Beyond the Wall of Time Read online

  The Factor spoke. “You, stranger, have confessed to the crime of regicide, the attempted assassination of our lord. That in itself is a capital offence, the punishment for which we naturally cede to the Undying Man to be carried out at a time and place of his choosing.”

  The Undying Man nodded sombrely. “In turn, Factor, I cede my rights back to you, judging you the more wronged.”

  “Where’s Stella? She wouldn’t stand for this!” Robal shouted. “Stella! Stella!”

  “Cut out the prisoner’s tongue,” said the Factor calmly.

  “No! I’ll be quiet!”

  “Do you promise to remain quiet during the rest of the proceedings ?”

  “Yes! Yes!” Robal panted his relief.

  “Excellent.” The Factor nodded contentedly, then fastened bleak eyes on him. “Cut it out anyway.”

  Robal’s pleading made no difference. They loosened his bonds a fraction, rolled him onto his side and forced his jaws apart. His pleading ended as efficient hands captured and held his tongue, stretching it out so the fellow with the sword could reach it more easily.

  The moment of pain in itself was but a small addition to that coursing within him, but the loss of his tongue was, Robal knew as he leaned over to spit out the blood, the loss of his last weapon of consequence.

  “Never mind, Robal,” said the Destroyer. “As you mature into your immortal gift you might learn enough about the Fire of Life to grow a new one. It’s a shame, however; you’re unlikely to live that long.”

  The Factor resumed his summation of Robal’s deeds as though he’d not been interrupted. “Further, stranger, you stand accused of causing the deaths of many hundreds of Zizhua, effected as a consequence of the ignition of explosives as part of your assassination attempt. Because these deaths were accidental, you will avoid, in theory, the ultimate punishment. However, because they were the side effects of an assassination attempt, each death is treated in law as though it was itself an assassination. Therefore you are sentenced to as many deaths as there were deaths among us.”

  Ridiculous, Robal thought as he spat blood from his maimed mouth. I can only die once. Except a dark suspicion had already begun to form in the back of his mind. No. Pray Most High they haven’t thought… they won’t… of course they won’t.

  “The first death,” the Factor went on, “was that of my son and heir, Shan, whom we nicknamed Sunrise, the light of my eyes. In his eight years of life he pleased everyone he came in contact with. He was unfailingly polite, always respected his elders and worked most diligently at home and at his studies. In time he would have made an exceptional administrator, unencumbered by the suspicious mind and hard heart most administrators are necessarily cursed with. Sadly, his heart was too trusting and he blundered into the middle of your plot without ever realising he’d encompassed his own death.”

  “I saw him,” said the Destroyer. “His face beamed with happiness as he ran towards the donkeys. You saw him too, Robal, but you did not stay your hand. You touched off the explosion, turning the boy into a red mist.” The gathered Zizhua groaned in unison at the words. “You judged his life as worth less than my death.”

  You do that all the time! Robal wanted to cry out, but even thinking of speech hurt his mouth.

  “You slew my son,” said the Factor of Zizhua. “In doing so you ripped my heart out. Therefore I slay you.”

  He took up the guardsman’s own sword, only slightly bent despite the power of the explosion, and walked over to where Robal lay.

  “This first death will be a simple one,” the man continued, and thrust the blade through Robal’s ribs and into his heart.

  Tired, sore and sick to her stomach, Stella stumbled through the outer suburbs of the city, her fellow travellers striding along briskly some way ahead of her. She had begun to shake some time back, some sort of delayed reaction to what might very well have been her death, she supposed, or to the memory, constantly replayed, of Kilfor dissolving in front of her. The sights and sounds of the city added their contribution to her miasma.

  Robal’s dead, she thought. That charming, funny, brave, perpetually indignant blockhead is dead. Funny, she had not realised how final, how irrevocable, death was until this moment. Leith’s death had set this deadly adventure in motion, but subsequent events had occupied her mind. She’d grieved for him, yes, but had not dwelled on his absence. Robal, though, nestled like sorrow and failure in her chest.

