On board the Grömsketter all eyes turned to the obviously bemused herdsman. When he did not respond, Stanager again addressed the assembled officials. “This man is a passenger on my ship. Though known to me for only a few days, I have found him to be a responsible and worthy individual. What is it you want with him?”

“That is our business,” another man shouted upward. “Turn him over and you may proceed on your way. Refuse, and your vessel will be boarded. Those who comply may depart freely. Those who resist will be killed or taken before the Board of Logicians to have their ultimate fates resolved.”

Stepping away from the railing, Stanager turned to stare up at her long-faced passenger. “I don’t understand any of this. What do the Gate Masters want with you? What have you done?”

“I tell you honestly, Captain: to my knowledge, nothing.” Ehomba was aware that the eyes not only of his friends but of the crew were on him, watching and waiting to see what he would do. “But I cannot allow my own circumstances to put you and your people in danger. You have done nothing.”

“By Gorquon’s Helmet, neither have we, Etjole!” The right hand of Simna ibn Sind rested firmly on the hilt of his sword. “I’ll not see you handed over to an unknown fate. Not after all we’ve been through together!”

The herdsman smiled fondly at his friend. “What is this, Simna? Loyalty? And without a gold piece in sight?”

“Mock me if you will, long bruther. You wouldn’t be the first.” The swordsman’s face was flush with anger. “Dying in combat with some monstrous beast or battling an attacking army is a worthy death for a man. You deserve better than to rot in some cell accused of Gwinbare knows what imaginary crime.”

“No one has said anything about dying or rotting in a cell.” Ehomba’s voice was calm, his manner composed. “They may only want to talk to me.”

“Hoy, but for how long?” Simna gestured sharply in the direction of the assembled soldiers and officials. “They said that once they have you, the rest can sail on. That doesn’t sound to me like they plan to let you go anytime soon, and you said yourself we shouldn’t wait two months for another ship.”

“So you should not.” Raising his hands, the herdsman placed them on his friend’s shoulders. “I hereby charge you, Simna ibn Sind, with completing my task, with fulfilling my promise to the dying Tarin Beckwith. Stay with the Grömsketter. See her across the Semordria, and find your way onward from there.”

The swordsman tensed. “What madness is this? What are you saying, Etjole?”

Removing his hands, Ehomba turned back to the railing. “I am getting off the ship.” He looked to Stanager. “Captain, as soon as I am on the dock and the Narrows are once more cleared to navigation, set your course downriver and sail on.” She eyed him purposefully for a long moment, then nodded once.

A ladder of rope and wood was thrown over the side. Ehomba started toward it, only to be grabbed and held by the swordsman.

“Don’t do this, bruther! You have your weapons; I have my sword. There is the black litah and Hunkapa Aub. We can fight them off!” His fingers tightened on the taller man’s arm.

Gently, Ehomba disengaged himself from his friend’s grasp. “No, Simna. Even if we could, sailors who have no part in this might get hurt, or killed. As could any of us, yourself included. Stay on the ship. Sail on.” He smiled warmly. “Think of me as the river carries you to the sea.” Turning away, he stepped over the side, straddling the railing preparatory to climbing down the ladder.

“Stop there!” a voice commanded from below. Crossbow bolts were trained on the herdsman. “No weapons. Leave them and the pack on your back on board the ship. You can claim them upon its return.”

Removing the sword of sea bone and the sword of sky metal, Ehomba passed them to a stricken Simna. They were joined by the long walking stick-spear. Lastly, the herdsman slipped off his backpack and handed it to a somber-faced Terious. Hunkapa Aub was crying outsized inhuman tears. Ehomba was grateful that the black litah was still asleep. It might not have been possible to restrain the big cat with words. Had it been awake, the spilling of blood might have proven unavoidable.

Descending the ladder, he jumped the last few feet to the dock, landing with a resonant thump on his well-worn sandals. Instantly, he was surrounded by soldiers. With an approving nod, one of the Gate Masters turned and gave a signal to someone in the brick tower. Flags flashed in the direction of the opposing headlands, where other flags responded.

