‘Yes, of course, of course. I shall be honoured to leave you the use of my quarters.’ The priest wobbled obsequiously off towards his room. ‘Tymon, be sure to fetch some lunch for his Reverence.’
The Envoy glanced briefly down at him. ‘Go in beauty, Tymon. Remember you’re restricted to the mission until further notice. Don’t behave rashly.’
‘In the beauty, Father. I’ll remember.’
Lace had his back turned before Tymon finished the sentence, striding after Verlain. The boy sighed with relief and leaned back on the couch. The confirmation of Samiha’s honesty made his heart sing, for he was desperate to find a crumb of truth in the lies surrounding him. Even the Focals appeared in a more attractive light after the Envoy’s smooth-talk. He doubted now that they had anything to do with Caro, or even knew of his arrangement with Verlain. It had been worth returning to the mission and meeting with Lace, simply to be assured of that.
The interview had left him drained, however; his thoughts unravelled themselves like twine, refusing to cooperate. His stomach grumbled. He remembered Verlain’s last injunction and extracted himself from the couch, wandering across the courtyard to the mission’s tiny kitchen in quest of food. Most of the cupboards were bare but he found the eternal pot of leftover melata beans sitting on Amu Bibi’s stove, along with a few pieces of dry flatbread. How the priest thought he would survive for a whole week without the old woman to care for him was a mystery. Tymon snorted scornfully to himself, serving a grey dollop of beans into a bowl. Then he grabbed an unopened cask of kush and returned to Verlain’s quarters. Repeated knocking on the door brought no answer, and he was obliged to leave the provisions on the doorstep.
He returned to the couch with his own portion, considering his next move as he crammed the gluey repast down his throat. With the knowledge of Samiha’s innocence came apprehension for his friend. If rebels were caught delivering goods to the shanti’s address, she could be convicted of a crime she had never committed. He remembered belatedly that she was organising the funeral that evening, and would be at the shrine, unaware of goings on in her home. He was the only person who could warn her of Caro’s activities. He had to return to see her at once. The mission gate was locked but that would not stop him. He stared blearily at the compound wall, trying to calculate whether it could be scaled.
He stood up. The courtyard was awash with searing light; he swayed, squinting through the white-hot glow. The distance to the gate seemed vast. He took one step beyond the awning, teetered, regained his balance, and took another step. Then he slowly crumpled into a heap on the barkwood flags.
Verlain’s many-chinned countenance became gradually visible, a dark stain on the brilliant sky. The sticky, sugary aftertaste of som clogged Tymon’s mouth. He could neither rouse his sluggish limbs nor lift his head, and realised with dim outrage that his food had been drugged. After all that had happened at the mission, after all the priests had said about Samiha, he had fallen for that simple ruse.
‘Nothing to worry about, Reverence,’ Verlain murmured. ‘He won’t be able to move till tomorrow evening at the earliest. He’s had enough to soothe a herd of shillies.’
Tymon distinguished the Envoy’s dry tones, somewhere above and behind him.
‘I hope so for your sake, Gerud. You obviously think something of the boy, one hardly dares wonder why. It would be sad if there were a mishap.’
‘There will be no mishap,’ the priest breathed. ‘I guarantee it.’
Tymon felt himself being picked up and hoisted back onto the couch. He stared at the shivering rolls of fat on Verlain’s neck, struggling to speak. He yearned to hurl abuse at his captors but only managed a faint groan. Verlain bent over him and placed a clammy finger on his lips.
‘Now, don’t exert yourself, my angel,’ he rasped. ‘You need to rest.’
17
The rain fell in a continual sheet, making a sound like far-off thunder. But it did not wet anything it touched. When the drops met the desiccated bark they evaporated with a hiss of steam. Tymon stood bone dry under the torrent, his mouth open wide in a vain attempt to catch the water on his parched tongue. But instead of water, ash caked his lips, gagging him. The rain thundered on.
