by Glenda Larke
I said, ‘No matter what I said, you’d still doubt me. The truth remains the same. I’m not your enemy, Temellin. Not any more.’
The look he gave me then was poignant in its sadness. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t blame you for what you are. As a child I was taken to the Mirage; you were taken to Tyrans. Had it been the other way around, who is to say what might have been? And you’re right, of course; no matter what you said, I would have my doubts. So much of you is Tyranian. Worse still, you know too much. You have too much power and the potential for so much more. We cannot let you have your liberty, perhaps not ever. When I threw my sword at you, I acted in passion and it was an evil thing I did. I’m glad you had deliberately protected yourself against it, for cabochon knows, you are still my sister and I don’t want your death. But in truth, perhaps it would have been kinder for you to have died then, for I doubt you can ever be freed.’
My heart wobbled absurdly; there were tears in his eyes.
‘It wasn’t deliberate,’ I said, but I doubt he heard.
‘I’m sorry, Shirin. I’m sorrier than I can say—for everything. I wish—I wish things could have been different.’
‘They could be, if you believed me. Never mind. When the Stalwarts attack, perhaps you’ll think again.’ If it’s not too late for all of us. Too late for the Mirage.
‘If there’s anything you need, ask. I will see that you receive anything within reason to make your imprisonment more comfortable.’
‘Oh, go away, Temellin. Imprisonment cannot be anything but uncomfortable, even when the Mirage does its best to entertain me. Watch out for the fish,’ I added as he turned abruptly to leave me.
After he had gone I sat down shakily, all my emotions spilling free once I was alone.
Two nights later, Pinar came.
She came late, long after I had fallen asleep and she came silently, yet I was attuned to the malignancy of the emotional aura surrounding her. I woke the moment she stepped into the room. ‘What do you want, Pinar?’ I asked.
She did not answer. She raised her left hand and sent a narrow beam of light around the room from her cabochon. When it illuminated the candle on the desk under the window, she let it linger a moment and the candle flamed. By its light she began a circuit of the room, investigating the fish in their water, the bubbles and their pictures, the wall paintings, the bathroom. By the time she had finished, I had flung on a shawl and was sprawled casually in the room’s only chair.
She came to stand before me, sword sheathed, hands on her hips. ‘What is the meaning of all this?’ she asked.‘Why do the Mirage Makers do this for you?’
I shrugged. ‘Perhaps to compensate for my wrongful imprisonment?’
‘Temellin should have killed you. You are dangerous to us somehow—’
I made a gesture of weariness. ‘Pinar, don’t be moondaft. Soon you’ll be convincing yourself I really did try to kill you and not the other way around.’
‘What I did was justified. You are still a danger to us. And just as bad, having to imprison you here like this is devastating Temellin. He is tortured by guilt. Guilt! As if he has anything to be guilty about! I’ve tried to tell him we’d all be better off if you were dead, but he won’t listen.’
I raised an eyebrow, the mockery a cover to my own pain. ‘Poor Pinar, only a few weeks married, and already your husband ignores your suggestions?’
The tight expression on her face reminded me of Rathrox when he was planning revenge on someone who had slighted him.
The feeling remained, even when she’d gone. For the first time in my adult life, I had no control over my own destiny. I’d never felt so helpless and frustrated. So powerless. I doubt if anyone could have devised a more effective form of revenge than this one.
The next morning, as usual, Illuser-reftim brought my breakfast and left it on the desk. Normally he gave a swift look around to see what changes had been wrought during the night; this time he didn’t seem interested. There wasn’t anything new anyway, nor had anything been taken away. The fish were still swimming in their unconfined waters and occasionally one would poke its nose out into the air before withdrawing into the safety of its element. Reftim ignored them, ducked his head in my direction without looking at me, either, and left the room as quickly as he could.
Worried by his behaviour, I went to the desk and sat down. Fresh bread, a glass of juice, a pot of hot herbal tea, smoked fish, fresh fruit. My normal breakfast. I stared at it without appetite.
