Gil Trilogy 1: Lady in Gil

by Rebecca Bradley

  "Well?" said Calla. "What is it? Where does it go?"

  I handed her the candle. "I had a feeling he'd been in there, you know. Though why he was afraid to mention it—"

  "What? Who?"

  "Angel, the Lady bless him. This hole—"

  "Yes?"

  "—leads straight into the mountain. Into the caves."

  * * *

  31

  "DO YOU KNOW where you're going?"

  "No. Well, not exactly. Generally upwards."

  "I thought you knew the caves. I thought the Secrets of the Ancients—"

  "The Secrets assume you're starting from one of the proper gates, up in the Temple Palace."

  Calla stopped short. "Then we could get lost."

  "We're already lost, in a way."

  Calla made a sound of exasperation, which echoed along the passageway to become a full-throated chorus of nonconfidence. We had left the chamber where Angel had broken through and followed a rather grand, gently spiralling corridor that suddenly narrowed into a writhing natural cleft in the rock. We rapidly discovered that this was a common pattern in the Caves, particularly the lower reaches, but it was disconcerting the first time it happened.

  It was equally disconcerting to find, nearly by catastrophic and intimate personal experience, that the floors were fissured here and there by broad, sharp-edged cracks, or by sudden pits that ranged from shallow scoops to unfathomable wells of still, black water. We were not alone; the caves housed a simple life-chain of their own, the white bats feeding on the white roaches, the roaches on white antlings, the antlings on the ubiquitous white fungus, and the fungus, presumably, on the rock itself.

  While these little stumping and creeping denizens gave us the occasional nasty turn, they were also company of a sort. Imagine a small, dry rustle magnified by echoes and ambient silence into the scratch of a behemoth's belly-scales right at your heels; there is a certain comfort in knowing it is the roach you didn't step on a minute ago, or one of the diminutive, flightless bats lurching along in pursuit. We became inured fairly quickly to the soft sighs and whispers, the busy clicking of claws, the delicate whistles and squeaks—but even so, I was uneasy; there was a feeling of sleeping powers all around, as of other presences, or as if the twisted intestinal tunnels of the Caves were indeed the gut of some immense, dormant creature. I did not mention this to Calla.

  Of course, I didn't really need to. "Do you get the feeling," she asked as we scuttled along, "that we're not alone?"

  "Not really," I lied.

  Calla sensibly discounted the lie. "Maybe it's Angel."

  "I don't think so. Why would he hide from us? Anyhow, there's nobody there."

  She did not answer, but stopped again to listen. I realized that we were not just holding hands now, but were more closely linked, my arm tight around her shoulders, her arm warm around my waist. She jerked suddenly.

  "Listen! Did you hear that?"

  "A bat," I said.

  She raised her head, nostrils wide as if she were trying to smell the trace which the sound had left on the air. "Do you remember the legends about the caves?" she breathed.

  "That's all they are—legends."

  "You don't believe them?" Her voice was unsteady.

  "They're legends, Calla. Primitive superstitions from before Oballef came: never observed, never authenticated, no more real than—than the steam dragons of Calloon, or the Ghouls of Ghasca. No, I don't believe in them."

  She cocked her head at me suspiciously. "You don't believe in those either?"

  "I'm a memorian, not a priest. I'm not obliged to believe in things that can't be documented."

  "You believe in the Lady in Gil."

  "She can be documented. Her—" The same sound came again. A sliding sound, not loud, but with size built into its timbre. The squeaks and whispers hushed for a few seconds, then gradually resumed. Calla and I looked at each other over the candle. We walked on quickly.

  Decision time came again. The tunnel branched into three, two of them broad and smooth and climbing, the third no more than a rough pipe, wide enough for us to squeeze into, but furred all over with fungus. Calla sniffed with distaste and started to move past its mouth, but I found myself held by it.

  "Come on," said Calla impatiently, "which is it to be?"

