Dark Heart Part 18

He kicked the priest's pallet. 'Conal? Have you seen Stella?' No answer; another slugabed. No, the pallet was empty. 'Bah. Is no one-'

Ena walked out of the room she shared with Stella.

'Where is the queen?' Robal asked her.

'Gone out,' replied the girl, her face untroubled. 'Before dawn.'

'Gone where?'

'To meet someone. The priest went a few minutes after she did.'

Stella and the priest? What had he missed? His heart seemed to turn leaden in his chest. Surely not. If she's the type to take up with spoiled babes like him, I'm better rid of her.

'Anyone else see them go?' he asked the room. Kilfor shook his head, then bent it back towards his soup. Robal knew his friend. She's a big girl, he was saying. She can care for herself.

As Robal made towards the outer door, it opened and Conal walked through. One look at his face was enough.

'What has happened to her? What have you done? Did you force yourself on her?' Robal bit his lip to stop further inanities from coming out.

The priest sat on his pallet and began to cry. Enormous tears squeezed out of his crumpled face, accompanied by a huh, huh, huh noise Robal took for sobbing. The display left the guardsman shocked: the vain, pompous priest would never lose control like this.

He put his hand on Conal's shaking shoulder. 'Tell us. What has happened to Stella?' He did not doubt for a moment this concerned her.

'She muh-met Heredrew,' said the priest, his voice a thin warble. 'Out there in the street. I...I went out to see. I thought she might be meeting suh-someone, I thought it might be huh huh him.' He sobbed some more.

'Then what?' Robal could not wait for the blubberer to compose himself. 'They kissed, and you were jealous?'

The priest shook his head.

'They did more?'

Just what is wrong with me? She walks out to meet someone she knows, does something to set this fool weeping, and I'm all over jealous?

'N-no. I hid in the shadows and listened to them for a while as they quarrelled. I...she struck him and they fought. Then they fell.'

'Fell? Where?' Robal did not even realise he had strode to the front door.

'Up the street. Against the rail. Up she went, and took him over. Her...her face looked frightened. She tried to clutch the rail but she couldn't reach.'

Robal lunged towards the shaking priest and grabbed him by the arm. 'Show me.'

A few moments later the five of them stood by the railing. Dawn had painted the distance with the bright colours of the desert, but the lower city remained in shadow. Robal could barely make himself grasp the rail and ease himself over so he could see below.

Fifty paces, his mind recorded. The roofs of houses below, or the cobbles of a street. No trees or bushes.

'She might still be alive, mightn't she?' The priest sounded like a child. Was a child.

'No.'

'We need to look,' Kilfor said. 'Ena, please go and fetch Phemanderac. Tell him to meet us in the lower city on the street below this railing. We need to know what to do.'

The girl, her own small face pale with fright, ran quickly up the road, then slipped down a side street.

'Someone tell me this is not real,' Robal muttered to himself as he strode down the street, the others strung out behind him. The last ten minutes had hollowed him out.

She might be alive. The priest's words repeated in his head in time to his slapping feet. She might be alive. She might be alive.

Oh Most High, so much blood. His, hers, spurting, flowing, trickling, mixing together, covering their broken bodies like a shroud, like a curse, a curse.

Robal fell to his knees. So much blood! What he had taken for a shadow when looking from the railing was in fact a large pool of bright red wetness. She had lain here, he had lain there. The blood had coursed from both of them, her immortal lifeblood mixing with his mortal ichor. Someone had dragged their bodies away; the blood ran out about there, twenty paces or so from where he knelt.

'No, Conal,' Robal said, sure of the thoughts in the priest's head, but knowing that in the words he was about to speak he admitted his own guilt. 'Leave the blood alone. I will not allow you even a taste.'

Kilfor and his father must have wondered what he meant, but asked no questions. He probably would have told them had they wanted to know. What need for secrecy now? What need for a guard?

While Robal continued to stare ineffectually at the drying blood, Phemanderac and the girl arrived. A few local people had also gathered. No one asked him any questions, which suited him fine, as he had no answers.

Stella and Kannwar watched the gathering from a nearby rooftop. Neither could say a word: their wounds were too many, too fresh, too serious, to allow speech. It had taken all they had to climb the wall furthest from the road. Both knew it would take a long time to recover.

Someone will work it out, she sent.

I have removed as many clues as I can, he replied.

I don't want to leave them!