It was not rain but liquid fire, exploding into the night like a bright Festival garland, lighting up the city with birds and celebration. The rooftops burst into red and yellow flowers. Tymon stretched his fingers towards the shimmering petals on the palace walls. There must be a party at the Governor’s residence, he thought. This must be the night of the Rites, the night everything would change. He could hear the cries and commotion of the Festivalgoers. The sharp odour of blast-poison, the demons dancing on the slope outside the workshop: all of it was to be expected. He had seen it before. He laughed at the panic of the people running down the knot and through the streets, away from the burning carcass that was part building, part flower, part mechanical abomination.
‘It’s only a machine,’ he told the shadowy figures. ‘Three lengths of lightwood and a propeller. It isn’t magic, just science.’
A shadow approached. ‘Wake up!’ it cried. ‘The rain has come at last!’
‘You don’t understand,’ explained Tymon patiently. ‘This isn’t rain. It’s fire.’
Another explosion shook the Governor’s residence and flames poured out of the windows. The shadowy figure grew a yellow beard and spat yellow dust from its mouth.
‘Putar,’ it hissed. ‘Argosi putar.’
‘You’re a filthy, lying demon,’ Tymon shouted. ‘You have no soul!’
‘You’re wrong, you know,’ said the shanti. ‘He’s part of the Tree of Being just as much as you are.’
The red-haired girl knelt at the centre of the courtyard. She carefully arranged five corpses bound in white cloth on the flags, feet pointing together, heads radiating outwards. Tymon tried to remember her name without success.
‘That’s possible,’ he conceded. ‘But I’m thirsty. Will you give me some water?’
She made no answer but rose and walked slowly towards him, her face shadowed and eyeless. As she drew near her form changed, becoming bloated and obscene. Her eyes receded into the fatty folds of her cheeks.
‘My boy?’
Verlain’s bulbous figure bent over Tymon. ‘My boy, can you hear me?’
Tymon shrank back. He could not be sure whether the fat priest was real or not. Verlain hung between his dreams like an unwelcome spider, melting in and out of existence. His face was blurred and indistinct, and his features swam and bled into each other until nothing was left but a blank wall of shivering flesh. It was too much to bear. Tymon let go of the unpleasant image with a sense of liberation. The world became a tunnel of noise and fury and he fell into the Void, leaving light and life behind.
He awoke with the stale taste of som gagging in his throat. After a moment of disorientation he realised he was lying in Verlain’s quarters. Sweat saturated his rumpled tunic and thirst tortured him, but he felt able to move again. Even the pain in his ribs had improved. He raised himself onto one elbow. The room was dark and shreds of bright hallucination clung to the edges of his vision. A dull red luminescence that was neither daylight nor moonlight seeped under the doorway. He guessed he had slept for many hours, though whether it was still the night after his capture or the evening of the next day was unclear. He shook his head, trying to separate memory from fantasy. Had he imagined a fire in the Governor’s palace? Was the red light outside nothing but a delusion, the aftermath of drugged slumber?
He heaved himself up from the bed and staggered to the door. It was locked. He laid his ear against the wood, listening for movement in the courtyard. There was only silence. He had been left alone at the mission. He wrestled fruitlessly with the door-handle, cursing Verlain under his breath. Then he peered into the darkness in an effort to make out the contents of the room. By the bed, on a carved wooden chest, he found the sunken stub of a candle and a box of fire-sticks. He struck a light. The flam
e sent shadows scuttling into the corners.
Though there were no other exits or windows in the room, the gap between the priest’s quarters and his own cubicle caught Tymon’s eye. It looked just big enough to squeeze through. With a bit of luck, the cubicle door on the other side might be unlocked. He climbed onto the bed and tried to gain a grip on the high aperture, but it was out of reach. He cast about for something to use as a ladder. The only items of furniture in the room were the chest by the bed and a large hardwood wardrobe, too heavy to move. He descended from the bed and squatted down by the chest, bracing his arms about it. Then he paused. Slowly, he reached out and tried the lock on the box. It flipped open.
