Gil Trilogy 3: Lady Pain

by Rebecca Bradley

  "Precious gift?" I asked with terrible foreboding. "What precious gift do you mean?" Mallinna sat up straighter on her stool. Angel laid his arm over his eyes. Tig did nothing.

  "Precious gift, yes. Your face, Master Vero, and your brother's, the faces of the Priest-King Arkolef and the Divine Scion Tigrallef."

  "Oh, that gift," I said, relieved. Mallinna relaxed. Angel sighed. Tig did nothing.

  "A precious resource which the Primate, may he rot, was willing to throw away, but the Opposition is less wasteful. We are also your truest friends."

  "If we're such friends," I asked, "why are we tied up?"

  "We'll untie you when we're sure you understand your own best interests."

  "What about the guardsman?"

  Malso looked regretfully at the crumpled figure on the floor. "Poor lad. Let me say it this way—he may never have to suffer the hangover he deserves."

  "You bastard, Malso!" Mallinna shouted. "You touch a hair of his head and I'll make damned sure the Truant hears about it!"

  "I am the Truant."

  Mallinna's jaw dropped.

  "Who's the Truant?" I asked.

  "He is, obviously," said Tigrallef, raising his head.

  "No, I don't believe it," Mallinna cried. "The Truant is the great hero and war chief of the Opposition, the one I've been sending information to all these years. I do not believe the Truant would betray us and then threaten to murder a helpless prisoner. I do not believe you, fisherman. The Truant is an honourable man, a fighter for justice and freedom, and you're a—a—"

  "Pillak," I supplied. "Anyway, why would the great war chief of the Opposition be honouring us with his personal attention? I don't believe you either."

  Malso turned wearily to Entiso. "Who am I, partisan?"

  "You're the Truant, sir."

  "Why should we believe him?" I said.

  "Because, Vero, he's telling the truth." That was my father, and his tone worried me far more than just being trussed up like a roasting chicken in the hands of armed maniacs, which was at least something I had experienced before. Tigrallef's voice was different.

  Malso said, "Thank you, Master Tilgo. There's no need just now to convince the rest of you, but I promise when we get to Pilazhet—" He broke off as another rain-squall pounded the roof of the cabin and the Fifth ground her storm fenders lightly against the quay.

  "What's it to be, sir?" Entiso said impatiently. "Enough talking! If we don't leave in the next half hour or so, we shouldn't leave at all."

  "And yet leave we must. We're committed now. Let me think a moment." Malso narrowed his eyes and took a deep breath. "Dead, this poor young guardsman would be a fan to the flames. Quite useful. Alive, he'd be a hostage, possibly a valuable one, and we could certainly use the funds. That is, if the Most Revered Primate values his brother's progeny as highly as his own."

  My jaw fell open. Great-uncle.

  "Don't forget the Rolso case, sir. All the trouble we went to, and in the end we had to cut his throat anyway. Of course he'd only married into the Primate's line, but still . . ."

  Grandda sent me.

  "Yes, I see your point. His own great-granddaughter's husband, the mean-minded old palot-pincher. Whereas if the Most Revered Primate's great-nephew, a promising young guardsman of the Flamens' Corps no less, were to be found viciously murdered in Beriss, I can see all manner of positive effects."

  "Beriss will be blamed," said Entiso.

  "And brutal reprisals will follow. Entiso, you've swept away my doubts. The Opposition in Beriss needs an imperial atrocity or two to focus their minds, they've been getting too comfortable of late. A shame, though, because he's a nice lad."

  "He won't suffer," Entiso said.

  At that moment Mallinna did what I was longing to do and couldn't—launched herself at Malso with her head at his gut level, connecting with a good solid thud before Entiso caught her by her hair, swung her around and flung her against the wall beside my pallet. Angel cried out. I grunted as she thumped down more or less on top of me. It flashed into my mind that this was a ruse on her part—she had engineered being thrown on to me, she had a blade concealed in her hand, she would take this chance to cut through my bonds, I would leap up and overwhelm the two fraudulent fishermen, we would save the life of the guardsman, sail off, conquer the Mosslines, free the family, find the Banishment, get married . . .

