The Sea of Time - eARC

by P. C. Hodgell

  “Because I’m your ten-commander, idiot. I assume that precious note of yours included me.”

  “It did. Specifically. In none too polite terms.”

  “Which made you all the more determined to leave me out.”

  Brier shrugged again. “It was a stupid order, and presumptuous, given who sent it, to demand that the Knorth Lordan do anything. To involve you in such nonsense demeans us all.”

  Jame sighed. “If it had only been addressed to me, I might have torn it up the way Gorbel did with his challenge. Rue had it right: this little expedition proves nothing unless we run into a raid. But I am your commander and therefore responsible for you. In the future, we aren’t going to like many of the commands given to us, but we will still have to obey them. Do you have any spare water, by the way?”

  Brier unhooked a goatskin pouch from her saddle and handed it down to her. Jame drank, then leaned forward to offer Bel a cupped handful of water. The mare’s pink tongue rasped her fingers dry, once, twice, and again.

  “All right,” she said, straightening, a bit defensive. “I’m here without travel rations, tack, or even a weapon, discounting the knife in my boot. When I saw you heading out without me, well, I didn’t stop to think.”

  She paused, flicked by her sixth sense. Death’s-head was nearby, but so was something else.

  “Horses,” she said. “Strange ones.”

  They were finally in the foothills of the Apollynes, their view restricted by rolling hills, shrubs, and giant rocks. Their mounts stirred uneasily as hoofbeats approached both ahead of them and behind. Could it be another Gemman raid like the one that had cost the young seeker her life?

  The rathorn Death’s-head roared around a boulder lower down and surged up the incline toward them, his white mane roached up all down his spine and his tail flying like a battle standard.

  Simultaneously, black mares erupted from the surrounding rocks with riders also in black, cheches concealing all but hard, bright eyes set in sun-dark faces.

  “Karnids,” Brier snapped. “Circle up.”

  The cadets backed rump to rump with Bel squeezed in the middle, in danger of being kicked by any one of them. Jame slipped off and dodged between the surrounding horses. Death’s-head swerved toward her, as usual nearly running her over but allowing her to grab his mane and swing onto his back as he surged past. The rathorn pivoted to face the mares, then paused, snorting. Some of them were in season. Their scent drew off his attention as others dashed in.

  Jame found herself in the center of a swirling storm of horseflesh. Sleek black heads with red eyes snaked past. White fangs snapped at her. Hands grabbed. She drew her knife and hacked at them, all the time clinging to the rathorn’s mane, forced to ride high by the roached spine. Brier’s shout seemed distant. They were running away with her, the rathorn stumbling over rocky ground, striking almost at random.

  Come. You know where you belong.

  The image formed in her mind of a tall, black-robed figure lifting his arms to receive her. He wore a single, silver glove.

  I hacked off that hand when it reached out between scarlet ribbons to claim me…

  Death’s-head snorted and steadied.

  Not my lady.

  Then he stumbled again and threw Jame over his head. She fell among rocks and lay there, dazed. All around her iron hooves struck spark from stone. A hand grabbed her arm and jerked her up across a saddle, knocking the breath out of her. The dimming sky whirled overhead. Then it went black.

  V

  Flames leaped in the darkness, and black-clad figures hovered, flickering in and out of sight.

  “Do you recant…do you profess…then we must convince you, for your own good.”

  …gloves of red-hot wire…

  Oh god, my hands! Burning, burning…

  VI

  Jame heard the fire crackle and cringed from the memory of searing pain. Ah, my hands…

  No. Rather, it was her head that ached. Again. She touched it gingerly and encountered a bandage wrapped around her temples.

  Branches snapped like fingers in the fireplace and flames leaped. She was in her quarters at the camp and someone—Rue?—had set a blaze there. Jorin stretched out beside her, as usual complaining when her movement disturbed him, then rolling onto his back for a stomach rub. The bed was soft under her, the room warm although the late summer nights were growing cool. A large form eclipsed the fire and threw another log on it. Sparks flared up around him as he turned.

