The Sea of Time (38 page)
Authors: P C Hodgell
Tags: #Fiction, #Fantasy, #General, #Epic, #Paranormal
. . . no, no, no . . .
“Then we must convince you, for your own good.”
Someone screamed: “Oh god, my hands, my hands!”
They were hurting Tori. She wouldn’t allow that. But her steps seemed as slow as if caught in thickened honey. Shapes passed, carrying the glow of a furnace.
“Do you recant . . . do you profess . . .”
That was Rowan, crying out as the incandescent iron seared her forehead, and beyond that, there was Harn with his cracked skull, breathing in, breathing out, as stentorious as a drunkard.
What can I do? What can I do?
She found herself on a threshold, peering into a dim room. Someone hung from the far wall, his wrists secured too low for him to stand, too high for him to sit. His hands were enflamed with suppurating burns and infection ran down his arms in red streaks. A swathe of black hair covered his bowed face. His coat gaped open over a boy’s wiry chest, over the bars of unmoving ribs.
“You can save him,” said a voice behind her. She knew those deep, rich tones with their underlying touch of mockery, and her very bones shook. “He is worth nothing to me, but you . . .”
Jame licked dry lips. She wouldn’t turn to face him. She couldn’t.
“Tell me, girl: for what were you bred?”
“To replace the Dream-weaver, my mother.”
“Well, then. Come to me.”
He was standing so close behind her that she could feel his breath stir the short hairs on the nape of her neck.
“Blackie,” someone called from a neighboring room. “Blackie!”
The boy shuddered and gasped.
What if he stopped breathing again? His hands were already a frightful mess, possibly beyond the power of
dwar
sleep to heal. Could he survive without them? Would he want to?
“Decide,” said the Master. “Dear child, think what I can offer you. You will never be alone again. The Shanir power that you curse will find its true use. I wait to embrace you.”
For a moment she swayed. What had she ever wanted except to belong? Her god had impressed that need on all of her people, even if the way led through a different concourse than himself. Not even her father had wanted her.
However, she had won a place at Tentir, dammit. The Master was speaking to the outcast child whom she had been, not to the young woman whom she had become.
But Tori . . . could her sacrifice save him, or was this just another of Gerridon’s tricks?
The past cannot be changed.
The Master had said so himself.
Yet Tori had somehow escaped this trap and gone on to become Highlord of the Kencyrath. That was his destiny. Nothing she did now could alter that . . . or perhaps her next action would allow that future to exist.
“Will you let your brother die?”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his hand—the right, of course—glide down her arm without touching, but so close that she could feel its heat. She stepped away from it, into the room, across it, and knelt before Torisen.
When she brushed the hair aside, his face was pale with a sheen of sweat and his eyes were closed. He looked impossibly young. The gyves from which he hung were secured by threaded bolts and the bolts by pins out of his reach, but not out of hers. She drew one.
“Don’t,” said that voice by the door. Had it changed in timber, becoming almost petulant? As it grew fainter, it was hard to tell.
The bolt unscrewed and Tori’s hand fell. She caught it, flinching at the heat of its infection, then freed the other one. He sagged into her arms. For a moment she held him, then laid him down on the floor and kissed his clammy brow.
“Wake. Live.”
She wanted to tell him more: that she missed him, that she loved him, that he must trust her. His eyelids flickered, but already he was fading, the outline of the flagstones under him showing through. He was slipping back into the past. That was the way with the House, where time shifted at will. Others had escaped with him, all of those years ago. She hoped that he would regain his wits enough to free them—but then he must have, because Harn, Rowan, and the rest had survived.
Jorin crouched in the doorway, chirping anxiously.
His prints and hers marked the dust, as did a larger set of footsteps almost overlapping her own. Damnation. Gerridon, or someone, had stood that close behind her, breathing down her neck. She could see where he had turned away, the signs of his passing trailing off within a few steps. Had he also retreated into the House’s past, or had he gone into its future to wait for her there? What game was he playing, anyway? As twisted as his plots had become, did he himself even know? Time would tell. With Jorin trotting at her side, she retraced their path.
