Gil Trilogy 3: Lady Pain

by Rebecca Bradley

"Much." My legs were wobbling, but the terror on the ladder had effectively disposed of the headache, and any residual pains and fears were swallowed up by an urgent curiosity to see this Mallinna woman in a stronger light. Whatever chamber we had landed in this time was as dark as a cave except for the archway of stars framed by the window and a purely localized glow from the tiny oil lamp, extending no more than a span or two from the wick. By the expansive timbre of our whispers, I knew the room was large and probably empty, and a faint mustiness in the air suggested it was not in frequent use.

  Then I became aware we were not alone. Somebody was watching us from just outside the feeble corona of the lamp, somebody whose breathing was soft and ratchety, whose eyes were little twin sparks of reflected lamplight against the black gloom. This person also accounted for the hand I noticed in the next few seconds, an emaciated, liver-spotted and amazingly wrinkled old hand, truncated at the wrist where it passed into the darkness, its fingers knotted in the edge of Tigrallef's tunic. When Tig rose to his feet with the lamp, the stranger maintained that death clutch and rose as well. Tig made no comment.

  I sighed and climbed to my feet. "Do you realize someone is holding you by the tunic?"

  Tigrallef raised the lamp higher. "Of course. Come along, Angel, show yourself."

  Angel. Surely this could not be the Angel; not the lonely orphan of the between-ways, raised in the shadows, named by the harlots, the shaggy rescuer in one of my father's favourite stories, left behind in Gil as First Memorian when my father inadvertently set off to circumnavigate the globe. He blinked in the light. I saw he was old enough, all right; a floss of thin white hair fell in tangles to his shoulders, in wild contrast with the trim of his neat white beard, and his face was not so much wrinkled as etched with permanent lines of bewilderment. His bleached blue eyes flicked over me, and he made a polite gesture of greeting with his free hand. Then he returned to his rather touching fixation on my father. He put me in mind of a very ancient puppy.

  Tigrallef forestalled any questions at that point by dousing the lamp, taking me by the elbow and setting off with immense sureness into the gloom, with the old man pattering trustfully behind us. Only by glancing backwards and orienting myself by the diminishing patch of stars could I reckon that we were heading on a direct line across the chamber. The floor was bare, hard and empty, and seemed to go on for a very long way. At last there was the indefinable change in the air that meant we were approaching a wall, alse a scent that I eagerly recognized from my brief exposure moments ago, a mixture of clean hair, soap and—oddly—fresh ink.

  "Mallinna, there's no sound at all out there," my father whispered. "It's safe to open the door."

  She did not answer in words, but the darkness split as she pulled the door open a few inches and peered through the crack. Her silhouetted profile, I noted, was flawless. I had never known that ink could smell so enticing.

  Moments later our oddly assorted party was walking softly but briskly along a corridor where the darkness was punctuated at intervals by peculiar oil lamps in crystal hoods, a type I had not seen before, casting a light that was steadier than a torch and not so smoky. Mallinna prowled along about half a dozen paces in the lead, a long body moving lithely inside a rather shapeless brown robe—a very long body, I realized, an inch or more longer than my own. Then came the strange composite figure of my father and the old man, apparently joined at the hip; and then me, a few paces behind, on legs that still felt as if they were stuffed with aspic.

  I did my best to stop watching how Mallinna moved. Indeed, I had never had much time for watching women, and this was not a good moment to form the habit. Not ten minutes before, I had nearly turned myself into a thin puddle of red paste by jumping out of a window so high I didn't want to think about it; my beloved family was in dire danger at the hands of my father's oldest enemy; my father and I were still in danger, same source as above; a hero of my childhood and the woman I was trying to avoid looking at had probably imperilled themselves just by helping us. And then of course there was my duty to my father—how many pretty women had I turned away from for the sake of the Pain?

