But that other cosmographer, Lenares, the uncanny one—her seizure had been the finish of his leadership. He had given her credibility, so when hers was undermined, his went with it. His last act as leader had been to argue that she should be left alone, a course of inaction none had agreed with. Farouq—ma sor Farouq, he corrected himself bitterly—sent one of his, Duon’s, own soldiers after her. Duon’s remonstrations were laughed at. The real struggle for power that afternoon had been between Pasmaran and Elboran, with the latter, more numerous, emerging victorious. The other Alliances had rushed to position themselves profitably with respect to the victor. Captain Duon was no more use to anyone.
No…morrzzz…uzze…to mee…zzz.
Behind him the caravan continued to enter the valley. Duon and his guards were now equidistant between the fatherwards and fatherback bluffs, in the middle of what was once, if the legends were to be believed, the bed of a river that ran night and day every day of the year, even in the heat of summer. He had seen streams sustained by ice in the knotted peaks of the Maranon, but could not imagine the water needed to fill this valley.
There was some evidence of recent river activity, though. Duon could not prevent his explorer’s mind from cataloguing the small clues. Driftwood, mostly ash and cypress, no doubt from the forests he had never seen, hundreds of leagues to the sonback. Scour marks between the larger stones. Sand ridges perpendicular to the likely flow—probably pressure ridges left by a flood, or perhaps small dunes shaped by the downvalley wind. Their path took them between and parallel to the sand ridges.
A rider cantered past him, travelling in the opposite direction. Duon caught a glimpse of the man’s tense face, observed the way he restrained himself and his horse, and knew something untoward had happened.
Good.
Not his thought. Or perhaps it was, and he was simply unwilling to admit his ungentlemanly conduct.
No time to consider. Farouq, who had been visiting the camp followers, rode past him in the direction of the vanguard, his face a brittle mask. Dryman, Duon’s turncoat soldier, followed, jogging in his new leader’s dust, more excitement than usual evident on his features. At a gesture from Farouq he halted and spoke to Duon’s guard. The Elboran Elder continued on.
‘Ambush ahead,’ Dryman said, breathing heavily. ‘Farouq thinks it trivial, but good soldiers ought to be prepared for anything. Divide the caravan into two units of equal size. Include the camp followers in the second unit, but send wagons forward to the first. Should the ambush be larger than our leader thinks, one of the two units should be able to disengage and escape.’
What sort of idiotic advice was this? And on whose authority? Duon opened his mouth.
‘Keep thizzz expedizzion togezzer,’ he said; then, horrified, snapped his mouth shut.
Dryman ignored him. ‘Go,’ he told the guards. ‘I am more than sufficient to guard one powerless man. As always, I am answerable to Farouq, so have no fear of being called to account.’
The guards looked at each other warily, but left as he commanded.
‘Something is about to happen, ma sor Duon,’ Dryman remarked, and winked at him. ‘Can you not feel it?’ Truly the man was insufferable, a wide smile creasing his plain, pale face. Insufferable, or mad.
He izz mad? And you are the judgzz of thizz?
Duon froze.
The soldier seemed unperturbed by Duon’s lack of response. ‘Come, then,’ he said. ‘The first thing to do is get you untied and find you a sword. I have a feeling you will need it.’
With that, he drew a plain-looking knife—plain, that was, unless one knew the value of the oft-tempered steel—and cut Duon’s bonds. ‘Take the knife,’ Dryman said, handing it to him handle first. ‘We’ll find you a longer blade shortly.’
Duon glanced behind him. The last of the camp followers had finally set foot on the riverbed, and to him it seemed like a trap closing on his expedition. He turned to Dryman, eyes wide.
‘Ah, you sense it too,’ the soldier said. ‘I had begun to wonder if my faith in you was misplaced.’
Hizz faith? Who izz thizz man?
Duon clutched at his head in horror. None of the rationalisations he’d dredged up would suffice to explain this voice. ‘There is someone talking in my head. I am unfit for command.’ He hadn’t meant to say it out loud.
