The Heart of the mirage mm-1

by Glenda Larke

  'I said the Magor in those days were stupid,' he said with a snort of contempt and popped several of the fruit into his mouth at once. 'They were so secure in their feelings of superiority they didn't bother to practise, to hone their skills. You can see how hard you've had to work to control your sword. They were so arrogant, they didn't bother. They knew the theory, but never put it into practice. They thought some of the things they could do – control storms, for example – were enough to keep them safe. Even so, most of the minor skirmishes with the legions were won by the Magor, you know. The one where the heir, Magoria-sarana, was killed was an exception. I suppose that's one reason why the Mirager-solad took it so badly. It must have seemed unfair: of all the people to die, it had to be the heir.'

  He spat a fruit seed out with an accuracy that spoke of expertise, hitting a young and pretty Illusa on the rump. She whirled around indignantly, but Garis, straight-faced, walked on, saying, 'They underestimated Tyranian persistence and cunning and they died because they hadn't worked at all their skills. When they were caught without their weapons, they just didn't have enough control of their cabochons to defeat the archers.'

  He couldn't resist a backward glance at the Illusa, and promptly received a rap on the nose from the same fruit seed. 'Illusa-jenka knows me too well, I think,' he said with a rueful grin as he rubbed his nose.

  He gave the rest of his fruit to a boy sitting on a wall banging his heels to the detriment of his sandals, and continued, 'We will not make the same mistake as our parents' generation. Temellin or Korden or Pinar, any of the original Ten, there's no way they could be defeated like that. Even you and I – we would have felt the presence of intruders in the feasting hall.' He paused. 'Although we believe the traitor used a ward to prevent that… To tell the truth, we don't know too much about what happened there. The only account we have is from Zerise. None of the Magoroth survived. Anyway, you may not have known what you were doing back in Tyrans, but you must have been constantly practising to improve those skills you were aware of. Now you must practise even more.'

  I gave him a heartfelt look. 'Practice can be very boring.'

  He laughed. 'Why don't you take a break sometimes? Go for a ride? You can borrow a shleth from the stables, you know, any time you want.'

  I hadn't known, but from then on I rode out almost every day, sometimes with Garis, sometimes alone. During those rides I was close to happy, perhaps because it was then I felt an affinity to the land itself; to the Mirage Makers who were the land. At those time's I certainly couldn't believe they would deliberately harm me in order to obtain my unborn child. Alone on my pallet at night, my thoughts tended to be less comforting.

  The worst part of those rides was when I came across the sores of the Ravage eating away at the land, swallowing its beauty and its joyful absurdities in those creeping excrescences of foulness. I once made the mistake of dismounting near one of these abominations, gagging on its stench, to take a closer

  look. I shut out its hatred with a deliberate mind-block, but even so I could feel the hammer blows of vicious dislike against my mental shield. If it wanted to terrorise me, it succeeded. It took every particle of courage I had just to approach it close enough to look down into its depths.

  As I stared into its green-black slime and saw past its surface to the horrors below, I wished I had not come. The dimness beneath was full of writhing, bestial forms exuding pus and other fluids, stinking of gangrenous flesh. At first I thought they were true animals, managing to survive in putrescence. Strange deformed things, but just creatures.

  Then one of them rose up through the slime to poke its head out into the air, to look at me. Its body resembled a bulging caterpillar, except it was the size of a hound. Its head had tearing feeding parts and large, voracious eyes. Its gaze enveloped me with gleeful, cruel hunger… and I was back in another time.

  Tyr. Ligea on her first job for Rathrox. She wanted so much to please him because she knew he would be reporting to Gayed. She was sixteen years old, sitting in the Brotherhood's interrogation rooms, a bleak place inspiring fear even in the innocent.

  It wasn't an important case. Rathrox was just testing her. He'd discovered she had a knack of identifying a lie, and he'd asked her to accompany him to interview a number of suspects. He asked the questions; all she had to do was listen, and make a sign when a lie was uttered. She didn't find it difficult, until the fourth man was brought in. He was arrogant, bumptious, sure of himself, confident no one would be able to find him guilty of anything, and indeed, the evidence was slim.

