Beyond the Wall of Time

by Russell Kirkpatrick

  A dozen nods.

  “If we all go,” she added, “the thread will most likely disappear and we will not be able to return.”

  “The alternative is that we leave you, Torve and Cylene behind. You are coming with us.” The fisherman was adamant.

  “How do we reach the thread?” Cylene asked.

  “The others should grasp it,” Lenares said. “You, Torve and I only have to visualise it. Everyone ready?”

  Cries of assent. Unlike her, they had spent long enough in this weird place.

  “Travel,” she said.

  CHAPTER 19

  ANDRATAN

  “MY FRONT DOOR,” SAID THE DESTROYER, nodding to his right. “From the inside.” Beyond a broad hallway stood wide wooden doors, barred and reinforced with iron. They looked every day of their nearly two thousand years of age. “Using these doors would have given us an easier approach, but I couldn’t risk the possibility that my guards had been suborned. Deorc is clever enough on his own; allied with Umu, there is no end to the tricks they might have devised.”

  The first of those tricks claimed the red-haired servant soon after. At the top of a wide stair located at the far end of the hallway, the man paused and drew a flint from his pocket. The corridor ahead was unlit, so he struck a spark and ignited the nearest torch. The thing exploded in his face, showering him with flame. With a scream he threw himself to the floor and began to roll in an attempt to douse the flames.

  The Destroyer stood and watched the man die, his arms folded.

  “Damn you!” Stella shrieked, and threw herself towards the man.

  She ran into a solid wall of air and fell to the ground, bruised. The thing on the other side of the invisible wall screamed for a long time, then fell silent. His body twitched a few more times and went limp.

  A pair of boots moved into Stella’s blurred field of vision. “Imagine you are a god sitting somewhere in this fortress, waiting like a spider for the fly to fall into her trap. Your first snare is triggered. It’s a simple snare, one unlikely to trouble your opponent. So you build another feature into the snare: should anyone attempt to douse the flames, the corridor itself bursts into flame.”

  “How… how did you know?”

  “I don’t. I had to stand there and watch my hand-picked servant burn to death, not knowing whether this was a simple trap designed to be an irritant, or something more elaborate.”

  “With a mind like yours,” she said evenly, “you can invent an excuse to justify any action you choose. Even a cowardly one.”

  His expression froze. “Cowardly? You stand in the Square of Rainbows and face down the Most High in his anger, then talk to me about cowardly.”

  “I didn’t call you a coward,” she said, “but to let your servant burn to death was an act of cowardice. Or, more correctly, a cowardly inaction.”

  “You’re a prisoner in my fortress and you choose to bandy words with me?”

  “I’m not sixteen any more, you beast. You can’t intimidate me with words.” She smiled at him. “You might be two thousand years old, but you’ve never before dealt with anyone of my experience. It is you, not I, who is at a disadvantage.”

  He frowned, pulled his collar forward and stepped over her. With a flick of his hand he banished the wall of air; a further gesture pulled her to her feet.

  The Destroyer said little after this, and their journey through the largely deserted fortress grew noticeably slower. Stella had a reasonably good memory, but after the third unexpected change of direction she realised she had no chance of finding her way back to the front door. They passed many distinctive features: a bright wall-hanging eerily similar to the carving in the Great Hall of Instruere, a suit of armour built for someone at least ten feet tall, a mosaic running the entire length of a hallway, a sequence of arched windows high up in a wall, letting in moonlight—all combining to impart a less gloomy impression than she would have expected.

  There were further booby traps, but these seemed designed to irritate rather than destroy.

  “There is a limit to how much magic one can leave in a place unsustained by one’s continued presence,” the Destroyer explained as he held her steady over a sudden-appearing gap in the floor. “These traps were, I think, intended to stretch me thinner, making me protect any companions I might have with me, rendering me vulnerable. Umu wasn’t to know I would choose to leave our companions behind.”

  “You sealed them in the House of the Gods.”