  Feeling strange and light-headed, I took the candle and held it into the white-crusted opening. Within reach of the light, the pipe twisted downwards and to one side. Calla peered in beside me. "Not that one, thank the Lady. You said we should keep going up."

  Only half of my head heard her. The other half was preoccupied by an entirely novel sensation.

  "This way," I said.

  "You're joking. In there?"

  "Yes." I tucked my knife in my belt, dumped my cloak and Angel's rope on the ground and climbed in.

  "Tig, you fishbrain, it turns downwards!"

  Under my hands and knees, the fungus yielded spongily, then popped like blisters, releasing a viscous liquid that smelled like rotting onions.

  "Tigrallef!"

  "It's all right," I called back. There was a scramble in the darkness behind me, followed by a small explosion of heartfelt disgust. I grinned and crawled on; however reluctantly, Calla was following.

  She caught my foot and held on doggedly. "You've finally gone mad," she snapped. "Why in Oballef's name choose this one? There are two perfectly good passages back there that don't involve swimming through hogbile, or whatever this muck is. You come back this instant."

  "They're dead ends, Calla. This one will get us there—the others won't."

  "How can you be so sure?"

  "I'm a Scion of Oballef, aren't I?"

  "So what? You come back here."

  I kicked my foot loose, but she grabbed it again and started to pull. "Calla," I said, "trust me. I know where we are. We've reached the parts I memorized."

  That knocked the wheels off her wain. "Why didn't you say so in the first place?" she said. Her voice still dripped with suspicion, but she released my foot. Onwards we squelched, onwards and downwards, pulling ourselves along on our elbows and knees. It became as tight a fit as any duct in the Middle Palace, but the malodorous fungal slime had the advantage of oiling our progress.

  I had lied, of course. For all I knew at that point, we were still miles from any landmark described in the Secrets. I could hardly explain to Calla (not fully understanding myself) that some impalpable certainty had poked its paw through the mouth of this stinking hole, and beckoned me in—that I knew no closed doors lay between us and the Lady now, only an unbroken pipeline of passage and cave, tortuous but unmistakable, as if I held one end of an unseen cord, the other end of which was tied around the Lady. This was not something mentioned in the Secrets, this pull between Scion and Lady; however, I could think of no other time when the phenomenon might have revealed itself.

  The pipe turned sharply downwards, but I could see that it opened out about three feet beyond, just on the edge of the candlelight. I started to ease myself forwards, but it was not easy head-first, especially since I was greased crown to foot with fungus-blood; I lost my grip and slid the rest of the way, landing with a thud on a hard stone floor. The candle went out. A second later, a solid, weighty object slammed into me from behind. Calla had arrived.

  "Give me the candle." She sounded upset. I groped for her, caught her hand, pushed the candle into it. A dull scraping noise was repeated several times, followed by a memorable Sheranik curse.

  "Is the flint giving you trouble?" I asked.

  "Yes." She packed more sheer deadly expressiveness into that one little word than into the preceding several, rich as they had been. "It's wet," she added in the same tone.

  This is what it's like to be blind, I told myself.

  "I am also wet," Calla went on accusingly, "and mucky, and my cloak is mucky, and everything in my cloak is mucky, up to and including our last bit of bread. And we're lost—"

  "We're not lost," I interrupted.<
br />
  "You know where we are?"

  "I know where we're going."

  "Really?" Judging by her voice, she had pulled down her eyebrows and stuck her chin out an inch or two, and badly wanted to hit me.

  "Really." I found her hand again and pulled her upright. I closed my eyes—unnecessarily, in fact, given how dark it was—and felt for the tug of the invisible line. It drew me unerringly through the darkness to a wall where, to Calla's surprise but not to mine, there was an opening and the foot of a stairway just beyond. "See?" I said. "Everything's fine."

