The Rose of the World

by Jude Fisher

  The priests were calling the eleventh observance as he approached the city, their wailing song floating through the still air like a charm upon the land. It was a prayer designed to soothe the faithful, a plea for the Goddess’s mercy and blessing as they went to their beds; but now that Virelai knew the identity of the One to whom it was dedicated, it gave him no comfort at all. He entered the orchards which bordered the southern edge of the city, but at this season the trees were empty of fruit, their leaves dropped to form a thick carpet which rustled as he walked. The last time he had come this way had been with the Beast, huge as a mountain cat, its eyes lambent in the darkness, and he had been sorely afraid of it. He had used the voice of command to compel Saro to accompany him south and at the time had felt no compunction at doing so. Now, his conscience struck him hard. Had he left the boy to his own devices and forsaken his own wild stratagems, Falo and the other nomads would most likely have made it to the safety of the mountains, Alisha would not be running mad with the deathstone, and Saro would be wherever he was headed on a black stallion charged with natural energy, rather than the creature out of nightmare which last he had seen galloping south with empty, soulless eyes. He had no plan for how he would find Saro, let alone save him and flee the city; but rather than allow despair and cowardice to set in before he had even made an attempt, he pushed his doubts and fears away with a force of will he had never owned before.

  There were no guards on the walls and the postern gate, miraculously, was open. Virelai slipped unseen into the city he had sworn never to set foot in again. He had no idea where they might have taken his friend, but he found himself treading carefully up the back stairs towards the quarters Tycho Issian had occupied when he was last in Jetra. They were empty and in disarray. Virelai’s spirits leapt: perhaps the Lord of Cantara had left the Eternal City; and perhaps he had taken Saro with him, north to Forent maybe, where Rui Finco would be overseeing their war plans.

  In which case the vision the crystal had shown him was false after all. A tremendous sensation of relief came over him: even though it would mean a long hard journey on foot and a postponed crisis rather than an immediate one, at least he would not have to see his friend tortured.

  He had no sooner thought this than a terrible cry rang out, echoing down the corridors. His heart jumped erratically The cry came again, shrill and piercing; the cry of a wounded animal?

  He flattened himself against the ancient stone wall and was disturbed to feel it vibrate beneath his palms and back. When the scream came again, he knew, with some part of himself to which he had never previously had access, exactly where it had come from.

  Suddenly, volitionlessly, he found his feet carrying him towards the sound. Down two flights of stairs they took him, around a corner, past a suite of rooms in which the Vingo clan had resided during the council meeting. These, too, lay empty and abandoned, the furniture overturned, the finer artefacts gone from within, as if ransacked by some marauding host. Had enemies come this far south? He shook his head as if answering an unseen question: that was surely impossible in the short span of time which had elapsed. A riot then, an uprising of the people? But he had seen how the populace had responded to Tycho Issian’s orations in market square and city hall, wildly applauding his words and cheering his every sentiment. Perhaps the Lord of Cantara had staged a coup, and cast the established lords out of Jetra? Virelai was not a worldly man, in any sense of the word. He did not understand politics, had no experience of war, civil or otherwise; the chaos he encountered as he traversed the castle was unsettling. What was clear was that something strange and threatening had taken place in this city since the last time he had been here, when all had been elegance, order and perfection.

  The cry came again, more of a moan now. It was followed by loud voices then a slamming door and the sounds of footsteps hurrying down the corridors in the opposite direction to where he stood with his heart hammering. Virelai waited, then pushed himself around the corner. There were three doors ahead of him. The first he tried was locked, the brass handle cold. The second opened onto a empty chamber stacked with sheet-draped furniture. The third door showed a strip of light along its bottom edge, and the sound of soft keening emanated from it. Bending down, Virelai looked cautiously through the keyhole but could see nothing. Nothing, that is, except a large room with tables covered in scrolls and parchments, many of which appeared disarranged. A dozen candles burned raggedly from sconces around the walls: their guttering flames and the erratic play of light they generated were all that moved. Virelai frowned. Then he dropped to his knees and peered through the gap beneath the door.

  An eye stared back at him.

