The Stair Of Time (Book 2) (27 page)

A Timely Return

Andaris clamped shut his mouth and stared in wonder at the flaxen-haired guard sprawled on the ground before him.  What he’d just said, the bit about being their Lord and Savior, had spilled from his lips as if he’d said it hundreds of times before.  What’s more, it had been completely involuntary, his mouth seeming to move of its own volition.

How
odd,
he thought.

And now th
is man had prostrated himself before him in apparent homage, as flat as one of Grandfather Rocaren’s “extra special” griddlecakes—sword, shield, knees, and elbows akimbo.  Stranger still, just before said man had assumed said position, he’d exclaimed, “Against all hope, His Majesty has returned to us in our hour of need!”

So w
hat in the blue blazes, as Gaven might put it, was going on here?  Lord and Savior?  King?  But king of whom and of…what? Andaris cleared his throat, preparing to ask the soldier his pardon.  After all, people were beginning to stare.  When he noticed that the guard on his left had not only
not
prostrated himself on the ground, but had removed his helm and was glowering at him in a decidedly unworshipful fashion, right hand gripping his sword hilt tightly, black beard jutting in indignation. 

“It’s a capital offense to impersonate
His Majesty,” the man informed him with careful, even words.  “Lord Rocaren has been away now for more than fifteen years, and though I’ll admit you bear a passing resemblance to His Highness, you are far too young to
be
His Highness.”

Andaris once again felt himself swell with authority.  He tried to stop it, but could not.  Puffing out his chest and straightening his spine, he bellowed, “I would have you drawn and quartered for your insolence if not for the years of faithful service, Bernard!”  The tenor of his voice surprised him, ringing forth with a resonance that left no room for
doubt.  “I know you mean well, old friend.  That you think only of the good and glory of the empire, of Daedronell and the White.  But lest you forget, raising arms against your sovereign is
also
a capital offense.”

Bernard’s dark eyes trembled with indecision, the tip of his sword dipping.  After what felt like an unnecessarily lengthy pause, eyes and sword regained their previous menace.
  “The thing is,” he continued, tone insistent but now less certain, “we did not actually see you emerge from the sacred door.  We turned, and there you were.  You might have simply snuck up behind us.  And also, how could you be so young and…and if you are king, why do you not wear the raiment of your office?”

Andaris’ smile was large and languid, eyes shimmering with amusement.  “I will humor your questioning a bit longer, Bernard, but soon this foolishness will come to an end and you and your underling slug will escort me up the steps of enlightenment to the ivory throne of Ekthillius.  From that
lofty perch, as the first rays of dawn break over the Shindellin range, I shall address my people, telling them of my adventures beyond this mortal coil, of my rebirth as foretold in the Book of Prophecy, and of my constant companion, who listens even now, but does not believe.  Of him I will speak most candidly, for He is much more than He knows—our greatest weapon against The Lost One and the shadow-blighted shapeling brigades!”

At this, Bernard looked wholly undone, so out of sorts that he scarcely knew his own name, much less anyone else’s.  Indeed, if at that very moment someone had asked him his name, he likely
would not have had the emotional wherewithal to respond with anything resembling complete certainty.  It sounded like his old master, and yet….  “I believe it starts with a B,” he would have fumbled.  “Ber…something—I’m almost sure of it!”      

“No
w
, sergeant, if all that I have said does not convince you, then perhaps this will!”  From his pouch, Andaris drew forth the silver flute, touched its eerily cool metal to his lips, and blew a series of notes, each clearer and more poignant than the last. 

Bernard gasped and finally dropped to his knees as the sacred door
of Locknorien whooshed open and a covey of dove burst forth, curling into the cloudless blue sky like white smoke from the creator’s own chimney.

Andaris raised his left wrist to the heavens and, as the door whooshed shut again, shouted, “I stand before you, bearing the maker’s mark, the brand of truth which all my line possess!”

The blood sign to which Andaris referred was a small strawberry mark centered just below his left palm—a pale birthmark that, with just the merest hint of imagination, could be made to look like The Symbol.

Now Bernard was as f
lat as his slug of an underling.  Well, almost anyway.  His gut was too prodigious to be “griddle” flat.  “Begging your pardon, Your Majesty!” he cried, lifting his head and averting his eyes.  “I will suffer any penance you wish!  A week in the blockades!  Twenty lashes across the back!  A year as a serf!  Whatever punishment you deem fitting for my insolence, I will gladly accept, for it will be nothing compared to the suffering I bore during your absence.  The suffering we
all
bore.  To have you vanish before our eyes right after war broke out was almost more than your people could endure.” 

