P. Hodgell - The Sea of Time

The boy plucked at her jacket. “Leave,” he hissed. “Before worse happens.”

Jame retreated step by step, unwilling to turn her back on that sullen edifice. What worse could it do? How unstable was it, really, and did she really want to find out? Then she was out of the tower, free of the baleful thing that it contained and its churlish priests.

Once away, Jame tried to clear her senses in order to pick up Graykin’s trail again. It came to her, faintly, and she followed it back into the forest of ghostly towers.

Finally here was one that seemed, after a fashion, to be occupied. At least it had a door and, inside, dusty tapestries hung on the walls between the arched windows. Most of the weavings depicted shadowy figures with their backs turned although a few pale, hooded visages faced the room. A thicket of pillars held up the roof. As she entered, a murmur as if of conversation died.

“Hello?”

Only silence answered her, and flickers of movement seen out of the corner of her eyes. There were definitely people in the room, standing behind the pillars, shifting as she moved to stay out of sight.

“I’m looking for a Kencyr named Graykin,” she told the room at large.

“So are we,” replied a husky whisper at her elbow, making her jump. One of the gray figures had joined her. She could see half of his face under the hood—a sharp nose and a narrow chin, thin lips pursed as if at the taste of something nasty.

“How long has he been missing?”

“Fourteen days. Are you one of his clients?”

How to answer that? “We have done business before. Is this the Intelligencers’ Hall?”

“It is.”

Belatedly, it occurred to Jame that she didn’t know what Graykin’s relationship was to the spies’ guild. If he hadn’t registered with it, they might well be hunting him.

More gray figures detached themselves from the pillars and the wall to surround her. They smelled of dust and dank, like dirty linen. Now she could see them clearly direct on, but out of the corner of her eye the room appeared to be empty.

“Who speaks for you?” she asked.

“One who is not here. I will show you where he was last seen.”

That confused Jame. “Where who was?”

The thin lips twisted without mirth. “The one whom you seek.”

There seemed no answer to that except to follow her gray guide out of the room and down the stair that angled around the corners of the tower. They passed a door at each level, all shut, but by the dingy underwear hanging from balcony wash lines Jame guessed that the guild occupied the entire structure. She tried to keep her focus on the spy who led her as he flickered in and out of view. Her sense was that he was playing with her. Whatever Graykin’s association with the guild, hers with him had gained her little credit.

At last they reached the ground on a dirty back street many rings removed from the city’s colorful center.

“There,” said her guide, indicating a wide circular hole in the roadway, its cover dragged to one side.

Jame peered into the depths. “The Undercliff?”

“Yes,” he said, and pushed her in.

Jame fell headfirst into darkness, trapped air snatching at her clothes. Close-set walls echoed back her startled cry. Above, the circle of light receded but, twisting, she saw a dim glow below. Its ghostly light shone on the bars of a ladder flashing past beside her. She reached for it. Its rungs rapped her knuckles sharply, then she caught it. The wrench nearly dislocated both shoulders. For a second she dangled there, breathing hard and scrabbling for a foothold, then her grip weakened and she fell again, onto a sloping pile of rubble at the ladder’s foot.

Sweet Trinity. She would never take the mere falling down of stairs seriously again.

When she got her breath back, Jame propped herself up and looked around. She had come to rest against the wall of a huge cave. Light filtered into it through the vines curtaining its mouth. The shadowy, stalactite-fanged roof must have been a good two hundred feet up and it was nearly as wide side to side. Its floor, while undulating, gave the impression of having been cleared of all obstacles and trampled smooth.

A number of people had turned to witness her sudden descent. Their curiosity satisfied, they went back to work. Jame saw that she had fallen into a subterranean marketplace. As above, so below? Getting shakily to her feet, she limped over to the nearest stall where the merchant in charge handed her a tin of cold water.

“Dropping in on us, eh?”

Jame gratefully drained the cup. The water tasted strongly of iron. “Am I welcome?”

“So long as you don’t come to spy.”

Still collecting her wits, she inspected his wares. Very dingy they seemed—scraps of thin gray cloth, a vest, a codpiece.

“Woven only of the finest spider web,” he said proudly, “and you know how strong that is. One of these strips will stop an arrow.”

He named a price that made Jame blink. It seemed to be her day to meet armorers.

Besides his stall, she saw others selling such basic necessities as fuel and food, the latter rather dispirited, apparent rejects from the market above. Sprinkled among them were more wares native to the Undercliff: multicolored mushrooms, small rock formations apparently intended to be shrines, and water bottled from various subterranean pools. There were also sizable chunks of diamantine softly aglow, priced quite cheaply for such a valuable substance. The Undercliff seemed in general to cater as much to the Overcliff as to its own inhabitants.

The distorted echo of music reached them from farther back in the cave.

“Here they come,” said the dealer. “Happy Vediafest.”

Girls clad in yellow and black robes danced out of the shadow of towering stalagmites playing pipes. As they neared, Jame saw that each one was wreathed with similarly colored snakes, their tails knotted together behind the girls’ necks. Each also carried a long wand at the end of which, tethered with a leash, fluttered a bat. The snakes strained to reach it, coil and strike, coil and strike. When one succeeded, cymbals clashed and the girls cried out in triumph. Supplicants wriggled on the ground at their heels, apparently hoping to see their particular bat caught. Jame saw the bright clothes of Overcliffers and the sturdy cottons of farmers among the drab Undercliffers. Some had obvious injuries; others wore their suffering in their expressions or in the twist of their wasted bodies.

In their midst came a litter carried shoulder high on which sat the statue of a matronly woman festooned with stone serpents.

“Mother Vedia!” the stall holder called out to her as she passed. “Grant good health to me and mine!”

“I didn’t see anything like this above,” Jame said.

“You wouldn’t, not since King Kruin drove all the Old Ones Undercliff. Seems he didn’t want any rivals to his own godhood. Well, his loss, our gain.”

A girl with a bald, tattooed head darted through the celebrants and stopped the litter. The statue quivered. Its surface, laced with cracks and white dust, floated down as both woman and snakes stirred to life. She rose, knelt to listen to her petitioner, then signaled her bearers to set her down. While the dancers continued to thread back and forth between the booths, still singing, she and the girl hurried off. On impulse, Jame returned the tin cup to the merchant and followed them.

They climbed a chiseled stair and ducked into a side cave full of limestone columns with space enough between them for two dozen child-sized sleeping mats. The children themselves were clustered around an alcove at one end of the cave. Jame came up behind them to peer over their heads. In the alcove was a bed and on it lay a restive child with a blood-stained bandage wrapped around his head, supported by a lanky, ginger-haired young man, well endowed with pimples. The bald girl hovered nearby while the matron consulted with another young female, this one plump and blond, wearing a white tunic.