Beyond the Wall of Time (14 page)

Lenares held her breath a moment, trying to work out what Mahudia meant by that, especially the last. It was almost taking
shape in her mind.

“My other half?” she asked. “What do you mean?”

The faintest of hisses came from the thread binding her and Mahudia.
Have you not—but that was the whole purpose!
A silence, then, in a calmer voice:
Ignore me, child, I do not see too well from where I stand. I must go now. Already I have been here too long. I must not be
discovered.

“Please, don’t go! Explain to me what you meant by my other half. Do you mean Torve? Is he my other half?”

She waited, but there was no reply. The thread hung motionless before her. But despite her desire to learn more she would
not tug on it again, not now at least. Not if her Mahudia was in danger from Umu. If only she had not let the treacherous
god go!

The pain had subsided to a dull discomfort, but Torve knew the amount of pain associated with the cut itself was irrelevant.
He was ill with corruption. His wound had become infected and without medicine he would die. No one said this openly to him;
his new companions spoke encouraging words, but they would abandon him when he became too inconvenient. It was what people
always did with Omerans, after all. Even Lenares would leave, driven by her obsessive compulsion to search for and destroy
the gods.

He wished they would abandon him. He liked the forest, its blanket of leaves, its thick silences and warm, moist breath. So
much better than the stark, sterile desert where one was exposed to the world’s mocking gaze. Nothing but heartache came from
the sands and rocks of Elamaq. Let the others go on to do whatever it was they felt they had to do, while he remained here,
lying still as the leaves filtered down to smother his face, as he decayed into the rich soil of the forest floor.

“Feeling sorry for yourself, lad?”

Torve still struggled a little with the Bhrudwan language, but Heredrew spoke with such clarity he was easy to follow. “You
read minds,” he replied.

“No, but yours is a face with few secrets.” The tall Falthan hunched down beside him. “You’re gravely ill, my friend. You
ought to feel sorry for yourself.”

Torve smiled. It hurt to smile, he discovered; his cheeks and his forehead ached for a few moments after he carefully relaxed
his muscles. “They have not told me, but I know. I will not leave the forest alive, it seems. Please tell the others to go
on without me.”

“I will do something better, but only if you keep my secret.”

“Secret? What use is a secret to me?”

“This one could rip our little group apart.” The man’s elongated, bony hand shot out and grabbed Torve’s arm. “You kept secret
an emperor’s identity, they tell me. I command you to keep my identity just as secret.”

Torve hadn’t known it was possible, hadn’t thought it through, but as the compulsion took him he realised he had been a fool.
Omerans would always be susceptible to commands. He had not overcome three thousand years of breeding after all. His surprise
deepened into shock. It wasn’t just the realisation that shook him. Heredrew was doing something to his body. The strangest,
most unsettling mixture of warmth and cold had begun to flow into his arm, and from there, it seemed, directly into his blood.
He began to fizz as though someone had exchanged his blood for fire. His muscles spasmed and shook and his spine began to
arch.

“Bite on this,” the Falthan instructed him, and forced a stick into his mouth.

The pain intensified, the darkness around him seemed to flee and he could suddenly see everything—trees, rain, people—in shades
of white. The pain moved down his limbs to his torso, and from there centred on his groin, a mounting conflagration of agony.
He found himself grinding his teeth on the stick. His head jerked back and he looked up into Heredrew’s eyes—and saw a monster.
A face cracked like a dry lake bed, eyes mere pits in the skull, skin raw and ancient, a nose eroded to little more than a
scarred nub.

Heredrew’s secret.

“Thus I am exposed to you,” the Falthan—or perhaps not Falthan—man said, his normal rich voice replaced by a dry rasp. “Keep
this secret if you want to keep your healing.”

The pain began to subside. Torve lifted a hand to his mouth and brushed away the remnants of the stick.

“I can offer you nothing but my thanks,” he said.

“I don’t deserve them. I have not healed you fully, lad, and for that I apologise, but there are reasons. First, I don’t want
this to look too suspicious, and I am reluctant for our companions to recall my previous healing. Second, I have someone else
to heal tonight, and I must husband my remaining strength after the events of the last few days.”

