P. Hodgell - Bound in Blood

Three days out from Tentir, the randon college, they found the first body.

The jewel-jaws led them to it in a fluttering cloud, changing color against each surface that they passedtawny for the bark of a late summer birch, gold for its leaves, stormy blue for a thickening sky. When they landed on the back of the cadets forage coat, however, they crinkled their wings in disappointment and turned the dusky brown of a bruised plum.

The slighter of the two cadets chased them off with her gloved hands and turned over the body.

Her companion caught his breath. Lady, what happened to him?

I dont know. Hes Randir, anyway. Look at how his token scarf is tied.

They stared down at a face that should have been young, but that had sunken in on itself under parched and browning skin. A faint crackle came from his chest as if something small and tired shivered there. He was breathing. Then, horribly, his eyelids stirred and opened. The eyes themselves were almost opaque, without pupils, but they moved as the irises shifted, searching.

Lips creaked open, splitting, bloodless, at the corners.

Mmmm lorrr . . .

In a swift movement, the randon known to the hillmen as Mer-kanti was there, kneeling beside the boy. He drew a white-hilted knife, opened the coat, and gently slid the blade home between prominent ribs. The boy sighed and closed his eyes.

The cadet Gari frowned down at him. Isnt he one of the cadets who tried to assassinate Ran

Careful, said Jame. We arent that far from Wilden. Yes, I think so. For the life of me, though, I cant remember his name.

But the Commandant gave them all permission to leave. This is unfair, Garis tone said in bewildered outrage. How could it have been allowed to happen?

He was very young.

It did seem hard that the boy should have to confront another of deaths uglier faces so soon after his swarm of bees had plunged, stinging, down the Randir Tempters throat. Gari hadnt told them to do that; they just had, answering his vengeful mood, aided by Jame who at the time had been forcing the womans mouth open with her thumbs jammed deep into the hinges of the others jaws.

The Commandant even said that they could come back next year if their lord permitted, Gari added, still protesting.

Thats just it. It was their true lord whom they tried to kill.

Jame glanced at the hooded randon who was hacking branches off a sapling. This close to his home keep, she tried to think of the Randir Lordan solely by his hill name, Mer-kanti. For years he had avoided the shadow assassins sent by the false lords mother, Rawneth, Witch of Wilden, so long that he had almost forgotten the habit of human speech. White skin, white hair, eyes that could hardly bear sunlightif he hadnt been so obviously a Shanir, one of the Old Blood, Rawneths scheme never would have worked. As it was, his people turned to him by instinct, as this poor boy just had, unless they were personally bound to the Witch or to her son.

Then she saw what the randon was doing, and went to help.

Soon they had a pole sled lashed with boughs, attached to Mirahs saddle. The green-eyed mare took this as placidly as she did most things, including her masters need for a diet of fresh blood and his penchant for painting her pale gray hide all the hues of the current season.

When they lifted the cadet, he seemed a mere husk, all but weightless, and he cast no shadow.

They spent the rest of that day and the next searching for those others of Mer-kantis house who had tried to kill him in Tentirs subterranean stable. All were mere shells. Some, like the first, were still alive, barely. To these also he brought the White Knife, an honorable death at the hands of their rightful lord.

Then, on the night of the fifth day, they descended to the Silver and crossed it into Wildens grim shadow.

Like all the Riverland fortresses, Wilden was built around the fragments of an ancient hill fort. However, unlike Gothregor, where the stones formed the foundation of the death banner hall, Wildens ruins stood on their own, crowning a small hillock in a courtyard near the front gate. That night, a pyre had been laid on the sweet, late summer grass within the ring of stones, and on it rested the bodies of those expelled cadets who had lived long enough to reach home. Kendar stood around them, silent, bearing torches whose flames shifted uneasily in the sulfurous currents that flowed down the steep streets from the Witchs Tower set high above. There, at a lit window, the Randir Matriarch Rawneth kept watch. So she and they might all have stood, waiting, since the first word of the failed assassination had reached Wilden days before.

Rawneth meant to teach her people a lesson, Jame thought. Perhaps they wished her to learn one as well.

Careful hands lifted the husks from the sled and placed them beside their fellows. A priest stepped forward and spoke the pyric rune. The night blazed up, as if the very air were tinder. A long sigh rose from the watchers. Fire lent a tinge of color to Mer-kantis pale, impassive face and to the white hair within the shadow of his travel-stained hood.

There was a disturbance on the other side of the flames.

Rawneths son, Kenan, Lord Randir, shoved his way through the crowd, glaring across the pyre at the randon known as Mer-kanti, who was also the exiled Randir Heir, Randiroc. Kenan wore full rhi-sar armor with gilded inserts. He glittered red-gold in the firelight, a lordly sight meant to overawe; but hate twisted his handsome face into something ugly, something unnatural, somethingsomehowalmost familiar, Jame thought. His lips writhed. If he gave orders, either no one heard them over the fires roar or, perhaps, understood. Certainly, no one moved when he and his mothers sworn followers tried to force their way through the silent onlookers to get at the rival who had eluded them for so long.

Randiroc watched them struggle against the passive resistance of his house, then turned and left, unspeaking, unhindered. Muffled in their forage hoods, trying their best to be invisible, the two cadets slipped out on his heels.

The night wind keened down stairwells, tasting of rain, and the tapestries that rustled against the cold, stone walls of the old keeps lower hall exhaled their stale breath in fitful, answering puffs. Woven faces shifted uneasily in the flickering torchlight, a thin lip twisting here, a brow furrowing there. Eyes, so many watchful eyes, most the silver-gray of their house. Even if the subject of the banner had had the ill fortune to die wearing the wrong shade, Kendar artisans had somehow blended strands to achieve it. Their work, as usual, was unnervingly effective. From the rags of the dead, teased apart thread by thread, they had created an illusion of life that whispered back and forth, each to each:

. . . he can . . . he cant . . . he can . . . he cant . . .

Torisen Black Lord paced under the disapproving gaze of his ancestors, scanning their ranks with something like despair. Except for his haggard expression, the fine bones of his face matched the best of those that glared back at him. Moreover, he had donned his least shabby dress coat to honor this occasion and moved within it like a cat within its skin, unconsciously lithe. If it was a bit loose at the waist, well, it had been a hard summer, and only his servant Burr saw him naked to remark on the growing shadows between his ribs.

Winter is coming, he thought, with an involuntary shiver, and the Greater Harvest has failed. How will I feed my people?

But these too were of his house. Never mind that all had died long before he had been born and might almost be said to have lived in a different world, before the long years of chaos following Ganth Gray Lords fall. Twice since he had become Highlord of the Kencyrath and, incidentally, Lord Knorth, Torisen had recited their names on Autumns Eve to keep their memory alive within their house. True, he had had help from senior Kendar like Harn Grip-hard, contemporaries of his father, Ganth, and from his former mentor, Adric, Lord Ardeth. Even so, there had been gaps, fading features to whom no one alive could put a name and others blurred beyond recognition. Weeping stone and silent centuries had not been kind to warp and weft, especially when they were no longer bound to a name.