P. Hodgell - Bound in Blood

“I may have a hole in my side, but you have one in your head. What?” he added, with a grin that turned into a grimace of pain. “Didn’t you know?”

Jame ran her hand over her skull, and found an unnerving dent in the ivory. As with Kindrie, something beneath had been taken away. Sweet Trinity, when had that happened, and what did it mean?

Memories.

What have I forgotten, and why?

Kindrie stared, then so did Jame. The fumbling node of threads had reached Tieri’s linen remains. Being more numerous and still endowed with a trace of life, they were stronger than their older counterparts. A woman’s figure arose slowly, unsteadily, weaving itself together as it did so. Skirt, bodice, arms like empty sleeves with flaccid, dangling fingers . . . The wobbling column of a neck straightening as more cords climbed to strengthen it. Then the blank face lifted. Through its empty sockets and open mouth, they saw threads weave together the back of its head. Mutely, it raised its arms to Kindrie.

. . . come . . .

Did he know who it was, or rather had been? Kindrie had been born in the Moon Garden, but had he ever visited it since? Jame didn’t know. In her previous glimpses of his soul-image, no banner had hung on that far wall, but a pattern of lichen had suggested the ghost of a face. Even as a newborn, he had remembered enough to adopt the real garden as his soul-image. Did he also remember the embrace of a dying mother?

She wished to embrace him again, to draw him back into the shell of her body with all of the cords that his birth had torn out, nevermore to part.

. . . mine . . .

“Go,” he said to Jame in a half-strangled voice, his eyes locked on that strange figure. It swayed forward a step, into the far margin of the stream. Water swirled and rose about the hem of its skirt, unraveling it. “Now.”

Jame scooped up the prickly, protesting bundle that was Lyra, profoundly glad that at least her arms and chest were protected. As she staggered toward the door, she heard mighty waters coming, and the ground shook. At first she thought that it was that great tide of clotted shadows vomiting out of Perimal Darkling that sometimes haunted her nightmares. Then she recognized its more natural origin. The stream flowed down under Gothregor from the mountains above where it must have rained very heavily indeed. Besides, at least one of Rathillien’s Four had noticed the breached boundary.

“Kindrie, run!”

Too late. As Tieri swayed another step into the stream, the western iron grate by which it entered the garden was wrenched out of the wall by a great gout of water. In the midst of it surged a glistening, translucent form. Although the Eaten One usually manifested itself as a huge catfish, this time it had come in the form of a silvery fish from the courtyard fountain, grown vast as a leviathan. Seeing it through Jame’s eyes, Jorin shrieked and scuttled out the door with all his fur on end and tail a-bristle. She paused on the threshold, staring back. Water and giant fish, nearly indistinguishable from each other, crested over the healer and relics of his mother as they stood facing each other, oblivious. Then something like a great, shimmering tail lashed out sideways, hurtling Jame and Lyra out the door, slamming it after them.

Running water protects boundaries , thought Jame, half dazed, picking herself up. What protects a son from the mindless hunger of a dead mother?

She was stumbling back toward the tapestry-shrouded door when a heavy hand fell on her shoulder and spun her around. Sweet Trinity. Corvine. The Randir sargent lifted her off her feet and slammed her back against the stone wall beside the hidden door.

“Now tell me,” she growled in Jame’s face, thus brought level with her own. “How did my son die and what was his name? Quick. Before I break your misbegotten neck.”

“Just once, I’d like to spend a quiet night at home, wherever that is. Ouch.”

The Kendar had just bounced Jame’s skull off the wall again.

“ What did you say?”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to speak out loud. Sar, I have it on good authority that there’s a hole in my head. Please don’t crack it as well.”

Her feet dangled, but Corvine stood too close for an effective kick. Moreover, the Randir was gripping her upper arms, not her shirt, out of which she might have slipped, if the fabric didn’t tear first. The Kendar wasn’t berserk, only so focused on her own inner torment that she didn’t notice Jorin wrapped tooth and nail about her leg. She also seemed unaware of Jame’s hands, which had been trapped between them and which Jame had been edging upward. Now her extended claws rested on either side of the randon’s neck just above the old scar, sharp tips moving with the arterial pulse that throbbed beneath them. One quick thrust and she could finish what some enemy’s blade had nearly accomplished long ago.

However, she hesitated. Somehow, she had the key to this situation, if only she could remember what it was.

Meanwhile, Lyra kicked loose the tucked-in hem of the jacket and started to wriggle out backward. Here burrs were only burrs, after all, not the barbed weapons of the soulscape. Corvine might ignore a furious ounce attached to her leg, but she and Jame both stared down, bemused, at this unlikely sartorial breech birth. By the time Lyra had fought her way free, she was thoroughly flushed, scratched, and disheveled. Also, very little of her nightgown remained intact. She looked up at them, panting, and shoved hair out of her eyes.

“Now . . . can I . . . scream?”

“No,” said Jame and Corvine simultaneously, and the Kendar gave the Highborn another almost absentminded thump against the wall by way of emphasis.

Perhaps that last jolt did it; perhaps it was the sight of a bloody youngster on the ground; but at last Jame remembered.

She had been leaning on the rail of the training square, looking across it up at the peach-colored windows of the Map Room where the Autumn cull would begin as soon as they had cleared up the mess below in the stable in the wake of the failed attempt to assassinate Randiroc. On the other side of the low wall, close enough to touch, the black head of a direhound rose to snarl at her. Before it in moon-cast shadow and a growing pool of blood lay the huddled form of its prey.

The Randir cadet Shade had come up beside her, the gilded swamp adder Addy slung like a thick, undulating chain about her neck.

“Quirl,” she had said, glancing down dispassionately at that pathetic heap. “He always was a fool.”

“You can stop shaking me now,” Jame said to Corvine. “Your son’s name was Quirl. He tried to put an arrow through the Randir Heir and failed. The hunt-master gave a lymer his scent from the fletching and sent a direhound after him. He was dead when I found him. I’m sorry.”

The Kendar’s face seemed to clench in on itself, more like a Molocar’s than ever, and her small eyes lost focus.

“Quirl,” she said to herself. “His name was Quirl.”

She dropped Jame, turned, and limped off, muttering her son’s name over and over. At the corner she paused to glance back over her shoulder. “Thank you, lady.” Then she was gone.

Lyra stared after her. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m beginning to,” said Jame, and wasn’t surprised when both the ounce and the younger Highborn drew back from her. She had rarely felt more angry in her life, short of a full berserker flare. That was what Rawneth had done to the cadets who had failed to kill her son’s rival: she had taken away their names. Without a name, soul and body crumble. No wonder they had been too wasted even to cast proper shadows. Soon, it would be as if they had never been born, except for an aching, nameless void in the lives of those who had loved them.