Path of Revenge (45 page)

He nodded. Once Lenares had recovered her numbers they could return here. ‘Come, then,’ he said, extending a hand to her.

The two of them began to work their way up the sandy slope, no more than thirty paces high. A third of the way up, sand began cascading past them, covering their feet and ankles. They eased their feet
free and took another step, triggering more sand. With a hiss the whole slope moved, sending them sliding, still upright, back to the beach beside the pool.

Lenares laughed and flicked a tangle of hair out of her eyes. ‘Again?’

After the third time they found themselves at the base of the slope, this time in a painful snarl of limbs, neither of them laughed. Their efforts had succeeded only in steepening the slope; every movement now sent sand sloughing down in sheets. Torve pulled Lenares to her feet, and shook himself in an attempt to free his clothing of loose sand. Another avalanche hissed past them, much of it finishing in the pool.

Increasingly worried, Torve searched for handholds in the sheer walls either side of the sandy slope. Higher up the wall, well beyond his reach, the rocks were clearly jointed, but lower down they had been worn smooth by water. After a number of futile attempts to force a handhold in the wall, he gave up, sucking at a bruised hand and growling in frustration. Lenares began to cry.

An hour later Torve himself was ready to cry. They had fallen in easily enough, but could not climb out. Trapped like insects under glass. Was the canyon simply a snare for inquisitive people? If they dug under the sand, would they find a forlorn scattering of skeletons?

‘We must follow the canyon in order to discover another way out.’ He tried to sound optimistic. There
would
be another way back to the dry riverbed.

‘But the expedition may be gone by then. What happens if there is a sandstorm? We may never find where Captain Duon pitched his tent. Then I would have to travel all the way back to Talamaq.’

Privately Torve wondered if this might, in fact, be the plan of the intelligence behind the hole in the world. He dared not voice the thought aloud.

‘I don’t think we have a choice,’ he said. ‘We get no nearer to the expedition by remaining here.’

As soon as Lenares had refreshed herself and attended to her woman’s matters, they left the deep, dark pool behind them. Holding hands, they waded through the cool shallows between one slender, pale beach and the next, drawn on by a growing excitement at what they might find.

The feeling that they walked from room to room in someone’s house grew stronger in Torve’s mind, enhanced further when the canyon curved left and opened into a circular basin at least fifty paces across.

Ferns and grasses softened the base of the canyon walls on both sides, and framed a small jewel-like lake of seemingly infinite depth. Surrounding the lake were three large rock outcrops, far too regular to be natural, shaped like enormous low-backed seats. Torve scrambled up the nearest of the three and noted the signs of wear, the softening of the angular grey rock where a giant figure might have sat. The basin seemed like nothing other than a reception room, a place for intimate conversation, three large heads bent together.

‘Do you think,’ he asked Lenares breathlessly, ‘do you think this might be a place where the three gods meet?’

The cosmographer scowled at him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘They can’t still meet here, because one of them is missing. I remember that. But without my numbers nothing is clear to me, not even you. Especially not you. Something is different about you today. What is it?’

So direct, as always. He dropped down to the floor of the basin and walked over to her, then took her hand in his and looked intently into her troubled eyes. Perhaps she would understand directness. He took a deep breath, drew her closer, bent forward and kissed her softly on the lips.

‘That,’ he murmured, ‘is what is different.’

‘Oh,’ she said, a gentle exhalation of air against his cheek. ‘I’ve known
that
since before we left Talamaq. But I thought Omerans weren’t allowed…weren’t allowed to…Mahudia told me it is dirty with Omerans, since they are animals.’

He pushed himself away from her, something deep within him wounded by her careless—no, her
direct
speech. ‘It is true,’ he said, not looking at her. ‘True that the Amaqi and Omerans both consider relations between their species dirt—distasteful. But not true that Omerans are animals. I am not an animal, Lenares. Look, there are birds here in this place. Are they filled with awe because they dwell in the house of the gods? They are not, but I am. How can I be called an animal? Compared to a bird or a beast?’

Her gaze was at once tender and confused. ‘But the birds fall in love here, like we have,’ she said, and with her words Torve’s traitorous heart leaped. ‘They…they mate and have chicks. Are we not just like them?’

