Beyond the Wall of Time Page 39

  A face intruded on this panorama of uncertainty. Kilfor. Saying something to her, inaudible. The horrified look on his face as he cast an eye over her confirmed the messages her body continued to send to her, telling her everything she needed—and feared—to know.

  “The others?” she asked him. Or tried to ask: she had no idea if the words came out of her mouth. If she still had a mouth.

  Dare she try to stand? Even move? Success seemed laughably unlikely.

  Before she could make the attempt, something white landed on the street in front of them, exploding into a blizzard of knife-sharp shards. She felt a few of them hit her, sink into her, dull thuds adding mere increments to her pain. One took her in the left eye: vision was replaced by yellow whorls.

  Kilfor took the brunt of the stone rain, falling to the ground in a red haze.

  She couldn’t move to help him. She didn’t need to. There was no point. Even through one eye it was obvious that the man was dead.

  He did live, apparently, but by the god-cursed torture in and around his waist—and the numbness below—Robal immediately wished he had not.

  A price worth paying if the trap had worked.

  The pillar had collapsed on top of him, pinning him. He lay staring into a cloud of dust, covered in something warm, sticky and metallic. Blood.

  Whose?

  His enemy lay beside him, torn asunder beyond any hope of repair, his blood pulsing from multiple wounds in already-decreasing fountains.

  Oh, oh, oh.

  Robal lay there, pinned, unable to move, irretrievably broken, undoubtedly dying—and covered in the Destroyer’s immortal blood.

  He licked his lips. Stretched his tongue as far as it would go.

  Not enough. The Lord of Fear drained a chalice full of Stella’s blood. I need more.

  In utter desperation he forced one of his hands to move, then his arm. Placed it under the Destroyer’s neck, ripped open in a gaping red grin. Waited as the blood oozed into his palm. Then brought it carefully, carefully to his lips. Swallowed it down without gagging.

  More, more. More! Hurry!

  His arm snaked back to the wound, shaking now with the effort, spilling half the red harvest. Three more times his hand made the journey, until the man’s throat ceased its bleeding, denying him any more of the world’s most precious liquid.

  His mind whirled in an agony of fear and hope. Had he done enough? Would the miracle blossom within him? Would it be enough to give Stella another choice? Certainly something, some new thing, had begun to take shape in his veins… burning…

  The vast cavern shook as though suffering its own agonies. High above them millennia-old rock formations, formed with infinite patience one small grain at a time, were shaken loose and plunged to the cave floor, crashing into streets, houses and people who had run into the open to escape collapsing buildings. Each formation smashed into a thousand deadly pieces, shredding anyone unfortunate enough to be close by.

  As the groans subsided and the shaking diminished, the natives of Zizhua City began to venture from their homes. Many of those unlucky enough to live within a hundred paces of the warehouse had died, or were in the process of dying, whilst a random selection of those living further away had been killed by falling debris, the collapse of their homes due to unseen fractures in their walls or roof, or had been choked to death by the unrelenting dust. None within five hundred paces had heard anything after the initial blast, and therefore did not breathe a relieved sigh as the sounds of tortured stone gradually faded. Nor did they start with fear when enormous spears of rock continued to crash to the ground among them.

  Those more than a thousand paces away from the explosion heard as well as saw the dust settle with something akin to a sigh, as though content with what had happened. The best—or worst—view of all was afforded those travelling down into the cavern from one of the entrances, though more than one of them was knocked from the path by the bucking rock to add his screaming form to the rain of projectiles plummeting into the city.

  A deep crater had replaced the warehouse. Only one wall and a few pillars remained. In a wide circle around the centre of the blast lay the ruins of homes and other buildings. Small figures began to scurry from one ruin to the next, bending over unmoving shapes, then in most cases abandoning them.

  After a full minute’s silence, as eerie a thing as anyone there had ever heard, the wailing began.

