Dark Heart (Husk)

by Russell Kirkpatrick

  Their host returned and sniffed at the cauldron. ‘Just a moment longer,’ she said, smiling as though she was about to solve every one of the mysteries bothering Lenares. ‘Then the blend will mend your problems, as we say in Ikhnos.’

  ‘How does it work?’ Lenares asked, curious. She ignored the stare from Dryman. You can’t touch me, you bully.

  The woman beamed at her as though she’d just been acclaimed queen of the realm. ‘Every person is a combination of four humours, madam. Virility, sobriety, congeniality and activity. The “Four Teas”, we call them.’ She paused.

  In the past Lenares would not have known what the pause was for, but she had learned. The woman wanted them to laugh. Lenares could not identify any humour in her words, but she found her own unintentional pun funny so she laughed. Their host was pleased.

  ‘The traditional method of making tea gives us the time to assess each participant,’ she continued. ‘Your companions are mysterious, with their dusky skin and strange eyes, but I think I have their measure. You, dear, are an open book to me, and I believe I have just the drink for you. It will relax your body while stimulating your mind, an organ you put much store in. Am I right?’

  ‘You are,’ Lenares replied, smiling faintly. Guesswork. The woman can tell I use my mind because I ask lots of questions.

  ‘Ah, you doubt me,’ the woman said. ‘Everyone does at first. The Yacoppica Cliffs Tea House prides itself on the skill of its readers, as we are known. We offer you this test. Take a sip from the cup of each of your companions. Should you find their infusions more pleasurable than your own, we will refund your money.’

  Dryman looked up. ‘That is fair,’ he said. ‘Now, enough of the fairground fakery. Fetch us our drinks. We would be out of here within the hour.’

  ‘Fakery? One wonders why you have availed yourself of our services if you do not believe in their efficacy.’ Her voice rose as she spoke and the skin around her eyes tightened.

  ‘Just get our tea, woman,’ Dryman growled.

  ‘Rude as well as a bully,’ Lenares said as the woman walked away, their cauldron in hand, her back ramrod-stiff.

  ‘Oh, come, cosmographer. You can see as well as I just how foolish all this is.’

  ‘I thought I was the insensitive one,’ she said. ‘Rouza and Palain tell me all the time I can’t tell a pig from shit. But you deliberately try to hurt people.’

  As she said the words, two heretofore separate numbers came together. Oh, oh. Torve, oh.

  ‘Then I am better than you,’ he said, ‘since you only hurt people by accident. At least I can put their pain to some use.’

  Torve glanced up, the surprise on his face a confirmation. Dryman smiled, the expression reflecting thoughts he no doubt considered secret. Another person to underestimate her.

  Now I know what you do, she thought as she observed the mercenary. All I have to do is find out who you are.

  Their host returned, four cups on a tray, and placed one in front of each of their party without a word. She was still upset but was trying to be professional. On an impulse, Lenares put out her hand to the woman.

  ‘Wait a moment,’ she said. ‘Would you please give us a fifth cup? Make this for someone strong and powerful who has been imprisoned most of his life. Someone who has hopes of freedom.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ The woman’s brows rose. ‘And where is this person?’

  ‘I have high hopes he will make an appearance before the ceremony is over,’ Lenares said. Her impulse felt better and better the more she reflected upon it. Create a god-shaped hole…

  ‘Which of the four humours does he favour?’ the woman asked, again pleased Lenares showed an interest.

  ‘Virility and activity,’ the cosmographer replied promptly.

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ said the woman, her smile broadening. ‘When your friend does arrive, would you advise him I would be happy to assess him more closely?’

  Another double meaning. Was conversation never free of them? Lenares had no intention of exposing this kind woman to their potential fifth guest. Nevertheless, she nodded. Only a few months ago she would not have been able to lie, even by nodding ‘yes’ when she meant ‘no’.

  The woman went off, and returned a minute later with a small cup, hardly larger than a thimble, from which thick fumes wafted.

  ‘You tell your friend to drink this slowly,’ she said. ‘There’s enough here to slow down the most ardent of suitors. That’s if you want him slowed down.’ She winked at the girl, then nodded towards where Dryman and Torve sat, heads together, deep in conversation. ‘His fault if he hasn’t been listening.’

