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More than once upon a time, Hubley Mims hurried down the Sun Road through the deepest caverns of the Dwarves. More than once upon a time because, in this particular place, and at this particular time, there was more than one Hubley Mims.
Irritably she wondered why she had allowed her older self to talk her into this ridiculous situation in the first place. She should have asked for more explanation. But no, she had to rush off the moment the prize was dangled before her eyes. Just because she was the first chronothurge ever was no reason not to learn to look before she leapt.
She was invisible, of course. Her older self had done that much. “No one would ever understand if they saw both of us at the same time,” the older Hubley had explained. But invisibility is only useful when you’re following someone, not when you’re the one in the lead. Which was exactly where the younger Hubley found herself after the party took a couple of wrong turns, then doubled back to find the road.
Spotting a side passage in the outer wall, she scrambled over the broken stone toward this new way. Shadows outlined the image of a frog carved in the stone above the entrance as the light from her older self’s staff bloomed in the curve of the road behind her.
A few steps into the passage, she stopped and pressed herself against the wall. The shadows outside shortened as the company approached. Once they passed her, she’d be able to follow them again instead of having to scramble in the lead. Presuming, of course, her older self didn’t lead them this way.
Glancing back down the tunnel in the other direction, she saw something that almost stopped her heart. Where there had been nothing a moment before, a thin light now flickered against the ceiling.
Great. Just her luck to pick a passage with a group of sissit coming from the opposite direction. It couldn’t be anything else this deep in the earth. Even if she managed to slip out unseen, back to the main tunnel, the creatures behind her would still see the light of the other party. There would be a fight, and who knew what would happen then. Better to take care of the sissit herself. Maybe that was why the older Hubley had brought her along in the first place.
She crept deeper into the passage. The light on the ceiling grew brighter. Hearing footsteps and ragged panting ahead but seeing nothing, she decided the way must dip downward, and considered tossing a fireball or two into the tunnel. But fireballs were notoriously hard to manage in small spaces, and besides, the noise would surely attract the attention of the party on the Sun Road. No, she needed a quieter solution.
Making up her mind, she stopped a few feet in front of the dip in the passage. The splash of light widened against the ceiling as it came closer. A simple false wall would keep any sissit occupied for more than enough time to let the other party pass. She just hoped they wouldn’t hear her cast the spell.
Raising her arms, she chanted in as low a voice as possible,
“By rock and vein and Inach bone,
Raise a wall of seeming stone.”
Around her, the passage went dark. The sound of footsteps and heavy breathing disappeared. She touched the new wall with her fingers, feeling the cool stone. The barrier would last a couple of hours, plenty long enough to keep the sissit at bay. Sissit were many things, hungry most of all, but their mage lore was weak. A sissit conjurer would be hard-pressed to summon the skill required to pass her barricade.
She turned back to the main passage. Clustered around the light from the elder Hubley’s staff, the small party moved cautiously into view beyond the doorway. Two were of a sort she had never seen before. Diggers, the older Hubley had called them. They were not much taller than children, but solidly built, like Dwarves. The other two, a man and a woman, had the look of well-traveled soldiers.
The woman notched an arrow to her bow as she came even with the passage. She started forward to peer into the darkness, but a word from the older Hubley called her back.
“No time for exploring, Canna. We’re too near the deep. The road doesn’t descend much further.”
Canna cast one last suspicious look toward the passageway, and turned away.
She had barely rejoined the others when suddenly, from the hidden gloom in the tunnel behind her, there was a loud crash. She turned in surprise. A single wild figure rushed toward her, silhouetted in the light that had sprung back up in the passage brighter than before. The figure was followed by the harsh shouts and hoots of many sissit, and a flight of black arrows that clattered weakly against the ceiling above Hubley’s head. Turning, she raced for the loway. Sissit arrows were generally poisoned, even if the creatures were notoriously bad shots. And whatever was leading them, sissit or human, had broken her spell with ease. If it came to a fight, her place was with the company outside.
Hurrying back to the loway, Hubley found the party already turned to confront the commotion behind them. As the sissit swarmed out of the tunnel behind her, the soldiers loosed two quick volleys. The pale creatures pulled up in surprise. A fresh group piled into them from the side passage, pushing the vanguard into the middle of the loway. Their fishy white skins glowed in the light of the elder Hubley’s staff. The sissit who led them brandished a great oval shield threateningly when he saw the party below. In response, the elder Hubley raised her staff and called out a spell in a short, harsh voice. The cavern boomed, and half a dozen sissit fell in a burst of light and flame. She expected the rest to turn and run, for sissit, being born in magic, had no heart to fight it. But the shield had kept the leader unharmed and, with a harsh shout, he rushed forward. Still more sissit, an entire tribe it seemed, burst out of the tunnel behind him.
“Quick!” shouted the elder Hubley. “We can’t fight them all! To the deep!”
She grabbed the closest digger by the back of his cloak and pushed him forward. The soldiers followed, still firing arrows at their pursuers as the invisible Hubley raced by, trusting the shouts of the sissit to cover the sound of her passing.
Ahead, the road continued to curve gently down and to the right. Hubley was in such a rush she nearly ran into her older self and the digger standing at the end of the way. Beyond them lay the great gulf of Vonn Kurr. Her boots skidded in the dust as she nearly tumbled into the void.
“What was that?” asked one of the diggers, looking straight at the invisible Hubley.
“A lizard,” said the elder.
The digger didn’t look convinced. He stared at the spot where he thought he’d heard the noise. Hubley stood completely still, her heart pounding beneath her cloak. Then the digger looked away as the rearguard arrived.
“They’ll be on us in a minute,” said the man. “We convinced them to pause a bit back there, but we didn’t stop them.” He chewed his lip at the sight of the sheer cliff where the road ended, and kicked a loose stone out into the blackness. It disappeared without a sound.
“There’s a ledge about three feet down,” said Canna, peering over the edge. “We can hold them off from there as long as our arrows and Hubley’s magic hold out.”
“We won’t need that.”
The older Hubley turned her attention to the middle of the loway, hunting around on the rock floor and sweeping the gravel away into the swallowing depths with her boot as she searched.
“There.” She pointed to an iron ring embedded in the stone at her feet. “You don’t think I led you into a trap, do you? Omarose, if you’d give me a hand with this. I’m not as strong as a Dwarf, but you might be.”
She tapped the ring with her staff. Omarose slung his bow over his shoulder and reached down to grab the iron loop with both hands. The muscles in his neck bulged, but nothing happened.
“Keep trying. That door is old.”
As she spoke, the sissit, having recovered their courage, came howling down the tunnel. Stopping a short bowshot from the party, their leader came forward once more, its Dwarven shield held carefully before it. The invisible Hubley slipped over the edge of the cliff to the safety of the ledge, hoping she could watch whatever came next without having to interfere.
Omarose was still straining at the iron ring. To give him more time, the elder Hubley stepped forward to face the sissit. They hooted at her approach and waved their bows and axes over their heads; but they took a couple of steps backward as well.
Their leader shook his shield. “You give up!” he called loudly, but his tone was more wheedling than demanding. The older Hubley’s magic had scared them all. They watched warily as she stood before them in the tunnel, her staff braced on the floor. The magic glow from its tip cast a light upward across her chin, hollowing her eyes and cheeks in black shadow. A harsh sorceress, all cold anger and fierce justice. Even Hubley found the sight of her older self fearsome.
The sissit leader shook his shield again. In the old and battered metal the younger Hubley discerned the image of a coiled serpent, its mouth locked around a great jewel fixed to the shield’s center.
“You not scare us,” the sissit cried. “I carry great emblem of Ydderri! I guard way to city and worm! We kill you sister! We kill you!”
He shook his shield again and then, quick and furtive, tossed a large, smooth stone at the older Hubley from the end of a hidden sling. She leaned slightly to her left, and the stone shot past her into the gloom beyond. Then the older Hubley raised her staff and presented it parallel to the ground.
“Flame!” she said simply, and a bolt of fire shot out from each end into the crowd behind the leader. Squeals of pain followed, and the smell of charred flesh.
