The Heart of the Mirage (23 page)

‘No. No, to feel this way is wondrous. But to give into it? It will hurt Pinar, it will anger Korden and some of the others. And yet I can’t help myself. I don’t even want to try.’

I heard his ache and shuddered, hurting. The huntress shouldn’t love the prey.

Such a love disarms you.

We were cheered as we rode towards the Maze. People poured out of the houses, welcoming their Mirager, clapping and waving and smiling. Far from accepting the adulation as his due, Temellin appeared profoundly moved and not a little embarrassed. Yet there was a natural regality about him too. He unsheathed his sword and raised it over his head for everyone to see, and the cheering redoubled. There were tears in his eyes as we rode into the courtyard of the Maze.

He was busy then, greeting people, organising, talking. He asked Garis to look after me, and Brand as well, which the youth was happy enough to do. It was Garis who led us into the building, saying, ‘You won’t see much of Temellin in the next few days, Derya. Now that he has his sword back,’ he glanced at Brand and lowered his voice, ‘he has to attend to some babies.’

He was being indiscreet, to say the least, reminding me that he was little more than a youth, capable of a rash lack of caution when he wanted to impress. However, I was too preoccupied to think about what he said. I was trying to make sense of the building and its furnishings, a difficult task when there was so much absurdity.

‘A drunken architect?’ Brand suggested.

‘And a blind mason as well, I think,’ I said. Stairways ended in blank walls, passages led nowhere, bridges were strung across the top of tall rooms. Some rooms had no furniture, while in others even the wooden chairs were so solid it would have taken four strong men to lift just one. I saw empty bookshelves floating in the air, and fires that burned without consuming anything—in fireplaces built of anything from fish skeletons to blacksmiths’ hammers.

There were plenty of people about: ordinary Kardis to undertake all the menial chores, as well as Magor of all ranks. And underfoot, everywhere, Magoroth children, laughing, playing or being marched to lessons by their Magor tutors. One passageway we passed along had an intricate game of hopsquares chalked out on the floor, although no one was using it just then.

At first the informality grated on me. This was the building that housed the man who claimed to be the rightful ruler of all Kardiastan; why then did it have more of the atmosphere of a country market fair than a monarch’s residence? I thought of the Exaltarch’s palace in Tyr, with its rich ornamentation, its uniformed guards everywhere, its rigid rules of etiquette and protocol, all more appropriate for a ruler than this cheerful informality. And then I remembered, guiltily, that I’d found those marbled rooms in Tyr stifling. In fact, I had hated the palace. I’d hated the coldness of the atmosphere, the faint touch of unease pervading it like an invisible mist—the residue left by absolute power. I’d hated bending my knees to Bator Korbus and touching the hem of his robe.

Confound it, my thoughts were as muddled as my emotions. I couldn’t even be sure what I believed in any more. I was surrounded by too much that was bizarre. And I’d had insufficient time to consider all I had learned from my contact with the Mirage Makers.

After a confusing ten-minute walk, Garis found a room for Brand close to his own and another for me. ‘The Mirager’s apartments are just down that flight of steps,’ he whispered, pointing. In ten minutes more he’d produced a maid for me, had a meal sent up, arranged for hot water for a bath and procured me some clean clothes. Then he left.

With infinite relief, I removed my sandals, reflecting I would never be able to accustom myself to wearing shoes inside a building. I still found the whole idea of tramping the outside dirt into one’s living quarters disgusting.

An hour later, having bathed and eaten and changed, I lay down to rest.

It was four hours before I woke, when someone knocked on my door. It was Garis, with Brand behind him. ‘You’re wanted,’ he said. ‘Both of you.’

I glanced out of the window; the sun was just setting in a patchwork sky. ‘Who wants us?’ I asked.

‘Well, Temellin sent for you,’ he replied as I tied on my sandals to go with them, ‘but it’s really a meeting of all the Magoroth.’ As the three of us hurried over a rope bridge a moment or two later, he filled us in on what had been happening. ‘Pinar’s been earbashing everyone with her suspicions. Her party got back yesterday, you know, because our route was longer than hers, and she’s had plenty of time to spread her poison. We were the last to arrive, more’s the pity.’

