Path of Revenge (13 page)

‘What are my numbers?’ the Emperor had asked.

‘Ninety-one and one hundred and twenty-one are your most obvious numbers,’ Lenares was saying. ‘There are more, but I haven’t known you very long so I can’t see them yet. Ninety-one means lots of things, but one of the things it means is the scent of roses, while one hundred and twenty-one can mean the smell of dead rats in a larder.’ She said this matter-of-factly, despite whom she was talking to; she was, Mahudia knew, incapable of the subtlety required to dissemble, especially when talking about her numbers. ‘Put ninety-one and one hundred and twenty-one together and you have two hundred and twelve, a palindrome, another of your numbers, meaning death hidden by the pretence of health whichever way you look. Palindromes are numbers that hide the truth.’

‘I am a palindrome, then?’ The Emperor had a sharp mind, very sharp. Mahudia hoped Lenares would not forget this.

‘You are made up of palindromes,’ the girl replied. ‘They are special numbers.’

Mahudia couldn’t work out if this constituted a naïve attempt at flattery. Lenares generally argued that all numbers were special. She also did not flatter.

‘What happens if you multiply the numbers?’ the Omeran asked.

Lenares beamed at him, as though he was slightly less dim-witted than her other pupils. ‘Addition is flat, like a table-top. Multiplication has a shape like a box. There are even more complicated ways of putting numbers together, and these ways have shapes with more…’ she searched for the word, ‘more surfaces. More dimensions.’

‘Eleven thousand and eleven,’ the Omeran announced, obviously proud of himself.

‘Good.’ Lenares nodded to the Omeran. ‘But very slow. Eleven thousand and eleven, one digit short of perfect oneness, a very special number and another palindrome.’

But with a hole in the middle, Lenares did not say. She was showing unaccustomed caution. A man with a void inside him, perhaps, Mahudia speculated. Or a rent?

‘This is fascinating,’ the Emperor said, addressing Mahudia. ‘You have taught it to mouth meaningless philosophies and attach homilies to numbers. Of what use is this to anyone?’

‘As much use as your Omeran is to you, ma great sor,’ she ventured; and immediately regretting her words, turned her gaze away so she didn’t have to see her fate written in her Emperor’s eyes. No matter what the Emperor decided to do with Lenares, Mahudia feared she would not leave the room alive. She
glanced in his direction: his dark eyes were on her, hot and furious, shining through his mask. She was lost. All that remained was to fight for the girl.

Lenares scowled, unaware of the by-play. ‘Numbers define the universe,’ she said impatiently. ‘Even the gods leave traces when they act on the world. Reading the numbers correctly enables the cosmographers to know where the gods are and what they are doing.’

‘We haven’t had a cosmographer capable of reading the numbers correctly for five hundred years or more,’ Mahudia added.

‘I can read them correctly.’ Lenares snapped out her assertion. ‘But lately my calculations have been going wrong.’

‘Forgetting your tricks?’ the Emperor mocked.

Lenares gave him a rude stare. ‘No. Something very important in the world is changing, affecting all the numbers around it. Things are being destroyed, and it is going to get worse. I see it as a great and growing gap in my mind, a hole in the world. I was going to tell the Emperor when he granted me an audience to raise me as a cosmographer, but he was rude and put me aside. I don’t have to tell him now, though, do I?’

‘Are we in danger from this hole?’

‘It nearly killed you today.’

‘Ah. And you say you can tell us where it is?’

‘And what it is, I think.’

The Emperor clicked his tongue in impatience. ‘What is it, then?’

‘I think the hole in the world is a missing god.’

The silence following this pronouncement lasted just a little too long.
The Emperor is taking this seriously,
Mahudia realised, and her heart warmed. Her precious child held the power in this room now. They would not dare kill Lenares until she told them what she
knew, and once they fully understood her value they would not harm her. They would exalt her and the cosmographers with her. The secularisation of Elamaq would be reversed. She was sure of it.

One fear eased; another rose in its place.
A missing god?
A cold finger touched Mahudia’s spine as she considered her protégé’s words.

Elamaq was the latest incarnation of the Amaqi people’s desire to rule. How was it taught to infants? Elamaq the empire, Amaqi the people, Talamaq the city and the Palace of the Emperor, who ruled by the authority of the Three. At least, that was how she had been taught.