I jabbed my knife into the fish, more in a gesture of disgust at my situation than with any intent of eating it. And smelled something that didn’t seem quite right: a faint whiff of unpleasantness. It was vaguely familiar and, a moment later, I knew why: it reminded me of the Ravage.
I stared at the fish; it looked normal. I opened up my palm and passed my left hand over the meal without believing anything would come of such a gesture, yet as I looked, I saw a writhing black mass appear in the middle of the fish. In revulsion I flung the tray and all its contents away from me, smashing them from the desk onto the floor.
Some time later, Reftim returned to clear away the tray. His face glistened with sweat and his initial step into the room, even before his glance took in the empty desk and the food on the floor, was the palsied movement of an old man. Then he paled, the colour draining from his plump face so fast I thought he would faint. His guilt was obvious, but I knew he was not the initiator. I stood leaning against the door, waiting while he wordlessly cleaned up the mess. When he had finished and was on his way out with the tray, I did not move and he was forced to stop in front of me.
‘In all my years working for the Brotherhood, I never poisoned anyone,’ I said.
The colour returned to his face as rapidly as it had left it. ‘Magoria—’ he began, but his shame strangled any further words in the back of his throat.
‘Do you think the Mirager would approve?’
He did not reply.
I knew I had no hope of him reporting the attempt, not when he himself was involved. ‘Tell Pinar she will have to do better than that,’ I said and stood aside to let him pass.
Once he had gone, I crossed the room to the desk and hit the desktop with the flat of my right hand, all my repressed anger and frustration surfacing. My helplessness was suffocating me. I plunged away from the desk, forgot the uncontained water and splashed into it, sending fish flying about the room.
‘Vortexdamn you!’ I shouted, venting my rage on the Mirage Makers. ‘Do you think a poisoned baby is going to do you any good? Why don’t you find some way of getting me out of this? Or at least send me something useful, like a—a—a book!’
For a moment I continued to stand, hands clenched by my sides, and then calm prevailed.
I bent to pick up the fish flopping on the floor and stuffed them back into what was left of the water.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The morning after the poisoning attempt, I didn’t have to look far to see what changes had occurred during the night. The fish and all the other useless additions to the decor had gone. Instead, the room was lined from ceiling to floor with bookshelves, each shelf packed with vellum-bound volumes and scrolls.
I had never seen such a collection outside of the Public Library in Tyr; it was rare for even the most scholarly of individuals to have more than three or four treasured volumes. Copying a book cost money and not many people could afford them.
I rolled off my pallet and ran my eye along the roughly tooled spines of the closest shelf: all were written in Kardi. The first book was a compendium on Kardi freshwater fish, with illustrations. The next was a tome consisting mainly of dates and figures and, as far as I could make out, it detailed the heights and times of the coastal tides of Kardiastan for their entire five-year cycle. The next was a philosophical work, with a title I couldn’t understand, written by a past Mirager; something, I thought, about the morality of using supernatural powers on people who had none. The trouble was this: I was by no means at
ease with written Kardi. I’d had little opportunity to study it.
Well, I certainly had both the time and the opportunity now. Quietly I thanked the Mirage Makers for their extravagant answer to my request, and in the days following I began to go through the books, sorting them out into those of no conceivable interest, such as the tide timetable, and those I would like to read. I did wonder if I’d be allowed to keep the library, but if Reftim reported it, no one did anything about it. It didn’t take me long to realise the lack of interest was just as well. Had the Magor known of the treasure I now possessed, they would surely have separated me from it, for among the books were twenty-two volumes dealing with the power of the Magor.