“I have it!”
Omarose heaved a round block of stone up out of the floor, exposing the dark hole beneath. The sissit, who had fallen back under Hubley’s attack, rushed forward again. A flight of buzzing arrows followed their advance, some catching weakly in the leather of the human fighters, others biting only the empty blackness beyond. But no arrow caught the elder Hubley. Around her the air glimmered faintly with a bluish light. She had cast a protection about herself. Only magic could affect her now. The younger Hubley knew the spell well. It was her favorite defense.
The elder shouted back over her shoulder. “Down the shaft, all of you! Canna, you first!”
Another flight of arrows followed from the sissit bows, with the same result. The younger Hubley had to duck her head below the top of the road as errant shafts snaked into the darkness around her. The elder replied with another blast from her staff. The wounded sissit howled.
Canna hesitated at the mouth of the hole.
“Go!” the elder Hubley cried. “Sit on the edge and let yourself slide down. The passage is steep, but it’s safe.”
More arrows flitted past the mage like darting swallows as she turned to make sure the woman followed her instructions.
Canna slipped into the hole and disappeared. Omarose dropped the diggers in separately behind her like two sacks of potatoes. Unsheathing his sword, he came to stand beside the older Hubley.
“Go!” she ordered. “I can hold them long enough for you to be away! You’ll only hinder me by staying! I’ll be right behind you!”
Another flight of arrows splattered off her magical protection cascading into the pit behind them. Omarose bowed his head, sheathed his blade, and stepped into the shaft. At the same moment the sissit rushed the elder magician, sweeping forward in a hesitant wave behind the apex of their leader’s shield. The older Hubley let them come until they were almost upon her, then threw up her arms. A blinding flash blew out from inside her cloak.
Shrieking, the sissit raced back up the corridor. Fresh bodies littered the ground behind them. Only the leader, who had been blown sideways as his heavy Dwarven shield repelled all but the force of the magician’s spell, remained. He fell to the inside of the corridor against the wall, and dropped his shield. But, instead of scrambling after it, he started rolling around in the rubble at the edge of the road slapping and flailing at himself.
Hubley didn’t understand why her older self didn’t finish him off at once. Kill the leader and the rest would flee.
“Blast him!” she shouted, willing to show herself now the rest of the party was gone.
But the older Hubley refused. Instead she kept an eye on the sissit starting to creep back toward them from farther up the loway, while also watching the leader in the throes of his apparent seizure.
“What are you waiting for?” Hubley demanded. “If you won’t do it, I will. We can’t hold them all off forever.”
Her eyes on the sissit, she began the incantation. Just three words, and the fixing of the target in her mind. Gripped by its convulsions, the sissit chieftain stood with its back to her, its hands contorted and straining as if holding something in their thick-knuckled grasp. So much the better. The creature could not have made a better target. The older Hubley did nothing, her back still to the younger.
Hubley spoke the words.
As if guided by deliberate malice, the older Hubley stepped straight into the path of the spell. There was a burst of fire and, where the sorceress had been, now stood a column of white flame. For an awful moment Hubley could see herself frozen in that terrible brightness, a grim statue encased in a cone of writhing fire, and then there was only the pale conflagration, the body within consumed by the magic blaze.
Hubley’s heart and mind went numb, transfixed by the image of her elder self expiring in a pillar of flame. How could she have done this? How could it have happened? It had almost been deliberate! It was all wrong!
Trembling in horror, she took a step backward. But she’d forgotten where she was and, as her foot slipped out over the nothingness above the pit, she gave a final forlorn cry and fell into the depths of Vonn Kurr.
***
She’d been standing at the top of Tower Dale, wrapped in a warm cloak and looking south where the sharp crags of the Bavadars stretched the limits of the sky. Only recently had she mastered the Timespell, and she was trying to decide which unhappy moment in history she would go back to fix first.
A hand tapped her on the shoulder.
She turned instantly and uttered a spell that should have blasted the intruder to dust. Instead she found herself staring at a gray-haired woman whose eyes twinkled at the exact same level as her own.
“Really, Hubley. You have to learn to be less rash. It only gets you in trouble.”
Hubley fought back the urge to launch another spell. “Who are you? How’d you get in here?”
The strange woman laughed. “Oh, I know the wards on this place at least as well as you do,” she said. “Look at me. Carefully. Don’t you recognize me?”
There was something familiar about the woman. The curve of her mouth, her light brown eyes. But Hubley couldn’t place her.
“No. I have no idea who you are.”
“I’m you.”
“No you’re not.”
“It is confusing.” The older woman nodded brightly, ignoring Hubley’s indignation. “I’m not that you, I’m this you. Oh, dear. I’d forgotten how complicated this moment was. Think for a moment, Hubley. You just mastered the Timespell, right?”
Hubley refused to answer, still suspecting some sort of trick.
The older woman went on anyway. “Of course you do. I know you know, after all. Well, I’m you, and I cast the Timespell to come back to talk to you because I need your help. It’s time you began to play your part.”
Now Hubley recognized the familiarity. The woman did look like her, an older Hubley with more lines around her mouth, and quieter eyes. Her face had the smoothness of age, like a surf-bled shore.
Still, Hubley didn’t believe it for a second. “Prove it,” she demanded.
The older woman rolled up the sleeve of her cloak, exposing her left forearm. Hubley noticed the thimbles on her little fingers. Despite the mottling of age, the other woman’s arm looked just like her own.
“Touch my wrist,” she said.
Hubley knew what the older woman wanted to show her. Slowly she took the offered arm in her hands. The slight swelling in the bone was there, and felt exactly the same as the one on her own wrist. The childhood break had healed well, but not perfectly. Her own wrist throbbed at the memory.
“That doesn’t prove anything,” she insisted.
“That’s exactly what Mother said when I was trying to prove who I was to her. You, however, will not require further evidence.”
“Ha. You don’t see me believing you yet, do you?”
“I think you’re going to want to come with me before you even believe I’m who I say I am.”
Pulling her cloak more closely about her, the old woman turned toward the stair.
“We have a lot to talk about. I put the kettle on as I came up through the pantry. It’s beautiful up here, but cold. Let’s have some of that Wistlewood tea we keep in the back of the bread box, and then we can discuss our arrangements. And I have a new way of casting that Stairtripper spell you webbed outside the Traveling Room I know you’ll appreciate.”
In the pantry, the older woman fetched the tea while the younger took the cups and saucers down from the cupboard. While they busied themselves the cat came in, a tawny stretch of proud fur. It looked once at each woman, licked a paw, and looked at them again. Then it mewled at both and strutted away, tail stiff with disdain.
If the old woman was her, it would certainly explain a lot. Maybe, if she really did know the Timespell...
“So,” she said casually, after they’d taken their kettle and cups to the library, “if you really are me, why have you returned?”
The older woman smiled. “I need you to do something important.”
“What?”
“I need you to follow a party of adventurers to Issinlough.”
“Issinlough’s a dangerous place now the Dwarves are gone. Why don’t you just do it yourself?”
“I can’t.” Hubley shivered as she recognized the way the older woman warmed her hands by rolling the cup gently between her palms. “I’ll be the one leading the party.”
“Then what do you need me for?”
“Because that’s what happens.”
“What do you mean, ‘That’s what happens’?”
“I’ve already been there.”
Hubley frowned. “That’s hardly enough of a reason to persuade me to go running off with you.”
“Believe me, when you’ve practiced the Timespell as long as I have, you’ll know that’s more than reason enough.” She took another sip from her cup. “But I do have another reason. One I know you’ll never be able to resist.”
“So tell me already. What is it?”
“To go to the future. You’re going to come with me because this is your chance to break the natural boundaries of the Timespell. You know you won’t turn that opportunity down.”
The full scope of the older woman’s offer came to Hubley in a rush. What the older woman said was true. There was no way Hubley could turn down a chance to get to the future. Like the Traveling Spell, the Timespell only worked according to the memory of the caster, or someone with the caster, and that limitation meant the caster couldn’t go forward to some time she hadn’t yet been, only backward. But, once she was in the future, Hubley would be able to travel back and forth between that time and now. And all the years between.
