Gil Trilogy 3: Lady Pain

by Rebecca Bradley

  He pointed to the southwest corner of the ruin, and suddenly a wavering vision of stone walls sprang up from the foundation courses, lamp brackets and troopers' graffiti and all. A spectral fire glimmered into life on a misty stone hearth; the ghost of a table began to take shape, groaning under high-piled platters, steaming jugs, soup basins, salvers of roast meat.

  Kat pushed past me and flung herself to her knees beside our father; Katla, who had not addressed a word to him for days, who could hardly bear to look at him. "Let it go, Father," she cried, "you've got to keep hold! Vero, don't push him! Father, listen to me, we'll be all right, we'll be fine, we'll find Mother and everything, but just—keep—hold!"

  The vision collapsed in a flare of moonlight.

  "Not even tripe?" Tig asked. His eyes were glassy.

  "Nothing. Fight the old sow. Keep hold." She rose from her knees, knocking nonexistent dust off her britches out of habit. With a severely minatory look at me, she stumbled back to the sledge and hid her face on Jonno's shoulder.

  It was five days later, and the Myrwolf was prowling along beside me with its tongue hanging out and its golden fur patchy over a washboard of ribs. When I looked again, it was the White Dragon of Khamanthana, which I personally, unlike Katla, had no trouble distinguishing from the Sun Serpent of Vizzath. It was very simple—one of them had wings, the other one was not white. As if to demonstrate the difference, the Sun Serpent slithered into the Dragon's stead while I was wiping the sweat out of my eyes.

  "Raksh take it, Father, can't you just walk?"

  At once he was back to stumbling along on two feet: slim high-arched feet at the end of legs as long as Mallinna's. The Lady's filmy robe was tattered and her hair hung down her back in a greasy tangle of snagglethorns and tiny burrs—which was quite clever of her, because nothing of the sort actually grew in the mountains of Fathan.

  "I had your own feet in mind, Father."

  "Of course," he said, "sorry." He was just as frayed and filthy as the old sow's many manifestations, as thin and hollow-eyed as the rest of us. About ten paces ahead, Jonno and Kat were pulling the sledge in tandem—although it weighed hardly more with Angel on it than it did empty, hauling it was now beyond the strength of any one of us on our own, except myself when absolutely necessary. Whenever we stopped, I checked Angel to make sure he was still breathing.

  Why were we in such bad shape? An interesting question. As fasts go, five days should hardly have counted. The faithful of Zaine fasted annually for fourteen days, one day in honour of each etys of the Pantheon; the Plaviset regarded nine days without food as a health cure; eight days was our own record, set while drifting through the waters of Balqees Hoh in the shattered hulk of the Fourth, and we had been in better shape at the end of it than we were now. On the other hand, eight days of enforced leisure at sea level was not as draining as five days of hard hiking in thin mountain air. Indeed, there was something about the air of the Blessed Range that struck up a vicious alliance with the hunger and cold, and altogether the flesh seemed to melt off our bones.

  Tig's troubles began on the third day of the fast. More accurately, the third day is when the rest of us began to see what poor Katla had been seeing all along, ever since she emerged from the Fifth's hidden hold. We didn't like to mention it at first. Four of us thought we were lightheaded with hunger and having individualized hallucinations, while Kat didn't realize anything had changed; but that evening, as Jonno and I went out of camp for our ablutions, he asked me shyly if I thought my father was looking quite himself. Somehow it was small comfort to discover there was nothing wrong with our eyes, since it meant my father was getting much worse.

  Not surprisingly, I was the one elected to ask him about it. I left it until the next morning and waited for him to be on two feet before I fell into step with him. "Father . . ." I began hesitantly.

  "We know what you're going to say, Vero. The many faces, right?"

  I nodded.

  "Don't worry about it," he said testily, "in fact, ignore it. You'll only encourage her otherwise."

  "You mean the Pain?"

  "Of course I mean the Pain. Who else?"

  "But why—how?"

  The Flaming Skull of Fathan gave me an impatient look. "We're fighting on other fronts at the moment—the old sow is honestly reluctant to continue on the road to Cansh Fathan, but you don't notice us turning back, do you? And if the core of the Will is Tigrallef's, the Harashil can do what it likes with the façade."