  “For their own good!” He set her down on the nearest solid floor. “What happened to my servant could have happened to Noetos, or Sauxa, or Moralye. How many of them would you have wanted to see die before your eyes?”

  Until today I would have believed you, she fumed silently at him. But they had no way of travelling here in time, whether or not you blocked the exits to the House of the Gods. How stupid do you think I am?

  She chose not to vocalise her thought, just in case he chose to answer.

  At the base of perhaps the sixth set of stairs since the Sea Door, the Destroyer halted in his tracks, one hand going to his temple.

  Stella cast an eye left and right, searching for the trap.

  “Huh,” he said, after a long pause. “I am constantly amazed by that woman.”

  “Who? What woman?”

  “I’ve said enough. Prepare yourself, my queen: we have visitors.”

  Having no idea what he meant, Stella simply nodded and followed her captor as he retraced their steps all the way to the front door.

  Duon found it difficult, no, impossible, to understand what happened after Lenares uttered the magic word. The beam of light suddenly came alive in his hand, jerking him upwards so fast he thought his neck would break. He could see other hands above and below his own, but not their owners; beyond a few finger-widths from the beam all was dark. Well, perhaps not: in the distance, far below him, lay the bronze map. It had become far larger, world-sized; or he had become far smaller.

  A moment later he began to descend towards the map-world, faster and faster, heading towards an ocean—no, an island—the ocean—the island, with a castle in one corner—the coast. They were about to be smeared on a dark coast.

  He slammed to a stop, against all reason on his feet. He looked down: there were no dents in the soft ground where his feet had landed. Around him the others stood and stared at their surroundings, faintly visible in the darkness.

  “Better than the blue fire,” Sauxa said.

  “I need help,” Noetos called, his voice strained.

  Duon spun around: the voice had been close behind him. In doing so he almost walked off into nothingness. Lenares, it seemed, had hit her target—barely. Noetos lay prone on the ground, his head hanging over a cliff, the sea far below. He must have fallen, perhaps hurt himself. Duon rushed to his side.

  The fisherman was unhurt. At the end of his arm, however, dangled Cylene. Ah, not quite on target after all. Duon threw himself to the ground and fastened his hand onto the woman’s wrist, just above the fisherman’s huge fist. Her wide eyes stared up at him, not quite in focus, as though she didn’t know where she was.

  “Thank Alkuon, my friend. I was losing her.”

  Together they hauled Cylene up to the top of the bank, where she lay on the grass and was immediately sick.

  “Everyone else here?” Duon called, seized by a sudden anxiety.

  Fifteen pairs of eyes searched the immediate area. To their backs lay a cliff perhaps fifty paces high, below which the sea battered against needle-sharp rocks. Under their feet, wet ankle-high grass stretched into the darkness in front of them. In the distance a single light gleamed.

  “Stay still!” Noetos cried out, looking up from where he bent over Cylene. “You might walk off the cliff.”

  Everyone froze at that.

  “I am sorry,” Lenares said into the silence.

  Cylene raised herself onto her elbows. “You have nothing to be sorry about.”

  “I nearly killed you.”r />
  “That you did,” came the answer, swift as thought. “But in the process you saved me. Saved us all. We owe our lives to you, Lenares.”

  There, Duon thought, nodding his head. It could hardly be expressed more clearly than that.

  Fourteen people thought on Cylene’s words for a moment.

  “Where are we, does anyone know?” asked Sautea. “Don’t mean to sound ungrateful and all that, but I can’t see a castle.”

  “You mean you can’t see in the dark?” Noetos chaffed his offsider. “There could be a whole mountain range in front of us and we wouldn’t know. Though I’ll give you some assistance, old man. See that lone star there, just above the horizon?”

  “Aye, young fellow, I see it.” The exaggerated patience in Sautea’s voice indicated how familiar he was with this sort of by-play.

  “Don’t tell the others,” Noetos whispered loudly. “It’s not a star.”

