Beyond the Hanging Wall Read online

  Finally Garth dared look at the man before them. The king was in his early forties; a fit, well-built man who looked a warrior even in his court silks. He had a stern but just face, with dark grey eyes warm with humour, a straight nose above a thin mouth, and dark hair just beginning to silver with the burden of his office. He was, Garth decided, one of the handsomest men he had ever seen.

  Cavor smiled at Garth’s stare, and even Joseph’s mouth curled in amusement.

  “It is the boy’s first trip from Narbon,” he said quietly.

  “Then I shall take care that he shall have only pleasant memories of Ruen,” Cavor said, his smile widening slightly. “Now, come,” he waved at a doorway to one side of the Throne Room. “I would speak with you in private, Joseph.”

  Joseph hesitated and looked at Garth. “Sire…”

  “Yes, yes, he may come. Two sets of hands with the gift are better than one, Joseph. Now, this way.”

  Whispers and the lingering touch of incense followed them from the Throne Room.

  The king led them into a small chamber furnished only with several chairs, a table, and a chest or two. Even so, Garth realised that the furnishings were richer than anything the best houses of Narbon could boast.

  A servant waited inside, but Cavor waved him impatiently away. “You know the reason, Joseph?” he asked as the servant closed the door behind him.

  “The mark,” Joseph murmured, and handed his bag to Garth.

  “Yes.” The king’s face had lost its smile now, and Garth could see that pain underscored his eyes. He hunched off his brocade jacket, and his voice became suddenly harsh. “The cursed mark! It plagues at me both night and day. If I had known…” he hesitated. “If I had known, then I would have refused the damned throne!”

  The king’s demeanour had changed, and Garth busied himself undoing the bag and setting healing powders and unguents across the table where his father could easily reach them.

  Cavor glanced at him, then took a deep breath. “I apologise,” he said, his tone now mild again. “The pain…”

  “Pain can make a demon of the most saintly mind,” Joseph said soothingly, his hands turning the king’s silken shirt down over his shoulders so that his upper body was exposed. He was as muscled as the wrestlers that plied their sport in Narbon’s market square on sixth-day, Garth noted, as he handed his father a small pair of scissors to cut away the stained dressing about Cavor’s upper right arm.

  Both father and son stilled when they saw what lay beneath the dressings.

  Every king of Escator was marked with the symbol of the royal house—the legendary Manteceros. Its bright blue, thick-legged, stiff-maned form fluttered from every pennant atop the royal palace, and Garth had seen it any number of times emblazoned across the chests of the royal militia whenever a unit of them had passed through Narbon.

  And so it should have been emblazoned across Cavor’s right biceps.

  That the tattoo had originally been carved into the man’s skin was easy enough to see, but its clear blue lines were marked and blurred with festering sores. A sickening, sweet stench rose from the man’s flesh, and Cavor half-turned his head away, his jaw tightening.

  No wonder the incense in the Throne Room.

  Joseph shared a glance with Garth, then gently probed the flesh above and below the infection. “Sire, you should have called before now.”

  “Oberon Fisk is a fool. For months he has been assuring me that he was but a day or two away from a complete cure.”

  “I am sure he has done his best, sire.”

  Cavor winced as Joseph probed a little too deep. “Are you willing to reconsider my offer, Baxtor? A place at court?”

  “My home is in Narbon,” Joseph said, frowning at the sudden light of excitement in Garth’s eyes at the king’s offer. “But I will do what I can in what time I have. You know that Garth and I are on our way to the Veins.”

  The king shrugged. “I can have your duty transferred to court, Joseph.”

  Joseph hesitated. He did not like court, and thought his talents would be largely wasted here.

  And despite the fact that he hated the Veins, he knew that the prisoners needed him there as much, if not more, than Cavor. “I can set you on the road to healing in but a day or so, sire, and check you on my return home again in three weeks’ time. Now, be quiet while I examine your arm.”

