The Sea of Time

XVIII “Please”

“Now try sitting,” said Gaudaric. “And remember to breathe.”

Jame gingerly lowered herself onto a wooden chair, misjudged the distance, and dropped the last few inches with a thud. Every joint of the rhi-sar armor creaked in protest.

“Hmm,” said the armorer, regarding her critically, stroking his chin. “Now bend forward. I thought so: the shoulder straps are too tight.”

Byrne detached and lifted each shoulder guard in turn to let the strap beneath out a notch—like adjusting the girth on a horse, thought Jame, grumpily, feeling the front- and backplates of the cuirass shift downward. Unused as she was even to shopping for clothes, the fitting sessions were beginning to try her patience. But the armor did feel better. Now she could reach down to stroke Jorin with a gauntleted hand. The ounce rolled over on his back and stretched, purring. The gloves at least were marvels. The smallest rhi-sar teeth marched down the fully articulated backs, which in turn were sewn to leather gloves with slits in the fingertips to accommodate her extended nails. She hadn’t realized that the armorer had noticed them.

“It will grow more supple the more you wear it,” said Gaudaric. “The trick in making it is to use as little wax and resin as possible to give it its initial shape. Too much and it becomes brittle.”

“I feel like a tortoise,” said Jame in a muffled voice, speaking to her knees. Their leather cops showed the pattern of fine, mottled scales, surprisingly dainty to have come from such a monster.

“You should feel like a dragon,” said Gaudaric. “Stand up. Take a look at yourself.”

Jame rose and stepped in front of the full-length mirror. What she saw reflected there was a fantastical creature sheathed in white leather reinforced by the ivory of tooth and claw. The armor fit together as steel plate would, but it was much lighter. Braided inserts increased its flexibility and vented body heat. Gaudaric had reinforced the helm with a ridged crest and one rhi-sar fang thrusting downward from it as a nasal guard. Two more teeth pointed upward, socketed in the cheek guards. Jame hoped that these last were as unbreakable as Gaudaric believed, given that they presented two very sharp tips just below the slit out of which she peered. Larger teeth encased her torso like an external ribcage, their points tucked under a reinforced breastplate. Smaller ones in addition to claws marched up her arms and down her legs. It wasn’t hard to imagine the white rhi-sar’s mad, blue eyes glaring back at her from within that cage of ivory.

“I see what you mean,” she said.

“Never think that you’re invulnerable, though. A bludgeon swung with sufficient force can break ribs through the leather, and some weapons can pierce or slice through it, especially in a lateral blow falling between the ivory. Remember, the beast had to be skinned in the first place and then I had to cut out the pieces, mostly with persistent sawing. Does it pull anywhere else?”

Jame rolled her shoulders and head, then twisted her body, to the right, to the left. Presumably the leather would also creak less with use.

“Good,” said Gaudaric. “We can still make minor adjustments, but that, I think, completes the final fitting. Now, let’s see you get out of it.”

Jame considered the arming sequence in reverse. First she removed the helmet and gauntlets; then, with Byrne’s help, the shoulder cops with their toothy spikes, the arm harnesses, and the gorget. Next Byrne unstrapped the cuirass and removed both back- and frontplates. Then the thigh protectors with their knee cops were unhooked from the belt and the belt itself was unbuckled, followed by the greaves and articulated shoes. This reduced Jame to the padded underwear of a gambeson. To her amusement, both men tactfully turned their backs as she stripped and then gratefully re-dressed in her own clothing.

Gaudaric turned back. “Getting it off is always faster than putting it on, but you’ll have help with that, I should think. I’ll wrap it up and have it delivered to your quarters in the Host’s camp.” He paused, as if about to say something else, then shook his head and bent to gather up the pieces.

Jame thanked him, remarking with a shade of guilt, “So much work for a few leftover scraps.”

His payment for the work was whatever was left of the rhi-sar.

Gaudaric chuckled. “They’re more than that. Every bit of antique white rhi-sar leather is highly prized among the few with the rank and money to afford it.”

Jame crossed over to the open window, through which the smell of dust and rot drifted. Earlier there had been a crash quite nearby, loud enough to make everyone jump. Another tower must have fallen.

“I’d forgotten that King Krothen is the only Kothifiran with the right to wear all white,” she said over her shoulder, “or is it different since he lost his god status?”

“These days,” said Byrne darkly, with the moral certainty of the young, “anyone can wear anything. It’s disgraceful.”

