Dark Heart (Husk)

by Russell Kirkpatrick

  Arathé said something urgent to Anomer. He stood, turned and looked to the east, over the heads of the Neherians and whatever they were planning on the far bank of the stream, into the dark heart of the storm bearing down on them.

  ‘Too late,’ he said, his voice hollow. ‘It’s found you.’

  Cries from along the line of defenders indicated they had seen it also. Noetos stood too, then took a step back and his hand went to his sword hilt.

  The storm clouds had begun to rotate.

  A circular wall of cloud lowered towards the harbour and moved slowly in their direction, as though it were some kind of vast mechanical beast. The cloud seemed eager, desperate, like a blind man scrabbling on the floor for his last scrap of food.

  Noetos had seen a circular cloud like this once before. He had been fishing with Halieutes, Mustar’s renowned father, in the first year of Noetos’s apprenticeship. They had been out beyond The Rhoos, nets laden, when a sudden hailstorm had descended upon them, hidden until the last minute by the bulk of Bluefin Stack. They had ridden it out; the clouds threw ice at them, rolled over the top of their little boat, then lifted. Noetos had been exhilarated by the power of the storm.

  Halieutes had stared carefully at the sky as it cleared and cursed in the way only he could. ‘The hook!’ he’d cried. ‘We must row for shelter!’

  They’d put their backs to it, cutting the nets free then rowing until they reached Bluefin Stack. And Noetos had seen the hook: the Finger of Alkuon, Halieutes had called it, a spiralling finger of wind that descended from the sky to drink the water, to eat the fish, to destroy anything human in its path.

  Rain, then hail, then a clearing in the weather, then the hook. If Halieutes was right, Noetos would see the hook now.

  A spinning black wedge began to lower from the cloud wall. Immediately below it, one of the Neherian ships jerked as though plucked up by an invisible hand, then disintegrated. A cloud of debris rose into the air, forming a funnel that spun upwards to meet the wedge. The Finger of Alkuon.

  ‘It is coming for you.’ Anomer took his sister’s arm. ‘We have to run.’

  The spinning finger stretched out and touched another ship, and the noise rumbled around the harbour. Then it made landfall, running along the length of Red Duke Wharf, ripping up timbers as it went.

  A bone-deep fear thrummed through the fisherman. ‘This is not natural,’ he said. ‘This has been sent by someone with power enough to kill us all.’

  What does it want with my daughter?

  The Neherians had seen the finger strike land; heedless of cover they broke left and right. A few of them began wading the river, coming towards them, eyes wide, battle forgotten. A Raceman lifted his bow, but Cohamma struck it down.

  ‘Dun waste yer time.’ The captain pointed to the west, along Broad Way. ‘We all need ter get outta here.’

  Is this a Neherian device? Have the Neherians found a new, powerful practitioner of magic? Has there ever been a Maghdi Dasht capable of such things?

  Noetos had heard stories of the Falthan War, in which the combined forces of the Maghdi Dasht and the Undying Man himself had managed to influence the weather. Surely no man had ever, would ever, exercise such power on his own?

  The fisherman followed Cohamma’s arm. A second finger stretched towards the ground, thinner than the first, paler, but spinning much faster. It sped down Broad Way towards them, exactly as though it was hunting for something. Intelligent. Purposeful.

  Cohamma met Noetos’s gaze, nodded.

  ‘Head for Suggate!’ Noetos yelled. ‘Seren, you and the rest of my men, take Dagla with you. I don’t want him left behind. Go!’

  His legs ached with the need to run, to be anywhere but the place where the two Fingers of Alkuon were converging. He forced them to stay still.

  ‘Anomer, Arathé,’ he said, motioning his children closer. The roaring to their left and right made it difficult to communicate. ‘Are you sure they are seeking you?’

  Arathé, eyes wide and face dead white, nodded.

  ‘Then we cannot go with the others. We must draw the Fingers of Alkuon away from Suggate. Give them a chance of escape. You must do whatever it is you do to draw them.’

  Arathé nodded again, sweat sheening her skin. In that moment Noetos saw his wife framed in his daughter’s face.

  ‘Come on, then. We head east.’ No time to think about his wife, his daughter, his son.

