Path of Revenge

by Russell Kirkpatrick

  Mahudia nodded her head in acknowledgment, as was proper. ‘We thank you, ma great sor, for this unexpected invitation. We seek your blessing on our new cosmographer, and would ask you a boon.’

  A boon? What could the woman possibly want that she had not asked for a hundred times in her interminable missives? Deal with this one issue at a time. Blessing, then boon.

  Mahudia stood, dragging the half-wit with her.

  The Emperor stood in turn, almost knocking over the bench in his haste to put some distance between himself and the distasteful girl. He forced himself to relax his tense muscles. He would not allow the girl to unsettle him.

  ‘This is your latest cosmographer?’ he asked, and watched the colour drain from Mahudia’s face in response to his tone. How could she think he would not be affronted by this?

  ‘Ma great sor, she is—’

  ‘A lackwit,’ he finished. ‘A charity or something worse. Your plaything, perhaps.’

  Now her colour returned, but she dared not speak. Well-trained daughter of a prominent Alliance member.

  The Emperor adopted a conciliatory tone. ‘How can we bless a half-wit? You know what must be done with her.’ He knew he should speak more harshly, but did not want the ambience of his garden disturbed.

  ‘She is no half-wit, ma great sor!’ His ear picked up a note of pleading in her voice, piquing his interest. ‘Sometimes those carrying the greatest gifts also bear unusual burdens. She sees…she sees—’

  ‘I see the hole in the world,’ said the half-wit in a droning voice, her wet eyes unfocused in the manner of a third-rate carnival-ground seer. ‘Here, in this garden. We should not be here. We must leave.’

  The Emperor turned to the abomination. ‘We decide when—or if—you leave. Torve, we shall keep this one for further examination. If she can show us she is worthy of our blessing, she will receive it.’

  Mahudia showed the good sense to bow her head in helpless submission, but then jerked it up again, against all protocol, as a deep rumble came from the ground directly beneath them. There was a pause, a soundless moment, the birds silent—as they had been for some time, the Emperor realised, only the gentle sound of water from fountains around the garden, patter patter patter—followed by a roar and a powerful jerk that knocked the cosmographers to the ground. The Garden of Angels was instantly transformed into a heaving sea of green, ponderous earth-waves carrying with them bursting pipes, reeling fountains, bushes and trees. Branches whipped and cracked all around them, falling across rippling lawns. People cried out in terror. The world itself seemed to roar at them, a voice filled with agony.

  In the midst of this crashing and grinding the Emperor stood unmoving, legs apart, hands braced against the bench. He willed himself not to fall. Refused the terror clawing at him. He mastered his fear and watched wide-eyed as the earth ripped asunder across the width of the garden, a wet brown mouth opening as if to swallow whatever it could. Trees fell into the maw. People crawled desperately away from the gash—gardeners, cosmographers, guards. An elderly gardener stumbled, lost her footing and pitched backwards into the darkness with a thin cry. Tree roots flicked up like serpent tongues. A foul breath came from the gaping mouth, choking the Emperor who imagined he smelled the decay and corruption underneath his garden. As if all the dead bodies conspired revenge against him.

  He must not die. This was what he was afraid of, above all. He had built an entire empire as a bulwark against death, something to take shelter within, to keep him safe. And yet, in spite of all his planning, his careful investigations into death and the circumstances surrounding it, the countless people he’d observed as they died, death now reached out a palsied hand to take him. The gods would have him, would punish him for his blasphemy. Paralysed now, he could only watch as a tree root snaked towards him, tip quivering, searching, grasping, winding itself around his leg.

  The roaring stopped, the earth ceased shuddering. There was a crash as a last tree toppled to the ground, then another as a wall of the glorious Talamaq Palace belatedly collapsed in a dusty heap. The Emperor’s ears rang, but despite this he heard the inarticulate groaning of his subjects as they pulled themselves to their feet. Avoiding the water pooling in new-formed depressions, stepping around the overturned hedges and the diagonal slash of the sundered earth, his people came from wherever in or around the Palace they’d been and slowly gathered around him, their Emperor, the only one to remain standing throughout the shaking. He realised how he must appear to them; a god amongst mere mortals. One who could stand against the power of the earth. Immortal in bearing, in wisdom, in countenance, in courage. In everything but fact.

