The Children, ancestors to the Omeran animal. How far had the Omerans fallen? How long ago had they lost their humanity?
The same three who had spoken to her at the previous meeting stepped forward. Their movements were not as composed as they had been; Lenares had trouble understanding them.
‘One of you did this. He must step forward. We will kill him and let the rest of you leave. If he does not step forward, we will kill you all.’
‘They are bluffing,’ Dryman said when she relayed the message. ‘They cannot take human life. Not since they conspired with the Daughter and the Son to drive out the Father have they spilled human blood. They were appalled by what they did. Since then they have made a covenant with themselves not to interfere, which is how they survived. Until now.’
‘How do you know this?’ Lenares asked him.
‘Does it matter, witch-girl? Is what I say true?’
She nodded. Or at least it is not false. His words made her freshly aware of the growing gap between the two poles of her life, truth and falsehood, as though the twin rocks upon which she stood had suddenly begun to move apart, revealing a chasm between them.
Torve clearly wished to step forward, but his feet remained where they were. His body strained like a hound against an invisible leash. What could prevent him doing what he obviously wanted to do? She felt herself on the very edge of revelation.
The moment drew out, the two groups staring at each other over the small pile of palm leaves, until the Children began arguing with each other. While Lenares could not understand what was being said, the general flow of the argument was clear. To kill, in violation of their covenant, or to send their captives on their way?
For a time the two factions seemed equally vehement, but gradually the man and woman—the child’s parents—leading those seeking the deaths of the Amaqi gave way to the obligations of tradition. Dryman had been right.
‘Come with us,’ the Children instructed Lenares, every trace of cordiality erased from their demeanour.
Torve drew alongside her. ‘Lenares,’ he began.
‘Don’t talk to me, don’t touch me, don’t look at me,’ she said, using the most menacing tone she could muster. ‘Don’t think about me. You are a sick animal. Go away. I will not speak to you again.’
She swung a fist and hit him, hard, on the side of the jaw. Two of her knuckles split but she didn’t care about the pain. Welcomed it. He—it—went down to its haunches with a grunt of pain and surprise.
It took an hour for the dizziness to depart. He truly had not been anticipating her strike; he thought of his pretentious Defiances, in which he avoided every kick and punch any opponent threw at him. One of the Children here could slay me with her fists. Lenares can send me to my knees. I am not worthy of being anyone’s opponent.
He recognised these thoughts for the despair they were, packaged them up and resolved to deal with them when next he had an opportunity to practise his Defiance. It seemed he would be fighting the whole world.
The Children of the Desert gathered around a flat patch of stony ground. One of the Children took a stick and spat on it and, as before, a rectangular hole opened at his bidding. Was the stick magical? Or the spit? And the portal, was it a permanent fixture or was it re-created wherever and whenever required?
So many things he wanted to know. He so desperately wanted to explore the kinship he felt with these people, to learn what he had lost, what they might be able to offer him. What they might be able to offer his race, all Omerans. More than anything he desired release from the cage he had been locked in. He was compelled to obey the voice of the Emperor by his upbringing, by his heredity; but obedience had lost him Lenares’ regard, and would lose him so much more. Her death lay in his future; she would not be suffered to live.
Once she died he would earnestly wish his own death. Would beg his tormentor for it. But he would not be granted the release.
Through the portal they went, emerging at the edge of the Children’s territory, he supposed. No. On the margin of a piece of broad, level ground, in the midst of which were propped a hundred statues or more.
Duon recognised what they were before anyone else. Even as the Children turned their backs on the Amaqi and filed back through the portal, he cried out in anguish and ran forward. Dryman followed him, a look of puzzlement on his face slowly replaced by one of comprehension.
Not statues, then.
There were twelve rows, roughly twelve people to a row; some with more, others less. About a hundred and fifty in total. Each one an Amaqi, mostly soldiers, but the occasional camp follower, all impaled on their own tripod of ash spears and covered with salt.
The pain must have been incredible. Many of them had expired, but a few still writhed on their improvised instruments of torture. While Dryman wandered up and down the rows, searching for survivors, Captain Duon stumbled over to a pile of discarded equipment, no doubt stripped from the soldiers, and was sick. After a while he took something from the pile—a sword—and walked amongst the tableau of dead and dying, cutting throats.
Me, it ought to have been me suffering here, Torve thought.
He would have welcomed it.
Thus the centuries-old crime was balanced, thus were the Marasmians avenged. The exhausted, depleted desert warriors watched the four surviving Amaqis weep and curse at the fate of their fellows, and judged the full cup of suffering finally drunk to the dregs. The Marasmians would not interfere, would not take the lives of those who remained; a full redress required that the tale be told throughout the world. Therefore a hundred of their fiercest warriors were detailed with the task of caring for these Amaqis, ensuring they remained alive until they left Marasmian lands. They would watch over these four, now they were out of the hands of the desert demons; would protect them as best they could from every desert danger without revealing themselves. And when they returned from that task, they would join with their fellow Marasmians in raising the old city once again. Then, finally, Marasmian eyes would turn sonback, towards the headwaters of their sacred river, and the abomination there would be torn down.
