by Glenda Larke
Brand hugging Ligea. Brand speaking to him, trying to be friendly. Arrant pinched up his face and hid behind his mother until the big man retreated, baffled.
Ligea scolding later, annoyed, ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with you. You’ve been acting very strangely lately. I’d like to know just why you treated Brand as if he were a Brotherhood Compeer about to haul you off to the Cages. You are behaving like a three-year-old!’
‘I don’t like him,’ he muttered. ‘And I don’t like Altan.’ They had been given a room in a dark, dank hut facing a water channel; it smelled of mouldiness and rot and damp. The ground was wet and mud oozed up wherever he trod, squishing between his leather sandals and his toes. He looked at his muddy feet in disgust. ‘I hate this place. When can we leave?’ he whined. ‘I wanna go home.’
He pushed the rest of the memory away.
Narjemah said, ‘Ligea’s strength was that, in the end, she recognised Gayed’s values as failings, not virtues. Her tragedy has been that she had so little time for you.’
‘I don’t blame her for that.’
‘It left a legacy, though. It means that you two have only a shaky foundation on which to build a relationship now, and that’s difficult. You have to make an effort to chat to her more.’ She caught the expression on his face and sighed. ‘I know, I know. Thirteen-year-olds hate confidential chats with their mothers!’ She rose to her feet. ‘Well, I’ll be going to bed. We ought to talk more often, you and I. The Magor should always stick together, especially two incomplete Magor like us.’
He nodded. The conversation may not have changed anything, but still it felt good to have someone who cared what happened to him. Especially now that he didn’t hear nearly often enough from Tarran.
‘I envy you, Arrant,’ she added as she paused in the doorway. ‘You have a chance to obtain what I lost forever—the wonder of being one of the Magor. Don’t throw it away so easily.’
But she didn’t explain how it was possible to throw away something you had never got a grip on in the first place.
He continued to sit, sipping his wine, wishing for things that were never going to happen. Wishing Tarran came every day, the way he used to, and that his mother had time for him. Wishing his father wanted him and wishing he understood, really understood, why he didn’t. Wishing he had control over his power and that he hadn’t killed all those people. Wishing everyone believed him when he said he hadn’t killed Foran.
The Illuser had taken a javelin in the chest and died. He’d seen it. He remembered it. It was just that afterwards no one had been able to find his body, just a few rags that had been his clothes.
Arrant looked at the fruit, plump with wine, remaining in the bottom of his glass. If he wanted, he could have asked for mulled sultanas to be sent up to him whenever he felt like them. Servants would have brought him all he wanted. He could have had it all—and he wanted none of it.
He put the goblet down, sultanas uneaten. Suddenly he had no appetite.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The day after the banquet, Arrant was restless and bored and filled with an odd sort of impatience to be up and doing something, although he didn’t know what. When the mathematician from the Academy, Lepidus, arrived to give him a geometry lesson, he sent the old man away. He felt mean, knowing how difficult Lepidus found it to move around when he was half crippled by arthritis, but he did it nonetheless.
So I’m an arrogant bastard, he thought. Who cares?
He did, of course. He threw himself down on his bed, hands behind his head, and stared at the ceiling. A jumble of voices leaped up at him:
‘—not even one sestus. Goddess, sometimes I wonder if we weren’t better off as slaves. At least we got enough to eat then—’
‘—do it today, I promise—’
‘—those snail-nibbled bastards wouldn’t work to please the Exaltarch herself—’
‘—so they say. But I think—’
‘—Councillor Trabus, I understand the problem—’
Vortex, that last was his mother’s voice. As usual, his Magor ability was being as unpredictable as a gorclak on heat and somehow he was picking up conversation from within the palace. Trabus was one of the Advisory Council, a fussy little man as rotund and bald as a pomegranate, his unctuous tone like olive oil slipping over a warmed pan.