Here again was the lichen-splotched suite of rooms, crawling with subdued, leprous color.
Jame stopped. She couldn’t leave without Shade, but where was the Randir? Her own childhood memories of the House were incomplete, assuming she had ever come this far into it. Later, though, she had found Prince Odalian “in the place where changers are made,” in the process of becoming one himself, poor boy. Was Shade there now, or trapped in the very fabric of this foul place?
“Shade,” she called. Her voice came out in a croak, hesitant to be heard. No good. Try again. “Shade!”
Filaments and glowing, hairy clots of lichen humped together on the wall. At first they formed a blotch, then a small, blurred image that grew as if something were stumbling toward the wall from its far side. Mittlike appendages fumbled against the inner surface, stirring the outer fungus, leaving red stains. They found the gouges that Jame had ripped with her nails. Fingertips forced their way through, then hands. Jame grabbed them and pulled. The lichen peeled back and Shade plunged through.
Released, the Randir huddled on the floor, hiding her face. One side showed oozing punctures where Addy had missed the encroaching lichen and struck flesh—with dry bites, Jame hoped: Kencyr were hard to poison, but venom was nasty stuff. The other side which had twitched before now seemed to be racked with spasms. Blood covered her hands up to the elbows and her legs from the knees down, as if she had knelt in a pool of gore.
“Sweet Trinity, Shade. What happened?”
The Randir drew a shuddering breath. “D-dead,” she stammered. “They’re all dead. I-I found Ran Awl chained to the floor in a room full of crawling shadows. She told me that she and the rest were members of a secret group within the Randir loyal to its lost heir, Randiroc. The Karnids seized them in Kothifir and brought them here, apparently as a favor to Lady Rawneth.”
“She’s mixed up with Urakarn? How did that happen?”
“I don’t know. Awl asked me as Lord Randir’s daughter to grant her an honorable death. I didn’t want to, but she grabbed Addy and Addy bit her. She went into convulsions. Then I saw . . . I saw that she was becoming a changer, against her will. So I gave her the death she wanted.”
Shade’s face altered as she spoke, becoming raw-boned like Awl’s. Then it changed again, twitching and sagging.
“There were more Randir there, a dozen at least, chained to walls and ceilings and floors. Some were dead already. Others . . . they were changing too, with no control over their bodies. They begged me . . . they begged . . . Ancestors forgive me, I killed them all.”
Jame held her as the faces of the slain writhed in torment over her own and her limbs twitched in sympathy with them.
“Hush. You did the honorable thing, in a monstrous situation.”
“No. I’m the monster!”
“Not unless you make yourself one, and so far you haven’t. Shade, trust me. I’ve been wrestling with situations like this longer than you have. Our darkling blood doesn’t help, but it doesn’t damn us outright either.”
Addy slithered out of the Randir’s disordered hair with a warning hiss, wicked, triangular head darting and mad, orange eyes ablaze.
“You. Behave,” said Jame. “Before I tie you into a knot.”
The serpent’s black, forked tongue flickered near her fingertips, then she submitted sullenly to being picked up. Jame slung the molten coils around her own neck since Shade looked as if she would collapse under the weight.
“Come on. We have to get out of here.”
They stumbled through seemingly endless, empty corridors, all the time feeling that they were being pursued. Dry whispers echoed in corners and debris rustled furtively. Eyes gleamed in the shadows, only to become patches of luminous mold as they passed. Jame wondered about the golden-eyed creatures who had taught her how to perform the Great Dance and about Beauty, their innocent child. Somewhere here too were Tirandys, Bender, and the Serpent-Skin Cloak, last seen slithering back into the House to avoid an earthquake in Karkinaroth, the coward.
At last they emerged in the main hall of the House. Stiffened death banners scraped against the walls with threadbare, frozen fingertips. The rain had stopped, giving way to ragged clouds skating past a gibbous moon waxing toward the full. Below, the floor was sheathed in ice over which they slipped and slid, bound for the darkness that gaped on the hall’s far side, between columns.
