I rushed forward to the stake. Fortunately, the cuts on the gypsy’s arms were shallow, since the aim of bloodpurging was to exact a full confession, not to kill. Still, the cuts were enough to drain her blood slowly. I ripped at the hem of my skirts and bound the torn strips around her arms, automatically setting up a barrier to repel the chaotic wave of unconscious thought that flowed from the gypsy as our flesh met. Then I cut through her bonds with shaking fingers, staggering as she fell heavily into my arms. A thick pot-metal band around her upper arm grazed my cheek.
All at once, my hair was wrenched savagely from behind, and I was pulled over backward, dragging the unconscious gypsy on top of me. For a second, I lay still, winded; then the acolyte launched himself at me, renewing his attack, raining blows on my head, his eyes alight with fanatical rage.
“Demon gypsy! Holocaust scum! Halfbreed!” he screamed in a reedy voice. “They’ve killed my master! Soldierguards!”
Fighting free of the gypsy’s dead weight, I shoved the boy hard, toppling him to the ground. He glared up at me, a handprint of the gypsy’s blood on his chest.
“You will die for this,” he hissed. “Lud has granted my masters great power to kill their enemies. One day we will destroy all of your kind, even the stinking Twentyfamilies.”
I turned from him in disgust and hauled the woman to her feet. This was no easy task, for she was tall and full-bodied, and her arms and upper body were slicked with blood. By the time I had her upright, Zade had responded to my mental summons. From the corner of my eye, I saw the acolyte’s eyes bulge in astonishment as the horse knelt to receive the woman’s body.
I groaned aloud as two soldierguards burst through the trees, wielding short-swords.
One dropped like a stone, pierced by another deadly arrow from my mysterious helper. The other soldierguard gave the dead man a sick look and flung himself behind a cart, scanning the treetops fearfully.
“Quickly, climb/get on my back,” Zade sent, rising to stand upright. “Gahltha will be angered if you are harmed in my care.”
Obediently, I vaulted onto him and wound my fingers in his mane, clamping my knees around the unconscious gypsy.
“Go!” I shouted, and he leapt forward.
Using coercion inwardly, I locked my muscles in place to ensure stability. Then I turned my head, sending an outward coercive bolt at the acolyte to erase all that he had seen. The block slammed into the boy’s stunned mind, but not swiftly enough to prevent him from throwing the bloodpurge knife.
It pinwheeled toward me with uncanny accuracy: blade, hilt, blade …
There was no time to summon the mental energy to deflect it, but instinctively, I threw my head backward.
A split second later, the knife hammered into my temple.
I’m dead, I thought, and the world exploded into painful pieces, sending me into the abyss.
2
I WAS STANDING on a high plateau at the beginning of a path that led down into the terrible seared deadness of the Blacklands. It was night and darkly quiet. The distant noise of liquid dripping slowly into liquid was the sound of seconds dissolving and falling away into the sea of time.
Far across the Blacklands, I saw a flash of dull, yellowish light. I blinked, and suddenly I was down in the valley; the bleary gleam I had seen from afar shone from the gaping maw of a tunnel cut into a rocky outcrop.
Entering, I walked until I reached the source of the light: two great carved doors set deep in a granite arch in the tunnel wall. Incredibly, though made of stone, the doors were ablaze. Opposite them, illuminated by the glow, was a small grotto. I felt a surge of terror, for within it, dead and stuffed, was the Agyllian Elder, Atthis.
Then a voice spoke inside my mind—Atthis’s voice from the past.
“Long ago … I dreamed one would be born among the funaga, a Seeker to cross the black wastes in search of the deathmachines, one who possessed the power to destroy them.… You are that Seeker.…”
The voice had grown steadily softer until it faded altogether.
“Atthis?” I whispered, but the bird in the grotto was as cold and silent as the rock, her clouded eyes gleaming with reflected flame.
I turned to face the doors again, for there was something about them that tugged at me. Before I could understand why, they swung open. Standing in their fiery embrace was a radiantly beautiful boy with gleaming yellow hair.
