The Sea of Time

VII Equinox

Summer ended and autumn advanced. The days remained warm but lost that breathtaking blast of summer. The nights were cool enough to make a fire or extra jacket welcome. It even rained a bit, not that the irrigated Betwixt Valley needed it where the fall harvest was already under way. However, the farmers probably welcomed it in the terraced mountains, and it did help to lay the dust on the training fields south of the Host’s camp.

Jame thought a lot about the senior cadets’ challenge, if one could call it that. All it had needed to become a threat had been an addition of the words “or else.” It was also double edged: if she ignored it, they had won. If she did as they demanded, not that she had any such intention, they still won. All in all, it was a game she refused to play.

Meanwhile, Harn kept her close to Kothifir for a time after the Karnids’ attempted kidnapping, only allowing her to go out with her ten-command to practice. When the day was done, however, she slipped away to tend to Death’s-head.

The black mares with their wicked fangs had savaged the rathorn badly, especially on his unarmored flanks, and the wounds had festered. Jame missed the Tentir horse-master’s advice, but had secured poultices from his Kothifiran counterpart. The man was eager to apply them himself; however, Jame had put him off. She supposed it was only natural that he wanted to lay hands on such a fabulous equine as a rathorn. Whether Death’s-head would have let him was another matter. Anyway, she was inclined to think that Bel-tairi’s attentions to the injuries helped more than any ointment.

Thus it was that, on the twenty-ninth of Autumn, after a day of maneuvers in the eastern field, Jame set out for the distant tumble of boulders in the creek bed where the rathorn made his lair.

First, she had to cross the southern road and the western training field, no easy matter now that the latter was rapidly filling with wagons for the next caravan, which promised to be the largest in generations. At least a hundred carts had already gathered on the plain, each at the heart of its own campsite. Attendants swarmed around them while draft horses snorted on picket lines and a constant stream of couriers descended from the city bearing freshly minted trade goods. All the craft guilds were working full time, including Gaudaric’s. Jame saw his son-in-law Ean directing the stowage of armor while Byrne ran about getting in everyone’s way.

“Talisman, Talisman!” he cried, collaring her by the leg. “Are you coming with us?”

“I doubt it,” Jame said with regret, ruffling his chestnut curls. She would have liked nothing better.

“Try to come. Try!”

“I will if I can.”

“You aren’t going anywhere,” said Ean, detaching his son from Jame. “How often do I have to tell you?”

“Oh, but Papa . . . !”

Jame left them to what promised to be a long wrangle.

Beyond the field, the land roughened into dips and hollows carved out by the Amar’s earlier channels before the Betwixt had been irrigated. Some still ran with the river’s overflow. Jame descended into one. Rounding the creek’s curve, she saw the rathorn standing like an ivory sentinel with the water curling around his legs while Bel licked the crescent-shaped scars on his flanks. Of course he had heard her coming. He brandished his horns, slashing rainbows out of the current, but an impatient snort from Bel held him in place. Jame ran a hand along his side. The infection was gone at last, the wounds scabbing over. In such a massed attack, unlike any he would face under natural circumstances, he needed a properly armed rider to protect his back. Jame resolved to pay more attention to her sword and scythe-arm practice.

She unslung her backpack. The rathorn’s nose, nasal tusk and all, was in it as soon as she had loosened the straps and she braced herself as he rummaged. A snort inflated the bag like a bellows. Out came his jaws clamped around the roast chicken that she had brought. Bones were no problem, she had discovered. Death’s-head could digest just about anything.

Leaving the creek bed, she returned to the camp in the descending twilight. After dinner in the Knorth barracks, she met Shade in the common canteen for a mug of thin ale.

Hazing had continued sporadically in the other houses but not in the Knorth, despite grumbles from the thirty-odd third-year cadets who were all that were left of fifty who had ridden to the Cataracts.

Meanwhile, randon kept disappearing from the Randir, but in such a trickle, attracting so little attention, that the other houses hardly noticed.