Before I could reply, a male voice echoed up from the room below. ‘Hey, Garis, Tavia says to tell you if you don’t get to her pallet soon, she’ll straighten out your lovely eyelashes!’

Garis was young enough to blush rather than laugh. He raised a hand in acknowledgement and gave me an embarrassed shrug. ‘It might not be an easy meeting for you.’

‘I’m sure I’ll survive,’ I said as we passed a group of small boys and girls coming the opposite way, all with that newly scrubbed look of children on their way to bed. The elderly Theura who was shepherding them along gave me a curious stare and a wide, toothless grin.

‘Here we are.’ Garis opened a door and ushered us in.

There were about thirty people in the room, too many, I thought, for them all to be of the highest rank. I guessed the sprinkling of older Magor were the respected lower-ranked teachers of the original ten Magoroth children. Brand and I were introduced to everyone we had not yet met. Pinar, full of confidence, with her malice carefully concealed, inclined her head in greeting. Jahan and Jessah, the married Magoroth siblings, came across to greet me. I still hadn’t managed to work out why Jahan had looked so familiar to me on the day we had met in Madrinya.

Temellin smiled at me, but I sensed his tension. Whatever had happened in the room before our arrival had not pleased him. ‘Derya,’ he said. ‘We have decided one of the first things we must do is to find out who you are. To help us, we must know your Magor rank. We would like to cut back the skin from your cabochon; do you mind?’

I smiled in return. ‘No, of course not. Who will do the deed?’ I held out my hand.

‘I will.’ It was Korden who stepped forward, drawing his sword from its scabbard.

I eyed the sharp blade with reluctance. ‘Isn’t that overly large for the job, Korden?’

He gave a faint smile. ‘If I use my Magor sword it won’t hurt; a knife would.’ He took my left hand in his right and with a swift slice of his blade he drew a line across my palm. Blood welled up, but I felt nothing. He laid the weapon aside, put both thumbs on either side of the cut and pulled the flesh so that it slipped away from the cabochon.

The flare of light took us all by surprise. It was as if it had been trapped in my hand and had ached to
escape. It shot forth, showering us with its brilliance, and then settled back into a steady glow on the palm of my hand.

The silence around the room was as profound as death. No one moved, no one spoke for so long I wondered if they had been struck dumb by the light. Then an old woman, an Illusa who had introduced herself as Zerise, stepped forward to kneel at my feet. She took up my left hand, wiped away the blood and kissed the cabochon. ‘One of the blessed has been returned to us,’ she said. ‘Welcome home, Magoria.’

The light from my cabochon bathed the woman with a warm gold radiance.

The silence splintered into babble and movement and emotional turmoil. Pinar’s angry ‘But that’s impossible!’ was lost in expressions of delight from others. The Magoroth came up to hug me, touching my cabochon to theirs, showing me the warmth of their welcome to their ranks.

Across the room, Brand’s shock segued into cynicism, but I refused to return his gaze. The glow in my cabochon subsided. All I saw now was a translucent yellow gem set into my palm. A cabochon that could kill. What did that make me? More than human? Or less? I shivered.

Then, as the excitement died away a little, Korden bent to murmur in my ear. ‘I am glad, for you, and for us. But—are you truly with us, Derya? Or do you think with a Tyranian heart, as Pinar would have us believe?’

I smiled ruefully to cover my anxiety. ‘I can’t change overnight, Korden. I will admit that. There are things which are strange, distasteful even. And things have happened too quickly for me to adjust.’ I took his left hand and pressed my cabochon to his.
‘Perhaps this will convince you; do you feel anything but happiness there?’ I knew he would be able to detect nothing suspicious. Not even Temellin had noticed the slightest sign of disloyalty within me, although he had often held my hand; I was a Brotherhood Compeer, and the masking of emotion was a Brotherhood skill as much as it was a Magor one. I was confident I could hide myself even better than they did.

