The Sea of Time

XVI Lost Children

The child sat in a puddle in the middle of the road and beat at it with his small fists. He had cried himself to whimpers. Still, no one had emerged from any of the towers lining the street to rescue him. The rain had ended and a wan moon shone in the sky. A lean dog slunk out of the shadows, curious or hungry, but fled as the ten-command approached.

Jame picked up the boy.

He was about three years old, wearing a torn, wet smock with a row of daisies carefully embroidered around the yoke. It seemed unlikely that anyone had abandoned him, yet here he was, a picture of misery with tears and snot running down his face. At Jame’s touch, he wailed anew and beat at her chest. She held him, dripping, at arm’s length.

“Somebody, come and take this child!”

The towers rang at her challenge, but all stood dark and silent, as if untenanted. However, most of their occupants were there behind locked doors and windows, praying that the wandering mobs would pass them by. One such group staggered past an intersection with a neighboring street, raucous with drink.

“Come out, come out!” they cried, and smashed empty bottles against tower walls. “Sing with us, dance with us, drink with us! Tonight no god watches, no sin counts, no crime is punished. We are free!”

“Yes, to make fools of yourselves,” muttered Brier. Like most Kendar, she found such civic disorder distasteful and deeply disturbing, maybe with a presentiment of what the Kencyrath might be like without the bonds that held it together. On the other hand, perhaps she was reminded of Restormir when Lord Caineron’s too-tight grip had passed on his own drunkenness and subsequent hangover to his defenseless people.

A door opened a crack and scrawny, disembodied arms hung with wrinkled skin reached out from the dark interior. Jame climbed the stairs, but hesitated near their top. Was this the boy’s grandmother, great-grandmother, or no relative at all?

“Do you grant this child guest rights?” she demanded.

Knobby fingers impatiently snapped and beckoned.

“Do you?”

“Of course,” came the toothless grumble of an answer. “Tell ’em that Granny’s got ’im.”

“Tell whom?”

“’Is parents, idiot.”

Forced to be content with this, Jame held out the boy. He was snatched from her hands and the door closed, stealthily, behind him.

The ten-command had been on patrol since sunset, with midnight and the end of their tour approaching. During that time, they had seen considerable havoc, not all as innocent as the roving bands of drunks. The city was every bit as unsettled as Graykin had said it had been during the last Change. Looters were abroad, and arsonists, and assassins. All over Kothifir, scores were being settled.

Raised voices sounded around the curve of the street and torchlight flared on stone walls. Jame went to investigate with her ten-command close behind her.

Quite a crowd had gathered in front of a lit tower whose door, for a change, gaped wide open. Closest to its steps stood perhaps two dozen burly men with torches, facing a smaller clutch of men, women, and children. Jame recognized the tall, bald man in charge of the latter as the former Master Paper Crown, stripped of his apprentices by the Change. What was his name? Ah. Qrink. The rest must be his family.

“What’s going on?” she asked a woman intently watching the proceedings while she clutched the hand of a child. “Why, Lanek! What are you doing here?”

The Langadine boy looked up at her with solemn, frightened eyes, his thumb in his mouth. The woman stared down at him, apparently astonished that he wasn’t someone else.

“Lanek? Where is your cousin? Where is my baby?”

“Is he wearing a smock embroidered with daisies?”

“Yes, yes. He’s always wandering away . . .” She looked about frantically but, to her credit, didn’t cast Lanek off.

“Granny asked me to tell you that she has him.”

“Oh.” The woman sagged with relief.

“It’s simple enough,” the leader of the torchbearers was saying to Qrink with a broad grin. “Either swear your allegiance to Prince Ton or pay us off. Preferably both.”

Jame recognized the patch of rose-colored velvet on his chest as the prince’s emblem. All of his followers wore it. So this was his much vaunted militia, which he had said would replace the Kencyrath as the guardians of Kothifir.

Qrink glowered. “And if I choose to do neither?”

“Then your tower burns.”

The former master licked chapped lips and frowned. From what Jame could see through its windows, this was not only the family home but also the guild headquarters. Could Qrink regain his position if he let it be destroyed? On the other hand, would he if he submitted to blackmail? One consideration cancelled out the other, leaving only pride.