Her impatience disappeared. Or rather, it assumed a different form as she made up her mind in a rush.
“I’ll go,” she said.
“Of course you will.”
“Will you at least say how old you are? So I know how far we’re going?”
The older woman shook her head. “That would be telling. In these matters, it’s always better to know less rather than more. Then you don’t have to keep track of so many details.”
***
Hubley fell through the darkness of Vonn Kurr, but she wasn’t particularly scared. How long she had before she hit bottom she didn’t know, but Vonn Kurr was deep, and there would be plenty of time. The wind cracked past her so fast she could hardly breathe as she raised her left hand and removed the small silver thimble that covered the shortened tip of her little finger.
“Return,” she whispered. There was a jar as time snapped...
...and she was lying on her back in the Traveling Room beneath her tower, back in her own time. Her finger itched where the last joint had reattached. It always took a day or two for flesh and bone to get reacquainted.
For a long time she lay with her eyes closed and tried to recover from the shock of having just killed herself. It wasn’t that she blamed herself for what had happened. She was too practical for that. If anything, she blamed her older self for putting her into such an impossible situation in the first place. All the same, it was a long time before she settled down enough to think rationally about what had happened. The rock floor was smooth and cool against her back; the darkness swaddled her like a blanket.
Eventually she drove the pillar of fire from her mind and began to think instead of what she could do to change what had happened. What was going to happen. What was the point of the Timespell if you couldn’t go back and undo whatever it was you didn’t want to occur? All she had to do was return to the future a few hours early and make sure the sissit remained inside that side passage. If they never found the party, then there would never be a fight at the edge of Vonn Kurr. And if there was no fight, then the elder Hubley wouldn’t die.
She wasn’t quite sure yet what she’d do once she found the sissit, but she was sure she’d think of something.
Just resolving to act made her feel better. She went back up to her tower and began the conjuration that would allow her to return to the time she’d just left. With no part of her in the future to act as a lodestone across the years and distance, the process would be more difficult, and take much longer, than her trip home. But the traveling would be just as sure.
Finishing the necessary preparations, she took herself forward to the time when the company had last rested in a small chamber off the loway, a few hours before they’d woken and she’d managed to get herself caught in front of them. But this time she was going to go on ahead deliberately. She knew the route they were taking now.
Her fingertips brushed the inner wall as she continued down the main passage until she felt she was far enough away to show a light. A simple thought, and a dim flame gleamed at the top of her staff. Its pale light showed the Sun Road winding down into the depths of the earth before her. Above her head the low ceiling swallowed the darkness beyond the circle of yellow light. Around her, the ruin of ancient Bryddin skill littered the passage; bits and pieces of the old sculpture and elegant mosaic that had once decorated the walls lay in shattered pieces along the road. Twisted brackets remained where once had shone the lamps of Uhle. Dwarven hands had carved this road in their search for the Sun, but those hands had long since disappeared. She wondered why.
At the junction where the frog’s face loomed above the tunnel, she held her staff before her and entered the passage. The walls closed in around her. Past the point where she had spelled her ineffective wall, a flight of stairs descended steeply into the darkness.
She counted the steps as she went down. One hundred, two hundred. At four hundred and eighty-two the stair stopped. The passage continued onward and forward into the gloom. The air was heavy and thick; water clung to the walls in beads that sparkled beneath her pallid light. The mist she inhaled with every breath had a fetid oiliness, not quite the smell of a bog. A bog, no matter how foul, possessed the stink of life. But this smell was metallic, of decayed and rusted iron, an odor that conjured an image of great metal corpses dissolving in ancient pools.
Unevenly, the passage continued its descent. Hubley found herself avoiding small but growing puddles whose dark water swallowed her light without reflection. Thick mold covered the walls. Soon she had to stoop as she pushed forward, her cloaked arm held out to brush away hanging tendrils thick as squirrels’ tails. The puddles deepened until no part of the floor was dry, bubbling ever so slightly as her boots stirred them. Thick mist simmered as high as her waist.
Then the heavy vegetation gave way and she found herself on the side of a large cavern. The water stretched in front of her to an uncertain distance; the walls vanished on either side. Above, the ceiling was lost in blackness. Not wanting to draw attention to herself in front of the very tunnel she wanted the sissit to avoid, she doused her light with a thought.
Nothing followed. No sound, no light, no breath of wind. Though she knew she was at the edge of a large cave, the pressing darkness felt solid as stone.
Then the absence was broken by voices welling across the lake, the wheedling tone of sissit. How far away they were, she couldn’t tell. Her ears had been so sharpened by the long hours of silence she didn’t trust them. The voices could be on the far shore, or they could be in a rowboat twenty feet away.
“You see it?” asked the first. “Big light by fishway?”
A second voice snorted. “Of course. Everybody see it.”
“You think that Glommer?”
“Don’t know. What you think?”
“I think Glommer come.”
The second voice took on a cunning tone. Hubley pictured the first somewhat cowed by the more commanding presence of the second.
“Maybe you go look. You see it, you go.”
“I not go. You go.”
“You see it, you go. Maybe you swim.”
“I no swim. Glommer here.”
“You do what Obahed say. I eat you else.”
“You don’t eat me.” This was said without full confidence, as if the speaker were aware of some possibility of the threat actually occurring. “Only Glommer eats.”
“I eat too. Glommer say, ‘Obahed, eat that one,’ or ‘Obahed, eat this one,’ and I eat. Glommer say that all the time. I number one chief. I eat what I want.”
“You just fat seeti. Glommer eat fat seeti. You swim.”
The thock of something hollow and hard being hit by something just as hard but not as hollow followed. A small splash echoed through the cavern like a stone dropped down a deep well. Then the first voice spluttered as it apparently flailed around in the water, “I see you, Obahed. You feed Glommer. I bring Teekee back and then whole tribe eat you!”
The splashing continued. Hubley strained forward as she tried to hear more. What was a Glommer? Where were the rest of the sissit? How had they all gotten across the water to the tunnel leading up to the loway? The darkness felt tangible around her ears, and she had an urge to swat it away the way she would a swarm of gnats. She took a step forward, and the oily water leaked over the tops of her boots to squish icily between her toes.
Her eyes flashed with pain as a heavy blow landed on the back of her head.
She woke with a rag in her mouth and her hands tied to a pipe on the wall behind her. Light splashed across the assemblage of boilers and belts, pipes and pistons that filled the room, but all the machinery was silent. Everything was ancient with decay.
She coughed, shaking her head to clear her thoughts. Gagged and bound, she could invoke no spells. The sissit were either going to dine on her, or they were going to be more creative. With a sinking feeling, she realized that, once again, she had rushed headlong through time into another unfortunate position.
She tugged at the ropes and the pipe. Flakes of rust showered her face. The ancient metal squeaked in a hopeful way, as if the strain was already too great. She pulled at the pipe as quietly as she could and was actually starting to think she might get herself free when a magician in stained robes surprised her by gliding out from behind one of the machines.
He was old. Too old. The skin of his face stretched taut over bone, and his hands, which he held clasped in front of him, appeared to have no skin at all. Under a black skullcap he floated forward like a bank of poisonous fog. Hubley had never seen anything like him, though she could make a good guess at what he’d been up to. Without a Living Stone, there was always a high price to pay for antiquity.
As he approached, she saw each bony claw seemed forced into a permanent fist. Inside each fist he clasped a small crystal globe.
“Ahh, my dear.” The sorcerer’s voice was not unkind, but lacked the least trace of concern. Below his black skullcap his long, hooked nose divided the hard blackness of his eyes with a thin, pointed ridge. “It seems you have regained some use of your senses. I was worried my servant had struck you too forcefully and that you were not going to waken.”
Smiling, he brought his hands together. As he did, Hubley was able to get a better look at the crystal globes, which were bound to each skeletal claw with loops of thin blumet wire. The shiny coils wound up around the hands and wrists to disappear into the folds of his robe. Deep within the heart of each globe flashed small streaks of blue lightning. Hubley felt the power of his magic swell like a blister out from those strange spheres.
