We did stop at last for a bite of fenset and a rest. Gods be thanked, Jonno, Kat, Angel and Mallinna were asleep within seconds of shutting their eyes. Tigrallef took maybe a few moments longer. When he was breathing quietly and evenly, my mother rose from his side and tiptoed over to the sombre little clump composed of Shree and Chasco and myself, at a considerate talking-distance from the sleepers. She was oddly serene for a woman whose worst nightmare had probably just come true. She said, "He's sleeping peacefully. That's new."
"Not very," I admitted, "it's been going on for some time."
"What else has been going on?"
"Too much."
"We need to hear it."
"Oh, Raksh. All right." I told them all I could remember of the Pain's onslaught since the last time they saw Tigrallef, the day we were captured in Gil, omitting only the revelation concerning Katla. When I was finished, I bowed my head and waited for the reproaches.
"Poor Vero, what a burden. You did well, son. No one could have done better. But I think it's all over now."
"Are we so sure about that?" said Chasco. "I'm finding it very hard to believe. Look at him! He isn't even shining now."
"I think we'll find," Calla said gently, "that it means the struggle is over and the Harashil has won."
"That's how it is in theory," said Shree, "but Chasco has a point. I can't believe that after resisting the Harashil for twenty years, Tig would blithely go ahead with an act of Will just to protect the Afadhnids, even if they are his relations."
"It was nothing to do with the Afadhnids," I said.
"What, then?"
"I think it was something about Oballef's inscription."
Shree waved this aside. "But consider what's happened since the bridge. No fanfare, no shape changes, no rushing off immediately to build the Great Nameless Last. Look here—all these years we've assumed that one good solid act of Will, one conscious and deliberate use of the Pain's power, would complete the melding. What if we were wrong?"
"You're thinking the end should have been noisier?" I asked. "A little more like Vassashinay? A stone bridge melting like soft wax wasn't dramatic enough for you?"
"Well—not quite, actually."
"Oh, gods."
Shree stood up restlessly and paced back and forth. "What about Itsant, Vero? Amballa? Nkalvi? He used the power then."
Again, for my mother's sake, I choked back what I now knew about Itsant. "Those were the Harashil's instinctive acts of defence, not Tigrallef's acts of Will. There's a difference."
"But this could be construed as defensive. After all, we were being chased by a murderous horde."
"Perhaps. But it looks to me like a fully conscious act of Will."
"That's still only a theory, Vero."
Calla slammed to her feet. "This is a stupid argument. Why don't we wake him up and ask him?"
So we did.
We crouched around him in a semicircle. He looked perfectly normal and harmless and he was smiling in his sleep; he turned over on to his back and gave a little snort. Calla shook him gently. Tig, dearheart—"
His eyelids snapped open. All I could see behind them was blackness and emptiness shot with cold sparks of fire. I had to swallow a couple of times before I could speak.
"Da, we'd like to ask you something. It's about what you did tonight."
His smile broadened. It was not a smile that I recognized, and I really did not like what it did to his face. "The two," he said, "are one." His voice contained no echoes.
"Thank you, darling," said my mother after a short silence. "That's all we wanted to know. Go back to sleep."
He shut his eyelids on those terrible voids and turned again on his side.
* * *
17
TIGRALLEF WAS IN no hurry to finish things. He could have spoken his Will at any time in Fathan. He could have abandoned us there as unimportant, or wafted the whole packet of us down from the Carthenten Cleft to the coast, or even to the Gilgard, with a wave of his fingers. Instead, he chose to do a walking tour of the sere beauties of Fathan's Blessed Range, to contemplate the ruins, to hold his nose at the stink of Faddelin, to pat the hull of the Fifth as we pulled alongside her. We had been gone sixteen days—ten uphill to Cansh Fathan, six downhill on the return journey—and there was evidence the townsite had been visited during that time, but our ship had gone unnoticed.
