I was still annoyed about the Tatakil girls. "I was hungry," I said sharply. "I missed breakfast and was unconscious through midday, if you can think back that far. Starving ourselves wouldn't help the others; anyway, they're probably being fed from the same kitchen. I think the First Flamen is being truthful when he says they're safe."
"Oh, they're safe for the moment. Just like us." His eyes wandered back to the ceiling.
"Well, then. Since we're all safe, and there's no action we can take for the time being that would make a blind bit of difference, the sensible course is to rest and eat and build up our strength—and by the bye, that's the best tripe I ever tasted."
"Don't get too comfortable. We're not staying long." There was a crystalline overlay to his eyes, which were a little too bright for my liking. Putting my feet back on the floor, I pulled him on to the settee beside me.
"Do we have a choice?" It was a serious question.
"No, we don't. It's an entertaining situation, but I really can't spare the time."
"I meant, do you think we can just choose to leave?"
"Well, yes, in an informal fashion . . ." Tig's voice faded as he resumed his scrutiny of the ceiling.
I sighed and gently pushed on the top of his head until he was looking down at the plate of pastries. "Eat something first. That spoonful or two of hotty won't get you very far. Have some of the tripe. And while you're doing it, you can tell me what you're talking about. I assume it's because you think the Primate will decide to have us killed after all, though he seems to like you so much."
"That goes without saying," Tig answered, taking a pastry from the plate and examining it earnestly. "You heard him, Vero, he won't want us upsetting his nice tidy mythology. But that's not why we have to go."
He leaned back into the cushions of the priceless settee and put his feet up on the equally priceless table as he ate. I did the same, licking gravied flakes of pastry from my fingers. "One thing at a time," I said. "Do you think he'll want to kill us fairly soon?"
"Maybe as early as tonight; maybe tomorrow, maybe in a year or two. We're an extraordinary find from his standpoint, two brothers who look so much like the brother Scions. He must be tempted to think up a scenario that would let him use us, otherwise it would seem like such a waste of a good coincidence. But I'm sure he'll be sensible in the end."
"And the sensible thing is to kill us."
"Yes, of course. Wouldn't you, in his place?"
"No, but I can see his point. He wouldn't hand power over to a nobody he thinks is a fake Scion."
My father looked at me with surprise and disapproval. "Hand over his power! What a foolish idea. Really, Vero."
"Then what?"
The last crumbs of the first little pastry vanished; Tig surveyed the rest of the platter with the eye of a horse trader in an auction barn before taking another. "Look at it this way: for centuries, as long as the blessed Lady in Gil was around and the Scions were the only ones who could conjure her, the Flamens had to put up with us—but as far as they know the Lady is gone forever, and when poor Arko dies the Scions' line dies with him. It puts the Flamens in an absolutely secure position. Their stewardship is validated by the memory of past Scions, buttressed by the promise of future Scions, and without the awkward complications of present Scions—which means the Flamens can get on with the business of being in complete control. Now that he's got over the Lady's loss, the Primate must be rather pleased with the way things have turned out."
"I don't see that their position is so secure," I objected. "What will happen when the prophesied Scion—the Ark and Sceptre, was it?—doesn't return within a reasonable span of time? Won't the people lose faith?"
"Vero, Vero, nobody notices when prophecies aren't fulfilled. In fact it's often a damned inconvenience when they are."
"Oh, right."
"Anyway, by the time the Primate's dynasty has carried on a few generations, the myth will be so well entrenched that nobody will even think of questioning—"
"Dynasty?" I broke in.
"Don't interrupt me, boy," Tig said in a precise and merciless imitation of the Primate. "This priesthood is a dynasty in the making. For example, Kesi, the First Flamen, is the youngest of Mycri's eight brothers—a good man, he was always kind to me when I was a child in Exile; but I suppose old Mycri's other brothers must all have died, because Kesi was never the type to seek high office. I doubt he could stomach becoming Primate."
"What about the Second Flamen?"
