Teresa saw them first.
Had she been younger, had she been a different woman, she would have fallen silent, the strength of voice faltering in the wake of fear. She had seen death before; no one who made home of the High Courts could avoid it, no matter how careful their fathers or brothers chose to be. But that death was different: a thing of blood and flesh; a cessation of motion, something that could be touched, ascertained, made distant.
These dead, Yollana"s dead, were hampered by no such forms. They were pale as morning mist, solid as vision; fear gave them their only solidity.
In her arms, Yollana of the Havallan Voyani stirred; in her arms, the old woman froze. The hand that Teresa held, the hand that held her, was tight now, so rigid it seemed that life had deserted it between the start-and the end-of the song.
But the song did not end.
Three ghosts. Three quiet ghosts, moved toward it.
A young man, one barely past childhood. A man in his prime. An old man, not yet bent by years, his face pale with beard"s ghost. But all of their eyes were black and hollow, and their skin was the color of light on water, although no light pierced the trees.
They came, moving in time to the rhythm of her song, and she knew that she could not let that song falter. Not yet.
The man who wore the mockery of the prime of life raised an arm. Flesh hung from it loosely, as if it were poorly donned cloth. But it was not flesh that concerned her; his finger was part fist and part finger; he pointed at the heart of the Havallan Matriarch, and when he opened his mouth, he introduced the first discordant note into the Serra"s perfect song.
She groped for harmony. Groped, phrasing the notes and the scales, as she tried to match, to gentle, his wordless keening.
He drew blade, and the blade was dark as his eyes. From it, dripping groundward, black blood. This, she thought, was memory; the memory of the dead. She knew how he had died.
He approached. Her song slowed him; she could see that he stepped in time with the notes that she sang. Seeing this, she modulated them, slowed her words, the power that they contained.
If he did not deign to notice her in any other way, he slowed.
The old man joined him, eyes as dark, hands darker. He, too, carried a dagger, night"s dagger. It was not, she thought, the Lady"s work.
Last came the boy. He was of an age with Adam, the Arkosan Matriarch"s brother, but there was none of his inherent sweetness in this ghostly face; there was something akin to malice, something akin to rage, and the youngest face wore it most openly of the three.
Yollana, Teresa thought, very much afraid. What did you do here?
She did not ask. Could not afford to; the break in the words would give them room and time to maneuver. No knowledge of the dead was necessary; she knew what that would mean. Could see it clearly in eyes that were no longer-if they had ever been-mortal.
The Serra Diora di"Marano lifted her head. As she did, her shoulders dropped; her posture became the posture of the wife of Tyrs. She did not rise, for she had not taken shelter upon the ground, fearing the earth here, fearing the tangle of roots, the touch of these trees.
But she was not unarmed: She, too sang.
Who better than she to sing a song of loss?
Since her sojourn, her brief peace, in the towers of Arkosa, the dead had slept more quietly; her memories had stilled and gentled. She heard, in Margret"s voice, the voice of the most beloved of her wives, and she was almost content. She had discovered, in the Sea of Sorrows, that the dead were not dead; that the wind did not contain them; that there existed, beyond the moment of a terrible, painful end, the possibility of another life.
That had brought her peace, in the only measure that she had known since the night of the slaughter.
Hard, to set that peace aside.
But she heard Ona Teresa"s song, and she understood that the moment for peace had pa.s.sed. She reached for memory, and memory came.
She sang of her own failure. She sang of her own betrayal. She sang of the terrible, terrible cost to her loved and her dead, and in that song, she made her first plea for their forgiveness since she had trod the desert sands at the side of the Matriarch.
They did not hear her, of course; they had never heard her.
But there were creatures upon the road who were more-or less-fortunate.
The Radann par el"Sol was speaking. She lifted a hand, an imperious hand, stemming the tide of his scant words. Although she knew grace-how could she not, who was the Flower of the Dominion-she knew also that it cost, would cost, time. And time was the thing she did not have.
They did not have.
She began to walk. At her back, to one side, followed Ramdan; beside her, shoulder to shoulder, although his were broader and higher, the Radann par el"Sol. Stavos, blade drawn, walked before them, silent; he offered no interruption to the song she now sang.
They wound their way toward Serra Teresa.
Toward the dead.
Last, Kallandras of Senniel College lifted his head; pale curls, edges darkened by the dyes he had used to better disguise himself among the clans, shook a moment as he tested the wind.
