The Sea of Time - eARC

by P. C. Hodgell

  Her eyes swept the hall, flinching at half-remembered memories. There were the death banners which scrabbled fretfully against the walls, the luminous floor, the stinking wind, the cold hearth at the end of the room piled high with pelts of the Arrin-ken slain during the Fall…

  But something else rested on the hearth, something small and black. Jame crossed the floor to investigate and found a tiny, obsidian pyramid nestled between a pair of flayed paws. It was all of three inches high. Well, she had said that the Kothifiran temple might be reduced to the size of a grain of sand. This was at least bigger than that. Gingerly she picked up the object, rather surprised that it didn’t weigh more. If she tilted it, what would happen to the priests within? A temple inside a house inside a temple…the very thought made her head spin.

  Some catch in the wind caught her attention. A dark figure stood in the middle of the silently pulsing floor, watching her. From what she could make out, it looked like a Karnid. Damnation. Had one of them followed her into the temple and from there into this hall? Now it was advancing toward her, unwrapping its cheche as it came. Jame slipped the miniature temple into a pocket so as to free her hands, aware as she did so that it tipped and fell on its side. Oh well. The approaching figure had bared its face—square and dark, with piglike close-set eyes, but it changed as she watched. Even before it had settled into familiar lines, Jorin was trotting forward to greet it. Jame followed the ounce.

  “Shade.”

  The Randir stood before her in oversized robes which nonetheless showed lengths of bare, slender ankle and wrist.

  “I can change shapes, but apparently not my basic weight,” she remarked, regarding the pale gleam of her limbs with disapproval.

  Jame caught her in a hug. “I looked for you everywhere!”

  “Er…yes.” Shade hesitated, then gingerly returned the embrace before disengaging from it, but not before Jame had felt Addy’s warm length coiled around the other’s waist within her robe and heard the serpent’s sleepy, warning hiss. “You didn’t find me because I had assumed this form and didn’t dare break cover to communicate. Do you know that Karnids are secretly gathering in Kothifir? Well, they are. This was one of them until I took his place.” She frowned, remembering. “There was a lot of blood. While it helped me to make the change, I find that I don’t particularly like killing.”

  “I would worry if you did. But what are you doing here?”

  Shade tugged at her sleeves as if this would lengthen them. “I’m still looking for Ran Awl and the missing Randir, of course,” she said. “They weren’t in Kothifir and no word came from Wilden of their arrival there. Given the number of Karnids in Kothifir, that suggested Urakarn. When a courier returned here to report to their prophet, I followed him. That was a strange trip, underground and surprisingly fast.”

  “The step-forward tunnel.”

  “Is that what they call it? Well, I’ve been here for more days than I care to count, poking around, finding nothing. Only the temple remained to be searched. Most Karnids avoid it as a sacred site, so when I saw you dart in…”

  “You followed again.”

  “And found myself here, wherever this is.” She caught Jame’s arm with a sudden hiss of warning. “Look.”

  An errant breath of wind had brought something translucent into the hall. It drifted across the dark floor, gliding and bending with aching grace, trailed by white, floating drapery. Delicate feet moved to an unheard melody. A pale face fragile as the new moon turned in their direction without seeing them, locked in dreams. Oh, how sweet its faint smile was.

  “So beautiful…” breathed Shade and took an involuntary step toward it, but Jame held her back.

  Then the air changed…ahhhhh…and the apparition was gone.

  Shade turned on Jame furiously with a glint of tears in her eyes. “Why did you stop me? Who was she?”

  Jame drew a ragged breath. It had taken all her own self-restraint not to rush across the floor to clutch at that diaphanous skirt like a lost child.

  Mother…

  “That was the Dream-weaver,” she said unsteadily. “Perhaps that was how she danced the night the Kencyrath fell. Perhaps it was on some other occasion. Time moves in different currents here.”

  “Was she a ghost, then?”

  “Not exactly. Her world is as real to her as it would be to us if we got too close to her.”

