The Heart of the mirage mm-1

by Glenda Larke

Antonia shook my arm. 'That must be all that is for your ears,' she said. 'Allow me to blindfold you again -'

  I jerked my arm away and snapped at her. 'No. No more dulling of my senses. Show me the way out.'

  Her eyes flashed, anger roiling with unexpected intensity. 'The Brotherhood has no power here that we do not freely concede,' she hissed. 'All who come before the Oracle are blindfolded. This cavern is part of die Sacred Way, not a path for the undedicated to know.'

  "Very well:' I freed the end of my wrap from my waist and wound it around my head to cover my eyes. 'Now lead me out.'

  She was silent for a moment, then grabbed my elbow and pulled me after her. I stumbled blindly in her wake for what felt like an age, but was probably no more than five minutes. As far as I could tell, we traversed the cavern of the Eternal Flame to some kind of tunnel which ended in steps. We ascended these, then I heard the scraping sound once more and we were back in the room behind the sanctum.

  I unwound the end of my wrap. Antonia stood before me, glaring. 'With the Brotherhood behind you, you think you are untouchable. But before the Goddess, you are no more than each intake of mortal breath. All you are is easily snatched away, Compeer Ligea.' Her use of my title confirmed her knowledge of my Brotherhood status, something I preferred to hide from Tyr's highborn. She added, 'Don't mock the Goddess, or you will live to regret it.'

  T wouldn't dream of it,' I replied, schooling my tone to a careful neutrality. There was no point in upsetting the Temple High Priestess if it were avoidable. 'Nor would I mock the Oracle. It has given me, er, food for

  thought.' In truth, it had been worryingly accurate, but I wasn't going to tell her that. 'I trust that what you and Esme learned today remains unsaid to others.'

  'We are servants of the Goddess. We keep many secrets.'

  Not quite the promise I hoped for, but obviously all I was going to get. I nodded to her and left the temple.

  Outside, I had to narrow my eyes against the glare of midday light. My mind seethed with all I had seen as I descended the stairs to the Forum Publicum. The crowd there was thinning now that the heat was so intense. Most of the well-to-do had headed home, leaving the streets to the slaves and the poor, but I had something I needed to do.

  Noting the fineness of my clothing, litter carriers hurried up to offer their services, but I waved them away and started to walk. I wanted to be alone while I digested all that had happened. I slipped into the labyrinth of streets and alleys leading to the poorer sections of the central city, the area called the Snarls. The change from wide, well-kept public spaces to the closed-in squalor of poverty was rapid; the stink of open drains and rotting rubbish cloyed as the crowds disappeared. Beneath my feet, the smoothness of well-swept pavements gave way to the hard-packed earth of potholed lanes. No marble facades here, no creeper-shaded courtyards. The buildings were of crumbling rough-hewn stone, the rooms cramped, the windows and doorways narrow and mean, the occupants lean and tough. This was the other, more regrettable face of Tyr; but then, I supposed any centre as great as this city had to attract the scavengers as well as the cultured. Most who eked out an inadequate living in the Snarls were not citizens, but a mix of nationalities attracted to the capital of the Exaltarchy, thinking they

  would make their fortunes. Some of them were even right.

  I halted for a moment, my head aching and the taste in my mouth foul. I couldn't even think straight. The Oracle had spoken to me, Ligea Gayed, and prophesied my future. Not many were so privileged. Why, then, did I feel so… besmirched?

  I pushed the feeling away and directed my thoughts instead to assimilating the reality of my coming departure from Tyr. No more desert-season evenings spent at the open-air theatre to hear a new comedy i

  from Crispin; no more sitting around a fire on a snow-season night with the Academy scholars, drinking punch and discussing Asculi's latest treatise or arguing about why the seasons change; no more pleasant hours spent at one of Nereus's musical evenings.

  Kardiastan. Desert hell. Uncultured land of assassins and evil numina, of windstorms and rainless skies. May the wind of Acheron's Vortex take that bastard Rathrox!

