The Sea of Time

by P. C. Hodgell

  “Heartbroken, I say!” boomed the princess, glowering at her.

  Krothen spoke behind a plump hand to the priest.

  “Your Mellifluous Highness,” said the latter, with a respectful bow. “My lord wonders if Lady Cella’s heart was truly in this proposal. It was his understanding that she prefers to play with her . . . er . . . doll.”

  The lady in question nodded so vigorously that her veil fluttered up, revealing a middle-aged face painted white, with buck teeth, protruding eyes, and no chin to speak of.

  “Then go,” Krothen said to her in a nasal, not unkind voice. “Play.”

  She gave a hoot of glee, grabbed the handsome boy by the hand, and scrambled off down the stairs, pursued by the servant. Two flights down they collided with someone. The new arrival could be heard lumbering up the stairs in their wake.

  “Well!” said Amantine, drawing herself up and swaying ominously. “You still need an heir, Nephew. What will happen to this city after you are gone?”

  “Where am I going, Aunt? Perhaps, like my father, I choose to stay.”

  The princess stomped, and lost her balance. Servants rushed to prop her up.

  “What my brother Kruin did was a disaster to his family. Need I remind you that on the male side only you and my dear son Ton are left? Here he comes now, to receive your blessing.”

  A figure loomed, wheezing, in the doorway. Unable to enter it head-on, he turned sideways and sidled in, disarranging a coat of bright pink satin as rich as the frosting on a cake. While nowhere nearly as gross as Krothen, the newcomer could easily have made up three men, although he was hardly more than a boy.

  “Cousin,” he said, still breathing hard and sounding petulant. “Why you have to live . . . at the top . . . of a damned tower . . .”

  Krothen stopped him with a raised hand. “Please,” he said. “Eat.”

  A servant offered the boy a platter of locust drizzled with honey.

  “Ton-ton, no,” said his mother sharply.

  He waved her off, took a dripping insect, and defiantly jammed it into his mouth. Krothen ate another candied slug. Prince Ton grabbed two locusts. Everyone watched first one and then the other as the royal cousins continued to match each other, insect against mollusk.

  Ton started to turn green. Cheeks bulging, insectile legs a bristle between plump lips, he made a frantic gesture. A lackey ran up to him carrying a golden bucket into which he was copiously sick. His mother led him away with a grip on his ear that steadied her as much as it chastised him. Those above could hear her scolding her son all the way down the stairs.

  Krothen sighed and flipped a fat, dismissive hand at Jame.

  As he scooped up the remaining slugs and shoveled them into his mouth, she turned to go, bemused. Had the god-king of Kothifir just winked at her?

  II

  SEVERAL TURNS DOWN THE STAIR, out of sight from above and below, Jame paused, thinking. Her call on Krothen had only really been an excuse to visit the Overcliff; her true mission was as yet unfulfilled. In the spring she had sent her half-breed servant Graykin south ahead of her to gather information. He should know by now that she had reached the Host’s camp and have reported to her, but no sign of him had she seen. The bond between them told her that he at least wasn’t in severe distress. Instead she felt echoes of anger and frustration when she thought about him. However, would anyone tell the Knorth Lordan what she needed to know? It was time for a change—one she had been looking forward to for a long time.

  Jame stripped off her gray dress coat and reversed it. The tailor who had sewn it had asked why she wanted a finished black lining, but she had only smiled. It was a poor substitute for the knife-fighter’s d’hen, still stowed in her luggage, but at least it was the right color. Unwrapping the tight cheche came as a relief to her burnt, flaking forehead. She considered winding the cloth around her waist, but guessed from Gaudaric’s white sash that to do so would mean something unintended, so instead she rolled it up and stuffed it into her jacket. From an inside pocket came a black cap. The gloves she already wore.

  A sense of relief and release swept over her, as if at the shedding of too tight a garment. As much as she enjoyed being a randon cadet, this freedom was an older love.

  “Welcome back, Talisman,” she breathed.

  No one had yet come up or down the tower, but someone was bound to soon. Were those voices ascending? Time to be gone.

