Mother of Lies

by Dave Duncan

  In the spring, Dantio broke his parole. Knowing more geography now, he went downstream to Ocean. By the time the hue and cry was raised, he had stowed away aboard a ship and the ship had weighed anchor. The satrap had to send another in pursuit of it.

  Tranquility hurried to the sanctuary of Sinura on Broom Creek. There was a minor sanctuary within the palace, but Broom Creek was the Healers’ headquarters and the senior Healer in Skjar was Ferganfar Narson.

  She had known Ferganfar since childhood, when they had been neighbors in the potters’ quarter. As a youth he had been godlike, a handsome giant, and if he had shown any romantic interest in little Lonia next door, holy Mayn would have had to have gotten by without Sister Tranquility. From those humble origins he had risen far. Now he dressed in silk and dwelt amid fine rugs and amberwood furniture, looking out on vistas of cataracts and lily ponds. The icon of his goddess on the wall was inlaid with jade and seashell. Physically he had not fared so well—stooped and almost crippled, a shrunken remnant of what he had been. Life had written suffering on his face as scribes inscribed clay

  They talked briefly of old times and longer of newer, harder times. They discussed the possibility that the Queen of Shadows was a Chosen. Tranquility explained why she had come.

  His first reaction was incredulity. “But the boy is a hostage, you say? No one treats hostages like that!” He spoke in painful whispers.

  “Saltaja will. Who will ever carry word back to his father and what could he do about it if he knew? I overheard her threats and I swear that she meant them.”

  “But, Witness …” The old man shook his head in dismay, and his jowls flapped. “You know that our goddess will never restore missing parts. If the boy is mutilated, we could halt the bleeding and heal the wounds, at some cost to ourselves, but we can never replace what has been lost.”

  He gestured with a cruelly misshapen hand. Tranquility had heard about that hand many times, how a block of marble had fallen on a young stonemason, crippling him when his wife was great with their first child and leaving them facing starvation. Such a patient could pay no fee, but Ferganfar had entreated Sinura for him anyway. The goddess had restored the stonemason’s hand, but the Healer had never recovered all the function in his. There were many similar stories about him.

  “Your sympathy does you great credit,” he said, “and I agree the woman is evil personified. If she really goes so far as castration … the Healer would have to be male, and even the elderly hesitate to treat such injuries.”

  “The boy is terminally stupid,” she admitted. “His courage is rank insanity. What are the chances that he will die of shock and loss of blood?”

  “That is quite likely. The slavers do not bring their victims to us to save, because the gifts we should require of them in return would be worth far more than the slave. Even if he survives the first day or two, the wound may well become poisoned.”

  She told him about seasoning.

  He was shocked, but he believed her. “You think this child is destined to overthrow the bloodlord’s tyranny?”

  “You know we never prophesy. Seasoning is only a warning that one day the world may either curse or celebrate his name—provided he lives long enough. Knowing Dantio as I do, I am convinced his fame will not be notoriety like that woman’s.”

  The Healer took a while to think. Then he heaved himself painfully to his feet. “We must see that he survives the ordeal. Where is he now?”

  Dantio was delivered bound to the palace and taken before Saltaja, who struck him, hurling him to the floor. “Fool!” she said. “You were warned. You know I never make a vain threat, so you’ve forced me to do this. It is your own fault. Take him away.”

  He was handed over to the waiting slavers. They marched him out and led him on a tether down to Blackstaur, where slavers’ barns were confined between dyers’, tanners’, abattoirs, and other malodorous premises.

  Tranquility watched it all from the nearest Sinurist sanctuary, which was on Handily, two islands away. Although not as grand as the Broom Creek temple where the rich went for treatment, it was still a very splendid timbered hall, overshadowing the stores and tenements around it. It even had a small park of its own, and there she sat on a bench, feeling very untranquil indeed.