  Ligea didn't like him. He could not hide his emotions., from her, and they were vile. Outwardly, he was '

  ordinary enough. He was a boat builder, neatly dressed, but when his eyes lingered on her, his thoughts were viciously predatory. Behind the bland exterior, behind his smile, there lurked the sentiments of a sadistic killer. His mind slavered, his emotions were raw and unrestrained. He told the truth when he protested his innocence of the minor treason Rathrox accused him of, but there were crimes far darker smouldering inside him. He terrified Ligea. She had never met someone so dark. She had never been so sure of someone's criminality.

  Rathrox questioned him, and to each answer she had to give the sign that said he spoke the truth.

  She thought: What if he goes free? He smiled at her, his lips curling up to charm. His eyes twinkled. The blackness within darkened. She could not read his intentions, but the way he felt about her was akin to the emotions of a starving dog offered red meat. Given the chance, he would have devoured her.

  And when the next question came, she turned her hand over, palm up, to indicate a lie.

  They sent him to the Cages on the strength of that, while they hunted for evidence. He was dead of disease within a month, and the case was closed. Ligea knew she'd murdered him as effectively as if she'd slid a knife into his heart. She'd lied and killed her first man…

  Worst of all, perhaps, I never felt the slightest guilt. For others that followed perhaps, dead for other reasons, but not for that one.

  I lay on the grass a few paces away from the Ravage with no idea of how I had come to be there. One moment I had been engulfed in those savage eyes, then I'd been back in my childhood reliving something as a spectator, in every detail. I'd had to wrench myself away, as dreamers suffering nightmares pull memselves

  by an effort of will from a treacherous sleep.

  ¦ – • • ¦ ¦ ¦. – ¦•» -. – •

  Shaken, I stood. Something had happened that I did not understand. And I wanted to know. I had to know. If I didn't understand the Mirage Makers, then the chances I was going to die seemed high. Temellin could say the Ravage was too evil to be a part of the Mirage, that it caused pain to the Mirage Makers and therefore must be something else, but that was spurious logic. The Ravage existed within the Mirage and nowhere else.

  Foolishly, I returned to the edge of the Ravage to seek answers.

  And the same thing happened again. I met the eyes of another of the creatures and was once again caught up in the past…

  A much older Ligea. Twenty-five, and making a name for herself within the Brotherhood.

  In Tyr society, however, she was regarded as a little strange. She was too intellectual, too uninterested in temple, too masculine, too forthright, too independent. She was occasionally seen in odd places or in odd company. Rumours abounded. At her age, she should have been married, of course, but there hadn't been too many proposals, and now she had openly taken a legionnaire lover. It was one thing for a Tyranian matron – who had already presented her husband with sufficient progeny – to behave that way, it was quite another to see an unmarried woman be so shameless.

  And then General Gayed and his wife Salacia both died, leaving their adopted daughter heir by default. Ligea suddenly became eminently eligible because she had money. The change both irritated and amused her, and she could be abrupt with those who so presumed to court her. One, charming and personably plausible, had been the
most persistent and the most ardent, protesting his admiration for strong women and his affection for

  her. His name was Casmodius, and she might have believed him if she hadn't been able to read lies and sense emotions. In reality he despised her and inwardly he ridiculed her. He was not the wealthy man he professed to be, but a gambler trying to hide his losses from his creditors and society, with an eye on her fortune.

  His hypocrisy was so profound, his lies so blatant, she determined to punish him. In public she played the affectionate friend, in private she teased and smiled and stroked his ego, even as she spoke of her feelings for Favonius, away in Quyr at the time. She tormented him with her unpredictable behaviour and fluctuating affections. At the same time, she used her position in the Brotherhood to gather information about his debts. When he finally lied once too often, and with promises of undying love implored her to marry him, she showed the extent of his debts to all his creditors and spread the tale all over Tyr. Within days, the whole of the city was despising Casmodius for his deceptions, ridiculing him for being so publicly mocked by the woman he had courted. Hounded by his creditors, he came in desperation to Ligea. She sent him away, laughing at his naivety. When he went to others he had considered friends, they turned away in contempt.

