Others would surely take care of mundane things like food and water, their destination and choice of route. The warriors and
wizards among them would protect them from anyone who sought to attack them, like these foolish tree-dwellers. But only Lenares
could save them from the gods. It was a heady responsibility, one she intended to take seriously.
They had found Moralye hiding behind a tree some distance from the base of the ladder that finally brought them down from
the Canopy. She immediately sought their aid for both her charges, Torve and Phemanderac. The philosopher’s cough was back,
rattling his chest, and Torve was hot and feverish.
“Infection was almost a certainty,” Stella remarked, her voice low.
“Will it kill him?” Lenares asked her.
“Don’t know. Phemanderac is our best physic, but he’s in no condition to help Torve. We’ll get no assistance from anyone in
Padouk. We need to find someone soon though.”
Her numbers told her that the queen was more worried than she was saying. So Lenares had taken one handle of the improvised
stretcher they had prepared and told them to hurry.
She tugged back the blanket and took stock of the Omeran. His face was hot and running with sweat, his eyes glassy. The inflamed
red mess around his groin—
oh, Torve!
—seemed almost to glow with a malicious light, and red lines were creeping up towards his stomach and down his thighs.
“You are getting sick,” she whispered in his ear. She didn’t want the others to hear what she said to Torve; already she felt
mortified knowing what they knew about. Those things ought to be private! It was as though they had been watching, and although
they had all been polite, keeping an eye on Torve’s worsening condition as they made their way through the jungle, she could
sense some of them had questions they would never ask her.
None of her fellow travellers were Amaqi, though, and that made everything much easier to bear. These people didn’t know that
Omerans were considered animals. Well, they knew, because Lenares had told them, but they didn’t believe it. Nor would they
believe Lenares herself was considered a half-wit by many Amaqi. Had Captain Duon still been with them, she would have found
things far more difficult.
So many pressures.
It took an hour for anyone to remember the porters. Kilfor asked where they had gone, and Moralye was forced to admit they’d
sneaked away during the night. Good, Lenares thought. They were her brothers, but she’d felt nothing but anger towards them.
They reached the forest floor at dusk, though it was difficult to tell due to the persistent rain and low cloud cover. There
had been no night in the House of the Gods—which was odd, Lenares told herself, given she and Torve had spent a night in the
House back at Marasmos—and everyone was very tired. Kilfor had hurt himself, stumbling on a ladder and ricking his knee, and
hobbled with Stella’s guard, Robal, supporting him under one shoulder. Robal himself wore a rough rag bandage on his right
arm, having caught the tip of a blade, but had taken no serious harm. Heredrew and Stella walked wearily together at the rear
of the group, just behind Sauxa, Mustar and the miners who were now carrying Torve’s litter. Moralye and Phemanderac completed
the party stumbling along just behind Lenares, he mumbling feverish words to the woman in a language the cosmographer could
not understand.
They were in trouble, she knew. No one could tell what direction to take to get them out of the forest. They had no plans
to find shelter for the night, and were quite soaked by the rain. It was not cold, but night would likely bring sickness.
Noetos, their leader, was gone in search of his daughter and the other two voice-possessed, or at least that had been his
son Anomer’s guess. And Anomer had himself left the group near the base of the Canopy, remaining there to wait for his father.
That left Heredrew. A number of the others, primarily his Falthan companions, were somewhat unwilling to accept his guidance.
Not surprising, she thought, considering his numbers: the man was nearly a god himself. He had been alive for centuries and
had many magical powers, though apparently healing others was not one of his strongest. Nor was trustworthiness. What she
could clearly see—that deception and falsehood were his defining characteristics—the others no doubt intuited, or had learned
from experience.
So the leadership had fallen to her. Tired, wet, injured, sick and apathetic, none of the others had the energy. But, for
all her self-confidence, Lenares knew she was a fraud. What did she know about leadership? She was a cosmographer, the only
cosmographer left in the world, but her leadership was spiritual, not practical. Now that she had no centre, she had no way
of leading the travellers in the right direction. Worse, the travellers did not even have a common direction in mind, so which
way was correct?
