The Heart of the mirage mm-1

by Glenda Larke

  The light from my cabochon bathed the woman with a warm gold radiance.

  SHlRIN

  The silence splintered into babble and movement and emotional turmoil. Pinar's angry 'But that's impossible!' was lost in expressions of delight from others. The Magoroth came up to hug me, touching my cabochon to theirs, showing me the warmth of their welcome to their ranks.

  Across the room, Brand's shock segued into cynicism, but I refused to return his gaze. The glow in my cabochon subsided. All I saw now was a translucent yellow gem set into my palm. A cabochon that could kill. What did that make me? More than human? Or less? I shivered.

  Then, as the excitement died away a little, Korden bent to murmur in my ear. 'I am glad, for you, and for us. But – are you truly with us, Derya? Or do you think with a Tyranian heart, as Pinar would have us believe?'

  I smiled ruefully to cover my anxiety. 'I can't change overnight, Korden. I will admit that. There are things which are strange, distasteful even. And things have happened too quickly for me to adjust.' I took his left hand and pressed my cabochon to his. 'Perhaps this

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  will convince you; do you feel anything but happiness there?' I knew he would be able to detect nothing suspicious. Not even Temellin had noticed the slightest sign of disloyalty within me, although he had often held my hand; I was a Brotherhood Compeer, and the masking of emotion was a Brotherhood skill as much as it was a Magor one. I was confident I could hide myself even better than they did.

  But Korden wasn't convinced, and his 'Welcome to the Magoroth, Magoria-derya', was as welcoming as the stare of a guard dog.

  Temellin laid a hand on Korden's arm. 'My turn, I think,' he said, and then drew me aside. He held my hand and I was shot with his delight. He was transformed.

  I stared at him, wondering what I was missing.

  He laughed at me, whispering in my ear as he drew me into a congratulatory hug. 'Don't you know what this means, Derya? You can be Miragerin-consort! I do not have to turn to Pinar.'

  My heart leapt, absurdly, then cracked. What was I thinking of? I was not going to stay long. I was an agent of Tyrans. I was going to betray them all, put down this damned insurgency of theirs. Bring back peace to their land. Marry a Kardi barbarian? The idea was ludicrous.

  Marry Temellin7. I gazed at him, and those eyes of his were full of humour, of anticipation. His delight washed over me in waves. Goddess, I thought, the idiot is in love with me. And then: This is what love ought to he. And then: But not for me. I'm a compeer.

  I thought of Favonius, remembered all that his emotions had said. Favonius had lusted after me. He'd been proud of his possession of a general's daughter. He'd loved me as much as he was capable of loving

  anyone, but there had been nothing like this in him. The memories of all the time we had spent together withered like sun-seared leaves.

  I remembered the way Brand had felt when he had – oh, so briefly – allowed me to touch his emotions. He loved me the way Temellin did, too.

  My thoughts, unbidden, took another leap. I remembered the time Temellin and I had spent together. I remembered his body, his tenderness. The way he laughed. His intelligence. The way his voice softened when he spoke of things he loved. The way his language became poetry. I remembered how the children of the freed slaves adored him. Sweet Elysium, I thought, stop me from being so – so witless. Just because no one has ever loved me before is no reason to fall apart like – like a broken amphora spilling its contents. I cannot crack simply because I find a man attractive and his love flattering.

  'Derya -?' Temellin asked. 'Are you all right?' His concern was palpable. I was far too aware of his unconcealed emotions.

  My eyes searched for Pinar. The older Magoria was staring at me, hatred-filled, but with her emotions under tight control. 'Pinar will kill me,' I said involuntarily.

  'Don't be silly! She and I don't love one another, not that way. It was to be a marriage of – of friendship. For children. She will be glad for me.'

  I blinked at this extraordinary self-deception, but before I could comment, Korden was there again, saying, 'Temellin, shouldn't we continue with what we intended? We wanted to find out who Derya is; let's do so.'

  'How?' I asked. 'Is it possible that I – that I have

  family here? That -?' I couldn't give voice to the words,

  mm: ' °

  but my mind was suddenly filled with my childhood memory of a woman with a mane of russet hair, a woman bathed in gold light and splattered with scarlet. Perhaps I had been loved before this, once. I felt I was choking on memories and emotion and sentiment.

