P. Hodgell - The Sea of Time

Shade had been cautiously maneuvering to peer out the window between the bloated white flowers.

“The sky is green,” she said.

“We aren’t on Rathillien anymore.”

The Randir gave her a blank look. “Where, then?”

“The House spans the entire Chain of Creation, from threshold world to world. Each time the Kencyrath has fled, it has walled up the older apartments behind it except when we came to Rathillien. The Fall happened too quickly; there was no time. Since then, the Master has smashed all the barriers, laying the House open from end to end.”

“Has Rathillien been breached?”

“After a fashion. This sort of invasion has happened before, where this world is ‘thin.’”

She was thinking of Karkinaroth, the Moon Garden where Tieri’s death banner had hung, the Haunted Lands, and the White Hills. She had thought at the time that Karkinaroth was unique. Apparently not.

Shade scowled. So much new information obviously disturbed her, and she was inclined to blame Jame for enlightening her. “Then why doesn’t Perimal Darkling burst into Rathillien and overwhelm it?”

Jame remembered standing in the Moon Garden before that gaping hole into the House’s shadows while the threads that had been Tieri’s death banner wove themselves into an obscene semblance of the dead girl. Then as now, the Master hadn’t seemed ready to take advantage of this sudden breach into Rathillien, any more than she had been prepared to carry the battle to him.

Besides, Jame suspected that there had been a change in Gerridon’s plans since the Fall. He still wanted immortality, but on his own terms, not as a consuming gift from the shadows. She remembered the rebel changers who had wanted to seize this world as a bastion against their former lord. Perhaps they had gotten the idea from Gerridon himself. If he was to defy Perimal Darkling, he needed a place to stand. Where else if not on Rathillien, the last threshold world to which the Kencyrath had access?

“Come on,” she said to Shade, adding, when the other hesitated, “You want to find your Senethari Awl, don’t you?”

They walked deeper into the House, trying to stay close to the outer wall and whatever windows it supplied. Dim light seeped from above and sometimes from below. The rooms grew progressively stranger as life and death, animate and inanimate, intermingled more and more. That was the nature of Perimal Darkling, Jame thought, sidestepping a soft, crusty spot on the floor that looked and smelled like a weeping ulcer. It had occurred to her before that the shadows weren’t so much evil as antithetical to human life, so that contact with them perverted it. The Master had used them to pursue his own selfish ends and now was trying to avoid paying the price. Did that make it any less necessary to fight them? No. They were a spreading blight on reality whose triumph would change everything. She could only hope that defeating the Master would also defeat them.

Shade looked more and more nervous, and her face began to twitch. She had only started to show changer characteristics within the past year and didn’t yet have full control over them. Worse, despite Jame’s reassurance about unfallen darklings, she apparently thought of herself as compromised, if not tainted. Jame began to question her, as much to distract the Randir as to gain information.

“You’ve spent a lot of time now with the Karnids. What have you learned about them?”

Shade slipped Addy out of her robe, looped the serpent around her neck, and traced the gilded scales with nervous fingertips as the snake tasted the foul air, its black, forked tongue darting. Finally, absentmindedly, she began to talk.

Some of what she told Jame was familiar: the Karnids had originally been a nomadic desert folk who worshipped Stone, Salt, and Dune. Then a holy man had come to them preaching of a true world beyond the harsh one evident to their senses, an eternal place where death itself would die. The gateway to it, he said, was a black rock on the shore of a vast inland sea. Then he had died. His people continued to make pilgrimages to the rock for a millennium, waiting for his return, even after a trading city had grown around it.

That would have been doomed Langadine, Jame thought, remembering the metropolis’s cheerful bustling, nighttime streets in contrast to the sullen black rock around which the king’s palace had been built. Few had known that the rock was actually a Kencyr temple and that its activation had destroyed the city. Fewer still knew that a grief-stricken Tishooo had subsequently smashed the Langadine temple.

“The Karnids wandered for a long time after that,” Shade was saying. “Eventually, they settled at what came to be known as Urakarn. Why here . . . there . . . wherever . . . I don’t know.”

“Probably because they found another Kencyr temple,” said Jame, thinking out loud. “It may have been a lot smaller to look at than the one at Langadine, but it also seemed to be without a door, perhaps solid.”

Shade turned to stare at her. “What are you talking about?”

“But it wasn’t solid, because the Prophet finally emerged out of it, which was proof enough for them of his identity. How many years has he been back?”

“About fifteen, but . . .”

That would be roughly the same time that Tori joined the Southern Host and was taken prisoner at Urakarn, thought Jame.

“Let me guess,” she said. “Before that the Karnids weren’t particularly hostile to the Kencyrath. After it, they were. So we can pretty well guess who their reborn prophet really is.”

Shade stopped. “We can? Who?”

“Gerridon, the Master.”

“But why?”

“Among other things, because the Karnid temple has a link to the House.”

“So was the Master the first prophet as well?” Shade asked, trying to keep her voice level.

“I don’t think so. The Karnids’ holy man came to them long before the Kencyrath arrived on Rathillien. Maybe he really was a prophet. Of course, the Builders were already here erecting the temples. It’s a good question, anyway.”

The Randir took a step away from her. Like a nervous tic, one of her eyes fluctuated between her own and the porcine orb of the Karnid whose form she had assumed. “You know too much.”

“I’ve been asking questions for a long time, in many strange places. What’s wrong?”

Shade retreated another step. “Everything is too much. The Master, the Prophet, you, me . . . is anyone what they seem to be?”

They had stopped in a room where every surface was crusted with luminous lichen. Flat leaves, scales, and hairy clumps of ochre, rust, chartreuse, and leprous white crawled around them like sluggish thoughts trapped in a bad dream.

Shade backed into a wall. When she tried to step away from it, she couldn’t. Fungus crept up over her shoulders and down her arms, holding her as she strained to free herself. Jame unsheathed her claws, but hesitated to use them for fear of ripping the other’s skin off. Filaments inched across Shade’s startled face and took root. Addy struck at them, drawing blood, until fungus encased her too. The wall sucked both in with a dry rustle and closed over them. All that remained was a blurred image shaded with lichen, in the process of dissolving.

Jame raked the wall with her claws, calling Shade’s name, answered by the flat echo of an enclosed space. Lichen flaked off under her nails. The gouges bled. A section of the wall bulged, then expelled gas between fungal leaves in a flatulent cloud. What if Shade had emerged on the other side? She darted up and down the wall’s length, looking for some turn that would bring her to its far side. None appeared.

Jame stepped back, panting.