Dammit, she didn’t want to kill him; much less, however, did she want him to kill her.
Gorbel shouted something Jame couldn’t hear. Sonny Boy tripped her with a spear shaft between her legs.
Right, she thought, getting up, her knees stinging from the rough flagstones Let’s play.
Her sixth sense defined the space around her and what moved through it. Concentration blocked sight and sound. He was . . . behind her, about to stab her in the back. She spun, caught the spear under her arm, and broke his nose with a upthrust palm. The mask didn’t quite cover the scent of blood. The crowd jeered. He was lurching around her, trying to recover himself. She felt his growing rage.
“Finish it!” Chingetai shouted at him.
That, she could hear clearly, both through her senses and Jorin’s. The ounce must have recovered his nerve, or been roused by the insatiable curiosity of his kind.
The addition of his senses to hers nearly undid her. Sound and scent came roaring back. Blood and fish oil and sulfur-soaked torches sputtering in the rain. The shouts of the onlookers, Sonny Boy’s incoherent cursing, the sound of his rapid approach.
She pivoted and lashed out almost without thinking in a fire-leaping kick. It connected. The shock and the weight of the mask overbalanced her. For the second time she was on the ground—stumbling around like a fool, she thought crossly; but the jolt had dislodged the mask and she pried it off, never mind who saw her naked face.
Sonny Boy had fallen back into one of the torches and overset it. Burning fragments of cloth rained down on him, on his oil-soaked vest and pants. Suddenly both were on fire, as was his hair. He leaped up with a yell and beat at them, but the flames only seemed to spread. At their caress, his skin turned red, then black, and still he flailed, screaming, around the square. The stench of burning hair and flesh rolled off his body like smoke. Jame tried to catch him in Gorbel’s coat, but in his agony he knocked her away. She became aware that she was also slathered with oil from her falls. A thread of flame ran up her sleeve. She beat it out and retreated toward the lodge.
Those outside the square had stepped back in horror. There, it was raining hard and many had drawn up their hoods against the deluge. Ash dissolved into mud and trickled out of the shadows, as slippery underfoot as the rancid fish oil. Now that was burning too, until the mud flowed over it.
Mother Ragga’s bulk blocked the door, with Gorbel peering out aghast under her arm. She was staring not at the burning boy but at the muddy rivulets. A huge grin broke out across her face. “By stock and stone, transformation!” she breathed, and raised a clenched fist grown to the dimensions of a club. “Ash to mud, mud to earth. Got you, Burny!”
The blackening figure had stopped and stood swaying, still obscenely alive. Its head lifted as something of the boy surfaced.
“I . . . can talk,” he croaked, and even that terrible immolation couldn’t quite dim his startled delight. “Father, I can talk! It doesn’t hurt anymore. But . . . what’s happening to me? Father?”
Up until then, Chingetai hadn’t moved. Now he backed slowly away, out of disintegrating sacred space into the downpour.
“Father!”
The boy’s skin split over the tracery of molten veins and he stepped out of it, out of himself, forever.
“Transformation,” agreed a voice out of the blackened hulk like the crackle and hiss of banked flames. “Told you, can’t fool me. Not again. Not ever.” And it shambled toward Jame.
The Earth Wife grabbed her, shoved both Kencyr back into the lodge, and shut the door in the Burnt Man’s charred face.
XII
Fire and Ice
BOOM!
Everyone in the lodge jumped, and Gorbel fell over again.
BOOM!
“It sounds as if he’s knocking on the door with a battering ram,” said Jame, and stooped to pick up a frightened Jorin before he could wreak painful havoc by climbing her leg. At forty pounds, the ounce made a considerable armful. “How can he do that without shattering his hands? God’s claws, I could see the naked bones.”
The Earth Wife had retreated to the chair by the hearth and settled herself in it, one hulking shadow among many. Her own guardians had come forward but checked at a wave of her hand. So many eyes, some near the ground, others higher than seemed possible under that low roof. “That will come later, when the Burnt Man has ridden him to pieces.”
“I’ve seen that happen before,” said Jame, thinking of the unfortunate Simmel, whose rider had been a mere if very nasty mortal. “Can’t the process be stopped?”
“Would you if you could, considering the state that boy is in already?”
Tap, tap, tap . . .
“Mother, Mother, please let me in. Listen: I can talk again!”
“Sod off!” Gorbel shouted from the floor.
Boom!
“You should return to the college,” the Earth Wife said, “before he breaks down my door. But you, girl, promise me first that you’ll return on Winter’s Day.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Gorbel sputtered. “This is no place for any sane person, not that you exactly are, Knorth.”
“Thank you.”
He climbed to his feet or rather to one foot, the other clearly being too sore to bear his weight. “I’m getting really tired of falling over,” he said, precariously balancing. “Crazy promises aside, how are we supposed to leave? The disappearing wall isn’t there, or rather it is—oh, you know what I mean—and a human torch is knocking at the door.”
“Wait.”
Boom. The sound seemed farther away . . . boom . . . and farther yet. At last it faded to a mere vibration, then was gone.
“Right. Out you go. He will follow you as long as the boy’s body holds its form, but not into Tentir. Probably. So run.”
The door creaked open. Beyond lay not the Merikit square but a twilight wood, with a glimpse of Old Tentir’s towers over the trees. They found themselves standing on grass, beside a featureless bank. Gorbel wobbled and clutched at Jame to steady himself. She in turn dropped an indignant cat to take his weight.
“We’ve got to find you a crutch.”
“And a basin of hot water.”
“Wimp.”
“You try walking on a foot punched full of holes.”
“Gimp. Listen.”
A shiver passed through the forest, rattling leaves, causing many of them to fall. The wind gusted hot, then cold again, uncertain, frightened. They had outpaced the rain, as they had the Burnt Man, but both followed fast on their heels.
Now Jame felt something else, ahead of them. It was the rathorn colt, and he was upset, almost frantic. What could drive him to such distraction? Only a threat to the Whinno-hir Bel-tairi. She remembered her sense earlier that day—Trinity, how long ago that seemed!—of strangers in the wood, and the unrest among the herd which Bel had been trying to calm. Even at this distance, she could hear them crying, and then the rathorn’s scream.
“Someone is after the horses,” she said, letting go of Gorbel, who promptly fell over yet again and sat swearing on the grass. She searched for and found a fallen branch sturdy enough to support him.
“Take this. Get help.”
“Who?”
“Find the Commandant or Harn if you can. If not, go to Vant. I need every Knorth he can muster.”
“You,” he said, “are out of your mind. Either that, or you want all the credit for thwarting a raid, as if one were likely this far south.”
“Go!”
“All right, all right.” He limped away, cursing at every step.