The Sea of Time (33 page)

CHAPTER XVIII

“Please”

Winter 100

I

“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.