“I don’t like bullies,” he said. “We can rebuild.”

The other man scowled. “So be it.”

The ten-command started forward, but the militia leader had already signaled two of his men who ran up the steps with their torches. They could be glimpsed inside setting fire to stacks of paper, scrolls, and books. Some smoldered, others caught quickly, throwing orange light to dance on the whitewashed walls.

Jame had been anxiously looking over Qrink’s huddled family.

“Where is your mother?” she asked Lanek.

The child took his thumb out of his mouth and pointed at the top of the tower.

“Qrink!” Jame pushed through the crowd to his side. “Your sister-in-law . . .”

His quick glance confirmed Kalan’s absence. He grabbed the militiaman by the arm. “Stop them! There’s still someone in the tower!”

The man tore his attention away from the growing blaze, but the gloating light of fire lingered in his eyes. He grinned, wet-lipped. “Too late.”

Jame felt rage kindle in her. She barely noticed that her claws had extended.

“You would burn someone alive?”

He blinked and retreated a step, fire-lust giving way to uncertainty. So one might confront a small creature gone suddenly rabid. Jame stalked him.

“Call them off.”

“No . . .”

“So you like fire.” The fragment of a master rune came into her mind unbidden. “Taste it, then.”

Her nails sparked together under his bulbous nose, setting its nostril hairs alit. He flailed at his face, but every move only spread the flames. They kindled his greasy hair. He backed away, wailing, into a widening void as his men retreated from him in horror. Jame slipped past, up the stairs, into the burning tower.

She was surrounded by fire. It licked at paper on all sides, orange, red, and yellow tipped with blue. Kindling inks sparkled green and gold. Pages turned in the draft, their edges blackening, their wonderful images eaten away. Charred fragments swirled past her up the interior stair as if up a chimney. The very air seemed to burn.

Dance.

She began to move in the fire-leaping and wind-blowing patterns of the Senetha, threading her way between flames. Blades of cool air from the open door gave her paths. Flares of heat warned her away from stacks of paper about to ignite. It was intoxicating. She could have played thus until the very stones exploded around her, but she had come here to do something. Oh yes. The Kothifiran seeker.

The stairs were burning, but she mounted them, barely touching their charred surfaces where paint boiled in the heat. Wind-blowing upheld her. Heat lifted her. She could almost fly.

Behind her a step cracked. Jame looked over her shoulder and saw Brier Iron-thorn at the bottom of the stair, one foot on a tread which had broken under her weight. The rushing air stirred her red hair into a fiery aureole about her face as she looked up. Her sleeve was already on fire. She couldn’t live in this inferno, but she wouldn’t retreat without Jame.

Jame turned back. Weight returned to her with the fading of the enchantment and steps crunched underfoot. Heat caught her by the throat. She grabbed the Southron’s arm and hustled her out of the tower.

Both of them were coughing when they reached the cool evening air.

“What in Perimal’s name were you playing at?” demanded Brier as Rue and Mint beat out her flaming sleeve.

“I might ask you the same.”

Jame saw that the militiamen had departed, taking their singed leader with them. Ha. Cowards, the lot of them, when it came to a dose of their own fiery medicine. Meanwhile, Qrink’s family still huddled together on the other side of the street, staring in dismay as their home was reduced to blackened stone and ash.

“Look!” one of them cried, pointing upward.

Near the tower’s summit, a window had been thrown open. Kalan stood in it framed by fire, holding her baby daughter. She looked back at the burning room, then down at the ninety foot drop before her.

“Jump!” some of her relatives cried.

Others shouted, “Don’t!”

Kalan threw her baby out the window.

Brier caught it.

The next moment flames erupted out of the tower’s roof and Kalan was sucked back into their incandescent grip.

The Southron cradled the infant in her arms, staring down at it. “She said to hold its head just so . . .”

It looked merely asleep, warm and rosy from the heat, tiny hands only just beginning to relax, but it was dead.

Qrink eased the body away from Brier and handed it to his womenfolk.

“Brier?” said Jame.

The Kendar turned away.

“Look after her,” Jame told Rue. “It must be almost midnight by now. All of you, your tour of duty is over. Go back to camp. Have a drink. Sleep.”