  Sautea smiled good-naturedly, recognising, as Duon himself did, the fisherman’s attempts to lighten their peril, landed as they were on the most ill-named island in the world. Andratan was not a place for the faint of heart; even on his previous visit, while entertained as befitting a representative from a foreign power, Duon had sensed the despair in the place, ingrained in the very stones. He’d visited the legendary dungeons below Talamaq Palace a time or two, and they were almost pleasant compared to the dark and brutal caves he’d been shown on his guided tour of Andratan. The tour during which he’d likely been infected by Husk’s spike.

  They set out in the direction of the single light. If that was the light at the top of the Tower of Farsight, which, the castellan had claimed, was always kept burning, the fortress was either not as large as he remembered, or much further away.

  The latter, it seemed initially, until they surmounted a ridge visible only by being slightly greyer than the dark vale in front of them and saw the fortress in its fullness, no longer partially hidden by the hills of the island. Duon shook his head. His memory had sold Andratan short.

  Outlined against the starry horizon was a dark city, or so it seemed. To the far left, abutting into the ocean, was the Sea Tower, taller than any of the three towers of Talamaq Palace. High in its flank a walkway connected it to the Tower of the East, named, Duon recalled, because it was the place where the Undying Man met his guests from Bhrudwo. City Factors, mostly, though once it had housed the Maghdi Dasht. Now there was a name of ill repute.

  The third and shortest of the five great towers, the Tower of Voices, was the most feared of all, his guide had told him proudly. It squatted over the deepest dungeons and the Hall of Voices where, it was said, the Undying Man peeled apart the minds of his prisoners and took from them everything they had, including their sanity. The guide had laughed at that, in an attempt to take the menace from the words, but Duon had not doubted them. He had not been shown the Hall of Voices itself, for which he’d been thankful.

  Odd, that when Heredrew had been revealed as the Undying Man, how little menace he had communicated, unlike his counterpart Dryman, unmasked as the Emperor of Elamaq—and the god Keppia. Perhaps it was a matter of degree: nothing Heredrew could do would match the vicious insanity demonstrated by Duon’s own ruler. In fact, the ruler of Bhrudwo had been urbane. Gracious, even. Which did nothing to explain why he had fled the House of the Gods with Stella.

  The fourth tower was the newest, having been capped less than fifty years ago. Called the Spindle, it was more of a spire than a tower. His guide had not explained its purpose, despite Duon’s questioning.

  Inevitably and finally, his eye was drawn to the Tower of Farsight, a thousand steps from its base to the light set atop it. Symbolic, of course: even at that dizzy height one could not see the mainland, let alone the rest of Bhrudwo. It contained· the Undying Man’s vast collection of books and scrolls, and it and the Sea Tower housed most of the fortress’s servants and soldiers.

  The five towers surmounted a vast complex of halls, vaults, keeps and courtyards, all surrounded by a tall crenellated wall. The visual and emotional impact as they drew close to it was overwhelming, enough to induce a pain at the back of his head.

  “Big place,” Sauxa said.

  * * *

  Noetos had taken himself away to speak to his children. Arathé was suffering from a headache, she said, and Anomer was worried. Lenares spied Cylene walking through the darkness alone and decided to join her.

  “I am very grateful for what you said about me,” Lenares told her. “Most of the time my specialness goes unnoticed.”

  “Not by me,” Cylene said. “I’m so happy to have a sister at last.”

  “But you had sisters. I spoke to Sena.”

  “My mother’s creatures,” Cylene said. “Sena barely had any self-will left in her. I never shared anything special with her. Never spoke to her, actually.”

  “And you want to share special things with me?” Lenares could not think of anything she wanted more. To be special in a sister’s eyes! To have secret confidences whispered in her ear!

  As if echoing her thoughts, Cylene drew closer to Lenares and spoke quietly. “You know, there are things you and Torve could do together that don’t need his… ah, equipment to accomplish.”

  It took Lenares a moment to work out what her sister meant. “What?”

  Cylene licked her lips, as though about to attempt something difficult. “You’ve seen animals mate. I know you have: I can remember watching the horses with you. We thought they were fighting.”

  A memory of sound and movement presented itself to Lenares’ mind. “Vaguely,” she said.