  Shade gave Jame a hard look. “You obviously know more about this place than I do.”

  “I told you once before: we’re both unfallen darklings, you thanks to your changer blood inherited from your grandfather Keral, I because of where I grew up. Here, in fact.”

  “And where exactly are we?”

  Jame told her.

  “Oh.”

  Lightning threw the hall into sudden, stark relief, and Jorin crouched, squalling in protest. Thunder roared. Some banners lost their perilous grip on the surrounding walls and plummeted, shrieking, to the floor. A cold, hard rain began to fall through the shattered roof beams, giving way after a moment to hail. The ounce scuttled back toward the hearth, into the shelter of the partial roof. The two young women followed him, both shivering, their breath puffs of cloud.

  “Now what?” Jame asked.

  Shade clenched her teeth to stop them from rattling, and not only because of the cold. Like most Kencyr, she had previously thought little about Perimal Darkling as a living entity. The worst stories of her childhood were coming to life around her.

  “I still need to find Ran Awl,” she said with a gulp, committing herself to nightmare. “And there was something else I overheard among the Karnids—that she and the others had been taken ‘where changers are made.’ What?”

  Jame had sworn under her breath. With the Kothifiran temple in her pocket, she had hoped that her mission here was ended. After all, what did the depths of the House offer her except bitter memories best forgotten and perhaps a very real current threat? If the Master was here, in any level of the structure’s past, her presence would call to him.

  “I know that place,” she said reluctantly. “It lies deep within the House. You’ll need help to find it.”

  “And you will give me that help.”

  Jame sighed. Shade wasn’t giving her a choice. Anyway, Awl was a fellow randon and a good woman, even if she was Randir. Whatever was happening to her now, she didn’t deserve it.

  Jame led the way across the hall and through an archway. The House opened out around them in a seemingly endless procession of high-vaulted passageways, broad stone stairs spiraling up or down, more corridors, more halls. Everywhere lay cold stones, colder shadows, and desolation. At length they came to an open archway whose upper curve was shaped like a mouth. It had been walled up, but the massive blocks now lay tumbled about on the floor like broken teeth through which the wind blew.

  “What is that smell?” Shade asked, speaking barely above a whisper.

  Something dead, something alive, many things in between…

  And there was a faint, sickly light within, coming from a barred window curtained with vines and white flowers shaped like swollen, pouting lips.

  Jame stopped Shade from going for a closer look. “Those blossoms are vampiric,” she said.

  Was it her imagination, or for a moment did the wisp of a figure hang in their obscene embrace? They had caught her once and had nearly drained her dry before Tirandys and his brother Bender had come to her rescue.

  Ah, Tirandys, Senethari, who taught me honor by your bitter mistakes…

  Although he had died at the Cataracts, the victim of Honor’s Paradox, he would be here too in some fold of the House’s past, perhaps no more than a breath away. She wanted to see him, to warn him against what lay ahead.

  But “The past cannot be changed.”

  Who had said that? Ah. The Master himself, explaining why he could not reap souls in the past. What happened there happened only once.

  Shade had been cautiously maneuvering to peer out the window between t
he bloated white flowers.

  “The sky is green,” she said.

  “We aren’t on Rathillien anymore.”

  The Randir gave her a blank look. “Where, then?”

  “The House spans the entire Chain of Creation, from threshold world to world. Each time the Kencyrath has fled, it has walled up the older apartments behind it except when we came to Rathillien. The Fall happened too quickly; there was no time. Since then, the Master has smashed all the barriers, laying the House open from end to end.”

  “Has Rathillien been breached?”

  “After a fashion. This sort of invasion has happened before, where this world is ‘thin.’”

  She was thinking of Karkinaroth, the Moon Garden where Tieri’s death banner had hung, the Haunted Lands, and the White Hills. She had thought at the time that Karkinaroth was unique. Apparently not.

  Shade scowled. So much new information obviously disturbed her, and she was inclined to blame Jame for enlightening her. “Then why doesn’t Perimal Darkling burst into Rathillien and overwhelm it?”