“I hope you are comfortable,” he continued. “Let me unloose that nasty gag.” Raising his right hand sent a shimmer of cold blue light flashing toward the cloth around her mouth. She felt nothing until the rag untied itself with an eerie, flowing motion, and slithered away from her face. Then the magician crossed his hands before him, slipping each into the opposite sleeve, and nodded. He seemed quite pleased with himself.
With her mouth free Hubley was no longer defenseless. She spoke two quick words, intending a cloud of noxious smoke to form about the mage’s head, but he only laughed. His voice was a high-pitched cackle, seasoned with more than a little nutty madness.
“Oh, my dear!” he wheezed. “That is wonderful! Do you really think I would allow you to conjure in my own chambers? Ha, ha! How delightful! You might have struck me dead, and that would not have been to my liking. No, no. Not after all these years of time and effort.”
He shook his head in silent mirth, and Hubley noticed he had no ears. Just holes, like the nokken back in Valing. Didn’t she just wish she was back there with them.
“There are incantations covering this place,” he chortled, “which prevent the working of any magic, except the magic of my own, clever hands.”
Holding up his bony claws for Hubley’s admiration, he looked like nothing so much as a Malmoret baroness showing off her freshly painted nails. The crystal spheres gleamed.
“I see so few fellow humans down here to whom I can show off my talents,” he sniffed. “Just these miserable sissit, which provide all the sustenance of a worm. Do you know, in all the centuries I have been down here, I don’t believe I have caught even a dozen actual humans? And not a one of them a magician. Until now.”
He leaned forward and beamed, his dead eyes devouring her like a pair of hungry mouths.
It was the worst trick of magic, to feed off the lives of the living. Hubley knew exactly what to expect from this monster who supplemented his own soul by siphoning the spirits of others. A cold quiet settled over her as she realized she’d accidentally discovered the easiest way to change the future. She’d get herself killed now, instead of later. She didn’t want to even think about what else would change when all the various older Hubleys melted away from the years behind her.
The mage’s rambling was interrupted as a large sissit padded in through a low entrance on the other side of the room. The magician turned and spoke sharply before the sissit could say a word. “Obahed! I told you not to disturb me until I am finished! You know my wishes.”
The sissit bowed as best it could and spoke, trembling. “Obahed knows. But Eebul go see what Teekee doing. Maybe whole tribe coming now to kill Obahed.”
“I will take care of Teekee and the rest when I am done. Now go away. They cannot hurt you here.”
“Obahed hungry.”
“Obahed eats when I am done. Now go!”
The sissit ducked quickly back out of the room; its large, flat feet slapped hollowly on the metal floor. The magician returned his attention to Hubley. “I would like to continue our chat,” he said, “but time appears to be running low. And I wish to take care of you first.”
He turned to a table in the middle of the room. His back was to the door as he began to arrange several wicked looking knives and metal tubes upon a table. He was completely absorbed in his work and didn’t notice when a new visitor came in through the door behind him, tiptoeing stealthily. Not even when she smashed his head in with an axe.
“Hi, sis,” the new arrival announced. “I’m back.”
Hubley gaped at the sight of yet another Hubley. How many of her were wandering around this particular part of the Stoneways at this particular time? At least this one looked closer to her own age. The new Hubley gave a nervous grin, then bent down over the body of the mage.
“I’m not sure he’s dead, yet,” she said, “if he ever was alive. But this is what I did the last time I was here. When I was you, that is. It seemed to work.”
The axe flashed again quickly; once, twice, and the sorcerer’s hands bounced off and across the room, still wired to the crystals. The wrists were no more than brittle bone, and the two strokes had required no strength at all. A final cut at the pipe above her head freed her.
“Come on, we’ve still got that Obahed to get past.” The newest Hubley pulled her up by the arm before Hubley had a chance to say a word. “We’ve got to close this circle we’re both running around in.” She handed the rescued Hubley the axe, pulled a knife from her belt, and led the way out of the chamber.
They went out through the door and into a narrow tunnel. Everything was made of the same rusted metal. Pipes twisted across the walls and ceiling like vines in a forest. Only the floor was clear, except for occasional puddles where water dripped from the ceiling. They hurried down the corridor past several side tunnels until the slightly older Hubley came to a stop and held her younger self back with a cautionary hand outside the entrance to a small room. Obahed was seated at a rough wooden table against the far wall, not five feet away. Her staff leaned against the wall beside him. The sissit sat with its back to them, one elbow resting on the table, its chin in hand. Its other hand held a long knife with which it hacked small chips off the side of the table. Its feet slapped sloppily up and down in a pool of water on the floor. Five or six spells to kill the creature came to Hubley’s mind before she remembered her magic wouldn’t work here.
The older Hubley took one deep breath to steel herself, then tiptoed up behind the pale sissit and stabbed it in the back of the neck.
The magician hadn’t bled, but the sissit did. Its blood was everywhere. It gave a great cry and grabbed the knife with both hands. The older Hubley stumbled away and came to a stop with her back propped to the wall beside her younger self. The sissit twisted as it tried to get the dagger from its neck, knocked over the bench it had been sitting on, and collapsed on the floor. Twice it tried to sit up, splashing around in the bloody puddle. Then its head fell sharply back against the metal floor with a loud, echoing clang, and it died.
A moment passed. The younger Hubley swallowed once, then turned and threw up into the slimy puddles at her feet. All the tension of the last few hours came spewing out as she slumped weakly to the floor. For a few minutes her older self left her alone. But, when she had recovered, the elder told her to get the knife the sissit had been playing with before it died.
“And look closely at the place where I stabbed it,” she added. “Memorize the exact spot. That’s the only way you’ll be sure to kill it on the first try. Which, as you already know, you will.”
Reluctantly the younger Hubley took the bloody corpse in her hands. She had to roll it over to retrieve the knife, which had fallen beneath its body. She studied the second knife in the creature’s neck for a moment, before dumbly realizing the two were exactly the same. Then she fell back wearily onto the floor beside her elder self, wet and miserable and covered with rust and muck.
“Have you recovered?” the elder asked sympathetically. Hubley nodded. “Okay then. It’s time to get out of here. You’re going to have to watch everything I do very closely, because the only reason I know how to do all this is because I saw myself doing it when I was you. Got it?”
Hubley nodded numbly. She was beginning to understand what her older self had told her, back at the beginning of this increasingly unpleasant adventure, about wanting to know as little about the future as possible. All this foreknowledge only seemed to be causing trouble. Here she was, following herself in what was starting to look like an endless circle, all in an effort to change the future. And, for the life of her, she couldn’t seem to get ahead of what was happening. The circles just kept drawing closer and closer, like a whirlpool spiraling down a drain.
Wearily she took her staff from its place by the wall. The older Hubley pointed to a rusty iron wheel fixed to a trap door in the ceiling. Although it looked impossible to turn because of the rust, it actually spun quite easily at the elder’s touch, once she had climbed up on the table to reach it. The trap door fell open heavily and a spatter of rusty water rained down around them. A second wheel showed on the inside. Behind the table was a flimsy ladder, but it reached up into the door in the ceiling and in a moment both Hubleys had climbed into the tiny room above.
The small chamber they found themselves in was unlit and almost filled by the two of them standing close together. The light shining up from below cast their faces in ghastly shadow. Above them, almost touching their heads, was a third wheel similar to the one they had opened. Hubley reached for it at once, eager to get out of this constricting place. A word from the elder stopped her.
“Don’t. You’ll bring the whole lake down on our heads if you do. We have to close the bottom door first, then pull that lever on the left.” She pointed to two levers on the wall beside them. “You pull the right one when you come back. Don’t forget.”
She closed the bottom door and pulled a lever in the darkness. For a moment, nothing happened. Then there came a sound of gears clanking and metal grinding, and Hubley’s legs jerked as the room around her suddenly moved.
“It’s a lift!” she said, suddenly understanding.
