Dark Heart (50 page)

Lenares had held out her hand. Robal knew what she wanted. He placed the stone in the small palm, and her pale fingers wrapped themselves around it.

‘Don’t steal,’ she’d said.

The flames roared, and the Destroyer carried him out into the open air despite his struggling and pleading. ‘She wants you,’ was all he would say.

So he returned empty-handed, in the arms of the man he had tried to kill; arms that deposited him on the ground at her feet. That she stood was a miracle; but he had witnessed this miracle before. He knew she was already healing with unnatural swiftness. But she would never have a right arm again.

The priest made the most pathetic sight, crawling unheeded on the grass, free of the spell and in hideous pain, his ruined face and dreadful hollowed pit washed with light from the flickering flames. ‘Stella,’ he croaked. ‘Stella.’ Everyone there turned their faces away from him.

Heredrew had forced Martje to tell him what she had done. Conal’s part in the disaster had been revealed. Robal felt as revulsed as Stella had looked. Something, some perverse honesty, had compelled him to say to her, ‘He was a dupe.’

She had stared at him, brushed a stray lock from in front of her eyes, and had never looked as unattainable as the moment she said, ‘So were you.’

Later, the Undying Man had explained to them all how his deception had attempted to preserve the life of the Umerta heir.

‘My efforts have all now, of course, been undone,’ he said. ‘Somewhere in there, consumed by the flames, is the bier and the body on it.’ He raised his voice for the benefit of the woman lying bound a few paces distant, now separated from her surviving children. ‘Had you not moved against me, Martje, he would be alive now. We would be taking our leave of you. A lesson would have been learned. As it is, my mercy has cost my companions and I dearly, and your desire for revenge has cost you and your family even more.’

His solemn gaze turned to Stella standing beside him, her arm now ending at the elbow. ‘I should have chosen justice.’

He strode closer to the Umertas. ‘This cannot go unpunished,’ he said. ‘I now restore your paralysis, Martje, and anchor you to the ground.’ He closed his illusory fist and it was so. ‘You cannot move, nor can others move you. Here you will die. But I have freed your mouth and throat. You will find this a mixed blessing at best.’ With that he turned away.

‘Let her see the ruination of her life,’ he said to Sauxa and Kilfor. ‘The rest of the family will remain tied up until someone finds them. They may invent any story they wish in order to explain what happened here, but I do not expect them to let the truth be known; nor, I daresay, would it be believed. Now, let us take our leave.’

The last sound they heard as they made their way from the steading, walking slowly behind Phemanderac’s horse-drawn dray, was Martje’s screams.

INTERLUDE

Husk is the most content he has been in seventy years.

Other men, he knows, would be at their wits’ end, stretched beyond their abilities as they tried to weave the various strands of the plan into something that might achieve the intended goal. But he is not like other men; he has proved that yet again, and wishes only for an appreciative audience to marvel at his skill, intelligence and patience. He will have the audience he wants soon. Three months at the most. By the middle of winter Stella will be begging him for mercy over the Destroyer’s dead body.

Not like other men, no. Not a man at all, in fact. The first of a new breed. The first god to dwell among men. And, despite having no eyes, the most farsighted of them all.

Well has he learned that obsession makes one blind. The Son has no thought other than to recover his place in the world, and so focuses his thoughts so narrowly he does not see what Husk is doing to him, clever, clever Husk, drawing off power through the link he has made with the obsessed god.

And what does he do with the power? He has made for himself a new skin, a glossy thing, a beautiful thing, with restored nerves and feeling, and with the capacity for something akin to sight. Better by far than the original. Yes, it means an increase in pain, but that is the price of being alive. New lungs, purged of decades-old blood; lungs that can sustain him without magic. He has not yet been able to grow proper appendages, but that will come. The delay will give him time to decide what he wants to become. Not merely human again. No, he must be greater than that. His new body must reflect the greatness of his soul, forged in the fires of suffering.

He has a tongue now, a voice, a mouth, rather than a ragged hole. But why stop with one? He plans a second and a third, all designed to suck every available sensation from the world around him; to consume everything, then to expel it all, blessed, sanctified, that others might live on his leavings.

