The Sea of Time (36 page)

CHAPTER XIX

A Walk into Shadows

Winter 100

I

NO LIGHT, NO SOUND. It was utterly dark inside the temple, like being stricken both blind and deaf. Even the flow of power had stopped as if dammed. Jame was at length aware of her breath, panting, and of Jorin standing on her foot. The blind ounce depended on her eyes to see and protested their mutual handicap in a low, fretful whine.

“Be still,” she told him in a whisper. “Listen.”

Silence.

It didn’t surprise her to reach back and touch nothing. Gingerly, she took a step forward, then another, wobbling. It was hard to keep one’s balance in such a void. Only her feet pressing against the floor gave her a sense of direction. Two more steps and she should have reached the other side of the hut, but there was still nothing. This also was not unexpected: most Kencyr temples were bigger inside than out.

Air breathed in her face.

Ahhh . . .

It stank of rot and of something sweet. It was also bitterly cold.

Jame followed the smell, step by step, her stomach curdling within her as if at some long suppressed memory. She
knew
that stench. It spoke to her at a level below the rational, beneath the skin, within the very bone, to the helpless child that she had once been.

Something ahead grumbled, like distant thunder, and the air vibrated. Coarse grass now wrapped, whining, around her boots.

Don’t go, don’t go . . .

A muted flash of light shone ahead. Against scuttling clouds, the front of a structure reared up before her, many roofed, where it had roofs at all, with dark windows and open doors out of which the rank wind breathed.

Hahhh, ah, ah, ah . . .

Darkness again, and another distant rumble, in the flesh, in the bones.

Was that thunder, or stones grinding one against another? She couldn’t see it now, but for a moment it had seemed as if that massive pile were inching toward her, out of a greater darkness. Even now, it might loom over her, poised to fall . . .

Jame swallowed panic. She was still within the Urakarn temple . . . or was she? Something like this had happened to her before, at Karkinaroth, when she had plunged deep into Prince Odalian’s palace only to emerge in Perimal Darkling, inside the House. If so again, another step might take her under shadows’ eaves.

Don’t go . . .

As she hesitated, Jorin stood on her toes, his shoulder pressed against her thigh, chirping in agitation. She was in danger enough; was it right to risk him too? But he was a comfort, here on the brink of madness. Moreover, it was important that she find . . . what? The immediate past blurred. She took another cautious step forward into darkness, onto hard pavement.

Lightning flashed again, closer, with a boom that imprinted the image on her mind of broken rafters overhead against a stricken sky. As her eyes cleared, she found that light had lingered here below. Underfoot was a floor paved with cold, dark stone, laced with veins of luminous green. Walls towered around her. On them hung the woven faces of many death banners, all of them fidgeting and grimacing in a thin wind that threatened to pry them from their perches.

Ahhh
. . .

Her heart chilled within her. This was the dire hall where the Dream-weaver had danced and the Kencyrath had fallen.

Alas for the greed of a man and the deceit of a woman
. . .

Here she had played as a child after her father had driven her out of the Haunted Lands keep, away from her twin brother Tori, and here the changer Keral had tormented her.

“No mementos for you, brat. This is your home now. Shall I comfort you? No? Then I will leave it to our lord and master.”

Then
he
had come down the stairs out of the ruined past to claim her as his own, to take her mother’s place.

“So you’ve lost a father, child,”
a soft voice had said.
“I will be another one to you and much, much more. Come. You know where you belong.”

The tapestry faces seemed to lean in over her.

You fool,
she thought, fighting a wave of dizziness.
You’re breathing too hard
.

She crouched and gathered Jorin into a warm, furry hug, an anchor in a reeling world. The ounce licked her cheek with a rough, anxious tongue, then stuck his wet nose into her ear.

She was
not
the frightened child who had fled this hall after forcefully declining the bridal bed and hacking her way to freedom through the hand that had reached out to claim her from between fluttering red ribbons. After that had come flight from the House, leaving it in flames behind her, then nearly a year as an apprentice thief in Tai-tastigon, Karkinaroth, the battle at the Cataracts, that terrible winter in the Women’s Halls at Gothregor, and finally blesséd Tentir. When she considered all that had happened since then, her childhood seemed a lifetime ago. She wasn’t even the same young woman who had stumbled into this hall two years ago out of Karkinaroth. An old, defiant chant came back to her:

If I want, I will learn.
If I want, I will fight.
If I want, I will live.
And I want.
And I will.

Her breath steadied. She glowered up at the banners, and realized that there were fewer of them than since her last visit here. Many now hung in tattered rags, stripped to bare warp strings that whined in the wind and tapped restlessly against cold stone. Others slumped on the floor, barely twitching.

An answer to their dilapidated state came to her out of the past:
the souls have been eaten out of them.

Blood trapped a Kencyr’s spirit in the weave of its death. Gerridon, the Master, needed these souls, reaped for him by his sister-consort Jamethiel, in order to maintain his ill-gotten immortality. (There: she had spoken his name at last, if only to herself.) Now that the Dream-weaver was gone, he needed her, Jame, to take her mother’s place. In the meantime, he had been subsisting on Highborn leftovers, as it were, but it looked as if he had nearly run out of them. What next? He could turn to the fallen Kendar and to the changers, as the latter had feared when they had started the revolt that had led to the Cataracts. He could accept what Perimal Darkling offered and become at last its creature, its Voice. Or he could try again to win her to his side, to reap new souls among the Kencyrath’s Highborn of whatever house. It was no good, she told herself, turning solely on the Knorth, where only she, Tori, and Kindrie remained.

