Path of Revenge (46 page)

Lenares, however, was distraught. The expedition had moved on and there was no sign of where Captain Duon’s tent might have been.

There remained plenty of evidence to fix the boundaries of the vast camp: the informal paths that had been beaten down by hundreds of boots, the latrines, dumps and burial grounds that defined any temporary site. But neither Torve nor Lenares could identify anything amongst the sand and stone that looked like a clearing in front of a tent site—or, more accurately, they could identify many such sites.

Torve trailed his foot through another site, marking it as having been examined. Endless days of similar inspections loomed ahead, an impossibility given their lack of food. Water they had in plenty from the well, the reason the camp had been located here in the first place; but for food they would have to find the expedition or go back to the house of the gods. For a moment he let his mind dwell on that cheerful thought, while something nagged at him…

The well.

‘Lenares, you told me you spoke to the Elborans by the well. Is that right?’

‘Why would I lie to you about it?’ Lack of food and the loss of the expedition had made her somewhat bad-tempered.

‘No, I’m asking to refresh my own memory. We know where the well is. Can you remember the number of steps you had counted when you stopped at the well?’

‘Oh!’ She clapped her hands together. ‘Of course I can!’

She hitched up her dress and ran in the direction of the well, heels kicking high like a little girl. When
Torve arrived at the well, having walked at a more sedate pace—in truth, because he was exhausted—she hailed him with ‘Clever Torve!’. He tried not to feel as though he were a dog being patted for an especially smart trick.

He could see a clear difference in her face. Some of the hard lines around her cheekbones had softened, a relaxation of the tension that had developed since her seizure. Her eyes burned with their familiar intensity, and when she spoke her words rattled out as though she needed to make room for more.

Had a mask come off, or had one just been put on?

He went to touch her—seeking reassurance her feelings had not changed, that they were part of her centre—but she held up a hand. He froze.

‘I need time,’ she said, breathing heavily. ‘So many things—I have to fit everything into…Please, I cannot deal with distractions.’

Torve understood what she meant, he
knew
she was not calling him a distraction, but the comment hurt him unbearably. ‘I will go and wait on the other side of the well,’ he said. ‘While you fit things together, I will think about how we might find food to survive.’

He looked at Lenares hopefully, but her eyes were half-closed and she waved him away.

He busied himself, finding a discarded gourd amongst the detritus scattered around the camp, then some cloth to stuff in the cracks. The sun was touching the desert’s rim when Torve successfully raised his water pouch from the well, detached the ancient rope and offered it to his cosmographer. She took it from him and downed the contents with a murmur of thanks; wearily he returned to the well and drew himself water.

‘It worked,’ she said, immense satisfaction suffusing her words.

‘You have recovered your numbers?’

‘Oh yes, and much more. Please, Torve, we need to go back to the place in the canyon with the chairs. With what I know now, I think I could solve the whole mystery.’

‘Lenares, we cannot go back. Our only hope of survival is to make contact with the expedition. Where else can we get food? And how can we do anything about the hole you see if we remain on our own?’

‘Oh, we don’t have to worry about the expedition any longer,’ Lenares said, and gave a strange giggle. ‘They are all going to die.’

‘What? They are all going to
what
?’ Torve staggered a step backwards; he had come to believe Lenares’ pronouncements, accept them, make plans based on them. ‘Are you sure?’

She cocked her head at him. ‘The hole in the world has returned. Last time it sent the lions to kill three people; this time it sends something else to swallow the whole expedition.’

‘But why? What has been sent this time? Can’t we warn them?’

‘Why?’ She thought a moment. ‘Because it thinks we are with the expedition, and wants to be certain of being rid of us. And no, we can’t warn anyone. They’ve been gone for a long time; whatever was going to happen to them probably has already. I don’t know what it is. I can’t imagine what would be large enough to devour so many people.’

Torve was appalled. Her callousness reminded him of the Emperor. ‘Lenares, how can you talk of thirty thousand deaths as though they are of no account? What of the cosmographers? I know they’ve not been good to you lately, but you grew up with many of them. Will you just abandon your friends?’

