The Sea of Time - eARC

by P. C. Hodgell

  “‘Rise up, Highlord of the Kencyrath,’ said the Arrin-ken to Glendar. ‘Your brother has forfeited all. Flee, man, flee, and we will follow.’” Caldane snorted. “Talk about a song providing a legal precedent! Gerridon lost the Kencyrath through his treachery. Who can doubt that? So what if someone copied such foolishness down? A touch of fire, and where is our precious Highlord then?”

  Kirien considered her words. She had long ago discovered that if she phrased things properly, people told her the truth, at least as they saw it.

  “If Torisen loses power, who takes it up?”

  “Why, the strongest, of course. Who but me?”

  “Based on how many Kendar are bound to you, I suppose, but how many actually belong to your seven established sons?”

  “Humph. They all still serve me. To whom can Torisen turn? I’d like to see that sister of his add to his numbers, not that he would ever let her. Even he isn’t that stupid.”

  “And if you claim the Highlord’s seat, will you also claim the Kenthiar?”

  Caldane turned away with a petulant scowl. “That filthy old thing. It’s already decapitated three legitimate Knorth highlords. Did you know that? No one even knows where it came from. Torisen would never have risked wearing it if he had had his father’s ring and sword to give him authority. Bloody show-off.”

  “In other words,” murmured Kirien, “no Kenthiar.”

  Caldane shot a discontented look out the window at the gathering gloom. “Where is that wretched Index? Am I going to have to burn the entire library?”

  “You wouldn’t!”

  “Ha. Try me. And I mean to incinerate that obscenity who calls herself Ashe, if I can lay hands on her.”

  Kirien caught her breath. The man was serious.

  “Do you have any idea,” she said carefully, “how much trouble you are in already? For that matter, what do you hope to gain by holding me hostage?”

  He glowered at her. “Wait and see.”

  “If you hurt me, the Jaran will declare war on you, maybe the Knorth, Brandan, and Danior as well. They take my rank seriously, even if you don’t, and they value the records held here at the college. Think. Where would we be without them?”

  “Free to create our own destiny. Don’t you see? The dead past shackles us. Our god abandoned us ages ago. What do we owe him? Even after all these years, this is still a new world, ours for the taking. That we haven’t already is an indictment of Knorth leadership. As for you, what if I were to take you back to Restormir, eh? My eldest son Grondin needs a new consort. He crushed the last one.”

  “This is the man so fat that he has to be trundled about his own house in a wheelbarrow, isn’t it? I don’t think so.”

  “I wasn’t asking for your consent, girl.”

  “D’you think that my uncle Jedrak would grant it?”

  “If I have you, what choice does he have?”

  Kirien regarded him curiously. She was used to academic discourse where contestants might disagree, but each side had a grasp of basic logic and of the shared concept of reality that bound the Kencyrath together. Caldane seemed to live in his own world, defined by his ambition and power. Thanks to his scrollsmen, he had half-glimpsed a possible shortcut to the Highlord’s seat. Now, however, what had once seemed simple was putting forth as many barbs as a porcupine. She read this in his heavy, anxious pout and in the gathering sheen of sweat on his brow.

  “I think,” she said, not unkindly, “that you should consult with the Caineron Matriarch about such matters.”

  Caldane shivered. “I don’t talk to my great-grandmother Cattila if I can help it. She only laughs at me.”

  Kirien’s hand began to twitch. “Excuse me,” she said, and groped inside her jacket for her tablet, only to remember that it had fallen into the abyss behind the college.

  Caldane was watching her. “Now what?”

  “Aunt Trishien is trying to contact me. I need something to write on.”

  He looked around impatiently. “This is a library, full of parchment.”

  “I do not intend to turn any of it into wastepaper, thank you.”

  But what else to use? There was an ink bottle on the table and a cup full of sharpened quills. Kirien snatched one of the latter, dipped it in the ink, and began to write on the tabletop. Caldane leaned over her shoulder, breathing heavily, trying to read the rough script. Trishien usually wrote with an elegant hand, but this time her letters jerked all over the tabletop. That and its wood grain almost defeated their transcription.

