Path of Revenge (10 page)

The day’s entertainment had made Lenares angry. She knew it was wrong to think such thoughts—‘treasonous’, Mahudia called her words when she’d whispered them in her ear—but to Lenares their beloved Emperor acted like a bully. Earlier in the day she had watched a man praised for squeezing extra rental money from poor stallholders in Avensvala (she listened to the long list of figures and calculated seventeen thousand, five hundred and sixty-three mola total profit at thirty-six point three per cent, a figure eleven point three per cent over the odds). He was honoured with yellow-green light and some flattering praise. Another man had been told off because he’d been kind to tenants in the Third of Glass, and as a result hadn’t collected as much rent as the Emperor demanded. The Emperor hadn’t raised his voice from behind his big yellow mask, but the man had been scared and, in between stuttering and grovelling, promised to do much better. Lenares couldn’t understand what was wrong with being kind. Wasn’t that what they were all taught to be? Hadn’t Mahudia told them the Emperor was the kindest of all men?

Following this a tall, thin woman had been bathed in orange light, and rewarded with one thousand mola (two point four five eight eight three five times
the average annual cosmographer’s salary, Lenares calculated to six decimal places) for her part in uncovering an assassination attempt. Apparently the woman had overheard some discussion among her fellow seamstresses and reported it to her seniors—at considerable risk to herself, she said. Lenares did not believe the woman’s story, though she could not say why. According to Mahudia, who called it intuition, Lenares was seldom wrong.
Never
wrong, according to herself.

Of much more interest was an army captain’s lengthy report on a journey of exploration to the little-known lands fatherwards of Elamaq. The report listed the value of items received through judicious trading (the captain emphasised this repeatedly) but was silent on the shape of the land, the beliefs and customs of the people and other things of interest to a cosmographer. This frustrated Lenares.
Why are the important things always ignored?
The man was awarded a generous annual stipend of one percent of the value of his plunder (she calculated the stipend as thirty-one thousand, one hundred and seventy-eight point nine mola, seventy-six point six six six nine one two six times the average annual cosmographer’s salary, to seven decimal places this time). The Emperor would meet with him again soon, the herald said.

Cramped and bored, Lenares had little to occupy her mind as she waited for Mahudia to present her to the Emperor and his court. She was special, everybody said so, even the jealous ones who continued to tease her. Lenares was about to become the latest fully commissioned cosmographer, a rare thing in these secular days, bringing the total to sixteen women and two men. This total was the lowest since the establishment of the Elamaq Empire three thousand, one hundred and seventeen years ago (one million, one hundred and thirty-eight thousand, six hundred
and seventy-two days ago, including leap years and other adjustments, she calculated absently). She should be treated with reverence and honour, but after watching the day’s tawdry display of greed she doubted the Emperor would recognise her value.

The Emperor knew something about value, however. This was clear from the wonder of Lenares’ surroundings. Mahudia, who said she had been here many times before, had spent some time this morning explaining this to her, warning her not to touch anything. Lenares liked to touch things. She enjoyed the sensations texture created on her fingers. She wanted to run her hands over the thick red and blue rugs arranged on the pale stone floor. If only she was allowed to touch the tapestries hanging on the walls, each depicting a scene of importance in the empire’s glorious past, she would be happy. She imagined how they would smell. The information they might yield to her! Yet the effect of the rich carpets, the detailed tapestries, the paintings framed in gold, the bronze statues, the intricate mosaics—colours, textures, scents—was to frustrate her still further. Why display these things only to deny her the opportunity to look at them? Perhaps when she was raised a true cosmographer she would be granted permission. She would ask the Emperor.

Now the corridor was readied to reward yet another revenue-gatherer or informer. Lenares prepared to sink her mind back into distance-and-bearing calculations for the Third of Pasture, the fatherback sector of the city, just for the fun of playing with the numbers. Around her the light dimmed, and dimmed further, through blue and indigo and violet. Her head jerked up, calculations forgotten, as the Emperor addressed the invisible figure in the dark corridor.

