“Stop!” Noetos cried, lowering his sword.
Kidson took one more swing, which the fisherman parried, then froze in place. Magic.
“I’m not having this,” Noetos said, fury writ even larger on his face. “Someone is supplying me with strength. Who is it?”
No one answered, but Stella saw his children turn their heads away. The fisherman clearly noted their reluctance to face him, for he said: “Must my every attempt to put things right be interfered with?”
“Blame them if you will,” Kannwar said, “but it was I who gave you strength.”
“You?” Noetos spun round to face the Undying Man. “I’m not sure I believe you. But whether then or now, you are interfering. Can you not simply let things play out? Must you always shape events to your purpose?”
“You are too important to me to be thrown away in some foolish, misplaced bout of anger. Everyone standing here knows what you’re about, Roudhos, even though you do not. You cannot strike at me, so you relieve your feelings of frustration by striking at someone else. Once you have disposed of Kidson you would go on to vent your anger at your children, I have no doubt, or at anyone else you imagine disagrees with you. Noetos, you have it in you to become the greatest Duke of Roudhos in a thousand years, but this will happen only if you learn to harness your anger.”
The fisherman’s eyes bulged. He turned away from the Undying Man and lifted his sword, making ready to swing at the motionless Kidson.
“You’re too late,” Kannwar added. “He’s already dead.”
“What?” The word came out flat.
“Dead. Strangled. I’ve put an end to this risky nonsense. Can no one else sense the urgency of our position?”
Noetos strode up to the figure held upright by the Undying Man’s magic. The lips were blue, the tongue lolling, eyes bulging but empty of life.
The fisherman turned to confront Kannwar, but the Undying Man spoke first.
“Is this a game to you all? Some sort of puzzle to be solved? To me it is the future of Bhrudwo. Am I the only one here who grieves for the thousands of people already slain by the gods because you and I, god-selected, have not been smart or brave enough to do what we’ve been called here to do? How many more thousands of people must die before we defeat Umu and heal the hole in the world?”
Stella could not contain herself. “But you killed him with no warning. He could not even defend himself!”
“A deed I should have done when I met him days ago in Mensaya. I knew him guilty then, through the testimony of a family I met there who had been on his ship. But I held off, Stella, because I am being taught by a fellow ruler to exercise caution. Do you see what the outcome of such caution must inevitably be? What would you say to me now if the future Duke of Roudhos lay dead, cut down by a lucky blow from a should-have-been-dead man? Would you congratulate me on my judgment? Ah!” He barked his disgust. “The best of you has been alive for less than a hundred years, and in my foolishness I thought to at least try to regard your ideas as wisdom. You have made me soft, you people, with your ideas of individual justice and personal rights. You are wrong, and you always will be wrong. Until you have lived two thousand years, do not dare teach me how I ought to run my empire.”
“You’ve been considering what we said?” Stella stared at Kannwar, trying to read something, anything, in the illusory face.
“Why else would I have behaved with such stupidity? Of course I have been thinking. What, did you think I have survived this long by believing I have nothing to learn?”
The unnaturally erect corpse collapsed to the grass, occasioning a gasp from the onlookers, some of whom were obviously struggling to keep abreast of developments.
“The Most High drags you all to Bhrudwo in order to assist me in defeating the gods,” Kannwar continued. “This battle could have been fought anywhere, you realise. The hole in the world is a metaphor for something spiritual. It is not real, and it is not here.” He flung an arm towards the sky, where, some distance behind them, the unnatural circle let starlight—void-light—into the world. “Well, it is here as much as it is anywhere. We see it in one place, but the hole represents a weakening of the magical bonds that god-fuse the world into a functioning whole rather than a collection of disparate things. In order to return to the world, the gods need to break those magical bonds to the point that the threads tying them to their own allocated place—beyond the Wall of Time—dissolve. That point has been reached. It has been reached everywhere. The fact that we are here and not in Faltha or Elamaq ought to tell you that I, the one whom the Most High called from childhood to defeat the gods, am the nexus of his plan. You’ll think me arrogant, but you already think me cruel. I maintain that I am merely experienced and thus I see what you do not.”
