Beyond the Wall of Time (2 page)

Husk frowns with newly restored facial muscles. Now there are two ways to become immortal his options have increased, so he
ought not to be feeling the anxiety as strongly as he does. Thump, thump, thump goes his heart. His blood hisses through his
veins and threatens to erupt from the tips of his fingers. The bubble and fizz of fearful thoughts must be resisted or they
will—unman him. But it is so hard, despite the fact he is familiar with despair. Desperation has shaped him over the foggy
decades of pain, yet despair is so much sharper now he has real hope.

But he will resist the temptation to give up, to crawl away to some dark corner of the Destroyer’s dungeon and die. He reminds
himself that, due to his new power, he is Husk no longer. He will put his self-imposed name aside and take his old name back.
Deorc of Jasweyah. No; he reconsiders: Deorc the Great. Far more suitable.

Husk laughs at himself, at the caricature of evil he seems about to become. All he needs is the cackle and he’d be the legendary
Jasweyan Witch-Hag reborn. No matter: whatever his name, the common people will make fireside tales about him, and he will
be around to hear them. He’ll make them forget about their folk villains, the Witch-Hag and the Undying Man both. The commoners
will have no need to fear anything but him. And, oh, he will work hard to ensure they fear him.

He licks his lips, tasting the victory about to be his; and, though he knows it to be a cliché, cannot resist the laughter
bubbling up from within him. The thick walls of Andratan ring with the sound, and the denizens of the fortress pause in sudden
fright.

Their fear is balm to Husk’s scarred soul.

FISHERMAN

THERE IS A SILENCE FAR
deeper than the mere absence of sound. It can settle on a scene despite, say, the thin wail of a woman weeping. Even the
laboured breathing of someone in severe pain does little to disturb such stillness. This silence is a calm, black pool of
quiet. It is the sound of shock.

Noetos remembered all too well what such silence sounded like. He had experienced it in the Summer Palace, in the aftermath
of the slaughter of the Neherian gentry. It was a stunned disbelief at what had happened coupled with an expectation that
he would soon wake up to find nothing of the sort had occurred. But, of course, it had.

No waking from this nightmare.

He watched from a distance as his travelling companions stared at each other, eyes wide, saying nothing. When finally they
began to move, it was in slow motion, hands fluttering with the need to do something but not knowing what. The fisherman had
been nothing but an observer of the events leading to a man’s castration and the violent death of the one who had wielded
the knife, but he could help now with restoring calm. Guidance, order and leadership were what were needed. He made his way
towards the tight knot of people, ready to assist.

“He is gone.” The one-eyed priest’s voice was a ripple of sound breaking the deep silence as though a pebble had been dropped
in a pool.

“Yes,” said Duon, looking up, his hand on Dryman’s unmoving chest. “He’s gone, all praise to the gods.” This was followed
by a grimace, no doubt as he realised anew just whom he was praising.

Noetos strode across the sandy floor of the enclosure, and his two children followed him. Three piles made up of enormous
slabs of rock were the only interruption to the smooth floor, apart from the figures gathered around the dead, the injured
and the maimed. And a smaller rock soaked in blood.

The thought came to him that of the three groups drawn together in the contention of the gods, his had fared the worst. Gawl
and Dagla were dead. Of the miners, only Tumar and Seren remained. The Fossan fishermen Sautea and Mustar were still with
him, but they had come north because of Arathé, not him, and might well leave at any moment. Omiy the alchemist had betrayed
him, Bregor had left him and Noetos had not succeeded in getting Cylene to join him. True, the Amaqi had just been reduced
from four to three with the death of Dryman, but that had been their only loss.
If you don’t count the loss of thirty thousand soldiers
, he reminded himself.
Even I haven’t failed that spectacularly.

The Falthans had done best. All eight remained alive, though Stella had apparently lost an arm—she used some form of magic
to disguise this, but it was only intermittently effective—and the priest an eye.
They haven’t had whirlwinds and Neherians to cope with.
He frowned.
But now we all have to deal with angry gods and mysterious voices in people’s heads, as well as blood and death delivered
by human hands.