We have no alternative. One of them sought our deaths. I doubt he was in control of his body when he did so. Certainly he's been controlled by another at least once before.

She conceded him the point. Most High, this hurts.

Worse every time, he said.

I'm not prepared to run off and leave these good people behind, she said. I don't see why they can't be given an explanation.

Run off? Not for some time, Stella. And no, no explanation.

She summoned her strength. You chafed under the Most High when he withheld the full truth. According to you, this was the root of the rebellion in the Vale of Youth. If you choose to behave in the same fas.h.i.+on, your story loses all credibility.

Silence for a time. She tried to turn her head, but could do no more than catch a glimpse of his ruined face. The longer the silence lasted, the more hopeful she became.

You trust them? he asked eventually.

With the exception of the priest, for obvious reasons, yes. Phemanderac and Robal with my life. Kilfor and Sauxa because Robal vouches for them.

Mm.

Silence again. Stella watched her friends weep as they gathered together to try to make sense of the scene before them. Conal was at the centre of the gathering and Phemanderac was clearly questioning him hard.

He didn't tell them what he did, she said.

No?

No. Or the guard would have killed him by now.

Perhaps he does not know what he did.

I saw his face as I fell, she said. He knows.

In his place, would you tell? His question was sharp.

I wouldn't be in his place, she replied.

There is something we can do, he told her, though it means taking those you trust into our confidence.

Our confidence? They would have to learn who you are?

Yes. But it would greatly a.s.sist our recovery, and speed our entry into the coming conflict.

What must we do?

For now, wait. We have not the power to do what needs to be done. Then he told her what they would do once they had recovered a little of their strength.

The day had disappeared. One moment Robal was explaining events as best he could to various officials-whose function he could not identify-and the next shadows were creeping from the west across the dark stain at his feet.

There had been no sign of the bodies.

Well, that isn't accurate, the guardsman within him said. There was plenty of sign, an abundance of it. Unmissable. Just no actual corpses. Stella he could understand, barely. Perhaps her immortality could stand even a fifty-pace fall. But Heredrew must have died. Everyone agreed on this. Couldn't have survived. And those who did not know Stella's secret a.s.sumed she must also have perished.

But if she had survived, where was she now?

Robal stretched and yawned. Traitorous body, still demanding sleep and food. She would likely eat and drink no longer, though she would finally sleep. A sleep she had longed for, it seemed.

The crowds of puzzled, vaguely offended locals had long since dispersed. There had not been a murder for so long, apparently, that no one knew how to deal with it. Three of the Council of Scholars had questioned his group-everyone was calling Stella's friends 'his group' now, and waiting for him to make decisions on their behalf-but they had not asked the sort of questions a guard would. It didn't matter; there were no answers. So he'd spoken politely when asked, and had sent the others back to their lodgings when the questioners left. Now only he remained. Well, only he and a woman from the clan responsible for cleanliness on the streets, who had begun to scrub at the edges of the obscene brown stain. She'd be at it until dark, he judged, and would have to return in the morning. He couldn't help wondering if the woman could catch the curse from touching the dried blood.

I don't care, he decided wearily. Let her live forever.

Above her two people leaned over the railing, pointing out to each other where the dreadful accident had happened. Apart from them, the scene was deserted.

'Robal,' someone called. 'Robal.'

The voice sent a s.h.i.+ver through him. It sounded like nothing he'd ever heard. On the other side of the street the cleaning woman continued her work, oblivious.

He turned, and there she stood, half-hidden by the corner of the building nearest the cliff from which she'd fallen. His mind went blank as his brain fought with his eyes.

'Robal, we need your help. Please. Please come.'

He didn't believe it, not for a moment. It was preposterous, as his old sergeant used to say, pre-pos-ter-ous. Her fall had cus.h.i.+oned his, according to her, and they had crawled off together behind the houses like animals nursing their wounds. Had to be lies. Of course, this failed to account for how the man calling himself Heredrew-don't call him by the other name-could function with the back of his head stoved in. Completely avoided explaining what else might have left the bloodstains on the steps leading to the flat roof of the house where Stella claimed they had spent the day recuperating. Or their torn clothing, or the slowly weeping wounds on their hands, or a hundred other things.

She looked terrible. Her face had been sucked dry, the skin lying flat against the bone. Her eyes, blacker than he'd ever seen them, jutted from her face like those of a frog. Various parts of her body seemed not to be functioning properly, and her skin had turned a sickly yellow. Every time he looked at her he felt cold all over, then felt guilty at his cowardly reaction.

