The Heart of the Mirage

by Glenda Larke

  ‘Stronger. I don’t suppose you’re going to say it, but I know I was near death then, and you brought me back. I am in your debt.’ Another pause. ‘Shall we bury her?’

  ‘Cabochon knows how I am ever going to tell Temellin this—’ Garis sounded sick and his voice faded. ‘I shall ride after him today. He must be told.’ I felt the ragged edges of his despair.

  ‘And the Stalwarts?’

  ‘I no longer believe in them, Brand. Or in her. Somehow she distorted what should have been true. She has power, but it is not like ours. It is tainted.’

  ‘No.’

  They were silent for a time. Two men agreeing to disagree.

  ‘And you, what will you do?’ Garis asked him.

  ‘Wait here for her. She will be back.’

  ‘You witless Altani ass! She doesn’t deserve anyone’s loyalty.’

  ‘Because she killed Pinar? Come on, Garis, what else could she have done? Pinar was the one who attacked her. I almost died because Ligea hesitated to kill her. That’s when Pinar did this to me.’

  More silence.

  Then Brand’s: ‘Let’s get her buried.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re strong enough?’

  ‘A five-year-old could probably flatten me with a cooked turnip, though I think I can help you carry a body. I don’t know what you did, Garis, but it was nothing short of miraculous. You don’t look so chirpy yourself, come to think of it.’

  ‘All power has its price. That five-year-old would only need half a turnip to knock me into next week…’

  I listened to them leave the room, and relief brought my tears back.

  A little later, I was aware of a change in the darkness around me, a thickening. My hands seemed empty. Concepts in my head: Completion. Appreciation. It is done. We thank you. A hand—a mirage of substance rather than vision?—took mine and clasped it. I felt a flood of gratitude, not from one but from a host of individuals, each giving me their blessing through that one hand. Then there seemed to be a movement in the darkness and I felt what might have been lips against my cheek, a kiss as light and as soft as the brush of a falling snowflake. An illusion, of course. Their attempt at a human gesture.

  I was once again standing in the room, blinking in sunlight.

  I was desperately weak. I had to clutch the wall to support myself as I made my way downstairs, reeling from step to step like a wood-possum drunk on fermented fruit. Then, just as I reached the outside door, I heard Brand say, ‘You’re going immediately?’

  I stopped, leaning against the wall. I could see the two of them through the gap of the half-open door. Garis was holding the bridle of a shleth and Brand, stripped to the waist, was seated on a boulder nearby. An ugly wound ploughed raw and fresh across his stomach. Behind him, a mound—not there the night before—was covered with flowers, living ones: the Mirage Makers paying homage to the mother of their newest companion.

  But it was Brand who held my attention. He was…changed. I reached out, trying to touch his mind, to gauge his emotions. As always, he shielded himself, yet still I felt he was different. He reminded me of someone. A moment later, I had it. He reminded me of a Magor child. He had the same faint hint of undeveloped Magorness as such children had before they learned control of their cabochons.

  And that was surely impossible.

  Garis nodded in answer to Brand’s question. ‘Are you sure you won’t come with me?’

  ‘I’m sure. Garis, I don’t know what you’re thinking, but whatever it is, you’re doing Ligea—Shirin—an injustice. Why don’t you wait until she returns? She can explain—’

  ‘There can be no explanation that would justify what she did. None.’ He knew I was there, of course. He must have sensed my presence. He wanted me to hear.

  ‘There is, you know. She told me—’

  ‘And you believe everything she says, don’t you? You’re even more gullible than I was! She hated Pinar because Pinar had Temellin, so she slaughtered her. She’s a dangerous killer. I don’t want to see her, Brand, because if I do I will try to fry her and probably end up dead myself. She murdered Pinar; she’d make crow bait out of me. I’d give a lot to know how she managed to fade out of that room, though,’ he added thoughtfully as his anger died. ‘She must have learned from those Magor books.’

  Garis shook his head in an expression of sorrow and went to fetch his saddlebags from where they lay on the ground nearby. He looked little more than a boy. His charm and his good looks, the curling lashes and the unusual tawny eyes—they all accentuated his youth rather than his maturity. He had performed a miracle that would have taxed a strong man, but for all that, he was vulnerable. Garis would carry the mental scars of this day just as long as Brand would carry the physical ones.

