Dark Heart (43 page)

‘Your mind, you mean.’

‘I tried to love him. But because of you, your filth and torture and taunting and your curséd tainted blood, I could not—could not share with him. For fear of infecting him.’ She broke into sobs and put her hands to her stinging eyes. ‘You know this.’

‘And so you wrestled with guilt for seventy years,’ he said softly. ‘As did I.’

She wanted to kill him. To pick him up by the neck and sink him into the ground, into some abyss of fire. She imagined him shrieking in some lake of lava, while all around the red walls of his prison shook with the violence of the earth.

‘Stella. Stella! Are you doing this?’

She pulled her hands away from her eyes. Blurry movement resolved into people running along walkways. Her seat jerked. The plate and mug on a nearby table rattled. People shouted and shrieked as the earth rumbled.

All at once she remembered her fear: that the gods would somehow exploit the thermal features to destroy them.

‘You are putting out enormous power,’ Heredrew said, clasping her arm. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Nothing. Nothing!’

The pool nearest them started to bubble furiously and a deep red glow spread across its surface. With a hiss, steam began escaping from a crack in the earth. Other fractures began to appear.

‘This is not me.’

‘It’s not her,’ said a new voice, a familiar voice. The blonde-haired girl unfolded herself from her seat and stood up. ‘It’s the Son. But the Daughter and I, we are holding him off.’

She was gaunt, dishevelled, and grim of face, but Stella recognised her. The girl held a shaking hand out in front of her, the muscles in her bare arm straining as though she pulled hard on something, yet Stella could see nothing.

‘Tug, tug, tug,’ Lenares said. ‘Back to your cage, Umu. Your brother has gone.’

The shaking slowed, then ceased, and the sound of rattling china and frenzied boiling water faded away.

‘You have…you have captured the Daughter? She does your will?’ Heredrew stood before the thin Amaqi, amazement in his voice.

‘Yes,’ the girl said, her voice strained. ‘But I am running out of strength. Would you please help me?’

‘SO WE KILLED HIM,’ Lenares said.

‘He deserved it,’ Kilfor remarked. ‘If anyone deserves to die, it’s a man who forces himself on a woman.’

‘We didn’t kill Olifa because he deserved it. We killed him to stop him coming after me. The Daughter can’t always be here, and I must sometimes sleep. No matter where I ran to, he would have come for his stone. So we had to kill him.’

‘Yes, the stone,’ Heredrew said, a little too keenly. ‘You say the Daughter herself could not come close to you with the stone in the boat. I’ve heard of stones like that.’

If he asks to see the stone, or even wants to know any more about it, I will forbid her to answer
, Stella thought. She waited patiently as the strange southerner prepared her response.

‘It’s not much to look at,’ Lenares said finally. ‘But he wanted it anyway.’ She pressed her lips together. ‘He wanted many things.’

‘How did he die?’ An inane question, but Stella wanted the subject to move on from the stone.

‘The Daughter sent a fish to bump the boat and he fell in. I cut his fingers to make him let go, and then the Daughter brought other fish. Hungry fish.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘I didn’t want him to die, but if he had been nice it wouldn’t have happened.’

‘Quite,’ Stella agreed.
This woman is innocent—and deadly.

‘This is the woman for you, son,’ Sauxa said loudly, cuffing Kilfor on the back of his head. ‘Not one of those soft Falthan city women you mooned after. Someone who deals in life and death. Well, why do you wait? Ask her to marry you!’

Kilfor rounded on his father. ‘You ask her. She’s about the age you like them, old man.’

Protracted coughing from inside the dray interrupted the mock quarrel.

‘We have to find a physic,’ Robal said. ‘Phemanderac does not sound well.’

‘Indeed, he is very unwell,’ Moralye said. ‘What sort of horse would shy at an eel and tip the dray into the water? Surely in this land they train animals to cross rivers?’

The peevish outburst was unlike her, but she was clearly worried about the old scholar. As was Stella.

They had left behind the Boiling Waters Tea House three days earlier, having stayed in the cottage a night and a day; and now they drew close to the northern borders of the Fisher Coast. The country had become progressively wilder, looking to Stella like the more remote parts of the Wodranian Mountains in central Faltha. Not as majestic as the mountains of Firanes, her homeland, but dramatic all the same. To the west, bush-draped hills towered over the party, while to the east a complex series of tree-lined ridges separated the road from the sea. The occasional farm had been carved out of the wilderness, mostly on the seaward side of the road; extensive paddocks mostly empty of livestock.

‘This was deep forest once,’ Heredrew had told them. ‘Two centuries ago the Red Duke tried to extend his rule into Patina Padouk by settling some of his more enterprising burghers here, but most left or died within a generation. The foresters and farmers are almost all gone now. They suffered too many deaths at the hands of the forest people.’

He’d laughed, and Stella was reminded of the Destroyer hiding under Heredrew’s exterior.
That’s all it is, an exterior.