He told Phemanderac, as they requested. Only he could arrange what the two of them needed. The old man had started shaking as soon as Robal led him to the shadows where they waited, and had still been shaking when he left to find Lindha and their cart. Robal hoped the shock would not prove too much for the scholar's frail body.

He didn't tell Conal or the others, also as they requested.

Phemanderac returned eventually with the cart, driving it himself, still shaking as though in the midst of a seizure. Stella protested, but the scholar claimed he could think of no one to trust with the news that the Destroyer walked among them. No matter the stakes, irrespective of what was to be gained from the man's presence here, Kannwar's execution-his attempted execution, at least-would immediately be ordered. And the strangers who had consorted with him would be dealt with. He would drive them.

Robal and Phemanderac helped the two cadaver-like people into the trap, covering their cold bodies with a blanket. Stella said little apart from frequent expressions of thanks; the other man said nothing; and all the while Robal wanted to embrace the one and kill the other. No dream had ever seemed as unreal as this.

A faint misty rain began to fall as the scholar shucked the reins of their donkey. Robal walked beside Lindha's long, ugly head, his hand on her mane, for some contact with the mundane as much as anything. Slowly they moved through the night-quiet city, ghosts in an upside-down world.

This is the man who destroyed the most beautiful city in the world, Phemanderac told himself. The man whose hatred for the Way of Fire plunged us all into a future without the Most High. The Fuirfad was lost to the First Men because of him.

He could reach out and touch the man responsible for two thousand years of suffering across a continent. Responsible for thousands of deaths during the Falthan War. Responsible for the death of Hal, the Right Hand of the Most High. And responsible for the extended misery of Stella and Leith, the two people Phemanderac loved above all others in the world.

Phemanderac could reach out and touch him, and so he did. The scholar's arm stretched painfully behind him until it fetched up against the man's cratered face. There was a hiss of indrawn breath.

'Yes, I am real,' the man rasped in his reedy, broken voice. 'And yes, I did everything you are no doubt thinking. But it is not all I am. You recall our discussions twenty years ago, and so you know I am not entirely without merit.'

'Your permission to draw from you, friend Robal?' Phemanderac said as he withdrew his hand. 'It will make you feel a little weak, that is all.'

'Very well,' the guard said, clearly not knowing what the scholar meant.

'He wants to do magic, as much as his meagre talents allow,' said the man behind him. 'He can't draw from himself, as he is too fragile in his old age. Neither Stella nor I can spare any power; we're engaged in healing ourselves. Hence the request. He'll probably kill himself in the attempt.'

'Oh,' said Robal.

'There's no need,' the man continued. 'Leave the guard alone. I will remain quiet until I am required to speak. I will not attempt to escape. I will play no tricks. I will adhere to the plan as outlined.'

The rest of the journey to the Dhaurian docks was conducted in complete silence. The boat awaited them when they arrived.

The two wounded immortals were a.s.sisted from the trap and into the dinghy.

'Sorry, Lindha,' the scholar heard Robal whisper. 'You'll have to find your own way home.'

'Attach the reins to that post,' Phemanderac said, pointing. 'Someone will be down to pick her up in the morning.'

The guard nodded. Here was a man who did not require a full explanation; he just did what was needed. Robal was a fine guardian for an immortal.

But what use to an immortal was he, Phemanderac?

He pondered the question as Robal pushed the boat away from the wharf. He ought not to be involved in this most foolish enterprise: let them heal naturally-well, less unnaturally-over the next few years, and then let Stella return to Faltha and the leaders.h.i.+p of her people, while the other one stood trial for all he had done. But Stella had asked him, had begged him, to trust her, had called upon their bond of friends.h.i.+p. Had named Leith, his own secret, unconsummated love; had known about that, apparently.

He could not refuse her, not when she asked in Leith's name.

He was a guide, not a guardian. He whispered directions to Robal, who could see nothing meaningful in the dark, facing as he was away from the direction in which they headed.

'Left,' he said, not caring the word was not a nautical term. 'Further left. Hard right, now. Left again. Left.'

There was enough light to see by, but Phemanderac could have guided them by scent alone. He had never been to this place, but its smell permeated the wide, deep Dhaurian valley. A sweet scent of the purest water overlaid by the pungent smell of sulphur.