“You will take us back,” I told him—and I overrode him when he attempted to argue, to interrupt. “You will take us back to before Cevelar acquired the Shield of Sevenaya, that we may get there first.” I jabbed a finger directly in his face. “And you will do so now.”
FIFTEEN
Solonis shook his head wearily at me. “It will not work,” he protested.
I was sick of his arguments. I scarcely wished to hear any more of them. “Why not?” I forced myself to ask.
“Because you will never get there first,” he replied. “The Fates will not allow it. The universe will not be bent to your will, no matter how hard you try to force it.”
“And you know this for a certainty—how?”
He scoffed bitterly at me. “Dear Karilyne—do you think that in all the ages I have served in this role, as a time traveling agent of the Fates, of order against chaos, that it never once occurred to me to simply roll things back and undo everything bad that ever happened?” His eyes flashed with anger. “Do you believe I’ve never tried it? Not once? Not a thousand times? What sort of fool do you take me for?”
I frowned at this, for it was obvious he was speaking the truth and what he was saying made perfect sense. Certainly he would have done so, if he could have. “So you tried and you failed,” I said. “Why did you fail?”
He groaned as if half the weight of the world had descended upon his shoulders. He dropped his head and stared down at the floor. “I failed because I always fail. Because it is impossible.” He looked up and met my eyes. “Because, as I have stated more than once already, I cannot control where the Time Tomb takes me. I am a leaf blown by the winds of the Fates. A tool, an instrument. Whatever agency I appear to possess is merest illusion.”
Hearing this and attempting to mentally process it, I looked at the others. They appeared even more at sea than I felt.
“If there is nothing to be done and no hope of success,” Mirana almost shouted at him, “then why did you come to us in the first place?”
The god in the brown robes spread his hands in a gesture of futility. “The Fates willed that I should join with you all for a time. But we are not to be the captains of our own destinies. We must respect the Fates and move in the direction they indicate for us to go. That is the avenue that offers us the best chance of success.” He stopped and appeared to reconsider those words for a moment, then, “Or perhaps the least likelihood of utter disaster.”
I considered all that he was saying and reached a decision. I stepped forward, my hand on the hilt of my blade. “I am a pawn of no one,” I stated. “I determine my own destiny, my own direction. Am I not Karilyne, the Lady of the Ice?”
“You are,” Solonis said quietly.
“Then I decree that you move this box back in time—back to before the god Cevelar appeared here and laid claim to the Shield of Sevenaya.”
“I cannot do it, my lady,” Solonis replied softly. “Even did I desire to…” He gestured to the blank wall opposite us. “I have told you: there are no controls. The Time Tomb goes where and when it wants to go. I am merely carried along with it.” He emitted a sharp little laugh and looked at the rest of us. “And of course you four are too, now,” he added.
I was having none of this. I was fed up. I did not draw my sword, but then I didn’t leave it entirely alone either. As my fingertips brushed the hilt, I leaned in close to him. “I suggest you find a way to get us moving, Solonis,” I said.
* * *
Solonis had very nearly convinced me that he truly could not control the Time Tomb when suddenly it lurched into motion.
After my challenge to him, he had stood there for a long moment, clearly frustrated, unable to do much of anything. I understood that there were no visible controls, but I had a hard time accepting the notion that he had no way of directing the box’s travel. It simply made no sense.
I was just about to address him again—though what I was going to say, we will never know. Perhaps I felt some degree of pity for him. Perhaps I was going to admit the possibility that what he was saying was true. Or perhaps I was going to come up with an even more colorful and inventive threat to motivate him.
And then that rising, wailing sound came screaming at us, and the orange light flared all around. The box was alive again. It was doing something.
I met Solonis’ gaze and started to congratulate him on his success, but then I realized his expression reflected not satisfaction but surprise and confusion. He was not responsible for what was happening, and was in fact quite surprised; that much was obvious.
So then, who was responsible?
“You did it,” chirped Binari, clapping his little hands together.
“He did nothing,” Davos intoned. “I watched him. He did not move.”
Binari frowned. “But then, how—?”
“The Fates,” Solonis was whispering, even as I was about to question him. “The Fates will it.”
We were in motion again, not through space but through time. Outside the transparent walls, days, weeks and months flew by, then years and decades and centuries. I know now this was the case, though at the time all I could tell was that our surroundings lightened and darkened, lightened and darkened, faster and faster until all was but a gray blur.
Our scenery continued to change in this matter for a long while. At first we waited to see how far back in time we were actually being carried, hoping it would be well before Cevelar had arrived there in the Spire to take the Shield of Sevenaya. Soon it became apparent we were traveling much farther back than that; perhaps as far back as we had gone the first time, before the tower or the city around it had even been built.
“This is not necessary,” I said carefully to Solonis. “This is wasted effort. We required only a matter of hours or days.”
Solonis had looked surprised before; now he appeared utterly perplexed. He shook his head slowly but didn’t respond.
Resigning myself that we would soon be back in the dimmest reaches of ancient history again, I waited and watched, anticipating again seeing the Spire being built—or rather un-built—as we moved back through that time period.
