Farlander (46 page)

As the years advanced, he did his best to hold himself together. He kept those dreams of another existence to himself.

Eventually he grew into a man. He became R
shun.

*

At the time it had seemed like any other day, save that it was the eve of his twenty-first birthday, which in fact meant very little to Ché. His master, Shebec, had got his days mixed up as always, thinking it was already Ché’s birthday. Shebec made a bit of a fuss by preparing a honeycake crammed with nuts, then sat down and shared some wine with him. Ché did not have the heart to correct his master’s mistake, but when he retired to his room it was with a growing, indefinable sense of unease.

That night, for the very first time since arriving at the monastery, Ché dreamed of nothing at all. He slept deeply, without constant shifting, without muttering into the darkness, and awoke on the morning of his real birthday to find that he was no longer himself.

Suddenly, like seeing through a window thrown open upon a vista that had always been there but never acknowledged, he knew the truth about his life. And in the privacy of his small, neat cell, in the early light filtering through the gaps in the shutters, Ché shook with bitter laughter and tears welling out of relief, desperation, and all that he had lost.

He did not say goodbye to his master. He fought down the urge to seek Shebec out, to offer him even a subtle farewell, a smile perhaps. He feared the older man would catch wind of his intentions. Ché walked out of the monastery gates as the rest of the order slowly awoke to the new day, leaving everything that he possessed behind him, save for a travel bag stuffed with dried foods.

He didn’t descend the valley but headed across it instead. A stout, grey-sloped mountain, which they called the Old Man, reared above a twisting side-valley cut deep by a rushing torrent. In the dawn light Ché began to climb the Old Man’s steep pitch of shale. He knew where the closest R
shun sentinel was hidden in his lookout, watching out over the path below, and he made sure to cut a course leading behind him. When Ché reached the top of the peak, he looked back at the monastery of Sato with his heart in confusion.

Ché then turned and descended the other side.

He was to climb many high passes in the days that followed. He hiked in the tracks of mountain goats, picking his way along trails that ran along sheer cliff faces, with great airy drops yawning below him. Always Ché sought routes that would lead him gradually downwards. His meandering became purposeful like water seeking the sea as he steadily left the heart of the mountain range behind him.

He was ragged and starving by the time he came down from the foothills to the coast, twelve days having passed since he had first set off from Sato. He purchased food from the occasional dour homesteaders he passed, and a mule at the first harbour town he reached, and so made his way along the coast road to Cheem Port.

From Cheem Port, he caught a fast sloop straight to Q’os.

Ché never returned.

*

Now, many floors up, three years later, Ché perched within a fingertip’s reach of an open window. If he had chanced to look down just then, he would have spotted a diminishing sequence of solidified rags spiralling down around the curvature of the tower – for he had climbed not simply up but around it as well, fixing new handholds and footholds as he went. However, Ché did not look down.

The sound of love play tumbled from the open window above him. It was loud and reckless, and he waited without thought until it was finished. It did not take long.

A daring glance into the room revealed a man’s fat backside, pale and dimpled, before it was covered by a hastily donned robe. ‘My gratitude,’ the fat priest breathed to the woman sprawled naked on the tussled bed, before hurrying out without a further glance.

Ché failed to gain a proper look at the woman’s face, but something about her, unconsciously, sent a thrill of warning along his spine. He waited out of sight, and listened to the whisper of silk as she too threw on some clothing.

Ché placed the garrotte between his teeth.

Then, fighting his body’s resistance, he sprang.

He was into the room, and stretching the length of wire between his fists, even as she turned and put a hand to her mouth as if to stifle a scream.

With a sigh, Ché sagged back against the windowsill. He rested the garrotte in his lap as the woman dropped her hand.

‘Can you not use the door like everybody else?’ she demanded, scowling now.

‘Hello, mother,’ he said.

The woman busied herself for a moment with tidying up. She dragged the sheet from the bed, sprayed a mist of cloying perfume into the air, which smelled of wild lotus and scratched at the back of his throat. Finally she paused and, with a questioning frown disturbing her fine features, turned back to him.