  “Awake, are you?”

  It was Harn Grip-hard.

  “Y-yes, Ran. How long…”

  “Enough for your ten-command to fight free and get you back here, plus a few hours. It’s passing on toward midnight. You took quite a crack to your head.”

  “Those black mares…what were they?”

  “The Karnids’ mounts? They’re called thorns. Introduce a mare in season to a rathorn stallion and, if he doesn’t kill her, eleven months later you get the blackest, meanest little filly you can imagine. All they lack is their sire’s armor. Now, why were the Karnids after you?”

  “I didn’t realize that they were. It was a confusing situation. I don’t even know who grabbed me.”

  “That was Iron-thorn again, trying to get you out from underfoot before someone trampled you into jelly. Then your command ran for it, quite sensibly, with that bloody beast of yours mounting rear guard. What were all of you doing so far out to begin with?”

  Jame told him about the challenge.

  He snorted, went to the door, and spoke to someone, probably Rue.

  Jame lay back, thinking. Why had she had that sudden image of the Master reaching out for her?

  Come. You know where you belong.

  Gerridon thought that she belonged with him, in Perimal Darkling, as the new Dream-weaver. What did the Karnids have to do with that?

  Then there had been that flash of Tori at Urakarn, under the Karnid torture that had nearly crippled him and left his hands scarred for life. Had he just woken at Gothregor, that nightmare memory still seared into his mind? Once again, it seemed, their dreams had crossed.

  Harn stumped back bringing a dark, sullen third-year cadet.

  “Char here says that neither he nor his friends sent you any such message.”

  “We’ve been waiting to tell you, ever since we first heard,” said Char, sounding exasperated. “We would never have made up such a lame-brained challenge.”

  Jame snorted. “As if any of them make any sense. Is this how you test your juniors, with stupid commands? We each find our own rite of passage. Do you agree?”

  “Well, yes, of course, but…”

  “But nothing. Let the other houses make fools of themselves if they must. Here and now, I’m enforcing my brother’s order and forbidding it within the Knorth.”

  The cadet stiffened, at first with outrage and then as if drawn further up against his will by her sudden tone of authority. Here, after all, was not only a second-year master-ten but the putative commander of the Knorth barracks and the Highlord’s heir.

  “Yes…Lordan,” he said, saluted, and left.

  Harn drew up a chair and sat down beside the fire. Wooden legs groaned under his weight.

  “So,” he said heavily, looking into the flames. “We have to ask ourselves: who among the Host would want to lure you into such a trap, presumably in collusion with the Karnids?”

  “If you’re right.”

  “Accept for a moment that I am.”

  Jame considered her various enemies, in particular Fash, but how would a Caineron cadet newly arrived at Kothifir have connections with Urakarn? Further thought along those lines made her head ache anew.

  “We’ll know in time,” she said, dismissing the matter.

  “You mean, when he—or she—tries again.”

  “If it takes that. Harn, why have you been avoiding me?”

  He shifted in his seat.

  “It’s been that noticeable, has it?”

&nbs
p; “To anyone with half an eye. You can’t think that as Knorth Lordan I want to take my brother’s place as Commandant of the Host.”

  He snorted. “A fine mess that would be.”

  “Agreed. So?”

  Harn fidgeted some more, making the chair’s joints protest. “When Blackie first joined the Host, I didn’t treat him very well. I was a fool.”

  “You didn’t know him then. I don’t think he knew himself yet. It takes fire to forge steel.”

  …oh God, my hands…!

  He gave her a sidelong look under unkempt brows. “And what fires have you known, heh?”

  “A few, if you can call them that. Not enough to be my brother’s equal.”

  He snorted. “No doubt. I saw him tested early, before Urakarn. He was challenged too, by the Caineron. Burr warned me. We burst into Genjar’s quarters to find Blackie standing, hooded, on a shaky stool with his hands tied behind him. The other end of the rope was thrown over a rafter and knotted around his neck.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  He shot her another glance. “He told you about it? That surprises me. I nearly flared.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Around Blackie, I seldom do. That was no such fire as the one to come, but it showed his mettle, if I hadn’t been too blind to see it. In those days, his strength lay in endurance. In you, now, we all feel the power building, like that poor booby of a third-year, when you let it out.”

