"Oh please," he said faintly, "not the Lucian proverbs."
I hesitated. "Are you all right? This is the Pain, isn't it?"
"It is, but don't bother. I'm afraid we've moved beyond that form of helpfulness. Don't bore us both by trying." He even managed to laugh, a ghastly little cackle with no mirth in it. I was not fooled. Any thoughts of Mallinna fled my mind—even my mother and the rest were pushed into the background. As always, the Pain took precedence. I sat down heavily on the edge of the work table and tilted Tigrallef's head until he was looking into my eyes.
"Deep breaths, Father."
He laughed again. "How much better it would be if I could stop breathing altogether."
"Don't talk like that. How can I help you? Is it like that time in Amballa?"
"It's like nothing we've ever seen. No, Vero, I believe the Harashil and the Naar turned a corner together last night. I doubt the old rules and remedies apply any more."
"Just keep hold." Pretty feeble, but there was nothing much I could say.
His eyes drifted down to the table top. Mine followed. His right hand was in a claw palm-down on the granite veneer, with the fingers bent so the knuckles of the first joints formed a prominent ridge; but the whole hand was slowly and effortlessly sinking into the granite surface. The fingertips vanished first, then the back of his hand, leaving the knuckles standing proud like islands in a sea of reddish stone; then they sank as well, clean out of sight, prompting a vagrant thought of Iklankish. Tigrallef wore an expression of extreme interest. From my angle, he gave the illusion of a one-handed man pushing the stump of his wrist against the edge of the table. Then he twisted the stump and lifted; the hand began to emerge from the granite, fingertips first, the stone dripping out of his palm like water.
"That was interesting. Would you like to see it again?" His hand was poised over the table top.
"No. Stop it. What's happened to you? Is it because Calla's been taken? We'll get her back, Tig, I promise you, we'll—"
"I could get her back at once if I was willing to pay the price; but don't worry, I'm not that far gone. There has been no act of will as yet." His lip visibly finished healing as he spoke, his hand descended as gently as floating thistledown—to the top of the table this time, not through it; but the granite rippled, the books and papers on it rocked gently like fallen leaves on the surface of a lapping tide. A moment later, when I touched the table with great caution, it was solid again.
I tried to think of something sensible to say.
"I have an idea," Tig said.
"What is it?"
"Watch this." Without further warning, he flung himself off the stool and charged straight at the stone wall, leading with the crown of his head. I threw myself after him a broken second too late. His head encountered the wall with a crash that felled him flat, jolted the dust out of the chinks in the masonry, toppled a book or two and would have staved in the skull of any normal man—I fell gasping to my knees beside him as he rolled over on to his back.
I discovered later that a rash of strange incidents were reported all over Gil City at about the same time as my father tried to batter his brains out against the wall of Angel's workroom. The three that were best supported by the evidence were these: first, the Great Head of the Scion that overlooked the inner harbour blinked its stone eyes, opened its mouth and sang a snatch of song in a strange tongue, which I tentatively identified from garbled eyewitness accounts as the primary dialect of Gafrin-Gammanthan. The song itself was probably indecent. Second, the four life-size idols of Tigrallef in the Great Garden, ranged protectively around the base of the almost immemorial statue of the Lady in Gil, spun around to stare accusingly at the stone woman in their midst and turned their backs on her again. Third, the remaining portions of the Sherkin bastion crumbled into a drift of dust and rubble, fortunately with no loss of life; the adjacent shrine dedicated to the Scion Tigrallef, Ark and Sceptre of the Lady in Gil, an ostentatious structure in the style of Tallislef Second, slumped on its foundations but did not fall.
Other reported miracles—such as the dog who proclaimed the Scion's return in fluent Gillish with a marked Zainoi accent, the seventy-foot sea-eel sighted weeping in the outer harbour, the flock of birds that spelled out Tigrallef's name-glyph as they flew over the roofs of the Lower Palace—all these I considered to be signs of the people's thirst for wonders, mere superstition, a kind of mass madness fuelled by the fear that hung over the Primate's domain.
