Dark Heart (44 page)

She giggled. ‘I was right, totally right. Zero can be divided. Not only that, zero is a divisor.’ She bit her lip, casting around for an example, and grabbed a slice of bread from the cloth laid between them. ‘This bread is one thing. The more times I divide it, the more pieces I have. But something strange happens if I divide it by less than one but more than zero—a fraction of one, if you understand me. I know this will hurt your head, but what I’m saying follows the rules of numbers. One thing divided by a half grows to twice the size; divided by a quarter it quadruples. The smaller the number the thing is divided by, the larger it gets, until if it is divided by the tiniest fraction it is as big as the world. And if it is divided by zero, it goes on forever.’

She snatched up a stick and began drawing in the sand. ‘Look here. Let me show you in mathematical language. I graph quotients,’—she drew a ‘Q’ by one axis—‘against divisors,’—and added a ‘D’ by the other—‘so that as the divisor approaches zero, the quotient gets larger and larger until it has no limit. Like I said, strange things begin to happen to the numbers.’

Heredrew turned to her angrily. ‘Very well, you’ve proved you know more about mathematics than I do. What of it?’

‘When I first arrived at Raceme I was drawn by the Daughter through a hole in the world. I assigned a number—zero—to the hole, and made it my centre. It therefore became defined. It was as though I had tied a string to it, tug, tug. All I had to do was start dividing it using more strings—dividing zero by zero—until I trapped the Daughter in a piece too small for her to escape. So she is trapped.

‘I thought about it all night before I did it. In the morning I watched her dolphins circling me, until I could work out which one was her. Then I divided zero again and again with my string, which is itself zero, always dividing the part of the hole she swam in. It took her a while to work out what I was doing, didn’t it, Umu? By then she was trapped. I let her swim along beside me for a week or so, and found I could control everything about her.

‘I have her still. She is here, near us, sometimes a bird and sometimes a fox. I could bring her down to this blanket if I wanted. I could let you kill her. We could spit her and eat her for our dinner. Or I could put the stone on her. It hurts her so much she doesn’t want to get too close to me. When she saved me from Olifa it cost her a lot of her strength. So now she is totally in my power.’

‘Why don’t we kill her then?’ Robal asked. ‘If she’s responsible for what happened at Lake Woe and at the tea house, she ought to pay for it with her life.’

‘Oh, but that wasn’t her. That was the Son, he’s the more powerful of the two. He controls the entire continent of Elamaq, while the Daughter has few assets to call upon. I think we can make the Daughter work for us, and help us to get rid of the Son. Then we can talk about what we do with her. Tug, tug, tug.’

Somewhere in the distance a bird, probably a hawk, screeched in anger.

‘I have never been so impressed,’ Heredrew said. ‘You did all this with your mind. I’ll await further proof of this, of course, but what we saw at the Boiling Waters Tea House seems to support your claim.’

Lenares giggled again. ‘I am special,’ she said. ‘Mahudia always said so. The first real cosmographer in hundreds of years, she said.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I think I had help,’ she said. ‘The Daughter killed Mahudia, my Talamaq mother, by becoming a lion and eating her up. Torve saw her do it. So something of Mahudia is now in the Daughter. When I first tried to assign my zero to the hole in the world, to make it something so it could be divided, I couldn’t tie it to anything. Then I felt Mahudia’s hand take the string from mine.’ She blinked huge tears out of her eyes. ‘I think she holds the other end of the string.’

Stella shook her head.
Fanciful
. The girl was a savant, extraordinarily capable in one area at the expense of many others. Her explanation—zeroes, strings, dolphins, dead mothers—meant nothing, surely. Nevertheless, somehow she had tied it all together. Out of nothing she had captured the Daughter. Still, Stella was not entirely convinced.

‘When we met you in the Boiling Waters Tea House, you said that you were nearly out of strength. I don’t understand. How can numbers get weaker? Does your trap depend on something other than numbers?’

‘Yes, I think so. Mahudia is strengthening the trap with something she gets from the void. But it felt as though she was slipping away. Heredrew has been lending his strength to me.’

Stella smiled. This sounded far more likely than zeroes and strings made of numbers. Or perhaps it was some strange combination of magic and logic.

‘You miss Mahudia, don’t you?’

