The Sea of Time

by P. C. Hodgell

  Jorin paced the shore behind them, crying. Jame thought of Kalan and the baby that she had left behind. Would she ever see the ounce again? How did one make clear to a cat or to an infant that it wasn’t being willfully abandoned?

  “I should explain some things to you,” she said to her fellow lordan, and told them about Langadine. “Time is fluid here,” she concluded. “Granny Sit-by-the-Fire called this the Sea of Time. The camp might be stranded on the shore forever if our seeker doesn’t return, and we may find ourselves too deep in the past to return even that far.”

  Timmon was aghast. “Now you tell us?”

  Gorbel only shook his heavy head. “It doesn’t matter. Once we came to the edge of the sea, wet or dry, we had to follow the caravan. The only way back leads though this mysterious city of yours, if we can find it.”

  They waded slowly on. Clouds came up from the south, mirrored under their feet by the water so that one felt almost as if one could walk on either. The sun disappeared. The horizon circled them in a thin, dark band. Without the broken salt plates leading straight ahead, they would quickly have lost all sense of direction.

  “How far have we come?” asked Timmon, breaking a long silence.

  Gorbel grunted. “At this pace? Hard to tell. More than three miles. Out here, distance plays tricks as well as time.”

  The reflected sky made the lambas’ trail harder and harder to follow, and the water was now up to the moas’ knees, over three feet deep. They had started in midmorning. It now appeared to be midafternoon, but who could say? Had they been walking hours, or days, or years?

  The suspense seemed to unnerve Timmon. “What will your father do if he learns the way to Langadine?” he asked.

  “Whatever he can to get a trade mission there, or a raiding party, but from what you say”—with a nod to Jame—“he will need a seeker, and those are dying out.”

  “What about Kalan’s daughter in Kothifir?”

  “She can only find her way back to her birth city. If Laurintine is the last of her line, no one will ever find the city again, at least until after its destruction.”

  “And what do you make of that?”

  “What can I? Something happened some three thousand years ago that shattered Langadine.”

  “That would be more or less when the Kencyrath arrived on Rathillien,” said Jame.

  Timmon scratched a peeling nose, dubious. “Coincidence?”

  “I doubt it. Anyway, our appearance here and Perimal Darkling moving one world closer seem to have shaken up all sorts of things.”

  She was thinking about the sudden manifestation of the Four and about Langadine’s climate changing, along with that of the Southern Wastes, although that seemed to have started before the Kencyrath had arrived.

  Was the water getting deeper? Yes, to mid-thigh on the moas, who no longer tried to lift their feet free with each stride. The fluffy feathers on their bellies were soaked and matted. She raised her boots to keep them from getting wet.

  Brier nudged her bird up level with the three lordan. “I can’t see the trail anymore,” she said.

  Jame peered down. The moas’ progress had stirred up the bottom somewhat, and further distortion made the salt plates dance. Were they broken, or simply smaller than they had been before? At what point would the lambas have started to swim, pulling their barges behind them?

  All the birds had stopped and were honking uneasily to each other. The riders sat, surrounded by a seemingly infinite, trackless expanse. The sun was going down.

  “Now what?” Timmon asked.

  “Forward,” said Gorbel, and kicked his moas into reluctant motion.

  “I don’t think these birds can swim,” Jame said, but she followed the Caineron, her ten-command trailing after her.

  The sun dipped below the clouds and set them on fire. Orange, red, and yellow ribbons streamed across the sky, perfectly mirrored in the waters below. It was like wading through the heart of a silent inferno. Then the sun’s fiery disk sank into its own reflection, going, going, gone. Color died out of the sky and stars winked between sable clouds. It was hours yet before the moon would rise, if it ever did.

  They splashed on into the deepening night, drawn by Gorbel’s will. Water edged up to the moas’ breasts.

  “He’s going to drown all of us,” Timmon said to Jame in an undertone.

  “Maybe. Turn around, if you choose.”