‘You are no animal,’ he said.

‘Lenares Lackwit,’ she said in a singsong voice, as though mimicking the voice of another. ‘Fit for living with the pigs, a smelly, silly swine.’ Her face screwed up in misery and silent tears ran down her cheeks. ‘Don’t touch me.’

‘Why not?’ Torve asked, though he let her hand go. ‘Because I am an animal, or because you are?’

‘Because everyone thinks we are. The cosmographers would shun me if they found out. The Emperor…’

‘He would send me to the surgeon. He doesn’t want to breed from me. But, Lenares, why do you care what the cosmographers think? They were willing to hand you over to the Elborans. And how can the Emperor command me to forsake you when he is hundreds of
leagues away? Until we are once again in the place where our betters command us, can’t we do as we please?’

She bit her lip and sniffed, her tears drying on her face. ‘Mahudia put up with me because of what I could do. The others, even Nehane, didn’t really like me. Rouza and Palain and Vinaru hated me. Everyone, even Mahudia, treated me like a pet with a poisonous sting. But you…’ She choked back a sob. ‘From the first you liked me, loved me, for what I am. And I…’

‘Yes?’ he prompted.

‘I am in love with an Omeran,’ she said, and buried herself in his arms and wept.

In the course of the next few days Torve and Lenares walked through the many rooms of the house of the gods. They drank liberally from the numerous pools and were harmed by none; partook of the bright red berries from small trees growing in crevices in the rock, and felt no need for other sustenance. They wandered into a beautiful playroom one evening, a bowl of shining blue stone surrounding an orange pool, water-sculpted shelves arranged like seating for an audience. As the sun set they watched a chill mist rise from the lake, to be formed by a gentle breeze into an endless variety of fantastic shapes. Torve imagined he could hear children’s laughter echo faintly around the bowl as the misty grotesqueries cavorted before them.

The next morning they bathed in a warm, steamy pool with a faint rotten-egg smell and watched the play of rippled light on the red rock walls above them, then went on to discover a long hall in which both walls towered over them like breaking waves, smooth-sided curves with vertical fissures completing the illusion. A reminder, perhaps, that there was a more mundane world beyond the beautiful desert. Torve and Lenares walked through the hall quietly, hand in
hand, so as not to shatter the illusion and cause the waves to break over them.

Whenever they walked together they held hands, but seldom did they kiss. It was as though they teetered on the brink of a depthless precipice, and the merest step forward would plunge them both into a chasm of cascading events neither could escape. Battered and broken by those who should have loved them, it was no surprise they were themselves cautious, Torve reflected. Their constant touching seemed as much for reassurance as anything: was she still there? Did he still feel the same?

They spent a frustrating morning clambering through and over an enormous tangle of odd-shaped rocks, which Torve eventually concluded was a nursery for a colossal child. An evening’s camp was made at the base of a gossamer waterfall trickling from a spring high in the sonwards wall, the late sunlight creating the illusion of blood seeping from a wound. Another spring, this one emerging from a slot at ground level, they found to be icy cold and provided them a great deal of splashing and dunking fun. A hall between rooms featured a series of visually jarring carvings, most of which were beyond their comprehension. The occasional animal was recognisable, as were two desert scenes, but was that an enormous snake winding between the dunes, or perhaps an improbable river in the desert? A final room, truly unearthly, featured no less than nine perfectly circular pools arranged in three rows, each pool shaded by a tall plant with broad leaves. Neither Torve nor Lenares could work out what the room might have been used for, but he guessed from the foot-polished stone floor that this chamber had seen more use than all of the others.

In all this time there had been no side corridors, no alternative routes, no lessening of the steepness of the
canyon walls. So it came as a distinctly unpleasant surprise when the final room came to a dead end, a vertical cliff-face surrounding it on all sides except the narrow notch through which they had entered it. Torve sat on a rock with his head in his hands, while beside him Lenares whimpered in frustration.

A frenzied desperation took hold of Torve, forcing him to his feet. He ran to the nearest wall and grabbed at the rock, looking for handholds. Abandoning his usual caution he threw himself against the rock and worked his way up from the rocky floor.