‘A voice?’ Dryman said, tilting his head quizzically. ‘Really? I hope it encourages you to act sensibly. For example, we are approaching Farouq and his Elboran mob. Perhaps your voice might advise you to conceal your knife and put your hands behind your back?’
Duon nodded, badly frightened.
Dryman pushed through a ring of soldiers and stood, arms folded, at the edge of a large pool, two hundred paces wide. Duon followed him. This was the Falanrasel oasis, the largest spring between Talamaq and Nomansland, a crucial link in any fatherwards journey.
Unsure what was expected of him, Duon positioned himself immediately behind the soldier. Farouq stood on his right, facing a bedraggled woman with enormous eyes. The fey cosmographer. Her arms were held by a bluff-faced soldier. Dryman hissed, a sound echoed by the voice in Duon’s head.
‘A few spies don’t make an ambush,’ Farouq said. ‘We are grateful that you and your Omeran stumbled across them, but we are in no danger.’ The Elboran Elder was posturing for the benefit of his soldiers, trying to defuse panic. ‘The no-accounts above us no doubt wish to shepherd us out of their lands as swiftly as poss—’
A flash passed in front of Duon’s eyes, followed by a meaty thwack and a scream from Farouq. A long wooden spear had penetrated his thigh and driven deep into the sand beneath him. A second spear barely missed his head, taking a soldier behind him in the stomach.
‘Get this thing out of me!’ roared Farouq as soldiers scattered, assumed defensive crouches or took cover behind their horses. Two brave men ran towards him; the third spear knocked one off his feet. Farouq’s head jerked up, his eyes went wide and he thrust his bloody hands protectively in front of his face, but the next spear went through his hands and his head with a sound like a cracking jar.
A chorus of shouts came from the ridge above them, followed by a lethal rain of spears. Hundreds of them, turning the sky black, whistling through the air, clattering against each other in flight, splashing into the pool, burying themselves indiscriminately in sand, in horses and in soldiers. The oasis turned to a field of horror, transformed by the screams of men and animals, by dreadful wounds, merciful death and merciless agony, blood on the sand and in the water.
While most of the soldiers ran away from the cliff, seeking to get beyond the range of the spear-throwers, Torve snatched at Lenares’ hand and dragged her through the oasis and towards the steep bluffs. A spear thumped into the ground just in front of them, throwing sand into their faces, but no others came close. They climbed a little way up the cliff, found a niche in the shadowed rock-face and turned to watch the butchery below.
‘They wouldn’t listen, they wouldn’t listen!’ Lenares sobbed, her hands scrubbing at her face. ‘What use is it to be special if no one believes me?’ She winced as her salty tears soaked into the broken skin of her cheeks.
‘Some of the soldiers believed you,’ Torve said. ‘But their leaders will not accept anything we say as true. Lenares, forgive me, but we are not believable.’
‘Then what use am I?’ she wailed.
From their vantage point the two observers saw the expedition pull back from both cliffs—the one they were on and the other on the far side of the valley—pouring into a boiling mass in the centre of the valley. The hail of whistling spears slowed, then ceased, as no targets remained within range. From under the thin-trunked spear forest that had sprung up around the oasis came the groans and cries of the wounded, accompanied by the muffled wriggling of men and horses trying to free themselves from ashwood spears that pinned them to the ground. Torve wished the spears would begin again; anything to silence the grinding cacophany assaulting his ears.
A shout from above heralded scrabbling sounds and the rattling of rocks, then after a few minutes the first of the desert savages clambered down the cliff on narrow paths. If just one of them looks back in our direction…Intent on the scene below, readying their curved knives, none of the attackers spared a glance behind them. In their thousands they came, dark-skinned, pale-skinned, men, women, a dozen different races, all wearing similar fierce expressions. Torve had not imagined that this many non-Amaqi remained in the world.
Reaching the valley floor, the warriors separated into two groups. The larger set out in pursuit of the remnants of the expedition. The remainder turned their attention to the wounded. Despite the severity of their wounds a few of the Amaqi fought their killers with the same desperation they would use to fight the Herald of Death herself; others welcomed the release of the spear or the knife as though greeting a lover. Boys barely old enough to handle a sword lay side by side with hardened veterans of campaigns in the daughterwards parts of Elamaq; young and old died together. The Marasmians left none alive.
