P. Hodgell - The Sea of Time

“Why don’t you find out before you kill me?” she shouted up into the raging sky. “I and my people may be your last, best hope.”

The Tishooo righted himself with energetic swimming motions.

“All right. I’ll go look. Mind you, we aren’t through with each other yet.”

He whisked up into the sky, drawing the wind with him. The tornado inverted and died, leaving a faintly moonlit night. All around Jame, bodies crashed to earth or into the simmering water.

“Waugh!” said Jorin, pressing against her leg.

“Yes,” she said. “Time to go.”

The temple door still stood open, gaping into darkness, and power poured out of it. Jame hesitated on the threshold. To whom did she trust herself—her despised god or Urakarn?

Better the devil you know . . .

She stepped inside and the door slammed shut behind her.

No light, no sound. It was utterly dark inside the temple, like being stricken both blind and deaf. Even the flow of power had stopped as if dammed. Jame was at length aware of her breath, panting, and of Jorin standing on her foot. The blind ounce depended on her eyes to see and protested their mutual handicap in a low, fretful whine.

“Be still,” she told him in a whisper. “Listen.”

Silence.

It didn’t surprise her to reach back and touch nothing. Gingerly, she took a step forward, then another, wobbling. It was hard to keep one’s balance in such a void. Only her feet pressing against the floor gave her a sense of direction. Two more steps and she should have reached the other side of the hut, but there was still nothing. This also was not unexpected: most Kencyr temples were bigger inside than out.

Air breathed in her face.

Ahhh . . .

It stank of rot and of something sweet. It was also bitterly cold.

Jame followed the smell, step by step, her stomach curdling within her as if at some long suppressed memory. She knew that stench. It spoke to her at a level below the rational, beneath the skin, within the very bone, to the helpless child that she had once been.

Something ahead grumbled, like distant thunder, and the air vibrated. Coarse grass now wrapped, whining, around her boots.

Don’t go, don’t go . . .

A muted flash of light shone ahead. Against scuttling clouds, the front of a structure reared up before her, many roofed, where it had roofs at all, with dark windows and open doors out of which the rank wind breathed.

Hahhh, ah, ah, ah . . .

Darkness again, and another distant rumble, in the flesh, in the bones.

Was that thunder, or stones grinding one against another? She couldn’t see it now, but for a moment it had seemed as if that massive pile were inching toward her, out of a greater darkness. Even now, it might loom over her, poised to fall . . .

Jame swallowed panic. She was still within the Urakarn temple . . . or was she? Something like this had happened to her before, at Karkinaroth, when she had plunged deep into Prince Odalian’s palace only to emerge in Perimal Darkling, inside the House. If so again, another step might take her under shadows’ eaves.

Don’t go . . .

As she hesitated, Jorin stood on her toes, his shoulder pressed against her thigh, chirping in agitation. She was in danger enough; was it right to risk him too? But he was a comfort, here on the brink of madness. Moreover, it was important that she find . . . what? The immediate past blurred. She took another cautious step forward into darkness, onto hard pavement.

Lightning flashed again, closer, with a boom that imprinted the image on her mind of broken rafters overhead against a stricken sky. As her eyes cleared, she found that light had lingered here below. Underfoot was a floor paved with cold, dark stone, laced with veins of luminous green. Walls towered around her. On them hung the woven faces of many death banners, all of them fidgeting and grimacing in a thin wind that threatened to pry them from their perches.

Ahhh . . .

Her heart chilled within her. This was the dire hall where the Dream-weaver had danced and the Kencyrath had fallen.

Alas for the greed of a man and the deceit of a woman . . .

Here she had played as a child after her father had driven her out of the Haunted Lands keep, away from her twin brother Tori, and here the changer Keral had tormented her.

“No mementos for you, brat. This is your home now. Shall I comfort you? No? Then I will leave it to our lord and master.”

Then he had come down the stairs out of the ruined past to claim her as his own, to take her mother’s place.

“So you’ve lost a father, child,” a soft voice had said. “I will be another one to you and much, much more. Come. You know where you belong.”

The tapestry faces seemed to lean in over her.

You fool, she thought, fighting a wave of dizziness. You’re breathing too hard .

She crouched and gathered Jorin into a warm, furry hug, an anchor in a reeling world. The ounce licked her cheek with a rough, anxious tongue, then stuck his wet nose into her ear.

She was not the frightened child who had fled this hall after forcefully declining the bridal bed and hacking her way to freedom through the hand that had reached out to claim her from between fluttering red ribbons. After that had come flight from the House, leaving it in flames behind her, then nearly a year as an apprentice thief in Tai-tastigon, Karkinaroth, the battle at the Cataracts, that terrible winter in the Women’s Halls at Gothregor, and finally blesséd Tentir. When she considered all that had happened since then, her childhood seemed a lifetime ago. She wasn’t even the same young woman who had stumbled into this hall two years ago out of Karkinaroth. An old, defiant chant came back to her:

Her breath steadied. She glowered up at the banners, and realized that there were fewer of them than since her last visit here. Many now hung in tattered rags, stripped to bare warp strings that whined in the wind and tapped restlessly against cold stone. Others slumped on the floor, barely twitching.

An answer to their dilapidated state came to her out of the past: the souls have been eaten out of them.

Blood trapped a Kencyr’s spirit in the weave of its death. Gerridon, the Master, needed these souls, reaped for him by his sister-consort Jamethiel, in order to maintain his ill-gotten immortality. (There: she had spoken his name at last, if only to herself.) Now that the Dream-weaver was gone, he needed her, Jame, to take her mother’s place. In the meantime, he had been subsisting on Highborn leftovers, as it were, but it looked as if he had nearly run out of them. What next? He could turn to the fallen Kendar and to the changers, as the latter had feared when they had started the revolt that had led to the Cataracts. He could accept what Perimal Darkling offered and become at last its creature, its Voice. Or he could try again to win her to his side, to reap new souls among the Kencyrath’s Highborn of whatever house. It was no good, she told herself, turning solely on the Knorth, where only she, Tori, and Kindrie remained.

So think. This is now. You are here. What else in this seemingly ageless House has changed?

Her eyes swept the hall, flinching at half-remembered memories. There were the death banners which scrabbled fretfully against the walls, the luminous floor, the stinking wind, the cold hearth at the end of the room piled high with pelts of the Arrin-ken slain during the Fall . . .