Beyond the Wall of Time (6 page)

“I thought we had worked our way through this,” Noetos said with a sigh. “I agree with you: I have acted selfishly and did
not consider my family’s needs during this affair. Cylene helped me see the truth in your words. What more, son?”

Noetos could see that for some reason his words had angered the boy, but Anomer kept his temper in check.
I had such hopes for him. But unless he matures, and swiftly, he will not be able to assume leadership of the family, let
alone Old Roudhos. As he is at present, I could not even mention the possibility to him.

“What more? Has Arathé mind-spoken you of late?”

Noetos had to think for a moment. “I’ve overheard one or two of her thoughts, but nothing directly. I thought it a result
of her increasing ability to communicate with her hands and voice. People are working hard to understand her, you know.”

Anomer ought to be pleased at that, but it appeared he wasn’t.

“You didn’t think to question why she has been silent? She’s at the end of herself, Father, can’t you see that? Two years
of abuse at the hands of the Recruiters, then home to Fossa and safety for a matter of hours, followed by the loss of her
family. Did you think how that might have affected her? The journey north, battered by supernatural storms. Hearing about
the death of her mother and not even being able to travel to the grave. The events in Raceme, when it seemed we were to be
snuffed out by the fingers of a god at any moment. How much did her magical rescue of you and her part in the defeat of the
Neherians take out of her? And then the walking, the weeks and weeks of it, followed by a month or more of starvation on board
ship. All the time she’s been plagued by voices and battling to come to terms with what’s been done to her. Father, she’s
worn out. She needs a rest.”

Noetos heard the implied condemnation in his son’s voice. Anomer might as well be shouting it in his ear.

“I saw you and her talking earlier, before we left the Throne Room. Is that when she told you all this?”

“She… yes.”

“So, before you spoke to her, you didn’t know how seriously she has been affected by events? If so, why are you angry at me
for not knowing until I was told?”

“When I learned this is not at issue. Father, we must do something for her sake. Leave off this path of revenge. Let’s find
somewhere to make a home.”

The party entered a room none of them had seen before. According to Lenares, the rooms were not fixed, changing order at random.
This room had something resembling blood trickling from pocked walls, and it pooled in small depressions on the sand. It felt
far more sinister than any of the other rooms. One of the crimson rivulets seemed more recent than the others: it had not
yet worn a channel in the wall, and its pool was less than a handspan across.

The red pools exercised a strange fascination on Noetos. What did they represent? Why was one of them so recent? A fanciful
thought struck him: he imagined they were the blood of those who had died as avatars of the gods. What properties would such
blood have? Would it leave a mark on the skin? What would it taste like? He wrestled his mind away from the thought.

“I will speak to her, find out what she needs. Malayu is a large city. Perhaps a physic there can help her.”

Anomer punched the fist of one hand into the palm of the other. “Will you never listen? She needs assistance now, not later,
and especially not in Malayu. Unless she receives the help she needs now, there will be no Malayu.”

“No, son, it is you who refuses to listen. I have cast my net and I am obliged to wait until the time is right to haul it
in. I will not abandon it now, not when the shark I seek to catch is still swimming in the open sea, savaging anyone who swims
too close to his jaws. We are going north because I agreed to this with the other leaders. There are larger issues at stake
than my desire for revenge or Arathé’s health. Arathé has a voice in her head that is somehow linked to all this, and she
has a power we need. I can’t allow her to abandon this task or hinder others in their execution of it.”

“Can’t allow her? By Alkuon, Father, what are you going to do? Order her to feel better? Carry her north like you’re carrying
Dryman’s body? This is not your decision. Either she regains her health and vigour or she and I leave you. We will not follow
you mindlessly just because you ask it of us. Do we have an understanding?”

After the boy had taken his leave, Noetos reflected that he’d been wrong in his assessment of his son. Worse luck. Anomer
was ready to take command. Too ready.

It was only as they left the blood room that Noetos noticed the corpse’s wounds had begun to bleed anew.

