Beyond the Wall of Time

Book 3: The Broken Man

by Russell Kirkpatrick

Genres: Action & Adventure; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

The wall of time has fallen and the Gods are free to ravage the world. The few that know of their escape into mortal lands are under the control of the malevolent Husk. Stella, a queen in hiding, makes a deal with the Undying Man even though she knows his agenda comes first. Noetos seeks revenge for the deaths of his loved ones, not yet realizing the enemy is closer than even he can imagine. And the unconventional cosmographer, Lenares, is the only one with the power to prevent the Gods from destroying the world -- if only the others would believe her. The queen, the fisherman, and the cosmographer must travel to Andratan to confront Husk. But whether they can break free of his hold on them, and defeat the Gods, is another matter entirely.

Release date: November 12, 2009

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 721

Sample

HUSK STRUGGLES TO REMEMBER what it is like to think with clarity. Seven decades of unrelenting pain have created a permanent cloud in his mind, as though
looking through smeared glass. He constantly has to fight off a desire to go to sleep and never wake up, has to keep resisting
the creeping lassitude that threatens to engulf him. Cannot remember what it used to be like living as a normal human being,
agony not the most important part of his life. Even now, despite his link to the unlimited power from the void beyond the
world, and the freedom from pain it brings, he finds it difficult to focus on the important things happening in a remote valley
a few hundred leagues away.


Part of Husk’s trouble is he does not know the location of the House of the Gods. Normally this would not matter. His magical
contact with his three spikes does not depend on his knowing where they are. But designing a strategy does. The place on which
his attention is focused, the place where his hosts now contend with the gods, is to be found at perhaps a half-dozen locations
in the world at once, and yet fully in none of them: a paradox of the kind of which the gods are distressingly fond. He has
spent a deal of time trying, in mounting desperation, to comprehend how the Godhouse works, but he is still no nearer a useful
understanding.


So he preoccupies himself with questions. Will the travellers—his spikes and his enemies—emerge into Patina Padouk, the land
from which they entered this version of the House of the Gods? Or, as happened in Nomansland, will they appear somewhere else?
Husk cannot lay his plans until he knows. Trouble is, with all the fog in his head he fears he may have missed some essential
clue.


Husk hates not knowing things.

He needs to know where everyone is because he must decide whether to confront his enemies here, in the Undying Man’s fortress
of Andratan, or there, wherever there might be. He wishes to destroy his enemies in a way that pays them back for his years of suffering, while, of course, risking
himself as little as possible. Best of all would be a public triumph here at Andratan. Himself in the Tower of Farsight, at
the head of a vast crowd of people, all watching the Destroyer and his cursed consort writhing out their agony in ways that
reduce the memories of his own pain to pleasant inconsequentiality. It is no longer enough for him merely to remain alive.
Not even enough to be immortal, the rich prize now almost in his grasp. To truly live he must destroy them both. No; more
accurately, they must be destroyed again and again. He must be able to return whenever the mood takes him to watch them suffer.
A public gallery in which the continual destruction of Stella and Kannwar is the main installation, that is what he needs.


He wonders just how many centuries it will take to cancel out his own hurt. If his hurting will ever end.

Events in the House of the Gods are seriously limiting his supply of power from beyond the wall around the world. The three
gods are all drawing deeply from the hole in the world—that blessed opening first made when the Son and Daughter drove their
Father out—and their combined power is squeezing his tiny, unnoticed conduit until it is almost shut off. Nevertheless, his
small link continues to restore him. Husk has grown new limbs to replace those seared away by the Destroyer’s magic, but their
fragility means he cannot yet walk on them. He now breathes air unmixed with his own blood. But his great plans, his plans
for his transformation to godhood, the elimination of all who might possibly hurt him and the subjugation of everyone else,
await a respite in the hostilities between the gods.


He is patient. He can wait.