Tigrallef roused himself sharply. "A different matter. I recognized him too—I taught him to read. He's the Primate's great-grandson Lestri, whom I remember as a devious and unlikeable little lout of eight years old. He came to me as a pupil in the archives, but I suspect the Primate was only sending him to spy on me. He's grown up true to form. I should think he's the one Mycri's grooming to be his successor."
"The second in a dynasty of Flamens," I said, watching him closely, having noticed his hands were twisted together as if to discourage each other from trembling. This was something we'd learned to look out for. "How do you feel about that?"
"I feel nothing. Why should I? The Scions are gone, the Flamens may as well be the ones to pick up the pieces. Look how long the Divinatrixes lasted in Vassashinay."
"We're Scions," I reminded him mildly.
"Not any more, Verolef—we're the heritors of Naar. The Scions are becoming a memory, like the kings of Fathan, Itsant, Nkalvi and the rest. There's nothing for us now in Gil. Isn't that right? Isn't that right?"
I opened my mouth to answer, but shut it again when I saw the question was not addressed to me. The eyes he turned to mine were fixed and glistening, his neck was corded. Sighing, I loosened the drawstring at the throat of his tunic. The table was just starting to vibrate in synchrony with his hands; I moved the crystal decanter and beakers to safety on the floor below it. Tigrallef started to rise in strange jerks as if each muscle had to be individually sought out and instructed, a process that was obviously agonizing, so I took him by the wrists and pushed him back on to the cushions of the settee.
A normal first-line procedure involved the Zelfic Mathematical Protocols: orderly, invariable, symmetrical, a formal perfection that owed nothing to magic. Eye contact was necessary, even on those occasions when my father was blind at the onset of the attack. The rhythm of the words was important, also the tone of voice. Too loud, and the Pain would rise to smother it and my father's torment would increase and be prolonged. Too low, and it would be lost in the multiple voices that filled his ears, all the snarls, yips, howls and oily suggestive whispers of the Pain's extensive repertoire. The best voice to use was firm, clear and insistent, delivering the elegant Zelfic equations in a steady pulse that would thread through the chaos like a slender steel lifeline.
This was fortunately not a very bad attack, hardly more than a lash of the Pain's tail. By the Sixth Protocol my father's dilated pupils were contracting, by the Eighth he was managing to repeat the equations along with me. I faded out by the Eleventh and let him carry on by himself in a voice that gradually took on strength and colour. Relieved that we would not need to go on to the insanely numbing qualities of the Lucian proverb lists, I left him to it and toured the room to see if anything was broken. When he drifted off to sleep in the middle of the Seventeenth Protocol, I lifted his bare feet on to the settee and covered him with a brocade throw. Then I retrieved the crystal beakers from under the table and drained the one that had more wine left in it.
We should never have come to Gil, I thought. Tigrallef was right; there was nothing for us here. For twenty years we had followed the Harashil's trail backwards through time, each footprint a blasted or waterlogged ruin with the Harashil's hallmark on it, and at Nkalvi the trail had ended; but Gil was not the place to pick it up again. Gil was at the wrong end of history, the last of the Harashil's empires. We would find no clue here to the Great Nameless First. The spell of banishment was not in any Gillish archive. We were here only beca
use we could think of nowhere else to go, and we'd made a bad mistake in coming.
Pearl of the World, I thought bitterly. I drank what was left in the other beaker.
My father was twitching and murmuring in his sleep—all normal. It was twenty years since he had taken an easy night's rest, I thought as I watched him, and I could not imagine the next twenty years were going to be any different. I reached under the table for the decanter and poured some more wine into my beaker. In a few years I would have to start passing as his uncle or his father, someday his grandfather. Someday, if I ever had the chance to beget any, my children would still be chanting the Zelfic Mathematical Protocols into his ears to help him keep hold; unless, of course, the Pain defeated him first.
Surely it was the wine that was depressing me; I wondered if more of it would reverse the effect. I filled my beaker again. And again.
And again.
"Wake up, Vero."
