Dark Heart (17 page)

‘A troop of Piskasian water-monkeys after they’ve been overfed on bananas,’ Kilfor said.

Robal laughed at this sally. Conal kept a straight face, but his small eyes were lighter than Stella had seen in some time. The point of Kilfor’s statement was lost on Stella, who had not been listening.

‘Monkeys? You inherited your ears from your mother, along with your dress sense,’ Sauxa said, then sucked on his teeth as he thought. ‘I sound more like a treeful of songbirds.’

‘Old man, you snored so hard last night that the top half of this city collapsed and came rumbling down past us. And the only reason I know this is because I was told this morning; I certainly couldn’t hear the destruction over the noises you were making. I didn’t know what would make my ears pop first: the rumble from your gaping maw or the way you sucked all the air out of the room every time you took a breath.’

‘Tuneful.’

Robal coughed, then began to choke. He lost most of his mouthful of porridge in the process.

Kilfor twitched an eyebrow. ‘Tuneful? The citizens of Dhauria organised a bounty hunt for the horde of ravenous, deep-throated monsters loose on their streets. The number of times I was awoken last night by men tapping on the window, asking if I needed rescuing, it’s a wonder I got any sleep.’

‘Tonight you can sleep with the donkey then.’ Sauxa put on his most aggrieved voice.

‘Infinitely preferable! Indeed, why don’t I sleep with a roomful of them. Not only will it be much quieter, the room will also smell much better.’

Stella felt her own mouth twitching. Kilfor, a friend of Robal, had agreed to hide her from the Instruian authorities in the Great Plains settlement of Chardzou. However, he and his father had ended up guiding her to the desert track that led to Dhauria. Now they were here, she found herself enjoying their company but not knowing what to do with them. They would not be able to come with her on the next stage of her journey. Indeed, Robal and Conal had somehow to be persuaded to stay behind also. After all, what need did she have of guards when it was now proven beyond all doubt that she could not die?

Colourful descriptions of odours the Chardzou men had known—or created—gave way to comparisons of their intellectual capacity. Smiling inwardly, Stella eased herself up from her chair, forgetting again her ties to the girl next to her.

‘Sorry, Ena,’ she said. Heads turned. ‘I need some fresh air.’

This occasioned raucous laughter from Kilfor and Robal. ‘I’m not surprised,’ Kilfor said, sniggering and looking pointedly at his father.

‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned about men,’ she shot at them as she and Ena got to their feet, ‘it is that their lives revolve around their own bodily functions. It doesn’t matter how long I live, I doubt I’ll ever discover anything more complicated about them.’

She hadn’t meant the last words to sting, but the men behind her quietened as she strode to the door and looked out on a Dhaurian morning.

‘Oh, my,’ she said. Beside her Ena smiled.

They were perhaps halfway up the hill upon which Dhauria had been built. Behind them the cliff stretched impossibly high, looking as though it leaned over them like some large, inquisitive neighbour. But it was the scene before her that took Stella’s breath.

The lower city, with its white walls, green trees and red roofs, spread out below her like a rumpled blanket, an effect enhanced by the patchwork fields beyond. In the distance the sea glittered, a thousand beckoning wavetops. Everything glowed with a golden light.
The sunlight shines through desert sand suspended high in the air,
Stella told herself.
It’s a trick of the light.
But it looked like a Bansila painting from the woman’s Spiritualist phase, when the artist imbued every living thing with a golden essenza, as she called it. Stella owned—had owned—four of her best works. The effect was achingly beautiful, but paled in comparison to what lay before her.

‘How can you stand it?’ she breathed, but Ena did not answer. Stella turned to her: the girl’s face was awash with light, and for a surreal moment the Falthan queen was tempted to fall to her knees.

A trick of the light.
But she wondered.

A shout, a hailed welcome, and here came Phemanderac, drawn slowly up the street in a cart. Even her old friend’s familiar lined face appeared otherworldly this morning.

Stella extended her hand and helped him alight.

‘Thank you, my dear,’ he said. ‘Forgive the cart; I did not sleep well. My back did not like the softness of my bed.’ Then he turned and greeted Ena with a smile and a kind word.

