The Sea of Time (4 page)

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 with 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