All due to the gamble he took, the bargain he struck with the Son and the Daughter. They are his allies now, uneasy and duplicitous though the relationship is, and have been since they offered their assistance to him. Together they intercepted the Undying Man as he pulled his companions eastward to Andratan through the blue fire. It would not have suited Husk to have the Undying Man arrive back in his fortress with Stella in tow, oh no. Nor would it have suited him to destroy them mid-journey, though he had considered it. There was a possibility he could have ended them, almost a certainty had the gods agreed to help him, but his great soul demands far more than their deaths. They must suffer, and he must watch.

The agreement was struck in an instant, and the power the gods loosed through him was like nothing in his experience. His own power had strength, he knew, greater than that of almost anyone who had ever lived, but he had been easily surpassed by that of the Undying Man, who burned with a white-hot flame. But the gods, ah, the gods seemed to compress the power of all the worlds into his veins as they pulled through him: the lasting impression was not of strength, or fire, but incalculable
weight
. Of something so heavy that to be overwhelmed by it would pull one down, down through the world, through the universe and out into the nothingness of the void, to fall forever. Such power!

Patience over long, long years, and an instant of boldness, won him his prize. He snatched at the ragged edge of their concentrated might, drawing off the merest filament and attaching it to himself. A conduit of raw energy from beyond the wall of the world, threaded through the hole the gods have made.

For the first time, Husk thinks, the ledger is balanced, is more than balanced. He would have endured all the suffering, ten times the suffering, for a chance such as this. No longer does he have to battle for every breath; no longer is he forced to steal life from those around him. Oh yes, Husk is happy.

But there are important implications for his new state. He cannot allow the gods to achieve their goals. Once they have left the void and returned to the world, his source of power will vanish. They must be kept alive and on the far side of the great rent in the world-wall. Husk is realistic enough to know that this state of affairs cannot continue forever, but there is a critical moment ahead, some incalculable time in the future, when he will no longer need the power of the gods. The energy he is absorbing will become self-sustaining. He will be able to make his own hole in the worldwall and draw directly from the void beyond.

He has regrets, if a new god can be said to have regrets. If only he had risked more, he laments. Had he grabbed a larger filament the process would be swifter. He was afraid at the time, unknowing of the power and sensitivity of the gods, frightened that even the tiny filament he took would be noticed. But it was not. How large a piece of their power could he have stolen? Might he already be independent of them? Caution and courage are not bedfellows: he did well even to think of stealing fire from the gods. No use berating himself. After all, the only thing required now is patience.

So, ought he to continue with his plan? Are the Stone, the Blood and the Emperor’s hate necessary any longer? No, they are not. But he will cultivate them anyway. The gods would rightly suspect any deviation from his plan. They know what he wants, and are interested in how he will achieve it. He has revealed as little as possible, but the Daughter—by far the smarter of the two—seems to grasp what he intends to do. Certainly both gods now know why three groups of people, one from Faltha, one from Bhrudwo and one from Elamaq, are approaching Andratan.

But there is a problem. His spikes are interfering with the gods’ own plans. The spikes are slivers of pure magic, and interact in unpredictable ways with the movement of the gods through the ever-enlarging holes in the world. In fact, they have in some strange manner been drawing the attention of the gods. The Son wants all the spikes destroyed, while the Daughter is content to let them survive as long as they do not coalesce. She wants the three groups kept ignorant of the gods’ real intentions, but the Son does not believe this possible.

The humans do not comprehend the mechanism by which the gods intend to break into the world. Lenares has a dim understanding, but they will keep her apart from the others—at least, Husk and the Daughter intend this. The Son seeks to kill her. Husk will prevent this, for a time at least. Lenares, after all, is his main threat, for she also has a filament connected to a god. Of course, unlike him, she does not realise what she has in her hand. Nor, he hopes, does she have the magic to exploit it. He was certain of this until recently, but events at the Umerta house have cast doubt on this. Lenares, a daughter of a practitioner of the old magic. Who could have known? From the Hanseia Hills, no less. Perhaps this Lenares is an unconscious practitioner herself. That would explain a great deal.

None of his spikes, nor any of those travelling with them, even Lenares with her numbers, truly understands what is happening. The worldwall is comprised of the lives—the thoughts, actions and, above all, the intersections—of all those in the world. Remove the worldwall, everybody dies and the world is open to the void. In order to penetrate the worldwall, lives must be destroyed before their time, their threads burned away, their nodes torn out. When the holes are made large enough, the gods will come through and live again.

