P. Hodgell - The Sea of Time

Jame slipped between the stone petals, emerging behind Krothen’s massive bulk as it slumped on the dais. Bending to peer under his arm, she saw Amantine draw herself up to her full if negligible height, her court gown rising to reveal shoes with improbably high heels. Ton hovered at her elbow like an overstuffed bolster, in sweat-stained, premature white with bedraggled pink trim.

“Would it be such a disaster if I came to rule?” demanded the princess. “I have more courage and skill than either you or my son.”

“Mother . . .”

“Face the truth, boy. Where would you be without me? Even if the white should truly come to you, you need my guidance.”

“Your Magnificence,” Jame whispered to Krothen under cover of the growing familial ruckus. “How can I help?”

He laughed again, ending with a wet, racking cough. “You see Life on my right hand . . . Death on my left.”

In the filtered, predawn light, Jame made out Mother Vedia’s plump form wreathed with restless snakes to one side of Krothen and the crone with a box to the other. The box was open. The crone raised a skinny finger to chapped lips.

“Only the god-touched can see us,” whispered Mother Vedia.

Jame could hear the muffled sound of Brier and Amberley battling on the stair. At a guess, they were moving upward. She wondered briefly which form of combat, Kencyr or Kothifiran, they were using. Did one favor unequal ground over the other?

A sudden glow of light came through the stone petals behind her and began to climb Krothen’s back. Sunrise. To the north of the chamber, it slanted in through the gap where a petal had broken off during the earthquake when Jame had last been here.

Krothen groaned.

Jame circled him. The princess was trying to shake the much heavier prince, only succeeding in shaking herself, but Jame ignored them both. Krothen exhaled with a rattle, and his eyes rolled up in their sockets. Then he was still.

The crone closed her box and faded away.

From outside at a distance came the crash of falling towers. Jame wondered if the treasuries had been taken, but the sound came from the wrong direction.

“That’s your temple,” said Mother Vedia. “It’s coming to life again, knocking over its neighbors. Where did you place it, anyway?”

Jame thought that she could feel the return of power, when she extended her sixth sense. She certainly felt the high priest’s rage; somehow, he had learned of his grandson’s fate, if not necessarily of its circumstances.

“Quick now!” hissed Mother Vedia. “Help him!”

“Who?” Jame stared, helpless, at the edifice of inert flesh before her. “How?”

Krothen sat there with mouth agape and blank eyes. His exposed flesh had taken on the waxy translucence of marble. When she touched the folds of his robe, they were hard, and cold, and she could see the shadow of her fingers through them.

The chamber’s doors burst open. Amberley skidded into the room, propelled backward by Brier’s attack. Ton and Amantine scuttled out of the way, clinging to each other. Brier followed her lover’s retreat.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” she said.

Amberley laughed breathlessly and drew a hand across her mouth, smearing blood from a split lip. “I always said that you were good. Would I have settled for anything less?”

Gaudaric and Ruso appeared in the doorway. The latter’s red hair and beard, which had hung limp during the Change, now bristled with energy and sparked at the tips. “I can’t believe it,” he was saying, excitedly waving his once-too-heavy axe as if it were made of balsa, making Gaudaric duck. “I’m Lord Artifice again!”

Amberley backed toward the gap in the stone petals, into the slanting stream of morning light. Her hair glowed like a golden crown. Bloody face notwithstanding, she looked magnificent.

“You have the advantage here,” she said. “I see that. Another time, then.”

“Amb—”

“No.” She stepped over the broken marble stub onto the outer walk. “Where I am going, death cannot follow, nor can you. Good-bye, sweet Brier Rose.”

With that, she took another step out into space and was gone.

Brier had taken a hasty stride after her but now halted, staring at the vacant slice of sky beyond the dome. Then she turned to Jame with a blank face and stricken eyes.

“What did she mean?”

“About death? The Karnids claim to have conquered it. From what I’ve seen, though, I doubt it.”

She also wondered if Amberley had counted on landing some twenty feet below on the spiral stair, not realizing that on the north side of the Rose Tower, due to the twist in its construction, the drop was sheer.

“Brier.” She tugged on the Kendar’s sleeve, trying to reclaim her dazed attention. “I need your help. Gaudaric, M’lord Artifice, yours as well.”

The latter two approached Krothen’s motionless hulk.

“Is he dead?” asked Ruso, staring.

Gaudaric touched the marmoreal vestments and jerked his hand back, as if cold could burn.

A faint sound escaped from between those parted, rosebud lips:

“. . . help . . .”

“Kroaky!” said Jame. “He’s still inside! Mother Vedia, how do we save him?”

Gaudaric started, having apparently just seen the Old Pantheon goddess standing in Krothen’s shadow. So his god-given status as guild master had also returned.

“I don’t know!” wailed Vedia, wringing her hands in agitation while her snakes tried to wring each other’s necks. “Just get him out!”

“This looks like a job for a mason,” said Gaudaric. “What we need is a chisel and a mallet.”

“No time for that.” Jame looked around frantically for something to use. How much air did Kroaky have? “We’ve got to smash our way in.”

Princess Amantine pushed past her to stand in the way. “Sacrilege!” she boomed. “This is my nephew’s sepulcher. I forbid you to desecrate it!”

Ruso picked her up and put her, sputtering, aside. Prince Ton attacked him with a flurry of plump fists.

“How dare you lay hands on my mother!”

“Not now, sonny. King Krothen is dead, but the white hasn’t come to you, has it? So stand aside.”

He turned back to the petrified former monarch.

“A sculptor once told me that marble is softer when first quarried than later,” he said, and tapped the figure’s distended belly with his axe. The translucent marble robe covering it shattered like thin ice over a pond. Beneath was dimpled, marble skin apparently drawn over billows of former flesh.

“Go on,” said Gaudaric, leaning in to watch.

Another harder blow near the deep navel cracked the surface. It gave way. They stared at the next layer, which resembled tightly packed pebbles.

“I think this was fat,” said Jame, and poked it with a finger.

Her touch broke the surface tension. They jumped back as a landslide of stones crashed down to rattle and bounce on the floor. More and more fell, hundreds of pounds’ worth. Was the entire abdomen emptying? No. As the dust cleared, inside they could see the petrified organs: loops of frozen intestines, an enlarged liver, but most of all the stomach, which filled most of the enormous cavity. From within this last came a faint scratching.

Ruso scrambled back through the sliding, shifting pile of pebbles. He took careful aim, but as he swung his axe, stones rolled under his feet and he nearly fell.

“Again, again!” said Mother Vedia, clasping her hands in an ecstasy of agitation.

Ruso grunted and regained his stance. This time he used the butt end of his weapon to rap on the distended organ, lightly at first, then harder and harder. Cracks laced its surface. Then it disintegrated and a body spilled out.

“Kroaky!” said Jame, and rushed to help.