  Stella awoke to her old friend, suffering. She knew this pain though, this old friend, this old enemy, for what it was: the pain of healing. Already her limbs had regained some of their movement. Her left eye seemed open again, seeing as through a broken window, but seeing nonetheless. Beside her was a bloodied stone chip, lying where it had fallen from her face. Her immortal curse, it seemed, was determined to repair her.

  But what of Kannwar? He had been in the warehouse when it had exploded. It had been his cry she’d heard. Whose doing had the explosion been? No magic had been involved, she was willing to swear it before any tribunal in the land—and, depending on their hosts, it might come to that. Had it been some kind of ghastly accident? Was this some trick of Umu’s? Had something Kannwar had been attempting gone wrong? What had Robal wanted with him? Had the two men survived?

  She doubted that last. She doubted it very much.

  The sound of sobbing came to her ears. She turned her neck slowly, slowly, to see Sauxa kneeling by the sodden form of his son, weeping.

  “Why you?” he was whispering, or at least that seemed to be the phrase playing on his lips. “Why not me?”

  Stella.

  She shook her mind clear of the imagined voice and placed a shaking hand on Sauxa’s shoulder. He hissed in fright, jerked his head towards her, nodded once and turned away. His face was a rictus of grief.

  “He saved me, Sauxa,” Stella tried to say. “He absorbed all the shrapnel that had been heading towards me.”

  But perhaps she still hadn’t made any noise, or maybe he, like her, had been deafened by the blast. He made no indication he had heard her words. The true act of kindness would have been to let the rock shards slice me to pieces. Though maybe even then she would not have been able to die.

  Enough people have died. Enough misery. Enough heartbreak. Enough! She screwed her eyes tightly shut against the dreadful sights to the right and left of her.

  Stella. Not an imagined voice at all. Send someone to retrieve me. One of our companions. Noetos. He’s the only one I really trust.

  His flat, pain-riddled voice raised a thousand questions, and his request raised a thousand more. Alive at least. She’d think about the rest of it later.

  She reached up a red hand and pulled Sauxa down to whisper in his ear, relaying Kannwar’s message. He nodded and left, a broken man.

  Gentle hands eventually lifted her to her feet and through the silence she heard muffled words: “Lucky, this one. The blast must have missed her. Or poor Kilfor took the blow.” They would never think of the restorative powers of immortal blood. Never realise she should be dead. At rest.

  “Kannwar,” she said, naming her secret fear. They could not lose him; she could not lose him. “Kannwar. Is he all right?”

  “I am here,” he said, right at her elbow. It was his strong arm under hers, supporting her as she hobbled down the street, her rapid recovery continuing but not yet complete.

  Her heart warmed.

  “Robal?”

  “You know no mortal could have survived that blast,” came Kannwar’s sonorous voice.

  Oddly phrased, that. As though avoiding a question he wanted left unasked. She was far too tired to pursue the matter. She would grieve for her recalcitrant guardsman later. So much would come later.

  “The others?”

  “Seren the miner is badly injured. He’s lost an arm and his leg may well go the same way. He and the two fishermen, Mustar and Sautea, were standing under a roof that gave way. The other two have less serious injuries.”

  “Can you heal them?”<
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  “My lady, I barely have the strength to heal myself. But if you wish it, I will try.”

  “I do wish it.”

  “Very well.” He bowed his head, as though reaching inwards to gather strength.

  “Any deaths?”

  “I’m coming to that. Kilfor is dead, as is Tumar. The girl Moralye is near death and is not expected to survive. Both Arathé and Anomer have suffered internal injuries of some kind. The rest of us sustained cuts and bruises.”

  “Heal the most badly wounded,” Stella said. “The Most High surely hasn’t brought them this far to be killed by some stratagem of the Daughter.”

  “It wasn’t… The children of Noetos believe they can heal themselves. They are drawing on some substantial power; I can feel it, they acknowledge it, but will not explain from where it comes. They will offer succour to as many as they can.”

  “And you, Kannwar? How did you survive?”

  “Just as you did, my dear. Courtesy of our shared curse.”

  They exchanged grimaces, those two cheaters of death, and understood each other completely.

