Path of Revenge (39 page)

Torve settled down to his supper: a heel of bread, lightly seasoned with cinnamon, followed by a small pouch of tepid water. The moon rose as he ate, a fragile silver disc imparting a ghostly sheen to the stone plain around him. A few paces to his left lay a small area of sand, piled against a stony ridge. It would do. He laid down his bread and shrugged off his burnous. His Defiance was a morning practice, but the stony ground had prevented him conducting the full ritual. He would take the opportunity now.

For the first time in his life his opponent was an Omeran. No specific person, just a mélange of all those he had encountered in the last week. They sought to reject him, to push him into a state of non-being, he realised as he defended himself against random, uneven strikes. They did not want him to be Omeran. He occupied some middle place, neither Omeran nor Amaqi, and they found this threatening. A foot whistled past his ear: more than one opponent, then. He would be tested.

Defiance had never been so difficult. They were right, they were right: he had betrayed his race by allowing the Emperor to use him; it would be better to find a way of killing himself, better to wander out into the desert until he died of thirst. He dropped onto his back, his legs whirring out in the direction of the expedition camp. Nothing held back, no attempt to establish dominance and withdraw; his kicks were aimed at chests, throats, faces twisted with hatred.

With no warning his opponents melted away like the ghosts they were, leaving him alone, panting as he lay on the sand.
No, not alone.
Three small, dark-skinned children sat huddled together on the gravel, their wide eyes watching him, heads turning in unison to follow him as he levered himself from his back to his knees. Each was dressed in an identical strip of black cloth with a hole in the centre through which to put one’s head, allowing the fabric to hang down in front and behind. It was tied at the waist by a cord of rope, leaving their limbs free. Their hair lay in tight curls, uniformly short, and the moon silvered their black limbs. Two boys, leaning forward as though drinking him in with their eyes; one girl, sitting shyly back on her heels.

One of the boys, the taller and so probably the elder, stood and took a step forward onto the sand. He raised his narrow eyebrows and stretched out a hand, palm up.
Asking permission.
Torve nodded, both hands pushing forward, fingers crooked.
Go ahead. Show me.

The boy glided forward, amazingly light on his feet, and beckoned the other two children to his side; then—Torve’s skin chilled as he watched—the three of them mimicked exactly the Defiance he had just completed.

Well, not exactly. Where he had been jerky, they were smooth; where he had overbalanced, they retained their poise. Where he performed a ritual, they danced. An
immensely sweet sorrow settled upon him as he watched them measure his worth in their fluid movements.

These are not children of camp followers.
Who would let these ones run about practically unclothed in the darkness, prey to wild animals? And he had not seen such faces before, wider even than his own, with the barest of turned-up snub noses, unaffected smiles playing across their lips. And the way they moved, like nothing he had ever seen.

The three children finished their—
his
—dance, and smiled timidly at him. Hoping for his approval. Approval? He wanted to fall at their feet, beg them to explain to him how they turned defiance into dance.

Or perhaps we turned dance into defiance?

He tried to mask his shock at this thought, making his smile as welcoming as he could, concerned he might appear to them like a lynxcat or some other predator. ‘Here,’ he said, reaching behind himself, not daring to take his eyes from them, to bring out the remainder of his bread.

The otherworldly children stared at his offering; he put it down carefully on the sand and backed away a few paces. A slender hand darted out, snaring the bread. In a moment the children were nibbling at it, laughing with sparkling dark eyes at the unfamiliar flavour, a language of sibilants flowing between them like the hiss of a fountain in the Garden of Angels. No, an unfortunate metaphor; the thought of that terrible place, of the Emperor and his victims, the children buried there, shadowed the night with ugliness. He closed his eyes and passed his hand across his face.

When he opened his eyes the children were gone.

They must be close by, I only closed my eyes for a moment.
There was enough light to enable him to see, but absolutely no movement anywhere around him.