How it was done Ehomba could not tell. The time gates that surmounted the headlands were too far away for him to discern the mechanisms involved. But the shimmering, coruscating blue haze that blocked the Eynharrowk abruptly vanished, though it remained in place everywhere else.

Aboard the Grömsketter shouts rang loudly. He could make out the brisk, lively syllables of Stanager’s commands and the deeper echoes of Terious and the other mates. Deliberately, the sleek ship pulled away from the dock and turned its bow once more toward the Narrows. Along the railing he could see an openly distraught Simna staring back at him. Behind the swordsman the hulking mass of hair that was Hunkapa Aub stood and waved slowly. He continued to follow them with his eyes until a hand shoved him roughly in the middle of his back.

“Move along, then. There are coaches waiting to take us back to the city.”

Turning away from the Grömsketter, receding rapidly now that it was edging back out into the main current, Ehomba began the long march to the end of the dock. Gate Masters paralleled him on both sides and were in turn flanked by their stalwart, alert soldiers.

“Maybe now you can tell me what this is all about?” he asked the green-clad official on his left. Like his sisters and brothers, the man’s hands were locked together in front of him.

“Certainly. We don’t act arbitrarily, you know. There is a reason for this. Your arrival was predicted by the Logicians. Taking their measurements from disturbances in the Aether and the flow of Time, they calculated the cognomen of your aura and its probable path. As you have seen, Hamacassar is a big place, where even a distinctive aura can hide. We almost missed you. That would have been tragic.”

Ehomba frowned, openly puzzled. “Why is that?”

The Gate Master looked up at him. “Because according to the Logicians’ predictions, if you were allowed to proceed on your chosen course unhindered, the flow of Time would have been substantially altered, and perhaps unfavorably.”

“Unfavorable to whom?” In the lexicon of the Naumkib, forthrightness invariably took precedent over tact. Ehomba was no exception.

“It does not matter. Not to you,” the official informed him importantly. “Having committed no crime, you are not a prisoner. You are a guest, until your friends return. Or if you prefer, you will be allowed to leave in one month’s time, once the Grömsketter is well out to sea and beyond reach.” The man smiled. His expression was, the herdsman decided, at least half genuine.

They were nearing the end of the dock. “What makes you so certain that if I was permitted to continue on my journey Time would react adversely?”

This time it was the woman on his right who replied. “The Logicians have declared it to be so. And the Logicians are never wrong.”

“Time may be a river,” Ehomba responded, “but logic is not. At least, not the logic that is discussed by the wise men and women of my village.”

“His ‘village.’” Two of the Gate Masters strolling in front of him exchanged a snickering laugh.

“This is not a village, foreigner,” declared the man on the herdsman’s left meaningfully. “This is Hamacassar, whose Board of Logicians is comprised of the finest minds the city and its surrounding provinces can provide.”

Ehomba was not intimidated. “Even the finest minds are not infallible. Even the most reasonable and logical people can make mistakes.”

“Well, according to them, detaining you is not a mistake. Whereas letting you continue on most surely would be.”

The tall southerner glanced back down the dock. In the distance, the sturdy hull of the Grömsketter was passing through the Narrows, traveling swiftly westward as the current continued to increase its speed. Turning his attention to the red-brick administration buildings up ahead, he saw several antelope-drawn coaches lined up outside. More soldiers waited there, a mounted escort to convoy him and the Gate Masters back to the city.

“You know,” he murmured conversationally, “logic is a funny thing. It can be used to solve many problems, even to predict things that may happen in the future. But it is not so very good at explaining people: who they are, what they are about, why they do the things they do. Sometimes even masters of logic and reason can think too long and too hard about something, until the truth of it becomes lost in a labyrinth of conflicting possibilities.”

While the woman on his right pondered his words, the man on his left frowned. “What are you trying to say, foreigner?”