“Ariel …,” I whispered disbelievingly.
He gave a prim, cruel little smile. “Of course it is I. Did you really think we were done with each other?” His voice was as I remembered: high-pitched and taunting. “You cannot hide from me. But my revenge will wait, because there is a thing you must do for me.”
“I won’t do anything for you,” I hissed.
“Do as you wish and you shall still do my bidding,” he said with an angelic smile. “And when you have served my purpose, I will kill you. Until then, let me give you a gift of pain to remember me by.”
I backed away from him, but before he could do anything, Maruman leapt from the darkness into the tunnel. The old cat was huge—the size of a wild wolf—and he positioned himself between Ariel and me, tail twitching back and forth. Tattered ears flat to the skull, he gave a yowling cry. The sound lifted the hair on my neck.
Ariel’s eyes widened with terror. He made a warding-off shape with his fingers, and all at once, as if by moon-fair conjury, it was not Ariel on the threshold of the burning doors but another blond boy—Jik.
The sight of the empath filled me with sorrow, and I barely noticed that Maruman had vanished.
“Promise,” Jik murmured, the word barely audible against the crack of flame.
“Jik—” I began.
“Promise!” His voice drove into my mind, his eyes bright with dread.
Before I could summon the wit to answer, he lifted a hand to me. Instantly, fire licked at his sleeve and leapt into his hair.
At last I found my voice.
I screamed, but the noise that came from my mouth was a slow, rumbling growl that shook the world.
I opened my eyes and squinted in the dim light, my heart pounding sluggishly. The stone walls and tapestry hangings told me I was in the Healer hall at Obernewtyn.
I frowned. I had dreamed a long, oddly chaotic dream. And before that? The effort of trying to remember made my head throb.
Thunder rumbled ominously, and I looked out the window. Storm clouds darkened the horizon, and distant flashes of lightning threw the edges of the high mountains into sharp relief. Closer, in the gardens, the treetops whirled in a dervish dance in the rising wind.
As if my waking had been a cue, it began to rain heavily. I started as someone moved to the window, blocking my view.
“So the Days of Rain begin,” Rushton murmured.
The sadness in his voice startled me, for the Master of Obernewtyn rarely displayed emotion. I felt immediately uncomfortable at his presence.
“It is just as well this season is brief, for, in truth, it casts a shadow on my spirits.” Dameon’s voice rose out of the darkness. The blind empath spoke with the slightly stilted formality of the highborn, for so he had been before being charged Misfit. Why were the leaders of Obernewtyn at my bedside?
“They feared for you, ElspethInnle,” Maruman’s voice whispered into my mind.
The old cat was curled by my head in his usual position. “You were in my dream!” I beastspoke to him. “But you were much bigger.”
“Things are not always what they seem on the dreamtrails,” he sent composedly.
“I wish it were summerdays all th’ time.” Matthew’s voice came from a chair alongside the window. “I wish it were summerdays all th’ time.”
“Softly,” Rushton murmured. “You will waken her.”
“I’m awake,” I rasped. My mouth felt dry and furry.
Rushton turned on his heel to face the bed, and I could not see his face at all. After a momentary stillness, he crossed to a table, poured water into a mug, and brought it to
me. I was careful not to let our hands touch as I took it from him. Lifting my head slightly, I drank a mouthful, then froze at a sudden vision of a knife spinning through the air toward me.
“What happened in Guanette?” he asked.
I reached up to touch my temple. There was a slight lump on my head but no broken skin. Odd. I explained the sequence of events in Guanette after Matthew’s departure, assuming he had told the rest. “The Herder’s acolyte threw a knife at me just as I mounted Zade,” I said at last. “The hilt must have hit me.”
I had thought the blade struck me. I even seemed to recall the feel of it cutting into me. Or had that been part of the dream?
