Gil Trilogy 3: Lady Pain

by Rebecca Bradley

  I do not know whether we left harbour by Tigrallef's deadline; if the houring bells were rung in Beriss at midnight, we could not hear them over the fury of the wind. All I can say is, the next hour or so was much too exciting, to the point where I nearly decided to abandon the attempt and take our chances on losing the Cirallef another day. In theory, we could still cover up the evening's events. It was improbable that Jonno had heard much, or would remember anything, of what took place in the cabin; perhaps we could concoct some story to explain Kat's advent and the fishermen's disappearance, a credible lie that would not spark the suspicions of the Cirallef's captain. Malso, even then perhaps bumping about at the bottom of the harbour with his colleague Entiso, was unlikely to return as a threat.

  But I still wanted to put Beriss and the Cirallef far behind us, bad weather, high seas and all. What swayed me in the end was a vague instinct that the Pain was becoming more dangerous than any trivial stormbowl. We could run before the wind once we were safely past the breakwater—I'd been through enough stormbowls in the Ronchar Sea and even the Deeps to have a fine feel for these things—but I had no such confidence about Tigrallef's state of mind. The sooner we got him away from the Primate's forces, from populous places and unpredictable human factors, the better would be his chances of riding out the Pain.

  Casting off and manoeuvring away from the quay were not impossibly daunting, since the swell was still moderate inside the breakwater; the nightmare consisted of picking a perilous way through the other boats pitching at anchor in the harbour, with particular reference to the looming obstacle of the Scion Cirallef. Moreover, the storm's outermost rainbands were already relieving themselves over Beriss, such that we seemed to be breathing just as much water as air, and the wind was a crazed howl. I was strapped to the wheel, shouting orders to Kat—Mallinna, for all her inexperience and the sedentary life she'd led in the archives, was quick to learn and strong as a man. Between the shortened foresail and the demi-lateens, we tacked downharbour through the rolling targets of the moored ships without grazing more than two, at the cost of some minor damage to the Primate's paint job. As far as I know, we did not sink anything.

  At last we were far enough upwind of the gap in the breakwater that we could go about and make a run for it. The prospect was not hopeless, but it was not very cheering, either. The great lanterns that normally flared on both sides of the opening were not showing, but the far edge of the gap was obvious as a churn of white water where the storm-waves were throwing themselves against the masonry and its foundation fringe of boulders. I selected a few sea gods to pray to on a more or less random basis and assessed my angle of approach. It was a tighter angle than I liked—an unintended jibe could lose us the masts and perhaps kill us, while any slackening of wind or loss of way could end with us shattered between the masonry and the breakers. The track leading to it, however, seemed clear. Blessing the double rudders, I aimed for a point well to the left of where we needed to go and shouted to Kat to watch the foresail.

  She was at that moment watching something else, or so it seemed, and Mallinna was doing the same. I could see them braced together by the foremast, staring up into the open sluice gates of the sky. I screamed at Kat again as the foresail shivered, and she heard me and caught the sheets and hung on with all her weight; but Mallinna stayed where she was, staring first up at the sky, then to starboard and back again. Odd, I thought, there was nothing to see, even the few lights still showing along the Beriss waterfront had vanished behind scudding blots of rain. I risked an upward glance of my own, glimpsed lights slipping past us at some height on the right, went back to concentrating on the gap in the breakwater while I puzzled over it; then had a small seizure without losing hold of the wheel. I had completely forgotten the Cirallef was there.

  The windcatcher was a great black wall looming above us to starboard, sliding sternwards; she was perhaps twelve or fourteen feet away at the waterline, but our mast-tops must have been grazing the rail of her overhanging fighting deck. Too close, inescapably convergent. I could see her prow now by the waves boiling around it, and heeled the wheel over. The Fifth shuddered without responding; if anything, her nose moved a point or two closer to disaster, only moments away. Shouting to the women, I braced myself.

  A black wave rose between us and the windcatcher.