  Oh. Had she misunderstood the woman? A deep fear speared through her: was her growing insight into conversation coming at the expense of her unique number-based vision?

  Think about that later.

  ‘Come and drink your tea,’ she said quietly, aiming her voice along the pattern of numbers she had discerned, the link into the hole in the world. ‘Come on, it’s getting cold.’ Like a mother entreating a child.

  And he came.

  There was no compulsion, Lenares knew that. All she was doing was offering the most tenuous of invitations. Not too strong, lest she aid him in tearing the hole wider. No more solid than the wisps of steam now forming a shape, a face, a taloned hand.

  The three men couldn’t see him. Why should they? Would she have seen the god’s face in a steaming cup of tea had she not been looking for it?

  His hands, no more than a sketch in mist, were fine-boned and lovely. His face…his face…

  A brow twitched, the lips pursed. Are you surprised? she asked Lenares.

  ‘Yes,’ Lenares whispered, and she was. Her invitation had drawn the Daughter, not the Son. Something was wrong. She had made a mistake somewhere.

  Both eyebrows rose, pulling the eyes open. Disappointed?

  ‘No. You were so kind. You saved me in the House of—in your house. You let me sit on your seat.’

  A beatific smile, eyes still wide open, inviting. I could let you have more than that.

  ‘Lenares? Who are you talking to?’ Torve asked. The breath in his words rippled through the steam, contorting the Daughter’s beautiful face, making the eyes asymmetrical and the mouth sag open as though she were a madman.

  ‘Torve, be quiet!’ Lenares snapped. Torve pulled back as though slapped.

  ‘Come back, come back,’ she whispered. ‘Have some of the tea. Our host says you’ll like it.’

  The face had not reassembled itself, but the clawed hand, outlined in steam, took the cup—and lifted it.

  Were the others seeing this? Did they note how the steam arced downwards, creating a loop? That it raised the small cup? Did they see the liquid disappear?

  Colour spread through the vapour. Pale pink, filling in cheeks and chin. Green eyes, the tips of blonde hair. Red lips, parting to speak.

  ‘I remember,’ said the Daughter. ‘I remember the taste, the heat. How could I have turned my back on such things?’

  ‘But you did,’ Lenares breathed.

  Dryman, Duon and Torve stared at her as though she was crazy. No, there was something other than disdain in Dryman’s eyes.

  ‘What are you doing, cosmographer?’ he asked. ‘What are you conjuring? I can feel it. She.’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ the Daughter said, ignoring or simply not hearing the mercenary. ‘I’m so cold, so cold. Look at me. I made a mistake. You could help me get back. Together we could stop my brother, close the hole in the world, make things right. So cold, Lenares. Everything you wanted. We could be friends. You could show me, warm me.’ A pause: the drink cooled. ‘Lenares?’

  Lenares thought of the bronze map, the secrets of the world inscribed on it, visible from the three seats of the gods. She thought of the House of the Gods and the time she and Torve had spent there, and a tear of longing formed in the corner of her eye. She could not imagine a more perfect world. The Daughter could give it to her.

  ‘What do you want me to
do?’

  ‘Just give me a place, Lenares, a small place in your flesh, a link to this world.’ The misty figure licked her lips. ‘The warmth of this world.’

  Dryman stood. ‘I asked you, cosmographer, what you were doing. Answer me!’

  The mist curled away from the man, losing its shape and colour.

  A final whisper. ‘Help me, Lenares.’

  No point in lying. ‘I tried to establish a link to the power making the hole in the world,’ she said. ‘I thought I could summon him.’

  Oh, but I am lying, in all the things I did not say. No mention of the link I have already forged to the hole. I said I was trying to summon a male, but didn’t say I actually summoned a female. I didn’t even say it worked.

  Dryman strode around the table and put a hand on her shoulder, pressing harder than he ought to have. ‘What made you think you could call down a god?’