Their plan is simple: to reach through the holes and kill as many people as possible, thus enlarging the holes. Up until now they have used the natural world against those they wished to destroy. While they continue to do this, and natural disasters follow wherever the gods go, Husk suspects they intend to use other means in future. He is almost certain he has already seen one of these means in action.

The gods will kill as many people as it takes. But they will keep a connection to the void beyond, so maintaining their godhood, and will, they believe, be the first gods to live in the world. Well, each believes they will destroy the other and be the only god to live on earth.

They are both wrong.

Husk smiles to himself at the surprise in store for them.

FISHERMAN

WHEN IT HAD COME to it, the choice had been easy. They would travel by sea.

It was, after all, what they knew. None of them had been as far north as Sayonae, on whose docks they now stood, and everyone they had asked had told them the same thing: there was no way through the formidable jungles of Patina Padouk. Arathé hadn’t wanted to board a ship; her experience coming north from Fossa to Raceme had cured her of any desire for sea travel. But none of the others had objected to Noetos’s plan.

Sautea had money enough to cover their passage, but only in steerage class. Staggeringly, his life savings, which he always kept in a small bag on a string around his neck, could not get them better passage, no matter how aggressively he and Noetos bargained. The autumn waters were dangerous, Noetos knew that, but he had anticipated that fares would therefore be reduced during this period. On the contrary, the ship’s captain explained. Since no one else was prepared to make the run, he could charge whatever he liked. It was only his generosity, he said, that saw rates this affordable. The fisherman had watched Sautea’s money disappear into the captain’s pocket with real regret. Noetos offered the older man his thanks, but he brushed it off.

‘At the rates you paid, I couldn’t have afforded the widow Nellas until I was ninety anyway.’

‘I saw the way she looked at you,’ Noetos countered. ‘I’m sure she would have given you a discount.’

The captain leered at them. ‘If you’re looking for that sort of service, bring some money aboard ship.’

‘Thanks,’ said Noetos, ‘but you have already taken practically everything we have.’

The man grunted, then left them, called away by his first mate. Something to do with repairs to one of the sails.

Noetos didn’t know what to make of the ship’s captain. The surprisingly sophisticated man was also the ship’s owner, a conjunction uncommon on the Fisher Coast, but apparently more common in the prosperous north, especially in Malayu and around the Northern Roads. He was a Raceman, so he said, though Noetos had not heard of his family, the Kidsons. ‘Named after the son of a goat who first bought a boat,’ the captain had joked.

The joking ceased when Noetos told him that the city had suffered a calamity. He did not elaborate, save to mention the whirlwinds, though he did not indicate they were anything other than a natural phenomenon. For a time Captain Kidson talked of sailing south to see what could be done, but he eventually admitted his schedule would not allow it, and his family had not lived there for several generations.

The trip north at this time of year, Kidson told them, would likely be unpleasant even for the experienced sailors, due to the autumn storms. Noetos knew that for his children and the miners it would be terrible, especially if they were followed by one of the so-called holes in the world. But he also knew there was no other way. They had to go north. Someone had to give answer for what had happened to them.

The first mate beckoned them up the gangplank. Seren and Tumar carried their gear, most of which had been accumulated on the road north in exchange for work. The others followed, Dagla at their head, his eyes darting left and right excitedly, taking in everything about this new experience. Noetos admired the lad’s attitude.
If I was planning to continue fishing, this is a man I’d seek to hire.
Noetos scratched his red beard as he followed his children on board: he’d not thought of life after Andratan in quite some time.

‘Look, Noetos,’ Dagla said happily. ‘Always wanted to go on a boat. M’father promised me he’d take me one day, but the tunnel collapsed an’ he never did.’

The young miner constantly came out with such things. If he’d done one good thing on this path he’d taken, rescuing Dagla was it.

Their accommodation was neither as poor as he’d feared or as good as he’d hoped. Bunks were stacked three high, built into the hull of the ship, but thick curtains provided a degree of modesty. Steerage passengers were supposed to spend most of their time aboard in the thirty-foot space between the two rows of bunks: here they would eat, on trestle tables set up for the purpose, anchored to the floor by leather straps; in the evenings the tables were cleared away and games, dances and other pursuits were encouraged. Food—the most important part of any shipboard journey—promised to be monotonous, consisting of preserved meat, oatmeal and ship’s biscuit. Noetos had noticed live animals on board, but no meat or produce seemed likely to make it past cabin class.