Arrant snatched his hands away from his head, hoping the voices would disappear. They didn’t. His mother was saying, ‘I will not countenance anything that resembles the Brotherhood. It was an iniquitous organisation—’
‘Perhaps, Exalted One. But it kept citizens in line. Now, when Tyrans seethes with unrest, the only thing that maintains stability is fear of the Exaltarch, of you personally, of your abilities—but you can’t be everywhere, Domina Ligea.’
‘I never wanted to rule by fear.’ He heard the touch of wry humour behind the tiredness of her voice.
‘You have done nothing to merit fear from the honest, Exalted One.’
Obsequious bastard, Arrant thought.
‘Nonetheless,’ Trabus continued, ‘your powers are great enough to frighten even such as me, let alone the ordinary citizen of Tyrans.’
This was followed by a short silence that made Arrant wonder if he had at last lost the conversation, until Trabus said, ‘But if you won’t consider reintroducing a secret brotherhood of some kind, then perhaps you will give some thought to how to deal with what’s left of the old one. There is reason to believe the Brotherhood still operates, with your downfall in mind.’
‘Councillor, I’m delighted to find that you are worried about my welfare—’
Arrant lost the next couple of minutes to an argument between two children on the relative merits of the bats they used for their games of roundball, but then the conversation in the palace audience hall jumped back into focus. Ligea was saying, ‘I’m aware of the rumours. There is nothing I wish more than that he hadn’t escaped our forces. I don’t need proof to know he’s the one who tweaks the gorclak’s ear because he can’t reach the horn. But it has been four years, Councillor, and he hasn’t managed to do any lasting harm yet.’
‘Exalted One, one day he will reach the horn. He will reach you and find your vulnerable spot and attack you through that.’
‘Then I shall have to make sure I remain invulnerable. I am not defenceless. Rathrox can’t get within two hundred paces of me without me knowing. Councillor, you may—’
Then she was gone again and all Arrant could hear was something that sounded like cartwheels over potholes and an unidentifiable metallic racket, as if the contents of a tinker’s wagon had been subjected to a minor earthquake. When the audience hall did pop back into his head again, Trabus had gone and Ligea was speaking to a servant, saying, ‘Bring Dominus Arrant to me.’
Arrant winced. She couldn’t have known he was listening, could she? Vortex no, that was impossible, surely. He scowled. Dominus! How he hated that word. He wasn’t a lord of Tyr who had earned such a title. He was a Magori, Mirager-heir to Kardiastan. But Tyr didn’t know that.
Aloud, he said, ‘Goddess, how I hate this place!’
Ten minutes later, a servant ushered him into the audience hall as if he were a petitioner being graciously granted an interview. As he crossed the marble floor, he noted Ligea had finally ordered those awful carpets ripped up. Doubtless she’d had them sold, just as she had earlier disposed of the lion skins and all the more ostentatious furniture. She wasted nothing.
She was dressed as she usually was these days, in a fine silk wrap woven through with gold thread. Her crinkled hair was highlighted with gold to match. He supposed she looked regal, but she didn’t look like his mother. She didn’t look like Ligea, who’d led an army, either. She was Ligea Gayed, Exaltarch, and he didn’t really know her any more.
Ocrastes’ balls, I hate this place. I hate it, I hate it…
He had another flash of memory. That first evening, as he was entering the palace for the first time. Tarran had been wi
th him, trying to calm him down after what had happened. Trying to bring him back from the dark place he crouched in, silent and refusing to remember. Refusing to think, because thinking was agony. Thinking made him the murderer of innocent men.
There had been blood on the marble of the portico, and a sticky puddle of it right in the doorway, reflecting the light of the burning torches. Blood. More blood. He’d looked up, wiping his hands on his tunic as if he could rid himself of the stickiness that clung, only to see a man’s head impaled on a spike over the doorway. Nausea crept up into his throat, to be swallowed back.
One of the soldiers with him, noting the direction of his gaze, said cheerfully, ‘That was the Exaltarch. Bator Korbus, that was.’
Sweet cabochon, Tarran had remarked, your mother doesn’t believe in sinking only half the boat, does she?