Here Jorin paused, sniffing, then trotted into the shadows. For once the sensory link between them was acting in Jame’s favor. She could feel first pavement, then clutching grass, then stone again under the cat’s paws, then under her own feet as she followed, half dragging Shade with her. Would they be able to find the door? Yes. Shade hadn’t entirely closed it, so it was edged with faint light.
Jame cautiously pushed it open and slipped through. The exterior bar had fallen off. She kicked it away and shouldered the door shut, so that no sign remained of it. Let the Master and the Karnids find their own way back inside, if they could.
Outside it was still dark—perhaps, judging by the stars, around three in the morning—but which night? Time moved slower in the Master’s House than in Rathillien, which was how her twin brother Tori had managed to gain ten years on her. The moon had been a waning crescent when she had entered the temple. Now it was waxing gibbous, tumbling down the sky. Jame counted on her fingertips. Was it possible that she had been gone up to twenty-four days? Someone was bound to comment on that.
Of more immediate concern, where was everybody? She would have expected the Karnids to be astir, even this early. Mud pots spat. The lake seethed. Dead trees hung over it, their white branches wreathed with mist. Nothing else moved, except for something that bobbed in the water. It seemed to be wearing a black robe, but with that thatch of blond hair, Jame suspected that the garment was actually a Kencyr acolyte’s brown.
“Dorin?”
She eased Shade to the ground, picked up a dead branch, and gingerly poked the floating figure. Bubbles erupted around it as it sluggishly rolled over to bare its teeth. The flesh had boiled off its face and its eyes were poached. The movement detached an arm at the shoulder, but the sleeve prevented it from drifting away. Mixed with the sulfur stench of the lake was the smell of overstewed meat, reminding Jame how long it was since she had last eaten.
Jorin chirped anxiously. A moment later, the ground began to quiver and the lake to ripple. Jame and Shade staggered as fissures opened in the valley floor. Geysers erupted. Farther away, sections of the caldera wall cracked and fell, laying bare Karnid cells.
“This is worse than the last time,” said Jame. “We’d better get going.”
Not far away was the opening to the step-forward tunnel. When Jame leaned over it, hot air rose in her face, lifting the wings of her hair, and a red light glowered below, but at least there was no sign of the trocks. To go underground, though, with the earth so restless . . .
Well, what choice did they have unless they wanted a long, long walk back across the Wastes?
Jame pulled Shade to her feet and edged down the steep risers with her, clutching the rail with her free hand.
CHAPTER XX
A Season of Fog
Winter 110
I
PATCHES OF MIST snagged in the bare trees and drifted, torn, between their trunks. Leafless limbs dripped. Beside the New Road ran the Silver, a sinuous, smoking snake of a river that hid one bank from the other and chuckled slyly to itself as it went. The ground was sodden with last year’s leaves and last night’s rain, the undergrowth snarled with skeins of fog. It was early morning, the sun barely risen over the eastern Snowthorns in a haloed presence.
Along the road’s western bank came the muffled clop of hooves. A white horse emerged from a fog bank as if taking shape out of it. Its rider, on the other hand, wore the black leathers that had given him his nickname.
Storm was still lame and Rain was dead, hence this new mount, a normally placid mare named Snow. Like Storm, Torisen continued to limp. Just as his bruised leg had begun to heal, he had tripped over Grimly lying at the top of the old keep’s stairs and had fallen down a flight, wrenching it anew. It hadn’t helped to be told that his sister made a habit of tumbling down stairs without harming herself.
Torisen wondered what Jame was doing now, at this very moment. He missed her more than he imagined he would, but thoughts of her also made him uneasy. She was so unpredictable, so inclined to ridiculous situations. His dreams of late had been confused, apparently relating to his own past rather than to her present, but seen from a strange angle. If Marc was right about the scrying potential of his stained glass window, he must be mistaken about how it worked.