Her older self nodded. They ground slowly upwards, then the contraption jarred to a sudden stop. Hubley felt her older self move past to unscrew the wheel above their heads. She heard the door swing open, and a gust of somewhat fresher air swept into the chamber along with a splash of rusty water.
“Where are we?” she whispered after following her older self outside. A cool breeze fingered her cheek, bringing with it the smell of rusty water.
“In the middle of the lake.”
“The lake?”
“The one at the end of the tunnel. You were standing in it when the sissit grabbed you.”
That lake. Hubley had almost forgotten. She was very confused. After the light of the magician’s lair, dim though it was, the plunge back into the darkness of the cavern was disorienting. She wanted to flash a light from the top of her staff that would open up the darkness to the highest point in the ceiling above. But her elder self was already tugging at her sleeve.
“Hurry. You have to go back again. I don’t know what happens next, but there are more sissit coming. I’ll take care of them. And don’t forget that knife, or the axe!”
Hubley removed the silver cap from her little finger once again. The wound at the last knuckle was barely a day old and throbbed in the thick air of the cave. The breeze was gusting more strongly now, and her cloak flapped loudly in the wind. She spoke the word of power, and once more her soul snapped back through time.
***
Once again she lay in her Traveling Room, her eyes focused on the rune of carved ivory set into the middle of the stone ceiling. Her rune of recovery and return.
This time she didn’t linger, though she wasn’t about to go rushing off a second time without thinking. She needed to be more patient. She was a chronothurge, after all; she was supposed to be in control of time, rather than the other way around. The axe at her belt belied that thought, perhaps, but right now she preferred not to go too deeply into the how and why of where it had come from.
In a chair in her study she curled up with the cat and a mug of hot tea. The problem, she decided, was that she didn’t know enough. She needed to go back to the lake, scout around, and find out where the sissit had come from. The magician she already knew she would take care of. All she had to do with him was let matters run their course. But the sissit were another question. She needed to find them. Only then could she burn them out of every tunnel in Vonn Kurr, if she had to, to make sure they never found their way to the Sun Road.
This time she would keep events under control.
When she was ready, and after she had gotten some much needed rest, she summoned a memory even earlier than the last one and retraced her route once more through the tunnels of Vonn Kurr to the shore of Gommer’s lake. There she discovered a shallow ledge that led around the water to a rocky beach on the far side, where two small coracles were drawn up on the shingle. She considered smashing the bottoms of both, until she remembered she would need a way to get to the middle of the lake and the entrance to the magician’s lair. So she left them alone.
Beyond the coracles she discovered a pair of tunnels at the top of the slope. The passages were roughly hewn, not Dwarven work at all. They twisted and split among each other like a clutch of snakes, with branching tunnels going left and right and up and down. She spent hours exploring them, but without some way to mark her path she kept going round and round in circles. What she needed was to capture a sissit and make it show her the way. Otherwise she was only going to get lost.
She retraced her steps. As she emerged back into the cavern she heard sounds from the lake. One of the coracles was being quietly paddled. If she could catch the paddler she would have her guide. But the soft splashes faded away and she was left silently cursing her lost opportunity on the wrong side of the cave.
She waited a few minutes to see if the paddler would return. The darkness was absolute. She had risked a small light while exploring the passages, but had ended that spell before she had returned to the lake. There was no sense in showing a light now; she would only scare off her quarry. She was just deciding to sneak back around the side of the cavern and try to grab it there, when the sound of flat feet flopping carelessly against the stone floor came from the second passage. She recognized the voices immediately.
“So. Where is boat?”
“Boat is here.”
“We catch fish?”
“We catch big fish.”
Two sissit, with who knew how many others on the far side of the cave, was more risk than Hubley wanted to take in capturing a guide. No doubt if she acted now she would just start up some new chain of events that would end with her having to save herself one more time. No, she had promised herself she would be patient this time. Better to just keep on watching. There would be other chances.
The sissit dragged the second coracle across the shingle and into the water. The boat creaked as they climbed aboard.
“Ssh!” the first sissit warned. “No noises. We on Glommer’s waters now.”
“Glommer not worry about us. I tell you, I know when Glommer sleeping. I one smart sissit.”
“I worry.”
Obahed didn’t seem to care about that. “You got hooks?” it asked.
“I got hooks.”
Several minutes passed with no talking. Hubley guessed they were baiting their hooks, or doing whatever it might be that sissit did to catch fish. A pair of gentle plops marked the moment when they lowered their lines into the water.
Time passed. Sissit appeared to be no more inclined to talk while fishing than humans. Hubley began to fidget impatiently, and was starting to cast about for some new course of action when a flash of light burst out across the lake. The cavern glowed briefly from the entrance at the far side, exposing the dark water, a hint of stony walls, and the two sissit crouching in their small coracle. Then the light was extinguished as quickly as it had appeared.
Hubley was taken completely by surprise. She hadn’t thought her other self would arrive so soon. Now everything was going to get complicated again. She listened as the two sissit had their argument and fought, the first time for them, but the second for her. This time, however, she was in position to hear what happened next.
The first sissit swam noisily ashore, his wet feet squishing quickly across the beach as he ran for the other tunnel. At the same time, more splashing erupted from the other side of the lake, signaling her own capture.
Obahed called loudly across the water. “Ho, Eebul! What you catch?”
“Man, I think.” A new voice echoed from the far wall. “You have sissit?”
“No. He fall in water after I hit him. He run to Teekee. But we make fine catch today if you catch man. Glommer be very happy.” Hubley heard the sissit climb back into its boat and begin paddling toward the far shore.
“Maybe we eat this one,” suggested the far voice.
“No! No!” Obahed answered quickly. His splashes quickened. “Glommer not like that at all.”
“Glommer not know,” suggested Eebul.
“Glommer know everything,” Obahed insisted. “We make Glommer happy, we stay happy. Glommer not eat us. But Glommer know about human. Glommer know everything.”
The new voice grunted at this wisdom, apparently convinced.
Hubley listened as the creatures loaded her younger self into their boat and paddled back to the middle of the lake. Their paddling stopped, and a low, grinding sound began that she felt more than heard. When the sound stopped, she guessed the entrance to the magician’s lair had just surfaced, and that the sissit were now loading her unconscious body into the small metal room.
The grinding resumed. When it was gone the cavern was silent again. Hubley waited in the tunnel mouth, her heart beating. Events had been taken out of her hands yet again. Somewhere down there, at the bottom of the rusty lake, she was being trussed to the pipes in the mage’s chamber. Obviously now was the time she was supposed to rescue herself; no other Hubleys seemed to be showing up. Finding the sissit would have to wait. Again. She curled her fingers anxiously around the handle of the axe at her belt, and wondered if she was supposed to swim out to the mechanical island. But, no. She hadn’t been wet when she’d come to her own rescue. She would have to just keep waiting.
Half an hour passed. Then the grinding resumed, followed by the sound of a single grumbling sissit clambering back into one of the boats.
“‘Go, Eebul,” Obahed say. ‘Go get other sissit.’” The sound of its low muttering floated clearly across the lake. “Always going for Eebul. Never eating.”
Hubley came quietly down to the beach as the sissit paddled itself ashore. She heard the bottom of the boat grind against the rock, then the creature’s feet slapping against water and stone as it hopped out. With a word she caused her staff to flare. The sissit cried out and held up its hand against the glare. She knocked it unconscious with a single blow from the back of her axe, the same as it had done to her several days, and maybe only an hour, before.
Taking the boat, she paddled out onto the lake. She left her staff still shining in the bow; its light revealed the other coracle tethered to a low island in the midst of the water. She tied her boat beside the first, then opened the trap door on the floor of the lift and climbed inside.
Two levers stuck out from the wall beside her. Grabbing the one on the right, she closed and locked the upper hatch, and pulled.
The low clanking began again, as if wheels were turning somewhere in the lake below. She could feel the vibrations through the floor. Then her knees buckled and the entire room began to move downwards. She held out a hand to steady herself. In less than a minute the clanking ceased and the small room stopped moving.
She stooped to listen at the door by her feet. Hearing nothing, she turned the lower wheel. There was a rusty creak, then the mechanism spun freely and the door fell open.
