P. Hodgell - Honor's Paradox

Bel emerged at the meadow where on the equinox the Merikit had feasted in honor of the Eaten One. Ahead, a circle of figures at the foot of the falls played a slight form back and forth between them to bursts of stiffled laughter. Cloth ripped. White skin shone.

Bel shied at a body half hidden in the deep grass. For a moment, Jame looked down into the still face of the war maid Anku, an arrow through her throat. Other bodies dimpled the meadow. They must have walked into an ambush.

By now the intruders had seen her and their circle split open. Some drew bows but their leader stopped them. Even from here, Jame could see the scar-twisted lip of the Noyat chief Nidling who had led the horse raid against Tentir and killed her cadet Anise. He held Prid with an arm twisted up behind her back, then thrust her contemptuously away to fall in a small heap at his feet.

“Well, well, well.” His voice carried clearly across the meadow. “Have you come to play, little girl?”

Jame swung down from Bel. As she walked toward him, she tugged free the scythe-arms at her back and slid her hands into their leather grips. Black rage built in her, giving a tiger’s lope to her stride. Here was her prey, too long denied, here her claws, two and three feet long respectively with deadly spurs behind. Cool night breathed in her face, spiked with the sharp scent of blood. Lithe and loose-limbed, she moved into her element.

The Noyat were spreading out, moving to encircle her with drawn knives. Good. She wanted them within reach. A flicker behind her. She spun and parried a thrust. Her blade slithered up her attacker’s arm, splitting cloth and skin. A backhanded slash opened a second mouth below his chin and he fell away in a spray of blood, suddenly speechless. Two came at her from either side. She slid out from between them with a wind-blowing move. As they crashed together, she swept in low, hamstringing them both.

The others were drawing back. Whatever they had expected, it wasn’t this cold, silent savagery.

“Well?” demanded their leader. “Get her!”

She had reached Prid and stood over her.

“All right, child?”

“Y-yes . . .”

Two more took their chances and fell, gutted, to her spurs. That still left seven including Nidling. Jame smiled at them. “Next?”

Six turned and fled. Dark figures tracked them through the grass, leaving smoldering trails as the Burning Ones took up their master’s hunt.

Jame faced the chief, still smiling. “Alone at last,” she said, hearing the purr roughening her voice, relishing it. This, after all, was what she had been born for. Damson had been right to say, “Why do I have this ability, if not to use it?”

He had a short sword, perhaps stolen in some southern raid, but he handled it clumsily, gripping the hilt with both hands. Jame might have sympathized; however, she was having too much fun. Thrust and parry, slash and retreat, steel rang. Oh, how she loved her twin blades. One needn’t even get one’s hands dirty.

She was backing the Noyat up toward the Silver. Behind him, water cascaded over the stepped falls, fretted now with the tumbling dark whips of blackheads. The borders were down, the infestation spreading. She slashed at his chest, opening his felt coat. Tucked into his belt, a black stick protruded like a rib sprung free. Jame snatched it.

“Prid, quick.”

The girl seized the cinder bone and scrambled up the path beside the Steps. At their top, on the edge of the dark lake, she thrust her prize into a tangle of branches. Barely had she fallen back when the bonefire ignited. Above it, for a instant, in midleap, Chingetai appeared, his braids wildly swinging, his face screwed up in determination. Then he was gone. Behind him, the fire continued to flare. Out of it, limb by limb, rose the Burnt Man. His skin crackled with fiery fissures. His charred eyepits scanned the meadow.

“YOU.”

Jame fought to stand still, repelled as she was by his hot, stinking breath. Prid shrank back against her as her own anger sputtered and died. Such rage hardly seemed a match for the figure now drawing itself up out of the flames. Obviously, he remembered her role in the holocaust of the winter solstice.

Then his head turned, creaking, toward the Noyat who was backing away with open mouth and goggling eyes. The northern tribe didn’t believe in the Four. Had their chief thought that such a creature was a tale fit only to scare children?

“Ha-ROOM,” said the Burnt Man, spraying him with flaming cinders. Some nestled in the folds of his clothing and began to smoke against his bare skin.

He didn’t know where to turn. The Merikit land had closed, leaving him adrift and tottering on the riverbank. Behind him, the water seethed obscenely with blackheads. His foot slipped, and he fell in. Serpentine forms swarmed over him, nuzzling, biting, burrowing. His clothes shredded under the assault. Round holes appeared in his pale skin and leaked red around the thrashing black bodies as they bore into him.

Prid gagged. Jame held her, the girl’s face against her shoulder, but she herself watched steadily as the blackheads claimed Anise’s blood-price.

The roiling water surged backward up the falls. A great, gray, bewhiskered head had surfaced at their foot.

“BLOOP,” said the monster catfish.

In its gaping, oval mouth behind the serrated teeth lay two figures, blissfully entwined, paying no attention to anything but each other.

“Drie!” Jame called. “Drive them back!”

The giant mouth closed, fringed with shredded blackheads, and the fish surged forward. Blackheads fled it, squirming up the Steps, taking with them the tattered remains of the Noyat. To the last, until they dumped him over the upper lip of the falls into the seething lake, his eyes were fixed in horror on Jame.

The Eaten One sank in a swirl of clear water.

“Hoom-ha,” said the Burnt Man, folding himself into the dying fire, and squatting there with his knees jutting high over his charred lump of a head.

Looking past Jame, Prid gave a little shriek.

Jame turned, and there was Vant, smiling down at her. His clothes fluttered in blackened scraps. The skin on his face seemed to come and go, charring in patches, eaten down to the bone in others, re-forming over all in an ever-changing map of devastation.

“What are you doing here?” Jame asked him, resisting the urge to back away.

His smile widened. Incandescence rimmed the edges of his teeth from the banked fire deep in his throat. She had forgotten that he was so tall and broad.

“You asked me that before, in the lilac grove.” He driveled fire and impatiently wiped his mouth as if plagued with spittle. “Where else should I be, when we have unfinished business?”

“I mean, why here, with the Burning Ones?”

“Ah. In the pit at Tentir where you left me, I sensed that there were others like myself, so I went to them and they accepted me as their leader.”

He seemed pleased with himself. Finally, someone had recognized his qualities.

Jame became aware of the Noyat plunging about the meadow, unable to tell from moment to moment in which direction they went as the closing of the hills played havoc with them. On their trails crept the Burning Ones, leaving behind smoldering tracks. Some hillmen doubled back and were caught. Their screams and the sizzle of their flesh rose above thrashing screens of grass. Others would probably escape, for their hunters crawled painfully on the stubs of limbs attached to wasted torsos. Gran Cyd had said that they needed the winter to sleep, but Vant hadn’t allowed that. Driven by his own need, he still hadn’t learned that to lead was also to be responsible for one’s followers as well as for their actions. Honor’s Paradox, it seemed, had many facets, all of them sharp-edged.