  Timmon rose in the saddle to look back the way they had come, past the following cadets. Nothing remained to mark their passage, and clouds were beginning to extinguish whatever stars might have guided them.

  “Huh,” he said.

  They continued. The water rose until they were sitting in it as much as in the saddle, and yet it crept higher.

  “Look,” said Quill, pointing ahead.

  A faint light shone there, perhaps a star near the now invisible horizon. Soon, however, it twinned, one above and one below. More dim lights came out as they advanced, a cluster low in the sky, reflecting off the water.

  The moas were mostly underwater now, their small heads rising on serpentine necks. A new determination animated them, a straining forward as if toward the scent of land.

  Jame slipped out of the stirrups and rose to swim beside her bird’s head. The others did too, except for Brier and Damson. Jame cursed herself for forgetting that neither cadet could swim. Mint supported the five-commander while Dar grabbed Damson. The lights loomed over them now, above and below, faintly defining high walls and candlelit windows.

  Gorbel sank. Timmon and Jame dove, seized his arms, and pulled him up. Trinity, when had the man grown so heavy?

  They were coming in between high marble wharfs topped with torches. Jame’s moa found its footing and surged upward. A moment later her feet also hit a flight of marble stairs rising out of the water. The birds lurched up them, their riders staggering beside them.

  Timmon and Jame dragged Gorbel to the summit and dropped him.

  “Well,” he gasped, rolling over, leaking water from every fold. “Here . . . we are.”

  CHAPTER XI

  Night in a Lost City

  Winter 14–15

  I

  THE NEAREST BUILDING showed lights at every window and echoed like a seashell with voices. After Tai-tastigon, Jame knew the sight, sound, and smell of an inn, wherever its location. The cordial commotion within stopped as she opened the door and stepped inside, followed by her dripping retinue. A tubby, bald man, clearly the host, approached them, drying his hands on his apron, and asked a question in a language that none of them knew.

  “We seek shelter,” said Jame in Kothifiran Rendish. “For myself, my friends, and our mounts.”

  The man brightened. “Ah! Our kin from over the sea. At last! Welcome!”

  The weary, bedraggled moas were led around to the stable where the local horses could be heard protesting at their alien smell. Meanwhile, their riders were given quarters, towels, and food—a fish stew, crusty bread, and coarse, red wine—while their clothes dried before the fire. The relief, after hours of uncertainty, was profound, and perhaps premature.

  “How are we going to pay for all of this?” Jame asked, dipping her bread into the stew broth. Both were delicious, although something in the stew ate most of the bread before she could.

  Timmon looked blank, as if he had never been asked to account for anything in his life, which was probably true.

  Gorbel, however, opened his jacket and unhitched a heavy belt. Unfolded, it spilled a cascade of thick, golden arax onto the table.

  “No wonder you sank,” said Timmon, enlightened.

  The Caineron gave the snort that, for him, passed as a laugh. “This may yet turn into a trade mission, or into headlong flight. Either way, should I have come with empty hands?”

  A knock sounded on the door. Gorbel scooped the coins out of sight as Jame bade their host enter.

  “The company would be glad to hear your story,” said the man, beaming. No wonder he was p
leased: from the growing noise below, their arrival had greatly increased the inn’s business for the night.

  Jame stopped Gorbel from snarling a refusal. They had already argued about letting their presence be known in the city. While it carried some risks, Jame had pointed out that the alternative was that the twelve of them skulk in the shadows all night, wet, hungry and, worse, unable to learn anything useful, nor was the next day apt to produce anything better. The sea front was the place most likely to supply someone who spoke their own language or at least that of Kothifir, and so it had proved.

  “I’ll go down,” she now said. “The rest of you, get some rest.”

  “I’m going too,” said Gorbel with a stubborn set to his jaw. What, did he think she would conclude some bargain behind his back?

  “And me,” Timmon chimed in, running fingers through his drying hair. Some of the tavern maids had been pretty.

  Brier and Damson both rose, looking stubborn.

  “Oh, all right,” said Jame.

