The Sea of Time - eARC

by P. C. Hodgell

  “I’m sorry,” said Jame. What else could one say? “How do I get to the top?”

  Cella gulped, trying to compose herself. “Krothen’s dais rises and falls. Right now, it’s stuck in the throne room.”

  Outside, someone shouted a warning. Jame heard the scrabble of steel claws on the stair, circling the tower. Rotating, she followed the silver body as it surged up the steps. Gaudaric’s men hastily made way for it. The mechanical hound slammed into the barricade raised by Ton’s followers and shattered it. Debris hurtled into the room and out over the balustrade, likewise most of the militia. Cella screamed. Then someone caught the dog in midstride, off balance, and tipped it sideways. It hit the railing and bumped along it from baluster to baluster, legs churning, until stone gave way. The metal dog flew out into space and down, to a cry of protest from Ruso.

  “No,” said Brier, as if echoing him, but her attention was fixed on the one who had destroyed his creation. “Amberley.”

  She stepped out onto the stair to confront her former lover.

  “Why?” she asked.

  Amberley tossed back honey-gold hair and smiled at her. “Sweet, sweet Brier Rose. You always have to be right, don’t you?”

  “Have I said that?”

  “Not in so many words, but I watch rather than listen.”

  She began to circle the other Kendar, who stood rigid on the landing. Her fingers slid under Brier’s hair to caress the nape of her neck. Auburn hair rippled at her touch. Brier shivered.

  “Was it your fault, though? The Knorth tempted you, and you fell, like your mother before you.”

  “Rose Iron-thorn never swore to the Knorth.”

  “She might as well have, after what happened at Urakarn and in the Wastes.” Amberley flicked Brier’s hair and stepped away. “Lord Caineron never forgave her for that, or you, by extension. It was clear enough that he meant to break you to his service. That’s why I didn’t want you to go to Restormir to become a cadet. And I was right, wasn’t I?”

  “About Lord Caineron, yes.”

  “So you came back to me, until the Knorth lordling whistled you away. Well, what if I told you that there was a stronger lord than Torisen? And no, I don’t mean Caldane. I met him, the Master of us all. He came to me in the mountains when I was on patrol. My horse spooked at his shadow and threw me among the rocks. When I looked up, there he was, and there was no gainsaying his power.”

  “You mean Gerridon,” said Brier evenly.

  Jame was surprised. Few Kencyr thought about the Master of Knorth anymore, as if he were lost in the mists that confused history and legend. That was one of his strengths.

  “Who else?” Amberley’s white teeth flashed again in her sun-darkened face. “The Karnids may call him their prophet, but we know who he is, and what he will become.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Why, our Master again, as he was always meant to be.”

  “Have you encountered Torisen since he became Highlord?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Then you don’t know his true strength.”

  Amberley’s smile became a grimace. “As I said, you always have to be right, and now you are bound to that freak whom he has named his lordan. Oh, Brier, Brier.”

  The Southron took a step forward and Amberley, despite herself, took a step back. Her foot struck the first step of the final flight.

  “What do you know of so ancient a bloodline and of its last descendents? It was you who told the Karnids the lordan would be on wide patrol the day she was nearly kidnapped, wasn’t it? And I suppose you arranged for that note to be slipped under her door in the first place.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Will you stand aside?”

  “What do you think?”

  They drew back into fighting position, Amberley mounting the stair to gain the higher ground. Gaudaric’s forces watched from below. Ton’s above were too scattered and shaken to care.

  Jame shook her attention away from the members of the militia lying groaning on the apartment floor. She crossed to the opposite eastern side of the tower, dodging through wreckage, and leaned out a window. Above her was the ring of stone thorns from which the Gemman raiders had hung. She jumped and caught one. It began to give way. Hastily, she swung a leg up over it and scrambled onto the walk that circled the marble rose petals of the dome. Voices rose within.

  “Abdicate,” Prince Ton was pleading. He sounded exhausted and near tears, his adolescent voice cracking. “Even now, physicians may save you!”