He did not know exactly what he was expecting. Perhaps he cherished a wild hope of finding proof of the fat priest’s duplicity, some link to the rebels or compromising correspondence with the seminary. There was, of course, nothing of the sort among the documents piled in the unlocked chest. Tymon thumbed through the volumes of strawpaper, the candle weeping over the yellow sheets. A smile of disbelief stretched across his lips. Every letter he had ever copied out for Verlain, every preposterous report and whining petition lay there rotting and unsent. He leaned back against the bed and laughed aloud at his own gullibility. Why had he thought there would be any regular communication at all between the fat priest and the Council? The seminary was not interested in what Gerud Verlain, a disgraced and deported failure, had to say about mission life in the colonies. The priest was there to do a specific job and was given the funds and means necessary to do it. It was enough for the Dean to send him a few missives by bird with his instructions. Lace would take care of the rest.
The candle burned low, singeing Tymon’s fingers. With a swift movement he kicked the box over and spilled its contents onto the floor. A mountain of useless paper slid over his feet. It was with difficulty that he restrained himself from dropping the remains of the candle into the heap and reducing the legacy of his indenture to a crisp. He took a deep breath, stuck the candle stub on one of the bedposts and hoisted the empty and much lighter chest onto the bed. The gap by the ceiling was narrow but passable. He wriggled over the wall and dropped down into his cubicle, ignoring the spasm in his side. The candle he had left in Verlain’s quarters guttered and went out. He groped in the darkness towards the faint red line of the doorway. To his relief the handle turned in his grasp and the door opened.
The courtyard beyond was deserted and still. There was no sign of either Verlain or Lace, although he waited in the doorway for several minutes before venturing outside. The blush of firelight hung unmistakably over the compound and the caustic whiff of smoke caught in his nostrils. The area in front of the mission gates appeared to be strewn with empty boxes. Propelled by thirst, he hurried at last to the water cistern by the kitchen and scraped up a ladleful of brackish liquid from its depths. The drink was only enough to wet his mouth. He returned to the gates, licking his cracked lips with discomfort, and prepared to scale the compound wall.
But the gates were hanging half-open. The heavy hardwood bolts had been splintered, the doors bludgeoned and wrenched off their axis. What he had taken in his haste for empty boxes was wreckage littering the flags. The mission had been vandalised, though by whom and for what purpose he could not tell. Nothing in the compound had been touched. He picked his way through the ruined gates, scanning the temple courtyard beyond for movement. It was quiet and empty. The temple was bathed in a fitful orange glow, as were the walls of the third tier above. His new vantage point afforded a better view of the Governor’s residence than the mission compound. He was able to take in the full extent of the damage inflicted on the palace.
He had heard accounts of the power of blast-poison, a substance said to unleash a ball of fire so intense it could consume the heaviest of buildings in an instant. The secret of its making was a Dark Art—the first taught to men by demons, according to Argosian legend. He half expected the devastation before him to evaporate like one of his hallucinatory dreams. The Governor’s palace was gutted. A large section at the top of the city had been gouged out of existence, leaving a gaping wound that belched thick black smoke. Flames leapt at its heart. Only blast-poison could have wreaked such havoc with the foot-thick walls of the palace, and few but the Fathers at the seminary had access to the knowledge necessary to re-create the formula. Tymon shuddered. This must have been the ‘little surprise’ that would kick-start Caro’s revolution. No demons were needed to perpetuate the crime, however; he guessed now what goods the Nurian might have received from Verlain.
He set off warily across the temple courtyard, keeping a sharp eye out for the fat priest. The city might be in the throes of a revolution but it was also theoretically under curfew. He had no desire to be caught and questioned by soldiers, or returned to the custody of his masters. The second tier was quiet but he had the disagreeable impression that he was being watched from behind closed shutters. The murderous glare from the Governor’s residence lit up the streets better than any torch as he hastened down the deserted main ramp to the first tier and market.
There the signs of trouble multiplied. Market stalls had been demolished and crates and wheelbarrows overturned by the side of the road. Several of the houses had been ransacked, their doors and shutters forced open and left to swing in the smoky breeze. Broken furniture lay scattered about on the ramp. A dim uproar drifted towards Tymon from beyond the city gates. He saw the telltale glimmer of orange rising above the palisade—the tent-town was on fire. Far away, a militia horn blew four victorious blasts, and through the faint cries from the tent-quarter came the sound of singing. Strains of ‘The Merry Bells’ pierced the night. It seemed that the soldiers were finally teaching the natives their salutary lesson.