  I had no time, though, to dwell on the pleasant fantasy of an unpleasant end for my Brotherhood mentor, because my thoughts were jerked back to the present. Away from the safety of frequented streets, my senses had subconsciously roamed outwards to become aware of what was happening around me. It seemed my foolishness in crossing the Snarls while so richly dressed was going to bring me trouble: I was being followed. It served me right; I ought to have known better. I should have taken a litter.

  I focused my attention. The people in the houses I ignored; those in the surrounding streets I allowed my senses to touch, taking note of their proximity, checking if they were a potential threat by testing their emotions. I found an irate woman and several sulky

  children, a man consumed with an as-yet-unsatisfied lust in the company of a woman who seemed unenthusiastic – a whore perhaps? – and, out of sight down a parallel street, a crowd of young people exuding drunken amusement. No one I need worry about.

  My follower was another matter. I flicked my senses behind and felt his emotions as a black cloud of violence and avarice, too full of malevolent anticipation to be ignored. Damn the man. Around the next corner, I stepped into the nearest recessed doorway of the lane to wait, and felt for my knife. It wasn't there, of course. No one carried a knife into an audience with the Exaltarch.

  With growing badtemper and exasperation, I tracked the progress of my pursuer. When he rounded the corner into the lane and found I was no longer in sight, he hesitated a moment, then began to run. I hitched up my wrap and stuck out a foot at the precise moment he drew level; predictably, he sprawled face down in the dirt. I was on him before he had even determined what had happened, pinning him down with a knee in the middle of his back, immobilising him still further by twisting his right arm up behind him. I assessed him quickly: an ill-dressed individual, foul-smelling, not all that young, with neither the strength nor the skill to resist. His clothes were ragged, but I saw some embroidery on what was left of the collar: Quyr beadwork, unless I was much mistaken. Rebellion within the Quyr region and legionnaire attempts to subdue the insurgents had forced many Quyriots out of their mountain homes. Some had made their way to Tyr in search of a living – honest or otherwise; doubtless this man was one such.

  'What did you want, helot?' I asked.

  'N-nothin',' he stuttered in shock. 'Was just walkin' -'

  I tightened my grip. 'Your first lie,' I said. 'The next earns you a broken bone. Why were you following me?'

  'I wasn't, Domina -'

  I shifted my hold slightly and broke his little finger. He yelped in pain and disbelief.

  'Why were you following me?'

  He was silent, so I began to apply pressure on his next finger.

  'Don't -!' he yelled, too late.

  'Were you after my purse? Shall I add a third finger to the tally?'

  He howled briefly, but increased pressure soon brought a more comprehensible mumble of admission. His disbelief had melted into fear, his outrage vanished into a numbed acceptance, a common enough emotion of the underprivileged when faced with their superiors.

  'Any other reason?'

  'No – I swear in the name of the Goddess! Lady, please -'

  I felt the truth of his answer and released the pressure a little. Ordinarily I would have continued to question him until I found a way I could use him; I'd have held the threat of imprisonment over him and enlisted him in my army of informants, but now – what was the use? I was off to Kardiastan and had no further need of informants… 'That could earn you a spell in the Cages, my friend,' I said. 'But you're lucky. I'm in a merciful mood today. Get going.'

  I released him abruptly, and stood up. He scrambled to his feet, nursing his injured fingers. He opened his mouth to curse me, saw the look on my

  face and changed his mind, then scuttled away down a side
alley without a word.

  I walked on, rubbing my aching head, wondering why my distaste for what had happened was so pronounced. Usually that sort of incident didn't worry me. This time, though, as the man's acidic hate for me lingered in the air after he had gone, I found myself wondering if my talents, especially those that gave me an awareness of other people's emotions, were worth having.

  As a child I had been hurt again and again by my uninvited knowledge, until I'd learned to build a wall around my too-soft core. When I'd been very young, I'd thought everyone felt things the same way I did, and I'd gone on thinking so, until Aemid, my Kardi slave-nurse, had disabused me. She had drawn me aside one day, making sure no one overheard us, to say, 'You feel things others don't. You know things you shouldn't. And until you learn to control those feelings, to push aside that knowledge, to ignore all that comes to you unbidden, to squash it – until then, you will continue to be hurt. None of this inner knowledge of yours will do you any good, Ligea; don't listen to it. That way it will eventually stop coming to you.'