“That anyone, however clever they believe themselves to be, can think too much.” Whereupon he lurched heavily to his right, slamming his shoulder into the startled female official and sending her stumbling and crashing into the two soldiers marching close alongside her. In a confusion of weapons and words, all three went toppling together off the end of the dock to land in the shallow water below.

“Stop him! Don’t kill him, but stop him!” the senior Gate Master shouted.

With dozens of soldiers in pursuit, Ehomba ran inland. A lifetime of chasing down errant calves and stray lambs allowed him to outdistance all but the most active of his pursuers, not to mention the Gate Masters who trailed huffing and puffing in their wake. Neither group was in any especial hurry. There was nowhere for the herdsman to go. If he entered the water they would quickly chase him down in boats. The headland toward which he was running ended in a low bluff overlooking the river. All other directions were sealed off by the still active time gates, through which the flow of Time continued to ripple and shimmer.

“Stop!” yelled a voice from behind him.

“You can’t get away!” shouted another. “There’s nowhere to go!”

But there was somewhere to go. Or rather, somewhen.

Taking a deep breath and making an arrow of his clasped hands, Ehomba leaped forward and dove headfirst into the time stream.

Somewhere far around the curve of the world, the most powerful sorcerer alive woke up screaming.

From the hole Ehomba’s body made in the channel, Time spewed forth in a gush of unrestrained chronology. Amid shrieks and howls, Gate Masters and soldiers alike were swept up and washed away in the flood of Time, to disappear forever into some otherwhen. The detained deranged foreigner was forgotten in the survivors’ haste to close all the time gates and so shut off the flow to the devastating leak.

Once this had finally been accomplished, reluctant soldiers were sent to scour the area where the tall stranger had disappeared. Though not hopeful, the Gate Masters knew they had to try. The Logicians would demand it. As expected, there was no sign or suspicion that the foreigner had ever existed. He was gone forever: vanished, swept away, taken up by the river of Time. With wondering sighs and expressions of regret for those colleagues who had been lost in the short-lived disaster, they set about composing themselves for the journey back into the city. It was an occurrence that occasioned much animated discussion among the survivors.

Caught up by the river of Time, Ehomba kicked and dug hard at the eras that rushed past. Growing up by the sea, he was a naturally strong swimmer. Still, it was hard to tread years, difficult to hold one’s breath as wave after wave of eternity broke over one’s mind. But to the determined and well conditioned, not impossible.

He swam on, trying to make timefall as close to the point where he had entered the river as possible. The current was strong, but he had expected that and, by his angle of entry, done his best to anticipate it. Caught up in the flow of Time, he was battered and buffeted by astonishing sights. Animals ancient and fantastical rushed past. Great machines the likes of which he had never imagined clanked ponderously forward down unsuspected evolutionary paths, and all manner of men inhabited times immemorial and impossibly distant.

He was almost out of breath when a faint gleam caught his eye. Turning in the Time flow, he kicked hard for it. It was one of the blazing yellow-white streaks he had seen from his own time, viewed now from the inside out. This in itself was a wonderment to him, for he did not know that it was possible to see light from the inside out. The current tore at him, insistent and relentless. He felt himself weakening.

Worse than that, he was running out of Time.

Below the Narrows of Hamacassar the Eynharrowk once more became a broad, placid highway. Smaller boats traveling in the same direction as the Grömsketter kept closer to either shore, while those beating their way upstream gave her a wide berth. Small islands dotted with reeds and cattails had begun to appear, the first outposts of the great delta into which the torpid river spread before at last entering the ocean. Fishermen had erected modest homes on the larger islets, and spread their nets from long poles rammed into the shallows.

The Grömsketter kept to the main channel. With the widening of the river, the current had dissipated considerably over the past weeks and her speed had slowed accordingly. Crewmen and -women palavered boisterously as they worked the ship, but among her remaining passengers the mood was glum.