In the meantime, Lenares is the great danger. She seeks to close the hole in the world, despite having taken advantage of
it. Ironic, this. She had managed to ensnare the Daughter by tying something—Husk is not exactly sure what it is she tied—to
someone beyond the wall. Husk does not know who, though Lenares herself is convinced it is her dead foster mother. Her use
of mathematics was flawed, but it worked nonetheless. Lenares has tapped into her own source of power, drawing on it unwittingly
to help her to capture the Daughter for a time; and, worryingly, may draw on it again, perhaps accidentally interfering with
his plans. It is unlikely she will learn how to harness her power, especially given the logical, mathematical cast to her
mind and its associated limits. However unlikely, Husk cannot risk her interference. He must find some way to eliminate her.
No elaborate revenge, no desire to inflict pain; he just wants an end to her.


Another question nags at him. Has he any further need for his spikes? Arathé, Conal and Duon have served him well but, unless
his new-found power is totally severed, he no longer needs them. In fact, he continues to expend energy to keep hold of them
that he could better use to strengthen himself. And it is not as though his spikes are of much use to him. Conal is blinded
in one eye and in all his opinions, and his recent possession by the Father has rendered him untrust-worthy. Imagine if the
Father seized the lad’s mind while Husk was in possession of it! Arathé is becoming increasingly wary of the voice in her
head, and is devising ever-cleverer ways of keeping him out. And Duon is trying to deceive him. A futile attempt—Husk can
read the outer layers of the minds of those he has spiked—but it makes the Amaqi captain, of whom he had high hopes, less
dependable.


Husk had supposed the huanu stone would aid him in defeating the Destroyer, but now wonders even at this. The stone is now
as much a risk to himself as it is to the Destroyer. It could undo the magic keeping him alive, could sever the supply of
power from beyond the wall. And it is now beyond his reach, sewn into the lining of a pack left behind on the Conch, which is probably a good thing. Too dangerous to allow his enemies access to something that could do him so much damage.


The same logic can be applied to the immortal blood he had planned to drain from Stella. Not yet in his possession, and just
as likely could be used to promote someone else to the ranks of the deathless. With his own conduit to the raw power of the
void, Husk need not risk the problematic—and painful—immortality offered by the blood. Maybe he needs to keep the blood and
the stone away from Andratan. The only difficulty with this line of thought is his inability to prevent them being brought
north regardless. With bravery and intelligence he has set all this in motion, and now it appears he is powerless to stop
it.


Husk frowns with newly restored facial muscles. Now there are two ways to become immortal his options have increased, so he
ought not to be feeling the anxiety as strongly as he does. Thump, thump, thump goes his heart. His blood hisses through his
veins and threatens to erupt from the tips of his fingers. The bubble and fizz of fearful thoughts must be resisted or they
will—unman him. But it is so hard, despite the fact he is familiar with despair. Desperation has shaped him over the foggy
decades of pain, yet despair is so much sharper now he has real hope.


But he will resist the temptation to give up, to crawl away to some dark corner of the Destroyer’s dungeon and die. He reminds
himself that, due to his new power, he is Husk no longer. He will put his self-imposed name aside and take his old name back.
Deorc of Jasweyah. No; he reconsiders: Deorc the Great. Far more suitable.


Husk laughs at himself, at the caricature of evil he seems about to become. All he needs is the cackle and he’d be the legendary
Jasweyan Witch-Hag reborn. No matter: whatever his name, the common people will make fireside tales about him, and he will
be around to hear them. He’ll make them forget about their folk villains, the Witch-Hag and the Undying Man both. The commoners
will have no need to fear anything but him. And, oh, he will work hard to ensure they fear him.


He licks his lips, tasting the victory about to be his; and, though he knows it to be a cliché, cannot resist the laughter
bubbling up from within him. The thick walls of Andratan ring with the sound, and the denizens of the fortress pause in sudden
fright.


Their fear is balm to Husk’s scarred soul.

THERE IS A SILENCE FAR deeper than the mere absence of sound. It can settle on a scene despite, say, the thin wail of a woman weeping. Even the
laboured breathing of someone in severe pain does little to disturb such stillness. This silence is a calm, black pool of
quiet. It is the sound of shock.


