Honor's Paradox-ARC (34 page)

The others were drawing back. Whatever they had expected, it wasn’t this cold, silent savagery.

“Well?” demanded their leader. “Get her!”

She had reached Prid and stood over her.

“All right, child?”

“Y-yes . . .”

Two more took their chances and fell, gutted, to her spurs. That still left seven including Nidling. Jame smiled at them. “Next?”

Six turned and fled. Dark figures tracked them through the grass, leaving smoldering trails as the Burning Ones took up their master’s hunt.

Jame faced the chief, still smiling. “Alone at last,” she said, hearing the purr roughening her voice, relishing it. This, after all, was what she had been born for. Damson had been right to say, “Why do I have this ability, if not to use it?”

He had a short sword, perhaps stolen in some southern raid, but he handled it clumsily, gripping the hilt with both hands. Jame might have sympathized; however, she was having too much fun. Thrust and parry, slash and retreat, steel rang. Oh, how she loved her twin blades. One needn’t even get one’s hands dirty.

She was backing the Noyat up toward the Silver. Behind him, water cascaded over the stepped falls, fretted now with the tumbling dark whips of blackheads. The borders were down, the infestation spreading. She slashed at his chest, opening his felt coat. Tucked into his belt, a black stick protruded like a rib sprung free. Jame snatched it.

“Prid, quick.”

The girl seized the cinder bone and scrambled up the path beside the Steps. At their top, on the edge of the dark lake, she thrust her prize into a tangle of branches. Barely had she fallen back when the bonefire ignited. Above it, for a instant, in midleap, Chingetai appeared, his braids wildly swinging, his face screwed up in determination. Then he was gone. Behind him, the fire continued to flare. Out of it, limb by limb, rose the Burnt Man. His skin crackled with fiery fissures. His charred eyepits scanned the meadow.

“YOU.”

Jame fought to stand still, repelled as she was by his hot, stinking breath. Prid shrank back against her as her own anger sputtered and died. Such rage hardly seemed a match for the figure now drawing itself up out of the flames. Obviously, he remembered her role in the holocaust of the winter solstice.

Then his head turned, creaking, toward the Noyat who was backing away with open mouth and goggling eyes. The northern tribe didn’t believe in the Four. Had their chief thought that such a creature was a tale fit only to scare children?

“Ha-ROOM,” said the Burnt Man, spraying him with flaming cinders. Some nestled in the folds of his clothing and began to smoke against his bare skin.

He didn’t know where to turn. The Merikit land had closed, leaving him adrift and tottering on the riverbank. Behind him, the water seethed obscenely with blackheads. His foot slipped, and he fell in. Serpentine forms swarmed over him, nuzzling, biting, burrowing. His clothes shredded under the assault. Round holes appeared in his pale skin and leaked red around the thrashing black bodies as they bore into him.

Prid gagged. Jame held her, the girl’s face against her shoulder, but she herself watched steadily as the blackheads claimed Anise’s blood-price.

The roiling water surged backward up the falls. A great, gray, bewhiskered head had surfaced at their foot.

“BLOOP,” said the monster catfish.

In its gaping, oval mouth behind the serrated teeth lay two figures, blissfully entwined, paying no attention to anything but each other.

“Drie!” Jame called. “Drive them back!”

The giant mouth closed, fringed with shredded blackheads, and the fish surged forward. Blackheads fled it, squirming up the Steps, taking with them the tattered remains of the Noyat. To the last, until they dumped him over the upper lip of the falls into the seething lake, his eyes were fixed in horror on Jame.

The Eaten One sank in a swirl of clear water.

“Hoom-ha,” said the Burnt Man, folding himself into the dying fire, and squatting there with his knees jutting high over his charred lump of a head.

Looking past Jame, Prid gave a little shriek.

Jame turned, and there was Vant, smiling down at her. His clothes fluttered in blackened scraps. The skin on his face seemed to come and go, charring in patches, eaten down to the bone in others, re-forming over all in an ever-changing map of devastation.

“What are you doing here?” Jame asked him, resisting the urge to back away.

His smile widened. Incandescence rimmed the edges of his teeth from the banked fire deep in his throat. She had forgotten that he was so tall and broad.

“You asked me that before, in the lilac grove.” He driveled fire and impatiently wiped his mouth as if plagued with spittle. “Where else should I be, when we have unfinished business?”