  That was the difference, she realised. She had been responsible for Robal, had miscalculated the strength of his feeling for her, and had lost him. More than that: if she was interpreting the signs correctly, she might have inadvertently cost many innocent people their lives.

  But I couldn’t have given him what he wanted. Could I?

  Knowing the cost as she now did, of course she could have. Would have, to prevent this awful tragedy, without demur. But it was too late now—and she knew, better than anyone else alive perhaps, save the Undying Man himself, how futile were self-recriminations. If Robal brought those explosives into the city with the intention of killing Kannwar, he was the cause of all this. Not me. Not my spurning of his heart.

  She would have appreciated the time to examine the scene of his death more closely, if only to pay her respects to him, to Kilfor, Tumar and to the many Zizhua people killed. But the Factor had ordered them out of the city forthwith—oh, it had been phrased most politely, but she had been a ruler and knew a command when she heard one—and they had not been allowed even to inter Kilfor’s poor remains in the catacombs that served the city as a cemetery.

  Sauxa placed a shaking hand on her shoulder. “My lady? Are you well?”

  “Oh, Sauxa, no, I am not well,” she said, her voice a raw wound. “We’ve lost him, lost them both. I’m so sorry.”

  “Aye.” The man blinked twice, as near to tears as he’d ever likely get. “Reckon you had a small part to play in that, if my eyes still see. I know you’re thinking about it, my lady, as am I. But these deaths, they’re not about us, not yet. Let’s wait until we’ve put some distance between us and the dead, and then perhaps we can decide what our responsibilities are, and what we ought to do about it. In the meantime, content yourself that they made their choices: Robal to taste the sour fruit of anger; Kilfor to give his life in saving yours. Kind of balances out, wouldn’t you say?”

  Stella said nothing to correct his impression of his son’s last moments. If it helps the old fellow to think of Kilfor as a hero, let him so think. And perhaps he was.

  “Anyway, they sent me back here to fetch you. The Zizhua guards are tellin’ us to hurry. Eager to get back to the city, if you ask me.”

  Stella nodded, and willed her leaden legs forward. She lifted her gaze to the winding path before them, leading to the entrance and the real world—and glimpsed something.

  “Sauxa, can you see that light?”

  “No, my lady,” the man said.

  “Look, sight along my arm. Some way up the cavern wall.”

  “Ah, no—oh. Yes. What is that?”

  Perhaps twenty paces up from the floor, the wall ahead of them had cracked and rock had fallen to the bottom of the cavern. Caused by the explosion, no doubt, given how fresh and unadorned the rock around the crack appeared in contrast to the sculptured wall to either side. But what had drawn Stella’s attention was the glow coming from the crack, as though liquid gold burned within the rock and had only now found a way out.

  She took a pace backwards and the light failed—or, more likely, she was at the wrong angle to see it. A similar result when she stepped two paces forward. On, off, as though someone was alternately covering and uncovering a lamp with a blanket.

  “Wait here, my lady. Someone needs to take a look at this. It don’t look natural to me.”

  Sauxa lumbered off, struggling to catch the others, leaving Stella alone with the glow in the cliff and a rising disquiet.

  Kilfor, Kilfor, he thought he called out as the dream ended and reality began, sl
amming into him like a stone wall. Kilfor! But Kilfor was dead, dead by his hand, and Robal was alive, the possessor of life without end. Most High help him.

  He had come back to life.

  Please, please, have mercy, he wanted to plead, but his burbling communicated nothing but his terror. His body had quickened, obedient to the immortal blood, but his tongue had not grown back.

  “—will make sure he never leaves this room, my lord. When the debt is paid, we will burn him.”

  “Make sure you do. I cannot afford—ah, he has returned. Farewell, Factor. For this service I will allow you to name your reward.”

  “I will think on it,” said the Factor.