  She had stopped near one of the suspension bridges leading to the nearest palace complex above the clouds. She stepped off onto it over the fleecy backs of clouds. At its lowest point, wisps curled over the steps and it swung gently underfoot. A murmur rose from the plaza far below as if from a distant sea lapping around the Rose Tower’s base.

  The structure she approached now was another tower topped with an oversized cupola. The sun glowed off sheets of riveted copper and flashed from large, round windows like portholes, ringed with gold. A second smaller glass cupola sat on top like a blister, no doubt giving light to the chamber below. Smoke trickled up the brazen shoulders along with the sound of hammers. Inside, someone was bellowing.

  “. . . of all the incompetent, block-headed fools . . .”

  Jame stepped off the bridge onto a balcony. One of the round windows fronted it, its glass disc tilted open a crack vertically. She edged inside, emerging behind a high-backed chair which in turn was drawn up to a huge desk covered with paper work. Other tables around the circular room were piled high with scraps of disjointed armor and tools.

  In the center of the room, a ruddy, bearded man in burnished half-armor over a white tunic was roaring at a cringing apprentice. His voice made all the surrounding metal ring. Some of it clanged to the floor and tried to crawl away.

  “You sodding idiot, couldn’t you see that you had the thing on backward?”

  Between the two was a large dog in fully articulated plate armor, trying wretchedly to scratch itself. Not only was steel in the way, but also its front and rear legs appeared to have been transposed.

  Jame’s eyebrows raised. Itchy skin be damned. How could it even survive, configured like that?

  The ruddy man grabbed the ’prentice and shook him until his cap tumbled over his eyes and his teeth chattered.

  “Out of my sight, you . . . you loose screw!”

  He flung the man away, straight into a hole against the opposite wall. A complicated, diminishing clatter followed—thumps and yelps generally associated with someone falling down a long flight of stairs.

  Lord Artifice, for surely it was he, turned to consider the unfortunate canine.

  “Now, how am I going to sort you out?”

  He picked up a tool, knelt, and started popping rivets at the shoulder and hip seams. The steel torso came free. He lifted it off its framework and reversed it. There didn’t appear to be a dog inside after all, only a dog-shaped hollow.

  He patted its metal back, which rang hollowly. “Better? Now what’s the matter?”

  The creature, whatever it was, had begun to sniff and snarl—a curiously echoing sound within its metal shell. Its head swung toward the chair behind which Jame crouched, and it lunged toward her. Jame broke cover.

  Ruso straightened with a roar, his red beard again abristle, emitting random sparks. “Who are you, skulking there? An assassin? Ha! Don’t you know that you can’t kill a guild lord?”

  Jame kicked the oncoming creature, catching it in the snout and jarring its head askew. It came at her again, slantwise, and again she struck, this time knocking the unsecured torso off its legs, which continued to scrabble blindly forward. Ruso tried to grab her. She felt the heat of his body, but slid past with a water-flowing move that raised steam between them, and rushed down the stairs. Below, on a landing, a knot of people had gathered around the fallen apprentice, helping him up. Jame swerved to a window, thrust it open, and plunged out onto a lower balcony swallowed by the clouds. Here was another catwalk. Without hesitation, she took it. The shouts died behind her as if muffled wi
th a steaming towel.

  The world turned a ghostly gray out of which walls and blank windows loomed seemingly at random. A few showed furtive signs of life, but most appeared to be abandoned. Jame thought that she was moving westward, but soon wasn’t so sure. Tower succeeded tower, first ovoid, then with corners. Some she skirted, others she entered by one window only to leave by the next. Interior spaces no longer corresponded to outer dimensions. A reed-thin tower could take what felt like forever to circumnavigate while a broad edifice might take mere steps to cross. All were dark, dusty, and dank, with simmering heat pressing down from above. The going underfoot became more and more decrepit. Window sills crumbled; floors sagged; catwalks creaked and splintered underfoot.

  Something tugged unpleasantly at Jame’s sixth sense, like a thread snagging a broken tooth. It wasn’t the trail she had hoped for, but she followed it almost perforce, as if toward the stench of home.