She expected no one, and she was right. Had she been caught by surprise before, she doubted she would have been able to sneak up on the mage the way she had. She dropped down into the room, her boot heels clanging against the iron floor. Carefully she hefted her axe and waited for someone to challenge her. But water dripping into pools from the ceiling was the only sound she heard. Still holding the axe at the ready, she closed the hatch above her head and advanced cautiously down the hall that led to the magician’s chamber. Everything in this strange cave was just as she remembered: the dank, metallic smell, the reddish water puddled everywhere. Another corridor ran off to the right, turning almost immediately and disappearing.
She came to a quick stop at the sound of footsteps approaching from the tunnel in front of her. She darted into the side passage and around the turn, her heart in her throat. The footsteps padded softly forward, bare feet slapping on the metal floor. She held her axe tight against her chest. Then the sound was past, fading down the corridor toward the room she had just left. With a sigh of relief she started forward cautiously again.
Another several steps brought her to the sorcerer’s laboratory. Glommer was standing with his back to her, arranging the grisly tools on his workbench. Beyond him Hubley saw herself chained to the pipes on the wall. A moment of anger rushed through her and she charged forward, banging the axe down sharply on the sorcerer’s head. He sprawled across the floor, his skull crushed. There wasn’t a drop of blood. She felt a sharp thrill of relief, as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She was reenacting the past! And, for the first time, it was working!
She grinned gaily at her earlier self. “Hi, sis! I’m back!”
The younger Hubley looked at her with a mixture of astonishment and relief. And a little horror as well. Hubley took the axe in both hands and bent over the magician’s body.
“I’m not sure he’s dead, yet. If he ever was alive. But this is what I did the last time I was here. When I was you, that is. It seemed to work then.”
As she had seen herself do before, she flashed the axe up twice and cut off each hand at the bony wrist. Then she cut herself free from the iron pipes.
“Come on,” she urged. “We still have Obahed to get past. We have to close this little loop we’re both running around in.”
She hushed her younger self as she was about to ask a question and handed her the axe. Then she drew the knife from her belt and started back down the passageway. They went quietly, Hubley in front with her blade ready, the younger following. They found the sissit sitting at the table, just as it had been before, chopping at the wood with its long knife. The same knife Hubley held in her hand. With one deep breath to steel herself, she tiptoed up behind the creature and stabbed it quickly in the back of the neck in the exact spot she had seen the knife pierce before.
The creature shrieked and grabbed at the blade. Blood spouted. Hubley stumbled away from the wretched thing until her back was against the wall. The sissit thrashed desperately on the slimy floor, adding its thick red blood to the puddled mess, then toppled over and died. And the younger Hubley threw up on the floor beside her.
She gave her younger self a minute to pull herself together. Having already been through that particular bout of nausea, she was much less moved. Until she brained the magician she’d never killed anyone by hand before, but the shock and disgust were much less the second time. So she left her younger self in peace, until she knew she had caught her breath and recovered some composure. Then she told the younger Hubley to take the knife the sissit had been playing with.
“And look closely at the place where I stabbed it,” she added. “Memorize the exact spot. That’s the only way you’ll be sure to kill it on the first try. Which, as you already know, you will.”
Loops within loops. Now she had taught herself how to kill a sissit without actually knowing how. She watched as her younger self warily picked up the sissit’s blade.
“Are you recovered now?” she asked. Her younger self nodded tiredly. “Okay then, it’s time to get out of here. You’re going to have to watch everything I do very closely, because the only reason I know how to do all this is because I saw myself doing it when I was you. Got it?”
The younger Hubley nodded again, though she still looked a little green around the edges. Hubley led them back through the trap door in the ceiling, showed her younger self how to operate the lift, then took her up and helped her out onto the island in the middle of the lake. A faint breeze had come up and was brushing across her cheek. After the deep metallic rot of that cave, the lake itself smelled almost as fresh as the hills of Valing, especially on the back of the breeze.
“Where are we?” the younger Hubley whispered.
“On an island in the lake.”
“What lake?”
“The one at the end of the tunnel. You were standing in it when the sissit grabbed you.” She tugged impatiently at her younger self’s sleeve. “Hurry. You have to cast the spell,” she whispered. “I don’t know what happens next, but there are more sissit coming. I’ll take care of them. And don’t forget that knife, or the axe!”
A spot of movement in the darkness struck her eye. A small light had appeared high up in the cavern to her right. She guessed the sissit who had run off to fetch Teekee was returning. Another light appeared, then a third, and now there was enough to cast a glow all the way to the far wall of the cavern, and for Hubley to see that the sissit were approaching the lake from the left hand tunnel. She reached out to touch her younger self, but she was already gone, back into the past. Eagerly, she faced the approaching sissit instead. Her chance to stop them had finally arrived.
Brushing a loose strand of hair from her face, she noticed the soft breeze had picked up to a steady wind. Across the cavern the line of lights twisted down to the dark mirror of the lake like spots on an uncoiling snake. The sissit came silently; unblinking eyes gathered noiselessly by the side of the dark water. When they had come close enough that their lights revealed Hubley standing on the island, they began to jabber excitedly. The leader stepped out of the crowd, and Hubley recognized him by his shield. The emblem of Ydderri.
“Obahed! We see you! Tulum come back, tell sissit everything! We know you try kill him! We not afraid of Glommer any more. We kill you and Glommer!”
Hubley wondered if she could use Glommer to her advantage now that he was dead. The sissit were acting brave now, but one whiff of power and they would turn tail immediately, scampering back to their smelly holes.
An arrow whistled out of the darkness, passing close beside her. She raised her arms so that her cloak spread out ominously around her, and lit her staff with a thought. “Foolish sissit,” she called, trying to think of what a sorcerer like Glommer might say to scare them. “I am not Obahed. Obahed is dead. He failed me. But do not be so rash as to think you can challenge ME!”
Raising her staff, she pointed it threateningly. A word, and a bolt of fire flashed over the sissits’ heads to splash in a shower of sparks on the cavern wall. Half the torches vanished as their owners decided that a magician was more than they had bargained for and melted back into the darkness.
But the leader wasn’t cowed. “Puny fireman!” he called brazenly. “Sissit knows that magic!” And he launched a fireball of his own. Disdainfully Hubley caught his feeble casting with her staff and tossed it into the water at his feet. A puff of steam hissed up from the lake, and a few more sissit fled. The leader took a few steps backward and shook his fist.
With a roar of noise a greater burst of wind grabbed Hubley’s cloak and nearly lifted her off her feet. Most of the sissit torches were blown out by the gale, but the light from Hubley’s staff was enough to show her what was happening. Little waves had begun to dance madly across the lake’s black surface, chopping back and forth, both with the wind and against it. They broke the dark water into a churning boil. Another blast of wind shook Hubley and she had to draw her arms back in to wrap her cloak around herself or she would have been blown into the water. Her little island began to shake violently with the waves.
A strange current started swirling in the lake. Hubley felt the lift shudder and thrum in time with the dancing waves. On shore the sissit were either cowering on the ground or had started crawling up the hill to escape the surging water. The wind blew even stronger.
Hubley threw herself down as well and scrabbled to open the trap door. There would be no more cowing of sissit now. A roaring that was half wind and half the shaking water drowned out all other sounds. In the light of her staff, she saw the quaking waves begin to stretch and join together, circling in a huge eddy that occupied most of the hundred feet between the island and the shore. Then, with a great sucking sound and a deeper roar of wind, the center of the waters opened. A whirlpool formed. The lake rushed round and round. Hubley clung to the ring on the trap door and tried not to get sucked in.
The island shuddered violently, the rusty old metal pulling and twisting in the rush around it. The entire lake had turned into a crashing maelstrom. Waves swept up against the side of the island, drenching her. A sudden, twisting wrench knocked the island forward and Hubley would have been pitched headfirst into the whirlpool had she not been gripping onto the wheel on top of the trapdoor. As it was, she was left splayed across the surface of the tilted island while she tried desperately not to slide off. The water sprayed up and around her as waves crashed and boomed.