  “Let me have a moment with the prisoner.”

  The request was followed by the clatter of booted feet leaving the chamber.

  “Your body is about to be tortured beyond anything I’ve managed to accomplish, and I have tried very hard,” said the Destroyer, his mouth close to Robal’s ear. “It is only fair, then, that we extend this torture to your mind.”

  How could anything be worse than this?

  “I am returning to Stella’s side. I shall woo her and win her, and while you are dying, again and again, I shall possess her. Again and again. Then, as you guessed, I shall betray her. Her powers I will press into my service. I will use her up and discard her, broken and forgotten, to rot. And you, my friend, will not be there to protect her.” The creature smiled. “The knowledge of how much you are about to suffer eases my own pain,” he added. “I will not say ‘fare well,’ for you will fare very poorly, I predict.”

  With that the monster turned and walked from the chamber.

  Stella, oh, Stella!

  The Zizhua returned to the chamber.

  “Your second death,” the Factor began, “will pay for the loss of my wife.”

  “It is an opening of some kind,” the senior Zizhua guard opined.

  “To the outside?” Stella didn’t think so: the light had a different quality about it. Otherworldly.

  “Unlikely. This is the long axis of the hill. The crack would have to extend many thousands of paces into the rock to let in light from the outside world.”

  “Some unusual seam?” Seren asked. Kannwar had healed his horrific injuries. Though there remained some unsightly remnants, he required minimal assistance to walk, and was likely to recover completely.

  “Never have we seen rock that glowed,” the younger guard answered. “I would wish to examine this more closely.”

  “We are commanded to return to aid in the search for further survivors,” the other guard reminded him. “We have already lingered too long.” He glanced meaningfully at the travellers.

  Lenares peered at the crack. “There is power coming from it,” she said. “It reminds me of… I’m not certain. We must climb up the wall. I must know what this is.”

  “You’re not certain?” Stella repeated. “But you think you might know?”

  “Faah. I want to be sure before I say anything. But that light reminds me of the light in the House of the Gods. I am wondering if the earthquake loosened this rock and the explosion brought it down, exposing… somewhere else.”

  “The House of the Gods buried in a mountain?” Torve said.

  “The entrances have to be somewhere,” the cosmographer replied reasonably enough. “The gods wouldn’t put them where everyone would come crawling all over them. Perhaps there is an outside entrance, and we’re looking in through the back door, so to speak.”

  Stella turned her head at the sound of crunching feet on the road behind them. It was Kannwar, seemingly completely recovered from his near-death—or full-death—experience. She wondered about that for a moment, remembering how long it had taken them both to heal after Conal pushed them over a cliff back in Dhauria. She herself was nowhere near recovered, yet he had been far closer to the blast. And he had given of himself to help heal the injured.

  The man appeared almost ridiculously cheerful, humming under his breath.

  “What are you looking at?” he asked as he drew up to them. “The Zizhua want us to leave as soon—oh. Now that is interesting.”

  “We think it might be—” began Lenares.

  “Yes, one of the Houses of the Gods. Or, more correctly, another entrance to the one and only House. Another mystery solved; seems like our day for them.”

  “What mystery?” Stella asked. All this cheerfulness made her skin prickle.

  “I came across a scroll once, in the scriptorium at Dhauria, claiming to be a comprehensive list of the locations of the Houses of the Gods, although it didn’t call them—it—that. Named it the Crèche. The list can’t have been comprehensive though, as there was no record of the entrance Lenares and Torve say they found in Elamaq.”

  “And on the list was an entrance in the Zizhua Valley,” Lenares interrupted, not to be outdone.

  “Indeed,” said Kannwar agreeably, showing no resentment at the interruption. “So, something good comes from an act of darkness. We should be able to use this against Umu. We have likely been followed into the valley by the Daughter’s avatar; at least, we have no reason to suspect otherwise, given the gods have identified us as the only impediment to their plan and have therefore followed us since this began. And you all saw the hole in the world following us, as though we dragged it along.”

