Northlight (34 page)

I looked up at his slow white smile, his eyes like

new-minted gold. And he saw me, Kardith, not just the last of old Hamnir's kids to be taken care of somehow —
Let's marry the poor girl off to someone who'll beat some decency into her.
Not just a body to dump his spunk into whenever his dilapidated balls could manage it.

Me, Kardith.

He tipped his head, eyes and teeth shining. “Hamnir taught you.”

We both knew what he meant, and it wasn't cooking. He was there when they found me, half dead from fever and dehydration, with my stepfather and brothers already rotting around me. He was there when the priests crawled out of their smoke jort with the vision that it was the knifeplay of a woman —
me
— that offended the gods and sent the water-plague, but in their wisdom, their infinite compassion —
may they stink in hell forever, the whole crotting lot of them
— they were going to save my soul. And now here he was, saying my stepfather's name as if he were someone to be remembered with respect and not just a bad influence, the curse-bringer who taught knives to a woman.

My back still smarted from last night, when I forgot for a moment, picked up a cooking knife and tested its balance. We were alone, he and I, but my voice came out in a scratch: “Women are forbidden to use knives.”

He took me by the shoulders and forced my eyes to meet his. “That's what the priests would have us believe. But I can read what it says in the Scripts for myself. It says that men and women danced the forms together. Hamnir was the best — and he taught you — and you're all that's left of that line.”

I saw the fire in him. Ay Mother, such a fire. And such a hunger in me.

“It's no sin to dance the knives,” he whispered. “The sin is to waste the gift.”

Waste the gift.
Waste the stolen moments as my muscles remembered the soaring joy when everything came together, every angle, every point of balance and momentum. Waste the memory of his laugh as I spun inside his guard, slid the edge of the wooden practice knife along his neck and slipped away before he could touch me.

“Father damn us all, woman, you're good!”

Waste the feel of his soft scratchy beard against my breast, the tenderness of his lips. “Aram...” I said his name only once, when we lay together and something broke open in me, like a sandstorm so sweet and melting I couldn't move or breathe or see, only his eyes — like sunlight through honey.

He put a finger to my lips. I knew I must never say his name again, nor even think it for fear I might call out to him in my dreams. How then could I tell him of his child growing inside me?

That old ghamel of a husband was so smoke-loaded he couldn't remember the last time he speared me. Who was to say the baby wasn't his? And who was to say what he felt when he told me Aram was dead.
Shadow panther,
he said. But I knew better. I knew it was the demon god of chance, come at last, as the priests would say, to take back his own.

Like flashes of light, like falling stars, the moments burst over me and seized me in those same panther claws. I heard myself crying,
No more, no more!

The nights sobbing alone. The baby born early but strong — ay Mother! — and with his father's eyes. The little wet mouth tugging at my nipple and a stabbing all through my heart so that I wept again, with joy and pain, and the priests smiled.
You see how we have saved her, you see how we have made a real woman out of her.

But they were not smiling as they came to dress the stiffening body of my husband. His heart gave out one night — nobody's fault except whatever god created old age. But the priests didn't see it that way. They figured I'd somehow stolen his soul. I saw the creamy pleasure in their eyes, the moistness at the corners of their mouths as they spoke of monstrous sin, as they spoke of the redemption by blood, as they beat the death gongs and chanted of
that woman's evil.

We have given her every chance to redeem herself in the way of the Tribes, they said. To atone, to live in virtue. A righteous husband we gave her, a proper place among us. But you see, all of you, how she has brought only evil on her master, she and her devil's spawn. Who can say what horrors she would unloose upon us, she who has turned her back on salvation? We cannot help her fleshly body, but we must purify her soul and protect the rest of the Tribe.

Mother, father, demon god — any god! — let me not remember!

Now I saw the funeral mount, the sky like charcoal dust, the faces I didn't know any more, wet-looking in the flickering torchlight. I lay on my belly, hands tied over my head. The priest, the fat bald one with the cold hands, shouted but I couldn't understand the words. The drink they forced down me earlier left my head spinning but my senses sharp. I felt every cut as he drew the hooked blade across my back, felt every drop that spilled down my naked sides, pooled around my waist, soaked into the cloth of my drawstring breeches. Beyond my head, my son whimpered softly. I thought they must have drugged him, too, or he'd be screaming in outrage at being tied down.