  Entiso dragged her off me. There was no knife, alas, and she'd have been too dazed to use one anyway. He conducted her firmly to her stool and set her down, draping her over the side of the pallet. Malso, winded by the belly blow, straightened himself with gratifying difficulty.

  "You shouldn't have thrown her so hard, Entiso. Remember her long and valuable service to the Opposition. Go deal with the guardsman now, and call me when you're done—I want to be off the quay within the next quarter hour."

  "Malso!" I don't know what my voice sounded like, but it got his startled attention and Entiso's as well. "I'm warning you—don't you harm the boy. If you kill him, I swear you'll get no help from me, or from any of us; and I also swear, by the Old Ones, that I will make you bleed for it someday—"

  "Master Vero, be reasonable. He's the vicious bloody-handed lackey of an imperial despot. You'll forget all about him in a day or two. Just remember that we are your true friends."

  "Friends? Not likely."

  "We have ways of making friends," he said vaguely, "and five weeks to do it in." Less vaguely: "Get moving, Entiso."

  With the toe of his boot, Entiso flipped Jonno on to his back and straightened the boy's neck relative to his shoulders; at the same time, he reached for the new moon leaning against the wall. Without waking up, Jonno groaned and trembled in his sodden tunic.

  Malso made an impatient noise in his throat. "Not in here, Entiso. Messy. Take him on deck."

  "Of course, Truant. And then?"

  "Dump him on the quay—but you'd better nail him down or the storm will wash him away. He's no good to us if they don't find the body."

  Entiso nodded impassively, grabbed Jonno by the ankles and dragged him to the door. "You'll find the mallet in the bow locker," Malso called as the door shut behind them. All that time I had been feverishly experimenting with dislocating my shoulders and seeing how much skin I could scrape off my wrists and ankles; Mallinna, looking as if she would gut-charge Malso again if she could figure out where her feet had gone, was groggily trying to get herself upright on the stool; Angel was lying back on his pillows with his eyes wet and closed.

  Tigrallef was smiling at the floor.

  After a minute or two, the sound I had been dreading came to our ears over the keening of the wind. A terrible sound—a sustained shriek of pain and terror, that rose higher and went on longer than I had expected or could bear. The death we were listening to was not being an easy one, nor particularly quick. Even hearing it was agony. At last, mercifully, the death-cry either faded away or mingled with the wind.

  "May his bones bring forth flowers," said Malso piously.

  I loathed him too much to bother cursing him. Since there was no immediate point left in struggling, I lay still. Poor little Jonno, I thought tight-lipped, with his golden hair and his beauty, his grandda, his two loving sisters and his rather endearing ineptitude as a spy. I wondered what his poems might have been like.

  The minutes passed. Malso essayed a bit of light conversation, sitting companionably on the end of Angel's pallet, but the rest of us did not respond very well.

  Perhaps I should have been paying more attention to the strange state Tigrallef was in, but his symptoms had shifted so rapidly recently that it was hard for me to keep up. For twenty years, one of our fundamental rules had been: when he was able to sit still, he was fine; when he began to fidget, it was time to brush up on the Zelfic Protocols. How was I to know what to watch for when the Pain kept changing the rules? Anyway, I was distracted, raging inside over Jonno's murder, straining my ears for any echo of Entiso and his damned mallet. Every musc
le in my body, moreover, was starting to complain about being pulled out of shape.

  More minutes passed. Presently, it was Malso who began to fidget as he watched the door and waited vainly for Entiso's signal. The swell was on the rise, putting the deck through a complex dance of pitches, yaws and rolls—much longer, and the Fifth would have trouble clearing the quay, not to mention the breakwater. The wind rattled the door between its hinges and its latch.

  "Perhaps Entiso can't find the nails," I suggested.

  "They were with the mallet." Malso refused to be goaded. "Ah, there he is!" He rose expectantly, but the thump outside was not repeated; the door shook in the wind but remained stubbornly closed.

  "Messy," said my father.

  "Your pardon, Master Tilgo?"

  "The blood coming under the door. Messy."

