"That bad, is it?" The officer looked sideways at me with a flash of compassion.
"I don't know what you mean." This was the man who, not ten minutes before, had smashed my door down and been ready to drag me bodily out of the archives. He could keep his compassion. I walked on in frosty silence until he stopped in front of an open door and ushered me inside.
The décor was obviously designed to reflect my new status. I hated the room on sight. Green hangings threaded with gold crowded the walls; the floor was lost under a carpet as lush as a fallow field in springtime, which was lost in turn under a forest of carven and freshly oiled furniture. The Second Flamen beamed at me as we came through the door.
"My lord Tigrallef, welcome! As you see, we finished just in time. I was afraid we wouldn't be ready for you."
I looked around. "Your work, Second Flamen? Very nice."
He flushed, pleased. "We gathered the best for you, my lord."
"So I see. The hangings are from the Priest-King's own chambers, aren't they? And aren't those chairs from my mother's parlour? What is the Lady Dazeene going to sit on when she comes back from Malvi?"
"It's only temporary, my lord," said the Second Flamen. His smile slipped. "When you go, we'll put everything back again."
"When I go. Yes, I suppose my mother can make do for a few days. Thank you, Second Flamen. Please leave now."
He moved closer. "My lord Scion, is there something here that doesn't please you? Just tell me. The Primate ordered that you should have anything you ask for, within reason."
"How very thoughtful of him. Well, for one thing, I'd like the archives back. And I'd like my own life back." And I'd like Caila back. Far behind my eyes, gold lights flickered. I roused myself and refocused on the Second Flamen. Relenting, I patted his shoulder. "Never mind, Second Flamen. I know there are matters you can't arrange. But I haven't had breakfast yet; and I wouldn't mind having some paper and ink and pens, and some books and scrolls. Perhaps the Primate would be good enough to lend me a few from the archives. I'll make you a list."
His face cleared. "I'll present your request to the Primate."
"You do that."
I watched him go. The officer closed the door behind him—from the inside. I glared at the man with rising hostility.
"There's no need to stay. I promise you, I'm not going anywhere."
"I have my orders, lord Scion." He stood imperturbably beside the door.
"And what if I order you to leave? Doesn't a Scion of Oballef outrank a Flamen?"
"My orders have the stamp of the Priest-King, my lord Scion. I've been permanently assigned to your service."
"Permanently? Does that mean you'll be going with me to Miishel?"
"Yes, my lord Scion."
"Whether I want you or not, which I don't?"
His eyes didn't even flicker. "Yes, my lord Scion."
I turned from him with disgust and idly catalogued the room's scraped-together splendours, hating the man for his serenity, his impermeable courtesy, and most of all for the Primate's green band on his arm. There was no doubt in my mind that the Primate had planted him in my retinue as his personal spy.
"Tell me, trooper," I said without turning around, "do people like you have names?"
"Chasco. Captain, Third Guardtroop, Second Company," he answered smartly. After a pause, he added in an undertone, "of the House of Clanseri."
"A Clanseri! Well, well." I twisted my head to look at him, up and down, coldly. "One of the great old families. Some prime poets in your ancestry, though I don't suppose that means anything to you. They were great friends to the Scions before the invasion—I believe a Clanseri or two died beside the Priest-King in Malvi, may their bones bring forth flowers. I wonder what they'd make of you."
"Times change, my lord Scion."
I shrugged and crossed the room to lie down on the pallet, a gorgeous pile of furs and soft blankets that must have been levied from half the best bedrooms in the Gilgard. I cursed the pallet, silently but in detail, then settled down to the serious business of not thinking.
Three days ago, my greatest problems in life had been low-quality paper and some creeping mould in one corner of the scroll room. I had two friends, a few pupils, eleven-thousand-plus archival items to love and care for, and enough work to keep the nightmares at bay.
Now I had nothing.
