Dark Heart (39 page)

A thought for another day.

Could a misty hand cast a shadow? Something loomed over her. She kept her head down, she did not want to look; her fear was finally getting the better of her, it was harder and harder to take steps forward; so cruel, she had almost escaped…

‘Ahoy, the shore!’ a cheery voice cried. It came from somewhere to her right, out to sea.

Above her a deep growl shook the headland, and the shadow vanished.

‘Hoy!’ There was a man in a boat, and he was waving to her with a small, pale hand. A human, welcoming hand. ‘Can you tell me how far it is to Foulwater Mouth? Oh my, I’m lost, oh yes indeed.’

The man brought his boat to shore on the next beach. Lenares helped him to drag it the last few yards, though the effort bit into her chest.

She watched the man carefully.
Something must be special about him, else why did the gods flee?
She didn’t think it was because they had fought themselves to exhaustion. The Son had seemed on the point of killing her and vanquishing the Daughter.

‘I thank you, oh yes, you’ve been most kind,’ said the funny little man. He was old, over thirty at least, with thin, wispy hair and a pate burned red by the sun. His features were generous to a fault: too much mouth, a large nose and wide, staring eyes. He looked harmless, but she would soon know.

‘My name is Lenares,’ she said.

‘Oh my, yes. Mine is Olifa, late of Eisarn,’ he said in a breathless rush. ‘A long way south of here. Inland. Not much of a sailor really, but this boat and I have gotten along just fine, oh yes. Are you local? Do you know the way to Foulwater Mouth?’

‘I am Lenares of Talamaq,’ she said, then corrected herself. ‘I mean, Lenares the Cosmographer. No, I am not local. You are more local than me.’

‘You look like a local, yes you do. So you don’t know how to find Foulwater Mouth?’

‘No, but I can help row a boat,’ she said, wincing at the thought of the damage she might do her rib. He saw her wince, she was certain of it, but he passed no comment, pausing in silence for a while, obviously thinking.

‘Well, it would be pleasant to have an attractive companion on my journey north, oh yes,’ he said eventually.

‘Is that why you want to go to Foulwater Mouth? To find an attractive companion?’

The man laughed. ‘Oh my, young lady, how funny you are!’ He licked his lips. ‘I will not have to look very far for attractive companionship, no indeed. Not far at all.’

‘That’s good,’ Lenares said. ‘I want to travel Fatherward, I mean north, as quickly as I can. I am trying to find someone, and I think he will be walking north. So I hope your search doesn’t take long.’

This occasioned another laugh from the man.

His numbers were ambiguous. A teller of truth who had recently taken up lying; a killer of men who had aided an important quest. A man with more than one name; a man who had endured mockery. He intended, according to the numbers, to enjoy her companionship to the full.

She could see no real threat in that.

They launched the little boat on the outgoing tide. It had bench seats in the front and the back—the bow and the stern, she told the man, having read a scroll about sailing some years ago—and a place in the middle that held the mast and sail. The mast was down at the moment, the man explained, because he didn’t know how to use it. He seemed ineffectual, for all the history she could read in him, and Lenares wondered if she had made a mistake taking up with him. Who would travel by boat while not knowing how to operate it?

She became thoroughly soaked during the launching process, and the saltwater stung her wounds. She sucked at the more accessible cuts, but this didn’t help.

‘You ought to use some ointment on those,’ said Olifa. ‘Keep them free of infection. I’ve seen what can happen to a dirty wound. Oh my, yes.’

‘I would if I had any.’

‘I’m something of an expert on mixtures and the like,’ the man said. ‘I’ll see if I can find you something in the next town.’

‘I don’t have any money,’ Lenares said anxiously. ‘And I haven’t eaten or drunk since yesterday.’

‘My, you are in a bad way,’ the man said. ‘Never mind, I have plenty of money, and food and drink enough to share, if you don’t mind your bread stale and your cheese hard, oh yes. And as for repayment, there are many ways you can make yourself useful on our journey north, however long it lasts, oh yes indeed.’

Lenares knew the words he spoke had more than one meaning, but she put them aside. The man seemed friendly, and would hardly attack her now she had made it clear she had no money. She had just been in the presence of two gods powerful enough to reshape the world, and the harmlessness of this man encouraged her to relax. To lower her guard.