  The five descended into the common room, a whitewashed rectangle with a geometric frieze around the top in shades of blue and green. Substantial tables were centered under many-candled chandeliers, and fireplaces flanked either end of the chamber, unlit on this mild night. The room was full of dark-skinned, bright-eyed customers whose glances darted back and forth among the three lordan as they came down.

  The host escorted them to a central table, which its occupants quickly surrendered. “If it please you, lady and lords, from where do you come?”

  “Kothifir,” said Gorbel.

  “Ahh . . . !” breathed his audience, recognizing the name at least.

  “It has been a long time since anyone came by that route,” the host said.

  The lordan exchanged uneasy glances. “How long?” asked Jame.

  “Some fifteen years,” the host replied, turning to his customers for confirmation. “Is that not so? Yes. The last caravan arrived in a terrible storm. Our sea is changeable: these days sometimes fresh, sometimes salt; sometimes calm and shallow like tonight, sometimes as high as mountains and as deep. That night, it raged. Bodies were cast on the shore for days, men and beasts alike, also much treasure. Most drowned, except for the seekers and a few others who swam to safety.”

  Oh Ean, oh Byrne, thought Jame, briefly closing her eyes. What will I tell Gaudaric?

  “One of the survivors has a stall in the night market,” said a man wearing a blue, fish-stained tunic, speaking passable Rendish. “He sells armor.”

  The door was flung open. An old man stood dramatically on the threshold. His robe, dyed saffron with a deep hem embroidered with copper thread, swirled around him in a wind unfelt by those within. His white hair and beard flailed upward serpentlike in shaggy braids threaded with gold. He looked vaguely familiar.

  “Travelers!” he cried. The others good-naturedly made way for him as he plunged into the room. “What news have you from my fellow gods to the north?”

  “Er . . .” said Jame, staring.

  “The end is coming, you know,” he said with a broad smile, seeming to relish his news. He turned to take in his audience with a sweeping gesture that overturned tankards as far back as the corners of the room. “All of you have felt the earth shake,” he proclaimed over cries of protest at the spilt beer. “The sea changes its nature more and more often. Year by year, the climate grows drier and hotter. Clearly, a great change is coming. But this world is only an illusion. Are you ready to fly away with me to the true one that lies beyond?”

  “Enough of such desert talk,” someone called from his audience. “Next, you’ll claim to be the Karnids’ long-lost prophet, returned again. Show us a trick, old man!”

  “Well, now, what would you like?”

  “More beer!” shouted back a chorus of voices.

  “Hmm. Will this do? Landlord, a round of drinks on me!”

  Tavern maids ran about with ewers, pouring amid the cheers of the patrons. Jame had a feeling that the old man had performed this “trick” before, and was all the more welcome here because of it. Her sense was that she and her comrades didn’t really interest him. Rather, he had detected a center of attention and had rushed to usurp it. Timmon looked miffed and Gorbel bored, but she didn’t mind: the more other people talked, the more she might learn.

  The tremor started with a faint rumble like a heavy cart approaching over cobblestones. The wine in her cup rippled in concentric circles. The candle flames wavered. No one seemed to pay much attention except the old man in the saffron robe who turned suddenly pale and clutched the back of a chair. Slowly, without any fanfare, his feet left the floor. Jame grabbed his arm . . .

  . . . and was falling.

  They seemed to be the only two steady people in that whole jiggling room, and yet the pit of her stomach plummeted sickeningly as if the bottom had dropped out of the world. A look of wonder crossed the other’s face as his braids flew upward. He let go of the chair, experimentally. Jame clung to him with both hands, hardly sure which of them she was anchoring. Then the rumble receded and his feet descended gently to the floor.

  “I flew,” he said in astonishment, eyes as wide as a child’s. “I flew! You saw me, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

  “I saw you fall,” said Jame, shaken.

  No one else apparently had noticed anything, nor did they seem to take the quake very seriously except to clutch their brimming cups against another upset.