  "Then I don't need to worry? You'll be all right?" I felt absurd saying that—how much farther from all right was it possible to be? But the Itsanti Master of Hands reached out with three of its twenty-odd arms and patted my shoulder.

  "We'll be fine," the Lady in Gil told me.

  Towards evening of the fifth day of our fast, when we reached the high pass which Tigrallef and the Grisotin charts called the Carthenten Cleft, we were long past being disconcerted by the Pain's repertoire of shapes. Perhaps our hunger-induced dullness helped; perhaps we were starting to have genuine hallucinations, and could not tell the difference. I had two other obsessions by then anyway, the first one a powerful and persistent feeling that we were being watched on all sides. There was no evidence for it—we sighted nothing and nobody in the high places above the road as we trudged wearily along, and nothing approached our miserable camps during the cold nights—but the feeling only grew stronger.

  Something about that instinct of being watched kept plucking at strings in my memory. It was a sensation similar to the one called seen-before, but it appeared to involve a story I had once heard rather than a personal experience. This led by short steps to the second obsession, an unscratchable itch, a terrible desire to remember or reconstruct that particular story, which was teasing at the edges of my mind. The genre was travel, that much I knew, but that knowledge was not very helpful in narrowing down the field. Approximately two-fifths of all literature, by my father's estimate, dealt with getting from one bit of the world to another, usually through bits that were nastier than either of the first two—perilous quests, heroic voyages of exploration and discovery, glorious expeditions of conquest or rescue, traveller's accounts of places any sensible person would avoid like the Storican pox. The story I was trying so hard to remember could be in any one of those categories, coming from any one of several dozen scattered literary traditions.

  "We're nearly at the bridge," Tig said in a voice that mixed excitement with the dreaded timbre of the Harashil.

  "Hmm, good," I replied. A winter's tale, perhaps? A background of snow and ice seemed just about right. Ahead of us, Kat sagged in the leather tow-strap of the sledge and folded at the knees—Jonno caught her as she fell. I sighed. "Put her on the sledge with Angel, Jonno. I'll take over pulling for a while." Not a story from the known world, I was thinking as I fitted the tow-strap to my chest; and probably a story I was told rather than one I read, because I seemed to remember it with my ears rather than my eyes. I plodded on with the sledge in tow, Jonno and Mallinna stumbling with hunger and fatigue on either side of me, the Myrwolf loping ahead of us waving its tail like a great golden flag. Though the pass was cold, a constant supply of sweat ran down into my eyes.

  Eyes—the eyes were a significant piece of the puzzle. Silver eyes plucked the string quite vigorously; but surely I was thinking of the moon's reflections off the eyes of the mantis men, which could not possibly be right. The mantis men were a distraction, a cold trail—cold trail. Snow and ice. I was back to that again, remembering in circles.

  "The bridge of the Carthenten Cleft!" Tig cried, "and just as beautiful as before the great fire!" The Myrwolf bayed with excitement; a moment later the White Dragon lifted a few spans off the ground, brushing me with its great white wings.

  "Damn it, Da, keep your wings to yourself," I mumbled; but it was the Myrwolf that stayed in my mind. Myrwolf. Myr. Ice and snow. It felt like I had the right landmass at last; but we had heard so many stories in Myr . . .

  "Lo
ok, Vero! Jonno, Mallinna, have you ever seen anything so beautiful?"

  "Many times," Mallinna said in a dull voice.

  I lifted my head with great difficulty and squinted through sweaty strands of hair. Myself, I could see nothing of any beauty at all. The roadway here was running along the upper lip of a broad canyon, walled with sheer onyx cliffs falling away beneath us; at the bottom, perhaps two hundred feet below, I could see the dry rivercourse winding serpent-like through a stony black valley. Ahead of us, the road curved to the edge of the abyss and met an arch of gleaming black drawn like an ink stroke across the twilit sky to the other side, where I assumed the road would continue.

  Putting my head down, I concentrated on shifting the full-sized windcatcher on the tow-strap behind me, evidently loaded with stone blocks and Storican trunk beasts. Myr, Myr, Myr. Snow and ice . . . the story stubbornly eluded me. Mallinna stumbled several times. Jonno wordlessly joined me in the loop of the leather tow-strap, easing the burden enough to let me start thinking again. Myr, Myr, Myr . . .