THEY EMERGED FROM THE
House of the Gods into a thunderstorm of breathless fury. One after another the travellers left the dry, sandy floor of the
last room and passed between the two portal trees to be assaulted by slashing rain and continuous flashes and booms. Nothing
made it clearer that the House of the Gods was truly in another place than passing from blue sky to dark clouds and driving
rain.

Noetos blinked as he stood on the waterlogged plateau with the others and waited for the last of their party, Tumar and Kilfor,
to appear. He was soaked in moments, his hair plastered to his head.

“Is this natural?” Seren yelled in his ear between cracks of thunder.

“Don’t know!” Noetos replied, then looked around for Arathé.
That this might be of the gods is something I should have considered
, he chastised himself. He could see no more than ten paces in any direction, so thick was the rain; the air was milky with
it. That shadow there was likely his daughter—no, it was too tall. It hurried away from the portal, shoulders hunched.

“Here, have you seen Arathé?” Noetos called to it, and took it by the shoulder. The figure swung its other arm around and
delivered the fisherman a solid blow on the shoulder, then snarled and shook him off.

“There’s no call for that!” Noetos cried, and he automatically went for his sword, but remembered he was weaponless; he looked
up as the figure disappeared into the murk. Noetos hadn’t recognised what he’d seen of the face. One of the porters perhaps.
He glanced at the hand he’d used to grab the figure’s shoulder. His fingers were smeared with blood. As he stared at it, the
rain washed it off save the faintest residue.

What’s the fool doing running off when he’s clearly still injured?

He stumbled across his daughter a moment later. She was helping rewind one of the porter boy’s bandages, while the other looked
on. Noetos looked from one to the other, confused.
Neither of the porters then.

“The storm, Arathé,” he said. “Is it of the gods?”

“I don’t think so,” she said, leaving off her work to sign the words. “I get no sense of power from this. Just a sense of
being far too wet.”

“Did you see someone hurry past a moment ago?”

“I’ve been busy with Gennel’s loose bandages since we left the House of the Gods.” She tsked. “Whoever bound these wounds
wasn’t paying attention to their task.” Talking done, she returned to her work.

Noetos found himself studying the fading marks on his hand in the pouring rain. What had he seen? He had just about convinced
himself it had been wet sand, not blood, when Tumar approached him.

“Heredrew says we need to talk.”

“What about?”

The miner’s answer was drowned out by a crack of thunder that shook the earth. The fisherman’s shoulders hunched involuntarily.
It reminded him of the moments he had spent with Mustar fleeing the gods in Raceme.

“Why don’t we return to the House of the Gods and wait out the storm?” he suggested.

Tumar shook his head vehemently and a look as close to fear as Noetos had seen materialised on the miner’s face. “Not goin’
back there,” he said, his eyes darting back and forth.

“Why? What happened?”

“Come ’n’ speak to Heredrew.”

He led Noetos, Alkuon knew how, unerringly through the battering storm to the portal trees. Heredrew had seated himself under
the tree to the right of the entrance. Most of the others were gathered there, though the tree itself provided little shelter
from the rain.

“I saw what I saw,” Kilfor was shouting as Noetos approached. “You’ve seen all manner of miracles on this journey, even been
involved in a few of your own, so the story goes, expecting all the while for us to believe you, yet you quibble at this?”
He glanced in Noetos’s direction, at Tumar, and said, “Ask the miner!”

“I am not questioning your truthfulness,” Heredrew began.

“He is telling the truth,” Lenares said.

The tall Falthan stared at her. “That means nothing. I have no doubt he has described truthfully what he saw, which is little
enough. What we need to decide is the relevance of his speculation as to what it means, and where the body has gone.”

Sauxa leaned forward and shook a finger at Heredrew. “My son is a drunkard, a lecher, a coward and has a feeble mind,” he
said, “but he’s no liar.”

Kilfor’s mouth twitched in what looked like exasperation.

The Falthan turned his attention to Noetos. “Did you see anything unusual as we emerged from the gods’ house?”

Who decided you should run this court?
Too late now: the man was in control.

“A man rushed past me,” he said, loud enough for them all to hear. “I did not recognise him. I grasped at him, but he struck
my hand away, leaving blood on my fingers.”

Multiple pairs of eyes looked down at his hands.