  Now he had embarrassed her. “I can’t help what I am, only what I may become, and maybe not even that. I’m a nemesis, Harn. Yes, potentially one of the Three. And I don’t know yet what I might destroy.”

  The big Kendar rose and stood over her, a hulking shape edged with light.

  “A nemesis, eh? That explains a lot of things. And your brother?”

  “A creator, not that he knows it yet.”

  “Too bad there aren’t three of you. Now, that would be something. Are you Blackie’s destroyer?”

  Jame forced herself not to shrink in his ominous shadow. They had known each other at Tentir, but here things were different, closer to the bone. His voice was mild, but his big hands unconsciously flexed. He would kill to protect Torisen. The thought wasn’t foremost in his mind, but it lurked close to his berserker nature, and she had seen how suddenly that could be triggered.

  She wrapped her hands around one of his (Trinity, how easily he could have crushed her fingers), and held it until its twitching stilled.

  “I will never willingly harm my brother, or you, or anyone else whom I love.”

  He relaxed slowly and freed his hand. “Well, no. At least not intentionally. You’ll care what you do and take responsibility for your actions afterward, however daft they are. I see that now. What more can one ask, eh? I’ll bid you good night, then, my lady. Sleep well.”

  Jame did, although at one point she half-woke to hear Jorin growling. In the morning, Rue discovered that a note addressed to the lordan had been slipped under the door. Jame unfolded it and read the four-word unsigned message:

  “Leave,” it said, “and never return.”

  CHAPTER VII

  Equinox

  Autumn 1–36

  I

  Summer ended and autumn advanced. The days remained warm but lost that breathtaking blast of summer. The nights were cool enough to make a fire or extra jacket welcome. It even rained a bit, not that the irrigated Betwixt Valley needed it where the fall harvest was already under way. However, the farmers probably welcomed it in the terraced mountains, and it did help to lay the dust on the training fields south of the Host’s camp.

  Jame thought a lot about the senior cadets’ challenge, if one could call it that. All it had needed to become a threat had been an addition of the words “or else.” It was also double edged: if she ignored it, they had won. If she did as they demanded, not that she had any such intention, they still won. All in all, it was a game she refused to play.

  Meanwhile, Harn kept her close to Kothifir for a time after the Karnids’ attempted kidnapping, only allowing her to go out with her ten-command to practice. When the day was done, however, she slipped away to tend to Death’s-head.

  The black mares with their wicked fangs had savaged the rathorn badly, especially on his unarmored flanks, and the wounds had festered. Jame missed the Tentir horse-master’s advice, but had secured poultices from his Kothifiran counterpart. The man was eager to apply them himself; however, Jame had put him off. She supposed it was only natural that he wanted to lay hands on such a fabulous equine as a rathorn. Whether Death’s-head would have let him was another matter. Anyway, she was inclined to think that Bel-tairi’s attentions to the injuries helped more than any ointment.

  Thus it was that, on the twenty-ninth of Autumn, after a day of maneuvers in the eastern field, Jame set out for the distant tumble of boulders in the creek bed where the rathorn made his lair.

  First, she had to cross the southern road and the western training field, no easy matter now that the latter was rapidly filling with wagons for the next caravan, which promised to be the largest in generations. At least a hundred carts had already gathered on the plain, each at the heart of its own campsite. Attendants swarmed around them while draft horses snorted on picket lines and a constant stream of couriers descended from the city bearing freshly minted trade goods. All the craft guilds were working full time, including Gaudaric’s. Jame saw his son-in-law Ean directing the stowage of armor while Byrne ran about getting in everyone’s way.

  “Talisman, Talisman!” he cried, collaring her by the leg. “Are you coming with us?”

  “I doubt it,” Jame said with regret, ruffling his chestnut curls. She would have liked nothing better.