  Then the road turned and our feet were on a smoother black surface that rose ahead of us like a gentle hill with a fading evening sky at the top. Tigrallef was suddenly there, slipping the leather strap down and helping Jonno and me step clear of it. He was himself for the moment.

  "Our turn to pull," he said. "Stay near the centre, all of you—much of the parapet was melted away, and it's a long way to the bottom, though we must say . . ."

  He walked away up the black hill, chattering steadily, with the sledge trailing behind him. Angel had his eyes closed and looked dead, but he had looked that way for three days; Katla's eyes were open. She stirred dazedly on the sledge, lifted her head and let it drop again. Somehow Jonno and Mallinna and I ended up drifting after Tigrallef as a unit, tangled together in mutual support; when we caught up, he was still talking.

  ". . . quite an engineering feat, but they wouldn't have been able to build it without our help, just like the Gilgard. Strong enough to withstand the fires which blasted Fathan—fused into a single stone spanning the abyss! Stronger than ever, as far as we can tell. No cracks at all. Astonishing—"

  "Eyesuckers," I said suddenly.

  "What was that, Vero?"

  "The Eyesuckers of Myr," I croaked in triumph. "I've been trying to remember that story for days."

  "Funny you should think of the Eyesuckers now," he said in an odd voice. He flicked with dizzying speed through the Flaming Skull, the Sun Serpent and the Nkalvi Great-of-Fangs, and became himself again. On the sledge, Katla sat up with her eyes wide and her nostrils flaring.

  Her tension was contagious.

  I broke free of Jonno and Mallinna. For the first time since Tigrallef took over the sledge, I stood up straight and had a good look around. This black hill was the bridge and we were about halfway across it, on the highest point. Under my feet was a solid surface of black glass, fortunately not transparent; about ten feet away on either side the surface simply ended. Far ahead, just glimpsed through a notch between two crags, was a mirage of high towers and ochre-streaked ramparts catching the late rays of the sun—a clear sign to me that my mind was beginning to go. I recognized them as the grim iron ramparts where Katla sometimes stood in my nightmares. I had a moment of intense vertigo, an almost irresistible impulse to drop to the ground and crawl the rest of the way across the bridge on my belly. Katla's shout snapped me out of it.

  "They're coming!"

  She rolled off the sledge and leapt to her feet. For a terrible moment I thought she was going to break for the knife-edge of the span and cast herself over—I launched myself at her, grabbed her in my arms, lost my balance and toppled with her to the hard ground.

  "Gods' sake, Vero, get off me."

  "They won't hurt us." Tig's voice was normal, matter-of-fact, without Painful overtones. "They could if they tried, but they've been waiting for us a long time. The Pain can't hurt them at all. That's just how it is."

  "Who's he babbling about?" Nobody answered. I had to wait for Kat to extricate herself furiously before I was able to sit up and see for myself.

  Jonno and Mallinna were standing stiffly side by side looking back at the end of the bridge we had come from. Katla was standing with her hands on her hips glaring at the end we were heading for. At both ends—silver eyes gleaming through the dusk, long misshapen bodies taking every posture from four-legged to upright—the mantis men were gathered to greet us.

  "We're dead," I breathed.

  "Not yet," my father said behind me.

  "Then it's only a matter of time. Raksh, Tig, are they even human?"

  "Well, you weren't far off thinking about the Eyesuckers," he said cheerfully. "It was clever of you to make the connection. And yes, they're more or less human. Vero, put the chain away. Jonno, forget the sword."

  "But who are they?"

  Soundless burst of light—I shielded my eyes in the crook of my arm. He was Tigrallef, but he was glowing through his skin with a light as strong as the sun, as pale as the moon. He said, "They're sort of distant cousins, Vero. Be polite, now."

  * * *

  16

  "DISTANT COUSINS?" I repeated. "That's not funny, Tig."

  "Very distant cousins. Collateral descendants of your direct ancestor Oballef. Just as much children of the Naar as you and Katla. Oh, Verolef," he chided me as I opened my mouth with a dozen panicky questions, "we'll explain later. They're waiting for us."

