"Anything," I said. I sat still for a few moments, trying to decide on a course that would comfort him, and in those moments he began to cough, a tired sound like the hack of a horse sinking in its traces, and he slid deeper into his chair. I made up my mind.
"Bequiin Ardin, I will tell you something: we are escaping from Vassashinay, tonight. Come with us." I ignored Shree's warning gesture and drew a long breath. "Come with us, Ardin. You can escape the Frath's trap as well."
He looked up and seemed to be considering it, but only for a few blinks of an eyelid. Standing heavily, he laid one hand on my head and the other on Shree's, as if blessing us in the old Gillish style, and I remembered distantly that the gesture had the same meaning in Miisheli.
"It is too late for me," he said. "I came here to kill you and stayed to warn you—some small payment for the evil I have been party to—and now that I am done, I must leave you. I hope I will not see you in the morning. Goodspeed, Scion of Oballef."
Shree looked thoughtful after the Bequiin left. "I don't quite understand," he said after a while, "why you and Ardin are so disturbed about this Great Nameless Last. It sounds all right to me. Isn't it the hope of every empire to last for ever?"
"Hopes have nothing to do with historical reality," I said tartly. "All the great empires on record seem to have started out well and then degenerated into cruelty and vice, and eventually ended in fire or flood. Not an impressive record for empires. And if I hear Ardin rightly, the Great Nameless Last will get caught indefinitely in the cruelty and vice stage, until such time as it brings the whole world down with it. I find that disturbing—don't you?"
He grimaced. "But there have been breaks in the pattern before. Sher wasn't raised by—the Harashil; Gil didn't go sour."
"Sher was destroyed by the Harashil. And Gil went soft instead of sour." I frowned. "But I agree, Gil doesn't quite fit the mould. I would like to know a great deal more about my ancestor Oballef and how he came by the Harashil." The words I was groping for came into my head: Seed of the Excommunicant. I shook off a chill. "The point is, Shree, that the Lady doesn't appear to come equipped with a moral sense. She was just as effective at killing the Sherkin millions as she was at making Gil a garden of culture and learning; she saved Calla, but only because a Scion, a child of the Naar, was in Calla's womb, and otherwise she would have let her drown."
"But—"
"No, let me finish. The Lady may have been the instrument for many wonderful things—but she's been the instrument for just as many evils and atrocities and, on the whole, I think the world would muddle along better without her. If I can break the cycle, I will."
"But you have a well-developed moral sense. Tig. Overdeveloped, if anything. Enough and to spare for both you and the Lady."
"Oh really? I wish I could believe that." Gloomily, I slumped against the wall. "But how long do you think I'd remain a moral being once the power became a habit? And you're forgetting something else."
"What?"
"Who it was that ordered the sinking of Sher."
A long silence. "Oh yes," he said at last.
He never defended the Lady again.
* * *
35
"SHE'S NOT COMING," I breathed.
"Keep your voice down. Of course she's coming."
"She's late."
"A few minutes. Don't be—hush!"
Three novices were crossing the courtyard from the direction of the main gate, heading directly towards our hiding place in the shadow of the great rain-tun. I froze every muscle and held my breath; but they were chirping away excitedly in Vassashin, not keeping their voices down, and they passed by on the other side of the tun's housing without noticing us. I peered around the curve of the housing in time to see the little side-door a few feet away close behind them. The courtyard was deserted again.
I began counting to pass the time. By the count of fifty, I assured myself, Calla would come, and she would have Verolef with her, and I would never let either of them out of my sight again.
Forty-nine, fifty. No Calla. Although the Sacellum was quiet and only a few lights showed in the windows of the Daughters' quarters, a sound like distant surf floated over the walls from the faithful and distressed gathered outside.
One hundred.
They had stormed the Sacellum just after sunset, poor wretches; one man, said to be from Villim, had risen from his mat and started to dance, and the sight of the pustules swelling on his face as he danced had caused a stampede that crushed a dozen or more citizens against the locked gate of the Sacellum a few moments later. The gate itself held.
One hundred and fifty.
