Path of Revenge (64 page)

He did not intend to make the same mistake again. This time he would not rely on a feeling to achieve redemption; he would serve those that remained. He carried water for them, tidied and prepared their dwelling, helped with the meal preparations and whatever else he could find to do. Guilt would not just be something he felt, it would become what he was.

But, he was forced to admit, a selfish motive lay even at the heart of this selfless behaviour. He needed a focus, anything, to stop himself going mad. Gradually Duon was being taken over by the voice in his head, the scornful voice that mocked his every effort to do the right thing. In his most lucid moments, he worried that he was breaking in two. Frighteningly, the voice in his head reassured him that he was not.

Duon tried talking to Dryman. The Children had identified both him and the soldier as ‘bad men’, suggesting they could see his fractured mind. Perhaps Dryman suffered from something similar? But Dryman dashed this hopeful idea. ‘I am completely sound of mind,’ the soldier said in a tone of clipped assertion. ‘These desert anachronisms have labelled us, no doubt, because we ran from our army.’ He shrugged, as if such betrayal were of no account.

‘How did you know about the existence of the portal in the desert?’

Something hard rose in the man’s eyes. ‘I am not entirely talentless,’ he said. ‘You are trained to find
new paths and explore them; I am trained to find a different kind of path and exploit it. Rather than subjecting me to interrogation, you would do better to ask yourself this: where will we go once these desert mice have done with us?’

‘Will they let us go?’

‘They will not be able to stop us.’

‘But they have magic. If a child is a sorcerer, what might their adults be capable of?’

‘They have no reason to harm us. You fuss like an old woman. Are you sure the voice you say you’re hearing isn’t that of your mother?’

Duon gave up. ‘Keep your secrets, then. But I wish you had left me with the rest of the expedition.’

‘You are a fool,’ Dryman said, the last word overlaid exactly by the voice in Duon’s head, a duet of condemnation.
Fool.

The soldier continued his assault on Duon’s illusions. ‘I take with me every tool I need. You are a tool. You are here because I need you to take me where I want to go. A man like you, Captain, cannot afford for a moment to think he is in charge of his life. Others rule you and they always will. Tie yourself in moral knots if you must, but others are responsible for the direction you have taken. How can a mere tool be held to account for what skilled hands make it do?’

The man’s words reverberated in Duon’s skull. They tempted him to surrender, to allow others to use him as they would. Worse, they told him that he had already done so by choosing to serve. He had made himself a tool, a functionary with no responsibility.

He made his way back to the alcove, his mind a tangle of severed threads. How quickly his life had been rendered meaningless, how cruelly his future had been taken out of his hands. From the heady heights of favouritism with a gracious, generous Emperor to the depths of his discussion with the boorish Dryman.

You are layered in self-deception,
said the voice in his head, or perhaps it was his own thought. He was beginning to lose the ability to tell.
When the onion is fully peeled, what will remain?

Torve’s secret tormented him like the sun. That was what it was like: as though a second sun had been set in the desert sky. It burned away at his Defiance. If it were possible for anything to undo thousands of years of breeding, this was it. He could feel it draining him of integrity.

Worse, he could see its effect on Lenares. She knew he was keeping something from her; he knew she would not be able to bear it. He would lose her, had most likely already lost her, and his joy at discovering her unexpected love had began to evaporate.

Worst of all was what was to come. No one could save him from it, not Captain Duon, not the Desert Children, not even Lenares. They would all suffer because of what Torve would be compelled to do.

They had already begun to suffer.

Next morning the Children assembled in front of the alcove, ready to see the Amaqi on their way. They asked Torve to remain, and indicated that Lenares could also stay, but of course such a thing had been rendered impossible. Torve could no more remain here, much as he wished to penetrate the mystery of their survival in the desert heart of Elamaq, than he could turn aside his heritage of obedience. He did not pass their invitation on to Lenares.

