The Sea of Time (46 page)
Authors: P C Hodgell
Tags: #Fiction, #Fantasy, #General, #Epic, #Paranormal
“About Lord Caineron, yes.”
“So you came back to me, until the Knorth lordling whistled you away. Well, what if I told you that there was a stronger lord than Torisen? And no, I don’t mean Caldane. I met him, the Master of us all. He came to me in the mountains when I was on patrol. My horse spooked at his shadow and threw me among the rocks. When I looked up, there he was, and there was no gainsaying his power.”
“You mean Gerridon,” said Brier evenly.
Jame was surprised. Few Kencyr thought about the Master of Knorth anymore, as if he were lost in the mists that confused history and legend. That was one of his strengths.
“Who else?” Amberley’s white teeth flashed again in her sun-darkened face. “The Karnids may call him their prophet, but we know who he is, and what he will become.”
“And what is that?”
“Why, our Master again, as he was always meant to be.”
“Have you encountered Torisen since he became Highlord?”
“No. Why?”
“Then you don’t know his true strength.”
Amberley’s smile became a grimace. “As I said, you always have to be right, and now you are bound to that freak whom he has named his lordan. Oh, Brier, Brier.”
The Southron took a step forward and Amberley, despite herself, took a step back. Her foot struck the first step of the final flight.
“What do you know of so ancient a bloodline and of its last descendents? It was you who told the Karnids the lordan would be on wide patrol the day she was nearly kidnapped, wasn’t it? And I suppose you arranged for that note to be slipped under her door in the first place.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Will you stand aside?”
“What do you think?”
They drew back into fighting position, Amberley mounting the stair to gain the higher ground. Gaudaric’s forces watched from below. Ton’s above were too scattered and shaken to care.
Jame shook her attention away from the members of the militia lying groaning on the apartment floor. She crossed to the opposite eastern side of the tower, dodging through wreckage, and leaned out a window. Above her was the ring of stone thorns from which the Gemman raiders had hung. She jumped and caught one. It began to give way. Hastily, she swung a leg up over it and scrambled onto the walk that circled the marble rose petals of the dome. Voices rose within.
“Abdicate,” Prince Ton was pleading. He sounded exhausted and near tears, his adolescent voice cracking. “Even now, physicians may save you!”
Princess Amantine’s deep voice answered him with a scornful snort: “Pull yourself together, boy. You know that there can be only one god-king.”
Krothen laughed, choked, and laughed again. “That may not be you, cousin . . . whatever happens to me . . .
especially if it be . . . at your hands.” He paused, wheezing. “Only you and I . . . are left . . . among the male heirs of our house. Who comes next? Your mother?”
Jame slipped between the stone petals, emerging behind Krothen’s massive bulk as it slumped on the dais. Bending to peer under his arm, she saw Amantine draw herself up to her full if negligible height, her court gown rising to reveal shoes with improbably high heels. Ton hovered at her elbow like an overstuffed bolster, in sweat-stained, premature white with bedraggled pink trim.
“Would it be such a disaster if I came to rule?” demanded the princess. “I have more courage and skill than either you or my son.”
“Mother . . .”
“Face the truth, boy. Where would you be without me? Even if the white should truly come to you, you need my guidance.”
“Your Magnificence,” Jame whispered to Krothen under cover of the growing familial ruckus. “How can I help?”
He laughed again, ending with a wet, racking cough. “You see Life on my right hand . . . Death on my left.”
In the filtered, predawn light, Jame made out Mother Vedia’s plump form wreathed with restless snakes to one side of Krothen and the crone with a box to the other. The box was open. The crone raised a skinny finger to chapped lips.
“Only the god-touched can see us,” whispered Mother Vedia.
Jame could hear the muffled sound of Brier and Amberley battling on the stair. At a guess, they were moving upward. She wondered briefly which form of combat, Kencyr or Kothifiran, they were using. Did one favor unequal ground over the other?
A sudden glow of light came through the stone petals behind her and began to climb Krothen’s back. Sunrise. To the north of the chamber, it slanted in through the gap where a petal had broken off during the earthquake when Jame had last been here.
Krothen groaned.
Jame circled him. The princess was trying to shake the much heavier prince, only succeeding in shaking herself, but Jame ignored them both. Krothen exhaled with a rattle, and his eyes rolled up in their sockets. Then he was still.
The crone closed her box and faded away.
From outside at a distance came the crash of falling towers. Jame wondered if the treasuries had been taken, but the sound came from the wrong direction.