  Jame remembered standing in the Moon Garden before that gaping hole into the House’s shadows while the threads that had been Tieri’s death banner wove themselves into an obscene semblance of the dead girl. Then as now, the Master hadn’t seemed ready to take advantage of this sudden breach into Rathillien, any more than she had been prepared to carry the battle to him.

  Besides, Jame suspected that there had been a change in Gerridon’s plans since the Fall. He still wanted immortality, but on his own terms, not as a consuming gift from the shadows. She remembered the rebel changers who had wanted to seize this world as a bastion against their former lord. Perhaps they had gotten the idea from Gerridon himself. If he was to defy Perimal Darkling, he needed a place to stand. Where else if not on Rathillien, the last threshold world to which the Kencyrath had access?

  “Come on,” she said to Shade, adding, when the other hesitated, “You want to find your Senethari Awl, don’t you?”

  They walked deeper into the House, trying to stay close to the outer wall and whatever windows it supplied. Dim light seeped from above and sometimes from below. The rooms grew progressively stranger as life and death, animate and inanimate, intermingled more and more. That was the nature of Perimal Darkling, Jame thought, sidestepping a soft, crusty spot on the floor that looked and smelled like a weeping ulcer. It had occurred to her before that the shadows weren’t so much evil as antithetical to human life, so that contact with them perverted it. The Master had used them to pursue his own selfish ends and now was trying to avoid paying the price. Did that make it any less necessary to fight them? No. They were a spreading blight on reality whose triumph would change everything. She could only hope that defeating the Master would also defeat them.

  Shade looked more and more nervous, and her face began to twitch. She had only started to show changer characteristics within the past year and didn’t yet have full control over them. Worse, despite Jame’s reassurance about unfallen darklings, she apparently thought of herself as compromised, if not tainted. Jame began to question her, as much to distract the Randir as to gain information.

  “You’ve spent a lot of time now with the Karnids. What have you learned about them?”

  Shade slipped Addy out of her robe, looped the serpent around her neck, and traced the gilded scales with nervous fingertips as the snake tasted the foul air, its black, forked tongue darting. Finally, absentmindedly, she began to talk.

  Some of what she told Jame was familiar: the Karnids had originally been a nomadic desert folk who worshipped Stone, Salt, and Dune. Then a holy man had come to them preaching of a true world beyond the harsh one evident to their senses, an eternal place where death itself would die. The gateway to it, he said, was a black rock on the shore of a vast inland sea. Then he had died. His people continued to make pilgrimages to the rock for a millennium, waiting for his return, even after a trading city had grown around it.

  That would have been doomed Langadine, Jame thought, remembering the metropolis’s cheerful bustling, nighttime streets in contrast to the sullen black rock around which the king’s palace had been built. Few had known that the rock was actually a Kencyr temple and that its activation had destroyed the city. Fewer still knew that a grief-stricken Tishooo had subsequently smashed the Langadine temple.

  “The Karnids wandered for a long time after that,” Shade was saying. “Eventually, they settled at what came to be known as Urakarn. Why here…there…wherever…I don’t know.”

  “Probably because they found another Kencyr temple,” said Jame, thinking out loud. “It may have been a lot smaller to look at than the one at Langadine, but it also seemed to be without a door, perhaps solid.”

  Shade turned to stare at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “But it wasn’t solid, because the Prophet finally emerged out of it, which was proof enough for them of his identity. How many years has he been back?”

  “About fifteen, but…”

  That would be roughly the same time that Tori joined the Southern Host and was taken prisoner at Urakarn, thought Jame.

  “Let me guess,” she said. “Before that the Karnids weren’t particularly hostile to the Kencyrath. After it, they were. So we can pretty well guess who their reborn prophet really is.”

  Shade stopped. “We can? Who?”

  “Gerridon, the Master.”

  “But why?”

  “Among other things, because the Karnid temple has a link to the House.”