Perhaps that was the real magic: that Lenares had been able to tap into something stronger than magic.
Ah, it sounds like a bard’s tale. Love conquers all.

‘Yes,’ Lenares replied. ‘She shouldn’t have died. The Daughter will have to explain to me why she ate my mother. Unless she can come up with a very good reason, I think I might end up eating her.’

The meal finished, the members of the group went in separate directions to attend to personal matters. Stella found Heredrew sitting on a stump, picking at his teeth.

‘Thought you would have some magical system to keep your teeth clean,’ she said.

He shook his head.

‘No? You certainly manage to keep your robes in good condition.’

‘Ah, well, I spare a little sorcery for that,’ he said. ‘Do you think an evil lord would be credible with food on his robes?’

She snorted. ‘You’re not doing a very good impression of an evil lord at the moment. Serving the Most High, allowing annoying mortals like Conal to oppose you and live, even talking civilly to your enemies the Falthans. Why, you haven’t needlessly slaughtered anyone in days.’

‘Weeks, actually,’ he said blandly. ‘Don’t be fooled. You might be immortal, but you’re new at it. There are many things you simply don’t perceive. For example, do you know where I get the magic from to keep my robe clean?’

She shook her head.

‘From you, of course, and the others.’

She froze. ‘What? You hurt us just to keep yourself looking good?’

‘Relax,’ he said, smiling. ‘It takes an infinitesimal amount of power to maintain my clothes. My physical shell, on the other hand, requires enormous strength. I get that from myself, largely, now that I am prohibited the blue fire.’

‘Largely?’

He shrugged. ‘Yes, well.’

‘What did you think of Lenares’ explanation?’ she asked him.

‘I followed it easily enough,’ he said, ‘though I decided it is best to deal with her by pretending she knows more than everyone else. I followed it, yes, but I can’t say I would have thought to try it. She really is an interesting woman.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought you were interested in women,’ she said carelessly, then instantly regretted the words.

‘Oh? Tell me, Stella, when did you stop being interested in men? And remember, I’ve been in your head, so no lying.’

‘I’m sorry, Heredrew. I didn’t have the right to ask.’

‘But you want to know, don’t you. I’m interested in women, but I stop short of fathering children. Why would I wish potential rivals upon myself?’

‘You never thought…that you would infect them?’

‘With the curse? No. It would take—is that why? All those years, you never touched him?’ He turned his head away. ‘You are a better person than I.’

Stella stood and angrily brushed dirt from her breeches. ‘Was there ever any doubt, Kannwar? Has there ever been a person in the history of the world who couldn’t claim to be a better person than you?’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I showed you my interpretation of the
Domaz Skreud
. When assessing a man’s life, I don’t think you can rely totally on history written by his enemies.’

She handed him a water bottle. ‘There’s another reason you want us to travel overland, isn’t there?’

‘And what would that be?’

‘I think you’re afraid of what you will find in Malayu. You’re anxious about how long you’ve been away from your dungeons and battlements. You think that in your absence one of the other snakes has slithered onto your throne. A snake powerful enough to prevent you from using your magic to take us directly to Andratan. And you think this snake might well be talking into the minds of the three voice-possessed.’

The sorcerer said nothing for a moment, then grunted. ‘Clever girl.’

‘Cleverer than you think,’ she retorted to his condescension. ‘I know why you are here. Why you’ve put your entire empire at risk.’

‘Because we were drawn off course by the power of the gods.’

‘No. Well, yes, that’s why we’re here in southern Bhrudwo. But I know why you agreed to follow the Most High. Why you were in Dhauria. Why you joined us.’

‘Oh?’ He stared into her eyes, his own hypnotisingly deep pools of pain and desire. ‘Oh?’ He lifted his finger to her face and placed it gently on her lips, jolting her entire body. ‘You do, don’t you. You’d best keep the thought unvoiced, Stella, lest our enemies overhear.’

She could not draw her gaze away from his. He had her in thrall, was expending his magic to keep her docile, but nothing in her desired to struggle. Instead, every part of her wished to…surrender.

‘It’s not our enemies you wish to keep secrets from,’ she murmured, her lips moving against his elegant, illusionary finger. ‘It’s the Most High.’

