Dark Heart (Husk)

by Russell Kirkpatrick

  This, she realised, is the hole in the world.

  Dare she, could she, centre herself here? Did she have the capacity to build a web of numbers here in the antithesis of everything? Or leave a numerical construction perhaps, linked to her, something that would go wherever the hole went? Something she would recognise later? No, she decided, she would not centre herself here, not yet. Not when there was something—someone—else to centre on. But she could, yes she could, attach something here, for even absence had its own shape, and any shape could be mathematically defined. Defined, then pinned down.

  After what seemed to her an hour or more of careful thought, she decided to employ the special number Qarismi of Kutrubul had discovered. She began to work on an equation.

  Someone had made a mistake, letting her in here.

  As she spun her web of numbers, Lenares fancied she handed a thread to an invisible hand, the gentle hand of a woman who had been the only mother she had ever known.

  Then Lenares’ eyes opened, her hearing returned, and she tasted blood in her mouth, no doubt from her tongue. The people around her had not changed. Captain Duon still fussed over the amount of food they had been given, Dryman looked on with an unreadable expression, and Torve was still away somewhere practising his Defiance. She had no idea how much time had passed. People from the city below the hill moved about purposefully, many of them gathering together, probably getting ready to return to the ruins of their homes. She could hear their babble, mixed with the sound of birds about their morning songs. But everything had changed in the brief moment of infinity.

  She took a moment to think about it, to remember, before the memory faded. Her link to Talamaq was gone. She could feel no drawing to the city she had grown up in; instead, a growing disquiet about what she had experienced—endured—during those years. It was as though a glamour cast upon her had finally revealed itself. Why had she always felt comfortable in Talamaq? Especially when her life had been filled with torment and ridicule? Something to be considered later. She would not forget to address the question.

  The nearest she could come with words to what had changed within her was that she no longer saw with Talamaq eyes; no longer felt with Talamaq skin. Since she had left the great southern city she’d felt out of place, separated from her real life; but now she felt completely at home exactly where she was.

  I am centred…on myself.

  But what happens when you move? she asked herself. How can you tie your numbers to a moving centre?

  The answer was immediate.

  I already have a system of relative numbers. I have tied a trap in the hole in the world. Or perhaps one of the holes in the world. If I tie myself to a few more places, some of them unmoving, I can triangulate myself if necessary, and use my relative numbers most of the time.

  No absolute certainty?

  No. No, and I don’t have certainty in any part of my life. So why not use numbers rooted in probability? Does Torve love me? Probably. Does he always tell me the truth? Probably not. Who is Dryman? Certainly not whom logic says—and Torve hints—he must be.

  One question she could not answer. Am I still special, or have I become like everyone else?

  Torve had not completed his Defiance for days. The hectic, unreal passage through Nomansland had curtailed his ritual of physical discipline. Now he understood how Lenares must feel: confused, disoriented, deprived of her centre. He wished to talk to her about it, to hear her voice, her peculiar way of assessing things that so often made sense. He just wanted to hear her voice.

  He dared not speak to Lenares, however; dared not say to her what he wanted to say, not while he was anywhere near. She didn’t know the danger. One careless word, a single unguarded gesture betraying their feelings for each other, could see Torve punished. Killed. It seemed so cruel. Just when life became worth living, it might well be taken away.

  Torve threw himself into his Defiance, but it no longer held any restorative magic for him, not after last night.

  He had managed to avoid Dryman since their arrival in the north, but not long after the others had settled to sleep, he had been pulled roughly awake by a hand on his shoulder. Even before the man spoke, Torve knew what he wanted, what was going to happen. He had retched, barely keeping the contents of his stomach down.

  ‘Your presence is required,’ Dryman said in the bantering tone he’d always used. ‘Come on, did you honestly think we’d put this behind us? We have much yet to learn before I finally dip my hand in the fountain of youth. Your insights are always valuable, and you are the only one I can trust.’

