The Sea of Time - eARC

by P. C. Hodgell

  “Leave and never return,” the note shoved under her door had said during the season of challenges.

  Others had no doubt that she didn’t belong and never had.

  Here was the Optomancers’ Tower, a thin, crooked structure thrusting up into the growing clouds like a gnarled finger raised to stir the sky. On impulse, Jame climbed its outer stair, followed by Brier and Jorin. Near the top, she was almost bowled over by the gangly young man with the enormous glasses who had showed her and Byrne the Eye of Kothifir at the end of summer.

  “Whoops,” he said, grabbing the rail to steady himself. “I wasn’t expecting visitors. Is it true what they say about King Krothen?”

  “I expect so, depending on what they say.”

  His eyes, greatly magnified, blinked at her through thick lenses. “It’s a great day, then, but life goes on. What can I do for you?”

  “I’d like a glimpse of the city and its environs. To gain perspective.”

  “Come along, then.”

  He led them up to the Eye and threw open its door. When he closed it, complete darkness again fell within. They heard him stumble around the room, muttering to himself, then a shutter creaked open and blinding light fell in a circle on the floor. Jame blinked watering eyes and tried to focus. The image was of the upper plain. Perhaps the caretaker of the Eye had been keeping track of the battle there, of such concern to the entire city. As she had guessed, the Gemmans were in flight, with their war lizards mounting a rearguard defense. The Host, mostly on foot, surrounded each of these giant reptiles in turn and pulled it down, then moved on to the next. As Jame watched, the Gemman line broke and fled.

  “So much for that,” said the caretaker’s voice from the shadows, with unmistakable relief. “Where next?”

  “The Rose Tower.”

  The lens of the Eye rotated, groaning.

  There stood King Kroaky, Lord Artifice, and Grandmaster Gaudaric on the lowest turn of the spiral stair, a sea of upturned faces beneath them. Mouths opened in unheard cheers, which grew as Mother Vedia descended to join the royal party. Perhaps now the Old Pantheon would be welcome Overcliff once more. Certainly, Kroaky owed this goddess for serving as midwife to his peculiar rebirth. Below, the crowd parted. Jame glimpsed Dani’s blond head and Mercer’s white one. The healer was supporting the merchant, who raised a weak hand to return the city’s applause. Citizens lifted them up and carried them to join the company on the stair. All seemed to be well there.

  “Where next?” asked the caretaker again.

  “Show me the Host’s camp.”

  The lens shifted to point, dizzyingly, down the Escarpment to the stone barracks at its foot. These seemed unusually quiet, even for so early an hour. Only the cadets were there, Jame remembered, as well as a skeleton staff of randon. How they must regret missing the fight above. Char and the other Knorth third-years were probably grinding their teeth, her own second-year ten-command as well. For herself, she had seen battle and its attendant horrors at the Cataracts, enough bloodshed to sate her for a lifetime.

  She was about to turn away when the lens swung yet again, perhaps reverting to its set point.

  “Wait. What was that?”

  “What? Where?”

  “Westward, up the valley.”

  “I didn’t see…oh.”

  The Eye had caught a teeming blur moving down the Betwixt, filling the valley between the Escarpment and the Apollyne mountains. The lens tightened its focus. The mass became horsemen, headed toward the camp which lay some ten miles ahead of them.

  Brier leaned in, staring. Her head cast a shadow over the scene and she withdrew with a frown.

  “Has Gemma launched a second attack to the rear?”

  Jame had thought so too at first. Then she had seen that all of these riders wore black, and the front rank rode black horses.

  Thorns?

  She remembered Urakarn, apparently deserted. Where had its inhabitants gone, given that they couldn’t take their mounts anywhere by the step-forward path? It would, on the other hand, have taken them about this long to arrive overland by the Betwixt Valley. It was potentially the Urakarn massacre in reverse. The Karnids were coming.

  On the point of turning away, she glimpsed another rider out in front of the thorns. His mount, steel gray, fought against its bit. Even the thorns edged away from it.

