Arrows of Time - Kim Falconer [35]
Selene was given a wide berth, and Jarrod wondered at the woman’s rank. She didn’t look to have anything that distinguished her, save the brooch at her throat. She made no eye contact, nor did she acknowledge the other people at all. And they were careful of her. There were no greetings, shouts or waves. There was only wary silence.
‘Popular in these parts?’ he asked, after a group of children skirted around them, the adults pulling them away.
She said nothing. He tried again.
‘How are you related to the Caller?’
‘I’m not.’
‘Then you are…?’
‘As I said, I’m the first marshal of the border scouts.’ She looked at him as if he were a slow learner.
‘I’ve no idea what that means,’ he said loudly, projecting his voice over the street noise.
‘I patrol the borders.’
‘The borders of what?’
‘Tensar.’
‘And that is?’
She frowned at him but didn’t answer. Perhaps she didn’t take it as a serious question.
‘And the Caller? What does she do?’ Jarrod persisted.
Selene turned to him, her hands on her hips. ‘It’s like this, Jarrod. The Caller keeps everything in sequence. The border scouts keep out the inflections. Get it?’
Jarrod checked his database to see if he had the word meanings correct. ‘What sequence?’
‘The sequence of time.’
‘Of course,’ he agreed as they continued walking. What was this woman on about? It startled him how he could understand the words but not the meaning of her sentences. ‘And the inflections?’ he asked.
‘Inflections are,’ she said, laughing at his quizzical look, ‘those like you.’
TENSAR—TIME: CIRCULAR
CHAPTER 9
Shane looked out over the swamp, scratching his head. If he thought he had problems with his love-life, this current situation made them insignificant. He sat down, his back to the granite wall, and pulled out his flute. His fingers shook. He knew what would happen next. What he didn’t know was how long it would take before it started or how long it would keep happening.
He suspected that the woman, Rosette, and her big black temple tabby had caused this strange and repeating sequence of events. She clearly wasn’t from T’locity and perhaps not even of Tensar itself. If so, it may have been a glitch in her travel methods—whatever those may be—that had snagged Time. He thought for a moment about killing her to see if it would break the cycle, but he didn’t like the idea. He’d never get past the feline, for starters, and he didn’t have the heart for it, or the stomach. She was lovely. Whatever the solution to their time-entrapment problem was, they would have to work it out together. He needed to remember to discuss it with her again, as soon as she appeared. It wouldn’t be long now.
The mystery schools of T’locity had taught about these occurrences—rare snicks in the fabric of time where a sequence of events would play out in an infinite number of versions of itself. He felt nauseous just thinking about it. What bad luck to stumble into this mess. He had to figure out how to pull himself out. Rosette too, if he could.
He might be better equipped to manage such an anomaly had he not flunked out of the Darkwood Mystery School in his third term. That had been years ago and, as it was, he could only remember a listing of the proclivity of time, and not much about its management. If he’d stayed on, he might have some idea of how to deal with this.
As it was, he’d failed, not from a lack of intelligence or focus exactly, but from a lack of desire. His aptitudes, and his heart, lay elsewhere, in the lilting sounds of the flute and the driving rhythms of his guitar. Music to him was a mystery teaching of its own, and he’d followed it, away from the learned halls of Darkwood