So on they stumbled, led by a fraud, one eye open for pursuit, the other closed in exhaustion.
By the time full night arrived, Lenares was sobbing with pain. Her clothes were wet through, chafing her skin until it was
raw and, in some places, bleeding. Her limbs were leaden, her whole body shaking with weariness beyond belief. Worse, she
had failed those she led. A while ago Anomer had emerged from the side of the path they had taken and, after greeting the
others, had drawn her aside and told her they were only a few hundred paces from the Canopy. She must have led them in a circle,
yet she had tried so hard, been so careful to keep behind her the place where she thought the sun had set. At least the boy
hadn’t told everyone of her failure, but the smarter ones would be able to work it out.
At his words she had nearly collapsed where she stood.
“Lead us,” she said to him. Pleaded with him. “I have no idea where we are.”
“I’m not familiar with getting about in a jungle,” Anomer said, shaking his head.
“I only know the desert,” Lenares replied. “Big spaces and wide-open skies. It’s a place of truth where everything can be
seen. I cannot find myself properly in a land where the horizon is only a few paces away. So much is hidden.”
“I think I understand.”
Lenares smiled wanly. “I’m not sure I do.”
“My father is still out there somewhere, searching for my sister and the two others missing. He has led the Padouki warriors
away after him, I think, so we should be safe for a time. Nevertheless, we must find somewhere to rest well away from the
Canopy.”
“Should we try to help your father?”
Lenares didn’t much like the grumpy Noetos, but he was the nearest the group had to a leader. She would put up with him if
it meant she didn’t have to find a way out of this jungle.
Anomer laughed, a bitter sound. “He wouldn’t thank you for getting in his way. You’d probably end up under a pile of rubble
or with a sword in your belly. He’s a dangerous man.” He cleared his throat. “Now come, we have to move.”
As the group trailed after her—still believing she led, not knowing how poorly she served them—Lenares thought for a moment
about how sensitive this young man was, and how bitter. And she wondered how long it would be before she became like him.
Later that night, under a stifling blanket of darkness, without any of the stars that signified open heavens, Lenares finally
asked herself the question that had been hiding nervously in her mind the whole miserable day.
Am I really the only cosmographer left?
She felt guilty for asking it. What was anything compared to Torve’s loss? Yet she could do nothing more for her beloved:
she checked him regularly, ensuring he was as comfortable as his wound allowed, trying to get him to take water, and whispering
encouragingly to him when no one else was listening.
“Mahudia,” she whispered, and gave her invisible line a little tug. “Mahudia, are you there?”
The line went somewhere. Not exactly “up”: the hole in the world wasn’t a real, physical hole, just as the wall in which it
occurred was not a physical wall, even though it manifested itself in the real world from time to time. Not up, but out from
herself into the world of people, events and the relationships between them, all bound together inside the wall, something
Phemanderac called the Wall of Time.
Tug, tug.
For a while nothing happened; she felt no resistance to her tentative pulling. The fear that the line might snap, or come
falling out of the hole to lie uselessly at her feet, kept her from applying any real pressure. She whispered her foster mother’s
name, half-afraid that Keppia or Umu would overhear her and come roaring down the line, mouth open wide to engulf her.
“Mahudia?”
It began as a faint ripple in the line, a slight tensioning, as though the connection had snagged on something.
“Is that you?”
Yes
, came a reply, not in words or anything else Lenares could describe objectively. A sort of vibration coupled with the barest
sense of a personality. But where was she feeling the vibration? Not in her real hands. And her eyes did not see Mahudia’s
face, but it was there nonetheless, as wispy and ephemeral as smoke.
This could be a trap. Perhaps Umu had hold of her string and was trying to ensnare her. But there was no way she could prove
who was at the other end, and she so wanted her mother…
I saw what they did to Torve
, said Mahudia.