“The ominous thing,” Shade said, cradling her mug, “is that so far the only Randir to vanish have been sworn to some Highborn other than Lord Kenan or Lady Rawneth.”

“Is it a cull?”

“One would almost think so, but where are they going?”

“You aren’t sworn to your father or to your grandmother. Neither is Ran Awl.”

“But Frost, the current commander of the Host’s Randir, is, and she doesn’t seem to take the situation very seriously.”

As they spoke, keeping their voices low in the noisy room, Addy moved restlessly around Shade’s neck like a thick, molten torque. When she stretched out her triangular head, black tongue flickering, Jame reached out to her. Glittering scales flowed over her palm, soft and dry but with hard muscles rippling beneath. She and Shade played the serpent back and forth between them, over and under, each pursuing her own thought, finding no answers.

“Take care,” Jame said as the other at last retrieved her pet and stood up. “Watch your back, and Ran Awl’s too. We can’t afford to lose either of you.”

Shade nodded brusquely, turned and left.

The autumnal equinox came several days later. Although it was a workday, Jame got permission to visit Kothifir for the morning, taking Gorbel and Timmon with her. Gorbel had witnessed the Merikit festival honoring the harvest and the Great Hunt, but Timmon, new to any such native celebrations, was eager to see one. Jame herself wondered what approach the Kothifirans would take to the equinox.

The other two lordan argued all the way up the cliff about the recent hazing.

“It’s traditional,” Gorbel insisted yet again. “Cadets new to Kothifir are always tested.”

“What, with being made to wash dishes?”

“That was a special task, just for you.”

“Well, it didn’t do much good. My house still doesn’t take me seriously.”

“They do as a scullery maid.”

Gorbel’s eyes were screwed shut and his squat face ran with sweat. Without thinking, Jame had led them to the open lift cage. She joined in the conversation to distract him.

“Perhaps your approach was the best, simply to ignore an inappropriate challenge. I don’t know if I did my house a favor by forbidding them altogether. D’you think that’s going to make my cadets anxious to prove themselves in other ways?”

Gorbel considered this. “It might, especially among those who haven’t been blooded yet. Trinity!”

The cage had bounced and his eyes had involuntarily popped open. He stared, transfixed, at the abyss beneath his feet.

Jame hastily told him about Shade’s observations concerning the missing Randir.

“Is it just cadets who are disappearing or established randon too?” asked Timmon.

“I think both.”

“It’s serious, then, although as the presumed commander of the Ardeth barracks—ha!—I haven’t heard anything about it. Have you, Gorbel?”

“A word or two, yes. Obviously not enough.”

“Well,” said Jame, “the more who know, the sooner we may have an answer. Not all the Randir are rotten, and it seems to be the good ones who are being targeted.”

The lift cage swooped over the balustrade and landed with a thump on Kothifir’s forecourt. Gorbel let out his breath with a loud “Huh!” and wiped his brow.

When they stepped out, the swirling street greeted them. It was even more crowded than it had been at the solstice, apprentices, journeymen, and masters intermingling, each festooned with the bright ribbons denoting his or her individual guild. Distant horns and drums sounded. People began to move toward the noise, toward the central plaza. Bands went with them, playing different, discordant tunes while venders loudly hawked their wares from the sidelines. The three lordan bought fish strips dusted in almonds and paper twists full of garlic snails to munch on the way. Reaching the plaza, they climbed up onto a convenient balcony, not high enough to set Gorbel’s nerves freshly ajangle.

From above, they watched the Kothifirans organize themselves into guilds. This time they didn’t carry golden emblems, so they must have something other than races in mind. Dozens of pots hung some three stories up, suspended from catwalks invisible above the perennially circling clouds. Guilds were forming under them. The bands trailed off into expectant silence as the three guild lords appeared high on the stairs of the Rose Tower.