  “Try to come. Try!”

  “I will if I can.”

  “You aren’t going anywhere,” said Ean, detaching his son from Jame. “How often do I have to tell you?”

  “Oh, but Papa…!”

  Jame left them to what promised to be a long wrangle.

  Beyond the field, the land roughened into dips and hollows carved out by the Amar’s earlier channels before the Betwixt had been irrigated. Some still ran with the river’s overflow. Jame descended into one. Rounding the creek’s curve, she saw the rathorn standing like an ivory sentinel with the water curling around his legs while Bel licked the crescent-shaped scars on his flanks. Of course he had heard her coming. He brandished his horns, slashing rainbows out of the current, but an impatient snort from Bel held him in place. Jame ran a hand along his side. The infection was gone at last, the wounds scabbing over. In such a massed attack, unlike any he would face under natural circumstances, he needed a properly armed rider to protect his back. Jame resolved to pay more attention to her sword and scythe-arm practice.

  She unslung her backpack. The rathorn’s nose, nasal tusk and all, was in it as soon as she had loosened the straps and she braced herself as he rummaged. A snort inflated the bag like a bellows. Out came his jaws clamped around the roast chicken that she had brought. Bones were no problem, she had discovered. Death’s-head could digest just about anything.

  Leaving the creek bed, she returned to the camp in the descending twilight. After dinner in the Knorth barracks, she met Shade in the common canteen for a mug of thin ale.

  Hazing had continued sporadically in the other houses but not in the Knorth, despite grumbles from the thirty-odd third-year cadets who were all that were left of fifty who had ridden to the Cataracts.

  Meanwhile, randon kept disappearing from the Randir, but in such a trickle, attracting so little attention, that the other houses hardly noticed.

  “The ominous thing,” Shade said, cradling her mug, “is that so far the only Randir to vanish have been sworn to some Highborn other than Lord Kenan or Lady Rawneth.”

  “Is it a cull?”

  “One would almost think so, but where are they going?”

  “You aren’t sworn to your father or to your grandmother. Neither is Ran Awl.”

&n
bsp; “But Frost, the current commander of the Host’s Randir, is, and she doesn’t seem to take the situation very seriously.”

  As they spoke, keeping their voices low in the noisy room, Addy moved restlessly around Shade’s neck like a thick, molten torque. When she stretched out her triangular head, black tongue flickering, Jame reached out to her. Glittering scales flowed over her palm, soft and dry but with hard muscles rippling beneath. She and Shade played the serpent back and forth between them, over and under, each pursuing her own thought, finding no answers.

  “Take care,” Jame said as the other at last retrieved her pet and stood up. “Watch your back, and Ran Awl’s too. We can’t afford to lose either of you.”

  Shade nodded brusquely, turned and left.

  II

  The autumnal equinox came several days later. Although it was a workday, Jame got permission to visit Kothifir for the morning, taking Gorbel and Timmon with her. Gorbel had witnessed the Merikit festival honoring the harvest and the Great Hunt, but Timmon, new to any such native celebrations, was eager to see one. Jame herself wondered what approach the Kothifirans would take to the equinox.

  The other two lordan argued all the way up the cliff about the recent hazing.

  “It’s traditional,” Gorbel insisted yet again. “Cadets new to Kothifir are always tested.”

  “What, with being made to wash dishes?”

  “That was a special task, just for you.”

  “Well, it didn’t do much good. My house still doesn’t take me seriously.”

  “They do as a scullery maid.”

  Gorbel’s eyes were screwed shut and his squat face ran with sweat. Without thinking, Jame had led them to the open lift cage. She joined in the conversation to distract him.

  “Perhaps your approach was the best, simply to ignore an inappropriate challenge. I don’t know if I did my house a favor by forbidding them altogether. D’you think that’s going to make my cadets anxious to prove themselves in other ways?”

  Gorbel considered this. “It might, especially among those who haven’t been blooded yet. Trinity!”

  The cage had bounced and his eyes had involuntarily popped open. He stared, transfixed, at the abyss beneath his feet.