The Sea of Time - eARC

by P. C. Hodgell

  No one saw this as the new, permanent state. Never before had a Change lasted so long, but eventually it would end and new leaders, divinely chosen, would emerge. It was impossible to guarantee who they would be, but there was some evidence that those in whom others had faith had the best chance. Consequently a scramble was now on in many quarters to attract followers.

  Needham, the former master of the silk merchants, clearly aimed to become the next Lord Merchandy. In this he was all the more desperate since the Wastes were the only source of silken goods and that trade had ended, probably forever. It was common knowledge that his assassins were hunting for Mercer. So far, however, the Undercliff had protected the former guild lord. Although Kroaky hadn’t been seen since the Change began, Fang and her urchins seemed to be making it a game to spot and plague these would-be killers—without endangering themselves, Jame hoped. Then again, from what she had seen of Kothifir’s assassins, they were a limited threat.

  Lady Professionate had fewer rivals. Most (excluding her family) saw it as a universal good that a healer should have special powers and wished her well, but she stayed in hiding to nurse her mentor.

  As for Ruso, Lord Artifice, many guild masters would have contended for his position, but most of them were too busy fighting off challengers within their own houses. In the meantime, he had been seen working in Iron Gauntlet’s shop on strange creations run by gears and wheels. As Gaudaric’s apprentice had said, no one with a true vocation wanted to sit idle.

  Jame looked out over the domed rooftops to the Rose Tower. Krothen might have his share of enemies among the ruling class, but his loss was felt in the very fabric of the city. From the start, buildings had begun to collapse in the ruinous outer rings. Now the destruction was creeping inward as the limestone that supported the Overcliff gave way here and there to the weight of its soaring towers. For that matter, several lesser towers had broken off at the decrepit level formerly obscured and supported by clouds, raining destruction on the streets below. Kothifir clearly needed its king.

  But “Which king?” Prince Ton and his mother Lady Amantine asked. He too was seeking followers among the nobility, hoping that he could overthrow his uncle when the Change ended. He at least could sire an heir. Krothen, he claimed, couldn’t, or at least not without crushing his would-be consort.

  Gaudaric bowed her and Jorin out of his private workshop. Below, members of the Armorers’ Guild pursued their craft as if everything were normal, except for their children playing at their feet.

  Jame paused as usual in the display room to admire the rathorn ivory vest with its intricate scale armor and high, elegant collar. Would it jab her in the throat the way the new gorget did? Its tiny scales looked as supple as a serpent’s belly. But then Gaudaric had said that the rhi-sar leather would soften with use, so she shouldn’t complain.

  Outside, the sun was setting in a crimson haze. Sand eddied in ripples down the street and formed mounds in corners, blown from the south now that Kothifir had lost the protection of the Tishooo. How long before the next storm—or two, or three—buried the city altogether? Already the Host’s camp in the valley below was having problems, as were the farmers with clogged irrigation ditches and wells.

  Meanwhile, it still seemed odd to see not circling clouds but the tops of towers, as if heaven had been dragged down to earth, quite literally in some cases. Debris littered the street from the recent partial collapse of a neighboring spire, surely the source of the earlier crash. Like many others, it had broken off at the cloud level. Stone blocks, broken furniture, clothes and trinkets…some minor noblewoman’s bedchamber spilled its treasures across the street. Urchins picked through the ruins, strips of cloth wound around their faces against a lingering cloud of dust.

  One scavenger paused, listening, then another. Suddenly all were in flight.

  Jame squinted into the dust cloud. Forms moved there, ghostlike, approaching. What in Perimal’s name…?

  Someone grabbed her arm. She spun around and nearly struck down the dingy figure that clung to her.

  “Graykin! I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  “Save me!” her servant gasped, his grip tightening. “Here they come!”

  “Who…”

  But in a moment she guessed. Shabby, hooded forms emerged from the dust, a dozen, two dozen, more. She could clearly see those whom she looked directly at, but a quick turn of her head, to the left, to the right, revealed more of them hidden from her peripheral vision. The Intelligencers’ Guild had come for its former master.