She didn’t do that, Arrant had replied, utterly certain. She wouldn’t. Not Ligea. She’s not like that.
Tarran had remained unconvinced and Arrant had sunk back into his dreamlike state, where he was somewhere else, a time when he hadn’t killed all those people.
But now he wondered if Tarran hadn’t been right. He wasn’t sure he knew his mother at all any more.
She waited until the door closed behind him before she greeted him. Then she smiled and came forward to take his hand, cabochon to cabochon. He knew she would feel nothing of his emotions. She’d always had trouble reading him and he’d been utterly hidden from her ever since the moment he’d killed the men outside the North Gate. It wasn’t deliberate. It was just all part of the shrivelling that had started that day. All part of the barricade, and the loneliness.
He remembered the moment it happened: the stark instant when he knew what he had done, and knew that if he wanted to stay sane, he had to not be there. And so he had gone away. Closed up, like a shopkeeper putting up the shutters. He had come back, of course, but slowly, opening one shutter at a time, one sense at a time, one sliver of memory at a time, letting in just enough tragedy for him to cope with each time. There was nothing conscious about the decision to return, any more than there had been anything conscious about going away in the first place. It had just happened. It had taken him a year to reassemble all the memories into one indigestible lump of guilt.
But somehow, ever since then, his feelings had never re-emerged to be sensed by Ligea. Or, he assumed, by any Magor. He had wrapped them all up, tight inside himself, a ball of pain and scars and self-loathing, the canker beneath his breastbone. It never went away. It tainted him.
But at least he could hide himself—and his lies.
‘You wanted me, Mater?’ he asked. She gave the faintest of sighs and he wondered if she had unleashed her pleasure at his presence, hoping he would feel it and reciprocate.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Firstly, I’ve had a letter from your father that I thought you’d like to read.’
She handed him a papyrus scroll and he couldn’t help the sick, angry pain in the pit of his stomach as he took it. He sat down on one of the divans to read. It was mundane news for the most part, and much of it concerned people he didn’t know, yet it was enough for him to conjure up Temellin’s face and hear his voice once more.
It ended with his usual expression of affection for him, and then a few words for Ligea that seared him with their poignancy.
I have never ceased to love you. This separation is a darkness in my soul. I beg you, come back. If you cannot stay, then just come to visit. How can I live any longer without seeing you?
The sentiment made him feel uncomfortable, as if he had been peeping into their bedroom. He wished he hadn’t read that part. He hadn’t wanted to know. ‘Are you going to go?’ he asked.
She shook her head, not meeting his eyes. ‘I can’t.’
He stared at her, shocked. He had never heard that much pain in her voice. In Ligea? Controlled—that was his mother. Not a woman whose words spoke of the rawness of wounds, of a life lived so close to the emotional edges that she could fall too badly to rise again.
Yet when she spoke again, she was matter-of-fact. ‘If I were to leave Tyrans, there’d be a revolution in my absence. Everything people died for would vanish into chaos. How can I—who caused the deaths of so many—allow my personal wishes to bring more tragedy? Arrant, I’m the only thing that’s holding the country together.’ She made a gesture with her hand. ‘I knew the problems would be great. I just never realised how long it would take to solve them. If it hadn’t been for the food Temellin sent last snow-season, people may have starved. We didn’t have enough labourers to work the grain fields because farmers won’t or can’t pay them.’ She sighed. ‘I must go to the western cities soon, to talk to some of the civic leaders there. Gevenan tells me my presence might make a difference.’
‘Ah. I suppose so,’ he said, handing the scroll back. ‘What about Tyr? At the banquet, the Reviarch hinted that you should be wary of the Meletian High Priestess.’
‘Oh? Believe me, I am wary of her. She thought nothing of deceiving the religious to further the Exaltarch’s power, and thus her own position.’
‘Why does she hate you?’
‘I made a fool of her, the same way she fooled others. I pretended to be the Oracle, among other things, and Antonia believed I was, until Bator Korbus and Rathrox finally managed to disabuse her of that notion. She has never forgiven me.’
‘So why allow her to continue as High Priestess?’