‘Are you here to kill me?’ she inquired, with a nod towards the garrotte wire.

‘Of course not,’ he protested ‘I was instructed to count coup, then return to the Temple immediately.’

‘So you are here on an exercise then. But what possessed them, I wonder, to send you after your own mother?’

Ché remained calm on the surface, as always, though within him a quiet rage was building. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘You normally live on the floor above this one, surely?’

‘Ah,’ she purred, as though realizing a sudden truth. ‘Yes, of course. They had me moved here just this morning.’

As she stepped closer, he could smell a musky after-scent. She smiled at him, almost seductively, the only smile that she seemed to know.

‘I wonder,’ she mused, ‘what you would have done if they
had
ordered you to throttle the life from your own mother?’

Ché frowned. He tucked the garrotte away among the folds of his robe, unable to meet her eyes. ‘I wonder, too, if you would have enjoyed your lovemaking quite so much had you known your only son was dangling just outside the window.’

She turned away at that remark, pulling her thin robe tighter about herself.

‘You shouldn’t goad me, then,’ he said to her stiffened back.

She crossed to a table, poured water from a jug into a crystal glass, several slices of orange peel bobbing upon the surface.

His mother – though that term still came to Ché with some difficulty – remained beautiful for all her years. She was forty-one now he reckoned, despite any vain lies to the contrary. She was also in no way the same woman he had remembered being his mother when he was a youth, living in Q’os’s most affluent suburb, without a care in the world.

In fact, that mother of his childhood memory had never existed at all. Nor had that life.

What Ché had suddenly discovered in the monastery, on the morning of his twenty-first birthday, was this: every memory he retained of life before his exile to Cheem had been fake. They had all been implanted within his head for the younger Ché to assume as real.

Upon awakening that morning he had realized this quite clearly; and that his mind had, in some way been instructed to remember it on the precise day of his twenty-first birthday. Like a surging tide his real memories had washed through the previous foundations of his life, carrying them away like so much useless flotsam. In their place, Ché had suddenly known that he was no son of a rich merchant family at all. Instead he was a simple bastard, his father unknown, and his real mother a devoted Sentiate in one of the many love cults found within the Mannian order, in which Ché had originally been raised as an Acolyte, a priest in the making.

When the tide of recall had swamped him, Ché had been left floundering and breathless and with only a single purpose in which to hold on to: leave Cheem, return to Q’os.

It wasn’t until his eventual return to the capital that he discovered precisely what had been done to him. Ché had been used for the Empire’s own purposes. They feared the R
shun, it seemed, and years before, they had deemed it prudent to send one of their own novices to train as one of these secretive assassins, in the hope of gaining information on them not only of their ways and methods but more importantly their location, in case the Empire ever had need to combat the order.

They had chosen Ché for this particular task by a selection process unknown to him. Perhaps it had been a random choice. Perhaps he had shown some aptitude for such work. For several moons they had subjected his thirteen-year-old self to an intensive regime of mental manipulation, drugged beyond stupefaction as they talked him clear out of his young mind, repressing crucial memories, planting and reinforcing others.

Of course it had shocked Ché to the core, these revelations. Without time to find his feet again after his return, even to be certain of his own identity again, the imperial Regulators had questioned Ché for a full moon by using truth drugs and hypnosis to strip the smallest of details from him. Satisfied that he had been plucked clean, they ordered the tip of each little finger to be chopped off as part of his initiation into Mann. And let it be known how pleased they would be if he continued in his vocation as an assassin – not as R
shun, of course, but as one of their own.

They had left him no choice in the matter.

‘Water?’ asked his mother, crossing the room with the glass held out to him.

Ché accepted. He drank it in one swallow, and for a moment he simply sat there, savouring the taste of it in his mouth.

The world intrudes, though, on all moments of quietness.

I must know why they sent me here today, to feign the murder of my own mother. Sweet Er
s! Look at her, the empty-headed bitch. In her devotion to them, she believes they are merely playing games with us.