  Might that one day be changed?

  He watched one of his Omeran guards, uniform plastered with mud, draw his sword and cut the tree root away from his Emperor’s leg. Legends will grow around this, the great man realised. I will be worshipped.

  Events had driven all memory of the half-wit’s words from his head until he was reminded by Torve’s whispers in his ear. The Emperor turned to his companion.

  ‘She did say that, did she not. Set her apart. We have questions for her.’

  He clicked his tongue in annoyance. His first words after this event would be remembered. They ought not to have been about a half-wit.

  Taking a deep, steadying breath, he addressed his subjects, who continued to gather, coming from the Palace and grounds. ‘Seemingly the gods are displeased with our garden,’ he said dryly. His courtiers laughed: none believed in the gods, at least openly. ‘We in turn are displeased by their response. The Garden of Angels will be rebuilt, and all marks of the intervention of the Three will be expunged. In the meantime, we will journey through our beloved city to survey the extent of the damage and offer assistance to our subjects. Then we will ascertain why we continue to sponsor cosmographers who cannot predict the actions of their gods, or even prove their existence.’

  His subjects bowed before him; he dismissed them with a gesture. Let others see to the dead and the wounded. For now he needed a stiff drink—more than one, in fact—and then he had some questions to ask.

  CHAPTER 4

  QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

  THE AIR FELT DRY AND STALE in the room far below the Emperor’s Palace. Though she knew the room to be a dungeon, a dangerous place where terrible things happened, Lenares felt safe here. The thick stone walls hid her, no longer exposing her to the bright questing mind she had briefly glimpsed earlier that day through the hole in the world. The dreadful fear had relaxed its grip, though Mahudia was clearly still terrified, holding Lenares’ chained hand with annoying tightness.

  Lenares tried to talk with her, to comfort her, but Mahudia appeared beyond comfort. ‘Hush,’ she replied to anything Lenares said. ‘Hush.’ And once: ‘We are in the Emperor’s domain now. We should not speak.’

  So Lenares remained silent, sitting on a wooden bench, calculating furiously, her free hand moving small piles of dust back and forth. The hole had revealed itself, and by doing so had given her an absolute value upon which to hang her strange numbers. She had numerous adjustments to make. Her mind worked without her conscious volition: she sat back as a spectator and watched the patterns select themselves, watched the equations emerge and resolve. Watched expectantly, with mounting excitement, as the conclusion began to take shape.

  She was special. None of the other cosmographers could think like her. The trouble was, this conclusion was so big, so important, that they would not believe her even when she explained it to them using her strange numbers. She was not sure she believed it herself. She would have to find out for herself. She would have to go to the place—

  The rusty metal door swung open and two people walked in. Lenares remembered seeing one of them in the Garden of Angels, over by the white roses. Not a tall man, he looked different from the people she was used to seeing in the Third of Glass. He had very dark skin, a wide face, a broad nose, and crinkly lines around his eyes. She studied him for a moment, assigning him a no
de, calculating his position relative to the tear in the garden, her new absolute. The numbers declared him trustworthy, a relief. He had a nice face. Soft, open.

  The other person wore a hood. Mahudia whimpered in fear and tried to spider-walk away from the hooded figure. Her head cracked against the stone wall behind her. She shrieked once and then fell silent.

  ‘What are you afraid of, cosmographer?’ The hooded person approached Mahudia’s cowering body. The voice was muffled, distorted somehow, but Lenares couldn’t be fooled. Voice tricks could not disguise the numbers. She knew who this man was. Her instincts told her not to reveal this knowledge, not yet. He must have a reason for his disguise.

  ‘Don’t—please, don’t touch her,’ Mahudia pleaded. Lenares started in surprise, and tears came to her eyes. Mahudia is not frightened for herself alone. She is frightened for me!

  ‘Touch her? We will do a lot more than touch her, cosmographer, if we choose to. I see from your face you know what we can do here, in our domain. Let me ask you, then, why you think we have you and your companion here?’