  The skies had darkened again; the circular cloud wall hovered almost directly overhead, rotating slowly. Two more slim funnels were forming, one lowering from the cloud, another reaching up from the wreckage of the Justice District, off to their left.

  Four fingers. Alkuon! What had they done to provoke such forces? What could he possibly do to resist them? Some small awareness battered at his mind, but he forced himself to ignore it. No time. He focused his entire attention on escape.

  The fisherman and his two children ran past Hook, Line and Sinker, the largest inn in Raceme. Gawl followed a few paces back. An explosion shook the ground. Noetos turned and watched as one of the fingers ripped through the Old Council Chambers, a few hundred paces behind them. Thatch from the relic’s steeply sloping roof simply vanished, while sections of the wall buckled outwards and were picked up by the roaring funnel. Then, as though it realised its quarry was not within the building, the finger spun sideways into the middle of Broad Way and leapt towards them.

  ‘Gawl! I told you to go to Suggate! You can’t help us here.’

  ‘Guess I lost my way,’ the man replied, mouth curved in his insolent grin.

  They sprinted across Midtown Bridge, then turned right. Noetos could not resist looking back: behind him, the finger approached the Man-o’-War inn. Even before the funnel reached it, the building’s verandah crumpled, detached and rose into the air in a lazy spiral, where it was snared and hungrily absorbed by the vortex. The inn offered no resistance. Windows and walls dissolved as the finger touched them. The upper-storey window, from which Noetos and his men had watched the approaching storm a couple of hours ago, exploded outwards in a cascade of splinters and glass.

  Suddenly the funnel jerked backwards as though scalded, finishing in the middle of the road. It spun in the one place a moment, then headed towards them.

  Some instinct warned the fisherman. He threw himself to the ground just as the Man-o’-War’s verandah, still largely intact, came spearing out of the approaching spiral. It bounced once, scraping across the road, jerked forward like a leaf in a storm and whistled over Noetos’s back. Somewhere behind him it thumped into something, probably the side of a building.

  Braving himself against the rising wind, Noetos levered himself to his feet. Anomer was already running, pulling Arathé along with him. The spinning finger leapt across the stream, tearing up Midtown Bridge. Noetos ran past the forlorn verandah, draped across the front of the largest warehouse in the district.

  ‘Aaaah,’ someone called.

  There was a ragged bundle lying beside the verandah. It was Gawl, panting, his leg pierced clean through by a splintered beam. His clothing lay loosely about him, shredded beyond recognition. As Noetos approached, the rogue smiled at him, then spat out blood.

  ‘Go on with you,’ he said. ‘The devil-wind’s too close.’

  ‘Hold still and we’ll get you off this spike,’ Noetos said, approaching the miner. His daughter made to join him.

  ‘No, Arathé,’ Anomer said, holding his sister back. ‘Don’t go near him. If the finger is truly tracking you, you’ll just lead it to him if you use your power.’

  Gawl laughed. ‘Spat me out once, it has. Let’s see if it’ll swallow me this time.’ His grin grew even fiercer. ‘Now get out o’ here, ’fore you end up in its belly.’

  ‘He’s right. We have to go.’ Anomer tugged on his father’s arm.

  Noetos roared in frustration. He didn’t want to leave anyone behind, but his son was right. He let himself be led away.

  The three Fossans put the
ir heads down and ran. Noetos had no idea whether the finger could be outrun, but he would try. He would give no one else to the wind.

  They reached Summer Way, panting and out of breath. Behind them the roar had subsided to a growl. They risked a backward glance: the dark finger approached the large warehouse, picking at the discarded verandah. Noetos watched, fists clenched in anger, as Gawl pushed himself up on one arm and shook the other at his approaching death, shouting at it all the while. The whirlwind plucked reluctantly at the verandah, as if uncertain about something, then leapt forward and sucked verandah and warehouse wall into its funnel. Arms flailing, Gawl vanished into the maw.

  ‘Alkuon forfend,’ Anomer breathed.

