Mother of Lies

by Dave Duncan

  “I will try, my lady.”

  “Twelve blessings on you.”

  “He’s not dead, then?” Stralg said.

  The voice behind her was unforgettable—deep and sonorous, but also imperious, very masculine. Like a war horn.

  She gasped with shock and spun around so hard she staggered.

  She looked up. He seemed taller every day. Still bony, all feet and hands and a boy’s loincloth like a linen flute. On his way to being very big. Gold bracelets adorned his wrists and a weighty pelf string laden with silver wisps encircled his neck. He had dark Florengian coloring, but the fierce eagle-beak nose was developing fast. Since his voice broke, Chies had sounded exactly like his father, and now was undeniably starting to look like him, too.

  “You sent for me. I thought he must be dead.”

  “No. Come.” She pushed past him and did not speak until they had passed through the sanctuary. She nodded approvingly to the senior Mercy and went out into the corridor with her willow-tree bastard slouching behind her.

  They walked together with her little lamp throwing bizarre shadows on the high walls. Typically, Chies had not bothered to bring a light. Perhaps young eyes saw better in the dark.

  “I wanted to tell you that Master Dicerno is pleased with your progress. He says you are trying very hard. I am happy to hear this, Chies.”

  Grunt. “That’s all?”

  Her mind groped for the right answer. Was there ever a right answer when dealing with adolescents? She had no experience. Dantio had been only a child when her first brood was stolen away. She was very old to be learning. Deep breath …

  “It is a sign of maturity. As a reward, and as long as you continue to progress, I will let you wear a dagger. You can choose—”

  “Why not a sword?”

  You could never score when the target kept moving.

  “Not until you know how to use one. You’d be a gift-wrapped prize to the first street thug you met.”

  “I’d still have my guards with me,” he said sulkily.

  “And if you run into trouble, you’ll just stand by without drawing and let them defend you?” But apparently the absence of a dagger was no longer the most important thing in the entire world, no longer a source of eternal shame. It no longer justified suicide, as it had a sixday ago. “Is there something you would rather have?”

  “Take girls to my room.”

  She needed several deep breaths for that one, but Master Dicerno’s strongest advice had been “Be just, be fair, and encourage him any chance you get.” Better his room than under a bush somewhere.

  “Have you taken girls to your room already?”

  Pause. “Maybe.”

  She knew he had tried twice and the guards had blocked him. But he had not told her a direct lie. Encourage him, the preceptor had said.

  “As long as you continue to be discreet I won’t mind. I’ll give you a key to the private door.”

  She stole a glance. He was pleased. Very pleased. Probably quite pink, although it was hard to say in this light. How long before he started giving away palace silverware? How long before the first little hussy cried rape or pregnancy?

  “You are almost grown up. At New Year, you’ll start wearing a seal and I shall take Master Dicerno’s teeth out of your leg. You may find your girlfriends’ brothers and fathers coming after you with cudgels, but that will be your problem.”

  “By then I’ll be doge.”

  “What!?” The echo of her cry rolled away along the concourse.

  He smirked down at her. “It has to be a man of the royal house and I’m the only one. Who else can they choose?”

  “Chies, Chies darling … I’ve never lied to you. You know that Piero is not your father.”

  “But you lied to everyone else.” Sneer. “He accepted me as his. Didn’t want to tell people his wife balled other men.”

  Piero could have handled this with a few quiet words. She couldn’t. She warned herself not to start screaming. “Have you looked in a mirror lately?”

  He laughed. “The Werists call me ‘the Little Fist’!” Even more than dagger-wearing, his chumminess with the garrison had been a source of family friction. Practicing his Vigaelian, he’d called it. She’d thought they were just loose company. So now she knew better. If the ice devils saw him as the bloodlord’s son they might even start taking his orders, and then Chies would be dangerous.

  “It’s the council that matters.”

  “Piero never denied me!” Chies shouted and stopped walking. “They won’t!”

