P. Hodgell - The Sea of Time

Released, the Randir huddled on the floor, hiding her face. One side showed oozing punctures where Addy had missed the encroaching lichen and struck flesh—with dry bites, Jame hoped: Kencyr were hard to poison, but venom was nasty stuff. The other side which had twitched before now seemed to be racked with spasms. Blood covered her hands up to the elbows and her legs from the knees down, as if she had knelt in a pool of gore.

“Sweet Trinity, Shade. What happened?”

The Randir drew a shuddering breath. “D-dead,” she stammered. “They’re all dead. I-I found Ran Awl chained to the floor in a room full of crawling shadows. She told me that she and the rest were members of a secret group within the Randir loyal to its lost heir, Randiroc. The Karnids seized them in Kothifir and brought them here, apparently as a favor to Lady Rawneth.”

“She’s mixed up with Urakarn? How did that happen?”

“I don’t know. Awl asked me as Lord Randir’s daughter to grant her an honorable death. I didn’t want to, but she grabbed Addy and Addy bit her. She went into convulsions. Then I saw . . . I saw that she was becoming a changer, against her will. So I gave her the death she wanted.”

Shade’s face altered as she spoke, becoming raw-boned like Awl’s. Then it changed again, twitching and sagging.

“There were more Randir there, a dozen at least, chained to walls and ceilings and floors. Some were dead already. Others . . . they were changing too, with no control over their bodies. They begged me . . . they begged . . . Ancestors forgive me, I killed them all.”

Jame held her as the faces of the slain writhed in torment over her own and her limbs twitched in sympathy with them.

“Hush. You did the honorable thing, in a monstrous situation.”

“No. I’m the monster!”

“Not unless you make yourself one, and so far you haven’t. Shade, trust me. I’ve been wrestling with situations like this longer than you have. Our darkling blood doesn’t help, but it doesn’t damn us outright either.”

Addy slithered out of the Randir’s disordered hair with a warning hiss, wicked, triangular head darting and mad, orange eyes ablaze.

“You. Behave,” said Jame. “Before I tie you into a knot.”

The serpent’s black, forked tongue flickered near her fingertips, then she submitted sullenly to being picked up. Jame slung the molten coils around her own neck since Shade looked as if she would collapse under the weight.

“Come on. We have to get out of here.”

They stumbled through seemingly endless, empty corridors, all the time feeling that they were being pursued. Dry whispers echoed in corners and debris rustled furtively. Eyes gleamed in the shadows, only to become patches of luminous mold as they passed. Jame wondered about the golden-eyed creatures who had taught her how to perform the Great Dance and about Beauty, their innocent child. Somewhere here too were Tirandys, Bender, and the Serpent-Skin Cloak, last seen slithering back into the House to avoid an earthquake in Karkinaroth, the coward.

At last they emerged in the main hall of the House. Stiffened death banners scraped against the walls with threadbare, frozen fingertips. The rain had stopped, giving way to ragged clouds skating past a gibbous moon waxing toward the full. Below, the floor was sheathed in ice over which they slipped and slid, bound for the darkness that gaped on the hall’s far side, between columns.

Here Jorin paused, sniffing, then trotted into the shadows. For once the sensory link between them was acting in Jame’s favor. She could feel first pavement, then clutching grass, then stone again under the cat’s paws, then under her own feet as she followed, half dragging Shade with her. Would they be able to find the door? Yes. Shade hadn’t entirely closed it, so it was edged with faint light.

Jame cautiously pushed it open and slipped through. The exterior bar had fallen off. She kicked it away and shouldered the door shut, so that no sign remained of it. Let the Master and the Karnids find their own way back inside, if they could.

Outside it was still dark—perhaps, judging by the stars, around three in the morning—but which night? Time moved slower in the Master’s House than in Rathillien, which was how her twin brother Tori had managed to gain ten years on her. The moon had been a waning crescent when she had entered the temple. Now it was waxing gibbous, tumbling down the sky. Jame counted on her fingertips. Was it possible that she had been gone up to twenty-four days? Someone was bound to comment on that.

Of more immediate concern, where was everybody? She would have expected the Karnids to be astir, even this early. Mud pots spat. The lake seethed. Dead trees hung over it, their white branches wreathed with mist. Nothing else moved, except for something that bobbed in the water. It seemed to be wearing a black robe, but with that thatch of blond hair, Jame suspected that the garment was actually a Kencyr acolyte’s brown.

“Dorin?”

She eased Shade to the ground, picked up a dead branch, and gingerly poked the floating figure. Bubbles erupted around it as it sluggishly rolled over to bare its teeth. The flesh had boiled off its face and its eyes were poached. The movement detached an arm at the shoulder, but the sleeve prevented it from drifting away. Mixed with the sulfur stench of the lake was the smell of overstewed meat, reminding Jame how long it was since she had last eaten.

Jorin chirped anxiously. A moment later, the ground began to quiver and the lake to ripple. Jame and Shade staggered as fissures opened in the valley floor. Geysers erupted. Farther away, sections of the caldera wall cracked and fell, laying bare Karnid cells.

“This is worse than the last time,” said Jame. “We’d better get going.”

Not far away was the opening to the step-forward tunnel. When Jame leaned over it, hot air rose in her face, lifting the wings of her hair, and a red light glowered below, but at least there was no sign of the trocks. To go underground, though, with the earth so restless . . . Well, what choice did they have unless they wanted a long, long walk back across the Wastes?

Jame pulled Shade to her feet and edged down the steep risers with her, clutching the rail with her free hand.

Patches of mist snagged in the bare trees and drifted, torn, between their trunks. Leafless limbs dripped. Beside the New Road ran the Silver, a sinuous, smoking snake of a river that hid one bank from the other and chuckled slyly to itself as it went. The ground was sodden with last year’s leaves and last night’s rain, the undergrowth snarled with skeins of fog. It was early morning, the sun barely risen over the eastern Snowthorns in a haloed presence.

Along the road’s western bank came the muffled clop of hooves. A white horse emerged from a fog bank as if taking shape out of it. Its rider, on the other hand, wore the black leathers that had given him his nickname.

Storm was still lame and Rain was dead, hence this new mount, a normally placid mare named Snow. Like Storm, Torisen continued to limp. Just as his bruised leg had begun to heal, he had tripped over Grimly lying at the top of the old keep’s stairs and had fallen down a flight, wrenching it anew. It hadn’t helped to be told that his sister made a habit of tumbling down stairs without harming herself.

Torisen wondered what Jame was doing now, at this very moment. He missed her more than he imagined he would, but thoughts of her also made him uneasy. She was so unpredictable, so inclined to ridiculous situations. His dreams of late had been confused, apparently relating to his own past rather than to her present, but seen from a strange angle. If Marc was right about the scrying potential of his stained glass window, he must be mistaken about how it worked.