“But I don’t—”

“Say nothing of this. Remain where you are and allow the others to minister to you without comment. Do not question me about
this now or at any time in the future. And above all, keep my secret. Do you understand?”

Torve nodded, but he understood nothing. As the magician walked stiffly away, he whispered: “But I don’t know what your secret
means.”

The man did not hear him, or, if he did, chose not to acknowledge his words.

Later that night Lenares came to see him. She would know, he could not keep his healing from her; but he tried, pretending
he was asleep. It seemed, however, she was not aware of the change in his numbers. Something had blinded her.

“Torve, Torve, I’m so sorry,” she whispered as she ran her fingers gently through his hair. “I did this to you, I was so selfish,
I wanted you so much, I liked how you felt when you pressed close to me. I knew Dryman didn’t want us to… to whatever.”

She couldn’t say the word even now; perhaps she didn’t know any words for it. Warm, salty drops began to patter onto his forehead.

“I should have figured out who Dryman was, but I didn’t think like Mahudia taught me.” Her voice had thickened and she spoke
louder, loud enough, perhaps, to have woken him had he in truth been asleep. “I was proud. I didn’t think anyone could keep
secrets from me, even though I understood you couldn’t tell me what you knew. I was proud and I was stupid.”

She began to sob.

“I even let Umu go. If I had held onto her I could have made her heal you. And then I had to watch as Dryman took his knife
to you.”

Nothing more for a while, just more tears on his face and her thick breathing. His healing was hidden from her by her own
grief.

He felt so deceitful. What he ought to do was to open his eyes and offer whatever comfort remained for him to give. He ought
to tell her he was healed. But he couldn’t. Trapped by who he was, by who he’d been bred to be, Torve lay there helpless as
his Lenares sobbed out her heart, apologising to him again and again, until her words and her tears faded into cold silence.

She finally sighed one last time and left him. He lay there the remainder of the long night, thoroughly desolate.

*   *   *

Across the sheltered campsite from where Torve lay, Lenares hunched in on herself and tried to gather her thoughts. Mahudia
was dead and hidden from her; Torve was dying—he hadn’t even stirred when she’d blubbed all over him; and Mahudia had said
that Lenares had made a mistake with her calculations. She was dizzy with confusion and loss: not only was the love she had
barely discovered about to be taken from her, she had clearly lost her mathematical infallibility. One mistake, that was all
it took, and she could no longer trust herself. What other mistakes might she be making? Who might suffer as a result?

The nearest she could come to her possible error was in the application of Qarismi of Kutrubul’s dividing by zero. Mahudia
had hinted at it. Qarismi’s theorem had been how she ensnared the Daughter: dividing the hole in the world by nothing and
creating a web to catch her. It had worked too, or so she’d thought. Ought she to have divided the hole in the world by zero,
or divided zero by the hole in the world? There was a clear mathematical difference: one made no sense. She could not remember
which one she had attempted. The thought cheered her a little; she could accept a mistake in her understanding or application
of a principle, but not one of computation.

Her ragged breathing slowed. She had not truly realised just how much she relied on her ability with numbers to define who
she was. If she should lose that… would it honestly be more of a loss than losing Mahudia or Torve?

Yes
, she whispered to herself, deeply ashamed.

“Your thoughts must be important ones,” said a voice beside her, so close she could feel the speaker’s breath tickle her ear.

“Don’t—”
touch me
, she was going to say, but she held her tongue as she tried to work out who it was. His face was barely visible in the darkness.

“Anomer?”

“Sorry to frighten you,” the boy said. He crouched down on his haunches and turned his face slightly away from her, allowing
a little light from the cloud-shrouded moon to illuminate his features. “I could hear you talking to yourself and wondered
if you wanted company.”

The words formed themselves in a line on her tongue, ready to be delivered:
No, go away and leave me alone, tend to your own business.
It was what she wanted to say, what she would have said before coming on this journey. But she knew it would be rude to say
those words, and Anomer had been kind to her earlier, not telling the others how badly she had led them.