  Mallinna, halting near one of the lamps at the top of a stairwell, glanced around just as that thought was running through my mind. She caught my eye and smiled with her underlip between her teeth. A heavier portion of pure lust was added to my burden. Fortunately, I was distracted at that moment by the outbreak of a great uproar funnelling up to us via the stairwell, a bull-cry of rage or distress, shouts, orders, marching feet, running feet—I reached for the shark tooth at my throat, remembered it had been confiscated; reached for the fighting chain in my belt, remembered it was back on the Fifth; cursed softly.

  "The old goatfish," Tigrallef breathed beside me. His chin was up and his eyes were distant as he listened to the tumult below. Angel was clutching his arm fearfully with both hands. "The old goatfish," Tigrallef repeated, "was very quick in deciding to keep things as they are. A lamentable lack of imagination on his part, I think. There must be many options he didn't even consider."

  "Were the troopers coming to murder us?"

  "Yes, Vero." His grin was just a shade too manic.

  "Who are you listening to?"

  "The captain from the Flamens' Corps is one." He closed his eyes, held his breath, moved deeper into the shadows as if that would help his ears sort out the threads of the voices. Angel moved with him. After almost a minute Tigrallef said, "The other is Lestri, the Second Flamen. They know we used the window."

  "That's bad."

  "They've sent a search party down to the beach to look for our bodies."

  "That's good."

  "The Second Flamen is unhappy."

  "That breaks my heart. Anything else?"

  Another long silence. I peered at him anxiously. Even in the shadows I found I could see him quite well—too well. He was phosphorescent as a moonfish and getting brighter by the moment. My headache returned.

  "Mallinna," I said, addressing my beloved for the first time, "let's move!"

  She glided back to us, smiled at me again, and peered with great interest at Tigrallef's luminous face and glazed eyes. "That's a curious phenomenon," she said in a voice that was both sweet and husky. "Is it something he ate?"

  "In a sense."

  He was sagging; Angel's mouth was opening and closing in distress, though he made no sound. I gently disengaged the old man's grip and handed him over to Mallinna, then bent and slung Tigrallef across my shoulder, grimacing at the contact with the white-burning heat of his skin. He felt heavier than usual, possibly because I felt worse than usual.

  The clamour below us was getting even louder, moving closer to the foot of the stairwell. If they decided to search the floors above and below our ex-prison, we'd be easy game.

  "Wherever it is we're going," I said bluntly, "let's go there now."

  Mallinna shook herself out of her fascinated observation of my father. "Oh yes, of course." She turned immediately, took Angel by the hand and set off down the corridor in an undulant walk that looked unhurried but was not easy to match with my father on my back. The old man allowed himself to be towed along, but his eyes kept turning back to Tigrallef as if he feared we would vanish if not carefully monitored. Several turns, another down-spiralling stairwell—the guardtroops' discord swelled briefly and faded again as we descended to and past their level—another corridor, more turns, a change from plastered to solid stone walls, and at last we were in a dusty little passage about thirty feet long, narrow and made narrower by the scroll racks and bookshelves that lined it from one end to the other. All of them were full and neatly ordered. At the end of the passage was a small unmarked door which Mallinna pushed open without hesitation, propelling the old man tenderly ahead of her. I followed her through and stood panting under Tig's weight while she lit the first of several lamps.

  "There's a pallet over there you can put him on."

  I located the pallet and staggered towards it, dimly seeing that I was
moving through a landscape composed almost entirely of more bookshelves and scroll racks, also dimly aware that Angel had latched on to Tig's tunic again and was shuffling along beside me. Thankfully I eased Tigrallef's dead weight off my shoulders and on to the rumpled pallet. Mallinna had lit four or five lamps by then and it was hard to tell whether Tigrallef was still glowing, but one of his eyes was blinking madly while the other was staring straight up at the dust swirls on the ceiling. I had once seen someone else who could do that, a buffoon in a travelling comedy show in Gafrin-Gammanthan. When my father did it, it was not funny. I dropped to my knees beside the pallet and launched wildly into the First Protocol. Against all experience, his eyes cleared almost at once, and he stared up at me with a blank expression on his face. My words faltered.

  "Too late," he breathed, and added something almost inaudible about the breakwater. That was all. His head drooped sideways as he fell into a shivering sleep. I found a blanket crumpled at the foot of the pallet and pulled it up around his shoulders.