  "Do you mean us in the sense of you and the Pain?" I was really asking whether the rest of our complement would be cut into stewing-pieces while he and the Harashil were reverentially escorted to the towers of Cansh Fathan. Tig looked thoughtful.

  "More precisely, it's probably Oballef they're waiting for; but we suppose we'll have to do. Jonno, Kat, Mallinna—time to move."

  I did not like it, but there were only three ways to go: two of them led straight into the arms of our remote cousins, and the third was a very long drop.

  The towers and ramparts had not been a trick of my eyes nor a carry-over from my nightmares; they were the small part of Cansh Fathan that was visible from the summit of the Carthenten Span. We could see much more when we reached the far end of the bridge, where the growing horde of relatives parted to let us pass.

  It was a strange parade that set off from the bridgehead: Tigrallef, giving off enough light to read by in the deepening dusk, ambled along in the lead—then came the sledge, sliding effortlessly behind him with a puzzled-looking Angel on board, then the other four of us keeping together in a tight, uneasy cluster, then the multitude. There were no overtly threatening gestures; though I felt herded, it was in the direction we were heading anyway.

  Somehow, they were marginally less terrifying now that I could see them up close. Short hunched bodies, scrawny and pot-bellied, with long legs and long curving arms; heads that drooped rather touchingly between their collarbones on the ends of too fragile necks; massive foreheads, receding chins, surprisingly delicate noses with long slanted nostrils—a marked over-abundance of teeth. The eyes, silver-irised and slightly bulging, followed Tigrallef in a unison that was almost comic. Their sartorial taste ran to wrong-sized tunics and britches, many of them the familiar dun or black of Gillish imperial troopers, and a ragged assortment of cloaks and robes. Booty of war, obviously—one could tell by the slashes, rips, bloodstains and bad fit. An altogether dazzling gown of jewelled brocade that hung in tatters on one ugly cousin might well have belonged to the Deppowe governor's lady. I found myself watching for the white-trimmed red tunic Shree was so fond of, the grey one Chasco was wearing when I last saw him. My mother's chest of Amballan silk robes? I didn't dare think about that.

  They were everywhere around us. They crept in from the shadows on either side of the road as we passed, to join our growing snake of followers, and they were as silent as the thieves who had left us to starve. I felt a hand slide into mine: Mallinna's. Meantime, the vista of Cansh Fathan broadened and deepened ahead of us until, about a h
alf-mile from the Carthenten Span, we reached the most scenic viewpoint any sightseer could ever wish for. It was on the edge of a precipice sheer enough to convince me I really might be afraid of heights after all.

  There it was at last, the fabled lost city of Cansh Fathan. I was no stranger to fabled lost cities, but there was something different about Cansh Fathan. Much of Myr was under ice, Itsant under water and coral, Khamanthana partly under the suburbs of latter-day Gafrin-Gammanthan, Baul many feet deep under Amballa, Nkalvi smothered in creepers and delving roots and poisonous rock-devouring thorn bushes—but Cansh Fathan was a standing ruin where somebody still lived.

  The precipice was the curved backdrop to a huge amphitheatre of a valley, its floor a good two hundred feet below where we stood. To our right, the road began a serpentine descent down the cliff wall; to the north across the valley, the open front of the amphitheatre rolled away in smooth black foothills, as glassy and desolate as the plains around the Mosslines; and between the foothills and the cliff was a sprawling walled city whose lowest towers were on a level with our eyes, whose tallest towers thrust as high again above us into the darkening sky. A curtain wall forty or fifty feet high enclosed it. Within it rose level upon level of massive ramparts, each with its own bastions and towers, leading the eyes on and up to a lofty central spire.

  Three miracles. First, whereas the rest of Fathan was as barren as a garden where a locust swarm has just had supper, in the valley of Cansh Fathan the greenery sprang wildly and profusely from the crevices of the cliff, the ramparts and the curtain wall. Second, the black-glazed surface covering the valley floor was not stone but water—a still lake that lapped from near the base of the cliff to the curtain wall, and around it to the first rise of the foothills. Third, many of the window squares in the ramparts of Cansh Fathan were already glowing gamely against the approaching darkness; which meant that the scores and scores of mantis-people already gathered behind us were only some of the ancient city's populace.