Partway through her explanation, the warm place at the back of her head began to grow hot. By the time she’d reached the last thought, the pain was nigh unbearable.
I have a problem with your thinking, the voice said, its poise recovered, as waves of pain pulsed through her head. If I continue to have this problem, I will snuff your thinking out. I could do it easily, little swan. I could take control of your own hands and force you to wrap them around your lovely neck.
Her hands and arms tingled and began to rise without her volition, frightening her even more than the pain. She fought him, but her limbs were his. Nothing in the dungeons of Andratan had scared her half as much.
Or I could have you cast yourself from a cliff. If you anger me, I might make you kill your friends first. The voice was laden with mock sorrow. I have no idea how effective you would be as an automaton, but I’d find a way to deceive your friends into thinking you remained in control. So keep your thoughts to yourself and I’ll let you live. Do we have an understanding?
We do, she told him, ashamed at her cowardice. Please…
The voice vanished in an instant, but the pain and the horror took a great deal longer to fade.
I harbour a monster, she had said to herself, and wept quietly.
“You’re not happy, sister.”
“You have eyes at least,” she said to Anomer, her hands busy shaping the words her tongue could not. “More than our father. He’s noticed nothing.”
His eyes narrowed. “Something really is amiss. Normally you defend him past reason.”
“I am sorry, I have run out of energy to defend anyone.” I’m going to lie to my brother about something important for the first time.
“This is not like you, sister.”
“I feel so weary. So much has happened, we have come so far, and I am near the end of my endurance. My legs feel as though they cannot walk another step, and I do not want to see any more suffering and death.”
“Is this why you will not speak mind to mind? It would be so much easier for you.”
Anomer sat beside her on the cooling sand and put an arm on her shoulder. She rested her head against his hand.
“I am tired, Anomer,” she whispered, her hands flickering desultorily. “The effort of mind-speaking has left me exhausted. I have had enough of gods and voices and earthquakes and whirlwinds and fire. I do not want revenge. Let Father confront the man, if he must. I just want to go home.”
He will believe this, she thought, sorrow bubbling up in her chest.
She allowed her tears to roll down onto her brother’s hand, her misery compounded by the necessary but cruel deception.
The perversity of life brought Mustar to her on the very evening she had decided she must remain alone.
He limped across the sand and sat with a groan in the same place Anomer had left only a few minutes before. Arathé dashed away her tears, but could do nothing about her undoubted redness of eye. She smiled at him.
“You look tired,” he said.
“And your leg still gives you pain, I see.”
She had to sign slowly: Mustar had not yet fully mastered her language. At least he didn’t need Anomer to interpret for him. He frowned. Arathé noted with dismay that even his frown crumpled his attractive face pleasingly, lending his chiselled features a mock-serious air.
“My leg?” he said. “Only when I’m inactive for any length of time. Arathé, what do you think of this place? Does it make you feel”—he cast about for the word—“uncomfortable?”
There was something irresistible about the young fisherman. Unlike the cliff-girls of Fossa, Arathé had never been impressed by his broad shoulders and rippling muscles. Instead, it was his sly sense of humour, a cheekiness that immediately took her side, engaging her, that she found most endearing. There was something carefree about him. He listened no better than any male, to be sure, and was certainly not a person to whom she would ever confide her closest secrets. But talking with him made her feel lighter somehow. She’d missed his banter on board the Conch, where he’d been absorbed in the rowdy single men’s section of the steerage cabin. He was certainly a welcome change from the intensity of her father and brother. So if Mustar found the House of the Gods uncomfortable, and troubled to say so, the feeling must be strong.
“Dead bodies make me uneasy,” she replied. “I haven’t noticed anything else.”
“No, it’s the place itself. There’s a sadness here. Do you remember Old Man Cadere’s family?”
“The Cadere Row mob?”
Arathé had heard about them from her father but, given their rather unsavoury reputation, had not mixed with them. Old Man Cadere had gone through four wives, one after the other, and they had given him over twenty children—twenty-four by some counts, twenty-five by others. They had all lived in a ramshackle house built of little more than driftwood and brushsticks. Then the old man had died and the family immediately scattered throughout Fossa. Some eventually came back to Cadere Row and built new houses there, giving the street its name, but the old house was never again occupied.
“I went to see the family house once, when I was little,” Mustar said. “Thought it would be a good place to play. But the roof had fallen in, and the walls had turned white and splintered. All the life had gone out of it. It was only an old abandoned house but it frightened me. Later I learned the old man’s sons had argued over who was to inherit it, and in the end decided that since no one could agree on who should have it, it was to be left uninhabited. This place feels like that. There was so much life here once, Arathé. Can’t you feel it? I can imagine the Father’s two special children playing in the room with the large objects. Or all three sitting together, Father, Son and Daughter, watching the mist from the pool making wonderful patterns. I imagine I can hear faint laughter at the edges of my ears. And when the children were grown, I see them in this room with their Father, sitting on their three chairs, making decisions together, guiding, influencing the world of men.” He closed his eyes. “Then arguments. Disagreements over what should be done and who should do it. Two children trying to grow up, to become independent of a proud and powerful father.”
