Gil Trilogy 1: Lady in Gil

by Rebecca Bradley

  Lord Shree caught my eye, and my heart lurched. Alone of the Sherank, he was looking up at the corpse shackled to the platform, impaled now at cheeks, belly, thighs and shoulders, and bleeding suspiciously little. The Sherkin prince was sitting straight and tense in his saddle; it was obvious that he understood. Any second, I expected him to bellow with rage and disappointment—after all, the Gilman had cheated by dying so soon and so painlessly; but Lord Shree only sat on his horse. Eventually, he looked away.

  He shared the joke with us for several minutes longer. At last one of the honour guard, possibly wondering why the screams were so long in coming, looked up at the prisoner and shouted furiously in Sheranik.

  "Bastard's died on us!"

  His comrades whirled, outraged, and drew their swords with a great clattering and many curses. But Lord Shree roared for silence. He growled at the troopers who were already halfway up the stairs, and they stopped, uncertain, and then scrambled hastily down. At another word from Shree, they caught at the lines dangling from the counterweights and hauled until the spikes shook themselves free of the Gilman's body and jerked to the top of the Pleasure. Lord Shree himself dropped gracefully from the saddle and ascended the stairs alone. He bent over the fettered corpse for a few moments, then turned to address the crowd. The air in the marketplace was crackling with tension, like the air before a thunderstorm.

  "People of Gil," Shree cried, "the criminal has paid for his treachery and is dead. I regret he was denied the full pleasure of the points—but the next among you to climb these stairs will not be so unfortunate." There was a corporate shudder throughout the crowd, but nobody moved. Shree paused and looked around. Then he shouted, "Go now! Go to your homes!" He stilled a Sheranik outburst with one raised hand. I was fascinated—but on Shree's last word, the crowd had begun a stampede out of the marketplace, and I was buffeted by moving bodies, nearly knocked down, separated from Calla within seconds. I turned and ran with the crowd, but when I reached the shelter of the bread ovens I crouched behind them and looked back. Lord Shree was still at the top of the stairs, watching the exodus, loftily ignoring an altercation among the honour guard below him. I saw him look down once, and heard him bark a short command—a mounted Sherkin holding a Gilman off the ground by the scruff of his neck threw the man down and watched dourly as he scrambled away. At that moment Calla found me and grabbed my hand.

  "Quickly, Tig," she panted, "before Lord Shree changes his mind." We joined the stream of people flooding from the square. As we reached the mouth of our alley, I realized the man pounding along on my other side was none other than Hawelli.

  * * *

  12

  CALLA WAITED UNTIL we were inside the doorway before she grabbed Hawelli's arm. She pulled him past the staircase and into a narrow corridor, half-blocked in places with brick rubble and carpeted with shull droppings. She stopped for a second to glare at the tall Flamen, then marched on ahead, swiping at the cobwebs. Without a glance at me, Hawelli followed her. I grimaced and took up the tail.

  The corridor was gap-toothed with uninviting doorways. By the time I had finished crawling over the third or fourth heap of debris, the others were already waiting by the least inviting of all, a black hole distinguished by a sagging lintel and a powerfully cold draught from below. There was angry silence between the two of them, reminding me of Callefiya and Arkolef in one of their cousinly tiffs. I fought the impulse to turn back and leave them to it.

  "Are you actually intending to go down there?" I asked, squinting into the blackness.

  "It's safe and it's private. I have some questions for this esteemed Flamen here before I make my report to the council. You don't have to come if you're afraid."

  I sighed at her tone and peered at Hawelli. Even in the near-darkness I could tell he was uncomfortable, that his forbidding façade was very slightly cracked. That alone made it worth tagging along. "Afraid? Me?" I said.

  Calla humphed and led through the door on to a descending flight of stairs, of a decrepitude that made the main staircase seem positively youthful. She did have the sense to strike a light on a candle-end taken from a pocket in her cloak. And while she bounced down the stairs in her customary carefree fashion, I was pleased to see that Hawelli was testing each footfall and flinching at the groans of the rotten wood, just as I was.

