Beyond the Wall of Time (45 page)

Cruel, what he was doing, but love sometimes had to be cruel.

“That is fiction. You deserted your post to protect me in the first place.”

“Nevertheless, I am now in your service. Do you dismiss me?”

Robal watched her face as they walked together, booted feet crunching on the gravel road. She didn’t cry, but her cheeks reddened
and her eyes grew moist. Her throat worked away as she swallowed again and again, keeping her emotions under control. Woman
of iron.

Robal’s life hung suspended as he waited.

“Yes,” she said, after many minutes of silence. And again: “Yes. I dismiss you.”

Stella may have guarded her heart, but Robal had constructed no such defence. Her single word laid him open from throat to
groin, as deeply and effectively as a mortal sword blow. He had gambled, he had lost, he was dismissed. She would turn to
him, the dark temptation, of that Robal was now certain. She would give herself to the Destroyer.

He turned and walked swiftly away.

“Robal. Robal!”

He refused to halt, to turn, to acknowledge her in any way. It was the only counterthrust he could make, the only wound he
could inflict.

No
, he thought, his own darkness drawing closer.
Not the only wound.

He could have tolerated her rejection. After all, she wouldn’t be the first girl who’d turned him down, and not all of them
had continued to resist him. He could be patient if he had to be.

What he could not tolerate was Kannwar’s continued interest in her. The man’s every glance sullied her. She had little choice
in the matter, he realised that now: the Most High himself had appointed the Destroyer as the leader of this expedition, and
Stella had decided this time through to be obedient to her calling, no matter the cost. He certainly didn’t want to see her
suffer like she’d suffered the first time.

But it was clear that Kannwar was not to be the source of their salvation. That task, it seemed, had been given to the strange
southern woman, Lenares. The Destroyer himself had anointed her as their leader.

What further use then for Kannwar?

This interesting thought occupied him as he walked on.

A night passed, and a day, and a second night. Robal barely noticed the passage of time. Did not stop for food and only reluctantly
for water. Spoke to no one, ignored the increasing numbers of people he encountered on the path to Corata Pit. Refused to
answer their welcoming hails, their requests for news, their desperate enquiries about loved ones.

What further use for Kannwar?

“He left without another word?”

“I tried to call him back,” Stella said bitterly. “I have no idea whether he even heard me.”

“You cannot blame yourself.”

“Perhaps not, but I believe you are right. We have all been drawn together by the design of the Most High. Every person we
lose makes it harder, if not impossible, to do what he wishes us to do.”

“That is my fear,” Kannwar said.

Noetos, who had not strayed far from the Undying Man since learning his true identity, leaned towards them. “Send someone
to fetch him back,” he said.

Another man of action
, Stella thought,
another man who speaks to find out what he thinks.

“Are you volunteering?” Kannwar said.

“You’ll not be rid of me that easily. Delayed, I remind you, not denied.”

“Indeed,” the Undying Man said, inclining his head. “And when the time comes I will gladly be held to account—by your daughter.”

“By Alkuon, you will not! You have done her more than enough harm already. I will not stand to one side and watch you destroy
her again!”

“No, you will not,” said the Undying Man, and Stella heard the Wordweave in his voice.
Obey me
, it said. “I will converse with your daughter in private. What I have to say to her is for her ears, not yours.”

To his credit, Noetos shook off the Wordweave. “We Dukes of Roudhos have made a habit of disobedience,” he said.

“Ah, now. You are making formal claim to the title?”

And so the trap opens wide, ready to swallow this man.

Noetos stepped into Kannwar’s path, forcing him to halt.

“I make claim to nothing. The Duke of Roudhos is what I am. If some day I want the title as well as the reality it will be
because I believe it to be in the best interests of those who live in Roudhos, understand? Those who live in Roudhos, not
those who see it as a buffer state between Neherius and Jasweyah.”

His face hovered a hand’s span from that of Kannwar, and if the fisherman was at a slight disadvantage in that he had to lift
his head to stare into his lord’s eyes, the stare did not show it.