There seemed some unease amongst the Desert Children, a constant agitated turning of heads and movement of limbs, where in previous gatherings there had been calmness. A child came scampering towards the gathering, running almost on all fours, his face pale and cheeks streaked with tears. The Children listened as the child spoke, then a woman cried out
and a man shouted in something between rage and agony. The man took a stride towards where Torve and the Amaqi sat, then visibly restrained himself. Two other Children, a man and a woman, walked after the crying child, who, after shaking his head a few times, relented and led them away in the direction Torve expected, back along the path the child had come from.

He knew what this was about. How could he not? It had stained his soul.

A few minutes later—they must have used their spit-and-stick sorcery—the Children returned, the woman holding something small and bloody in her arms. The dead child looked like a burst fruit. As she laid the body down on the stony ground between the two groups an absolute silence fell, interrupted only when one of the child’s limbs flopped from its chest and dislodged a stone. An eerie moment, giving the impression, despite appearances, that the body was alive.

But it could not be. Not after what had been done to it.

Torve risked a glance at Dryman. The man regarded the scene before him with what looked like indifference, his arms folded, feet apart.

They watched as the Children argued amongst themselves. One of the youths was sent away, and returned with an armful of palm fronds. With these the Children honoured the dead girl—Torve knew the corpse for a girl, though its gender was no longer discernible—by layering them on the body. The Children came from the left and the right, each bearing a frond, and every one stared at the Amaqi after placing their offering on the child’s remnants.

‘Who did this?’ Lenares whispered. But from the incredulous look on her face it was clear she guessed who had been involved.

The sun burned away in the sweating sky, towering above them in what seemed to Torve like judgment. The second sun, much closer and far more powerful, threatened to consume his soul.

The numbers crackled through Lenares’ head like lightning; she had no way of stopping them. She wished she could hold them back, dam them like the Amaqi had done to the Marasmos River, withhold the knowledge they watered her with. If only there was some trick of forgetfulness she could play, a way of convincing her mind to ignore the numbers and concentrate only on what the others could see. A child, torn apart by some kind of wild animal.

The truth…oh, it was the truth. A wild animal
had
torn the child apart. She could read it in her beloved’s face, the face of an animal, a killer. He—it—knew. His face was frightened, appalled, but not surprised. And that Dryman, he had something to do with it too. There was a connection between them. But Lenares could not read the soldier; it was as though he wore a false face, a mask. She could not see his true face, it was hidden from her somehow. A mystery; perhaps the most important mystery of this journey filled with mysteries.

The Children, ancestors to the Omeran animal. How far had the Omerans fallen? How long ago had they lost their humanity?

The same three who had spoken to her at the previous meeting stepped forward. Their movements were not as composed as they had been; Lenares had trouble understanding them.

‘One of you did this. He must step forward. We will kill him and let the rest of you leave. If he does not step forward, we will kill you all.’

‘They are bluffing,’ Dryman said when she relayed the message. ‘They cannot take human life. Not since
they conspired with the Daughter and the Son to drive out the Father have they spilled human blood. They were appalled by what they did. Since then they have made a covenant with themselves not to interfere, which is how they survived. Until now.’

‘How do you know this?’ Lenares asked him.

‘Does it matter, witch-girl? Is what I say true?’

She nodded.
Or at least it is not false.
His words made her freshly aware of the growing gap between the two poles of her life, truth and falsehood, as though the twin rocks upon which she stood had suddenly begun to move apart, revealing a chasm between them.

Torve clearly wished to step forward, but his feet remained where they were. His body strained like a hound against an invisible leash. What could prevent him doing what he obviously wanted to do? She felt herself on the very edge of revelation.

The moment drew out, the two groups staring at each other over the small pile of palm leaves, until the Children began arguing with each other. While Lenares could not understand what was being said, the general flow of the argument was clear. To kill, in violation of their covenant, or to send their captives on their way?

