Beyond the Wall of Time (19 page)

“No, m’lord, it’s bin either down the pit or workin’ on the Altima Road e’er since I was old enough to hold a pickaxe. Plain
speakers, us miners. No point in wasting words when any of ’em might be your last, eh?”

Lenares found herself fascinated by the exchange. Kannwar was succeeding in keeping his temper in check, but the miner was
definitely provoking him, and Lenares felt certain the provocation was deliberate. Did Seren know the risk he was taking?
Kannwar was a murderer, a man steeped in blood, whose idea of truth was to say whatever he thought would advance his own interests.
Seren ought not to be placing himself in the path of such a man.

“Then tell me about Corata and the Factor of Malayu,” said Kannwar, “and speak plainly.”

The miner cleared his throat. “Corata’s the biggest mine in Bhrudwo, far bigger’n Eisarn Pit where I come from. It’s a mountain
o’ granite that sits on the land like a stone in a bowl o’ porridge. Three leagues wide, it is, or so young Dagla told me;
his family came from there, he said. They cut the stone out an’ use it for all manner o’ buildings. Not round here; the peasants
can’t afford it, seemingly. In Malayu City and other big places. Seems that it was t’ be kept a secret from the bigwigs in
Andratan—that’s yourself, sir—because of the hope they’d find huanu stone there. The Factor wanted it for himself, Dagla said.”

“How did your friend Dagla know what the Factor intended?”

“Dunno, sir. It’s widely known, that’s all.”

“Hearsay then,” Kannwar said. “Evidence enough, however, to ensure I will ask my Factor of Malayu a few questions.”

The look on his face frightened Lenares: all the animation had drained from it, leaving a blank mask.

The travellers now numbered eleven. Phemanderac they had buried with tears and many regrets, but rather than returning to
Dhauria, Moralye had elected to stay a while longer with Stella and Robal, the only Falthans left in the party. Conal was
lost, along with Arathé and Duon, and Sauxa and Kilfor had abandoned them. Kannwar now led the Bhrudwans. At least, none of
that young or ill-educated lot had yet challenged his authority. Anomer was the liveliest of them, while the two miners, Seren
and Tumar, said little even when spoken to. Sautea and Mustar, the fishermen, said nothing at all, awed, perhaps, by the Undying
Man. They awaited their master Noetos’s return from the search for his daughter.

Lenares and Torve were the only people remaining from the Amaqi expedition. She wondered what the Alliance leaders would think
now, seeing a half-wit and an Omeran animal acting as their empire’s representatives in the most important endeavour in thousands
of years. Likely they would seek Torve’s death, and Lenares they would bundle off home.

The travellers traversed a land almost completely foreign to one brought up in the desert, as Lenares had been. Every hour
she had to remind herself that Elamaq, not this abundant land, was the unusual place; apparently, most of the known world
was covered in smothering vegetation, this creeping greenery. It was hard to bear, the shrouding of clean rock; hard, also,
not to feel it as some kind of metaphor. Her distaste did not come from the land’s lack of beauty. Rather, the land was profligate:
water cascading from the escarpment they’d climbed down that morning, gathering in unremarked pools; trees and bushes growing
in every possible niche short of sheer cliff-faces; and rain tumbling from the sky at an ever-increasing rate. It was all
so wasteful that it made Lenares feel guilty, as though she was again in the Garden of Angels observing the Emperor’s private
extravagance.

The Padouki lands ended with the escarpment, but the lower land, though sprinkled with cattle and sheep, still looked wild.
Mounds of hard rock jutted out from the soft green pasture grass, standing in the fields like giant, unmoving sheep. Swift
streams sliced the fields in two, their waters running close to flood levels because of the tumbling rain of the last week.
An occasional farmhouse and rare village punctuated the flatter areas. The travellers were working slightly north of east
through this lowland, despite Kannwar’s original intention to lead the storm south. Seren’s idea had thoroughly persuaded
him.

The Undying Man had approached Lenares to ascertain whether the miner was telling the truth about Corata Pit. It felt good
to know even this demigod needed her wisdom, and she noted Anomer nodding at her during the exchange. She had replied with
care. “He believes what he is saying. That may not be the same as the truth.”