  The stairs landed in a cellar, cold as a mountaintop, with a cavernous feel—Calla's light barely scratched the darkness. A bitter faecal smell fouled the air, no doubt the legacy of many generations of shulls. Calla led surely across the hazard-strewn floor, with Hawelli and I stumbling in her trail, to a wooden door in the far wall. "In here," she snapped.

  It was a small room, stone-floored and freezing, that might once have been used as a root-cellar. Calla stuck the candle-end to the floor with melted tallow and straightened up. "Sit down where I can see your face, Flamen."

  He sighed heavily and obeyed. I was fascinated. "Is that how you talk to Flamens around here?" I asked. "I wish you'd teach me."

  "Hawelli and I are—old friends," Calla said through tight lips. She sat down on the floor on the other side of the candle from Hawelli, looking anything but friendly. I hovered.

  "Flamen," she began, "I was the council's designated observer at that Pleasuring."

  "So?"

  "So what were you doing there?"

  "Standing around like everyone else, watching some poor sod get murdered," Hawelli said coolly.

  "You should not have been there." There were marked overtones of the Primate in Calla's voice. "You deliberately defied the council's ban."

  Hawelli warmed his hands at the candle. "So?"

  "I'll have to include it in my report."

  "I'm trembling with fear."

  "Stop it, Flamen. This is serious. Did you have anything to do with what happened?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean the Pleasurebait dying before the points reached him."

  "Oh, that." Hawelli spread his hands. "How could I?"

  "A dart-tube." I joined them on the floor. My buttocks instantly turned to globes of ice. "I was watching; I think I saw it happen, not long after the sandbags were unplugged."

  "What did you see?" Calla frowned at me fiercely. So did Hawelli. Their breath made silver clouds in the candlelight.

  "I saw the poor man jerk once and then go rigid, and he never moved again. I think he was hit with a poisoned dart."

  Calla looked at Hawelli. "Is that true?"

  Hawelli smiled. "Well done, lord Scion. One little pinprick, a broken second of pain, and then a quick death. I used concentrated parth-asp venom and aimed for the neck."

  "Beautiful shot," I said admiringly, "I mean, I'm not bad with the dart-tube myself, but I know I couldn't—"

  "Be quiet, Tig," Calla snapped. She turned on Hawelli, furious. "You pocketing idiot! How could you? You know what the council said."

  "Yes, I know."

  "And you know what might have happened."

  "Yes, I know that also."

  "What might have happened?" I interjected. They ignored me.

  "And in the face of the council's orders, and all common sense, you went ahead and did it anyway."

  "Yes." Hawelli sat back on the floor, still smiling. Calla, speechless with outrage, glared at him.

  "What might have happened?" I asked again, taking advantage of the lull.

  Calla turned to me. "It's like this, Tig. Often, if the Sherank feel the first Gilman has not had enough Pleasure from the points, they will take his body out of the shackles and put in a second Pleasurebait, chosen at random from the crowd. But if Lord Shree had realized, or even suspected, that the prisoner's death was hastened by some misguided well-wisher," she raised her voice and glowered at Hawelli as she said this, "he would certainly have ordered a massacre. Scores, even hundreds, might have died—possibly even you, my lord." She shot to her feet and stomped around the room, stopping to bend angrily over Hawelli. "You should never have taken that chance, especial
ly when you put the Scion at risk!"

  Happy as I was to watch a Flamen being abused, especially that Flamen, I had to intervene. "You missed something, Calla," I said mildly.

  She whirled to face me. "And what's that?"

  "Lord Shree did know."

  That stopped her cold. She looked at me thoughtfully as she lowered herself to the floor at my side. "What makes you think so?"

  "I was watching him. He knew the prisoner was dead almost as soon as the crowd did."

  "What did he do?"

  "Nothing much. He looked away, that's all."

  "You're only supposing that he noticed."

  "Perhaps. But there's another thing I thought was interesting. Later, he made sure he was the first Sherkin to get close to the body. It's even possible he disposed of the dart himself—palmed it or dropped it through the grille."

  "And then," Hawelli spoke up, "he let the crowd go, which was something I could never have foreseen—" He stopped abruptly.

