Jame circled the chair. Gorbel still lay on his back, foot absurdly in the air. Trinity, what if the rootlets had reached as high as his heart? No. He had only fainted from the pain.
“Mother Ragga . . . ”
“Enough distractions. I’m off.”
With that she trotted back into the dimness of the northern wall and beyond.
Jorin bounded after the Earth Wife and Jame followed him, scarcely knowing why. Utter darkness enfolded them, and the dank smell of earth. The unseen floor rose and fell underfoot, sometimes providing hard obstacles to stumble over or on which to whack one’s shins. A sideways lurch from one such collision briefly tangled Jame in roots reaching out from the walls—not those of a golden willow, luckily, but unnervingly limber, like scaly, bifurcating snakes.
Ahead, Jame saw a dim light, and made for it with relief.
. . . boom-wah, boom-wah . . .
The throb of drums, growing louder.
Boom-wah-wah. Ching. Boom-wah-wah. Ching, ching, ching . . .
Jame stumbled out of darkness, back into the Earth Wife’s lodge. Had she gone in a circle? But here the chair by the cold hearth stood upright and no Gorbel sprawled on the floor. Besides, the late afternoon light that spilled aslant down the stairs was not that of the noontide glare near the college.
Jame crept up the steps to ground level, Jorin slinking beside her. At the top, raising her head cautiously, she wasn’t entirely surprised to find herself in the circular courtyard of ruined Kithorn, Marc’s old home keep, now deep within Merikit territory. To the right was the smithy where she, Ashe, Kirien, and Kindrie had been held prisoner; to the left, the shell of barracks; ahead, across the covered well-mouth, the gutted tower keep. Worse, not only was she within Kithorn’s courtyard but inside the square that defined the Merikits’ sacred space, facing a setting sun. More time must have passed in the lodge and underground than she had realized. Then too, Kithorn was at least a hundred miles farther north than Tentir. Time and space could both be tricky on this world.
Apparently so could matter.
Jame realized with a start that part of the black tower’s base squatted close enough for her to touch, that in fact it was the Earth Wife’s broad back.
“Mother Ragga,” she whispered, “I’m here.”
“I know you are. Stay quiet.”
Boom-wah-wah-BOOM!
The great boulder that the volcano had dropped near the well at the summer solstice had been cleared away and the ash of that eruption swept back into the ruins in drifts. Only cracks remained lacing the flagstones as a reminder both of the solstice impact and of the earthquake the previous Summer’s Eve. Jame wondered what Rathillien had in store for them this time. A rain of frogs? No, that had already happened too.
The courtyard’s margin was filling with Merikit men. Most stayed outside the square. Into it, however, stepped a cocky figure in red britches and vest, Chingetai’s latest candidate for Favorite. Jame recognized him as Sonny’s younger half-brother, that charming lad who had vandalized Mount Alban’s storeroom and tried to put her eye out with a stick. He had grown, more in gangly height than width. He had also acquired a fine garnish of pimples.
The Earth Wife grunted. “Old Chingely must be running short of sons. As if I would ever favor a poor stick like that.”
The “poor stick,” already dubbed Sonny Boy in Jame’s mind, might also have considered the fates of the previous two substitute Favorites, the first—Sonny—bitten off at the ankles by the River Snake and the second smashed flat.
“Bloody stupid Merikit,” the Dark Judge had said, speaking for himself and for his native counterpart, the Burnt Man, referring to Chingetai’s stubborn efforts to pass off a false Favorite for the chosen one, Jame. “Think they can fool us, do they? Not again. Never again.”
A sudden, chill thought struck Jame. Burnt Man, Dark Judge, as That-Which-Destroys, am I the third of your dread trinity?
But Chingetai hadn’t believed the threat and neither, apparently, did his son.
Sonny Boy certainly appeared very pleased with himself, and courted nervous laughter from onlookers by fussing about the dour shaman in straw wig and skirt who had taken the Eaten One’s place on the western side of the square, a seething basin at his feet. When the false Favorite tried the same tricks with the Falling Man’s representative to the south, Index’s old friend Tungit, he got boxed on the ear. For a moment, it looked as if he would return the blow. However, at a sharp word from the chief in the northern corner, he made a face and went back to clowning for the crowd.
Three more Merikit entered the square, masked with fluttering black feathers sown to peaked leather hoods.
Ching, ching, ching.
The shamans stamped and the bells strapped to their ankles rang. With a sputtering whoosh, the standing torches surrounding the square burst into blue flame one after another, closing sacred space but not, as before, entirely transforming it. The outer courtyard remained fitfully visible between drifting clouds of smoke. Within, glimpses came and went of the Eaten One in her scaly glory and the Falling Man, hovering just above the ground. The Earth Wife also wavered between her familiar stout form and that of a thin, anxious shaman who seemed incapable of sitting still.
Errant breezes, blowing first hot, then cold, teased the flames, making them dance. The weather was changing, and clouds scudding high above caught the sunset’s ominous fire. A few fat raindrops fell in the courtyard if not—yet—in the square.
Chingetai rose.
“Hail, equinox!” he shouted, defiantly throwing wide his muscular arms.
Jame listened closely. One odd consequence of her choice as Favorite was that she could understand the Merikit tongue, but not yet speak it. Already, though, her trained memory was storing up words and noting grammatical constructions.
“Balance bright day with long night,” roared the Merikit chief. “Courage we crave to face the coming dark. Faith we have in the strength of our arms, in the favor of our gods. The harvest is done!”
“Such as it was,” muttered Ragga. “Poor gifts I got from it, too—a handful of bitter blackberries, some unripe hazelnuts, and a rotten potato. After that, he expects my help?”
Which, Jame supposed, was why the Earth Wife hadn’t yet betrayed the presence of her true Favorite in the square.
“Now the hunt begins!”
“What, without the yackcarn?” someone outside the square called from the safety of the crowd, to a general rumble of discontent.
No one seemed very happy about these rites, Jame thought, except for that preening, idiot boy. The rest sensed, as did she, how wrong this all was, what a farce, at the cost of powers too great to be trifled with. The result might not be Index’s promised “end of the world,” but a failed hunt would be almost as bad.
“What about the yackcarn?” she whispered. “And what are they, anyway, when they’re at home?”
“Big, bad-tempered brutes with more hair and horns than brains, also the Merikits’ chief source of meat. They summer and mate up in the mountains, then head south for the winter. Their migration should have started by now, but they’re bottled up above the volcano by a valley-deep ash drift. That’s Burny’s work too.”
“Can’t you or the Falling Man sweep it away?”
“Told you, didn’t I? We Four can only meddle so far in what the other three do. That ash belongs to the Burnt Man, and nasty stuff it is too. Breathe enough of it and it’ll shred your lungs like so many tiny knives. And while the yackcarn are milling around up there, fighting each other out of sheer frustration, the Noyat are getting their pick of winter meat.”