We can do nothing, Torve repeated to himself. We can do nothing.
The slaughter of the wounded over, the warriors put their knives between their teeth, gathered up as many spears as they could carry and ran with enthusiasm towards the bulk of their enemy. For the briefest moment Torve imagined himself leading his Omeran people across the valley, swords and pikes in hands and hot anger in their hearts, ready to extract the full measure of revenge on the Amaqi for all the terrible things they had done to them. Except the Omerans would be more likely to turn on him than on their masters.
Out in the middle of the valley the Amaqi expedition appeared to be regrouping. Though they had lost many of their horses in the initial ambush, there remained enough to hitch to the formidable chariots. Horse-handlers disengaged the mules that had served to pull the chariots during the journey and rushed through the complicated set-up procedure. Other soldiers stood in the armoury wagons, passing out armour. There was nowhere near enough.
Looking more closely, Torve noticed pale lines either side of the massed Amaqi army, as though a giant had scored a series of grooves across the stony riverbed and filled them with sand. They are too straight, those lines. Not natural.
‘Oh,’ Lenares said. ‘Oh. It is going to get very bad.’
For a moment Torve imagined he could see the hole Lenares talked about. Or perhaps it was a trick of the light, an artefact of the sun glinting on the swords and armour of the Amaqi soldiers. Directly above the expedition the sky paled; a hard edge appeared, encompassing a circle within which could be seen a different sky. Wheeling gulls, whitecap waves.
He was distracted by sudden movement to the left and right of the expedition. Figures emerged from behind the sand ridges, springing directly out of the ground. Thousands of Marasmians hidden in trenches, bursting out unseen by the disoriented, shocked, leaderless expedition. Torve found it hard to tell at this distance, but it looked like the warriors had drawn throwing knives. Right hand overhand, left hand underhand, thrown with deadly force into the melee, calculated to wreak maximum damage. Wails of surprise, fear and pain came their way, borne on the hot breeze.
Torve could not hold himself back. ‘Lenares, we have to try to help them!’
She glanced at him. ‘Would the Emperor send you into battle?’
The Omeran ignored her. What I require now is courage, not wise counsel. He began a rapid descent. ‘Wait here!’ he tossed off behind him.
The smell of blood and faeces threatened to unman him as he worked his way through the forest of spears. Many of the bodies looked chewed up, as though forced through a monster’s maw. An apt description. He pulled a spear free of the sand, hefted and discarded it, then thought carefully about his own abilities and picked it up again.
‘What are you going to do with that?’ Lenares said.
He turned on her. ‘I asked you to wait!’
‘The hole is narrowing,’ she said, avoiding his gaze. ‘I want to see what happens.’
‘You could see perfectly well from the cliff! The hole has you as a target. Why put yourself in its eye?’
She snarled angrily at him. ‘All right, I’m coming so you don’t get killed, and I want you to live because I…because I want you to live and not die.’ Her face threatened to crumple. ‘I don’t think I like you when you won’t let me lie to you.’
‘I like you when you tell the truth,’ he replied. ‘Everyone else is dishonest.’
They left the sandy oasis and ran across the sun-hot stones towards the battle. The circle of Amaqi had shrunk considerably in the few minutes it took them to reach the encircling Marasmian warriors. Torve guided Lenares up a small hill to partial shelter behind a large rock. ‘There is nothing we can do; we cannot break through the encirclement. We can only wait. Something may present itself.’ Lenares bit her lip, but allowed Torve to guide her to the hiding place.
The battle was the most complex thing, the most beautiful and terrible thing, Lenares had ever seen. She found herself able to separate out her fears, her tiredness and the sun-inflicted pain from her perception of the events surrounding her. The shapes, sounds and colours that made up her objective reality poured into her mind so swiftly she was not able to convert them to numbers. All the better to see the underlying patterns, evidence of the godly hands that directed—and interfered with—the battle.