“I mean, why here, with the Burning Ones?”

“Ah. In the pit at Tentir where you left me, I sensed that there were others like myself, so I went to them and they accepted me as their leader.”

He seemed pleased with himself. Finally, someone had recognized his qualities.

Jame became aware of the Noyat plunging about the meadow, unable to tell from moment to moment in which direction they went as the closing of the hills played havoc with them. On their trails crept the Burning Ones, leaving behind smoldering tracks. Some hillmen doubled back and were caught. Their screams and the sizzle of their flesh rose above thrashing screens of grass. Others would probably escape, for their hunters crawled painfully on the stubs of limbs attached to wasted torsos. Gran Cyd had said that they needed the winter to sleep, but Vant hadn’t allowed that. Driven by his own need, he still hadn’t learned that to lead was also to be responsible for one’s followers as well as for their actions. Honor’s Paradox, it seemed, had many facets, all of them sharp-edged.

Jame was also very aware—more so, apparently, than her former five-commander—of the Burnt Man crouching on the ridge above them. Vant had arrived at the solstice just as the master of fire had laid himself in the earth for the winter. A vacuum had formed and Vant had stepped into it. He no more believed in the Four than had Nidling of the Noyat, nor did he see what lurked over him with head cocked as if puzzling over this miniature usurper.

Clutching Jame’s shoulder, Prid whispered in her ear.

“What does the little savage say?” Vant asked.

“That you’re dead.”

He laughed, which set him to a harsh, raking cough. “Now, is that likely? I walk, I talk, I think.”

“So do some haunts. Look at your hands.”

As with his face, flesh came and went there over a lattice of white bones. He regarded the phenomena, and dismissed it.

“True, I was badly burned after you threw me into the fire.”

“Vant, I wasn’t there.”

His face contorted. Skin ripped and sloughed off over taut muscles. “It was your fault. Deny that if you dare.”

“I do.”

As she spoke, Jame realized that she truly didn’t feel guilt anymore, that she never should have in the first place. What had happened to Vant wasn’t fair, but it also wasn’t her fault.

He jerked back with a hiss like raw meat on a hot grill. “You will admit it. Someone is to blame. If not you, then who? I will have justice, or I will have vengeance.”

The night growled back at him.
“All things end, light, hope, and life. Come to judgment. Come!”

Something huge prowled the meadow’s edge, a great darkness shot with fiery fissures that opened and closed as it moved. The earth trembled under its paws and the bones of fallen Noyat crunched.

Jame freed herself from Prid’s clutch.

“Stay here,” she told the girl, and moved to face the blind Arrin-ken. Who better to support her cause, but sweet Trinity, how dangerous even to ask.

“Lord, a judgment!” Vant cried behind her.

She and the Dark Judge circled each other. He moved out into the moonlight, seemingly as vast as the mountain range that he claimed as his domain. Heat rolled off his body. Loose strands of her hair rose, crinkled, and stank in the draft.

“Ah,”
he muttered and cleared his throat like boulders grinding together.
“I would gladly judge you, little nemesis, as I have so many others of your kind. What are you to us but grief and disappointment?”

Jame gulped, her mouth dry. She had dealt with the Dark Judge before, and barely escaped with her skin. All that had saved her was his obsession with the truth.

“I could be the way to Master Gerridon and to the changer Keral who blinded you.”

“So they might all have claimed.”

“But this time there are three of us, all potential Tyr-ridan. Do you dare take the risk?”

“If you should prove unworthy, if . . .”
He raked his face with lethal claws as if to wipe it clean.
“Argh, where is the stench of guilt? You should reek of it.”

“Sorry,” said Jame. “Not this time.”

“You!”
The great head swung toward Vant.
“Judgment you have demanded. Receive it you shall. Who threw you into the fire?”

“She did!”

“Liar.”

Jame backed away as the Blind Judge prowled past her, closer to Vant. Prid gripped her arm. The Burning Ones crept past toward the hunched figure on the ridge.

The Arrin-ken indicated Jame with a sideways sweep of his massive head.
“I know this one. If she could take the blame, she would. That has confused me before. Someday I will judge her, but not for this. You, however, tried to pull your lord into the flames with you and now you have lied, yet I smell no sense of guilt on you for that.”