Twenty-two volumes written by Magoroth, dating prior to the Tyranian invasion—some of them more than five hundred years prior—written as manuals for students, each dealing with different aspects of Magor art. Some of what was written there I already knew, but the rest took my breath away as I began to realise the possible extent of Magor powers. A fully trained Magoroth could call up a localised windstorm strong enough to flatten a shleth; he could conserve air in the body and walk under water or mimic death; he could shut off pain and not feel; he could produce light, abort a baby, kill a person or start a fire—all with his cabochon. He could hear a whisper spoken two hundred paces away or see acutely enough to note the twinkle in a windhover’s eye as it drifted the skies.
Abort a baby.
It was easy. I could abort someone else’s, or my own, simply by laying the cabochon on my lower abdomen and conjuring the right words in the right way.
I learned the words. I studied the texts to make sure different books outlined the same method, and they did. No latent maternal instinct arose to usurp my normal indifference to the thought of motherhood. No concern for an unborn child, scarcely started along the path of its life, came to overwhelm my sense of self-preservation. This was going to be so easy. I could live. I could stop being haunted by the knowledge I might die with the child ripped from my womb, sacrificed against my will in order to fulfil a bargain I’d had no say in.
I laid my hand in the correct place, and opened my mouth to say the words—and couldn’t do it.
I, who’d slid a knife into several people during my years as a compeer and then walked away without a qualm, couldn’t kill the life growing in me. It wasn’t the Mirage Makers who stopped me. It was the thought that this was Temellin’s child, and I couldn’t kill his son.
The next morning when I awoke, I thought about that. I thought of all Brand had said about the woman I had been. And after breakfast, I turned to the books, skimming through volume after volume, looking for references to the Ravage. Most authors who mentioned it subscribed to the theory that it was a disease. The Mirage Makers, the theory went, were living beings and as such were prone to infection, just as humans were. The Ravage was a disease or an infection like gangrene or a suppurating abscess. The creatures inside the Ravage were the animals that lived inside such infection. One writer even postulated that little creatures lived inside our infections too, but we couldn’t see them because they were small, just as no one would be able to see what was in the Ravage if it were scaled down in size. Needless to say, I didn’t give any credit to that idea.
In the past, the Magoroth had attempted to cure the sores in the same way as they might try to cure an abscess or gangrene, by cleaning them out and washing the wound left in the land. It hadn’t worked. None of the texts had mentioned the kind of hallucination I had suffered. No one seemed to have been attacked with such intense personal hatred as I had been.
I continued to explore the books, my hunt fuelled by a desperation only partially choked down to a manageable level. And finally I found a writer who had another theory. Perhaps, he wrote, the Ravage was caused by the evil of the creatures within, rather than the other way around. The creatures were evil, ergo, the effect they had was also evil. The author offered no evidence to back his idea, and I wasn’t sure I agreed with him, either.
I knew the things I’d seen in the Ravage weren’t true creatures. They weren’t like insects or worms. I’d felt them as much as seen them, and I’d never before felt anything that wasn’t human. The emotions of normal animals were as closed to me as they were to anyone else. I knew a growling dog or a spitting cat was angry when I saw and heard them, not because I sensed the rage. I puzzled over this, even wondering if the Ravage creatures were some form of deformed human.
In the end, I decided the hatred of the Ravage beasts for me, and the Mirage Makers’ need of a child, were linked. At a guess, the Mirage Makers believed a Magoroth child who became a Mirage Maker would make them strong enough to win the ongoing battle with the Ravage. The Ravage wanted me dead because they wanted to stop the Mirage Makers getting hold of my child.
I had to be careful, or I was going to die, killed by the Ravage. Or by the Magoroth, to settle Solad’s murderous bargain with the Mirage Makers. And I couldn’t expect the Mirage Makers to help me.
I sighed. My future was looking increasingly grim.
I couldn’t risk telling Temellin about the baby. If Pinar got to hear of it, and if she knew the nature of Solad’s bargain, she’d be lobbying the others to sacrifice me and my son. I knew how strongly the Magor felt about the covenant between themselves and the Mirage Makers. I knew they would want to uphold any new agreement Solad had made. Without it, there would eventually be no Mirage Makers.