Lenares began to cry, huge heaving sobs that seemed to tear her rib cage on the way out. She ran further into the pitch-black
forest so as not to wake the others. So as not to be seen crying. She cried for what seemed like hours, wishing she could
feel Mahudia’s arms around her. Listening to the cosmographer’s words of comfort.
“What’s happening?” she asked her mentor eventually, when the hiccoughs had subsided. “What am I doing wrong?”
I don’t see very much from here, Lenares
, said the voice at the other end of the string.
I’m not a god. Just a lost soul out here beyond time, drawn close to your warmth and now bound in your trap.
“Am I holding you? Should I set you free?”
No, dear, you misunderstand me. I am bound because I choose to be. This is the place I can help you most.
“Does it hurt, Mahudia? Is it a terrible thing to be dead?”
Yes, sweetheart, it hurts. But it hurt even more to be alive, and those who choose to be content out here in the void can
forget about the pain of life and just learn to be. I’m sorry, Lenares, I have no words for this. But it does hurt to be near
the breach in the Wall of Time, to see someone I love in distress. The closer I get to you, the more life pulls at me, draining
me of the serenity I feel here.
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
And I don’t want you to be hurt. I left you exposed, my dear foster daughter, because I insisted on occupying myself with
that dreadful man Chasico. This is my way of making it up to you. We don’t feel guilt here, but then there usually isn’t anything
we can do to put right what we’ve done.
Something occurred to Lenares as Mahudia whispered to her, and her drawn face became animated. “Could I pull you back into
the world? Could I make you alive again? I could, couldn’t I? Let me do it, Mahudia, please.”
No, little one. The breach isn’t yet wide enough. You would destroy the barrier between you and the timeless void. Countless
numbers would die, exposed to the cold austerity of eternity.
“I don’t understand.”
Keppia and Umu seek to come back into the world, body and soul. To do this they have to destroy time. This means undoing enough
of the relationships between people—the things people do, say and think; the events that separate one moment in time from
another—that time begins to lose its meaning. You will notice the effects before long.
“Like time repeating itself? People saying and doing the same things?”
Ah, that has happened already, has it? Unless the gods are stopped, it will happen again and again, more and more often, until
all times recur at once.
“Can you help me stop them, Mahudia?”
A long pause. The rain, now diminished to a light drizzle, pattered down on the trees overhead.
No.
The answer came as little more than a breath.
“What can you do?” The girl’s voice came out as a timid squeak. “Can you do anything to help me?”
I can give you advice, Lenares, but I must be careful. If Umu finds me anywhere near the hole she will destroy me utterly.
She knows someone up here aided you in her capture. It wasn’t your numbers, you know. You were wrong, my dear: that dividing
by zero method just served to focus your mind. It was me. I used your link to the hole in the world to trap her.
“Can we do it again?”
She will destroy me.
No doubting the fear in Mahudia’s voice.
“But you’re already dead,” Lenares said, knowing how selfish she sounded. How could she know what Mahudia endured in that
cold place beyond time, or how much it pained her to draw close to the world?
I am dead
, Mahudia said, a faint hint of steel in her words.
Eaten by a lion. Eaten by Umu herself, hence my link to her and the source of my ability to help you trap her. If she sees
me here she will know what I did, and she will absorb what’s left of me into herself. It is what they do, these terrible gods:
prey on the souls in repose beyond the sky. If she finds me I will become her food. That has already happened once, child.
If it happens again I will cease to exist.
“I understand,” Lenares said, her voice low.
I see you do.
Genuine warmth infused her mentor’s words.
I never would have believed it, my Lenares, but you are developing empathy. My child, growing up.
“I’m not your child, not really. I met my real family, you know. They were not very nice.”
I wondered if you would. Dear one, don’t be distressed at what you found, nor surprised your feet led you there. You are exposed
to the pattern of time, and the gods are pulling the threads. It is no wonder you ended up back where your thread began. Be
happy you escaped your family when you were young. And now at least you have met your other half, and you can combine your
strength against the gods.