  She turned to face him, feeling as if she were drowning. Why had she never guessed he would aspire to the coronet? Was that why he had been on his best behavior lately?

  “The last time Stralg …” She began again. “Your father carried me away by force and kept me for seven sixdays as his prisoner and plaything. He raped me, abused me, even stole the babe from my breast. The day he released me he told me that the seers said I was carrying his child and it was a boy. He said he still had my four children as hostage and I was to carry you to term and Piero was to raise you as his own, or else he’d send orders and all four would die.”

  Stralg’s son shrugged. “So he hadn’t any choice.”

  Why should the boy be grateful?

  “Piero? Yes, Piero had a choice, because I never told him what Stralg said. He knew you weren’t his, but you were mine, and you were innocent of the crime, so he let you live. He reared you and loved you. When you were lovable.”

  At once she wished she hadn’t said that last thing, but it was too late to take it back. If anything, Chies had been too lovable. With the others gone, he’d been all they had, and they had spoiled him horribly. Now their weakness was about to bear terrible fruit.

  A stray gust puffed out the flame on her lamp.

  “But you just admitted,” Stralg’s voice resonated in the darkness, “that the Fist made me because he wanted me. Obviously he wanted me so I can be doge and rule Celebre for him.”

  No. Stralg had just wanted to show his contempt for Piero by sending her home bearing his bastard, but she could never tell Chies that.

  He said, “The council knows what’s good for it. They’ll do what my real father tells it to do, just like that milksop husband of yours always did.” The hated voice suddenly turned squeaky. “My real father will tell them to elect me! And if you really try hard and behave yourself in future, I may let you take men to your room!”

  While she was still floundering to find a suitable retort, any retort, she remembered that she was on her way to meet with Marno Cavotti. If Chies Stralgson caught the merest hint of a suspicion of a rumor that the Mutineer was in the palace, he would be across the road to the Vigaelian barracks to claim the notorious reward, faster than a thunderbolt.

  Without another word, he turned and ran. She caught a brief glimpse of his gangling form against a glow at the end of the concourse as he ran around the corner into the Hall of Pillars.

  The storm was moving on. One of the great shutters in the colonnade had been unlatched and moved aside to admit glimmers of gray light and wafts of steamy air. The rain on the terrace outside had dwindled to a drizzle. Forcing herself to move no faster than usual, Oliva swept across to join the three men standing there.

  Silvery robe, silver hair—the one holding the lamp was Master Dicerno, and beside him stood Chies in loincloth and glints of silver. He was as tall as the preceptor, but he looked like a child alongside the third man. Werists were chosen for their size in adolescence and kept on growing—a little larger every time they battleformed, it was said.

  As she arrived at the group, she was shocked to realize that the third man wore a Nulist robe. The cowl covered his head and shoulders leaving only his face exposed, so it was one of the very few garments that would hide a brass collar, but it seemed especial blasphemy for a Hero to pose as a Mercy. All three knelt to her, Chies just a fraction of a second behind the others. Correct protocol would have been for him to bo
w only, then present the newcomer.

  Dicerno waited an instant for him before saying, “My lady … if I may have the honor … Brother Marno. Brother Marno is a renowned and skillful devotee of holy Nula.”

  Marno was a common name, but Oliva wished they had chosen another. One glance at Chies warned her that his mood had changed yet again. He was twitching, excited, unable to keep his eyes off the disguised Werist. He knew! She had no idea how he knew, but she was quite certain he did.

  Life had become a nightmare inside a nightmare.

  “Rise, please, all of you. You are very welcome to our house, Brother Marno.”

  “My lady, I thank the gods for giving me the opportunity and honor of attending lord Piero.” The big man spoke in a harsh growl, very unlike Stralg’s sonorous carillons, but his face was completely unlike her expectations of what a notorious rebel should look like—handsome, sensitive, aristocratic, with a strong resemblance to Duilio Cavotti, his long-dead father.

  “You will be able to assuage my husband’s distress?”

  “Not I, my lady. The goddess.”

  “Of course.”

  He should have said my goddess.