  At first I'd tried to follow her advice. Then, one day I'd been saved from unpleasantness by knowing beforehand that some bullying young playmates of mine were waiting in ambush for me in our villa garden. Aemid, I decided, was wrong. The knowledge coming to me unbidden might often have hurt, but it also provided invaluable insights. Instead of crushing it, I nurtured it. I practised, I trained myself to listen, to be aware, to feel things others couldn't feel, to know what should have been unknowable. Slowly I learned to coax more nebulous intuitions into a coherent form

  of awareness, to recognise vague feelings about the emotions of others as information to be read and interpreted. The extent of my abilities was my secret, and one I kept well. Aemid may have guessed I hadn't taken her advice, but she never said. Gayed, and later Rathrox, sensed I was different, that I was more perceptive than others, but I never explained my gift to them; I never let them know just how good I was.

  Even so, it seemed Rathrox knew too much, and now, because of my abilities, I was being sent to Kardiastan. Worse, the Oracle was aware of my abilities too. What was it Esme had said about me? With powers to see behind the face. And with her blurting that out, the temple authorities – Antonia and her ilk – would know there was something odd about me too, blast them. The fewer people who knew what I could do, the more valuable my power was.

  I sighed. No matter what, exile was far too high a price to pay for my talent.

  The tangle of alleyways I followed led me into the heart of the Snarls, to what passed for a prison in Tyr: the Cages. Lesser criminals were sold into slavery and usually never found themselves here. The Cages were for the more violent felons, for those awaiting execution, for traitors and insurgents.

  The place had a stink all its own: sweat, excreta, disease, dirt and hopelessness combined in a sour foulness permeating the air, a gangrenous stench that always clung to my clothes and hair even after I'd left the place. I should have been used to it – my job took me there often enough – but I wasn't. It was never easy to accustom oneself to a place like that.

  Stacked like chicken coops in Tyr's fowl market, two high and two deep, the cages lined a rutted alleyway

  always sodden with the muck washed from cage floors. Scum-covered puddles of stagnant slime made walking a hazard; vermin lurked in every crevice. At night, and during the day too sometimes, some of them emerged to feed on the caged.

  Each cage differed in size from the next: some were so cramped they could barely contain a grown man bent double; others were large enough to house ten or twelve adults – and did. Each had iron bars on all four sides, a slab floor below and a slab roof above. Each contained nothing but prisoners and blankets rotted with urine. They were sluiced once a day, but there was no privacy, no real shelter from the weather or fellow prisoners, no protection from a sometimes hostile public. In this, the desert-season, the place crawled with flies and maggots, and reeked with fever. In the snow-season, only the generosity of people who donated blankets saved the incarcerated from freezing to death.

  To condemn a man – or woman – to a year in the Cages was as good as telling them they had an appointment with the Vortex of Death, a passage to Acheron. The law courts of Tyr might have been fair and just, but the punishment system was run by demoted military men, disgraced legionnaires. It was an irony Rathrox delighted in. 'True justice is to be found in the Cages,' he told me once, 'not in the verdicts handed out in pristine courtrooms. I loathe men who know the theory of law, yet never sully their lily-white feet by walking into the Snarls.'

  I ignored the Cages for the time being and went straight to the Warden's office, which was in a solid stone building nearby. Inside the door, burning incense pebbles did their best to conquer the less attractive smells and the miasma of disease wafting in

  from outside. The Warden himself was out and it was the Sub-warden I saw, a man called Hargen Bivius. He was seated behind the Warden's desk when I entered, his feet on the desktop and a jug of wine in his hand. His eyes slitted with sullen dislike the moment he saw me, but he didn't move. 'Ligea,' he drawled, 'and dressed in all her finery, too. We are honoured. But careful, m'dear, around here you could dirty the hem of your oh-so-pretty wrap.'

  I refused to be drawn to anger. 'Dorus the Jeweller's son – Markis, I believe his name is – what cage is he in?'

