Gil Trilogy 1: Lady in Gil

by Rebecca Bradley

  "No, my lord Scion."

  "Odd—it sounds Sheranik—the feminine form. But that's not possible. The women can't leave Sher." I tried to focus on the puzzle; my head spun.

  Calla shifted impatiently. "So what are we going to do?"

  "The same as we'd already planned, I suppose." I slumped back on to the pallet, deathly weary of conversation, of thinking, even of breathing. We had talked through the night, Angel and I, before jaunting off to explore his private ways through Sherkin territory. I had patiently drawn out of him the details of ducts and drains, the hidden roads through the Middle Palace, as familiar to Angel as the seams on his wrinkled palms, and the ways through the Temple Palace, not his usual scavenging ground, but he knew enough to get me as far as the sanctuary. After that, I would need no guide. I suspected he had even been into the caves, but when I tried to press him on the point, he became more impenetrable than usual. In fact, it was the toss of a token whether talking to Angel or slithering through the Middle Palace ducts had been the greater strain. My eyes started to close. I shook my head to clear the fog.

  Calla looked at me shrewdly, and felt my forehead. Her hand was cool. "You need some sleep," she said. The nagging tone was gone from her voice. "I'm rested, I'll keep watch."

  "No. We have to be moving." My tongue was about as thick and responsive as a scrubbing sponge. "I told you what Kekashr said. Once they have the spider, they may learn about the between-ways, and we won't be safe here."

  "Kekashr said they'd have him by nightfall," she said soothingly. "It's only morning—we'll be out of here by then. Angel should get some sleep too." She smiled at Angel, with perhaps too many teeth.

  Angel looked alarmed, but I was tempted by her offer. Something was bothering me but I could not focus on it. "Only for a little," I mumbled, and collapsed gratefully back on to the pallet, already half asleep, and drowsily felt a blanket thrown over me and heard whispers and light running footsteps and a hissing of more whispers that turned into the steam of a kettle boiling in the kitchen in Exile as I started to slide into a dream. And then Calla was shaking me, and the silvery gleam behind her could only be the candlelight on Lissula's hair. Sleepily, I tried to draw Calla closer.

  "Wake up, Tig. Wake up!"

  "Hnh? Why? How long did I sleep—?"

  "A minute or two." I groaned and closed my eyes, but she punched my shoulder hard enough to shake them open again. "Goldbottom's here. There's going to be a raid," she said tightly. "They're going after the Council of Flamens."

  I blinked up at her. Surely this was part of my dream. Lissula's shining head appeared over Calla's shoulder. "It's true, my lord. One of my takers told me last night. He promised me a gold token from his bonus."

  The fog thinned inside my head, but the sense of nightmare persisted. I stared up at Lissula with my mouth open.

  "They want Bekri."

  That woke me. "How do you know?"

  "My taker described him. How many men have scars like his? Lord Shree himself is going to lead the raid."

  Shree. I remembered his face in the firelight and damned myself for not putting a dart into his neck. And I damned myself for a drooling idiot, remembering what Kekashr had said; why would the spider's usefulness be finishing unless the Web was going to be torn? Then I would be the traitor's only counter; and the fact that he was also doomed was meagre comfort.

  "When is the raid?" I whispered.

  "Probably tonight." Lissula daintily shrugged. "My taker told me not to look for him tonight, but tomorrow night he'd bring me a—"

  "Tonight! Tig, there's still time to warn Bekri. If we go back now we can save them!"

  I looked numbly up at Calla.

  "Let's go, damn it!" She pulled me roughly to my feet, knocking a bowl of fruit and meat out of Lissula's hands. I watched apples and pikcherries scatter on the floor around us as Angel retreated into the shadows, his hands and mouth full. It helped me to put off for a few seconds what I knew I had to say.

  "We can't go back."

  "What?"

  "We can't go back. There's nothing we can do, Calla."

  Clown, coward, weakling. That's what her eyes said. Her mouth said, "Then what is your plan?"

  "To carry on. We must get to the caves."

