Gil Trilogy 3: Lady Pain

by Rebecca Bradley

  "I'm fine." I was better than fine. Yes, we were walking downhill into a scene of horror, fiery destruction and bloody death. Yes, we were about to embark on an uphill trudge of unknown duration into dangers I could hardly imagine. Yes, my mother was still missing, possibly dead, my sister had a doom hanging over her and my father was still host to a demented cult fetish with a wild agenda for the future of the world. And so on. For just a little while, however, I managed to feel good. That foolishness did not last long.

  The first few hours were not too difficult. We moved inland from Faddelin along a gentle incline where a good Gillish road had been laid over the treacherous ground of glass and clinker, all greyed with a thin powdering of ash. Angel was able to walk this stretch without slowing us down, so we had the luxury of hauling the backsacks on the sledge instead of on our backs. The others had that luxury, anyway. I ended up pulling the sledge.

  Not long after we left the smoking ruins of the modern town, we came to traces of the town's reason for being, the first of the Mosslines. It was nothing more than a crack in the slag; but it was a crack a good two spans wide, and it zigzagged away from us until it merged with a broader crack a hundred feet or more away. Instead of moss, it was filled to within a couple of fingers of the top with fine grey ash, and lying across it near the road was a curious faggot of what looked like sticks of charcoal. I recognized the latter, after some study, as a spectacularly incinerated human skeleton. The others did not seem to notice, so I kept my mouth shut.

  "Whoever it was that smashed Faddelin," Mallinna breathed, "they also fired the Mosslines and destroyed the moss. Thousands of palots-worth, think of it! You could touch a burning brand to one end of a crack, and the fire would race along from branch to branch until a whole Mossline was blazing. It must have been an astonishing sight . . ."

  "We should keep moving," said Tig, "but don't worry, there will be a hundred astonishing sights to marvel at before we're done. How are you feeling, Angel?"

  Angel was well enough to be scribbling in the small notebook he was wearing on a string around his neck. Tig waited patiently until Angel closed the book and let it fall back against his breastbone, and then we moved on, but not very far. Within half an hour we had to stop and gawk again, because the road had wound upwards on to a plateau covered with some of the strangest ruins I had seen in twenty years of tramping around fallen cities and blasted empires—a complete town apparently sheared off at knee height and baked in a thick black glaze. Only the coral-encrusted cadaver of Itsant came close to matching its strangeness; Nkalvi and Khamanthana and the others were hardly in the same contest. The fire that destroyed Fathan had been hot enough to melt this masonry like so much candle wax.

  To my eyes, the inshore ruins at Faddelin looked like a full-scale model of a townsite constructed out of large black boxes without lids. We had an excellent view of it from above—the Gillish road, which crossed the perfect grid of streets and avenues at an acute angle, was raised to just above the level of the surviving walls on a bed of black gravel and rubble fill. We walked along the roadway in silence, looking down into plan views of small courtyards and large houses, and vast enclosures that may always have been open to the sky, all with ash piled in drifts in their corners. Down the centre ran a broader avenue where the slag had something of the appearance of lava flows I had seen, billowy here and there, in places lapping up against the vitrified stumps of the structures.

  Angel stopped midway through the ruin-field and opened his notebook. Mallinna fumbled to get another out of her backsack on the sledge. Jonno's lips moved silently, and I bet myself that he was working up a poem on this thought-provoking scenery. Tig looked around with great interest, not necessarily at the ruins, but in a way that suggested he was seeing much more than the rest of us, and Kat stared determinedly at the gravel surface of the Gillish roadway as if trying not to see the ruins at all.

  On this occasion, Tigrallef gave the note-scribblers considerably less time to fill their notebooks. "That's enough," he said, "and there will be no more stopping to enjoy picturesque views. We have a long journey ahead of us." We moved on.

  Three hours and two hills later, however, it was necessary to halt again. Angel had been hobbling on bravely, but when he stopped abruptly and sat down in the middle of the road, it was obviously time for the sledge. While the others unloaded the backsacks, I followed my father to the brow of the hill and sat down beside him, rubbing at my aching neck. We had a clear view down to the Deppowe Strait past the ancient ruins and the new ruins, and I even thought I could pick out the mast-tops of the Fifth in the next cove over. I glanced at Tig, wondering for the fiftieth time that day whether he saw the same view that I did.