Now Mustar was talking of his own childhood, Arathé knew. His father, Halieutes, had been the Fisher of Fossa before Noetos and had won widespread renown. Of course, he might just as well have been describing her own formative years.
“It must have been difficult growing up in the shadow of such a great man,” she signed, and he nodded, unconscious of how she had read his meaning.
“It was, I think. And the Son and Daughter would have contended with their Father, wanting to prove themselves to him, until they could no longer stand it. I feel their anger and frustration, Arathé. I feel the cliffs crowding in on me. The House of the Gods would have become a prison. I hear the arguing, the reasoned voice of the Father, the words that make perfect logical sense even as they stifle the life out of you. Then one day things went too far and the children left in anger, only to return in strength to drive their hated Father from this place.”
“You sound like you sympathise with them,” she said.
“Of course I do. No matter how bad they’ve become, there must have been a point when the Father might have done something to make things turn out differently.”
“So how did you turn out so well?”
He opened his eyes, his dark brown eyes, and turned to her. “You think I’ve turned out well?”
“I—”
“Arathé, you never saw what I did with the cliff-girls. Nothing they didn’t want, to be sure, but I did it anyway, knowing it was wrong. Women, they… ” He struggled for words, and waved his hands desperately at himself, obviously thinking he was not communicating his meaning. She nodded to him to continue.
“There was a woman in cabin class on the Conch. An older woman, travelling alone. She made a suggestion to me.” His face coloured, and suddenly Arathé didn’t want to hear any more. “I moved in with her for the best part of
a week. She… I… Arathé, I’m sorry. I’m not a good person.”
Her heart plummeted. There was no reason why this should matter, but it did.
“Why do you apologise to me?” she signed. “I am not your father or your sister. And you are not Keppia. You haven’t killed people for fun or possessed others. You’re not trying to break apart the world so you can prolong your hateful life. So you slept with a woman who desired you. Where is the harm?”
His look was full of helplessness and something else. “It would be harmful,” he said quietly, “if it hurt someone I hoped might desire me.” Then he turned away.
Her chest flooded with renewed hurt. “Oh,” she said, a grunt more than a word. To be desired and not pitied… Oh, Alkuon, not today. Not when someone truly dreadful holds my life in his hands.
He waited for her to speak, this young man who thought himself reprehensible merely for taking and giving pleasure, betraying no one in the process. While she harboured a secret that ought to be screamed to everyone in this place, a warning of how cruelly she was enslaved, of what the voice might make her do; a secret so shameful she could never share it with Mustar, with anyone, for fear of losing everything.
She had no choice. She so wanted to take him in her arms and love him, to let his openness wash away all her sordid memories and fears, but she could not do it. She could not open to him and still keep her secret, so she must remain closed. And the sadness of this was how he would inevitably interpret her actions.
“Mustar,” she said, her hands weaving the words as though constructing the bars of her own prison, “I do not desire you. I cannot. I am too broken. Please, give me time.”
He smiled wanly. “I thought this was so. You want time? You have it. And hopefully one day you might forgive me for the woman in cabin class, and the many other terrible things I have done.”
“Truly, Mustar, it—” she began. But he had stood up and was already walking away from her.
Arathé sighed. Best, perhaps, if he thought her angry with him. If the voice in her mind thought Mustar was a threat, it would not hesitate to use her to remove him. She could not stand that. As much as she desired his comfort and closeness, she had to put beautiful, dangerous Mustar out of her mind. From now on she would have to keep well away from those she valued most.
“Father, we must talk.”
“Son, I have matters to discuss with Captain Duon. And, as you can see, I am helping him bear an unpleasant burden.”
“You are by no means the only one with an unpleasant burden. But if you don’t listen to me now, you’ll be continuing north on your own.”
Ahead, Duon stumbled on a slope of slippery, worn rock reduced to the consistency of glass. They were in a room of rippled blue stone with a steaming pool set in the rocky floor.
“Steady, there,” Noetos called, and the southern soldier grunted some answer he failed to catch.
There was no doubt the House of the Gods was beguilingly beautiful. Each room had its own hidden or obscure function, and every room contained a numinous feel: the sense that someone immense had just left or was about to step in. Noetos prided himself on his practical bent, but even he found himself distracted by the shapes, the colours, the way the light pooled or rippled or reflected. Others of the party ran from one side of the room to the other, exclaiming over this strange relic or that incomprehensible artefact.
“I thought we had worked our way through this,” Noetos said with a sigh. “I agree with you: I have acted selfishly and did not consider my family’s needs during this affair. Cylene helped me see the truth in your words. What more, son?”
Noetos could see that for some reason his words had angered the boy, but Anomer kept his temper in check. I had such hopes for him. But unless he matures, and swiftly, he will not be able to assume leadership of the family, let alone Old Roudhos. As he is at present, I could not even mention the possibility to him.
“What more? Has Arathé mind-spoken you of late?”
