P. Hodgell - The Sea of Time

From above, they watched the Kothifirans organize themselves into guilds. This time they didn’t carry golden emblems, so they must have something other than races in mind. Dozens of pots hung some three stories up, suspended from catwalks invisible above the perennially circling clouds. Guilds were forming under them. The bands trailed off into expectant silence as the three guild lords appeared high on the stairs of the Rose Tower.

“Welcome to the Equinox!” Lord Merchandy called down in his reedy voice. The people below hushed each other in order to listen. “We meet here balanced between seasons, between success and potential disaster, or greater success. The fall harvest is safely in. The winter crops are yet to be planted. More important, we are about to launch the biggest trade caravan ever to enter the Wastes . . .”

He coughed, his voice failing. Lady Professionate took his arm to steady him. Ruso stepped forward.

“To the greater glory of Kothifir, then, and to profit!” he roared over the railing. “Ready, steady, climb!”

The plaza dissolved into chaos. Some rushed off to snatch materials from side streets. The carpenters’ guide came running back with boards which they began hastily to bang into a platform. The masons hauled in stone blocks. Bricklayers slapped brick on brick. Tapestry makers wheeled in their largest upright loom and swarmed up the warp threads to the top bar. Binders stacked up books. Most of the others, who couldn’t turn to their working materials, bent down and began to form human towers. The nearest rose close by the watching lordan, one tier, two . . . People leaned in to support the base while others climbed onto their shoulders and stood, wavering. Three, four, five . . .

The pots still swung high above their heads.

“I bet they don’t make it,” said Timmon.

Gorbel grunted. “How much?”

“A golden arax .”

“Done.”

Six, seven, eight . . .

“Look,” said Jame, pointing.

A curious apparition had appeared at the edge of the plaza. It looked at first like ten gray-clad men standing, unsupported, on each other’s shoulders, swaying forward in unison step by step. Then one saw that they were connected by two parallel ropes with loops for each one’s feet and hands. The clouds thinned momentarily. On a catwalk overhead, two more men pushed one end and then the other of a beam balanced across the handrail. The upper ends of the ropes were secured to this bar. Its movement swung the attenuated tower forward like the crosspiece of a puppeteer.

Jame recognized the top man just as he spotted her. Graykin flashed her a grin that reminded her how young he actually was.

“Go, Intelligencer!” she called to him, clapping. “Rah, rah, rah!”

Timmon and Gorbel stared at her.

Below, the binders’ pile of books began to slide, taking those who knelt on it with it. They spilled over into the next tower, taking it down, and so on and on in a spreading circle. The chaos lapped over the masons, who had only succeeded in raising one level of stone, and collapsed the carpenters’ jury-rigged tower. Amid yells and not a few screams, the spies advanced, even after the lowest two had been knocked out of their stirrups. Graykin reached up and struck a pot. It burst, spraying him and those beneath him with honeyed milk.

“What in Perimal’s name . . .” said Timmon.

“I think it’s a fertility ritual, or a way to secure luck, or both. Do our ceremonies make any more sense?”

“Of course they do,” said Gorbel, wiping splattered milk off his face. “If nothing else, none of them is this messy.”

“Better spilt milk than blood.”

Below, the plaza was sorting itself out with many cries that the Intelligencers’ Guild had cheated. Graykin’s tower clambered down and bolted for cover, leaving its leader to stand for a moment at the mouth of a side street making a rude gesture. Then he too scampered back into the shadows.

“As a portent, though,” said Jame thoughtfully, “I don’t much like it, assuming one believes in such things.”

“Let’s go see what the Undercliff has to offer,” said Timmon.

“We have to report back at noon, not long from now,” Jame said regretfully. “Anyway, I understand all that happens is that the old gods wage a glorified food-fight, and the Favorite has to eat everything that hits him.”

With that, they turned reluctantly back to the Rim, where this time they took the enclosed cage down.

Rue was waiting for Jame at the gate to the barracks, practically hopping from foot to foot with excitement.

“They’ve posted who’s going with the caravan to guard it, and our ten-command is on the list!”

Jame stopped short, remembering her recent restriction to the camp and its environs. “No.”

“Yes! There are one hundred and fifty wagons, three hundred attendants, a thousand Kothifiran guards, and four hundred of us. The Commandant left you a message.”

Jame accepted the note and unfolded it. “With such a large escort,” Harn had written in his barely legible scrawl, “I dare you to get into trouble.”

Bang, bang, bang!

Torisen couldn’t sleep with that pounding inside his head.

“Be quiet!” he shouted at it.

Yce licked his chin. When had she slipped under the covers with him?

“Be strong,” the wolver pup whined to him, her whiskered lips tickling his beard. “Remember, fathers may devour their young, but only if we are weak.”

“Be still,” whispered Jame’s voice in his ear as her strong, slender arms wound around him and her body pressed against his. “He has to sleep sooner or later. Then we will have him.”

How like them both to think in terms of fighting back. How alike they were, in so many ways.

And white-haired Kindrie? He stood aloof with his back turned, braced against that crack of anger, but stubborn too in his endurance. Ancestors knew, he had suffered as much as any of them.

Am I weaker than he? Torisen wondered.

But their cases were different: Kindrie had faced his demons and (presumably) won, while Torisen still had his dead father lodged like a festering splinter in his soul-image, behind a none too securely locked door.

The tapping began again, almost sly at first but getting louder and louder as Ganth raged.

Do you think you can ignore me? Stupid boy, who has brought a Shanir abomination into my house! Stupid girl, with your cursed blood!

Torisen tightened his grip on his sister in the bed where they cowered together, children again. “Mother is gone. I’ll protect you.”

“And Kindrie too?”

In the sodden field between Wilden and Shadow Rock, the healer had warned him barely in time about shape-shifting Kenan and arguably had saved his life. In return, he had welcomed their Shanir cousin into the Knorth’s “small but interestingly inbred family.” Father couldn’t make him take back those words . . . could he?

The thought was greeted with harsh laughter. Would you challenge me, boy?

Jame was already drawing away, a child no longer but a supple-limbed temptress whose touch he longed to regain. “You let me go before. Will you again?”

“Never!” he cried, and cringed at the loudness of his own voice. “I love you!”

Tap, tap, boom!

He lurched awake in his tower bedroom at Gothregor. From the hearth, Yce regarded him warily.

The Jaran matriarch Trishien sat by an open window in the Women’s Halls, reading. A cool breeze scented with fallen leaves stirred the brightly illuminated pages of her book. Winter was coming. She could feel it in her bones. Soon she would have to spend more time in the warm common room, forfeiting her precious privacy. Time to enjoy it while she could.