Rue hesitated, looking dogged. “And you, Ten?”

“I still have an errand to run.”

Paper Crown’s tower was only three blocks from Gaudaric’s. Had the militia already been there?

Jame was alarmed at first to see it also blazing with lights and people moving in front of it. Then someone emerged from the shadows in full armor, leveling a spear at her chest.

“Stand. Who are you?” Then he relaxed. “Oh, Talisman. I didn’t recognize you in that jacket.”

True, she was dressed as a cadet. It was unclear to Jame how many Kothifirans besides the Kencyr priests knew of her dual identity. She hadn’t made a secret of it in Tai-tastigon nor had she here, but people were still apt to see her either as the Knorth Lordan or as the fabled Tastigon thief.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“The prince’s bully boys have been to call, but we showed them off. Before that . . . Well, you should talk to Ean.”

“Not to Gaudaric?”

“He isn’t here. Come on.”

Following him toward the tower, Jame noted that many of Iron Gauntlet’s apprentices were in evidence standing guard, unlike Paper Crown’s. When she mentioned this to her guide, he shrugged.

“Gaudaric opened the tower to our families when the Change first occurred. We’ve taken shelter here ever since, and carried on with our work. Who wants to sit idle?”

An island of stability in a sea of change. If Gaudaric eventually lost his position as grandmaster, it would be through no fault of his own.

Jame wondered, not for the first time, about Graykin. Was he still, somehow, in charge of his fractious guild or was he on the run? If the latter, why hadn’t he sought her out? When she thought about him, an echo returned of anxiety, underlain by a strong streak of stubbornness.

. . . whatever happens, I’m still your sneak, aren’t I?

What had she done to requite such loyalty? Precious little.

Ean waited for her on the tower steps, his time-ravaged face haggard under gray-threaded hair.

“Have you any news?” he asked anxiously.

“About what?”

“Byrne. My son. He was snatched by Ruso’s agents early this evening. Ruso sent word that Father had to come to his tower, alone, and Father went. Armed.”

Jame felt her heart sink. “When was this?”

“About two hours ago. The rest know that the master is gone, but not where or why, otherwise they would be storming Lord Artifice’s tower and Byrne would be dead. Where are you going?”

“To Ruso, of course, but don’t worry: I’ll be careful.”

“As you were in Langadine?”

“More careful, then.”

When she reached it, the tower of Lord Artifice was dark except for its uppermost floor under the cupola dome. She climbed the stair silently. Voices floated down from above. Ever so slowly, she raised her head. Gaudaric leaned panting against a table at one side of the room and Ruso against one opposite him. The former held a sword, the latter an axe that seemed too heavy for him. Both wore full armor. Gaudaric’s reflected his taste for the simple and efficient; Ruso’s was more elaborate with red-trimmed scales and serrated spikes on his shoulders. Steam rose from the collars of both their gorgets and their hair hung down dank with sweat. From that and the disheveled state of the room, it appeared that they had been going at each other furiously for hours and only now had stopped for a much needed rest.

Ruso coughed and wiped his bedraggled red beard from which no sparks now flew. Without his fiery aura, he looked common enough, and quite young. “You’re finished, old man,” he said hoarsely. “Just let me kill you and this will all be over.”

“It was your idea that we fight to the death, lad, although I keep telling you: I have no ambition to become the next Lord Artifice.”

“Ha. Ambition has nothing to do with it. Gods know, I have enough for both of us. Don’t you understand? When I lost the lordship, I lost my talent. D’you know how that feels?”

“I can guess,” said Gaudaric, not unsympathetically. “Yet you weren’t so bad before that as my apprentice.”

“But not good enough to marry your daughter.”

“Easily that good, except that she had chosen Ean.”

“She would have taken me if you had told her to.”

“Now, would I do a thing like that against her wishes?”

Ruso shook his tousled head. “You’re too soft, old man. If we had joined forces . . . but now that withered fool Ean calls you father and what am I? Nothing.”

An impatient voice sounded from the edge of the room: “Is this going to take all night?”

