Dark Heart (Husk)

by Russell Kirkpatrick

  Heredrew closed his eyes. He was so caught in his memory that, had she been armed, Stella could have struck him down where he stood.

  ‘He looked out for a moment, then turned and spoke to me. Stella, I have no doubt you remember the servant I assigned to you when you were my guest—’

  ‘Captive,’ she retorted.

  ‘Captive, then. I honour the man’s memory, though I don’t expect you to believe that. I do know he died many years ago, and was buried in front of the Hall of Meeting in Instruere with a full public ceremony. That pleased me.’

  Stella found herself shocked at the level of knowledge he displayed of her affairs. She forced herself to make no comment about this. ‘You treated him shamefully. For that alone you have earned my undying hatred.’

  The man did no more than shrug his shoulders. ‘On the day you left me, seventy years ago, and took my servant with you, he spoke to me with the voice of the Most High. I will never forget it, of course. Two years ago I heard the voice of the Most High again, this time from the mouth of a Halite priest.’

  Dawn spread its gentle wings across the sky as Stella struggled with the familiar nausea associated with thinking about this man, her enemy. She closed her eyes and tried to regain control of her stomach, resigned to this story’s likely end.

  ‘What did the voice tell you?’

  ‘He gave me the choice I am giving you,’ came the calm reply. ‘I chose to become involved; or, at least, I told the voice I would. Naturally, I still reserve my options.

  ‘I was told that the time of the world’s destruction has come. The two rebellious children of the Most High have found a way to break into the world. This will allow them to dominate more directly the civilisations of the three great continents. He told me that this would likely lead to a gradual decay in the world’s natural order, beginning with the very fluxes upon which the earth stands, causing earthquakes and fountains of fire to burst forth from the ground. While I did not doubt the truth of the words, the fact that I had that very morning spoken with a scholar who reported significantly increased earth tremors throughout northern Bhrudwo helped confirm the message. Of course, you would have heard of the recent devastating Malayu earthquake. No? Do you no longer have reliable sources in Bhrudwo? Hmm. I will have to supply some.

  ‘By itself this is no confirmation of the truth of the avatar’s words. After all, it is a common tendency of humans everywhere to notice only those data that confirm a trend. However, the man predicted a rise in other features: storms, floods, whirlwinds, droughts and all manner of imbalances in the world’s physical processes. Such things will gather in intensity until they tear the world apart. I believe we are seeing these things in Bhrudwo now. My informants tell me, however, that Faltha remains relatively unaffected. I have no information on how the southern continent fares.

  ‘I argued with the voice, asserting that this state of affairs was his fault. You’ve read my scroll, you know my point of view, and I argued it vigorously. He chose not to dispute this, which angered me, pointing out instead that no matter whose fault it was, we would all suffer together. The world, he said, would die a slow death, torn apart by the growing metaphysical instability initially caused when he was driven out of the southern continent, and now fatally exploited by his son and daughter.

  ‘The voice invited me once again to assist him in putting right what had gone wrong so long ago. It seemed not to matter to him that I had spent two thousand years killing those who served him. I thought this indecent, and told him so. He evaded the point.

  ‘I then said to him: “You’re going to tell me that if you interfere directly in this matter, the fabric of the world will immediately come apart.” He acknowledged this. If the children of the Most High were to be defeated, he told me, it was we who would do it.’

  ‘We,’ Stella said wearily. ‘This is a fireside tale, and a poor one at that. Two immortals, a man and a woman, to face the evil son and daughter of the Most High. I seem to remember a similar-sounding story presented to our court by the Deuverran Players just last year. These stories are always about the fate of the world and combat between men and gods. Force me into captivity again if you must, Kannwar, but don’t bore me to death first.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ the man said, and he sounded it. ‘If you reduce any story down to its bare essentials it will sound like a fanciful fireside tale. Perhaps you should ask the priest himself. He would likely give you a much more convincing version of my tale, since it came out of his mouth.’

