Beyond the Wall of Time

by Russell Kirkpatrick

  The wail that came from her throat felt as if it had been ripped from the depths of her heart.

  She raised her eyes from the bodies of her enemies. On the platform beside her stood her friends and acquaintances—and her brother—staring at her with wide eyes and white faces.

  “Kill me,” she begged them, signing shakily. As her hands moved, flesh flicked from her fingers and fell to the ground. “Please. Kill me now.”

  No one moved.

  She took a step backwards at the expressions of horror on their faces. Her foot caught on something and she stumbled, her heel grinding, then sliding, in wetness. Another step, then another.

  “Arathé, don’t.” This from her brother.

  Another stop. Her heel balanced on the edge of the platform.

  “I must,” she signaled, then closed her eyes and took another step.

  Praise for the Fire of Heaven Trilogy:

  “A joyous experience for readers who love getting lost in a complex fictional world… ”

  — scifi.com on Across the Face of the World

  By Russell Kirkpatrick

  The Fire of Heaven Trilogy

  Across the Face of the World

  In the Earth Abides the Flame

  The Right Hand of God

  The Broken Man Trilogy

  Path of Revenge

  Dark Heart

  Beyond the Wall of Time

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2009 by Russell Kirkpatrick

  Excerpt from Orcs copyright © 2004 by Stan Nicholls

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Orbit

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  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

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  Orbit is an imprint of Hachette Book Group. The Orbit name and logo are trademarks of Little, Brown Book Group Limited.

  First eBook Edition: December 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-316-05283-2

  To Dorinda,

  with love

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  MAPS

  PROLOGUE

  FISHERMAN

  CHAPTER 1: BLOOD ON THE SAND

  CHAPTER 2: THE CANOPY

  CHAPTER 3: SWORDMASTER

  COSMOGRAPHER

  CHAPTER 4: LOSS

  CHAPTER 5: THE VOLUNTEER

  CHAPTER 6: CORATA PIT

  QUEEN

  CHAPTER 7: THE RELUCTANT GOD

  CHAPTER 8: SHIPWRECK

  INTERLUDE

  FISHERMAN

  CHAPTER 9: CYLENE

  CHAPTER 10: SHAKY GROUND

  COSMOGRAPHER

  CHAPTER 11: MENSAYA

  CHAPTER 12: THE SNARE

  CHAPTER 13: THE LIMITS OF LOVE

  QUEEN

  CHAPTER 14: DEATH OF A CAPTAIN

  CHAPTER 15: THE WAGON

  CHAPTER 16: LIFE WITHOUT END

  CHAPTER 17: GODHOUSE

  INTERLUDE

  THE BROKEN MAN

  CHAPTER 18: THE BRONZE MAP

  CHAPTER 19: ANDRATAN

  CHAPTER 20: THE BROKEN MAN

  CHAPTER 21: SON AND DAUGHTER

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  EXTRAS

  MEET THE AUTHOR

  A PREVIEW OF ORCS

  BRONZE MAP

  PROLOGUE

  HUSK STRUGGLES TO REMEMBER what it is like to think with clarity. Seven decades of unrelenting pain have created a permanent cloud in his mind, as though looking through smeared glass. He constantly has to fight off a desire to go to sleep and never wake up, has to keep resisting the creeping lassitude that threatens to engulf him. Cannot remember what it used to be like living as a normal human being, agony not the most important part of his life. Even now, despite his link to the unlimited power from the void beyond the world, and the freedom from pain it brings, he finds it difficult to focus on the important things happening in a remote valley a few hundred leagues away.

  Part of Husk’s trouble is he does not know the location of the House of the Gods. Normally this would not matter. His magical contact with his three spikes does not depend on his knowing where they are. But designing a strategy does. The place on which his attention is focused, the place where his hosts now contend with the gods, is to be found at perhaps a half-dozen locations in the world at once, and yet fully in none of them: a paradox of the kind of which the gods are distressingly fond. He has spent a deal of time trying, in mounting desperation, to comprehend how the Godhouse works, but he is still no nearer a useful understanding.

  So he preoccupies himself with questions. Will the travellers—his spikes and his enemies—emerge into Patina Padouk, the land from which they entered this version of the House of the Gods? Or, as happened in Nomansland, will they appear somewhere else? Husk cannot lay his plans until he knows. Trouble is, with all the fog in his head he fears he may have missed some essential clue.

  Husk hates not knowing things.

  He needs to know where everyone is because he must decide whether to confront his enemies here, in the Undying Man’s fortress of Andratan, or there, wherever there might be. He wishes to destroy his enemies in a way that pays them back for his years of suffering, while, of course, risking himself as little as possible. Best of all would be a public triumph here at Andratan. Himself in the Tower of Farsight, at the head of a vast crowd of people, all watching the Destroyer and his cursed consort writhing out their agony in ways that reduce the memories of his own pain to pleasant inconsequentiality. It is no longer enough for him merely to remain alive. Not even enough to be immortal, the rich prize now almost in his grasp. To truly live he must destroy them both. No; more accurately, they must be destroyed again and again. He must be able to return whenever the mood takes him to watch them suffer. A public gallery in which the continual destruction of Stella and Kannwar is the main installation, that is what he needs.