  We were under water—confusing, because as far as I knew the crash hadn't happened yet. Then I was in air again, water was pouring off the decks on all sides, the Fifth was wallowing and recovering and miraculously still on course, and I looked around just in time to see our stern in the process of shaving past the windcatcher's high prow, and the lights of Beriss reappearing from their eclipse. A dripping Kat was already hauling herself back to the foresail sheets along her safety line. Mallinna was unpeeling herself from the foremast. Whatever had just happened, we had come through it in the original number of pieces.

  All that was ahead of us now was the frothing mouth of the harbour, armed with its deadly stone teeth. Our angle was almost right—a little more to port to compensate for the wind, a signal to Kat about the demi-lateens—and suddenly we were in the delta of violent turbulence that marked the meeting of harbour and channel, and the sea was doing its best to suck the stern towards the lethal ferment at the rocks even as it shoved the bow away with the backwash.

  I held my breath, leaned on the wheel and prayed. The Fifth lurched and straightened, the sails rippled but did not split, and a broken second later they steadied; through the wheel, I felt the tension on the rudders as the tide caught the keel. Then the froth was receding to starboard, and the few lights of Beriss vanished—Kat shot past me to the bow, trailing her safety line, to release the drag anchor. I took a breath and gave my aching shoulders a holiday for a few seconds. We still had to pass through the perils of the channel of Canton Ber, but the worst dangers from the sea and the stormbowl were already behind us. Now I could go back to worrying about Tigrallef and the Pain.

  * * *

  11

  MORNING IN THE PILAZHET Basin. The wind, still strong but well below storm force, had swung around through the night until by dawn it was coming fitfully out of the west. The sea was a rough blue-black, stitched all over with whitecaps, and the sky was pallid with a veil of thin high mist that was mainly visible by the halo it made around the sun. I had let myself fall asleep sometime after dawn, still strapped to the wheel, with Katla and Mallinna slumped in a single heap on the deck at my feet and the drag anchor keeping us to the wind. When I awoke not long before midday, I was on the deck with a fleece over me, Kat was at the wheel and Mallinna was somewhere else entirely. Aching in every muscle, I sat up.

  "Mallinna's just gone down to get the fire going so she can heat up some gruel," Kat said. "She'll bring us our breakfast when it's ready. We had a long talk, Vero. I like her. She told me about the Mosslines and all, and about Angel and the archives."

  "What have you told her?"

  "Nearly everything."

  "Then you can start all over again and tell me. You have a lot of explaining to do, little Kat." Actually, some of it was already clear to me. All through the long tempest-driven night, as I wrestled with the wheel, my mind was busy putting pieces together: Jonno's vision of the Lady, the rumours of haunting in the shipyard, the supposed theft of Kat's blades and clothing, the overnight disappearance of leftovers from the Fifth's galley now and then, which I had attributed to Malso or Entiso getting hungry in the middle of the night watch. "You were on the Fifth all along, weren't you, Katla? Those bastards never even carried you ashore. You got yourself to the hidden holds when the Flamens' Corps attacked—"

  "Wrong," she replied, a little sullenly. "I did go ashore, that first night in Gil—by myself. I didn't think I'd ever come back, either."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I ran away, Vero."

  "Ran away?" I started to laugh, but caught myself when I saw her face darken, and bit my lip. "How could you run away, Katla? How would you have survive
d on your own? Where would you have run to?"

  "Away," she said coldly, "just away. I didn't care where."

  "But why?"

  She glared at the distant line of breakers that marked the skerries, far ahead on the eastern horizon. "Because nobody understood."

  Idiot that I can be at times, I did laugh at that. "Oh Katla, I remember feeling misunderstood at your age. You were too young to notice, probably, but there was one time in Gafrin-Gammanthan when I was about fifteen—"

  "I kept trying to warn you, all of you, about what was happening to him, but nobody listened to me," she broke in impatiently, "and it's probably too late now. I saw what he was like last night, he's worse than ever."

  There was no doubt whom she was talking about, and I could not argue with her there. "I know, I know. You don't know the half of it, Katla. To be honest, the last few weeks have been difficult altogether."

