Path of Revenge

by Russell Kirkpatrick

  ‘What’s happened? Why have we stopped?’ No one responded to the priest’s plaintive voice.

  ‘Ohhh,’ Stella breathed, unable to help herself.

  She stood on the very edge of a chasm of stupefying depth, looking down into a deep, wide valley. Little fluffy clouds some distance below them indicated how high the cliff-top was; below the clouds—a long way below—wind-whipped whitecaps rippled across deep blue water. Her gaze was drawn to the opposite shore, a dark line suggesting a precipice of at least equal height, hazy in the remote distance. The water continued many leagues to her right, to the southwest, and in this direction the far cliff receded until it was barely visible. In the distance a bank of storm-clouds hung above a grey curtain of rain. But to her left spread the scene that had taken her breath.

  There the cliffs narrowed somewhat. The sea washed up on a shore of pale sand, fronting a league or more of patchwork fields and forests, softened by a gentle golden mist. Behind this towered another cliff, forming the end of the valley, and at the place where the fertile fields met the rocky wall rose a city of red and white.

  Dhauria. Which was once Dona Mihst, the Vale of Youth. The thousand-year cradle of the First Men, ended by the Destroyer’s rebellion and the great flood unleashed by the Most High. The mother-city of the First Men, from whom Faltha had sprung. A shadow of its former glory, yet the shadow was still far greater than the sunshine of this present age.

  Phemanderac smiled, a proud parent. ‘Welcome,’ he said.

  COSMOGRAPHER

  CHAPTER 20

  THE DESERT CHILDREN

  HEAT, THOUGH ON ITS OWN heat wouldn’t be enough. Hunger, then. Yes, hunger would do it, but hunger was a lazy executioner and would take far too long, days perhaps, even weeks. Thirst would oblige him more quickly, but the death would still be an agonising, protracted one. For a time Captain Duon placed his hope in their pursuers catching them; though even then he would need to be fortunate to escape a prolonged death. The Marasmians had kept some of their captives alive night after night. There had been one in particular, a man—though in such extremity it had been difficult to tell—who had hooted and screamed his defiance for three consecutive nights. The Amaqi had found him on the fourth morning, lying in their path, the body of an owl stuffed in his mouth.

  Perhaps expiring from thirst would be best, after all.

  But Captain Duon’s rational mind had no power in the desert. He shambled daughterback towards the bitter Skeleton Coast along with the meagre remnants of the mighty Amaqi army, all using their cloaks or other items of clothing to shield their faces from the worst of the sun. Duon took his allotted sips from their rapidly dwindling store of water, as did everyone else. No food remained, but it hardly seemed to matter. The Amaqi knew they were being pursued; the Marasmians had not troubled to hide themselves since that dreadful first night after the Valley of the Damned—so the survivors now named it—but neither Duon nor anyone else chose to sit on the sand and await the creative hands of vengeance. Duon’s clever mind told him the quickest way to die would be to refuse the water, that the slowest death was to continue as they were; but the desert took no account of clever thinking. It demanded you survive another moment, then another; it robbed you of the ability to plan, to think long-term.

  A pity, then, that one could not die of shame. Though technically Captain Duon had not been in charge of the Amaqi army at the time the Marasmians ambushed them, the defeat was his responsibility. It had not been an honourable defeat; the name of Taleth Salmadi Duon would not be reported to the Emperor as that of a hero. No, he and the few hundred survivors of the great army of conquest had abandoned their fellows. Had run from the horror. When the Emperor heard of this humiliation, he might even order Duon’s family executed.

  If he heard of it. Someone would have to survive this flight from their tormentors, a possibility becoming increasingly unlikely. The Amaqi expedition would vanish in the desert, and no word of their passing would reach Talamaq and the royal ears.

  We are being herded. The Marasmians wanted them to know this, to despair of life long before they lost it. There could be no other explanation for the constant taunting; the hourly discovery of artefacts from their captured comrades placed carefully in their path. Or sometimes bodies, their cruelly marred features inevitably recognised by at least one of the survivors. Bodies stripped of clothing and dignity, arranged obscenely in grotesque parodies of sexual congress.