  “So was the Master the first prophet as well?” Shade asked, trying to keep her voice level.

  “I don’t think so. The Karnids’ holy man came to them long before the Kencyrath arrived on Rathillien. Maybe he really was a prophet. Of course, the Builders were already here erecting the temples. It’s a good question, anyway.”

  The Randir took a step away from her. Like a nervous tic, one of her eyes fluctuated between her own and the porcine orb of the Karnid whose form she had assumed. “You know too much.”

  “I’ve been asking questions for a long time, in many strange places. What’s wrong?”

  Shade retreated another step. “Everything is too much. The Master, the Prophet, you, me…is anyone what they seem to be?”

  They had stopped in a room where every surface was crusted with luminous lichen. Flat leaves, scales, and hairy clumps of ochre, rust, chartreuse, and leprous white crawled around them like sluggish thoughts trapped in a bad dream.

  Shade backed into a wall. When she tried to step away from it, she couldn’t. Fungus crept up over her shoulders and down her arms, holding her as she strained to free herself. Jame unsheathed her claws, but hesitated to use them for fear of ripping the other’s skin off. Filaments inched across Shade’s startled face and took root. Addy struck at them, drawing blood, until fungus encased her too. The wall sucked both in with a dry rustle and closed over them. All that remained was a blurred image shaded with lichen, in the process of dissolving.

  II

  Jame raked the wall with her claws, calling Shade’s name, answered by the flat echo of an enclosed space. Lichen flaked off under her nails. The gouges bled. A section of the wall bulged, then expelled gas between fungal leaves in a flatulent cloud. What if Shade had emerged on the other side? She darted up and down the wall’s length, looking for some turn that would bring her to its far side. None appeared.

  Jame stepped back, panting.

  “Shade!” she cried again.

  No response…or was there one, muffled, somewhere in the distance?

  If one called here, who knew what might answer?

  Fool, thought Jame. Now it knows where you are.

  No wind blew, but the halls around her seemed to breathe.

  Ahhh—a long, slow exhalation. Ha, ha, ha, ha…

  In its wake came a pressure against the ears and against the heart, as if the air had thickened with a taste of corruption. With Shade beside her and the conversation between them, s
he hadn’t felt this intolerable isolation. Trinity, to be alone in the House…

  But Jorin was with her. She knelt and buried her face in the ounce’s rich fur. Its feeling and the familiar clean smell of it anchored her.

  “Oh, kitten,” she whispered to him. “What have I gotten us into?”

  Haaaah…, said the House, and again there was that distant echo:

  …help, help, help…

  Jame looked around. She had drifted away from the exterior windows into the heart of the House. What world was this on the Chain of Creation? The walls seemed to expand and contract about her like the bowels of some great creature that had swallowed her whole. Who had called?

  Go to them, said one voice in her mind. Stay away, said another.

  The House tended to take one where it chose. Jame began to drift, listening for distant voices. Shadowy arches, halls leading nowhere, great, intricately muraled domes admitting strange, filtered light…

  Shadows and movement began to catch the corner of her eyes. Others walked with her or shied away as if she were the ghost. Some wore elaborate court gowns of a style millennia out of date. Others were draped in dark robes similar to those of Kencyr or Karnid priests. The latter were chanting:

  “Do you recant…do you profess…”

  The voices tugged at her. She followed them. Here was a corridor lined with rooms flexing like the harsh breath in her lungs.

  “Do you recant your belief in your false, triune god? Do you profess the Prophet of the Shadows to be your true lord and master?”

  …no, no, no…

  “Then we must convince you, for your own good.”

  Someone screamed: “Oh god, my hands, my hands!”

  They were hurting Tori. She wouldn’t allow that. But her steps seemed as slow as if caught in thickened honey. Shapes passed, carrying the glow of a furnace.

  “Do you recant…do you profess…”

  That was Rowan, crying out as the incandescent iron seared her forehead, and beyond that, there was Harn with his cracked skull, breathing in, breathing out, as stentorious as a drunkard.