Lord Celleriant, blade drawn, stood at his side. "Be wary," he said softly. "I have drawn blade, but it is not, I fear, a weapon against what we face here."
"What do we face?"
"Memory," the Arianni lord said quietly. "Mortal memory."
"If I recall my history correctly, mortal memory is a poor container for events; it lacks the steel of the Arianni, the fire of the Kialli."
"One day, I will ask you where you learned that history," Celleriant said quietly. "And as payment against that day, I will offer you my own experience. You are right: my memory is sharper and cleaner than yours-than any of yours-and it is far, far longer. But the pa.s.sions of the Arianni, the pa.s.sions of those who were once Allasiani, run to few things, and they are living pa.s.sions. Few events in our lives have the significance of a simple birth or a simple death in yours; we are not moved by the mundane."
"This is hardly mundane."
"No? Three men died here, and those deaths define the path upon which we now stand."
"Memory of death-"
"Not their memory," Celleriant said softly, "but hers." He lifted his head. "The Cities of Man," he said quietly, "contained such ghosts as these. They were a punishment, and a monument, to the power of those to whom they had lost. In the cities of this diminished world, you build gargoyles and winged creatures, you decorate your buildings with the silence of stone.
"Such art, such work, was considered lesser by the Tors of the ancient Cities. What they built, what they contained, was meant to invoke no sense of grandeur; it was meant to invoke fear. It offered warning. And it offered death to the unwary, the unpowerful."
Kallandras nodded quietly. "I will sing," he said quietly.
Celleriant nodded, understanding the truth that had not yet been spoken: song was their best weapon.
And Kallandras of Senniel College was a bard without peer upon this poorly traveled road.
His voice joined theirs. Serra Teresa heard it instantly, and she gave over some part of her melody to its power, choosing harmonies that might better bring his voice to light. But she was shaken. She had heard him sing before; in the Court of the Tyr"agar Markaso kai di"Leonne, a man who had become a simple part of the complexity of Annagarian history, and in the Eastern Fount of contemplation. Then, he had chosen cradle song, overpowering her with her own desire for safety and simplicity.
Now, he chose to speak to the heart of loss, and his loss was the wind"s sharpest voice.
Had she been better prepared, she might not have faltered. Indeed, she faltered only for a moment.
But were it not for her niece, that moment would have been her death. The dead moved in the gap between the fullness of her offered musical phrases, seeking an opening.
They were no longer a distant audience; they had found the strength to move, and move again, with each verse she offered. She laid her heart bare, and they slowed, but it was costly.
She sang of Alora, her brother"s dead wife. She sang of the bitterness of their parting. She sang of her failure, her profound failure, and again, the men faltered. But they did not stop; they were close enough to Yollana of the Havalla Voyani now, and she drew them forward.
The strongest of the men reached them first, and stood at the feet of the Havallan Matriarch. Yollana, crouched to ground, lifted a face carved by wind and darkened by sun; her eyes met his, and she saw in those eyes something that Teresa herself could not see.
"The time has come, Andreas. The time has come at last." She made to rise, and Teresa rose with her, struggling with the weight of both song and Matriarch.
He nodded, grim, and the dagger he held shifted position in the palm of his hand.
Wordless, he came, and wordless, he remained. But the dagger itself moved; it struck Yollana full in the chest.
The Matriarch grunted, stumbling. Teresa almost lost song as she pulled Yollana to her feet, and held her swaying there. The hilt of the black knife protruded from her chest.
"You are free," Yollana whispered, choking on the words. On the words and more. Blood trailed from the corners of her mouth, darkening the wind"s cracks, the sun"s lines.
The man smiled.
The boy came next. Teresa could not look away; the whole of his face seemed absorbed by the shadow that had taken up residence in the hollow of his eyes.
"You betrayed us," he said, the sibilance of the last syllable louder than the Serra Teresa"s voice. He lifted a slender dagger.
The Matriarch said nothing.
And the Serra Teresa"s song faltered. If Yollana had chosen to armor herself against the gift-and the curse-that had forever defined the Serra"s life, the boy felt no such compunction. She heard what lay beneath the surface of his words clearly, and she was stunned into silence by it: it was dark, terrible, a thing that might belong to the servants of the Lord of Night.
It was a costly mistake, that silence; the boy darted forward, the dagger swinging in a wide, a wild, arc.