It was nearly half a winter’s season since the Change had begun, with no sign yet of resolving itself. However, just when it had seemed that things couldn’t get any worse, the city had begun to organize itself. Leaders arose. Committees formed. Neighborhoods started to protect themselves. And politicking began.

No one saw this as the new, permanent state. Never before in living memory had a Change lasted so long, but eventually it would end and new leaders, divinely chosen, would emerge. It was impossible to guarantee who they would be, but there was some evidence that those in whom others had faith had the best chance. Consequently a scramble was now on in many quarters to attract followers.

Needham, the former master of the silk merchants, clearly aimed to become the next Lord Merchandy. In this he was all the more desperate since the Wastes were the only source of silken goods and that trade had ended, probably forever. It was common knowledge that his assassins were hunting for Mercer. So far, however, the Undercliff had protected the former guild lord. Although Kroaky hadn’t been seen since the Change began, Fang and her urchins seemed to be making it a game to spot and plague these would-be killers—without endangering themselves, Jame hoped. Then again, from what she had seen of Kothifir’s assassins, they were a limited threat.

Lady Professionate had fewer rivals. Most (excluding her family) saw it as a universal good that a healer should have special powers and wished her well, but she stayed in hiding to nurse her mentor.

As for Ruso, Lord Artifice, many guild masters would have contended for his position, but most of them were too busy fighting off challengers within their own houses. In the meantime, he had been seen working in Iron Gauntlet’s shop on strange creations run by gears and wheels. As Gaudaric’s apprentice had said, no one with a true vocation wanted to sit idle.

Jame looked out over the domed rooftops to the Rose Tower. Krothen might have his share of enemies among the ruling class, but his loss was felt in the very fabric of the city. From the start, buildings had begun to collapse in the ruinous outer rings. Now the destruction was creeping inward as the limestone that supported the Overcliff gave way here and there to the weight of its soaring towers. For that matter, several lesser towers had broken off at the decrepit level formerly obscured and supported by clouds, raining destruction on the streets below. Kothifir clearly needed its king.

But “Which king?” Prince Ton and his mother Lady Amantine asked. He too was seeking followers among the nobility, hoping that he could overthrow his uncle when the Change ended. He at least could sire an heir. Krothen, he claimed, couldn’t, or at least not without crushing his would-be consort.

Gaudaric bowed her and Jorin out of his private workshop. Below, members of the Armorers’ Guild pursued their craft as if everything were normal, except for their children playing at their feet.

Jame paused as usual in the display room to admire the rathorn ivory vest with its intricate scale armor and high, elegant collar. Would it jab her in the throat the way the new gorget did? Its tiny scales looked as supple as a serpent’s belly. But then Gaudaric had said that the rhi-sar leather would soften with use, so she shouldn’t complain.

Outside, the sun was setting in a crimson haze. Sand eddied in ripples down the street and formed mounds in corners, blown from the south now that Kothifir had lost the protection of the Tishooo. How long before the next storm—or two, or three—buried the city altogether? Already the Host’s camp in the valley below was having problems, as were the farmers with clogged irrigation ditches and wells.

Meanwhile, it still seemed odd to see not circling clouds but the tops of towers, as if heaven had been dragged down to earth, quite literally in some cases. Debris littered the street from the recent partial collapse of a neighboring spire, surely the source of the earlier crash. Like many others, it had broken off at the cloud level. Stone blocks, broken furniture, clothes and trinkets . . . some minor noblewoman’s bedchamber spilled its treasures across the street. Urchins picked through the ruins, strips of cloth wound around their faces against a lingering cloud of dust.

One scavenger paused, listening, then another. Suddenly all were in flight.

Jame squinted into the dust cloud. Forms moved there, ghostlike, approaching. What in Perimal’s name . . . ?

Someone grabbed her arm. She spun around and nearly struck down the dingy figure that clung to her.

“Graykin! I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

“Save me!” her servant gasped, his grip tightening. “Here they come!”

“Who . . .”

But in a moment she guessed. Shabby, hooded forms emerged from the dust, a dozen, two dozen, more. She could clearly see those whom she looked directly at, but a quick turn of her head, to the left, to the right, revealed more of them hidden from her peripheral vision. The Intelligencers’ Guild had come for its former master.

Hangnail stepped to the fore. “We have been watching you come and go for days, Talisman, knowing that he would reveal himself to you sooner or later. Now leave. This is no business of yours.”