  Captain Duon knew exactly where the herders intended to drive their ‘cattle’. He alone of the survivors had previously seen the bare ground where once had stood the city of Marasmos, an obscene reminder of the ruthlessness of an Amaqi emperor long past. There the remnants of the Amaqi army would be corralled, and the Marasmian goal of revenge would be consummated in slaughter. There Duon would find just reward for his cowardice at the cruel hand of some grinning savage.

  To his mortification, Captain Duon did not even command the residue of the expedition. That honour had been taken by Dryman, a mere mid-ranking soldier, member of no Alliance. But, it seemed, a man of resource and persuasion. It was Dryman who kept everyone walking long after Duon would have surrendered. It was he who began to play tricks of his own: an attempt, Duon thought, to raise morale among the dispirited survivors.

  During the second night Dryman had sent two soldiers ahead to disrupt the Marasmians’ next attempt to intimidate them. Both returned midmorning, though one died a few hours later of a stomach wound sustained during the venture. The survivor reported a successful engagement, confirmed later in the day when the site was examined carefully and six dead Marasmian warriors were found. Emboldened, Dryman organised a raiding party that night, finding a dozen volunteers for what would be essentially a suicide mission. Many of the soldiers, despairing of their own lives, were keen to do something to silence their companions’ constant shrieking and moaning that echoed about the hills during the cold nights. That the surprise attack failed was made clear later that evening when the volunteers added their screams to those who had been captured in the Valley of the Damned.

  Dryman took himself off at nights. Duon watched him leave, suspicious of his fervid eyes and eager expression, resentful of the man’s seemingly boundless energy. He returned before dawn, eyes feverish, but gave no clue as to where he’d been.

  The Amaqi were encaged, and the cage was about to be lowered into the fire.

  Torve maintained his Defiance, even though he could feel his strength leaving him. Each morning Lenares would come and watch, her once-pretty cheeks hollowing out by the day. They said little during the long hot marches, trying not to draw attention to themselves. Dryman had already intervened once when a couple of soldiers, half-crazed by thirst, had sought to reduce the number of survivors by two.

  It seemed some of the survivors had adopted the belief that he and Lenares had led the expedition into the Marasmian ambush. Certainly none would credit their story, and after the third time his telling of their painful desert crossing was mocked Torve gave up. The soldiers needed to be angry at someone, and those most at fault for their predicament had been killed. He knew that further arguing would bring more unwelcome attention upon them, so he and Lenares each walked a solitary path, separated from the other survivors, and each other.

  It hurt his newborn heart to watch Lenares suffer. She had already been near the end of her strength when the ambush took place; one night’s sleep had not served to restore her. Whenever he caught sight of her she seemed on the edge of collapse. As usual, there was nothing he could do for her.

  Just before dawn on the fifth morning Torve’s chosen place of Defiance overlooked the steel-grey sea, and the end of everything seemed in sight. Lenares squatted a few paces away and watched with her usual frightening intensity that had disconcerted the Omeran until he became used to it. He finished his almost-dance to find his audience had grown: three small, curly-headed figures sat cross-legged on the sand, watching him with round eyes and absorbed faces.

&n
bsp; ‘The desert children,’ Lenares said happily. ‘Just as you told me.’ So like her: she was more likely to be happy because Torve had been proved truthful than because the children might offer a chance of rescue.

  First things first.

  He beckoned the three children onto his circle; just as they had on the previous occasion, the children replicated his Defiance in movements so seamless as to be magical, inhuman. Lenares gasped; her numbers were telling her something, presumably.

  If only he could communicate with the children. Were they aware of the Amaqis’ desperate straits? Could they do anything to help? For that matter, how had they penetrated this far through the Marasmian perimeter?

  Or were they Marasmian allies?