As to more conventional means of communication, Torisen had sent a post message to Harn asking what had happened to Brier when he had realized that the Kendar cadet had slipped away. He owed such personal attention not only because of Brier’s mother Rose, who had saved his life in their escape from Urakarn, but also because by all accounts Brier was shaping up into something special. In future years, she might well join the ranks of such legendary randon as Harn Grip-hard and Sheth Sharp-tongue. She already had the earned name of Iron-thorn, unusual in one so young, even if she held it in part in honor of her dead mother.
Can’t hang on to your people, can you, boy?
came his father’s taunting voice through the locked door in his soul-image.
I lost all except those foolish enough to follow me into the Haunted Lands. Are you stronger than I was? Than your sister is? Ha. You pathetic little cripple.
“It’s only a sprain,” Torisen muttered to himself. Snow’s ears twitched at the sound of his voice. “I’ll be well soon enough, dammit.”
But part of him wondered. He had never outgrown his dread of mutilation, stemming from the time at Urakarn when he had nearly lost his burnt hands to infection. A young man might feel immortal. An older one knew that he was not. Was such knowledge good or bad? What if it was hindering him in his role as Highlord? Ardeth had warned Torisen that he held his people too lightly. To them, his consideration might feel like impotence when what they needed most in an uncertain world was a strong hand. Almost anything could be forgiven a lord but weakness.
“I fear, however,”
Ardeth had gone on to say, apparently now addressing Torisen’s dead father as, these days, he was wont to do,
“that you may have mistaken anger for strength. Use your rage as a tool, not a crutch, if you must use it at all. Never let it use you.”
His former mentor was slipping, Torisen thought, with a shiver. As much as he had sometimes resented the old lord’s high-handed manner, the decay of that formidable intelligence was a fearsome thing.
He wrenched his thoughts back to the postriders carrying his message to Harn. Ten days on the road south to Kothifir at the very least, ten north again. By that reckoning, Harn’s reply was already five days late. It might arrive any time now.
Torisen reined in, listening. From uphill came the muffled thud of axes, then a warning cry and the rip of wood giving way. Branches snapped. The ground shook. He left the road and nudged his horse to climb. Soon Chantrie’s ruined walls loomed over him. A pity, he thought, that no one had ever set about rebuilding it, but then Gothregor on the opposite bank had plenty of roofless, abandoned halls at its own heart. There simply weren’t enough Knorth to restore the ancient fabric of either keep.
Forms moved ahead of him in the fog. One advanced and became his chief forester, Hull, a burly Kendar with a grizzled beard and a bald, lumpy head.
“How goes it?” Torisen asked him.
Hull wiped his brow which dripped with sweat, precipitation, or both. Steam rose from the collar of his open shirt as if from the withers of an overworked horse.
“We’ve our work cut out for us, so to speak, m’lord. Many trees fell during the recent rains when their roots couldn’t hold ’em in the earth. There’s thinning to do too, and pruning, and the alder coppice down by the river is ready to harvest. We’ll have a nice lot of waterproof wood from that, along with seasoning for our cheese.”
“By no account, forget the cheese,” said Torisen dryly. “Well, watch out for pockets of weirding. You’ll recognize them by their brightness.”
Huh,
he thought;
as if the man didn’t know that.
“Are there any signs yet of arboreal drift?”
“The sumac always begins to creep with the first thaw. So do other brush.” Hull chuckled. “I had a crew caught up yesterday in a patch of crawling raspberry canes that nearly carried them away. We’re anchoring the more valuable standing trees, in case they get restless. How is it downriver?”
“The water meadow dikes are rebuilt. Now they’re working on the terraces.”
Torisen remembered watching Kendar hoist stone blocks back into place that morning after the flood that had dislodged them the previous year. Before that, the Riverland had been wracked with earthquakes, tornadoes, and fire. Earth, air, fire, and water.
All since your sister came home
.
Now, that
had
to be a coincidence . . . didn’t it?