They let down the sail and soon it filled with the breeze. Once they had mastered the skill of jibbing, the boat propelled them northward more quickly and certainly with far less effort than rowing, though they both suffered the occasional knock when the boat didn’t behave as they expected.

She told him her story as the beautiful green waters rolled under the hull and the wild coast passed them by. A new world revealed itself to Lenares as she watched fish darting about in large groups, weaving their way between strange multicoloured trees. He seemed very interested in what she had to say, so she continued, even though she really wanted silence in which to contemplate the wonderful underwater panorama passing below. She did spread herself across the bow seat, with her head over the gunwale, watching the amazing antics of the fish as she talked and nibbled on a hard heel of bread.

Olifa did not believe all the parts about the gods and the holes in the world, though he was too polite to say so. He was fascinated, though, by her tales of Raceme and the Bhrudwans she had fallen in with.

‘A red-haired man and his two children? Two? Oh my, a girl as well as a boy? Do tell!’

And he clapped his hands as she told of the fireball and then of the wave sent to smash the tea house.

‘You have a wonderful imagination, Lenares,’ he said. ‘Such description; I can well believe what it must have been like. But I am a scientist, my girl, and I know such things don’t happen without a natural explanation. I don’t hold with all this intervention of the gods.’

‘How else do you think I ended up on the beach?’ Lenares said. ‘You interrupted a battle between the gods: surely you saw the great hands?’

‘Oh dear, oh my, no hands did I see,’ he replied, and she knew he told the truth, hard as it was to accept: he had been right there in his boat.

Surely it was not all in my head. Of course not: people saw the other manifestations of the gods.
She wanted to know why the gods had been invisible to this man, but he had already moved on. She hoped it had not taken place entirely within her head, and, at the thought, part of her wanted to go back to the beach and check the sand for marks.

‘Whatever the explanation, I’m glad you are with me,’ Olifa said, smiling toothily. ‘Oh my, yes.’

Lenares smiled back. ‘No one says that to me. Not even Torve lately.’

‘Torve is your lover?’ A casual question.

Lenares could feel herself blushing. ‘No. I thought he might be, but his master won’t let him.’

‘Ah, an oft-repeated tale. Well, I have no master to tell me what to do.’

His glance at her was intended to be meaningful, but Lenares could not interpret it. Did he want to be her lover? Surely not; he was so old.

She thought again of Torve. He would have wanted to search for her, but she doubted Dryman would let him. She could ask Olifa to take her back to the beach. She could maybe scale the cliff, and hope the gods weren’t still there, waiting for her. But when she got to the top, there would be no one there. And she would then have to hurry through an unfamiliar country to catch them up. No, this was the better way.

The morning blended into afternoon as Olifa talked about himself while Lenares watched the parade of the sea. He was an alchemist, he said, a man of wealth and great talent (all true, the numbers said, or, at least, he believed it to be true, though he had not said the wealth was recent) who had worked for years in an enormous mine. He made the occupation sound important and mysterious. His tales of seeking for precious metals hidden under the ground appealed to Lenares and her love of puzzles, and she told him so.

‘You are a lovely girl, oh yes, so I will tell you our secret,’ he said. ‘We dig for many metals, yes, but our real purpose is to search for a special stone. It is found in the heart of our richest lodes, in such small quantities it is almost impossible to identify, but I am an expert, oh yes.
The
expert, really. The only one.’

She smiled again at the man. He was practically bald, his teeth were crooked and his breath smelled bad, but Lenares found him interesting. Almost a kindred mind.

‘I, too, am the only expert left,’ she said. ‘The last cosmographer. Do they listen to you? They don’t listen to me.’

‘Oh, they listen to me all right, yes indeed. They don’t listen, they end up smeared all over the mine. They’ve learned to listen, oh yes.’

‘They don’t listen to me,’ Lenares repeated. ‘And many people have already died because of it.’

‘I’ll listen to you, yes, I’ll listen,’ Olifa said. ‘I always listen. There is so much to learn.’

A kindred mind indeed. He didn’t always agree with her, but he listened. More than Dryman or Captain Duon did.

‘So let me tell you about the special stone,’ Olifa said, pleased by her interest. ‘It is very rare, oh my, and there are many theories as to what makes it form. My own personal belief is that it needs extreme heat and pressure to be created, so, despite the ridicule of my peers, I suggested the stone was born of meteorites, yes indeed I did.’