Noetos remembered all too well what such silence sounded like. He had experienced it in the Summer Palace, in the aftermath
of the slaughter of the Neherian gentry. It was a stunned disbelief at what had happened coupled with an expectation that
he would soon wake up to find nothing of the sort had occurred. But, of course, it had.


No waking from this nightmare.

He watched from a distance as his travelling companions stared at each other, eyes wide, saying nothing. When finally they
began to move, it was in slow motion, hands fluttering with the need to do something but not knowing what. The fisherman had
been nothing but an observer of the events leading to a man’s castration and the violent death of the one who had wielded
the knife, but he could help now with restoring calm. Guidance, order and leadership were what were needed. He made his way
towards the tight knot of people, ready to assist.


“He is gone.” The one-eyed priest’s voice was a ripple of sound breaking the deep silence as though a pebble had been dropped
in a pool.


“Yes,” said Duon, looking up, his hand on Dryman’s unmoving chest. “He’s gone, all praise to the gods.” This was followed
by a grimace, no doubt as he realised anew just whom he was praising.


Noetos strode across the sandy floor of the enclosure, and his two children followed him. Three piles made up of enormous
slabs of rock were the only interruption to the smooth floor, apart from the figures gathered around the dead, the injured
and the maimed. And a smaller rock soaked in blood.


The thought came to him that of the three groups drawn together in the contention of the gods, his had fared the worst. Gawl
and Dagla were dead. Of the miners, only Tumar and Seren remained. The Fossan fishermen Sautea and Mustar were still with
him, but they had come north because of Arathé, not him, and might well leave at any moment. Omiy the alchemist had betrayed
him, Bregor had left him and Noetos had not succeeded in getting Cylene to join him. True, the Amaqi had just been reduced
from four to three with the death of Dryman, but that had been their only loss. If you don’t count the loss of thirty thousand soldiers, he reminded himself. Even I haven’t failed that spectacularly.

The Falthans had done best. All eight remained alive, though Stella had apparently lost an arm—she used some form of magic
to disguise this, but it was only intermittently effective—and the priest an eye. They haven’t had whirlwinds and Neherians to cope with. He frowned. But now we all have to deal with angry gods and mysterious voices in people’s heads, as well as blood and death delivered
by human hands.

“I didn’t mean the mercenary,” Conal snapped. “The Most High, the Father, he is gone. I have my own voice back again. And
I won’t be using it to praise any gods, that’s for certain.”


“What is it like, priest?” Heredrew asked him, his voice deceptively gentle. “What does it feel like being forced to do the
bidding of the Most High? Do I detect anger, friend? Unhappiness at being made the mouthpiece of a god?”


Conal scowled and turned away. No doubt the continuation of some irrelevant debate, Noetos thought. Some people would argue
at a graveside. More important than any argument were the three figures at the centre of the gathering: the dead mercenary,
who had been some sort of avatar for one of the gods; the maimed servant, who lay on his back, his breath rasping; and the
grieving cosmographer.


It was this last person Noetos made towards. Lenares always made him uncomfortable with her uncanny way of seeing things,
her facility with numbers, and her lack of the simple social graces that kept people from hurting each other unintentionally.
And in that last, hypocrite, how is she different from you? She was unpredictable, and Noetos was not the only one who found her difficult, he was sure. He was able to overcome his
reluctance and approach her not because of some kindness of heart, but because of his regard for Cylene, her twin. The sister
Lenares hadn’t yet met.


“Are you all right, Lenares?” he asked her.

She looked up at him from where she knelt. “Am I all right?”

Those wide eyes, their shape so familiar to him—no, not hers, her sister’s—blinked slowly once, twice, thrice. Noetos wondered
whether he ought to repeat the question. Had it not been simple enough?


“Of course she’s not all right, Father,” Anomer said from beside him, then turned to the girl. “Here, come with us, Lenares.
You need food and drink. We’ll talk of what we should do about all this after you’ve eaten.”