  Goddess, Rathrox would never believe his eyes if he saw me like this.

  Temellin slid an arm around my shoulders. 'Illusa-zerise,' he said, indicating the woman who had kissed my cabochon, 'was the Magor in charge of the palace nursery in Madrinya at the time of the invasion. She knew all the children. Including, therefore, you. She was one of the few people who survived the massacre of the Shimmer Festival.' He led me across the room to the Illusa.

  My immediate thought was that if I had indeed been one of Zerise's charges, she would have scared me out of my swaddling clothes. She was all sharp edges: face, body, hands, all honed to acute peaks and ridges with no softening flesh. One cheek was badly scarred by two deeply gouged holes and two flanking lesser marks, all in a straight line. Her eyes had a sharply focused intensity and she held her body as if it were a poised axe. She was aged about fifty, not quite as old as I had first thought; the sparseness of her iron-grey hair and the angular thinness of her body were deceptive.

  'Zerise,' Temellin was saying, 'who can Derya be?'

  The woman looked at me with those sharp eyes, searching my face as if to find the imprint of the child there. 'What do you know about yourself?' she asked finally. 'Your real name perhaps? There was no child called Derya. Anything at all might be helpful.'

  Her voice was soft, at complete variance with her looks, but I was breathless with the tension of that moment; truth was suspended somewhere in the

  minutes ahead and I longed for it to be plucked and given to me. Yet when I spoke, my voice was calm; that, too, was a Brotherhood skill.

  'I can't remember my real name. General Gayed renamed me.' True enough, although the name had been a good Tyranian one: Ligea. 'He found me and took me to Tyr when I was just a little less than three. That was in the tenth year of Senna Timonius's Exaltarchy, in the fourth month, I think. Before that – I remember the woman I think was my mother. A Magoria, I guess. She had a sword and there was gold light streaming out of her. There were people shouting and screaming. There were curtains. I wanted to look through the curtains, but someone wouldn't let me. Another woman. And then she disappeared too and I was horribly afraid and surrounded by strangers. There was a lot of fighting. And blood.' My left hand had curled up into a fist and it was an effort to relax it again. T can't remember much else.'

  Zerise bit her lip, considering.

  I stared at her face and thought, I've seen that kind of scar somewhere before… Then I remembered. It had been on the cheek of a man held in the Cages in Tyr, a rebel. I'd been told that a legionnaires? weapon, a circular piece of metal with jagged edges hurled from a whirlsling, left just such a mark. A rip-disc, the legions called it.

  'Almost three in the fourth month of the tenth year of the previous Exaltarchy,' Zerise was saying. 'Let me see, that would mean you were born around the fifth or sixth month of the Kardi year Veshol-twenty-three. There were two Magorias born about then -'

  'Mirageless soul!' The exclamation was Temellin's.

  Zerise nodded. 'Yes. Shirin. Magoria-shirin was born in the fifth month. It's got to be her.'

  'And the other?' Korden prompted.

  She addressed Temellin. 'Your cousin Sarana, Mirager-temellin. Magoria-sarana was just a month younger than Magoria-shirin.'

  The silence in the room developed an intensity so widely shared it could almost be touched. I darted gl
ances from one person to another, not understanding why everyone was so tense, knowing something significant was not being said, hating my ignorance, but not sure I wanted to dispel it. They were all horrified – no, more than that – they were devastated by the idea I might be Sarana. Emotion skipped around the room in flurries.

  Even Garis was aghast. 'Are you sure she is Shirin?' he asked.

  'Oh, she couldn't be Sarana,' Zerise said. She dispensed a comforting calm in liberal waves that said even more than her words. 'The Mirager-solad himself brought Magoria-sarana's body back for burial. We all went to the burial griefs.'

  'There can't be any doubt? A misidentification?' It was Temellin who asked, and his voice was unfamiliar to my ears; it was harsh and almost cruel.

