Beyond the Wall of Time

by Russell Kirkpatrick

  They had no defence, however, against a repeat of the shifting rooms. They lost Sauxa, Seren and Moralye between the Standing Wave Room and the Sculpture Room, and then the remaining group was divided neatly in half as they tried to hurry into the Rainbow Room from the Rotten-Egg Room: directly in front of Stella the corridor went blank and was replaced by the Children’s Room, taking Mustar, Sautea, Bregor and Consina with it.

  “This is deliberate,” Lenares said, clearly distressed. “Umu is separating us out.”

  “But you told us the House of the Gods was different in Patina Padouk than in Marasmos,” Kannwar said. “Surely—”

  “It didn’t change this quickly. Umu has been too clever for us. We should never have come here.”

  “All that matters now is to find Noetos,” Stella reminded them, “and then the Throne Room. The others will find us eventually.”

  “If they are still free,” Torve said.

  Lenares grunted agreement. “If they are still alive.”

  “What do we do now?” Seren asked.

  “Find the others,” replied Sauxa.

  “Stay put until the others find us,” Moralye responded at the same moment.

  The three of them stood panting in the middle of the Standing Wave Room, looking at each other with wide and troubled eyes. The room loomed over them; it had been given its name by Lenares because of the walls, which bent inwards in uncannily realistic replications of breaking waves, complete with foam and even drops of water that seemed to hover in the air.

  “We have no magic between us,” Moralye reminded them. “Every time we cross into a new room there is a chance we might encounter the Daughter. I do not want to face her without the protection of our fellow travellers.”

  “We may have to take the risk,” Seren said.

  “Oh, Most High,” Sauxa breathed, his eyes widening further.

  The scholar and the miner turned to the plainsman, then followed his gaze up, up to where the standing waves shimmered, transforming from stone to water, and came crashing down on them with a thunderous roar.

  A moment later the water pulled back, draining towards the walls, and the standing waves were restored, leaving an empty room.

  “The only way we can beat Umu is to split up,” Anomer argued, as they prepared to leave the Sculpture Room. “We need to make this more difficult for her. The more variables we introduce, the more complex her problem.” Cyclamere nodded his agreement with this plan.

  “She’s a god,” Duon said, but the thought was Arathé’s. “We won’t confuse her.”

  Cylene glanced around the Sculpture Room, her face anxious. “I don’t want to be separated from the rest of you. I don’t want… I don’t want the Daughter to find me.”

  “I can understand that,” said Noetos.

  Arathé screamed.

  She had brushed past one of the sculptures—an evil-looking thing, a tortured melange of human figures—and now was held firm by the merest contact. Sand began to flow upwards from the floor, coating her legs.

  Duon cried out, grabbed at her and shouted again, this time in horror. Within moments he too was falling victim to the sand.

  From the corridor between the rooms Noetos bellowed his rage, slapped a hand to his belt and pulled out the huanu stone. Took a step forward, then vanished along with Cylene as the rooms rearranged themselves.

  His mouth open in shock, Anomer watched, impotent to interfere, as the sand crawled its way up his sister, the Padouki warrior and the captain, swarming like a plague of insects. Covering? Absorbing? Knee, waist, chest, neck, mouth, eyes. Within minutes Arathé, Cyclamere and Duon had vanished, their increasingly desperate cries for help choked off, replaced by two new sculptures.

  Anomer srood miserably in the centre of the room, alone save for the remains of people unfortunate enough to have been ensnared by the sculptures. These he cringed away from as he settled to wait for help. A hissing sound drew his gaze downwards. Sand had begun to climb his legs.

  Torve had been taken by the orange pool. He’d stepped in it and the contact had started a whirlpool that had torn him from his feet, then pulled him around and around until he’d disappeared. Lenares had caught only the end of it as her Torve had not cried out, unwilling, it seemed, to see her caught in the same snare that had taken him. She’d shrieked in rage, but that had not stopped the water pulling him under.