Finally she wrestled the hatch open and threw herself inside. She clamped the door shut behind her, spun the wheel tight, and collapsed on the rumbling floor. She lay there panting, feeling the strain of the chains that anchored her to the bottom as they were rattled by the power of the whirling water. Then they broke and the whole chamber hurtled forward, pounding her flat against the floor as if a huge hand was squashing her chest, and the island began to spin and twist and jump madly as it was caught in the grip of the current. Hubley was thrown back and forth and up and down. Every inch of her body was banged and bruised as she rolled about inside the lift like a die in a cup. She curled up in a ball, covered her head with her arms and tucked her face against her knees, trying to take all the bruises on her legs and back. Then the fury slowed. She felt her little chamber get caught in the final swirling of the funnel itself, spinning round and round in the whirlpool. A sudden lurch, her head banging against one of the iron wheels on the doors, and she passed into jarring unconsciousness. Again.
***
When she woke, Hubley decided the pounding must have stopped soon after she passed out or she’d never have survived. Her whole body ached; her head was bloody and her ears rang. At least her arms and legs seemed to work. The roaring of the whirlpool and the waves was gone, but she thought she still heard the sound of running water. Or maybe that was just her ears. After a moment’s groping in the dark to find her staff, she set a small glow burning coldly.
The first trapdoor she tried to open wouldn’t budge. Judging from the dents in the walls, the iron lift seemed to have been banged about as badly as she was. Using her staff as a lever, she tried the wheel again. For a moment nothing happened; then, with a sudden grinding of tired metal, it spun free. She let the door fall open and peered outside.
Before her, many torches gleamed across a muddy plain. Small pools of water glinted here and there in hollows; rocks and boulders lay scattered about. Sissit scrabbled in the mud, grabbing something from the slime and stuffing it into their filthy shirts. Fish. But where was the lake?
For that matter, where was she? Had the whirlpool carried her off to some new cave? Then she recognized the hill above the muddy plain. It was twice as tall as it had been before, but it was the same hill where she had found the coracles. The beach was now halfway up the slope, where the dry rock turned to mud, forty feet above her head. The lake itself was entirely gone. She had no idea what had happened, but she guessed that, by killing the sorcerer, she had also released the magic that had held the lake in check.
The sound of water at her feet made her look down. The metal island hung above a large, deep hole. To her left a small stream dropped into the darkness in a thin plume of muddy water. Pure luck had caught her at the edge as the lake had drained, instead of sending her spiraling down into the darkness. A massive Dwarven chain, each link thicker than her arm, dangled down into the hole, all that remained of the lift’s anchor.
She ducked back inside before the sissit saw her and thought about what to do next. There was no way out through that door. She would have to try the other.
The upper wheel swung open more easily than the lower. She found herself staring at a wall of rusted metal just beyond her reach. Carefully she poked her head out and looked around, but the metal wall curved to block her view. The lift appeared to have wedged itself against the structure, whatever it was. That explained why she hadn’t been sucked down the massive drain. She guessed immediately she was looking at Gommer’s lair, revealed on the lake bottom now that the lake was dry. The metallic smell was the same.
She pulled her head back inside and cast a quick spell. Her body groaning just as painfully now that she was invisible as it had before, she climbed out the trap door and up the metal wall.
It was an easy climb. The metal surface was mottled with lumpy bulges that made for excellent hand and foot holds. From the top she could see the whole structure was actually a sculpture of a giant frog crouching on its belly with the drain caught between its two front legs. The eyes that bulged from the top of its head were made of thick glass, but so covered in ancient grime as to be completely dark.
Above her, the lake bed sloped up forty or fifty feet to the tunnel that led back to the Sun Road. The mud between lacked pools and fish, which meant the sissit were only scrabbling in the slime behind her. She had an open path all the way out.
She half-climbed, half-slid down the back of the metal frog to the ground and began to slog her way through the slippery ooze. The thick muck stuck to her boots, and she had to keep her eyes on her feet as she trudged along. Had anyone been close, they would certainly have heard the loud squelching each time she pulled her feet out of the slime and took another step forward. But no one was and, by the time she reached the edge of the lake bed, she was well away from the hungry sissit. A high curb marked the edge of the old lake. All she had to do was climb over it to reach the tunnel that led back to the Sun Road.
She had just finished when a large sissit barreled out of the tunnel mouth and banged straight into her, knocking her back into the mud. She rose, covered in slime. Beneath the mud she was still invisible, but the layer of lake bottom she now wore outlined her as clearly as if she had been wearing brown paint. The sissit that had knocked her over spotted her at once. With a great cry it brandished its axe over its head and jumped from the ledge to finish her off. But its feet slipped out from under it as it landed and, being much larger and heavier than Hubley, the sissit went rolling down the slope beyond.
She scrambled back over the curb as quickly as she could. The big sissit flopped futilely, its curses attracting the attention of every other sissit in the cavern.
“There!”
“By tunnel!”
“Is Glommer!”
“Yes, Glommer!”
“Kill!”
A shower of poorly aimed arrows clattered around her as she ducked into the tunnel. She ran up the dark passageway as fast as she could, splashing through the rank water, waving away the grabbing growths. By the time she reached the stairs she could plainly hear the sissit behind her. Banged up as she was she wasn’t sure she could outrun them. She wasn’t sure she was thinking too well either. But there was no time to rest. She stumbled over the first step in the darkness because of her slippery boots, then was climbing the steep steps on all fours as quickly as she could.
She had been climbing for some time when arrows started clanging around her once more. The sissit were gaining, their torchlight revealing the steps closest to her. With a desperate burst of speed she scrambled out of range of their weak bows. Below her the creatures shouted in rage.
Her heart pounded and her legs ached. Her panting grew so loud she could no longer hear the slapping of the sissit feet behind her. She barely had the strength in her thighs for each step. Then she stumbled badly, falling hard on the sharp stairs, and almost dropped her staff. The sissit behind her whooped and shook their torches.
“Glommer, we get you!” they taunted. “You not get away now!”
The thought of capture sent a final surge of strength through her burning legs. In a moment she was over the last stair, with only the gentle slope of the passage before her. Behind her the sissit gave a maddened cry and fired another volley of their black arrows. But she was too far ahead of them now. Another fifty paces and she would be out in the main tunnel.
She dashed forward, and crashed head first into something stretched solidly across the passage. She lay stunned for a moment on the cold stone floor, the cries of the sissit suddenly very far away. Then, in a daze of memory, she realized she had run headlong into the barrier she had cast herself. She was leading them out onto the Sun Road! The timing was exact! In a sudden terrible insight, she saw that, far from changing anything, she had been the cause of everything! Had she only left the situation alone, none of this would ever have happened.
But there was no time to think. If she stayed where she was, the sissit would rip her to pieces. Staggering to her feet, she reached for her staff. With a word she dismissed the spell before her. There was a loud crack as her casting was broken, then she staggered on down the tunnel. The loway loomed just ahead, the glow from the oldest Hubley’s staff plain beyond the tunnel’s end. An arrow whizzed past her ear, and then another. The sissit were almost on her. Only five more steps remained. An arrow struck her in the back, sticking to her abruptly like a great pin. Two more struck her, their poison already going to work, and she tumbled forward onto the cold stone. How can I die now? she thought. The Hubley who had sent her off on this wild goose chase was much, much older. Where were the years in between? Had she changed everything after all? Then the pain stopped, the poison grabbed her heart, and the loway closed to darkness around her.
***
The third time Hubley woke she was in her own bed in her own tower. Her entire body ached, but there was some relief in giving herself up to warm sheets and the smell of fresh brewed tea. An older Hubley was sitting in the chair by the window, waiting for her.
She remembered why she was there.
“Don’t try to get up,” her older self cautioned. “You still don’t have all the poison out of your system. You need to rest for at least another few days.”
Hubley fell back onto the pillow; her older self came over to tuck her back in under the quilt. Slowly the wave of nausea that had swept over her when she tried to rise passed, replaced by dull anger. It was all so frustrating. Every time she’d gone back to Vonn Kurr she’d only made things worse. She hated not being in control. There had to be something she could do.