  Kirien lay down the pen and regarded her efforts. “There was an ambush at Wilden,” she deciphered. “Now, who could have arranged that? But Torisen escaped it. He should arrive here soon. With Kin-Slayer unsheathed.”

  VII

  The day dragged on for the Knorth vanguard. The River Road had been largely repaired since the earthquake that had shattered sections of it the previous year, but one still had to watch for rough patches. One would have supposed, Torisen thought sourly, that horses had more sense than to step into holes, but they still needed continual guidance.

  Meanwhile, muscles ached, stomachs growled, and eyes grew weary of the perpetual, featureless, white shroud that enfolded them.

  Corvine rode ahead.

  Trishien fretted that she had had no new messages from Kirien.

  Torisen tried to ease his throbbing leg.

  Yce finally tired of trotting beside him, assumed a nearly human shape, and jumped up onto his horse’s back behind the saddle, almost making the animal bolt.

  Now there were ten riders, counting the two wolvers, on eight mounts. Once or twice, Torisen thought he glimpsed a ninth horse and sometimes a tenth lagging behind them, downwind, but then the fog closed in again. He wondered how far back his one hundred-command was and if they had roused the friendly keeps as they had passed.

  The randon college at Tentir now lay behind them. It was growing dark, with the ghostly presence of a waxing crescent moon rising over the Snowthorns to the east. Torches were kindled and lit the way, but not very far. The fog was as dense as ever. Lightning glowered in its depths, followed moments later by sullen growls of thunder.

  Torisen found himself simmering about Caldane. The Caineron lord had been his enemy ever since Torisen had joined the Southern Host as a fifteen-year-old, sometimes in person, sometimes in the form of his sons, especially Genjar and Nusair, both long since dead. Caldane’s ambition had always been clear. To him, Honor’s Paradox was a way to avoid responsibility while reaping its rewards. He would gladly break the Kencyrath to his liking, as long as enough of it remained for him to rule. It was that recklessness that Torisen found chilling. Caldane was capable of anything.

  Corvine suddenly emerged from the fog.

  “Mount Alban lies some five miles ahead,” she reported. “There are lights in every window.”

  Sweet Trinity. Had Caldane set fire to the college?

  …I propose to visit Mount Alban at winter’s end to undertake some long overdue housecleaning. If I hear nothing from you before that time, I will assume that you agree with the measures that I intend to undertake…

  It would be Torisen’s fault as much as Caldane’s if Mount Alban came to grief this night.

  Torisen spurred forward, hearing the rest of his escort break into a rattling canter after him. He drew Kin-Slayer. To his left, Trishien gave a muffled cry. In grabbing for her tablet, she had nearly fallen off her mount. Burr seized her reins to lead her as she balanced the paper on her jolting pommel and scribbled a hasty, barely legible note on it to her niece.

  After that long, long ride, they hadn’t far to go, but it seemed to take forever. Finally, here was Mount Alban’s outer wall rising precipitously to the right, and Corvine had been correct: some seventy-five feet up, where the college’s windows began, rectangles of fire light bloomed in the murk.

  Torisen swung down at the door, nearly falling as his weight came to bear on his sore leg.

  Mount Alban’s double fr
ont gate was big enough to accommodate a full company of riders, but it was shut. However, a smaller door set into its right leaf swung open as they approached. A tall Kendar stood on the threshold—the college’s Director, Torisen saw, as he advanced at a hasty limp.

  “Welcome, Highlord. We had word that you were coming.”

  A slim, neat figure slipped past the Director. “Aunt Trishien! Oh, Ancestors be praised! And Kindrie!”

  “It pleases me to see you as well, Lordan,” said Torisen dryly as Kirien flung herself into his cousin’s arms. “Is the keep on fire?”

  “No. We are trying to signal Valantir, now that Lord Caineron has left us.”

  “He’s gone?”

  “As soon as he heard that you were nearly upon him and he couldn’t find any of his own men. Over the course of the afternoon, we ejected them all one by one from the college.” The Director gave a smile warped by the scars that crossed his face. “He should have remembered that many of the scholars here are former randon. Some of the traps that they devised were quite ingenuous.”

  “I’ll go fetch Index and Ashe,” said Kirien happily. “I may not have the key, but I can still shout through the keyhole. Someone, send to the kitchen to start dinner if they havn’t already. I expect that soon we will have a considerable company to entertain. Will you enter, my lord?”