The Miisheli troopers, never ones to pass up a good fight, had surged quite happily out of their enclave by the gate to control the riot, and I wondered if they had doomed themselves by doing so. One of the red surplices had addressed the faithful from the window above the gate, urging calm, promising safety, guaranteeing that the fire-gods were even now taking the plague in hand—but this did not prevent the unfortunate lone dancer from being thrown alive into one of the great bonfires that dotted the encampment. This was something that the Miisheli troopers did not try to stop.
Two hundred.
Where was Calla? I felt as though we had been crouched for hours in that patch of shadow in the wash of the waning moon, but I knew, in fact, that it had been scant minutes. Perhaps she could not get away—perhaps, in this desperate time, she had been drafted into some ritual duty devised by Valsoria in the subterranean amphitheatre, perhaps she had been caught trying to take Verolef from under the noses of his guardians, perhaps—
The mountain rumbled and shook. Shree shot out his hand to clutch my shoulder. "Stop it. Calm down."
"It's not my doing. We're sitting on a volcano, damn it." In fact, the Lady was being eerily cooperative; either that, or she was sulking in silence. Thinking about it, I decided it was the latter. She had stopped even muttering when the Bequiin Ardin left us, and I had neither heard nor felt her through the endless hours since. This should have worried me, of course, but at the time it was just a relief.
Three hundred.
Two more lights were extinguished in the Daughters' quarters; from the encampment, a high shriek pierced the night and was suddenly cut off.
Three hundred and fifty.
The processional door opened and two dim figures came out, the Divinatrix and another. I heard the low tones of Valsoria's voice, and caught a few words—smooth the waters—all the time we need—that arrogant idiot—and then they disappeared into the corridor leading to the main outer gate. I did not think, somehow, that it was to throw the door open to welcome the populace inside; more likely to survey the punters from the safety of the window above the gate.
Four hundred. Nothing.
Four hundred and fifty. Shree pulled at my sleeve—the shadow that hid us was shortening as the moon floated higher in the sky, and our feet were about to become embarrassingly visible. I started to follow Shree as he edged around the housing when a creak from the corner of the courtyard immobilized us both. I snapped my head around, but Shree was in my way and I could see nothing. A second later, he grabbed the scruff of my tunic and hauled me after him towards the side-door behind the housing, which was half-open. The door creaked shut behind us.
The air inside was dank and close and smelled of lamp-grease, as if a lamp had recently been extinguished there, but the room seemed dark as pitch after the moonlight outside. A hand out of the darkness found my face.
"Tig? Shree?" It was Calla's voice. From a few feet away, Shree whispered a greeting. Weak with relief, I followed the hand to the arm, found the rest of the body, tried to wrap myself around it; there was an obstacle in the form of a small warm blanketed object in Calla's arms.
"Here, take him, he's getting heavy," and suddenly the blanketed thing was in my arms. Fine hair nestled against my neck, soft regular breathing fanned my collarbone, a thin soft arm draped itself across my shoulder and dangled down
my back.
"I gave him something to keep him sleeping," Calla's whisper came out of the darkness. "This way—hurry!"
My eyes were adjusting to the dimness and I could just make out that we were in a narrow flagged corridor, seemingly quite long, with a faint glimmer of greyish light at the end. Clutching my burden, followed by Shree, I trod as lightly as I could after Calla. There was no lessening of tension, but at least half of my mind was centred on the bundle in my arms, while the odd tight feeling in my chest had nothing to do with fear. My son. I was holding my son.
Our feet scraped along the rough stone floor. The light at the end of the passage was feeble moonlight filtering through a square skylight in one of the chambers off the corridor, just bright enough to show racks of winejars standing in piers all across the room. Calla stopped at the door and listened, then crept noiselessly into the chamber, vanishing almost immediately behind a pier of wine-racks. Shree prodded me from behind.
Calla was waiting for us at a door on the far side of the room, with her finger on her lips. Silently, she eased the door open. There was a flickering light beyond, and the crackle of a fire, mixed with muffled voices. After a few moments Calla slipped through the door with us on her heels. We were in another passageway, with firelight spilling through an open door on our left and darkness stretching away indefinitely to our right. I felt Calla's hand on my shoulder, guiding me further into the darkness. Verolef shifted in my arms.