  Hangnail stepped to the fore. “We have been watching you come and go for days, Talisman, knowing that he would reveal himself to you sooner or later. Now leave. This is no business of yours.”

  Graykin gulped, released his grip, and stepped away from Jame. “He’s right, lady. There are too many of them.”

  Jame glanced at his white, set face, impressed despite herself.

  “Give us the sash,” said Hangnail.

  The Southron’s hands fluttered to his waist. The strip of silk there was now more gray than white, but he clung to it as he had these many long days, symbol that it was of the first real power he had ever possessed. “No.”

  “It means nothing until the crisis ends,” Jame told him. “Let them have it. You can reclaim it later, perhaps.”

  Graykin bit his lip, then fumbled with the knot. “All right,” he said, almost in tears. “Take the filthy thing.”

  He balled up the sash and threw it. The entire guild swayed forward, but it was Hangnail who snatched it out of the air. The spy held the silk for a moment, clutched tight to his chest, snarling at those who would have taken it from him. Then he slipped it into a pocket. His eyes rose, glittering in the shadow of his hood.

  “Do you think we would risk it ever falling into your clutches again, outsider?”

  His hand emerged from his cloak holding a knife. More glinted all around him. In this, at least, they were unified. There are too many of them, Graykin had said. He was right.

  Footsteps approached and voices sounded, speaking Kens.

  The Intelligencers’ Guild melted away.

  A ten-command appeared out of the growing gloom. Randir, Jame noted.

  “Having trouble?” asked the leader, a third-year randon cadet. What was his name? Ah, Shrike.

  “A bit,” Jame admitted as Graykin shrank back out of sight into Gaudaric’s doorway. She recognized the cadet as one bound not to Rawneth but to some other Randir Highborn. Curious, how one never met one bound to Kenan, Lord Randir, himself. “Still no word from your war-leader or Shade?”

  “Ran Frost says that Shade must have followed Ran Awl back to the Riverland.”

  “Assuming that’s where Ran Awl went.”

  “Yes. Assuming. But where else could she have gone?”

  That indeed was the question, to which so far Jame had no answer. Would the Randir even say if Awl and Shade arrived at Wilden? That secretive house liked to conceal its comings and goings from outsiders, perhaps even from members of its own community not within the inner circle.

  “We’re fresh off duty guarding Krothen’s treasure towers,” said Shrike. “Prince Ton and Master Needham are both advocating that their wealth be distributed throughout the city—this, assuming that either the prince or Master Silk Purse can seize control of said towers. As you can imagine, their claims and promises have attracted a lot of attention.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  At the moment, whoever controlled those towers controlled Kothifir. Krothen had gained vast wealth and considerable ill will over the years by claiming the best of the city’s spoils, but out of them came the Host’s pay. Jame could see both why the former god-king wanted his treasures protected and why the Host had a vested interest in their safety. It did seem unfair, though, if the city suffered as a result.

  “The word is out to all the guards,” said Shrike. “King Krothen wants to see you.”

  That was unexpected.

 
; “Why?” Jame asked, adding, “Oh, never mind,” when the Randir shrugged. “I’d better go. First, a favor: will you escort this man to the Knorth barracks on the way to your own?”

  She reached into the shadows and drew out a reluctant Graykin. Shrike regarded him with a curled lip. “Your personal spy? Oh yes, we know who and what this fellow is.”

  Not entirely, thought Jame. No one knew or even suspected that Graykin was bound to her. To reveal that would be to expose a major breach of custom, never mind that Rawneth bound Kendar all the time or that Jame herself had just bound Brier Iron-thorn.

  It was tempting to touch the thread of their new connection. What was Brier doing now? What was she thinking and feeling? But the Southron’s habitual reticence made Jame hesitate to intrude. She only hoped that she was giving the Kendar the support that she needed, unlike her brother. Tori didn’t seem to realize that some Kencyr required something to lean on. Ancestors knew, Jame herself would sometimes have liked such support. It was hard to stand alone. At least, there had been no repetition of Brier’s excesses on the night that Paper Crown’s tower had burned and Kalan’s baby had fallen to its death.