“There isn’t,” said the other. “You’re beginning to understand that now, aren’t you?”
Hubley still didn’t like the idea of having someone around who knew what she was thinking, but at least she was getting used to it.
The older Hubley, however, wanted to make certain she had learned her lesson. “Do you think you’ve caused enough trouble yet?” she asked. “So far you’ve managed to almost get yourself killed twice. And that’s after you already did kill yourself the first time.”
“It’s not right.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
“There’s nothing we can do?”
“Nothing. The Timespell is only good for learning about the past. Don’t ever think you can change it. No matter how many times you loop through some moment, your own experience is always going to be in a straight line. You can’t get ahead of yourself, no matter how hard you try. You’ll just be a dog chasing your tail if you do. And as for the future...”
The older Hubley pursed her lips; a painful shadow passed through her eyes. Apparently there just weren’t enough years available to soften the blow.
“Just remember, you can never forget what you’d rather not know.”
Beyond the window, finches chattered in the sunshine. Hubley, considerably older now after everything she’d been through, decided she no longer wanted to be lectured to, and asked for her cup of tea.
She gave herself up to the care of her older self for the next few days. Life was easier that way. Lying in bed, she had more than enough time to try and sort everything out in her mind. There were still moments when she quivered in frustration, when the memory of killing herself came unbidden and she was forced to live with the thought that she could do nothing about it, that some parts of life were outside even a chronothurge’s hands. She saw now that she’d been guilty of the most basic error of magic. She’d almost thought herself beyond any control other than the limits of her own will. But she’d been lucky. Various versions of herself had been there to pick her up each time she fell.
At least now she knew she’d live to a ripe old age. Now there would be times when she could be fearless, armed with the knowledge of her place of dying. But she would be careful, too. Having challenged fate once and lost irrevocably, she would be unlikely to do so again.
Still, there was one thing she didn’t completely understand.
The day came when her wounds were healed and the poison fully leached from her blood. The older Hubley came to her on an evening when she had gone to the roof to watch the sun set behind the mountains. She was thinking about how pleasant it was to have the older there to nurse and comfort her, how much it was like having her own mother back again. Silently she wondered if she would ever see her older self again.
“You know I won’t answer that,” the older Hubley said.
“You know I wasn’t going to ask,” she replied.
“Yes. And I know what you are going to ask, too.”
“About going back?”
“Yes.”
Hubley pulled her cloak more closely about her shoulders. The nighttime chill was rushing into Valing faster than the sun was leaving.
“Then you know you could answer my suspicions just as easily right here,” she said.
“I could. But it’s better if you see for yourself.”
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
Her older self shrugged and said nothing.
Hubley persisted. “It wouldn’t be something special about that sissit, would it?” she asked, looking for an answer other than the one she’d imagined. “Was that the reason I stepped in front of my own spell?”
“Either way, we have to go back and see.”
Hubley nodded. She had the feeling this was what she was supposed to do. Her older self held up a small bottle, no larger than her thumb, filled with a dark red liquid.
“I’ve already prepared the spell.” She handed the bottle to Hubley. “It will bring you back here whenever you want. You’re not strong enough yet to do it yourself.”
Then the elder spoke a word and the top of their tower was gone, replaced by darkness. She spoke a second word and a pale light shone out from her staff. Before them lay the looming pit of Vonn Kurr, behind them the gently curving wall of the Sun Road.
“They’ll be here any moment,” said the elder. “And I still have to make us both invisible.”
She spoke the third spell softly and doused her light. Then she pulled Hubley back against the smooth stone beside her.
Almost immediately a dull boom echoed up the passage to their left. In the quiet darkness Hubley could feel the pressure of the sound against her ears. Faint shouts followed the explosion, but soon the cries and crashes of battle grew louder. A glimmer of light appeared up the loway; the last Hubley and the diggers came running in full flight around the turn to stop, panting, at the edge of the road.
A skittering of stones at the far side of the tunnel signaled the arrival of the youngest Hubley. There were four Hubleys on the Sun Road now, three of them invisible.
The scene played itself out. The oldest Hubley found the hatch in the floor; Omarose opened it. The company fled down the chute one by one while the oldest Hubley kept the sissit at bay. Several arrows came close to the two hiding invisibly by the wall, misfires from the sissit’s bows, but the eldest Hubley made sure that none of her magical attacks came near them. The sissit fell beneath her power; the cavern began to fill with the stench of their burns. Then Omarose bowed to her and stepped into the shaft, and only the four Hubleys remained at the edge of Vonn Kurr. The sissit rushed the one they saw, howling their rage at the escape of the rest of their prey, forgetting their fear of magic until Hubley splashed them with fire once again and they went tumbling backward.
Their leader rolled away from the blast toward the inner wall of the loway, its shield falling away from its hand. Even though she saw the sissit coming, Hubley still lost her balance and fell on top of it when the creature banged into her legs. It couldn’t see her of course, but, thinking itself attacked by some strange new magic, the sissit grabbed her violently all the same. They wrestled in the dust, Hubley trying to escape from the creature, the sissit clinging to her desperately, fighting for its life against this new and unseen apparition. Its hard, knobby hands closed around her throat. She fought to push it away, her head twisted to one side, and found herself looking at her oldest self, the one who was about to die. That Hubley stood slightly to one side, her staff raised. Hubley saw plainly that her older self was ready to blast the sissit to a cinder if she could only find a clear shot; willing, even in that moment, to take a chance with history and save herself if the opportunity arose. But the chance, as they both knew, never came.
Then the older Hubley’s eyes focused directly on her. A weary smile graced her mouth. And in her older self’s eyes Hubley saw tenderness, and a message of forgiveness sent to reassure her. There was no time for anything more. No chance for the elder to say all the things she wanted to before she took one step to her right and caught the flash of flame the youngest Hubley fired, killing herself. But saving herself also.
The shock from the blast caused the sissit to loosen its grip on Hubley’s throat. She kicked herself free and rolled panting to the edge of the cliff. For the second time she watched her death in a plume of fire and tried not to imagine the pain.
When it was over, the sissit stood silent for a moment, their enemy defeated in a way they didn’t understand. They had no idea where that ball of flame had come from. The leader scrabbled across the dusty floor for his shield. Once that protection was back in his hands he stood, shook the shield over his head, and let out a howl of victory. That was the signal for the rest to break their silence and cheer as well. Their whoops and bellows crashed across the Sun Road and out into the great, dark deep.
They were stopped, though, when a loud voice shouted, “ENOUGH!” Another Hubley appeared magically in the middle of the circle of ash where she’d died a moment before. Even the younger Hubley was fooled, until she realized this was the third Hubley, the one who’d been hiding beside her against the wall. But the sissit possessed no such understanding. As far as they were concerned, this was the same mage, apparently risen from the dead. A hush fell across their pale faces.
“BEGONE!” she cried, and launched her fire once more into their ranks. They ran, even the leader, who dropped his shield and fled with the rest back up the tunnel into the darkness. As the last of their bare feet slapped away into silence her elder self turned to Hubley with a weary sigh.
“You know it all, now. It’s time to go home.”
“And you? What are you going to do?”
The elder stooped to retrieve the sissit’s shield. “I have to go on with the others. There’s no reason for them to know I’ve died. They’ll never know what happened.”
“You should get some rest first.”
“I should,” the elder agreed, “but it’s better if I don’t. They’ll be expecting me to be exhausted after the strain of the battle.”
She sat down on the rock beside the open shaft and began to lower herself down. Then she looked back up at Hubley one last time.
“You have many, many years,” she said, “before you get to this point. You’ll know what to do when the time comes. There is still much for you to learn. Break the vial I gave you and step into the mist that forms. That will take you home.”
Without another word, the older Hubley let go the sides of the chute. With the emblem of Ydderri strapped to her back, she disappeared down the shaft. Hubley heard a thin whoosh as her older self vanished; then all was silence and darkness on the Sun Road again.
She went home.