P. Hodgell - The Sea of Time

But something else rested on the hearth, something small and black. Jame crossed the floor to investigate and found a tiny, obsidian pyramid nestled between a pair of flayed paws. It was all of three inches high. Well, she had said that the Kothifiran temple might be reduced to the size of a grain of sand. This was at least bigger than that. Gingerly she picked up the object, rather surprised that it didn’t weigh more. If she tilted it, what would happen to the priests within? A temple inside a house inside a temple . . . the very thought made her head spin.

Some catch in the wind caught her attention. A dark figure stood in the middle of the silently pulsing floor, watching her. From what she could make out, it looked like a Karnid. Damnation. Had one of them followed her into the temple and from there into this hall? Now it was advancing toward her, unwrapping its cheche as it came. Jame slipped the miniature temple into a pocket so as to free her hands, aware as she did so that it tipped and fell on its side. Oh well. The approaching figure had bared its face—square and dark, with piglike close-set eyes, but it changed as she watched. Even before it had settled into familiar lines, Jorin was trotting forward to greet it. Jame followed the ounce.

“Shade.”

The Randir stood before her in oversized robes which nonetheless showed lengths of bare, slender ankle and wrist.

“I can change shapes, but apparently not my basic weight,” she remarked, regarding the pale gleam of her limbs with disapproval.

Jame caught her in a hug. “I looked for you everywhere!”

“Er . . . yes.” Shade hesitated, then gingerly returned the embrace before disengaging from it, but not before Jame had felt Addy’s warm length coiled around the other’s waist within her robe and heard the serpent’s sleepy, warning hiss. “You didn’t find me because I had assumed this form and didn’t dare break cover to communicate. Do you know that Karnids are secretly gathering in Kothifir? Well, they are. This was one of them until I took his place.” She frowned, remembering. “There was a lot of blood. While it helped me to make the change, I find that I don’t particularly like killing.”

“I would worry if you did. But what are you doing here?”

Shade tugged at her sleeves as if this would lengthen them. “I’m still looking for Ran Awl and the missing Randir, of course,” she said. “They weren’t in Kothifir and no word came from Wilden of their arrival there. Given the number of Karnids in Kothifir, that suggested Urakarn. When a courier returned here to report to their prophet, I followed him. That was a strange trip, underground and surprisingly fast.”

“The step-forward tunnel.”

“Is that what they call it? Well, I’ve been here for more days than I care to count, poking around, finding nothing. Only the temple remained to be searched. Most Karnids avoid it as a sacred site, so when I saw you dart in . . .”

“You followed again.”

“And found myself here, wherever this is.” She caught Jame’s arm with a sudden hiss of warning. “Look.”

An errant breath of wind had brought something translucent into the hall. It drifted across the dark floor, gliding and bending with aching grace, trailed by white, floating drapery. Delicate feet moved to an unheard melody. A pale face fragile as the new moon turned in their direction without seeing them, locked in dreams. Oh, how sweet its faint smile was.

“So beautiful . . .” breathed Shade and took an involuntary step toward it, but Jame held her back.

Then the air changed . . . ahhhhh . . . and the apparition was gone.

Shade turned on Jame furiously with a glint of tears in her eyes. “Why did you stop me? Who was she?”

Jame drew a ragged breath. It had taken all her own self-restraint not to rush across the floor to clutch at that diaphanous skirt like a lost child.

Mother . . .

“That was the Dream-weaver,” she said unsteadily. “Perhaps that was how she danced the night the Kencyrath fell. Perhaps it was on some other occasion. Time moves in different currents here.”

“Was she a ghost, then?”

“Not exactly. Her world is as real to her as it would be to us if we got too close to her.”

Shade gave Jame a hard look. “You obviously know more about this place than I do.”

“I told you once before: we’re both unfallen darklings, you thanks to your changer blood inherited from your grandfather Keral, I because of where I grew up. Here, in fact.”

“And where exactly are we?”

Jame told her.

“Oh.”

Lightning threw the hall into sudden, stark relief, and Jorin crouched, squalling in protest. Thunder roared. Some banners lost their perilous grip on the surrounding walls and plummeted, shrieking, to the floor. A cold, hard rain began to fall through the shattered roof beams, giving way after a moment to hail. The ounce scuttled back toward the hearth, into the shelter of the partial roof. The two young women followed him, both shivering, their breath puffs of cloud.

“Now what?” Jame asked.

Shade clenched her teeth to stop them from rattling, and not only because of the cold. Like most Kencyr, she had previously thought little about Perimal Darkling as a living entity. The worst stories of her childhood were coming to life around her.

“I still need to find Ran Awl,” she said with a gulp, committing herself to nightmare. “And there was something else I overheard among the Karnids—that she and the others had been taken ‘where changers are made.’ What?”

Jame had sworn under her breath. With the Kothifiran temple in her pocket, she had hoped that her mission here was ended. After all, what did the depths of the House offer her except bitter memories best forgotten and perhaps a very real current threat? If the Master was here, in any level of the structure’s past, her presence would call to him.

“I know that place,” she said reluctantly. “It lies deep within the House. You’ll need help to find it.”

“And you will give me that help.”

Jame sighed. Shade wasn’t giving her a choice. Anyway, Awl was a fellow randon and a good woman, even if she was Randir. Whatever was happening to her now, she didn’t deserve it.

Jame led the way across the hall and through an archway. The House opened out around them in a seemingly endless procession of high-vaulted passageways, broad stone stairs spiraling up or down, more corridors, more halls. Everywhere lay cold stones, colder shadows, and desolation. At length they came to an open archway whose upper curve was shaped like a mouth. It had been walled up, but the massive blocks now lay tumbled about on the floor like broken teeth through which the wind blew.

“What is that smell?” Shade asked, speaking barely above a whisper.

Something dead, something alive, many things in between . . .

And there was a faint, sickly light within, coming from a barred window curtained with vines and white flowers shaped like swollen, pouting lips.

Jame stopped Shade from going for a closer look. “Those blossoms are vampiric,” she said.

Was it her imagination, or for a moment did the wisp of a figure hang in their obscene embrace? They had caught her once and had nearly drained her dry before Tirandys and his brother Bender had come to her rescue.

Ah, Tirandys, Senethari, who taught me honor by your bitter mistakes . . .

Although he had died at the Cataracts, the victim of Honor’s Paradox, he would be here too in some fold of the House’s past, perhaps no more than a breath away. She wanted to see him, to warn him against what lay ahead.

But “The past cannot be changed.”

Who had said that? Ah. The Master himself, explaining why he could not reap souls in the past. What happened there happened only once.