Back in the archives, I knew nothing about the antics of statues and bastions, but I could see Tig actually felt better for that crushing blow to the head. If anything, he seemed less dazed than before. I climbed to my feet again and helped him to his.
"What was that, your new revised emergency procedure?" I asked disapprovingly, brushing the dust off his tunic.
"You'd be surprised," he said in a perfectly normal voice, "how much better it made me feel. And I'll wager it shook you up, you cursed old sow," he added with satisfaction, fingering the point of impact on the top of his head. By rights a lump the size of a maiden's fist should have been pushing up under his hair, but there was not even any blood. He looked weary but unusually sane.
"What brought this on?" I asked, guiding him back to the stool.
"Am I acting strangely?"
"You always act strangely, Da, but lately you've found a few new ways of doing it. It's because the others have been carried away to the Mosslines, right? Which reminds me—"
He performed a half-twirl on the round stool. "I wish it were that simple. Everything has changed, Vero, and it changed well before this morning—it changed when we set our course for Gil, though I didn't know it until last night, which is of course the whole point."
I surveyed him with great care. There was no sign that the Pain was going to retaliate for the knock on his head. Yet. "I understand you somewhat less than usual," I said diplomatically.
"It's not that difficult, Vero. All this time, I've been so sure I understood what passes for the old sow's intelligence. All these years, I've been faithfully following the line of most resistance. The harder the Harashil fought me, the more clearly she marked my path."
"I understand: like two meshed gears. If she spun one way, you spun the other. If she said yea, you said nay. If she said stay, you said go. If—"
"Exactly. When we returned to the known world, she said: Don't sail to Gil. So we sailed to Gil. When the inspection party came on board, she said: Don't let them see you. So I rushed on deck. When the troopers came to capture the ship, she said: Don't be captured, resist the troopers; let the others fight to the death. You know how badly that came out."
"We were doomed either way."
"Yes, but the point is, this time I read the old sow all wrong. I let her manoeuvre me straight into disaster." With one fingernail, he scraped at the dried bloodspots on Angel's paperwork.
I held myself ready in case he made another assault upon the wall, but I did think I had spotted a flaw in his logic. "Are you certain your decision was the wrong one?" I asked.
"Yes," he answered positively. "By the fact that, owing to my stupidity and overconfidence, your mother and sister and our good comrades have been snatched off to a living death on the Mosslines; by the fact that we are almost certainly unable to go after them unless I surrender and use the Harashil's power by my own choosing; by the fact that I have detected a certain smug satisfaction in the old sow's emanations—"
"But," I insisted, feeling subtle, "what if the Pain wasn't misleading you then, but is misleading you now? Maybe we're meant to follow the others to the Mosslines for some purpose that we don't know yet, and things are actually turning out as they should . . ."
"Alas, Vero, this is not a Calloonic farce. As far as the Old Ones are concerned, all that's meant to happen is for me to build the Great Nameless Last and then bring the world to an end. If we want to follow a different script, we have to think it up as we go."
He broke off and frowned at the ce
iling, tilting his head to listen. "Raksh take it, but she's in a hurry."
"Mallinna?" I strained my ears but could hear nothing.
"Who else do we know that pops in and out of ceilings?" He took his eyes off the wooden screen above the bookshelves long enough to glance at me. "She's a fine woman, Vero."
"I'm aware of that," I said coolly.
"She'll make a grand colleague—ah, here she comes."
The skittering and slithering noises overhead were so subtle I would have missed them if Tig hadn't been there to point them out. The wooden screen slid aside, bare brown feet emerged followed by remarkably long brown legs and—and I bent over the work table and pretended very hard to be reading. I heard her agile descent of the bookshelves, her breathless greeting to my father, the rustle of cloth . . .
"Hurry, help me get the oil off."
When I turned around, she was sponging at her bare shoulders with a wet rag, and she seemed to be in a great hurry. Tigrallef, working industriously on her back with another rag, flung me yet another. Averting my eyes, I moved as close as I dared and scrubbed away at whatever came to hand, fumbling under my breath for the Lucian proverbs.