  Angel was on his knees on one side of me, looking stricken and more bewildered than ever. Mallinna was kneeling on my other side. Thoughtfully she touched Tig's cheek. "His skin's cold. First fever, now chills. But it isn't swamp sickness, is it? Because that wouldn't explain the luminosity."

  "No," I said sadly, "it isn't swamp sickness. Swamp sickness would be easier to deal with."

  She frowned as she studied him; I took the opportunity to study her in turn, in the stronger light I had wished for. I noted that her skin was darker than her light brown robe; that her hands were longer and much slimmer than mine; that her black eyes were bright with intelligence; that she did not bother with how she looked and was beautiful enough to get away with it; that her long slim body under the plain robe was an attenuated version of perfection; that her mouth . . .

  I stopped there and looked away quickly from her mouth, as it brought the lust rushing back, and I knew perfectly well that lust and duty didn't mix. It was time to address the necessary task of falling back out of love with her—bitterly, because it was not the first time the Pain had sabotaged my love life but it was the first time I had minded very much. Mallinna, ignorant of the quick birth, short life and imminent demise of our love affair, made the process harder by putting her hand on my shoulder and gazing earnestly into my eyes.

  "The luminosity—does it indicate an exotic disease of some kind?"

  "Uh—not really."

  "An exotic parasite, perhaps?"

  "Well . . ."

  "Or is it related to the Lady in Gil?"

  Too far, too fast. "What do you know about the Lady?" I countered sharply.

  Angel tapped my shoulder. "The Harashil," he said in a matter-of-fact voice. They were the first words I had heard him speak, but it was the shock of hearing that hated name, which I had thought was known only to the company on the Fifth, that nearly knocked me off my knees.

  "The what?" I asked, still nurturing the hope I had misheard him.

  "He's referring," Mallinna clarified, "to one of our working hypotheses. We have reasonable evidence the Lady was an aspect of something more properly called the Harashil."

  "Mmmm," I said non-committally.

  "The Vassashin texts," Angel prompted, nodding at her.

  "He's referring to a study we did of archival material from a place called Vassashinay, fragments of a very intriguing story. Unfortunately the texts were too badly preserved to give us the rest." She waved her hand vaguely at the mountain range of written matter around us. "We have some parallel texts that we think originated in Fathan, but they were badly damaged in the sackings of Cansh Miishel. Perhaps Lord Tigrallef can help us interpret them. And we were also wondering why he hasn't aged since the last—"

  "What excellent questions," I said, closing my eyes wearily, "but I have other things on my mind right now, and I'm sure Tig will as well when he wakes up. Our family, for example."

  "The Harashil?" Angel repeated, this time as a question.

  "He's referring—"

  "I know what he's referring to," I said, opening my eyes just as wearily. "We call it the Pain, and it's probably the answer to any working hypothesis the two of you would want to think up. But I can't take the time to tell you about it this moment, and Tig could be asleep for hours. If you know what his plan was for freeing the rest of our family, please tell me now."

  Angel and Mallinna craned around me to see each other's faces.

  "Contingent," said Angel unhappily.

  "He means," Mallinna said, "that he doesn't believe Lord Tigrallef had a plan yet, exactly."

  "I see. He was going to make it up as he went along. That's a great help." I took a moment to glare at my father, moaning and sweating on the pallet. "Do you know where they're being kept?"

  Mallinna looked pensive. "I know where they were earlier, a comfortable suite of rooms in the Middle Palace. But I would wager they've been moved."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Hostages," said Angel sagely.

  "He means, they were being kept in that comfortable room only as long as you were being kept in yours. But since the First Flamen said they were being moved, and Lord Tigrallef said the Most Revered Primate had decided to kill you instead of using you—"

  It hit me with the force of a collapsing ceiling. I shot to my feet, pulling Mallinna up with me. "Quickly! Can you see the outer harbour from here? Can you see the breakwaters?"

  She caught my urgency. "Yes, Lord Verolef, you can see the whole harbour from the main workroom. Come with me."