  Within a week, he had taken poison and died…

  I had felt no remorse then, either.

  I tore myself back into the present. Once again I was lying on the grass, closer to the Ravage this time. Or was it that the Ravage had moved?

  I stood up and looked at the patch of slime. Fingers of liquid oozed out of the main body of the Ravage, each rivulet crawling in my direction. It was coming closer. Shit, I thought. This is personal. It's aiming at me.

  And then I felt the appalling pain of the Mirage

  Makers. They screamed with the agony of the cancer y

  • -.T-¦…-.-. -, ¦ ¦.-",

  eating deep into them in a hundred different locations, dissolving, corrupting, devouring their living flesh. Aghast, I remembered what Temellin had said about these sores having been present even when he was a child. How long then had the Mirage Makers suffered? Only then did I understand the strain there had been in Temellin's voice when he had spoken of the diseased land. He, too, had felt their pain.

  I began to shake. Sickened, I was careful not to look into the slime again, but just as I was about to turn away, a bony limb shot out in my direction, jabbing at me, drawing the attention of the others.

  I stumbled backwards in shock, thumping down on my backside. In one flash of rage and energy they had all turned on me, all those nightmarish creatures, rushing up out of the shadows of the depths in a mass of claws and talons and teeth, snapping, hacking, slashing, frothing, clawing at the edges in an attempt to lever themselves out of the slime…

  I scrabbled away, still on my rump, my screams raw with terror. They flung themselves upwards, bloodying their jaws on each other in their efforts to reach me. They grunted and shrilled their need to rip into my flesh, then plopped back into the fester, their hate shredding my mind-block and slamming into my thoughts.

  I got up and ran, incoherent with terror.

  It was some time before I could think enough to acknowledge I wasn't hurt. In spite of their rabid desire to devour me, those creatures hadn't been able to leave the confines of the Ravage.

  I was unhurt, but I had to walk back to the Mirage City in urine-wet trousers.

  My shleth had long since fled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I spent the next few days thinking about the Ravage. That wasn't altogether a matter of choice: it impinged on my thoughts whether I wanted to think about it or not. I'd wake in the middle of the night, bathed in sweat, remembering those shapes, recalling their hunger. Knowing I was their target. Not just anyone. Me. I was sure of it.

  I tried to make sense of what had happened. Why were they able to take me back and make me remember past incidents with such lucidity? What were they? When I asked others of the Magoroth, they didn't seem able to give me a satisfactory answer to explain my regression into the past. They dismissed my assertion that the hatred had been personal. 'Oh, the Ravage hates everyone,' they said. Perhaps it did, but it was me it wanted most.

  I spoke to Brand, describing everything I could remember.

  'What do those two past episodes have in common?' he asked.

  'I have no idea, beyond the obvious,' I said. 'In one

  I was just sixteen. And I told a lie to punish someone…

  – . ¦¦¦-»*'¦¦.,* 'ir-

  In the other I was an adult and told the truth to punish someone. The result was the same, I suppose. Both men died. Both were unpleasant men deserving of punishment.'

  'Both incidents never gave you a sleepless night.'

  'So?'

  'I don't know. It just seems that maybe they should have. You don't appear in your best light, Ligea, either time.'

  I thought about that, but came to no conclusions. 'They are foul, whatever they are, those Ravage creatures.'

  'Perhaps that's it,' he suggested. 'They were looking for things in your past that are -'

  'Foul? Are you telling me what I did was foul?'

  'No, not exactly. But your lack of-' Once again he stopped, unwilling to speak his thoughts.

  'Remorse?'

  'No. Not lack of remorse. Lack of thought about what you did. In those days, you could walk away from all you did without wondering if it was right or wrong. Without doubts. Most people would worry about whether they could have done things differently. If their decisions were correct. You never did. It's very human to plague oneself with doubt after the fact.'

  I stared at him. 'You think I was inhuman? And yet you loved me!'