  He paused, clearly seeking acknowledgment. Various of the travellers nodded.

  “Umu must know where the House is. What better place to confront us?” Noetos growled. Kannwar nodded encouragingly. “Therefore,” the fisherman concluded, “we should stay well away.”

  “You were correct until that last, friend Noetos,” Kannwar said, still insanely cheerful. “What better place for us to confront her? No one else but us to get hurt.” He nodded to Stella. “It is a place that focuses power, and that will magnify any advantage we have over her. And she will not be able to resist the place, even though she must suspect it is a trap.”

  Stella smiled at him, then frowned. “You said ‘another mystery solved.’ What other mystery?”

  The man grinned even more broadly, and for a moment Stella could see the real Kannwar, the boy-man raised in the service of the Most High two thousand years ago. His glamour was entirely natural and utterly irresistible.

  “Nothing you should concern yourself about,” he said. “Just an interesting way one might prolong the punishment of a criminal for a truly horrific crime.”

  “You have a terrifying way of thinking. One moment human, the next something entirely other.”

  “Wait until you’ve lived two thousand years, then see how many people understand you,” he said.

  Stella could think of nothing, not a single thing, she’d like less.

  * * *

  —please, please, let it end—

  Robal’s return to consciousness was as meat through a grinder. Someone was talking, but it took him a while to recognise the words.

  “—struck by a roof-spear while trying to help her neighbour who was pinned by the wall of her home. She was my beloved daughter.” Sobs, wailing.

  Limbs twitching, thoughts firing uncontrollably, a cascade of images, all of them grey, red-edged. Entering a land between life and death. Entering the realm of insanity.

  “We have the right to choose the punishment.” The words came slowly, amid weeping. “I want him flayed.”

  His last clear thought before the agony began—the agony that finally drove him into madness—was a desperate wish that the doubling of time they had experienced might send him back to the moment before he threw the sulphur paper. The moment before the madness began.

  Another chance! he screamed. A chance to undo what I have done!

  Silence. And then pain.

  CHAPTER 17

  GODHOUSE

  ONLY TWENTY PACES SEPARATED them from their goal. But those twenty paces were vertical. The first three were relatively easy, scrambling up a mound of newly fallen rock, but the rest appeared impossible to St
ella.

  “Can you do anything?” she asked Kannwar, who stood beside her watching Noetos and his son lead the first attempt to scale the wall.

  “Yes,” he said. “I could fashion a stair out of the air itself that we could ascend to the entrance.”

  “Then do it,” she urged him. “Umu may already be within, planning our deaths.”

  He inclined his head towards her. “Do you remember my escape from Instruere, Stella?”

  Did she remember it? Of course she did. At the climax of the Falthan War, Kannwar had arrived in Instruere a conquering king leading a victorious army, having defeated the Falthan champion and accepted their surrender. Stella had been his handmaiden, already cursed with the immortal blood, in thrall to him.

  He strode into the Great Hall of Instruere to sign the surrender documents, which were to be sealed magically with a truthspell. Stella herself had been compelled to deliver the documents into his hand; the walk up to and across the makeshift stage had been the single most humiliating moment of her life, watched by a thousand of Instruere’s citizens who clearly saw her betrayal, not knowing how hard she struggled to break his iron will. As Kannwar raised the pen, his hand was struck off by an unseen assailant in a bizarre parody of his encounter with the Most High two thousand years previously. Leith claimed to have seen what happened: his story, ever unchanging, was that the carving of the Most High in the Great Hall loosed an arrow at the Destroyer, taking off his hand at the wrist. Well, everyone saw the arrow flaming as it stood stuck fast in the signing desk, quivering. Everyone heard the Destroyer’s cry of anguish as his hand was severed from his arm. And, much later, everyone saw that the face of the Most High on that carving had turned into the face of Leith’s brother, Hal. And so the Halites were born.