“That’s your temple,” said Mother Vedia. “It’s coming to life again, knocking over its neighbors. Where did you place it, anyway?”
Jame thought that she could feel the return of power, when she extended her sixth sense. She certainly felt the high priest’s rage; somehow, he had learned of his grandson’s fate, if not necessarily of its circumstances.
“Quick now!” hissed Mother Vedia. “Help him!”
“Who?” Jame stared, helpless, at the edifice of inert flesh before her. “How?”
Krothen sat there with mouth agape and blank eyes. His exposed flesh had taken on the waxy translucence of marble. When she touched the folds of his robe, they were hard, and cold, and she could see the shadow of her fingers through them.
The chamber’s doors burst open. Amberley skidded into the room, propelled backward by Brier’s attack. Ton and Amantine scuttled out of the way, clinging to each other. Brier followed her lover’s retreat.
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” she said.
Amberley laughed breathlessly and drew a hand across her mouth, smearing blood from a split lip. “I always said that you were good. Would I have settled for anything less?”
Gaudaric and Ruso appeared in the doorway. The latter’s red hair and beard, which had hung limp during the Change, now bristled with energy and sparked at the tips. “I can’t believe it,” he was saying, excitedly waving his once-too-heavy axe as if it were made of balsa, making Gaudaric duck. “I’m Lord Artifice again!”
Amberley backed toward the gap in the stone petals, into the slanting stream of morning light. Her hair glowed like a golden crown. Bloody face notwithstanding, she looked magnificent.
“You have the advantage here,” she said. “I see that. Another time, then.”
“Amb—”
“No.” She stepped over the broken marble stub onto the outer walk. “Where I am going, death cannot follow, nor can you. Good-bye, sweet Brier Rose.”
With that, she took another step out into space and was gone.
Brier had taken a hasty stride after her but now halted, staring at the vacant slice of sky beyond the dome. Then she turned to Jame with a blank face and stricken eyes.
“What did she mean?”
“About death? The Karnids claim to have conquered it. From what I’ve seen, though, I doubt it.”
She also wondered if Amberley had counted on landing some twenty feet below on the spiral stair, not realizing that on the north side of the Rose Tower, due to the twist in its construction, the drop was sheer.
“Brier.” She tugged on the Kendar’s sleeve, trying to reclaim her dazed attention. “I need your help. Gaudaric, M’lord Artifice, yours as well.”
The latter two approached Krothen’s motionless hulk.
“Is he dead?” asked Ruso, staring.
Gaudaric touched the marmoreal vestments and jerked his hand back, as if cold could burn.
A faint sound escaped from between those parted, rosebud lips:
“. . . help . . .”
“Kroaky!” said Jame. “He’s still inside! Mother Vedia, how do we save him?”
Gaudaric started, having apparently just seen the Old Pantheon goddess standing in Krothen’s shadow. So his god-given status as guild master had also returned.
“I don’t know!” wailed Vedia, wringing her hands in agitation while her snakes tried to wring each other’s necks. “Just get him out!”
“This looks like a job for a mason,” said Gaudaric. “What we need is a chisel and a mallet.”
“No time for that.” Jame looked around frantically for something to use. How much air did Kroaky have? “We’ve got to smash our way in.”
Princess Amantine pushed past her to stand in the way. “Sacrilege!” she boomed. “This is my nephew’s sepulcher. I forbid you to desecrate it!”
Ruso picked her up and put her, sputtering, aside. Prince Ton attacked him with a flurry of plump fists.
“How dare you lay hands on my mother!”
“Not now, sonny. King Krothen is dead, but the white hasn’t come to you, has it? So stand aside.”
He turned back to the petrified former monarch.
“A sculptor once told me that marble is softer when first quarried than later,” he said, and tapped the figure’s distended belly with his axe. The translucent marble robe covering it shattered like thin ice over a pond. Beneath was dimpled, marble skin apparently drawn over billows of former flesh.
“Go on,” said Gaudaric, leaning in to watch.
Another harder blow near the deep navel cracked the surface. It gave way. They stared at the next layer, which resembled tightly packed pebbles.
“I think this was fat,” said Jame, and poked it with a finger.
Her touch broke the surface tension. They jumped back as a landslide of stones crashed down to rattle and bounce on the floor. More and more fell, hundreds of pounds’ worth. Was the entire abdomen emptying? No. As the dust cleared, inside they could see the petrified organs: loops of frozen intestines, an enlarged liver, but most of all the stomach, which filled most of the enormous cavity. From within this last came a faint scratching.