  Her sight was barred from the interior of the consecrated building, but years earlier, in Nuthervale, she had broken an ankle and experienced Sinurist ritual firsthand. The Healer had bound her injured limb to his own healthy one; then he and his helpers had chanted prayers to the goddess. Tranquility had walked away with barely a limp, while the Sinurist was carried off on a litter. He had recovered in a couple of days, much faster than his patient would have done without help, but the Healers’ mystery demanded true dedication.

  Tranquility saw Dantio being carried screaming into the squalid little courtyard where the slavers did their butchery. She watched two men lash him to a grating and a third pump bellows at the furnace. While the monsters were waiting for their implements to become hot enough, a team of three white-clad stretcher bearers arrived, announcing that they had been sent to make sure the hostage survived the operation. The sanctuary had sent them, but the slavers assumed that the palace was keeping an eye on its property.

  A brown-robed woman sat down beside Tranquility and clasped her wrist with a cool hand. “Try not to worry, honored lady. You will only give the Healers more work to do.”

  She was a Mercy. Nulists hung around the Healers’ sanctuaries, providing their goddess’s comfort to those in distress, and her influence calmed Tranquility’s pounding heart. Because she was not dressed as a Witness, the Mercy misunderstood Tranquility’s presence there and urged her to talk about her husband? son? daughter? and what malady had brought him? her? to the temple of healing? Tranquility’s resisted the babble of questions, but was sufficiently distracted that she missed seeing Dantio actually being mutilated. When she forced her sight back to Blackstaur, he had already gone.

  The healers—all large and powerful men—had not even bothered to put him on their stretcher. Instead, the largest was running flat out, carrying Dantio wrapped in a sheet. The other two were racing ahead, ringing hand-bells and clearing a path through the crowds by brute force when necessary. Tranquility shook off the Mercy’s grip and leaped to her feet. Before she reached the sanctuary door, a novice opened it and Ferganfar came limping out, began to say something, and saw the answer already in her face.

  “Where?”

  “Just crossing Nig.”

  “They will be here very soon then. We are ready.”

  Shouts and bell clamor announced the healers’ approach, and in moments they came racing along the street. The sanctuary door swung open to receive them, but as they plunged into the dimness within and vanished from Tranquility’s sight, she began to weep.

  The Mercy embraced her. “You must not give up hope, dear. The goddess is very merciful. The powers of Her Healers are boundless.”

  But they did not include resurrection. Not only Tranquility—every Witness in Skjar had seen that the seasoner was not breathing, that the bloodstained bundle the big man had brought contained a lifeless corpse. Tranquility sobbed for a long time, despite the Mercy’s continuing comfort. When, at last, an elderly Healer came looking for her, it was not Ferganfar. He thanked the Nulist and led the Witness inside.

  He took her through to one of the treatment rooms, and there, sitting on a bloodstained bed, clutching a steaming beaker in both hands, sat a very pale and subdued, brown-skinned boy. He had no tops to his ears. He stared up at her with wide dark eyes.

  “But he was dead!” she whispered.

  “Perhaps not quite dead,” the Healer said softly. “Or perhaps She made an exception for Her dearly loved servant, Ferganfar.”

  Tranquility looked up at him in alarm. “How is …?”

  The man shook his head. “We urged him not to make the attempt. We all insisted it was too late. He knew. As I said, holy Sinura loved him very dearly, or She w
ould not have granted his prayers in this instance.”

  Or else the gods loved Dantio even more.

  Later the chief slaver came looking for the palace’s boy and was told he had been dead when he arrived. Justifiably apprehensive, the man went and reported to Saltaja, who ordered him flogged to the doorknocker of death for carelessness. She made Eide question a Witness, who confirmed what the slaver had said: Dantio had died.

  By that time he and Tranquility were at sea.

  No one pursued them or came looking for them. The voyage to Bergashamm never took less than two sixdays and she spun it out to two thirties, dallying at sun-dried fishing ports around the coast. Dantio soon recovered from his ordeal. With the resilience and ignorance of youth, he was more annoyed by the mutilation of his ears than worried over what else he had lost.