What followed made her feel ill. The crooked stallholder was undoubtedly a bad man, she could hear
it in his thin voice quivering in the darkness, but the way the Emperor dealt with him seemed unfair to her. His crime was behaving like a bully, just like the Emperor, only smaller. Her all-loving ruler forced frightened citizens to testify against this man. ‘I sold Jau Maranaya many secrets from my employer’s factory,’ said one man, smelling of terror as he spoke, his voice hesitating as though he had been forced to learn his speech. She could hear his fear; it frightened her. ‘He threatened to tell my wife and employer about my perverted liaisons with Omeran females if I didn’t.’ A silence: Lenares imagined him glancing around the chamber, shame and misery in his eyes. ‘My confession absolves my crime.’ But the man’s frightened voice made it clear that his crime was not absolved. Something awful would be done to him. Why else would he be so scared?

And what would happen to the stallholder in the corridor? He deserved some punishment, but not this humiliation. How many other people would die for imitating their Emperor?
We have lost our way,
Lenares realised, using a phrase her teacher often employed. The thought made her feel sick, especially in the light of what she knew.
We cannot afford to lose our way, not now.

Two Omeran guards bundled the man out. Hauled him away like refuse. Gentle pale light flooded the audience hall through the Corridor of Rainbows, and around Lenares people took deep breaths and began to stretch aching muscles. It seemed the Emperor had had enough of audiences: he instructed his herald to dip the royal standard, signalling the end of the day’s court.

Beside Lenares, Mahudia bit her lip, concern etched on her pale patrician face. ‘He has forgotten us,’ she said, and to the young cosmographer’s literal mind the comment seemed to sum up everything she had seen.

They filed unregarded from the vast audience hall, and passed quickly through the Garden of Angels. The garden’s delicate beauty touched her far less than it had this morning. Perhaps it was her black mood, or the cramps still causing her pain. She paused to stare interestedly for a few moments at an elderly gardener standing in a deep, narrow hole, then left the woman to get on with her digging. Her tables of figures called to her.

‘I am so ashamed, Lenares. You ought not to have been brushed aside in this manner.’ Mahudia followed her words with a hug.

‘I don’t care,’ the girl replied, her mouth half-full of bread. ‘I don’t need the Emperor’s blessing to be what I am.’

‘But we do.’ Worry rippled through the Chief Cosmographer’s voice. ‘Thanks to your calculations we know that something has changed in the world, and we need the Emperor’s help to combat it.’

‘Soon I will know what it is and where to find it,’ Lenares said, seizing the moment.

‘You will?’ Mahudia smiled warmly. ‘That’s wonderful news. But it will mean nothing unless we can persuade the Emperor to listen.’

Back to this again. The young cosmographer didn’t care overmuch about the Emperor and his doings. She couldn’t see how he could do much about the growing change she could sense in the world around her.

The change fascinated her, consumed her, forcing her to check all her calculations again and again for error, even though she never made mistakes.
What is the change like?
Mahudia asked her regularly. Impossible to answer. Lenares’ world was different to that experienced by others. Hers was made up not of people and events, but of nodes, each node a number, with threads between the nodes giving them meaning.
She was not good with words, Lenares knew this, but no one saw numbers as she saw them. Numbers were places, real places in the landscape of her mind, each place connected to thousands of other places by a network of threads like lines on a map. Except this map was not fixed on paper; it was constantly on the move, with herself at the centre. She had a highly developed spatial sense, Mahudia always said by way of explanation. Lenares shrugged. Unimportant.

Much more important was the widening hole in the threads of her world, a jagged tear as though someone had taken a knife to her mind. It terrified her.

Lenares suspected the hole had always been there. Something had always lurked just beyond her best efforts to bring it into focus, a shape with no shape—a nothingness, she had no words for it—that interfered with her perception of an ordered world. When she first tried putting it into words Mahudia named it randomness, said it was a metaphor for the changing world Lenares had always been afraid of. Part of her specialness. Lenares always shrugged when her teachers said things like that. The words sounded right because they were clever, but they didn’t fit into the nodes and threads, so they were wrong. She could not demonstrate this to the third degree of proof needed for cosmography, not yet, so she was not believed by anyone but Mahudia.