  It was a pale eye, grey-green of iris, the white shot through with a crazing of red. It did not belong to Saro Vingo. For a moment, Virelai thought himself to be looking at the glazed orb of a dead man; then the eye blinked. He scrambled to his feet, prepared to run away, but instead his hand wrapped itself around the brass handle and he found himself stepping into the room.

  The man was lying on the floor with his head twisted sideways and his legs splayed out. His face was bruised and puffy and there was blood in his hair and spattered around him. One of his arms lay at a unnatural angle to his body. At the sight of Virelai, he had become silent; now the air between them filled with expectancy, but the sorcerer did not know what to say. After a few seconds he ventured, ‘Are you all right?’ which was idiotic but at least showed he meant no harm.

  The eye blinked furiously. ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Can you move?’

  The body began an awful shuffling motion and eventually levered itself onto one side, the broken arm flopping uselessly. More effort followed, and eventually the figure sat up, revealing itself as a man in his middle years with a balding head and a lot of pink flesh. One eye was closed, the lid swollen purple; the other stared at Virelai, now kneeling at his side, and then at the wrapped crystal, with suspicion.

  ‘Who are you?’ the man asked.

  ‘No one, really,’ said Virelai, unwilling to offer his identity up too easily. ‘I was looking for a friend of mine. Who are you?’

  ‘My name is Plutario Falco. Some called me “the Magnificent”.’ He laughed, coughed and spat out a tooth, which he regarded mournfully. ‘Not very magnificent now. Not that I ever was, really. It was all just tricks, you see. My lord of Cantara set me a task, which I failed miserably. You can see the results of his fury for yourself. They’ll hand me over to the Tormentor tomorrow.’

  ‘The Tormentor?’

  The man gave Virelai a broken smile, then tossed the tooth onto the floor. ‘Where have you been these last weeks?’ he asked. ‘Not in Jetra, that’s for certain. Tycho’s pet – Tanto Vingo, the cripple from Altea – has the run of the whole city, now that all the other nobles have gone north and the Dystras are on their deathbeds.’

  Virelai shuddered. Tanto Vingo. He remembered the sluglike white-faced boy with his burning-coal eyes full of calculation and pent fury, so different to the mild, open regard of his younger sibling, being wheeled about the castle in a great wicker throne. He recalled, too, the tales of the slaves, overheard in whispered conversations, tales of cruelty and temper; and he remembered how Bëte, with the instinctive understanding of an animal, had avoided him assiduously.

  ‘And what of his brother, Saro Vingo?’ he asked with dawning dread.

  Plutario grimaced. ‘Down in the Miseria,’ he said. ‘Poor lad. Dragged him in out of the desert, I’d heard, where he’d been stupid enough to run away and join a nomad band rather than fight for his country; but when Tycho Issian’s got hold of the exchequer and there’s a bounty on your head, there’s not too much chance for escape. They say they’ll punish him for desertion and that there’s no love lost between the brothers. I dare say I’ll be making the lad’s acquaintance for a brief while, before we both succumb to Tanto’s pleasure.’ He shifted his weight, wincing at the pain that shot up his arm. ‘You don’t have a knife, or something sharp, do you?�
�� he asked a moment later.

  The sorcerer shook his head.

  ‘Pity. Be better to do away with myself quickly and quietly before they give me over to that monster.’

  Virelai looked appalled. ‘You can’t take your own life. Surely nothing can be so bad that it would drive you to do that . . .’ The words trailed away, for even as he said it he knew it wasn’t true. Suddenly he was brought back to a time in Sanctuary’s ice tower when Rahe had shown him the world that lay beyond, how the mage had shown him man’s cruelty to man all over Elda – the rapes, the burnings, beatings and torture. Whole villages overrun by soldiers, slaves whipped under a merciless sun, a man stretched on a flaming rack. Nomads being stoned by angry mobs, cast into huge pyres. Men nailed to great wooden frames and left to die in agony. And it came to him with a sudden, terrible comprehension that the sights the Master had afforded him on that fateful day had been not a simple view of the depredations which were taking place at that time, but a window into the future, this future. The old man had tried to warn him; but he had ignored the mage’s words and had followed a course of action which had set off a sequence of events leading to the very horrors the world was now facing.