We sailed out the east end of the Deppowe Channel before turning on to the sea lane for Canton Pilazh, carried along by the most unnaturally obliging winds that ever filled a highsail. A great Gillish Imperial fleet was sighted to the north at one point, probably heading for the coast of Fathan, to avenge the sack of the Mosslines. Tigrallef said it was not important. Just outside the skerries of the Pilazhet Basin we skimmed blithely through a wolfpack of pirates without any of their bolts even grazing us, to their evident astonishment. Signs of a stormbowl approaching Canton Pilazh from the Sherkin Sea dissipated without fuss. The journey was terrifyingly easy.
Meantime, my father's behaviour on the Fifth was so normal that it struck us as bizarre. He smiled too much and strolled about on deck humming little tunes. He gave Jonno helpful comments about his poetry. He did more than his share of the cooking. He played fingersticks with anyone he could talk into it, and didn't even cheat. I believe he was indulging us. When we managed to avoid his eyes, we could almost forget he was the power-deranged avatar whose destruction of the world had been foretold. Calla's assessment was probably right—he was at ease because he was no longer resisting the Harashil. There would be no more attacks of the Pain, no more absurdities or helpless spasms of shape-changing, no more Myrwolves, White Dragons or Ladies in Gil. Katla reported he looked exactly like himself all the time. The battle was over, and apparently so was the war.
As for the rest of us, a version of the calm my mother displayed at the Carthenten Span enveloped us all. Not one of us felt inclined to desert Tigrallef, though he would not or could not tell us what his intentions were. We knew we were going to Gil—beyond that, it was impossible to think and useless to plan. Perhaps we would all die in a burst of the Harashil's fire. Perhaps we would witness the raising of the Great Nameless Last, more vicious and barbarous than anything that ever burdened the earth before. In either case the worst had already happened—we had fallen over the edge of the cliff and were just marking time until we hit the bottom. There was no point in screaming all the way down.
I made one concession to the possible existence of a future. Throughout the journey I filled page after page of the Primate's top-quality paper with an account of the events since my father's return to the known world; a memoir which could turn out to be either a valuable historical document—The Last Empire: the Rise of the Emperor Tigrallef and the Beginning of the End of the World. An Eyewitness Account—or a complete waste of time. Whatever happened, there was a good chance that nobody would be around afterwards to read it.
Still-life on the afterdeck of the Fifth, on the last night of our journey. It was well after nightfall, and the Mors Beacon was gliding past us on the port side. The red star hanging on the western horizon was not a star, according to my father, but a powerful new beaconlight erected by the Primate on the very summit of the Gilgard. Chasco, who was on watch in the rigging, estimated we would swing round the north point of Gil not long past sunrise.
Jonno and Katla were leaning against the taffrail talking with their usual intensity, Kat's shining dark head very close to Jonno's golden one, and their fingers (I noticed) were twined together. I contemplated my role as brother-protector for a few seconds, decided that Jonno would not have time to break Kat's heart before the cataclysm, even if he meant to, which I doubted. As for honour and virtue, our Katlefiya was quite capable of safeguarding her own.
Shree was in the galley making dried-meat pies for our last supper. Tig and Angel were in the comfortable angle of the bow, comparing things on the horizon with things on Angel's chart. My mother was sitting nearby in Tigrallef's chair, a
nd I watched her as she watched everyone else. The sadness in her face was a great giveaway, especially when she looked at the two grave children by the taffrail. But when she looked towards my father, her face was sadder still.
Mallinna was at the wheel, nominally under my supervision, though neither she nor the ship needed much guidance by that point. We had spent most of the voyage in each other's company, talking about hundreds of things without ever saying anything of actual importance. The future, for example, was something we never discussed; likewise the Erotic Mistifalia. This was not merely because of the dampening effect of the looming catastrophe, nor yet the inhibitive effect of sharing an overcrowded windcatcher with a parent who could see through walls and hear a flea's footfall. No, I think it was because just being beside Mallinna was comfort enough under the circumstances; and though nothing of any importance was said, many significant matters were quietly understood.