  Memory caught Jame by the throat: The stallion surged up over the hillcrest with nostrils flaring red. Its steel hooves nearly clipped her as it roared over her head. It landed and turned, torn grass shrieking underfoot. Its iron teeth were bared, its eyes rolled white and dead…

  The changer Keral, jeering at her: “We can always feed you to his new war-horse.”

  It couldn’t be…could it?

  “What?” the caretaker demanded as she turned from the bright image and floundered through the darkness in search of the door.

  Jorin squawked as she tripped over him. Glass shattered. Here at last was the way out, the door smashing open to admit a wash of early morning light across the floor.

  Jame scrambled down the steps with the ounce on her heels, still protesting, and Brier Iron-thorn bringing up the rear. Here was the street, leading to other streets crowded with people celebrating the end of the Change and, incidentally, the Feast of Fools, that day between winter and spring that is recorded on no calendar. Usually, it was a festival of misrule, when powers secular and religious were set aside. How ironic that this year it marked the return of the king and the gods, both old and new. Whispers had grown to whoops and shouts, timorous groups to an excited mob.

  “Dance with us!” cried a plump matron in a nightgown bedecked with fluttering ribbons.

  She grabbed Jame’s hand. Jame in turn grabbed Brier’s. Thus they were pulled into one of many chains of celebrants that snaked back and forth down through the city’s byways, between the legs of stilt walkers, around men wearing the giant heads of gods. Jorin wound about the pounding feet to keep up, chirping in agitation and occasionally squalling when someone stepped on his toes. This was not his idea of fun. The chain broke and re-formed. Now Jame was holding hands with a baker, whose every step raised clouds of flour from his clothing. She freed herself while maintaining her grip on Brier. They plunged into another group who were tossing one of their number in a blanket. Their victim flew free in a mill of limbs. Brier caught him.

  “Wheee!” he said breathlessly, laughing, as she set him down. It was Byrne.

  “Your father is at the Rose Tower,” Jame told him.

  “Let him find his own blanket!”

  With that, he plunged back into the crowd.

  Another turn brought Jame face-to-face with the spy Hangnail, who looked terrified at having been hauled out into the open.

  “Who’s your new grandmaster?” she asked him.

  “That gray sneak again, gods damn it.”

  “See that you honor him, or I’ll come back to haunt you.”

  Hangnail gave her a look compounded of incredulity and horror. Then the dance whirled him away.

  They reached the main avenue where shopkeepers had set out their wares with the dawn. Cabbages and rutabagas now flew over the crowd, kicked from the sidelines. Jame ducked a flailing bunch of carrots. An onion hit Brier in the face. They broke away near the boulevard’s end and headed across the paved forecourt toward the lift cages. Of these, only one was at the top. However, its attendants had left their post to join in the general rejoicing.

  “Wonderful,” said Jame. “How do we get down?”

  “We could use the stairs, or you could take the lift. I can use the brake to regulate your descent—I think—and let gravity do the rest. It will be a bumpy ride, though.”

  “And you?”

  “Someone has to warn Harn Grip-hard.”

  Jame looked at the cage and gulped. Three thousand feet down.…

  “All right,” she said, and stepped into it, followed by the ounce.

  Brier fumbled for a minute with the winch a
nd crane, then used them to lift the cage up and out over the balustrade. She released the brake. The cage fell in a rush that left both girl and cat hovering in midair. Then the floor leaped up at them, nearly making their legs buckle. Down it plunged again, again stopping with a jerk as the brake reengaged. By such fits and starts they descended, falling the last ten feet for an abrupt and noisy arrival.

  Jame staggered out of the cage.

  “All right, kitten,” she said to the distraught ounce, trying to catch her breath. “All right.”

  She stumbled through the north gate and the tunnel that led under the official offices, then across the inner ward. The Knorth barracks had a gate that opened onto the ward, but it was sealed for repairs. Jame plunged into the streets that separated the various houses. Early rising cadets turned to stare at her as she passed.

  “Returned at last, have you?” Fash called from the Caineron’s eastern door. “What makes you think that we want you back?”

  Onyx-eyed’s second-in-command, Ran Spare, met her as she entered the Knorth by its western gate.