  I could not see it, myself; but Malso swore softly and squatted down by the door. After a moment he pulled off his tunic, revealing a body scabbard strapped across his hairy chest, with slots for four blades, all full, and a broad belt medallioned with throwing disks. Crouching beside the door with his back against the jamb, he reached up cautiously with one of the knives and lifted the latch. The wind caught the door and crashed it open, spraying rain inside; even protected by its mantle, the lamp's flame flickered.

  "Entiso!" he shouted, "what are you playing at?"

  No answer came to him over the wind. By craning my neck I could see a watery dark stain diffusing along the drenched deck and into the cabin; the origin of it was in darkness, beyond the edge of the lamplight that fluttered across the threshold. Another swell tilted the Fifth to starboard—I glimpsed a round object about the size of a head rolling downslope past the door.

  "Entiso, answer me!"

  Reverse tilt. The head-sized object tumbled back again. This time as it passed the door it bounced with a soft thump on the outer jamb, hesitated, and—responding to a slight lifting of the bow—wobbled inside to come to rest very briefly in the middle of the room. Even Angel sat up to see it better. Then the stern lifted and the object rolled straight to Malso's feet, ricocheted gently, and continued past him out the door. Malso watched its progress, inwards and outwards, with an air of stupefied interest.

  "Was that Entiso?" asked Mallinna. "I couldn't quite see."

  "Only part of him," my father said drowsily.

  "Hush!" Malso was breathing hard. Keeping his body in the shelter of the jamb, he darted his arm out to grab the edge of the door and drag it shut against the wind; but in the broken second that it resisted his efforts, a thread of silver light whipped out of the darkness, curled around his hand, and was gone. With a scream, he jerked his arm back.

  "Did you see something just then?" asked Mallinna.

  I had seen something, all right. I even knew what it was. I was not surprised, therefore, that the hand Malso was examining with such bewilderment was missing the top halves of all three middle fingers. In every other respect, I was a solid mass of astonishment.

  Who was out there?

  The second time, I missed it by blinking. I did hear the click as the last link made contact with the floor, though, and then of course there was Malso's roar of rage and pain. Incautious enough to expose the edge of one bare shoulder to the view of whatever was outside, he had paid with a long slice of meat from the upper arm.

  I lifted my head and filled my lungs. "Shorten by three spans," I bellowed in Gafrin-Gammanthan. "Korfin's Lateral Twist! Six spans up for the throat!"

  Malso threw himself sideways—in time, unfortunately. Like a snake's tongue, the silver thread lashed through the door, seemed to hang motionless for a broken moment, then curled back in a sinuous shimmy that sliced the air where Malso's throat had been.

  Apparently, Malso was a man who knew when he was beaten. The big square port, barred and shuttered, was just above his head. With amazing quickness for such a ponderous body, he knocked the bar away with his good hand, smashed the shutters open and vaulted out, leaving a fair amount of blood in a trail behind him. The stormwind howled through the cabin and deadened all other noises, all except a muffled crash a moment later and another a few seconds after that.

  "Gangplank," Tigrallef shouted over the wind. "He's gone now." His chin dropped towards his chest.

  "Father—who's out there? Which one? Or all of them?"

  He shrugged, and the ropes fell away. He wandered over to close and bar the shutters, which improved the noise level in the cabin; he picked up the knife Malso had abandoned on the floor, frowned at it, looked thoughtfully at me, wandered over and hacked through the ropes that were holding me in a semicircular shape. The sudden release of tension was a new kind of torture. My joints flatly refused to straighten, my muscles shrieked at me for even trying, but I managed to catch at his arm before falling off the side of the pallet.

  "Who's out there?"

  "See for yourself, Vero. They're just coming." He drifted over to cut Mallinna's bindings.

  They?

  I was on the floor trying to get my arms to work, but I had a clear view of the deck through the door. I was looking for four figures; all I saw was two—both slight, one somewhat taller than the other, the shorter one supporting the taller as they limped out of the shadows and rain into the wavering light at the threshold. I forgot about my muscles and stared as the lamplight fell on her face. Cheeks too thin, eyes too big, burden too heavy; the guardsman, just barely on his own feet, was held up largely by her too-thin arms around his middle.

  Kat was home.