  "The caves!" Calla reared up in her fury. She spat a Sheranik phrase too obscene to have a Gillish equivalent. "The caves, by the (genitalia) of the (procreatively engaged) Lady," she went on, reverting to Gillish. I'd never seen her so angry. "The Caves be (penetrated from an unusual position)! How can you think of your (coprophagic) mission when those (incestuous offspring of) shulls will put Bekri under torture?"

  "We can't help him," I said miserably. "What did you intend to do? Ask the guards nicely if they'd let us pass? Be reasonable, Calla; our only hope is finding the Lady."

  "You could kill Kekashr," Lissula lilted, in much the same tone as she might have suggested a picnic. "Angel could help you find him—"

  "No!" said Calla forcefully.

  "Whyever not, darling?"

  Calla disdained to answer, but I supposed I knew. Killing Kekashr, even killing Shree, might gain us valuable time, but if I knew anything about the Sherank, it would release a murderous rage against the helpless citizens of Gil. I thought of how five thousand freemen of Kuttumm had been fed to their own dogs after a failed attempt on the life of Lord Kekashr's grandfather. How much worse would it be for Gil if we succeeded? Bekri himself would tell us to go to the caves if we could, I knew that. And yet, sense and reason aside, the thought of abandoning Bekri and the Web to Lord Shree without even a warning sent a jab of agony through my heart.

  Calla clapped her hands together explosively and hurled herself into the shadows where Angel was squatting. He flinched away, but she knelt down and gripped him hard by the shoulders. She pushed her face close to his. "Do you know a way we can get out of the Gilgard?" she demanded.

  Still chewing, he nodded.

  "Without the Sherank seeing us?"

  He swallowed and nodded again. Calla looked up at me. I kicked at an apple. It was madness.

  "Oh, all right," I said.

  * * *

  27

  "THIS IS COMPLETELY mad," I informed Calla. I peered down the deep, dead blackness of the rubbish chute.

  "Scared?"

  "I don't like heights."

  "You don't have to come."

  "Yes I do. Angel won't take you otherwise. He doesn't like you."

  At that point, Angel found the coils of rope he wanted within the wild medley of his collection. He tied one to a ring-bolt in the clearing-chamber wall and pitched the rest of that armload into the shaft. It snaked down into the darkness. He kept the second, longer rope looped over his shoulder.

  "That ring-bolt," I remarked, "is at least six hundred years old."

  Calla tugged on the rope to test it, not listening. Lissula came to my side and gazed with interest into the chute. "How deep is it?"

  "Maybe a hundred and fifty feet."

  "You know, I once saw a man who fell only a hundred feet. Every bone in his body was smashed, splintered actually, and the splinters were sticking right through his skin, and there were buckets of blood pouring out of his mouth, and—"

  "Thank you," I said.

  "—his skull was so crushed that his head wobbled like a water-bladder if you poked it—"

  "Which of course you did," put in Calla grimly.

  "—or like a raw, peeled egg—"

  "Shut up, Goldbottom." Calla turned purposefully towards her. Angel seized the rope with all speed and disappeared into the chute. I shut my eyes and thought of the training Flamens as they urged me on to a rope dangling over the edge of an abyss: a real Hero feels no height at his back. Big help. My bowels had rumbled then, and they were rumbling now.

  "You next, Tig—if you're going, that is," said Calla. I opened my eyes. She was standing firmly in Lissula's way, as if to block any attempt on the latter's part to kiss me goodbye. Lissula may actually ha
ve been planning something of the sort, for she was managing to look both wistful and annoyed. Clutching the rope, I shut my eyes again and worked my way over the edge of the chute.

  I have consistently tried and failed to block out the memory of that descent, though it was by no means the worst few moments of the quest. There was something peculiarly memorable about clinging to a rope secured to an antiquated ring-bolt, with my feet flailing for purchase on the top few stones of a long vertical tunnel. The idea was that I should "walk" down the shaft, braking myself with a loop of the rope about my middle; in fact, my method was much more extemporized than that, and much less dignified. For one thing, the rope kept swinging me around so that my back was to the wall; for another, the walls were slippery as glass with condensation, and the superb workmanship ensured that few footholds were available in the masonry. I wriggled, I cursed, I jerked down a few spans at a go; I took twice the time of either Angel or Calla and landed at last in pitchy blackness, dazed with elation that I had made it and oppressed by the thought that eventually, if I lived that long, I would have to climb back up again.