  He caught my glance and returned it with a high rate of interest. "You can ask me, I don't mind," he said.

  "Fine, I'll risk it. What do you see?"

  He waved his hand at the view, making a prong of two fingers—a highly informal, colloquial and unadmiring gesture from the fingerspeech. "I see exactly what you do, Vero. The bleakest landscape in the known world."

  I gave him a shrewd look. "But what does the Pain see?"

  "Oh, the Pain. That's a different matter. Alas, I'm not as good as I once was at closing the old sow's eyes."

  "Well then? Tell me what the old sow sees when she looks at Fathan."

  He sighed. "It would be hard to explain in ways you could understand, Vero. A landscape is a palimpsest with many layers. I could hardly begin to tell you all of them."

  I glanced back at the activity around the sledge; Angel was nowhere near to being strapped in. "We've got a few minutes. Be selective."

  He sighed again, stood up and moved dangerously close to the edge of a steep slope, almost as if he perceived an unseen barrier there—a decorative railing, a rustic fence. "I'm looking at a river that runs into the sea just a little west of where the harbour will stand someday. On its banks there's a cluster of huts—hovels, really—with mud walls and thatched roofs, and there are fishing boats pulled up on the beach. The beach is broad and covered with clean white sand, and a ship of light is just sliding into the bay." He paused, with his eyes following something across the water far below.

  "Carry on, Tig."

  He glanced at me. "You're sitting in a garden—this is centuries on, of course, the huts are gone and there's a tidy little harbour built astride the river's mouth where the ship of light came in. The town on the plateau is—beautiful. Shining white walls; the roofs are terracotta, but they're painted in stunning patterns and a few are even gilded, and there's a great gilded skull in low relief above the temple door."

  "Beautiful," I said wryly.

  "You have no idea. Pity the garden didn't last. It's long gone, and the town is not so pretty now. There's also a pain-wheel above you, and somebody's in it. Whereas the gallows block is over there near the stump of a rose tree, about where the arbour used to stand. The gallows block is also in use."

  He looked past me with such conviction that I whirled around, fully expecting to see a corpse leering at me from the end of a rope overhead. Tigrallef had made much stranger things appear in his time. But there was no visible gallows block beyond me, no rose tree nor arbour nor pain-wheel, nothing but a barren hilltop that overlooked an equally barren coastal plain stretching far to the west, webbed all over with the grey scars of the Mosslines.

  "You've seen enough, we'd better be going," I sighed.

  "But you haven't heard the most interesting part." He swung me around again and pointed down the valley towards Faddelin. "Look at it now! The melting is happening so rapidly we can hardly take it in; no screams, though, because streaks of soot have no voices to scream with. The sea must be boiling—there's a great bank of steam rolling uphill where the harbour used to be. That salient over there," he pointed to a broad black depression on the next hill, "is slumping into the riverbed, and it's already halfway to the town. Impressive. Rather loud."

  All I could hear was the breeze soughing along the
hilltop. "I'm sure the sledge is ready now," I said nervously. It was the echoing timbre and the scintillant pupils that were getting to me, plus another disturbing element in his voice—a detached kind of pleasure. I was sorry I'd asked.

  "We have not finished looking." Again he pointed towards the harbour. The echo was stronger. "We are watching a rowboat."

  I was not sure I'd heard him correctly. "A rowboat," I repeated.

  "Yes and no. We can't explain what it truly is—the rowboat is more than a metaphor and less than a rowboat, with a few other aspects on the side. But we will call it a rowboat."

  "It's a rowboat," I agreed.

  "There is one man in it, who is something more than a man; and there is a crowd on the shore. Shouting, waving, weeping."

  "They've come to see him off?"

  "You're guessing, Verolef, child of the Naar. No, they're imploring him to return. The shouting and waving are for him, the tears are for themselves. He's turning his face to the west and weeping loudly enough to block the others out of his own ears. There is a bundle in the bow, a small thing wrapped in an old blanket."