Ruso scrambled back through the sliding, shifting pile of pebbles. He took careful aim, but as he swung his axe, stones rolled under his feet and he nearly fell.
“Again, again!” said Mother Vedia, clasping her hands in an ecstasy of agitation.
Ruso grunted and regained his stance. This time he used the butt end of his weapon to rap on the distended organ, lightly at first, then harder and harder. Cracks laced its surface. Then it disintegrated and a body spilled out.
“Kroaky!” said Jame, and rushed to help.
Krothen’s younger, thinner self sprawled on the pile of rocks, gasping for breath. He was coated with dust but otherwise naked. Also, he appeared to be choking.
Mother Vedia waded to his side and gave him a firm slap on the back. He exhaled a cloud of dust, then began to breathe more naturally. His eyes opened.
“Well,” he said, gasping, “here I am . . . again.”
Gaudaric regarded him dubiously. “So we see. And yes, I remember you from some fifteen years back. Where have you been?”
Kroaky laughed and drew a shaky hand across his face. Dirt and dust smeared. “Most recently, being introspective. Before that, having fun.”
He looked back at the former shell of himself and sighed. “I suppose those days are over now. No more frolicking anonymously in the Undercliff. Well, I’ve had a good run.”
Amantine and Ton had been edging closer, eyes round.
“I don’t believe it,” said the princess. “You can’t be he. This is a trick to deprive my son of his rights.”
“On the contrary,” said Kroaky, not unkindly, “I hereby name him my heir apparent, unless I should have children of my own. What do you think?” he appealed to Jame. “Will Fang marry me?”
“Queen Fang.” Jame tasted the words. “I like it.”
“Well, I don’t.” Princess Amantine drew herself up, ruffled as a disturbed partridge. “I will fight this. No one will believe it anyway. Ton, come!”
She trotted to the door in her high heels, only noticing when she reached it that her son had not followed.
The prince looked at Kroaky askance, sheepishly. “Er . . . peace?”
“Ton-ton!” bellowed his mother.
“Mother, I’m sorry, but this has gone much too far already. Besides, I’m tired of fighting.”
She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again. Her eyes were bulging. “You . . . you little ingrate!”
With that, she turned and stormed down the stairs. They heard her startled exclamation when she reached the level of Krothen’s apartment, then a scream, suddenly cut short. Gaudaric went to investigate.
“Lady Cella was waiting for her below,” he reported back. “She tackled Princess Amantine and they both fell through the broken rail, off the tower.”
Ton uttered an indistinct cry and plunged toward the door. There he got stuck before turning to edge through sideways. They heard him thunder down the steps.
“For what it’s worth,” said Jame, “the tower overhangs the stair at that point. Still, it’s a significant drop.”
CHAPTER XXIII
The Feast of Fools
I
AS IT HAPPENED, Princess Amantine survived the fall, if with sundry broken bones. The unhappy Lady Cella did not.
Jame, Brier, and Jorin left Kroaky thrashing out with Master Iron Gauntlet and Lord Artifice how he was to present his transformed self to the city. There would, Jame supposed, be problems. However, no one could deny in the end that, for all his pimples, the lanky young man was indeed Kothifir’s god-king, reborn.
With dawn and the end of the Change, the city was astir. Doors and windows opened. People scurried about in the streets and gathered at corners, eager for the latest news. Who were the new grandmasters and the new guild lords? What was this about Krothen’s dramatic return? Jame heard, in passing, that Mercer was again Lord Merchandy and Shandanielle, Lady Professionate. She wondered if Mercer was still deathly ill. Dani had said that immortality was a burden to him, but apparently he had again set aside his poor health to serve his city.
They met Needham’s disgruntled troops filtering back from their failed siege of the treasure towers. Needham, it appeared, had not regained his position as Master Silk Purse. Some reported that they had left him hammering bloody fists against the treasury’s iron door and sobbing.
There was no sign yet of the Southern Host’s return to the city. Presumably it was still out on the plain, chasing Kothifir’s would-be invaders back to Gemma.
In contrast to the noisy streets, Jame and Brier walked together in silence. The Kendar had barely spoken since Amberley’s death. Jame glanced more than once at her emotionless face, but didn’t know what to say. The bond between them told her nothing. As a Caineron, Brier had clearly learned to hide her feelings. Jame had supposed that she would go to find Amberley’s body, but she hadn’t. Someone else would have to retrieve it for the pyre.