He sighed then, an exhalation of longing, and drew his finger away; then reached for her and took her in his arms, enveloping her in darkness. ‘Yes,’ he whispered in her ear, his voice the merest breath. ‘Clever girl.’

They took the east road, and walked all that day and most of the next, until they crested a ridge and came to the sea. Huddled against the coast was a port, small when compared to some in Faltha, but unexpected all the same in such a sparsely inhabited region. And standing in the road was the woman from the tea house that Heredrew had agreed to take north with him.

‘I assumed she’d decided against the trip,’ Robal said quietly to Stella.

‘Sadly for her, she has not,’ Stella replied.

So their party grew by one, now numbering ten; though Stella, listening to the persistent coughing coming from the dray, and observing the concern on Moralye’s face, worried that the number might yet decline.

The girl’s name was Pernessa, a pretty, fussy name, entirely suitable for its owner, it seemed. She carried a small harp, wrapped in oiled skins, over one shoulder, and far too much baggage over the other.

‘Put that on the dray,’ Heredrew told her.

All very well, but who would carry the baggage once they took the forest path? Stella doubted they would be taking the pony and wagon north. For that matter, what would they do with Phemanderac?

A half-hour’s pleasant walk brought them to the seaport. Sayonae, Heredrew named it, and for once he didn’t have a bad word to say about the place. The travellers had six inns to choose from—no tea houses, sadly; Stella had come to enjoy the brewed herbs—and each seemed clean and well-run, at least from the outside.
Quite a feat for a port town,
Stella considered.

Heredrew chose the Silver Tankard, the best of the six inns, and they filed in. Two dozen men sat around a low central table, clearly the site of communal drinking, while others filled tables around the walls. The main room was smoky and somewhat odorous with salt and sweat but otherwise pleasant, rushes rather than sawdust lining the floor, and even sporting three faded tapestries on the walls. One, Stella was sure, depicted the Undying Man on his throne.

The sorcerer spoke with the proprietor, a youngish woman with hard features, and with her permission arranged three tables together to provide enough seating for the party.

It wasn’t until the meal was served that the trouble began. Broiled fish and baked potatoes arrived on large platters, each carried by two women. One of them dropped her end of the platter on the table, stared with narrowed eyes at the party, then had a whispered word in the proprietor’s ear.

‘I’m going to have to ask you to leave,’ the hard-faced woman said to them in a voice loud enough to carry throughout the room. ‘Cylene’s been in enough trouble recently without taking up with you men. You assured me you were respectable, but my customers won’t be having goings-on like this. The girl’s antics are well known. Now, out with you.’

Heredrew drew himself up. ‘I’m sure—’

‘You’re about to go on about a misunderstanding,’ the proprietor said. ‘Don’t waste your breath. Your only misunderstanding is mistaking the Silver Tankard for a brothel. Out, before I set my men on you.’

Two men with cudgels approached the group.

‘I don’t want to have to call Gul and Haff onto you, but call them I will. Move.’

Stella nudged the Undying Man in the ribs. ‘Don’t make any fuss,’ she said. ‘Let’s sort this out by talking, not by magic. We’ll speak to Pernessa and uncover her deception.’

‘Very well,’ Heredrew grated. ‘But she’ll not be travelling a step further with us.’

‘Of course,’ Stella murmured. ‘Can’t have someone pretending to be someone they’re not, can we?’

As they reached the door, having passed through a gauntlet of dark mutterings from the townsfolk, the proprietor called out: ‘Not you, Cylene. I’ll be taking you home to your family. The rest of you can leave.’

‘And our coin for the meal and accommodation?’

‘Is forfeit, tall man. Read the sign.’ She pointed to a small metal square on which words had been scribed. Stella certainly hadn’t noticed it. ‘Those who don’t abide by the rules don’t get refunds.’

Heredrew snorted, then muttered, ‘The first place on the Fisher Coast I’ve ever seen my rules properly enforced, and it had to be here and now.’

‘I said stay, Cylene!’ the hard-featured woman cried. Stella went to put a hand on Pernessa’s arm, but it wasn’t her the woman strode towards, a soup ladle brandished menacingly.

It was Lenares.

Stella tried reason one last time. ‘But she’s been with us for weeks. Why would we deceive you? We are already disgraced in the town; what do we have to gain from furthering a deception? We’re telling you the truth!’