That the city of the Amaqis would be destroyed as a result was, to their mind, an entirely beneficial side effect.
CHAPTER 21
NOMANSLAND
DUON LED THE SOLDIER, the cosmographer and the Omeran through a landscape every bit as jumbled and broken as the wasteland of his mind. In Punta province, the fatherback land of his birth, the hills were tame, ordered by rain and run-off. Not so here in the Had Hills to the fatherwards of Marasmos. Were it not for the winding path he had located and followed, he doubted they would have found their way through the hills. But finally, a month fatherwards of Marasmos, an arduous month, he had brought them through the hills to the fatherback edge of Nomansland, and to the edge of sanity.
Dryman had decided their direction, driving them fatherwards with the intensity of his will. A mystery, since the Amaqi expedition had been eviscerated, and the safety of Talamaq lay fatherbackwards. The soldier insisted they travel fatherwards, but would not offer any argument, and even Duon could not stand before him. It almost came to swordplay, there on the twice blood-hallowed site of old Marasmos, with the others watching silently, unable to comprehend what Dryman hoped to achieve. But after looking into Dryman’s resolute eyes Duon decided not to press the issue.
So silent were the cosmographer and the Omeran during the interminable footsore weeks, for a time Duon thought they had lost the use of their voices. The dark-skinned man and the pale woman seemed to have put everything aside to focus on placing one foot in front of the other. Like him, they had been broken by the Valley of the Damned and the city of Marasmos. Certainly neither had been exactly sane even before the expedition had begun; now, Duon doubted whether they could be of any further use to anyone. Of course, he had the same doubts about himself.
Nevertheless Dryman drove them on, guarding the Omeran and the cosmographer as though they were the most important pair in the world. With Duon he
was less careful, sending him on excursions to look for water, game or firewood. The captain knew he could escape at any time, but found himself bound to the others by cords of duty and guilt. As Dryman knew well.
Duon had seen disturbing signs on these journeys. Evidence that people lived in these barren coastal hills. More, a suspicion that someone shadowed them. The smell of smoke, the occasional footprint, a feeling between the shoulder blades that could neither be explained nor denied. A sense no professional explorer could afford to ignore. As though someone made sure they continued their journey away from Marasmian lands. Odd, then, that the travellers came in contact with no one as they made their way through the scrublands.
Though the true desert lurked inland, hinted at by a shimmering on the daughterward horizon, the coastal hills were trial enough. It seldom rained in this broken country, the regular sea fogs supplying the spindly trees and sparse, spiky grasses with the water they needed. There was actually less potable water here; most of the deep wells were to be found inland, where the meltwater from the alpine heights emerged from a thousand-league journey sonwards. None of the meltwater came this close to the coast, where the few wells were small and brackish. They sufficed. Duon felt, and Dryman agreed, that neither Lenares nor Torve were in good enough condition to risk the desert.
While not exactly plentiful, food was relatively easy to come by, reducing the need for water. In the second week they came across a tangle of wild melons ripening nicely amid a snarl of leafy vines lying on the sand. Dryman bade them gather as many as they could carry, though this cost them an unpleasant afternoon later in the week when their improvised cloth bags were soaked by exploding overripe fruit.
Dryman stood beside Duon and together they gazed over Nomansland. The Had Hills had finally come to an end, and now nothing but a long, gradual downward slope separated them from the beginning of the badlands maze that lay across their path.
‘Ideally we should seek out and hire the Nehra to ensure our passage,’ Duon said.
‘And how many lap-boxes of gold are we to offer them?’ Dryman’s temper flared regularly; Duon tried not to let it affect him.
‘More than we have,’ he answered, spreading his hands wide to indicate emptiness. The Nehra, the only people who knew the twisted badlands everyone called Nomansland, lived many leagues to the sonback. They would guide people through the maze, but only for gold. They could charge what they pleased, as there was no way around Nomansland, which stretched across Elamaq from the sonwards coast to the mountainous daughterwards spine. Unguided venturers usually vanished without trace in the complex jumble of ridges, box canyons and dead-end valleys. There were no landmarks within Nomansland by which to orient oneself: all the summits were congruent, their tops flat, the valleys between them carved out of a relict plain by some ancient wandering river.
Those who survived here invariably claimed that routes would open and close like doors. A canyon could be entered, they said, and then surround a traveller on all four sides with steep talus slopes that collapsed on anyone foolish enough to try to climb them. Feeble excuses for those unable to navigate the badlands, most people thought. Not Duon. He had passed through Nomansland twice, both difficult traverses even when well equipped and with the help of their knowledgeable guides.
‘Would they entertain a generous percentage of our wealth paid on our return fatherbackwards?’
‘The Nehra would likely kill us for asking,’ Duon said. ‘What wealth could the four of us bring back, they would say.’ So the man is motivated by riches. Thirty thousand of us might have wrested riches from the Nehra; four of us will earn only our deaths.
‘What wealth did the Emperor command you to seek, Captain?’
Duon hesitated before answering. As he was about to speak a low rumble came from somewhere to their left. Thunder, or something like it. Duon scanned the cloudless sky in vain.