Bernard
got to one knee, chest heaving as he fought back tears.  “But you should be proud of us, Your Majesty.  We have been at war fifteen years now, and still, Adrianna, the brightest jewel in your crown of kingdoms, remains intact.  The White have fought long against the shapeling invaders.  We have given up much ground. Geridan Forest to the east, the seaports to the west, the iron mines to the north.  But here we stand firm!  We will retreat no further!  We will not give up the capital city to those beasts!

Her Highness, The Lady Rocaren, has
rallied The White for one final battle.  She has drawn her cloak of concealment about us, shrouding our borders in mist.  She has vowed to give The Lost One no quarter!  ‘We are like bears that have retreated deep into our dens,’ she said.  ‘And now we wait, sharpening our claws in the dark, for the invaders to bumble in, making ready to slash their fool throats and stave in their fool heads!’”

Bernard’s tear-streaked face split into a broad grin.  “She said those very words to the gathered masses just last week,
Your Highness.  You should have seen the effect it had on them!  They more than worship her after all she’s sacrificed, they love her, every last one of them, and would gladly lay down their lives to save her.  And now, against all odds, you have returned to us!  Here at the end, in this our darkest hour.  And so perhaps all is not lost.  Perhaps, with you by her side, there is still hope.  How overjoyed she will be at your return, Your Majesty!  Will they all be!”

Divine Negligence

Eli had to admit, two thousand and twenty-nine was a pretty large number, especially when it came to someone’s age.  Rather than being awed, or even impressed, however, he felt sorry for Sarilla.  He couldn’t say for certain, but was relatively sure, that he wouldn’t want to be
that
old.

After a hundred years or so, the whole business would get kinda tiresome, wouldn’t it?  Heck, it was gettin’ tiresome already.  What must it be like to live so long?  His tongue burned with questions he wanted to ask regarding the monotony of extended existence, but seeing as how he wasn’t supposed to talk at all, much less about matters
of such breadth and weight, he kept his mouth shut.

Sarilla cocked her head at him, a shadow passing over her
lined face.  For a moment, she looked gray, brittle, and very, very tired, as if she might expire on the spot.  Fortunately, the moment lasted, well, only a moment, the ghost of long years slipping from her countenance like fog from the surface of a still pool. 

She shook herself and fixed him with his
grandmamma’s deep blue eyes.  “Now, where was I?  Oh yes.  Time—that deceptively linear construct.  That’s why I decided to live so long, Eli.  I did it because of time.  To my knowledge, I know more about how it all works than any other person alive.  Funny, isn’t it?  Time is why I can endure time.  In other words, I can endure the bone-crushing press of accumulating years because I want to unravel the secret of existence, of which time, obviously, is an integral part.”

Eli
graced her with a nervous half-smile.

“You’ve heard the
saying; all the worlds sit on a shelf.
But do you know where that shelf exists?  Hmmm? 

Not sure if she expected an answer,
if this is what she had to referred to as a non-rhetorical question or not, he simply nodded.

“
I’m not certain myself.  I don’t think anyone is.  But if pressed, I would say the shelf exists in another plane of reality, in a quaint little study no bigger, proportionally, than your grandmamma’s living room.  All the worlds, except for their own, were made by the Lenoy.  Of this, I am now certain.  I borrowed and then transformed a little pocket of their space to suit my own needs.  I fear one day I will be discovered, fear and…hope.  For you see, more than I fear discovery, I fear that the Lenoy are dead.”

After all that had befallen
his family, Eli wasn’t sure what to believe.  Before losing his faith, he would have disputed the point until he was blue in the face, until the veins in his neck stood out like angry serpents ready to strike.  “A god can’t die!”
he would have argued.  “Why, anyone with a lick o’ sense knows that!”
And that’s what they were.  Surely.  If the Lenoy had created the worlds, as Sarilla so clearly believed, what other explanation was there?

But now that his
wife and son were gone….  Well, that changed everything, didn’t it?  At least if the Lenoy were dead, they weren’t what he’d begun to fancy The Watcher to be—a petty child who tears the wings off of butterflies for sport.  As far as deities went, he’d prefer deceased to sadistic any day.

Shortly a
fter losing his family, he’d decided that The Watcher must either have ceased to exist, or be a being of singular cruelty.  Before the week was out, he’d settled on the latter, mainly because no matter how he’d tried, he couldn’t quite accept the former, couldn’t quite wrap his mind around it.