  I had a blurred impression of more books and scrolls, more and more and again more, ranged with exquisite tidiness on the piers that flashed past us; then a door and another dark room. Mallinna guided me across it without bothering to light a lamp and slid to a stop in front of a large double square of starry sky.

  Gil really was relentlessly scenic, even on a pitch-dark moonless morning an hour or two before dawn. There was no mist bank this time, and the harbour was visible in full from where we stood. Each of the breakwaters was outlined like a crystal necklace by a bright string of lanterns; festive-looking clusters of white and coloured guide lamps stood on the summits of the guardtowers at the outer breach; fire buoys flamed here and there among the dark ships moored inside the harbour; and well beyond the double arc of the breakwaters, other lights moved on the open sea, the mast lamps of a large vessel.

  Mallinna caught her breath. I lost mine.

  The great ship, a three-masted wind-galley, was stern-on to the shore at that point; but she heeled and swung slowly northwards as we watched her, and then a few points to the east, as if to round the base of the Gilgard on as tight a course as possible.

  "They're on that ship," I said flatly. "That's what Tig meant about the breakwaters."

  "That is not good news," said Mallinna after a moment. "In fact it's very bad news."

  "Why? What ship is it?"

  She shook her head without looking at me. "I only know its destination. There are four wind-galleys of that grade plying the route, as well as two Warrior-grade windcatchers and two non-specific rammers. That's probably the Dowager Dazeene." She glanced at me. "She's named after your grandmother—Dazeene used to come to the archives daily until the Primate sent her away from Gil—"

  "Why are you changing the subject? Where's the ship bound?"

  She went back to avoiding my eyes. "Only the Mosslines."

  "Nowhere else?"

  "Nowhere else. Straight to the Mosslines, straight back."

  "Cargo?"

  "Outward bound," she said steadily, "those ships carry labourers for the Mosslines and the troops to keep them in order. On the return journey, the only cargo is the moss itself. The refinery is in Gil, you see."

  The Mosslines again. Every mention of them in my hearing had been hung about with nasty connotations like the smell of rotten meat. "Tell me about the Mosslines. Where are they? What moss? Why? Who gets sent there?"

  She looked out across
the dark ocean, frowning. "The Mosslines are far over the sea in the wasteland that used to be called Fathan, the only place in the known world where the moss is found. It's strange stuff, can't be cultivated, but it grows very fast in natural rifts in the slag-cover—it has potent healing properties as well as the power to give dreams, and the Flamens guard their monopoly very carefully. As for who gets sent there—mostly convicts. Thieves, murderers, milchers, smugglers, blasphemers. That's officially, and it's also nearly true." Her voice dropped. "Unofficially: a few citizens who don't like the rule of the Flamens; a few citizens the Flamens don't like; a few citizens who have said unwise words or seen sights they weren't meant to see. They're called treasoners, and they don't last long on the Mosslines."

  Shree, Chasco, Calla, Kat. Four inadvertent treasoners who had seen something they were not meant to see, Tigrallef's face and mine. Watching the ship's mast lamps recede around the curved flank of the Gilgard, I knew that we had already lost this battle. I could hardly swim after them. Until we could somehow get hold of a sea-going vessel, there was nothing in the world we could do for them.

  "You don't happen to have a ship we could borrow, do you?" I asked Mallinna bitterly.

  She took it as a serious question. "Not at this moment. However we put in a requisition for one several months ago."

  I almost laughed.

  "When we do get a ship," she went on, "we'll be happy to take you anywhere you want to go, even to the Mosslines."

  "Thanks, but they'll be dead by then," I said, not very graciously. I had previous experience in how the Gillish bureaucracy worked.

  Angel, keeping vigil over the pallet when we returned, was clumsily but tenderly wiping the sweat off my father's forehead with the sleeve of his brown robe. There were no questions in his eyes as he looked up at us, and he came out with the longest string of words I'd heard from him so far. "He says they've been taken away on a ship," he sighed, shaking his aureole of white hair. Tigrallef muttered and ground his teeth in his sleep.

  * * *