  Princess Amantine’s deep voice answered him with a scornful snort: “Pull yourself together, boy. You know that there can be only one god-king.”

  Krothen laughed, choked, and laughed again. “That may not be you, cousin…whatever happens to me… especially if it be…at your hands.” He paused, wheezing. “Only you and I…are left…among the male heirs of our house. Who comes next? Your mother?”

  Jame slipped between the stone petals, emerging behind Krothen’s massive bulk as it slumped on the dais. Bending to peer under his arm, she saw Amantine draw herself up to her full if negligible height, her court gown rising to reveal shoes with improbably high heels. Ton hovered at her elbow like an overstuffed bolster, in sweat-stained, premature white with bedraggled pink trim.

  “Would it be such a disaster if I came to rule?” demanded the princess. “I have more courage and skill than either you or my son.”

  “Mother…”

  “Face the truth, boy. Where would you be without me? Even if the white should truly come to you, you need my guidance.”

  “Your Magnificence,” Jame whispered to Krothen under cover of the growing familial ruckus. “How can I help?”

  He laughed again, ending with a wet, racking cough. “You see Life on my right hand…Death on my left.”

  In the filtered, predawn light, Jame made out Mother Vedia’s plump form wreathed with restless snakes to one side of Krothen and the crone with a box to the other. The box was open. The crone raised a skinny finger to chapped lips.

  “Only the god-touched can see us,” whispered Mother Vedia.

  Jame could hear the muffled sound of Brier and Amberley battling on the stair. At a guess, they were moving upward. She wondered briefly which form of combat, Kencyr or Kothifiran, they were using. Did one favor unequal ground over the other?

  A sudden glow of light came through the stone petals behind her and began to climb Krothen’s back. Sunrise. To the north of the chamber, it slanted in through the gap where a petal had broken off during the earthquake when Jame had last been here.

  Krothen groaned.

  Jame circled him. The princess was trying to shake the much heavier prince, only succeeding in shaking herself, but Jame ignored them both. Krothen exhaled with a rattle, and his eyes rolled up in their sockets. Then he was still.

  The crone closed her box and faded away.

  From outside at a distance came the crash of falling towers. Jame wondered if the treasuries had been taken, but the sound came from the wrong direction.

  “That’s your temple,” said Mother Vedia. “It’s coming to life again, knocking over its neighbors. Where did you place it, anyway?”

  Jame thought that she could feel the return of power, when she extended her sixth sense. She certainly felt the high priest’s rage; somehow, he had learned of his grandson’s fate, if not necessarily of its circumstances.

  “Quick now!” hissed Mother Vedia. “Help him!”

  “Who?” Jame stared, helpless, at the edifice of inert flesh before her. “How?”

  Krothen sat there with mouth agape and blank eyes. His exposed flesh had taken on the waxy translucence of marble. When she touched the folds of his robe, they were hard, and cold, and she could see the shadow of her fingers through them.

  The chamber’s doors burst open. Amberley skidded into the room, propelled backward by Brier’s attack. Ton and Amantine scuttled out of the way, clinging to each other. Brier followed her lov
er’s retreat.

  “It doesn’t have to be this way,” she said.

  Amberley laughed breathlessly and drew a hand across her mouth, smearing blood from a split lip. “I always said that you were good. Would I have settled for anything less?”

  Gaudaric and Ruso appeared in the doorway. The latter’s red hair and beard, which had hung limp during the Change, now bristled with energy and sparked at the tips. “I can’t believe it,” he was saying, excitedly waving his once too heavy axe as if it were made of balsa, making Gaudaric duck. “I’m Lord Artifice again!”

  Amberley backed toward the gap in the stone petals, into the slanting stream of morning light. Her hair glowed like a golden crown. Bloody face notwithstanding, she looked magnificent.

  “You have the advantage here,” she said. “I see that. Another time, then.”

  “Amb—”

  “No.” She stepped over the broken marble stub onto the outer walk. “Where I am going, death cannot follow, nor can you. Good-bye, sweet Brier Rose.”

  With that, she took another step out into space and was gone.