  It took him a while to decide to move. Finally he placed the jug on the desk with careful deliberation and swung his feet to the floor so he could consult a wax tablet in front of him. A wisp of incense smoke drifted between us, swirling delicately as it was caught on his breath. With infuriating slowness, he ran a dirty finger down the column of names impressed on the tablet and at last gave me the information I wanted. 'Number twenty-eight. One of our more luxurious accommodations – it's high enough to stand up in, is number twenty-eight. At your request, I believe. A lover of yours, perhaps? Hard up these days are you, Compeer?'

  I suppressed a sigh. 'He's well?'

  'As can be expected.' The sourness of his breath drowned the aroma of the incense stones.

  'He is to be kept in good health.'

  He gave an exaggerated bow. 'Anything to oblige the Magister Officii's pet.'

  'Think of it as obliging the Brotherhood, Hargen. And if you should torment Markis for some petty reasons of your own, I'll see you face Brotherhood wrath.'

  He gripped the edge of the desk as if that was the only way he could keep his hands under control. 'Ligea, m'dear, do you have any concept of how much I hate you?'

  I could feel his loathing without even trying. 'I have a fair idea. Just remember, if anything happens to Markis, it will be Rathrox's wrath you face, not mine.'

  Hargen Bivius had been a fellow compeer once, as well as a legionnaire, until I'd decided the Brotherhood would be better off without him. A gratuitously cruel and petty-minded man who'd crossed me again and again for no reason other than sheer malice, I'd had no compunction about ruining his career. He hadn't deserved the privilege of being a compeer, and his behaviour had been damaging the effectiveness of the Brotherhood. I'd enjoyed nudging him along to his own self-destruction. Apparently, he had finally figured out the part I'd played in what had happened to him: his emotions raged at me.

  'One day,' he promised, 'I'll have my revenge.'

  I heard the lie and smiled inwardly. Hargen had about as much resolution as a snail without its shell. 'I doubt it,' I said. 'Wine loosens the tongue, but it seldom sharpens the wits and never stiffens the spine. Or anything else for that matter.' I nodded to him pleasantly and went out into the street once more.

  Assailed by the stench of the Cages again, I almost gagged. It was an effort to turn to one of the duty guards and ask to be shown cage number twenty-eight, an effort to breathe normally and ignore the rats slinking in the gutters, their fur stiff with filth. I could almost feel compassion for Markis Dorus, even though he had played at treason. He was eighteen years old, a pampered lad with an overzealous tongu
e

  whod suddenly found out the world could be a vicious and unfriendly place to the unwise.

  He sat alone, hunched up at one end of his cage, his hair matted, his clothing filthied, his skin scabbed with dirt. Flies buzzed around his head. He looked well enough in spite of the grime, and there was food and water in covered containers at his feet. His family evidently kept him well supplied, which was more than could be said for some of the otiier lowlife incarcerated around him.

  I didn't bother to speak to him. My business was not with Markis, but with his father, and gloating over the lawless I'd brought to justice held no attraction for me. The majority of those imprisoned here were murderers, rapists, kidnappers, traitors – men and women warped with cruelty, dissipation and greed. I knew the hideousness of their crimes better than most, but I took no pleasure, as some highborn did, in seeing them mired in misery. I wanted to check that Markis was well, and that done, I turned my back on them all and set off through the Snarls once more.

  It was a relief to emerge at last into the Artisan Quarter. The laneways of this part of the city may have been narrow, but at least they were paved and clean, the stone walls kept repaired and whitewashed. Doors and windows were shuttered and barred at this time of the day as shop-owners and householders dozed somewhere behind them: it was the siesta hour.

  When I reached my destination, Dorus the Jeweller's, I paused until I was sure I was unobserved. I tugged at the bellpull, but it was a while before the door was unbarred and opened. The man in the doorway stared at me, his expression blank as he failed to recognise me dressed as I was. Then his plump face paled. 'Compeer… Holy Goddess -!' He gestured me

  inside, but not before giving a swift glance into the street in an agony of terror. 'Compeer, if someone were to recognise you -'

  'No one saw me, Dorus. Do you have the information?'

  'Yes, yes! Upstairs. But it's more than my life is worth to be seen talking to you!' He indicated a chair in the darkest corner of his workroom. 'Stay here, Lady Compeer, please. I'll get it.'