Dark Heart (Husk)

by Russell Kirkpatrick

  But he’d thought he had at the moment he’d spoken.

  ‘That’s what you’ve been unable to tell me all along, isn’t it,’ she said. ‘He could hide himself from me because I’ve never seen his Emperor face, just his Dryman face.’

  ‘It is part of what I could not tell you. Forgive me, Lenares, but there are still things I cannot say. I am trying so hard to be disobedient, but the compulsion is very hard to break.’

  She said nothing, but he could sense her disappointment. Far better that than what she would think were he to reveal the rest of the truth.

  They climbed for at least two hours, perhaps much more, until they found themselves above the clouds and under a starlit sky. He persuaded her to rest, though he could sense she wanted to continue. The tentative beginnings of a new day could be seen off to their right.

  ‘We’re nearly there,’ Lenares said, and led him on.

  She stopped him with slight pressure to his hand. ‘I learned who my true mother is,’ she told him in her typical abrupt manner, without preamble. ‘I am from a farm near Sayonae, but it burned down,’ she said, and his heart sank. ‘My mother—’

  ‘No.’ No, it could not be; such cruelty would not be permitted. The Father in his mercy, in his mercy, in his mercy…‘Lenares, I do not want to hear this story.’

  ‘Torve, the truth cannot hurt us.’ He could see her eager smile in the growing light, and it squeezed his heart.

  ‘Yes, Lenares,’ he said. ‘It can.’

  ‘My mother…my birth mother…is not a nice person. When we went—’

  ‘Please, no more, not now. I want to be happy with you for a while.’

  She frowned at him, but did not continue her telling. They walked in silence for a time, and Torve wondered if he could possibly keep the truth from her. Was everything a circle?

  ‘We’re here,’ she said.

  The sun’s bright disc rose above the tree-lined horizon and threw their surroundings into relief. They stood in the centre of a wide plateau a thousand paces above the surrounding jungle. The ground was relatively flat and almost completely treeless; small shrubs were the dominant species, the larger specimens bending away from the sun in the still morning as though sculptured by an invisible wind.

  ‘We’re late,’ Lenares said, and led him to the only two trees on the plateau.

  The sun had already caught their upper branches, colouring the broad leaves a virile green. They stood either side of a faint path, a portal into an ancient house. She led him between the trees, and the sun disappeared. Bark turned to rock walls and leaves to sand. Within moments they were descending a stone staircase into a narrow, lake-floored fissure.

  ‘She was telling the truth,’ Lenares said, and turned to him, the most beautiful smile on her wide open face.

  They kissed there, in the morning room, and stayed to watch the sun illuminate the walls and listen to the solar choir, as they had done months ago on their first visit to this house.

  ‘There are doors all over the world,’ Lenares said. ‘We can come here whenever we like.’

  He wanted to stay, but she led him on to find the room with the three chairs. It was much further away than he remembered, and she told him that, according to the Daughter, the rooms didn’t stay in the same place. They walked through one room he didn’t remember. It was filled with geometric shapes—enormous cubes and pyramids and spheres, and shapes even stranger—but none of them were in focus. No matter how he squinted, the edges of each shape remained blurred. The room troubled him, though it excited Lenares, but she did not linger. The Daughter, apparently, called them on.

  He did not trust this Daughter. Lenares was very clever, but so trusting. Why would a captive lead her captor to such a place unless it contained a way for her to escape? He said this to Lenares as they scrambled through the Wave Room, but she shook her head.

  ‘I’m forcing her to tell me. I’ve been asking her how to get to the House of the Gods ever since I captured her.’

  Her answer heartened him, but did not entirely deal with his unease.

  Finally they arrived.

  ‘Oh,’ Lenares said. Torve’s breath caught in his throat.

  The circular room had been destroyed. There was no sign of the three chairs, and the lake had vanished. A small sandy depression was all that remained of the site of the map of bronze.

  ‘The whirlwind did this,’ Torve said, as he watched her face crumple with the realisation. ‘When it took us up out of Nomansland. The chairs and the map must have fallen with us into Raceme.’