“The hole is everywhere,” Lenares said. “So why are we going to an empty place to confront Umu?” She paused a moment, then exclaimed: “Oh.”
“Yes. Think it through.”
“Because we are anchored to the world. We have a place. Each of us is in one place at one time. Therefore any interaction between the gods and ourselves must happen in one place, even though it also happens everywhere.” She smiled a greedy smile, enjoying the new knowledge as though it was a sweet treat. “Mahudia would have called that a paradox. It makes so much clear to me.”
“Good.” Kannwar spread his arms, encompassing them all. “Only by exercising your unique gifts can you eventually arrive at the plane of understanding from which I start. You—we all—would do better to question less and follow more closely.”
“So why are we here then?” Stella enquired, as levelly as she could in the face of this conceit. “Why has the Most High not simply left this task to you alone?”
“I don’t know,” Kannwar said, frowning, not hearing her sarcasm. “Clearly you have some part to play. I thought I knew what it was, Stella, but I may have been wrong.”
Lenares spoke. “How long has the Most High lived?” she asked.
“What?” The Undying Man seemed bemused by the question.
“How long has he lived? Longer than you?”
“Of course he has.”
“And you claim a better view of his plan than we have,” she continued.
“Yes, but—ah.”
“Yes, ah,” she said, a manic grin plastered across her face. “Think it through.”
“You’re reminding me that he began planning this two thousand years ago? But that would mean he intended me to… it was his plan that I rebel and drink of the Fountain?”
“He says he doesn’t have a plan,” Noetos said.
“You’ve spoken to him?”
“I’ve been possessed by him.”
“And you haven’t told anyone? Am I surrounded by fools?”
“The Father might not have a plan,” Lenares said, “but that doesn’t stop him making it up as he goes along. How can he have one single plan if we have freedom to do what we want? He must have hundreds, thousands of plans, changing from one to another every time one of us decides to do something he doesn’t want us to do.”
“So he had a plan for me to defeat the gods two thousand years ago, a full thousand years after they drove him out of Elamaq north to Faltha. I was probably not his first plan then.”
“Nor his last,” Lenares said, her voice shaking with suppressed emotion. She was actually bouncing up and down on her toes as she spoke. “You refused your calling, then rebelled and broke his law by drinking the magical water. So he changed his plan. Your rebellion held things back two thousand years.”
Silence as everyone took this in. A few of the refugees had drifted away, but most stood listening.
“Look around you,” Noetos said eventually. “Those thousands of corpses you’re so angry about? They are the stinking fruit of your rebellion. Well the Falthans named you Destroyer.”
“The Most High put too much pressure on him,” Stella said, the words tumbling from her lips. “Who here would have coped well with his calling
at such a young age?”
“A thousand years of careful breeding,” said Moralye. “The Most High knew what he was doing. Kannwar was the reason for the First Men’s existence, and their confinement in the Vale. A vast breeding program designed to generate one man. So Hauthius always taught, though he never said why he believed this.”
“You know who Hauthius was, don’t you?” Kannwar asked softly.
Moralye’s face crumpled in horror. “No, no,” she breathed.
“Oh, yes,” said the Undying Man. Revelation upon revelation: Stella could hardly bear the way her mind was being enlarged. “Yes. How else was I to keep a close eye on my enemies?”
“How else was the Most High to prepare you all for this eventual partnership?” Lenares said, and again everyone stilled.
“You asked who else would have coped with Kannwar’s calling,” Noetos said. “According to him, none of us are like him. He ought to have coped.”
“Like you, the scion of a noble grandfather, coped with the deaths of your family?” Kannwar shot back. “For all my faults, I never turned my back on my responsibility!”
Noetos’s angry reply was lost in a general uproar. Shouting, arguing, hands clinging to arms in an attempt to restrain them, or waving in a threatening manner, yet no use of magic or steel.
We are drawn together by the will of the Most High, Stella acknowledged, but we are not yet one instrument of his will.
The travellers ate a nervous meal, eyeing each other balefully over the last of the stale bread. Before they moved on there was one last debate over the fate of Kidson’s body. Cylene asked for it to be buried, but Sauxa argued against this.
