P. Hodgell - The Sea of Time

Cautiously, Jame turned her head. There lay the Master’s horned helmet, scored where the rhi-sar tooth had entered it. Its mangled eye slit seemed to stare back at her, dark and empty.

She started to rise, and gasped as pain lanced through her left shoulder. Finding that arm limp, she struggled up onto the other elbow. The rest of the black enameled armor sprawled on the ground nearby, also tenantless, held together by various buckles and straps.

Iron-jaw was gone too. Whether he had vanished like his master or simply walked away, she didn’t know. Death’s-head remained, looking about curiously with head high and ears pricked. The battle had stopped in its tracks. Jame had the impression that the Karnids had all turned to stare at what remained of their fallen prophet, but now their attention was fixed on something to the west. She craned to follow their gaze.

Urakarn still loomed behind the rags of night, but its face had changed. A massive column of ash billowed above it, stabbed through by lightning bolts, and fiery chasms had opened down its flanks. As Jame watched, the eastern face of the mountain bulged and slid. Another explosion belched clouds of steam near the summit, and another, and another. Everything was in motion, rising or falling, to a sound like that of distant thunder. The Betwixt appeared to be in the direct path of that vast, roiling collapse. Just when it seemed that a wall of debris would come rolling around the valley’s western curve, the sun lifted over the mountain spur to the east and night rolled back, taking the shades of Urakarn with it.

The sky growled and the ground briefly trembled. A trickle of smoke rose on the far horizon from a mountain hidden by the curve of the earth.

The Karnids stirred and muttered. From where Jame lay, she could see mostly shifting black legs, of horses, of men. All seemed to reach the same conclusion at once. With that, they turned and trudged off westward, away from the battlefield, toward the ruins of their home.

Jame rose slowly, carefully, as if one joint at a time. Her left arm hung dead at her side and her left shoulder slumped forward within her shell of rhi-sar armor. All around her, Karnids were retreating, skirting the circle of combat as if the ground there were tainted. No one so much as looked at her.

“That’s it?” she asked Death’s-head.

The rathorn snorted and shook himself.

When she turned to the east, the sun blinded her. The two ridges and the gap between them appeared to be full of waving figures. Their voices seemed far away and faint, but she thought that they were cheering. Jame waited for them, holding her arm by the elbow close against her side, feeling cold and sick.

The camp surgeon told her that she had broken her collarbone.

“It’s nothing serious,” he said cheerfully. “A healer could set it right in a few days, but we don’t have one. Say, two weeks in a sling with plenty of dwar sleep, four or five weeks without it.”

Then he had given her a sleeping draft, which she had hardly needed. It seemed an age since she had last closed her eyes—twenty days, if one went by the calendar.

Toward dusk, she woke in her dimly lit quarters with Jorin curled up beside her. Rue had propped her upright with pillows to ease the pain in her shoulder. Sounds of celebration filtered through curtains drawn across the windows. She gathered that the rest of the Host had returned to camp during the day, following Harn Grip-hard who had ridden up on a donkey, the only mount he could find, as they had quitted the pass.

“I see that you’ve done it again,” he had said to her. She still wasn’t sure exactly what he had meant.

Her mouth was very dry, her lips chapped. “Water,” she croaked, hoping that Rue was nearby. Instead, a dark figure loomed up beside her holding a cup of water.

“Here. Drink,” said Harn. “I sent your servant off to enjoy the festivities. The Feast of Fools has been going on all day, Overcliff, Undercliff, and in the camp. You, however, got your foolery in early. What possessed you to take on the entire Karnid horde single-handed?”

Jame thought that she had had her reasons, but none of them sounded convincing now.

Harn drew up a chair and sat down beside her. Wood groaned under his weight while his knees peaked halfway up his chest.

“Never had a broken bone before, have you?” he said. “It’s disheartening. Everything will seem worse than it is until you get used to the idea, and by then the bone will have knit.”

Jame sipped the water, tasting the tang of pomegranate juice.

“How many casualties?” she asked.

“In the Betwixt? A dozen wounded, but none killed. The cadets had too strong a position, and their line held. On the other hand, the Karnids must have lost several hundred. We’ll never know for sure since they took their dead with them. Given the way the valley funnels there, most never got within striking distance.”

Jame regarded him. Everything will seem worse. . . . “You have something else to tell me, don’t you?”

Harn looked away, then back at her. “While you were gone, I got a message from Blackie. He wanted to know what had happened to Brier Iron-thorn. As far as I knew, nothing had, until I asked her. She said that her bond to the Highlord had broken, and re-formed with you.”

Jame sighed. She had known this was coming, but had hoped that, somehow, it would never arrive. “It was an accident,” she said. “Brier was very upset when the seeker’s baby died in her arms, and Tori was too far away to help her.”

“Whereas you were right there. Yes, I understand. Hopefully Blackie will too, when he hears the full story.”

A moment’s silence fell between them. Both were thinking that Torisen’s responses weren’t always rational, and that this one had sprung from the heart of his deepest insecurities.

Harn clapped his big hands on his knees with an air of someone facing up to the worst. “There’s more. He’s ordered you to return to Gothregor. Immediately.”

Jame stared at him. “But I still have sixty days, all of spring, left of my year at Kothifir!”

“The randon will understand a summons from your lord—I hope. You’ll take Iron-thorn, of course. And your ten-command as an escort, on extended duty. Cheer up,” he added, seeing her expression. “However mad your actions this morning, you aren’t exactly leaving under a cloud.”

Her eyes dropped to a little pile of paper scraps on the floor. She remembered waking earlier that day to find third-year cadet Char standing by her bed, glowering down at her.

“D’you still have that note I slipped under your door?” he had asked.

She had fished it out from under her pillow and mutely handed it to him. He had torn it up. Then he had left without another word. Just now, waking, she had thought that it had all been a dream. Apparently not.

Harn stood up, seeming to scrape the ceiling and fill the room. “For all Blackie’s histrionics, you needn’t leave until tomorrow. Go back to sleep.”

In the doorway, he passed Brier. The Southron stepped into the apartment, glanced after him, then raised an eyebrow at Jame.

“Tell the others to pack,” Jame said, leaning back against her pillows with a sigh. “We’re going home.”

Addy—Shade’s gilded swamp adder, to whom she is bound

Adric—Lord Ardeth

Ahack—in the Wastes, the west wind

Amantine, Princess—Kruin’s sister, Krothen’s aunt

Amberley—a Kendar, Brier’s former lover

Anooo—in the Wastes, the north wind

Apollynes—the mountain range parallel to the Rim