But Korden wasn’t convinced, and his ‘Welcome to the Magoroth, Magoria-derya’, was as welcoming as the stare of a guard dog.

Temellin laid a hand on Korden’s arm. ‘My turn, I think,’ he said, and then drew me aside. He held my hand and I was shot with his delight. He was
transformed
.

I stared at him, wondering what I was missing.

He laughed at me, whispering in my ear as he drew me into a congratulatory hug. ‘Don’t you know what this means, Derya?
You
can be Miragerin-consort! I do not have to turn to Pinar.’

My heart leapt, absurdly, then cracked. What was I thinking of? I was not going to stay long. I was an agent of Tyrans. I was going to betray them all, put down this damned insurgency of theirs. Bring back peace to their land.
Marry
a Kardi barbarian? The idea was ludicrous.

Marry
Temellin
? I gazed at him, and those eyes of his were full of humour, of anticipation. His delight washed over me in waves.
Goddess
, I thought,
the idiot is in love with me
. And then:
This is what love ought to be
. And then:
But not for me. I’m a compeer
.

I thought of Favonius, remembered all that his emotions had said. Favonius had lusted after me. He’d been proud of his possession of a general’s daughter. He’d loved me as much as he was capable of loving
anyone, but there had been nothing like this in him. The memories of all the time we had spent together withered like sun-seared leaves.

I remembered the way Brand had felt when he had—oh, so briefly—allowed me to touch his emotions. He loved me the way Temellin did, too.

My thoughts, unbidden, took another leap. I remembered the time Temellin and I had spent together. I remembered his body, his tenderness. The way he laughed. His intelligence. The way his voice softened when he spoke of things he loved. The way his language became poetry. I remembered how the children of the freed slaves adored him.
Sweet Elysium
, I thought,
stop me from being so—so
witless
. Just because no one has ever loved me before is no reason to fall apart like—like a broken amphora spilling its contents. I cannot crack simply because I find a man attractive and his love flattering
.

‘Derya—?’ Temellin asked. ‘Are you all right?’ His concern was palpable. I was far too aware of his unconcealed emotions.

My eyes searched for Pinar. The older Magoria was staring at me, hatred-filled, but with her emotions under tight control. ‘Pinar will kill me,’ I said involuntarily.

‘Don’t be silly! She and I don’t love one another, not that way. It was to be a marriage of—of friendship. For children. She will be glad for me.’

I blinked at this extraordinary self-deception, but before I could comment, Korden was there again, saying, ‘Temellin, shouldn’t we continue with what we intended? We wanted to find out who Derya is; let’s do so.’

‘How?’ I asked. ‘Is it possible that I—that I have family here? That—?’ I couldn’t give voice to the words,
but my mind was suddenly filled with my childhood memory of a woman with a mane of russet hair, a woman bathed in gold light and splattered with scarlet. Perhaps I had been loved before this, once. I felt I was choking on memories and emotion and sentiment.

Goddess, Rathrox would never believe his eyes if he saw me like this.

Temellin slid an arm around my shoulders. ‘Illusazerise,’ he said, indicating the woman who had kissed my cabochon, ‘was the Magor in charge of the palace nursery in Madrinya at the time of the invasion. She knew all the children. Including, therefore, you. She was one of the few people who survived the massacre of the Shimmer Festival.’ He led me across the room to the Illusa.

My immediate thought was that if I had indeed been one of Zerise’s charges, she would have scared me out of my swaddling clothes. She was all sharp edges: face, body, hands, all honed to acute peaks and ridges with no softening flesh. One cheek was badly scarred by two deeply gouged holes and two flanking lesser marks, all in a straight line. Her eyes had a sharply focused intensity and she held her body as if it were a poised axe. She was aged about fifty, not quite as old as I had first thought; the sparseness of her iron-grey hair and the angular thinness of her body were deceptive.

‘Zerise,’ Temellin was saying, ‘who can Derya be?’