Shree came on deck and passed around his dried-meat pies. Though very good, they seemed a little homely for what was potentially our last meal in the old order of the world. I had a feeling we should be marking the occasion somehow, but none of us had much heart for it. Nor was Tig's offer to make oat pudding for breakfast very well received. Oat pudding felt no more fitting than dried-meat pies, and by breakfast-time we'd be in Gil anyway. I had a wild mental image: Tigrallef making oat pudding, then going off to build the Great Nameless Last with his apron still around his middle. He frequently forgot to take it off.
We spread ourselves around the afterdeck eating our pies and drinking dark wine from an excellent butt the Primate had paid for. Chasco was at the wheel. The Mors Beacon was already about a mile astern, the red star was perceptibly rising above the horizon, and a generally depressed silence had fallen over us all.
"Why are you doing this, Tig?" Shree asked amiably. "Why didn't you just go ahead and construct your tupping empire as soon as you took on the power? Did we really need to go through this farce of a voyage?"
"Patience, Shree. It's not important. If the Great Nameless Last rises from the ashes of the First, there will be a place in it for you."
"I don't want a place in your empire, and I'm not pushing you to build it any time soon. I just want to know why it's so important to do it in Gil." Shree tapped off another beaker of wine and looked up with a trace of the old Sherkin aggressiveness.
My father's equanimity was undisturbed. He turned instead to my mother.
"There speaks our best and oldest friend. What about you, our beloved? Tomorrow we could make you an empress. Would you like that?"
She swallowed her mouthful of meat pie. "No thank you," she said.
"Did you realize there's a degree of immortality attached? You would rule with us to the end of history."
"I said no, dearheart. I don't want to be an empress."
He looked at her appraisingly with his whiteless eyes. "What do you want?"
My mother hesitated. Then she scowled at the remainder of her pie and pitched it overboard. "Since you're asking, what I'd most like to do is go back to Myr. We were happy there. Do you remember anything at all about being happy, Tig?"
Very long silence, then a puzzled voice: "He remembers."
"Bloody right, you should remember. It was our first home together. And we might as well have stayed there, for all the good we did in twenty years of questing."
Another long, thoughtful pause from the avatar. "He agrees with you on that."
"Well, then?" my mother said.
The two are one. There can be no turning back now. We must see this through to the end."
"Fine." She got to her feet and headed for the companionway. Tig put up his hand to delay her; I saw he was holding a short sword which had not been there a moment before. What happened then was probably not meant to distress, but it was not pleasant to watch someone attempt to disembowel himself in the middle of dinner, especially when dinner consisted of dried-meat pies. There was no blood. Tig's belly reacted to the knife as a bowlful of warm aspic would, by closing seamlessly together again—but Jonno went so far as to retch over the remains of his pie, confirming that his was an imaginative soul. The rest of us were less squeamish.
"Tig, dearheart, you know that sort of thing doesn't work. All you've done is ruin your tunic."
"He was giving you a sign." Tigrallef dropped the sword on the deck; we watched without comment as it turned into a kind of silver snake with legs and scuttled overboard.
My mother sighed deeply. "I must say, if it's a sign, I don't quite catch the message."
"It's not important." He stood quietly for a heartbeat or two, looking ahead at the red spark of light that marked the Gilgard—The Great Ark and Sceptre, the Wind and the Tree, the fusion of Naar and Harashil, the world's bane, a smallish, pale-cheeked young man with a ripped tunic and a glitter in his eyes that was not at all cheerful—and then he vanished. We discovered after a frantic search that he had gone straight to bed.
Calla retired also, to keep an eye on him. The rest of us stayed on deck watching the steady approach of the Gilgard's beaconlight, while a grey line gradually defined itself between the dark sea and sky to the east. Katla and Jonno fell asleep, she with her head on his shoulder, he with his cheek against her hair. Angel and Shree carried on a desultory debate about what would happen if we tried to change course away from Gil—the answer was, nothing would happen. I knew because Mallinna and I had tried it a couple of days ago, and Chasco was trying it again that very moment in a quiet experimental fashion, but the Fifth seemed to know very well where she was meant to sail.