  The lure of a hot meal and a place to sit that didn’t bounce drew Torisen forward, but he checked himself short of the door. Kin-Slayer hung from fingers already grown numb from tightly gripping it. Tradition said that the war-blade couldn’t be sheathed until it had killed.

  “Go ahead,” he told his followers. “I would like to…uh…stretch my legs first.” Stepping back, he disappeared into the mist.

  VIII

  Torisen walked away from Mount Alban, going downhill toward the Silver because that was the easiest path to follow. The college’s lit windows faded behind him. The crescent moon above the cloud cover shone only brightly enough to distinguish up from down while the fog pressed against his face like a dank, dark hand. Thunder rumbled closer. Despite it all, however, part of him felt exultant: at the first word of his approach, Caldane had panicked and fled. He had never expected that, although perhaps he should have. While no coward, Lord Caineron didn’t react well to surprises.

  Had Torisen really meant to use Kin-Slayer, though? All too well, he knew what a threat the sword represented. However, the college had appeared to be in danger. He hadn’t stopped to think.

  For that matter, why had he brought the sword with him in the first place? Presumably, as an emblem of his power as Highlord, should Caldane choose to contest it. When he had first declared himself Ganth’s son and heir, he had had nothing to prove such a claim except for his willingness to wear that potentially lethal silver collar known as the Kenthiar. Then Jame had brought him his father’s emerald signet ring and fabled sword, both of which were said to perform miracles for their rightful owner.

  “Wear the ring on the same hand that wields the sword,” his sister had told him.

  She had also said something about the shattered blade having been reforged in Perimal Darkling, unlikely as that sounded.

  Fact or fantasy? Similar questions had brought Caldane to Mount Alban in the first place.

  Torisen had once combined the sword and ring to hack through a mirror and the wall from which it had hung. He had been half out of his mind at the time and for many days thereafter. When he had finally tried to resheathe the sword, he had found that he couldn’t even release it—that is, until he had pried its hilt loose from his grip by breaking three of his fingers. That had been nearly two years ago. He hadn’t touched the damned thing since. Was it an accident that even now he carried the blade in his right hand and wore the ring on his left? Perhaps that meant they were both inert and no threat to anyone, at least at the moment. He could test that hypothesis by trying to sheathe the sword or by switching it to his ring hand, but he hesitated to do either.

  Ganth jeered at him from behind the locked door in his soul-image. Do you expect to claim my power when you refuse to accept the responsibility that comes with it? And you call yourself my son.

  “Shut up,” Torisen muttered to himself. “Shut up, shut up.”

  Downhill, a glow appeared. Torisen thought at first that it was a pocket of weirding, but it pulsed strangely and an odd, two-noted sound came out of it. As he approached, he recognized the site of the hill fort ruins that lay between Mount Alban and the river. Stepping between fallen blocks, he found himself in a cave of sickly light cut out of the fog. The cavity took the internal shape of the hall it once had been, circular, some forty feet across. Someone sat on a rock on its far side, sharpening iron claws with a whetstone and humming to himself. It was from him that the light emanated. He glanced up at Torisen with feverish blue eyes from under a ragged thatch of white hair.

  “Well, sit,” the Gnasher said. “Neither of us wants to spring directly into battle, I suppose, although that will come soon enough.”

  Torisen lowered himself onto a block. Mindful that it would soon begin to stiffen but seeing no other recourse, he stretched out his sore leg. Kin-Slayer’s pattern-woven blade rippled in the peculiar light as he grounded its point beside his sound foot.

  The man he faced wore dirty homespun probably taken from one of the shepherds whom he had slain near Gothregor. One pant leg had been ripped off above the knee. Below, bent at an unnatural angle, was a wolf’s hind leg, its shattered tibia lancing out through discolored, matted fur. The stench of gangrene emanated from it. Clearly, the wolver king of the Deep Weald could not have run all the way from Gothregor in such a condition.

  “You were the rider I saw lagging behind us,” said Torisen.