  “And why should we oblige you in this slight matter?” Shrike was saying with a smile.

  Oh yes. There was also Graykin, who leaned on her all too heavily.

  Behind the Randir, his ten-command stirred and chuckled.

  “For the novelty of it, perhaps?” said Jame, stifling a flash of irritation. Why could one never deal freely with the Randir, except for Shade and Randiroc? “How often do you have the chance to grant a Knorth anything?”

  “Say ‘please.’”

  “I thought that was implied. Please.”

  “Very well. Come along, you.”

  Graykin shot her a glance, then turned away, straightening. He disappeared with the Randir, a shabby, oddly dignified figure, into the falling night.

  And now, thought Jame, for Krothen.

  II

  In better days, the Rose Tower was a hive of activity. Now it drowsed, its lower rooms untenanted.

  It had also suffered damage without the god-king to maintain it. For one thing, that subtle twist in its construction seemed more pronounced so that Jame, walking up the spiral stair, felt as if she was about to pitch out over the balustrade into space. For another, the stone roses that rambled around the window frames and up the balusters crumbled at her touch. At the level of the absent clouds, they had worn away altogether, leaving pocked stone, and the marble steps were hollowed out with use.

  Here was the level at which guards usually stood. Not now. Above, curtains as ragged as cobwebs fumbled at the windowsills of Krothen’s apartment. Inside, chaos.

  However, Krothen still had servants, as Jame found when she climbed to the top.

  “Welcome,” said a wheezing voice.

  Labored breath seemed to fill the circular room, rasping and rattling within its stone shell. It was dim and hot inside, despite a cool evening breeze edging around the marble petals, and it stank.

  As her eyes adjusted, Jame made out a great mass of flesh slumped on the dais. The Krothen of old had been obese beyond reason, but he had also seemed oddly buoyant, no doubt thanks to his god-given power. Now, deserted by it, his flesh dragged him down in heavy, sagging folds as if he were a sculpture of butter left out in the sun. Servants had removed a side panel of his white brocade robe. One was struggling to hold up a pallid slab of fat while another sponged the exposed crevasse with lavender water.

  “Forgive me for not rising to greet you,” said the former king with a twisted smile that more closely resembled a grimace. “My skin tears if I move. Ah, mortality. It’s killing me, you know.”

  What to say to that? Jame kept a respectful silence and waited.

  “I miss my acrobats and clowns,” he said peevishly, pausing between sentences to gasp. “What, am I never to have any fun again? I even miss that stodgy prick, my high priest. He’s saying that I’ve lost the favor of the gods, you know. What gods? I was one. I will be again. That’s why these few servants have stayed. They still have faith in me. Do you?”

  “I do,” said Jame, surprised to find that this was true. “At least as king.”

  He wheezed a laugh. “I forgot. You Kencyr and your one true god, whom you hate. Do the Karnids love their precious prophet or only fear him? What about the Witch King of Nekrien? No matter. Their followers believe in them, and belief is power.”

  That certainly was the case in Tai-tastigon, thought Jame, where gods died along with the last of their worshippers. For that matter, she suspected that even in his current state Krothen had more followers than the few in this room. After all, common folk spoke more often of his return to power than of his nephew and possible successor, Prince Ton.

  “To make it worse,” he continued, “Gemma is bestirring itself. They’ve always envied our prosperity. Now that they see us weak, how long before they rise up to strike? Ah, their emissary was right: my arrogance may yet come back to haunt my people. Hanging their raiders certainly didn’t help, even if they did indirectly cause a seeker’s death. And I had to endure their bodies dangling in front of my windows.”

  “What can I do for you, your majesty?”

  “Just this: find that cursed temple of yours and start it up again.”

  She should have guessed that Krothen, no fool, knew the ultimate source of his power.

  “When it first failed, I went to look for it,” she said. “The tower built around it has collapsed. It must be buried in the ruins, perhaps shrunk too small to find.”