The ship was called the MF
Conch
. Kidson had explained his family tradition of naming their Malayu Factor ships after seashells: the
Periwinkle
and the
Clam
plied the route between Malayu and the northern Astralagus ports; and the pride of his fleet, the galleon
Nautilus
, ran the dangerous but profitable route from Malayu to Andratan and return, under a charter from the Undying Man himself. Four ships, yet he chose to make this one his own, Noetos thought, and wondered why. The
Conch
was nothing exceptional: a three-master clearly designed for cargo, with two large holds packed with goods and two smaller holds adapted for paying passengers. About two hundred tons excluding cargo, Noetos estimated, and a hundred passengers, seventy of them in steerage. He’d seen ships in better condition, having spent much of his childhood playing around the Raceme wharves, but he’d seen far worse. As a rule passenger ships were kept in better shape than cargo ships, and this was a fairly good example of the latter. The
Conch
would perform well on the open sea.

Depending, of course, on the crew. Noetos would take a close interest in the performance of the hired hands. On the days his father and his tutors had demanded too much, or had been too stuffy for words, he’d imagined himself running away to sea. To tell the truth he had never liked the sea, but during those days it had seemed infinitely preferable to studying in overhot rooms, trying to stay awake amid the drone of irrelevant voices.

As the days passed he began to look with fondness on his stuffy childhood studies. Below decks was oven-like, an unbearable cauldron of smells, noise and sweat. Crying children and grunting adults, both seemingly unaware of travelling in company, kept his nights virtually sleepless. Days were punctuated by hunger and sudden fights: there appeared to be two families aboard determined to revenge themselves on each other for some past wrong, and nothing Noetos said to either group would dissuade them. Altogether unsatisfactory; and the crew would do nothing about it. Considered, indeed, the voyage to be rather a tame one.

‘Wait till you bin attacked by freeboarders, or had ta deal with an outbreak of pox,’ said the first mate when Noetos asked for some intervention. ‘Let ’lone the storms.’

He asked if he could help the crew. He’d be willing to do anything to escape the boredom weighing him down, he told them, anything to keep him above decks. They turned him down, claiming there was nothing for an unskilled hand to do. ‘I’m not tellin’ one of my men to look after you while y’do a job he could do in half the time,’ the first mate explained. ‘Now, you’ve had yer time on deck. Back down you go.’

On the fifth day out from port Noetos found himself staring at one of the ship’s slatterns. There were three of them, girls hired by the captain to entertain the single men who could afford them. Noetos was familiar with the concept, but this was the first time he’d come across it as an adult: he’d been too young in Raceme to notice them, and Fossa had strict laws about such things. The girls generally kept to cabin class, where there was sufficient coin, but were occasionally hired by men—and once, to everyone’s scandal, a woman—in steerage. Over the first few days of the voyage families swapped places with the single men, until, when one descended the narrow ladder, families occupied the bunks on the left, single men the right. The curtains kept out the sights—thankfully, Noetos told himself—but not the sounds. Vigorous and seemingly never-ending, they served as a pointed reminder of what he had lost; and, to be honest, what he had never had.

The youngest girl sat on one of the long benches at the table on which dinner would soon be served, rearranging herself after her latest encounter. Oddly, she reminded him of the cosmographer girl—an improbable comparison. Lenares had surely never made noises such as had recently issued from a nearby bunk, nor had she worn such a world-weary expression as this girl, Sai, now displayed on her fraying face.

So what was it? There was something about the eyes, the way they looked right through a person, penetrating to an unwelcome depth, as though she knew all one’s secrets. The hair colour was different: this girl wore her hair red and frizzled, but both were so plainly artificial her hair might well be similar to the cosmographer’s long pale locks. There—she took an end of her hair and stuck it firmly between nose and mouth, the exact comfort-habit he’d noticed Lenares do. And there were other mannerisms. And her smile. Uncanny.

Anyone would think you’ve developed a fondness for young foreign halfwits,
he told himself angrily. Given the activity he’d just listened to, no wonder his thoughts drifted in such ways.