* * *
7
I WAS NOT permitted to leave those quarters for nearly six weeks, during which period I was bored, overfed, and never once left alone. A box was sent down from the archives containing my own notebooks and writing materials, but no other books; nor, until the very end, were there any sinister visitors, assassination parties, threatening notes, or special deliveries of a potentially lethal nature, any of which would at least have enlivened the monotony. There was a small army of Miishelu, Gillish and Satheli bodyguards encamped in the hallway outside my quarters, also a taster who comprehensively sampled every dish sent up from the kitchens. Whoever it was (besides myself) who disapproved of this alliance, the forces promoting it seemed to be well in control.
True to his word for once, the Primate installed Angel as the new First Memorian; but I had to go on hunger strike before Shree was allowed to join me. Four days without food did me no harm; indeed I was glad of the fast, since the sudden rich diet was destroying me. The Primate, however, was gratifyingly reduced to a nervous wreck by the third evening, my health being dear to him for the first time in our long and troubled coexistence. Though I could happily have gone on for days, I was relieved when he surrendered. I wanted Shree with me, not so much for my protection as for his; and the taster began to get even fatter on double portions, for I made sure he tasted Shree's dishes as well as mine.
Only two incidents in those six weeks stand out in my memory, the first involving my mother. Earlier in the spring, Arko had suddenly sent my parents to stay in a villa near Malvi, for the sake, so he claimed, of my poor father's health. It was true that my father was not strong, but he was not sick either. In retrospect, I realized that the Primate had simply wanted my mother out of the way while he arranged the sale of her son.
It was about a month after the formal settlement, and I still had not been presented to the Frath Major. My mother, back from Malvi, was keeping me company while the imported Omelian tailors swarmed about me in a kind of measuring frenzy, brandishing great swathes of imported Omelian silk. She said, "You decided well, Tig."
I flinched as a pin grazed my thigh. "I decided nothing. The Satheli envoy chose the cloth. And why not? The Archipelago's paying for it."
"I don't mean the cloth, my darling son, I mean the marriage."
"Oh. That. Mother, I didn't exactly agree to the match, you know, I just stopped disagreeing."
"It comes to the same thing."
"Not to me, it doesn't," I said darkly. I had to stop talking while a billow of gold silk descended on me and wrapped itself around my head, and when it whisked away again, the session seemed to be over. The whole crew packed up and disappeared in a flutter of rolled-up bolts, debating the cut of the sleeves. My mother and I were alone.
Almost alone. Shree was asleep on his pallet beside the fire. Two alert, well-armed troopers were stationed by the door. Chasco the Clanseri was seated on what had become his usual chair in the far corner, politely pretending to be deaf and blind. I poured out two beakers of wine and put one on the table beside my mother, who was knitting long woolen under-britches for both Shree and me against the icy Miisheli winters.
"Don't look so worried, Tig," she murmured.
"Do I look worried?"
"Yes, you do." She glanced at me placidly over the under-britches. "Worried and unhappy. There's no reason for it."
"I'm fine, Mother, really," I lied.
"Of course you're fine," she said, "and you're going to be very happy." She smiled fondly at me, looking about ten years younger than her actual age. I smiled back and leaned across the knitting to kiss her cheek.
"You don't believe me," she stated tranquilly.
"Not really."
"You should believe me. Remember back in Exile, when the Primate chose you to go to Gil? Didn't I tell you that you'd find the Lady? Didn't I know your father would still be alive?"
"Where is my father, anyway?"
"He's sleeping. Don't try to change the subject. I was right, wasn't I?"
"Yes, you were," I admitted grudgingly, "but this is different."
She shook her head, her flying fingers never pausing in their work. "Not as different as you might think."
Thoughtfully, I sat and watched her. My mother did have an uncanny way of being right, almost as if little gods whispered the future into her ear, as they were said to have whispered to the prophets of ancient Fathan. Maybe Rinn would not be the distaff version of the Primate I was expecting, maybe I'd misread those signs of obstinacy and ill temper in her portrait. Strength of character in a woman could be a very desirable trait—just look at Calla. But at the thought of Calla, my spirits slumped again. Whatever paragon Rinn might turn out to be, she would still not be Calla.
