‘Take care of these fools,’ his master bade Torve. ‘I will subdue the village. Duon, stand where you are and do not interfere. Instead, reflect on your uselessness.’
It was one thing for Torve to use his Defiance to defend himself against assault, however justified; entirely another to pursue and attack people who had lost the stomach for fighting. Yet his master had commanded him and Torve was compelled to obey.
Wasn’t he?
The memories of that morning were already an inextricable part of who he had become. Revealed as a killer, gifted with the deadly legacy of his heritage. He had stepped—no, he had been pushed—over a line forbidden to his race, and was now a dangerous weapon in the service of his ruthless master.
But, his mind whispered, he had crossed one line. Could he not cross another? Could he not disobey his master? Could he not…could he not break free?
That morning he had tried. A dozen villagers had been trapped between himself and the burning trees and, from their faces, it was clear none of them wished to engage him. His master had gone in pursuit of the rest, striding into the flames as though they weren’t there, leaving Torve alone to fulfil the man’s wishes. Which were what exactly? Take care of these fools. How much room did those instructions give him? Could he literally take care of them? Succour them, ensure their continued good health?
No. Even as he formed the thought an immobilising burst of fear took hold of him, the paralysis that claimed him whenever he entertained any thought of disobedience. It was such a basic part of his nature that Torve had never questioned it until recently: were he to think of doing something forbidden, his muscles locked tight; while a decision not to do something he had been commanded led to a burst of energy blossoming within him, forcing him to act.
This attempt at disobedience was complicated: he’d intended doing the opposite of what he’d been bidden, using the ambiguity in the command he’d been issued. His master had been careless. His body tried to respond in two contradictory ways, by both paralysing and energising him. He screamed with the shock of it, and the villagers, taking heart from what must have appeared like an injury to them, scurried towards him.
His equal and opposite imperatives remained so only for a moment, until paralysis gave way to the immediate need for energy. This, he understood in that moment, must be what the Emperor had trained him for: to generate and use in his service the energy released by thoughts of disobedience. He’d always known he was a tool, but had not realised just how cynically he had been manipulated. By someone who called him ‘friend’.
He moved with a precision and swiftness even greater than that which he had seen in the Children. Not a single inch of wasted momentum. It was almost as though he could predict where the villagers’ slow, untrained bodies would be. Again the glory of his body’s efficiency overwhelmed him and he ceased to consider the deadly consequences of his actions.
This time Duon did not recall him to himself. In fact, when he regained his normal thought patterns—rather, when his mind slowed to normality—the explorer was nowhere to be seen. The only things moving in the clearing were himself and half a dozen severely wounded villagers.
Very well, Torve told himself. I have taken care of them. Now I will see what my master has done to subdue the village.
Torve’s thoughts returned momentarily to the present. A total of seventeen villagers slain by one Omeran: an unheard-of number for a member of a pacifist race. But the guilt associated with such behaviour gave way before the abhorrence he felt towards what had happened next. For what his master had done to the village.
Disoriented by smoke, Torve had stumbled through the smouldering trees for an age before finding the small village of Foulwater. The Emperor, or whoever the Emperor had now become, had already surrounded the village with a ring of fire. Deep red flames with bright orange cores rose in sheets from the ground itself, as though a chasm had opened into the molten underworld, a chasm that bent around until joining with itself at the far side of the town. Dryman himself stood in the middle of the main street, surrounded by the men and women of Foulwater, some begging him to put out the flames, others demanding to know what had happened to their brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, fathers and mothers. Their voices mixed with the crackle and roar of the flames to create a discordant sound that ground on Torve’s already abraded nerves.
The ground shook, and through the shimmering heat Torve could see the Emperor raise his arms, an expression on his face like a mad prophet. At first he could not tell what was happening, but then he saw the ground within the fiery circle jerk and settle a foot lower. His master lifted his head and began to howl like a rabid wolf. The very air around Torve crackled as something essential was drawn from it and sucked towards the centre of the village. A great weight settled on the scene, pressing on everything inside the circle. Houses began groaning, and a roof gave way, collapsing with a sigh. The flames barely flickered with the wind it created. Another house crumbled, and another. Villagers put their hands to their heads; blood began to run from noses and ears. A small boy fell to his knees, vomiting blood. People struggled to move, and even standing was almost impossible. Steam and smoke made it difficult to see what was happening within the circle, but occasional glimpses more than sufficed. And still Torve’s master howled, still the air crackled, and the encircled village continued to sink further below the land around it.
Something hot and red began to flood into the circle. For a moment Torve thought it was blood, but it was too thick for that. The chasm surrounding the village now spat molten lava, gouts of it being flung into the air and spattering back to earth. The villagers saw it too, and those that retained the ability to move dragged themselves closer to where the Emperor stood. One mother would not leave her two children, stricken and probably already dead from the weight. The lava found them first, flaring briefly into yellow flame as it consumed them, then her. Her cries were borne on the superheated air to Torve, whose tears evaporated before they could flow down his cheeks.