Graykin gulped, released his grip, and stepped away from Jame. “He’s right, lady. There are too many of them.”

Jame glanced at his white, set face, impressed despite herself.

“Give us the sash,” said Hangnail.

The Southron’s hands fluttered to his waist. The strip of silk there was now more gray than white, but he clung to it as he had these many long days, symbol that it was of the first real power he had ever possessed. “No.”

“It means nothing until the crisis ends,” Jame told him. “Let them have it. You can reclaim it later, perhaps.”

Graykin bit his lip, then fumbled with the knot. “All right,” he said, almost in tears. “Take the filthy thing.”

He balled up the sash and threw it. The entire guild swayed forward, but it was Hangnail who snatched it out of the air. The spy held the silk for a moment, clutched tight to his chest, snarling at those who would have taken it from him. Then he slipped it into a pocket. His eyes rose, glittering in the shadow of his hood.

“Do you think we would risk it ever falling into your clutches again, outsider?”

His hand emerged from his cloak holding a knife. More glinted all around him. In this, at least, they were unified. There are too many of them, Graykin had said. He was right.

Footsteps approached and voices sounded, speaking Kens.

The Intelligencers’ Guild melted away.

A ten-command appeared out of the growing gloom. Randir, Jame noted.

“Having trouble?” asked the leader, a third-year randon cadet. What was his name? Ah, Shrike.

“A bit,” Jame admitted as Graykin shrank back out of sight into Gaudaric’s doorway. She recognized the cadet as one bound not to Rawneth but to some other Randir Highborn. Curious, how one never met one bound to Kenan, Lord Randir, himself. “Still no word from your war-leader or Shade?”

“Ran Frost says that Shade must have followed Ran Awl back to the Riverland.”

“Assuming that’s where Ran Awl went.”

“Yes. Assuming. But where else could she have gone?”

That indeed was the question, to which so far Jame had no answer. Would the Randir even say if Awl and Shade arrived at Wilden? That secretive house liked to conceal its comings and goings from outsiders, perhaps even from members of its own community not within the inner circle.

“We’re fresh off duty guarding Krothen’s treasure towers,” said Shrike. “Prince Ton and Master Needham are both advocating that their wealth be distributed throughout the city—this, assuming that either the prince or Master Silk Purse can seize control of said towers. As you can imagine, their claims and promises have attracted a lot of attention.”

“So I’ve heard.”

At the moment, whoever controlled those towers controlled Kothifir. Krothen had gained vast wealth and considerable ill will over the years by claiming the best of the city’s spoils, but out of them came the Host’s pay. Jame could see both why the former god-king wanted his treasures protected and why the Host had a vested interest in their safety. It did seem unfair, though, if the city suffered as a result.

“The word is out to all the guards,” said Shrike. “King Krothen wants to see you.”

That was unexpected.

“Why?” Jame asked, adding, “Oh, never mind,” when the Randir shrugged. “I’d better go. First, a favor: will you escort this man to the Knorth barracks on the way to your own?”

She reached into the shadows and drew out a reluctant Graykin. Shrike regarded him with a curled lip. “Your personal spy? Oh yes, we know who and what this fellow is.”

Not entirely, thought Jame. No one knew or even suspected that Graykin was bound to her. To reveal that would be to expose a major breach of custom, never mind that Rawneth bound Kendar all the time or that Jame herself had just bound Brier Iron-thorn.

It was tempting to touch the thread of their new connection. What was Brier doing now? What was she thinking and feeling? But the Southron’s habitual reticence made Jame hesitate to intrude. She only hoped that she was giving the Kendar the support that she needed, unlike her brother. Tori didn’t seem to realize that some Kencyr required something to lean on. Ancestors knew, Jame herself would sometimes have liked such support. It was hard to stand alone. At least, there had been no repetition of Brier’s excesses on the night that Paper Crown’s tower had burned and Kalan’s baby had fallen to its death.

“And why should we oblige you in this slight matter?” Shrike was saying with a smile.

Oh yes. There was also Graykin, who leaned on her all too heavily.

Behind the Randir, his ten-command stirred and chuckled.

“For the novelty of it, perhaps?” said Jame, stifling a flash of irritation. Why could one never deal freely with the Randir, except for Shade and Randiroc? “How often do you have the chance to grant a Knorth anything?”

“Say ‘please.’”

“I thought that was implied. Please.”

“Very well. Come along, you.”