W
here exactly does The Watcher fit into all this, anyway?
he wondered.

Sarilla paused, cocking her head to
the side, seeming uncomfortable with what she’d just said, as though worried that some force on high would smite her down for her impudence even as her words hung in the air with ominous portent—a noose for her slender neck.  Worried and…hoped.

Eli
shivered.  The air seemed to shiver, too, a slight rippling spreading out from where they sat.

Sarilla gave herself a mental shake and went on.  “It is conjectured that each worl
d is contained within a sort of glass sphere, fashioned in the great halls of magic by our creators.  They are known to us by many names—The Ancients, The Lenoy, The keeper, The Watcher, and Rodan.  As should be evident by what I have just articulated, some civilizations believe in many gods, others just one.  In a way, they are all correct.  Unfortunately, the vast majority have no idea that they are worshiping the same thing.  Many wars could have been avoided if they’d only known the truth.  Of course, there may be a reason, or reasons for the knowledge to remain hidden, eventualities which, given my current vantage, have yet to occur to me.

Regarding my pr
ior assertion, however, I am absolutely certain.  No matter what name a given society chooses, singular or plural, they are worshiping the same thing.  In every single instance, it is The Lenoy. And just so we’re clear, I do not look down on humanity for this.  In truth, given the grand scale of things, most days I too believe they are gods.  The difference being, I recognize the possibility that I am wrong.  I also recognize that it doesn’t matter.  After all, to an ant, the construction of a single house must be incomprehensible, and yet said construction is routinely achieved by a single man.  So logically it follows that if we are like ants when compared to The Lenoy, then they are like gods when compared to us.  So basically, for all intents and purposes, even if they’re not gods, they may as well be for all the difference it makes.”

Eli
nodded, glad that Sarilla had touched on something he sort of understood.  He was a little uncomfortable with what she’d said about The Watcher, but at least now knew where
his
god fit into all this.  Indeed, he found what she proposed to be more plausible than a lot of people would.  In part because of his matter-of-fact way of thinking, and in part because this business about the ant being inconsequential when compared to a person was something he’d pondered one day while riding his plow, the summer sun deepening the already pronounced furrows in his brow.

And his ponderin’ hadn’t stopped there.  That thought had been a bridge to many others, too many, eventually leading to the notion that there might be something else out there of a corporeal nature that made him seem as inconsequential as an ant seemed to him.  He obviously hadn’t expected that something to be The Watcher, seeing how he’d assumed Him to be of an uncorporal nature, although wasn’t exactly shocked by the idea either.

Feeling pleased with himself after his day of plow ponderin’, he’d gone home to regale Marnie with his “revolutionary” theories, only to have her gently explain to him that many people’s minds had traveled down similar paths.  He had been crestfallen, but only briefly, regaining his usual good humor by suppertime.  After all, Eli Johansen had never counted himself among the world’s great thinkers.  Most assuredly not! 

The words his grandmamma had uttered all those years ago still rang true in his ears: “Eli, no sense in scrunchin’ up yer forehead and squintin’ yer eyes until they pop outta yer fool woolly head!  Ya have a strong back and a good heart, and that’s more’n most.  So leave the ponderin’ for them that are better suited to it, and the turnip pullin’ to us Johansens!”  And so he had.  Until now, that is.  And only because he had no other choice.

“All the worlds are connected by an invisible conduit,” Sarilla went on in her unsettlingly implacable way, “passable only by those possessing the skill and knowledge necessary to first factor in the coordinates and then ride the wave from one world to the next.  These conduits spring forth from…from places that exist outside or between normal space-time.  Control nodes, if you will.  It’s like locations on a map with lines drawn between.  Understand?”

Eli’s expression went from merely perplexed to wholly mystified—a caricature of befuddlement which, under ordinary circumstances, would have been considered humorous.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking genuinely embarrassed.  “I’ve never had to explain this to anyone before.  It’s more difficult to put into words than I had imagined.”  She sighed.  “Okay, let’s try again.  Think of the worlds as towns, and the conduit as a road.  Most towns, certainly any large enough to be called such without argument, have either a center square or a town hall, a place where folk gather and important decisions are made.  With me so far?”

Eli nodded dutifully.

“Good.  For you see, just like every town has a road going in and out, every world has a conduit.  But instead of a town hall or square, each world has a secret place where everything related to it can be monitored— weather, rotation, plant and animal life, and so forth.