  In a great square of a tower open to the sky, the temple rose up out of shattered floors so that only its upper reaches were visible from above. These at first looked snapped off. Then one realized that they had never been finished. The air rising from within wavered with power as if with heat, causing the hair on the back of Jame’s neck to prickle. So did a low, continuous vibration that made the dust at her feet skitter across the boards. This, then, was the Kothifir temple of the Three-Faced God of her own people, although avoided by all except its priests. Jame saw none of the latter, but assumed that they must be there somewhere, perhaps below: otherwise, the temple’s power would have run amuck.

  She remembered her first sight of the Tai-tastigon temple in its circle of devastation, in that city teeming with godlings. The Kencyrath was monotheistic, believing only in he (or she, or it) of the three faces who had bound the Three People together and set them against Perimal Darkling on the long path of so many bitter defeats down the Chain of Creation from threshold world to world. Rathillien was the last of these in that here the mysterious temple Builders had died, leaving this, their last work, incomplete and unstable. If the Kencyrath was forced to move on again, assuming it could, it would finally place itself beyond its god. Some might say, “Good!” But even Jame, who hated her absentee divinity, felt oddly naked at the thought of losing him forever.

  Tai-tastigon’s New Pantheon “gods” had turned out to owe their existence to the mindless excess energy of the Kencyr temple as shaped by the faith of their worshippers. Jame wondered if there were any gods here besides Krothen, although Ancestors knew there was enough of him to soak up any amount of power. The closest thing she had seen so far other than he was Lord Artifice. There, surely, was power of some sort.

  Ironic, that only the natives of Rathillien seemed to benefit from the Three-Faced God. Perhaps on other worlds his power had helped the Kencyrath, but here it existed only as a threat to them.

  Yet, was that entirely true? Jame sensed the patterns in it as they plucked at her nerves, muscles, and will. She had directed them before with the Great Dance such as the priests used, causing the explosive untempling of the Tastigon gods. She could dance them now as a potential Tyr-ridan, but only as the Third Face of God, That-Which-Destroys.

  And what would you destroy this time, Jamethiel Priest’s-bane? Kothifir, the Kencyrath, yourself?

  A foot shuffled on the debris behind her. Jame spun around to confront a young, blond acolyte in a brown robe.

  “Who are you?” he demanded. “Why are you spying on us?” He peered at her more closely. “Why, you’re Kencyr. That half-breed sneak we’ve heard about, probably.”

  Jame didn’t like being confused with Graykin, much less the boy’s snotty manner or the way he drew back as if to avoid contact with something unclean. Then the floor gave slightly underfoot. It felt rotten. The temple’s rogue power must be gnawing continually at it.

  The boy smiled. “I should let you fall. The next floor might stop you, or maybe not. It’s a long way down.”

  The spar of a rafter jutted out overhead. Jame sprang and caught it just as the floor dropped away beneath her. The beam felt none too solid either and gave an ominous crack. The boy laughed. Jame launched herself at the doorway where he stood and knocked him back through it into a mural stair. The rafter snapped and plummeted like a spear. Angry shouts below greeted its descent.

  “Get off of me, you filth!” the boy snarled, wriggling under her and scrabbling at her jacket front. His expression changed. “Why, you’re a girl!”

  Jame reared back, driving a knee into his groin in the process. “Surprise.”

  He was, she supposed, a year or two younger than she, but that didn’t excuse bad manners. Speaking of which . . .

  “I suppose I had better greet your high priest while I’m here.”

  Sulky and limping, he led her down the mural stair past doorways gaping on shattered floors and the looming blackness within. It was the third Kencyr temple that Jame had seen, and no two of them had been alike. The mysterious Builders seemed to enjoy variety. This one resembled a sheer, black pyramid with its top missing. A clutch of priests had gathered, exclaiming angrily, at its foot around the fallen beam and the mound of debris it had brought down. At least it hadn’t landed on anyone, as far as Jame could tell.

  “Grandfather.” The boy tugged at a black sleeve. “We have company.”