  She let Jonno sag to the floor and wrestled the door shut behind her. Then she slid towards our father on a slick of rainwater and Malso's blood, but skidded to a halt a couple of spans short. I saw the eagerness in her face turn to horror, and the horror vanish in turn behind a mask of gravity.

  "Father," she breathed, "what's happened to you?" He said nothing.

  They regarded each other solemnly. I forgot the howling chorus from my body, grew deaf to the urgency of the storm—I was absorbed in watching an eerie convergence take place. Kat was said to favour our mother in looks, but in those few moments she might have been our father's image in a pool of still water. Then Tigrallef reached out and embraced her as sadly as if he held her lifeless corpse instead of her living body.

  "Kat, Kat, I'm happy you're safe, but I wish you were anywhere but here."

  She put her arms around him, also sadly. It occurred to me as I sat on the floor, watching them while I tried to massage my knees into working order, that my little sister already knew far more than I did about what was going on in our father's head. Then she backed away, snapping the thread between them, and suddenly I found I could speak again.

  "Kat—beloved little sister—happy to see you—sorry I can't get up—"

  "Oh, Vero!"

  She burst into tears and threw herself into my lap, landing with considerable force on the one leg that was responding to treatment. I didn't mind.

  "How did you get here, flower? Where are the others?" Me, to Kat.

  At the same time: "Where's Mother and Shree and Chasco? Who's she?" Kat surveyed Mallinna suspiciously and wiped her wet face with an equally wet sleeve.

  At the same time: "Was it you with that silver whip thing? What was that?" Mallinna held out a nose-rag and regarded Kat with interest and sympathy, in that order.

  At the same time: "What was the cook called?" That was a feeble voice near the door which none of us heeded because we were all too busy asking more sensible questions; too busy, indeed, to give sensible answers. I held up my hand with an audible creaking of joints.

  "I've got a thousand questions for you, little Kat, and a thousand things to tell you, but now is not the time. We're not safe yet."

  "Just tell me one thing," she said forcefully. "Where's Mother?"

  I hesitated. "I thought you were with her and the others. Enough now, Katla. We're on our way to them, but we have to cast off now, right away, and make a run for the Pilazhet Basin while we still can."

/>   Kat gasped. "In this weather? Your cargo must have shifted, Vero."

  "What cargo?" Mallinna again.

  "It's a metaphor, Mallinna. Kat, I'll explain later. Take Mallinna out, get the two of you secured, show her what to do. And get ready to cast off."

  A mournful cry from the door: "The name of the cook . . ."

  "Oh, gods. I'll be out in a minute—go!"

  Kat trumpeted into Mallinna's nose-rag. She rose, giving Mallinna an appraising look, and motioned for her to follow. I noticed she avoided glancing at Tigrallef, who was sitting quietly on the end of Angel's pallet with a vacant look on his face.

  When they were gone, I limped over to Jonno, joints shrieking, hoisted him off the floor and walked him over to the pallet I had recently occupied. There was no longer any question of leaving him behind. I only wished, a little sourly, that he was in good enough condition to be put to work in the rigging. As he was just barely conscious, I tied him down on the pallet, less to keep him out of mischief than to make sure his neck did not get broken in the next few storm-tossed hours. He was still mumbling something about the cook. I covered him with a blanket.

  It was clear Tigrallef was not fit to work either, so I left him and Angel in the cabin to keep an eye on each other. The best luck we had was that Malso and Entiso had already done all the hard labour of storm-rigging the Fifth. By the time I left the devastated cabin for the windy spray-ridden chaos on deck, Kat had helped Mallinna harness herself to one of the safety lines and was giving her a quick lesson in which sheet was which.

  One last job before casting off: Entiso. The Truant Malso had evidently departed the Fifth via the gangplank, and might even have survived his departure; but the significantly shortened (and, I discovered, one-armed) body of his henchman had not been obliging enough to walk off, and was very much in the way. I dragged most of him to the port side and heaved him into the water. When that was done I spent a few moments searching for the head and the missing arm; stumbled over the latter and slung it overboard; located the head and had a rapid but thoughtful survey of the mincemeat Kat's chain had made of the neck. Then I chucked it overboard as well.