Although it wasn’t he who had spoken, Jame could make out Byrne standing in the shadows. Behind him, a tall, thin man held a knife to his throat. Two others flanked them, one short and squat, the other as wide as a temple door. All three wore black, but their garments otherwise appeared to be threadbare street clothes, and their masks looked suspiciously like pillow cases dyed black, with eye holes cut out of them.

“Are you all right, Byrne?” asked Gaudaric.

“Yes, Grandpapa, but I’m getting tired of standing.”

“Patience, boy. You know,” he added, addressing the shabby, black-clad figures, “I still don’t understand your place in all of this. Ruso is almost broke. What has he promised you?”

The squat leader stirred. “Recognition,” he said. “For an official assassins’ guild.”

“Oh dear. If the gods haven’t granted you a grandmaster in all of this time, what d’you think Ruso can do about it?”

“He will have power and influence when the Change ends. He told us so.”

“Yes, but don’t you understand? An assassins’ guild would fall under the auspices of Professionate, not Artifice. If Shandanielle comes back, healer that she is, do you see her sanctioning your efforts?”

The broad would-be assassin stirred. “Here now, brother,” he said in a surprisingly high-pitched voice. “Why didn’t you think of that? Lady Professionate is no friend to killers. Anyway, I’m tired of standing too. What say we cut out of this?”

Gaudaric twitched at the word “cut,” but the tall man lowered his knife. “Right,” he said. “It seems to me that we should be approaching a professional. Any suggestions?” he asked Gaudaric.

The armorer sighed. “Maybe the former Mistress High Hat of the Philosophers’ Guild. I don’t know. This is the Change, after all.”

The three trooped away down the stair. Jame flattened herself against the wall, but the first two only glanced at her as they passed. “It’s your party now,” said the third in disgust. Then they were gone.

Jame slipped up the steps and joined Byrne. “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked him, seeing the shallow cuts that scored his neck and drops of blood on his collar.

“Well enough,” he said, fingering his throat. “Toward the end, his hand started to shake.”

Gaudaric pushed himself away from the table and lowered his visor. “Well, shall we?”

Ruso threw down his axe with a clatter. “Oh, what’s the use? I can’t kill you. Come to that, I don’t even want to. I’m a failure at everything.”

One of his mechanical dogs crept out of the shadows and nuzzled him. Gaudaric stared.

“But I thought that our special powers ended when the Change began. How did you animate it?”

Ruso scratched the metal head as it nosed its way under his arm with a high-pitched whine. “I cheated. See?” He opened a panel between its shoulder blades to reveal busy wheels and cogs. “It’s clockwork.”

“Really?” Gaudaric dropped his sword on the table, took off his helmet, and went to crouch by his former pupil. He stared at the younger man’s creation. “Why, it’s wonderful! Don’t you see? This is a skill that no Change can take away!”

“Let’s go,” Jame said to Byrne. “Your parents are worried half to death about you.”

“But Grandpa . . .”

She laughed. “Unless I miss my guess, he and Ruso are going to be discussing nuts and bolts until dawn.”

Jame escorted Byrne back to the Armorers’ Tower, all the way listening to his enthusiastic description of the fight which she had missed. It sounded as if the two had been fairly evenly matched. However, there was little question that in Byrne’s mind Gaudaric’s superior armor and skills had been about to triumph over the other’s youth. On the whole, he was sorry that his grandfather hadn’t finished the job, but he also had to admit that the mechanical dog was something special. Maybe Grandpa would build him one.

At the Armorers’ Tower, she turned the boy over to his anxious father and, as she departed, heard Byrne launch into his story again from the beginning with unabated zeal.

It was only shortly after midnight, but already it felt like a long day. Jame took the last lift cage down to the camp. As she approached her barracks, she saw more lights burning there than she would have expected at this hour.

Rue met her at the gate.

“Thank Trinity you’re back. It’s Brier. I think she’s gone mad.”

Crashes sounded inside the mess. Older randon looked in through the windows from the outer courtyard, but retreated as a harsh voice from within ordered them back.

“That’s Harn Grip-hard,” said Jame. “What’s he doing here?”

“I sent for him,” Rue said. “With you gone, someone had to do something.”