  ‘We need to go back there,’ Lenares said, her voice strained. ‘Hire men to find the chairs and the map, and to bring the pieces back. I must see.’

  ‘No, Lenares. The Daughter is trying to sidetrack you.’

  I am not, a voice whispered. Yes, you can recreate this place. But because it was destroyed, you can remake it to suit yourselves. In fashioning your own chairs, you will fashion yourselves as gods.

  ‘And you and the Son will take our place in the world. Lenares, why can’t you see what she’s doing?’

  ‘I can,’ she said. ‘But I can keep her from doing it.’

  She had already moved away from him, searching for rocks with which to begin building her chair.

  He took hold of her. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘We can come back here when the gods are vanquished. You said yourself that there are doors everywhere. Put it aside for a moment.’

  She looked into his eyes with such longing. He seized on it. ‘Can’t we take some time for ourselves?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She slipped an arm around his head and drew him close.

  He had thought about this in the days before he lost her. If the chance ever came, he would fill his mind with only her. He would not see her as an experimental subject; would block the sights and sounds of his research from his memory and do his best to see beauty and not terror. Even if he struggled to succeed, he would give everything good of himself to her.

  On the day she had been lost he’d thought their chance gone forever. But here she was again, and here was their chance, on the sandy floor of the House of the Gods.

  And there it was that Dryman found them.

  CHAPTER 22

  DARK HEART

  STELLA SWORE TO HERSELF. At a word from Conal—the first words he’d spoken for days—the Falthans had abandoned their largely coastal path and plunged into the heart of the forest. His voice had told him Arathé and the Bhrudwans were in trouble. He’d not been especially convincing, but why else did they keep him with them, given his recent betrayals, if not to keep track of the others through his voice? Either disregard his warning and be rid of him, Heredrew had argued, or listen to him. After a protracted argument they had decided on the latter.

  It soon became clear that Arathé was not in any particular difficulty. Indeed, she was also rushing into the forest, along with her fellow Bhrudwans, having fallen for the same ruse as the Falthans. They had made contact the previous afternoon, on the border of the inner lands of Patina Padouk, the place known, so Heredrew said, as Dark Heart. Each group had thought the other in trouble. Conal and Arathé compared notes and together tried to engage their mysterious magician in conversation, but they could not raise the treacherous voice. It therefore became a matter of urgency that they locate Captain Duon, the third of the voice-infested people. Heredrew was, rightly, not prepared to continue if it meant the three of them came together and attracted more activity of the gods.

  After searching their immediate surroundings and finding no sign of the Amaqi party, the two groups had camped together last night. Their tales of the last few weeks had kept them up late into the evening.

  The Falthan party had gratefully accepted the rest. Stella huddled next to the fire, body bent over her missing arm, one ear on the conversation. Heredrew had performed a combination of magical and field surgery on her stump, but, without the rest of the forearm and hand, had not been able to recreate it. Instead, he’d taught her
how to produce an illusory hand. ‘One thing I am competent at,’ he’d said with a wry smile. She appreciated his trouble, but it seemed poor compensation for the loss. The pain was still severe, greater because of the shedding of immortal blood, but more significant than the pain was the knowledge she was marked in the same way he was.

  ‘Perhaps an immortal can die,’ she had said to him. ‘Chop me up into sufficiently small pieces and burn them. You’ll be rid of me, and it will be no great loss.’

  He ignored her self-pity. It would take her months if not years of practice before her illusory arm became even partially corporeal, he warned her. Just because she could see it did not mean she could use it for anything.

  ‘Illusion works on the mind of the beholder,’ he had said. ‘Others, even those who know of your loss, will see a normal hand and arm, but you will not. It requires intense practice to convince yourself it is real, which is what is required for corporeality to be effective. I never thought to try it until I lost my second hand,’ he admitted.

  Heredrew had also privately confided that he could have healed Conal’s sight. ‘We had the ruins of his eye. Had it been you, Stella, I would have repaired the damage. But I thought it best that the priest not recover his full vision. If his eyes have served as windows for this unknown magician, better that they are shut. I confess I am tempted to give the man the symmetry he craves, but not in the way he wishes.’