  ‘Please,’ Torve said, the words slurring from lips slack with dread. ‘Haven’t we learned enough? Can we not leave these people alone?’

  ‘Now, Torve, you know better,’ the man chided. ‘You can’t resist me. Must I make it a command? Would you break the love between us? Must I reduce you to what you are—an animal?’

  ‘Yes.’ It was a whisper. ‘Command me, my lord.’

  ‘Very well.’

  Torve felt the familiar weight settle on the man, the weight of presence that he had always ascribed to thousands of years of unbroken command, handed down from emperor to emperor. But was it? And was he imagining it, or had it become much stronger of late? Lenares would know. She would work it out, if only he could talk freely to her.

  ‘Torve, I command your obedience in this. You will accompany me tonight as we continue our research here in the northlands.’

  ‘Yes, my lord, I will.’ I have no choice. But someday, she will find you out. May the day come soon.

  So they had hunted, he and Dryman. They had gone into the city, where rubble still fell from broken buildings, crashing into the street, and searched for subjects under an intermittent, cloud-occluded halfmoon. Dryman had shown almost no regard for his own safety, just an avidity in his search. Torve did as little searching as he could, but it was he who found the woman, her legs snared by a beam protruding from the roof of her house.

  Her face was pale with pain and blood loss, but it lit up when Torve brushed away the debris obscuring her. She babbled what was obviously thanks in her northern language, but her talk evaporated when Torve made no move to free her.

  She eased an arm out from under her body and held it out to him, a clear gesture in any language. Torve turned away from her, unable to bear it.

  ‘What have you found?’ Dryman asked jovially. ‘Oh, clever Omeran, she’s perfect. Come on then, let’s get to work. We’ll use whatever comes to hand. I charge you with remembering every expression on her face.’ Immediately the man started scrabbling in the debris for something sharp: a nail, glass, a wooden splinter.

  Torve doubted how much he would be able to see in the darkness, but he would try to obey.

  A few minutes later, after the woman realised what was happening to her and began screaming, Dryman cursed. ‘This would be much more scientific if she spoke our language. I’ve underestimated how much of this depends on what our subjects tell us.’

  Torve mouthed ‘Sorry’ to the woman whenever Dryman was otherwise occupied, and when the Emperor of Elamaq went off in search of something sharper, he tried to explain the unexplainable, but of course she could not understand what he was saying. Torve hoped she could see that this was not his will, but he doubted she understood anything beyond her pain.

  Eventually she seemed to find numbness, an acceptance that she was going to die, and Torve supposed he was grateful. He wished he could change places with her, so that tonight might see his death.

  ‘Bah,’ Dryman muttered. ‘She will be of no further use to us. We have learned all we can. End her, Torve, while I consider how best to spend the rest of the evening.’

  How could he resist the command? As he took her bloodied head between his hands, he cursed his ancestors and the three thousand years of breeding ensuring an Omeran’s absolute obedience to his or her master. He braced himself, then twisted his hands sharply. The woman’s neck broke, a merciful sound in a night d
renched with suffering.

  And more to come.

  Torve could hear other cries from amid the ruins, some strong, others failing. He laid the woman tenderly on the ground and watered her face with his tears.

  Evidently his master decided he had risked enough in the city. On the way back to the hill, however, they found a young lad frog-hunting by moonlight. He afforded Dryman much more gratification than had the woman, but much less information. Not only did the lad only speak the northern tongue, Dryman made Torve force a stick between his teeth to limit the sound he made. But at this point his master was not seeking information. Torve had often observed this in their experiments beneath the Talamaq Palace. Children pleased him, because they didn’t know when to lose hope.

  With patience and skill developed over decades of research, Dryman brought the boy to the door of death, made him look through, and read his body for signs of what he saw there. The Emperor had always been good at this. Through the door, and back. Through, and back. Watching all the time for any hint, any chink in the power of death, any way to cheat the darkness awaiting them all.