  I sprawled beside Angel at the bottom of the chute while Calla made the descent. She landed hard on my shin and immediately struck a flint for the candle. The walls glimmered wetly around us. We were on a platform that sloped gently to an arched aperture through which wafted a slight but chilling draft.

  "Is that the sewer?" said Calla.

  "One of them—the old main sewer under the Lower Palace. There's an outlet into the sea at the north end of the Gilgard. You can swim, can't you?"

  "I'll manage." She pushed past me with the candle, through the dark archway. Angel and I followed.

  The sewer was an arched tunnel through the living rock, with its floor about three feet lower than the end of the platform. The underground spring that used to feed it had been diverted long ago to the Lower Palace fountains so that only the faintest trace of a sewer smell lingered, but the moisture dripped down the walls and oozed along the floor and the damp coldness crept like frozen spiders into the marrow of my bones.

  "Which way?"

  "That way."

  Calla set off at a determined pace, with Angel and I trotting in her wake. Every muscle in my body whined with fatigue. Calla's candle, bobbing along a few paces ahead, seemed to swell and recede, brighten and darken, and at last to take on strange and nightmarish shapes as I fought to stay awake. The world compressed itself into the tiresome necessity of putting one foot before the other, staying upright, moving on, not falling, not stopping; right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. When we finally halted, it took me some moments to take the fact in. "Are we in Malvi yet?" I asked drunkenly.

  "Malvi? Wake up, Tig."

  I fought to focus my eyes, partially succeeding. Not dark now; the candle was paled by a source of light from below. The tunnel ended at that point, or rather turned downwards as a steep flume that slid grandly into a vast cavern floored with turgid, gently undulant seawater. It seemed as if we stood on the edge of a well of weak daylight, tinted seagreen at intervals as the swells rose in the outlet to the open sea. It was not, I thought, the most efficient of waste disposal systems, and I was slightly surprised at my ancestors. I started to explain this to Calla, but she cut me short.

  "It looks like we'll have to slide down and swim out—try to find the ledge Angel talked about, outside the opening. You go first."

  I sat down hard. "Me? This expedition was your idea."

  "I can't swim."

  "What? I thought you said—"

  "I said I'd manage. Where would I have learned to swim? Most Gilmen never even learn to wash. Come on, down you go. There's a rock by the entrance, swim to that and secure the rope." Angel started to say something, but Calla hushed him with a look.

  "And then what?"

  "I'll pull myself to you along the rope, stupid."

  "And then what?"

  "And then we'll see. The rock isn't far from the opening, and then there's the ledge. If you can help me to that, we'll be fine."

  "And how do we get back up if—when—we return?"

  "Angel will stay here with the other end of the rope and pull us up. Now get going."

  I gaped at her. She was serious. I could think of no major objection, except that we would probably be killed. Shaking my head, I tied one end of Angel's rope around my middle and sat down to dangle my feet over the brink of the flume. From that vantage point, it seemed nearly vertical and horribly long. I looked back at Calla. She bared her teeth encouragingly. "If I do this," I asked, "will you be impressed?"

  "It's possible," she said. "Anyhow, there's no other way to save Bekri."

  I nodded gloomily, took a deep breath and slid. There was a lightning impression of Angel stepping forwards to say something, but I dismissed it as improbable. Anyway, I was busy. The stone surface of the flume, polished by centuries of unspeakable drainage, hurtled me bottomwards. Two thoughts flashed through my mind in that tiny scrap of time: first, that we had not stopped to consider what might be lurking in the cloudy waters rushing to meet me; second, that the sea-troglodytes of Miishel actually did this kind of thing for fun.