Simna was unable to think straight. His friend had charged him with completing the journey begun in the far south, but how was a common mercenary like himself to know how to proceed? Ehomba’s mystic weapons remained on board, but the swordsman was more leery than hopeful of figuring out how to make proper use of them. He had no money, the herdsman having carried off the remaining “beach pebbles” in his pocket. His one ally was the imposing but simpleminded Hunkapa Aub. As for the black litah, upon awakening and learning what had transpired, the big cat had promptly announced his intention to leave the ship at the first opportunity. As he explained inexorably to Simna, his allegiance had been to the herdsman personally, not to his cause. With Ehomba gone, the cat considered its obligation at an end.

“Don’t you care about what he began?” the swordsman had reproached the litah. “Do you wish all his efforts to go for naught?”

The big cat remained unperturbed. “His efforts are, and were, of no interest to me. It was the person I chose to associate with. I am sorry he is no longer here. For a human, he was a most interesting individual.” The moist black tongue emerged to lick and clean around the nostrils. “I always wondered what he would have tasted like.”

Simna sneered openly, not caring how the sleek predator might react, finding that he presently cared about so little that it shocked him. “It’s all primeval to you, isn’t it? Food, sex, sleep. You’ve acquired nothing in the way of culture from your association with us. Nothing!”

“On the contrary,” the litah objected. “I have learned a good deal these past many weeks about humankind. I have learned that its culture is obsessed with food, sex, and sleep. The only difference between us is that you don’t do any of it as well.”

“By Geenvar’s claws, I’ll tell you that—”

The discussion was interrupted by a loud cry from the lookout. Posted atop the mainmast, the seaman was pointing and shouting. Fully intending to resume his dialogue with the big cat, Simna glanced curiously in the direction indicated by the mariner. At first he saw nothing. Then the subject of much commotion came into view and he found himself surrounded and carried forward by excited members of the crew. Not that he needed any help.

Etjole Ehomba was standing on the end of a small, handmade pier, waving casually in the Grömsketter’s direction. Except for a rip or two in his kilt and shirt, he looked healthy and relaxed.

Unsuspected excitement in her voice, Stanager Rose roared commands. The mainsail was reefed and the sea anchor cast off astern to slow their speed. As she hurriedly explained to Simna, she did not want to risk anchoring and stopping in the event that the soldiers of the Gate Masters were giving chase. This despite the fact that no troops or pursuers of any kind were in evidence. The swordsman did not argue with her. He was of like mind when it came to not taking chances.

One of the ship’s lifeboats was quickly put over the side. Commanded by Terious himself, it plucked the waiting Ehomba from the end of the pier and, propelled by six strong oarsmen, returned to the Grömsketter. The sea anchor was hauled in, and this time all sails were set.

Ehomba’s friends were waiting impatiently to greet him as he climbed back aboard. Attempting to clasp the tall southerner by the arm, Simna was nearly bowled over as Hunkapa Aub rushed past him to envelop the herdsman in an embrace that threatened to suffocate him before he could explain what had happened. From the helm deck, Stanager Rose looked on with pretended disinterest.

When Ehomba finally managed to extricate himself from Hunkapa’s smothering grasp, Simna confronted him with the question that had been bothering him ever since they had first caught sight of the herdsman standing alone on the pier.

“I am half convinced that you are what you claim to be, Etjole: nothing more than a humble herder of cattle and sheep.” He gestured back toward the section of river that was falling far behind. “However, the other half of me wonders not only how you escaped the Gate Masters and their minions, but how you managed to appear in the middle of the Eynharrowk ahead of us. I know you can play the flute and spew forth heavenly winds and white sharks from your weapons, but I didn’t know that you could fly.”

“I cannot, friend Simna.” With a smile and nod in the Captain’s direction, the herdsman began to walk forward, seemingly little the worse for his experience. “No more than a bird without wings. But I can swim.”

As had happened to him more times than he cared to remember in the herdsman’s presence, Simna ibn Sind did not understand.