  Brier had taken a hasty stride after her but now halted, staring at the vacant slice of sky beyond the dome. Then she turned to Jame with a blank face and stricken eyes.

  “What did she mean?”

  “About death? The Karnids claim to have conquered it. From what I’ve seen, though, I doubt it.”

  She also wondered if Amberley had counted on landing some twenty feet below on the spiral stair, not realizing that on the north side of the Rose Tower, due to the twist in its construction, the drop was sheer.

  “Brier.” She tugged on the Kendar’s sleeve, trying to reclaim her dazed attention. “I need your help. Gaudaric, M’lord Artifice, yours as well.”

  The latter two approached Krothen’s motionless hulk.

  “Is he dead?” asked Ruso, staring.

  Gaudaric touched the marmoreal vestments and jerked his hand back, as if cold could burn.

  A faint sound escaped from between those parted, rosebud lips:

  “…help…”

  “Kroaky!” said Jame. “He’s still inside! Mother Vedia, how do we save him?”

  Gaudaric started, having apparently just seen the Old Pantheon goddess standing in Krothen’s shadow. So his god-given status as guild master had also returned.

  “I don’t know!” wailed Vedia, wringing her hands in agitation while her snakes tried to wring each other’s necks. “Just get him out!”

  “This looks like a job for a mason,” said Gaudaric. “What we need is a chisel and a mallet.”

  “No time for that.” Jame looked around frantically for something to use. How much air did Kroaky have? “We’ve got to smash our way in.”

  Princess Amantine pushed past her to stand in the way. “Sacrilege!” she boomed. “This is my nephew’s sepulcher. I forbid you to desecrate it!”

  Ruso picked her up and put her, sputtering, aside. Prince Ton attacked him with a flurry of plump fists.

  “How dare you lay hands on my mother!”

  “Not now, sonny. King Krothen is dead, but the white hasn’t come to you, has it? So stand aside.”

  He turned back to the petrified former monarch.

  “A sculptor once told me that marble is softer when first quarried than later,” he said, and tapped the figure’s distended belly with his axe. The translucent marble robe covering it shattered like thin ice over a pond. Beneath was dimpled, marble skin apparently drawn over billows of former flesh.

  “Go on,” said Gaudaric, leaning in to watch.

  Another harder blow near the deep navel cracked the surface. It gave way. They stared at the next layer, which resembled tightly packed pebbles.

  “I think this was fat,” said Jame, and poked it with a finger.

  Her touch broke the surface tension. They jumped back as a landslide of stones crashed down to rattle and bounce on the floor. More and more fell, hundreds of pounds’ worth. Was the entire abdomen emptying? No. As the dust cleared, inside they could see the petrified organs: loops of frozen intestines, an enlarged liver, but most of all the stomach, which filled most of the enormous cavity. From within this last came a faint scratching.

  Ruso scrambled back through the sliding, shifting pile of pebbles. He took careful aim, but as he swung his axe, stones rolled under his feet and he nearly fell.

  “Again, again!” said Mother Vedia, clasping her hands in an ecstasy of agitation.

  Ruso grunted and regained his stance. This time he used the butt end of his weapon to rap on the distended organ, lightly at first, then harder and harder. Cracks laced its surface. Then it disintegrated and a body spilled out.

  “Kroaky!” said Jame, and rushed to help.

  Krothen’s younger, thinner self sprawled on the pile of rocks, gasping for breath. He was coated with dust but otherwise naked. Also, he appeared to be choking.

  Mother Vedia waded to his side and gave him a firm slap on the back. He exhaled a cloud of dust, then began to breathe more naturally. His eyes opened.

  “Well,” he said, gasping, “here I am…again.”

  Gaudaric regarded him dubiously. “So we see. And yes, I remember you from some fifteen years back. Where have you been?”

  Kroaky laughed and drew a shaky hand across his face. Dirt and dust smeared. “Most recently, being introspective. Before that, having fun.”

  He looked back at the former shell of himself and sighed. “I suppose those days are over now. No more frolicking anonymously in the Undercliff. Well, I’ve had a good run.”