He rose from his bunk and made to leave. He could see Anomer and Arathé playing cards down the far end of the room; he’d join them. Though he had a mild distaste for cards, for gambling of any sort, it would lead his mind away from uncomfortable roads.

‘Ho, fisherman,’ the girl said cheerfully. Noetos was not sure how he’d earned the nickname; no doubt one of the others had been telling stories. ‘What’ve you been doing? Casting your net on your own? I could help you with that.’

‘I haven’t heard it called that,’ he said genially, brushing past her.

‘I doubt you’ve heard it called anything for a long time,’ she said, her eyes narrowing. ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

He stopped and gave her an angry look, but did not deter her.

‘I’ve seen you staring at me, eyes all over me. Make an honest man of yourself and take me to your bunk.’

‘I’ve been staring at you, Miss Sai, because you remind me of someone.’

He wanted to end the conversation, to move on, especially when he knew others were listening from behind their curtains; but, paradoxically, he could not find it in him to be rude to her. Such a direct, desperate occupation: how could he brush her off?

She laughed. Genuine, unaffected. So much like Lenares, for a moment he was sure he could not be imagining it. ‘They all say that, fisherman. It’s part of the art. We learn to be whoever you want us to be: mothers, daughters, absent lovers.’

‘It’s an art? You are trained?’ Drawn in despite himself, Noetos sat on the bench opposite her.

‘Oooh, yes,’ she said, batting her eyelids and wiggling her hips, so obviously coquettish they both laughed. ‘Training on the job mostly, and most of it ain’t fun,’ she said, all seriousness for a moment. ‘So your pole don’t need greasing?’

‘No, Miss Sai, it doesn’t. I can’t deny I’d appreciate release, but that’s all it would be. And you don’t even get that, for all your acting to the contrary. I’ve seen you abovedecks: as much mopping and cleaning for your employer as bedwork, it seems to me.’

‘Look at the bright side,’ she said. ‘I get to make the beds and to lie in them.’ Another laugh, but this one was definitely forced.

‘Ah well, fisherman, take that pole o’ yours off with you; I believe there’s a gentleman in cabin class who needs his little doggie taken for a walk. I’ll see you again, I’m sure.’ She smiled at him.

‘And I’ll hear you about, Miss Sai,’ he responded.

Her smile fell, but she nodded politely and made her way up the ladder to the hatch. His last glimpse of her was panties and petticoats. He sighed, and went to find his children.

His relationship with Anomer and Arathé had improved markedly aboard the
Conch
. He supposed it to be because he was no longer leading; the ship took them to a predetermined destination and there were no decisions to be made, hence no conflict.
Problems deferred, not solved,
he was honest enough to acknowledge, but he made the most of their willingness to talk with him.

On the seventh day from Sayonae, Arathé sought him out. He had learned enough of her peculiar language that he no longer needed her brother to interpret; conversation was still slow—though not as slow as that awful first day in Fossa. She sat down on the side of the bunk, pulled the curtain closed and began to talk.

As she told him what was on her mind, he found himself looking at her, really looking at her, for the first time in a month or more. His memories of her as a willowy, fair-skinned child would never leave him, he knew, but more recent images of a dumpy, hollow-eyed wreck were gradually being replaced. She had lost weight, her eyes had lost that dark, unhealthy colour, and she again began to approximate the girl he knew, albeit with a maturity not entirely flattering. Not surprising, given how she’d achieved it.

‘I’m sorry, Arathé, forgive me, but I wasn’t listening,’ he said. ‘I was thinking about you, and how you’ve coped with what happened to you in Andratan.’

‘I think about that too,’ she signalled. ‘My’—the next word was difficult, but he interpreted it as ‘rememberings’—‘my rememberings hurt me, but not as much as they once did. I want to talk about one remembering with you, but now is not the time.’

‘Your mother?’

She grimaced, and he knew he’d guessed right.

‘Why not now?’

‘Because the voice in my head has started speaking again,’ she signed.

A feeling of revulsion swept over him. Andratan had stolen his daughter’s innocence, and would have taken her life but for her courage. And now it lurked in her mind, not only as awful memories but as an actual voice, trying to steer her to destruction. A voice most probably linked to the gods who were trying to kill her.

It was so unfair. How could his beautiful daughter, his firstborn, have attracted such a curse?

‘What is it saying?’ he asked with a heavy heart.