The boy broke into a run, gripped by a new and terrible certainty. The vigilante crowd would look for an easy target. They would blame a well-known figure for the explosion. Samiha was the obvious choice. He skidded down Kion Street and almost tripped over ladder six, all thought of personal danger gone. But as he scrambled onto the balcony, he saw with cold shock that he was too late. The green door gaped wide, its lock smashed.
‘Samiha!’ he cried, plunging into the dark apartment.
Someone was sitting in the middle of the room. He could make out a bowed shape in the fitful glimmer from the doorway.
‘Are you there?’ he called.
His foot struck something soft; he hesitated. He reached down and touched a human arm. There were bodies lying on the floor in front of him. He recoiled in confusion as the bowed figure lifted its head.
‘I’m here,’ said Samiha quietly.
There was a brief scrape and a fire-stick leapt to life, its small flame cupped in the shanti’s hands. She was dressed in a hooded travel cloak as if she had just come in from outside. Her red hair fell in long folds about her face.
‘What’s going on?’ Tymon frowned as he caught a glimpse of huddled figures on the floor. ‘Are you hurt?’ he asked anxiously. ‘What happened here?’
‘I’m unhurt,’ she replied, her tones flat and weary. ‘Soldiers came. I wasn’t at home. But they were—the Focals.’
The flame went out. She struck another, lighting a small basket-lantern beside her. Tymon shrank from the scene before him in horror. Five corpses lay on the floor of the apartment. The Focals had been slaughtered, their throats cut. The old man and the old woman were curled together in curiously child-like postures; the young couple still clasped each other’s hands. They had been attacked during their trance. Beside them lay the man with green eyes, his bright gaze now empty and dull. With a jolt, Tymon recalled where he had met the fifth Focal. The scar on the Nurian’s face was clearly visible in the flickering lantern light: he could not think why he had not noticed it before. There was the stranger who had spoken to him at the gates of Argos city, what seemed like a lifetime ago. There lay the beggar from the prison cart—dead.
He barely had time to register the startling fact. Samiha stumbled to
him over the bodies of her companions, her light throwing wild shadows on the walls. He could see that she had been crying. He reached out his arms and steadied her, pulled her close. She laid her head against his shoulder.
‘They were butchered,’ she whispered. ‘Elder Tuvala and Elder Brek. Little Payah and her Sem. Wise Ash. Every one of them.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled ineffectually. With a twinge of shame he noticed that he was thinking more about the sweet smell of Samiha’s hair than the murdered people at his feet. ‘It’s not your fault,’ he assured her. ‘You couldn’t have stopped it.’
To his regret, she raised her head and pulled away from him.
‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘They died because of me. My choices have been all wrong, from the start—’ she broke off, flustered, before continuing. ‘In any case, the soldiers came looking for me. People have been saying I called down the demon fire on the Governor’s palace.’
‘There’s something you should know about that—’ began Tymon.
He was interrupted by the sound of a military horn blaring outside the palisade. The tramp of booted feet approached from the direction of the city gates, accompanied by a chorus of ‘The Merry Bells’.
‘You’d better leave now. They’ll be back soon.’ Samiha pushed him towards the door.
‘What do you mean, I’d better leave?’ Tymon protested. ‘If they’re looking for you, aren’t you the one who should be leaving?’
‘I’m staying here.’ She half thrust him onto the balcony.
‘Never!’ Tymon arrested his progress, catching himself on the doorframe. ‘I’m not going unless you come with me!’
‘That isn’t your decision to make.’
The clamour of the crowd drew closer. Tymon realised with alarm that she intended to give herself up to the mob, to be caught or killed.
‘Why throw your life away?’ he cried. ‘What good would it do? It won’t bring the others back.’
Tymon's Flight Page 25