P. Hodgell - The Sea of Time

“Shade!” she cried again.

No response . . . or was there one, muffled, somewhere in the distance?

If one called here, who knew what might answer?

Fool , thought Jame. Now it knows where you are.

No wind blew, but the halls around her seemed to breathe.

Ahhh —a long, slow exhalation. Ha, ha, ha, ha . . .

In its wake came a pressure against the ears and against the heart, as if the air had thickened with a taste of corruption. With Shade beside her and the conversation between them, she hadn’t felt this intolerable isolation. Trinity, to be alone in the House . . .

But Jorin was with her. She knelt and buried her face in the ounce’s rich fur. Its feeling and the familiar clean smell of it anchored her.

“Oh, kitten,” she whispered to him. “What have I gotten us into?”

Haaaah . . . , said the House, and again there was that distant echo:

. . . help, help, help . . .

Jame looked around. She had drifted away from the exterior windows into the heart of the House. What world was this on the Chain of Creation? The walls seemed to expand and contract about her like the bowels of some great creature that had swallowed her whole. Who had called?

Go to them, said one voice in her mind. Stay away, said another.

The House tended to take one where it chose. Jame began to drift, listening for distant voices. Shadowy arches, halls leading nowhere, great, intricately muraled domes admitting strange, filtered light . . .

Shadows and movement began to catch the corner of her eyes. Others walked with her or shied away as if she were the ghost. Some wore elaborate court gowns of a style millennia out of date. Others were draped in dark robes similar to those of Kencyr or Karnid priests. The latter were chanting:

“Do you recant . . . do you profess . . .”

The voices tugged at her. She followed them. Here was a corridor lined with rooms flexing like the harsh breath in her lungs.

“Do you recant your belief in your false, triune god? Do you profess the Prophet of the Shadows to be your true lord and master?”

. . . no, no, no . . .

“Then we must convince you, for your own good.”

Someone screamed: “Oh god, my hands, my hands!”

They were hurting Tori. She wouldn’t allow that. But her steps seemed as slow as if caught in thickened honey. Shapes passed, carrying the glow of a furnace.

“Do you recant . . . do you profess . . .”

That was Rowan, crying out as the incandescent iron seared her forehead, and beyond that, there was Harn with his cracked skull, breathing in, breathing out, as stentorious as a drunkard.

What can I do? What can I do?

She found herself on a threshold, peering into a dim room. Someone hung from the far wall, his wrists secured too low for him to stand, too high for him to sit. His hands were enflamed with suppurating burns and infection ran down his arms in red streaks. A swathe of black hair covered his bowed face. His coat gaped open over a boy’s wiry chest, over the bars of unmoving ribs.

“You can save him,” said a voice behind her. She knew those deep, rich tones with their underlying touch of mockery, and her very bones shook. “He is worth nothing to me, but you . . .”

Jame licked dry lips. She wouldn’t turn to face him. She couldn’t.

“Tell me, girl: for what were you bred?”

“To replace the Dream-weaver, my mother.”

“Well, then. Come to me.”

He was standing so close behind her that she could feel his breath stir the short hairs on the nape of her neck.

“Blackie,” someone called from a neighboring room. “Blackie!”

The boy shuddered and gasped.

What if he stopped breathing again? His hands were already a frightful mess, possibly beyond the power of dwar sleep to heal. Could he survive without them? Would he want to?

“Decide,” said the Master. “Dear child, think what I can offer you. You will never be alone again. The Shanir power that you curse will find its true use. I wait to embrace you.”

For a moment she swayed. What had she ever wanted except to belong? Her god had impressed that need on all of her people, even if the way led through a different concourse than himself. Not even her father had wanted her.

However, she had won a place at Tentir, dammit. The Master was speaking to the outcast child whom she had been, not to the young woman whom she had become.

But Tori . . . could her sacrifice save him, or was this just another of Gerridon’s tricks?

The past cannot be changed. The Master had said so himself.

Yet Tori had somehow escaped this trap and gone on to become Highlord of the Kencyrath. That was his destiny. Nothing she did now could alter that . . . or perhaps her next action would allow that future to exist.

“Will you let your brother die?”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his hand—the right, of course—glide down her arm without touching, but so close that she could feel its heat. She stepped away from it, into the room, across it, and knelt before Torisen.

When she brushed the hair aside, his face was pale with a sheen of sweat and his eyes were closed. He looked impossibly young. The gyves from which he hung were secured by threaded bolts and the bolts by pins out of his reach, but not out of hers. She drew one.

“Don’t,” said that voice by the door. Had it changed in timber, becoming almost petulant? As it grew fainter, it was hard to tell.

The bolt unscrewed and Tori’s hand fell. She caught it, flinching at the heat of its infection, then freed the other one. He sagged into her arms. For a moment she held him, then laid him down on the floor and kissed his clammy brow.

“Wake. Live.”

She wanted to tell him more: that she missed him, that she loved him, that he must trust her. His eyelids flickered, but already he was fading, the outline of the flagstones under him showing through. He was slipping back into the past. That was the way with the House, where time shifted at will. Others had escaped with him, all of those years ago. She hoped that he would regain his wits enough to free them—but then he must have, because Harn, Rowan, and the rest had survived.

Jorin crouched in the doorway, chirping anxiously.

His prints and hers marked the dust, as did a larger set of footsteps almost overlapping her own. Damnation. Gerridon, or someone, had stood that close behind her, breathing down her neck. She could see where he had turned away, the signs of his passing trailing off within a few steps. Had he also retreated into the House’s past, or had he gone into its future to wait for her there? What game was he playing, anyway? As twisted as his plots had become, did he himself even know? Time would tell. With Jorin trotting at her side, she retraced their path.

Here again was the lichen-splotched suite of rooms, crawling with subdued, leprous color.

Jame stopped. She couldn’t leave without Shade, but where was the Randir? Her own childhood memories of the House were incomplete, assuming she had ever come this far into it. Later, though, she had found Prince Odalian “in the place where changers are made,” in the process of becoming one himself, poor boy. Was Shade there now, or trapped in the very fabric of this foul place?

“Shade,” she called. Her voice came out in a croak, hesitant to be heard. No good. Try again. “Shade!”

Filaments and glowing, hairy clots of lichen humped together on the wall. At first they formed a blotch, then a small, blurred image that grew as if something were stumbling toward the wall from its far side. Mittlike appendages fumbled against the inner surface, stirring the outer fungus, leaving red stains. They found the gouges that Jame had ripped with her nails. Fingertips forced their way through, then hands. Jame grabbed them and pulled. The lichen peeled back and Shade plunged through.