  ‘There!’ Dryman said. ‘Watch the muscles relax. Is that knowledge of the coming freedom from pain, I wonder, or joy at what he’s seen awaiting him? Can the keeper of the door be bought or bribed? Does Death’s Herald see all, or can his eye be blinded? I have to know!’

  ‘What will it matter, if you are able to wrest the secret of immortality from the Undying Man? Master, why must we continue this research?’

  ‘Because I will it!’ Dryman snarled, and his face, as he turned it towards Torve, glowed with an inhuman light. ‘Because I do not live like other men, and I should not be forced to die like them!’

  ‘You have power,’ Torve said gently. ‘Must you also live forever?’

  ‘How can one have power when death but awaits its chance to end it? True power can only belong to an immortal.’

  Torve felt the life drain from the boy lying broken between them, but said nothing, continuing instead to distract his master.

  ‘And when I die? You will train another Omeran, no doubt, to replace me?’

  ‘Who knows? I may decide you should remain by my side forever. Would that not be a fitting reward, Torve, for your unflagging devotion?’

  Torve knew his master would be watching, but could not stop himself shuddering. Doing this forever? He could imagine nothing worse.

  ‘Ah, Torve, he has slipped away from us while we talked. Fool! Why did you not pay attention?’

  Torve ignored the man’s ravings. If you haven’t learned much tonight, master, I have. You are vulnerable when absorbed by your research. Watch out: one day my Lenares will catch you and kill you herself. And the moment you’re dead, I will be free.

  Torve finished his Defiance, his body shaking with the effort. The vigorous exercises were traditional among the Omeran, and had evolved over thousands of years into a way to suppress hatred and rage, to allow them to channel their emotions productively in the service of their masters. A defiance of all that had been done to them. ‘It is why we have survived when all other races fell to the Elamaq,’ Torve’s father had told him in the days before he’d been taken to become the Emperor’s pet. But now he wondered whether the Defiance kept Omerans in thrall.

  Torve had been unsure what to think when he had been commanded by the Emperor to accompany Captain Duon’s great expedition to the northlands. He was to look out for the blood of immortality, the Emperor had told him. For whom could the Emperor trust, apart from his faithful slave, to bring the blood back south without sampling it along the way? Eventually Torve decided to be pleased by the opportunity, especially since it afforded him the chance to be close to the intriguing young cosmographer. Yet the Emperor had clearly not trusted him, for after the events of the Valley of the Damned had played out, and the great Amaqi army had been destroyed, Torve had discovered that the Emperor of Talamaq had hidden himself within his own expedition.

  For a time Torve wondered why he had not recognised his master. Yes, the Emperor had gone everywhere and done everything behind a golden mask, and no one, not even Torve, his closest confidant, knew what his uncovered face looked like. But the voice, the sardonic tone, the burning eyes, ought to have betrayed the man. Nevertheless, Torve had not even suspected the real identity of Dryman the mercenary soldier until the night they spent with the Children of the Desert, when Dryman had revealed himself as the Emperor and forced Torve to accompany him on a hunt. They had taken a young girl that night, snatched her right out of her tent, from between her sleeping parents.

  But what surprised Torve—no, shocked him—was Lenares’ inability to recognise the Emperor. She had the uncanny talent to assess anyone she met using her strange vision of the world—the numbers never lie, she told Torve—and had done so when she had first met the Emperor. She had summarised his master perfectly. ‘You want to live forever,’ she’d told him. ‘You are afraid to die.’

  The Emperor had been angered by that. Shocked that a halfwit girl had seen through him. So when the Children of the Desert had confronted their guests about the death of one of their own, Torve had expected Lenares to unmask Dryman as the murderous Emperor, thus condemning the man to death and setting Torve free. But she had not. Not because she could keep a secret, much less that she thought this a secret worth keeping. No, she had said nothing because she simply hadn’t recognised him.