  The pool had instantly returned to its calm state, but Lenares had not dared the water. Forces far beyond her understanding were at work here.

  She bit her lower lip, fighting panic. One hand went to her hair, twirling it in an automatic comforting motion. “Clever Umu,” she said. “We will have to go on without him.”

  She expected an answer like, How can you be so callous? and was fully prepared to argue that he had merely been taken by the water, which did not necessarily mean he’d been killed. There had been no change in the nodes and threads she could see, which implied he was still alive. She hoped.

  But there was no answer.

  She glanced up: Kannwar and Stella had already gone on to the next room.

  Oh dear.

  There seemed little doubt as to what would happen next. The House of the Gods—or someone manipulating it—had divided them and was now picking them off one by one. She was on her own now. When she walked through the corridor to the next room, she had no doubt she would still be on her own.

  “Fascinating,” Kannwar said.

  “Fascinating?” Stella replied. They had seen Torve pulled to his doom in the whirlpool, but the House of the Gods had whisked them away to somewhere else—a room bordered by glittering walls—rendering them powerless to help. “You call the likely deaths of everyone in our party but us—and that only a matter of time—fascinating?”

  “Indeed. I’d wondered how she would do it. This method is particularly ingenious.”

  “But… Kannwar, what do you mean?”

  He sighed. His illusory right hand took hold of her arm and at the same time his consciousness penetrated hers, possessing her. Why the Most High persists with such material as yourself is beyond my comprehension. Such blind trust! Capturing Umu will have to wait, my queen. We must go. We have a more dangerous opponent to dethrone.

  A hundred contradictory questions roared in her head, striking her temporarily mute. Though, no doubt, he’d taken her power of speech anyway. Oh, Most High, Robal warned me…

  You thought you were behaving in such a sophisticated fashion, didn’t you, my queen? Extending your trust to one who appeared to have reformed himself? Surely the Most High would reward such trust? Ah, Stella, you are his tool. He uses his tools hard, my queen, I should know. Uses and then discards them. Welcome to the discards pile.

  What are you going to do? With me? she added in the back of her mind.

  He didn’t answer her, instead yanking her forward, past the innocent-seeming lake that spread across the floor of this room and to the base of a broad stone stair that disappeared into a huge mound of sand.

  Up there is one of the House’s entrances, he remarked, then waved a hand at it. A shock spread out from his hand—she could see it, ripples in the air—and crashed into the shining walls, shaking the room. Parts of both walls came down, falling into the narrow gap at the top of the stair, above the mound of sand.

  An entrance no longer, he said, his voice a smirk in her mind. One entrance closed, three more to go.

  He beckoned her forward, and her feet were already dancing in obedience before she’d even thought of resisting him.

  Lenares stumbled into the Throne Room at precisely the moment she least wished it. Alone, weary, defenceless.

  There Umu sat, atop one of the three rebuilt chairs, looking small and rather ridiculous in Conal’s body, but Lenares knew better than to tell her that. The Daughter lifted an arm in sardonic greeting.

  “Welcome, cosmographer,” said the priest’s voice, overlaid with Umu’s thick cadences. “I have spent some time thinking how I would re
pay you for my days in captivity. I believe I have come up with a satisfactory plan.”

  She raised her—Conal’s—fist and opened it.

  Lenares turned and ran, but the rooms beyond the entrance changed faster than thought. Flicker, flicker, flicker. No escape save into some nowhere void.

  “Aren’t you going to look at what I have?”

  “No need,” Lenares said, keeping her voice even. “I know what it is.”

  “And if you’d let me alone, you could have known it, and its former owner, a great deal better. But as it is, it is a powerful talisman in my skilled hand. Observe.”

  She—it—breathed on the dreadful thing and Torve materialised at the base of the chair. Lenares ran towards him.

  “Ah, ah,” Umu said, wagging an admonitory finger. “Stay where you are, please.”

  Lenares ignored her. A pale bubble appeared, encasing the pale-faced figure of her beloved—his face has the look of the drowned, she realised—and began to expand. She didn’t bother to test the strength of the magical barrier.