So think. This is now. You are here.
What else in this seemingly ageless House has changed?

Her eyes swept the hall, flinching at half-remembered memories. There were the death banners which scrabbled fretfully against the walls, the luminous floor, the stinking wind, the cold hearth at the end of the room piled high with pelts of the Arrin-ken slain during the Fall . . .

But something else rested on the hearth, something small and black. Jame crossed the floor to investigate and found a tiny, obsidian pyramid nestled between a pair of flayed paws. It was all of three inches high. Well, she had said that the Kothifiran temple might be reduced to the size of a grain of sand. This was at least bigger than that. Gingerly she picked up the object, rather surprised that it didn’t weigh more. If she tilted it, what would happen to the priests within? A temple inside a house inside a temple . . . the very thought made her head spin.

Some catch in the wind caught her attention. A dark figure stood in the middle of the silently pulsing floor, watching her. From what she could make out, it looked like a Karnid. Damnation. Had one of them followed her into the temple and from there into this hall? Now it was advancing toward her, unwrapping its
cheche
as it came. Jame slipped the miniature temple into a pocket so as to free her hands, aware as she did so that it tipped and fell on its side. Oh well. The approaching figure had bared its face—square and dark, with piglike close-set eyes, but it changed as she watched. Even before it had settled into familiar lines, Jorin was trotting forward to greet it. Jame followed the ounce.

“Shade.”

The Randir stood before her in oversized robes which nonetheless showed lengths of bare, slender ankle and wrist.

“I can change shapes, but apparently not my basic weight,” she remarked, regarding the pale gleam of her limbs with disapproval.

Jame caught her in a hug. “I looked for you everywhere!”

“Er . . . yes.” Shade hesitated, then gingerly returned the embrace before disengaging from it, but not before Jame had felt Addy’s warm length coiled around the other’s waist within her robe and heard the serpent’s sleepy, warning hiss. “You didn’t find me because I had assumed this form and didn’t dare break cover to communicate. Do you know that Karnids are secretly gathering in Kothifir? Well, they are. This was one of them until I took his place.” She frowned, remembering. “There was a lot of blood. While it helped me to make the change, I find that I don’t particularly like killing.”

“I would worry if you did. But what are you doing here?”

Shade tugged at her sleeves as if this would lengthen them. “I’m still looking for Ran Awl and the missing Randir, of course,” she said. “They weren’t in Kothifir and no word came from Wilden of their arrival there. Given the number of Karnids in Kothifir, that suggested Urakarn. When a courier returned here to report to their prophet, I followed him. That was a strange trip, underground and surprisingly fast.”

“The step-forward tunnel.”

“Is that what they call it? Well, I’ve been here for more days than I care to count, poking around, finding nothing. Only the temple remained to be searched. Most Karnids avoid it as a sacred site, so when I saw you dart in . . .”

“You followed again.”

“And found myself here, wherever this is.” She caught Jame’s arm with a sudden hiss of warning. “Look.”

An errant breath of wind had brought something translucent into the hall. It drifted across the dark floor, gliding and bending with aching grace, trailed by white, floating drapery. Delicate feet moved to an unheard melody. A pale face fragile as the new moon turned in their direction without seeing them, locked in dreams. Oh, how sweet its faint smile was.

“So beautiful . . .” breathed Shade and took an involuntary step toward it, but Jame held her back.

Then the air changed . . .
ahhhhh
. . . and the apparition was gone.

Shade turned on Jame furiously with a glint of tears in her eyes. “Why did you stop me? Who was she?”

Jame drew a ragged breath. It had taken all her own self-restraint not to rush across the floor to clutch at that diaphanous skirt like a lost child.

Mother
. . .

“That was the Dream-weaver,” she said unsteadily. “Perhaps that was how she danced the night the Kencyrath fell. Perhaps it was on some other occasion. Time moves in different currents here.”

“Was she a ghost, then?”

“Not exactly. Her world is as real to her as it would be to us if we got too close to her.”

Shade gave Jame a hard look. “You obviously know more about this place than I do.”

“I told you once before: we’re both unfallen darklings, you thanks to your changer blood inherited from your grandfather Keral, I because of where I grew up. Here, in fact.”

“And where exactly are we?”

Jame told her.

“Oh.”

Lightning threw the hall into sudden, stark relief, and Jorin crouched, squalling in protest. Thunder roared. Some banners lost their perilous grip on the surrounding walls and plummeted, shrieking, to the floor. A cold, hard rain began to fall through the shattered roof beams, giving way after a moment to hail. The ounce scuttled back toward the hearth, into the shelter of the partial roof. The two young women followed him, both shivering, their breath puffs of cloud.

“Now what?” Jame asked.

Shade clenched her teeth to stop them from rattling, and not only because of the cold. Like most Kencyr, she had previously thought little about Perimal Darkling as a living entity. The worst stories of her childhood were coming to life around her.