“Travelers!” he cried. The others good-naturedly made way for him as he plunged into the room. “What news have you from my fellow gods to the north?”
“Er . . .” said Jame, staring.
“The end is coming, you know,” he said with a broad smile, seeming to relish his news. He turned to take in his audience with a sweeping gesture that overturned tankards as far back as the corners of the room. “All of you have felt the earth shake,” he proclaimed over cries of protest at the spilt beer. “The sea changes its nature more and more often. Year by year, the climate grows drier and hotter. Clearly, a great change is coming. But this world is only an illusion. Are you ready to fly away with me to the true one that lies beyond?”
“Enough of such desert talk,” someone called from his audience. “Next, you’ll claim to be the Karnids’ long-lost prophet, returned again. Show us a trick, old man!”
“Well, now, what would you like?”
“More beer!” shouted back a chorus of voices.
“Hmm. Will this do? Landlord, a round of drinks on me!”
Tavern maids ran about with ewers, pouring amid the cheers of the patrons. Jame had a feeling that the old man had performed this “trick” before, and was all the more welcome here because of it. Her sense was that she and her comrades didn’t really interest him. Rather, he had detected a center of attention and had rushed to usurp it. Timmon looked miffed and Gorbel bored, but she didn’t mind: the more other people talked, the more she might learn.
The tremor started with a faint rumble like a heavy cart approaching over cobblestones. The wine in her cup rippled in concentric circles. The candle flames wavered. No one seemed to pay much attention except the old man in the saffron robe who turned suddenly pale and clutched the back of a chair. Slowly, without any fanfare, his feet left the floor. Jame grabbed his arm . . .
. . . and was falling.
They seemed to be the only two steady people in that whole jiggling room, and yet the pit of her stomach plummeted sickeningly as if the bottom had dropped out of the world. A look of wonder crossed the other’s face as his braids flew upward. He let go of the chair, experimentally. Jame clung to him with both hands, hardly sure which of them she was anchoring. Then the rumble receded and his feet descended gently to the floor.
“I flew,” he said in astonishment, eyes as wide as a child’s. “I flew! You saw me, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
“I saw you fall,” said Jame, shaken.
No one else apparently had noticed anything, nor did they seem to take the quake very seriously except to clutch their brimming cups against another upset.
“Here he is! Here! Master!”
In rushed a crowd wearing yellow tunics. They seized the old man and dragged him with them out the door.
“I flew!” he exclaimed in protest to them as he went. “I really flew!”
“Yes, yes,” they assured him. “Soon the entire city will know!”
The landlord shook his bald head as he shut the door behind them. “These uncertain days have bred many strange prophets and the rumor of gods, old and new. Sometimes I think the desert dwellers are right: our new king should never have buried the black temple.”
“The what?” demanded Gorbel.
“Ah, I keep forgetting that you are strangers here. The black rock is as old as the city . . .”
“Older!” called someone.
“Indeed. Langadine was built around it, although I only guess to call it a temple: it appears to be a huge, black square of granite without seam or opening. The desert folk claim that, according to their prophet, it is the gateway to another world and they make pilgrimage to it, or did until King Lainoscopes came to power and quickly grew tired of their frenzied worship. A stickler for order, he, not lenient like his father, the gods give him rest. At any rate, Lainoscopes tried to break up the rock. Failing that, he built it into the foundation of a new tower.”
The lordan exchanged looks.
“You said that your father’s expedition found the ruins of a Kencyr temple,” said Timmon in Kens. “Could it have been here? In which case at some point something destroyed it, and the city too.”
The host was still apparently thinking about his late guest. “Prophets and gods, forsooth. Foolish fellow, to have made such a claim. Now, I suppose, that pack of madmen in yellow will put him to the test. He has finally found his true believers, and they are apt to kill him. Poor Tishooo.”
Jame had chosen wine over beer. Now she choked on it.
“That was the Tishooo?”
“The Old Man, yes. Why?”
“I knew I had seen him before, but never clearly. This is serious,” she said to the others in Kens. “‘There was an old man, oh, so clever, so ambitious that he claimed to be a god. To prove it, his followers threw him from a high tower.’ You remember, Gorbeclass="underline" it’s part of one of those Merikit rites you used to spy on.”
“Oh. That Tishooo. The so-called Falling Man. But what is he doing here if he belongs to the hill tribes?”
“He belongs to Rathillien. So do the Earth Wife—your Wood Witch, Gorbel—the Burnt Man, and the Eaten One. Remember her, Timmon? She ate your half-brother Drie. Wherever they originally came from, all of them were mortal once, I think, until our temples turned them into the Four, the elemental forces that personify this world.”
“You know the oddest people,” remarked Timmon. “Then again, since I met you, so do I. That peculiar old man is destined to become the manifestation of air? When?”
“Potentially, any minute now.”
Scowling, Gorbel planted his elbows on the table in a puddle of spilt beer. “Look here: we’re back in time now, or so you tell me, before our people even landed on this accursed world.”
“No one knows when the Builders constructed the temples,” said Jame, “but the structures preceded us here and apparently fired up just before we arrived.”
“So,” Timmon said, “if that old man is about to become the Tishooo, the black rock—pardon, temple—is about to come to life. That means that, even now, Jamethiel Dream-weaver may be dancing out the souls of the Kencyr Host. The Fall is happening, the greatest disaster in our history, and here we sit, its unfortunate heirs, warm and dry, drinking in a tavern in a lost city.”
Gorbel grunted. “Lost. Destroyed. How long have we got?”
“How long before the Tishooo’s worshippers find a high enough tower and get him up it? He may come to his senses and resist, but still . . . My guess? Sometime tonight.”
Timmon ticked off the events on his fingertips. “The Fall occurs, the temples activate, the Four are created, the Kencyrath flees to this world, the temple destroys Langadine, something destroys the temple, and you’re assuming that all of this happens more or less simultaneously. But in our time it’s actually three thousand and twenty-eight years after the Fall, if you believe our scrollsmen. Langadine could have decades yet to live. It all may not fall out exactly so pat.”
Jame shrugged. “Yes, I’m making several assumptions. Do you want to take the chance, though?”
Timmon sighed and scanned the room. “Should we warn them?”
“Would they listen?” said Gorbel. “You’ve convinced me, girl. We need to finish our business here and get out as fast as possible.” He stood up. “Ahoy! Who wants to sell us a boat? We can pay well.”
“You manage that and get my ten-command on board,” Jame said to him under cover of a sudden stir of interest. “I have errands to run in town.”
Langadine sprawled across several foothills in the shadow of the Tenebrae mountain range. The highest hill was crowned by a white, shining structure that must be King Lainoscopes’ palace. Walled terraces descended from it, curving to fit the contours of the land. The streets on each level thus whorled like the ridges of a massive fingerprint. Whitewashed houses lined them, presenting a solid face to the pavement. Most were two stories high at most, given the illusion of greater height by the rolling ground on which they were set. Jame saw, as she climbed higher, that each building had a small, walled garden behind it like a green jewel set in stone.