  Sanctuary I named this place, and sanctuary it is. You should thank me for bringing you here and saving you from all that greed and horror . . . It all decays and falls away, boy: life, love, magic. There’s nothing worth saving in the end . . .

  Virelai felt a buzzing in his head, a rising sensation in his chest. The man was saying something, but the words were just a blur. ‘No,’ he said, then: ‘No!’ He reached out blindly, caught Plutario by the shoulder. ‘NO.’

  He had no idea whom he was addressing: it might have been himself. It might have been a rejection of the Master’s nihilism, or of this broken man’s despair. It might have been a challenge to the entropy of all things, an outraged demand of the Goddess, in whom it all began. White light filled his mind; white noise, too. There were two voices, locked in a spiral of sound; then silence.

  Virelai opened his eyes. The man, Plutario Falco, was sitting staring at him with something approaching terror in his face. Where the bruise had closed his left eye, the skin was as pink and glowing as a newborn’s. He backed away from the sorcerer, pushing off the floor with his hands. Both hands. With a shock, Virelai realised the broken arm was whole again, the bones knit, the shoulder joint relocated.

  ‘Wh– who are you?’ Plutario stammered. He flexed his fingers in bewilderment. ‘You’ve healed me. It’s a miracle. I can’t believe it. Is it magic? True magic? By the Lady, I never believed it existed, I thought it all was chicanery, tricks and sleight-of-hand, a bit of clever flimflam like my own. But this—’ He raised an amazed smile to his saviour. There was a gap where the knocked-out tooth was missing; the molar lay still upon the floor, bloody at the root.

  Not a complete miracle, then, Virelai thought inconsequentially. But what else could it be called, and how had it been accomplished? His mind sought wildly for explanation: failed. After a while, tears began to roll down his cheeks, another new experience.

  ‘Don’t weep, man!’ Plutario cried, hauling him to his feet. ‘You’re free and I’m whole: we can escape this place and never look back!’

  ‘I cannot leave without Saro,’ Virelai said dully.

  ‘Give him up, man. He’s as good as dead, that one. My life is yours: let me repay you in fine style. I’ll tell you how – I have friends down on the Tilsen River and they have a boat; if we leave here now, tonight, we can pay a ferryman to take us to them. Have you ever been to Gila? It is a wonderful place, my homeland: wine, women and song from dawn to dusk and no priests or fanatics to spoil the fun. I can’t think why I ever left.’ He paused, considering this, then grinned. ‘Well, what reason does anyone ever come to the Eternal City, eh, my friend? Money: there is always money to be made in the Eternal City, especially in my trade – or there was before they started persecuting magicmakers and gearing up for this mad war. Come with me to Gila and live like a prince and you’ll soon forget about this whole sorry business.’

  ‘I can’t do that. I must rescue Saro. Where is the Miseria?’

  Plutario shook his head sadly. ‘You’re mad. No one goes into the Miseria except as a guard or a prisoner; and of the latter none get out alive, unless they’re on the way to their own execution.’

  Virelai looked desperate.

  ‘Well, my friend, I must be on my way,’ Plutario said at last. ‘I’ll be glad to leave this place. The Eternal City has been nothing but a nightmare for me ever since that jackass Barzaco told the Lord of Cantara I could do magic for him.’

  ‘What sort of magic?’

  ‘Oh, he wanted me to make his ships invisible or something, so he could sneak into Halbo and rescue the Rosa Eldi woman. Something nonsensical, and would he listen to me when I said it was all just tricks, that sort of thing? He would not. My idea of making people invisible involves curtains and trapdoors and a lot of blue smoke. He’s a crazy man, that one: believes in the whole shebang.’

  Virelai grabbed him by the shoulders.‘I have an idea. And yes, your life is forfeit to me, and I have an idea of how you may redeem the debt . . .’

  Sixteen

  The Miseria

  ‘I like this not at all.’

  ‘It was never a matter of liking.’

  ‘If they catch us we are dead men.’

  ‘Not an hour ago you were prepared to take your own life, so you are already in profit by an hour.’

