Beyond the Wall of Time

by Russell Kirkpatrick

  “Animals?” Phemanderac looked puzzled. “Torve is a man, not an animal.”

  Duon snorted. “Not to the Amaqi. They—we—destroyed every race of men who opposed us, save the Omerans who, in return for their continued existence as a race, pledged to serve us. I am embarrassed to say it, but our religion declared them less than human many centuries ago, which gave us the right to do with them what we desired. Most of them live brutalised lives of unquestioning service. Torve here is a well-known exception, and at the court was often referred to as the Emperor’s pet.”

  “So it’s impossible for you to disobey your master?” Arathé signalled, Anomer stepping forward to translate. At Torve’s nod, she frowned. “How terrible. But you tried?” Another nod, more emphatic this time.

  Noetos did not have to open his mind to her to be able to read her thoughts.

  “Why?” said Lenares suddenly, breaking a short silence.

  “Why what?” Noetos responded, more gruffly than he intended.

  “Why did the Emperor leave Talamaq and travel north with his army? And why in disguise?”

  “I seek answers to the same questions,” Duon said. “And I have a third: given he was both Emperor and god, why did he allow his army to be destroyed in the Valley of the Damned?”

  “He wanted it to be destroyed,” Torve said. “He encouraged the most powerful Alliances to supply their best soldiers and their strongest sons for this expedition, but my master never intended them to get past the Marasmos. He told me later that he recruited mercenaries from all parts of the empire, save Talamaq itself, and salted the Marasmian army with them. He supplied gold and weapons to the Marasmians. Thus, by ridding himself of the major Talamaq houses, he strengthened his hold on the empire.”

  “So he never intended his expedition to succeed?” Duon’s face had gone white.

  Torve grimaced with pain; the conversation was clearly claiming what strength he’d regained. “His supposed expedition, no. But his true expedition, yes. We went north, Captain, because you reported what you had learned of the Bhrudwan tales of the Undying Man, though I am sure you merely confirmed what he already knew. My master greatly desires—desired—immortality and planned to wrest the secret from the Bhrudwans. He did not believe he needed an army to do this. In fact, the fewer people involved in his true purpose, the better.”

  “He wanted to be immortal, did he?” asked Heredrew, leaning forward, a look of strange intensity on his face. “Maybe he ought to have done his research more thoroughly before settling on such a desire.”

  “Perhaps speaking to an immortal or two might have cured him of the craving.” Stella sounded angry. “They might have told him how very poor a bargain he would likely make.”

  Heredrew spoke again. “So this man, with the aid of a god, planned to become immortal by—doing what exactly? How did he think he would achieve it?”

  “By drinking the blood of the Undying Man,” Torve said to the tall Falthan.

  Heredrew chuckled. “From what I hear of the Undying Man, I suspect your Emperor underestimated the strength needed to complete his task. How, after all, do you obtain the blood of an immortal? Especially one as powerful as the Lord of Bhrudwo?”

  “My master was a very patient man, and he had the assistance of a god. I believe that without the intervention of another god he would have achieved his goal.”

  “Good thing he didn’t then,” old Sauxa said, sucking at his teeth. “Better one insane tyrant than two.”

  “Better none at all,” said Robal, making to rise.

  “You gave me your word!” Stella hissed at the guardsman, grabbing his arm.

  Robal growled, but went no further. People turned their heads to them, but neither Stella nor Robal offered any explanation. The guardsman settled back on his haunches.

  Secrets, secrets. “Still not telling us everything?” Noetos said. “How can we make decisions unless all the truth is exposed? I, for one, would have appreciated knowing I was travelling north with a god-possessed emperor. I presume there are no more hidden emperors or the like among us?”

  The silence at this question stretched on a little too long. Noetos found himself growing faintly suspicious and more than a little angry. Lenares sat there pulling at her lip as though she wanted to say something, but even she kept quiet. It smacked of a conspiracy.