"Quickly, no time to tell you now, the Flamens are coming."
She danced out of reach; the next sounds I heard implied the brown robe was being pulled on over her head, a comb was attacking the thick, dark hair, Tigrallef was helping her on with her slippers. "Wait here," she said hastily, and then she was gone. I felt as if a whirlwind had passed through the room and out again.
"You can look now," said Tigrallef. He seemed amused.
An hour passed. A brittle edge developed to Tigrallef's behaviour that I had never seen before, but otherwise he seemed to be in control of himself. I tried once more to get him to make plans, perhaps to discuss our chances of acquiring a boat without raising too much suspicion among the brokers, but it was impossible to hold his interest. At times I thought he was listening with close attention to something that was happening in the stacks or the main workroom, at times he simply stared into space. His eyes were bright but not particularly mad.
"They're going," he said at last, followed immediately by "they're coming." For once I did not care about his maddening imprecision with pronouns. We both looked expectantly at the door as it opened.
Angel hobbled in leaning on Mallinna's arm. An odd couple they made in their matching brown robes, she so tall and straight, Angel so bent and shrunken, but they wore identical expressions of being terribly pleased with themselves.
"Well?" I asked, taking Angel's other arm. Tigrallef kept silent.
"Kesi. Good news," Angel said as we conducted him between us to a comfortable chair.
"He means, Kesi the First Flamen came to the archives to give us some excellent news—though, of course, I knew it already because I'd listened to the Council's deliberations, and I can tell you it was all the First Flamen's idea anyway."
"What was?" I asked.
"Requisition," Angel remarked, nodding significantly.
"He means, some time ago we put in a requisition for a small ocean-going windcatcher to be attached to the archives, for a survey we'd proposed of the Sherkin Sea—"
"A ship!" I cried. Tigrallef was still silent.
"Yours," Angel said modestly.
"That's generous of you—" I began.
"He means," Mallinna interrupted, "that the Primate has been persuaded to give us your ship."
This was stunning luck, and it very nearly didn't happen. In the debate regarding the disposal of the Fifth, the Primate's first impulse had been to fire it and scuttle the hulk in deep water south of Malvi Point, thus erasing the evidence of a sensitive and disappointing matter. It was Kesi, the First Flamen, who timidly suggested such a boat might just suit the needs of the First Memorian for his expedition to the Sherkin Sea; a great pity, he said, to scuttle such a sleek-looking little windcatcher when it could be put to good use. And, of course, it would save the expense of building another to give to the First Memorian, which was exactly the sort of argument to impress the Primate. The decision was made in minutes, and the First Flamen was delegated to inform the memorians that they now owned a boat. Mallinna had raced him back to the archives.
"There was something else you should hear about the captain's report," she said when our jubilation had died down to the point where she didn't have to shout to be heard.
"More good news, I hope," said Tigrallef.
"Good and bad," she answered. "Officially, the two of you are dead. The Council accepted Captain Abro's conclusion that you foolishly tried to escape through the window and fell to your deaths. No further search will be ordered for you. That's the good news." She paused. "The bad news is, they recovered your bodies from the beach."
Tig and I exchanged puzzled looks, followed by a moment of trying to work out whether Mallinna was joking, and then the rapid disappearance of elation.
"Unrecognizable, naturally," Mallinna added. "You more or less exploded when you hit the ground—bits of flesh all over, Captain Abro said, and enough blood to redden the tide along quite a stretch of beach. He wasn't exaggerating, either, he brought along a representative sample of body parts. He said the rock-pool crabs were already—"
"Enough, Mallinna," Tig said, not happy. "Poor sods, I wonder who they were."
"Whereas I wonder who threw them out the window," I said.
