He’d seen this done once in the desert, an attempt to save a soldier from cock-rot, but it had not been successful. Of course, the surgeon had not been a god.
‘No!’ cried a cracked voice. ‘Umu, I set you free! Heal him!’
Lenares’ hand twitched, as though letting go of a string, and in answer a manic laugh rang out across the enclosure.
‘You wish me to contend with my brother for your lover’s manhood?’ the voice shrieked, pressed full with glee. ‘What will haunt you forever, little Lenares, is the knowledge I could have helped him—but I chose not to! And now I take my freedom!’
The voice came from a shadowed part of the room. Duon could make out a misty form, feminine and curved, with long hair unbound and head tilted back, as though taken with uncontrollable laughter.
‘Brother,’ the voice said in acknowledgment, and the head dipped. ‘You make progress, I see. Yet you remain soft-hearted. Why keep the Omeran alive?’
Dryman raised his eyes from the damage he had done. ‘Because he is an anomaly. I remain curious about him. And he may yet hold the key to my research.’
The Daughter laughed. ‘You continue to tinker with the gates of death. I, on the other hand, am well prepared to step through them at the end of a long and triumphant life. That makes me more powerful than you.’
‘And more ruthless,’ her brother replied, seemingly unconcerned by her boast. ‘What do you intend to do with your erstwhile captor?’
‘Oh, she will suffer before she dies. And I do not have to raise a finger to achieve it; you have seen to that. You cannot imagine how profoundly her lover’s loss will affect her. Far more than it will affect him, in fact.’
Her voice grew stronger by the moment, her form more substantial. ‘May I ask you a favour?’ she said to her brother.
‘Anything within reason,’ he replied.
‘The trophy in your hand,’ she said. ‘I would like to have it. I have the perfect setting for it.’
He nodded, as though the request was a reasonable one. ‘As you wish,’ he said. ‘But do not allow yourself to be deceived. You and I will face each other some time soon. One of us will rule as the Father once did, will be made whole again, dwelling completely within the world yet anchored in the void beyond the wall. Until that day we will continue to cooperate, as we have done.’
‘Why not end it now?’ asked the Daughter. ‘Two-thirds of them are here, with the other third close by. Why not destroy them? They are strong, but even the strongest could not stand against our combined might. Recall how we dealt with the Crynon Magickers. They used the power of Ilix against us, but it did not avail them.’
‘These people are not as they appear to you. Sister, you are ever a fool. In your haste to inflict death and destruction you never consider the long game. I have already given you my reason for keeping the Omeran alive; rest assured I have equally valid reasons to see the others keep drawing breath, for now. Little Umu, if you wish to kill someone, why not try your strength against me?’
He flicked a finger and instantly he was encased in a bubble of what looked like water. Immediately it began to grow, forcing those nearby away from him.
‘Come, sister, our power is enhanced in this place. Raise your hand against mine. Let us see if cunning and desperation can defeat strength and wisdom.’
The Daughter’s figure wavered as the bubble drew slowly nearer. Some distance short of where Duon stood it stopped and held firm. The membrane looked as though it could be pierced with a pin, but Duon was not prepared to touch it.
Neither was the Daughter, it seemed, even though the Son’s goading had angered her.
The god smiled. ‘You will leave now,’ he said pleasantly. ‘We will discuss this further elsewhere. This is my place and my time. Pleasant as a discussion with you always is, this one is at an end. Go and recover your strength.’
‘You do not command me, brother. Yet I shall leave you to your doctoring and your research. And when you travel through the gates of death for yourself, I will be there to watch you. Perhaps you will be good enough to tell me of what you see there, so I might avoid your failure.’
He took a step towards her and raised a hand, but did not attack. Instead, he threw a small, bloody object in her direction. Duon watched it arc through the air, spattering drops as it went, until it was swallowed in the shadows.
‘It will make a suitable trophy,’ she said. ‘I will think of little Lenares whenever I see it.’ Her fragile form wavered, then dissolved.
Dryman picked up his servant, who remained unconscious, legs akimbo, wearing a great red scar where his manhood had once rested. ‘My servant and I will now leave,’ the mercenary announced. ‘You will not try to interfere with our passing. And you will not attempt to track us with any of the devices you employ.’
He turned his head to where Lenares had fallen; the girl had hauled herself to a sitting position. ‘To you I offer a special caution. You are alive only because the Daughter wishes to exact a full measure of retribution for her imprisonment—and, I confess, because I wish you to escape her grasp; a reward you deserve for providing me with the entertainment of watching her enslaved. But if you attempt your number-working on me, it will cost you your life and the lives of all those you consider precious. And remember, I hold what remains of your lover in my hands. Your word is all that stands between him and death. Do you give it? Do you promise you will not interfere? Or must I commence slicing away other parts of this animal?’
