Dark Heart (27 page)

‘No! No!’

A frenzy came on the torturer. Had to be magic, had to be. He hacked and hacked, raining blows on the man until his sword arm dropped from exhaustion. The tip of the blade clicked on the stone floor.

The only sound in the room was Claudo’s own panting.

Joined at once by Noetos’s laughter. ‘Neherius is a dung-heap,’ he said. ‘Always was, always will be. Time to rid ourselves of dung.’ He turned his head towards the wide-eyed, white-faced soldiers. ‘Are you going to free me, or must I break free on my own?’

‘We, my friend,’ said Duon from behind him. ‘We. Our hosts have yet to see my power.’

The nearest soldier stammered something unintelligible, then pulled a key from his belt.

‘No!’ cried the Emperor, suddenly afraid. ‘Keep the prisoners secured! Guards! Valiant Protectors! Shield your Emperor! Magicians! Launch your attack!’

The more perceptive members of his court were already up from their chairs, but they had left it too late. Feeling like a god, Noetos flexed his multiply augmented muscles and the chains around him disintegrated. Behind him Duon appeared to have done the same thing.

‘I have the north door,’ he said to Noetos, and was gone in a blur of movement. A moment later the remaining chains crashed to the ground, along with the stake.

The five magicians ignored Duon and came walking carefully towards Noetos.

‘We believe this will work, particularly if they are not expecting it,’ Anomer said. There were a number of uncertain faces in front of him, but there was not time to explain. ‘If it fails, we will draw strength from all of you, but not enough to place anyone in danger. This is what we agreed to, remember. If any of you repent of the agreement, leave now.’

No one moved.

Here was the test. Could they draw magical power from a powerful magician using sheer strength of numbers? Would their distance from Raceme reduce their strength? Were the five magicians stronger than the brave thousand?

Now, sister,
he said.

Noetos felt Arathé reach through him towards the magicians. The pull of her magic was immense. A thousand people, she had said in his mind. A few weakly gifted, but all possessing essenza she could tap into.

The leftmost of the magicians winced. ‘What is that?’ he asked. ‘Are you—is anyone?’ His face went white and he fell to the floor.

‘You all felt that,’ Noetos said. ‘Who else wants to be drained dry?’

The four pale faces looked uncertainly at each other. Then, as one, they took to their heels and ran for the south door. Their fellow writhed on the floor, crying in a soft, unregarded voice.

‘Be strong, now,’ Anomer told those gathered on the hillside. ‘And do not flinch, no matter what is demanded of you. No matter what you sense, what you see. As they have done to your countrymen—and as they would do to you—so must be done to them, if we are ever to be safe.’

Some of the people who had remained steadfast through pain and magical drain stood and walked away. Knowing even better than they did what was to come, Arathé did not blame them. But she knew her father would never accept surrender from those who had murdered his family. Her family. The grandparents, aunts and uncles she would never meet. Today she felt some of her father’s rage.

She clenched her teeth and dug her feet into the turf beneath her, determined to do what needed to be done.

Noetos and Duon met in the middle of the room when the butchery was over. Some of it was fierce swordplay, but much of it had been simple execution. The fisherman knew he would regret this until his dying day. Not the defeat of the Neherians, but the manner in which it had been achieved. The human mind, he knew, was simply not resilient enough to cope with what he had just seen, with what he had just done.

But his soul, ever treacherous, sang in delight.

The room is even more colourful now,
it said, and the realisation he was capable of such a thought sickened him.

The southerner, now his brother in arms, wore an obscene coat of red over his clothes. Noetos’s own garments were torn and soaking wet, and he knew by looking at the man before him how he himself appeared. ‘Like a bloody sunset,’ he said. ‘The sunset of Neherian power.’

Duon grinned fiercely, then frowned and put a hand to the back of his head. ‘Oh!’ he said. His eyes widened, his head swung around wildly, and he rushed for one of the windows, retching as he went.

‘We had better leave,’ Noetos said. Guards had come, alerted by the screaming, and at least one had escaped. The fisherman had no sense that his power was about to falter, but he knew he could take nothing for granted. And Duon had clearly lost his own source of strength.

‘Come on.’ He grabbed at the man’s arm.

‘Give me a moment.’

As Duon composed himself, Noetos began to hear the moans of the dying. Not every stroke had been clean, and there were those who would take time to die. Others, perhaps, who would live. He hoped so. This story needed to become part of history.

And it was his key to gain entrance to Andratan. Oh yes, the hero of Raceme would have unfettered access to the Undying Man.

‘We must go,’ Noetos insisted. The sooner he left the room, the less it would engrave itself on his memory.

‘Which way?’

‘The north door, then over the battlements and down to the Duchess’s Walk. I’ll explain the rest when we get there.’