“Who would’ve thought that weedy acolyte had such a throw in him,” Matthew marveled with what seemed to me tasteless relish. “It’s just lucky ye’d locked yer muscles in place. Zade brought ye to th’ wagon absolutely frantic. I near died meself when I saw ye covered in blood. I thought ye were mortal wounded and raced back to Obernewtyn. It were only when I got ye here that I realized it were th’ gypsy’s blood on ye, fer ye’d nowt a scrape.”
Something in his description bothered me, but I could not pinpoint it. I sat up, wincing as a bolt of pain struck my temples. Instinctively, I set a suppressing barrier, a kind of mental net, to capture any hurt. It was a useful measure that enabled me to put off enduring pain. It was dangerous, however, to let too much pain build up.
The Healer guildmaster entered the chamber. “Is the gypsy all right?” I asked him.
“It is difficult to tell,” Roland answered gravely. “Because she lost so much blood, she is weak, but the problem is more that her body appears resistant to healing.”
I frowned. “How long have I been asleep?”
“Only a night. But you slept like the dead, if you will forgive the expression,” the Healer guildmaster added dryly. “Obviously, the blow concussed you, for there is only a slight abrasion at your temple. But you always did heal fast.” He let a little pointed silence form, reminding me that he still believed there was more to the healing of my scarred legs the previous year than I had told.
“Fortunately, it was not a serious wound,” he went on, “since your mind will not allow healing access. But I suppose you know that well enough.”
I hadn’t known. Since a healer’s talents required access to the unconscious levels of the mind, it must be some sort of instinctive reflex.
Roland shrugged. “Speaking of healing, you should be resting now.” He looked around at the others.
“I’m goin’,” Matthew said, rising. He looked down at me. “I’ll tell Alad yer awake. Gahltha is madder ’n hell that he was nowt with ye. He’s convinced ye’d nowt have been hurt if he were.”
“I hope he hasn’t blamed Zade for what happened,” I worried as the Farseeker ward departed.
Dameon came to the bedside, and as he bent to touch my hand, I kept a tight hold on my emotional shield, wary of the Empath guildmaster’s phenomenal Talent.
“I am glad you are safe, Elspeth,” he said in his soft tones.
I nodded, forgetting he could not see, but he did not wait for an answer, gliding from the room with the slow grace that was a sign of caution but that sometimes appeared to be an uncanny instinct guiding him in compensation for his blindness.
Roland glared at Rushton.
“A moment,” the Master of Obernewtyn said.
The Healer guildmaster shook his head in exasperation and moved away.
“You seem to go out of your way to try to get yourself killed,” Rushton admonished gently, pulling a chair to sit by the bed.
From this angle, a lantern on the far wall cast enough light to show me the craggy plains of his face, but it was not possible to make out his expression. Nevertheless, there was an intimacy in the moment that filled me with discomfort.
Maruman snorted derisively and curled back to sleep, for human emotions irritated his senses.
“I had no choice,” I told Rushton awkwardly, wishing Roland had not left us alone.
Rushton’s feelings for me had been distorted during a partial mindbond we had undergone during the battle for Obernewtyn. Once, injured and delirious, he had called me his love. To my relief, he had not spoken of it since. Rushton had Misfit Talent, but it was latent, and I reasoned that his feelings for me were the same. Nearly suffocated already by his solicitude, I had no desire to face the restrictions that would surely arise from waking his overt affections. Besides, there was no room in my life for such things so long as I secretly awaited a summons from Atthis.
“You know, you talked in your sleep,” Rushton said.
My heart beat faster at the thought of what I might have said. “I dreamed. It made no sense.”
“You called out Ariel’s name.”
I heard again the dream—Ariel’s promise to kill me—and felt chilled.
“He can’t hurt us while he is locked up in the Herder cloisters as an acolyte,” Rushton said.
If he is in a cloister, I thought. That was what we had heard, but I could not believe that Ariel would have tied himself to an organization weakened by its estrangement from the Council. Ariel had always sought power, and a Herder acolyte would be little more than a lowly servitor for his masters.
“You said Jik’s name, too,” Rushton went on.
I felt abruptly depressed. “I dream of Jik often. I wonder what it means.”
“Too much death is all it means,” Rushton said sharply.