  ‘Garis—’ Brand said.

  Garis cut him short. ‘Don’t bother, Brand. You’re even worse than Temellin! The woman has made a fool of you. Of us all. At least Temellin knew enough to ward her. Vortex only knows how I am going to tell him what my foolishness has wrought here. How do you tell a man you were responsible for the death of his wife?’ He mounted his animal. ‘Full life, Brand.’

  ‘Full life, Garis.’ Brand touched the rough scarring at his waist. ‘I hope I can repay you one day.’

  ‘You can repay me by putting your blade through her.’ The youth wheeled his mount and rode back up the track.

  Brand watched him go.

  I stepped out into the sunlight. ‘Not a very happy farewell,’ I said. ‘He’s going to torment himself with his foolishness and his supposed cowardice all the way to Temellin.’

  He spun around in shock. He stared, taking in my exhaustion, the dirt and blood still streaking my clothing and hands. ‘Ligea…’ His voice was gentle with concern.

  ‘I thought I had killed you with my foolishness.’ I held out a hand to him. ‘Can you forgive me?’

  He took my hand, supporting me. And I felt again that faint whisper of undeveloped Magorness. He said, ‘It is always better to err on the side of compassion.’

  ‘Is it? Pity can be as big an error as hate. I have loved Temellin with a passion I’ll never find again, but you have been my closest friend; I do not know that I could have gone on living, knowing I had caused your death.’

  He was moved; I felt the trickle of his unconcealed emotion. ‘It was not you who brought me to the edge of death; it was Pinar. And Garis was able to save me.’

  ‘How? How in all the mists of Acheron did he do it?’

  He looked uncomfortable. ‘He didn’t have the power himself, so he cut out Pinar’s cabochon. It powdered and he put the powder in my wound. He told me just then he got the idea from some old tale of a Magor who committed suicide by removing his cabochon and giving it to save a friend he had mortally wounded in an argument.’ He shivered, not liking anything to do with powers he didn’t understand. ‘It seems to have done the trick.’ That explained his sudden attainment of a faint Magor’s aura, and I blessed Garis for his inspiration.

  ‘Garis says time will eliminate it from my system and I’ll be as good as new. But you—where have you been, Ligea? I was worried.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. Here, but not here. Knowing the love of the Mirage Makers, giving them the child…’

  He glanced around, every line of his body an eloquent expression of his unease. ‘Are they separate…minds?’ Poor Brand. How he hated this!

  I nodded. ‘I think so, although perhaps not in the sense we think of separation. There are many entities and each has a separate…personality, but there can be no dissension between them because they are all part of the same whole: the Mirage. Do I make sense?’

  ‘I think it is sick. They are each trapped, prisoners in one body—’

  ‘No, it is not like that. It is wonderful. They are a unity.’

  ‘And the child? You have delivered Temellin’s son to these—these creatures?’

  ‘Yes. He is part of them now. In this—’ I touched a flower on a bush near me. The
glitter from its petals stuck to my hand and I brushed it to the ground in a shower of silver ‘—or in that. He is already all around us. He has been received with love, such great love: something larger, more perfect than we can ever know, and it is our loss.’

  Brand said flatly, ‘He will go mad.’

  I shook my head. ‘No. He will never miss what he has not known. His mind will grow, his personality will develop just as it would have done had he been born in the normal way. He was part of his mother; now he is part of the Mirage. He will never know what it is to be a separate creature, so how can he miss it?’ I remembered the pain the Ravage gave to the Mirage and shivered. I had delivered Temellin’s son to be a part of that pain until such time as he was old enough to bring an end to the suffering. Goddess, what if he died in there? What if he couldn’t cure the illness of the Mirage anyway? What if he lived in constant pain for the rest of eternity?

  My breathing quickened, my heart thumped. Temellin’s son…it could have been mine. Don’t think about all that could go wrong. Don’t think.

  I continued, ‘I was surrounded by such love, such caring. Perhaps I should have spoken to Garis, told him to tell Temellin it went well.’