“Let him rot,” he said. “He deserves not a moment more of our time. He will not be dignified by a burial. Better men than he are rotting in crushed houses and open fields as we speak. Let him join them.”
The flaw in Robal’s plan became apparent when he returned to Mensaya and the Malayu Basin. Of course he’d anticipated his quarry would have moved on by this time—there had, after all, been talk of finding a relatively unpopulated area near the coast—but the further coast-ward he travelled, the less he heard of his former companions. Those few people he came in contact with were far too busy rebuilding their lives to answer his hail; it took nearly two full days’ steady travel east of Mensaya to meet someone who could state unequivocally that the travellers had not taken the coastal road.
Early in the evening of a furious day later, he found himself drawing up to Mensaya Square, donkeys lathered, wagon still overloaded and a desperate ache in his heart. For a few mad moments he considered striking out in a random direction, or even ditching the wagon, somehow finding his companions on foot, then returning for his cargo. Muttering under his breath, he cursed the gods who seemed to have granted everyone else supernatural visitations or gifts while leaving him solidly normal.
A young lad tugged on his jerkin. “Hey, mister, weren’t you with the magicians?”
“I was,” he said. “I have urgent supplies for them. Do you know where they are?”
Perhaps the gods were smiling on him after all.
“Dunno,” said the boy, scratching at his nose. Robal’s heart sank. “We came back here with my father. He didn’t want to go inland with the magicians.”
“They’re going inland?”
The boy didn’t answer, preferring to talk about his father. Perhaps Robal had been too eager and had spooked the lad. He cursed under his breath.
“Where is your father?” he interrupted in exasperation. “I need to speak to him.”
“What’s in your wagon?”
“Please!” Too sharp; the boy turned away. Robal grabbed the lad’s arm. “I must speak with your father!”
The boy stuck out his bottom lip, clearly unimpressed with Robal’s manners. “You’ll have to wait, mister,” he said. “He’s out in the fields. Said he’d be back before dusk.”
Robal glanced up to see the sun nearly touching low hills behind the town. He let the boy go, then set his mind to wait.
Kannwar led the travellers inland, having decided that the safest place for a potentially devastating final confrontation with Umu was in the perpetually mist-shrouded hills of the sparsely inhabited Zizhua province. Many days they were on the road, and every turn they made seemed to lead them into rougher country and along narrower, less kempt paths. Rutted earth replaced gravel, fading in turn into overgrown, barely discernible tracks winding between steep-sided hills. True to the province’s fame, the mist descended every evening and did not lift until after noon each day—if it lifted at all.
After two weeks all their accompanying refugees had drifted away. Perhaps they had been encouraged to put aside their fear by the absence of god-activity, or maybe the Undying Man’s warning that they would be defenceless should the gods strike had finally made an impression on them, but on the day the travellers emerged from a narrow gorge into a wide valley, they were reduced· to the groups from the three continents. Kannwar, Noetos and his children, Cyclamere, his former fishermen Mustar and Sautea, Cylene, the two miners, and Bregor and Consina from Bhrudwo; Lenares, Torve and Duon from Elamaq; and Stella, Moralye, Kilfor and Sauxa from Faltha. Called from their homes to serve the Most High, pursued by a god bent on making the world her personal possession.
Stella had travelled most of her life, having left her childhood home of Loulea far, far to the west at the age of sixteen to travel across the face of the world. Since then she had been to every one of Faltha’s Sixteen Kingdoms and many of the independent nations, as well as latterly to Dhauria itself, and to Bhrudwo. Yet she had never seen anything to compare with the sheer heart-lifting beauty she was confronted with as she gazed into the Zizhua Valley.
A broad, languid river lay quietly in its bed just below them. Fields of yellow grass lay to the left and right of the river, waving gently in a slight breeze. The golden glow of the fields was interrupted irregularly by tall, broad trees with spreading limbs more like feather dusters than the vegetation Stella was familiar with. In the middle distance rose a series of steep-sided hills, each a few hundred paces high; the closer hills green, the further hills purpling into the misty distance.
There was no sign of human habitation.