“Time is harder to tread than water, my friend, but it can be done. We of the Naumkib are taught how to swim at an early age. It is a necessary thing when one lives so near to the sea, and to other great emptinesses.” Reaching into a pocket, he began to roll the remaining beach pebbles in the little cloth sack fondly through his fingers. Whereas before he had never paid any attention to the activity, now, each time he heard them grind together, Simna winced.

“I swam hard, my friend, determined never to give up.” Ehomba smiled. “Giving up would have meant renouncing my pledge to Tarin Beckwith, and never seeing my home or family again. I vowed that would not happen. After treading Time for a while I tried to swim back out a little ways from where I had entered the river of Time.” A shrug rippled his shoulders.

“But the current was powerful. Time is like that, always moving forward, always flowing strongly. So I did not come out where I wanted to.” He looked back over his shoulder. “Emerging several weeks before I entered, I found myself on this little island. I built a small shelter of reeds, and the clumsy pier you saw, and caught fish and mussels and clams. And I waited for you. A month after a few minutes ago, the Grömsketter came through the Narrows.” Reaching out, he put a comradely arm around the swordsman’s shoulders. “And now, here you are.”

The explanation did nothing to mitigate the look of utter bewilderment that had commandeered the swordsman’s countenance. “Wait now, bruther. We just saw you off the ship and in the surly company of those Gate Masters not more than—”

“A few minutes ago. I know.” They were approaching the bow. “But I have been waiting for you nearly a month. Time is a river most strange, my friend. Strange as only those who swim in it can know.”

“But if you were there, and now you are here ...” Simna’s brows furrowed so deeply they threatened to pinch off his nose.

“Do not ponder on such things too long,” Ehomba advised him. “That was the Logicians’ problem. Overthinking can snarl the most elegant logic.” Raising a hand, he gestured forward. “Ahead lies the great delta of the Eynharrowk. Soon we will leave behind the land for the Semordria. The eternal ocean that I have fished in, swam in, and played in all my life. If the shore is so amazing, what wonders must lie hidden beneath its outer depths?”

“Some that bite, I’ve no doubt.” Inhaling deeply of the still steamy air, the swordsman leaned against the bow rail and gazed westward.

Feeling something bump him firmly from behind, Ehomba turned to see the black litah standing at his back. Typically, he had neither heard nor sensed the big cat’s approach.

“So you’re back.” The long-legged carnivore yawned, revealing a gape that extended from the herdsman’s head to his belly. “Pity. I was looking forward to returning home.”

“No one is restraining you,” Ehomba reminded him.

“Yes someone is. I am.” As he addressed Ehomba, yellow cat eyes glared at the herdsman. “Call it a matter of culture. I am stuck with you lot until the next time you try to die.”

“Then I will do my best to avoid that, and make an end to this business as quickly as events allow.”

The cat nodded impressively, the freshening breeze from off the bow ruffling the magnificent black mane. “We seek the same thing.”

“Hoy, not me,” Simna protested quickly. “It’s the treasure I’m after!” He eyed the herdsman sharply. “Whether it consists of legendary Damura-sese itself or nothing more than ‘beach pebbles.’ So don’t try to deny it, bruther!”

Ehomba sighed resignedly. “Has it ever done me any good to do so?”

“No,” the swordsman replied emphatically.

“Very well. The Visioness Themaryl. Treasure. No denials.”

Satisfied, Simna went silent. Its freedom once again postponed, the black litah chose a sun-soaked section of deck, curled up into itself, and went back to sleep. Astern, Hunkapa Aub was watching a handful of sailors at dice while struggling to comprehend the intricacies of the game.

Waiting for the sea, Ehomba watched the river and thought of Mirhanja, and his children, and the way the same ocean they were about to enter lapped at the beach below the village. Soon it would be calving season at home, and he knew he would be missed.

Did ever any among the living drive a man so hard and so far as one dead? he found himself wondering.