Houses burst into flame and sunk into the viscous lake forming where the disintegrating village had once stood. Some villagers, surrendering hope, threw themselves into the lake, their bodies briefly flaring yellow before being destroyed. A few climbed the remaining structures, only to have the houses collapse under them; they shrieked as they fell into the lake of fire. Others ran ever inward, surrounding the Emperor, no doubt reasoning that as he would not destroy himself they would be safe.
The smoke and superheated air made it difficult for Torve to see what happened next. The lava surged towards the Emperor—who began somehow to rise against the crushing weight, levitating into the air as though made of ash. A man grasped at his heel, hoping to escape, but his hand seemed to pass right through. A moment later the lava reached the remaining villagers, washing against their feet, and the final shriek these people gave as their bodies caught fire was a truly horrific sound.
A moment later the fires vanished and the lava ceased pouring out of the trench. The depression where the village of Foulwater had once stood slowly filled with liquid fire. The great heat reignited some of the surrounding trees. Torve’s eyes stung; he could not see what had become of his master.
Who suddenly stood beside him, and spoke a single word.
The air around them changed subtly, and a cool wind came from somewhere far above them. Within moments it began to rain, rapidly increasing to a torrential downpour. The rain was icy, stinging as it fell like needles from the sky, and Torve had to shelter his face with his hand. Hail began to fall, hissing like a thousand snakes as it drove into the unnatural red lake. Colder still it became, as though balancing out the heat of a few minutes ago, and it was all ice now. When next Torve could raise his gaze to the site of the village, the lake had lost its red glow and was coloured a bluish-purple, an enormous bruise on the landscape.
‘Who are you?’ Duon said in a cracked voice. ‘What have you done?’ Amid the destruction Torve had not noticed the captain
arrive.
‘I am your Emperor,’ his master said to Duon, and the weight returned. ‘You knew I was not merely a mercenary, so do not act surprised. Bow before your Emperor, Captain Duon.’
The explorer doubled over under the weight, his face striking the ground in a parody of the triple obeisance.
‘Good. I do like worshipful servants,’ said the Emperor.
Torve wanted answers to the captain’s questions. ‘You are not my master,’ he said.
‘I am as much your Emperor as ever I was,’ the man had replied, but his words, which were all he would say, left much unanswered. Far too much.
Having relived the horror of that morning Torve continued his Defiance, but now his opponent was as elusive as ash borne on a rising heat. The Omeran poured everything of himself into his effort, but could not so much as touch his insubstantial opponent. His master—but much more than that—avoided every blow, no matter how skilled, how swift, how random. A mercenary, a master, an emperor—and a god. Unable to be defied.
The events of three weeks ago had not faded in Duon’s memory either. He had not witnessed the obliteration of the village, having been trapped by opposing walls of flame as he ran through the forest, but that the man calling himself Dryman had somehow engineered the death and destruction of Foulwater could not be disputed. It seemed that none of the Amaqi were what they appeared: Torve, the butcher, possessed of the ability to kill people with his hands and feet; Lenares, the woman who could see truth, now lost; and Dryman, finally revealed as the Emperor of Elamaq and a magician of extraordinary abilities.
And himself, with a voice in his head.
All of which begged a number of questions, which the voice did not stint in asking. Who was this man who called himself Dryman? Had they even now learned all there was to know about him? What could Duon remember of him? When did he join the army, and who hired him? And why, if he was the Emperor and so powerful a sorcerer, had he not come to the aid of his own army in the Valley of the Damned?
This last question haunted Duon also. If the Dryman-magician-Emperor had possessed these powers back then, might he not have saved both the army and Duon’s reputation? And if he had not, how had he come by them since? To the voice’s chagrin, Duon had not actually seen the full extent of the man’s magical powers with his own eyes, though Torve’s garbled story had been harrowing enough. But to return to the point, why had the man not come to the aid of those who paid his wage? And what had prompted the great Emperor of all Elamaq to disguise himself—surely at enormous risk—then to endure deprivation as a part of his own army, only to see them fall to their enemies the Marasmians?
The Omeran had his suspicions, that was clear, but refused to talk about it. More than ever Duon wished Lenares was here. She would have had an interesting perspective on the horrors they had witnessed. She would have the insight he so keenly wished for.
And she would have asked more questions. She would have wanted to know what had been done to attract the anger of the villagers. Dryman—he had to stop calling him by that name—the Emperor had said something about having ‘killed her’. Killed whom? Lenares? Or was this linked to something else Duon had noticed: a worrying pattern of death that followed them?
It had started immediately after the lions had attacked the army not far north of Talamaq. About the same time Dryman had first come to his attention, now he thought about it. Over the next few days Duon’s outriders had found clawed and eviscerated corpses, one each morning, and it had been thought that the lions had trailed the army looking for more easy meat, picking off anyone who wandered too far from their fellows. But he’d not quite been convinced. The marks were not the same as those they had found on the remnants of Mahudia’s corpse: there had been slashes, but not the crushing caused by those powerful jaws. It looked as though someone had carefully simulated injuries from the attack of a large animal.