  "Something you could never have foreseen?" Calla repeated. "You mean, you were waiting for Lord Shree to order a massacre?"

  "Hoping for it, maybe?" I added. I had a theory.

  He cast me a poisonous glance, and I could see that he wished he hadn't spoken. "Who would hope for a massacre?" he said at last.

  Calla stared at him. There was a silence while she seemed to be working out the obvious, and another while she forced herself to believe it, then she said, "It's true. It's true. You were trying to set off a massacre." Her voice was low and grieved; anger had temporarily deserted her. "Why, Hawelli? What kind of treachery—?"

  "Not treachery, Calla," he began, but she made a sharp gesture for silence. There was pain in her face.

  "Don't tell it to me. Explain yourself to the council."

  "No, never again. I've wasted enough breath on the council; I'm finished with the Flamens."

  "You still have to answer to them. You'll come up with me now."

  "And if I won't?"

  Calla answered by reaching into the apparently bottomless pockets of her cloak and producing a shiny, long-bladed knife. I saw tears in her eyes. The heretic Flamen saw them too.

  "You couldn't," he said softly. "Not to me, Calla. Don't hurt yourself by trying." He held a hand out to her, but she knocked it away. Despite the tears, her own hand was steady. She used the knife to point to the door. Hawelli didn't move.

  "Traitor," she said miserably. The knifepoint moved closer to Hawelli's throat.

  This was rapidly getting too serious for my liking. "Calla, put the knife down. I really don't think he's a traitor."

  "What do you know?" The knife remained steady.

  "Well, think about it. For one thing, I'd wager there was more than one dart-tube in the marketplace today. Eh, Hawelli?"

  His face was wooden. "Yes," he said.

  "And you weren't after a massacre at all, were you? An uprising, more like. You were hoping to force Bekri's hand. And mine."

  "In a way," he said grudgingly, "but there was more to it than that."

  "Tell us."

  He shrugged. "The prisoner—whoever he was—happened to be a countryman of mine. Do you know what his crime was? He spat. In the direction of a Sherkin he didn't know was there."

  "So?" Calla said coldly. She was recovering her anger. "Real criminals never get sent to the Gilman's Pleasure. Real criminals are the nails on the fingers of Sher—they get used against us. The point is—"

  "The point is," he broke in, "that we've become so bent on keeping our miserable lives that we've forgotten there are things worth dying for. The Sherank use that against us, too."

  "That's not so—"

  "Of course it is! What's happened to you, Calla? You used to agree with me. They know they can do anything, and all we'll do is look at the ground and smear a little more dirt on our faces, and thank the damned Lady that it's not our turn yet—"

  They burst into a confused babble of argument, more and more like Callefiya and Arkolef before the Heroic Code made them too stately to squabble. I was not warm enough to tolerate it for long.

  "Stop it!"

  They both turned furiously on me. I reached out, took the knife from Calla's hand and laid it beside the candle. "You're both right, and you're both wrong," I said firmly. "Let's keep to the main issue. What was your plan, Hawelli?"

  He scowled at the candle. "I had fifteen comrades positioned throughout the marketplace, plus myself, each with five or six venom-tipped darts. That was all the poison I could get hold of."

  "Go on."

  "Nothing complicated. We were going to kill as many of the bastards as possible. Lord Shree was to give us our signal, though he didn't know it."

  "The order for the massacre?"

  "Yes. Lord Shree was mine; I had my dart-tube trained on him from the moment he started up the stairs. Then—" Hawelli paused. "I'm not sure, but I think you may be right. I think he dropped the dart through the grille. And when he didn't give the signal, just told us all to go home, well—"

  "Well?"

  "Well, we went home. That wasn't a contingency we'd planned for. Scion, what are you grinning at?"

  "Nothing. But I'd love to know why Lord Shree held back."

  "I still don't believe he saw the dart," Calla said flatly. She picked up her knife, contemplated it for a moment and then stowed it back inside her cloak.

  I shook my head. "Don't be so sure. The rumours may be true, that he's not as bloodthirsty as the rest, or—"

  "Or what?"