  'Oh no. Utterly impossible. The Mirager-solad himself identified her. And he was her father, after all. She was unmutilated, killed by an arrow through the heart. He was the one who found her shortly after the ambush. He'd ridden out to persuade her mother to come back, you see… He shroud-wrapped her, and her mother Wendia, and rode back to Madrinya with them both in his howdah. I saw them arrive. He was shattered. He worshipped that child. And he loved Wendia too. The tears were streaming down his cheeks. Do you think if there had been the slightest doubt the bodies he carried were not those of Sarana

  and Wendia, he'would not have seized on it? I have rarely seen a man as broken as he was by the death of his daughter. He fought like a whirlwind during the Shimmer Feast attack, though.' She looked at me and explained. 'I was there, you understand, one of the few to survive. I saw Solad kill more Tyranians than anyone else that day, even though he was stuck through with arrows like a roast on a spit. It was sheer burning rage that kept him alive long enough to kill so many.' She wiped away tears with the back of a hand and turned to Temellin. 'No, the Magoria here cannot possibly be Sarana.'

  'Are you sure the only other possibility is Shirin?' J Once again the question came from Temellin. This time he was smiling, his eyes sparkling with a partially suppressed joy.

  'Yes, if the Magoria is right about how old she is. And even if she's not -' Zerise thought for a while. 'No. Reneta was about a year younger and I saw her body myself. The other girls were little more than babies and they were all accounted for, murdered in their cradles. But Shirin's body was never found. And she was the only Magoria missing. The part of the palace she was in was devastated by fire; there was little left to find. We thought she'd burned. I suppose it is possible she was saved by a Tyranian soldier.' She touched her scar and added bitterly, 'There were enough of them about.'

  But Temellin was already reaching for me, whirling me in his arms, holding me tightly, hurting me in his joy. 'Shirin… Shirin, my Shirin – don't you remember me? I gave you my wooden shleth when you cried after I broke your toy sword. Don't you remember?'

  I shook my head, laughing. 'Temellin, put me down -! Who am I? Tell me, who is this Shirin?'

  You are Shirin, my love! 1 thought you were dead! 1 remember crying when they told me -'

  Over Temellin's shoulder I caught a glimpse of Garis's face. He wasn't rejoicing. He was filled with consternation, as though he were waiting for a calamity he knew was inevitable. I thought, He realises something Temellin doesn't. I pushed Temellin away. 'Garis,' I asked, 'who is Shirin?'

  He blurted out the answer, knowing how I would feel, remembering as apparently Temellin did not. 'Shirin was – is – you are Temellin's little sister,' he said. 'You had the same parents.'

  My world died in a crashing roar in my ears. I saw people opening and closing their mouths, speaking to me, but I could not hear them. I saw their joy become uncertainty as my shock registered with them. My revulsion spilled out all over the room. I saw Temellin's grin become a horrified mouthing. I destroyed his happiness with my unbridled reaction, with the warding-off gesture of my hands. I turned from him to Brand, walking into his arms, clutching at him, burying my face in his chest. I couldn't speak. I was choking on the bile and vomit rising in me.

  Oh, Goddess, I thought. / have bedded my own brother.

  Oh, Goddess, forgive me.

  Oh, Goddess, now I knew- I loved this man. Ligea Gayed gave her heart without even knowing it. The Brotherhood Compeer fell in love with the enemy.

  Goddess forgive me. I did not know. Bedded my brother. Fitting punishment for thinking myself immune to sentiment.

  You stupid fool, Ligea.

  Brand knew. He swung me away from Temellin's imploring hands, herded me out of that room,

  somehow found his way through the labyrinth to the quietness of my own bedroom. When I lay down on my pallet, he chafed the coldness of my fingers, covered my shivering body with a blanket, gently stroked my face and hair. There was no triumph in him, no satisfaction. When I could not cry, when I shrivelled and froze inside, it was Brand who had tears in his eyes.

  'Don't let him near me,' I whispered. 'I don't want to see him.'

  'He won't come in here,' he promised, and he was as good as his word. Temellin came and was turned away.

  When my trembling died, it was Brand who tried to offer consolation. 'It's not so bad, Ligea. You've never been one to worship the Goddess and her rules, so you can't think you have sinned -'

  'Sinned? No. It's just – just the thought of doing such a thing,' I said finally. 'It's unnatural. And they think it so normal. Oh, Goddess, Brand. I wanted him so much. Just to look at him was enough to start the ache. And do you think I will feel any different now? I will always remember that; there will be part of me that will want him still… And yet the thought of his touch now – makes me sick. Physically ill.'