We glided along the passage until some sense other than sight told me that we had come to the end. A door creaked; Calla was outlined against the glow of another fire. I detected onions and fresh bread, vinegar, beans, fish, the ghosts of old cooking smells. The room we crept into was dark and empty, but beyond it, through a door at the far end, I could see an old woman standing by an open fireplace and prodding in a bored fashion at something in a stewpot.
"Wait here," Calla whispered. We watched as she stepped confidently into the next room and greeted the old pot-tender. She disappeared for a moment, then reappeared by the cauldron with a long wooden spoon in her hand. She dipped the spoon into the pot and tasted the contents, while the old woman watched with her head on one side; then, strike me dead if I lie, the two of them plumped down on adjacent stools by the fire for what seemed to be a long and cosy little chat. Verolef started to feel very heavy, so I sat down on the floor where I could keep an eye on Calla, and draped him comfortably across my knees with his head pillowed on my arm.
"Beard of Raksh—what's she doing?" Shree breathed, crouching down beside me. He was tight as a coiled spring; I, on the other hand, felt oddly calm and unhurried.
Then I looked down at the sleeping child in the dim light, and caught my breath—how frail he looked, how innocent and small and entirely vulnerable. Not that I was labouring under any illusions, of course. From my observations over the past few days, I knew he was pretty much a righteous terror when awake; but seeing him asleep, with his lashes resting on his cheeks and his fine little lips parted, I was struck hard by the pitiful inadequacy of his skin as an armour against the world, the terrible ease with which he could be destroyed—and the lengths to which I personally would go to prevent any such thing happening. I suppose it was in that instant that I fell, fearfully, helplessly and incurably, into being Verolef's father and his slave.
This had the effect of speeding up time for me again. "Balls of Oballef," I hissed to Shree, "what's that fool woman doing? Reciting the Endless Diversions of Belforell? Swapping recipes? We've got to get going!"
As if on cue, Calla rose from her comfy stool and gave another leisurely poke at the stewpot with her wooden spoon. This time, she sniffed appraisingly and exchanged a few more sentences with her good old crony and long-time conversational partner, who took a taste from the pot and nodded sagely. A moment later the old woman vanished from our limited field of view.
Calla stood for a few seconds longer, watching the direction which the old woman had taken; at last, she looked towards us and beckoned fiercely.
We went through the door like two arrows loosed from the same bow. Calla grabbed my arm and hustled me across the cavernous kitchen. "We have to hurry. This way!"
"Now we have to hurry?" I muttered.
"What did you want me to do, knock poor old Vianna on the head? I've sent her to the herb room to find something that isn't there, but we've only got a few minutes. Shree, help me."
There was a double wooden door in the shadows beyond the fireplace, secured with a hefty bar, which Shree and Calla lifted down and hid in the nearest dark corner—there was a good chance that Vianna would not notice immediately that the door had been unbarred. Calla pried open one of the heavy leaves and looked out. When she looked back at us, she was frowning.
"No guards."
"Is it usually guarded?" Shree asked in a hoarse whisper.
"No—but I thought it might be tonight, because of the plague—"
"Never mind," said Shree. We all froze as halting footsteps sounded in one of the passages leading to the kitchen. A second later we were outside and Shree was propping a stone against the leaf to hold it closed. We were in the kitchenyard, with a broad wain-rutted passageway running off to the right between the Sacellum and a pile of roughly thatched masonry that smelled like a stable. At the end of the passage, we could see moonlight moving on a field of low scrub.
In a strange way, I think all of us would have felt easier in our minds if the kitchenyard to the Sacellum had been guarded that night. I did not need Shree's Sheranik instincts, nor the seventh sense of a born daughter of the Web, like Calla, to know that. Creeping along the passageway felt like walking through a forest that was too silent, wondering why no birds sang and nothing rustled in the trees except the wind. We could have dealt quickly and efficiently with a few startled guards—it was much harder to deal with this feeling of being observed, anticipated, invisibly cut off.