  “My wife died,” said the Factor of Zizhua, his voice muffled by the intervening wall. Robal had to strain his ears to make out the words. “She survived the explosion but was struck down by a falling rock-spear.”

  “We are sorry,” one of the travellers responded.

  Anomer, Robal thought it might have been. One of the young men, certainly. The guardsman wished he could call out, somehow attract their attention, but even though his friends were in the next room he could not make himself heard. Not with this gag bound tightly over his mouth. Not with the restraints fastening him securely to the stone bench, a bench now fractured and covered in stone fragments that gouged into his back whenever he struggled.

  And struggle he did, for all he was worth, wriggling his arms and legs partly in an attempt to loosen his restraints, partly involuntarily in response to the incredible burning power pouring through his veins. Something had happened to him, there could be no doubt. The immortal blood had worked. Why else was he still alive? How else could he now feel his legs? Though he strongly wished he could not.

  “My son and heir also died in the blast,” the Factor added, as though it was of little consequence.

  Robal knew better, could hear the anguish in the words. He himself had seen the boy, his bright little face happy at the sight of the two donkeys, stumbling in his eagerness as he rushed into the warehouse just as Robal’s sulphur paper ignited.

  “We also have lost people dear to us,” the young man continued. Anomer, most certainly. Why was he the spokesman? How many of Robal’s friends had died? How could he have miscalculated the extent of the blast damage so severely? Had there been some enclosure effect, the confined space forcing the explosion into something more violent than the Corata miners had warned him to expect?

  “Only three,” the Factor said, and the bitterness and deep anger in his voice could not be missed. “You lost only three. And your magicians healed your injured. We have suffered far greater loss.”

  No doubt from the tone of voice that the Factor wished the toll amongst the travellers had been much higher.

  “You are certain Robal brought the explosives with him in the wagon?”

  “Oh, yes. Such items have been banned from this province on pain of torture and death. The use of such material is tantamount to the abrogation of everything the Zizhua have achieved. So argue the stalwarts among us. Some of our younger members desire explosives to make their task easier, but I have no doubt their ardour has been somewhat reduced by these events.”

  Dry, reserved, almost uncaring, that voice. But Robal was not fooled. An uncaring man would not have had men fetch Robal from under the pillar, would not have had him confined to a bedchamber. Bound and gagged. Prepared.

  “Your friend Robal died in the blast,” the Factor said. “We are sorry we cannot provide you with a body: it was… ah… deconstituted. As was that of my son.” The steely self-control slipped a little at that last word.

  Robal renewed his struggles, trying to cry for help, but could make no headway against his restraints. Supernatural life did not confer supernatural strength, it seemed, only supernatural pain.

  “Kilfor died also,” said a voice Robal knew only too well.

  Kilfor? Ah, my friend! What have I done? I didn’t intend… But he no longer had the stomach for fooling himself. Of course he would have exchanged Kilfor’s life for the Destroyer’s. No one was above sacrificing in order to see the Destroyer dead. He ceased his struggling as much as he was able to, not wanting his friend’s father—and for many years more of a father to Robal than his real father had been—to know he was alive. He had no doubt what the old man would say, how his lips would curl, just what form the well-earned curses would take. Sauxa would never understand. Oh, Kilfor.

  “How does your city fare?”

  Stella. Robal’s heart contracted in his breast at her voice. He knew with absolute certainty how she would regard him now, and the thought burned him more deeply than the tainted blood in his veins.

  “Hundreds have died. A large section of the cavern roof collapsed, obliterating an entire suburb. None there survived.”

  “I was nearby,” a woman said, her voice husky with emotion perhaps, or the astringent dust. “We heard the explosion, the ground shook and we all fell over, and then directly above us the roof detached and began to fall towards us. We ran, my lord, we ran screaming. I could see I was safe, but others behind me, they… ” she faltered, “they stopped running and put their arms around each other. I… they… I didn’t see anything else.”