“The rain has washed the blood away,” he finished. Heredrew wrinkled his long nose. “Did you not get a clear look at his face?”

“No, but I can guess whom it might have been.”
See how you like this, Falthan.
“Just as we left the Room of Blood—you remember that strange room with what looked like blood flowing from the walls—Dryman’s
corpse began to bleed.”

This occasioned mutters from the party.

“Did anyone else see this?” the Falthan asked. When no one responded, he added, “How is it you saw it?”

Why so sceptical?
Noetos wondered. “I was helping carry the body at the time,” he said. “Later, when Tumar and Kilfor took the body from Captain
Duon and me, the bleeding appeared to have stopped again. It was strange,” he admitted, forestalling Heredrew’s likely next
question, “but I didn’t mention it because, frankly, I’m not totally sure how dead bodies behave. I haven’t carried many before.”

“They don’t up ’n’ walk off,” Tumar said.

“No,” said Noetos. “But this one has. I gather the corpse came alive as you carried it through the portal?”

Kilfor nodded. “Someone believes me, at least,” he said. “Except we weren’t carrying it. We’d put it down to change places.
Heavy thing, a corpse. Almost as heavy carrying as lugging my father to bed after one of his drunken debaucheries. Soon as
it hit the ground, the thing shook itself, got to its feet and ran off, faster than thought.”

Lightning flashed, illuminating the entire party. Lenares groaned, at what Noetos could not say.

“Dead bodies shamble,” Stella’s guardsman said.

“Seen many, have you?” Kilfor replied to his friend. “Or are you going by the night-stories the old man used to tell us? Remember
‘The Shuffling Dead’? Well, this wasn’t like that. The body seemed more alive than when it was alive, if you get my meaning.”

“I don’t feel well,” said Lenares.

A young woman stood. For the moment Noetos could not remember her name; she was one of the Falthan party, a quietly spoken
lass who spent most of her time close to Phemanderac. A scholar like the old Dhaurian, that was as much as Noetos could recall.
Pretty, though, in a bookish kind of way.

“So Dryman’s corpse is missing,” she said in a precise voice, “and two men claim to have seen the body come to life. Another
touched it and blood came off on his hands. Given where we were and what has been happening to us, I see no reason not to
suspect that Dryman is now alive again.”

Murmurs from around the gathering. Noetos waited for a lightning flash, just like the story of the seaman’s ghost, but the
dark sky did not cooperate.

“What we do not know,” she went on, “is what this means. Is the god back in charge of the body? Or is there some power in
the House of the Gods that undoes death?”

Now the sky flashed and the air roared. Around them the rain eased off somewhat. Lenares moaned and put her hands to her head.

Kilfor smiled gratefully at the woman. “Thank you, Moralye,” he said.
Ah, Moralye
, Noetos thought. He didn’t remember ever hearing her name. “At least someone believes us—uh.”

The man’s hand dropped to his stomach, where an arrow shaft protruded.

“Down!” Noetos cried, but people were already moving. Even as the plainsman cried out and slumped to the ground, the others
dived for whatever cover was available.

“It’s the hole in the world!” Lenares cried out, then screamed as an arrow took her in the leg.

They are shooting at sound
, Noetos realised, as Duon called out: “Poisoned arrows! Everyone quiet!”

Flat on the ground, Noetos heard two shafts whistle over his head, but no thunks. The captain had hopefully been lucky. His
turn to chance to luck.

“Into the House of the Gods!” he cried, and dragged the nearest person to her feet. Arathé.

Lightning flashed, illuminating the entire party. Lenares moaned. Dizziness tickled Noetos’s mind.
Something… is wrong.

“Dead bodies shamble,” said Robal irrelevantly.

Come on, man, move, there are poison arrows!
Noetos wanted to shout at the guardsman, but he couldn’t form the words. Time itself felt greasy, stretched out. Broken.

“Seen many, have you?” Kilfor said. “Or are you going by the night-stories the old man used to tell us? Remember ‘The Shuffling
Dead’? Well, this wasn’t like that. The body seemed more alive than when it was alive, if you get my meaning.”