“I understand the nuances at play here,” the magician had shot back. “His information is second-hand. However, it still seems
the best hope we have.” He looked at her with his keen eyes. “How close is the storm now?”

“It nears the coast,” she replied. The hole in the world burned the edges of her mind, and she could work out to a reasonable
degree of precision how fast it progressed. “Perhaps a day from lying overhead were we to remain where we are.”

“It is speeding up then. Intensifying, no doubt. I can feel its enormous power.”

She nodded, one hand pressed against her temple. The red pain was there all the time now.

“Point to it,” he commanded.

She stretched out an arm behind herself, moving it until it bisected the storm’s approach.

The Undying Man grunted. “It will come ashore right over Pouk Peninsula. I will try to retard its momentum a little. I can
do no more, not against such power.”

Not entirely the truth, she knew, but she did not pursue the matter.

The land tended gently downhill the rest of the day. A fortunate thing, Lenares considered later that afternoon, as the wind
had risen to such an extent that its strongest gusts threatened to blow them off their feet. Certainly it impeded their attempts
to move forward. Branches were already breaking off trees either side of their path, a narrow, rutted road of shingle and
mud. The sheer intensity of the storm frightened her. Elamaq held no natural terrors like this, save perhaps the fire mountains
far to the south. Its weather was slower-acting, if no less deadly in the long run. The sun took longer to kill its victims,
but they died nonetheless.

The sky became an unrelenting sea of bruised grey cloud, whipping diagonally across their path from the north. Stella did
most of the work of keeping branches and other airborne objects from doing them harm, her illusory hand constantly flicking
back and forth. With the roaring of the wind and the crashing of branches, conversation became next to impossible.

Torve walked beside Lenares now, his gait rather narrower, as though he was still in pain. He had assured her that he no longer
suffered, but said nothing about his amazing recovery. He did not need to; Lenares could tell his healing was not natural,
that one of the party had healed him. She knew who it had been, and was aware of the healer’s dark secret. She nursed the
knowledge, wondering when best to use it.

Healed he was, but Torve was by no means restored. She wanted to talk to him about that, to find out how much his loss mattered
to him. Though the cosmographers had been taught about the ways of men, she had not paid much attention to the lessons. It
had not sounded very interesting, to tell the truth: a plumbing puzzle at best, something quite unpleasant at worst.
Don’t touch me!
Fortunately, cosmographers were allowed to remain unattached. In fact, the Emperor had encouraged it. Fewer mouths dependent
on the public purse, Nehane had said. Lenares had not cared about the reason back then, not able to imagine sharing such awkward
intimacy with any man. Now, however, she wished she had listened more carefully rather than playing with her numbers at the
back of the room.

Mahudia had encouraged her inattention, of course. No chance the half-wit would attract a mate. Except she had.

She could not ask Torve. Love would compel him to say something other than the honest truth. She would think of someone else
to ask.

Light leached slowly from the sky, though there were hours remaining until sunset. What replaced it wasn’t darkness exactly,
rather a grey blurriness that took the sharp edges from everything, a water-borne haze that left the travellers wading as
much as walking. They were drenched, of course, but the air was strangely warm, and apart from the constant chafing they were
not uncomfortable.

They met the first refugees from the storm soon after. An old man, his possessions on his back, head down, shoulders hunched,
and unwilling to answer their hail, heading away from the approaching weather. He was followed by others: younger men at first,
moving swiftly, then families with few possessions. Kannwar tried to get them to turn around, but they were having none of
it.

“Rain’s falling like the sky’s turned to water,” one man said. “I remember the storm of 1202, and this one’s already worse.”
They spoke of widespread damage and injuries, and warned of devastation to come.

“They’re not safe inland,” Lenares said. “This storm wants to eat everyone up. If it can’t smash them it will drown them.”

“What do you want me to do, girl?” Kannwar asked, anger giving his voice a sinister edge. “Force them to join us?”

“Yes, exactly that,” she shouted at him. “Make them come to the pit. Keep them alive and slow the gods down.”

He reflected on this a moment. “You are a sentimental fool,” he said—which she was not; his words made her angry—but nodded
to her anyway. Raising his voice effortlessly, his words boomed over the shriek of the wind: “Anyone we meet coming down this
path is to be detained and compelled to accompany us to the assembly point at Corata Pit. This is by order of Andratan.”