But if she had lost song, she had not lost wit; her arm tightened around Yollana"s midriff and she pulled the old woman back, unbalancing them both. A tree root caught the heel of her boot; she fell back and over it.
But the dagger had made its mark in the old woman"s flesh; a dark, dark line appeared across the folds of her desert robes-robes that had been separated cleanly by the blade"s edge.
Teresa looked up: the dagger was vanishing into the dusk, its shadow diminished by Yollana"s blood. The boy looked at his hand, at the ghost of a blade that was already insubstantial. He howled in rage and fury.
All of the stories of the wolves that lived in the darkest and the deadliest of the Western forests came back to her then. She had come, in time, to understand that even the most simple of children"s tales bore some element of older truth, and she wondered if the howling of those distant tales belonged, in the end, to men such as these.
But Yollana, wincing, pushed herself up from the dubious haven of the earth. Her hands were shaking, and her arms; her legs were buckled at an odd angle. She needed Teresa"s help, and the Serra responded instantly, as if she were a puppet master in the silent plays of the High Court.
"Sergio, you . . . are . . . free," Yollana said.
He came at her then, at a run, his dark eyes growing until they consumed half his face. But his hands were ineffectual; they pa.s.sed through her chest, her neck, her face. She flinched, though; the Serra Teresa felt the desert night in the pa.s.sing arc of his arm.
The old man stood silent in the face of the boy"s fury. He stared at the Matriarch. Of the blades she had faced, his was longest, darkest; it seemed to swallow all light until it remained in his hands, the symbol of the absence of all things that the Serra had ever valued.
She tried to find her song, and realized, belatedly, that although she had lost voice, lost strength, two others had not.
Kallandras of Senniel College came out of the tree"s shadows, and stood upon this slender, open road, his lips moving in the fullness of his song.
And the Serra Diora di"Marano joined him, coming from around the trunk of a different tree; she lifted her hands to rough, linen hood, and drew it back from her delicate, white face. Had she not had eyes that were perfect, lashes that, in the dawn"s gray, were full and thick, she might have been one of the three, a ghost, an ethereal vengeance visited upon the people who had dared to come to this place.
Yollana was bleeding. The blood was both dark and real; it was warm to the touch, although it had dried to stickiness where it nestled between the Serra"s fingers. Had Yollana been a young woman, the wounds would have been serious. But the dagger that remained in her chest had missed its mark; it did not reside in the heart"s center. And the boy"s blow, a jagged cut, seemed clean.
If such a thing could deliver a clean blow.
The old man gazed at Yollana; he was far more restrained than the boy had been, but more than that was hard to glean from the emptiness of his eyes.
The Matriarch of Havalla looked up at him, met his gaze as if it were a gaze. "Marius," she said, her voice as cold a voice as Teresa had yet heard.
The old man nodded.
"Tell the bard to stop singing," Yollana whispered, a hint of irritation breaking through the surface of her words.
"Is that wise?"
"No."
"I do not think you can survive another such blow," Teresa replied softly.
"If I"m lucky," Yollana replied, and again, some crack in the facade of smooth voice let Teresa hear her terrible bitterness.
He moved forward; Yollana stood her ground, putting most of her weight against the Serra Teresa. "The road is closed," he said.
The Serra was surprised; the younger man had not spoken a word; the boy, few. But there was an intelligence in this last creature.
"The road," Yollana told him quietly, "is waiting. Step from it, Marius. Return to the winds, at last, if that is your desire."
"My desire," the old man replied coldly, "is simply this." He raised the blade.
And Kallandras of Senniel College stepped out into the road before him. He carried the Lady"s weapons, one in either hand, and he crossed their blades before his chest, bowing briefly, offering this much respect.
"Have you not told them?" the dead man said.
"We do not speak of things Havallan to outsiders."
"Nor to insiders," was the cold reply.
She did not waver. "Not even to Havallans was it safe to speak of this."
"You trusted us so little?"
She was silent. The Serra Teresa arranged her weight with care, stepping to one side so that she might better judge her expression. To her surprise, she saw that the old woman"s eyes were closed.
"I am . . . sorry . . . cousin. Believe that I have carried the weight of this. Believe that the stains have never left my hands." She lifted her head, opened her eyes, and met his again; his face was white. Dead.
Only the Serra Diora sang now, and her voice was soft.
"Why?"
She flinched. "I had not thought . . . enough of you would remain . . . to ask that question."