  ‘I didn’t know whether I should say anything about the baby, about why you did it, or not. In the end, I didn’t.’

  ‘He probably wouldn’t have believed you anyway. And Temellin will, I think, know what I have done once Garis says what he saw.’ I looked down at my hands. They were red with dried blood. ‘Pinar’s…’ I said and added, puzzled: ‘Ah, Goddess, Brand, why do I feel as though I killed part of myself? I hated her. I shouldn’t feel this way…’

  I staggered against him and he caught me, holding me with gentle tenderness. ‘You are ill.’

  ‘I don’t think so, but I must rest. A few days…I’ve overextended my use of power.’

  ‘Vortexdamn it, Ligea! I loathe this stuff. Look at you! You are as weak as an unweaned kitten.’

  ‘Are you still with me, Brand?’

  He sighed, then nodded. ‘So far.’ But even as he said the words I sensed an unease inside him: a strange reluctance which I couldn’t put a name to, but which fingered me with sorrow.

  It was three days before I was strong enough to ride on, before I had renewed enough of what my battle with Pinar had taken from me. I was still Magor-weak, but my body at least was sufficiently strong to continue the journey.

  That third morning, when I came down the stairs carrying my saddlebags, I knew something was wrong even before I stepped outside. I could smell it. The stink of the Ravage, that vicious hate for me, personally mine—it hung in the air like the stench of sewerage in the Snarls of Tyr on a hot day.

  Pinar’s grave had disappeared. In its place, another foul green-black sore. The Ravage had evidently searched for the source of its doom-bringer, traced her—and found her already dead. It had erupted in a baffled magma of rage, swallowed her remains and grave into a new seething inflammation in the skin of its host. Now I felt its delight in its consumption of dead flesh; I felt its rejoicing in the silent agony of the Mirage Makers.

  I could feel it casting around for me, the one who had brought its doom into the weave of the Mirage. It was a disease in search of a victim, an assassin in search of its supposed nemesis: in search of me. Damn them to Acheron’s deepest hell, I hadn’t solved my problem at all.

  Brand looked over my shoulder at the place where the grave had been.‘Ah,’ he said, in that thoughtful way of his. ‘I think perhaps you were right, Ligea. About the reason for the Mirage Makers wanting a Magor baby, I mean. I don’t think the Ravage liked what happened one little bit.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Brand and I sat on our shleths at the top of an escarpment and looked across at the Alps. Neither of us had ever seen anything like these mountains before. Ragged peaks scarified the sky, ploughs to snag and shred the wisps of clouds forming there. Mountainsides plunged down, sheer-walled, into shadowed canyons. Snow whipped away from crests in wind-blasted flurries. A landscape of extremes, ruggedly beautiful or grimly forbidding, scenery to be enjoyed—or a barrier to be conquered.

  ‘They crossed those?’ Brand asked. ‘On gorclaks? By all that’s holy, how was it possible?’

  ‘Vortex knows. Yet they are here.’ I looked down on the narrow alluvial plain below me. Unlike the Alps, the plains were clearly still part of the Mirage. The grass glittered with silver as if it had been sprinkled with mica; the wind played across it to make waves. Grass crests broke in splatters of silver only to swell, whole again, a moment later. I scarcely noticed. I was gazing at the legionnaire camp erected on the plains, next to the snow-fed river dividing Mirage from alpine foothills. I now had no problem using my enhanced sight to scan the army camp; I may have been thinner than before, but otherwise I’d recovered the strength drained from me several weeks earlier. ‘Holy Goddess,’ I whispered. ‘Favonius said a legion—three thousand men or more.’

  ‘There’s not three thousand there, surely.’

  ‘There’s not half that number. Vortex, but they are battered, Brand. Some are barely hobbling. Frostbite perhaps? They seem to have most of their gorclaks, though. But where are the camp followers? The support people? These are all soldiers!’ I could see no proper kitchen tents set up, no blacksmith’s travelling forge, no store, no slaves. I shook my head. ‘They have had a hard time, and yet they are here.’

  ‘Can you see Favonius?’ Brand could not make out any detail at all, but he no longer questioned my ability to do so.