Tense and suspicious, we reached the end of the passage and surveyed the scrubland between us and the road. Empty. If we crouched low, we could reasonably hope that the scrub would hide us from any casual eyes. Shree bent down and started to move out from the shelter of the wall, but Calla pulled him back.
"Just a moment," she said. She stood in the mouth of the passage, a rigid silhouette; a rustle of silk, and the silhouette changed to something more human and definitely more female—Calla had shed her Vassashin surplice, robe and veil for what I hoped would be the last time in her life. As far as I could tell, she was wearing britches and a tunic now, and the grey moonlight flashed off something that could only be a knife in one of her fists. I smiled to myself—she was still the same old fierce and resourceful Calla, and never mind the soft white hands.
She glanced back and must have caught that look on my face, because she grinned too—a strained, nervous grin. She put her arms around me, including Verolef, and kissed us both quickly, me on the mouth, Verolef on the top of his head. Then she grabbed Shree and kissed him too. "Good fortune to us all," she whispered. "I'm starting to think we're going to make it."
And even as she finished speaking, there was a resounding crash behind us—the kitchenyard door smashing open against the stone wall. Torches flared in the kitchenyard. A bull voice roared in Miisheli, "Stop where you are!"
Shree whirled, knife and sword already in his hands. "Keep going!" Calla grabbed my free arm and pulled me along—Verolef stirred and started to whimper in his sleep. Trammelled by his weight, I tried to grope around him to find my own knife as we ran, but I couldn't reach it. By then we were on the edge of the scrubland, and Shree, who was right on my heels, cursed mightily; a moment later, metal clanged off metal close behind me.
I glanced over my shoulder in time to see Shree bring his sword down on the neck of a hulking great scragger who promptly fell out of sight among the scrubby bushes, but already three or four others were closing in on Shree—and on Calla, who was intent on jerking her knife out of somebody's midriff and didn't seem to see them coming.
/> Desperately, I shifted Verolef in my arms until I could almost reach my own weapon, then gave up and laid him down in the shelter of a bush and leapt to my feet, drawing my knife; a foot came out of nowhere and kicked it out of my hand. The next kick found my shoulder, spinning me backwards, the third and fourth crunched into my ribs. There was probably an unnecessary fifth, but by that point I was beyond noticing where it landed. I collapsed beside Verolef, and had just enough breath left to pull myself half over him, in a feeble attempt to shield him with my body. I could taste blood in my mouth. When somebody yanked me to my feet, I managed to lock my arms around the child and bring him up with me. Staggering under his weight, I shook the sweat out of my eyes and looked about me.
It was already over. They were all around us. The silver cross-straps of the Frath's Guard gleamed in the moonlight from a dozen or more broad chests. Judging by their positions, some of the troopers must have been concealed in the scrub before we ever left the Sacellum. We had been neatly trapped.
Shree arrived, slung over a trooper's shoulder. I was afraid for a moment that he was dead, but when he was dumped on the ground, he rolled over groggily and sat up. His tunic was slashed clear across and he was bleeding from cuts over the eye and on his chest. A few seconds later, Calla was frogmarched over to us between two creditably damaged troopers. She managed to pull free of them and gently took Verolef from me. She seemed to be unhurt, but tears were rolling down her cheeks.
Seed of the Excommunicant. A small, cold voice in my head.
I groaned, though not with pain. The pain was already draining from my body; I could feel my cracked ribs busily knitting themselves together. The groan was purely on the Lady's account.
Scion. It does not need to be like this. Command me. Tell me the two are one. Command me to crush these vermin.
By Oballef, I was tempted! It was fortunate for the Frath's Guardsmen that they did not try to finish off Shree, or tear Verolef from his mother's hold, for I am sure they would have died messily in the next instant or so. As it was, I looked up to see thunderheads racing across the sky towards us, knowing that a word from me, or even a lessening of my will to resist, would call the lightning down. And for that short-term gain, everything might be lost.
Gil Trilogy 2: Scion's Lady Page 27