  “No?” he said eventually. “Then we are all who we seem? Excellent. We had one bad man among us, but now he’s dead. So we can carry on to do what we intended to do. Except—what was that exactly?”

  “Different things for different people, as you well know,” said Kilfor.

  The plainsman’s father spread out his hands. “Then that’s the next step. Deciding what we intend to do from this point. Me, I make decisions best on a full belly and with a wench by my side.”

  “Your belly always looks full, old man,” said his son. “And you’ll get no volunteers for the other.”

  Sauxa barked a laugh. “Nevertheless, it’s time to eat. Then I hope we quickly finish with all this talk so I can leave this uncanny place. Men of Chardzou like their walls open to the breeze so they can see their enemies coming. These cliffs make me nervous.”

  Kilfor grunted. “Aye, old man, I’m with you on that.”

  The talking occupied most of the remaining light and was still not done when the sky started to dim.

  “We’ll need to be gone from this place before dark,” Noetos advised them. “I do not want to be trapped here overnight.”

  “Safest place we’ll find, I would have thought,” his son responded. “Better than camping out in the trees with those archers and their poison arrows.”

  “I would rather face poison arrows than vengeful gods. They could return at any time.”

  “But that’s just it, Father. We have to face up to the gods, or abandon the world to them. It might as well be now as some later time.”

  Anomer parroted the argument Phemanderac had offered earlier in the afternoon. The Dhaurian scholar had made an impassioned speech on the heels of prevarication from Captain Duon. The captain had been uncertain, not knowing what their next move ought to be, and Noetos had decided that for all the man’s courage he would have made a poor leader. By contrast, Phemanderac had argued with passion, pointing out how they had been drawn together and outlining what he thought their responsibility to be. “We have to face the gods,” he had said, “and help get the world back in order.” If that meant helping to destroy the Son and Daughter, so be it. His sentiments had received widespread support from members of each of the three groups.

  Anomer had spoken of sacrifice in the cause of saving the world and, embarrassingly, used Noetos as an example, telling everyone how his father had risked his life to save Raceme from the whirlwinds. As one, the travellers had shifted their attention to him.

  “I still have my one purpose,” Noetos had told them. “I intend to continue north to Andratan, there to make the Lord of Bhrudwo answer for the crimes of his servants, the Neherians and the Recruiters, including those perpetrated on Arathé’s body. More than that I will not say, given who might be listening to us.”

  He swung his gaze to the three infected by the voice in their heads to underline his comment. What was the point in discussing plans if they could be overheard?

  His two children were talking together, Arathé flapping her hands, Anomer’s head bent next to hers. More secrets, no doubt. Tell me what you’re saying! he had demanded, firing the thought at his daughter. She had started, given him a sidelong glance, but said nothing.

  Noetos’s comments had claimed the attention of the Falthans. “Tell us more of these crimes,” Heredrew had asked, his request supported by Stella and her guardsman. So Noetos had related the story of the recruitment of his child to Andratan two years previously, emphasising it had initially been in line with her will—knowing the oversensitive Falthans were likely to misunderstand him—and telling them how she had been treated while training in that dark place. Stella h
ad obviously been shocked when Noetos had revealed how Arathé had lost her tongue and the other things that had been done to her in the service of the Recruiters. More interesting, however, was Heredrew’s reaction. The man’s face clouded with anger, and his hands clasped and unclasped, as though reliving some dreadful experience. Perhaps someone he loved, or even he himself, had suffered at the hands of the Undying Man.

  “Stands to reason,” Robal had said when Noetos was finished. “You have a dungeon under your castle, you expect things like this to happen. You authorise them, you take part in them. I don’t know why anyone would be surprised at this.”

  A strange thing to say, and Heredrew’s reaction was even stranger. “I doubt even the Lord of Bhrudwo knows everything that goes on in his dungeons,” he’d said. “Immortal he may be, but I have never heard it claimed he was omniscient.” Why the man defended someone who had obviously done him wrong, Noetos could not say.

