P. Hodgell - Bound in Blood

Guilt in a small room. Bloody hands.

So this was how Harn and Sheth had unintentionally secured Ganth the Highlord’s chair, by killing his older brother.

The forget-me-not was wearing off. Jame saw Harn bending over a much smaller body than Greshan’s, although his full weight still bore down on it. He was smothering Graykin.

Avenger in the wall . . .

“Harn, don’t!”

She tried to pull him off.

The Commandant thrust her aside and caught his colleague in a choke hold. It must have been like trying to throttle a bull. Sheth adjusted his grip and wrestled Harn off his prey. The two lurched back, one clinging to the other.

Likewise, the coat fought Jame as she struggled to tear it free. There might have been a back under its silken threads, a body pressed down face to face with the Southron. She unsheathed her claws and ripped. The sensation was of tearing flesh off bones and it came, wetly. Graykin lay beneath, as skeletal as a corpse months dead, and he didn’t breath.

Jame breathed for him. Beneath her mouth, his changed into a dog’s muzzle.

She jerked back. There they lay on the Master’s cold hearth, she in her ivory armor, he in his scruffy fur. Once she had thought that this hall was her soulscape and here she had lain in wretched oblivion while this poor creature guarded her sleep. Self-knowledge had freed her, but not entirely, not while part of her soul, freely given, remained chained here.

Get away , she thought in near panic. Run before he wakes and begins to whine again. Do you want him always clinging like a sick child, always holding you back?

But it wouldn’t do. Giving him a job while his soul remained trapped here was like patting him on the head and saying, Go away and play. Just leave me alone.

No. She had to free him, but how? Break the braided chain that wound like a noose around his neck. It was woven of her own shining black hair. Break a strand and it bled. Must she rip out her only vanity? So be it. She slashed and tore, finally loosening the knot with her nails.

Now breathe into his slake mouth, once, twice, until his rank breath answered hers.

Follow me. Follow. Away from this cursed place.

And they ran, he panting on her heels, still a mongrel cur, away from the hearth, out of the hall, across the blighted hills, toward a fresh wind blowing.

He blinked up at her, and smiled crookedly. “Lady.”

Free he might be, but his will held the bond between them. Damn.

The Commandant knelt beside Harn with a hand on the bigger man’s slumped, shaking shoulders. Sheth looked more disheveled than Jame had ever seen him, his dark hair in his eyes, one of which was turning purple, his white scarf of office twisted askew around his neck.

All the time, she had been vaguely aware of them lurching around the room, one clinging to the other’s back, smashing furniture. Harn had rammed Sheth against a wall, but hadn’t loosened his grip. At last, the Knorth Kendar had tangled his feet in a welter of ruined shirts and pitched forward headfirst.

“That’s how it was,” the Commandant said, breathing hard. Jame had to think for a moment to remember what he was talking about. Oh, yes. “I don’t think Harn even knew that I was there. That one’s life wasn’t worth Hallick Hard-hand’s, nor worth much of anything as far as I could tell.”

“I agree, Ran. But that foul coat . . . ”

“You’ve settled for that, I should think.” He eyed the garment ripped almost seam to seam by her claws.

“Not quite, Ran.”

She rose from the bed and nudged it gingerly with her foot. It flapped over, like something that should have bones but didn’t. There were stains on the lining, dark red on peacock blue, soaking through to the weave. At first they looked random. Then one could discern crude features—a gaping mouth, running nose, bloody eyes. Leering.

“Greshan,” said the Commandant.

“And this is his death banner. All these years, his blood has trapped his soul in it.”

The randon looked up sharply. “I didn’t realize that that was possible.” A corner of his mouth twisted. “What an odd life you must lead, to know such a thing.”

“Ran, believe me, whatever my failings at Tentir, about some things I know considerably more than I find comfortable.”

“So. Presumably it possessed that wretched boy and might have you, if you had claimed it. What would you have done with it, Lordan?”

Jame didn’t have to think. “Burn it. Here. Now.”

The Commandant piled kindling on the cold hearth, some of it from the smashed chest that had held the coat, and added the soiled underclothes as tinder.

“Here.” Torisen emerged from the shadows and offered the snap-wick candle.

“Tori! How long have you been here?”

“Long enough to understand a number of things better.”

“Yes, but why are you here?”

“The Commandant invited me to see a slice of cadet life. Is Tentir always this confusing?”

“It comes and goes.”

“Also I wanted to apologize. I really thought that you had flayed that cadet. Instead, now I’ve burned him alive.”

“Vant is dead?”

“I sincerely hope so.”

“No doubt someone will explain that to me later,” said the Commandant, and snapped the wick alight.

The tinder caught. As he tried to throw the coat on it, however, it wrapped its arms around him. He and Tori pried it loose. It fell writhing on the flames. The stitches seethed into a face, mouth agape where the blood had seeped through.

“You!” it spat at Torisen. “Beware your own victims, Highlord.”

Torisen drew back. “I don’t understand you.”

“Think, and you will. The dead know what concerns the dead.”

The arms tried to rise, but thin threads entwined them like a net and drew them back, down into flames burning gold, cerulean, and chartreuse.

The heat drove the watchers back. The fire roared up once with a shriek, then sank to a sullen hissing of embers and the stink of burnt hair.

Sheth was breathing hard, but spoke steadily. “I thought that he was going to escape. What, pray tell, were those threads that pulled him back?”

“Every lordan for generations has added a strand of his hair to the weave. I’m the first and the last not to do so. It was a hair-loom, not just an heirloom. Some fragments of their souls were trapped in it too.”

She regarded her brother, frowning. That was the second time Greshan had spoken of unspecified unburnt dead. Were they never to be free of them?

Then she flinched. Suddenly into her mind had come a drawling voice, as clearly as it struck Jorin’s ears: “A prime pelt on this hunting cat. I reckon it’s wasted where it is.”

“Fash has Jorin. I’ve got to go.”

“Wait. Take these.” Tori handed her two scarves, one of which she recognized with surprise as Timmon’s. “I locked him in the Knorth kitchen—poetic justice, as it turns out.

She hastily donned her scarf, then stuffed the other one and the two flags into her coat, creating considerably more of a bosom than she normally sported, and a lumpy one at that.

When she was gone, Torisen and Sheth looked at each other.

“I seem to have saddled you with a whirlwind,” the Highlord remarked. “By the way, did you know that most of your student body appears to be rioting in the square?”

“Ah, children. They will have their war, one way or another. I see that I will have to talk to their so-called leaders. At least we know what your sister has been doing. Now, if you please, tell me about that wretched boy Vant.”

Rounding a corner on the stair, Jame ran head-on into Rue.