‘Why would you ever want to leave this place?’ Stella asked, indicating the scene before them with a wide gesture of her free arm.

‘It is a fine morning,’ he replied. ‘Worth taking a moment or two to consider. Were you to stay until autumn you would see true beauty. Although,’ he added with a smile, ‘Instruere has—had—one or two beautiful things of its own.’

‘Gallant,’ Stella replied. ‘Tell me, what is it I see?’

He pointed out the sights spread before them: the lower city, with its clan groupings, and further left, at the base of the hill, tall towers surrounding the Square of Sorrows. ‘Built in remembrance of that which was lost,’ he said, ‘in echo of the Square of Rainbows.’

‘As were the carvings inside the Hall of Meeting in Instruere,’ she replied. ‘Will we always be defined by what Kannwar did?’

Phemanderac had to know her words carried a personal meaning.

‘I imagine so,’ he said quietly.

‘Where was the old city of Dona Mihst? The
Domaz Skreud
said it was destroyed by the flood.’

‘The holy scroll is correct,’ Phemanderac said. ‘Look out beyond the shore—see there, where the sea sparkles so? The waves break there because there is a hill just below the surface. On that hill the Fountain once played, before the flood came, and around it Dona Mihst was built. Fishermen can apparently see the ruins of that place when the sea is clear. They tell of an enormous rent in the hill, a deep chasm from which comes a red glow, as though open to the earth’s deep furnaces. Sometimes the sea bubbles and boils, they say. I have never been out there.’

‘One of the few places you have not been, then,’ Stella said, taking his hand. ‘You are a hero, you know. All Faltha acknowledges the great debt you are owed for your part in the Falthan War. I cannot help wondering why you are not held in such honour here.’

‘But I am!’ he replied. ‘They call me
dominie
, the first since Hauthius. What higher honour could I ask for?’

‘An honour granted because of your academic achievements, old friend, not for your courage. There ought to be a statue of you down there, gleaming golden in the morning sun. Or they should rename the Square of Sorrows to something more fitting in your honour.’

‘Ah, Stella, I’m just grateful they tolerate me. Now, speaking of places I have been, I have come to take you to the Hall of Scrolls. I have wrung permission from the council for you to spend a daily hour in the scriptorium, under my supervision. Are you ready to accompany me?’ His question encompassed both Stella and Ena.

‘And on the way,’ he added, ‘you can think of a new name for the Square of Sorrows. “Phemanderac’s Folly” perhaps?’

Stella laughed, but her heart hurt for this gentle giant of a man, whose people would never acknowledge they owed their lives to him.

The Hall of Scrolls was a large building of a style Stella had never before seen. A central golden dome topped a square dressed stone structure at least as high as Instruere’s Hall of Meeting. The dome was inscribed with a filigree pattern that emphasised its fragility; it seemed to glow from within. Arched stained-glass windows punctuated the structure upon which it sat. A sheer wall, half the height of the main structure, wrapped itself around the hall itself, and the section visible to Stella was studded with three arched windows, much larger than those of the main hall. Each depicted a different symbol: open hand, flaming arrow, breaking wave. In the right of centre of this wall was a large open arch, the main entrance.

The main feature of the magnificent building’s exterior, however, were the twin slender towers stretching into the sky. Octagonal in shape, they were crowned with their own domes, under which nestled small chambers, open to the air through more arched windows.

Stella immediately appreciated what she saw: the progenitor of the home in which she had lived for the last seventy years. The towers took her back to the day Leith died, in a tower modelled on these—or, more accurately, she supposed, modelled on the building, now destroyed, that had also served as inspiration for the edifice before her.

A sudden image of Leith, his face alight in the last throes of life, filled her mind. His parting words to her; his final breath a warning to flee the Halites who sought her conversion or death for her role as the Destroyer’s Consort. The way his hand seemed to deflate. The change from human to shell.

The shock of it hit her as she stared at the towers above. She fell to her knees, dragging Ena unheeded to the ground. ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, oh.’

A warm hand rested on the back of her head, but Phemanderac said nothing. He no doubt understood what ailed her, but Ena did not.

‘I hurt my knee,’ the girl said, reproach in her voice. ‘Look, it’s bleeding.’

