Path of Revenge (5 page)

Gradually things began to come back into focus, but his eyes beheld a different world. A world in which someone could do dreadful things to his daughter without his knowledge, a world in which he was powerless to undo the damage that had been done.
Her tongue!
She had been such an eloquent, passionate speaker, shaming him again and again with her zeal and her forthright views, and it had been this passion two years ago that attracted the notice of the Recruiters. A leader, they announced, and took her…but in truth he had offered her up to them. Sold her. Now he witnessed the result of the transaction.

What else had been done to her? He looked on his daughter and forced himself to smile, and was rewarded with a wan smile in return, breaking his heart. She had been willow-thin two years ago, but now she was large, possibly twice the size she had been. Her eyes, once so clear, were dark holes in her face. Lines, folds and open sores covered her skin, which seemed that of an old woman. Her hair was gone completely: eyebrows as well as scalp-hair.

What was left? Oh mercy, Arathé was still there, buried somewhere within that awful disguise, he could feel it. Alkuon be thanked, something remained.

‘What happened to you, Arathé?’ Anomer stood beside him, his first movement since the truth had been revealed. ‘Can you tell us what happened?’ His voice was clear, calm, soothing.

‘Aaa…waaah…ahhhn,’ said the tongueless mouth. Eyes begging for understanding. Noetos had no idea what she meant.

‘Andratan?’ Anomer hazarded, and was rewarded by a quick smile, a faint echo of the sister she’d once been. ‘They did this to you in Andratan? Why?’

‘Nnooh…obaay,’ she replied, every sound an effort, her mouth moving in exaggerated fashion to form the words.

‘You wouldn’t obey them?’ The boy’s eyes were bright, as though solving one of the wooden puzzles he’d loved as a child. His sister nodded again.

Then she raised her hands and began to speak further, using her palms and fingers to make the sibilant and fricative sounds she could not manage with her mouth. Noetos was drawn into the puzzle, his mind whirring to learn the keys to this new language of mouth-vowels and hand-consonants, while behind them on the couch his wife sobbed unconsolably.

‘Maay (clap) me (hand signal) eernnh mah (two-finger flick on thumb) (clap).’

‘Make me learn…’ Noetos shrugged. His daughter nodded.

‘Maah (finger flick) (clap).’

‘Magic!’ cried Anomer. His sister nodded, tears running down her cheeks.

‘Fff…eww (tap on cheek) baaah (fist into palm).’

‘It felt bad. The magic made you feel bad?’ She nodded again to her brother.

‘(Fist into palm) aaaynn (two-finger flick on thumb),’ she said, pointing behind her to the door.

‘Danger!’ Anomer said. ‘Danger? Someone comes?’

‘(Rub hands together) Oon!’ Soon!

‘The Recruiters? You have escaped from the Recruiters?’ She nodded again, soberly this time.

‘They made me their slave,’ she told them, in a series of halting sounds and hand signals. ‘They brought me south with them, not knowing this is where I come from.’

‘Why did they take out your tongue?’ Anomer asked her. To Noetos it seemed as though the years had peeled away like scales, and his son and daughter once again played the word games they had delighted in as children.

Oh, if only.

‘Not them. I refused to learn magic, even though I had the best Voice they had heard in Andratan for
years. It felt foul. It kept making me sick. I told them I would not learn it, so they cut out my tongue and made me a slave for anyone on Andratan to use.’

The fisherman’s mind went white for a moment, then cooled again. Unspeakable cruelty in the place they had been taught was an island of grandeur, of greatness.

‘We don’t have time for this.’ Noetos tried to work out how long his daughter had been here. Minutes, just minutes. ‘Surely they will be coming after you?’

No, she explained. Not yet. She had tried what she believed she’d never be able to do again, and forced her clumsy mouth to shape the magical Voice she had learned in Andratan. To her astonishment she had been partially successful, turning the Recruiters’ early afternoon sleep into something more substantial, but still a long way short of the deep unconsciousness she had willed. She had taken up one of their swords, ready to slay them all; but they had been kind to her, after a fashion, kinder at least than the tutors of Andratan, and so she had not been able to strike any of them with it. In the end she had settled for cloaking them with deep layers of sleep, enough to keep them immobile until evening.