  For almost twenty minutes Joseph worked on the king’s arm, mostly in silence, but sometimes murmuring to Garth. He probed with his fingers, and occasionally the entire surface of his hand, easing his way in from the edges of the festering area to its centre, Garth moving swiftly and efficiently with gauze to wipe away the exudate as Joseph’s fingers worked it out of Cavor’s flesh. Occasionally the king grunted in pain, but he kept his arm still and his face averted, letting Joseph do what he would.

  Eventually Joseph had cleaned most of the inflamed flesh. Now the lines of the tattoo showed more clearly, although the sores still exuded yellow fluid.

  “Now,” Joseph breathed, and he wrapped his hands about the king’s arm.

  For long minutes he stood there, his face tight in concentration, his hands flexing and then contracting about the king’s biceps. Garth knew that his father was letting healing force flow with all the strength he had, encouraging and persuading the king’s flesh to heal itself. As he watched, Cavor started to relax, and his face lost some of its harsh lines.

  “You are a wonder worker,” he eventually said.

  Joseph, his own face lined now, stood back a half step. “Sire, would you let Garth touch you? He has the gift as much if not more than I, and his raw ability will only help you. It will not harm.”

  The king nodded, and smiled at Garth. “Perhaps I can tempt your son, Joseph, if I cannot tempt you.”

  Garth smiled uncertainly as he wrapped his hands about the king’s arm. Already he could see how his father’s Touch had helped. The skin was paler now, and the tattoo showed clearly.

  “He still has several years of his apprenticeship left, sire,” Joseph said smoothly. “He will be free to go where he likes at its conclusion.”

  Garth let the small talk flow over his head. Now that he was concentrating on the Touch, he forgot that it was a king’s flesh he grasped between his hands. He frowned, trying to feel the flesh, trying to feel its need, trying to understand what it was that it needed to heal.

  His fingers and palms tingled, as they always did when he let the power flow through him.

  But something was…odd.

  “Do you feel it?” Joseph asked softly at his side.

  Garth was used to his father’s voice and questions while he was working, and it did not break his concentration.

  He nodded. “Yes. It feels…unusual.” He couldn’t explain it any more than that. Each wound, each person, felt differently under his hands, but there was always an underlying “sameness”. With this wound it was, simply, different. The “sameness” was almost non-existent.

  “It is the blue ink,” Joseph whispered. “Some say the original batch was made from the blood of the Manteceros itself. Whatever, the ink changes the flesh that it bonds with.”

  “Curses it, more like,” Cavor muttered to the side, but his voice was relaxed, almost sleepy. Damn it, he thought, these Baxtors are good. What can I do to win either one to my court?

  Garth worked for a few more minutes, sending Cavor’s flesh as much encouragement as he could, then he stood back, exhausted.

  Cavor sighed, then turned his head to look at his arm. He jumped in surprise. It looked almost healed.

  “I will rub this unguent into the tattoo, sire.” Joseph reached for a jar from the table. “And then bind your arm for you. Garth and I will examine you again in the morning—if it suits your majesty—before we leave for the Veins. Then we can see you again in some weeks’ time.”

  “I will rise with the dawn if that is your wish, Joseph,” Cavor said dryly. “Now, come and dine with me.” He grinned at Garth. “I’m s
ure one of the courtier’s daughters will be only too pleased to serve your fine son.”

  Garth blushed, and then silently cursed his stained cheeks as both men laughed.

  THREE

  THE VEINS

  The Veins lay three days’ ride north-east of Ruen, and Joseph and Garth left the next morning after they had attended Cavor. The king was patently grateful at the relief they had dealt him, and again pleaded with Joseph to reconsider his decision to remain in Narbon. But Joseph had been firm, if polite. Narbon was his home, and there he would stay.

  Once they had left the city well behind them and their horses were jogging along cheerfully enough in the morning sunshine, Garth turned to his father.

  “Where did you come from, father? I know you were not born in Narbon.”

  Joseph grinned a little ruefully to himself. These questions had been almost sixteen years coming. “From Ruen itself, lad.”