Stella nodded.
The trap is sprung, the mouse avoids it, and may well yet get the cheese.
She was getting to know Kannwar and this was the sort of backbone he approved of. Could work with. Was, in fact, she reminded
herself, exactly how she had behaved during her captivity and what had drawn him to her.

Ahead of them the rest of the travellers continued on, Lenares at their head, bless her, taking her role seriously. Not even
a backwards glance.

Stella caught a glimpse of a white-faced Cylene peering out from behind Noetos. This was a courageous girl, yet she could
only believe she was about to witness the destruction of her beloved. After all, he was confronting the man who had destroyed
her family.

“The dukedom is mine, fisherman, mine to distribute as I see fit. As a reward for service, as a bribe, as a plaything, as
anything I want. Be assured of this: it will be given to the one whom I believe will serve the best interests of Bhrudwo.
I applaud your speech, but am wondering if your years in that tiny village might have left you more parochial than ought to
be the case in the duke of such a large duchy.”

“What do you know of Fossa?”

Kannwar turned to Stella. “You see?” he said, his hands spread wide in an exaggerated gesture of helplessness. “Mortals simply
do not understand the time at our disposal and therefore the breadth of our accumulated experience. I spent some time in Fossa
a few hundred years ago. You were lately the Fisher there?”

Noetos nodded warily.

“Then you live in a house that I helped construct.” His eyes narrowed. “If you want to escape my influence, better go and
live on some other continent.”

Another trap, one that Stella, for all her statecraft, hadn’t seen, closed around the fisherman. She could almost pity him.
If you remain in Bhrudwo, Kannwar was saying, you will forever be dependent on me.

“Hope it wasn’t you who did the mortaring,” Noetos said, his look indicating that he understood perfectly what was being said.
“Poor job, that. We’ve got leaks all along the cliff side of the house. Could do with a real builder.”

Clever man. Trap avoided, message sent.

Kannwar laughed, just as Stella knew he would. Say what you like about the Destroyer, he had a breadth of soul greater than
anyone else she had ever met.

“It may have been me who did the mortaring, at that,” he admitted with a smile. “One man can’t be good at everything.”

A breathtaking invitation.

Turned down.

“No, but there are some things he must be good at. Nations need mortaring together. What I see is Neherius allowed its head,
to the destruction of Saros and Palestra.”

“Old Roudhos is a building that must be torn down, and Neherius is undertaking the demolition. I am sure you will not appreciate
this, but I intend something greater to be built from the rubble.”

Bregor scuffed a foot on the path. “Forgive me, great lord, but I don’t see why Old Roudhos needed to be reduced to rubble.
Couldn’t the blocks have been taken apart carefully and reassembled without hurting anyone?”

Consina put a hand on Bregor’s shoulder. “He is about to tell us that Neherius is not a sophisticated instrument, but that
their armies were all he had. That his sincerest wish is that this could have been achieved without bloodshed, but that had
it not been attempted, the loss would have been far greater.”

Kannwar gave the woman a strange look. “How did you escape the eye of the provincial administrators in Tochar?”

“You said yourself that someone has drawn us together for a purpose,” the Hegeoma of Makyra Bay said. “Perhaps our part in
all this is to achieve a better resolution for Old Roudhos.”

“Or to show people how to rebuild after the devastation wrought by the gods,” Stella said, certain she was right. Certain
in a way only someone fire-touched could be.

“Then why, Stella, are you here?” Kannwar asked.

Robal climbed over the rubble and made his way down into Corata Pit. So fixed was he on his goal he barely noticed the devastation
wrought by the storm and the earthquake. The granite finger had come down right across the path into the pit; that it had
been more than a simple collapse was clear from the limbs, belonging to at least two people, protruding from under the fallen
rock. Other huge boulders had been strewn about the pit, and across the far side of the vast space a large slab of the wall
had collapsed, taking hundreds of tons of rock with it. The sheer force required to do such things was beyond comprehension,
even for one who had been caught up in it, and for a moment this gave him pause.

But only for a moment. So what if the Destroyer had magic enough to hold off a storm? He would not be able to hold off the
storm that Robal was preparing for him.