  I slammed into the water with a shocking jolt and then was deep under it and still descending with the runaway momentum built up on the flume. I kicked desperately to slow the downwards plunge and opened my eyes. Strange twisted towers and hillocks took murky shape around me, silhouetted in the diffuse greenish glow from the opening and haloed by long seagrasses that whipped slowly in the surge like the hair of drowned women. Then I was suspended among the sea-grasses, surrounded by the weird underwater topography, within touching distance of one of the towers; an anxious message floated up from my lungs—will this take much longer?—and I kicked myself upwards through shoals of little flickering fish-shadows. The surface was an iridescent, unreachable far horizon, right up to the instant when I crashed through and took a burning gulp of air.

  I trod water, rocked ponderously by the tide, and oriented myself to the sentinel of rock by the opening. Echoes thundered around me; Calla was shouting, but everything except the timbre of her voice was lost. I wasted no breath in trying to reply, and set off towards the rock in my own free-form version of the Calgornu Flail. It was not easy swimming—the waves pushed me back a stroke for every two or three I took; on the other hand, the cold water woke me up fully for the first time in hours.

  Somehow, gasping and choking and fairly clear-headed, I reached the rock. It was a smooth granite finger, slimed with algae, unclimbable, but the tide lifted me so I could slip the loop of rope over the top and pull it lower with my own weight when I dropped in the trough. Then I turned in the water to squint for Calla, but the head of the flume was a black mass of shadow.

  "Calla! I'm ready," I shouted. The echoes boomed. There was no answer.

  "Calla!"

  Her voice came quietly from behind me. "I'm over here. Stop shouting and come quickly."

  I twisted in the water and goggled with disbelief. She appeared to be stuck like a fly to the glistening wall about thirty feet away, and a few spans above water level. I remembered the Sheranik obscenity she had used in the clearing chamber, and used it myself, with conviction, several times.

  "Never mind that. Just get over here. Hurry!"

  Gibbering, I obeyed. I told myself it was the only way to get my hands around her neck. Something brushed past me in the water, twined softly around my ankle and drifted away again. I stopped gibbering and swam faster. The next brush was more insistent, and a cluster of little knives swept along my leg. Then Calla had my hands and was tugging me upwards; I found a blessed foothold and used it to catapult myself out of the water. I fell hard on my knees and gasped with the pain, but Calla hauled me bodily away from the edge and slammed me against the stone wall. Her knife was out.

  I slowly caught my breath. We were on a ledge a bit wider than I was tall, which curved away around a projection of the cavern. One leg of my britches was shredded and blood
was just starting to ooze out of four shallow parallel scratches down the calf. Calla was watching white-faced as something just out of sight over the rim of the ledge churned the water to froth and hurled itself repeatedly against the stone; a sharp, glistening fin-shape rose majestically into view and sank again. There was a louder, more violent explosion of water that slapped down over us both, and then silence except for the leisurely swash of the tide.

  "I think it's lost interest in us," Calla whispered after a moment. "Thank the Lady it couldn't reach us here."

  "What couldn't reach us here? Where's here? And how, by Oballef, did you get here, anyway?"

  She had the grace to look embarrassed. "I took the stairs." Under my breath, I recited the Zelfic Prophylaxis to Choler. When I had finished, I asked, "What stairs?"

  She fiddled with her knife, not meeting my eyes. "There's a staircase from the sewer down to this ledge. Angel showed me, just after you—" she paused "—left."

  "You mean," I said, unlocking my teeth, "just after I launched myself down a sheer precipice into freezing water swarming with dangerous man-eating seabeasts. That's what you mean."

  "There was only one of them," she said defensively. I leaned my head against the wall. Calla crept tentatively to my side and draped her cloak over me. It only just missed being as wet as I was, but I was touched by the gesture. When she began to swab at my scratches with the cloak's hem, I gave up entirely on being angry. "Never mind," I said. "We should be getting on. Where's Angel?"

  "He wouldn't come."

  "Why not?"

  "He didn't say. I'd guess he's afraid."

  "I can sympathize," I said dourly. Keeping well away from the rim, we made our way along the ledge towards the outlet. To my relief, the ledge continued through to the outside, although it dropped nearly to water level by the time it reached the opening. Indeed, the higher swells washed it a span deep every few seconds. Warily, with one eye on the smooth menace of the cavern waters, we waited for the trough of the next wave and dashed through into the sunlight.