But instead something strange and unexpected happened: the tower’s black walls all around us crumbled. In super-fast-forward, it fell down around us and lay there in rubble. With the walls and ceiling that had contained us now gone, we could see the blur that was the sun rising and setting as we continued to race through time.
Super-fast-forward?
I understood then: we were not going back. We were moving forward through time.
* * *
The sand was black. That was the first thing I noticed as we all exited the box.
We had continued speeding through the future for a bit longer after the Spire had collapsed around us, and then with a jolt we’d stopped. The sound had vanished, as usual, along with the accompanying orange light effects. When Solonis opened the door, a grim silence washed over us.
We stood on uneven, soft ground and looked all around, deeply puzzled.
The walls of the tower had fallen, their ruins grown over with weeds and ivy, and ultimately they had worn away and vanished entirely. Again the city was missing, too, as it had been when we’d visited the distant past. It had been replaced by a desert and the shore of a dark and empty sea. The sun overhead had grown noticeably larger, redder. All around us at an indeterminate distance was a fuzzy wall of gray clouds or fog, and I could see nothing beyond it.
I started to ask Solonis about the fog, because it reminded me of the strange distortions I’d been noticing here and there during our previous travels. But then something about the sand pulled at my attention. I knelt and dug my fingers into it, let it sift through my fingers. It glittered.
“Volcanic?” Davos asked, gazing down at what I was doing.
“No,” Solonis said as he walked past. “It is all that remains of the Spire and the city around it.”
I frowned and let what was still cupped in my hand drop o
ut.
“Nothing but sand,” Binari said in a tone of wonder. “All of that, gone—reduced to nothing but sand.”
“Where are the people?” Mirana asked.
Solonis shook his head. “Who knows?” He spread his hands. “Not here. Not any longer. Perhaps not anywhere, now.”
“How far in our future are we?” I asked, standing and turning to face him.
“Very far,” he said, looking back at me with a hollow expression. “Very, very far.”
We all remained silent for a moment, perhaps each of us attempting to process that information. We had possibly traveled so far into the future that the human race—and perhaps all other life forms, too—were gone.
“Eventually, even the Hands fail,” Solonis muttered. “Possibly only the Machine survives in this era. Or perhaps even it is now dust.”
Both Binari and Davos looked at him, both clearly wanting to say something in response to that but neither actually speaking.
Then Mirana broke the silence. “You say the Fates brought us here?” she asked. “Those unknowable forces that guide your time machine?”
The young-looking god in brown robes nodded once. “Yes.”
“Why?” Mirana strode up to him, looming perhaps a foot taller than him, and stood with her hands on her hips. “What would be the purpose of showing us all this? Do they wish us to know that, no matter what we do in our time, eventually it will not matter?”
Solonis shrugged. “Perhaps. I cannot say.”
Mirana scowled at him. “Well, if that is indeed the message, please tell them on my behalf that it is a very stupid message.” She flung one arm wide as if to encompass the world, the galaxy. “We are all well aware that the things we do in our lifetimes are transitory. Even the gods are finite, given enough time.” She leaned in toward him, her voice intense. “What matters is what we can accomplish for others—for those we care about—during the time we have, no matter how long or how brief it is.”
Solonis met her gaze, looked away, nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I agree. Understand, young Dyonari—in the many years since the murder of the majority of my fellow gods by Vorthan, virtually all I have done is engage in the thankless and often futile task of traveling up and down the timestream, attempting to put right what has gone wrong; attempting to make life better in each epoch for those who are fated to live within it.”
She looked back at him as he said this, then turned away, still scowling.
After a few moments I caught Solonis’s attention and gestured toward the gray fuzziness in the distance. “What is that?” I asked him. “I have noticed it, just on the edge of my perceptions, for some time now, all along our travels. But it seems pronouncedly worse here in this place and time.”
“I was wondering if you had seen it earlier,” the young-looking god said to me. “I was not certain how sharp your perceptions are.” He looked at me and his face was ashen. “It is entropy,” he said. “The end of everything. The death of the multiverse. The final triumph of chaos.”
“I understood we had traveled far,” Davos said, “but that far?”
“No,” Solonis replied. “Or, at least, it shouldn’t be far enough for that. Something has caused the layers of reality to collapse, and entropy is chewing them all up.”
I considered this. “So, in the very far future, the forces of nihilism triumph, and the very universe itself is annihilated?”
“That doesn’t seem so bad,” Binari noted. “It leaves us—what? Thousands more years? Millions more?”
“It is much worse than that,” Solonis said. He faced out to sea, staring at the wall of gray that obscured anything beyond. As he did, I began to realize that there was nothing beyond. This desert, this beach, was all there was.
“I understand why the Fates brought us here now,” he said after a moment. “As Karilyne has observed, the effects have been creeping backwards, working their way in reverse down the timestream. By this future era, the destruction is nearly complete, leaving only this circle of reality yet standing a little longer, here at the center of all. But as the annihilation wave works its way backwards through time, it will inevitably destroy everything, in all epochs.”
