P. Hodgell - The Sea of Time

“Leave it alone, kitten. That’s a feral trock, not like Dure’s pet. Let’s hope that there are no more of them.”

The Builders had brought these little creatures with them to Rathillien because of their ability to digest stone, but they also liked shoes and feet and paws.

More green spots blinked in the shadows back the way that they had come, spreading across the path. The chittering grew.

Perforce, they continued, following Dorin’s fading trail. Jame wondered at the boy’s pace, in the dark, with no light ahead of him that she could see. Had he come this way before? If so, when and why? She began to feel uneasy and more than a bit foolish for having followed his lead so readily.

The passageway went on and on. The track ahead vanished. Their own luminous footfalls shed light in a tight sphere around them, enough to reveal the abyss along whose edge they trod. Things stirred in the depths at their passing. A misstep would be fatal.

Suddenly here was another narrow stair, this one ascending. Jame followed Jorin up into thin moonlight and a desolate landscape. She couldn’t see much of the latter at first because of the mist rising off a nearby bubbling lake. Tendrils drifted around her, stinking of rotten eggs. The lake seemed to be at the bottom of a series of terraces, the ones higher up studded with smoking pits and boiling mud pots. Underfoot, the ground trembled continually, making Jorin pick up his paws as if loath to tread on it.

Across the water stood a structure little bigger than a hut, but so black that the feeble light seemed to fall into it as if into a hole cut out of space. Its outline warped—because of the wavering air? No. Jame’s sixth sense set her teeth on edge and her head began to thump in time to her heart. Despite its size, this was an active Kencyr temple, and not the one that she had come to seek.

A shrill voice was shouting something in the distance. It sounded like Dorin, but she couldn’t make out the words.

More drifting steam blurred her vision. Through it, she glimpsed towering volcanic walls, now near, now far, honeycombed with holes out of which black-clad figures dropped like so many malignant ants. Dorin ran toward them, pointing back at her. This time, his words were clear:

“You see? You see? I said I would bring the Prophet’s chosen one to you, and I have. Now give me back my grandfather!”

Jame swore under her breath. Next time, she would listen to Jorin—if there was a next time. She leaned over the mouth of the stair. At its base, darkness seethed and clattered angrily. To descend was to risk being eaten alive, but where else could they go? The landscape offered few chances for concealment or escape. Meanwhile, approaching Karnids spilled over the lips of the upper terraces and raced toward them.

The Prophet’s chosen one? Be damned to that, whatever it meant.

She ran the only direction she could, around the lake toward the temple with Jorin scampering at her heels.

The structure gained little definition as she approached it. Was it without a door like its much larger counterpart in Langadine? Was it really as small as it had seemed from a distance? Her eyes told her yes, but her other senses insisted that she was approaching something huge.

She found the door not by its own outline but by the rattling of the bar that secured it.

“Let me out, let me out!” cried a muffled voice from within.

Jame wrestled the heavy bar out of its brackets. A blast of wind threw the door open in her face and knocked her backward. She tripped over Jorin and fell flat on her back. Black feathers streamed over her head out of the door, borne on a mighty wind. The world dissolved into roaring chaos. Jame hugged the ground with Jorin pinned under her, protesting. Then, suddenly, all was deathly still. She looked up. Walls of racing clouds surrounded her, flecked with blue lightning, studded by the dark shapes of Karnids snatched off their feet, flying. The black feathers coalesced into a figure far up, silhouetted against the crescent moon at the tornado’s circular mouth, plunging down. A shriek trailed after it. It was going to land on top of her.

Jame scuttled out of the way, tensed for its impact on the stony ground. None came. Looking up, she saw that it had stopped in midair some twenty feet up, although it still gave the impression of plummeting toward the earth.

“Tishooo?”

The Falling Man flailed about with his robe inverted over his head.

“I’m blind!” he wailed.

“You’re upside down.”

He righted himself and clawed purple velvet away from his face. “I’m still blind! Why is it so dark?”

“It’s night.”

“Oh. That’s a relief.” He forced down his flapping robe and hooked his long white beard aside so that it flew upward behind his ear. Now he was parallel to the ground, seeming to hover over it although his clothing continued to whip upward. “You again.”

Jame detached Jorin, who had been clinging to her with all his claws, and got to her feet. “Yes. Me.”

“Harrumph! Is there any reason why I shouldn’t rip you apart where you stand?”

Jame frowned, confused. Her past encounters with the Falling Man for the most part had been almost playful. For all his power, Old Man Tishooo had always seemed somewhat of a clown. “Er . . . is there any reason why you should?”

“D’you have any idea how long I’ve been held captive in that damned temple? Because I’ve lost track of time. And that smug prophet of yours—thought he’d caught some minor desert godling, Kothifir’s native guardian who was best kept out of the way. Of what, though, damned if I know.”

“But you do guard. The city has missed you.”

“I should think so,” said the Tishooo, somewhat mollified.

“Anyway, what do you mean, ‘our’ prophet?”

“This is a Kencyr temple, isn’t it? So was the one that destroyed Langadine. And isn’t the Prophet a Kencyr himself? Oh, I sniffed that out soon enough, for all his wiles. Invaders and despoilers, the lot of you. Why don’t you go back to where you came from?”

“That was another world, a long time ago.”

“Huh. The Earth Wife has taken an interest in you, girl. And I sense that you still carry her imu although you may have forgotten it. But she hasn’t yet made up her mind. Neither have I. Who knows what the Eaten One and the Burnt Man think?”

Jame scrambled for the right words. If the Four didn’t accept her people on Rathillien, they had nowhere else to go, nor a place to stand in the final battle with Perimal Darkling.

“I don’t know who this prophet is, but if he leads the Karnids, then he’s our enemy too. There’s a dark force behind him, one that threatens this world as well as the Kencyrath. How much of Rathillien is left, even now? Our scrollsmen tell us that it’s round, like every other threshold world we’ve encountered. So what’s on its far side?”

The Tishooo fidgeted with his fluttering robe, looking uncomfortable. Blue sparks snapped in his flying beard, threatening to set it alight. “I can’t be everywhere, can I?”

“Why not? After all, you’re the elemental spirit of air, manifested as the wind. Do you even know what’s happened to the Western Lands of this continent?”

“Why?” he said sharply. “What have you heard?”

“Nothing. That’s the point. If Perimal Darkling has eaten them too, then most of this world has already been consumed by the shadows.”

“It can’t have been. I would know . . . wouldn’t I?”

In his agitation, he began to tumble again, and the cloud wall wobbled about him. For a moment, the sky above Jame was full of flying Karnids. A brown-clad figure with storm-tossed blond hair tumbled with them, his mouth and eyes circles of terror—Dorin, thought Jame, getting what he no doubt deserved. She turned from him.