  He wonders just how many centuries it will take to cancel out his own hurt. If his hurting will ever end.

  Events in the House of the Gods are seriously limiting his supply of power from beyond the wall around the world. The three gods are all drawing deeply from the hole in the world—that blessed opening first made when the Son and Daughter drove their Father out—and their combined power is squeezing his tiny, unnoticed conduit until it is almost shut off. Nevertheless, his small link continues to restore him. Husk has grown new limbs to replace those seared away by the Destroyer’s magic, but their fragility means he cannot yet walk on them. He now breathes air unmixed with his own blood. But his great plans, his plans for his transformation to godhood, the elimination of all who might possibly hurt him and the subjugation of everyone else, await a respite in the hostilities between the gods.

  He is patient. He can wait.

  In the meantime, Lenares is the great danger. She seeks to close the hole in the world, despite having taken advantage of it. Ironic, this. She had managed to ensnare the Daughter by tying something—Husk is not exactly sure what it is she tied—to someone beyond the wall. Husk does not know who, th
ough Lenares herself is convinced it is her dead foster mother. Her use of mathematics was flawed, but it worked nonetheless. Lenares has tapped into her own source of power, drawing on it unwittingly to help her to capture the Daughter for a time; and, worryingly, may draw on it again, perhaps accidentally interfering with his plans. It is unlikely she will learn how to harness her power, especially given the logical, mathematical cast to her mind and its associated limits. However unlikely, Husk cannot risk her interference. He must find some way to eliminate her. No elaborate revenge, no desire to inflict pain; he just wants an end to her.

  Another question nags at him. Has he any further need for his spikes? Arathé, Conal and Duon have served him well but, unless his new-found power is totally severed, he no longer needs them. In fact, he continues to expend energy to keep hold of them that he could better use to strengthen himself. And it is not as though his spikes are of much use to him. Conal is blinded in one eye and in all his opinions, and his recent possession by the Father has rendered him untrust-worthy. Imagine if the Father seized the lad’s mind while Husk was in possession of it! Arathé is becoming increasingly wary of the voice in her head, and is devising ever-cleverer ways of keeping him out. And Duon is trying to deceive him. A futile attempt—Husk can read the outer layers of the minds of those he has spiked—but it makes the Amaqi captain, of whom he had high hopes, less dependable.

  Husk had supposed the huanu stone would aid him in defeating the Destroyer, but now wonders even at this. The stone is now as much a risk to himself as it is to the Destroyer. It could undo the magic keeping him alive, could sever the supply of power from beyond the wall. And it is now beyond his reach, sewn into the lining of a pack left behind on the Conch, which is probably a good thing. Too dangerous to allow his enemies access to something that could do him so much damage.

  The same logic can be applied to the immortal blood he had planned to drain from Stella. Not yet in his possession, and just as likely could be used to promote someone else to the ranks of the deathless. With his own conduit to the raw power of the void, Husk need not risk the problematic—and painful—immortality offered by the blood. Maybe he needs to keep the blood and the stone away from Andratan. The only difficulty with this line of thought is his inability to prevent them being brought north regardless. With bravery and intelligence he has set all this in motion, and now it appears he is powerless to stop it.

  Husk frowns with newly restored facial muscles. Now there are two ways to become immortal his options have increased, so he ought not to be feeling the anxiety as strongly as he does. Thump, thump, thump goes his heart. His blood hisses through his veins and threatens to erupt from the tips of his fingers. The bubble and fizz of fearful thoughts must be resisted or they will—unman him. But it is so hard, despite the fact he is familiar with despair. Desperation has shaped him over the foggy decades of pain, yet despair is so much sharper now he has real hope.

  But he will resist the temptation to give up, to crawl away to some dark corner of the Destroyer’s dungeon and die. He reminds himself that, due to his new power, he is Husk no longer. He will put his self-imposed name aside and take his old name back. Deorc of Jasweyah. No; he reconsiders: Deorc the Great. Far more suitable.

  Husk laughs at himself, at the caricature of evil he seems about to become. All he needs is the cackle and he’d be the legendary Jasweyan Witch-Hag reborn. No matter: whatever his name, the common people will make fireside tales about him, and he will be around to hear them. He’ll make them forget about their folk villains, the Witch-Hag and the Undying Man both. The commoners will have no need to fear anything but him. And, oh, he will work hard to ensure they fear him.

  He licks his lips, tasting the victory about to be his; and, though he knows it to be a cliché, cannot resist the laughter bubbling up from within him. The thick walls of Andratan ring with the sound, and the denizens of the fortress pause in sudden fright.

  Their fear is balm to Husk’s scarred soul.

  FISHERMAN

  CHAPTER 1

  BLOOD ON THE SAND

  THERE IS A SILENCE FAR deeper than the mere absence of sound. It can settle on a scene despite, say, the thin wail of a woman weeping. Even the laboured breathing of someone in severe pain does little to disturb such stillness. This silence is a calm, black pool of quiet. It is the sound of shock.