As for Jame, she didn’t quite know what to do with herself. Walking through the city with Jorin trotting at her side, she felt disconnected from the streets’ excited bustle. She had had a role to play here, but now, with the king’s return, it seemed to be over. It occurred to her that she should say something to someone about the possibility of mining diamantine from the deeper caves to replace the lost silk trade. The city didn’t seem to realize that the stone was valuable. But that was a minor thing. Kothifir would go its own way now, into whatever the future brought.
Would her own people welcome her back, though, after so long an unauthorized absence? Before that, she had turned command of the barracks over to Ran Onyx-eyed and missed many days of lessons—not behavior expected of a leader-in-training.
Face it,
she thought disconsolately.
You would rather act alone, and that’s where events keep taking you. Were you ever meant to be a randon at all?
“Leave and never return,” the note shoved under her door had said during the season of challenges.
Others had no doubt that she didn’t belong and never had.
Here was the Optomancers’ Tower, a thin, crooked structure thrusting up into the growing clouds like a gnarled finger raised to stir the sky. On impulse, Jame climbed its outer stair, followed by Brier and Jorin. Near the top, she was almost bowled over by the gangly young man with the enormous glasses who had showed her and Byrne the Eye of Kothifir at the end of summer.
“Whoops,” he said, grabbing the rail to steady himself. “I wasn’t expecting visitors. Is it true what they say about King Krothen?”
“I expect so, depending on what they say.”
His eyes, greatly magnified, blinked at her through thick lenses. “It’s a great day, then, but life goes on. What can I do for you?”
“I’d like a glimpse of the city and its environs. To gain perspective.”
“Come along, then.”
He led them up to the Eye and threw open its door. When he closed it, complete darkness again fell within. They heard him stumble around the room, muttering to himself, then a shutter creaked open and blinding light fell in a circle on the floor. Jame blinked watering eyes and tried to focus. The image was of the upper plain. Perhaps the caretaker of the Eye had been keeping track of the battle there, of such concern to the entire city. As she had guessed, the Gemmans were in flight, with their war lizards mounting a rearguard defense. The Host, mostly on foot, surrounded each of these giant reptiles in turn and pulled it down, then moved on to the next. As Jame watched, the Gemman line broke and fled.
“So much for that,” said the caretaker’s voice from the shadows, with unmistakable relief. “Where next?”
“The Rose Tower.”
The lens of the Eye rotated, groaning.
There stood King Kroaky, Lord Artifice, and Grandmaster Gaudaric on the lowest turn of the spiral stair, a sea of upturned faces beneath them. Mouths opened in unheard cheers, which grew as Mother Vedia descended to join the royal party. Perhaps now the Old Pantheon would be welcome Overcliff once more. Certainly, Kroaky owed this goddess for serving as midwife to his peculiar rebirth. Below, the crowd parted. Jame glimpsed Dani’s blond head and Mercer’s white one. The healer was supporting the merchant, who raised a weak hand to return the city’s applause. Citizens lifted them up and carried them to join the company on the stair. All seemed to be well there.
“Where next?” asked the caretaker again.
“Show me the Host’s camp.”
The lens shifted to point, dizzyingly, down the Escarpment to the stone barracks at its foot. These seemed unusually quiet, even for so early an hour. Only the cadets were there, Jame remembered, as well as a skeleton staff of randon. How they must regret missing the fight above. Char and the other Knorth third-years were probably grinding their teeth, her own second-year ten-command as well. For herself, she had seen battle and its attendant horrors at the Cataracts, enough bloodshed to sate her for a lifetime.
She was about to turn away when the lens swung yet again, perhaps reverting to its set point.
“Wait. What was that?”
“What? Where?”
“Westward, up the valley.”
“I didn’t see . . . oh.”
The Eye had caught a teeming blur moving down the Betwixt, filling the valley between the Escarpment and the Apollyne mountains. The lens tightened its focus. The mass became horsemen, headed toward the camp which lay some ten miles ahead of them.
Brier leaned in, staring. Her head cast a shadow over the scene and she withdrew with a frown.
“Has Gemma launched a second attack to the rear?”
Jame had thought so too at first. Then she had seen that all of these riders wore black, and the front rank rode black horses.
Thorns?
She remembered Urakarn, apparently deserted. Where had its inhabitants gone, given that they couldn’t take their mounts anywhere by the step-forward path? It would, on the other hand, have taken them about this long to arrive overland by the Betwixt Valley. It was potentially the Urakarn massacre in reverse. The Karnids were coming.