  “Where have you been?” he demanded.

  “I had business elsewhere.” Jame paused, trying not to pant. “Listen: the Karnids are coming!”

  He stared at her. “What?”

  “I saw them through the Eye of Kothifir, coming down the valley. It’s all done by mirrors, you know.”

  “You aren’t making sense.”

  Jame realized that he had never been exposed to the Eye. Really, Kencyr didn’t know Kothifir as well as they should, given how long they had been here.

  “They’re coming,” she said again. “My word of honor on it. Don’t you believe me?”

  “I have to, don’t I? Either that or declare our lordan mad. How many?”

  “More than I could count. Ten thousand? About ten miles out.”

  “We could match that, if we were all here,” said Ran Spare, thinking out loud. “As it is, there are fewer than two thousand cadets in camp. I’ll sound the alarm.”

  He left at a run, and Jame pounded up the stairs to her apartment, where Rue met her at the door, almost limp with relief.

  “Ten! Brier Iron-thorn said that you’d come back! What’s going on?”

  Jame told her.

  “Truly?” Her eyes widened.

  Then she started as the great horn outside Harn’s apartment blared out over the drowsy camp. One by one, the waking compounds added their alerts, the Knorth’s immediately above Jame’s quarters, on the roof. Below, feet hit the floor and cadets scrambled into their clothes. Damson appeared at the door, barefoot with her shirt unlaced. Quill and Niall were behind her.

  “What?” she asked, then registered Jame’s presence. “I should have known.”

  “Just answer it,” said Jame. “I’ll catch up as soon as I can.”

  They turned and ran.

  Now, where was…oh, there. Gaudaric had delivered the rhi-sar armor as he had promised, in bundles piled at the foot of her bed. Jame tore off the wrappings and arranged the pieces on her blanket over the mound formed by Jorin, who had crawled under the cover and was resolutely ignoring her.

  “They’re forming in the inner ward,” Rue reported from the northern balcony, hanging over it to look down. “Here come the other randon in camp. Ran Spare is talking to them. Some are arguing with him—no wonder when, from what you say, we’re outnumbered five to one. But as a Knorth he’s senior to the others.”

  The horns stopped, little Coman piping to the very end and finishing with a discordant, excited bleat.

  Rue turned back to the room. “What’s that?”

  Jame unwrapped a large, round parcel. It was, as she had suspected from its shape, a shield, made of braided rhi-sar leather laced back and forth over fire-hardened ironwood. Another package yielded up barding in the form of a quilted crupper to cover a horse’s flanks. She hadn’t forgotten Death’s-head’s last, unfortunate encounter with the fangs of the black Karnid mares. That left one bundle. Now, what was this?

  “Oh,” said Jame, and held up the rathorn ivory vest, which she had last seen on display in Gaudaric’s showroom. Morning light glimmered off its intricate, overlapping plates, each barely two fingers wide, drilled at the top and laced to a sturdy, padded jacket. Its collar was high, its skirt long enough to cover the upper thighs and divided for riding. It shifted in her hands, its scales softly clinking. A note tumbled from its folds.

  “I could see that the gorget fretted you,” Gaudaric had written. “Please accept this as a gift from my family and a grateful city.”

  “It’s beautiful,” breathed Rue, touching it with a fingertip.

  “Yes. It is. And now it has to be useful as well.”

  Jame regarded the armor laid out on her bed, trying to remember the arming sequence. One started at the feet.

  Ran Spare’s voice echoed below, distorted by stone walls. He was telling the cadets what they faced.

  Jame fumbled with the hooks that secured the back- and frontplates of the greaves, then remembered that she hadn’t buckled the heel plates onto the articulated boots. Quick, quick…

  Next the belt, to which the thigh guards were attached.

  “Now what?” Rue indicated the padded gambeson and the equally padded ivory vest.

  Should she have put on the former first? Too late now.

  “The vest.”

  Rue helped her on with it and laced it up the back. Then she dropped the breast- and backplates of the cuirass over Jame’s head. Below, Spare was ordering the cadets to the armory, then to the stables.

