The Sea of Time - eARC

by P. C. Hodgell

  “Less. Much less,” the acolyte said, an eager light kindling in his eyes. “There’s a secret way under or near every temple, connecting them.”

  Jame cursed herself for having forgotten that. The mysterious Builders had chosen the Anarchies south of the Riverland as their base, and had linked it to each of their building sites throughout Rathillien by a series of subterranean tunnels lined with step-forward stones. She, Marc, and Jorin had traveled by them from the Anarchies to Karkinaroth in a matter of hours, although the two cities lay almost a thousand miles apart. And Gorbel had mentioned that, after the Massacre, Kencyr prisoners reported having seen a Kencyr temple at Urakarn, of all places.

  Should she go, though? Right now, without telling anyone?

  Dorin was tugging at her arm while Jorin continued to snarl at him, the golden fur rising down the ounce’s spine. That, for so well-mannered a beast, was unusual.

  Listen to Jorin, her instincts urged.

  The boy is upset, said her better nature. He has reason to be.

  “Come on, come on. They need us!”

  After so much time on increasingly diminished rations, a night’s delay might not matter, or it could prove fatal. Would it hurt at least to scout out the situation?

  “Come on, damn you,” said Dorin again, pulling harder. “Please.”

  IV

  The entrance to the step-forward tunnel was only paces away in the middle of the street, disguised as one of the many hatches leading to the Undercliff.

  A tight spiral stairway led down from the surface. The narrow, triangular risers were perhaps a foot high each, but gave the sensation of much greater depth as one descended. Jame supposed that they were composed of step-downward stones—that is, of rock slabs with such an affinity for their original geological placement that they took anyone who trod on them immediately to that level. With a particularly jarring step, they bypassed the Undercliff into the solid rock of the Escarpment and so on down, presumably, to beneath the valley floor. Darkness had closed around them almost at once. The walls ran with water and the stones underfoot were slippery. With no rail to clutch, it felt as if at any moment one might step off into empty space.

  Jame stumbled at the foot and fell to her knees. The impact of her hands caused the coarse moss beneath them to fluoresce, shedding a sickly green light upward between her fingers, onto her face. The acolyte’s footprints led away into the darkness.

  His voice floated back from ahead. “Hurry!”

  “Dorin, wait!” she called after him, scrambling to her feet, receiving no answer.

  She and Jorin followed his footsteps. Only a few strides took them well beyond the stair, Ancestors only knew how far into the Wastes. They were on step-forward stones now. Water dripped on their heads. Walls continued to sweat. Behind them, the light began to fade as it did ahead when they slowed. Jame stopped altogether, realizing that the ounce was no longer with her. She found him a few paces back, nosing a rock. It chittered angrily and rose on its claws, pinpoint eyes glowing like baleful green dots. Jorin dabbed at it with a paw. It snapped at him. Jame seized the ounce by his ruff and drew him away.

  “Leave it alone, kitten. That’s a feral trock, not like Dure’s pet. Let’s hope that there are no more of them.”

  The Builders had brought these little creatures with them to Rathillien because of their ability to digest stone, but they also liked shoes and feet and paws.

  More green spots blinked in the shadows back the way that they had come, spreading across the path. The chittering grew.

  Perforce, they continued, following Dorin’s fading trail. Jame wondered at the boy’s pace, in the dark, with no light ahead of him that she could see. Had he come this way before? If so, when and why? She began to feel uneasy and more than a bit foolish for having followed his lead so readily.

  The passageway went on and on. The track ahead vanished. Their own luminous footfalls shed light in a tight sphere around them, enough to reveal the abyss along whose edge they trod. Things stirred in the depths at their passing. A misstep would be fatal.

  Suddenly here was another narrow stair, this one ascending. Jame followed Jorin up into thin moonlight and a desolate landscape. She couldn’t see much of the latter at first because of the mist rising off a nearby bubbling lake. Tendrils drifted around her, stinking of rotten eggs. The lake seemed to be at the bottom of a series of terraces, the ones higher up studded with smoking pits and boiling mud pots. Underfoot, the ground trembled continually, making Jorin pick up his paws as if loath to tread on it.