Mahudia’s mind swept across the Great Land. The Elamaq Empire stretched more than a thousand leagues across the central and sonwards parts of the great continent, and as far from fatherwards to fatherback.

She chastised herself silently. The Emperor, in his quest to rid the empire of references to the gods, had forbidden the use of the old directional labels. Fatherwards was now ‘north’ by decree; fatherback, the opposite direction, ‘south’. Sonwards, daughterwards and their opposites had no direct counterpart in the new system. ‘East’ and ‘west’ were to be used instead. Mahudia sighed. The Emperor could not read her mind. She would continue to use the old notation, as would the rest of the cosmographers.

Her thoughts, sidetracked for a moment, returned to the missing god. Continuously occupied for over thirty thousand years, the lands of the empire were old and tired by comparison to the young lands said to lie fatherwards. Elamaq was a land of stone and sand, of pale deserts, of arthritic hills, of ephemeral rivers and mist-bound coasts. It was also a land of ancient enmity.

Long before people learned of their existence, three gods ruled the Great Land. The Omerans said that the
Daughter dominated the gods, and the troubles had begun when the Father and the Son united together to usurp her. The views of the Omerans would not have been considered credible in Elamaq had they been known to any but the cosmographers and a few other scholars.

The Amaqi told stories about the harlotry of the Daughter, base acts she committed with the ancestors of men, from which the Omerans were brought forth. This explained the need for her unnatural offspring to be kept in servitude, they said. The Son ruled the other two gods, the feeble Father and his Daughter the whore, and the Emperor reigned under the Son, the lord of a vigorous, dynamic empire, contaminated neither by womanish ways nor by the tired morals of the old.

Or the Son
would
rule the gods, had he not been declared non-existent by the latest Emperor. The epoch of the Three was over by decree. The Amaqi would make their way in the world, would conquer the world, without any supernatural encumbrances.

The followers of the Father no longer told any stories. They had been obliterated from the earth thousands of years ago, so the story went, victims of revenge for some atrocity or other. The cosmographers collected any scroll mentioning the Father’s worshippers: in three thousand years they had assembled half a dozen. No one remembered them.

Father, Son and Daughter. Few of the many formerly independent kingdoms that now made up Elamaq could agree on the relationship between the Three, but all agreed on the number of the gods and the name of each. And everyone—everyone but the Amaqi, it seemed—remembered what had happened to the Mother.

It was possible even for gods to die. But the legends associated with the Mother all talked of the
catastrophic loss of life resulting from her death, of the destruction and remaking of the earth, of centuries of suffering and desolation.

When gods died, they did not die alone.

A fevered excitement gripped the Emperor of the Amaqi when he heard the half-wit make her pronouncement. He had been truly worried that the girl had been taught merely to perform tricks, that her ‘numbers’ behaved in the same way as did the most credulous form of star-reading: the things she had said about him, for example, were the sort of things anyone might say about a king or emperor, though not normally to his face. He had feared she was a fake.

This evening the Emperor had for a time convinced himself that the half-wit possessed the ability to read faces. It wasn’t unknown. Ambassadors were often chosen for the skill. Faces behaved differently depending on whether their wearers spoke truth or lied. He himself had witnessed hundreds of desperate people who in their extremity had tried to convince him that lies were truth. He knew what to look for in his search for the truth behind death, had learned what the eye and muscle movements meant. Perhaps the half-wit had a natural gift.

However, this line of thinking didn’t explain how she could read a face perpetually hidden behind a golden mask. He could not be read. Torve, then? Even more obviously, such a talent could not account for her eerie prediction in the Garden of Angels. Could it have been coincidence, or had the gods found an unlikely mouthpiece?

No. The gods would not use one such as she to speak forth their truth. Therefore any predictive quality to her words must be coincidental.

A missing god? The thought made him nervous. He had been defying the gods for years, and would
continue to do so for as long as he could. Forever. They had never openly opposed him. Dead, or alive but weakened: it made no difference. Of course they were missing. He had banished them! They might as well not exist. They did not exist. He was the power now.

As a result, the cosmographers were missing something. A central purpose, a reason for continued existence. Perhaps the half-wit sensed the lack as a ‘hole’ in the world—or, more likely, it was this lack she had been instructed by Mahudia to emphasise. A political campaign, a quest for power. This he could understand.