‘Turns out the soil here is too poor to support anything but sheep and goats,’ he’d said.

A day north of the tea house Phemanderac’s dray had tipped into a swollen stream. They had discussed returning to the town, but no one had considered it a serious option: with the latest evidence of the Son’s willingness to interfere, the Falthans wanted to stay as far from inhabited areas as possible. So, after somewhat ineffectually drying Phemanderac and his wagon—the rain made it all but impossible for any of them to remain dry—they pressed on.

Within hours the scholar developed a hacking cough. Phemanderac had been part of Stella’s life for seventy years; it was easy to see him as an immovable fixture. But he was old: over ninety years of age. Too old, perhaps, to be engaging in what looked like being a long overland journey. Certainly too old to survive pneumonia. And not yet desperate enough to ask for Heredrew’s healing.

Stella sought answers regarding the duration and difficulty of their road, but no one, not even Heredrew, could give a satisfactory answer. The journey between the Fisher Coast and Malayu—the nearest port to Andratan and the only place from which a regular service to the fortress operated—was normally undertaken by ship. Heredrew had never travelled overland through Patina Padouk.

Stella had asked, quite reasonably, she thought, why they were attempting it.

Because the risk was likely to be less journeying by foot than by ship, Heredrew had argued. He did not want to be out there on the open sea, exposed to the machinations of the gods.

Stella had to agree; she had no way of knowing what faced them on the overland journey, but did not want to drown in a sinking ship. If she could drown. A hideous picture of herself standing on the sea floor, her leg snared by the anchor chain of some great boat, flashed before her eyes. Awaiting the changing of the earth to be freed.

How could anyone think immortality was to be desired?

She would gladly have donated some of her remaining time in the world to Phemanderac. He was such a great-souled man. Never angry or impatient, always prepared to consider any point of view, slow to speak yet with so much to say, if only people paid attention to him.

They arrived at an innocuous road junction. A narrow road, little more than a track, went west, disappearing into the mountains, while a much broader road arrowed down a narrow valley towards the sea. Directly ahead of the travellers stood a dark wall of trees: not the orderly trees of Faltha, row after row of noble, tall pines, firs and birches, but a many-tentacled explosion of growth, a hundred shades of verdancy, every level from forest floor to canopy filled with something twisted or spiked.
Less of a forest,
Stella thought,
and more of a fight.

‘We going that way?’ Kilfor asked. No trail ran from the crossroads towards the forest edge.

‘Not if I can help it,’ Heredrew replied. ‘The choices are stark: either we take a ship or travel through the jungle. I have already explained why we will not be sailing to Malayu. But there are paths, or at least there were. And, I think,’ he said, glancing at Lenares, ‘it might be useful if we were to be hidden for a while.’

‘There’s nowhere you can hide,’ the girl said in a monotone.

In the lead, Robal halted and turned. ‘Then you may have to free your prisoner. If holding her captive allows the Son to track us, how have we gained an advantage?’

‘A question that begs many others, guardsman,’ Heredrew said gruffly. ‘It’s time, I think, for some plain talk from our cosmographer.’

‘Then we halt here for our midday meal,’ Robal said. ‘And while we eat, Moralye can tend Phemanderac and we will listen to Lenares tell us how she came to capture a god.’

‘I trapped her,’ Lenares said simply. Stella shuddered at the smugness in the girl’s voice. How could one be so self-satisfied at having a bear by the tail?

‘How, Lenares? How did you trap her?’ the guardsman asked patiently, nibbling at an apple.

‘I told you how Umu and I stopped Olifa from attacking me. After the Daughter-fishes ate him up, we sailed north, me in the boat, making it sail straight, and the Daughter surrounding me with a circle of dolphins. You shouldn’t have done that, should you, Umu? Tug, tug.’ Lenares giggled like an excited child.

‘Why do you call her Umu?’

‘Because that’s her name. She was given it so long ago that sometimes she doesn’t remember it herself. She doesn’t remember her mother or father, or the names of her brothers and sisters. She’s very silly.’

‘So she doesn’t know the name of the Son?’

‘I asked her that,’ Lenares said. ‘But the Son is not her brother, not her real brother. The Father took one child from each side and drew life from them, making them gods.’

‘Drew life?’ Heredrew asked, a covetous gleam in his eye. He sat in the middle of the crossroads, a little way apart from the others, but shifted a pace closer at these words. Stella thought no one else had heard his question. Was
that
what he wanted? Hadn’t he enough of life?

‘A child from each side?’ Robal pressed. ‘What sides?’

‘There was a war,’ Lenares explained. ‘The Time of Quarrels. The children of the Father broke into two groups, one to the north, one to the south. They lived apart for a time, but the world was not large enough to contain their quarrels, and so they fought.’ She closed her eyes.