  He looked at me, and heard what I didn't say. I had loved Temellin. He read it in my pain. 'Then let's go away from here,' he said at last. 'Back to Madrinya, if you must. Bring the legions here, raze the place to the ground, kill them all if that's the only way you can lay your ghosts.' He was pointing out what I couldn't do, of course, forcing me to clarity of thought.

  I said, 'Damn you, Brand, you know I can't. Maybe that compeer bitch, Ligea of Tyr, could have done it, but she doesn't exist any more. He is my brother. My flesh and blood.' I turned my face to the wall. It was

  ¦BH-'

  difficult to say the next words, to tell him what I had refused to think about since I had learned the truth of it under the Shiver Barrens. 'He is the father of my son.'

  He was stilled with shock. 'You can't know that you -' he said after a long pause. 'You've known him only a matter of what, ten days? How could you know that you are -?'

  'I know. Just as I know when people lie. I have a life growing in me, his son. His nephew.' I gave a bitter laugh. 'I shall be mother and aunt all in one.' I rolled off the pallet and went to stand at the window. I had known my pregnancy in one split second when I was inside the Shiver Barrens. The knowledge had suddenly been there in my body, in my mind. And more than just that, I'd known his gender. A boy, conceived the first day when I had been so overwhelmed by the attraction of a Magoria to a Magori that I had cast all sense and precautions away in exchange for pleasure. The Goddess Melete – or fate, or whatever you like to call it – had made me pay for that moment of fervid passion.

  Doubtless the knowledge of the child, my son, should have been the source of joy, of wonderment. But what joy could there be when I learned of him just moments after I was shown a vile vision of death? A vision of a nameless baby ripped from his nameless mother's womb, to cause her demise – and for what? Some sick purpose of the Mirage Makers? What conclusion was I to derive from that, except the most obvious? And that was another thing I had spent days trying not to think about: I was being primed as a sacrifice, to supply an unborn child.

  Yet now I wondered. Perhaps I had mistaken the meaning of the vision. Perhaps the Mirage Makers had

  been telling me something slightly different: that the child was an abomination, seeded by a man who was his uncle as well as his father. That he had to be destroyed, even if it meant my death. Perhaps they didn't like s
ibling pairing any more than I did. Yet if that was the case, why my child and not, say, Jahan and Jessah's? They had children, I knew. Several of them. Why mine? Why me?

  I covered my face with my hands, to hide my horror from Brand.

  'Let's go back to Tyr, then,' he said. For once, his calm had deserted him. His face was ashen with shock. 'Tell Rathrox you failed. Resign. Live your own life.'

  T cannot return to Tyrans. I would be accused of treason. No one leaves the Brotherhood without Rathrox's consent. No one walks away from an assignment without being punished for their dereliction of duty.'

  He was disbelieving. 'Punished? Treason? You think they'd burn you?'

  'Oh no. Burning is for non-citizens. Citizen traitors are crucified.'

  'They wouldn't dare! You are Gayed's daughter. You are being melodramatic'

  Goddess, I wished I were. I could already feel the nails being driven into my hands, see the blood dribbling down my arms, hear the coarse mockery of men like Hargen Bivius. I said, 'But there are other factors involved here, aren't there?'

  We stared at one another while he considered what I meant. 'They set you up,' he said softly. 'The three of them. Korbus, Rathrox and Gayed. Your whole life was aimed at this moment. The moment you would be in a position to be an instrument of their revenge on Kardiastan.'

  I nodded, nausea seeping through me like poison. Gayed. I'd thought he loved me… I forced myself to sound rational, reasoned, calm. 'If I fail here, and go home with the task unfinished, their revenge will extend to my downfall. There would be some trumped-up charge, to make my dereliction seem truly traitorous. Would they stop short of crucifixion, do you think? I don't think so. Anyway, at the very least, they will strip me of all I own, including my reputation and my respectability. My life wouldn't be worth ten sestus.' Tyr, I thought. I had loved that city once.

  "Vortexdamn them.' His next words were said with an urgent passion. 'We can go somewhere else, then. Leave them all behind: Kardis, Tyranians, the Brotherhood, escape all of them. Build a life for yourself somewhere else. In Altan perhaps. Or even outside the boundaries of the Exaltarchy.'