Graykin shot her a glance, then turned away, straightening. He disappeared with the Randir, a shabby, oddly dignified figure, into the falling night.

And now, thought Jame, for Krothen.

In better days, the Rose Tower was a hive of activity. Now it drowsed, its lower rooms untenanted.

It had also suffered damage without the god-king to maintain it. For one thing, that subtle twist in its construction seemed more pronounced so that Jame, walking up the spiral stair, felt as if she was about to pitch out over the balustrade into space. For another, the stone roses that rambled around the window frames and up the balusters crumbled at her touch. At the level of the absent clouds, they had worn away altogether, leaving pocked stone, and the marble steps were hollowed out with use.

Here was the level at which guards usually stood. Not now. Above, curtains as ragged as cobwebs fumbled at the windowsills of Krothen’s apartment. Inside, chaos.

However, Krothen still had servants, as Jame found when she climbed to the top.

“Welcome,” said a wheezing voice.

Labored breath seemed to fill the circular room, rasping and rattling within its stone shell. It was dim and hot inside, despite a cool evening breeze edging around the marble petals, and it stank.

As her eyes adjusted, Jame made out a great mass of flesh slumped on the dais. The Krothen of old had been obese beyond reason, but he had also seemed oddly buoyant, no doubt thanks to his god-given power. Now, deserted by it, his flesh dragged him down in heavy, sagging folds as if he were a sculpture of butter left out in the sun. Servants had removed a side panel of his white brocade robe. One was struggling to hold up a pallid slab of fat while another sponged the exposed crevasse with lavender water.

“Forgive me for not rising to greet you,” said the former king with a twisted smile that more closely resembled a grimace. “My skin tears if I move. Ah, mortality. It’s killing me, you know.”

What to say to that? Jame kept a respectful silence and waited.

“I miss my acrobats and clowns,” he said peevishly, pausing between sentences to gasp. “What, am I never to have any fun again? I even miss that stodgy prick, my high priest. He’s saying that I’ve lost the favor of the gods, you know. What gods? I was one. I will be again. That’s why these few servants have stayed. They still have faith in me. Do you?”

“I do,” said Jame, surprised to find that this was true. “At least as king.”

He wheezed a laugh. “I forgot. You Kencyr and your one true god, whom you hate. Do the Karnids love their precious prophet or only fear him? What about the Witch King of Nekrien? No matter. Their followers believe in them, and belief is power.”

That certainly was the case in Tai-tastigon, thought Jame, where gods died along with the last of their worshippers. For that matter, she suspected that even in his current state Krothen had more followers than the few in this room. After all, common folk spoke more often of his return to power than of his nephew and possible successor, Prince Ton.

“To make it worse,” he continued, “Gemma is bestirring itself. They’ve always envied our prosperity. Now that they see us weak, how long before they rise up to strike? Ah, their emissary was right: my arrogance may yet come back to haunt my people. Hanging their raiders certainly didn’t help, even if they did indirectly cause a seeker’s death. And I had to endure their bodies dangling in front of my windows.”

“What can I do for you, your majesty?”

“Just this: find that cursed temple of yours and start it up again.”

She should have guessed that Krothen, no fool, knew the ultimate source of his power.

“When it first failed, I went to look for it,” she said. “The tower built around it has collapsed. It must be buried in the ruins, perhaps shrunk too small to find.”

Krothen quivered. Jame wondered if he was going to be sick. No, the entire tower was shaking. A stone rose petal split with a sharp report, then another. Cracks etched the pale green chalcedony floor. The servant lost his grip on the slippery fold of flesh which he had been supporting and it closed over his companion’s hand with a smack. The trapped man stifled a cry of pain and tried to pull free, but couldn’t. Krothen’s eyes rolled up in his head until only the whites showed. His mouth gaped, wide, wider. Something pale emerged: fingers, prying the plump lips further open, cracking their corners. Inside, behind rows of teeth, a face appeared. Kroaky.

“I can’t get out,” he gasped. “I can’t get out. Help us!”

Krothen shuddered again. Sweat ran down his multiple chins as if over a waterfall and his face was a patchy greenish-white. He reached up and stuffed his younger self’s fingers and face back down his throat. Then, with a mighty gulp, he swallowed them.

The Rose Tower stopped swaying. The servant at last pulled free his hand and retreated, cradling broken fingers. Krothen gave a sickly smile.

“Look again,” he said. “Please.”