  ‘Not from this distance. Let’s ride down.’

  He was surprised. ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Just like that.’ I set my shleth at the slope.

  ‘Ocrastes’ balls, are you sure, Ligea?’

  I grinned at him. I was beginning to feel like my old self again.

  There were guards, of course. We were challenged long before we reached the camp, but I spoke to them and one deferentially escorted us to the verandahed tent of the commanding officer, Legate Kilmar. There we dismounted and waited while Kilmar was informed of our arrival. A moment later, we were ushered inside.

  The interior had none of the usual luxury of an officer’s tent. There was no furniture, just a few cushions and saddle pelts on the floor. The Legate lounged back on some of these, a goblet in one hand and the remains of a meal spread out on a pelt in front of him. He was a man of fifty, thick and muscular and tough-skinned, his face rough and scarred by a lifetime of campaigns. One of his ankles was bandaged; blood seeped through.

  Behind him and to one side stood Favonius, his blue eyes startled, the slant of his nose accentuated by the increased leanness of his face. His tunic was ragged, his cuirass and greaves scored, but apart from that he appeared unhurt. Military protocol permitted him nothing more than a suggestion of a smile in my direction, but his amazement, his tender regard, the quick climb of his desire were all as obvious to me as if he’d shouted them to the world. I nodded slightly, then ignored him, turning all my attention to the Legate.

  ‘Legate Kilmar? I am Legata Ligea Gayed, Compeer of the Brotherhood.’ I did not introduce Brand; to the Legate, a free Altani could never have been anything more than a minor servant. Brand remained by the entrance with his hands clasped behind his back and his face expressionless. Favonius stared at his bare neck and gave a wondering frown.

  ‘Greetings, Legata,’ the Legate said. ‘It is indeed an honour to receive you. You will please forgive my reluctance to rise. As you can see, I had a slight mishap—a rockfall.’ He dismissed the injury with a wave. ‘Please be seated. Can I offer you a meal?’ ‘I have not long eaten,’ I said politely. ‘A drink would not go amiss, however.’

  The Legate nodded to Favonius, who poured some wine from a skin. It had been well watered down and splashed pinkly into a dented goblet. Legionnaires were not known for the moderation of their drinking habits; I could only assume they were low on supplies. ‘You know the Tribune, I believe?’ he asked.


  ‘I’ve had the pleasure. Well met, Tribune Favonius.’

  ‘Well met indeed, Legata. It seems you found a way to cross the Shiver Barrens after all?’

  ‘And you found a way to cross the Alps. Not without cost, though, I think.’

  The Legate grimaced. ‘There was an avalanche. Those at the back of the column were cut off. More than two thousand men are behind us somewhere, together with the camp followers, most of our supplies and our support slaves. It will take them weeks to clear the route. And that will mean they will have to send back for more supplies before they can join us.’ He looked at his foot ruefully. ‘There have also been injuries. And deaths. But even a weakened Stalwart legion is better than a legion of ordinary men. We have our gorclaks and our weapons; that’s all we need. We can pillage on our way across the Mirage.’

  ‘Perhaps. But you have a bare quarter of a legion, I think. Will you allow me to look at your injury, Legate? I have some experience with doctoring.’

  ‘I would be grateful.’ His face tautened, belying his words. He knew any unwrapping of his bandages would hurt him. ‘Neither of our physicians made it this far,’ he added.

  ‘Get some clean bandages from our pack, Brand,’ I said and knelt beside the Legate. I began to unwind the bloodied cloth.

  ‘What brought you here, Legata?’ Kilmar asked, gripping his leg above the knee in a valiant effort not to show his pain.

  ‘A warning. You must not proceed. I have come to tell you there is no question of victory here: you must turn back.’

  The Legate gave a harsh laugh. ‘Legata, I’m certain I couldn’t persuade my men to cross the Alps again! Besides, the Stalwarts do not turn back, especially when they have not yet seen the enemy.’

  ‘You will see them, and soon. This is a war you cannot win. Legate, the Kardi people of the Mirage make a practice of sorcery. Proceed and the death that awaits you, all of you, is the death of nightmares.’