He stretched down an arm. Hesitantly she took it, although her white face and hurt eyes remained totally focused on Torve.

“I don’t want to leave him,” she said.

“Let those skilled in healing tend him. You should let us tend you.”

Clearly reluctant, Lenares allowed herself to be led away a short distance from Torve, but kept her head turned so the Omeran
would not be out of her sight for a moment. Despite her oft-expressed dislike of being touched, she made no motion to prevent
Anomer rearranging her dishevelled clothing. She seemed not to notice it.


That’s the other reason she unnerves me, Noetos thought. He had never seen anyone able to devote themselves so completely to one thing at the expense of everything
else.


The Omeran servant was in poor condition. His wound had been cauterised but, however well the procedure had been done, the
red mess between his legs was clearly giving him intense pain. Noetos was not certain what had happened to precipitate this,
but it seemed the mercenary had discovered Torve and Lenares engaged in an intimate act—the intimate act, apparently—and had decided to castrate the fellow.


“Who was this Dryman, that he could do this to you?” Noetos asked.

Torve offered no reply.

Captain Duon lowered himself to his haunches with a groan. “Aye, that’s the question. I may have some answers for you. It
is time to lay everything out for all to hear, I think. Then we can judge what must be done.”


“Here?” Arathé asked, her hands flashing. “Are we safe here? Won’t the gods hear our conversation?”

“Who knows?” the southerner replied. “I doubt we’re safe anywhere. But I think we may have a short time to ourselves before
the gods return to resume their meddling. The Father has achieved his purpose, and the Son and Daughter are disembodied for
now. We must take this time to decide what we are to do next, and for that you need to hear what I have to say.”


Stella raised her head from bending over another prone figure. “I do not mean to offend,” she said, “but whatever answers
you provide may be somewhat suspect. Before we hear from you, we need to discuss the matter of the voice in your head. I am
wary of our plans being overheard.”


“But I can assure you—”

Stella shut him up with a wave of her left arm. “Later. First we attend to the injured. There is a man over here bleeding
from the head. His brother does not seem capable of dealing with him.”


“You know who those two are, don’t you?” her guardsman growled. “Two of the Umerta boys. Lenares’ brothers. The southerners
apparently hired them as porters.”


There was the briefest quiver in the woman’s arm, the smallest suggestion that she wanted to withdraw, but she said, “And
now they are hurt. We must care for them nonetheless.”


“Like they cared for you?” Noetos said, pointing at her missing forearm and hand.

“That… wasn’t the Umertas.”

Beside her, the guardsman stared at his feet.

“More to talk about,” said Noetos. “Or perhaps more secrets. Well, if we are to cleanse and bind these wounds, we need water
and cloth.”


“In hand,” the guardsman said. “Kilfor and his father have gone back to one of the other rooms in this place. There was a
pool of cold water there. There’s plenty of cloth in our packs, spare clothes and the like. We have all we need.”


So there was nothing for Noetos to do but sit and wait. Others attended those who needed help, others made decisions, others
did the things necessary for human survival and comfort. He sat on the sand and ate food handed to him, then lay down and
tried to rest, while all around him people busied themselves.


He found the experience of not being needed profoundly unsettling.

An indeterminate time later—it seemed like an hour, but time felt greasy here and it could have been a few minutes or a day
or more—Stella asked Duon to explain the voice in his head. Noetos pricked up his ears at this. He’d been expecting, and dreading,
this confrontation and the likely outcome.


“We’ll speak Bhrudwan,” Stella said as the others trooped over to where she sat. “We’ve all picked up enough of it over these
last few months to understand each other.”


Noetos acknowledged the point as he raised himself to his elbows, then his feet, and followed the others. Most of the Falthans
spoke the Bhrudwan common tongue with something approaching fluency, and even the southerners seemed able to understand it,
though occasionally they struggled to make themselves understood. Some common language root, no doubt, made it easier to learn.
More evidence to support the story of the three gods originating from the same place, he supposed.