The priests chanted the same senseless syllables over and over. I drifted on them, in and out of a formless dream. I thought of their promises, that my sins would soon be forgiven. I prayed to the Mother-of-us-all that somehow I might see Aram again and my stepfather Hamnir and my brothers. Tears ran down my face, the last I would ever shed.

The bloodbats came suddenly, plummeting. The air churned with their stinking wings, their high insane cries. Lured by the clotting blood, they latched on to my back with their iron claws. They ripped through skin and nerve and muscle, sucking and drinking.

Agony shocked through me. I screamed and screamed, my life pouring out in blood and sound. For an instant I couldn't breathe. The world whirled and darkened.

Then I heard my baby cry. Shrill with pain but also fury — fighting for his life. Too late —

NO!

All the passion still in me came boiling up, all the cold dead numbness turned to fire, set off by that single voice...

I twisted on my side, jammed one knee up, sank my teeth into the scab-crusted hide of the nearest bloodbat. The skin on my wrists shredded as the ties, meant to hold a drugged and willing victim, gave way. My hands free, I rolled off the altar stone and landed on my bare feet. Wounded bloodbats flapped on the sand with others latching on to them, a few still clinging to my back.

...and silence except for the beating of the wings, the piercing, inhuman cries...

I screamed again as I grabbed them, snapping the long bones in my hands. My fingers ripped through the leathery membranes and hot reeking blood spilled over my skin.

...his little body, torn and so covered with blood he looked clothed. His eyes gone, mouth open, one ear ripped half off. Delicate ribs splintered white, and guts spilling like a rope of pearls over the slick red stone...

And still. Ay Mother, so still.

Slowly I came to my body again, my real body, crouched under a blanket of shifting light, my throat scraped raw. Not the same body that kicked and clawed its way past the ring of priests, not the same body that somehow got its fingers round the hilt of a knife. Mother knows how many I killed before I bolted free of them. This I truly didn't remember.

Why did I wait so long to live? A few moments sooner and I could have saved him —

Why didn't I die instead?

“Kardith?”

At first all I saw was light, a borealis of white and gray and shimmering blue, constantly changing and bright enough to burn through to the back of my skull. Squinting, I made out shadows like trees or mountains, buildings, spinning globes, wild fantastic animals.

But yes, there was something there, something shaped like a man, more and more solid as he moved closer. The light seemed to radiate from his body.

For an instant my vision cleared and the man looked strangely familiar. Beyond him lay the source of the light, so bright I could hardly bear to look at it. Beneath my knees lay smooth stone, carved with the pattern of a doubled circle around a single dot. It seemed familiar, yet I couldn't think where I'd seen it before.

The man knelt in front of me and I caught the details of his face — his face washed colorless and hazy, his hair and beard no more than shadows. Eyes pale like ice. He took one of my hands and pulled it gently from my face. Put in it the hilt of a long-knife. For a moment I stared at the knife, caught by the ripples in the tempered steel. New strength surged from blade and up my arm. My heart beat fast and steady.

I remembered.

Everything.

All the years of running, torn with guilt and pain, dead-and-alive until Pateros gave me back my life. Now he was dead and I couldn't save him, either.

I remembered Avi touching my scarred back and weeping for me. I owed her, too, but what? Loyalty, gratefulness, perhaps — shame that I loved her more for loving me than for herself.

I remembered the norther chief Jakon, and what I saw in his eyes. And the boy from Laureal City, Avi's brother, bringing life and death and something bigger than any of us.

“Kardith?”

He took my other hand, pulled me to my feet. The long-knife glided into the worn-smooth leather sheath on my thigh. Then he headed for the center of brightness, slow as a blind man feeling his way and sure as a moth drawn to a flame. I turned my back on the funeral mount, on the bloodbats and the priests and the years of forgetting, and followed him.

