P. Hodgell - The Sea of Time

“What can I do for you, your majesty?”

“Just this: find that cursed temple of yours and start it up again.”

She should have guessed that Krothen, no fool, knew the ultimate source of his power.

“When it first failed, I went to look for it,” she said. “The tower built around it has collapsed. It must be buried in the ruins, perhaps shrunk too small to find.”

Krothen quivered. Jame wondered if he was going to be sick. No, the entire tower was shaking. A stone rose petal split with a sharp report, then another. Cracks etched the pale green chalcedony floor. The servant lost his grip on the slippery fold of flesh which he had been supporting and it closed over his companion’s hand with a smack. The trapped man stifled a cry of pain and tried to pull free, but couldn’t. Krothen’s eyes rolled up in his head until only the whites showed. His mouth gaped, wide, wider. Something pale emerged: fingers, prying the plump lips further open, cracking their corners. Inside, behind rows of teeth, a face appeared. Kroaky.

“I can’t get out,” he gasped. “I can’t get out. Help us!”

Krothen shuddered again. Sweat ran down his multiple chins as if over a waterfall and his face was a patchy greenish-white. He reached up and stuffed his younger self’s fingers and face back down his throat. Then, with a mighty gulp, he swallowed them.

The Rose Tower stopped swaying. The servant at last pulled free his hand and retreated, cradling broken fingers. Krothen gave a sickly smile.

“Look again,” he said. “Please.”

The rickety structure surrounding the Kencyr temple had collapsed more or less in place, filling the stump of its shell with a jumble of broken floorboards, rafters, and stones. The resulting pile was at least ninety feet across and three times Jame’s height. She regarded it dubiously from across the street, Jorin huddled close at her side. Nothing had changed since she had last been here, just after the winter solstice. Then as now, her sixth sense gave her not so much as a twinge, yet the dormant temple was presumably somewhere under that mass of wreckage, perhaps reaching nearly to its top, perhaps shrunken to the size of a grain of sand at its bottom. Nothing would prove which except shifting through the entire lot.

When she had first seen the scope of destruction, she had turned her back on it. The temple was the priests’ business. They had said so, emphatically. Therefore, let them deal with it. But half a season had passed since then, and they had done nothing.

Jame remembered the priests at Karkinaroth who, shut up in their temple, had died of hunger and thirst. Marc had tried to free them. Was she so much more callous than her old Kendar friend? If she hadn’t freed her cousin Kindrie from their god’s theocracy, he might have been in there. However reluctant she was to learn, experience was beginning to teach her that not all priests were alike.

Feet shuffled on the sandy road and Jorin growled. Jame turned quickly to confront a blond, tattered figure in the brown robe of an acolyte.

“You,” she said to Dorin, son of Denek, son of Dinnit Dun-eyed. “So you’re the guard they left outside the temple. Are the rest inside?”

“Yes.” He sounded dazed, as if he were having trouble bringing her into focus. Whom else had he seen over the past fifty-odd days of isolation, and what had that meant to someone accustomed to the hive mentality of the priesthood? “Grandfather, all the others, trapped . . .”

“Do they at least have provisions sealed in with them?”

He shook himself, coming to life a little and regaining a shade of his normal haughty nature. “D’you think we’re fools? The temple is unstable. This could have happened at any time, so of course they do. Some. But not enough to last all this time.” Again his manner and voice cracked. “We’ve got to get them out!”

They couldn’t help what they were, Jame thought, fashioned by a god who didn’t care.

She looked up at the frail sickle of a moon declining to the west overhead. “In this light, we might easily miss them, and there are only two of us. Tomorrow morning, early, I’ll bring my ten-command and heavy tackle.”

“No!”

He grabbed her arm. She could feel the nervous tremor of his flesh through her own. Instinct told her to shake him off, but she restrained herself.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “The temple isn’t here. Just after it shrank, before the tower collapsed, they came and took it.”

“Who did?”

“Men in black, muffled to the eyes in black cheches .”

Jame scrambled through images and came up, incredulously, with the memory of the Tishooo’s capture during the winter solstice.

“D’you mean . . . Karnids?”

His eyes slid away from her own. “They might have been.”

Was it possible? Both the Tishooo and the Kothifir temple? What were Urakarn and its precious prophet playing at?

Jame envisioned a map of the Wastes. “It will take . . . what, ten days to follow them?”

“Less. Much less,” the acolyte said, an eager light kindling in his eyes. “There’s a secret way under or near every temple, connecting them.”

Jame cursed herself for having forgotten that. The mysterious Builders had chosen the Anarchies south of the Riverland as their base, and had linked it to each of their building sites throughout Rathillien by a series of subterranean tunnels lined with step-forward stones. She, Marc, and Jorin had traveled by them from the Anarchies to Karkinaroth in a matter of hours, although the two cities lay almost a thousand miles apart. And Gorbel had mentioned that, after the Massacre, Kencyr prisoners reported having seen a Kencyr temple at Urakarn, of all places.

Should she go, though? Right now, without telling anyone?

Dorin was tugging at her arm while Jorin continued to snarl at him, the golden fur rising down the ounce’s spine. That, for so well-mannered a beast, was unusual.

Listen to Jorin, her instincts urged.

The boy is upset, said her better nature. He has reason to be.

“Come on, come on. They need us!”

After so much time on increasingly diminished rations, a night’s delay might not matter, or it could prove fatal. Would it hurt at least to scout out the situation?

“Come on, damn you,” said Dorin again, pulling harder. “Please.”

The entrance to the step-forward tunnel was only paces away in the middle of the street, disguised as one of the many hatches leading to the Undercliff.

A tight spiral stairway led down from the surface. The narrow, triangular risers were perhaps a foot high each, but gave the sensation of much greater depth as one descended. Jame supposed that they were composed of step-downward stones—that is, of rock slabs with such an affinity for their original geological placement that they took anyone who trod on them immediately to that level. With a particularly jarring step, they bypassed the Undercliff into the solid rock of the Escarpment and so on down, presumably, to beneath the valley floor. Darkness had closed around them almost at once. The walls ran with water and the stones underfoot were slippery. With no rail to clutch, it felt as if at any moment one might step off into empty space.

Jame stumbled at the foot and fell to her knees. The impact of her hands caused the coarse moss beneath them to fluoresce, shedding a sickly green light upward between her fingers, onto her face. The acolyte’s footprints led away into the darkness.

His voice floated back from ahead. “Hurry!”

“Dorin, wait!” she called after him, scrambling to her feet, receiving no answer.

She and Jorin followed his footsteps. Only a few strides took them well beyond the stair, Ancestors only knew how far into the Wastes. They were on step-forward stones now. Water dripped on their heads. Walls continued to sweat. Behind them, the light began to fade as it did ahead when they slowed. Jame stopped altogether, realizing that the ounce was no longer with her. She found him a few paces back, nosing a rock. It chittered angrily and rose on its claws, pinpoint eyes glowing like baleful green dots. Jorin dabbed at it with a paw. It snapped at him. Jame seized the ounce by his ruff and drew him away.