The rickety structure surrounding the Kencyr temple had collapsed more or less in place, filling the stump of its shell with a jumble of broken floorboards, rafters, and stones. The resulting pile was at least ninety feet across and three times Jame’s height. She regarded it dubiously from across the street, Jorin huddled close at her side. Nothing had changed since she had last been here, just after the winter solstice. Then as now, her sixth sense gave her not so much as a twinge, yet the dormant temple was presumably somewhere under that mass of wreckage, perhaps reaching nearly to its top, perhaps shrunken to the size of a grain of sand at its bottom. Nothing would prove which except shifting through the entire lot.

When she had first seen the scope of destruction, she had turned her back on it. The temple was the priests’ business. They had said so, emphatically. Therefore, let them deal with it. But half a season had passed since then, and they had done nothing.

Jame remembered the priests at Karkinaroth who, shut up in their temple, had died of hunger and thirst. Marc had tried to free them. Was she so much more callous than her old Kendar friend? If she hadn’t freed her cousin Kindrie from their god’s theocracy, he might have been in there. However reluctant she was to learn, experience was beginning to teach her that not all priests were alike.

Feet shuffled on the sandy road and Jorin growled. Jame turned quickly to confront a blond, tattered figure in the brown robe of an acolyte.

“You,” she said to Dorin, son of Denek, son of Dinnit Dun-eyed. “So you’re the guard they left outside the temple. Are the rest inside?”

“Yes.” He sounded dazed, as if he were having trouble bringing her into focus. Whom else had he seen over the past fifty-odd days of isolation, and what had that meant to someone accustomed to the hive mentality of the priesthood? “Grandfather, all the others, trapped . . .”

“Do they at least have provisions sealed in with them?”

He shook himself, coming to life a little and regaining a shade of his normal haughty nature. “D’you think we’re fools? The temple is unstable. This could have happened at any time, so of course they do. Some. But not enough to last all this time.” Again his manner and voice cracked. “We’ve got to get them out!”

They couldn’t help what they were, Jame thought, fashioned by a god who didn’t care.

She looked up at the frail sickle of a moon declining to the west overhead. “In this light, we might easily miss them, and there are only two of us. Tomorrow morning, early, I’ll bring my ten-command and heavy tackle.”

“No!”

He grabbed her arm. She could feel the nervous tremor of his flesh through her own. Instinct told her to shake him off, but she restrained herself.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “The temple isn’t here. Just after it shrank, before the tower collapsed, they came and took it.”

“Who did?”

“Men in black, muffled to the eyes in black cheches.”

Jame scrambled through images and came up, incredulously, with the memory of the Tishooo’s capture during the winter solstice.

“D’you mean . . . Karnids?”

His eyes slid away from her own. “They might have been.”

Was it possible? Both the Tishooo and the Kothifir temple? What were Urakarn and its precious prophet playing at?

Jame envisioned a map of the Wastes. “It will take . . . what, ten days to follow them?”

“Less. Much less,” the acolyte said, an eager light kindling in his eyes. “There’s a secret way under or near every temple, connecting them.”

Jame cursed herself for having forgotten that. The mysterious Builders had chosen the Anarchies south of the Riverland as their base, and had linked it to each of their building sites throughout Rathillien by a series of subterranean tunnels lined with step-forward stones. She, Marc, and Jorin had traveled by them from the Anarchies to Karkinaroth in a matter of hours, although the two cities lay almost a thousand miles apart. And Gorbel had mentioned that, after the Massacre, Kencyr prisoners reported having seen a Kencyr temple at Urakarn, of all places.

Should she go, though? Right now, without telling anyone?

Dorin was tugging at her arm while Jorin continued to snarl at him, the golden fur rising down the ounce’s spine. That, for so well-mannered a beast, was unusual.

Listen to Jorin, her instincts urged.

The boy is upset, said her better nature. He has reason to be.

“Come on, come on. They need us!”

After so much time on increasingly diminished rations, a night’s delay might not matter, or it could prove fatal. Would it hurt at least to scout out the situation?

“Come on, damn you,” said Dorin again, pulling harder. “Please.”

The entrance to the step-forward tunnel was only paces away in the middle of the street, disguised as one of the many hatches leading to the Undercliff.