His heart plummeted.
A dream, a desert vision.
Yet there were scuff marks in the sand, too light to have
been his, his bread was gone, and a faint, strange scent hung in the air. He did not know what was possible here in the desert. While his logical mind told him to believe the evidence of his eyes, he wondered if his thoughts about ancestors had led to the dream. Perhaps he had noted the marks in the sand before his Defiance, his mind providing a fanciful interpretation.

He lay himself down to sleep, careful not to erase the scuff marks, and dreamed of dancing limbs.

When Torve awoke near dawn the three children had returned. They were kneeling beside what Torve first took to be a weathered rock, but was in fact an old woman in robes of black. All four faces, the three smooth and the one wrinkled, gazed at him with ardent curiosity.

He gazed at them in turn. He found himself unable to give a name to the glow behind their eyes, the light that danced across their faces. Mischief, perhaps; a joyful enchantment, a shining innocence—no, all descriptions were inadequate. Totally bewitching. When the old woman held out a wooden bowl and beckoned for him to drink, he did not think of refusing. Goat’s milk mixed with something narcotic; it went down smoothly and lingered on his tongue.

His grin widened as the effects of the drink whirled in his head. The woman stood and indicated he should follow. He gave the expedition and his duties no thought, and slipped away after the four dream-figures, placing his feet in their footprints, stepping on the stones they had used. Five figures bearing away from the camp, even their walk a dance to some desert rhythm.

Torve had no idea how long the journey took, nor which direction they went; at times the sun shone from over his left shoulder, and later over his right. They left the stone plain behind and weaved a path among a
dune sea. Finally they arrived at a camp. Seven low leather tents, in the process of being struck. Men, women and children robed in blue or black, the older with black head coverings, moving with efficiency and purpose in almost complete silence, as though they feared discovery. Goats and camels and donkeys, loaded up with everything these people owned, waited patiently for the order to move out.

One of the men welcomed him, offering a hand, palm out. Torve reciprocated, and the man let his palm touch that of the Omeran, drawing it slowly back so that his callused fingers ran across Torve’s palm, then pulled his hand away and touched his chest. Words of greeting were spoken, but Torve understood nothing. It did not seem to matter. The others left their packing and gathered around him in a circle. At the man’s signal everyone sank to the sand. Torve followed suit.

The people told him a story. The younger children, of which there were nine, walked gracefully back and forth in front of him, as though travelling from place to place. Nomadic, bearing their burdens on their backs. Then the adults and youths, numbering about twenty, stood up and accosted the children. Their movements were jerky, awkward, a pointed caricature of the businesslike Amaqi gait. Dancing around the bemused adults, the children continued on their way, only to be confronted again at the next pass. This time one of the adults knocked a child to the ground as if using a club or a spear. The other children, wearing confusion on their faces like a mourning veil, mimed the burial of their fallen sister; while they mourned, the adults attacked them from behind. Two of the children escaped, hand in hand, darting away from the camp, while the others were beaten to the ground, where they lay still.

Perhaps it was the effect of the narcotic, or that Torve’s imagination had been augmented by the
simplicity and power of the story, but he believed he heard the thump of sword on bone and the bewildered cries of the people as they were erased from the desert by the callous Amaqi. Though the story was told in complete silence, he imagined he heard weeping, a sound of distress that pulled at him at such a fundamental level he searched in vain for something he could do to help.

The story ended, the man—the leader of the clan, it appeared—bowed to him, every member of the clan filed past him and touched his cheek with the palm of their right hand, and the three children led him away from the camp. Through and over dunes they went, the sand scorching beneath their feet, the relentless sun hammering down on them in waves of oppressive heat; they kept to the shadows where possible, and wound long black cloths around their heads when it was not. Ahead of them the horizon danced, a lake-like shimmer.
Mirage. I’ve heard of mirages,
he thought woozily, his lack of head covering beginning to tell.
When you see things that are not there. Like that long line of camels and people hovering well above the glittering horizon.
No, that was real.
The expedition.
Somehow not as real as the children accompanying him—

—who were gone.