Then there had been the incident in the camp of the Children of the Desert, as Torve had called them. One of their young had been found dead, cut and slashed to pieces. No attempt had been made to make it look accidental: it had to have been inflicted by humans. And it had been about that time that Duon had noticed the mercenary regularly disappearing at night, often taking the Omeran with him. Unfortunately he could not remember if he’d noticed them missing on that particular night.
On the flight north from Raceme Duon had tried to keep a close eye on Dryman, but the man had escaped his attention. A small boy had been found dead the next morning, but there were few marks on his body and it was supposed the boy had suffered some misadventure, a fall perhaps. Now Duon wondered. And there had been other deaths, some likely to be no more suspicious than the usual mishaps that befell a large, mobile population whose members found themselves in unfamiliar circumstances. True, there were more than he would have expected from an army of similar size, but these were untrained townspeople in the main. They were accidents.
Or perhaps the killer had become more wary.
And then there had been the moment when Dryman pulled out a knife and began to slice at one of the injured Foulwater villagers. Why? Torture to reveal the origin of the attack, or something even more sinister?
The voice in Duon’s head asked numerous questions about the deaths, few of which the explorer could answer. Nor did he wish to engage the voice in extensive conversation. Not when he was refused answers to his own questions. Why should he share information with a voice that would not reveal who he was?
He knew he played a dangerous game. His thoughts had always been orderly, his mind disciplined, but now he needed to shield as much information from his parasitical passenger as possible. Whenever he needed to suppress his thoughts, he allowed himself to recall the images of horror in the ballroom of Raceme’s Summer Palace: screams, smells, colours coalescing into red. The voice could retrieve nothing from him while those memories paraded across his mind. But all it would take was one slip, one revelation of knowledge previously kept from the voice, and he did not doubt he would discover the damage his possessor could do to him.
His conversations became rapid and concise. Tell the Emperor the minimum necessary to satisfy him, be obedient at all times, stay out of his way; but listen carefully to everything said, watch everything done, and ask gentle, probing questions whenever he was sure the voice was not listening. What he needed was someone to share this with. He wished the cosmographer had not died, and wondered if the Emperor had not somehow rid himself of her. And all the while Duon wondered about the effect on his sanity of this speculation, and of the voice and the deadly game he played with it.
Three blessed weeks without any research ended abruptly not far north of a small port town, the name of which Torve did not know. They set a fire not far from the edge of what looked like a deep forest, and lay silently, as they always did, waiting for sleep to take them. Duon’s breathing evened out as the unhappy man finally relaxed.
‘I thought he would never fall asleep,’ his master eventually said. ‘Rise, Torve; I have found a candidate upon which to continue my studies.’
He rose. How could he refuse? But first he put out a hand and touched the man on the arm. ‘I want you to tell me why you are doing the research,’ he said.
His master peered at him, puzzled. ‘For the same reason as always, friend,’ he said. ‘So we can uncover the secrets of immortality. It has been our lifelong task, and we are nearer to achieving our goal than ever.’
Torve willed himself to stillness. Nearer their goal? Nonsense. Their last conversation had established the uselessness of continuing the research.
‘I know why the Emperor wished to torture and kill,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know why the Son wishes to continue his work.’
The pause before his master spoke was just a little too long. ‘The Son? What have the gods to do with anything?’
‘You admitted you gained access to his memories. You gave him far more, it seems: a disguise to protect his identity from Lenares and the others around
him, and great powers to destroy those who oppose him. Master, I think you are no longer entirely human. Don’t you realise the Son possesses you? What did you think was happening when you stood in the centre of Foulwater while fire bloomed in a circle around you? Was that the natural behaviour of the Emperor who just a few months ago had forbidden even the mention of the gods? I know what Lenares would have said. She would have recognised the hole in the world, centred on you. She would have said, “You are the Son.”’
No pause this time. ‘I am more than I was, it’s true,’ he said. ‘Just by having been within me, the Son has left me certain gifts. How could it have been otherwise? The gods are so much greater than us, greater by far even than an emperor, and they do not leave us unchanged. I have gained powers, Torve, but I am still mortal.’
The hunger in his voice, on his face, was genuine, even though his words were not. Just sounds designed to keep his pet docile.
‘Mortal for now,’ Torve said, making docile sounds of his own. Pretending to be pacified. ‘You’ll win the secret one day.’
‘Perhaps today,’ said the being claiming to be his master, as it took up a stick from the fire to use as a torch. ‘But not if we stay here talking.’
Torve nodded, his thoughts swirling around his head. If the man ordering him about wasn’t his master, then did he need to be obeyed? Or, if as was more likely, the man was partly his master and partly something else, how much loyalty was he owed?
As the two men left the campsite, Duon allowed his breathing to resume its normal rate.
The questions repeated themselves in various permutations as the man—the best description Torve could give him—walked a purposeful path through scrub towards an open space. It was time to put his theory to the test, time to systematically attempt to disobey his master. Just one act, he was sure, would be enough to break his conditioning. He tried to stop walking, but that was too blatant an action. His legs resisted him: he did not even break stride. Something more subtle, then.
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