A tight spiral stairway led down from the surface. The narrow, triangular risers were perhaps a foot high each, but gave the sensation of much greater depth as one descended. Jame supposed that they were composed of step-downward stones—that is, of rock slabs with such an affinity for their original geological placement that they took anyone who trod on them immediately to that level. With a particularly jarring step, they bypassed the Undercliff into the solid rock of the Escarpment and so on down, presumably, to beneath the valley floor. Darkness had closed around them almost at once. The walls ran with water and the stones underfoot were slippery. With no rail to clutch, it felt as if at any moment one might step off into empty space.

Jame stumbled at the foot and fell to her knees. The impact of her hands caused the coarse moss beneath them to fluoresce, shedding a sickly green light upward between her fingers, onto her face. The acolyte’s footprints led away into the darkness.

His voice floated back from ahead. “Hurry!”

“Dorin, wait!” she called after him, scrambling to her feet, receiving no answer.

She and Jorin followed his footsteps. Only a few strides took them well beyond the stair, Ancestors only knew how far into the Wastes. They were on step-forward stones now. Water dripped on their heads. Walls continued to sweat. Behind them, the light began to fade as it did ahead when they slowed. Jame stopped altogether, realizing that the ounce was no longer with her. She found him a few paces back, nosing a rock. It chittered angrily and rose on its claws, pinpoint eyes glowing like baleful green dots. Jorin dabbed at it with a paw. It snapped at him. Jame seized the ounce by his ruff and drew him away.

“Leave it alone, kitten. That’s a feral trock, not like Dure’s pet. Let’s hope that there are no more of them.”

The Builders had brought these little creatures with them to Rathillien because of their ability to digest stone, but they also liked shoes and feet and paws.

More green spots blinked in the shadows back the way that they had come, spreading across the path. The chittering grew.

Perforce, they continued, following Dorin’s fading trail. Jame wondered at the boy’s pace, in the dark, with no light ahead of him that she could see. Had he come this way before? If so, when and why? She began to feel uneasy and more than a bit foolish for having followed his lead so readily.

The passageway went on and on. The track ahead vanished. Their own luminous footfalls shed light in a tight sphere around them, enough to reveal the abyss along whose edge they trod. Things stirred in the depths at their passing. A misstep would be fatal.

Suddenly here was another narrow stair, this one ascending. Jame followed Jorin up into thin moonlight and a desolate landscape. She couldn’t see much of the latter at first because of the mist rising off a nearby bubbling lake. Tendrils drifted around her, stinking of rotten eggs. The lake seemed to be at the bottom of a series of terraces, the ones higher up studded with smoking pits and boiling mud pots. Underfoot, the ground trembled continually, making Jorin pick up his paws as if loath to tread on it.

Across the water stood a structure little bigger than a hut, but so black that the feeble light seemed to fall into it as if into a hole cut out of space. Its outline warped—because of the wavering air? No. Jame’s sixth sense set her teeth on edge and her head began to thump in time to her heart. Despite its size, this was an active Kencyr temple, and not the one that she had come to seek.

A shrill voice was shouting something in the distance. It sounded like Dorin, but she couldn’t make out the words.

More drifting steam blurred her vision. Through it, she glimpsed towering volcanic walls, now near, now far, honeycombed with holes out of which black-clad figures dropped like so many malignant ants. Dorin ran toward them, pointing back at her. This time, his words were clear:

“You see? You see? I said I would bring the Prophet’s chosen one to you, and I have. Now give me back my grandfather!”

Jame swore under her breath. Next time, she would listen to Jorin—if there was a next time. She leaned over the mouth of the stair. At its base, darkness seethed and clattered angrily. To descend was to risk being eaten alive, but where else could they go? The landscape offered few chances for concealment or escape. Meanwhile, approaching Karnids spilled over the lips of the upper terraces and raced toward them.

The Prophet’s chosen one? Be damned to that, whatever it meant.

She ran the only direction she could, around the lake toward the temple with Jorin scampering at her heels.

The structure gained little definition as she approached it. Was it without a door like its much larger counterpart in Langadine? Was it really as small as it had seemed from a distance? Her eyes told her yes, but her other senses insisted that she was approaching something huge.

She found the door not by its own outline but by the rattling of the bar that secured it.

“Let me out, let me out!” cried a muffled voice from within.