“It was his own fault! A lord shouldn’t humiliate his followers as he did by subjecting me to that . . . that freak, his sister!”

“Look to your own winter’s servants. See how they crawl, mewling, back to their true master, how he gathers them up one by one. Is honor only honor when it serves your purpose?”

Vant sputtered with outrage. “How dare you judge me? I am a lord’s grandson, and I
will
have revenge.”

He started for Jame.

The Dark Judge reared up behind him, blotting out the stars and, with one mighty blow, batted off his head. It rolled, gibbering, to Jame’s feet. By reflex, she kicked it into the river where the heat within, meeting the ice-melt water, exploded the skull.

“Bloop,” said the lurking catfish, and swallowed it. “Burp.”

Vant’s body remained on hands and knees, swaying.

“Yours,”
said the Arrin-ken to the Burnt Man, who nodded and gathered up one more smoldering corpse to run, silent, at his heels.

“And you.”

The blind, blunt face swung toward Jame, who tried not to recoil from its fetid stench.

“Our time will come. And for the cadet Damson perhaps sooner. Be careful how you call me.”

“And you, beware how you answer.” The words came from deep within her Shanir nature, and she shuddered to utter them.

“Huh.”
The gust of his breath singed her lashes and made her eyes sting.
“You have grown, little nemesis.”

When she blinked away involuntary tears, he, the Burnt Man, and the Burning Ones were gone. A cricket sang tentatively, then another and another while the Silver Steps chuckled beside them.

“Come on,” said Jame to Prid in a shaken voice. “Let’s go home.”

II

Bel carried them to the Merikit village where Gran Cyd waited to enfold her half-naked granddaughter in rich sable.

Jame rode on to Kithorn. There she found the square containing sacred space nearly filled with blue smoke to the height of the torches. Vast shapes moved within the murk, shifting preposterously: the walls of the Earth Wife’s lodge; the Falling Man perpetually plummeting within his wicker cage; the catfish’s gigantic bewhiskered mouth out of which the Eaten One and Drie smiled at her. Largest of all, however, a bonefire blazed in the square’s northern corner. Smoke billowed from it, filling the square, tinged cobalt by the torches.

Bel whickered and minced uneasily as Jame rode her slowly around the square. Where was everyone? There was the smithy in which she had been held captive the previous Summer’s Eve; there, the steps up to the ruined stub of Kithorn’s tower.

“Hello?” she called, if only to break the silence.

Around the southwest corner of the square, she encountered Hatch, clad in green, fiddling with something behind his back. Jame dismounted, keeping her distance.

“Prid is safe,” she said. “The hills are closed. And this is entirely too much like last Summer’s Eve.”

A torch burst into flames beside her, one of a sequence closing the square. Bel retreated, snorting.

“Chingetai is trying to advance the midsummer rite, isn’t he?” she said to Hatch. “You and I are supposed to fight to become the Earth Wife’s new Favorite, but you don’t want that role and neither do I. Can you slip out of it again?”

He lunged at her, an ivy crown in his hand, and tried to plant it on her head. She blocked him with water-flowing, almost causing him to stumble into the square.

“You don’t understand,” he panted, collecting himself. “Who will protect Prid now?”

She feinted again, then caught him in an earth-moving maneuver that sent him sprawling. “Protect her from what?”

“She failed as the Ice Maid of the Merikit. You ruined her reputation. You owe her recognition. I could give that to her as her housebond, but I can’t if I become the new Favorite.”

So, although valued for their sexual potency, Favorites weren’t allowed to take life-mates during their tenure. Somehow, no one had thought to tell her that.

“Would she accept you?”

“What choice does she have? The maidens have cast her out. The war maids have refused her admittance. She can’t hide in her granddam’s lodge forever.”

Damnation. Had she saved Prid only to make her an outcast? Should everyone have to fight as hard as she herself had for a role in her own society? But wait. What place? Wasn’t she about to fail Tentir?

Hatch had escaped his fate once by clapping the ivy crown on her head and once by throwing himself at his opponent’s feet, just before the latter had been crushed by a lava bomb hurtled by the Burnt Man from an erupting volcano. Hatch couldn’t count on such a coincidence to save him again. He probably would have thrown the fight before now if he hadn’t felt compelled to explain.