  A sudden breeze roared in from the sea, and the steam vanished, along with the mists in her own mind.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ she said, spitting the words. ‘Keep your hands to yourself.’ Protective words, routine words, words to make people keep their distance. Especially this man, now she had worked out what he did with his hands. With the hand still resting on her shoulder.

  She shrugged it off. ‘I don’t have to answer you,’ she said.

  ‘No?’ He stood perfectly still.

  ‘Please,’ Torve said.

  The air around them began to thicken, and Lenares felt a weight pressing on her chest.

  ‘Good morning,’ came a halting voice from nearby. ‘May we have table with you?’

  The pressure vanished, and at the same moment Dryman growled, an inhuman sound. Torve glanced wearily at his master’s face and read the world of anger there. Oh, Lenares, please leave this man alone. Don’t get in his way.

  The hail had come from one of the Falthans; the wet nurse, his master had called the man disparagingly. The man acted as a guard to one of the women. Why, it was not certain: according to Dryman, the woman was much more powerful than her guard. Two other Falthans were with him, the tall leader and the woman he guarded.

  Torve waited for Dryman to pour invective at them, to tell them to leave.

  ‘Of course, please join us,’ Dryman said, his face a sudden mask. ‘I’m sure our hosts won’t mind if you pull up another table. Are all of you still alive?’

  The last delivered as sweetly as the first, the barb unmissable. Unless, of course, the man struggled with the language, as clearly he did. As Torve did, in truth, despite a month’s diligent study at Dryman’s command. The root of the tongue was much the same as that spoken by the Amaqi, but the differences in grammar and expression were subtle and confusing. He persevered because his master demanded it.

  Torve welcomed the arrival of the Falthans. He would have welcomed anyone who stayed long enough to take his master’s attention away from him. He feared he was losing his sanity, maybe had already lost it, as the cumulative weight of the occasional night expeditions settled ever more heavily on his mind. And not just the killing and the torturing; that he had become at least partly inured to years ago. It now took a particularly savage or sadistic killing to awaken pity in his breast, and when the Emperor decided to execute his work swiftly, Torve helped him with vigour. Better for everyone that way. However, his need to keep his activities secret from Lenares, and his equal and opposite need for her to find out, clove him in two. How, oh how, was his master keeping her ignorant?

  The question was unanswerable because he could not ask it.

  Moreover, the voice of command his master once used only when necessary seemed to have become his normal mode of conversation. The sheer weight of it, the depth of suffering and power and history and knowledge wrapped in it, threatened to overwhelm him, to strip his soul. Was overwhelming him. Plunging him into a world of unreason.

  How could he sustain love in such a world?

  Every day he gazed on Lenares with the memory of longing, but he was increasingly unable to hang on to it. Because there was a small and diminishing amount of him able to be called human.

  His Defiance no longer offered him protection. He hadn’t been able to finish it for weeks. Hadn’t even attempted it for days. It seemed so polluted. His compartmentalised life had broken down, the horrors were leaching in, and all he could see in his mind’s eye were struggling bodies and flailing limbs. Pleading and screams and bewildered questions filled his ears. He cursed his parents, his race, for their unwitting betrayal. None of them had been compelled to serve such a one as the Emperor had become. None had foreseen it when making their terrible bargain with the Amaqi. Better for the race to have died than this.

  Torve took a deep, shuddering breath.

  The two groups introduced themselves, formal, tentative. Though names had been exchanged in the aftermath of the fireball, Torve could not have given any of the Falthans their correct names. He suspected Lenares did not need the introductions. She never forgot anything.

  ‘They serve good tea here?’ the woman, Bandy, asked.

  ‘Tea and a lecture,’ Captain Duon answered. ‘The tea is excellent, the lecture less so. But the view is, as the locals claim, stunning.’

  Lenares thrust her face forward. ‘You weren’t listening to the woman: how do you know whether what she said was interesting or not?’

  Everyone drew back a little, as though Lenares had spat poison onto the table. As though social niceties were of more importance than the truth. And that was the heart of Torve’s troubles: he was beginning to see the world the way Lenares did. Not literally, of course: she had described her strange world of colours and smells and numbers to him, a mixture well beyond his comprehension. But her world-view was unassailable. Why, indeed, did people allow themselves to be held prisoner by such niceties, conventions designed to hide the truth? How could the truth hurt more than this continual evasion, this multiplicity of meaning so amenable to abuse by the powerful?