Noetos had chosen wisely, he knew. The main force of soldiers in the Summer Palace were garrisoned in the Underfort, on the landward or southern side of the palace. They would come up the Flame Path and through the south door to the ballroom. No doubt were coming at this moment.

Noetos and Duon encountered two servants on their way to the Duchess’s Walk. Both women wailed at the sight of them; one fell at their feet and begged to be spared, the other ran down a side corridor. The bespattered fugitives ignored them both.

They burst into the open and realised it was full night. Noetos had lost track of time in the ballroom, and wondered if what he planned was possible.

‘Hoy!’ someone shouted from somewhere to their left. Yes, of course, they were visible from lower levels, though were probably little more than shadows. ‘Have you seen them?’

‘Through the north door!’ Noetos called back.

The one who had shouted to them was perhaps forty paces away and one level down, separated from the fugitives by a stone wall. There were steps, however, not far from where he had hailed them.

‘Been there! No sign of them! Is it true they’ve slaughtered—’ The ensuing silence was no doubt the man figuring out that the men he was speaking to must have come from the south door.

‘Stand still!’ he cried; bravely, Noetos thought.

‘I’ve had enough of killing,’ Duon said quietly.

‘As have I. Can you swim?’

‘Yes. But not with a sword at my side.’

‘I’m not leaving this behind,’ Noetos said. He fingered the hilt of the Heirsword.

‘Then we must hope our benefactors can assist us,’ Duon said. ‘Where is the water?’

To their left the soldier clattered up the stairs, and would be on them in a moment.

‘Down there.’ Noetos pointed over the battlements. ‘I’ve done this before.’
Only once, and that when you were a much younger and more foolish man.
‘You must leap at least three paces outwards from the wall to clear the rocks.’

‘Rocks? Ah. How far down?’

‘Does it matter? Into the dark, that’s all we need to know.’

‘Then let us leap.’ The man stood on the crenellation, bunched his legs and jumped.
Not far enough.

Noetos sighed, and followed the southerner over the edge.

‘THIS CAN’T GO ON.’

Arathé sighed, stretching her aching limbs.
Morning.
Noetos was making his way home, so there were no immediate demands on the ragged remnants of her strength. Sleep, more sleep, was the thing. Weeks since she’d had anything approaching a full night’s rest. Still, as Anomer continually reminded her, there were many others suffering.

Those others hadn’t lost their mothers, though.
Well,
she amended, remembering the whirlwinds,
perhaps some of them have.

‘What can’t go on?’ she answered in her hybrid language. ‘The constant drain on our essenza? Weeks without sleep? Or five thousand Racemen scavenging the barren hills of northern Saros?’

Her brother grunted, a sour acknowledgment of their troubles. ‘All of them. But I meant the last. Children are hungry, which makes their parents frightened and angry. There have been raids on local villages. Some of the men have organised foraging parties, but I’ve heard they are little more than thieving squads. Understandable, given their sons and daughters are crying. But an hour ago I heard men talking about killing. Villagers have heard of the Neherian raid, and one group of locals somewhere west of here mistook a foraging party for the vanguard of the Neherian forces. There was a pitched battle. Dozens of men killed, apparently.’

‘What is Captain Cohamma doing about this?’

‘Cohamma? A chicken with his head cut off. Half the time he asks where Father has gone, the rest he spends lamenting the loss of the governor and his own superiors. He’s lost control, Arathé.’

‘He never had it. It was his decision to abandon Raceme two nights ago that surrendered the city to the Neherians.’

Her brother shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. Perhaps he didn’t intend it, but his actions saved these five thousand Racemen. Imagine what might have happened had there still been resistance in the city when the Neherian army arrived.’

‘I’m more worried about the other battle.’

‘There’s another battle? Oh, you mean the storm. Arathé, I never got the straight of that. Mustar tried to explain it to me—’

Arathé waved her hands at him. ‘Be quiet, be quiet. Mustar knows nothing.’

‘I know he likes you,’ Anomer grinned.

Teasing her, as he’d always done. She’d missed him the last two years, more than her parents, in truth. He had been her closest friend, two years younger than her but willing to assist in any scheme she came up with. He stole the eggs she needed to make her biscuits on the wooden floor of their Old Fossan home; they’d both thought the sun-warmed surface would be hot enough to bake the dreadful mixture. Mother had been angry, blaming Arathé, but Anomer admitted his part in the fiasco and shared the subsequent beating. When she had taken up with what he called ‘her giggly girls’, he hadn’t hung around her, like younger brothers often do. He’d found friends of his own, but always he and his sister made time for each other when the friends went home. And when their father became important in the community and her old friends no longer came to play, he looked to cheer her. As now.