And who better to supply the child than a Tyranian compeer they didn’t trust? Which left the question: would Temellin sanction my killing, even if I were unwilling? There had been a time when he wouldn’t have contemplated it. But now? He wouldn’t like it, but if he were under pressure from the others? Perhaps he now despised me enough to do it without a qualm. The difficult part would be to offer his own son…
As soon as he found out I was pregnant, he would have to order my death. He really didn’t have any choice. Without the Mirage Makers’ support, there would be no Magor—and I was expendable. One supposedly traitorous woman’s life in exchange for a whole way of life and the health of the land. It was a bargain.
If I had been truly Kardi, brought up a Magoria, believing in the greater good of my fellow Magoroth, perhaps I would have made the sacrifice gladly. But I wasn’t. Underneath I was still Ligea, and she was the kind of person who’d go to her death kicking and screaming every inch of the way…
The powerlessness of my existence gnawed at me. Imprisonment, I found, was something not taken too kindly by even the remnants of Ligea, Brotherhood Compeer. It wasn’t the feeling of confinement that tortured, although that was bad enough. It was the feeling I had no influence over anyone, and even less over my own future. I could die one night, unexpectedly, if the Ravage came, and I could do nothing about it. I wanted to talk to someone about it. But there was no one. I considered mentioning it to Reftim, the miasma of his antipathy followed him into the room with every visit. He would have seen me dead without hesitation, and his attitude was doubtless a reflection of every Magor in the Maze. I was so Goddessdamned lonely.
I turned back to my studies of Magor magic, as recounted in the books.
And found out how Temellin had escaped the might of Tyrans. An imprisoned Magoroth of skill could use his cabochon to burn through the iron of manacles, produce pain in people bathed in its light, or raise a temporary ward between his skin and the blows rained on him. The one thing Temellin couldn’t have done was make smoke appear out of nowhere. Anything like that would have been an illusion—a mirage—and mirages were banned to the Magor. Ciceron, the officer in charge of the execution, must have been right: something had been sprinkled on the wood of the execution pyre beforehand. Which meant, not surprisingly, that others had helped Temellin to escape.
Of more surprise to me was the discovery that the Magor could enhance their hearing if they wished. My true identity could have been discovered much earlier if Temellin or Pinar or one of the other Magor had listened in on my conversations
with Brand. But they hadn’t. Evidently, strong Magor distaste for invading another’s privacy prevented such an action, although I suspected that where Pinar was concerned, it was perhaps more likely she just hadn’t listened at the right times.
The days of my incarceration began to fly past. I hunched over the books, reading and rereading, then practising what I learned. Garis had already shown me much that was helpful; even so, I made mistakes. After three days of trying to light a candle from a distance, as Pinar had done, I finally produced a beam of light, set fire to my desk and crumbled part of the wall. My next attempt melted the candle to an unusable lump of wax and shattered the holder to powder. Fortunately, I improved with time. Even more luckily, the Mirage Makers repaired the damage before Reftim entered my room again.
I learned how to draw a ward of a simple kind around myself with my cabochon. It would not prevent a skilled Magor from entering that space, but it ensured I would always know when they did. It meant I could not be surprised by an intruder while I was asleep.
Nor could I be poisoned. It was comforting to have in writing what I had already assumed to be true: the passing of my cabochon over food or water would always betray a poison into displaying itself. However, no one tried poison again; all food brought to me was just as it should have been.
Unhappily, a ward drawn with swords, such as the one imprisoning me, could not be broken by the person who was the object of it. The door to my room remained unlocked. Anyone else could come and go through it, but if I tried, I walked into a barrier as solid as gorclak horn.
The first month of my imprisonment passed, then the second. The life within me continued to grow; I was aware of it even though it was still too early for it to make its presence felt with discernible movements. I made no move to tell Temellin. I didn’t want to give the Magoroth the excuse to kill me.