It would not be fair to Robal to suggest he suffered no qualms of conscience about what he intended to do. Far from it. The
single most difficult aspect of this entire affair was the fact that Kannwar was not the thoroughly evil being he had expected
the man to be. In fact, he was distressingly human. Whether the Destroyer was called Kannwar or Heredrew, he behaved no worse
than any other ruler Robal had known, making difficult decisions with alacrity. Robal knew King Leith and Queen Stella had
made similar decisions: one such had led to an army crushing the nascent rebellion of the Central Plains. Robal had come to
believe King Leith had acted correctly, and even his friend Kilfor admitted as much, though only in private and not within
earshot of his father. There had been deaths, including those of good patriots, and Sauxa had named some of them as friends.

Why couldn’t Kannwar have been a monster? Someone otherworldly, supernaturally, insanely evil, as the Son and the Daughter
had proven to be? Why was he not mercilessly destroying anyone who got in his way? Why was he so rational, so reasonable,
so human?

Moreover, he actually compared well to the behaviour of others. The woman at the Sayonae steading, the cosmographer girl’s
real mother, had acted callously by giving her daughter to the ugly little priest in an attempt to bind the Undying Man. Dryman,
the Emperor of Elamaq, had cut off Torve’s private parts for no more reason than the lad was enjoying himself. It was almost
as though they were conspiring to make Kannwar appear wholesome.

Why did the Destroyer not behave like the tyrant everyone knew him to be?

There could be only one answer to that question, and it was this answer that kept his feet striding further into Corata Pit,
towards the small clutch of buildings at its base and what he knew would be housed there. The duplicitous man was hiding his
true personality in an attempt to win Stella’s trust. And once he had her in his thrall he would take her, would take her
and Faltha both, and rape them until they were dead.

Let the magicians deal with the gods. He would deal with the real threat. He would destroy the Destroyer.

The gear he needed cost him a great deal of money, far more than he’d been able to steal from Stella’s purse. The three miners,
their faces covered in grey cloths, had not been swayed by his pleadings nor moved by his threats. They reduced their price
not one iota when he reminded them how he and his friends had kept Corata Pit safe during the great storm. In the end he’d
had to barter away the shard of huanu stone he’d stolen from Lenares. They had been eager when, in desperation, he’d revealed
the shard, so eager that he had almost expected fights to break out even before he handed it over. Another betrayal of trust,
another stain on his conscience; it seemed ironic that in order to defeat his enemy Robal had to become as double-dealing
as Kannwar himself.

By the time the sun set on his third day away from the other travellers, he was well on his way north from Corata Pit, coaxing
along his two placid donkeys from the uncomfortable wooden seat of his newly purchased wagon. And behind him, stacked carefully
in neat piles, lay the materials that would rid the world of its most duplicitous inhabitant.

Why am I here?

There were a dozen answers to the question, all of them partial, none satisfactory to Stella.

Because the Most High required a presence here perhaps; though Kannwar himself had served just as well when the time had come
for the Father to reveal himself. Even Noetos, a Bhrudwan, had—if she’d apprehended his story correctly—served briefly as
an avatar of the Most High.

To represent Faltha? More likely, that, as there seemed to be a symmetry amongst the travellers. Clearly someone thought people
from all three continents ought to be involved in the attempt to hold back the gods. But this still didn’t explain why she
had specifically been chosen. And when considering the symmetry, it would not do to forget Husk, the invisible puppet-master
who until recently had controlled Conal, Arathé and Duon. Stella thought it likely that their role had been to shepherd others
towards Andratan. Duon was to draw the Emperor north; Arathé, her father—and his huanu stone; and Conal—well, Stella herself.
For what purpose, no one knew, though if the magician was trapped in Kannwar’s dungeon, the motive had to be either escape
or revenge. Likely both.

There was, of course, another answer. An answer that had been growing within her for seventy years as her immortality weighed
more and more heavily on her spirit and she realised just how unfit for human company she was becoming. An answer she refused
to examine.