‘Meteorites? Fireballs?’

‘Indeed,’ he said, his eyebrows raised.

‘You didn’t think I’d know what a fireball was, did you. I told you, I saw one.’

‘You did, Lenares, and I apologise, yes I do. It was not your seeing the fireball I doubted, for, as I am about to tell you, I saw it too. No, it is the method of creation. Oh my, meteorites are falling stars, and they come from beyond the walls of the world—’

‘No, they do not,’ Lenares said. ‘Nothing gets through the worldwall—well, almost nothing, and certainly not meteorites.’

‘I’m not going to argue with you, girl, oh no, because it doesn’t matter. I investigated the site of the fireball north of Raceme just after it fell, yes I did, I spent a week and a day digging where I calculated the stone would be, and I found the special stone.’ He smiled, and drew a small glass vial out of a pocket in his tunic. ‘Oh my. There it is, genuine huanu stone, oh yes. Olifa was right.’

‘It’s very small,’ Lenares said.

‘I told you it was. But powerful all the same. With it—’

‘I know what it does,’ she said, and watched as his eyes opened wide in surprise—though not as surprised as she had expected. ‘It stops magic.
Absorbs
magic. But I’ve seen a much bigger huanu stone. I’ve held a piece’—she looked closely at the stone—‘four hundred and twenty-six times the volume of the one in your glass container.’

He nodded, not at all surprised by this.

‘You knew,’ she said. ‘You know Noetos and his huanu stone, don’t you?’

‘Noetos? Oh yes, indeed. Oh my. Famous, he is. Famous, but an angry man. I’m surprised he let you hold the stone, my dear, oh yes. But with
this
stone I will also be famous,’ he crowed. ‘Oh my, the most famous alchemist in the world. And the richest. No more to be stuck down filthy mines with filthy miners.’

‘So where are you taking it?’

‘Why, to its rightful owner, oh yes,’ the mad alchemist replied. ‘The Undying Man of Bhrudwo, our rightful Emperor. And if he is prepared to pay what it is worth, he can have it.’

‘And if not?’

‘Well, there’s not much he can do, is there, no indeed, since the huanu stone negates magic while in my possession.’

‘I am going north also,’ she confessed, ‘but I will not travel all the way with you. I would like to rejoin my companions.’

‘Of course,’ he said grandly. ‘Any time you want to leave, all you have to do is step off the boat. Now, Lenares, you’re tired and sore, so you are. Why don’t you take some rest? I’ll keep this boat going north, oh yes I will.’

Even as Lenares lay back in the bow of the boat, her head still above the gunwale, her numbers showed hidden plans in the man. Unseen dangers. Treachery against Noetos, against the Undying Man. She would keep a careful eye on him when next she woke.

She awoke in a panic. The boat was being tossed about and something dark and heavy had landed on top of her, crushing her already painful rib. A cloth had been pressed against her eyes and there was a fumbling at her tunic.

‘What?’ she cried, and received a sharp blow in the mouth. Something was attacking her. She went to cry out and tasted blood. The boat continued its frenzied rocking.

‘Olifa! Something—’

The cloth slipped enough for her to see. The weight on her chest was Olifa himself, his naked torso pinning hers to the hull. It was his hand fumbling with her tunic. Her shocked brain took a moment longer to assemble the obvious explanation.

‘No! Don’t touch me!’ she screamed, and began to twist and jerk underneath him, trying to fetch him a blow with her knees.

‘Stop fighting,’ he said, already panting. ‘You have to pay me for passage, oh yes, and pay me you will, in coin of my choosing.’

‘Nobody touches me,’ she snarled, struggling to free herself. ‘Not without my permission.’ But though he was a small man, and very old, he was tough and wiry.
A miner,
she thought.
Miners are strong and I am weak.

‘You boarded my boat,’ the man said. ‘That’s permission enough in my book, oh yes.’

His breath was hot and foul on her neck. With one hand he unfastened his breeches, letting them slide down his scrawny legs, exposing his worm.

Lenares closed her eyes and twisted her head away. He was too strong for her; she didn’t want to see what he was about to do. She had wanted Torve to do this to her, she still did, but it was Torve she wanted, not the act alone, and this man was stealing and hurting. His horrible worm touched her leg and she screamed, involuntarily opening her eyes as the scream ended.