On the point of turning away, she glimpsed another rider out in front of the thorns. His mount, steel gray, fought against its bit. Even the thorns edged away from it.
Memory caught Jame by the throat: The stallion surged up over the hillcrest with nostrils flaring red. Its steel hooves nearly clipped her as it roared over her head. It landed and turned, torn grass shrieking underfoot. Its iron teeth were bared, its eyes rolled white and dead . . .
The changer Keral, jeering at her:
“We can always feed you to his new war-horse.”
It couldn’t be . . . could it?
“What?” the caretaker demanded as she turned from the bright image and floundered through the darkness in search of the door.
Jorin squawked as she tripped over him. Glass shattered. Here at last was the way out, the door smashing open to admit a wash of early morning light across the floor.
Jame scrambled down the steps with the ounce on her heels, still protesting, and Brier Iron-thorn bringing up the rear. Here was the street, leading to other streets crowded with people celebrating the end of the Change and, incidentally, the Feast of Fools, that day between winter and spring that is recorded on no calendar. Usually, it was a festival of misrule, when powers secular and religious were set aside. How ironic that this year it marked the return of the king and the gods, both old and new. Whispers had grown to whoops and shouts, timorous groups to an excited mob.
“Dance with us!” cried a plump matron in a nightgown bedecked with fluttering ribbons.
She grabbed Jame’s hand. Jame in turn grabbed Brier’s. Thus they were pulled into one of many chains of celebrants that snaked back and forth down through the city’s byways, between the legs of stilt walkers, around men wearing the giant heads of gods. Jorin wound about the pounding feet to keep up, chirping in agitation and occasionally squalling when someone stepped on his toes. This was not his idea of fun. The chain broke and re-formed. Now Jame was holding hands with a baker, whose every step raised clouds of flour from his clothing. She freed herself while maintaining her grip on Brier. They plunged into another group who were tossing one of their number in a blanket. Their victim flew free in a mill of limbs. Brier caught him.
“Wheee!” he said breathlessly, laughing, as she set him down. It was Byrne.
“Your father is at the Rose Tower,” Jame told him.
“Let him find his own blanket!”
With that, he plunged back into the crowd.
Another turn brought Jame face-to-face with the spy Hangnail, who looked terrified at having been hauled out into the open.
“Who’s your new grandmaster?” she asked him.
“That gray sneak again, gods damn it.”
“See that you honor him, or I’ll come back to haunt you.”
Hangnail gave her a look compounded of incredulity and horror. Then the dance whirled him away.
They reached the main avenue where shopkeepers had set out their wares with the dawn. Cabbages and rutabagas now flew over the crowd, kicked from the sidelines. Jame ducked a flailing bunch of carrots. An onion hit Brier in the face. They broke away near the boulevard’s end and headed across the paved forecourt toward the lift cages. Of these, only one was at the top. However, its attendants had left their post to join in the general rejoicing.
“Wonderful,” said Jame. “How do we get down?”
“We could use the stairs, or you could take the lift. I can use the brake to regulate your descent—I think—and let gravity do the rest. It will be a bumpy ride, though.”
“And you?”
“Someone has to warn Harn Grip-hard.”
Jame looked at the cage and gulped. Three thousand feet down. . . .
“All right,” she said, and stepped into it, followed by the ounce.
Brier fumbled for a minute with the winch and crane, then used them to lift the cage up and out over the balustrade. She released the brake. The cage fell in a rush that left both girl and cat hovering in midair. Then the floor leaped up at them, nearly making their legs buckle. Down it plunged again, again stopping with a jerk as the brake reengaged. By such fits and starts they descended, falling the last ten feet for an abrupt and noisy arrival.
Jame staggered out of the cage.
“All right, kitten,” she said to the distraught ounce, trying to catch her breath. “All right.”
She stumbled through the north gate and the tunnel that led under the official offices, then across the inner ward. The Knorth barracks had a gate that opened onto the ward, but it was sealed for repairs. Jame plunged into the streets that separated the various houses. Early rising cadets turned to stare at her as she passed.
“Returned at last, have you?” Fash called from the Caineron’s eastern door. “What makes you think that we want you back?”
Onyx-eyed’s second-in-command, Ran Spare, met her as she entered the Knorth by its western gate.
“Where have you been?” he demanded.
“I had business elsewhere.” Jame paused, trying not to pant. “Listen: the Karnids are coming!”
He stared at her. “What?”
“I saw them through the Eye of Kothifir, coming down the valley. It’s all done by mirrors, you know.”
“You aren’t making sense.”