  ‘An hour does not profit me much.’

  ‘There is much that can be done in an hour. The future course of the world may change in less.’

  ‘I’m just a trickster, a charlatan, a mountebank – what care I for the future course of the world?’

  In the gloom of the corridor, Virelai turned his pale eyes on Plutario Falco and looked him up and down. The uniform was as detailed as he could remember it – a blue tunic and breeches worked with silver braid, tall black boots, a gleaming silver helm. There were no fat men in the Jetran Guard, and so the conjurer was a shadow of his former self, a shadow which glowed slightly around the edges, which might seem to the casual eye no more than a trick of the light, instead of evidence of the rather poor glamour he had employed. He was reserving what little remained of his sorcery for what came next. He had been surprised his small skills had worked as well as they had, without the cat or any other aid; but remembering how quickly the illusions he used to make could evaporate, there was no time to spare.

  ‘Your life is forfeit to me: you said it yourself. I shall release you from your debt as soon as we have the Vingo boy safe.’

  Plutario shook his head wearily. ‘I do not know why I allowed you to talk me into this; surely you have mazed my mind as well as my body.’

  Down they went into increasing darkness, their footsteps ringing on the stone. It seemed remarkable that no one came out to see who made such a racket; but what was left of the soldiery of Jetra had clearly been assigned to other duties; or, knowing the entrances to the Miseria so well secured, did not bother to guard them as well as they might, especially now that chaos reigned in the Eternal City. The stench rose the further down they went, until Plutario held his hand over his nose and mouth. It was not the honest smell of human sweat and waste – or rather, it was not simply that, but a more disturbing aroma altogether. The scent of cooked meat mingled with an iron tang, until the air itself felt thick and fatty, as if it might leave a residue on your face and hands, might slick the nostrils as you inhaled and coat the lungs with an impermeable grease. Even breathing it made Virelai feel complicit in whatever vile acts had been perpetrated here.

  ‘Faugh!’ exclaimed the conjurer at last. ‘I thought they confined their burnings to the Grand Campo and the Merchants’ Square.’

  Virelai felt the disgust rise in him, as acrid as bile.

  ‘Come on,’ he said shortly, and quickened his pace.

  The sound of voices brought them to a halt on the nex
t level down, then laughter and the chink of glassware. Sweetsmoke and incense drifted along the corridor outside the guardroom, hazing the air. Virelai pressed his companion back against the wall and studied the men inside intently. A moment later he removed Plutario’s helm and, muttering softly, rubbed his palm across the other man’s face. Then he stood back, examined his handiwork, and added a scar to the conjurer’s left cheek. A belligerent man stared back at him, bold and bloodshot of eye, with a jutting jaw and a vein-reddened nose.

  He had never tried to transform himself. Without a mirror it would be difficult, since he was used to viewing the changes he essayed as he made them and adjusting those features that did not match the template. The houris he had worked on for Tycho’s pleasure, with their wide hips and dark skin and hair, had been of a different species to the Rosa Eldi, and effecting a transformation which would last for an hour or more had been challenging. With luck, he would need to hold these disguises for a short time only. With a sigh he closed his eyes and concentrated on the man facing the door, dealing out the cards. Then with the guard’s face focused clearly in his mind’s eye, he touched his own features. The prickle of the sorcery took him aback. It was less painful than unsettling, as if the skin was crawling over his bones, unanchored from muscle, cartilage and ligament. The buzzing that accompanied it sounded like a wasps’ nest in his skull; the vibrations travelled through his skeleton and earthed themselves in the flagstones beneath his feet. When he touched his face again, he knew it was not his own. The chin was shorter and more compact, the jaw broader, his vision more widely spaced.

  Beckoning his companion, he laid a swift spell of concentration on the men inside the guardroom so that they studied their cards intently for a few seconds as they passed the door; then the murmur of their voices rose again.

  Plutario, who had little idea of what had just transpired, tapped Virelai on the shoulder as soon as they were out of earshot.‘Now what?’ he asked plaintively. His face ached and prickled, he felt uncomfortable in his own skin; but even so, he wanted to save it and be out of here as quickly as possible.