The hole in the world swirled above the valley. Still drawing inwards, like a knot being tightened, it screamed at her, a roiling mass of purple with jagged, bleeding edges. The Marasmians, standing in a circle of their own directly below the hole, drew strength from it somehow; Lenares could see the linkages, but could not understand how they had been established or how they worked.
A greedy, hungry presence radiated from the hole. By a simple process of elimination Lenares knew now who he was. She had sat on the Daughter’s seat in the house of the gods, and had heard her voice; this was not her. The Father was the missing god, driven out of Elamaq by his two ungrateful children, so it could not be him. That left the Son, the most respected by the Amaqi of the three gods, at least until the Emperor had spoken against god-worship. Her enemy was the Son. What she did not yet know was why the Son would lend strength to the enemies of the Amaqi.
But lend it he did, and at the same time the hole drew strength from the Amaqi army. Lenares watched as armoured soldiers cast down their swords in despair, to be slain by knife-wielding Marasmians who ought not to have stood a chance against them. The camp followers put up a more spirited defence—the god did not oppose them—but were being killed in their hundreds. In places brave Amaqi commanders rallied soldiers behind a few chariots or a defensive formation, and there had the upper hand against the desert warriors.
Another presence flowed through both armies, confounding much of what the Son tried to accomplish. The Daughter, her presence as sweet as a spring bloom, lent her courage to the pockets of Amaqi resistance, and sowed confusion in the Marasmian ranks. Yet she could not counteract the strategic—and supernatural—advantage owned by the attacking warriors. Nor could she, seemingly, confront the hole or the god within it directly. A delaying tactic at best.
Two other people registered as important nodes in the ever-changing tapestry Lenares beheld. One, a tall, blond-haired soldier, she recognised as Captain Duon. To her senses he glowed, a conduit for magical power: certainly none could stand before his sword. The captain wore a surprised look on his face, as though he could not believe the prowess he exhibited with the blade.
Beside him stood a soldier, shorter in stature, but, if anything, more of a lodestone of power in the battlefield. So much magic poured into the man that Lenares could not recognise him. Most disturbing was that both the Son and the Daughter were attempting to infuse their will into him; he coruscated with a swirling blend of purple and gold, masking his face and wrapping him like a shroud. So much seemed to depend on him, so much effort being expended, and yet Lenares knew nothing of him
.
As she watched, one of the warriors, a chieftain with braided hair, burst through the Amaqi defences and threw a knife at the unknown soldier. Captain Duon knocked it out of the air with his sword, then turned and engaged the warrior, who used his spear as a staff. The exchange was a brief one. The captain parried the spear and thrust the man through before he could recover.
‘It’s time!’ the unknown soldier called, his voice supernaturally amplified by one of the gods, Lenares could not distinguish which. ‘Abandon the field!’
Captain Duon bent his head to speak to the fellow, but received only a shake of the head in reply. The captain waved his arms in remonstration, which brought a further shake. The remnant of Amaqi soldiers formed around the two men, then began marching towards where Lenares and Torve had hidden. Before they realised what was happening, the Marasmians had given way before the Amaqis and the two observers had been enveloped by the army they were observing.
‘I will not abandon the larger part of my expedition!’ the captain roared as he passed the rock that hid Lenares and Torve. ‘They will be killed!’
‘They are dead already, Captain,’ said a voice Lenares recognised. ‘Unless we disengage now we will join them in a graveless death.’
‘But all we have left are a few hundred soldiers! What of our chariots?’
‘Toys for the Marasmians to amuse themselves with, ma sor,’ said the soldier.
Dryman, that was the man’s name. Lenares risked a peek from behind the rock, but to her annoyance the gods had withdrawn their power from both men. Were they no longer relevant? Or had their escape been offered and accepted, somehow conceded? She suspected that Dryman had been the one the gods had contended for.
Torve pulled her up by her arm, and they fell in with the soldiers.
Behind them the Marasmians formed up again, closing their circle on the thousands of soldiers and camp followers still alive. Lenares knew what was about to happen, but did not want to watch. But I have to. I might learn something more about the hole in the world. The more I study it, the more I can analyse its patterns. So she observed when she could as they hurried fatherbackwards towards the oasis and freedom.
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