Dark Heart (Husk)

by Russell Kirkpatrick

  Noetos grimaced. ‘Unless your benefactor is strong enough to overcome our guards, I fear the only certain purpose left us is to provide entertainment for the Neherians.’

  Duon nodded and turned his head away.

  A slitted window high above the two prisoners projected a small rectangle of sunlight on the rough walls of their cell. The rectangle moved gradually from left to right, rising higher above their heads until it turned from yellow to red and began to fade. Along with their hopes. Despite checking regularly, Noetos continued to hear nothing from his children.

  The guards came for them a little while after the rectangle disappeared. A dozen strong, they arrived prepared for trouble: swords drawn, heavy chains draped over their shoulders. They all crammed themselves into the cell, their very closeness making it impossible for Noetos and Duon to fight.

  Not that Noetos had the heart for it. Surely if Arathé had survived the day, his son would have told him. He ought to have said something. The fisherman had died a hundred deaths in the course of the afternoon, starting at any strange sound, thinking it might be the beginning of Anomer’s voice in his head. Eventually even his own thoughts began to sound like his son’s voice. He wondered if a headache might make him unreceptive. If the thick walls of the cell were impenetrable. If he would fall asleep and make himself unreachable. If a hundred other things.

  When the Neherians wrapped their chains around him, he offered no resistance. He shuffled compliantly at the point of a sword. Duon had it worse: the way they were chained together meant he had to walk backwards.

  Reality gave way to a walking dream. He’d been down these corridors many times. Played in them as a child. Hidden in that alcove, stared out this window, swung on that railing. For a wonder, the pennants of the countries that had once made up Old Roudhos still decorated the southern atrium, though the lovely stained-glass windows were all smashed. The whirlwind might have done that. But the whirlwind hadn’t left the pennants to moulder and slowly go grey. That had been neglect.

  The ballroom, converted to an impromptu throne room earlier that day, had again been transformed. The real throne room, high above in the tower, had been broken by the storm: he had seen it lying in pieces at the foot of the cliff on which the palace was perched. But the Neherians had improvised: surely every bright and pretty thing left intact by the whirlwinds had been taken from Raceme town below and installed on the walls or hung from the ceiling. Spirals of coloured paper intertwined with strings of beads in random patterns. Paintings, many no doubt valuable, had been brought up from the vaults or moved from other corridors in the Summer Palace and scattered around the room with no thought for suitability or placement. Garlands of flowers splashed colour everywhere; the most spectacular arrangements were framed by tall, arched windows. The floor had been festooned with orchids and lilies. Servants bearing trays laden with golden goblets trod on the fragile blooms with no regard. Every kitchen and pantry, every secret store and treasure room, must have been emptied. Some of this must have come north aboard ship, or overland with the army.

  Neherians, all right.

  The extravagance was daunting. A table weighed down with food ran the length of the room. Buckets filled with ice—ice! Could only have come from the Jasweyan Mountains!—preserved seafood delicacies. Haunches of meat, placed at intervals on the table, steamed in the cool air. Air that was laden with a dizzying mix of perfume and exotic spice. Gluttony and desire.

  His hearing, however, was the sense to suffer the most from this onslaught of excess. A hundred people were arranged along the far side of the table, dressed in their courtly finery, and filled the room with their talk: excited babble, raised voices as they strove to outdo each other, shouts, shrieks of laughter, nodding heads, hands slapping thighs. A parody of a banquet.

  He was not the only one suffering deprivation. A score of guards stood in rows behind the empty wooden throne, four rows of five, no doubt the army’s best men. Each wore a red uniform, threaded with gold, the ceremonial garb of the Valiant Protectors of the Duke of Roudhos. Five of their number had much more elaborate uniforms than the others, but appeared no less hungry. They all looked on stoically as the people they were paid to protect indulged themselves.

  Noetos narrowed his eyes. The Valiant Protectors had been slaughtered, along with their Duke, seventy years ago at the behest of the Undying Man. He’d not heard of their revival, though anything that had happened in the last twenty years would have been beyond his ears. Why had the position been restored? Why had the entire court come north? No, the real question was why any of the court had come north. Surely the conquest of the Fisher Coast could be accomplished by their military might alone. What was happening here?