  Krothen quivered. Jame wondered if he was going to be sick. No, the entire tower was shaking. A stone rose petal split with a sharp report, then another. Cracks etched the pale green chalcedony floor. The servant lost his grip on the slippery fold of flesh which he had been supporting and it closed over his companion’s hand with a smack. The trapped man stifled a cry of pain and tried to pull free, but couldn’t. Krothen’s eyes rolled up in his head until only the whites showed. His mouth gaped, wide, wider. Something pale emerged: fingers, prying the plump lips further open, cracking their corners. Inside, behind rows of teeth, a face appeared. Kroaky.

  “I can’t get out,” he gasped. “I can’t get out. Help us!”

  Krothen shuddered again. Sweat ran down his multiple chins as if over a waterfall and his face was a patchy greenish-white. He reached up and stuffed his younger self’s fingers and face back down his throat. Then, with a mighty gulp, he swallowed them.

  The Rose Tower stopped swaying. The servant at last pulled free his hand and retreated, cradling broken fingers. Krothen gave a sickly smile.

  “Look again,” he said. “Please.”

  III

  The rickety structure surrounding the Kencyr temple had collapsed more or less in place, filling the stump of its shell with a jumble of broken floorboards, rafters, and stones. The resulting pile was at least ninety feet across and three times Jame’s height. She regarded it dubiously from across the street, Jorin huddled close at her side. Nothing had changed since she had last been here, just after the winter solstice. Then as now, her sixth sense gave her not so much as a twinge, yet the dormant temple was presumably somewhere under that mass of wreckage, perhaps reaching nearly to its top, perhaps shrunken to the size of a grain of sand at its bottom. Nothing would prove which except shifting through the entire lot.

  When she had first seen the scope of destruction, she had turned her back on it. The temple was the priests’ business. They had said so, emphatically. Therefore, let them deal with it. But half a season had passed since then, and they had done nothing.

  Jame remembered the priests at Karkinaroth who, shut up in their temple, had died of hunger and thirst. Marc had tried to free them. Was she so much more callous than her old Kendar friend? If she hadn’t freed her cousin Kindrie from their god’s theocracy, he might have been in there. However reluctant she was to learn, experience was beginning to teach her that not all priests were a
like.

  Feet shuffled on the sandy road and Jorin growled. Jame turned quickly to confront a blond, tattered figure in the brown robe of an acolyte.

  “You,” she said to Dorin, son of Denek, son of Dinnit Dun-eyed. “So you’re the guard they left outside the temple. Are the rest inside?”

  “Yes.” He sounded dazed, as if he were having trouble bringing her into focus. Whom else had he seen over the past fifty-odd days of isolation, and what had that meant to someone accustomed to the hive mentality of the priesthood? “Grandfather, all the others, trapped…”

  “Do they at least have provisions sealed in with them?”

  He shook himself, coming to life a little and regaining a shade of his normal haughty nature. “D’you think we’re fools? The temple is unstable. This could have happened at any time, so of course they do. Some. But not enough to last all this time.” Again his manner and voice cracked. “We’ve got to get them out!”

  They couldn’t help what they were, Jame thought, fashioned by a god who didn’t care.

  She looked up at the frail sickle of a moon declining to the west overhead. “In this light, we might easily miss them, and there are only two of us. Tomorrow morning, early, I’ll bring my ten-command and heavy tackle.”

  “No!”

  He grabbed her arm. She could feel the nervous tremor of his flesh through her own. Instinct told her to shake him off, but she restrained herself.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “The temple isn’t here. Just after it shrank, before the tower collapsed, they came and took it.”

  “Who did?”

  “Men in black, muffled to the eyes in black cheches.”

  Jame scrambled through images and came up, incredulously, with the memory of the Tishooo’s capture during the winter solstice.

  “D’you mean…Karnids?”

  His eyes slid away from her own. “They might have been.”

  Was it possible? Both the Tishooo and the Kothifir temple? What were Urakarn and its precious prophet playing at?

  Jame envisioned a map of the Wastes. “It will take…what, ten days to follow them?”