Beyond the Wall of Time (61 page)

Hopefully not much give or take.
Sou’souwest? She converted it into proper directions—just to the daughterwards of fatherback—and considered the result. A
greater distortion than that Noetos had experienced and in a different direction. Maximum distortion, then, to be expected
between the two.

Confirmed by Consina when she returned from Makyra Bay—or, at least, from as close to it as she could come. Out of breath,
she explained how she’d run hard along the North Road and finally found the top of the cliff, and had spent no more than a
regretful moment staring down at the darkness where her town used to be.

Bregor’s return added further confirmation. “Raceme is on fire,” he said, puffing out the words. “All is confusion. I could
hear the shouting and the crackling of the flames from atop the hills beyond the Shambles. Wanted to go closer but I would
probably just have met my death.”

When the last of the travellers had returned, Lenares smiled at them as confidently as she could. “The map is dented, not
badly distorted. I have calculated the error for the region of Andratan and have chosen a feature from the map to travel to.
If you please, I want to make one final test: I do not want to end up swimming for my life in Malayu Bay.”

“What test?” Noetos asked, impatience in his voice.

“Send someone to Malayu itself,” she said. “It’s near enough to Andratan that the amount of error is almost exactly the same.
If I select a feature the error-distance away, the traveller should be transported into the heart of Malayu.”

“Lenares,” Noetos said, his arms wide, “we would have been literally lost without you. None of us could have worked this out
for ourselves. You are a marvel. But there just isn’t the time to check everything. We must trust you. Let us leave.”

“Really?” she asked, her eyes shining.

A dozen nods.

“If we all go,” she added, “the thread will most likely disappear and we will not be able to return.”

“The alternative is that we leave you, Torve and Cylene behind. You are coming with us.” The fisherman was adamant.

“How do we reach the thread?” Cylene asked.

“The others should grasp it,” Lenares said. “You, Torve and I only have to visualise it. Everyone ready?”

Cries of assent. Unlike her, they had spent long enough in this weird place.

“Travel,” she said.

“
MY FRONT DOOR,” SAID THE DESTROYER
, nodding to his right. “From the inside.” Beyond a broad hallway stood wide wooden doors, barred and reinforced with iron.
They looked every day of their nearly two thousand years of age. “Using these doors would have given us an easier approach,
but I couldn’t risk the possibility that my guards had been suborned. Deorc is clever enough on his own; allied with Umu,
there is no end to the tricks they might have devised.”

The first of those tricks claimed the red-haired servant soon after. At the top of a wide stair located at the far end of
the hallway, the man paused and drew a flint from his pocket. The corridor ahead was unlit, so he struck a spark and ignited
the nearest torch. The thing exploded in his face, showering him with flame. With a scream he threw himself to the floor and
began to roll in an attempt to douse the flames.

The Destroyer stood and watched the man die, his arms folded.

“Damn you!” Stella shrieked, and threw herself towards the man.

She ran into a solid wall of air and fell to the ground, bruised. The thing on the other side of the invisible wall screamed
for a long time, then fell silent. His body twitched a few more times and went limp.

A pair of boots moved into Stella’s blurred field of vision. “Imagine you are a god sitting somewhere in this fortress, waiting
like a spider for the fly to fall into her trap. Your first snare is triggered. It’s a simple snare, one unlikely to trouble
your opponent. So you build another feature into the snare: should anyone attempt to douse the flames, the corridor itself
bursts into flame.”

“How… how did you know?”

“I don’t. I had to stand there and watch my hand-picked servant burn to death, not knowing whether this was a simple trap
designed to be an irritant, or something more elaborate.”

“With a mind like yours,” she said evenly, “you can invent an excuse to justify any action you choose. Even a cowardly one.”

His expression froze. “Cowardly? You stand in the Square of Rainbows and face down the Most High in his anger, then talk to
me about cowardly.”

“I didn’t call you a coward,” she said, “but to let your servant burn to death was an act of cowardice. Or, more correctly,
a cowardly inaction.”

“You’re a prisoner in my fortress and you choose to bandy words with me?”

