Session 16

When last we left our heroes... the first blood of the Seven Cities had reached Sothalkarr. Beneath a stone tree in the Jade-Cutters' Night Market lay Yalafir, courier of fallen Yalethkarr, pierced by arrows and hacked by poisoned blades. Ineia knelt beside him, and Inayin—drawing upon the hard lessons of wounds stitched in the monster-haunted North—showed her where to press her hands. Between them they arrested the bleeding and brought the messenger back to speech.

Yalafir had been sent to warn King Lasuyaran. Other couriers had ridden for the other cities, though he did not know how many had survived. The bat-nosed monsters were already abroad in the Hills, hunting those who had fled Yalethkarr and cutting down the refugees upon the road—women and children among them. He drew a bloodstained letter from beneath his belt, sealed for the king, placed it in Ineia's keeping, and fell unconscious.

The festival crowd had already divided around them. One voice cried that the guard-city had fallen and the gates must be shut; another answered that Yaleth's people had not fallen, but gone home before them. The watch ordered silence until the king had heard—but when Ineia repeated the courier's report, the officer dismissed it as a drunken Sothbori superstition and walked away. So the companions carried Yalafir through the singing streets to House Neras.

Vianrei received the dying man beneath the same guest-right she had given the companions and surrendered her own chamber to the work of saving him. She would not break the royal seal, yet warned that the message could not reach the king merely as a bloodied scrap in a stranger's hand. To vouch for it herself would set House Neras publicly against the Homeward and against Akdhēras—her dead husband's nearest kinsman, who had twice pressed his customary right to wed her. And if her love for Rinsos became known, the young priest would be ruined and she herself accused of betraying her house. Yet she promised that, if Yalafir lived to speak, she could arrange a private audience with the king at dawn.

Then began the long labour of the night. Lotus paste closed what wounds it could, but the poison fought every stitch and made the torn flesh yearn to open again. Fjalenar rolled back his sleeve and gave of his own blood until he went pale, and Ineia drove it into the dying man with the little bellows of the ancient physicians. Inayin remained at her side. At last the gashes were closed, Yalafir's pulse was faint but steady, and the pain passed from his face into peaceful sleep. They had done all that skill, courage, and mercy could do; only the dawn would give the answer.

While they laboured, Herek and Tenuyala climbed to Thargash's rooms. They found the door unlocked, the bed untouched, and the chamber empty. An open window showed the way their smiling guide had gone. Guessing that his secret purpose lay near the Bridge of Jade, they climbed the hundreds of steps to the shrine and found Rinsos standing among twelve pillars, reading the stars.

Rinsos had already perceived that the strangers were not wholly of his age, and that Thargash stood farther outside time than any of them—as though he had stepped out of one river of time and into a stream that ran beside it. Behind the shrine he showed them a door of solid jade, fashioned by the Stone Kings. It opened once each year at the thirteenth convergence, when the walls between the corridors of time grew thin. That hour would come upon the final night of the feast, three nights hence. Rinsos had read that someone would then attempt to redirect one of time's rivers, and had been preparing himself to stand against the deed.

 He told them also of a vision that had seized him at dinner: himself and Thargash in a chamber beneath a mountain of red stone, standing before a man who bore a strange sword and wore a black panther's hide. In that instant Thargash had worn the face of Tengelbur, Lord of the Road. Nor was theirs the only companion Rinsos had seen strangely. When he looked upon Inayin, he had glimpsed the face of a corpse and the mark of the Vulture.

Back at House Neras, Fjalenar put aside all caution and told Vianrei the truth. The companions were travellers from thousands of years yet to come. Yalafir's warning was true; the Giver was Orkon, greatest enemy of their people's oldest songs; and the beauty around them stood upon the brink of ruin. If they found a road home they would take it, but they would not abandon their hosts without warning. Vianrei could scarcely believe them, yet at last she did—and answered that even if every word were true, she would not leave Rinsos.

The young priest soon returned to the bloodstained chamber while Herek and Tenuyala continued their fruitless search for Thargash. He vouched for King Lasuyaran as a good man, though too hospitable to the Giver, and then delivered the night's worst news: the Giver himself had arrived at the palace. Afālnela's letters were placed at last in Rinsos's hands. He read them, took Inayin's face between his palms, and looked unflinchingly into the blood-weeping eyes.

The hurt was not a wound, he said, but a door—a window made thin, with something looking outward from the farther side. He could close it only from the Bridge of Jade when the thirteenth convergence came. Until then, the companions must assume that the power behind the mark had seen and heard all they had done, and had allowed them to come so far because some part remained for them in its malice.

Then Ineia told the whole bitter inheritance: how some Star-folk would become the monsters their descendants still fought, how others would be carried into slavery through the unnumbered Years of Darkness, and how a remnant would endure among the Sothbori until a Hero lead the captives from the dark hills and the two peoples became one. Vianrei wept and asked Rinsos what they must do if it were all true. He answered that they must destroy the Bridge of Jade. She promised whatever aid lay in her power.

At that moment the dawn kindled red upon the Hills of Jade, and Yalafir gave his death-rattle. For all the companions had done, the poison claimed him before he could stand before the king. Vianrei promised him the honours of her house and turned again to the unopened letter.

Then Thargash put his head around the door, still drunk and adorned for the feast, offering nothing of where he had passed the night. When the companions told him that Vianrei and Rinsos now knew the truth—and that Orkon waited at the palace—he demanded to know why they had burdened good people with the knowledge of their deaths. There were still three nights of the festival left, he said. Since they had ruined them in the cause of saving the city, he would at least insist upon eggs before beginning the day.