  "More than difficult, by the looks of him! I had to get away, Vero. I'd had enough of the Pain, couldn't bear it any more; watching Father get stranger by the day, watching the rest of you fool yourselves that you could help him. I didn't care where I jumped ship, and I didn't care what the rest of you thought, so long as I didn't have to be around the Pain any more. I didn't want to become like you."

  "Thanks."

  "You still don't understand." Frowning, she gave the wheel a corrective nudge and looked up appraisingly as the foresail bellied.

  "I understand better than you might think," I said, pulling the fleece up around my shoulders. "Never mind, flower, just tell me what happened when you ran away."

  Kat leant back in the wheelman's chair with her hands lightly on the wheel, instinctively tracking the feel of the rudders. "It was at the end of your watch, when you were waking Chasco to take over. Maybe you need to sharpen up a little, you and Chasco. I put a line over the stern while you were distracted, and swam along under the lip of the moorage until I could climb out without the troopers seeing me. Then I took that walkway that runs along the top of the breakwater—there were a couple of patrols to avoid but they were no problem, they just slowed me down a little."

  "Of course," I said. No problem for a child of our mother's anyway. For long stretches of our wanderings, four bored grown-ups had nothing much to do with their time except teach us things. Calla made sure we grew up with all the wisdom she had acquired in her own childhood in the Web: dirty fighting and inaudible sneaking, to name but two. Chasco made us into sailors. Shree passed on many useful soldiering skills from our Sherkin heritage, notably dozens of techniques of being deadly, maintaining our weapons and mending our own clothes. Tigrallef's curriculum was too varied and comprehensive to list. Watching Kat's ease behind the wheel, remembering how decisively she had dealt with Entiso and Malso, I began to realize that our little flower would probably have survived very well on her own.

  "What happened in Gil City? Why did you come back?"

  She sighed, looking years older than fifteen, in fact looking very like our mother on one of Tigrallef's bad days. "Because in the end I couldn't leave. It was too late for me, I'm already like the rest of you. We'll need to tack soon, Vero."

  "There's plenty of time for that. Don't change the subject, tell me what happened ashore."

  "Nothing much, I didn't get far and I was only there about half an hour. It took me a long time to work my way along the breakwater, and I reckon it was about an hour and a half before dawn when I finally got to the waterfront. The walkway comes ashore on to a kind of landing plaza, with a lot of jetties coming off it—did you see that part of the waterfront?"

  "Oh, yes," I said.

  "Well, there was a thick fog in the inner harbour that morning, and it was still dark, and I got turned around a little on the landing stage—I couldn't even tell which way the water was, because the fog spread the sound of the ripples out and muddled the direction. I cast around for a while, and at last I saw a huge dark shape through the fog that I thought must be a house, or at any rate something larger than a guardpost and on dry land, so I went towards it; but when I got close enough, I saw it wasn't a house at all."

  I nodded sagely. "Was it by any chance a very large bust of our da?"

  "You saw it too?" She frowned. "Well, it was our da and it wasn't, if you know what I mean. I had to work the face out feature by feature because of the fog, and I was just deciding it wasn't Father when a watchman came up and grabbed me and demanded to know what I was doing there, and why wasn't I showing proper respect for the Divine Scion Tigrallef, and where was my identity seal, and maybe if I was very, very nice to him he'd let me go, and so on."

  "What did you do?"

  "Sherkin half-trip and a toss."

  "Break any legs this time?"

  She shrugged. "I don't think so. They weren't bent oddly when I left him."

  "Good girl." I reached up and patted her knee approvingly. "You know what Shree always says—fit the force to the occasion. And then?"

  "I started back for the Fifth. That bust of our da changed everything—I thought there was still a chance we could get the Fifth out of the harbour. But there were already hordes of troopers at the moorage when I got back, and I was just in time to see you and Father carried off—that was a great fight you put up, Vero."

  "Thank you." As I recalled, it had been the thought of her threatened innocence and presumed helplessness that lent me strength and fury, but I was not about to tell her that. "Where were you?"