‘No, don’t hurt him,’ Lenares said, sobbing where she sat. ‘Please. I give you a promise that I will do nothing to harm you. Just let him live.’
‘Good. You are a truth-sayer and a truth-keeper. You will not break your word, just as he cannot disobey me. You are both now trapped, and my Father’s plan is stymied.’
He laid the Omeran down on the sand and drew himself up to his full height. As he spoke he seemed to tower over everyone else in the enclosure.
‘Do you hear me, Father? I have taken your weapons and blunted them! Did you think I wouldn’t recognise your finger’s print on these foolish dupes? You are defeated, old man. I SAID, DO YOU HEAR ME?’
The words were not shouted, but they carried incredible weight, impacting on their hearers’ ears as though they were the tolling of a bell.
‘What is happening? What is he doing? What was that scream?’ Sauxa plied Stella with questions enough for everyone in the party.
She waved her hand behind her back, not wanting to turn around. ‘Hush,’ she said. ‘The mercenary has done something to his servant. Cut something. I hope it was not—oh, Most High, it was.’
‘What? Tell us!’ The old man had no taste for suspense, and a lack of patience to boot.
‘He’s castrated poor Torve.’
‘His servant,’ Sauxa said dismissively. ‘But he’ll not survive without a sawbones to patch him up. I’ve gelded many a colt; I could help.’
‘It was more than a gelding, Sauxa,’ Stella said. ‘The blade took everything. I doubt there is much you could do for him. Nor do I think the mercenary would let you.’
Heredrew eased his way into the narrow passageway, his shoulder pressed hard against hers. ‘Dryman is much more than he appears to be,’ he said. ‘Even the name is ironic. I fear he has been deceiving everyone. The power he used to drive us out of the room was immense.’
‘Your equivalent, then?’ Phemanderac questioned. ‘The overlord of Elamaq?’
‘Perhaps,’ Heredrew replied. ‘If he is not, I do not want to meet his master.’
‘What is happening now?’ the man from Chardzou wanted to know. ‘My eyes aren’t so good any more. Tell me.’
‘Hush. Someone else has entered the enclosure. Someone very powerful.’ Heredrew shook his head in denial or disgust.
‘No one went past us,’ Stella said wryly.
‘I believe both the Son and the Daughter are manifested in front of us. No wonder I cannot force my way back in.’
Conal
cleared his throat, then spoke. But the voice that came from his mouth was not his. ‘We are very nearly defeated,’ it said.
Both Stella and Heredrew snapped their heads around in shock; instantly Stella knew who spoke to them. As did Heredrew, by the look of hatred on his face. The others drew back.
‘Is this the voice in Conal’s head?’ Phemanderac asked. ‘The hidden magician?’
‘No,’ said Stella.
‘Who then?’
‘I don’t…want to say.’ I’m frightened.
Conal’s mouth spoke again. ‘I have a request to make of Stella and of Kannwar. I have no right to expect more of two who have suffered so much, but only you can accomplish my deception.’
A pause, punctuated by the priest’s heavy breathing, as though he tried to fight the possession of his throat.
‘He’s served as a conduit for that voice before,’ Heredrew said. ‘It was not welcome then, and clearly it is not welcome now.’
‘I wish to trick my son,’ the voice said. ‘Will you assist me? Will both of you lend me yourselves for just a while?’
‘You’ve asked this of me before,’ said Heredrew, ‘when I was far too young to know what it would cost. Yet I knew enough to refuse you. What makes you think I will answer differently this time?’
‘I don’t think,’ said the voice candidly. ‘I only ask. Remember, I always have other plans. But I choose the plan that offers most benefit to all who participate in it.’
‘Benefit?’ Heredrew cried bitterly. ‘Your plan was for me to become a freak, a boy despised by his peers. And it happened, even though I tried to resist. Where is the choice, Most High?’
‘Must we always have this conversation, Kannwar? You have exacted your revenge on me and on those I love many times over for my precipitate action. But for some people, chosen by birth or circumstance to be pivots on which the world turns, choice is subsumed by need.’
‘Your need.’
The voice did not deny it.
‘I will assist you,’ Stella said.
‘No, Stella!’ Heredrew said. ‘Not like this. You have no idea what it will cost you!’
She turned to face him, face twitching, then struck him a ringing blow across the cheek with her open hand. ‘What it will cost? How could it cost as much as the price I’m paying for your assistance all those years ago?’ Her voice softened. ‘Drew, how can you talk of selfishness and need, when everything you do serves your own purposes?’
He stared at her strangely, then down at the hand she’d used to strike him. ‘Look at your hand,’ he said.
‘Oh, I did, didn’t I. With my illusory hand.’ She smiled. ‘I must have wanted to hurt you so much the desire to strike you overcame my doubt.’
‘Good,’ he said, smiling back at her. ‘I will endeavour to engineer many more such occasions then.’
‘Serving him together could be such an occasion,’ she said.
They both smiled.