I was obviously on the Fifth, and the weather was against us. The deck was rocking gently under me, while the ship was simultaneously rotating in a smooth, leisured sweep, as if we had happened on the centre of a shallow water whorl. Somebody had kindly placed a thick-napped carpet under my body, but had forgotten to do anything about the stench of sweat and stale wine. My head and eyes could also have done with some maintenance, and the inside of my mouth was like the nest of a fieldmouse, furred and fouled. Groaning, I raised myself on to my elbows and blinked my eyes open, immediately regretting it. My head was an anvil under the hammer of an apprentice blacksmith; the single lamp burning on the table was a flame-sling aimed with deadly accuracy at my eyeballs. I let my head fall back.
"What time is it?"
"It's about two hours after midnight—I heard the bells in the city a few minutes ago. Is something wrong, Vero? Are you unwell?"
"No." I was dying. I wanted to die.
"Come on, then, get your boots on. It's time to go."
I contrived to get about halfway to a sitting position before falling back. By hooking an elbow over the seat of the settee and hoisting myself up, I slowly became more or less vertical from the waist up. "Does it have to be tonight?"
"The others are being moved out of the Gilgard very soon. Fetching them now will save us a lot of trouble later."
"Oh." Struggling with the boots, I mumbled some vile phrases I'd learned from a tavern-creeper in Tata; but then, through the sick irregular rhythm of the headache, it occurred to me to wonder and doubt. "How do you know they're being moved? Did the troopers tell you?"
"The First Flamen, among others, was here while you slept. Come on, Vero, you're wasting time."
He pulled at my arm—he was stronger than he looked—hauled me to my feet and guided me, not towards the impressive doorway framed by tapestries but to the narrow arched casement that faced it across the room. It was a dead end, as far as I knew. I had already rejected it. We were high up on the northwestern face of the Temple Palace, a segment where each storey projected as a cunning stone cantilever about six or seven feet beyond the storey below, a miracle of engineering that impressed even me when I saw it from the Fifth. At that long distance, in profile, it had the effect of a great slanting wing flaring outward and upward from the white eagle-breast of the mountain.
My current perspective, propped uneasily against the window frame, was very different. Downwards, a few hundred feet of empty space ended abruptly in the rock-strewn tidal flats north of the harbour, at this moment visible only as a glimmering of wet sand in the dark night; upwards, the smooth soffit of the next storey up overhung us like the underside of a half-open drawer. No handholds, nothing to cling to, nothing much to secure a rope to—assuming we had several hundred feet of rope. Short of growing wings like birds or sticky feet like lizards, we could not possibly escape by this route.
My father climbed up on the broad marble window sill and threw himself into the abyss of the night.
I closed my eyes and slumped back against the window frame, feeling too ill to be more than mildly cross. Fine for him, I thought, but if he was expecting me to leap out after him, he was in for a very long wait at the bottom. I knew I should watch what was happening, if only to determine for future reference exactly how the Pain dealt with the mechanics of such a long drop. Was she halting him in mid-air? Floating him gently down the air currents? Arranging for him to land catlike on his feet without driving his shin bones up to his shoulders? Or simply letting him smash himself to pulp on the sand, and then knitting him back together again? The last seemed most likely. No, I couldn't watch.
"Vero?"
His voice was not far from the window and on a level with it. I opened my eyes cautiously. There was no moon, and the sky was spattered thickly with stars, merging far away with the reflections on the black burnished surface of the sea. Tig was visible mostly as a dead-black silhouette defined by the stars, swinging gently to and fro like a man on the end of an invisible rope. His hands were raised level with his shoulders and curled around something I couldn't make out. I tottered to the table to get the lamp, tottered back again, held the light high in the arch of the casement. This time I could see a ladder, a spindly looking article of rope dangling down past the edge of the soffit, with Tig clinging to it as casually as I might sit on a chair.
"Vero," he said, "it occurs to me that I forgot to mention what the plan is."
"I did wonder," I said.