  Amantine and Ton had been edging closer, eyes round.

  “I don’t believe it,” said the princess. “You can’t be he. This is a trick to deprive my son of his rights.”

  “On the contrary,” said Kroaky, not unkindly, “I hereby name him my heir apparent, unless I should have children of my own. What do you think?” he appealed to Jame. “Will Fang marry me?”

  “Queen Fang.” Jame tasted the words. “I like it.”

  “Well, I don’t.” Princess Amantine drew herself up, ruffled as a disturbed partridge. “I will fight this. No one will believe it anyway. Ton, come!”

  She trotted to the door in her high heels, only noticing when she reached it that her son had not followed.

  The prince looked at Kroaky askance, sheepishly. “Er…peace?”

  “Ton-ton!” bellowed his mother.

  “Mother, I’m sorry, but this has gone much too far already. Besides, I’m tired of fighting.”

  She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again. Her eyes were bulging. “You…you little ingrate!”

  With that, she turned and stormed down the stairs. They heard her startled exclamation when she reached the level of Krothen’s apartment, then a scream, suddenly cut short. Gaudaric went to investigate.

  “Lady Cella was waiting for her below,” he reported back. “She tackled Princess Amantine and they both fell through the broken rail, off the tower.”

  Ton uttered an indistinct cry and plunged toward the door. There he got stuck before turning to edge through sideways. They heard him thunder down the steps.

  “For what it’s worth,” said Jame, “the tower overhangs the stair at that point. Still, it’s a significant drop.”

  CHAPTER XXIII

  The Feast of Fools

  I

  As it happened, Princess Amantine survived the fall, if with sundry broken bones. The unhappy Lady Cella did not.

  Jame, Brier, and Jorin left Kroaky thrashing out with Master Iron Gauntlet and Lord Artifice how he was to present his transformed self to the city. There would, Jame supposed, be problems. However, no one could deny in the end that, for all his pimples, the lanky young man was indeed Kothifir’s god-king, reborn.

  With dawn and the end of the Change, the city was astir. Doors and windows opened. People scurried about in the streets and gathered at corners, eager for the latest news. Who were the new grandmasters and the new guild lords? What was t
his about Krothen’s dramatic return? Jame heard, in passing, that Mercer was again Lord Merchandy and Shandanielle, Lady Professionate. She wondered if Mercer was still deathly ill. Dani had said that immortality was a burden to him, but apparently he had again set aside his poor health to serve his city.

  They met Needham’s disgruntled troops filtering back from their failed siege of the treasure towers. Needham, it appeared, had not regained his position as Master Silk Purse. Some reported that they had left him hammering bloody fists against the treasury’s iron door and sobbing.

  There was no sign yet of the Southern Host’s return to the city. Presumably it was still out on the plain, chasing Kothifir’s would-be invaders back to Gemma.

  In contrast to the noisy streets, Jame and Brier walked together in silence. The Kendar had barely spoken since Amberley’s death. Jame glanced more than once at her emotionless face, but didn’t know what to say. The bond between them told her nothing. As a Caineron, Brier had clearly learned to hide her feelings. Jame had supposed that she would go to find Amberley’s body, but she hadn’t. Someone else would have to retrieve it for the pyre.

  As for Jame, she didn’t quite know what to do with herself. Walking through the city with Jorin trotting at her side, she felt disconnected from the streets’ excited bustle. She had had a role to play here, but now, with the king’s return, it seemed to be over. It occurred to her that she should say something to someone about the possibility of mining diamantine from the deeper caves to replace the lost silk trade. The city didn’t seem to realize that the stone was valuable. But that was a minor thing. Kothifir would go its own way now, into whatever the future brought.

  Would her own people welcome her back, though, after so long an unauthorized absence? Before that, she had turned command of the barracks over to Ran Onyx-eyed and missed many days of lessons—not behavior expected of a leader-in-training.

  Face it, she thought disconsolately. You would rather act alone, and that’s where events keep taking you. Were you ever meant to be a randon at all?