  "I think I see where this vision is going," I said.

  "You see nothing, seed of the seed of the Excommunicant."

  "Oh come on, Father. The rowboat and the bundle make it fairly obvious." I was getting my nerve back.

  "Still you see nothing, calos masha. Not even Oballef can see now where it will end; poor man, to be carrying such vain and useless hopes in his heart. We, on the other hand, know very well what we are doing. Of course it has all been foretold."

  I risked a glance at his face. "You can't tell me Oballef went all the way to Gil in that rowboat."

  "As I told you, Scion of the Great Tree, it is not exactly a rowboat."

  Footsteps crushed the cinder surface behind us. Mallinna said, "Vero, Lord Tigrallef, we're ready to move."

  "Thank you, Mallinna, we're coming," Tigrallef said; the echo was gone, the timbre was normal, his eyes were blue, but somehow I was not relieved. There was a brief silence behind us, then the sound of Mallinna's feet crunching back towards the sledge. Tigrallef began to rise, but I stopped him by grabbing the front of his tunic.

  "Just a moment. There's something that worries me. You enjoyed those visions, Father."

  "Not at all." He gently brushed my hand away.

  "Yes you did. I heard it in your voice, especially while you and the old sow were watching the wrack of Fathan. You enjoyed it. The devastation was a treat."

  He stood up, put his hand under my elbow and pulled me to my feet. "I won't deny there was a grandeur to it, Vero. The Harashil has a talent for grandeur. It's part of what the old sow tempts me with. Destruction is the other hand of creation and can be just as beautiful in its own way."

  "Was the wrack of Sher beautiful?" I asked bluntly. He did not answer, nor even look at me, and suddenly I lost my desire to pursue the question. I really preferred to remain ignorant of how far the Pain had pulled my father along the road to the Great Nameless Last.

  * * *

  15

  WE HAD SET OFF on our journey carrying four leathers of a compressed fishpaste, called fenset in the original Satheli, which smelt evil and tasted even worse but had one shining attribute: the amount you could force yourself to choke down your throat was almost enough to keep you going for a full day. In combination with three bags of sea biscuits and a sack of apples divided among four backsacks, the fenset leathers should have sufficed for an expedition of at least four weeks, even taking into account the three extra mouths we hoped to return with. We also brought some waterbags from the Fifth, but the heavy dew that collected every morning in the highlands turned out to be sufficient for our needs.

  For two days we climbed steadily from the low hills near the shore to the higher foothills behind them, following the Gillish roadway. Every so often we would pass field-camps associated with the Mosslines, ranks and files of crude stone huts erected for the labourers and their guards, but we did not bother to get too close because of the powerful stench of death that hung around them. As on the plains below, every scrap of the moss had been fired, leaving a fine ash that sifted out of the trenches with the prevailing wind and made long grey scars down the hillsides. We saw not one living thing, not so much as a bird or an insect or a blade of grass, all through that portion of the journey.

  Our first two nights were spent in the open, curled up in our blankets under a clear, jewelled night sky—at that point, we were still warm enough and well nourished enough to appreciate the stars. We even let Jonno recite some of his poetry for us, and it was not bad at all. The most trenchant criticisms, for some reason, came from Katlefiya.

  About midway through the third day, we came to the end of the Gillish roadway and found we were right on the edge of the mountains. We detoured silently around the stinking huts at the roadhead and stared at the furrowed peaks looming over us; except for Kat, who rarely moved her eyes from her feet these days, and Tig, who was concentrating on the mountains' lower flanks. He pulled me a little apart from the others.

  "How fortunate we are," he said happily, "that we won't need to hack our way through thick forests and tangled undergrowth, or encounter small animals that would tempt us to hunt them."

  "That's the bright side, is it? I don't know, Da." My own feeling was that a forest, any forest, even the Hungry Woods of Nkalvi or the mantrapgroves of the South Ronchar Sea, would have looked benign and welcoming compared with those brooding black mountains straight out of a Lucian hell. This opinion must have been apparent on my face.