  The higher we climbed, the drier the air and walls became, and the sparser the population. Calla made me stop now and then while she tested the flint, but for a long time it sullenly refused to spark; from the powerful clutch she maintained on my shoulder it was clear that she found the dark oppressive. Often she would stop just to listen, digging her fingers into my arm, shushing me fiercely if I even breathed, muttering about being followed. To me, nothing mattered now, neither the darkness nor the strange noises, nothing except the sureness of every step I took, the sensation of utter certainty. I was exhilarated, Calla glum and fearful; I chatted to her softly, she answered in monosyllables or did not answer at all. At last, on about her twentieth periodic attempt, the flint produced enough of a flame to light the candle. The light bounced off the crazed coating of slime-residue on her hair and face.

  She held the candle between us and gripped my arm. "What's wrong with you, Tig? You've been babbling like a madman for the last half-hour or so. And stop smiling at me."

  "Was I smiling? Sorry. But we're very near, Calla, I can feel it."

  "What do you mean, feel it?"

  "The Lady's very close." I looked around and the details of the chamber clicked into place on my mental map: the placement of the narrow archways breaking three walls, the particular curve of the broad-treaded staircase we had climbed to get there. Without knowing, or without bothering to know, we had reached those labyrinthine stretches of the Caves that were laid out, span by span, in the Secrets of the Ancients. "If you look at the floor, Calla," I said airily, "you will find a nicely executed mosaic of the Plavipern cosmogony."

  She dropped to one knee and cleared the dust from a small patch of floor. "It's a tortoise," she said coldly.

  "That's right. Tortoises are worshipped in Plav."

  "Oh." She got slowly to her feet.

  "Through that doorway," I went on, "is a corridor decorated with a mural of Oballef's Scions—the first seven generations, anyway; the rest, down to my great-great-grandfather, are on the far side of Lyksolef's Folly, so we won't get to see them."

  "I don't want to see them. Where's the Lady?"

  "Precisely? I don't know yet. Come on."

  She shrugged resignedly and followed me through the archway. Faces lined the passage walls, wise, calm faces in themselves, but decidedly unnerving in their habit of springing unheralded into the candlelight and then back into the shadows as we moved past. Curallef the Versifier, Oballef Third, Tilislef the Harpist, Oballefiya the Beautiful—I murmured the names as we passed, feeling the power rising inside me and the exhilaration, the oneness with and heritance from a thousand years of wise, powerful ancestors. The Lady was close, so close; the knowledge that hauled me along was nothing like an invisible rope now, more like a whirlpool centred on the spot where the Lady waited. Up the stairs at the end of the corridor, off at the second landing, through the Septagon, almost running by that point; down the small spiral ramp with the gemstone inlays, along a short whitewashed passage with a startling golden light spilling on to its floor from the further threshold—and there it was, the Lesser Chamber, directly under the sanctuary. (The Flamens-in-Exile had decided, after much debate on the old Primate's state of mind, that it was the last place I needed to look.) I leaned against the jamb, bent almost double, panting to catch my breath. Calla moved fearfully up beside me.

  The Lady was there, all right. Shining, coruscating, she lit the whole chamber, not steadily, but in bursts and ripples like sunlight through shifting leaves. The form was indistinct, lost in the bright, blinding core. Calla choked and moved closer to me. "Who's holding it?" she whispered. A hunched figure in a green robe and heavy green cloak, unmoving, one hand outstretched with the light balanced on the palm. Two green shadows knelt in front of him, and they were not moving either.

  "It's the Primate and the senior Flamens," I said softly. "They were trying to work the Will, poor fools. Interesting how they've been preserved."

  With Calla lagging a few steps behind, I walked into the Lady's radiance. The Primate's mummified face, illuminated behind her, showed no signs of pain, just the beginnings of a profound astonishment. The light welcomed us, bathed us. I was within a few feet of my destiny—and Gil's, and Sher's—when something rustled behind us.

  The first arrow slammed through my shoulder and spun me around and on to the floor. The second hit the old Primate, who exploded into glittering dust, robes and all. The Lady fell, turning gracefully in the air, and rolled away from me towards Calla. I tried to crawl to her, but a flood of crimson darkness rolled past my eyes and I collapsed back on to the flagstones. Calla dove along the floor, caught up the shining object in both hands and started in my direction.