As amazing as it sounds, theoretically, one could travel from world to world until one ended right back where one started.  I see it as a giant serpent eating its own tail, undulating through the fabric of space-time.  And every bit of it—from the tip of its tail to the top of its head—exists atop a mahogany shelf in a cozy little study that, in and of itself, is much much larger than the whole of the known universe.

And what lies beyond the shelf, you ask?  And beyond the room?  And beyond the world?  Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?  Could be there is another undulating serpent.  Could be there are infinitely many.  Or, perhaps, there is something else altogether.  Perhaps there is only
one
level.  But if that’s the case, then in what does the serpent undulate?  Space-time fabric, you say?  Yes, of course, I know.  But of what is that made, and in what is it contained?  And then what is outside the container?  You see, it goes on and on and on like that, each discovery creating more questions than it answers, mysteries within riddles within revelations, revelations which, invariably, lead to more mysteries within riddles, many of which, if followed to their discernible conclusions, become paradoxical to the extreme.  I tell you, it’s positively infuriating sometimes.”  She leaned back in her chair and rubbed the bridge of her nose.  “You know, after all the centuries of immersing myself in this, I’m surprised I’ve been able to keep my mind from spinning off.”

Eli wanted to leap to his feet and sprint into the forest, yelling and waving his arms for help.  It was only with the most superlative effort that he managed to stay put, squirming and perspiring instead.  His simple mind was simply overfull.  Much more of this and he felt sure it would burst apart entirely, pieces landing with a sickening splat against the cobblestones.  He smiled at the thought.

“Could be there is no beginning and no end,” Sarilla droned on, “only change.  I know what you’re thinking.  Sounds like lunacy, doesn’t it?  Perhaps it is.  I just don’t know anymore.  And yet there is precedence to support what I say.  You see, there is very little
real
stability, Eli.  While there are through lines that run fairly straight, they are so easily lost amongst the chaos of the greater weave, that they become difficult, if not impossible, to follow.”

Like this talk,
he thought.

Sarilla smiled, a broad, genuine smile that added sparkle to her eyes.  “You know, Eli, I hope you listen closely to what I say, and heed it well.  I really am beginning to like you, and would hate to see anything…
unseemly
happen to you.  Given your spirit and courage, if you listen to me and do as I instruct, all may still be put right.”

Eli blushed, regretting his unkind thoughts towards the witch, and then nodded, determined, no matter how uncomfortable it made him, to get through this.  Truth be told, he felt like he was floundering waist deep in bog mud—the black as pitch variety typically found in and around the banks of streambeds, like the one running south along the western edge of his land, marking the boundary between his crops and the stunted wood beyond.

Nevertheless, floundering or not, he would stay the course.  There was too much at stake to do otherwise.  He would stay if it took a year.  Mostly for Mandie.  Partly for himself.  And lastly, increasingly, for Sarilla.  It was becoming more and more evident that she needed to talk almost as much as he needed to listen.  She really wasn’t turning out to be that bad a sort, as far as witches went.  And if he could help her by providing an outlet while she helped him, why not?

Sarilla straightened in her chair and drew in a deep breath.  “
Henceforth, in an effort to expedite things, I shall attempt to tell you only what you need to know in the simplest and—my articulation and your comprehension permitting—most economical fashion possible.  You will likely deem it more than necessary.  But trust me, it is not.”

Eli gestured for her to proceed, his expression of sober determination almost comical, that of a man
, or in this case child, preparing to do battle with beasts spawned from the bowels of his blackest dreams.

Sarilla suppressed another smile and, in a calm, steady voice said, “The problem is actually quite simple.  It’s the solution that’s the problem, if you catch my meaning.”  She shook her head and sighed.  “I see I’m not going to get anywhere dancing around the issue with
you,
so I’ll just come out and say it.  Eli, in the future, in another time and place, your daughter is supposed to be…a dog.”

Seeing that he was about to break his vow of silence, she quickly added, “Now I’m not referring to any ordinary dog, I’m talking about a canine of exceptional beauty and breeding, of uncontested pedigree and intelligence, sired from a long line of champions.” 
A little embellishment to spare his feelings won’t do any harm,
she thought.  “Remember, most of us have been animals at one point or another.  I myself was once a common housecat.  Don’t believe me?  Well, I assure you it’s true.  As far as I can tell, we each get one lifetime as an animal, everyone from the most bedraggled of peasants to kings.  I believe it’s meant to teach us humility, and to make us more benevolent towards the lesser creatures of the world—on a subconscious level, of course.”