  “You are new to our fair city, brother?” Chies making small talk had to mark the dawn of an epoch.

  Cavotti must be aware of his Celebrian accent, because he evaded the trap. “I was born here, but I have been away for some years.”

  “Since before I was born, yes?”

  The fake Nulist waited a beat before saying, “Much longer than that, lord Chies.”

  Oliva chuckled, which was perhaps a mistake, but probably nothing would have stopped Chies now.

  “Did you move that shutter, brother? It takes four men to put them up.”

  “Master Dicerno did it. As he will have told you, the gods give strength to the pure in heart.”

  Chies let out a surprised snigger.

  “I have certainly told him that diffidence is a sign of good breeding,” Dicerno countered.

  The boy’s eyes narrowed. “I saw my father just now and he’s in such terrible pain that I feel very upset. Will you give me some comfort, Nulist? Just a touch?” He extended a skinny arm.

  Cavotti closed a huge hand around it. “Better, lad, I will show you how to work off your own worries.” He moved over to the doorway and out onto the terrace.

  Chies perforce went with him, struggling, kicking, squealing. “Stop! You’re hurting! Let me go!”

  “You don’t need holy Nula,” the giant growled. “See there? An agile youngster like you can easily scramble over that balustrade and jump down to the river wall. Run twice around the city as fast as you can, and you will find that all your cares have given way to a glow of healthy well-being.”

  Released, Chies sprang away, rubbing the white marks on his arm and spitting anger like a cat. “I’ll find better shoes.” Without even a bow to his mother, he sprinted across the chamber and disappeared the way he had come.

  The Werist came back in, chuckling. “Sorry, my lady, but I enjoyed that. I am a disgrace to Master Dicerno’s training.” He bowed again. “Marno Cavotti, at your service.”

  “You dare manhandle my son?”

  His eyes blazed. “You are lucky I didn’t break his neck, lady. At his age I was a prisoner at Boluzzi in compulsory Werist training. The only way to fail the course there was to die there. If you ran away you were run down—you know warbeasts can track like hounds? Ripped to pieces. Boys of thirteen, fourteen. They’d bring the scraps back to show us. No, my complaint against Stralg is even heavier than yours, my lady, and your precious bastard is lucky he’s still got his balls on right now.”

  The preceptor moaned and was ignored.

  “Boor!” Oliva had found a target for the fury she had been building all night. “It is you who may be lacking body parts very shortly. Chies has undoubtedly gone to ask the senior Mercy if she knows anything of a Brother Marno.”

  “And after that how long for him to reach the Vigaelians?”

  “A few minutes only.”

  “My lady!” Dicerno squealed. “Cannot you send the palace guard to stop him? This is terrible!”

  “We have time to attend to our business,” the Mutineer said calmly. “But the less you know the better, old man. Leave us. I suggest you quit the city the moment the gates are opened in the morning.”

  “Do as he says, master.” Oliva dismissed the preceptor by turning her back on him. “Be quick, Cavotti. I don’t want you all over my clean floor.”

  The big man laughed and tucked his hands inside his sleeves as if he had worn Nulist garb for years. “We can start by agreeing that we share no love for Stralg Hragson. There were about four sixty of us to start with in the school, half of us from Celebre. In the five years we were there, earning our collars, we were joined by six or seven times that many—boys kidnapped from all over the Face.”

  “I know the history,” she said, imagining Chies bursting into the sanctuary, yelling out his questions, then taking off along the corridor like a mad guanaco. “What do you want of me?”

  “I’ll get to that. We stayed and we worked and we won our collars. Stralg was dreaming … he’s basically just a thug bully, as you well know … dreaming of setting up a second empire here, to match the one he had on the Vigaelian Face. He expected us loyal Florengian Werists to run it for him when he went home. Expected us to be grateful, I suppose. We were initiated, the first of us. We swore the oaths. He came to Boluzzi in person for the ceremony, and by that time he’d been all around the Fertile Circle, stamping out opposition. He ruled the Face then. Two Faces. Dream come true. We were part of his great plan, the first crop from Boluzzi, donning the collars we can never shed. We swore eternal obedience, cheered him, and went off to our postings, but we’d agreed to meet back at the school after Stralg and his guards had left.”