‘It’s not so easy to get rid of a High Priestess. Some people believe she is chosen by the Goddess herself. I barely got away with forcing the Cult of Melete out of the Forum Publicum temple.’ She shrugged. ‘I could have killed her, I suppose, but it seemed a better idea to keep her where she was. She knows what I am, and what I can do. That fear keeps her honest. More or less. But this is not what I wanted to talk to you about.’ She took a deep breath. ‘It’s something…more personal. And disturbing. I have heard rumours that you disappear from time to time. That you simply cannot be found. Arrant, have you been leaving the palace alone, without your bodyguards?’
‘Aren’t I entitled to some privacy, Mater? Do I have to be available all the time? If I have found a way to be alone sometimes, does it matter? And I was unaware I could leave the palace even with bodyguards.’
It could hardly have escaped her that he hadn’t answered her question, which probably told her something anyway.
She said softly, almost gently, ‘I hope I don’t have to remind you that until such time as you can control your cabochon at will, it would be incredibly dangerous for you to leave the palace alone. There are still too many people out there who would be only to happy to hurt you because it would hurt me. Rathrox Ligatan among them.’
He nodded. ‘I know that. I’m not stupid. Do you think he is here in Tyr?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t felt his presence, but then sorting out just one person from a city full of people is hardly possible anyway. He would have to be close by for me to do that. Just because I have not felt him, doesn’t mean he’s not out there, awaiting his chance.’
‘We both sensed him that time we were on the boat, heading for Kardiastan.’
‘He was close by, and furious. I may not feel him now, but I sense his fine touch behind much of this unrest—he is at his best when it comes to manipulating people, and the citizens of Tyrans are being manipulated.’ She added harshly, ‘He would love to get his hands on you, Arrant.’
‘Don’t worry; he won’t,’ he said. When he was out on the streets, no one recognised him. No one. He was too wily for that. He took too much care. Why didn’t she have confidence in his good sense?
‘I need to know how you are leaving the palace.’
‘Ask the guards if I leave at all.’
‘I have. And no one will admit to letting you out. And yet two of the servants swore they had glimpsed you in the crowds of Marketwalk.’
He didn’t reply.
‘I think it would be better if you didn’t come to any
more of the banquets,’ she added, after a long silence. ‘It’s better that people don’t recognise you. Better that they don’t know what my son looks like.’ She sat down beside him on the divan and glanced at the letter still in her hand. ‘I have written back to your father telling him that it is time you went to him. I will not take no for an answer this time. You must go to him. And soon. You must be given your Magor sword. You have to learn what it is like to be a Kardi. When I come back from the west, I will arrange it, even if I haven’t heard from Temellin.’ She stood up, and he knew it was time for him to leave.
Audience over. Usher the petitioner out.
He turned to go, but then turned back. ‘That day we first came here—did you order Bator Korbus’ head to be placed over the palace doorway?’
‘Why in all Acheron’s mists would you want to know that?’
So I understand you better? I don’t know why! I don’t seem to know anything any more…
When he didn’t reply, she said, ‘Yes, I did. I slit his throat, and gave the order for his head to be removed and put over the door. I wanted everyone to know he was dead. I wanted all to see that I had killed him.’
He met her steady gaze. Finally he nodded, accepting. Yes, she was a woman who didn’t believe in sinking just half the boat.
‘War changes people,’ she said. ‘It changes us all.’
He thought of the boy he had been, before the attack on Tyr. Pleading with Foran to get closer to the gate. Because he wanted to see.
He nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it does.’
The canker under his breastbone suddenly seemed to have moved to his throat. He turned away so she wouldn’t see just how close he was to tears.
When he had gone, she sat again and covered her face with her hands. That look on Arrant’s face…So cold. He had not thought her barbaric, until now. Now he knows, Goddess help me. He had found out, and thought it a betrayal.
I never wanted to be Ligea Gayed again, but that’s what I am becoming…
A compeer bitch.
Cabochon take it, Temellin…I can’t do this alone.