“That is the way of the world, and you have to accept it. What happened to Jik was not your fault, Elspeth. No one could stop a firestorm. You should not judge yourself so harshly.”
“I don’t,” I snapped. “My dreams judge me.”
“Well, what are dreams but tricks of the mind?”
“Are they?” I asked coolly. I was less convinced of that. Sometimes dreams were gateways through which messages might come. Beasts called them ashlings: dreams that called.
Thunder rumbled again, and Rushton glanced back over his shoulder at the slanting gush of rain, just as a distant flash of lightning illuminated the clouds.
I took advantage of his inattention to turn the conversation to less personal matters. “Did Matthew make sure he wasn’t followed when he brought me back here from Guanette?”
Rushton turned back from the window. “The only person he saw leave was an older gypsy who rode hell for leather toward the lowlands. He is almost certainly the one who shot the arrows. I don’t know whether he had any interest in you, but fortunately, he did not try to track the wagon. Just the same, I will ask Gevan to have his coercers keep their eyes open so they can turn him aside if he does appear.”
“I’m surprised the other soldierguard didn’t come after me.”
“I expect the gypsy put an end to him and to the acolyte. The villagers are probably still arguing about who should report the whole thing. It wouldn’t surprise me if they had not even removed the corpses.”
“The queerest thing was how frightened the villagers were of the Herder. I thought the Faction had lost influence, but you would not have thought so to see them cowering.”
“I must send word to the safe house in Sutrium and ask Domick to investigate the relationship between the Herders and the Council. At his last report, they were still at odds, and I will be happier if that is still so,” Rushton murmured.
To my relief, he rose, his thoughts absorbed by these larger concerns. “I was thinking of sending someone down to make contact with the safe house anyway. Domick’s reports have been scant of late, and he has sent no word yet about how our offer of alliance was received by the rebels. I will speak of it at the next guildmerge if I have no word from them by then.”
Briefly, his eyes returned to me. “We will have to decide, too, what to do with your gypsy when she wakes.”
“If she wakes,” Roland said, coming over determinedly. Rushton nodded and allowed himself to be ushered out.
I lay back, weary and curiously depressed. Rushton had be
en right about one thing—there had been too much death. Grieving had drained the heart and soul out of me, and sometimes I felt as if all that was left of me was a pale, shadowy wraith. And now the gypsy might die, too. Well, I had known that even as I strove to save her.
I looked out to the mountains, which were almost lost in the blackness of the stormy evening, and wished for the thousandth time that Atthis would call and that I might begin to live and act, instead of waiting.
3
LANTERN LIGHT GLIMMERED on patches of wet, black stone, dulling the pallid glow that emanated from a thick phosphorescent crust on the rock wall.
Fian reached out and prodded gently at one of the scabbed mounds, and a cloud of glowing insects rose, exposing uneven patches of bare rock as they flitted away into the echoing darkness.
“Do ye know these little beggars eat th’ holocaust poisons but are nowt poisonous themselves?” he murmured.
I was startled at that but did not comment. There was no reason to be silent, yet the thought of the mountain of stone pressing down on top of the subterranean cave network seemed to compact the darkness and thicken it, leaving no room for words.
I looked back, searching in vain for a glimpse of daylight, but even the rock shelf we were walking along vanished into the shadows a few steps behind. The teknoguilders had laboriously cut the ledge out of the cave walls, it was designed to run from the White Valley entrance, shaped by the flow of the upper Suggredoon River, around the cavern walls just above the level of the subterranean lake. In spite of the constant flow of water from the Suggredoon, the lake remained at the same level, because a steep channel offered an outlet through the other side of the mountain to the lowlands.
The only other way to move about the caverns was by raft, poling between buildings and along the straight, narrow waterways that, leagues below, had been streets. Clusters of the strange, glowing insects that were the cave’s sole inhabitants lit segments of the stone walls and crumbling buildings, reflecting them in pale disconnected shimmers on the dark water, but the majority of the dead city and the caves that contained it were sunk in eternal night.