  At first Tranquility worried that the Eldest would anathematize her for interfering, but eventually she realized that the gods had saved Dantio by a miracle and mortals must not argue with gods. Besides, the cult had reported that the boy had died, so how could it change its story without denying its own claim of infallibility? As long as Saltaja did not notice the difference between “died” and “is dead,” she should nevermore be a problem for Dantio.

  Unless he chose to become a problem for her, of course. Children do grow up.

  What was Tranquility to do with this ward she had so unexpectedly inherited? Try to smuggle him home over the Edge? See him apprenticed to some trade? Dantio answered that question for her one night.

  The ship had been beached, as usual. Crew and passengers were asleep ashore under the sky, in a world deliciously cool after the daytime heat, scented by teasing breaths of salty sea-wind, lulled by the splash of waves. She wondered what had wakened her—the lurid phantasms of a dreaming sailor? Not predatory marauders approaching … No, the source was right beside her, staring up at the stars. Dantio was registering true happiness for the first time since she met him.

  “Go to sleep,” she whispered.

  (surprise—joy) He grinned. “You know everything!”

  “Only the goddess knows everything. Seers just know more than most people.”

  (worry) “My mama won’t mind that I love you too, will she?”

  “Of course not. And my goddess does not mind that I love you.”

  Tranquility felt the boy’s adoration whenever he looked at her, but until then she had not realized how much she returned it. Few Witnesses ever managed enough self-deception to fall in love. Bergashamm was full of aging spinsters, with many sixty more of them scattered in retirement all over the Face.

  “You will send me home, won’t you?” (anxiety, homesickness)

  Tranquility rolled over to face him, resigned to a serious discussion. The sailors snored on. Would the Eldest tolerate even more meddling than she had done already? “That may be possible, dear, but it will not be easy. I’m sure I cannot rescue your brothers. If we try to do that, we will put them in great danger. And you, too. And me.”

  (distress—resentment) “Why? I will not go without Benard and Orlando!”

  It seemed to take half the night to convince him, but he accepted the situation at last. “Then teach me!” he said, frowning at the stars.

  “Teach you what?”

  “How to know the things you know.”

  His motivation was suspect, but she had long recognized his bright, questing mind. “I can try,” she said.

  “You can, but will you?”

  She chuckled. “I will try, when we get to Bergashamm.”

  He was too young to be even a postulant, but he became a sort of mascot—and also a teaching aid in the lectures on seasoning. Later that year the Maynists located the Celebre daughter, who had vanished with her wet nurse during the sack of Jat-Nogul, and now turned up in Skjar as putative daughter of Master Merchant Horth. Some furtive prying soon confirmed that she was another seasoner. Four of them!

  Rather than return to Skjar, Tranquility accepted a roaming commission to investigate other Florengian hostages scattered around the Face. She established that most were being well treated, and that none had seasoning. Accompanying her on her travels, Dantio saw his brothers from afar and was comforted. He learned a great deal about Vigaelia, the way the Werists were ruling it, and the subtle art of snooping without being noticed. When he was sixteen, they returned to Bergashamm, and he was accepted as a novice, although he was still younger than all other novices and even most postulants.

  He put up with the discipline for four sixdays. Then he came calling on Tranquility one evening and brazenly asked her to sponsor him for initiation. He was tall, slender, with the perpetual restlessness of an adolescent, but he was still a child. In one sense he always would be.

  “You are insane!” she said. “At your age? The elders will never approve you. They would laugh me to shame if I put you forward.”

  He had a confidence far beyond his years, and he grinned at her doubts. “They won’t, you know! Half of them are convinced that the goddess has chosen me to avenge the harm Stralg did to Her cult in the year I was born. The other half can’t stand the sight of me and will rely on the All-Knowing to throw me out on my ear, what’s left of it.”

  Holy Mayn rejected about one candidate in five. The discards were sent away, and it was known that few of them ever prospered afterward—how could they, when She did not want them and they had forsworn all other gods? But Dantio’s confidence was as solid as rock, and Tranquility could not fault his logic. Ordinary rules did not apply to him.