  Across the water stood a structure little bigger than a hut, but so black that the feeble light seemed to fall into it as if into a hole cut out of space. Its outline warped—because of the wavering air? No. Jame’s sixth sense set her teeth on edge and her head began to thump in time to her heart. Despite its size, this was an active Kencyr temple, and not the one that she had come to seek.

  A shrill voice was shouting something in the distance. It sounded like Dorin, but she couldn’t make out the words.

  More drifting steam blurred her vision. Through it, she glimpsed towering volcanic walls, now near, now far, honeycombed with holes out of which black-clad figures dropped like so many malignant ants. Dorin ran toward them, pointing back at her. This time, his words were clear:

  “You see? You see? I said I would bring the Prophet’s chosen one to you, and I have. Now give me back my grandfather!”

  Jame swore under her breath. Next time, she would listen to Jorin—if there was a next time. She leaned over the mouth of the stair. At its base, darkness seethed and clattered angrily. To descend was to risk being eaten alive, but where else could they go? The landscape offered few chances for concealment or escape. Meanwhile, approaching Karnids spilled over the lips of the upper terraces and raced toward them.

  The Prophet’s chosen one? Be damned to that, whatever it meant.

  She ran the only direction she could, around the lake toward the temple with Jorin scampering at her heels.

  The structure gained little definition as she approached it. Was it without a door like its much larger counterpart in Langadine? Was it really as small as it had seemed from a distance? Her eyes told her yes, but her other senses insisted that she was approaching something huge.

  She found the door not by its own outline but by the rattling of the bar that secured it.

  “Let me out, let me out!” cried a muffled voice from within.

  Jame wrestled the heavy bar out of its brackets. A blast of wind threw the door open in her face and knocked her backward. She tripped over Jorin and fell flat on her back. Black feathers streamed over her head out of the door, borne on a mighty wind. The world dissolved into roaring chaos. Jame hugged the ground with Jorin pinned under her, protesting. Then, suddenly, all was deathly still. She looked up. Walls of racing clouds surrounded her, flecked with blue lightning, studded by the dark shapes of Karnids snatched off their feet, flying. The black feathers coalesced into a figure far up, silhouetted against the crescent moon at the tornado’s circular mouth, plunging down. A shriek trailed after it. It was going to land on top of her.

  Jame scuttled out of the way, tensed for its impact on the stony ground. None came. Looking up, she saw that it had stopped in midair some twenty feet up, although it still gave the impression of plummeting toward the earth.

  “Tishooo?”

  The Falling Man flailed about with his robe inverted over his head.

  “I’m blind!” he wailed.

  “You’re upside down.”

  He righted himself and clawed purple velvet away from his face. “I’m still blind! Why is it so dark?”

  “It’s night.”

  “Oh. That’s a relief.” He forced down his flapping robe and hooked his long white beard aside so that it flew upward behind his ear. Now he was parallel to the ground, seeming to hover over it although his clothing continued to whip upward. “You again.”

  Jame detached Jorin, who had been clinging to her w
ith all his claws, and got to her feet. “Yes. Me.”

  “Harrumph! Is there any reason why I shouldn’t rip you apart where you stand?”

  Jame frowned, confused. Her past encounters with the Falling Man for the most part had been almost playful. For all his power, Old Man Tishooo had always seemed somewhat of a clown. “Er…is there any reason why you should?”

  “D’you have any idea how long I’ve been held captive in that damned temple? Because I’ve lost track of time. And that smug prophet of yours—thought he’d caught some minor desert godling, Kothifir’s native guardian who was best kept out of the way. Of what, though, damned if I know.”

  “But you do guard. The city has missed you.”

  “I should think so,” said the Tishooo, somewhat mollified.

  “Anyway, what do you mean, ‘our’ prophet?”

  “This is a Kencyr temple, isn’t it? So was the one that destroyed Langadine. And isn’t the Prophet a Kencyr himself? Oh, I sniffed that out soon enough, for all his wiles. Invaders and despoilers, the lot of you. Why don’t you go back to where you came from?”