A reply came to the god-Emperor’s challenge.
‘We hear you, Keppia. And we are reminded why we must oppose you, of why our long efforts over thousands of years must succeed.’
Movement at the entrance to the enclosure, then someone walked in. The young woman Stella, followed by Heredrew. There was no sign of the other Falthans. Neither of the two was the source of the voice, Duon realised, yet it seemed they both spoke, and the sound the voice made was a combination of her cool, pleasant tone and his well-spoken, clipped one. A sound of compelling authority.
The mercenary acted with incredible swiftness. The bubble around him, which had shrunk to little more than the size of his body, sprang out again to encompass at least half the enclosure.
‘Have you come to do battle, ancient one?’
‘No,’ was the reply. The hybrid voice sent chills of fear down Duon’s spine. He could hear age in it, and responsibility, and a desperate weariness.
And, inside his head, the magician listened.
‘No, we have not come to challenge you, not yet. But you must know we are involved, and we have planned longer and with more care for these days than you can imagine. The very fact we awaited you here indicates we foresaw your actions. Keppia, it is not too late to return to the void. Or, if you desire it, we can give you release, the freedom you crave.’
The mercenary’s eyes bulged. ‘Do not patronise me! Release, indeed! Freedom for you to pursue your own goal of subjugating everyone under your smothering hand of benevolence. You are vulnerable here, Father, and I mean to make you pay for your mistake!’
He flung out an arm and drew up sand from the ground, then breathed on it with a breath of fire, fashioning six long spears of what looked to Duon like glass. Just like they manufacture glass back in Talamaq, he thought, somewhat irrelevantly. The spears’ tips were sharp, their centres hollow.
‘Seek!’ the mercenary shouted, and the slivers of glass arrowed from him towards where the two Falthans stood, hand in hand. As the spears approached the edge of his bubble it vanished.
The Falthans did not move.
‘We always have a plan, Son,’ said the voice, and the two bodies changed, becoming something else: shapes of fire, with water for veins. The spears passed through without so much as a sound, then vanished into the wall of the enclosure. The two Falthans resumed their true shapes. Or had Duon just witnessed their true form?
‘No!’ Dryman shouted.
‘Have you forgotten the way this enclosure works?’ the gentle voice asked the mercenary. ‘I remember it. I remember playing here with you, Keppia, when you were a child, before you went out into the world. Tossing stones against the wall, seeing who could throw the highest. Remember what happened to those stones, Keppia?’
Duon saw the spears materialise on the far side of the enclosure. He saw them continue their journey as though nothing had interrupted them. Heading straight for the unwitting Dryman.
‘I do not want to remember!’ the mercenary shouted, as the glass needles pierced him. ‘I choose to remember my hatred of you! I REJECT YOUR LOVE!’
The needles slipped through his body as if through water, emerging from his torso, his neck and his mouth, to fall spent at his feet.
‘Aaah!’ the mercenary cried. ‘You have killed him!’
The body changed before Duon’s horrified eyes, its features altering subtly. This was a man he’d never seen before, wholly the Emperor of Elamaq, exposed without his golden mask. The Son had left him, gone back to the void on the far side of the hole.
‘No,’ said the Emperor in his own voice, thick with blood. ‘No.’
That was all: two puzzled exclamations of defiance against the black tide rolling through him. And then he fell to the ground, dead.
Stella and Heredrew walked slowly towards the body, but Torve was there before them, having crawled across the sand from where he had fallen.
‘What do you see?’ he shouted, his mouth pressed down against his master’s ear. ‘What do you see? Are there gates, great one?’ He shook the body. ‘Do those you killed await you there? Tell me! Is death the end? TELL ME WHAT YOU SEE!’
He collapsed on the body, crying like a child.
About the Author
Russell Kirkpatrick’s love of literature and a chance encounter with fantasy novels as a teenager opened up a vast number of possibilities to him. The idea that he could marry storytelling and mapmaking (his other passion) into one project grabbed him and wouldn’t let go.
Russell lectures in geography and manages a small mapmaking business. He lives in NZ with his wife and two children.
Visit Russell’s website at:
www.russellkirkpatrick.com
Visit the Voyager website: www.voyageronline.com.au
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Books by Russell Kirkpatrick
Fire of Heaven
Across the Face of the World (1)
In the Earth Abides the Flame (2)
&
nbsp; The Right Hand of God (3)
Husk
Path of Revenge (1)
Dark Heart (2)
Copyright
Harper Voyager
A imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in Australia in 2008
This edition published in 2010
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
www.harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Russell Kirkpatrick 2008
The right of Russell Kirkpatrick to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
HarperCollinsPublishers
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Author: Kirkpatrick, Russell.
Title: Dark heart / author, Russell Kirkpatrick.
Publisher: Pymble, N.S.W.: HarperCollins, 2008.
Dark Heart (Husk) Page 55