  Mahudia levered herself onto her elbows and drew her knees close to her body. ‘The Emperor wants to know about the warning Lenares offered.’

  The hooded man turned to his colleague. ‘See? I told you she is no simpleton. Mahudia comes from some of our purest bloodlines. This is no puzzle to her.’

  His companion nodded. ‘She is courageous as well as intelligent.’

  Mahudia spoke. ‘If you know who my father is, you must know he will object to my mistreatment. He will seek audience with the Emperor, and will find some way to secure our release.’ Her raised chin was a brave attempt at defiance, but Lenares could see her whole body shaking. Mahudia was scared.

  The reply was swift and brutal. ‘We know who your father is. In fact, the Emperor has already dispatched a messenger to sor Hudan to tell him of the tragic death of his daughter today in the Garden of Angels. It appears she was swallowed by the earth, so unfortunately no body will made available for burial.’

  Lenares watched as the words punctured Mahudia’s pretend defiance, her head dropping until her chin rested on her chest.

  ‘We must question the girl, and question her hard. You know this, Mahudia. The less you cooperate, the harder we will question. Look at it.’ The man in the hood gestured towards Lenares as though pointing to a cow or a pig. ‘Look. There’s not much there to begin with. How much do you think will remain of your pet when we have finished?’

  ‘Cruel,’ Mahudia whispered. ‘So cruel.’ She gathered herself. ‘I will cooperate.’

  ‘Of course you will,’ said the hooded man, and nodded.

  At the nod the Omeran sprang forward and grabbed a pair of shears from a low bench. Mahudia gasped and Lenares squealed in surprise as he hacked off a hank of Lenares’ hair. He let her go, then strode over to a brazier and cast the hair into the embers. A scorched smell drifted over them. Mahudia began to weep.

  Lenares ran her free hand over the spot on her head where her hair had been taken. No one was supposed to touch her without asking; Mahudia made that rule to stop the others picking on her. But the rules don’t hold in here.

  ‘I know who you are,’ she said to the hooded man, fixing him with her most direct stare. The man flinched, just like the Emperor had when Mahudia introduced her to him in the garden. ‘Your hood and your clever voice trick fool everyone, but not me. I don’t believe my eyes or my ears. I see the real world, and you look the same to me whether you wear a hood or a mask. I know your secret.’

  She expected the man to be shocked and angry, but he threw back his head and laughed. ‘Ah, Mahudia, you have chosen your pet well. I hope she gives you as much pleasure as Torve gives me!’

  A word, a name spoken, the mention of the mask perhaps, gave the secret to Mahudia. She said nothing, but Lenares could read the shock clearly on her face. The man in the hood saw she knew.

  ‘So you know why you cannot leave this place, my dear,’ said the Emperor, pushing back his hood to reveal a golden mask. ‘We will make it clean, though, out of respect for your father. That is, if your pet does what we want.’

  ‘Don’t hurt her.’ The words were weak, the only defence Mahudia had left.

  This had gone far enough. Lenares knew how to deal with bullies. ‘Hurt me and you will never know what I have learned. Without the things I know, you will never get what you want.’

  ‘And what do I want?’ Mockery in the voice.

  ‘You want to live forever,’ she said simply, throwing the words at him as though tossing him a poisonous spider. ‘You’re afraid to die.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘No one. The numbers are clear. I can see what you are by looking at the numbers in my head. They make a pattern and the pattern tells me all about you. That’s how I know you are frightened. That’s what makes you mean and cruel. Your fear draws the hole—’

  ‘Enough!’ the Emperor roared, and backhanded Lenares across her face, knocking her to the stone floor.

  It was much later, in the depths of the night, though Mahudia could not be certain of the time. Lenares lectured them. It marked her difference that she would instruct her captors in a dungeon rather than bemoan her fate or plead for her life. The Emperor listened and said little. The Omeran took notes.

  ‘Everything is made up of numbers,’ Lenares explained, her voice more animated than earlier, thickened somewhat by her bruised nose. ‘Mahudia is made up of numbers. The numbers describe how she looks, how she smells, whether she’s nice or mean. If I look at the numbers connected to her I can tell things about her past and even some things about her future.’