“I didn’t mean the mercenary,” Conal snapped. “The Most High, the Father, he is gone. I have my own voice back again. And
I won’t be using it to praise any gods, that’s for certain.”

“What is it like, priest?” Heredrew asked him, his voice deceptively gentle. “What does it feel like being forced to do the
bidding of the Most High? Do I detect anger, friend? Unhappiness at being made the mouthpiece of a god?”

Conal scowled and turned away. No doubt the continuation of some irrelevant debate, Noetos thought. Some people would argue
at a graveside. More important than any argument were the three figures at the centre of the gathering: the dead mercenary,
who had been some sort of avatar for one of the gods; the maimed servant, who lay on his back, his breath rasping; and the
grieving cosmographer.

It was this last person Noetos made towards. Lenares always made him uncomfortable with her uncanny way of seeing things,
her facility with numbers, and her lack of the simple social graces that kept people from hurting each other unintentionally.
And in that last, hypocrite, how is she different from you?
She was unpredictable, and Noetos was not the only one who found her difficult, he was sure. He was able to overcome his
reluctance and approach her not because of some kindness of heart, but because of his regard for Cylene, her twin. The sister
Lenares hadn’t yet met.

“Are you all right, Lenares?” he asked her.

She looked up at him from where she knelt. “Am I all right?”

Those wide eyes, their shape so familiar to him—no, not hers, her sister’s—blinked slowly once, twice, thrice. Noetos wondered
whether he ought to repeat the question. Had it not been simple enough?

“Of course she’s not all right, Father,” Anomer said from beside him, then turned to the girl. “Here, come with us, Lenares.
You need food and drink. We’ll talk of what we should do about all this after you’ve eaten.”

He stretched down an arm. Hesitantly she took it, although her white face and hurt eyes remained totally focused on Torve.

“I don’t want to leave him,” she said.

“Let those skilled in healing tend him. You should let us tend you.”

Clearly reluctant, Lenares allowed herself to be led away a short distance from Torve, but kept her head turned so the Omeran
would not be out of her sight for a moment. Despite her oft-expressed dislike of being touched, she made no motion to prevent
Anomer rearranging her dishevelled clothing. She seemed not to notice it.

That’s the other reason she unnerves me
, Noetos thought. He had never seen anyone able to devote themselves so completely to one thing at the expense of everything
else.

The Omeran servant was in poor condition. His wound had been cauterised but, however well the procedure had been done, the
red mess between his legs was clearly giving him intense pain. Noetos was not certain what had happened to precipitate this,
but it seemed the mercenary had discovered Torve and Lenares engaged in an intimate act—
the
intimate act, apparently—and had decided to castrate the fellow.

“Who was this Dryman, that he could do this to you?” Noetos asked.

Torve offered no reply.

Captain Duon lowered himself to his haunches with a groan. “Aye, that’s the question. I may have some answers for you. It
is time to lay everything out for all to hear, I think. Then we can judge what must be done.”

“Here?” Arathé asked, her hands flashing. “Are we safe here? Won’t the gods hear our conversation?”

“Who knows?” the southerner replied. “I doubt we’re safe anywhere. But I think we may have a short time to ourselves before
the gods return to resume their meddling. The Father has achieved his purpose, and the Son and Daughter are disembodied for
now. We must take this time to decide what we are to do next, and for that you need to hear what I have to say.”

Stella raised her head from bending over another prone figure. “I do not mean to offend,” she said, “but whatever answers
you provide may be somewhat suspect. Before we hear from you, we need to discuss the matter of the voice in your head. I am
wary of our plans being overheard.”

“But I can assure you—”

Stella shut him up with a wave of her left arm. “Later. First we attend to the injured. There is a man over here bleeding
from the head. His brother does not seem capable of dealing with him.”

“You know who those two are, don’t you?” her guardsman growled. “Two of the Umerta boys. Lenares’ brothers. The southerners
apparently hired them as porters.”

There was the briefest quiver in the woman’s arm, the smallest suggestion that she wanted to withdraw, but she said, “And
now they are hurt. We must care for them nonetheless.”