“Your orders don’t apply to us, Destroyer!” Robal shouted.

Kannwar stopped in his tracks. “Whose land are you in?”

“Don’t know who owns this patch of dirt.” The guardsman lifted steely eyes to the tall man. “Maybe the Padouki, maybe Old
Roudhos, maybe someone else. I’ll do as they ask.”

Stella put a hand on his arm. “Robal, this is a waste of our time.”

He shook her hand off, not noticing that his arm went right through her illusory forearm, nor her wince at the sight. “The
only one wasting time is this snake, ordering us around.”

“Then do it because I ask you,” she said.

The man stood irresolute for a moment. Lenares could almost read his mind as his numbers flickered across his face:
I should have gone with Sauxa and Kilfor. I want to kill the Destroyer. Why does Stella side with him?
The thoughts were so clear she had no doubt the others could see them too.

The flaming red circle flared strongly in her mind, sparking dizziness and nausea. She clamped her lips together, trying not
to vomit.

“Hurry,” she said hoarsely. “The hole is close now. Terrible things are coming.”

Robal glanced at her, his lip curling with disdain.

“Very well, my queen,” he said and, splattering mud everywhere, strode off to the front of the bedraggled group.

“The man is trouble,” Kannwar said. “Fortunately he has no power to do us harm.”

“If you think that, you don’t understand anything,” Stella snapped at him, and marched after her guard.

The world shrank to a grey nightmare. Conversation was impossible as the wind roared its anger at them. All around them young
trees bent and old trees broke, their fall completely soundless in the maelstrom of noise. The few houses they could see close
to the road had lost their roofs, and many had been levelled. The injured they gathered up into their swollen band of refugees;
the dead they were forced to ignore.

And the dead became more common as the travellers pushed on, bent forward from the waist, into the storm’s heart. A young
man lay splayed out on the path, his head split by a fallen branch, his once-fine clothes brown with mud. A tiny girl face
down in a puddle complete with its own little wavelets, her body rocking in time with the wind gusts. A family ran towards
the path, then were lost to view as the roof of a house slammed down on top of them.

Kannwar’s magic protected the travellers, keeping out the worst of the wind and debris, but even he could not shelter the
hundreds of people following them. Lenares saw the rising anger in his eyes, the almost uncontrollable raging of his numbers.
He was insulted, she saw, that there were powers stalking his land more potent than he.

A black column emerged from the grey swirl. Seren beckoned the others and stumbled towards it. The local who had been guiding
them—much against his will—nodded, then turned and ran back down the path, pushing through the crowds following them. Kannwar
did nothing to prevent him leaving.

The black column was an enormous tower of stone. Perhaps twenty paces across, it was hundreds of paces high, its apex lost
in the cloud. Lenares could not discern its function, but there was a formed road beside it, leading down into darkness.

As she reached the road, a strange and frightening vista opened ahead of her. A vast pit stretched into the distance, its
sides stepped like a giant staircase or circular arena—an enormous version of Talamaq’s Great Circus. The road, it seemed,
wound around and around the pit, and Lenares set her weary feet to its rocky surface. As she dropped below the lip of the
pit the storm lost much of its potency, and within minutes they could converse in relative comfort.

Seren, it seemed, had saved them all.

The storm is enormous
, he said.

But heading south. The worst of it will miss us
, she said.

An image of a vast, rotating pinwheel of cloud with a hole like an eye in the centre filled his mind.
These storms are not predictable
, he warned.
It could turn our way. Even the outer reaches could make life very unpleasant for us.

Not as unpleasant as it was
, she said, her mind-smile irrepressible.

Other people will be suffering.

How do you know so much about such storms?

He showed her his memories.
You forget I am an explorer. I have seen storms like this in Crynon , where the inhabitants have learned how to survive, and
in the Spear Lands, where because of the storms’ frequency no one makes their home. The wind comes from one direction, building
in intensity until it destroys much in its path, then there is a lull as the central eye passes overhead. After that comes
the worst as the wind reverses direction, breaking many structures that had merely bent before.