  She’d seen it all, Robal had no doubt. He could see it now, in his mind’s eye: the vast slab of rock falling, the people running, stumbling, hurling themselves forward, and at the last, as the inevitability of their deaths became clear, raising their arms in futile defence.

  The conversation droned on for a while, then the travellers’ voices drifted away. Or perhaps Robal himself drifted away, lost in a labyrinth of pain and regret. Whichever, he came to full alert when a voice spoke beside his ear.

  “I am still alive. You failed. In every possible sense, you failed.”

  Eyes widening in shock, the guardsman tried to turn his head, an instinctive and unnecessary action. He knew whose voice had spoken the words.

  “You intended to set off the explosive charge.” Not a question. “It was no accident. You sought to destroy me. Instead you destroyed yourself.”

  Robal issued a muffled denial. The Destroyer sighed and removed the cloth from his mouth.

  “No, I… I… ” No use denying it. “Yes. I wanted you dead.”

  “You wanted me dead from the moment you realised Stella was seeking me out,” said the Destroyer, his face coming into view as he walked around the bench on which Robal lay. His perfect face, his unmarked face, below which there was no sign of the gaping wound from which Robal had drunk his blood. “You were never content to be her servant. Having already been raised above your ability by your appointment to the Instruian Guard, you then thought to elevate yourself further by applying yourself to your queen. And you accuse me of arrogance.”

  “I love her!” Robal shouted. “I sought to protect Faltha from more of your lies!”

  “Ah, a hero, are you? Problem is, in order to be a hero you have to succeed, and you did not.”

  “I have your blood. I’m immortal now. You can’t kill me!”

  “Yes, I’d assumed you’d helped yourself. Fool. You really haven’t thought this through, Robal. Stella can’t kill herself, true, because to do a thorough job of it she needs assistance. Assistance I would provide without blinking should she ask me for it. On the other hand, there are many willing assistants waiting eagerly for the chance to aid in achieving your death.”

  “How? How can I die? How can you kill an immortal?”

  “There are so many ways. You tried one that came distressingly close to succeeding. The bes
t way of killing an immortal is to separate his or her body into non-viable parts so small as to render reconstitution impossible. Blow you up. Cut you up into little pieces. Burn you. Dissolve you in acid. Even something as crude as decapitation will do it. Or at least I assume it will, unless you have the capacity to grow a new head. You see, the blood you have stolen from me has within it the Water of Life, which has the power to preserve life and the power to transform life. The power to preserve begins immediately: it comes from the Water of Life, the power you can feel burning you from the inside out. You have to do nothing except endure, and avoid accidents, to live forever. The more important power, however, is the power to transform. This the ancients called the Fire of Life. It sets something of the essence of the Most High within you. My study suggests it provides a variety of benefits. However, these benefits mature only with time and training. One of the crucial benefits is to prevent those accidents that might shorten your life.

  “Do you see your problem? You have the capacity to live forever, but, as yet, you cannot harness your latent power to avoid death. Something of a conundrum for a man chained as you are, helpless in the house of your enemies.”

  The Destroyer smiled, and Robal knew he had not misjudged the man after all. He was implacably evil. As what was about to happen to him sank into his mind, Robal’s bowels turned to water.

  “You have heard the man’s confession,” said the Destroyer. “You may now read the charges against him.”

  Six Zizhua natives clad in long black robes—mourning robes, Robal supposed—strode into the room.

  “You tricked me!” Robal cried. “That was no trial!”

  “You tricked yourself,” came the Destroyer’s answer. “You are a distressingly simple person whose stupidity and short-sightedness has caused a great deal of pain. Be assured that this pain will be redeemed in full upon your person.”

  As the Factor led his fellow Zizhua to stand in a line facing him, Robal felt himself drift into a waking nightmare. His vision seemed to triple: as well as the Zizhua, he could see the past, the foolish past, where he plotted the fall of an immortal for what now appeared to be all the wrong reasons; and he could see the future and all the ways the Zizhua might revenge themselves on him. Tears of sheer terror began to roll down his cheeks.