Though reassured, Noetos moved around the room as his daughter spoke, gathering things they would need if they had to leave. Opuntia saw what he was doing and followed suit.

Hurrying, always hurrying, but still pitifully slow, Arathé told them her story, while Anomer translated. She had been taken to Andratan in honour, one with the Voice, capable of harnessing the wild Water magic. She would serve the Undying Man himself. Such honour! The first few weeks were marvellous, even though the cold fortress made her uncomfortable, as she learned from her masters how to manipulate the flows of Water magic bound within
her. So easily, so powerfully, could she wield it her teachers speculated that as the daughter of a fisherman she must have been exposed to a source of Water magic as a child.

But soon she baulked at the demands the magic put on her—and, she noticed, on those around her. It seemed that the more she used the Voice, the more she drew…something…from those nearby. Her tutors began to bring servants and criminals to sit in the corner of the room where she trained, and at the end of each session they lay unconscious where they had fallen. She asked her teachers why this was so, and was not above shaping the questions with her Voice to draw out the answers she sought. Eventually she pieced together what no one would tell her: the magic of the Voice used the strength of others to operate.

Arathé rejected her gift then, gentle child, and nothing her tutors said could change her mind. She had expected at worst to be put off the island, and had been shocked beyond belief when the hooded men came for her and took her deep beneath the fortress to the most dreadful place. She had cried out her tutors’ names at first, then when the men guided the knife towards her mouth she had shouted for her father, the last clear words she would ever utter.

They had kept her there for an indeterminate time, then had taken her back up to the teaching rooms where her former tutors used her cruelly. They force-fed her to make her gain weight, and every day would place her in the corner of the room while some young acolyte or other learned how to harness the Voice. Drawing from her. None of the acolytes were as good as she had been, but she took little comfort from that.

Six months ago she had become too weak even for such use, so had been put out of the castle and taken to a city called Malayu on the mainland. There the
Recruiters had received her and pressed her into less onerous service, still draining her when the Voice or other magic was required, but far less often than on Andratan. Her periods of consciousness lasted much longer now, and she began to fight her new masters in ways they would not notice; at first a series of small defiances, then by teaching herself a language of sorts in case she ever had a chance to communicate. How she had wished she could speak to the eager youths of the Fisher Coast during her journey southwards, to warn them of what awaited them in Andratan, but she was never given a chance.

She had wondered why they brought her southwards along the coast. Surely they could have assigned her to another Recruiting Cabal? Or did they know nothing of her history? Gradually it dawned on her that they saw her as completely powerless and had not bothered to ask her Andratan tutors anything about her past. There was little about her current appearance that marked her as one from the Fisher Coast, and so when the Cabal finally arrived in Fossa her masters truly had no idea that they had brought her home.

Arathé had seen her father the previous night, dancing and drinking at the Fossan celebrations. Even though she’d hoped to meet her family, she had been shocked to see him, her first link to any sort of life in nearly two years, and in that moment a desperate plan came to her. Her resolve was strengthened beyond measure the next morning when she discovered her younger brother was one of the candidates for recruitment. She knew with a dreadful certainty that he would be chosen. He had been equally Voice-gifted as a child. They would not miss it.

She watched him fight, heard his answer to their two-edged question and revised her opinion. He had the greater gift. With all her being she knew she had to warn him of his likely fate, so she used the Voice to
put the Recruiters to sleep, then left them in their tent near Nadoce Square and used the back streets to find her family at their house in Old Fossa Road.

There her plan came closest to foundering, for the house she had been brought up in was now home to another, and she could not ask the new occupants what had become of her family without risking everything. So she had gone down to the beach in despair, hoping that her father might be there mending nets, even though he had been commanded home. There her luck had turned, for she found the boat named after her and, knowing her mother, guessed the rest. She knew where the Fisher’s cliff-house was, and made her way as swiftly as her abused frame allowed.

And now, she asked them, what were they to do?