Jame wrestled the heavy bar out of its brackets. A blast of wind threw the door open in her face and knocked her backward. She tripped over Jorin and fell flat on her back. Black feathers streamed over her head out of the door, borne on a mighty wind. The world dissolved into roaring chaos. Jame hugged the ground with Jorin pinned under her, protesting. Then, suddenly, all was deathly still. She looked up. Walls of racing clouds surrounded her, flecked with blue lightning, studded by the dark shapes of Karnids snatched off their feet, flying. The black feathers coalesced into a figure far up, silhouetted against the crescent moon at the tornado’s circular mouth, plunging down. A shriek trailed after it. It was going to land on top of her.

Jame scuttled out of the way, tensed for its impact on the stony ground. None came. Looking up, she saw that it had stopped in midair some twenty feet up, although it still gave the impression of plummeting toward the earth.

“Tishooo?”

The Falling Man flailed about with his robe inverted over his head.

“I’m blind!” he wailed.

“You’re upside down.”

He righted himself and clawed purple velvet away from his face. “I’m still blind! Why is it so dark?”

“It’s night.”

“Oh. That’s a relief.” He forced down his flapping robe and hooked his long white beard aside so that it flew upward behind his ear. Now he was parallel to the ground, seeming to hover over it although his clothing continued to whip upward. “You again.”

Jame detached Jorin, who had been clinging to her with all his claws, and got to her feet. “Yes. Me.”

“Harrumph! Is there any reason why I shouldn’t rip you apart where you stand?”

Jame frowned, confused. Her past encounters with the Falling Man for the most part had been almost playful. For all his power, Old Man Tishooo had always seemed somewhat of a clown. “Er . . . is there any reason why you should?”

“D’you have any idea how long I’ve been held captive in that damned temple? Because I’ve lost track of time. And that smug prophet of yours—thought he’d caught some minor desert godling, Kothifir’s native guardian who was best kept out of the way. Of what, though, damned if I know.”

“But you do guard. The city has missed you.”

“I should think so,” said the Tishooo, somewhat mollified.

“Anyway, what do you mean, ‘our’ prophet?”

“This is a Kencyr temple, isn’t it? So was the one that destroyed Langadine. And isn’t the Prophet a Kencyr himself? Oh, I sniffed that out soon enough, for all his wiles. Invaders and despoilers, the lot of you. Why don’t you go back to where you came from?”

“That was another world, a long time ago.”

“Huh. The Earth Wife has taken an interest in you, girl. And I sense that you still carry her imu although you may have forgotten it. But she hasn’t yet made up her mind. Neither have I. Who knows what the Eaten One and the Burnt Man think?”

Jame scrambled for the right words. If the Four didn’t accept her people on Rathillien, they had nowhere else to go, nor a place to stand in the final battle with Perimal Darkling.

“I don’t know who this prophet is, but if he leads the Karnids, then he’s our enemy too. There’s a dark force behind him, one that threatens this world as well as the Kencyrath. How much of Rathillien is left, even now? Our scrollsmen tell us that it’s round, like every other threshold world we’ve encountered. So what’s on its far side?”

The Tishooo fidgeted with his fluttering robe, looking uncomfortable. Blue sparks snapped in his flying beard, threatening to set it alight. “I can’t be everywhere, can I?”

“Why not? After all, you’re the elemental spirit of air, manifested as the wind. Do you even know what’s happened to the Western Lands of this continent?”

“Why?” he said sharply. “What have you heard?”

“Nothing. That’s the point. If Perimal Darkling has eaten them too, then most of this world has already been consumed by the shadows.”

“It can’t have been. I would know . . . wouldn’t I?”

In his agitation, he began to tumble again, and the cloud wall wobbled about him. For a moment, the sky above Jame was full of flying Karnids. A brown-clad figure with storm-tossed blond hair tumbled with them, his mouth and eyes circles of terror—Dorin, thought Jame, getting what he no doubt deserved. She turned from him.

“Why don’t you find out before you kill me?” she shouted up into the raging sky. “I and my people may be your last, best hope.”

The Tishooo righted himself with energetic swimming motions.

“All right. I’ll go look. Mind you, we aren’t through with each other yet.”

He whisked up into the sky, drawing the wind with him. The tornado inverted and died, leaving a faintly moonlit night. All around Jame, bodies crashed to earth or into the simmering water.

“Waugh!” said Jorin, pressing against her leg.

“Yes,” she said. “Time to go.”

The temple door still stood open, gaping into darkness, and power poured out of it. Jame hesitated on the threshold. To whom did she trust herself—her despised god or Urakarn?

Better the devil you know . . .

She stepped inside and the door slammed shut behind her.