Noetos had to think for a moment. “I’ve overheard one or two of her thoughts, but nothing directly. I thought it a result of her increasing ability to communicate with her hands and voice. People are working hard to understand her, you know.”
Anomer ought to be pleased at that, but it appeared he wasn’t.
“You didn’t think to question why she has been silent? She’s at the end of herself, Father, can’t you see that? Two years of abuse at the hands of the Recruiters, then home to Fossa and safety for a matter of hours, followed by the loss of her family. Did you think how that might have affected her? The journey north, battered by supernatural storms. Hearing about the death of her mother and not even being able to travel to the grave. The events in Raceme, when it seemed we were to be snuffed out by the fingers of a god at any moment. How much did her magical rescue of you and her part in the defeat of the Neherians take out of her? And then the walking, the weeks and weeks of it, followed by a month or more of starvation on board ship. All the time she’s been plagued by voices and battling to come to terms with what’s been done to her. Father, she’s worn out. She needs a rest.”
Noetos heard the implied condemnation in his son’s voice. Anomer might as well be shouting it in his ear.
“I saw you and her talking earlier, before we left the Throne Room. Is that when she told you all this?”
“She… yes.”
“So, before you spoke to her, you didn’t know how seriously she has been affected by events? If so, why are you angry at me for not knowing until I was told?”
“When I learned this is not at issue. Father, we must do something for her sake. Leave off this path of revenge. Let’s find somewhere to make a home.”
The party entered a room none of them had seen before. According to Lenares, the rooms were not fixed, changing order at random. This room had something resembling blood trickling from pocked walls, and it pooled in small depressions on the sand. It felt far more sinister than any of the other rooms. One of the crimson rivulets seemed more recent than the others: it had not yet worn a channel in the wall, and its pool was less than a handspan across.
The red pools exercised a strange fascination on Noetos. What did they represent? Why was one of them so recent? A fanciful thought struck him: he imagined they were the blood of those who had died as avatars of the gods. What properties would such blood have? Would it leave a mark on the skin? What would it taste like? He wrestled his mind away from the thought.
“I will speak to her, find out what she needs. Malayu is a large city. Perhaps a physic there can help her.”
Anomer punched the fist of one hand into the palm of the other. “Will you never listen? She needs assistance now, not later, and especially not in Malayu. Unless she receives the help she needs now, there will be no Malayu.”
“No, son, it is you who refuses to listen. I have cast my net and I am obliged to wait until the time is right to haul it in. I will not abandon it now, not when the shark I seek to catch is still swimming in the open sea, savaging anyone who swims too close to his jaws. We are going north because I agreed to this with the other leaders. There are larger issues at stake than my desire for revenge or Arathé’s health. Arathé has a voice in her head that is somehow linked to all this, and she has a power we need. I can’t allow her to abandon this task or hinder others in their execution of it.”
“Can’t allow her? By Alkuon, Father, what are you going to do? Order her to feel better? Carry her north like you’re carrying Dryman’s body? This is not your decision. Either she regains her health and vigour or she and I leave you. We will not follow you mindlessly just because you ask it of us. Do we have an understanding?”
After the boy had taken his leave, Noetos reflected that he’d been wrong in his assessment of his son. Worse luck. Anomer was ready to take command. Too ready.
It was only as they left the blood room that Noetos noticed the corpse’s wounds had begun to bleed anew.
CHAPTER 2
THE CANO
PY
THEY EMERGED FROM THE House of the Gods into a thunderstorm of breathless fury. One after another the travellers left the dry, sandy floor of the last room and passed between the two portal trees to be assaulted by slashing rain and continuous flashes and booms. Nothing made it clearer that the House of the Gods was truly in another place than passing from blue sky to dark clouds and driving rain.
Noetos blinked as he stood on the waterlogged plateau with the others and waited for the last of their party, Tumar and Kilfor, to appear. He was soaked in moments, his hair plastered to his head.
“Is this natural?” Seren yelled in his ear between cracks of thunder.
“Don’t know!” Noetos replied, then looked around for Arathé. That this might be of the gods is something I should have considered, he chastised himself. He could see no more than ten paces in any direction, so thick was the rain; the air was milky with it. That shadow there was likely his daughter—no, it was too tall. It hurried away from the portal, shoulders hunched.
“Here, have you seen Arathé?” Noetos called to it, and took it by the shoulder. The figure swung its other arm around and delivered the fisherman a solid blow on the shoulder, then snarled and shook him off.
“There’s no call for that!” Noetos cried, and he automatically went for his sword, but remembered he was weaponless; he looked up as the figure disappeared into the murk. Noetos hadn’t recognised what he’d seen of the face. One of the porters perhaps. He glanced at the hand he’d used to grab the figure’s shoulder. His fingers were smeared with blood. As he stared at it, the rain washed it off save the faintest residue.
What’s the fool doing running off when he’s clearly still injured?
He stumbled across his daughter a moment later. She was helping rewind one of the porter boy’s bandages, while the other looked on. Noetos looked from one to the other, confused. Neither of the porters then.
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