  CHAPTER 2

  STONE AND STORM

  PEOPLE SWARMED AROUND SUGGATE as though it were the entrance to a beehive. Bregor tried to force his way into the chaos, but stronger or more desperate people pushed, shouldered and elbowed him back to the periphery of the mass. He’d tried to attract Mustar’s attention, but the young man, his leg crudely bandaged, was busy shouting instructions from atop the gate, ensuring a steady flow of people through it, out of the city. His shouting was barely audible: the air was filled with the cries of men, women’s shrieks and the sobbing of children, all insufficient to mask the slowly growing rumbling from those things destroying the city. Panic slowly dissolved into terror as people cast increasingly frightened looks behind them.

  No queen bee to guide us, no homing instinct to tell us where to go to escape our deaths. We need a leader. Where’s the governor?

  Possibly one of those fleeing that palace, Bregor answered himself.

  If he stood on the steps of the Money Exchange he could see right across the city, to where the largest of the five funnels tore at a tall stone building overlooking the harbour. More a wedge than a finger, it plucked stones from the walls and scattered them over the lower city like seeds. And not just stones. Some of those shapes disappearing into the wedge, to be flung broken into buildings and onto the streets below were—or had been—people.

  He was tired of death.

  Mustar had given him the news he’d been dreading. Merle was…had been…she was dead. Dead. Killed by the Neherians, those to whom he’d betrayed his people in order to save her. Merle and Opuntia, he’d lost them both. Mustar had told him how she’d died under torture, resisting her captors to the last. Torture. Merle, whose gentleness was bruised by the death of an animal, who always had to catch and free any bees trapped in their house. How could she have been made to suffer so? Bregor had pressed the lad for the details; the boy had told him, albeit reluctantly. Her flesh slit, salt rubbed in the open wounds, staked out on the beach, twisting against the ropes for all to see, to await the tide…

  He so desperately wanted to scream, but there was no voice profound enough to express his own agony. The Fisher thought him a coward, but Bregor knew he was not. He would have exchanged places with Merle or Opuntia. Would do it now. If it were within his power he would have it so his body squirmed under the Neherians’ salted knives or fell bleeding beneath the Recruiter’s sword thrust. He would suffer everlasting torment to reverse their deaths. But there was no god of time he could petition in order to undo what had been done.

  What he had done.

  That knowledge was the source of the howling inner whirlwind busy shaking him to pieces. But for his attempts to save their lives, Opuntia and Merle would both still be alive, and he himself would be dead. An infinitely preferable state of affairs.

  A little while earlier Bregor had fled with the others from the death falling from the sky, towards Suggate and safety. But he did not know why. Traitorous feet. Much better to have faced the storm, to embrace the whirlwind, to die spitting and snarling, opposing the irresistible forces of the world. But his feet had carried him to Suggate. Maybe he was a coward, after all.

  The four slender fingers of the gods, flanked to the right by the larger wedge, really did seem like a supernatural hand descending from the clouds, sent to winnow the earth. Searching for the damnable Fisher and his family, it seemed, the Heir of Roudhos who had somehow become the centre of this strange, terrible season.

  Merle wasn’t even important, he thought. She could have lived and cost neither the gods nor the fisherman anything. She could have lived. Why would anyone strike down such an innocent?

  Why were Noetos and his family not taken instead?

  He drew a ragged breath. The sheer self-pity in that last thought brought him back to some kind of sense. The leaderless people clustered about Suggate were unimportant. Who would give their lives for them? That soldier there, struggling to direct even his own frightened townsmen? Mustar, trying to make himself heard over the din?

  Bregor sighed, squared his shoulders and strode towards the buzzing crowd. He wanted to die; so, naturally, in this perverse world, he would be forced to live.

  ‘Arathé says this storm chased her all the way from Fossa,’ Anomer shouted in his father’s ear as they ran along the road.

  ‘Not possible,’ was his reply, just as Anomer had expected. ‘Storms don’t last that long on the Fisher Coast. And they don’t move north this time of year.’

  Anomer had grown up believing inflexibility of opinion to be a virtue. It hadn’t been until after his sister left for Andratan that he’d realised how much he had valued his conversations with her. She had gently teased out the wound-up threads of his emotions, showing him that it was possible to hold a different opinion from his forceful father. More, that such contrariness was often necessary in order to preserve some sense of self.