Mallinna sat beside me, not saying much. I put my arm around her and after a while she dozed off. Sitting there with her warm body against mine, I had another of those moments of ill-timed, quite inappropriate happiness—it was the thought of spending the rest of my life with her, all four or five hours of it—and then I drifted off as well.
One by one, we shook ourselves awake in the grey minutes just before the sun rose. Tigrallef came back on deck not much later, and placed himself in the angle of the bow. There was a blankness in his face that disturbed me. As Chasco steered us into the tight turn around the sea face of the Gilgard, we passed four of those little black galleys that usually infested the harbour proper, but they did not challenge us. A massive windcatcher flying the Primate's banner was approaching from the direction of the Archipelago, and it looked as if it would pass through the breach just ahead of us. I noticed that Tig was watching it with close attention.
We came in view of the heights of Gilgard Castle, as beautiful and hateful as before. Kat and Shree were working the sails by then—Jonno was hastily trying to polish his boots while sponging a gravy stain off his black uniform tunic. Mallinna, beside me at the rail, silently slid her hand into mine. We watched as the big windcatcher slipped through the breach and turned her nose towards a moorage in the outer harbour.
Then it was our turn to run the gantlet between the watchtowers that flanked the breach. I squinted at the spearchuckers and the flame bolts, expecting to see them being cranked back for the barrage—but I could make out the crews clearly, also the archers in the towers, and nobody was doing more than watch us in return. Indeed, as we came level with the outer arms of the breach, the crews began to desert their posts, archers threw down their bows, troopers crowded to the edge of the breakwater to watch us sail through. Some of them were cheering.
"This is very strange," I said to Mallinna. She said nothing, but her grip tightened on my hand.
There were banners everywhere, streaming from the watchtowers, the warships in the outer harbour, the wolf-boats, the banner staffs along the breakwater. Katla called down from the rigging that the inner harbour was one great mass of ships; and a moment later, that the corniche and the streets leading down to the harbour were packed with seething crowds. And there was possible trouble to starboard—a flotilla of wolf-boats escorting a strange shining galley out of the shadow of the big windcatcher that had come in just ahead of us
. It was gilded, with two figures in the bow—gold robes, bright white hair under gold headdresses.
Then Mallinna struck her forehead and poked Jonno's shoulder and announced in silly-me tones that she'd realized what the date must be. Damn it, I thought. Just our luck to try sailing into Gil inconspicuously on the Day of the Scion.
We pulled in at the main quay of the landing stage just behind the gilded galley. Out of sight beyond it, a band of hornists was midway through the Gillish Paean of Praise. The great stone bust of the Blessed Scion Tigrallef smiled vaguely over our heads, but the real Scion Tigrallef jumped on to the quay with the bow mooring line as I secured the stern, with Chasco on my heels. Troopers with drawn swords were already racing towards us—but when Tigrallef stood up by the bollard and faced them with his hands on his hips, their ranks broke and they dropped their swords and fell on their faces on the polished flagstones. For a terrible moment, until it was clear they were only grovelling, I thought my father had struck them all dead. Revelation hit me hard.
"Oh gods," I snarled to Chasco, "they think the Divine Scion has returned."
"Well, he has," said Chasco.
"But—"
"And on the Day of the Scion, too," said Shree behind us, "just as the Primate foretold. This'll be a shock for old Mycri." I heard his sword and Chasco's clatter, one-two, back into their sheaths. By this time Mallinna and Jonno were helping Angel on to the quay, and my mother and sister were flanking Tigrallef protectively up by the bow. Above us on the corniche, the crowds nearest the landing stage were beginning to take notice. I heard a few screams, but they were of the ecstatic variety. The Scion has returned! The great day has come!
Gil Trilogy 3: Lady Pain Page 31