  The Emperor leaned over to whisper in the ear of his pet, who muttered an inaudible answer. They were still clearly uncertain, but perhaps not as sceptical as they had been an hour ago. Lenares continued to wear them down with her remorseless arguments.

  ‘What number tells you how Mahudia smells?’ asked the Emperor.

  ‘Not just one number. The numbers change all the time. But her nicest smell is usually linked to eighty-three. ’

  ‘Why eighty-three?’ the Omeran asked.

  ‘Eighty-three has a sliced-apple smell. It smells of sweetness, of goodness, of health.’

  Lenares spoke slowly, as though explaining to a child. Mahudia felt like a child listening to her. No cosmographer in history had had such a profound understanding of numbers, she was certain, not even the Emperor who founded the art three millennia ago. What they dreamed of, aspired to, this child had.

  ‘What other numbers are smells?’

  ‘Eighty-three is sometimes not a smell,’ Lenares continued, as though the Omeran had not spoken. She became like this when explaining something. She possessed an uncanny intensity about her, as though a powerful candle had been lit within her body. She had the supreme gift of being able to focus fully on one thing. Mahudia lost the thread for a moment, and backtracked.

  ‘What are my numbers?’ the Emperor had asked.

  ‘Ninety-one and one hundred and twenty-one are your most obvious numbers,’ Lenares was saying. ‘There are more, but I haven’t known you very long so I can’t see them yet. Ninety-one means lots of things, but one of the things it means is the scent of roses, while one hundred and twenty-one can mean the smell of dead rats in a larder.’ She said this matter-of-factly, despite whom she was talking to; she was, Mahudia knew, incapable of the subtlety required to dissemble, especially when talking about her numbers. ‘Put ninety-one and one hundred and twenty-one together and you have two hundred and twelve, a palindrome, another of your numbers, meaning death hidden by the pretence of health whichever way you look. Palindromes are numbers that hide the truth.’

  ‘I am a palindrome, then?’ The Emperor had a sharp mind, very sharp. Mahudia hoped Lenares would not forget this.

  ‘You are made up of palindromes,’ the girl replied. ‘They are special numbers.’

  Mahudia couldn’t work out if this constituted a naïve a
ttempt at flattery. Lenares generally argued that all numbers were special. She also did not flatter.

  ‘What happens if you multiply the numbers?’ the Omeran asked.

  Lenares beamed at him, as though he was slightly less dim-witted than her other pupils. ‘Addition is flat, like a table-top. Multiplication has a shape like a box. There are even more complicated ways of putting numbers together, and these ways have shapes with more…’ she searched for the word, ‘more surfaces. More dimensions.’

  ‘Eleven thousand and eleven,’ the Omeran announced, obviously proud of himself.

  ‘Good.’ Lenares nodded to the Omeran. ‘But very slow. Eleven thousand and eleven, one digit short of perfect oneness, a very special number and another palindrome.’

  But with a hole in the middle, Lenares did not say. She was showing unaccustomed caution. A man with a void inside him, perhaps, Mahudia speculated. Or a rent?

  ‘This is fascinating,’ the Emperor said, addressing Mahudia. ‘You have taught it to mouth meaningless philosophies and attach homilies to numbers. Of what use is this to anyone?’

  ‘As much use as your Omeran is to you, ma great sor,’ she ventured; and immediately regretting her words, turned her gaze away so she didn’t have to see her fate written in her Emperor’s eyes. No matter what the Emperor decided to do with Lenares, Mahudia feared she would not leave the room alive. She glanced in his direction: his dark eyes were on her, hot and furious, shining through his mask. She was lost. All that remained was to fight for the girl.

  Lenares scowled, unaware of the by-play. ‘Numbers define the universe,’ she said impatiently. ‘Even the gods leave traces when they act on the world. Reading the numbers correctly enables the cosmographers to know where the gods are and what they are doing.’

  ‘We haven’t had a cosmographer capable of reading the numbers correctly for five hundred years or more,’ Mahudia added.