‘
The people fought,
’ she said in a voice not entirely her own. ‘
Under the weeping eye of their god some ran and some chased, some became predators, others prey. Some made traps and others became snared in them.
’ She shuddered, and the deep tones in her voice faded. ‘The god tried to stop the fighting, but the children would not listen, except for two: a man of the south and a woman of the north.’

‘The Son and the Daughter,’ Robal said. The guardsman scratched his rapidly growing beard. Stella thought it made him look like a wild man, but said nothing. He was prideful, and anything she said to him these days tended to be taken the wrong way.

‘Yes. He made them into gods. To become gods they had to give up so much, Umu says, so much they didn’t realise they owned. The breath of life is something we all have. Umu says it is like a warm, wet wind with the promise of rain, that it flows through every part of us all. You can’t know what it is like to lose it, she says. It’s like spending an eternity in the baking desert, watching sweet rain fall on the horizon.’

‘So why did they do it, if it cost them so much?’ Sauxa asked, laying aside a piece of bread to ask the question.

‘Because they didn’t know!’ Lenares cried, and her voice changed again. ‘
Because the Father deceived us!
’ Her mouth snapped shut and she looked around wildly, as though she didn’t remember where she was. Or who she was.

‘Who has captured whom?’ Kilfor whispered to his father.

Lenares shook her head like a dog after a drink, then resumed her tale. ‘They agreed to godhood, to sacrifice themselves to stop the fighting. Yes, the Most High explained what they would lose. But no explanation, Umu says, can match the reality of consciousness without life.

‘The Son and the Daughter stopped the fighting. But, being new to godhood and desirous of all its secrets, they refused to make the sacrifice complete. The Most High wanted them to fade into the nothingness, but they hung on and hardened there, in the void beyond the world-wall. Now they are trapped. Tug, tug.’

‘A fascinating story,’ Heredrew said. ‘But you still haven’t told us how you captured the Daughter.’

‘No, I haven’t. Because none of you would understand.’

‘None of us?’ Heredrew rumbled.

‘Certainly not you,’ Lenares replied, straightening her shoulders. ‘Torve might understand, if he were here. Maybe Moralye or Phemanderac. But not you.’

‘Try me,’ he snapped. ‘Of course, you may not be sufficiently clever to make your explanation simple enough for us to follow.’

‘I might not be,’ Lenares replied, and Stella could see it was the simple truth: she really believed she would struggle to explain what she’d done.

‘I’ve discovered some new numbers,’ she said. ‘They are complex, not simple like counting numbers. When I lived in Talamaq, in my little world, all I needed were counting numbers, the ones that make sense to everyone.’ She looked from face to face, her expression clearly frustrated, worried she’d already surpassed them.

‘One, two, three and so on,’ Stella said.

‘Yes. But when I lost my centre, when I left Talamaq behind and lost count of how many steps I’d taken, I needed something else to base my numbers on. I had no centre, nothing. That’s when I realised “nothing” could be a number, like Qarismi of Kutrubul said. Nothing can be something. It took me a long time to believe it, but I do now, particularly since I trapped the Daughter with nothing.’ She laughed.

‘Now you are leaving us behind,’ Stella said.

‘I knew I would. Qarismi called “nothing” the zero number. It helps us subtract everything. Say you have three loyal Amaqi citizens, and then the cruel Emperor puts them to death. How many are left?’

‘None, of course.’

‘Of course, but in numbers we call that zero. What say you owe the Emperor a great debt, and he takes your three children in part payment. He says the debt will not be forgiven until he has four of your children. How many children do you have?’

‘None,’ Stella repeated.

‘No,’ Heredrew said. ‘You have one fewer than no children; that’s right, isn’t it, Lenares.’

The girl smiled, and for a moment it was as though the sun had peeked out from behind dark clouds. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Because if you bear another child, you lose that one too. You count into loss. So, let’s count down. Five, four, three, two, one, zero, less one, less two, less three and so on. It’s like looking at numbers in the mirror: profit on your side, loss on the other side. And, right at the centre, surrounded by numbers stretching away forever, is zero.’

She waited until comprehension began to show on a few of the faces around her. Stella almost had it…

A voice came from behind them. ‘So, if you position your numbers carefully, the hole in the world is at the centre? It is zero?’ Moralye sounded uncertain.

‘Yes, that’s what I did. But I went much further. If zero is something, then some very strange things begin to happen to numbers. I read a note scribbled in the margin of Qarismi’s papers: “Don’t divide by zero, or, if you do, be prepared to deal with what happens.” I wondered what he meant. Any number can be divided, because numbers stand for things, and things can be divided. So we return to the question: is zero something or nothing? I have shown it can be a number, it can be something, the central something. If it can be something, it can be divided. And if zero can be divided, so can the hole in the world. I might be able to halve it, and halve it again, until I trap the Daughter within it. Until the hole is so small she can’t move.’