  "Krisht." A voice from the shadows. Calla froze.

  "What are you waiting for?" I hissed. "Calla! There's still time!"

  She stood like a stone figure just out of range, staring at the entrance, frowning. I reached out with my good arm—my fingertips brushed the hem of her cloak.

  "Krisht—give it to me."

  One of the shadows at the door stepped forward into the Lady's light, slime-streaked, filthy, but familiar. Calla stared at him. I cried to her despairingly and she half-turned, her face haunted and confused. Then Lord Shree reached her and gently disengaged the Lady from her hands.

  Calla came to me then, too late, dropped to the floor, took me in her arms, cradled my head in her lap. "I'm sorry, Tig," she whispered. "I'm so very sorry."

  * * *

  32

  IT TOOK SHREE, obviously a bright bastard, about five heartbeats to figure out that the counterweight system on the far side of the chamber was worth a try. He pushed gingerly at just the right place, then leapt back as the beautifully balanced machinery, gritty with decades of dust but still functional, rumbled into action. Slowly, smoothly, the great altar from the Sanctuary sank downwards into the Lesser Chamber; two Sherkin helmets peered over the edge of the gap in the ceiling, appearing more startled than helmets can usually manage on their own, then vanished. Lord Shree shook his head ruefully.

  "Seventy years we searched that damned room," he said in Gillish.

  I rolled my head off Calla's lap and edged painfully away from any contact with her. "The way is opened from a different chamber, not that it matters now."

  "That's true," said Shree, "it doesn't matter now." His voice lacked the triumph one might expect from a man who had just conquered the world. The Lady was tucked carelessly under his arm, still lambent, but dimmed by the bright light pouring down from the Sanctuary. There was a distinct air of anticlimax. I lay bleeding quietly on the flagstones; Lord Shree and his beslimed guardsmen waited in awkward poses near the sunken altar, hardly more animated than the two senior Flamens. I did not look at Calla, so I have no idea what she was doing.

  Such was the end of the quest for the Lady in Gil.

  A whole array of helmets appeared in the ceiling, looking like a frieze of gargoyle cutouts pasted around the opening. With them was another familiar face. The shadowy eyes moved from Calla to me to Lord Shree and what he carried; the thin lips curved. "Well done, Nephew," said Lord Kekashr in Sheranik. And he added in Gillish, "Is that you, Krisht? Well done, Daughter."

  They treated me tenderly, by their standards. After all, they needed me. I was carried to a small room with a good fire in the grate and laid on a comfortable pallet. A Koroskan healer, grander than the one who had inspected the levy, was brou
ght in to cut the arrow out of my shoulder and tend the wound. This was followed by a wash, and then by a platter of steaming meat and vegetables, which I rejected, partly because the rich smell turned my stomach, partly because I had some notion of wilfully starving to death before they could use me to work the Will. That aim was frustrated; when I would not eat, several of them held me down and forced a good measure of beef broth down my throat. No maggots for Kekashr's honoured guest. When I vomited back most of what they had poured into me, they simply sat on me again and repeated the process. This time the broth stayed down. After that, I was left alone—alone, that is, except for two well-armed troopers in full battledress, who never took their eyes off me.

  Failure, betrayal, doom, the downfall of all hopes. My mind shuttled busily back and forth among those four like a shull on a griddle, not daring to settle too long on any one thought. The searing pain from my shoulder—the Sherank do not believe in soothing ointments—was like a refuge. I dived into it, wallowed in it, savoured the way the physical distress blotted out the other anguish, but always the thoughts returned. Calla had betrayed me. Everything that had happened between us was no more than good acting on her part, and insane foolishness on mine. The Lady was lost, Gil was lost; there was a good chance that the League of Free Nations would start grovelling once they knew the fabled Lady in Gil was in Sherkin hands, and eventually the whole world might be lost. And I, Tigrallef, Scion of Oballef, had led them right to her. I groaned out loud, occasioning snide remarks from the guards about the Gilman lack of shrikk, or balls.