  Garth turned in the saddle for a last glimpse of the city. “Ruen? Why leave?”

  His father shrugged. “Time for a change, Garth. Why? Don’t you like Narbon?”

  Garth swivelled and surveyed the almost empty road before them. This north east road led to the small town of Myrna, and the Veins just beyond it. No-one travelled this road unless they had business at the Veins, and few wanted to have anything do with the place.

  “I was just curious, father.” He paused. “How did Cavor know of you?”

  “My father—and then myself for some years—treated the old king and his family.”

  “What?” Joseph couldn’t have surprised his son more if he had tried. “You knew Prince Maximilian!”

  As with most Escatorians, Garth was fascinated by the tragic tale of the lost prince.

  Joseph’s face softened “Yes. I knew him well. When he disappeared, life changed. The palace and city was so sad, so grey, that I decided that Nona and I would make a life elsewhere. We moved to Narbon, and there you were born some five months later.”

  But Garth did not want to hear of Narbon. He wiped his too long hair out of his eyes with an abrupt motion of his hand. Why hadn’t his father mentioned this beforehand? “Tell me of Maximilian!”

  “He was too young to be lost the way he was,” Joseph snapped, “and Escator did not deserve to lose his line. Cavor is a good and fair king, but the ancient line…”

  “I’m sorry,” Garth apologised, thinking he had annoyed his father with his over-enthusiastic questioning.

  “No, lad,” Joseph said softly, and leaned across the distance between them, patting his son briefly on the shoulder. “‘Tis I who should apologise. I so rarely speak of Maximilian because his loss still hurts. He was like a younger brother to me. With him gone, and with both the king and queen—nay, the entire city—in mourning, I decided to move south.”

  He shrugged, and laughed shortly. “Whatever curse hit the royal palace with Maximilian’s disappearance still lingers. Cavor remains childless, and no-one knows what will happen when he dies.”

  For a long time they rode in silence, the only sound the soft beat of their horses’ hooves as they thudded into the packed dirt of the roadway. On the west side of the road stretched grazing lands as far as the coast, but on the eastern side ranged the royal forests. It was there that Maximilian had been lost.

  My age, thought Garth, or only a year or two younger. What must it have been like, to wander lost and afraid through the forests until you died from exposure or starvation, or until a bear grasped you in his hungry claws? As hard for a prince as for a physician’s son, he thought.

  Ahead, a distant movement caught his eye. It was an empty cart, massive, drawn by a team of ten great horses. On its tray was bolted a huge iron cage. Even from a distance Garth could hear the faint clink of chains.

  “Father?”

  Joseph’s face was drawn. “A prison transport, Garth. No doubt returning from the Veins for its next load of prisoners from Ruen’s gaols.”

  Garth’s stomach turned over as the cart drew closer. A foul stench and a swarm of fat flies clung to it in a fertile cloud of pestilence. As it rumbled past, its driver shouting a cheerful greeting, Garth could see that the chains and irons littering its filthy floor were smeared with dried blood. For the first time he had an intimation of what awaited him down the shafts of the Veins.

  “How long do they have to work down there, father?”

  Joseph’s dark eyes were haunted. “For as long as it takes them to die, Garth. If a man is sentenced to the Veins, then it is a lifetime sentence.”

  “That seems…cruel.”

  “Gloam is Escator’s main export, Garth. Without it we’d be a poor nation indeed. But as no free man will work the Veins, so the condemned are sent there to labour out their lives.”

  He looked back to the road before them, which was once again empty. “Few survive longer than two or three years. They are never allowed to the surface. Not even in death. There are great abandoned shafts within the Veins that reach into the bowels of the earth itself. They tip the dead bodies down there.”

  Late in the afternoon of the third day they approached Myrna. The small town existed only to service the Veins, and it was a dank and cheerless place. The streets were almost deserted; only a few wives and children of the guards walked from shop to shop, and their posture was sloped and poor, as if the confines of the Veins somehow communicated itself to them through their husbands and fathers, or perhaps through the very atmosphere itself. This close to the coast the air was damp, and even spring seemed not to have made an impression on the cold air. The buildings, whether stone or wood, were uniformly dark and sooty, and it was not hard to see why. Black, sticky dust lay all about.