  After discussing Arathé’s plight, the Falthans had gone on to argue that they had already made common cause with the Father, whom they called the Most High. Here they called on Lenares’ knowledge to supplement their own. The girl explained that her numbers had shown her how the Father had been cast down from the House of the Gods by the Son and the Daughter, and that the fall had cracked the wall surrounding the world.

  “Each day that passes, the hole in the world gets bigger,” she had told them. “Every thread that is snapped weakens the fabric separating the world from the gods and whatever else lies outside the wall. Every node burned out is the death of someone who ought not to have died. The hole is now large enough for the Son and Daughter to reach through and act directly upon us, as you have seen. In the past, the gods had to content themselves with manipulating others to achieve what they wanted. Now they can bend the natural world to their will. They rocked Talamaq with earthquakes, they killed my foster mother Mahudia with a lion, they attacked Raceme with whirlwinds, and we were all there at Lake Woe when they sought to kill us with the fireball. Since then they have destroyed the tea house in Ikhnos with a flood, eaten my travelling companion, and burned a village by fire. There is even evidence that they are messing with time; that the linear flow of time is threatened. What is may be irretrievably mixed together with what was and what is yet to come. The Son and the Daughter have harnessed the power of fire, water, earth and wind, and perhaps time itself. All the magics are in their hands. Either we find a way to close the hole in the world or the world itself will become a wasteland, a battleground between the two gods to see who is the stronger.”

  She had faced many questions after that. Not everyone there had heard all the stories of the gods, and their history was picked over with much debate. Heredrew, who seemed to be as much a scholar as the old Dhaurian, confirmed Lenares’ account of the creation of the Son and Daughter and their subsequent rebellion against their Father. Falthan legend, apparently, tallied with this account in that the Father had arrived in the north, with a small band of refugees in tow, three thousand years previously. The telling took an hour or more, but at the end of it the group had assembled a history that dovetailed the various folklores of Faltha, Bhrudwo and Elamaq. The tall Falthan, Heredrew, downplayed the role of Kannwar, the Undying Man, as betrayer of the Father and source of the enmity between Bhrudwo and Faltha. He received little support in this view from the others.

  “You mentioned a travelling companion, Lenares,” Noetos had said. “You said he was eaten. Can you tell us what happened? I don’t remember hearing this story.”

  Her response was the most fascinating part of the afternoon’s discussion, at least to Noetos. After she had been claimed by the flood at Yacoppica Tea House, Lenares explained, she had taken up with a boatman—Olifa of Eisarn, she named him. Noetos had sat up at that, and his son reacted similarly. His miners, who had been talking quietly amongst themselves, seemingly uninterested in the debate, were struck silent. The sordid tale of how Omiy the miner had sought to force himself on the young cosmographer did not surprise Noetos, and her god-assisted escape made him grin fiercely.

  “A fitting end for one so false,” he had said. “Omiy deserved everything he got. He pretended to be my friend so he could get his hands on the huanu stone.” Noetos laughed bleakly. “No-one will get their hands on it now, not unless I can find the Conch and recover my pack. I want that stone. More valuable than Old Roudhos, he named it, because it absorbs magic, rendering magicians powerless. With it I will neutralise the power of the Undying Man should he refuse to give me a satisfactory explanation of the activities in his dungeons.” There was no explanation he would consider satisfactory, of course, and he knew everyone took his meaning. “The thought of that traitor Omiy ending up in a shark’s belly pleases me,” Noetos had concluded. “I take it as a sign we will all be granted vengeance against those who have done us wrong.”

  He had directed a sympathetic glance towards Heredrew, who looked more embarrassed than encouraged at his words. Noetos had decided then that he must seek Heredrew out and talk with him in an attempt to draw out the story of the man’s suffering at the hands of the Lord of Bhrudwo.

  At the end of the talking it was clear that the Falthans wanted to travel north, though their reasons for doing so varied depending on which of them spoke. They apparently wanted to make common cause with the Undying Man against the gods.