But soon she would be. Soon they would all believe her. The hole in the world was large now, hundreds of bright threads hanging loose in the devouring blackness, and every time she checked her calculations a few more threads separated and another node fell out of the pattern. It was not natural, whatever Mahudia said. Lenares now had the means to locate the circumference of this hole, using strange numbers she had invented to give shape to the shapeless. To fight the nothingness that was destroying her ordered world. This knowledge was to be her gift
to the Emperor, the father of the Amaqi, the wise, great man whom Mahudia had taught her to love.

The Emperor, however, was not a great man. He did not deserve to be loved. He behaved more like the bullies she’d been tormented by throughout her miserable childhood. She hated bullies. Why should she share her great discovery with such a person?

Lenares nibbled at a strand of her hair, then pushed it up between her lips and her nose. She always did this when she was thinking.
We have lost our way.
What if the threads they were travelling ended at the hole? What if the next node was unreachable? What if their nodes were the next to be engulfed? She needed time to do more calculations, but all people wanted to do was talk. Even Mahudia, who was so nice to her, talked far too much. Sometimes she could not stand it.

‘The Emperor will not listen to us,’ Lenares said. ‘I think he is part of the problem. He is a weakness in the pattern. When I do my calculations I will find his node, and the hole will be nearby.’ As she said this, she knew it to be true. She could always tell whether or not words fitted the pattern. No one could lie to her.

Mahudia looked troubled by this. ‘We must try,’ she said, then plucked at her bottom lip in a characteristic gesture. Lenares knew exactly how many times she had seen Mahudia do this. It was a thread, giving meaning to the node that was the Chief Cosmographer.

‘When I work out where the hole is, I want to go and look at it,’ Lenares announced.

‘I thought you might.’ Mahudia’s face was stern. ‘I won’t let you. It would be dangerous. Wouldn’t you rather calculate some way we can put a stop to it, heal the gash, put the world back together?’

‘I’m going to my room,’ Lenares said, unable to bear her mentor’s face. She didn’t like Mahudia when she wore her angry face.

‘Find out how much time we have left,’ Mahudia called to the retreating figure, and received the usual shrug in response.

The summons came early the next morning. The day was already hot and promised to grow much hotter—in more ways than one, Mahudia reflected. All seventeen cosmographers, and the one who was to be raised, had been invited to attend upon the Emperor within the hour. They were to present themselves at the Gate of the Father, and would be received in the Garden of Angels. Such honour. They were to be properly grateful. They were not to be late.

Mahudia sent young Galla around the rooms to wake her charges. ‘Swiftly, girl; one hour is not long.’ The cosmographers were not a presentable lot. Obsessives never were, and one could not be a true cosmographer without having such a nature. They would need the full hour to stumble out of their beds and into their unfamiliar best clothes, such as they were. Only the Blessed Three knew how they were to travel across the city to Talamaq Palace in time for their appointment.

‘My lady!’ It was Galla, returned from her errand, her whining voice like rhubarb on the tongue. ‘Lenares won’t come out of her room.’

Not today, please the Son, let her not be taken by one of her humours.
Mahudia rushed down the cold stone corridor, which was unadorned by painting, cloth or art—meaningless irrelevancies—but still managed to trip on a flagstone and bruise both her palms and her left knee. She was in poor humour herself by the time she arrived at Lenares’ room.

The Chief Cosmographer found the girl sitting at her desk, wide-eyed and crying. She had clearly been upset for hours, by the state of her. All the rubbish on her desk—insect husks, pieces of paper, feathers,
myriad other incongruous objects—had been moved about, as happened whenever Lenares was agitated.
Something in her world has changed, and she has rebuilt it all over again.
Mahudia sighed, dismayed. So powerfully gifted, so difficult to love, so impossible to control.

‘Lenares?’ she hazarded. ‘Our new cosmographer?’

A pasty-white face turned to her, and Mahudia took an involuntary step backwards. All expression had been stripped from the girl’s features. Her enormous eyes were dull, her pale cheeks hollow and her honey-coloured hair hung lankly over her face. All the gains of the last eight years appeared to have been wiped away.