“You mean everywhere—every when—will soon be like this?” Binari gasped. “But—why?”
“Vorthan,” I stated.
The others all looked at me.
“This was Vorthan’s dream,” I said. “It was all he ever wanted—though the rest of us realized it too late.”
“Yes. This is the future he will create, if he is allowed to return,” Solonis said. “And this future will echo back down the timelines until everything, everywhere, is reduced to raw entropy and chaos. Indeed, as Karilyne has observed, it has already begun.”
“But…” Mirana appeared horrified, and I could not fault her for it. “But if the future looks like this—if it has already happened here—can we stop it from happening at all? Or is it already too late?”
“I do not believe it is too late,” Solonis said. “Some things in the past—many things, sadly—are set in stone. I know this, for I have spent millennia attempting to alter them, to no avail. The murder of the gods, for example. I cannot prevent that from happening. I have never been able to prevent it from happening, and you must believe that I have tried and tried. But—” He rubbed his chin and then raised one finger, shaking it, “I was able to at least alter the course of the Shattering wave. I needed many allies and it took a remarkable amount of effort, but in the end we were able to cause that event to happen differently than it had been fated to. Differently, and with vastly altered consequences.”
Binari and Davos appeared puzzled by that reference. Mirana leaned toward them and whispered, “It was part of the Nightfall War. I will explain later.”
“Very well, then,” I said. “If we can yet do something to thwart Cevelar, stop the return of Vorthan and prevent this universal annihilation, I say we get to it.”
We all turned to Solonis, anxious now to determine our next move. I believe we all thought at that moment that we understood why we have been brought there, to that desolate future: to look upon the potential outcome should we fail, and to appreciate how very much was at stake. These Fates Solonis spoke of had carried us the wrong way in time for a reason, and that was somehow reassuring.
Thus it was all the more shocking to each of us when, moments later, Solonis inexplicably abandoned us there, stranded in a distant future on the very knife-edge of oblivion.
SIXTEEN
Standing there upon the black sands, we had just reached our various conclusions and resolved to go back to our own time and stop Cevelar’s mad scheme, when Solonis suddenly hurried back to the Time Tomb and stepped inside.
At first there was no sense of alarm on anyone’s part. It was his machine; we thought nothing of his going to it. Apparently it was time for us all to go. We turned to follow him.
And then the door slammed closed.
I frowned at this, but still felt no large sense of concern.
Then the wailing began. Orange light flared around the box.
We all exchange startled glasses, and then rushed towards it.
The door was indeed shut.
I banged on it.
“Solonis!” I shouted. ‘What are you doing? Open up!”
“I am sorry, my friends,” he called to us through the transparent door. “I’m afraid this is where and when I must leave you.”
“Leave us?” I was astonished. “Leave us here? Now?”
“Why?” Mirana demanded, her sword out.
“You will know soon enough,” he said. He shook his head. “It gets confusing even for me at times. But trust me—I must go, that I may arrive.”
“You cannot leave us here, Solonis,” I said, my eyes hard.
“I must.”
Binari wailed.
The orange light flared brighter still, and then a moment later it vanished entirely. The box still sat there on the black sands, but now it w
as empty, cold, dead. Just as it had been in the atrium of the Mosaic City, when we had first approached the Spire.
* * *
Two hours we spent attempting to open the door of the inert Time Tomb. We failed, and were not certain what we could do even if it had been possible. Solonis had maintained that he could not control it. How could we?
For another hour we stalked about the black sands, confirming to ourselves that we had indeed been abandoned in a desert by a being we had believed to be a friend and ally.
At last we collapsed to the ground and sat there, sulking.
For yet another hour or more, as the massive red sun dipped toward the horizon, no one spoke at all. Thus it came as something of a jolt when Davos broke the silence. And what he said concerned me greatly, as well as to whom he said it.
“Binari,” Davos said—and we all took silent note that, for once, he had used the Rao’s name instead of the evidently pejorative term “Builder.” “Binari, I would have words with you, here in this lonely place, while there is nothing else to distract us from our conversation.”
The little alien looked up at the big one, frowning, perhaps anticipating some sort of verbal or even physical attack. “Yes?”
“Your ancestors,” the big gray alien began.
I started to rise. Mirana was already up, hand on her sword hilt. “We are not going there,” she growled, looking directly at Davos. “The last thing we need right now is more disunity, more animosity.”
“No, no, I agree,” he replied. “I do not wish for more strife between us. To the contrary, I wish to lay as much of it to rest as can be done. I seek understanding, not conflict.”
Mirana continued to eye him warily.
“It is alright,” Binari said after seemingly considering Davos’ statement for a few seconds. He looked to Mirana and motioned for her to sit back down. “If any knowledge I possess can help to heal the breach between us, I am in entirely in favor of sharing it. Full disclosure.” He smiled at Davos. “Ask your questions. You were saying something about my ancestors?”
Karilyne- Heart Cold as Ice Page 18