  He knew they had not gone to this trouble purely to make sport of him. Despite the revelation that they had invaded Fossa to find him, he knew he was of little importance. Noetos of Fossa would be a small sideshow in the Neherian travelling circus. He was merely a loose end to be tied off. And he would likely go to his death in ignorance of the larger game being played here.

  Trumpets blared a brazen fanfare. Liveried heralds advanced into the room from doors at either end, making two columns. Into the corridor between the columns came a man and a woman wearing simple circlets of silver on their heads, in clear defiance of the Edict of Regional Sovereignty which forbade any display of political independence in the Bhrudwan Empire. Together the man and the woman proceeded to the throne, arm in arm, where the man sat and the woman took station to his left on a stool provided by one of the Valiant Protectors. Still sounding their trumpets, the heralds left by the opposite doors to which they had come in. The fanfare ceased, leaving Noetos’s ears ringing. A moment later the echo died, and silence fell.

  A hundred and twenty pairs of eyes turned to the two prisoners.

  Despite having known it was coming, Noetos could not help feeling intimidated by their regard. The combined disapproval of this many people had an impact, no matter how much one steeled oneself against it.

  ‘Who are these people?’ Duon whispered.

  ‘The Neherian nobility,’ breathed Noetos in reply. ‘All of them, I think. Claudo was telling the truth, strange as it seems to me.’

  ‘They’re staring at us.’ Duon’s voice quavered on the edge of fear.

  ‘Ignore them. Nosy lot.’

  Noetos had not realised how far his voice carried.

  ‘Indeed, son of Demios, we are curious about you.’ The rich voice came from the man on the throne. ‘Why would we not be? Had your father been somewhat more politic, it would have been he—or you—sitting today atop this throne and this newborn empire.’

  Noetos tried to breathe normally, but found himself gasping a series of shallow breaths. ‘Local politics never held much interest for my father,’ he said, addressing the room. ‘Nor me.’

  His reward was a flash of anger across the regent’s face. ‘Local politics, as you describe it, has swallowed up your village and your country just as easily as it swallowed your family.’

  ‘Ah, my family.’ Just like that his breathing relaxed as anger allowed him to put any consequences aside. ‘What would a Neherian know of filial devotion?’

  ‘More than you might think,’ said the woman, in the most beautiful, stately contralto. She smiled, a small thing. ‘Nephew.’

  She leaned back to assess the impact of her revelation.

  Noetos’s mind went grey, then white. What? ‘You claim me as a relative, woman? Who are you to me?’ Not my mother’s sister; she was no Neherian, and would be older and likely larger than this woman. Frantic searching of a memory deliberately repressed. My father had no sisters. Who then?

  ‘She is my wife, and new-crowned Empress of the Southern Empire,’ said the man. ‘And I, young Noetos, am your uncle. Your father’s younger brother. And, I am proud to say, his murderer, at least by proxy.’

  ‘Uncle Meranios? But he…you…were a loyal brother. You…I don’t understand.’ Suppressed laughter from t
he long table accompanied his discomfiture.

  ‘Why should you? Demios despaired of you, boy. According to him you never paid attention to your tutors. Had you, you would have learned enough of our “local politics” to know your father’s opposition to our patriotic expansionist policies could never be allowed to prevail. How many more generations were we going to wait before reclaiming Old Roudhos’s legacy? Do you know, your father threatened to go to the Undying Man himself with evidence of our plans? This, after initially being the ringleader of our movement?’

  ‘You seem surprised,’ Meranios’ wife continued. ‘But why? Are you shocked that the entire court knows of this? Your family history has been a secret from no one for the last decade or more. Well, from no one but you, obviously. We have come north from Aneheri to establish this city once again as the seat of our Summer Palace, the vanguard of our push to reclaim Roudhos from the Undying Man’s careless and gravely weakened grasp.’

  ‘So you ordered your brother and his family slain,’ Noetos said, his heart hammering. ‘Are you aware what was done to them? How they were killed?’