  Stella spoke last, and directed her speech to Noetos. “If you please, after the gods are brought low and the hole mended, you may have your time with the Undying Man and receive satisfaction one way or another.”

  Noetos muttered something they could take for agreement if they wished.

  “You don’t intend to wait, do you, Father?” Anomer said, squatting on his haunches beside him. Around them the conversation moved on. “You’ll move against the Undying Man before you know all the facts.”

  “How can I wait?” he answered, stung by his son’s knowing voice. “In order to get an unguarded answer I must take him by surprise. Otherwise he will dissemble and I will be no nearer an answer as to why he rules this land with such a heavy fist. And why his servants take the tongues of innocents.”

  And I do not want him forewarned of the fact I intend to drain his magic and kill him for what he did to your sister, he thought after Anomer withdrew, apparently satisfied.

  Satisfied? Not likely, not Anomer. His son was building up to something. Unsettled ever since his mother died, Anomer had come to a truce of sorts with his father aboard the Conch. But Noetos had no doubt his son would have more to say, and soon.

  Arathé sat alone as the others cleaned up their camp. Because it seemed somehow sacrilegious to leave anything behind in what was once the Throne Room of the gods, the travellers picked up every scrap of food and every bloodied cloth. The largest task would be carrying out Dryman’s body; predictably, her father wanted to burn or bury it, but no one else would have this. Noetos sat near the entrance to the room, glowering at proceedings as though he were a particularly dyspeptic overseer. If only you could see yourself, Father, she thought, but did not send the thought to him. She had her own distress to deal with.

  It had been clear to her for weeks that the voice in her mind was not there to serve her interests. Although she could point to times when it had warned her of approaching trouble, it seemed there were many more times when it had drawn trouble to her. Comparing her experiences with those of Duon and Conal had revealed similar occurrences. The gods seemed to be able to sense the connection between them and the voice, and it drew their power, as did any use of her magic. More, she now had a name for this connection: a spike. At least, that’s what the voice had called it.

  The voice had manifested earlier when Torve had been describing his participation in the tortures ordered by his master. As always, it began with a warming at the back of her head, just above her neck. Then a torrent of derisive laughter cut through her horrified thoughts.

  So, you object to using other people to further your own ends, little swan?
He had taken to calling her this in mockery of the story of the beautiful swan maiden, which he must have pulled from her memories. I would have thought someone who has been given so much suffering herself would be pleased to hear that she is not alone in the world.

  Then you don’t know me as well as you claim, she had responded with heat of her own. I was under the impression your magic allowed you to read my thoughts. Clearly I was wrong if you really think I would be happy to hear of anyone suffering.

  Not even the one responsible for what happened to you? The voice seemed to stroke her mind like a fret-board, plucking at memories of anger and resentment. Yes, you know who he is. And I do know you. Deny you’ve thought of revenge, little swan, and I’ll prove you a liar.

  Of course I’ve thought of revenge. But thinking it and acting on those thoughts are entirely different things. I’ll never do to anyone what the Emperor and his servant did, nor what the Recruiters did to me.

  He snorted. Have you learned nothing through my spike? Revenge is a necessary emotion. It motivates you to rid the world of something evil. You act as though there is something intrinsically poisonous about the notion.

  You might rid the world of one evil, but the cost will be the raising of another. If I had the power to bring down the Undying Man, and acted on that power because I wished to avenge the wrong done me, I would simply ascend in his place. Much as you intend to do, I’d guess. I’m right, am I not?

  The voice affected nonchalance, but Arathé was sure she could hear agitation in the words. You know nothing of what I intend to do.

  No? She aimed her thoughts recklessly at him. I know that you put spikes in three people when they visited Andratan about two years ago. To do this you must have been in Andratan yourself. And because you hate the Undying Man and plot his downfall, I would guess you are locked in his dungeon. You want us to do what you yourself cannot—