For a time the two factions seemed equally vehement, but gradually the man and woman—the child’s parents—leading those seeking the deaths of the Amaqi gave way to the obligations of tradition. Dryman had been right.

‘Come with us,’ the Children instructed Lenares, every trace of cordiality erased from their demeanour.

Torve drew alongside her. ‘Lenares,’ he began.

‘Don’t talk to me, don’t touch me, don’t look at me,’ she said, using the most menacing tone she could muster. ‘Don’t think about me. You are a sick animal. Go away. I will not speak to you again.’

She swung a fist and hit him, hard, on the side of
the jaw. Two of her knuckles split but she didn’t care about the pain. Welcomed it. He—it—went down to its haunches with a grunt of pain and surprise.

It took an hour for the dizziness to depart. He truly had not been anticipating her strike; he thought of his pretentious Defiances, in which he avoided every kick and punch any opponent threw at him.
One of the Children here could slay me with her fists. Lenares can send me to my knees. I am not worthy of being anyone’s opponent.

He recognised these thoughts for the despair they were, packaged them up and resolved to deal with them when next he had an opportunity to practise his Defiance. It seemed he would be fighting the whole world.

The Children of the Desert gathered around a flat patch of stony ground. One of the Children took a stick and spat on it and, as before, a rectangular hole opened at his bidding. Was the stick magical? Or the spit? And the portal, was it a permanent fixture or was it re-created wherever and whenever required?

So many things he wanted to know. He so desperately wanted to explore the kinship he felt with these people, to learn what he had lost, what they might be able to offer him. What they might be able to offer his race, all Omerans. More than anything he desired release from the cage he had been locked in. He was compelled to obey the voice of the Emperor by his upbringing, by his heredity; but obedience had lost him Lenares’ regard, and would lose him so much more. Her death lay in his future; she would not be suffered to live.

Once she died he would earnestly wish his own death. Would beg his tormentor for it. But he would not be granted the release.

Through the portal they went, emerging at the edge of the Children’s territory, he supposed. No. On the
margin of a piece of broad, level ground, in the midst of which were propped a hundred statues or more.

Duon recognised what they were before anyone else. Even as the Children turned their backs on the Amaqi and filed back through the portal, he cried out in anguish and ran forward. Dryman followed him, a look of puzzlement on his face slowly replaced by one of comprehension.

Not statues, then.

There were twelve rows, roughly twelve people to a row; some with more, others less. About a hundred and fifty in total. Each one an Amaqi, mostly soldiers, but the occasional camp follower, all impaled on their own tripod of ash spears and covered with salt.

The pain must have been incredible. Many of them had expired, but a few still writhed on their improvised instruments of torture. While Dryman wandered up and down the rows, searching for survivors, Captain Duon stumbled over to a pile of discarded equipment, no doubt stripped from the soldiers, and was sick. After a while he took something from the pile—a sword—and walked amongst the tableau of dead and dying, cutting throats.

Me, it ought to have been me suffering here,
Torve thought.

He would have welcomed it.

Thus the centuries-old crime was balanced, thus were the Marasmians avenged. The exhausted, depleted desert warriors watched the four surviving Amaqis weep and curse at the fate of their fellows, and judged the full cup of suffering finally drunk to the dregs. The Marasmians would not interfere, would not take the lives of those who remained; a full redress required that the tale be told throughout the world. Therefore a hundred of their fiercest warriors were detailed with the task of caring for these Amaqis, ensuring they
remained alive until they left Marasmian lands. They would watch over these four, now they were out of the hands of the desert demons; would protect them as best they could from every desert danger without revealing themselves. And when they returned from that task, they would join with their fellow Marasmians in raising the old city once again. Then, finally, Marasmian eyes would turn sonback, towards the headwaters of their sacred river, and the abomination there would be torn down.

That the city of the Amaqis would be destroyed as a result was, to their mind, an entirely beneficial side effect.