‘Oh,’ said Stella, dashing tears from her eyes. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.’ She took a small piece of linen from her tunic and patted down the small graze on the girl’s knee.

‘Be careful, Stella,’ Phemanderac said. ‘Do not dwell overmuch on the past. Memories have more power here than in the outside world.’ She wanted to pursue this cryptic comment, but he drew her to her feet. ‘Let us go inside. There are people looking at us, wondering what we are doing. I care nothing for their regard, but I am conscious of time passing. If we do not use the time we have been given, we may not be allowed to return.’

Stella allowed the two Dhaurians to guide her into the hall. She paid no attention to the mosaics covering the walls on either side of the corridor, immersed in her own thoughts. She had named Phemanderac a hero, but had forgotten Leith. Yes, he had been heralded in the days after the war, but his role in the victory over the Bhrudwans had been distorted by the Halites. He had, according to them, come close to losing the war, and only the selfless sacrifice by his older brother, Hal—after whom the Halites were named—had saved them all. It had been within Leith’s power as King of Faltha to suppress this story, but he had not. So now Hal was a religion and Leith was dead.

And Stella, infected with the blood of the Undying Man, itself corrupted by disobedience, could never die.

How, then, could she live?

That was the reason she had come here. In the golden age before the rebellion against the Most High, the First Men lived in this valley and were sustained by the Fountain. The waters of this fountain were forbidden anyone to drink, but—unbeknown to those who lived there—the spray had sustained them all, greatly elongating their lives. Some among them, according to the scrolls in Instruere’s archives, lived many hundreds of years. Surely somewhere in this Hall of Scrolls would be a text telling her how the longest-lived of these long-lived men, envied by the ignorant Halites, coped while their friends and lovers died around them.

If she couldn’t find help here, there was only one other place she could go—to the stronghold of the Undying Man himself, to Andratan, to ask the only other immortal in the world.

She told herself she hoped to find the answers here, but something deep and dark within her counselled her not to look too hard.

Phemanderac led her and Ena down a broad stair to a large oaken door. On the door was a sign in an ancient language, the letters all flourishes and points. ‘School of the prophets,’ Phemanderac whispered in her ear. An attendant opened the door for them, then lit glass lanterns for them before closing it. The small chamber in which Stella found herself was dark, save the pale light from their lanterns.

‘Why are we in this room?’ she asked Phemanderac.

‘We allow our eyes to adjust to the darkness. The scriptorium is built to keep out natural light, as such light damages the parchment. There is another door before us. When our eyes have adjusted, this door will be opened and we will join the other scholars in the scriptorium.

‘Another thing,’ he added. ‘You won’t be able to read the scrolls. The Falthan common tongue grew from the language of the First Men, but changed in the growing. However, I can interpret them for you.’ He sighed. ‘Or, at least, I could have, before my eyesight began to fail. Ena here could read most of what you need, or you could hire one of the Saiwan clansmen to read for you.’

‘Won’t the scrolls be too fragile to read?’ Stella asked. ‘They are thousands of years old, after all.’

Beside her, Ena giggled in the darkness.

‘Oh, you won’t be using the originals,’ Phemanderac said gently. ‘You will be reading a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. The few surviving original scrolls cannot be handled, lest the oils and acids in your fingertips contaminate the parchment. I could perhaps arrange for you to see one of the originals, should you wish,’ he added, though he sounded dubious.

‘Thank you, but that won’t be necessary.’

The inner door opened onto a world of murmuring and flickering lights. Stella followed Phemanderac to a small cubicle, then waited while he procured three extra seats. ‘Shall I arrange for a reader?’ he asked when he returned. ‘I will pay the hire myself, as you are a guest.’

‘Is the cost substantial?’ Stella asked.

Phemanderac laughed. ‘I am accounted a rich man here. It would be my pleasure. I mean that truly: to hear the words of the old scrolls read once again will ease my heart.’

He wandered off, and Stella sat down, Ena at her side. ‘I’m sorry about this,’ she whispered to the girl. ‘This must be boring for you.’

The girl giggled again. ‘What could be more interesting than learning about the great ones who went before us?’

Stella searched for irony in the voice, but could hear none. ‘You are different from the children in my land,’ she said.