  “Here he is! Here! Master!”

  In rushed a crowd wearing yellow tunics. They seized the old man and dragged him with them out the door.

  “I flew!” he exclaimed in protest to them as he went. “I really flew!”

  “Yes, yes,” they assured him. “Soon the entire city will know!”

  The landlord shook his bald head as he shut the door behind them. “These uncertain days have bred many strange prophets and the rumor of gods, old and new. Sometimes I think the desert dwellers are right: our new king should never have buried the black temple.”

  “The what?” demanded Gorbel.

  “Ah, I keep forgetting that you are strangers here. The black rock is as old as the city . . .”

  “Older!” called someone.

  “Indeed. Langadine was built around it, although I only guess to call it a temple: it appears to be a huge, black square of granite without seam or opening. The desert folk claim that, according to their prophet, it is the gateway to another world and they make pilgrimage to it, or did until King Lainoscopes came to power and quickly grew tired of their frenzied worship. A stickler for order, he, not lenient like his father, the gods give him rest. At any rate, Lainoscopes tried to break up the rock. Failing that, he built it into the foundation of a new tower.”

  The lordan exchanged looks.

  “You said that your father’s expedition found the ruins of a Kencyr temple,” said Timmon in Kens. “Could it have been here? In which case at some point something destroyed it, and the city too.”

  The host was still apparently thinking about his late guest. “Prophets and gods, forsooth. Foolish fellow, to have made such a claim. Now, I suppose, that pack of madmen in yellow will put him to the test. He has finally found his true believers, and they are apt to kill him. Poor Tishooo.”

  Jame had chosen wine over beer. Now she choked on it.

  “That was the Tishooo?”

  “The Old Man, yes. Why?”

  “I knew I had seen him before, but never clearly. This is serious,” she said to the others in Kens. “‘There was an old man, oh, so clever, so ambitious that he claimed to be a god. To prove it, his followers threw him from a high tower.’ You remember, Gorbel: it’s part of one of those Merikit rites you used to spy on.”

  “Oh. That Tishooo. The so-called Falling Man. But what is he doing here if he belongs to the hill tribes?”

  “He belongs to Rathillien. So do the Earth Wife—your Wood Witch, Gorbel—the Burnt Man, and the Eaten One. Remember her, Timmon? She ate your half-brother Drie
. Wherever they originally came from, all of them were mortal once, I think, until our temples turned them into the Four, the elemental forces that personify this world.”

  “You know the oddest people,” remarked Timmon. “Then again, since I met you, so do I. That peculiar old man is destined to become the manifestation of air? When?”

  “Potentially, any minute now.”

  Scowling, Gorbel planted his elbows on the table in a puddle of spilt beer. “Look here: we’re back in time now, or so you tell me, before our people even landed on this accursed world.”

  “No one knows when the Builders constructed the temples,” said Jame, “but the structures preceded us here and apparently fired up just before we arrived.”

  “So,” Timmon said, “if that old man is about to become the Tishooo, the black rock—pardon, temple—is about to come to life. That means that, even now, Jamethiel Dream-weaver may be dancing out the souls of the Kencyr Host. The Fall is happening, the greatest disaster in our history, and here we sit, its unfortunate heirs, warm and dry, drinking in a tavern in a lost city.”

  Gorbel grunted. “Lost. Destroyed. How long have we got?”

  “How long before the Tishooo’s worshippers find a high enough tower and get him up it? He may come to his senses and resist, but still . . . My guess? Sometime tonight.”

  Timmon ticked off the events on his fingertips. “The Fall occurs, the temples activate, the Four are created, the Kencyrath flees to this world, the temple destroys Langadine, something destroys the temple, and you’re assuming that all of this happens more or less simultaneously. But in our time it’s actually three thousand and twenty-eight years after the Fall, if you believe our scrollsmen. Langadine could have decades yet to live. It all may not fall out exactly so pat.”

  Jame shrugged. “Yes, I’m making several assumptions. Do you want to take the chance, though?”