  The priest suffered, and Stella was glad of it. His physical pain was underscored by his knowledge that his actions had endangered them all. He had expected to be put to death, and was surprised when Stella overruled an informal vote. She had been the only one to support him. But even she had run out of patience. He would serve them in one narrow area, the reporting of anything the voice said, and otherwise suffer himself to be led by the wishes of the party.

  Sauxa had been the most vocal in his efforts to have the priest pay with his life. ‘He’s played us all for fools,’ the old man said. ‘In Chardzou we’d string up anyone who gave away secrets to the Straux officials. It’s about trust. Stupidity can be forgiven, which is why my son remains with us, but betrayal brings death.’

  Moralye had agreed. ‘We cannot allow one self-obsessed priest to jeopardise everything we are trying to do. He must die.’ She had glanced around the camp as she spoke, the look in her eyes that of the morally righteous. None of the doubt that curled around Stella like vines on a tree. ‘Give me your sharpest knife. I will do it.’

  Conal had begged and cried pardon with words fit to break the hardest heart. He had given them his story, crying out all the time for the loss of his eye, emphasising his oppressed background, his confused feelings and his potential usefulness—each component designed to appeal to one or more of those judging him. In the end Stella could not condemn him; not when another like him, who had pleaded for understanding albeit in a rather more sophisticated fashion, remained unpunished in their midst. She merely pointed to Conal’s usefulness as a pretext; a sop to her own conscience.

  Robal said very little, seeming badly affected by the events at the Umerta steading. Even Kilfor could coax next to nothing from him. Stella worried for him. She found herself longing to take him aside, to see if she could help him in any way, but such things would only make matters more complicated still. And were Heredrew to find out…

  They had decided to leave Phemanderac in Sayonae, with Moralye to nurse him, but the old dominie rallied himself and joined them. Stella had grave concerns about the sense of this, but she’d also doubted his ability to survive unaided in a strange town. Better where I can see him, she had decided. Privately she wondered if Heredrew lent him strength. Goodness knew, she would give him some of hers if only she knew how to do it. Another thing to ask Heredrew; another debt to add to the list.

  If I’m going to live forever, she acknowledged, perhaps I need to learn how to harness the magic loose in me.

  At first light—some indeterminate time after dawn—they rose, breakfasted, then crossed a river, using a rope tied there for the purpose, and set off warily into the jungle heartland.

  ‘I warned you what would happen if you pursued this girl,’ said Dryman.

  His hand was still buried in Torve’s tunic where he had grabbed it to haul the Omeran up from the ground. The echoes of his voice rippled around the strange enclosure, and the onlookers, including Duon, found themselves momentarily distracted by the odd, whispery mutterings the sound seemed to call from the walls.

  ‘But you didn’t forbid it.’

  Duon found new admiration for the Omeran. He would have lost his water before this point, fearing what was to come, but Torve kept his gaze steady. His breeches were open and his manhood dangled free, but nonetheless he had an odd dignity about him.

  The mercenary turned to his three porters. ‘Fetch me the largest stone you can carry. Don’t go beyond this enclosure: you can’t bring anything in here from the other rooms. Take your time. Chisel it from the wall if you have to. I want my servant to reflect on what is about to happen to him.’

  Lenares put a hand out, as though reaching for some invisible rope. Her drawers were around her knees and her tunic undone, but she seemed neither to notice nor care. ‘Tug, tug, tug!’ she cried, or something similar. ‘Put a stop to this!’

  ‘She won’t listen to you, little halfwit,’ Dryman said, smiling. ‘Not while I stand unveiled in this room. She is trapped beyond the worldwall, rendered ineffective courtesy of your misguided animal cunning, while I am here by invitation of this man I possess. While this remains the case, I can dampen what little power she can exercise in this place. She won’t dare challenge me.’

  ‘You called me friend,’ Torve said.