“It’s beautiful,” Moralye said.
“That it is,” Kannwar responded. “A thousand years ago I determined that this valley was the cradle of human civilisation, the site of the oldest remains yet found. We came from here, as far as I can tell. I placed a ban on new dwellings, and many of the valley’s residents drifted away. Some still remain, but they live in such a secluded place they are unlikely to be vulnerable to the Daughter’s machinations. “
“It would be a terrible thing to see this land devastated,” Stella said, entranced by the fields of gold and the hills of green and blue.
“Yes. But in a thousand years from now any harm done by a god will have been undone by nature and the passage of time. Yet anyone killed by the god in her quest for control of the world—or by us as we resist her—will still be dead.”
They wound down a barely discernible track into the valley, and were bathed by warm, sweet breezes as they walked. Though her heart ached for Robal, and for Conal, for Kannwar and especially for herself, Stella felt those breezes as a balm to her spirit.
“No matter what happens,” she whispered to Kannwar as they crossed the first of the golden fields, “I’m glad I came here.”
He smiled in response, and she believed it to be genuine.
CHAPTER 15
THE WAGON
THE JOURNEY NORTH WAS, for Robal, an unpleasant one. He gradually came to realise that in deciding to pursue his desperate plan, he had exchanged a world of light for a dark tunnel. When he had allied himself to Stella, assisting her escape from Instruere, his life had taken on new meaning, expanding from the humdrum of soldierly service in a city that had not seen war in a generation to a world-encompassing quest to defeat gods he’d never even known existed. He h
ad traversed the Great Desert, visited fabled Dhauria, been drawn through the blue fire and walked the paths of Bhrudwo. He’d consorted with sorcerers, argued with emperors, witnessed miracles, stood in the House of the Gods—and fallen helplessly in love with an immortal queen. Enough to fill many pages in the history books.
He ought, therefore, to consider himself a lucky man. His fellows in the Instruian Guard would certainly regard him so. But with such an irresistible, deep love as his came jealousy, and it had eaten at him like a worm in an apple. First the absurd Conal had tried to claim his beloved, an action more ridiculous than threatening. But latterly his greatest fear had been realised: the Destroyer had exercised his fascination and hooked his queen. As a result, Stella was about to betray them all by joining herself with Kannwar’s unquestioned corruption. This could not be allowed to happen.
That thought consumed him. Everything else about his daily life since the moment Stella had called his bluff was mere mechanics: food, sleep, directions, all taken as required, all pleasure suspended, nothing more satisfying than dust and ashes. The world around him disappeared. He rode northwards through this dark tunnel, noticing nothing, his thoughts reduced to a few repetitive phrases that solidified his fears and grievances into something resembling truth.
This cannot be allowed to happen. She must be stopped.
He met people he recognised from the days after Corata Pit, people journeying southwards towards home, having abandoned their dangerous alliance with Robal’s former companions. They told him of the Bhrudwan lord’s change of plans, confirming what the young boy’s father had explained the night he left Mensaya and set out slowly on the north road. “Bound for Zizhua,” they said. “A place of ill repute. A place of ghosts. A place too strange for people to live.” And some whispered: “Stay away.”
Robal’s resolve hardened as he heard these words. Wherever the Destroyer was taking his friends, it was clearly a place of secrecy and danger. A place, he feared, of betrayal.
Despite his inattention to the world around him, he was careful to exercise all the care over his cargo he had been warned about. The many precautions seemed foolish to him, especially after those hurried first few days when anxiety had overcome prudence, all cautions ignored, and the stuff might have failed at any moment. Not that he would have cared overmuch. Keep it covered by the sawdust, the miners of Corata Pit had told him. Make sure it is kept out of direct sunlight and rain. Of course, they said to him, you must never park your wagon anywhere near a bonfire or other flame. A single spark… well, do we have to paint you a picture? Do not expose it to rough handling—preferably, one had said, holding up a handless arm as evidence, don’t handle it at all. If you must handle it, wear the gloves we have provided you. Don’t get any on your eyes, nose, lips or even on your skin, as your body will drink it in and it will fix inside you, causing terrible headaches and ague, possibly unto death.
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