  Now Noetos had been given time to adjust, he could make out the remnants of his uncle in this man’s face. The face was jowly, the hair had receded and the voice was thinner, but it was him.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ his uncle said. ‘All on the orders of the patriots. You see, his was not the only betrayal of our cause. There were others considering selling us to the Maghdi Dasht, and we had to provide an incentive for them to remain loyal. Avoiding the suffering and fate of Demios and his family is a good incentive, hmm?’

  ‘Rape?’ Noetos’s voice was leaden. ‘Ripped apart by wild dogs? Being made to watch?’

  ‘You’ll shock no one in this room,’ said his aunt. ‘We were the ones who made the decision. Everyone here knew about it and approved of every detail. A number of those looking on you now volunteered for the mission. That decision kept us alive and, more importantly, kept the cause alive. If you’d read your Comus you would know why it was necessary. But of course you didn’t. Let others do the work, as long as they kept the throne clean for your indolent backside to sit upon.’

  ‘So you believe you were right in what you did?’ Noetos ran his eyes across the assembled court, and read their assent in their eyes. ‘You all deserve to die.’

  ‘Fortunately, it is you who will die, nephew,’ said the man who sat the throne. The self-styled Emperor, Noetos supposed. The fool who, sooner or later, would be slain at the order of the Undying Man.

  He plunged in, their criticism of his political acumen notwithstanding. ‘Where are the places set for the Undying Man and his Maghdi Dasht? I assume this is all done with his assent. Or,’ he affected surprise, ‘are you doing this without his knowledge? You are, aren’t you. Whatever death you subject me to tonight will be but a shadow of what he will engineer upon your bodies. What on earth are you thinking, Uncle?’

  ‘So many questions,’ said his aunt, ‘and all that is missing is the wit to understand the answers. Truly, we would have to have killed them anyway, traitor or no. Could you imagine being ruled by someone as indigent and, frankly, stupid as this?’

  Their laughter swelled in his ears. They mocked him, yes, but they mocked his family also, and that hurt.

  ‘Really, it could not be simpler. We have spies in Andratan who tell us the Undying Man is severely incapacitated as a result of his invasion of Faltha. Foolishly, he spent almost all of his Maghdi Dasht, and has not replaced them with magicians of the same calibre. In this room are five men who will outmatch them in every conceivable way.’

  Magicians? Neherius, with its strange religious ways, had long rejected magicians. What magicians?

  The five elaborately uniformed Valiant Protectors stepped forward and bowed, then returned to their places, matching smiles on their confident faces.

  He could not formulate an answer.

  The Emperor leaned forward. ‘There is only one question you wish to ask, but you do not ask it. You are either patient or frightened. I have never seen you exercise patience, so I assume it is the latter. Here is your question. “Why was I spared on that day twenty years ago?” It has defined your existence ever since. And you are about to have an answer.

  ‘I told you there were others potentially disloyal to our cause. We left you alive, young Noetos, but under watch, to see if you attracted any of these dissidents to your side. You were a lightning rod designed to draw out fellow traitors. And, do you know, it worked. Three men went looking for you, and found a noose instead. Because you lived, three traitors died, and our cause survived. A fair exchange, I believe.

  ‘What entertained us most was the thought of you hiding in a poverty-stricken backwater, learning to fish, getting those fine hands dirty. And then sailing out amongst the Neherian fleet, thinking you were tweaking our noses, when all along you were simply making it easier for us to keep you under surveillance. The annual reports of our Fossan spy made diverting reading, I can assure you.’

  ‘Fossan spy?’ Noetos repeated. But he didn’t have to ask. He knew. Oh, Alkuon, he was every kind of fool.

  It seemed he was to be told anyway. The depthless extent of his naivety was to be publicly plumbed.

  ‘Halieutes, of course. Paid off with access to our fishing grounds, and finally eliminated when he became too greedy.’