  …arm harnesses, spiked shoulder guards, gauntlets…

  Jame started to pick up the helmet, then remembered that she needed a weapon. Gaudaric hadn’t sent her a sword because he knew that she already had one. It hung from a hook in its leather sheath in the corner, a nicely balanced, sharp-edged piece of steel with the wavy patterns down its blade of many foldings. Her lack of skill with it was legendary. As the doggerel verse went:

  Swords are flying, better duck.

  Lady Jameth’s run amuck.

  She had never yet managed to hang on to a sword throughout an entire engagement.

  Beside it were her scythe-arms, those elegant double-pointed blades that functioned as extensions of her claws. Of the two weapons, Jame much preferred the latter, but they weren’t intended for mounted combat. Reluctantly, she took down the sword and strapped its belt around her waist.

  “Here.” She gave Rue the shield and barding to carry, herself taking Death’s-head’s high, heavy saddle and bitless bridle from their racks. “We need to get out the South Gate before the cadets catch up with us.”

  Horses neighed in excitement behind them in the ward as they hurried down the deserted street.

  Creak, creak, creak went Jame’s leather armor. It might not be as heavy as steel plate, but it certainly was noisy. And stiff. I’m a dragon, not a tortoise, she told herself, beginning to sweat and pant as the saddle’s weight dragged her down and its dangling stirrups tripped her up.

  Meanwhile, she called silently to the rathorn, but received only sullen silence in reply. She had visited Death’s-head as often as she could over the past year, but had had little to ask of him even though she sensed that he was growing bored and resentful. Now he was sulking.

  Bel-tairi met them beyond the gate, over the bridge. Jame slung the saddle onto the Whinno-hir’s back and tightened the girth as far as it would go but, designed for a much larger barrel, it hung loose. Rue grabbed the right stirrup as Jame swung herself up, then handed her the shield, bridle, and folded crupper while she balanced precariously.

  “I don’t think she can carry me too,” the cadet said, stepping back. “You go on.”

  Jame looked down at her, remembering how Rue had longed to prove herself to the rest of the Knorth barracks. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. Go.”

  She rode across the training field, into the dips and hollows carved by the Amar’s overflow. From ahead of
her came the sound of swift water, and of something noisily churning in it. Splashing around a curve, Bel knee-deep in the early spring runoff, she saw the rathorn in the shallows, vigorously rolling in the mud. He regained his feet with a snort and shook himself. His white coat was streaked with muck, his mane and tail tangled. Jame regarded him in dismay.

  “Oh, no. Not now.”

  She shifted to dismount, and felt the saddle slide sideways under her. There was barely time to kick free her feet before she hit the water. Trinity, but it was cold, even so far from the mountains that had given it birth. She surfaced sputtering to find both rathorn and Whinno-hir watching her. Death’s-head snorted again, as if in scornful laughter. Jame pushed dripping black hair out of her eyes and scowled at him.

  “Come here, you.”

  At first she thought he was going to sidle away from her, but she must have put more command into her voice than she had thought. He stood, blowing with impatience, as she sluiced water over his shoulders and raked her claws through his unkempt hair. Beyond the ravine, out of sight, horses thundered past, the cadets riding to war. Quick, quick…

  Death’s-head accepted the saddle, bridle, and crupper with an ill grace, but his ears had twitched at the sound of hooves. Something was afoot, something interesting.

  Jame swung up into the high saddle, feeling water drain down inside her armor and run out of the gap at her heels. She had barely gathered the reins when the rathorn was in motion. He trotted up the creek bed with his horn-crowned head held high and his nostrils flaring red, then clambered up its steep bank to the valley floor. The other riders were a cloud of dust to the west. Death’s-head started after them at a canter that quickly grew into a gallop. Jame resisted the urge to clutch his mane, instead tightening her legs around his barrel. At the touch of her heels, he went even faster.

  Some two miles from the camp, a mountain spur cut into the valley from the south while a recent massive landslide from the Rim pinched it to the north, leaving only a hundred feet clear between them. The cadets were racing for this bottleneck, the only place along the Betwixt where their inferior number might hold off the far larger Karnid horde.