Arathé sat to one side of Duon, Conal to the other. Torve lay quietly nearby, only the bunching of his facial muscles betraying
his pain. The remainder of the travellers gathered in a group facing the three of them. As though they are to be judged, Noetos thought.


Perhaps Duon felt that too. “There’s no conspiracy here,” he said. “We kept nothing from you. It’s taken us a long time to
realise what is going on in our heads, and even longer to work out that each of us shared the phenomenon with two others.”


“So what is it?” the old scholar Phemanderac asked in his reedy voice. “Whose voice speaks in your mind?”

Duon sighed and scratched at his unshaven chin, making a rasping sound. “More than two years ago now all three of us were
in the Undying Man’s fortress of Andratan at the same time. I was visiting as an emissary of the Amaqi Emperor, while Arathé
had gone there to learn magic. Conal—”


“I’ll tell it myself,” the priest snapped. “I was there as an emissary of sorts, part of a delegation from the Koinobia, the
religious movement based in Instruere that some know as the Halites.”


“A spy,” Phemanderac said.

Conal denied it, but no one was fooled. With a voice cloaked in anger at all the injustices visited upon him, the priest described
his heroism and courage in playing his part to undermine the Undying Man. The gist of it, at least as it seemed to Noetos,
was that the Father—referred to as the Most High—had used the priest as a mouthpiece. Then, some time after that, months perhaps,
he began to have thoughts that were not his own.


“Thoughts about women?” Sauxa asked neutrally. “Perfectly natural, son. We all have them.” His son spluttered a laugh.

“Not about women,” Conal said, though he coloured. “I began to harbour rebellious thoughts about the Koinobia and my master,
the Archpriest.”


“Also perfectly natural,” muttered Stella. Noetos doubted the priest heard the woman’s words.

“The point is,” Duon said, “all three of us spent time in Andratan concurrently, and all three of us have since experienced
remarkably similar symptoms. A cynical voice in our heads, goading us to do things to its advantage. A supply of superhuman
strength, though not under our control. I experienced it in the fisherman’s company.” He nodded to Noetos, who sensed what
was coming. “We wiped out more than a hundred enemies between us, many of them heavily armed.”


The words were out before Noetos could bend the conversation away from the subject. He’d rather it was forgotten; he was trying
to forget it himself.


Arathé waved her hands and spoke in her distorted voice. “I survived a knife in the back,” she told them while Anomer translated.
“The voice exercised magic to keep me alive and heal me quickly.”


She then had to explain the context of her statement to those not familiar with the story of what had happened to her first
in Andratan and then months later in Fossa. Questions followed, one or two of them vehemently expressed, particularly from
Heredrew the Falthan. Noetos could think of no reason why the man should be so particularly concerned.


Robal then described how Conal had rescued Stella from the rogue Lord of Fear. “Never seen such strength and speed,” the guardsman
told them. “And afterwards the priest seemed unaware of what he had done.”


More questions followed, another story painstakingly told, more time wasted. This was followed by an account of Conal’s attempt
to kill Stella and Heredrew in some Falthan city. This story actually begged a few questions, but Noetos forbore. He was becoming
increasingly uneasy about the amount of time they were spending in the House of the Gods. Though he knew it was irrational,
though he acknowledged the gods would be able to find them anywhere they went, he still felt vulnerable here. And all the
while a dead body lay on the sand a short distance away.


“So,” he summarised, before anyone else could launch off into yet another tale, “you all hear the voice of someone you do
not know. He’s a magician, able to lend you powers you don’t normally have. And, by all accounts, he does not necessarily
have our best interests at heart.”


Three nods.

“You think someone in Andratan put something in your heads.”

Again, three nods.

“Then there’s only one solution,” he said, the words forming before he could question them. Pre-empting the obvious conclusion.
“You three need to leave the rest of us. It is too dangerous for you to remain.”


There was a general indrawing of breath.

“Father!” his son cried out. “How can you even suggest such a thing?”

Noetos found himself asking the same question. His own daughter, whom he’d thought lost! Yet he had a responsibility to everyone
here.


