P. Hodgell - Bound in Blood

“Nonetheless, I will k-kill you someday, darkling.”

“Perhaps, unless I k-kill you first. Farewell, Ganth Grayling.”

Gerraint fell to his knees. His right sleeve and the whole right side of his coat hung limp, empty. Half of his face withered on the bone. “So cold,” he moaned, collapsed, and was gone. So was Ganth, taking the shades of Gothregor’s death banner hall with him.

Jame staggered, clawing at her throat as Tieri’s fingers tightened around it in panic.

. . . I honored my contract! I’m a good girl! It wasn’t my fault, not my fault, my fault . . .

Extended nails hooked on the cords and tore them loose. Jame fought free of the clinging death threads and kicked them away from her, onto the far side of the stream where already herbs blackened and rotted on the dark marble floor as their virtue bled into the green, glowing cracks. Something had come away in her grip: a packet of waterproofed silk that must have been sewn to the banner’s reverse side. Clutching it, she threw herself backward into the garden and sprawled there on a carpet of dwarf gentian and white hellebore. On the opposite bank, under shadows’ eaves, the threads of Tieri’s death banner continued feebly to twitch.

It wasn’t her , Jame thought, panting, fighting sick horror. Not really. Not anymore.

That voice in her mind—after her years of solitary exile, Tieri must have been older than Jame when she died, although still a young woman. Yet that voice, whining, begging, impervious to reason . . . so a very young child might speak, or an old, old woman. The blood thins. The soul fades. The mind goes. All that had made Tieri herself was gone.

And yet her fibrous remains still quivered.

So did others, behind her. The Dream-weaver had not used all the death banner threads whose souls she had reaped. What remained stirred restlessly on the green-veined floor, perhaps trying to regain the shapes that they had held for so long, so far more resembling a knot of blind, white, whip-thin worms. Here also was no true life, no soul; but then within Perimal Darkling, life and death, animate and inanimate, obscenely intertwined.

Jame scrabbled to her feet, the packet still in her arms. Looking down at the flowers that she had crushed in her fall, she realized that this wasn’t the real Moon Garden anymore, ravaged by a late summer storm, but part of the Kencyr soulscape. Jame cursed herself. She should have known as soon as her own soul-image had clad her in ivory and she had felt that draft up her bare backside, young rathorns only having armor on the front. And there was Perimal Darkling across the rising stream, poised to vomit its poison into the Kencyrath at its most vulnerable level.

However, nothing seemed to be happening except for the slow, forward seethe of death banner cords as they groped toward the world that they had known. Some wove momentarily into the blind likeness of a face turned toward the garden’s warmth or into a reaching hand, braided fingers already unraveling for they were too old, too fragmentary, to hold any true shape long.

Meanwhile, the Master and the Dream-weaver were nowhere in sight. A vast hollowness had replaced them, the sort that made one want to shout if only to break the tension. The thought, however, of all those echoing, empty rooms strung out down the Chain of Creation dried the throat.

It occurred to Jame that Gerridon was no more prepared for this sudden, accidental opportunity than she was. Given time, he could marshal his forces. Given time, she might be prepared to meet them. But here and now, while a nemesis, she was not yet the Nemesis—and not at all eager to fight a major battle buck-naked.

Still, by now the garden wall had faded away entirely and only the stream held back the creeping advance of the marble floor. Gerridon might call himself the Master, but when he betrayed his people to the shadows he opened the doors of his worlds-spanning House to a power far greater than his own. The ultimate price of his immortality was that he should become the Voice of Perimal Darkling, the One to answer the Three who (just as reluctantly) were to speak for their own trice damned Three-Faced God—that is, if the Four who personified Rathillien didn’t mess things up first. While the Dream-weaver could reap souls for him, Gerridon had been safe; but now she was gone and proving precious hard to replace.

So. He might not be ready for a final encounter, but his master Perimal Darkling had already sensed this breach into another world and was flowing toward it like dark water down the Chain of Creation, at first only in a trickle, but soon in a torrent with the weight of a hundred drowned worlds behind it.

Jame slipped the packet inside her armor for later examination and retreated, in search of Lyra and Jorin. Half-stifled cries led her to a large clump of burdocks man-high, which surely hadn’t been there before. In the soulscape, the plants had regained their large, lower leaves but kept their bristling autumn crowns. Ivory armor helped Jame push her way through, but did nothing to protect her bare backside as the plants closed in behind her. In their midst, she found a mound which with difficultly she recognized as her forage jacket, completely sealed in prickles. Lyra must have hunched down within the coat’s protective folds, tucked its hem under her, then wrapped her arms around her knees and pinned them to her chest. Yes. The jacket began to seethe as its prisoner heard Jame approaching. Then it tipped over.

“Help!”

“I’m not sure how.”

Jame had seen herdsmen use burrs to secure their clothes against the winter wind, but this was the soulscape, and this particular soul-image obviously considered both of them to be enemy invaders. Lyra was as thoroughly encased as a bug in a cocoon.

Burrs stung Jame’s bare back. When she turned to ward them off, however, there was the pincushion that was Lyra behind her and burdock seeds ready to spit in her eyes.

“Kindrie!” she called, arched backward, one ivory gloved hand on Lyra’s shoulder to steady herself and the other up to protect her face. The whole of her soul-armor resonating with her need. “KINDRIE!”

The garden was, after all, the healer’s personal soul-image, and he could damn well make it behave.

Someone stumbled toward her, cursing. The weeds parted as though their roots waded through the damp soil, and there was her cousin.

“You,” he said. “I might have known.”

Kindrie looked awful. His white hair stood up in sweat-matted shocks and his pale blue eyes were rimmed with red. Like Jame, he apparently slept naked. His thin frame had filled out somewhat since she had last seen him, but under his clutching hand there was a hole in his side, all the more startling in that blood, bone, and flesh seemed to have been scooped out under the pallid skin without breaking it.

“These,” he said, through his teeth, “are the worst cramps I’ve ever had. Back at Mount Alban, I’ve half chewed through a blanket trying to keep quiet. And yes, healers do make the worst patients, thank you very much. Now what in Perimal’s name have you done?” Then he saw the south end of the garden gaping wide open to darkness. “Oh no.”

Naturally, if what a healer did to a soul-image wrought a curative effect on its owner, whatever happened to his own image affected him too, mentally and physically.

“Is that your work?” he demanded.

“No! At least, I don’t think so.”

The truth was that she wasn’t sure. As a nemesis and a darkling, however unfallen, she represented a connection between the Kencyrath and the Shadows wherever she went. People as well as places could be “thin” in that respect, and Kindrie was particularly vulnerable to her touch.