The water meadow itself would grow the coming year’s crop of hay. Above it, tier on tier, would rise stands of oats, wheat, rye, and barley, unless another natural disaster wiped them out.
Torisen wished that he could lend a hand in the restorations, not that he actually had the strength or skill to do so. God’s claws, at present he could barely dismount without help.
Cripple.
No doubt, though, his people were glad to see him keep his hands clean for once.
“We should be planting peas and beans within a few days,” he said, “as long as the shwupp stay in the river bottoms.”
Hull grimaced. “I hate those sneaky bastards. One wrong step and you’re in a mud pot with your bones half stripped.”
He started as a white shape ghosted out of the trees and trotted past him with lolling tongue and cold blue eyes. Nothing had been seen or heard of the Gnasher since Torisen’s encounter with him in the woods north of Gothregor. Perhaps his broken leg had done him in, as Burr had hoped. At any rate, Yce couldn’t be confined forever.
As they talked, workers passed, bound downhill. Someone below exclaimed in surprise. Foresters started to run, calling questions.
“There’s something unexpected in the coppice,” said Hull. “Your pardon, my lord.”
He hurried off into the fog, axe in hand. Torisen followed more slowly on Snow. A babble of voices rose to meet him:
“Can you see . . .”
“What is it?”
“Damn this fog . . . watch out!”
Wood splintered and rocks churned together. Men shouted in alarm. Something huge was coming up the hill, grinding and smashing its way through the undergrowth. A shape loomed out of the mist.
Snow squealed, spun, and bolted. Before Torisen could rein her in, she cut too close to a tree and slammed his sore knee against it. Dazed with pain, he fell.
The thing was almost on top of him. Bare golden branches swayed back and forth overhead and a massive trunk seemed to reel against the sky. Long fringe roots snaked past him, each tipped with a secretion that ate into the ground and gave the tree innumerable toeholds with which to pull itself along. One nearly lanced through his thigh. The tree which he had hit began to tilt as its own roots lost their grip in the loosened soil. It crashed over, luckily away from Torisen, but the next moment he had tumbled into the cavity left by its root ball. A writhing node of rootlets passed over him like so many wooden snakes, stiff and acreak with the sap just beginning to flow through them. For a moment the tree’s full weight sagged into the hole, pressing him down into the mud. Then it lifted, and the golden willow churned on its way.
People were shouting his name. “Highlord! Blackie! Where are you?”
Torisen spat out mud and croaked back, “Here. In the earth.”
Yce appeared at the edge of the pit, yipping, to be shoved aside. Just as hands reached down to grab him, something under the mud caught his boot and nearly jerked him out of their grasp. Bubbles rose around him through the liquefied soil.
Bloop
.
Bloop, bloop.
“Shwupp,” said Hull, and pulled.
They extricated Torisen hastily, with such brute force that he thought they were going to tear him in two. Once he was out of the hole, a circle of anxious faces closed around him. Without thinking, he put weight on his sore leg and pitched forward into their arms. Snow, caught, was led back to him and with difficulty he mounted.
“You
are
going back to the keep, aren’t you?” Hull asked anxiously, looking up at him.
Cold and shock made Torisen’s teeth clatter, and his sodden clothes dripped with mud. No clean hands this time, after all.
“I’d better, hadn’t I?” he said, trying to smile.
II
LORD CAINERON and the Director of Mount Alban sat in the college’s library on either side of its massive oak table. The southward-facing window was curtained with oiled cloth to keep out the fog, leaving a gloomy interior lit with candles as if it were twilight. In fact, it was morning on the last day of winter. The Director leaned back in his chair, his blind, opaque eyes overhung by shaggy, scar-broken brows. Caldane sat opposite in hunting leathers that strained against his girth. He had just finished a late breakfast, more by fretfully scattering its remains about the table and the floor than by consuming them. He seemed simultaneously eager and on edge, although he did his best to hide it. The former randon who served as the college’s current director might not have noticed, but Kirien suspected that he did: Taur was no one’s fool.