The woman looked at me with those sharp eyes, searching my face as if to find the imprint of the child there. ‘What do you know about yourself?’ she asked finally. ‘Your real name perhaps? There was no child called Derya. Anything at all might be helpful.’

Her voice was soft, at complete variance with her looks, but I was breathless with the tension of that moment; truth was suspended somewhere in the
minutes ahead and I longed for it to be plucked and given to me. Yet when I spoke, my voice was calm; that, too, was a Brotherhood skill.

‘I can’t remember my real name. General Gayed renamed me.’ True enough, although the name had been a good Tyranian one: Ligea. ‘He found me and took me to Tyr when I was just a little less than three. That was in the tenth year of Senna Timonius’s Exaltarchy, in the fourth month, I think. Before that—I remember the woman I think was my mother. A Magoria, I guess. She had a sword and there was gold light streaming out of her. There were people shouting and screaming. There were curtains. I wanted to look through the curtains, but someone wouldn’t let me. Another woman. And then she disappeared too and I was horribly afraid and surrounded by strangers. There was a lot of fighting. And blood.’ My left hand had curled up into a fist and it was an effort to relax it again. ‘I can’t remember much else.’

Zerise bit her lip, considering.

I stared at her face and thought,
I’ve seen that kind of scar somewhere before…
Then I remembered. It had been on the cheek of a man held in the Cages in Tyr, a rebel. I’d been told that a legionnaires’ weapon, a circular piece of metal with jagged edges hurled from a whirlsling, left just such a mark. A rip-disc, the legions called it.

‘Almost three in the fourth month of the tenth year of the previous Exaltarchy,’ Zerise was saying. ‘Let me see, that would mean you were born around the fifth or sixth month of the Kardi year Veshol-twenty-three. There were two Magorias born about then—’

‘Mirageless soul!’ The exclamation was Temellin’s.

Zerise nodded. ‘Yes. Shirin. Magoria-shirin was born in the fifth month. It’s got to be her.’

‘And the other?’ Korden prompted.

She addressed Temellin. ‘Your cousin Sarana, Mirager-temellin. Magoria-sarana was just a month younger than Magoria-shirin.’

The silence in the room developed an intensity so widely shared it could almost be touched. I darted glances from one person to another, not understanding why everyone was so tense, knowing something significant was not being said, hating my ignorance, but not sure I wanted to dispel it. They were all horrified—no, more than that—they were devastated by the idea I might be Sarana. Emotion skipped around the room in flurries.

Even Garis was aghast. ‘Are you
sure
she is Shirin?’ he asked.

‘Oh, she couldn’t be Sarana,’ Zerise said. She dispensed a comforting calm in liberal waves that said even more than her words. ‘The Mirager-solad himself brought Magoria-sarana’s body back for burial. We all went to the burial griefs.’

‘There can’t be any doubt? A misidentification?’ It was Temellin who asked, and his voice was unfamiliar to my ears; it was harsh and almost cruel.

‘Oh no. Utterly impossible. The Mirager-solad himself identified her. And he was her father, after all. She was unmutilated, killed by an arrow through the heart. He was the one who found her shortly after the ambush. He’d ridden out to persuade her mother to come back, you see…He shroud-wrapped her, and her mother Wendia, and rode back to Madrinya with them both in his howdah. I saw them arrive. He was shattered. He worshipped that child. And he loved Wendia too. The tears were streaming down his cheeks. Do you think if there had been the slightest doubt the bodies he carried were not those of Sarana
and Wendia, he would not have seized on it? I have rarely seen a man as broken as he was by the death of his daughter. He fought like a whirlwind during the Shimmer Feast attack, though.’ She looked at me and explained. ‘I was there, you understand, one of the few to survive. I saw Solad kill more Tyranians than anyone else that day, even though he was stuck through with arrows like a roast on a spit. It was sheer burning rage that kept him alive long enough to kill so many.’ She wiped away tears with the back of a hand and turned to Temellin. ‘No, the Magoria here cannot possibly be Sarana.’

