Cadets darted in and stabbed at its exposed belly. It was armored as thoroughly as a rathorn, but there were wrinkled gaps of bare skin under the forearms. Gorbel’s spear found its mark and bit deep. The creature toppled over backward, pinning Jame under its massive muzzle, knocking the wind out of her. She thought at first that she was dead, but then hands pulled her free.
The other two rhi-sar retreated to the water and reeds. The white one lay on its back, thick crimson blood sluggishly crawling down over its plated stomach. It scrabbled feebly at the sky, then fell limp, its armored jaw harmlessly agape.
Timmon pulled Jame to her feet and she clung to him, gasping. “Did I really . . . just do that?”
“You certainly did, and scared the spit out of me.”
Gorbel braced a foot against the creature, wrenched free his spear, and limped up to them. “I could claim the kill, but it only happened because of your insanity. Besides, I’ve already got a rhi-sar suit. I’d say that you’ve just earned your own armor, Lordan of Ivory.”
They gathered the dismembered limbs of their dead, such as they could retrieve, and gave them to the pyre. Char scowled at Jame over the flames.
I had as much to do with this kill as you did, he seemed to be thinking, and that was probably true, given that she couldn’t have pinned the brute if Char hadn’t tripped it first.
On the bright side, only two Kencyr had been killed, thanks mostly to Damson.
“Good work,” Jame told her.
The plump cadet nodded. She looked thoughtful, not smug, as Jame might have expected.
“I asked myself what you would do, Ten, if you could do what I can. Not run.”
“I did, though.”
“To draw off that white monster. I saw. Then you turned on it. I know I don’t think or feel the way that other people do. Something is . . . missing. But I can imitate you.”
Jame stared at her. “Trinity, Damson, you’d do better to take someone else as a model. Why not Brier?”
The cadet shook her head. “I can see that Five is a good randon. Someday she may even become a great one. But she isn’t like me. Not a bit. You are.”
Jame considered that as she watched the cadets start to skin the white rhi-sar—no easy task given the toughness of its hide. When properly tanned, it would be nearly as impenetrable as rathorn ivory, which itself was the second hardest substance on Rathillien after diamantine. Brier cut free the skull and they began the messy job of hollowing it out, leaving the fearsome, hinged jaws. Others worked on the feet, flaying them but retaining the claws.
All her life, Jame had turned to the Kendar as guides, primarily to Marc, whose moral sense she trusted far more than her own. To have one of them return the favor was . . . unnerving. But Damson was right: as a destructive Shanir, she and Jame had a lot more in common than either did with Brier Iron-thorn.
Meanwhile, Gorbel was arguing with the senior surviving officer, Onyx-eyed. The Caineron Lordan wanted to pursue the caravan.
“That would violate our standing orders,” said the randon.
“Yours. Not mine. My father told me to follow them. Anyway, as lordan I’m the highest ranking Caineron here.”
“You’re the only Caineron here.”
“Fine. I’ll go by myself.”
Jame peered at the black line of the distant horizon, all that separated sky from reflecting sea. The slight, wavering distortion was still there on the edge of sight.
“How far away is it?” she asked. “Three miles? If that’s a mirage, most of what casts it could be below our line of sight, if there’s anything there at all. Still . . .”
The randon looked at her, as blank of expression as ever. “So you want to go too.”
“And me,” said Timmon, coming up.
“You’re asking me to risk the heirs of three houses.”
“We aren’t asking anything,” said Gorbel, his jaw thrust stubbornly forward. As a cadet, he took orders; as a lordan, he gave them. They could all feel the authority radiating off him like heat off a sun-baked stone, and like that stone his will was no easy thing to break.
Onyx-eyed blinked. “Take an escort with you, then,” she said mildly, “and turn back if you lose the tracks.”
“You stay here,” Jame told Jorin. “What, d’you want to wade all the way to the horizon?”
She, the other two lordan, and her ten-command saddled up their moas. They could see the scrapes where the reverted sledges had entered the shallow water to become boats, and beyond that, salt plates on the bottom were broken by the lambas’ hooves. The moas dithered on the shore until encouraged in with whip and spur. The water came halfway up to their knees. They lifted their three-toed, webbed feet high, almost daintily, with every step.
Jorin paced the shore behind them, crying. Jame thought of Kalan and the baby that she had left behind. Would she ever see the ounce again? How did one make clear to a cat or to an infant that it wasn’t being willfully abandoned?
“I should explain some things to you,” she said to her fellow lordan, and told them about Langadine. “Time is fluid here,” she concluded. “Granny Sit-by-the-Fire called this the Sea of Time. The camp might be stranded on the shore forever if our seeker doesn’t return, and we may find ourselves too deep in the past to return even that far.”
Timmon was aghast. “Now you tell us?”
Gorbel only shook his heavy head. “It doesn’t matter. Once we came to the edge of the sea, wet or dry, we had to follow the caravan. The only way back leads though this mysterious city of yours, if we can find it.”
They waded slowly on. Clouds came up from the south, mirrored under their feet by the water so that one felt almost as if one could walk on either. The sun disappeared. The horizon circled them in a thin, dark band. Without the broken salt plates leading straight ahead, they would quickly have lost all sense of direction.
“How far have we come?” asked Timmon, breaking a long silence.
Gorbel grunted. “At this pace? Hard to tell. More than three miles. Out here, distance plays tricks as well as time.”
The reflected sky made the lambas’ trail harder and harder to follow, and the water was now up to the moas’ knees, over three feet deep. They had started in midmorning. It now appeared to be midafternoon, but who could say? Had they been walking hours, or days, or years?
The suspense seemed to unnerve Timmon. “What will your father do if he learns the way to Langadine?” he asked.
“Whatever he can to get a trade mission there, or a raiding party, but from what you say”—with a nod to Jame—“he will need a seeker, and those are dying out.”
“What about Kalan’s daughter in Kothifir?”
“She can only find her way back to her birth city. If Laurintine is the last of her line, no one will ever find the city again, at least until after its destruction.”
“And what do you make of that?”
“What can I? Something happened some three thousand years ago that shattered Langadine.”
“That would be more or less when the Kencyrath arrived on Rathillien,” said Jame.
Timmon scratched a peeling nose, dubious. “Coincidence?”
“I doubt it. Anyway, our appearance here and Perimal Darkling moving one world closer seem to have shaken up all sorts of things.”
She was thinking about the sudden manifestation of the Four and about Langadine’s climate changing, along with that of the Southern Wastes, although that seemed to have started before the Kencyrath had arrived.
Was the water getting deeper? Yes, to mid-thigh on the moas, who no longer tried to lift their feet free with each stride. The fluffy feathers on their bellies were soaked and matted. She raised her boots to keep them from getting wet.