  ‘Ask the priest? You mean Conal?’

  ‘I don’t remember his name. But the young priest who travels with you is the one used by the Most High to deliver his message to me in Andratan.’

  And so the circle closes, Stella thought, just as she had feared. No wonder she had sensed something about him.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ The man sprang forward from the railing as though avoiding an arrow. He halted a pace from her.

  ‘No. The voice did not mention me by name. If it had, you would have told me. So, no. Do it yourself. I offer you the same answer you offered him two thousand years ago, and for exactly the same reason. No!’

  ‘You will have no answers from me if you refuse,’ he said, keeping his voice level only by obvious effort.

  ‘No answers, then,’ she said, finally throwing open the gates she had kept so closely guarded. ‘Fine. I doubt you have any. Certainly no answers that help you understand what it means to be human. A public apology to me should be delivered with the knowledge of those hearing it. And should you eventually apologise properly, it will not be enough to satisfy me. Not nearly enough. Were you to give me a year of your life as a servant, or ten, or seventy, it wouldn’t suffice. Were you to draw the knife on your belt and gut yourself in front of me, I would dance on your entrails and still hate your memory for ten thousand years. Do you understand? You ruined me. Ruined! I never touched the man I loved for fear I would infect him with your punishment!’ The tears started, hot and painful. ‘A creature like you always sees and does what is most important to himself, no matter who it hurts. I am human, I’m not like you, but I see hatred and revenge! And I choose to pursue them!’

  She took the stride that brought them together: some things needed physical contact. Her hand snaked out and took a fistful of his ornate tunic. He did not resist as she slammed him back into the railing.

  ‘You killed many of my friends,’ she spluttered, showering him with water and snot. ‘Thousands of people died resisting you. I died resisting you. Why didn’t you leave me dead?’

  He was silent a moment, then offered the only answer that would keep her from pushing him over the railing and letting him fall into the lower city. She would do it. She knew he would let her. A new test of the limits of immortality.

  ‘Because I wanted you to live,’ he said.

  Conal had awoken when Stella cracked her shin against the oaf’s cot. Robal had done nothing more than murmur faintly, paying about as much attention to the world asleep as he did awake. But Conal woke alert and aware that something was wrong.

  Something had been wrong for at least a day. Stella had behaved strangely in the scriptorium yesterday. Much of what was said between her and that northern sorcerer had not rung true. They needed watching.

  He did not challenge her as she slipped through the door. She would say she was merely going outside to take in the view, or for some privacy, and where was the fault in that? No, let her do something suspicious within sight of his keen eyes, and he would record it for the scroll. He waited until she had left the room, then rose, dressed—he tried to hurry, but he had always been a fastidious dresser—and followed her.

  She was some way up the street, talking to the tall northerner. Still nothing wrong, but definitely suspicious. Hadn’t the man said he’d conceived a fancy for her? What was she doing talking to him in the pre-dawn dark? Playing the harlot? Look at how he lounged against the railing, watching her as she leaned toward
s him. The priest’s muscles tensed and he began to drift closer, favouring the deepest shadows.

  ‘Walk away now and never think of me again,’ he heard Heredrew say. A lover’s tiff, then. He did not catch much of Stella’s reply, apart from an accusation that made no sense. So he wanted to end it and she wished to continue. Harlot. Power-seeking whore.

  He could approach no nearer than the width of the street. Hidden around the corner of the nearest house, he was confident they could not see him. Trouble was, he could barely hear them. Not one word in four. The tall man said something about a conflict—or convict—and her involvement in his schemes.

  Everything changed with her clear reply. ‘I know one thing, Kannwar,’ she said distinctly in a raised voice. She clearly wanted the man to hear the name she used.

  Kannwar? For a moment his mind faltered. Was it possible?

  The Destroyer?

  Conal tried reinterpreting everything he remembered of yesterday’s encounter in the scriptorium in the light of this knowledge.

  ‘I will defy you,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not accustomed to being defied,’ he answered, sounding like the ruler of darkness himself.