  ‘Look, Torve,’ Lenares said. The youngest of the three children, a snub-nosed little boy of perhaps six years, took up a stick and spat on one end. Torve licked the inside of his cheeks: saliva in the desert is a sign of wealth, he thought. The boy extended his arm, then sketched a pace-wide square in the sand with the tip of the stick. Something in the flourish, perhaps, or in the boy’s expectant look, suggested magic.

  The Omeran expected a flash of light, a shimmering, a magical rustle of sound. Nothing. But when he looked closely he could see a small section of rocky plain within the square the boy had drawn, a slightly darker grey than the sand surrounding it. A picture of another place. The boy had opened a way between here and somewhere else.

  The girl giggled and clapped her hands, then beckoned Torve and Lenares forward.

  ‘Can we bring our friends?’ Torve asked.

  A furrow appeared in the centre of the girl’s brow.

  ‘Friends?’ Torve repeated. ‘Over the hill there. May we bring them?’

  Lenares’ mouth described a perfect circle. Torve could only imagine what this door—this hole in the world—would be doing to her numerical perception. She wouldn’t care, not now; her curiosity would overcome her fear, she would want to step through; Torve had no doubt he could do nothing to hold her back. Even as he thought it, she stepped forward and climbed through the hole as though leaving a room by a trapdoor.

  With a strangled cry, Torve dived through after her.

  A toe in the small of his back woke Duon from a restless slumber. ‘Get up quickly, boy,’ said a voice. ‘We have no time.’ Something in the tone jerked him awake and onto his feet before a clear thought had time to form.

  It was Dryman, and for once the man showed concern on his face, even fear. ‘Forget your sword,’ he said. ‘Now, or you’ll be left behind.’

  Duon grabbed at the sword-hilt as Dryman dragged him away from the still-sleeping camp. Figuring that the Marasmians could destroy them whenever they wanted, no guard had been set. What was the point? Dryman had argued. But now something had spooked him well and truly.

  ‘Run!’

  Oh yes, the man had been taken by fear.

  Duon was well past running, but Dryman would not listen. The soldier half-dragged him away from the camp, over a dune and into the pale grey valley beyond. In the middle of the valley, on a patch of sand, lay a human-sized square of darkness, and as Duon panted down the sandy slope he watched one, two, three people climb into it and disappear. Two small figures remained.

  ‘Our door to freedom,’ Dryman said, breathing hard.

  ‘Freedom?’ Captain Duon’s head spun viciously; he was barely able to retain consciousness. His life crossed a boundary then, from the understandable to the surreal. Finally, said the voice in the back of his head. Now, perhaps, we can achieve something.

  Duon groaned. He had forgotten his incipient madness, had not considered it as a means of escape from his situation. Might it not have been the kindest death of all, divorced from reality when the butcher’s knives appeared in Marasmian hands?

  Too late now. They were about to hide in a hole in the ground.

  A shout from somewhere behind them. Dryman turned, forcing Duon to follow. A score or more men sprinted down the slope behind them, some with spears in their hands. Dryman ducked as a spear hissed past, then pulled Duon forward.

  They arrived at the dark square at a dead run just as the last ankle disappeared. Dryman snatched at it, and with his other hand grabbed at Duon. Another spear flew low over their heads as the ground swallowed them.

  Nothing could have prepared a disoriented Captain Duon for what happened next. He and Dryman tumbled upwards along a tube that looked like nothing so much as an enormous gullet. Blurred images of dunes to their left, of the sea to their right, smeared across his vision. Without warning they were ejected from the far end of the gullet, spewing out onto a rocky plain. Duon landed half on Dryman, half on a small child who snarled at him.

  As he tried to get his breath back, he watched another child tap on the opening twice with a stick. The image of sand set in the stony desert floor seemed to solidify just as a Marasmian warrior approached the opening. The man’s features registered first shock, then terror as it became apparent he was trapped between the doors.

  Duon could still see into the gullet, but wished he could not. The passage contracted as it reverted to desert, slowly crushing the Marasmian in its grip of sand and stone. The young captain turned away a moment too late to avoid witnessing the man’s features collapse in a welter of blood, his eyes popping out from his head. Had he and Dryman been but a little later…

  ‘Who are these people?’ Dryman said. Duon opened his eyes; the question was addressed to the Emperor’s abandoned Omeran.

