P. Hodgell - The Sea of Time

“That sounds like a cautionary tale about leadership,” remarked Jame.

She wondered if Graykin had considered the personal implications. What would happen to him, come the next Change? He didn’t seem to be doing anything at all for his own so oddly won guild except using the powers that it granted him.

“Anything else?” she asked.

“Not really, except that a few Karnids have crept back into the city.”

Jame stared at him. “Graykin! You’re talking about the people who slaughtered thousands of Kencyr before Urakarn!”

“Only because we chased them there, or rather because we chased their blessed prophet. Anyway, that’s an old story,” said Graykin with a shrug, as if less than two decades rendered it inconsequential. “As I understand it, when King Kruin was dying, the Dark Prophet came to him and promised him immortality if he would buy it with the lives of his heirs.”

“That must have been when Kroaky took shelter with my brother and the Host,” said Jame, as more fragments of the previous night’s dreams came back to her.

Graykin glared. “Who’s telling this story anyway, and who’s this ‘Kroaky’ fellow?”

“That’s a very good question.”

“You’re laughing at me again.”

“Well, maybe a little. Please continue. King Kruin was dying and . . . ?”

“For a while, he didn’t. Meantime, Karnid priests were welcome here and made a lot of converts. When Kruin found out that he’d been fooled, he drove out his precious advisor. After his death, the city council sent the entire Host against Urakarn.”

Including Tori, thought Jame, remembering the lacework of scars on her brother’s hands, the mark of Karnid torture that had almost crippled him for life.

“I don’t know much more,” Graykin concluded, “not being a Karnid initiate.”

“Well, see what you can find out.”

Gray hadn’t grown up within the Kencyrath, Jame reminded herself. For him, perhaps, one Kencyr disaster merged into another. The slaughter of the Knorth women, the debacle in the White Hills, Ganth’s exile, Genjar’s catastrophe before Urakarn, the Kencyr Host against the Waster Horde in the desert before the battle at the Cataracts . . . say “massacre,” and which one did you mean? Looking back, it was hardly a surprise that the Southern Host was so depleted. Trinity, the entire Kencyrath had been bled white since it had first come to Rathillien, never mind what had happened before in all those other lost worlds or during the Fall itself. What was left to fight the final battle with Perimal Darkling? Perhaps only three, the Tyr-ridan, of whom she potentially was one.

G’ah. Jame shook her head. All the weight of the Kencyrath’s past seemed to settle on her shoulders, for surely That-Which-Destroys would have to move before Preservation and Creation. She wondered how her brother and Kindrie were doing. If they couldn’t learn to cooperate, the entire history of the Kencyrath would be for nothing. Her cousin might have some sense of that, but her brother as yet had none. What a time to leave them alone together.

Then too, she had little trust in her own ability to fulfill her role—that is, without destroying everything in her path. Tai-tastigon in flames, Karkinaroth crumbling, Tentir rocked to its roots . . . past results did not bode well for the future.

Their conference done, she rose to depart. “Same place and time next week?”

“I’ll send you word. Some of my guild are getting suspicious, especially Hangnail, the same who shoved you down the ladder into the Undercliff.”

“Watch out for that one. He means you no good.”

“I know,” he said, and laughed soundlessly, dismissively, within his hood.

From the desolate outer rings, Jame made her way toward the central towers, one of which housed Gaudaric’s workshops. The lower three floors offered such armor as the average buyer might want, all well-crafted but nothing special, mostly made by apprentices and journeymen. The fourth floor, however, was the master’s showroom. Gaudaric’s basic style was supremely functional, whether in steel or leather, elegant in its simplicity. However, he also entertained himself with fancier touches. Shafts of light from arched windows illuminated contoured breastplates of shining steel, helmets fashioned to resemble the heads of lions or bears, woven strips of rhi-sar leather in all the colors of nature, and one whole suit that looked like some fantastic beast with horns everywhere. Most wondrous of all, however, was a simple scale armor vest made of rathorn ivory, worth half the guild’s annual income.

“Talisman, Talisman!” Byrne rushed down the spiral stair from an upper floor. “Are we going to see the Eye of Kothifir?”

His grandfather followed him, wiping sooty hands on a leather apron.

“Is it safe?” Jame asked him.

“If you mean because of Lord Artifice, I think so. True, his boys were a trifle heavy-handed when we first met, but Ruso isn’t so bad, really. For the most part, he’s just obsessed with his craft.”

“And you aren’t?”

Gaudaric ruffled his fringe of gray hair, considering. “I’m serious about it, of course. It’s my life, but so is my family. Ruso only has his mechanical toys, his bullyboys, and his ambition. To tell the truth, I feel a bit sorry for him.”

Not entirely reassured, Jame let Byrne tug her out into the street, bound for the Optomancers’ Tower. It was a tall, thin, crooked structure full of strange devices, eyeballs in jars, and prisms flaring rainbows against whitewashed walls, all glimpsed through windows as they climbed the outside stair. At the top, just above the cloud cover, the tower ended in a windowless dome, and out of its door popped a gangly young man wearing enormous lenses in wire frames that drooped with their weight.

“Welcome to the Eye!” he said as he bowed to them with a flourish into the darkness. “Watch your step. Oh!”

Byrne had barged into something that tinkled like glass wind chimes and broke.

“Not to worry. Not to worry. The Eye sees all regardless. Just stand still while I close the door. There.”

They stood still as ordered in darkness so total that not even Jame’s keen night vision helped her. Meanwhile their guide fumbled around them. More glass broke.

“Damn. Where is it? Oh, here.”

A sudden, dazzling light pooled on the floor in a circle some four feet across.

It took Jame a moment to focus on what she saw. The lens pointed west, over Kothifir’s walls along the edge of the Escarpment, toward Gemma, the circling clouds presenting no obstacle. Dots moved on the clifftop plain, the closer identifiable as Kencyr patrols. Jealous Gemma was always threatening raids on its wealthy sister-city, necessitating at least the Host’s token presence Overcliff.

The lens rotated, grinding.

“Look!” cried Byrne in delight.

There was the Rose Tower, as clear as life. Tiny figures climbed up and down its circular stair. Merchants swarmed around its foot, one of them having his pocket picked. Jame waved her hand over the scene. It rippled across her fingers, which trailed shadows across the floor.

The focus shifted up the tower. Near the top was a ring of projecting thorns from which figures dangled, surrounded by diving birds. They must be hanging just outside the windows of the king’s apartment. Krothen had made good his threat to execute the Gemman raiders captured eleven days ago. Jame had heard rumors that one of them was the son of a Gemman council member.

“Show me home!” Byrne demanded.

Above them, the optomancers’ dome groaned and rotated. The city on the floor revolved, dizzyingly, until Gaudaric’s tower came into sight. The armorer himself was sitting on a window ledge, buffing a helmet. Byrne waved to him.