  The last two years had been hard. Listening to the father he loved poison himself with opinions so sharp he punctured himself and everyone around him. Mother had long been worn out by then, and had found her own solace. Anomer had known about that for at least a year, and had carefully guarded his lips to ensure his father didn’t find out about it from him.

  Not that his father was always prickly. On occasion they had fruitful and enjoyable family discussions. But even then every point of view had to be weighed and balanced, and an honest opinion could be cruelly cast down if poorly expressed. Anomer had learned to wield logic primarily as a method of self-defence.

  ‘Arathé tells me that Sautea and Mustar can confirm what she says. They rescued her, after all, and brought her north.’

  Noetos turned in the road and would have stopped, Anomer guessed, had the whirlwinds not been rumbling towards them. ‘I want to hear more about that. I thought she was dead.’

  Beside him, Arathé shook her head.

  ‘Later, Father, later,’ Anomer said. ‘For now all we need to know is that Arathé believes the storm is pursuing her. Perhaps if we could work out why, we could put a stop to it.’

  ‘So how did she keep this storm from destroying her? It’s only a little boat, after all, and I presume it is damaged.’

  ‘She kept her magic under control and her mind small. Now, can we talk about this later?’

  ‘You brought it up.’

  Anomer said nothing. It was always best to let his father have the last word.

  Noetos winced at every stride, as he had for the last half-hour. Sea-cursed leg. He’d hurt it, perhaps when he’d caught it in the rubble of the Betide Theatre, or maybe when Gawl’s broken body had come flying out of the maelstrom pursuing them and knocked the three of them to the ground.

  Arathé had shrieked then, tongue or no tongue. He would have cried out too, had it been him lying there with the man’s body draped over him, lolling tongue dripping blood into his hair.

  The fingers had all but caught them then, three of them closing in on Arathé as she used her magic out of instinct to batter the miner’s broken body off herself. They had escaped up Summer Way, retracing the steps Noetos and Mustar had taken earlier, the howling, grinding whirlwinds lining up to follow them. Noetos had thought they were about to die then. The winds were only a few paces behind them, and a hard-soft rain alternately clattered an
d pattered all around them, the dwellings and citizens of Raceme swallowed, chewed up and spat out upon them. He dared not look back. He ran, every moment expecting his feet to leave the ground.

  Yet, for all their menace, there was something oddly tentative about the way the whirlwinds had stalked them. As if the wind matched its pace to theirs. Reluctant to catch them.

  Noetos had ducked left along Broad Way, his children following him. Then he’d seen the trap: an enormous black wedge crashing through the stone building in front of him—the Betide Theatre; he remembered hiding in the shadows once to watch a play, one his father had forbidden him attend—hurling and tumbling rubble at them as it came.

  Yes, that was where he’d picked up the limp. The roaring wedge showed no hesitation in pursuing them through the Oligarchs District. It would have caught him, had it not been for his children. Though it meant further confirmation of their location, Arathé and Anomer had once again supplied him with strength; it hardly mattered that they exposed themselves to the mind behind the fingers, given how close they were. Together, they had fled the dark wall of cloud, sprinting through the trees on the riverbank, then across the water—Noetos could not remember its liquid touch—and into the Artisans District. He’d begun to feel his leg on the district’s rougher roads.

  Now he sighed. He thought they’d given the fingers the slip, at least temporarily, but here they came again. Anomer yelled instructions to Arathé. Noetos’s two children ran in opposite directions. He yelled, but they both ignored him. The dark wedge and the four trailing fingers came across the stream and hesitated, as though uncertain of the direction they should be heading in. The wedge moved left, then right, while the four fingers paired off and circled around each other. Noetos realised his children were using their magic to confuse the mind behind the whirlwinds, which perhaps knew of only one magician. For a moment the fisherman felt left out. His children had magic to share, while he had none. Only the huanu stone.

  Oh, Alkuon. The stone.

  A cold shiver struck his neck, ran across his shoulders and settled on his chest. Foolish, stupid man. How many lives consumed by the fingers of the gods while he’d been running, his guilt and fear making him forget what he carried?