‘Mustar remembers a girl he liked, one among many,’ she signed to him. ‘I am no longer that girl. Let him discover that for himself. We have too much else to consider.’

‘Yes,’ Anomer agreed.
Such as how a storm can be sentient
, he thought to himself.

Earlier Arathé had explained in detail to her brother her arrival in Raceme. Little enough else to occupy them on their way north as part of the five thousand survivors of the ‘Raceme Massacre’, as some were calling it. She wished her father had been party to her tale, but he’d gone off on an overwrought, dangerous tangent of his own, as always. After a mislaid sword! Continuing to regard his judgment as unquestionable; not bothering to tell them of his plans. Putting himself—and therefore everyone else, as it turned out—in danger.

Her story took a long time to tell. On that day in Fossa when she returned to them, she had last seen Anomer when finding herself unable to escape Fisher House via the kitchen window. She described to him how she could not avoid the Recruiters, ending up grappling with Ataphaxus in the hallway. Her strength was already low, weakened through months of abuse, leaving her especially vulnerable to those who had used her. The Recruiter’s forceful attack drove through her feeble defence and paltry magic. He struck her blade away and came at her with a knife he’d picked up from the kitchen. The last image that flashed across her mind as he stepped inside her desperate block was of using that very knife to slice vegetables in preparing a meal years ago, before all this had begun.

He had slammed into her shoulder, spinning her around, then struck her below her shoulder blades; the knife burned as it went in, and the power behind the blow drove her to the ground. The world flashed blue, then black.

She let go of life.

And awoke on fire.

Blue flames flickered everywhere, running along her arms, spouting from her mouth as she screamed. There was no pain, only an incredible heat from the back of her head. She recognised it, though she had never seen it before: a vast infusion of magical power directed at her own body, healing it. She stood, newly healed, and a kitchen knife clattered to the floor, startling her. Then she remembered how it had felt going in.

She had not known magicians had the ability to self-heal even when unconscious.
So much I was not taught,
she told Anomer.
Did I really do the right thing at Andratan when I refused the water magic?

He had said nothing, but she suspected he desired a greater share of the magic himself.

After making sure there were no Recruiters in the house, she had stumbled outside into a cloudy Fossan morning. No, not clouds. Smoke. Her feet turned towards Old Fossa, hoping that someone there would know where her family was. Hoping that, with her assumed death, the Recruiters had abandoned them and left the village—but deep inside knowing they would not leave this unresolved, and that her family had paid the price for the selfishness she had shown in seeking their help. They must have been taken or killed. Otherwise her body would surely not have been abandoned.

She met Mustar in the crowd down by the burning boats. Strangely, he’d recognised her even before she had begun what she thought would be a long and difficult explanation. In the midst of everything, this had melted her fear-frozen soul. He’d held her as she sobbed, found her a thin blanket and told her what he knew of the previous day’s tumultuous events. Noetos a hunted criminal; Opuntia and Anomer taken as surety of his surrender.

Those putting out the fires had been the first to see the approaching sails. Some of the villagers fled, but most remained, mesmerised by the continuation of strange happenings in their village. Not wanting to miss the next event, not really believing the sails bode them ill. So it was that nearly the entire village was rounded up and questioned by the Neherians, and Arathé witnessed the sordid torture and deaths of some she knew—or had once known. Mustar counselled her to keep her identity secret, and to use her blanket to hide herself from the prying eyes of those who might remember a Recruiter’s servant. He need not have worried. The villagers were too preoccupied with the disaster unfolding before them.

Sautea had been the one to secure their escape. It had been a risky, almost foolhardy plan, conceived in desperation. He signalled one of the Neherian captains and told him they were shipmates of this Noetos they were searching for, a disliked man, and offered to show the captain the man’s house and other likely places he might have hidden. It had been the old man’s hope they would be accompanied by only one or two Neherians, but a squad of six was dispatched with the captain and the three supposed informants.

Unarmed, Sautea and Mustar tried to ambush the squad in the great room of Fisher House. The Neherians reacted swiftly, apparently ready for any trick, and for a moment Arathé thought she was about to be struck down in her own home for the second time in a matter of hours; but her head had flashed white and she felt herself drawing power from everyone in the room, Neherian and Fossan alike. She had four of them disarmed and writhing on the ground before the Neherians had recovered from their shock. Mustar and Sautea didn’t know one end of a sword from the other, but the remaining Neherians ran like cowards.

Sautea led Mustar and Arathé to cover near Tipper Bridge. The three Fossans watched, guilt-ridden and sorrowful, as their fellow villagers were bound and transferred to waiting ships. Slowly and with many gestures, Arathé told the two men what had been done to her, and what had happened to her family when she sought their help. Mustar vowed to help her stay free and find her family, but Sautea asked them to consider something far more important: warning the Fisher Coast that the Neherian fleet was coming.