  "It won't be that hard, Vero. We can follow what used to be the river valley—a few gorges to cross, but the old roads and bridges are still passable. I'd say seven days to Cansh Fathan from here, eight at most, unless something happens to hold us up."

  I tried not to think about the sort of thing that might hold us up. I tried not to think about what or who we'd find at Cansh Fathan besides our loved ones. I asked, "How do you know all that?"

  His face seemed to flicker a little—glimpses of other faces, not all of them human, passed in such rapid succession that I could almost dismiss them as a trick of my eyes. "I can see the pass, of course. None of this is new to me. We should be able to pick up the old imperial highroad just about a mile from here, beyond that knoll."

  "The old imperial—Isn't that just a trifle indiscreet?"

  "Indiscreet? How?"

  I wiped a whole new batch of sweat off my forehead. "Oh, Da. You saw what happened to Deppowe and Faddelin, and yet you want to wander straight into Cansh Fathan along the main road, like a sightseer on a tour—I suppose when we get there you'll want a room in the best tavern."

  "Don't be stupid, Vero, I don't think Cansh Fathan has taverns any more. As for the road, I will know when to leave it. Just wait till you see the bridge at the Carthenten Cleft! One of the wonders of the Fathidiic Empire—the old sow remembers it well. She's not very pleased at the prospect of showing it to you, however."

  "That makes several of us," I said gloomily. I left him there surveying the mountain peaks with wide bright eyes, and joined the others around an open leather of fenset.

  And so, after a brief halt to gag down a half-day's ration, we set off into the mountains which the old Grisotin maps called the Blessed Range, no irony intended. After a difficult first mile of broken ground and irritating crevasses, we did indeed find the old Fathidiic high road, and the going became as relatively easy as Tig had promised. That was enough to get me worried all over again—if the road was passable for us, it was passable for travellers going the other way, and I never rounded a bend without wondering if we were about to meet the demons who smashed Faddelin, off on their merry way to another massacre; but the only sound we heard, apart from the wind, was the echo of our own feet and the scrape of Angel's sledge.

  The road was a broad flat ribbon as shiny and slippery as black ice, climbing monotonously along the curves of the mountains above a winding, barren scar of a
valley. Tigrallef assured us the latter once held a river of heart-stopping beauty, lined on both sides by graceful trees and artfully wild parklands, plied by boats with multicoloured lateen sails. He was starting to be something of a Pain on his own account. As the rest of us strode grimly along, watching the clefts and ledges above us for suspicious movement, straining under the weight of the backsacks or the sledge, occasionally slipping on the glassy surface, he chattered on unstoppably about the fine inns and gardens that punctuated this road in the early days of the empire, the forbidding gate towers and guardpoints that succeeded them. All gone now, though he seemed to see them as clearly as I saw the bubbled rock, the seared surfaces glaring in the sun, and the ripple marks where the rock had once flowed like a flaming river.

  Kat mostly watched her feet. I kept meaning to ask her why.

  The first three nights in the mountains were spent in reasonable warmth and even comfort in shallow caves near the road, theoretically defensible in case of attack. On the fourth night, we did not have the same luck. The best shelter that offered itself was in the roofless and largely wall-less remains of a structure on a plateau by the roadside, one of the few identifiable ruins we had seen along the pass. It was not a pleasing spot, even by the standards of a remarkably unattractive landscape. Most of the walls had been burned or melted to the tops of the foundation courses, which were visible in the slag like the ghostly engraving of a full-sized architectural plan; but short stretches of masonry survived here and there to the height of a few spans, and two that were preserved to about chest height formed a rough kind of sheltered corner at one edge of the ruin. About two hundred feet away, the little semicircular plateau it stood upon was bounded by a line of cliffs.

  I examined the standing walls without enthusiasm. They would give us some protection from the wind that howled down the valley from sunset to sunrise, but would leave us vulnerable to attack on two sides as well as open to the chilly night air of the mountains. Overall, I did not like the set-up—however, dusk was already falling when Kat and Jonno and I drew even with the ruins, and nothing better was visible on the long curve of road ahead. Moreover, nothing had threatened us for five nights running, and the terrors of Cansh Fathan were still a long way off.