‘The earth is uneasy,’ Dryman said as Torve the Omeran reached the crest of the slope beside them, assisting the cosmographer. ‘I have felt small shakes over the last week.’ The soldier’s eyes widened slightly, giving the impression he was making ready to do battle.
As they watched, a rolling curtain of dust approached them from the sonback. No, Duon corrected himself, his nervousness growing, it is a wave. The ground heaves as though some burrowing animal approaches, throwing up sand…
The wave arrived, a man-height distortion moving incredibly fast. With a heave it tossed them off their feet. Duon found himself dumped on his back amid a dust-cloud. Something thumped across his legs, a body, the Omeran. A hiss and the sand came down on top of them, followed by a sudden silence.
The soldier came striding into Duon’s field of vision, his teeth bared as though facing down an opponent. ‘Get up,’ he said unfeelingly. ‘We have a long way to go today.’
What was Dryman? A mercenary seeking his fortune? A madman? Or a magician holding his three followers in thrall? What did he hope to achieve by continuing this hopeless venture? Mercenary, madman, magician: the possibilities rattled through Duon’s head as he stood in obedience to the soldier’s command.
The Omeran got to his feet and stumbled away, rubbing at his shins.
Another rumble, accompanied by an embarrassingly gentle shake, sat Duon on his rump. Dryman laughed, then hauled him to his feet. ‘The gods seek to unsettle us,’ the soldier said.
‘The Emperor doesn’t believe in the gods,’ Duon said automatically.
‘Does he not? He ought to. He would, if he were here.’
‘Dryman, why are we throwing our lives away?’
‘Ah, the worm has a voice.’ They walked towards the other two, who stood together, holding each other for support.
More than one voice, actually. The cause of my problems. ‘Why not return to Talamaq?’ One last try before we die. ‘Surely the Emperor will raise another army? With you at its head, a guarantee of wealth and renown.’
‘Oh? Will I be as successful as the rich and famous Captain Duon?’
At this Duon snapped his mouth shut. In the back of his head, a light flashed white. I keep telling you, you are a fool. Keep your mouth shut and I might just be able to guide you through this.
Weary and soul-wounded, the captain offered no reply.
Misery wrapped itself around Lenares. She kept counting her steps, though she knew the total was more of an estimate than an accurate reflection of where she was. Just a reflexive habit. As were the steps themselves. She didn’t need the numbers. Out here in Nomansland nothing seemed to have a point. She had lost the ability to tell what was most important, and the world around her had become nothing more than an endless numerical swirl of information.
She knew why. Her centre had changed. Instead of being tied to a place—Talamaq—she was now tied to a person. Torve. It had happened without her consent, something done by her subconscious mind in an attempt to…what? Preserve herself? Hold onto love? Why had she never centred on Mahudia, if the latter was the truth? It angered her that her mind and body could so betray her.
And that was another thing. How could her numbers mean anything if truth didn’t stay still? A small part of her was excited by what she was learning: in the face of love, a love that could be both right and wrong, Lenares could no longer settle for her former belief in the old binary of absolute truth and falsehood. But the larger part of her was adrift, floundering in a sea of meaninglessness. She wondered if she might be rejecting both centres, the old truth of the Empire and the new truth of Torve’s love.
No, he rejected me. His is a false centre. I cannot trust him. Just as I cannot trust Talamaq and the Emperor.
Whenever she thought on this, the image of the bronze map shone in her mind. It had been centred on the house of the gods, but she had the impression its centre could move. Was the bronze map the truth, or merely a representation of truth? The truth from one point of view? One perspective? Lenares knew she was special, able to think in ways no one else could, but even so this thinking tax
ed her, pulling her mind in uncomfortable directions. The problem rearranged itself in her head: her eyes beheld truth, but she did not see everything. She saw from one perspective only. The bronze map, though, was an attempt to see everything. Even so, the view from above, from the eye of the god, was still only a single perspective. Things remained hidden even from the godlike gaze.
And now a word Mahudia had once taught her slipped into her consciousness. Omniscience. The ability to know everything. But such an ability must also involve the talent to see from every perspective all at once. Out of every pair of eyes in the world at all times. Then, if that were not impossible enough, to make sense of what was being seen. And that did not include the things that no one could see.
The gods could not be omniscient. They just thought they were.
Most frightening of all, Lenares wondered what might happen to her if she did not soon discover something to centre her life around.
‘Lenares?’ Torve’s gentle voice cut across her thinking.
She turned to him, angered; for a moment she had felt on the verge of some flowering of knowledge. ‘What?’
He flinched at her tone.
‘Look at the mist,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t feel right to me.’
They had descended the slope and were now approaching the first of the badland canyons, a narrow opening between two ochre-stained stone ridges. Nevertheless, they could still see some way across the crazed jumble of ridges stretching into the distance; though their field of vision was shrinking. A strange pale mist began to rise from all about them, thicker in the distance, gossamer-thin nearby. The ridges vanished.
‘Just what we need,’ Duon said from some distance in front of them, already little more than a grey outline.
The ground rumbled ominously below them.
Lenares glanced upwards to see the sky directly above her describing a blue oval, surrounded by mist. She turned: the path they had travelled was also obscured.
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