This day, Lenares considered, had rapidly become the hottest yet. The whole sonward third of the sky was difficult to look at; the sun blazed at them, a small, fierce white circle angry that city-dwellers in colourful clothes would dare intrude into its dominion.

Near noon the palanquin halted. Their chatelain, the man with the fatherback accent, poked his pretty head through the curtains. ‘Ma dama Mahudia, ma dama Lenares, Captain Duon has judged the weather too hot for afternoon travel. We are resting here for two or three
hours until the afternoon cool comes. Can I offer either of you some water?’

Lenares hated the man. Saying one thing and meaning another was behaviour bound to unsettle her; and when this was a man’s only mode of behaviour, it set her teeth on edge. He might as well be saying: ‘I’m doing you a favour, one of many; why not grant me a favour in return?’ She knew what sort of favour he would want.

Mahudia, though, was almost as bad. She spoke politely with the chatelain, but Lenares suspected she had granted him at least one favour in the past week. How else to explain the proprietorial smugness on his face, or the eagerness in her voice? Twice now, when Lenares walked through the camp on some errand of Mahudia’s, the man had cornered her, his clove-cloaked breath in her face, his hands twitching. Both times she had kicked him on the knee. Next time she would aim higher.

‘Water would be wonderful, thank you, Chasico,’ Mahudia trilled.

‘I will fetch a jug for you immediately. Would ma dama Lenares care to come with me? She must be careful to stretch her legs. It would not do for her to be carried all the way to the land of the barbarians. She would arrive there the consistency of a giant dumpling.’ He laughed genially, his mouth contorting in its lying shape under his predator eyes.

‘She will not be going anywhere with you, Sico the Letch,’ said a gruff voice, and a bearded man appeared at the opposite curtain. ‘Ma dama Lenares is required to attend upon ma sor Duon at the instant. She is to bring any documents or papers in her possession.’

‘Well then, we must make ready,’ Mahudia said, and began to smooth down her robe.

‘I am sorry, ma dama, but the invitation specifies ma dama Lenares and no other. We will return her to you
in time for the caravan to resume its journey later this afternoon.’

Mahudia frowned but forbore further comment. The chatelain snapped the curtain closed in what seemed like disgust, while Duon’s messenger waited patiently.

‘I have no documents or papers,’ Lenares said.

‘Oh? You are Lenares the Cosmographer?’ The man appeared surprised.

‘I’m a special cosmographer,’ she told him. ‘I don’t need parchment to hold my ideas. They are all stored here,’ and she tapped her forehead.

‘Very well, special cosmographer,’ the man said. ‘Come with me, and bring your head full of ideas with you. Captain Duon has others to meet, and does not take kindly to waiting.’

The day outside the palanquin was intolerably hot. The intense heat made every step an effort, as though the air pressed against her limbs. Above her the bronzed sky appeared to draw closer. She knew it for a trick of the light, but the sky and the sun reminded her uncomfortably of the skin of the world and the hole in it, growing larger, nearer. There was no one specific set of numbers, no one calculation that offered her warning, but rather a combination of probabilities. How likely was this, given that, that and that? The strange numbers she had invented to summarise these ever-shifting probabilities ticked away constantly at the back of her head, their overall shape bearing a summary colour she had come to regard as predictive. When enough unlikely things intersected in the environment around her, the shape attenuated and changed colour.

As it did now.

A surge of red filled her mind. The shape changed to a funnel, with the narrow end pointing towards her. At the same time a sharp pain seized her temples and
squeezed. She stumbled and fell to her hands and knees, cutting her left palm on an unusually sharp stone.

‘Are you all right, ma dama?’ the messenger enquired, a hand on her shoulder.

‘Don’t touch me,’ she said, her words partly mangled by a suddenly thick tongue. Could the hole reach into her mind, or was this shock due to the swiftness of the change?

‘Very well,’ the man said, and withdrew his hand.

She clambered to her feet and sucked at her bleeding palm. The pain in her head died away somewhat, but the redness continued to pulse in time with her rapid heartbeat. She could see nothing nearby to account for the sudden change, even though she knew the hole was drawing closer.