  The high priest swung around and glared in Jame’s general direction. His eyes, under tangled white brows, were clouded over with milky cataracts. How odd that he hadn’t consulted one of the order’s many healers. Perhaps none were available this far south. “And who might that be, eh?”

  Jame offered him a half-hearted salute which, in any event, he couldn’t see. “The Talisman, sir.”

  As soon as she spoke, she knew she had made a mistake.

  “What, M’lord Ishtier’s foe? Oh, we’ve heard all about you and the trouble that you caused in Tai-tastigon. Theocide. Nemesis. Well, I won’t have any of that nonsense here. Leave, before I bring the rest of the roof down on you!”

  His gnarled hands rose, clenched, and drew down power along with more wreckage. The others huddled close to the temple’s flanks although they didn’t dare touch them. The temple itself trembled and seemed for a moment to be less substantial.

  The boy plucked at her jacket. “Leave,” he hissed. “Before worse happens.”

  Jame retreated step by step, unwilling to turn her back on that sullen edifice. What worse could it do? How unstable was it, really, and did she really want to find out? Then she was out of the tower, free of the baleful thing that it contained and its churlish priests.

  III

  ONCE AWAY, Jame tried to clear her senses in order to pick up Graykin’s trail again. It came to her, faintly, and she followed it back into the forest of ghostly towers.

  Finally here was one that seemed, after a fashion, to be occupied. At least it had a door and, inside, dusty tapestries hung on the walls between the arched windows. Most of the weavings depicted shadowy figures with their backs turned although a few pale, hooded visages faced the room. A thicket of pillars held up the roof. As she entered, a murmur as if of conversation died.

  “Hello?”

  Only silence answered her, and flickers of movement seen out of the corner of her eyes. There were definitely people in the room, standing behind the pillars, shifting as she moved to stay out of sight.

  “I’m looking for a Kencyr named Graykin,” she told the room at large.

  “So are we,” replied a husky whisper at her elbow, making her jump. One of the gray figures had joined her. She could see half of his face under the hood—a sharp nose and a narrow chin, thin lips pursed as if at the taste of something nasty.

  “How long has he been missing?”

  “Fourteen days. Are you one of his clients?”

  How to answer that? “We have done business before. Is this the Intelligencers’ Hall?”

  “It is.”

  Belatedly, it occurred to Jame that she didn’t know what Graykin’
s relationship was to the spies’ guild. If he hadn’t registered with it, they might well be hunting him.

  More gray figures detached themselves from the pillars and the wall to surround her. They smelled of dust and dank, like dirty linen. Now she could see them clearly direct on, but out of the corner of her eye the room appeared to be empty.

  “Who speaks for you?” she asked.

  “One who is not here. I will show you where he was last seen.”

  That confused Jame. “Where who was?”

  The thin lips twisted without mirth. “The one whom you seek.”

  There seemed no answer to that except to follow her gray guide out of the room and down the stair that angled around the corners of the tower. They passed a door at each level, all shut, but by the dingy underwear hanging from balcony wash lines Jame guessed that the guild occupied the entire structure. She tried to keep her focus on the spy who led her as he flickered in and out of view. Her sense was that he was playing with her. Whatever Graykin’s association with the guild, hers with him had gained her little credit.

  At last they reached the ground on a dirty back street many rings removed from the city’s colorful center.

  “There,” said her guide, indicating a wide circular hole in the roadway, its cover dragged to one side.

  Jame peered into the depths. “The Undercliff?”

  “Yes,” he said, and pushed her in.

  IV

  JAME FELL HEADFIRST into darkness, trapped air snatching at her clothes. Close-set walls echoed back her startled cry. Above, the circle of light receded but, twisting, she saw a dim glow below. Its ghostly light shone on the bars of a ladder flashing past beside her. She reached for it. Its rungs rapped her knuckles sharply, then she caught it. The wrench nearly dislocated both shoulders. For a second she dangled there, breathing hard and scrabbling for a foothold, then her grip weakened and she fell again, onto a sloping pile of rubble at the ladder’s foot.

  Sweet Trinity. She would never take the mere falling down of stairs seriously again.