  “That was another world, a long time ago.”

  “Huh. The Earth Wife has taken an interest in you, girl. And I sense that you still carry her imu although you may have forgotten it. But she hasn’t yet made up her mind. Neither have I. Who knows what the Eaten One and the Burnt Man think?”

  Jame scrambled for the right words. If the Four didn’t accept her people on Rathillien, they had nowhere else to go, nor a place to stand in the final battle with Perimal Darkling.

  “I don’t know who this prophet is, but if he leads the Karnids, then he’s our enemy too. There’s a dark force behind him, one that threatens this world as well as the Kencyrath. How much of Rathillien is left, even now? Our scrollsmen tell us that it’s round, like every other threshold world we’ve encountered. So what’s on its far side?”

  The Tishooo fidgeted with his fluttering robe, looking uncomfortable. Blue sparks snapped in his flying beard, threatening to set it alight. “I can’t be everywhere, can I?”

  “Why not? After all, you’re the elemental spirit of air, manifested as the wind. Do you even know what’s happened to the Western Lands of this continent?”

  “Why?” he said sharply. “What have you heard?”

  “Nothing. That’s the point. If Perimal Darkling has eaten them too, then most of this world has already been consumed by the shadows.”

  “It can’t have been. I would know…wouldn’t I?”

  In his agitation, he began to tumble again, and the cloud wall wobbled about him. For a moment, the sky above Jame was full of flying Karnids. A brown-clad figure with storm-tossed blond hair tumbled with them, his mouth and eyes circles of terror—Dorin, thought Jame, getting what he no doubt deserved. She turned from him.

  “Why don’t you find out before you kill me?” she shouted up into the raging sky. “I and my people may be your last, best hope.”

  The Tishooo righted himself with energetic swimming motions.

  “All right. I’ll go look. Mind you, we aren’t through with each other yet.”

  He whisked up into the sky, drawing the wind with him. The tornado inverted and died, leaving a faintly moonlit night. All around Jame, bodies crashed to earth or into the simmering water.

  “Waugh!” said Jorin, pressing against her leg.

  “Yes,” she said. “Time to go.”

  The temple door still stood open, gaping into darkness, and power poured out of it. Jame hesitated on the threshold. To whom did she trust herself—her despised god or Urakarn?

  Better the devil you know…

  She stepped inside and the door slammed shut behind her.

  CHAPTER XIX

  A Walk into Shadows

  Winter 100

  I

  No light, no sound. It was utterly dark inside the temple, like being stricken both blind and deaf. Even the flow of power had stopped as if dammed. Jame was at length aware of her breath, panting, and of Jorin standing on her foot. The blind ounce depended on her eyes to see and protested their mutual handicap in a low, fretful whine.

  “Be still,” she told him in a whisper. “Listen.”

  Silence.

  It didn’t surprise her to reach back and touch nothing. Gingerly, she took a step forward, then another, wobbling. It was hard to keep one’s balance in such a void. Only her feet pressing against the floor gave her a sense of direction. Two more steps and she should have reached the other side of the hut, but there was still nothing. This also was not unexpected: most Kencyr temples were bigger inside than out.

  Air breathed in her face.

  Ahhh…

  It stank of rot and of something sweet. It was also bitterly cold.

  Jame followed the smell, step by step, her stomach curdling within her as if at some long suppressed memory. She knew that stench. It spoke to her at a level below the rational, beneath the skin, within the very bone, to the helpless child that she had once been.

  Something ahead grumbled, like distant thunder, and the air vibrated. Coarse grass now wrapped, whining, around her boots.

  Don’t go, don’t go…

  A muted flash of light shone ahead. Against scuttling clouds, the front of a structure reared up before her, many roofed, where it had roofs at all, with dark windows and open doors out of which the rank wind breathed.

  Hahhh, ah, ah, ah…

  Darkness again, and another distant rumble, in the flesh, in the bones.