  “The stallion mounts the mare with no concern for how she feels. Sometimes her body is not ready and she is damaged as a result.” Her face folded inwards for a moment. “But you, sister, are lucky. Your stallion has no urgent need to be relieved. He will not mount you unprepared. He will not damage you. So you can take your time and teach each other that which gives you pleasure.”

  “Oh, Cylene,” Lenares said, and tears began to run down her cheeks. This was what she needed to hear, had wanted explained to her in the town square at Mensaya. More than explanations, she just wanted to hear someone say it was allowable for her to find joy with Torve. “What gives a man pleasure?”

  Her sister giggled and enfolded Lenares in a hug. “It’s one thing to give a man pleasure, and I know all about that, but it’s another to love him with your body. So I am on my own voyage of discovery. Be sure I will share my findings with you, if you promise to put them into practice.”

  “I will,” Lenares said. “If we pass through this fortress alive.”

  Cylene shuddered in her arms.

  And so we come to the sharp end of the adventure, Noetos told himself grimly as the travellers approached the fortress of Andratan.

  The fortress hunkered on the landscape like an immense animal, asleep for the moment. High above them the single light winked like a half-lidded eye ready to spring open at the slightest sign of disturbance. There’ll be more than a slight sign, Noetos thought, fighting down waves of uneasiness.

  Arathé clung to his left arm, muttering wordlessly to herself. A headache, she’d claimed, only a headache. But they had been on this journey long enough to mistrust purely natural events. She has a conduit to Husk, who may well now be in the possession of a god. What will happen if that possession is challenged? Where might the god seek to go next?

  Noetos desperately wanted to run. Run down the path leading away from the door looming over them, run to the shore, commandeer a boat, any sort of boat, and put out to sea. He’d hated the sea his whole life, but now it seemed his family’s only place of safety.

  Irrational, he told himself. It didn’t matter where his daughter hid, she could be reached through the magical connection to Husk. On the ocean, in the favelas of Malayu, or under her blankets in Fisher House at home in Fossa, it was all the same—she could be found anywhere. As could Anomer, through his sister. Duon, who shared a similar connection. A
nd, through his daughter, Noetos himself.

  His children knew this, yet they were determined to go on. How could he do any less? Yet these thoughts did nothing to dampen his incipient terror.

  A hundred paces from the door Noetos turned and held his arms up, palms forward, then motioned the travellers behind the last piece of cover: a few low, wind-battered bushes.

  “We should have a strategy for this,” he said in a voice that sounded disappointingly weak to his ears. Fearful. “Otherwise we are doomed to react to the plans of others.”

  He took a deep breath. With this moment in mind he had wooed and won Cyclamere to his cause. The blunt Padouki, his former tutor, stepped forward at the fisherman’s signal. His face was marble, showing none of the uncertainty Noetos himself felt.

  “I yield to the Swordmaster of Roudhos,” Noetos said.

  “The Duke of Roudhos and I have discussed our approach many times in recent days,” said Cyclamere in clipped tones. “And, as you know, I have spent time with each of you, discussing your strengths in preparation for the inevitable confrontation in this fortress.”

  He discussed their weaknesses too, at some length, Noetos added mentally. But he does not mention them now. Not a word, not a hint of the negative immediately before a battle: his tutor had repeated the lesson enough times to make it a mantra.

  “We have two powerful magicians at our disposal,” the old warrior continued. “The children of Noetos have ably demonstrated their ability to protect us, as Captain Duon of Elamaq and the Duke of Roudhos himself will attest to, after vanquishing the Neherians in the Summer Palace at Raceme.”

  Good, remind them of past glories. Not that Raceme was in any way glorious.

  “They contained the attack of the gods at Lake Woe, and at Corata Pit fought off Umu herself. Anomer and Arathé have demonstrated the ability to draw power from everything around them, which I have been told is the mark of a superior magician.”

  Told by the Undying Man, who is no longer with us, Noetos thought; who may, in fact, be one of our adversaries. Certainly mine.