"Well, we're going to climb up there," he took one hand away from the ladder to wave vaguely towards the heavens, "and then we're going to go for your mother and the rest."
"That's clear enough," I said.
"But I've been thinking . . ."
I looked down, far down, at the expanse of beach and black sea below, then back at my father. "Just climb," I said.
"Yes, of course, but I was wondering—it seems to me that you're not looking very well, and you may not feel much like jumping for the ladder. The gap's only about seven feet, but it's rather a long drop if you miss."
Another glance downwards. Another glance at the rope ladder, which now seemed worse than spindly. An impossible target, especially in the light of my recent experiment with the wine decanter. "That's true," I said.
"Then this is what we'll do. When I'm at the top, we'll start swinging the ladder back and forth until you can reach the end of it from the casement. Sing out when you've got it, and we'll start pulling you up. Will that suit you better?"
"Very much."
With a cheerful nod he resumed his climb up the ladder, hand over hand. The double filament of it danced below him after he climbed out of my sight, and then was still, by which I reckoned he had reached the top safely. Wherever the top was, and whoever he meant by "we", it was now too late to ask.
I kept my eyes fixed on the end of the ladder, which began to twitch again after a few moments of stillness. Back and forth, back and forth, a few inches at first, then a few feet, further each time, out into the shadowy vaults of the night sky, back into the orb of light surrounding my lantern; looming, receding, looming, receding. After a while it was impossible not to watch it. Some part of me, however, perceived that this was unwise.
Back and forth, back and forth. Nearer every time.
Odd things began to happen. The night sky lost its depth, was pushed much closer, became a flat black wall pinholed with light only a few feet away. Back and forth, back and forth. The distant tidal flats were uplifted until they were no more than a step or two below the sill; how amazing it seemed that I had ever been afraid of falling. The chamber at my back seemed to be shrinking to the size of a coffin just large enough to hold me, though I could not confirm this without turning around.
At some point the ladder stopped moving altogether, whereas the rest of the world began to swing back and forth. This did not strike me as strange at the time. Passengers on a vast pendulum, the window frame and I swooped towards the ladder and away again, up in a mighty arc, down in a mighty arc, each time a little nearer. The ladder even spoke to me�
��it told me to jump. It said, quite persuasively, that nothing bad could happen.
I believed it. Dreamily, I climbed up on the sill and poised myself—how easy it was, really—and the next time the window swung downwards on its nearest approach to the ladder, I leapt forth with a glad cry. Naturally, that was the moment I woke up.
I could hear them talking as they pried my hands loose from the ladder, finger by finger. "Quite unaccountable," my father was saying. "I had no idea he was afraid of heights."
I was too offended to remain in shock. Half my life had been spent aloft in some rigging or other, not infrequently in a vicious gale and/or mountainous seas; I was the one who had scaled a near-sheer rockface in Nkalvi, carrying the rope that would enable the others to follow in ease and safety; I was the poor sod who was always sent creeping up the treacherous sides of the Khamanthana pyramids outside Gafrin-Gammanthan to scramble down the crumbling central shafts and open the portals from the inside.
"I'm not afraid of heights," I said, snapping my eyes open to glare at my father. That was the intention. Instead, I fell in love.
Lust, anyway.
It would have been too much to expect Tigrallef to introduce us. All he said was, "Good, Vero, you're awake. See to the door, Mallinna."
As he spoke, the unknown beauty was rolling the ladder into a tight coil. By the time I managed to sit up, she had vanished so silently into the encompassing shadows that I began to doubt I had even seen her. All I had to go on was the impression of dark eyes, deep brown if not black, buried in lashes; a firm chin and sculpted cheeks; black hair plaited rather untidily in a thick tail hanging over one shoulder; and yet I was sure I'd know her face again even if the next time I saw her was a hundred or a thousand years from then.
"Who is she?" I whispered.
"Mallinna? Like Lestri, she's somebody I taught to read. She knows who we are, by the way. Are you feeling better now?"
Gil Trilogy 3: Lady Pain Page 9