“Welcome to the Equinox!” Lord Merchandy called down in his reedy voice. The people below hushed each other in order to listen. “We meet here balanced between seasons, between success and potential disaster, or greater success. The fall harvest is safely in. The winter crops are yet to be planted. More important, we are about to launch the biggest trade caravan ever to enter the Wastes . . .”

He coughed, his voice failing. Lady Professionate took his arm to steady him. Ruso stepped forward.

“To the greater glory of Kothifir, then, and to profit!” he roared over the railing. “Ready, steady, climb!”

The plaza dissolved into chaos. Some rushed off to snatch materials from side streets. The carpenters’ guide came running back with boards which they began hastily to bang into a platform. The masons hauled in stone blocks. Bricklayers slapped brick on brick. Tapestry makers wheeled in their largest upright loom and swarmed up the warp threads to the top bar. Binders stacked up books. Most of the others, who couldn’t turn to their working materials, bent down and began to form human towers. The nearest rose close by the watching lordan, one tier, two . . . People leaned in to support the base while others climbed onto their shoulders and stood, wavering. Three, four, five . . .

The pots still swung high above their heads.

“I bet they don’t make it,” said Timmon.

Gorbel grunted. “How much?”

“A golden arax.”

“Done.”

Six, seven, eight . . .

“Look,” said Jame, pointing.

A curious apparition had appeared at the edge of the plaza. It looked at first like ten gray-clad men standing, unsupported, on each other’s shoulders, swaying forward in unison step by step. Then one saw that they were connected by two parallel ropes with loops for each one’s feet and hands. The clouds thinned momentarily. On a catwalk overhead, two more men pushed one end and then the other of a beam balanced across the handrail. The upper ends of the ropes were secured to this bar. Its movement swung the attenuated tower forward like the crosspiece of a puppeteer.

Jame recognized the top man just as he spotted her. Graykin flashed her a grin that reminded her how young he actually was.

“Go, Intelligencer!” she called to him, clapping. “Rah, rah, rah!”

Timmon and Gorbel stared at her.

Below, the binders’ pile of books began to slide, taking those who knelt on it with it. They spilled over into the next tower, taking it down, and so on and on in a spreading circle. The chaos lapped over the masons, who had only succeeded in raising one level of stone, and collapsed the carpenters’ jury-rigged tower. Amid yells and not a few screams, the spies advanced, even after the lowest two had been knocked out of their stirrups. Graykin reached up and struck a pot. It burst, spraying him and those beneath him with honeyed milk.

“What in Perimal’s name . . .” said Timmon.

“I think it’s a fertility ritual, or a way to secure luck, or both. Do our ceremonies make any more sense?”

“Of course they do,” said Gorbel, wiping splattered milk off his face. “If nothing else, none of them is this messy.”

“Better spilt milk than blood.”

Below, the plaza was sorting itself out with many cries that the Intelligencers’ Guild had cheated. Graykin’s tower clambered down and bolted for cover, leaving its leader to stand for a moment at the mouth of a side street making a rude gesture. Then he too scampered back into the shadows.

“As a portent, though,” said Jame thoughtfully, “I don’t much like it, assuming one believes in such things.”

“Let’s go see what the Undercliff has to offer,” said Timmon.

“We have to report back at noon, not long from now,” Jame said regretfully. “Anyway, I understand all that happens is that the old gods wage a glorified food-fight, and the Favorite has to eat everything that hits him.”

With that, they turned reluctantly back to the Rim, where this time they took the enclosed cage down.

Rue was waiting for Jame at the gate to the barracks, practically hopping from foot to foot with excitement.

“They’ve posted who’s going with the caravan to guard it, and our ten-command is on the list!”

Jame stopped short, remembering her recent restriction to the camp and its environs. “No.”

“Yes! There are one hundred and fifty wagons, three hundred attendants, a thousand Kothifiran guards, and four hundred of us. The Commandant left you a message.”

Jame accepted the note and unfolded it. “With such a large escort,” Harn had written in his barely legible scrawl, “I dare you to get into trouble.”