  Conal listened to a tale almost beyond his understanding. He barely noticed it draw him forward, out from the cover of the building and into the street, the better to hear the man’s words. Neither Stella nor the man she had named Kannwar noticed, so intent were they on each other.

  The mention of the Koinobia’s spying mission froze him in his tracks. He had been the most junior member on that mission, and had been unwell for two of the three days they had spent as guests in Andratan. How had this man known? And if the Destroyer had known, why had he suffered them to live?

  As the tale unfolded, Conal felt a weight descend upon him. A realisation that the real world was like and yet unlike the world he had read about in the theological scrolls: real in that supernatural things could happen; unreal in that they had happened to him.

  When Kannwar named him as the unwitting mouthpiece of the Most High, he nearly fainted with the shock.

  He had not known. Had no memory of it. Yet it was true, he could feel it.

  To be used without volition! Treated as a piece of meat! Not worthy enough even to be asked his permission! Anger, humiliation, outrage and self-loathing fought for supremacy in his spinning head.

  He regained control of his thoughts in time to see the Destroyer launch himself at Stella, who fought him off. She screamed at him, then reached out and took hold of him. He’s going to kill her. Or she him.

  The back of Conal’s head flashed white and abruptly he had no control over his movements. He tried, how he tried, to resist his strangely empowered muscles, especially when he realised what he was about to be compelled to do. He tried to shout a warning through an immobilised throat. No sound emerged. Powerless, he was a spectator to what happened. His body rushed forward, left shoulder lowered.

  He struck Stella a rising blow in the small of the back with his entire weight, sending her cannoning into the tall man. Stunned, Conal fell to the ground, his muscles his own again too late, and lifted his head in time to see both Stella and the Destroyer topple backwards over the railing and vanish from view.

  Robal was most of the way through preparing the morning’s bread when he thought to ask Stella how much she wanted. The thick loaves had been left by their hosts: strange silent people who clearly regarded feeding the outlanders as a solemn part of their clan duty, but talking to them as well beyond it. The guardsman puzzled at this arrangement. How could a mother and father leave their young girl in the care of mistrusted strangers? There were aspects to this society he found distasteful.

  Not this bread though. He stuffed another piece into his mouth. If Stella didn’t rise soon she and the girl would miss out altogether. Not that either would complain. Now if it was him deprived of a meal everyone would hear about it.

  ‘Stella,’ he called.

  Kilfor raised his head from his bowl, while Sauxa continued lapping at his porridge in the curious way he had.

  ‘You want any bread?’ Robal called again. ‘Ask the girl, will you?’

  No reply, which was odd. She was normally an early riser. Hardly needed sleep, in fact. Or, more truthfully, couldn’t get it on account of that cursed man’s blood in her veins. If he were ever to meet the Destroyer, he would pound the fiend into small lumps, preferably separated from each other by some distance, and then ask him some hard questions. Robal hated watching Stella suffer.

  He kicked the priest’s pallet. ‘Conal? Have you seen Stella?’ No answer; another slugabed. No, the pallet was empty. ‘Bah. Is no one—’

  Ena walked out of the room she shared with Stella.

  ‘Where is the queen?’ Robal asked her.

  ‘Gone out,’ replied the girl, her face untroubled. ‘Before dawn.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘To meet someone. The priest went a few minutes after she did.’

  Stella and the priest? What had he missed? His heart seemed to turn leaden in his chest. Surely not. If she’s the type to take up with spoiled babes like him, I’m better rid of her.

  ‘Anyone else see them go?’ he asked the room. Kilfor shook his head, then bent it back towards his soup. Robal knew his friend. She’s a big girl, he was saying. She can care for herself.

  As Robal made towards the outer door, it opened and Conal walked through. One look at his face was enough.

  ‘What has happened to her? What have you done? Did you force yourself on her?’ Robal bit his lip to stop further inanities from coming out.