They waited with increasing impatience until darkness offered them the cover they needed, then took the smaller and least damaged of Noetos’s two boats. It was a decision fraught with risk, but Sautea and Mustar were excellent sailors and kept close to shore. They could not keep pace with the fleet, but they could skip past them when the Neherians hove to in Farsala Sida’s shallow harbour.

And, as they did, the storm began stalking them.

It was a small thing to start with, battering them with fresh northerlies as they tacked east and west, trying to hug the coast. At the same time, the far side of the storm gave the Neherian fleet, sailing in deeper waters, easy passage northward. Every day the three Fossans tried to gain the next village before the Neherian fleet, and every day they failed. Every night they expended more energy than they could afford to pass the fleet, only to repeat the misery the next day. And every day the storm kept pace with them.

The storm then began attacking them—or, at least, that was how it seemed. Rain clouds tracked them northward, dumping prodigious amounts of water into their boat. Thin waterspouts would drift into their path, forcing them to seek shelter. They were peppered with hail the size of eggs, and their pale grey days were illuminated only by the lightning that walked across the water as though quartering their location.

No natural storm, then. Its path was too calculated; its position designed to minimise their progress while maximising that of the fleet. On top of this, it sucked at them as though drawing from their essenza. Perhaps it was; perhaps magicians from the Neherian fleet manipulated the weather against the small boat. Why not just crush them?
It takes a much greater magic to move the wind than to strike openly at a target,
Arathé had been told during her time in Andratan. What sort of magician lacked the presence to attack them directly?

During the long, exhausting voyage they wondered what had happened to the Fossans. Had they been thrown overboard? Unlikely. Transported south to Aneheri to begin a life of slavery? Possible, but if this was replicated at every village along the Fisher Coast there would soon be no ships left in the fleet. Most likely they were piled in the vessels’ holds, suffering the vicissitudes of a stormy sea journey. North or south, they were still prisoners.

But this led to the question the three Fossans debated through the cold nights. Why would the Neherians wish to depopulate the Fisher Coast? Surely even a conqueror needed subjects to work the fields and tend the machines of civilisation? Apparently not, if the fleet’s behaviour at Fossa was typical of what was happening along the coast.

And one other thought exercised their minds as they struggled against the storm with failing strength. Why had the Neherians been seeking Noetos?

Well,
Arathé had reflected as she finished her tale by describing their final run into Raceme, borne like a leaf on the wind of the now giant storm,
at least now I know why.
Not that she could tell Sautea and Mustar the full story. The latter would be crushed to learn his famous and respected father had been a Neherian informant.

Who could anticipate their parents’ pasts? Arathé and Anomer had known their father was different from other fathers in Fossa. He knew much more than other men, and there were hints in his words of lands and experiences far from the sheltered harbour that constrained Fossan lives. The man was shrouded in a twenty-year silence, refusing to answer any direct questions about the details of his own childhood: where he had been born, what conditions had been like growing up, and what had happened to his family. The things any normal family shared; things that became part of family history. But nothing had led them to expect a history as exotic and painful as that which their father had finally, reluctantly, described to them.

How did she feel about this history? Anomer was angry, she knew that. Deeply angry that he, the rightful heir of Roudhos—the rightful heir given that Noetos was the Duke of Roudhos—had been kept ignorant. Part of his identity had been stolen: her brother had a right to be angry. What would it have cost the man to have told his family? Was he worried that loose talk would bring the Neherians down upon them? As it turned out, they had been known. The Neherians had come anyway. And the inescapable fact was, had Noetos told his family of his origins and title, Opuntia would likely still be alive.

Alive, but frustrated. Arathé was realist enough to recognise that. To have been a duchess by claim but not by right; that would have been too much to bear.

‘It’s not really his fault,’ she signed, meaning her father, and provoking a growl from Anomer. She raised her eyebrows.
If he knew how much like our father he sounds when he does that, he’d tear out his tongue.

‘Not his fault?’ Anomer did not try to read her mind—they allowed each other too much respect for that—but he stared at her as though trying to intuit her thoughts. ‘Had he remained true to the cause, we might well now be living in luxury in Aneheri.’

‘Brother, there is so much wrong with those words I don’t know where to begin.’

He grimaced and his shoulders dropped. ‘I know. It was our grandfather who turned his back on the rump of Roudhos. He might well have made a moral decision, though it’s hard to see how staying loyal to the Neherian cause could have cost more lives. And had Father stayed in Aneheri he would never have met Mother. Better for them undoubtedly, but not for us.’