  “Between your vanguard and your growing army, yes. How do you think the latter will feel about having come all this way for nothing? They will probably laugh at you, although to tell the truth I didn’t think the fat man would run away like that. Oh, and there was someone else close on my heels. A genuine postrider, I think. Were you expecting one from Kothifir?”

  Torisen was, of course, but he put that out of his mind for the time being.

  “So, now what?” he asked.

  The Gnasher thoughtfully drew a long, jagged nail across the whetstone.

  Rasp, rasp, rasp…

  “The easiest thing would be for you to give me my daughter—Yce, d’you call her? A pretty name, although it doesn’t do to grow attached. Then we both could go home.”

  “No,” said Torisen.

  “Is that you speaking, or your father? When we last met, you almost turned to him for help. I could feel your hand on the latch to his prison. That’s his sword, isn’t it?”

  Torisen’s hand rested on the pommel. He gently twisted it back and forth so that the blade’s point bit into the old keep’s cracked paving.

  “You don’t want to face Kin-Slayer,” he said, “whoever wields it. Nor do you want to confront my father. Remember how the mere sound of his foot on the stair turned you into a cringing pup.”

  “And you into a cowering boy.” The Gnasher grinned. His teeth were very sharp. “I have grown since then. Have you? No one becomes a man until he has put his father into the ground or, in my case, into the stew pot. I told you, all those years ago, that you had to kill your sire. But you haven’t. I smell the stink of his blood in you.”

  Torisen sensed Ganth’s presence too, waiting, listening.

  Scree…went Kin-Slayer’s point, uprooting shards of pavement with a spray of dislodged soil. Screee…

  “Then too,” said the Gnasher meditatively, “I learned my lesson from King Kruin, better than he did himself. Name an heir and someday he will take your place. My offspring are all dead, except for this last one. Her death will give me the strength to heal and to live on.”

  “Forever?”

  “Perhaps.”

  He put aside the stone, stretched, and yawned. Jaws gaped. Hinges cracked. Hands became huge paws as they st
retched out to touch the ground. The shepherd’s clothes ripped down the back and fell away. He was as big as ever, the size of a small horse, but gaunt with thickly matted fur, and the light his soul cast flared a sickly yellow.

  “You see how an heir’s very existence poisons me. Learn from it. They say that you have named your sister as your successor. That was foolish. She may seem hardly more than a mouthful, but she has unexpected qualities. How long can you keep a step ahead of her, eh? Oh, your father would laugh to see you now. Can’t you hear him?”

  What Torisen heard were distant voices calling his name. Would his people find him in this murk? Did he want them to?

  The grass behind him rustled. Grimly slipped out of it to his right, Yce to his left, both in their complete furs.

  “Ah,” breathed the Gnasher.

  “Grimly, take her away,” Torisen said over his shoulder to his friend.

  “No.”

  They all looked at Yce. None of them had ever heard her speak before.

  “My father,” she said, showing white teeth. “My fight.”

  “Ah,” said the Gnasher again, with a breath of laughter. “Ah, ha, ha, ha…”

  Torisen started to rise, but Grimly slipped forward to block him. “Wait.”

  The two wolvers of the Deep Weald circled each other within the ring of ancient stones. One was barely half the size of the other, but she moved with fluid grace while he dragged his shattered limb behind him. He lunged at her, jaws agape, and bowled her over. Pinning her with his weight, he snapped at her throat, but missed. She twisted under him. Her teeth closed on his ear and shredded it as he reared back.

  “You little bitch!”

  Yce grinned.

  He came at her again, half-blinded by a mask of blood. She ducked under his charge and snapped sideways at his sound hind leg as he passed. Bones crunched. The Gnasher screamed and dragged himself around to face her with iron fingernails that gouged into the ancient pavement.

  “All right,” he panted, raising himself. “Meet your siblings.”

  Whorls of light gathered around him, tracing the patterns in his ragged coat. The line of an infant jaw, the curve of a muzzle, blue eyes barely open, small paws, scrabbling… How many pups he must have slain and devoured, litter upon litter. They covered him now like a moving coat, their edges limned with a purer light than his own. Milk teeth bared, and bit. The wolver king yelped with surprise and pain as red tears opened in his hide. He was bleeding from a dozen gashes, a hundred, and still those tiny teeth worried into his flesh, laying bare muscle, gnawing at bone.