‘Are you sure the only other possibility is Shirin?’ Once again the question came from Temellin. This time he was smiling, his eyes sparkling with a partially suppressed joy.

‘Yes, if the Magoria is right about how old she is. And even if she’s not—’ Zerise thought for a while. ‘No. Reneta was about a year younger and I saw her body myself. The other girls were little more than babies and they were all accounted for, murdered in their cradles. But Shirin’s body was never found. And she was the only Magoria missing. The part of the palace she was in was devastated by fire; there was little left to find. We thought she’d burned. I suppose it is possible she was saved by a Tyranian soldier.’ She touched her scar and added bitterly, ‘There were enough of
them
about.’

But Temellin was already reaching for me, whirling me in his arms, holding me tightly, hurting me in his joy. ‘Shirin…Shirin, my Shirin—don’t you remember me? I gave you my wooden shleth when you cried after I broke your toy sword. Don’t you remember?’

I shook my head, laughing. ‘Temellin, put me down—! Who am I? Tell me, who is this Shirin?’

‘
You
are Shirin, my love! I thought you were dead! I remember crying when they told me—’

Over Temellin’s shoulder I caught a glimpse of Garis’s face. He wasn’t rejoicing. He was filled with consternation, as though he were waiting for a calamity he knew was inevitable. I thought,
He realises something Temellin doesn’t.
I pushed Temellin away. ‘Garis,’ I asked, ‘who is Shirin?’

He blurted out the answer, knowing how I would feel, remembering as apparently Temellin did not. ‘Shirin was—is—you are Temellin’s little sister,’ he said. ‘You had the same parents.’

My world died in a crashing roar in my ears. I saw people opening and closing their mouths, speaking to me, but I could not hear them. I saw their joy become uncertainty as my shock registered with them. My revulsion spilled out all over the room. I saw Temellin’s grin become a horrified mouthing. I destroyed his happiness with my unbridled reaction, with the warding-off gesture of my hands. I turned from him to Brand, walking into his arms, clutching at him, burying my face in his chest. I couldn’t speak. I was choking on the bile and vomit rising in me.

Oh, Goddess
, I thought.
I have bedded my own brother
.

Oh, Goddess, forgive me.

Oh, Goddess, now I knew—I
loved
this man. Ligea Gayed gave her heart without even knowing it. The Brotherhood Compeer fell in love with the enemy.

Goddess forgive me. I did not know.
Bedded my brother
. Fitting punishment for thinking myself immune to sentiment.

You stupid fool, Ligea.

Brand knew. He swung me away from Temellin’s imploring hands, herded me out of that room,
somehow found his way through the labyrinth to the quietness of my own bedroom. When I lay down on my pallet, he chafed the coldness of my fingers, covered my shivering body with a blanket, gently stroked my face and hair. There was no triumph in him, no satisfaction. When I could not cry, when I shrivelled and froze inside, it was Brand who had tears in his eyes.

‘Don’t let him near me,’ I whispered. ‘I don’t want to see him.’

‘He won’t come in here,’ he promised, and he was as good as his word. Temellin came and was turned away.

When my trembling died, it was Brand who tried to offer consolation. ‘It’s not so bad, Ligea. You’ve never been one to worship the Goddess and her rules, so you
can’t
think you have sinned—’

‘Sinned? No. It’s just—just the
thought
of doing such a thing,’ I said finally. ‘It’s
unnatural.
And they think it so
normal
. Oh, Goddess, Brand. I wanted him so much. Just to look at him was enough to start the ache. And do you think I will feel any different now? I will always remember that; there will be part of me that will want him still…And yet the thought of his touch now—makes me
sick.
Physically ill.’

He looked at me, and heard what I didn’t say. I had loved Temellin. He read it in my pain. ‘Then let’s go away from here,’ he said at last. ‘Back to Madrinya, if you must. Bring the legions here, raze the place to the ground, kill them all if that’s the only way you can lay your ghosts.’ He was pointing out what I couldn’t do, of course, forcing me to clarity of thought.