As we drifted through the light, our boots made no sound on the rock floor, not even the squeak of leather or scuffling on the fine volcanic grit. Even my breathing seemed muffled. The air got thicker and harder to push through, or maybe that was just my imagining.

The cone seemed much larger than it had from the outside. I saw no walls behind the layers of shifting brightness, nor had we way to tell the passing of time or distance or any landmarks except the glowing heart of the cone.

Terris dropped my hand and gestured me to stay behind. Me, I'd rather go on than risk becoming separated. But some instinct made me stop. He traveled on a few paces and paused, his back to me. As I watched him, my fingers curled automatically around the hilt of my long-knife. Solid, cool even through the leather bands wrapped in my own pattern, it welcomed my touch.

My eyes burned and watered. I couldn't stay focused on Terris and yet I couldn't look away. He stood in the very heart of the light, no more than a blurred shadow against the glare. He waited there, still as rock in the shimmering brightness, hands out, head high, body shrouded in his thick norther parka, and for a moment I thought — I
hoped
— nothing was happening.

The edges of his body began to glow.

At first I noticed just a few splotches of red, like heated furnace iron. Then the colors changed to yellow and white, white-blue, hotter and brighter, rushing over his arms and legs. The separate spots flared and melted together. They spread over his body until he was covered by a halo of jagged spikes. The air crackled with unspent lightning. Sparks shot from his fingertips.

Terris shook like a scrap of hide caught in the edge of a steppe twister. His head jerked, turned back toward me. His eyes gleamed white, the irises rolled up in his skull.

I grabbed my knife and lunged for him, but my hand wouldn't move. My feet stayed rooted to the rock. My heart pounded with the effort.

From the whiteness around us, bolts of piercing brightness showered Terris like shooting stars. I screamed out a warning, but he made no move to dodge them. Where they touched him, the burning outline around his body blazed up like tinder catching flame.

“Terris!”

I bellowed his name, but no sound came from my mouth. My muscles strained and cramped, and sweat poured down my neck and sides underneath my parka. I felt his unborn screams in my bones, in my heart, tearing at me like bloodbat claws.

The air was no longer silent, but filled with a throbbing hum. I couldn't tell where it came from. Not Terris, for no human voice ever made such a sound — droning, whining, rattling the bones in my skull until I expected to feel hot blood spurting from my nose and ears. It built and built until all I thought of was clapping my hands over my head and squeezing my eyes tight shut.

But I still couldn't move. I fought just to breathe. My eyes watered in outrage, my knees shook and stuttered. I clamped my teeth together.

Terris...

He looked larger to me now, swollen with light and no longer quite human in form. I wondered if he would burst or merely turn into a god.

If the demon chance were nothing more than a bag of tricks, and the Mother blind and deaf, then why not a god with a human heart? Why not a god who tore up half of Laurea for a sister so long gone he hardly knew her anymore, who begged his enemy's help to find the truth, who took me into the crucible of my heart and out again, and now stood alone in a cone of fire...

He lifted his arms, as slowly as if they were weighted with lead, or maybe the light had melted his bones. His head sagged back. His knees bent, his body curving backward. He looked about ready to fall.

I hurled myself forward with all my strength, hard enough to pop a blood vessel. It was tougher than slogging through frozen Kratera Ridge mud or facing a steppe sandstorm, but somehow I managed to break free.

Staggering, I reached Terris and caught him behind the shoulders before he hit the ground. For a moment his body felt thin, light as a handful of rock-dove feathers. I could have crushed him in my hands without thinking. I was afraid to hold him, but even more afraid to let him drop. Then he was solid flesh again, and damned heavy into the bargain. I set him down on the cold stone with a jolt.

Lightning arced over us, illuminating the roof of the dome. Sparks like popping embers stung my face. The racket was worse than any storm I'd ever ridden out, enough to make a sandbat deaf — and they don't even have ears. My head rang with the sound so much that everything looked doubled. I crouched beside Terris, thinking that if one of those flashes of light hit us, we wouldn't either of us walk out of here.