  ‘I do not know,’ the slave replied. ‘I have met them before, but know little about them. They do not speak our tongue.’

  ‘I can see that,’ the soldier said impatiently, and turned to Duon. ‘They will take us somewhere else, then try to explain what they want with us. A service or reward of some kind, no doubt.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’ Duon asked him. ‘And why did you save me?’

  ‘I am something of a student of human nature,’ Dryman said. His back was to the Omeran, so he did not see—as the captain did—the astonishing effect his words had on the Emperor’s pet. ‘They will want something in exchange for our freedom. And as for your presence here, how else did you think we were going to find our way through the desert?’

  Behind Dryman the Omeran had fallen to his knees in something like shock, his mouth wide open, head shaking from side to side. The girl-cosmographer tried to pull him to his feet. Beyond them stood three children, talking urgently together in some foreign jabber. Too much was happening for Captain Duon to take in.

  One of the children stepped forward. The tallest one, a boy, now with the stick in his hand. He pointed it at each of them in turn—the cosmographer, the Omeran, Dryman and the captain—and Duon found himself flinching away from it as though it were a poisonous snake. Then the child made a beckoning motion. Follow us.

  Dryman shrugged, then began to walk towards the children. Duon followed: what other choice was there?

  The remnants of the night seemed to last forever, slowly fading into dawn, a never-ending sequence of rock and sand in shades of grey. At one point they passed the Marasmian camp, just outside the ring of sentries. Duon saw the fires and the stakes and the squirming figures with the increasing detachment of the chronically exhausted. He sensed the presence in his head watching everything with an avid interest.

  Some time later the cosmographer collapsed. Asleep, unconscious or dead, Duon could not tell and couldn’t make himself care. Dead, it looked like, the way her head lolled in the Omeran’s arms. The voice in his mind expressed regret, a sentiment Duon was too tired to share.

  Lenares awoke to the sound of murmuring voices and a head-splitting ache in her temples. She probed her awareness as gingerly as a tongue exploring a rotted tooth, and was surprised to find that, even though she had been transported through space—and possibly through time—by some device, and had subsequently lost consciousness, she remained centred.

  She was not sure how this was possible. Her spatial awa
reness, as Mahudia would have called it, retained its clarity. She could visualise exactly where she was on a map of Elamaq; the image of a circular map of bronze flashed through her mind, and she found she could locate her position on it also. Had the Daughter done something to her? Or did the map itself exercise some arcane power? It felt to her as though she emitted some unseen light in all directions, which returned to her complete with a numerical description of where it had been. It made Lenares feel as though she was the centre of the universe.

  A new talent? A result of her close encounter with the hole in the world? An accidental overlay of numerical data? She would observe herself with care. She feared losing control of herself more than anything.

  Torve and the soldier called Dryman were engaged in an intense conversation. Knees together, heads almost touching, they talked in undertones. Torve looked pale, his half-healed scars from the sun standing out on his cheeks as though they had been painted on chalk.

  ‘She’s awake,’ Dryman said, and the two men separated. ‘Remember what you’ve been told,’ the soldier cautioned Torve, to which the Omeran nodded unhappily.

  Lenares glanced around her. She lay on a rectangular mat, woven from all manner of bright colours. Twenty-six different shades, her mind told her. She ignored it: the interminable calculating was becoming increasingly irrelevant. She did not know whether to be disturbed or comforted by this change. The mat lay in turn upon solid rock, a shining green marble polished, she guessed, by many generations of people and their rugs. A wall behind her was of the same rock, though much more angular; above her the rock extended in a small outcrop, to which a pale awning was attached, held outstretched by two gnarled poles set into cracks in the rock.

  Apart from herself, Dryman and Torve were the only others in the alcove. Three, she told her mind, challenging herself to explain the significance of the number. Numbers don’t tell me everything, she admitted to herself. I know how many people are in this room, but not why Captain Duon is missing.