“Having a presence amongst us capable of slaying anyone without a moment’s warning is simply intolerable,” he said.

“There are many among us with such power,” growled Heredrew from somewhere behind him, in a voice that made the hairs on the
back of his neck stand up.


“You have that power yourself!” Duon shouted at the fisherman. “Must I tell everyone here all the details of what happened
in the Summer Palace at Raceme? You drew power from a voice in your head!”


This was not where he wanted the conversation to go. “That magic came from the sacrifice of my daughter, who acted as a conduit
for hundreds of refugees from the city,” he said angrily. “A perfectly legitimate exercise of her magical powers. Nothing
at all like yours.”


He decided not to mention that the voice in her head might well be able to reach him through her. Might even have assisted
him in the Summer Palace. If the others couldn’t figure that out, he’d not help them.


“You’d drive your own daughter away?” This from Stella, in the gentlest of voices.

“I do not see it as driving anyone away,” Noetos replied wearily, aware—and secretly grateful—that he was going to lose this
argument. “Rather, we are simply depriving our enemy of information. How can we help our three friends if our every plan is
overheard by the voice in their heads?”


“Spoken like a soldier,” said Stella. “Perhaps I’d feel more comfortable were you to speak like a father.” She stared at him
with something akin to loathing on her face.


Why do people always follow sentiment rather than common sense? He gave it one more try. “As her father, I want Arathé to have the best chance of getting free of this curse that has her
in its grip. If that means sending her away—in the company of a priest and a very capable soldier, I remind you—so we can
work out in secret how to save her, then that is what, as a father, I ought to do. If I give in to sentiment and keep her
here beside me, we all might lose our lives.”


Incredibly, as he scanned his fellow travellers, he found himself facing a dozen hardened expressions. They don’t understand. None of them, it seemed, could take the tough decisions. His son’s attitude he could comprehend, but the others were leaders.
This ought to be the sort of equation they dealt with on a daily basis. He wondered at the scrupulousness that forced him
to argue for what was right and against what he wanted. Was it some failure in him; or was their rejection of his argument
their failing?


They hate me, he realised. They think me unfeeling. They will never follow me.

“You should not send them away,” said Lenares. “If you send them away they will be hurt. The hole in the world will swallow
them up. We need to protect them.”


Murmurs of agreement rippled across the group.

“Very well,” Noetos said, trying to contain his anger and hide his relief. “But this decision should be reviewed often. And
those three”—his finger punched the air in their direction—“must report to us every word this voice speaks in their minds.
No more secrets.”


Without waiting for a reply, he rose from his position at the side of the gathering and strode rapidly away across the sand,
scuffing at the dirt. Walking off his frustration and confusion, just as he had done in Fossa after every argument with Opuntia.
Just as unsuccessfully.


He returned a few minutes later—it felt like a few minutes later—to find a fire lit and people eating food that would surely
have taken far longer than a few minutes to prepare. Time itself was playing tricks here; but then it was the House of the
Gods, in which the rooms moved about and the entrances could seemingly be anywhere. He squatted down near the fire.


“Now, to the question you asked earlier,” Captain Duon said, drawing his gaze across those gathered around the fire and nodding
to Noetos. Duon’s features were pinched, his lips pursed, as though about to deliver unwelcome news. “Who was Dryman?”


“He was a liar,” Lenares said. “An evil and cruel man. Look what he did to my Torve!”

Duon was clearly familiar with interruptions from the young cosmographer. “Yes, he was a liar, but even more, he was a deceiver.
Lenares, you have a great gift, but you did not penetrate Dryman’s disguise.” His voice was gentle. “That is because Dryman
had help from a god. You saw how he died. The Father, through Heredrew and Stella, confronted Dryman and spoke to him as the
Son. The Father tricked his Son and killed the body he inhabited, Dryman’s body, but the god escaped before Dryman died and
so continues to live.”


“The Father called him Keppia,” Lenares said. “Keppia spoke to the Daughter through Dryman’s lips, and she called him her
brother. Yes, he was