A dozen plans surged through the fisherman’s mind like a king tide through The Rhoos. Flee? They would have to travel on foot. They had no horses. They would be caught. Take the boat and sail away? Perhaps, but the
Arathé
was built for fishing, not speed. Any Neherian rake would run her down, and any Neherian captain would be only too keen to chase a Fossan vessel—particularly his. Hide somewhere in the village? They would be found. Resist? His skills with the sword were as rusty as his blade, and even at their best would barely match what he had seen this morning.

They were given no chance to implement any plan.

Boom, boom, boom came a series of heavy blows on the door. Opuntia shrieked, then put a hand across her mouth. Noetos knew nobody who knocked like that.

Boom, boom, boom.

Arathé knew who it was. She’d got it horribly wrong, had taken far too long to tell her story, and had clearly not been as effective with the Voice as she’d hoped.

The Recruiters had come for her.

‘DON’T MAKE THEM WAIT,’ Anomer said to his father. ‘Go and answer the door. They may be here only to speak to me. I will take Mother and Arathé into the kitchen.’

Noetos stood in the centre of the great room, composing himself.

‘Go on!’ his son urged, shoving him in the small of the back. The fisherman stumbled over to the stout wooden door of his magnificent home and opened it a hand’s-width.

‘Who is this disturbing our sleep?’ he grumbled, blinking as though roused from early afternoon torpor, running a careless hand through his dishevelled hair while observing every detail with sharp eyes. He needed to walk through this carefully. His son had acted quickly, shaming him, and it might be that the lives of everyone he loved depended on how he behaved in the next few minutes.

Two grey-cloaked figures stood on his portico, one behind the other. The closer of the two seemed relaxed, his head cocked to one side under his cowl, a non-threatening posture designed to put him at ease; but the other Recruiter stood in a slight crouch, coiled for action, hand on his sword-hilt, head moving slightly from side to side as he watched carefully for
danger.
Not a friendly visit, then. They want more than just Anomer. They know.

‘Your son answered our question this morning so wondrously well,’ the nearer figure said in his high-pitched, singsong voice. ‘We have a few more questions for him. And some for his father as well,’ he added with the barest hint of menace. ‘May we come in?’

‘I’m sorry, sirs, but my wife is unwell, and I have summoned the village physician to her bedside. We are in no position to entertain visitors this afternoon. Perhaps you might return tomorrow. Or maybe Anomer could accompany you to your own accommodation?’

‘Ah, then our arrival is indeed providential, for my companion here is a physician. A good one, undoubtedly superior to any hedge-doctor that might have washed up on the coarse sand of this village. Open your door and let him attend her.’

Noetos began to sweat, and wished he could wipe away the betraying sheen that had sprung up on his brow. ‘My lords, I thank you for your offer. But our physician is well versed in the needs of my wife, and brings with him the unguent she needs—’

‘What she needs, if she wishes to retain any semblance of good health,’ the second Recruiter said, his mellifluous voice all the more intimidating because of its mildness, ‘is for her foolish husband to open the door to this house. Do it now.’ He drew his sword a few inches out of its scabbard, and its sharp edge glittered in the harsh Fossan sunlight.

In answer Noetos slammed the door shut and drew down the bar. Beside him Anomer drove a wedge under the jamb. ‘Have your mother and sister escaped?’ Noetos asked him.

‘Two more Recruiters wait outside the back door. I listened to them talk: they tracked Arathé by the sword she took from them, and know she is here. We cannot get past them.’

‘Yet we must. We
must.
I have my family back, son. I would not lose you now.’

The Recruiters did not try to force open the front door by strength. What they were doing became clear as a shimmer of blue fire spread over the wooden surface of the door. Noetos sprang back: it was cold to the touch. He’d never seen magic before, aside from the battlefield, and that only in the distance. Illusion, he’d been told. This, however, looked disturbingly real.

The door began to splinter.

‘Go back to the others!’ Noetos cried, then grabbed a chair, stood on it and stretched up towards the translucent cupola that served to let light into their living room. Feeling around the joint where the glass dome met the stone ceiling, he found his old scabbard, then his sword, along with a few cockroach husks. Ignoring the latter, he belted the scabbard around his waist, where it hung comfortably, as it had always done. Years since he’d worn it, years since he’d used anything but training blades with Arathé and Anomer. Once learned, never forgotten. He hoped.