Her own childhood memories of the House were incomplete, assuming she had ever come this far into it. Later, though, she had found Prince Odalian “in the place where changers are made,” in the process of becoming one himself, poor boy. Was Shade there now, or trapped in the very fabric of this foul place?

“Shade,” she called. Her voice came out in a croak, hesitant to be heard. No good. Try again. “Shade!”

Filaments and glowing, hairy clots of lichen humped together on the wall. At first they formed a blotch, then a small, blurred image that grew as if something were stumbling toward the wall from its far side. Mittlike appendages fumbled against the inner surface, stirring the outer fungus, leaving red stains. They found the gouges that Jame had ripped with her nails. Fingertips forced their way through, then hands. Jame grabbed them and pulled. The lichen peeled back and Shade plunged through.

Released, the Randir huddled on the floor, hiding her face. One side showed oozing punctures where Addy had missed the encroaching lichen and struck flesh—with dry bites, Jame hoped: Kencyr were hard to poison, but venom was nasty stuff. The other side which had twitched before now seemed to be racked with spasms. Blood covered her hands up to the elbows and her legs from the knees down, as if she had knelt in a pool of gore.

“Sweet Trinity, Shade. What happened?”

The Randir drew a shuddering breath. “D-dead,” she stammered. “They’re all dead. I-I found Ran Awl chained to the floor in a room full of crawling shadows. She told me that she and the rest were members of a secret group within the Randir loyal to its lost heir, Randiroc. The Karnids seized them in Kothifir and brought them here, apparently as a favor to Lady Rawneth.”

“She’s mixed up with Urakarn? How did that happen?”

“I don’t know. Awl asked me as Lord Randir’s daughter to grant her an honorable death. I didn’t want to, but she grabbed Addy and Addy bit her. She went into convulsions. Then I saw . . . I saw that she was becoming a changer, against her will. So I gave her the death she wanted.”

Shade’s face altered as she spoke, becoming raw-boned like Awl’s. Then it changed again, twitching and sagging.

“There were more Randir there, a dozen at least, chained to walls and ceilings and floors. Some were dead already. Others . . . they were changing too, with no control over their bodies. They begged me . . . they begged . . . Ancestors forgive me, I killed them all.”

Jame held her as the faces of the slain writhed in torment over her own and her limbs twitched in sympathy with them.

“Hush. You did the honorable thing, in a monstrous situation.”

“No. I’m the monster!”

“Not unless you make yourself one, and so far you haven’t. Shade, trust me. I’ve been wrestling with situations like this longer than you have. Our darkling blood doesn’t help, but it doesn’t damn us outright either.”

Addy slithered out of the Randir’s disordered hair with a warning hiss, wicked, triangular head darting and mad, orange eyes ablaze.

“You. Behave,” said Jame. “Before I tie you into a knot.”

The serpent’s black, forked tongue flickered near her fingertips, then she submitted sullenly to being picked up. Jame slung the molten coils around her own neck since Shade looked as if she would collapse under the weight.

“Come on. We have to get out of here.”

They stumbled through seemingly endless, empty corridors, all the time feeling that they were being pursued. Dry whispers echoed in corners and debris rustled furtively. Eyes gleamed in the shadows, only to become patches of luminous mold as they passed. Jame wondered about the golden-eyed creatures who had taught her how to perform the Great Dance and about Beauty, their innocent child. Somewhere here too were Tirandys, Bender, and the Serpent-Skin Cloak, last seen slithering back into the House to avoid an earthquake in Karkinaroth, the coward.

At last they emerged in the main hall of the House. Stiffened death banners scraped against the walls with threadbare, frozen fingertips. The rain had stopped, giving way to ragged clouds skating past a gibbous moon waxing toward the full. Below, the floor was sheathed in ice over which they slipped and slid, bound for the darkness that gaped on the hall’s far side, between columns.

Here Jorin paused, sniffing, then trotted into the shadows. For once the sensory link between them was acting in Jame’s favor. She could feel first pavement, then clutching grass, then stone again under the cat’s paws, then under her own feet as she followed, half dragging Shade with her. Would they be able to find the door? Yes. Shade hadn’t entirely closed it, so it was edged with faint light.

Jame cautiously pushed it open and slipped through. The exterior bar had fallen off. She kicked it away and shouldered the door shut, so that no sign remained of it. Let the Master and the Karnids find their own way back inside, if they could.

Outside it was still dark—perhaps, judging by the stars, around three in the morning—but which night? Time moved slower in the Master’s House than in Rathillien, which was how her twin brother Tori had managed to gain ten years on her. The moon had been a waning crescent when she had entered the temple. Now it was waxing gibbous, tumbling down the sky. Jame counted on her fingertips. Was it possible that she had been gone up to twenty-four days? Someone was bound to comment on that.

Of more immediate concern, where was everybody? She would have expected the Karnids to be astir, even this early. Mud pots spat. The lake seethed. Dead trees hung over it, their white branches wreathed with mist. Nothing else moved, except for something that bobbed in the water. It seemed to be wearing a black robe, but with that thatch of blond hair, Jame suspected that the garment was actually a Kencyr acolyte’s brown.

“Dorin?”

She eased Shade to the ground, picked up a dead branch, and gingerly poked the floating figure. Bubbles erupted around it as it sluggishly rolled over to bare its teeth. The flesh had boiled off its face and its eyes were poached. The movement detached an arm at the shoulder, but the sleeve prevented it from drifting away. Mixed with the sulfur stench of the lake was the smell of overstewed meat, reminding Jame how long it was since she had last eaten.

Jorin chirped anxiously. A moment later, the ground began to quiver and the lake to ripple. Jame and Shade staggered as fissures opened in the valley floor. Geysers erupted. Farther away, sections of the caldera wall cracked and fell, laying bare Karnid cells.

“This is worse than the last time,” said Jame. “We’d better get going.”

Not far away was the opening to the step-forward tunnel. When Jame leaned over it, hot air rose in her face, lifting the wings of her hair, and a red light glowered below, but at least there was no sign of the trocks. To go underground, though, with the earth so restless . . . Well, what choice did they have unless they wanted a long, long walk back across the Wastes?

Jame pulled Shade to her feet and edged down the steep risers with her, clutching the rail with her free hand.