  ‘And you, friend, went and rutted with a halfwit, one I thought we were rid of. Look at you. Omerans mate only when their masters tell them. You know this. Not only did you wriggle through the net I placed about you to keep you pliant and obedient, you took up with another animal!’

  ‘Why is that worse than if he’d fornicated with a human?’ Duon heard himself ask. His voice sounded angry, but in his heart he was frightened of the man with arrow-shafts in his chest. There were things worse than death…

  ‘It is worse because I say it is!’ the man snapped, not even turning his head. ‘Because I established the laws three thousand years ago to keep the races pure! Their behaviour threatens everything!’ He turned and sought the porters. ‘Where is that stone?’

  ‘You said not to hurry,’ one of them said, very unwisely.

  ‘HURRY NOW!’

  The words pressed in on Duon’s ears. Guiltily he realised he’d escaped the god-Emperor’s wrath. He watched it descend on the unfortunate porter.

  ‘Please!’

  ‘Let my brother live!’

  The shouts were ignored. The speaker fell to the ground, hands on his ears, but the blood seeped through his fingers regardless and leaked onto the pale sand.

  The reason for the mercenary’s sudden anxiety revealed itself when a near-dozen people filed into the enclosure. Duon recognised the Falthans, the tall man at their head.

  ‘It would be wise to leave the boy alone,’ the tall man said. Heredrew, Duon thought, recalling the name.

  Duon was unsure which boy was meant: the one dying on the sand or the one in Dryman’s grasp.

  ‘He is mine and beyond your power,’ the mercenary said.

  ‘He is that,’ Heredrew agreed. ‘I’m asking you. Appealing to you.’

  Dryman released the Omeran, who fell to the ground as though boneless.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m doing something I ought to have had done some time ago. Take your people and leave this place, unless you are prepared to see their blood join his on the sand.’

  ‘And this is how you would live in the world? How you would deal with the weak and vulnerable? Are you trying to raise up an opposition to yourself and your sister, or is it merely a by-product of your towering arrogance? If you would have a place among us, you ca
nnot behave like this.’

  ‘Leave,’ Dryman said, his word hard as rock, heavy as a building, sharp as the edge of a blade. The Falthans had no choice but to back away and file out of the canyon.

  Duon had hoped Heredrew possessed the strength to intervene, but either he did not or he chose not to use it. The latter, possibly. Why, after all, should the fate of an Amaqi servant concern a Falthan?

  Why should it concern you? Duon barely noticed the voice’s arrival, and did not acknowledge it.

  The last two brothers fought with a stone half-embedded in the rock wall, but it would clearly be some time before they broke it free. Dryman beckoned with one hand and the wall exploded in a shower of rock and sand. The stone flew through the air, fetching one of the brothers a clip on the side of his head, and landed at the mercenary’s feet.

  The two porters scrambled over the debris and made their way to Dryman’s side. Pasty-faced and dull-eyed, they seemed more automaton than alive.

  ‘Hold him,’ commanded the mercenary. ‘You on the shoulders, you on the legs. Force his legs apart.’

  Torve began to struggle, but Dryman put a hand on his servant’s forehead and the fight seemed to drain from him.

  ‘In the absence of a surgeon this will have to do,’ he said. ‘You are lucky, my pet. Anyone else attempting this would kill you. However, with me you will lose exactly what I want you to lose.’

  ‘No!’ cried Lenares, throwing herself on the mercenary. He swatted her away: her body flew impossibly high, landed in a heap and flopped limply beside the small depression in the ground. She moaned once and went still.

  He drew a small knife and held it up to the light, then breathed on the blade. Duon recognised it as the man’s ‘research’ knife. At a command the porters lowered Torve until his rear lay astride the stone, then pulled down his breeches. Dryman grasped the Omeran’s member and pulled it taut, then raised the knife and sliced it free, along with the balls. Torve shrieked, then fainted. Blood spurted in a great flow, but the mercenary passed a hand over the wound. Duon saw the hand glow briefly white, and heard the hiss as the wound was cauterised, then blanched at the stench of cooked meat.