“Thank you, I would like that,” she forced herself to say.

Was it telling lies like this that had undermined her ability with numbers and caused her to miscalculate? She wondered if
her numbers required literal honesty, and if her attempts at being like others would eventually make her like everyone else:
innumerate and lost.

“Sorry to blunder in on you with no warning,” he said, smiling. He really did have nice teeth.

“It was my fault,” she replied. “I thought I was leading everyone sonwards, but I must have brought them around in a huge
circle.”

“I meant now, Lenares, not yesterday afternoon. Though I hope I didn’t frighten you then either.”

She could feel herself turning red. “You didn’t frighten me. But I was scared when I found out we had gone in a circle. Can
you find your way through jungle like this?”

“I found you, didn’t I?” Not the answer he had given her earlier.

“Then you could lead us,” Lenares said, unable to keep the hope from surging through her voice. “Without your father here,
no one seems to know where we should be going.”

“Ah, there it is. As to that, my father is searching for my sister and the two others still missing. I must pursue them and
offer any assistance I can. But I will find them and bring them back. We will all gather together again and decide then what
to do: whether to continue following my father’s fixation with the Undying Man or strike out in some different direction.
But if you are looking for a leader, why not follow Heredrew? He seems a knowledgeable and trustworthy man.”

Lenares was about to reply when a shriek ripped the night in two.

Dulled by her lack of sleep, Lenares trailed Anomer by seconds, but despite catching an ankle on a hidden obstacle of some
kind—possibly a root—she arrived at the source of the noise before anyone else. The screaming sounds came from the normally
quiet woman Moralye, who was shaking as she made the unearthly noise. She stood over a prone body as though preparing to defend
it. A dead body.

“What’s wrong, Moralye, what’s wrong?” Stella asked, rushing towards them, then looked down and gasped.

Lenares could have told them. Would have, but she had learned they didn’t like her displaying her facility with numbers. She’d
only taken a glimpse at the woman’s half-obscured face, but that had been enough.

“He’s dead!” Moralye said, her voice starting to crack. “He won’t wake up!”

Lenares found herself frightened by the intensity of the woman’s emotion. While she herself had managed to grieve after a
time, it had been in private; she would have been mortified had anyone witnessed her distress. But Moralye didn’t seem to
mind who knew she suffered.

Isn’t this a kind of truth you cannot emulate?
a sly thought said.
By hiding your feelings, aren’t you lying to the world? By expressing hers, isn’t Moralye telling the truth?

Lenares wanted to ignore the idea, but she sensed an important truth in the words, waiting to be unpacked. She put it aside
for the moment, to be examined later.

Stella’s face underwent a series of changes so swift none but Lenares would have noted them. Shock, denial, even momentary
relief as her mind rejected what she saw; then horror tinged with acceptance and the beginnings of anger.

“Who did this to him?” the Falthan queen asked as she bent over the unmoving figure and began to remove the thin blankets
he’d been wrapped in.

“I don’t know,” Moralye answered, her voice spiralling down towards normality. “He was… he was like this when I made to wake
him for a dose of his medicine.”

“Medicine?” Stella turned her face, hardened by anger, to the young woman. “What medicine? Why does he need it?”

“I have been administering it twice daily: once at midday and again in the early hours of the morning. He needs it for his
chest. You knew he was ill. Surely you have heard his laboured breathing? Have you not seen me crushing the roots?”

“I knew he was sick, yes, but not that he was close to death. Why did you not say?”

Moralye wilted under the hardness of the woman’s face. “I did say. At least, I said he was unwell. Remember, I stayed behind
with him when the rest of you went up to the Canopy. He instructed me as to what root to seek out and the correct dosage to
administer. I did not realise he was in serious danger of dying. I did nothing wrong.” Her face crumpled and she began to
sob. “1 forgot that every sickness in someone so old brings them near to death.”

“But you did do something wrong,” Lenares said, and the pale faces of those awoken by the noise swung towards her. “At least,
you think you did.”