  “You should have taken better care of your huanu fragment,” Umu said, clearly delighting in every word. “You thwarted me with it at Corata Pit, and never thought of it again. I see your hand darting to your pocket. How many days ago did you last think to check on it? Robal had it from you, claiming it as part of his own dark plans, some time ago now. Just imagine, girl. With it you could have marched right through my barrier and called your Omeran toy back from the cold lake in which he currently lies. Too bad, Lenares. Too bad you are only half a person. A shame you are so narrowly obsessed with yourself that you do not ever think of the wider picture. And you wanted to be a god! Youl You’d make a splendid anti-god. People would flee from you in case you offered to help them!”

  Lenares gasped at the cruelty in the words, and at their truth. Look what has happened since you began to lead the others, she acknowledged.

  “You see it, don’t you?” the Daughter said, baiting her.

  It’s only truth, the cosmographer told herself. Why should it frighten me?

  But Umu clearly thought such words would damage her, even destroy her. The notion puzzled Lenares. What will happen if I play along? She lowered her head to her chest and began to shake her shoulders, as though sobbing.

  The sound that came from the throne above her was as much a purr as a laugh.

  Stella could do nothing but watch as Kannwar gambled and won, moving from room to room without encountering Umu or indeed any of their fellow travellers. She wondered if he had some control over the House of the Gods, or if Umu and he were in collusion.

  As he strode ahead and she stumbled unwillingly behind, he continued to expand on his theme of his own brilliance and her incompetence. She judged this not as some gloating lord at the moment of his triumph, but more an attempt to keep her off balance to prevent her mounting a defence or even a counterattack.

  It follows, therefore, that he believes me capable of such a counterattack. The thought sharpened her mind.

  “I had to do little to incite Robal to madness,” he was saying. “The man was more than somewhat mad already, the possessor of what he believed was a great love. All I had to do was drive him to jealousy. He was cleverer than I thought, however. I never imagined he’d try to use explosives. It was I who suggested he take the stone from Lenares—though he thought the instructions I gave him were but a dream—and I expected him to try to use it on me directly, as he did at Martje’s house in Sayonae. He’d learned his lesson though. I admired him for that. Others never learn.

  “I had a few scant seconds to save myself. Ah, Stella, even you would have to admire my genius. Not only did I protect myself from the worst of the explosion by diverting it outwards and upwards, I artfully laid my supposedly dying body beside Robal and practically invited him to partake of his own doom. So eager he was, cupping my blood and drinking death to himself.”

  Stella shuddered. It broke her to learn that Robal had succumbed at the last.

  “He’s still alive, of course,” Kannwar remarked. “After a fashion, at least. The angle of the blast killed many more Zizhua than he—or even I—expected. But they have him and will exact their revenge, killing him again and again until the number of his deaths equals the number of theirs. I suspect he will live many months, if not years.”

  Stella leaned forward and vomited on the stone floor of the Children’s Room.

  “I was always going to betray you, of course. But when Umu started playing with her house, I moved my timetable forward somewhat.”

  You are frightened of him, she said into his mind.

  “Indeed I am. From what Arathé and Duon have said, I have very good reason. He grows stronger every day and is ready to claim my fortress for his own. That, Stella, I will not tolerate. Umu can wait: I am going after Husk.”

  He waved a hand and the new-forged link between the House of the Gods and Zizhua City vanished under a pile of rubble.

  “There,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “No escape now, except for us.”

  How can you do this? These are people you lived with for months. You shared danger with them, ate with them, laughed with them.

  “And I’m relieved to be rid of them. Fools and half-wits, without exception. If I were you, Stella, I would keep silent in my presence regarding these people. It would be just as easy for me to slay them all, thus ensuring their silence.”

  But they’ll die anyway, trapped in the House of the Gods.

  So much death, and she again at the Destroyer’s side, an unwilling observer. A dupe. To be remembered in histories as betraying her friends. Again.