  The priest sat on his pallet and began to cry. Enormous tears squeezed out of his crumpled face, accompanied by a huh, huh, huh noise Robal took for sobbing. The display left the guardsman shocked: the vain, pompous priest would never lose control like this.

  He put his hand on Conal’s shaking shoulder. ‘Tell us. What has happened to Stella?’ He did not doubt for a moment this concerned her.

  ‘She muh-met Heredrew,’ said the priest, his voice a thin warble. ‘Out there in the street. I…I went out to see. I thought she might be meeting suh-someone, I thought it might be huh huh him.’ He sobbed some more.

  ‘Then what?’ Robal could not wait for the blubberer to compose himself. ‘They kissed, and you were jealous?’

  The priest shook his head.

  ‘They did more?’

  Just what is wrong with me? She walks out to meet someone she knows, does something to set this fool weeping, and I’m all over jealous?

  ‘N-no. I hid in the shadows and listened to them for a while as they quarrelled. I…she struck him and they fought. Then they fell.’

  ‘Fell? Where?’ Robal did not even realise he had strode to the front door.

  ‘Up the street. Against the rail. Up she went, and took him over. Her…her face looked frightened. She tried to clutch the rail but she couldn’t reach.’

  Robal lunged towards the shaking priest and grabbed him by the arm. ‘Show me.’

  A few moments later the five of them stood by the railing. Dawn had painted the distance with the bright colours of the desert, but the lower city remained in shadow. Robal could barely make himself grasp the rail and ease himself over so he could see below.

  Fifty paces, his mind recorded. The roofs of houses below, or the cobbles of a street. No trees or bushes.

  ‘She might still be alive, mightn’t she?’ The priest sounded like a child. Was a child.

  ‘No.’

  ‘We need to look,’ Kilfor said. ‘Ena, please go and fetch Phemanderac. Tell him to meet us in the lower city on the street below this railing. We need to know what to do.’

  The girl, her own small face pale with fright, ran quickly up the road, then slipped down a side street.

  ‘Someone tell me this is not real,’ Robal muttered to himself as he strode down the street, the others strung out behind him. The last ten minutes had hollowed him out.

  She might be alive
. The priest’s words repeated in his head in time to his slapping feet. She might be alive. She might be alive.

  Oh Most High, so much blood. His, hers, spurting, flowing, trickling, mixing together, covering their broken bodies like a shroud, like a curse, a curse.

  Robal fell to his knees. So much blood! What he had taken for a shadow when looking from the railing was in fact a large pool of bright red wetness. She had lain here, he had lain there. The blood had coursed from both of them, her immortal lifeblood mixing with his mortal ichor. Someone had dragged their bodies away; the blood ran out about there, twenty paces or so from where he knelt.

  ‘No, Conal,’ Robal said, sure of the thoughts in the priest’s head, but knowing that in the words he was about to speak he admitted his own guilt. ‘Leave the blood alone. I will not allow you even a taste.’

  Kilfor and his father must have wondered what he meant, but asked no questions. He probably would have told them had they wanted to know. What need for secrecy now? What need for a guard?

  While Robal continued to stare ineffectually at the drying blood, Phemanderac and the girl arrived. A few local people had also gathered. No one asked him any questions, which suited him fine, as he had no answers.

  Stella and Kannwar watched the gathering from a nearby rooftop. Neither could say a word: their wounds were too many, too fresh, too serious, to allow speech. It had taken all they had to climb the wall furthest from the road. Both knew it would take a long time to recover.

  Someone will work it out, she sent.

  I have removed as many clues as I can, he replied.

  I don’t want to leave them!

  We have no alternative. One of them sought our deaths. I doubt he was in control of his body when he did so. Certainly he’s been controlled by another at least once before.

  She conceded him the point. Most High, this hurts.

  Worse every time, he said.

  I’m not prepared to run off and leave these good people behind, she said. I don’t see why they can’t be given an explanation.

  Run off? Not for some time, Stella. And no, no explanation.