"You're thinking about that Sherkin girl again, aren't you?"
I jumped. "Mother, I wish you'd stop reading my mind. Anyway, she was only half a Sherkint, and she was the best on earth until—"
"Until she betrayed you to Lord Kekashr. Poor thing."
"Me or her?"
"Both of you." My mother laid her knitting down and picked up the beaker of wine, but she didn't drink from it. Instead, she peered into the beaker for so long that I leaned over to peer into it myself, to see if any prophetic pictures were dancing on the surface of the wine. I saw nothing except our own reflections, but my mother carried on gazing. I felt a chill run down my spine.
"Mother?"
She looked up dreamily, sipped the wine, smiled at me. "You will be happy, Tig. I know you will."
"Of course, Mother." I drained my own beaker in one gulp. It had just occurred to me that, in two dialects of Satheli, "happy" was a euphemism for "dead."
The other—and more sinister—incident occurred some time before dawn on the last morning of my imprisonment. I had still not been presented to the Frath Major, Arkolef had not once visited me, and nobody was telling me anything. As far as I knew, I'd be spending the rest of my life in that hateful jewel-box of a prison cell, sunless, workless, hopeless, and assaulted daily by squadrons of wild-eyed Omelian tailors. The only distraction was a tutor who had come a few times that week to instruct me in the Miisheli segment of the wedding ritual, but for once it was a lesson I was not eager to learn.
That last morning, as always, I was not properly asleep, but dozing, floating in and out of my standard nightmare—the damned pallet was too soft, the fire too warm, and two of the four troopers who slept in my chamber were chronic snorers. I was thus finely balanced between sleeping and waking, and what happened had, at first, the ineffable quality of a dream.
The door opened softly and two men crept in. Both were muffled in dark cloaks, which they retained although the room felt stifling. Unsurprised, I drifted halfway back into the dream as they approached the pallet. Their whispers seemed to come from a great distance, beyond the grid of the Pleasure, beyond the great sloping ceiling of water just starting to break in the sky.
"He looks younger than twenty-nine."
"Never mind, it's the right man. Just do it."
Calla came and sat down beside me, looking skywards with mild interest on her face. We watched together as the hovering ocean contracted to one glittering focus of light, still rising, infinitely slow and far away. A galaxy of minute golden stars winked into existence around it, but I could tell they were inside my own head, and the one true light was gradually taking on the semblance of a knifepoint flashing in a gloved hand and beginning to descend, with equal leisure. In the dream, the chains exploded from my wrists in a shower of golden shrapnel; my dream-hands rose to command the water. The water stopped.
"Do it!" A frantic whisper.
"I can't."
"Fool! Give me the knife!"
"I can't move!"
Otherwise, the doomed city was wrapped in silence. Calla smiled at me and nodded approvingly and began to fade. I reached out to grasp her, but she was already no more substantial than the shadow of a wisp of smoke and my dream-hands closed around other things, things that were hard, hostile and ruthless, and my dream-fingers convulsed around them with the shock, which is when the wave broke at last—red, not green this time, warm, like blood, not the salty cold tide of other nights, other nightmares. Through the deluge, I heard Shree's voice.
"Great Raksh! Tigrallef!"
I rolled over on to my side. The furs were sodden and smelled metallic.
"Tig!"
"What is it, Shree? I am trying to get some sleep." I sat up and yawned. There were three figures bending over me. Shree was one of them, dressed in his normal night attire, which was nothing. The other two were fountain statues, spouting dark water from their mouths. One of them held a knife in his upraised hand, but made no move to use it. He made no move at all. On the far side of the room, the guards muttered and stirred. Shree glanced wildly at them over his shoulder.
"What is it, Shree? What's going on?"
He lunged for the knife and prised it out of the unresisting hand. Then, to my horror, he slashed at the stone-still figures in what looked like a curiously methodical fury, choosing his angles carefully, biting his lip all the while as if solving a difficult problem in logic. "That should do it," he whispered, and toppled the bodies over on to the floor, dropping the knife at the same time. He had struck like a snake, quickly and quietly; the guards were just rising in confusion from their bedrolls.