  Something about the soldier bothered her, Torve knew. She had said so on occasion. It was all there: in his voice, his manner, the hunger in his deep eyes, even the callus on the bridge of his nose where the mask usually rested. But she could not see! No matter how many hints Torve offered; clues that skirted right to the edge of the prohibition laid upon him not to reveal Dryman’s true identity.

  He could only think that Dryman had spread some sort of glamour over them. But the Emperor had rejected magic, along with everything else that came from the gods. So how could this be?

  He would wait, he would watch, he would learn. And somehow he would tell Lenares what she needed to know without breaking his vow of obedience. Then this dreadful grind of torture and death would finally be over, and he and Lenares could be together.

  The first reports that Raceme had been occupied overnight by the Neherians began filtering back to the hill above the city soon after dawn. Knots of Racemen began to gather, coalescing into crowds, and finally forming a great assembly around the largest of the bonfires. Duon followed them, accompanied by the enigmatic Dryman.

  ‘Tell me what they say, Captain,’ Dryman ordered.

  Duon bridled at the casual assumption of command, but said nothing. Time enough later for confrontation.

  ‘A few of the men went into the city just before dawn,’ Duon reported. ‘They got as far as the Money Exchange—I don’t know where that is, before you ask—and were confronted by red-bibbed soldiers, armed with swords and spears, coming the other way. The southern gate had been undefended, so the Racemen suppose the Neherians were only then securing the city. As the sun rose the Racemen could see red bibs atop buildings and in the intersections of the main streets. A fight broke out and one of the Racemen was killed. The others ran away, though that is not how they describe it, brave soldiers they imagine themselves to be. They left their friend’s body behind, of course.’

  And how many bodies did you leave behind, brave leader? The cynical voice took Duon by surprise, as it always did.

  ‘So, in essence, this tribe’s town has been conquered by another, stronger tribe,’ Dryman said. ‘Is this of any real importance? Will it prevent us resuming our task?’

  ‘Forgive me, soldier,’ Duon said, his mouth drying as he spoke, knowing he risked much. ‘I have been meaning to ask. What task is this?’

  Dryman turned to the captain. Duon searched the man’s face in vain for any sign of pity, of mercy, of humanity. He hadn’t meant to precipitate the confrontation so soon, but here it was, and he could no longer avoid it.

  ‘Wh
at task?’ Dryman echoed. ‘The task your Emperor set you, of course. You of all people should remember. It was you, after all, who reported to us the wealth and vulnerability of the northlands.’

  ‘But we are only four—’

  ‘Has the Emperor appeared to you? Has he told you to abandon your task? Where is your pride in your commission?’

  ‘Look here, man, pride is not the issue. What can we achieve? We were supposed to be here with thirty thousand men!’

  ‘Ah, so obedience to your Emperor is a matter of convenience? When you no longer have the resources you asked for, obedience ends?’

  That stung. ‘These are just words, Dryman. Anyone can see the futility of what you’re asking. How many baskets of treasure can we bring home on four backs? Wouldn’t we do better to return to Talamaq and apprise the Emperor of the failure of his mission?’

  The mercenary took a step closer to the captain. ‘Think on this then. Have you asked yourself why we were directed northward after our defeat? Clearly, someone or something wants us to continue with our mission. You came through the hole with the rest of us. Have you not yet asked yourself what could have been the purpose of this supernatural intervention?’

  Duon paused. And into the silence came the voice from the back of his head, the voice that had tormented him ever since the day they’d left Talamaq.

  Really, how can I do anything with you if you insist on remaining so obtuse?

  Shut up, Duon thought. I don’t believe in you; you are a product of my fear of failure—

  Oh, come on. You know I’m real. And if I’m real, why resist the notion that there are things going on you know nothing about?

  I don’t want to know anything about them. Or you. Stubborn, a child refusing to face reality. Duon knew he was behaving like a fool.

  Do you want to wrest back power from Dryman? the voice asked seductively.

  Oh.

  ‘I don’t know anything about supernatural forces,’ Duon said to Dryman. ‘I’m just a soldier. I’d need to have new orders to deal with supernatural forces.’