  The council agreed to consider his application, and even that was a surprise.

  By tradition, examinations were held in the crypt below the chapel, in pitch darkness. Tranquility led him in, whispering a warning to watch his step, for a thick layer of black sand covered the floor. When they reached the center, she told him to kneel. The Eldest sat on a tall stool in the center like a mummified monkey, her twisted fingers clutching her staff. Eight elders stood on either side of her, in a crescent facing the applicant.

  Darkness and silence. Tranquility had never known a mere initiation to raise such emotions. The chapel seemed to shake with them, and her own doubts rang as loud as any. She expected a refusal. He was the youngest novice ever put forward and the first Florengian to apply to the Vigaelian mystery, but his age and color barely mattered. Everyone knew that he was a brilliant student. What concerned the examiners was his history, and that rubbed salt into the gaping wound dividing the cult. Half the elders wanted to abrogate the Werist compact; the rest supported the Eldest, who was adamant that it must be preserved. The old crone did not like it, though, and she played fair in her appointments to the council. It was as evenly divided as the mystery itself.

  She began the ritual without preliminaries. “Who seeks the goddess?”

  “Honored mother, I bring Candidate Mist.”

  Hearing his new name for the first time, Dantio grinned in the darkness, unaware of the others’ smiles and frowns. His own, joking, suggestion had been Garlic, but the choice was Tranquility’s and she thought she had chosen well. He could pass for man or woman; he was fluent in Florengian, Vigaelian, and Wroggian. His dark complexion and cropped ears made him extremely visible, yet slaves were so unimportant that few people noticed him.

  “Surely,” whined the bitter voice of old Agate, “a Witness with seasoning is a contradiction of all the cult stands for?” She had been primed to ask this as the first question, to resolve the matter right away.

  “Flavor is merely a potential,” Tranquility said. “It may never be expressed in action, or it may act entirely by accident, with no intent on his part. The All-Knowing may even accept him and negate his seasoning—we have no precedents to judge by.”

  (doubt—relief—anger)

  Also fear, because a seasoner Witness might change the flavor of the cult itself. The Eldest was already very old, so Mist-Dantio was too young to be her direct successor, but a generation after that …? Aging childless spinsters
do not accept change easily.

  “How can he possibly be impartial?” Vihuela demanded. “After what that woman did to him? Can he take the oaths without reservation?”

  Not completely. Tranquility knew that from their rehearsals, and her own emotional reaction to the question was an instant answer—there were no secrets in Bergashamm. “I have known candidates be less certain,” she said. “If the goddess is not satisfied, She will not accept him.” That argument sounded weak even to her.

  Limpid agreed, though. “If holy Mayn cannot accept a seasoner into Her mystery, She will refuse him.”

  Carillon said, “Irresponsible thinking! We are supposed to stand behind the candidates we submit. Any time the All-Knowing refuses one of our candidates, we are disgraced!”

  There were more questions about sincerity, integrity, dedication, until Ember asked, “It is customary for new-sworn Witnesses to be posted to obscure, faraway places. Is he reconciled to spending the rest of his youth at the back of beyond?”

  (alarm) from Dantio.

  “I have not asked him that,” Tranquility admitted, “and the matter seems to trouble him. May the candidate speak to the question?”

  (shock—disapproval—indignation) were gradually overruled by (approval) as this outrageous suggestion was considered. The Eldest nodded her little skull head.

  Tranquility said, “Speak.”

  “Honored Witnesses,” Dantio said softly (resignation), “it is my intention, if accepted, to apply for posting to Zorthvarn.”

  (bewilderment) flowed into (amusement) …

  “The novice shames us,” Ember said. “Where is Zorthvarn and why does he care?”

  “Honored Witnesses, it is a very small settlement in the south. It is rumored to have been the birthplace of Hrag Hragson, the Fist’s father, although I am told that this is not recorded in the Wisdom. At Zorthvarn I would hope to discover who Hrag was, where he came from, and where he has gone, for his death is no more recorded than his life.”