  "Or he figured out what was brewing when he saw the Gilman die, and decided to let you build yourself a bigger fire to burn in. That might be your real error, Hawelli: alerting Lord Shree to trouble. He could be very dangerous now."

  "Speculation," Hawelli growled. "Calla, what are you going to report?"

  "Everything," she said, prying the candle off the floor. "It's my duty, Hawelli, you know that. It's up to the council to decide what to do with you. You'll come with us willingly?"

  He shrugged again—a habit of his—and led the way back through the cellar, up the stairs, and into the corridor. At that point, he seized Calla in a hasty embrace, kissed her hard on the lips and raced out of the door. Calla squawked and started to give chase, her arm thrusting for the knife in the folds of her cloak, but I caught her shoulder.

  "Better to let him go," I said.

  * * *

  13

  BEKRI, FOUND CONFERRING in the council chamber with Jebri, was less disturbed by Hawelli's insubordination than I expected. He hardly even seemed surprised; as Calla gave her report, stony-faced and flat-voiced, he listened with a serene absence of reaction. He simply nodded when she was done, and turned to me. "Have you anything to add, my lord Tigrallef?" he asked.

  "No. Well, only that I would like to know more about this Lord Shree. He's at least as interesting as Hawelli."

  "Oh, at least. Hawelli's not the first to rebel against the council, but Shree stands alone. We've never had a Sherkin lord before who missed a chance for bloodshed—they're more apt to create their chances out of dry clay. What are your thoughts on the matter, my lord?"

  "Oh, I don't know." I was feeling worn by Bekri's assumption that I had meaningful insights for all occasions; flattered, yes, for nobody had ever taken me so seriously before except my mother and the First Memorian, but I was tired and I wanted the luxury of being as puzzled as everyone else. Bekri's single eye regarded me keenly for a few seconds. Then he turned to the Second Flamen, who was sitting on the other end of the sofa.

  "You heard the Scion's request, Jebri. Send a message to Malviso—tell him to go to his contacts and find out all he can about Lord Shree's history before coming to Gil—two years ago, was it? Rumour as well as fact, tell him, but we must know which is which."

  Jebri bobbed his head importantly. "And Hawelli?" he asked.

  Bekri motioned let's-wait-and-see. "Calla was right not to oppose his going; he will come back to us in his own good time, if the Lady w
ills it. Meanwhile, there's no treachery to fear from him."

  "Oh, of course not, no treachery, no question of that. But what if he takes action again? Another foolhardy plot like today's?"

  "A chance we'll have to take, Jebri Flamen. Anyway, how could we stop him? Web or not, he's a free man—if he chooses not to accept the council's authority, what are we to do? Lock him up? Cut his hands off, in case he disobeys again? We are not the Sherank, Jebri."

  I opened my mouth and closed it again. Was Bekri really in touch with what was happening in the further reticulations of the Web? I had thought so, but now I was not so sure. What unwelcome duty, for example, had Calla been intending to carry out with that knife? I stole a glance at her. Her hood was pulled forward to hide her face. Jebri, looking very unhappy, had still not moved from the sofa.

  "But he could endanger us all, Revered Bekri." Jebri was almost whining. "These wild ventures of his—suppose the Sherank traced him back to us? Suppose they caught him and tortured him?"

  "That's not a new risk. We run it every day, every one of us."

  "But we don't invite it, do we? Hawelli does. For his own good as well as ours, Bekri, we should—"

  "What, Second Flamen?"

  "We should restrain him. Or at least find out where he is and—and ask him to restrain himself," Jebri finished weakly.

  Bekri laughed. "That hardly sounds like Hawelli."

  "Revered Bekri, he's endangering the future of the Web," the Second Flamen wailed, nearly in tears. His podgy little hands were twisted together. Bekri closed his eye.

  "Rest yourself, Flamen," he said.

  It was then that I understood. Bekri was not worried about the future of the Web. He was not worried about Hawelli. He was not even worried about the Sherank. He had developed a touching faith that I, Tigrallef, the two-left-footed, the burrower-in-books, the despair of the training Flamens, the coward, the weakling, the clown of Gil, was going to saunter into the Gilgard and out of it again with the Lady in my britches' pocket. And soon. I cleared my throat.