“I’m not sixteen any more, you beast. You can’t intimidate me with words.” She smiled at him. “You might be two thousand years
old, but you’ve never before dealt with anyone of my experience. It is you, not I, who is at a disadvantage.”

He frowned, pulled his collar forward and stepped over her. With a flick of his hand he banished the wall of air; a further
gesture pulled her to her feet.

The Destroyer said little after this, and their journey through the largely deserted fortress grew noticeably slower. Stella
had a reasonably good memory, but after the third unexpected change of direction she realised she had no chance of finding
her way back to the front door. They passed many distinctive features: a bright wall-hanging eerily similar to the carving
in the Great Hall of Instruere, a suit of armour built for someone at least ten feet tall, a mosaic running the entire length
of a hallway, a sequence of arched windows high up in a wall, letting in moonlight—all combining to impart a less gloomy impression
than she would have expected.

There were further booby traps, but these seemed designed to irritate rather than destroy.

“There is a limit to how much magic one can leave in a place unsustained by one’s continued presence,” the Destroyer explained
as he held her steady over a sudden-appearing gap in the floor. “These traps were, I think, intended to stretch me thinner,
making me protect any companions I might have with me, rendering me vulnerable. Umu wasn’t to know I would choose to leave
our companions behind.”

“You sealed them in the House of the Gods.”

“For their own good!” He set her down on the nearest solid floor. “What happened to my servant could have happened to Noetos,
or Sauxa, or Moralye. How many of them would you have wanted to see die before your eyes?”

Until today I would have believed you
, she fumed silently at him.
But they had no way of travelling here in time, whether or not you blocked the exits to the House of the Gods. How stupid
do you think I am?

She chose not to vocalise her thought, just in case he chose to answer.

At the base of perhaps the sixth set of stairs since the Sea Door, the Destroyer halted in his tracks, one hand going to his
temple.

Stella cast an eye left and right, searching for the trap.

“Huh,” he said, after a long pause. “I am constantly amazed by that woman.”

“Who? What woman?”

“I’ve said enough. Prepare yourself, my queen: we have visitors.”

Having no idea what he meant, Stella simply nodded and followed her captor as he retraced their steps all the way to the front
door.

Duon found it difficult, no, impossible, to understand what happened after Lenares uttered the magic word. The beam of light
suddenly came alive in his hand, jerking him upwards so fast he thought his neck would break. He could see other hands above
and below his own, but not their owners; beyond a few finger-widths from the beam all was dark. Well, perhaps not: in the
distance, far below him, lay the bronze map. It had become far larger, world-sized; or he had become far smaller.

A moment later he began to descend towards the map-world, faster and faster, heading towards an ocean—no, an island—the ocean—the
island, with a castle in one corner—the coast. They were about to be smeared on a dark coast.

He slammed to a stop, against all reason on his feet. He looked down: there were no dents in the soft ground where his feet
had landed. Around him the others stood and stared at their surroundings, faintly visible in the darkness.

“Better than the blue fire,” Sauxa said.

“I need help,” Noetos called, his voice strained.

Duon spun around: the voice had been close behind him. In doing so he almost walked off into nothingness. Lenares, it seemed,
had hit her target—barely. Noetos lay prone on the ground, his head hanging over a cliff, the sea far below. He must have
fallen, perhaps hurt himself. Duon rushed to his side.

The fisherman was unhurt. At the end of his arm, however, dangled Cylene.
Ah, not quite on target after all
. Duon threw himself to the ground and fastened his hand onto the woman’s wrist, just above the fisherman’s huge fist. Her
wide eyes stared up at him, not quite in focus, as though she didn’t know where she was.

“Thank Alkuon, my friend. I was losing her.”

Together they hauled Cylene up to the top of the bank, where she lay on the grass and was immediately sick.

“Everyone else here?” Duon called, seized by a sudden anxiety.

Fifteen pairs of eyes searched the immediate area. To their backs lay a cliff perhaps fifty paces high, below which the sea
battered against needle-sharp rocks. Under their feet, wet ankle-high grass stretched into the darkness in front of them.
In the distance a single light gleamed.