‘But if I cannot do anything, what good does it do me to worry?’

‘It makes you human!’ he snapped, regretting the words even as they came out of his mouth. Lenares seemed to take no offence. ‘Anyway, I intend to follow the expedition and warn them.’

Lenares stared at him. ‘And I want to go back to the canyon and learn as much as I can about the missing god,’ she said. ‘I remember…I am sure I had a dream about the three gods, just after my fit. If I can explore the circular room again, perhaps sit on one of the chairs, I’m sure I will understand much more—’

‘But for what purpose? What is the point of understanding the hole in the world if by the time you have finished studying it, everyone else has been consumed by it? Surely we should alert the expedition first, then conduct our studies?’

The two of them began talking at each other, faster and faster, their words crashing together, until Lenares put her hands to her ears and screamed. The sound echoed from the valley sides, startling a large carrion bird some distance away, which rose lazily into the rapidly darkening sky. Torve put his hands over his own ears, blocking out the inhuman sound.

‘Lenares, you are stubborn, I know that,’ he said in answer to her distressed look. ‘But I cannot follow you. I am bound by breeding to return to Captain Duon and warn him of the hole in the world, or, if I am too late, to bury his body and take news of him back to the Emperor.’

‘I thought…You said…’ She stopped in obvious confusion.

‘I did say,’ he replied in a gentle voice. ‘But I am what I am, Lenares. I am an Omeran, the Emperor’s pet, and I must serve the Emperor. Your task is much more important than mine, but I cannot help you. Please believe me: I can no more turn aside from the Emperor’s will than stop breathing.’

Her face crumpled into tears. ‘Wouldn’t the Emperor’s will be to find out everything about the hole in the world?’ she asked between sobs.

Torve sighed. ‘I rather think the Emperor would order me to try to save the expedition, but it does not matter. He has given me orders, the last of which was to keep secret the orders he has given me. I am required to obey him.’

There being nothing more to say, no way to break the impasse, Torve and Lenares made themselves comfortable against the coming night chill and watched the swift desert sunset.

Just another sunset, but to Torve it seemed to signal the end of much more than merely another day.

Dawn came, waking a reluctant Torve from a dream in which he discovered further rooms in the house of the gods. With upturned faces he and Lenares dream-walked through a room filled with gentle rain, soft and warm. In the manner of dreams the room changed around them, narrowing and deepening, and the water turned to a burbling cascade. Running water, an extravagance worthy of the Garden of Angels. With the thought, Torve saw the Emperor standing on a rock near the head of the cascade, looking down on them.
I know my duty,
Torve said to the golden mask, which twitched up and down in response. Dazzling sunlight filled a third open area, and the Emperor stood in the centre of the room and turned his mask to face Lenares and Torve, their hands still guiltily clasped together. The sun streamed from the golden face in blazing admonition…

Completely awake, the sun full in his face, the Omeran found himself fervently wishing himself back into his dream. Yesterday already seemed like a dream-country, the harsh, angry words as yet unsaid, her smile a reality rather than an ache in his heart. He
turned, scanned her sleeping place, but she was not there. Nor, he noted with increasing concern, was she at the well, twenty or so paces away.

He stood, stretching up on his toes, and saw nothing but the featureless stony riverbed stretching away in every direction.

She had taken the choice, if choice there ever was, out of his hands.

TORVE KNELT AT THE fatherward end of the expedition’s old campsite, poring over footprints in a small sandy hollow. Gentle night breezes had softened the many once-sharp ridges made by soldiers’ boots. In one place, however, the fresher prints of bare feet overlaid the blurred ridges.

A number of explanations came to mind.
Lenares may have wandered here during the night.
In a hopeful rather than realistic gesture he turned and looked in the direction of the well, out of sight over a gentle rise. His shoulders slumped. She would have gone directly fatherback towards the house of the gods; he doubted, in her obsession with that place, she would even have stopped by the well on her way, let alone come further in this direction. Besides, these footprints were too large for her delicate feet. And she had not left her shoes behind. He sighed. Equally unlikely was the possibility that one or more of the camp followers had returned to pick over the abandoned campsite. So little of value remained, which could be an indication either of successful scavengers or rigorous tidiness. Torve, knowing Captain Duon, suspected the latter.