  'Yes. Because I know what was done to you. And by whom. And how. And I always knew what you could have been. What you still can be, and are becoming.'

  'Weak,' I snapped.

  'No. Human.'

  I didn't want to think about that. I changed the subject. 'So why is the Ravage interested in that part of

  my past? Why would they be linked to my… inhumanity?'

  But he had no answer to that.

  I went to bed that night hearing a refrain of facts like a temple litany inside my head:

  The Ravage hates you above all others.

  There must be a reason for such a specific, virulent hate.

  The Ravage and its beasts live inside the Mirage.

  What the Ravage knows about you it can therefore only have learned from the Mirage Makers.

  And what is special about you anyway?

  A puzzle worthy of a one-time compeer. Reluctantly, I thought I was beginning to make sense of it all; the trouble was, I didn't like the answer, because whichever way I looked at it, I ended up dead.

  When Temellin and the other Magoroth returned with the freed slaves, Pinar was not with them. She had, Temellin said, gone to Madrinya on a private matter, but would be back within a few days.

  I was alarmed. That Pinar, already brittle with jealousy, should allow Temellin to return without her was odd, even sinister. It prompted me to action: I told Temellin I had an urgent need to talk to him; he nodded and said he was busy making arrangements about the ex-slaves, could it wait until the next day? I agreed one more day would make no difference and spent the time trying to think of the right words to say and despising the cowardice that had kept me silent so long.

  But when the next day came, we had other things on our minds. An outbreak of disease among the newcomers from Sandmurram kept all the Magor fully occupied, trying to stop its spread and cure those who had it. I did not sleep for two days, and I doubted

  , -…,•¦.;¦ _¦-,,- -jv,,-¦*_¦.,,-;*-* J- -if-

  any of the others did, either. We were all exhausted and drained; my cabochon was colourless with a lack of power.

  On the evening of the third day, although there had been several deaths among the elderly, the contagion was halted and the ill began to recover. Those Magoroth
, myself included, who had been involved with the sick, now found time to gather for a meal. There were a few wan smiles of subdued triumph, but most of us were more interested in the food the servants had prepared.

  Temellin, slipping into a vacant seat next to me, said, 'We never did get to have that talk. What did you want to see me about?'

  'Myself. Who I am. And -' I stopped. Conversation had died at our table and people nearby were listening. 'It's waited this long, it can wait until after we've eaten,' I said, glad, I suppose, to have yet another excuse. 'We're both too hungry to give any serious topic full attention. But it had better be today, Temel. It is a matter of some… seriousness.' I dropped my voice. 'In private.'

  He nodded wearily and began to eat. The conversation around the table remained desultory as most of us confined our attention to the food and thought of our pallets. When the door opened, it took a moment for it to register with me that it was Brand who stood there and something was wrong. I half rose to go to him, and then sat back down again as the reason for his agitation became obvious. Pinar had entered the room on his heels and she wasn't alone.

  Aemid was with her.

  Temellin rose, smiling, and went forward to greet his wife, but she hardly seemed to see him. She pointed to me and turned to Aemid. 'Is that her?'

  Aemid, her face resolute, nodded. 'That's her, Magoria. That's the Legata Ligea, Compeer of the Brotherhood.'

  Not even a troupe of the Exaltarch's nude dancers could have silenced the room as effectively as that statement did. Pinar turned to Temellin, her lips curling up in a smile of triumph. In her animation, she was both magnificent and beautiful. She said, 'I knew there was something wrong about her!' She came forward to take Temellin's hands. 'We have been terribly deceived by this woman, Tern. I have never trusted her. I didn't want to tell you this, but she tried to kill me once, when we were on our way to the Mirage. She knew I was suspicious and thought she could take my life.' There was just enough truth in that statement to make it credible. I met her eyes coldly and wondered at the woman's stupidity. Did she think to endear herself to Temellin by denigrating his sister? And if I chose to say she'd tried to murder me first, everyone would hear my truth just as they heard hers. She continued, 'This was my business in Madrinya. I went to see what I could find out.'