What use is this?
a voice in his mind asked tartly.
Even if you scale the wall, Lenares can’t. Do you plan to leave her here?

Never!

The rocks in this wall were compressed, squat, brick-like shapes, some sticking out further than others, providing plenty of handholds. He managed to climb past the smoother outcrops, rounded by the action of water over centuries, and to reach the more angular rocks, which gave him an easier passage. But the wall tilted above his head, and he found himself climbing under and then across an overhang. The rocks were more angular, yes, but were also much more brittle and began breaking off in his hands. Somewhere below him—he would not look down—came a splash from one of the pools, and a concerned cry from Lenares.
Perhaps I can steal a rope from the expedition, or plead with someone for help, if I make it up this wall.

He came to the end of his desperate energy, and found himself hanging from the cliff, toes and hands dug in just to hold him in place. He reached for another handhold, tested it, put his weight on it—and it came loose in his hand. He clutched at the rock-face, failed to find a handhold, and a foot slipped. He closed his eyes in defeated acquiescence as the rock in his other hand came away from the cliff.

He landed in one of the pools, though from the agony searing up and down his back as he sank into the pool’s depths, he might as well have landed on the stone floor. A rock bubbled past him, disappearing into the blackness below. He tried to move his arms and legs, to swim back to the surface, but they would not respond.

A new agony seized him, a fire across the top of his head. He could not even struggle as his scalp seemed to lift off; then, as Lenares pulled him to the surface and to the edge of the pool by his hair, he gave thanks that he had not been able to fight her.

Despite Lenares’ increasingly manic anxiety they stayed in the last room the rest of the day, allowing Torve to recover feeling in his arms and legs. His back was a mass of bruises, and the cold water Lenares continually applied to it eased the growing pain as feeling returned. He had heard of people crippled by similar falls—had seen one, the result of one of the Emperor’s more spectacular experiments—and acknowledged his good fortune.

Although Lenares lay beside him that night, sleeping deeply, Torve could find no rest. Too many actions contrary to his nature combined to trouble him. The realisation that finding their way out of this enchanted place might be difficult—or impossible, if the enchantment was real—fought with his desire to have Lenares here to himself for as long as possible.
We could live here forever, feasting on berries and drinking the magical water of this place. What need do either of us have for masters if we have each other?

But Lenares was compelled. He understood such compulsions. She had to find the hole in the world, had to confront the being she sensed behind it. It was what she believed she was made to do. And the only way to the hole was out of this place and back to the tent of Captain Duon.

He worried at it until dawn, then groaned as Lenares pushed away from him. ‘Torve,’ she said, excitement edging her voice, ‘was that light there yesterday?’

He squinted in the direction she pointed, into a narrow shaft of sunlight that came from the base of the cliff directly opposite the notch that had admitted them to this last room. A shiny stone? He scrambled after her, clutching his lower back. No—a way out. The smallest of holes, almost completely covered by sand; it would have been—was—invisible except when the dawn light shone through it.

They both dug at the sand with frantic hands, and for a time their hopes were dented as more and more sand came cascading in through the hole. But gradually the flow lessened, and at last they managed to uncover a threadlike tunnel under the cliff, stretching straight towards the sun. Torve took a last regretful look at the room of the gods, then plunged into the tunnel, Lenares at his heels.

The Omeran and the cosmographer found the expedition’s campsite easily enough. The tunnel leading from the house of the gods brought them back to the wide river valley, a day’s journey upvalley from the fatherwards path on which the expedition had camped. They did not know this, of course, when they chose the direction they would walk, and argued for both choices before deciding to head sonwards down the valley. It seemed the logical decision, given it was the opposite direction to the canyon they had just spent four days in, but Torve felt uneasy trusting his perceptions and memories of that place. He even scaled the cliff at a low point and walked half an hour fatherback across the stone plain, but did not find the canyon. This did nothing to ease his concerns, though Lenares seemed undisturbed when he returned with
the puzzling news. He breathed a relieved sigh when familiar landmarks came into view, edged by the afternoon sun.