Which left a further possibility.
Spies.
Of anyone in the expedition, Torve had the most reason to know that the desert was not empty. His dream-children wandered the desert freely, and he knew that, no matter what else they were, they left footprints behind. And they were surely not the only inhabitants of these harsh lands. Might his dream-children have shadowed the expedition fatherwards through the stone plain, trying to satisfy their strange, unexplained curiosity about him?

Another thought came to him, and as he let it fill his mind he cursed his foolishness; his foolishness and Lenares’, and especially that of Captain Duon. How could they all have forgotten? The Emperor had often discussed the geography and history of Elamaq with his pet Omeran; why had Torve not thought to review that knowledge as he travelled fatherwards?
Because you sought another kind of knowledge
came an unwelcome voice in his mind, one with the ring of truth about it.
You thought of yourself and your desires before those of your Emperor. And as a result the expedition may already be lost.

Belatedly he considered what he knew. It was a favourite Amaqi tale, standard fare for the travelling players. Many years ago the twenty-third Emperor of Elamaq, the bookish but rightly feared Pouna III, sent a team of engineers into the mountains far to the sonback of the desert, with an Omeran labour force numbering in the thousands. There, over a period of twenty-four years, they constructed a great earth dam and diversion race, thereby capturing the headwaters of the Marasmos River. The purpose of this vast expenditure, which came close to bankrupting the empire—the Emperor had shown Torve copies of the original accounts—was twofold. First, to capture the water as part of the development of Talamaq as the Emperor’s capital; and second, to consequently deprive the Marasmians, the
last remaining sovereign opponents of the empire, of the water source upon which they depended.

The first the unfortunate Marasmians knew of the Emperor Pouna’s engineering coup was when their ever-dependable river dried up. Foolishly they spent a season sacrificing to their gods in an attempt to encourage their river to relent, before finally sending an expedition sonback. That expedition did not return, though the Marasmians never found out why as by that time they had been surrounded by the Emperor’s well-provisioned army. In the ensuing siege the weakened Marasmians were wiped out, their city of delicate spires and colleges of learning torn apart. Not one stone was left on top of another, and the ground was salted against any chance of future habitation.

It was said that Emperor Pouna III himself came fatherwards to witness the death of the last Marasmian, a symbolic act. The unfortunate woman, a nameless scholar, was captured early in the siege, forced to watch the death and destruction of everything she loved, then impaled, encased with salt and left on a hill overlooking the sterile plain.

It was said that Emperor Pouna remained with her until she died in great agony. Said by Torve’s master, anyway, with great relish. Emperor Pouna III, forever after known as Pouna the Great, had been everything the current Emperor of Elamaq aspired to: intelligent, ruthless and, above all, long-lived.
But not eternal.

How much of this was exaggeration or hearsay Torve could not know. His master had often speculated about the degree to which the story of Pouna the Great’s life was the fanciful invention of subsequent storytellers, though the dry scrolls of the accountants and clerks alluded to even more horrific and ruthless events: revolts and repressions, cullings of the aristocracy, fratricide and worse. All of interest to
his master. Whatever the reality, Torve now stood in the dry bed of what had once been the Marasmos River.

In the centuries since the sack of Marasmos there had been no attempt to resettle the area, so the Emperor’s advisers had said. There were a few impoverished fishing villages on the Skeleton Coast, fatherwards and fatherback of the mouth of the former Marasmos River, but these were of little consequence to the empire. Tax collectors had long ago given up visiting the area, as the haggard fishermen accumulated no wealth. Torve wondered when last any accurate census or economic data had been collected from coastal regions. Captain Duon had seen no sign of inhabitants on his previous journey through the area, though this observation had little real value as the fatherward paths avoided the Skeleton Coast, taking routes many leagues inland of the desolate former city. Duon had reported nothing unusual, though there had been a mention of a man vanishing on the return journey. He had wandered from his tent one night, people said, his tracks leading into the heart of the stone plain.