“Stay still!” Noetos cried out, looking up from where he bent over Cylene. “You might walk off the cliff.”

Everyone froze at that.

“I am sorry,” Lenares said into the silence.

Cylene raised herself onto her elbows. “You have nothing to be sorry about.”

“I nearly killed you.”

“That you did,” came the answer, swift as thought. “But in the process you saved me. Saved us all. We owe our lives to you,
Lenares.”

There
, Duon thought, nodding his head.
It could hardly be expressed more clearly than that.

Fourteen people thought on Cylene’s words for a moment.

“Where are we, does anyone know?” asked Sautea. “Don’t mean to sound ungrateful and all that, but I can’t see a castle.”

“You mean you can’t see in the dark?” Noetos chaffed his offsider. “There could be a whole mountain range in front of us and
we wouldn’t know. Though I’ll give you some assistance, old man. See that lone star there, just above the horizon?”

“Aye, young fellow, I see it.” The exaggerated patience in Sautea’s voice indicated how familiar he was with this sort of
by-play.

“Don’t tell the others,” Noetos whispered loudly. “It’s not a star.”

Sautea smiled good-naturedly, recognising, as Duon himself did, the fisherman’s attempts to lighten their peril, landed as
they were on the most ill-named island in the world. Andratan was not a place for the faint of heart; even on his previous
visit, while entertained as befitting a representative from a foreign power, Duon had sensed the despair in the place, ingrained
in the very stones. He’d visited the legendary dungeons below Talamaq Palace a time or two, and they were almost pleasant
compared to the dark and brutal caves he’d been shown on his guided tour of Andratan. The tour during which he’d likely been
infected by Husk’s spike.

They set out in the direction of the single light. If that was the light at the top of the Tower of Farsight, which, the castellan
had claimed, was always kept burning, the fortress was either not as large as he remembered, or much further away.

The latter, it seemed initially, until they surmounted a ridge visible only by being slightly greyer than the dark vale in
front of them and saw the fortress in its fullness, no longer partially hidden by the hills of the island. Duon shook his
head. His memory had sold Andratan short.

Outlined against the starry horizon was a dark city, or so it seemed. To the far left, abutting into the ocean, was the Sea
Tower, taller than any of the three towers of Talamaq Palace. High in its flank a walkway connected it to the Tower of the
East, named, Duon recalled, because it was the place where the Undying Man met his guests from Bhrudwo. City Factors, mostly,
though once it had housed the
Maghdi Dasht
. Now there was a name of ill repute.

The third and shortest of the five great towers, the Tower of Voices, was the most feared of all, his guide had told him proudly.
It squatted over the deepest dungeons and the Hall of Voices where, it was said, the Undying Man peeled apart the minds of
his prisoners and took from them everything they had, including their sanity. The guide had laughed at that, in an attempt
to take the menace from the words, but Duon had not doubted them. He had not been shown the Hall of Voices itself, for which
he’d been thankful.

Odd, that when Heredrew had been revealed as the Undying Man, how little menace he had communicated, unlike his counterpart
Dryman, unmasked as the Emperor of Elamaq—and the god Keppia. Perhaps it was a matter of degree: nothing Heredrew could do
would match the vicious insanity demonstrated by Duon’s own ruler. In fact, the ruler of Bhrudwo had been urbane. Gracious,
even. Which did nothing to explain why he had fled the House of the Gods with Stella.

The fourth tower was the newest, having been capped less than fifty years ago. Called the Spindle, it was more of a spire
than a tower. His guide had not explained its purpose, despite Duon’s questioning.

Inevitably and finally, his eye was drawn to the Tower of Farsight, a thousand steps from its base to the light set atop it.
Symbolic, of course: even at that dizzy height one could not see the mainland, let alone the rest of Bhrudwo. It contained·
the Undying Man’s vast collection of books and scrolls, and it and the Sea Tower housed most of the fortress’s servants and
soldiers.

The five towers surmounted a vast complex of halls, vaults, keeps and courtyards, all surrounded by a tall crenellated wall.
The visual and emotional impact as they drew close to it was overwhelming, enough to induce a pain at the back of his head.