  The early cold twilight made the town even more depressing and unwelcoming.

  “Get used to it, Garth,” Joseph said as he watched his son try and brush away the thin layer of gloam dust that had accumulated on his cloak over the past few minutes. “You will eat, breathe and drink gloam dust for the next few weeks.”

  Already sickened, Garth could do nothing but nod.

  Joseph had spent three weeks a year for the past twenty years here, and he knew where to go. Fifteen minutes’ ride past the town, close to the Veins themselves, lay a small outcrop of buildings almost lost in the rapidly fading light. At the first of them Joseph pulled his horse to a halt and dismounted.

  “Stay here, Garth. I’m just going to report to the overseer of the Veins. We won’t go down until the morning. Tonight, at least, we’ll sleep well.”

  He disappeared into the building, and Garth took the time to take a deep breath—something he instantly regretted—and look about. To the west lay the Veins, and just beyond them stretched the long and lonely coastline of the Widowmaker Sea. Gloam was usually to be found along the sea coasts, and Garth had heard that in places the Veins stretched for half a league under the floor of the sea itself.

  But between the coast and this depressing group of buildings lay the Veins themselves. Great black mounds reared into the darkening sky, disappearing into a thick clinging mist that was rolling in from the glassy grey sea, and Garth had to squint to make out the grotesque and shadowed humps. Piles of gloam, probably, waiting to be shipped down the coast where it could be transported to Ruen and even Narbon. Garth had often seen the dust-encrusted gloam ships unload at his hometown’s wharves, although previously he had never thought very much about where they came from.

  Interspersed among the great mounds of gloam were the iron workings supporting the machinery that drove the carts and lifts of the Veins. As he watched, Garth could just discern great wheels and cogs churning among the fog, and hear chains sliding down, down, down. Something crashed, and he jumped, but it was only a cart tipping its load of gloam onto a growing pile of the rock before sliding back underneath the earth once more.

  Somewhere beneath his feet there were thousands of men slaving away; from dawn to dusk, Garth almost thought but then realised that they would have no idea when dawn and dusk was, and p
robably worked until they dropped, rested, then rose to exhaust themselves once more.

  And all about rose the rank smell of the gloam itself. Still damp from the mines, it gave off a sulphurous stench that Garth knew would take him days to get used to. Underlying the smell of the gloam was something else, and Garth had to concentrate to make it out.

  It was the stench of the cart that had passed them on the road to Ruen; the stench of old blood and sweat and fear and despair, and it made Garth sick to the stomach.

  Three weeks would be a lifetime for him under these conditions—yet how did men survive a year? Two? Three?

  Suddenly Garth could bear it no longer, and he turned and leaned down his horse’s side, choking and spluttering.

  Underneath, the ground shifted and rumbled; Garth could not only hear it, but feel it through his horse’s flesh. He sat up, wiping his mouth, puzzled. Far into the mounds of gloam he saw tiny figures running about in the fog, gesturing wildly. Wheels started to turn faster, their pace frantic; carts clanged and crashed as they were hauled to the surface at twice their previous rate.

  A door banged behind him and Garth jumped.

  It was his father, and an older and stouter man behind him. Both wore horrified faces.

  “By the gods!” the older man wailed. “‘Tis the wicked sea! She’s broached the hanging wall!” He turned and ran towards a group of men emerging from an abutting building.

  Joseph grabbed the bridle of Garth’s horse. “Courage, lad,” he said, his voice clearly strained. “But we’re going to be needed this minute. There are men dying below, and others in danger of it.”

  Behind them bells pealed madly into the thickening night.

  FOUR

  DESCENT INTO MADNESS

  “We can’t afford to lose many more prisoners,” the guard grunted as he buckled Garth’s helmet for him with sharp, economical movements. “We’re already behind our monthly quota of gloam production. There.”