  He was beginning to see things the way Lenares did, and her view was the complete opposite of his. Submerge your own will to that of your master, his upbringing told him. His word is truth. Ask no questions. An absolutism derived from absolute subsumption of himself. While Lenares submitted to no one, accepted no truth but her own, and asked every question with her whole being, no matter how unimportant the answer. An absolutism derived from absolute assertion of herself.

  Dryman answered her. ‘She interested you. Signal enough to the rest of us, I would have thought.’ He shifted his attention to the Falthans. ‘Lenares has special gifts, but they come at the expense of other abilities.’

  He smiled, the way he smiled when taking an experimental subject to the gates of death, and Torve shuddered.

  Bandy drew her chair forward so she could lean over and touch Lenares on the arm. Torve saw Lenares’ lips work—don’t touch me—but she didn’t say the words.

  ‘I’ve been surprised how cruel people are in this part of the world,’ Bandy said. ‘Or perhaps not; I’ve had some experience in the east before.’ A half-glance over at the tall, dignified man Heredrew, an unreadable exchange. ‘I have no problem with plain speaking, but I do not find cruelty for its own sake clever or endearing. Nor does it persuade me that I am dealing with a man worth listening to. Now, Dryman, would you consider taking greater care with your words? I have no desire to experience a repeat of what happened at Lake Woe.’

  Dryman’s face remained perfectly passive, but his eyes burned, measuring her, no doubt envisioning his hands on her, inflicting pain. Torve willed the woman to be careful. He had no desire to see this one suffer.

  She was a woman of power, this Bandy. When everything had begun to fall apart beside Lake Woe, she had very nearly kept the three groups together. Fluent in neither Falthan nor Bhrudwan, Torve had struggled to keep up with the arguments and recriminations as they developed. Lenares had explained events later, but he knew what she had witnessed would have been quite different from what everyone e
lse had seen. Heredrew had demanded to know who possessed the power to repel the fireball that, according to him, ought to have killed them all. No one had admitted to it, prompting the tall man to suggest that some people there were not what they seemed.

  Lenares had described to Torve the words used when the three groups had gathered in the midst of the charnel field, hurling accusations at each other. The magical ones among them had been able to sense great power, and fingers began to point. Of course, those who were singled out responded by asking how the finger-pointers knew. Lenares had laughed, telling him later. She could have pointed them all out, had anyone thought to ask her. She had tried to tell them, but they weren’t listening. Heredrew had the greatest power, she had claimed; in fact, his physical semblance was a shell for something else. Bandy also had great power, like yet unlike that of the tall man. Of the Bhrudwans, the two children of Noetos possessed a deal of raw power, and Noetos himself, while having no magic of his own, had something that made him impervious to magical interference. Whatever it was, it didn’t prevent Lenares from making an assessment of the man. Only Dryman had succeeded in avoiding her succinct summaries.

  Accusations broadened as people questioned the motives and purposes of each group. An angry and distraught Noetos refused to answer any questions, while asking many of his own. Once the rudest of the questions had been translated for him, Bandy’s guardsman, Robal, had reacted belligerently and threatened violence. This amidst a sea of dead bodies and still-glowing rocks.

  Bandy had tried to make the peace. Telling her guard to stand down, she stood up to the powerful men and asked each group to consider why they had been drawn to this place. Who were they up against? How might they find out? Questions Lenares also wanted to debate, Torve knew, and she joined her voice to that of the Falthan woman. But fear and mistrust won over rationality. The Bhrudwans had withdrawn first, arguing a more important set of priorities. They were right, Lenares conceded, or not right, depending on the length of view one took: this was uncomfortable thinking for her. The few hundred surviving refugees needed to be cared for, yes, and the dead disposed of before such debates could be undertaken; yet they could be assaulted anew at any moment by their hidden opponent, and so surely a discussion designed to reveal that opponent was the safest way forward.