  Was that thunder, or stones grinding one against another? She couldn’t see it now, but for a moment it had seemed as if that massive pile were inching toward her, out of a greater darkness. Even now, it might loom over her, poised to fall…

  Jame swallowed panic. She was still within the Urakarn temple…or was she? Something like this had happened to her before, at Karkinaroth, when she had plunged deep into Prince Odalian’s palace only to emerge in Perimal Darkling, inside the House. If so again, another step might take her under shadows’ eaves.

  Don’t go…

  As she hesitated, Jorin stood on her toes, his shoulder pressed against her thigh, chirping in agitation. She was in danger enough; was it right to risk him too? But he was a comfort, here on the brink of madness. Moreover, it was important that she find…what? The immediate past blurred. She took another cautious step forward into darkness, onto hard pavement.

  Lightning flashed again, closer, with a boom that imprinted the image on her mind of broken rafters overhead against a stricken sky. As her eyes cleared, she found that light had lingered here below. Underfoot was a floor paved with cold, dark stone, laced with veins of luminous green. Walls towered around her. On them hung the woven faces of many death banners, all of them fidgeting and grimacing in a thin wind that threatened to pry them from their perches.

  Ahhh…

  Her heart chilled within her. This was the dire hall where the Dream-weaver had danced and the Kencyrath had fallen.

  Alas for the greed of a man and the deceit of a woman…

  Here she had played as a child after her father had driven her out of the Haunted Lands keep, away from her twin brother Tori, and here the changer Keral had tormented her.

  “No mementos for you, brat. This is your home now. Shall I comfort you? No? Then I will leave it to our lord and master.”

  Then he had come down the stairs out of the ruined past to claim her as his own, to take her mother’s place.

  “So you’ve lost a father, child,” a soft voice had said. “I will be another one to you and much, much more. Come. You know where you belong.”

  The tapestry faces seemed to lean in over her.

  You fool, she thought, fighting a wave of dizziness. You’re breathing too hard.

  She crouched and gathered Jorin into a warm, furry hug, an anchor in a reeling world. The ounce licked her cheek with a rough, anxious tongue, then stuck his wet nose into her ear.

  She was not the frightened child who had fle
d this hall after forcefully declining the bridal bed and hacking her way to freedom through the hand that had reached out to claim her from between fluttering red ribbons. After that had come flight from the House, leaving it in flames behind her, then nearly a year as an apprentice thief in Tai-tastigon, Karkinaroth, the battle at the Cataracts, that terrible winter in the Women’s Halls at Gothregor, and finally blesséd Tentir. When she considered all that had happened since then, her childhood seemed a lifetime ago. She wasn’t even the same young woman who had stumbled into this hall two years ago out of Karkinaroth. An old, defiant chant came back to her:

  If I want, I will learn.

  If I want, I will fight.

  If I want, I will live.

  And I want.

  And I will.

  Her breath steadied. She glowered up at the banners, and realized that there were fewer of them than since her last visit here. Many now hung in tattered rags, stripped to bare warp strings that whined in the wind and tapped restlessly against cold stone. Others slumped on the floor, barely twitching.

  An answer to their dilapidated state came to her out of the past: the souls have been eaten out of them.

  Blood trapped a Kencyr’s spirit in the weave of its death. Gerridon, the Master, needed these souls, reaped for him by his sister-consort Jamethiel, in order to maintain his ill-gotten immortality. (There: she had spoken his name at last, if only to herself.) Now that the Dream-weaver was gone, he needed her, Jame, to take her mother’s place. In the meantime, he had been subsisting on Highborn leftovers, as it were, but it looked as if he had nearly run out of them. What next? He could turn to the fallen Kendar and to the changers, as the latter had feared when they had started the revolt that had led to the Cataracts. He could accept what Perimal Darkling offered and become at last its creature, its Voice. Or he could try again to win her to his side, to reap new souls among the Kencyrath’s Highborn of whatever house. It was no good, she told herself, turning solely on the Knorth, where only she, Tori, and Kindrie remained.

  So think. This is now. You are here. What else in this seemingly ageless House has changed?