Jame pushed through the crowd and stopped in the doorway. A plank, formerly part of a dinner table, hit the wall near her head and shattered, showering her with splinters. Brier upended a bench and smashed it against the fireplace. The room was littered with similar debris. Here too there had been a long battle, one woman against herself.

“Now, now . . .” rumbled Harn and caught her around the waist. When he swung her off her feet, she lashed backward at him and he dropped her with a grunt. She spun and went after him. Jame slipped between them.

“Brier, stop.”

The Southron loomed over her, fists raised, then gave a half-strangled sob and lurched away.

“What in Perimal’s name is going on?” Jame asked Harn, as Brier sank down on one of the few remaining benches and laid her head on the table in her hands. “Is it a berserker flare?”

“Huh. No. She’s drunk.”

“But Brier doesn’t drink.”

“She did tonight—on your orders, your cadet tells me.”

“Go back to camp,” she had said. “Have a drink. Sleep.”

Jame glanced at the hovering onlookers. “Send them away,” she said, “and Harn, please go with them. Thank you for your help, but I’ll take care of Brier now.”

He gave her a dubious look. “Sure about that, are you?”

“She’s my responsibility. Somehow, I’ve failed her.”

“Huh,” he said again. “As you will.”

He went to the windows and secured the shutters, then stepped outside, closing the door after him. His booming voice could be heard in the courtyard, sending everyone back to bed.

Jame sat down opposite Brier and took the Kendar’s hands across the table. They were bleeding, gouged with splinters.

“Brier, what is it?”

The other’s hands turned in her grasp and gripped her so hard that her bones ground together and her breath snagged in a hiss. Images flooded her mind, as sharp as knives.

—Kalan’s baby plummeted downward. She reached up and caught its slight weight. Its head bent backward over the crook of her arm. There was a muffled crack as if of a dry twig breaking—

She told me how to hold it.

. . . dead, dead, dead . . .

Mother, gone into the Wastes. Days waiting. Weeks. Months. She never came back except as a pale shadow under the sand, skimming before a stone boat . . .

What did I do wrong? Why did she leave me?

Blackie, telling me the story; the Highlord, offering me a place.

(Oh, Amberley . . . )

Caineron: “Pretending to be a Knorth now, aren’t you? Not easy. Not possible, I should think. On your knees. Kendar are bound by mind or by blood. Such a handsome woman as you, though, deserves to be bound more pleasurably. By the seed . . .”

The rustle of his breeches dropping, and then a descending blur—the Highlord’s mad sister: “Boo!”

“Hic!” Now Caldane was floating, pants around his ankles, turning over in the air . . .

The Highlord is kind, but do I deserve kindness? Do I trust it? Rather give me strength, even if it is cruel. Oh, Trinity, am I Knorth, or still Caineron?

And the memories started again in a vicious loop: Kalan’s baby falling, its neck breaking . . .

Brier raised her head and croaked, “More wine. More noise. Anything to stop that sound, like a dry twig snapping . . .”

“Stop it, Brier. It wasn’t your fault. None of it was.”

The Kendar’s bloodshot eyes focused on her.

Torisen Black Lord was too far away, too . . . gentle. Jamethiel Priest’s-bane was not, and she was here. Need speaks to need, as it had with Graykin in the gorge at Hurlen beside the Silver. Like Marc, Brier had the moral strength and the experience which Jame felt she lacked. Would she have survived as a cadet without the Kendar’s support? How much she had come to depend on the other’s solid presence behind her.

“I need you,” she heard herself say through numb lips.

Brier’s fragile bond to Torisen bent and broke. Another, stronger, formed in its place.

“I am yours.”

Then the Southron’s lids fluttered and her head dropped back to the tabletop. Jame freed her hands and leaned back, shaken, massaging her bruised wrists.

Rue emerged from the shadows. “What just happened?”

“Nothing that was intended.” Was it? “Tell no one, Rue. This is our secret, yours, mine, and Iron-thorn’s. D’you hear? Now help me get her up to bed.”

Between them they urged Brier to her feet and supported her to the foot of the stairs. There she shook them off and climbed by herself, holding tight to the railing.

Perhaps she had given the Southron what she needed after all, Jame thought as she followed Brier, and had received the same in return; but oh lord, what was Tori going to say?