We thought it over in silence. It was an excellent question, because whoever had arranged our unfortunate replacements knew perfectly well we weren't dead. On reflection, I didn't believe the Primate had anything to do with it. Mallinna said he had been severely displeased at the news of our deaths—yes, it was true he had ordered the Flamens' Corps to murder us, but he did not like his wishes to be anticipated. Jumping out the window was bad form, an outrageous gaffe, the sort of disrespect that would be punishable by death if we weren't thought to be scattered over an acre or so of beach already. Perhaps it was fortunate for my mother and the rest that the Dowager Dazeene had already upped her anchor by then, with them safely aboard and out of reach of immediate retribution—as if anybody on their way to the Mosslines could be considered lucky.
"It can only have been the captain of the Flamens' Corps," said Tigrallef.
"Or Kesi," Angel put in, surprising us.
"Or Kesi," Tigrallef agreed. "Yes, or even a collaboration between Kesi and your Captain—Abro, was it?"
Mallinna looked pensive; Angel shook his head. "They are not friends," he said positively. For once Mallinna did not bother to interpret for him.
"Bear in mind," I said, "that two innocents were pitched out of a wickedly high window to support the deception. We know Captain Abro, killer of scribes, would be capable of that—but would the First Flamen?"
Angel and Mallinna looked at each other, and Angel shrugged rather expressively. "He means maybe, if the reasons were good enough," Mallinna answered, "though Kesi's a very nice old man." She tapped her forehead suddenly, as if just remembering something. "There is another matter," she said, fishing something out of her pocket. She unwrapped and held up a small object on a broken string of leather. "I would guess it's from a marine predator, like a large shark, but I can't place the species."
I didn't need to look at it.
"You're right," I said, "but you wouldn't know the species because it's not indigenous to these oceans. We saw sharks like these near Itsant, in one of the unknown worlds. The savages called them the Bloody Spirits of the Sea. Where did you get it?"
"From the First Flamen," she said slowly, "as he was leaving the archives. He put it into my hand. He often donates odd items to the natural history collection. Is it yours? Would you like it back?"
"No," I said, "you keep it. It was the First Flamen's gift to you."
There was another long silence while I, and presumably the others, devoted some solid thinking to the motives of the First Flamen. Angel surprised me again by eventually giving voice to my own thoughts, in what was for him a
veritable spate of words.
"Maybe not a gift," he said. "Maybe a message."
* * *
PART TWO
The Benthonic Survey Expedition
Vero sighted the seafolk from the moorage about half an hour before sunset: three barges, seven war-skiffs, minimum three hundred spearmen. Tig and Katla were besieged in the Eighth Mamelon. When we arrived in the Third to take them off, Katla had a slight head injury and Tig was gripped by the worst attack of the Pain we've ever seen. Confirmed destroyed: three barges, six war-skiffs and eleven mysteriously exploded Mamelons. Presumed destroyed: the seventh war-skiff. As for the spearmen, the Bloody Spirits of the Sea should be thanking Tig for the feast. No damage to the Third. Bless the Old Ones, Katla will be fine.
Much to our surprise, this does not seem to have constituted an act of Will. If it had, Tig would be busy with the Great Nameless Last now instead of the same old struggle with the Harashil. If he ever wakes up, we'll ask him.
We were pretty much finished at Itsant anyway.
Excerpt from Chasco's Journal Vol. 3, 'Itsant and
the South Ronchar Sea', in the Archives of the
College of the Second Coming
* * *
7
AND SO, THE memorians had a ship—not just any ship, but our own beautiful Fifth, and there had never been a vessel like her in the known and unknown worlds. In designing her, Chasco and my father and I had collected bright ideas from a dozen or more shipbuilding traditions, ancient and modern, and profited from mistakes made with the ill-fated Fourth. According to the state of the sea, she could cut the waves with the tirelessness of a Bloody Spirit, skim them with the swiftness and grace of a Bauli cormorant, or resist them with the stability of the ice mountains in the waters off Myr. The Sherkin Sea Benthonic Survey Expedition—as Angel's project was called in the account ledgers and year-end fiscal statements of the Flamens' treasury in Gil—was fortunate to get her.
Gil Trilogy 3: Lady Pain Page 12