  Noetos remembered all too well what such silence sounded like. He had experienced it in the Summer Palace, in the aftermath of the slaughter of the Neherian gentry. It was a stunned disbelief at what had happened coupled with an expectation that he would soon wake up to find nothing of the sort had occurred. But, of course, it had.

  No waking from this nightmare.

  He watched from a distance as his travelling companions stared at each other, eyes wide, saying nothing. When finally they began to move, it was in slow motion, hands fluttering with the need to do something but not knowing what. The fisherman had been nothing but an observer of the events leading to a man’s castration and the violent death of the one who had wielded the knife, but he could help now with restoring calm. Guidance, order and leadership were what were needed. He made his way towards the tight knot of people, ready to assist.

  “He is gone.” The one-eyed priest’s voice was a ripple of sound breaking the deep silence as though a pebble had been dropped in a pool.

  “Yes,” said Duon, looking up, his hand on Dryman’s unmoving chest. “He’s gone, all praise to the gods.” This was followed by a grimace, no doubt as he realised anew just whom he was praising.

  Noetos strode across the sandy floor of the enclosure, and his two children followed him. Three piles made up of enormous slabs of rock were the only interruption to the smooth floor, apart from the figures gathered around the dead, the injured and the maimed. And a smaller rock soaked in blood.

  The thought came to him that of the three groups drawn together in the contention of the gods, his had fared the worst. Gawl and Dagla were dead. Of the miners, only Tumar and Seren remained. The Fossan fishermen Sautea and Mustar were still with him, but they had come north because of Arathé, not him, and might well leave at any moment. Omiy the alchemist had betrayed him, Bregor had left him and Noetos had not succeeded in getting Cylene to join him. True, the Amaqi had just been reduced from four to three with the death of Dryman, but that had been their only loss. If you don’t count the loss of thirty thousand soldiers, he reminded himself. Even I haven’t failed that spectacularly.

  The Falthans had done best. All eight remained alive, though Stella had apparently lost an arm—she used some form of magic to disguise this, but it was only intermittently effective—and the priest an eye. They haven’t had whirlwinds and Neherians to cope with. He frowned. But now we all have to deal with angry gods and mysterious voices in people’s heads, as well as blood and death delivered by human hands.

  “I didn’t mean the mercenary,” Conal snapped. “The Most High, the Father, he is gone. I have my own voice back again. And I won’t be using it to praise any gods, that’s for certain.”

  “What is it like, priest?” Heredrew asked him, his voice deceptively gentle. “What does it feel like being forced to do the bidding of the Most High? Do I detect anger, friend? Unhappiness at being made the mouthpiece of a god?”

  Conal scowled and turned away. No doubt the continuation of some irrelevant debate, Noetos thought. Some people would argue at a graveside. More important than any argument were the three figures at the centre of the gathering: the dead mercenary, who had been some sort of avatar for one of the gods; the maimed servant, who lay on his back, his breath rasping; and the grieving cosmographer.

  It was this last person Noetos made towards. Lenares always made him uncomfortable with her uncanny way of seeing things, her facility with numbers, and her lack of the simple social graces that kept people from hurting each other unintentionally. And in that last, hypocrite, how is she different from you? She was unpredictable, and Noetos was not the only one who found her
difficult, he was sure. He was able to overcome his reluctance and approach her not because of some kindness of heart, but because of his regard for Cylene, her twin. The sister Lenares hadn’t yet met.

  “Are you all right, Lenares?” he asked her.

  She looked up at him from where she knelt. “Am I all right?”

  Those wide eyes, their shape so familiar to him—no, not hers, her sister’s—blinked slowly once, twice, thrice. Noetos wondered whether he ought to repeat the question. Had it not been simple enough?

  “Of course she’s not all right, Father,” Anomer said from beside him, then turned to the girl. “Here, come with us, Lenares. You need food and drink. We’ll talk of what we should do about all this after you’ve eaten.”

  He stretched down an arm. Hesitantly she took it, although her white face and hurt eyes remained totally focused on Torve.

  “I don’t want to leave him,” she said.

  “Let those skilled in healing tend him. You should let us tend you.”

  Clearly reluctant, Lenares allowed herself to be led away a short distance from Torve, but kept her head turned so the Omeran would not be out of her sight for a moment. Despite her oft-expressed dislike of being touched, she made no motion to prevent Anomer rearranging her dishevelled clothing. She seemed not to notice it.

  That’s the other reason she unnerves me, Noetos thought. He had never seen anyone able to devote themselves so completely to one thing at the expense of everything else.

  The Omeran servant was in poor condition. His wound had been cauterised but, however well the procedure had been done, the red mess between his legs was clearly giving him intense pain. Noetos was not certain what had happened to precipitate this, but it seemed the mercenary had discovered Torve and Lenares engaged in an intimate act—the intimate act, apparently—and had decided to castrate the fellow.