  His uncle leaned over to his wife. ‘Do you know, dear, the look on our nephew’s face has made the whole uncomfortable overland trek worthwhile. I swear I’ll never forget it. Look at him: like a calf seeing the slaughterman’s knife for the first time, and realising the green pastures of his childhood have done nothing but prepare him for this moment.’

  He stood and nodded to his court, who responded with applause.

  ‘And speaking of slaughter,’ he said, resuming his seat, ‘we have after-meal entertainment, I understand. Claudo?’

  ‘My Emperor,’ the effeminate man said, hurrying to the throne from where he waited beside his prisoners.

  ‘Since you were the one who advocated Noetos be a lightning rod for our cause, my old friend, you have the honour of asking him the necessary questions. Now, I know everyone here approves of this course of action. However, for some of you, such a direct application of politics will not aid the digestion of your meal. This is understood by the throne. You have our leave to remove yourselves.’

  No one moved, though in Noetos’s judgment a number of the women and at least two of the men wished they could. They do not believe their Emperor’s assurances. And why should they? They’ve just been reminded of a clever subterfuge to flush out the disloyal among them. Why would they not suspect another?

  ‘We have questions for you,’ Claudo said, approaching Noetos and Duon. Two soldiers accompanied him, each carrying one end of a long stake.

  They mean to burn us? Inside this room?

  Duon, his back to Noetos, began to shake. Noetos himself was certain he was shaking also. Anomer! Arathé! Are you there? Please!

  Nothing.

  The soldiers lifted the stake, then slipped it between the men, forcing them apart and scoring their backs with its rough, knotty surface. It would hold them upright when, as would no doubt happen in the next few moments, they could no longer stand unaided.

  ‘I feel strange,’ said Duon.

  Claudo cracked him across the mouth. ‘We’ll hear from you later, black man.’

  A third soldier wheeled a brazier into the room, leaving it next to their torturer. Coals glowed redly, and in their midst sat half a dozen instruments. Claudo donned a glove, leaned over with the air of a scholar choosing a volume to read, and selected a pair of pincers.

  To Noetos’s mortification, his bladder let go. A few titters of laughter rippled around the room from those close enough to see.

  ‘Now, we want to know from you how you learned the schedule of the Neherian fleet. How did you know in time to organise resistance at Makyra Bay?’

  Noetos lifted his head wearily. ‘I know
how this goes. What answer do you want me to give?’ he said.

  ‘Those with no imagination do not fear pain. At least,’ Claudo said, with a glance at Noetos’s damp breeches, ‘not enough. The son of Demios has never had much imagination. At least, that is what our spy told us. Therefore we must stimulate it for him.’

  As the man lifted the pincer to Noetos’s tunic, fastened on the material and ripped it away, the fisherman’s thoughts turned, oddly, to the sound and smell of the sea, as though there was comfort to be found there. Strange that, at the end, he should return to a place he never liked.

  ‘Ready!’

  A thousand hands clasped each other. ‘Remember,’ they had been told, ‘you will experience discomfort, if not actual pain. Hold on, endure. The more of you who endure, the greater the number the effects will be spread across, and the less anyone will have to tolerate.’

  By no means everyone had believed it, though Anomer and Arathé had used their Voices widely. Those people had moved on, over the brow of the hill, and made camp there. The remaining volunteers braced themselves.

  ‘These things are of little use to a man,’ Claudo said, playing to his audience. ‘It is almost as though they were invented for the purpose. Can’t think of what else they’re good for.’

  To Noetos, the man’s voice was the cawing of a gull; the murmur of conversation from the table the wash of waves upon the reef.

  The pincers closed over his left nipple and squeezed.

  ‘Now.’

  And nothing happened. Claudo gritted his teeth and squeezed his gloved hand as hard as he could. Noetos watched in giddy bemusement. He could feel nothing.

  Meranios leaned forward.

  Claudo grasped the pincers with both hands, intending to apply more pressure. ‘Gah!’ he cried, and jerked his gloveless hand off the handle.

  A half-day’s walk north of the Summer Palace, just under a thousand people felt a slight constriction on their own chests. One or two of the more sensitive among them gave an involuntary cry. The gentle pain lasted a few seconds, then ended suddenly.