  “At least they’ll have time to prepare themselves for death. Something you must envy them if all your talk of the curse of immortality is more than mere posturing.”

  Did you ever love me? The question sounded plaintive even to her own ears.

  “Of course, my queen,” he said, bowing slightly. “But in my own way.”

  By Alkuon, the huanu stone had to be worth something. It negated magic, so dead Omiy had said; then let it negate the surely magical effect of changing rooms in the House of the Gods. Let it undo the magical snares his companions—his children—had fallen foul of. Let it be of some use. Or, by every god of the sea, he would throw it away.

  In these moments of terror, separated from his family and surrounded by walls so terrifyingly reminiscent of Fossa, Cylene was his rock. Noetos wanted to stand in the middle of the room and howl his rage; Cylene took him by the arm, steadied him, and led him onward.

  “Come on, love,” she whispered in his ear. “Our enemy may have disadvantaged us, but the battle is not over. Not yet.”

  Snare after snare had been activated as they walked through the rooms. In the Children’s Room, the giant toys had begun hurling themselves randomly around the enclosure, as though propelled by some petulant hand. Probably re-enacting some earlier time, Cylene speculated. They managed to avoid most of the objects, though the huanu stone in Noetos’s hand may have diverted a few of the swifter shapes. The floor of the Blood Room turned to… well, blood, Noetos guessed, but not under his feet. Again, the protection came from the huanu stone. The Sculpture Room ensnared Cylene momentarily as she touched one of the outstretched limbs, but Noetos broke her free by holding the stone at the place where her arm had fused to the statue.

  I suppose it is of some use, after all, he admitted.

  Finally, through the corridor, he spied the room he was looking for: where Torve had been castrated weeks before, and where Keppia had been driven out of Dryman, at least for a time. At least, he assumed it was the Throne Room: the thrones seemed to have been rebuilt. He approached the entrance, Cylene by his side.

  A figure sitting atop one of the thrones peered in his direction. The room began to fade.

  “Oh no, you don’t,” Noetos breathed, and held the huanu stone in front of him as he strode through the entrance. The room froze, half-dematerialised. Entering it was like breaking
through a thick spider’s web.

  The figure on the throne was Conal the priest. No, not Conal—Umu. The Daughter wearing a body of rotting meat. At the base of her throne cowered another figure. Cylene’s twin, Lenares.

  “Ah. The man with his stone—and Lenares’ sister. Perfect. Welcome, welcome.”

  The dead priest beckoned them forward as though he—she—had been expecting them. Could this have been part of Umu’s plan? Had she allowed for the likelihood of his making it to the Throne Room?

  “What have you done with my children?” Noetos asked, his voice as hard as he could make it, disguising the quaking inside him.

  “Of course, your children. A more sensible man than you would have written them off, realising that my defeat was worth more than their lives. But you are not a sensible man, are you? You are a child, able to focus on nothing more than the next innocent receptacle of your wrath. And thereby you can be held hostage.”

  She drew something out of Conal’s bloodstained pocket. “For this to work I needed something from each of you. I took hair from your son and your daughter; be thankful I didn’t take anything less easy to replace.”

  “When did you take it?” Cylene asked, her head tilted to one side, birdlike. She took small steps towards her sister, who sat, head bowed, as though she’d not noticed their arrival.

  “Does it matter?”

  “You are sorely reduced for a god,” Cylene continued. “Look at you, wearing a body decaying all around you. How can you stand it? Walking around in it, following us northwards, stopping and going through our cast-offs, picking over our food, our combings, our sleeping places, looking for hair or shit or skin. How demeaning.”

  Cylene had clearly guessed right. Noetos supposed the god would have flushed had there been blood left in Conal’s body. Certainly it drew itself up and regarded Cylene stiffly.

  “What do you know of godhood?” the voice said. “Are you like your sister then, lusting after power and knowledge without being prepared to pay the price?”

  “I am nothing like my sister. The things I desire, Umu, you can never have.”