“Like they cared for you?” Noetos said, pointing at her missing forearm and hand.

“That… wasn’t the Umertas.”

Beside her, the guardsman stared at his feet.

“More to talk about,” said Noetos. “Or perhaps more secrets. Well, if we are to cleanse and bind these wounds, we need water
and cloth.”

“In hand,” the guardsman said. “Kilfor and his father have gone back to one of the other rooms in this place. There was a
pool of cold water there. There’s plenty of cloth in our packs, spare clothes and the like. We have all we need.”

So there was nothing for Noetos to do but sit and wait. Others attended those who needed help, others made decisions, others
did the things necessary for human survival and comfort. He sat on the sand and ate food handed to him, then lay down and
tried to rest, while all around him people busied themselves.

He found the experience of not being needed profoundly unsettling.

An indeterminate time later—it seemed like an hour, but time felt greasy here and it could have been a few minutes or a day
or more—Stella asked Duon to explain the voice in his head. Noetos pricked up his ears at this. He’d been expecting, and dreading,
this confrontation and the likely outcome.

“We’ll speak Bhrudwan,” Stella said as the others trooped over to where she sat. “We’ve all picked up enough of it over these
last few months to understand each other.”

Noetos acknowledged the point as he raised himself to his elbows, then his feet, and followed the others. Most of the Falthans
spoke the Bhrudwan common tongue with something approaching fluency, and even the southerners seemed able to understand it,
though occasionally they struggled to make themselves understood. Some common language root, no doubt, made it easier to learn.
More evidence to support the story of the three gods originating from the same place, he supposed.

Arathé sat to one side of Duon, Conal to the other. Torve lay quietly nearby, only the bunching of his facial muscles betraying
his pain. The remainder of the travellers gathered in a group facing the three of them.
As though they are to be judged
, Noetos thought.

Perhaps Duon felt that too. “There’s no conspiracy here,” he said. “We kept nothing from you. It’s taken us a long time to
realise what is going on in our heads, and even longer to work out that each of us shared the phenomenon with two others.”

“So what is it?” the old scholar Phemanderac asked in his reedy voice. “Whose voice speaks in your mind?”

Duon sighed and scratched at his unshaven chin, making a rasping sound. “More than two years ago now all three of us were
in the Undying Man’s fortress of Andratan at the same time. I was visiting as an emissary of the Amaqi Emperor, while Arathé
had gone there to learn magic. Conal—”

“I’ll tell it myself,” the priest snapped. “I was there as an emissary of sorts, part of a delegation from the Koinobia, the
religious movement based in Instruere that some know as the Halites.”

“A spy,” Phemanderac said.

Conal denied it, but no one was fooled. With a voice cloaked in anger at all the injustices visited upon him, the priest described
his heroism and courage in playing his part to undermine the Undying Man. The gist of it, at least as it seemed to Noetos,
was that the Father—referred to as the Most High—had used the priest as a mouthpiece. Then, some time after that, months perhaps,
he began to have thoughts that were not his own.

“Thoughts about women?” Sauxa asked neutrally. “Perfectly natural, son. We all have them.” His son spluttered a laugh.

“Not about women,” Conal said, though he coloured. “I began to harbour rebellious thoughts about the Koinobia and my master,
the Archpriest.”

“Also perfectly natural,” muttered Stella. Noetos doubted the priest heard the woman’s words.

“The point is,” Duon said, “all three of us spent time in Andratan concurrently, and all three of us have since experienced
remarkably similar symptoms. A cynical voice in our heads, goading us to do things to its advantage. A supply of superhuman
strength, though not under our control. I experienced it in the fisherman’s company.” He nodded to Noetos, who sensed what
was coming. “We wiped out more than a hundred enemies between us, many of them heavily armed.”

The words were out before Noetos could bend the conversation away from the subject. He’d rather it was forgotten; he was trying
to forget it himself.

Arathé waved her hands and spoke in her distorted voice. “I survived a knife in the back,” she told them while Anomer translated.
“The voice exercised magic to keep me alive and heal me quickly.”