A panic of shouts: "The Scion!" "Murder!" "Bring a light!" The door crashed open. More troopers, greater panic, louder shouting. I slid off the pallet, which was unpleasantly wet. By the time a lamp was located and lighted, I was fully awake, and had identified the metallic tang in the air as the sharp copper of fresh blood.
Shree had wrapped himself in a blanket by then, and was ranting at a tousled officer by the door. "You call yourself bodyguards? Ten of you lumped along the corridor like a string of tupping pack-asses, and you let them walk right past you without so much as a pat-you-down? Four of your imbeciles on chamber duty, and not one of them heard a tupping thing? If I hadn't wakened in time, the Scion would be dead now!"
The officer was Chasco. He gave Shree a long, calculating look, then bent over the two bodies on the floor and flipped one of them on to its back with the toe of his boot. He called for a trooper to hold a lamp above the dead face. The trooper took one look and stumbled back, retching. Chasco took the lamp from him with a steady hand and knelt for a closer examination.
A glance was enough for me. It brought to mind a half-grown hare I'd once found on the edge of a field in Exile, a luckless little beast which had first been stepped on by one of the great Satheli plough-horses, and then, quite unnecessarily, been run over by the harrows of the plough. The dead assassin had a similar look: eyes pushed out into startled, bloodshot protuberances, mouth gaping around the engorged tongue, red tear-tracks down the cheeks and into the hair where the ears and nostrils and eyes had wept blood—the harrow-slashes from Shree's knife were an obvious redundancy. When Chasco, with admirable nerve, reached down to close the eyes, he could not make the lids meet over the eyeballs. He gave up on this and sat back on his heels.
"Do you know this man, my lord?"
I forced myself to take another look and a slow trickle of shock began to course down my backbone. Chasco was watching my face, so I kept it blank, but I prayed that he wouldn't look down at my shaking hands. I said, very firmly, "I doubt if his own mistress would recognize him now." I had no intention of telling that Clanseri bastard everything I knew, nor of letting his masters know how much I guessed. The face may not have been familiar, but the medallion which had slipped free of the tunic was unmistakable.
T
he dead man was a Frath Minor of Miishel.
The next hour belonged to the cleanup detail. Shree and I were shunted off to sit on cushions near the fire, but we had little chance to talk, since two or more of the troopers seemed always to be virtually sitting in our laps. We sat quietly and obediently sipped the beakers of warmed wine that had been prescribed for my valued nerves, and at the first opportunity I put my head close to Shree's and whispered, "They were bleeding before you slashed them."
"Nicely observed, Tig."
"I think they were already dead."
"Do you, now?"
"Shree—" I broke off as a trooper in Satheli colours crawled past our cushions, nose to the floor, ignoring our bare feet. Heaven knows what he was searching for. When he was well past us, I leaned close to Shree again.
"Shree—you didn't kill those men."
He gave me a long, tired look. "All right, I didn't kill them."
"So why did you slash them, if they were already dead?"
"Obviously, Tig, they had to be seen to die of something."
I digested that for a moment. "But who killed them? One of them was a Frath Minor of Miishel. Who would dare to assassinate a Frath Minor? And how? They looked like they were squeezed. It's not that I mind, of course, Shree, it's just that there was nobody near enough except you and me, and yet—"
"Perhaps you killed them."
"That's ridiculous. I was asleep."
"That needn't have stopped you."
Which was so absurd that no further argument was required. All I said in the end was, "Pass the flagon, Shree."
He passed the flagon.
* * *
8
THOUGH I DID not know until later, my bride's windcatcher was breasting the breakwater of Gil harbour at about the same time as the Frath Minor was being carried out of my bedchamber in a somewhat compressed condition. Nor were those the only events taking place at that moment. The Gilgard was on the boil.
Gil Trilogy 2: Scion's Lady Page 5