In fact, this was how he would use her. She would become his political tool. With her insight he could strip the bark of lies and deceit away from the Alliances and expose their rotten wood. And, if she proved as talented as he hoped, she would be introduced to his quest, his lifelong battle to wrest immortality from the gods.

Ah, he was arguing in circles, contradicting himself at every turn. The only possible explanation was also the least palatable. The girl really could see things hidden from others.

Torve was talking to him.

‘She knew about the earth tremor,’ his pet said quietly, echoing his own thoughts. ‘I’d like to learn how she knew.’

Ah. So his pet wanted a pet of his own. For what purpose?

‘We will sleep now,’ he told Torve. ‘In the morning we will bring this girl with us when we speak to our brave explorer-captain. Maybe she can tell us how much of the man’s story is true and how much is lies for the sake of reward. As for the other…’ He glanced at the undeniably attractive face of the noblewoman. ‘We will see what she can teach us about death. She may be instructive.’

Emperor and servant left the questioning room and locked their prisoners in. Servant turned to Emperor and resumed the conversation as they climbed the stone steps towards their rooms. ‘I see your scepticism, ma great sor,’ he said. ‘Yet to me her thinking opens doors I never even knew existed. Please do not lightly dismiss her ramblings.’

‘You believe her tale of a missing god?’

‘Ma great sor, you allow me to speak my mind, to take liberties forbidden to humans. In this fashion I serve you like none other can.’

‘So you always preface remarks you believe I will not like. You need not be concerned. How can the noises of an animal offend its master?’

‘Yet may an owner take a whip to his donkey to stop it braying in the streets.’

‘You are no donkey. You may speak.’

‘Then, my lord, I would say the girl offers evidence attesting to the existence of the gods we declared extinct. It is up to us whether we find that evidence compelling. But we will not know unless we hear it all.’

‘You
like
the half-wit?’ As always, the Emperor could read his pet.

No embarrassment clouded Torve’s honest face; further proof that, for all his cleverness, he was not human—for what human would not be affronted to be associated with a half-wit? ‘Ma great sor, she excites my mind in ways I have never imagined.’

‘You cannot have her. Not in that way, not in any way. You are my one indulgence, Torve: though I am the Emperor of all Elamaq, were I to favour a half-wit as well as an Omeran all the Alliances would turn on me.’

Torve smiled. ‘My lord, I will enjoy the excitement her words offer me until such time as they cease. I will learn everything I can from her. When the time comes
I will help you search out her dying thoughts. And perhaps something she says might touch upon our deepest matter. Has she not already hinted as much?’

The Emperor of Elamaq acknowledged the point. He would forgo a chance to further his research into death if the half-wit’s ways with numbers proved effective. And if she could provide even a hint to aid his elusive quest, he would keep her alive, however much he despised her.

Torve rose before dawn. He tidied his pallet, donned a simple white robe and padded across the small room to his chamberpot. After relieving himself, he unrolled his carpet and performed his Defiance.

The Defiance was known by all Omerans. It had been instituted thousands of years ago by the first Omerans taken as slaves, and refined into an elaborate ritual by Capixaba of long-lost Queda. The Amaqi knew of the ritual, having seen Omerans practise it wherever they could find an open space, and assumed it was part of the Omeran obsession with fitness, albeit with cultural overtones. Torve fostered this belief, keeping the real meaning hidden. He saw it as a secret rebellion, a hidden heart of disobedience, a ritualised disorder. Torve practised Defiance every morning, and knew it to be the core of his identity.

The Omeran stood motionless in the centre of the room, feet shoulder-width apart, hands lightly clasped behind his back, in a state of readiness. Suddenly he dropped from this standing position onto his back, arms spread wide, his hands barely cushioning his fall, then with a flick of his shoulders raised his legs and torso into the air. In the same movement he sent his body spinning, rotating on his shoulder blades, first one way, then the other. He feinted a kick, as though at an imaginary opponent, but today his opponent was not very skilful so he did not follow through with his attack. Capixaba taught that attacks should be shown
but not completed if the outcome was certain: true defiance asserted superiority without enforcing it. In this way the Omerans had survived as slaves while all other races had been killed or absorbed by the rapacious Amaqi.