  “This was your plan, your mutiny, how you got your name.” She thought Chies wouldn’t come back through here. He’d go around by the west stairs. That would hardly slow him at all, not the way he could move those long legs. Yet the Mutineer was showing no signs of haste, almost as if he were dragging this out.

  “I was one of the ringleaders. The others are all dead now. On the chosen night we broke in and there was a fight. Oh, was there a fight! By the time the blood congealed, all the instructors were dead and so were most of us. There were twenty-four Werist survivors—me and twenty-three others. About four sixty cadets threw in their lot with us, and some senior probationers too. The young ones we had to leave. We told them to scatter and look out for themselves, but we knew Stralg would get them.”

  Oliva imagined Chies hurtling down the stairs four at a time, belting along the arcade to the main gate …

  “The Fist realized his mistake at once and ordered us hunted down, every Florengian Werist killed on sight. We were trying to stay ahead of him and train the cadets at the same time. Mutineers, fugitives, oathbreakers, partisans, guerrillas—call us what you will. It was a year before we were strong enough to double back and ambush one of his patrols. He lost five times as many as we did, but in those days he could afford the losses. That was how it went the first few years. But gradually we gained in numbers. We recruited, we trained, and the more we had the more we could get! Understand?”

  Dicerno had gone, taking his lamp. The palace seemed deserted and very silent without the wind. She felt as if she were alone in it, standing chatting with a madman.

  “Yes, yes! What are you getting at?”

  Chies would have to talk his way past the men on the gates, who had orders to send guards with him when he went out. No, of course he’d go out the bolt-hole from the laundry, the one he thought nobody else knew about. That would save him a run around the stables, too. Twelve gods!

  “Getting to, my lady. We are getting to the final payoff. Two years ago we finally had as many collars as Stralg did and were training faster than he could bring men over the Edge. That was the turning point. He’s limited by the Ice on
the other side, you see. Their seasons are more extreme over there, and—”

  “So you think you can beat him?”

  “He’s beaten now. He knows it. The problem is to kill off the survivors with as few collateral deaths as possible. You heard about Miona?”

  She shivered. “Conflicting stories.”

  “Believe the worst of them,” Cavotti said grimly. “Stralg billeted a host in the town. We surrounded it and torched it. You know how peasants burn the stubble and the vermin run out with their fur—”

  “Please!”

  “He lost seventeen or eighteen sixties. That was two years’ reinforcements gone in one night.”

  “And how many civilians died?”

  “All of them, basically. It was not a small town.”

  “Atrocity!”

  “Regrettable. But for Stralg it was the beginning of the end. Hardly a sixday goes by without a battle now. Piaregga, Reggoni Bridge … two sixties here, three there. I am nibbling him to death, my lady! He cannot stand these losses. We can match him body for body and still get stronger.”

  Horrible! Horrible! “What do you want of me?” she yelled. Why was Cavotti talking so much? It was almost as if we were waiting for the Vigaelians to get there and kill him. Chies belting along the alley, almost at the barracks …

  Cavotti pulled a face. “I want to stop Celebre becoming another Miona, of course. It’s my home, too, and the smell of burning babies isn’t something you ever forget. Look at your maps, lady of Celebre. His escape route to Vigaelia goes past your city. He’s falling back as slowly as he can, but we’re driving him, and very soon now he will have to make a stand. Where better than here?” The big man’s raspy voice rose to fill the hall: “He has about three-sixty-sixty left. How do you feel about that many ice devils occupying your city, Mistress? For half a year while the Vigaelian winter has the pass sealed?

  Gods! “No!” A mere dozen was more than it could stand now.

  Chies must be at the barracks by this time, yelling for the flankleader. Werists moved like birds. It was their speed that made them so deadly. They’d come straight over the walls.