  "There was a good covert on the roof of the customs shed. Mother and the rest were dragged away a little while later, and then the ship was sealed off and a guard was posted. I had to wait all day until after dark to get back on board," she added indignantly, "and then I just had time to gather up some supplies and some things from my cabin before I heard feet thumping on deck again, and I locked myself into the hidden holds. And that's it."

  "Not quite," I said. "We've been on board for over a week now—why didn't you let us know you were here? I've been worried about you. I was afraid you were dead."

  Her chin rose defensively. "I didn't know you were on board, did I? All I knew was the Fifth spent weeks in a shipyard with workmen swarming over her night and day; and then she was sailed somewhere else, and I came out to see where, and found a trooper in uniform had set up housekeeping in the entry hold and was fast asleep in front of the hatch. How was I to know he was a friend of yours? Anyway, I don't understand why Father didn't know I was there. He can hear a dust mote land on a pillow."

  Revelation hit me very hard on the head. I gasped and tried to cover it with a cough. "Only if the old sow lets him," I said quickly. A thin excuse—of course Tigrallef had known all along she was aboard. He had known from the time we were coming along the quay with Mallinna, back in Gil harbour, when his mood had suddenly plummeted; and for reasons known only to himself and the Pain, he had not told the rest of us. I shelved this to beat him over the head with later, and tried to move on. "So this whole time," I said, "you've been hiding in the holds, afraid to come out except to raid the galley."

  She gave me a hard look. "The fool jabs at the armour, not waiting to glimpse the throat," she quoted in Sheranik.

  "Meaning?"

  "Meaning I was not afraid, Vero, I was just watching for the right moment to take the ship back. Pretty stupid to try anything while that big black warship was sitting on the Fifth's tail, don't you think? Meantime I had plenty to do, assembling the beartraps and working out where I'd put them, and clearing the main weapons locker, and making up some of that Amballan sleeping-poison to put in the soup, and—"

  "Never mind, I see. And last night you got a glimpse of throat?"

  "Not really. I was planning to wait until the Fifth was alone on the open sea. But last night, while you were ashore, those two pirates were in the entry hold going through the guardsman's things, and I heard them talking about you and Father. That's the first sign I had that you were aboard."

  "A good thing you didn't reveal yourself to them."


  "I'm not stupid, Vero. You should have heard what they were saying. They had plans for you and Father, you know, something about the Day of the Scion. And they were weighing the idea of killing the guardsman . . ." She trailed off and indulged in one of her rare blushes.

  I carefully did not smile. "I suppose you didn't like that idea."

  "I had no feelings either way," she said with dignity. "He was wearing an enemy's uniform, but I could see those two pirates were enemies as well, which maybe meant he was a friend, unless—anyway, I decided to watch and see. I was hiding on deck when they hustled Father and Mallinna into the cabin, and also when you came aboard with the guardsman, and I saw what they did to the two of you then; when the big fat one came out to kill the guardsman, I was ready with the chain. That's all—now you know everything."

  "You made quite a mess of the big fat one," I said, not meaning to sound chiding, but she took it the wrong way.

  "I wasn't aiming for the neck, Vero! He stooped down just as I let fly, with one of his arms raised above his head, and that's how the chain caught him. And then he tried to free himself, and the chain got tangled and wouldn't release, and—"

  Abruptly, Kat let go of the wheel, slid off the wheelman's chair and bent herself double. I took over the wheel until she finished retching, then lifted her up on to my knee and held her while she shivered with reaction. The chain was designed to be swift and clean; botched, it could be horrible. I was glad I had not been obliged to watch Entiso struggle himself to death. Keeping one hand on the wheel, I patted her shoulder with the other, and after a while she stopped shaking.

  "His name is Jonno," I said.

  "Who?" She wiped her face with her sleeve.

  "The guardsman whose life you saved. The one with the eyelashes. His name is Jonno."

  "Why should I care what his name is?"

  "No special reason." I made the mistake of grinning over the top of her head. She lifted her wet face in time to catch me.