Gil Trilogy 3: Lady Pain

by Rebecca Bradley

  "We don't need a guided tour," I broke in. "Where are you taking us?"

  Tig drifted to the centre of the Hall, examining the mosaics. "We're taking you to the place where the bargain was made."

  "What bargain?"

  "Naar's bargain." It was Kat who answered me. I examined her warily, fearing to find the marks of the Harashil on her as well; but she was wearing her what-a-dump face, as seen in filthy little ports and smelly little towns across the known and unknown worlds—who would have thought to see it here? She tugged Arkolef patiently along behind her. He came willingly enough but slowly, like an obedient child with its mind on other things.

  "We're going to the maze under the rock, aren't we?" Kat said. If anything, she sounded faintly interested now. "Is it far down? I suppose we'll use the between-ways to get to the caves, won't we, like you did before, and the caves to get to the maze. How difficult is the maze?"

  "It's not important. We are the Wind and the Tree, and we do not need to play that game." Tigrallef frowned at one of the mosaic scenes on the floor. The large-muscled hero, a sword in one hand and a blurred figurine of the Lady in the other, was beating off a well-rendered caricature of a Sherkin horde. "Why," he added, "do they insist on getting things wrong?"

  The tiles in that scene took on a faint glow—"best to keep our brother well back"—then quivered and abruptly puddled together, gold running into silver running into copper, pouring away together at last into a great black cavity that opened up below them. A sound like hissing steam, a blast of heat; when it was over, there was a square hole measuring about six feet across in the place where the offending scene had been. I approached it cautiously and peered down. It was a pit cut through the solid rock on which this hall was founded; well-cut stairs began at a landing a few feet below the opening and descended steeply into the darkness.

  "Was this here before?" I asked my father, "or did you just make it?"

  "It's not important," said Kat.

  "Don't you start." I helped her sit Arkolef on the edge of the cavity, then jumped in to guide his one foot and his wooden leg down to the landing. He came down docilely enough, but promptly did his best to climb back out again, which suggested to me that my poor uncle was not so crazy after all. After a brief struggle on the landing, I patted his back soothingly while he clung to me and whimpered deep in his magnificent throat. I sighed. This was not going to be easy.

  Tigrallef had gone ahead, glowing with a white radiance so powerful that it lit the staircase for a dozen feet in both directions, even around its numerous twists and corners. Kat and I started down after him with the Priest-King between us, and from the beginning I made a point of counting the stairs. For most of the first three hundred, I fumed at my father for dragging poor Arkolef along; from about three hundred to four hundred, I suffered vivid images of those we'd left behind, notably Mallinna and my mother; towards five hundred I became furious with Tigrallef for making us do this journey the difficult way, when we really didn't want to do it at all. It struck me that Katla and I were having to work far too hard for the dubious privilege of witnessing the world's doom. Why trudge down to Faddelin? Why sail to Gil in the Fifth? Why plod down miles of stairway? Why couldn't he just lift his little finger and take us straight to—wherever it was we were going. Why not—

  It hit me just after seven hundred. It took my breath away, to the point where I had to sit down on the stair for a moment while Kat moved on alone with Arkolef. I examined the idea critically and still found it credible. It had struck me that our father was doing the equivalent of leaving doors ajar behind him—return-trails clearly blazed, escape routes laid down and ready for use. It could only mean, I told myself, that he thought he had a chance of returning from this confrontation with the unknown. Perhaps the outcome was not quite as fired-in-the-kiln as I'd been assuming. I thought of his sign to my mother the night before, the ineffectual blade drawn through his own gut. The two were one, all right, the Wind and the Tree and all that; but perhaps he had been trying to tell her that something of himself survived and was exercising his old contrarian talents. For the first time since the night of the Carthenten Span, I felt a stirring of genuine hope.

  By the thousandth step, I decided I was wrong. It was foolish to hope. Tig was lost to us and the world was doomed. Moreover a phrase of Oballef's inscription in Fathan came back to haunt me, the bit about yielding up the seed of Naar to the Old Ones. It suddenly appeared suspicious to me that Tigrallef had brought the entire surviving seed of Naar down those stairs with him, Oballef's branch anyway, ripe to be yielded up. Wondering if a betrayal was in the wind kept me occupied well past twelve hundred, after which I didn't feel very much of anything except the ache in my legs and a vague longing to be back aboard the Fifth with Mallinna and far away from Gil . . .

  The end came after fourteen hundred and thirty-seven steps. By then I was supporting our uncle on my own, while Kat stumbled along behind us in a dizziness of exhaustion and sore knees. I reached out my foot to take another step and nearly fell over, because my boot met a solid surface it was not expecting. We had come to the bottom of the stairs. I caught my balance just in time for Kat to stagger out of the stairwell and knock me forwards a step or two. The three of us, Arkolef and Katla and I, clung together to stay upright. I shook my head to clear the clouds out of it.

  About ten feet ahead of us, Tigrallef was the only source of light. The chamber was probably large—his light did not touch any wall nor reach as high as the ceiling. The air was dry but thick, much warmer than I thought it would be, this deep in the bowels of the Gilgard rock. Breathing it was like trying to draw air through the folds of a heavy woollen blanket. The only sound was the tip of Arkolef's wooden leg scraping against the flagstones.

  "Just a little farther," Tig said. He walked away from us carrying his hemisphere of light with him, and I hooked an arm around my uncle's middle to encourage him along while Katla held his hand and murmured soothingly to him, as promised. I was looking at the floor—well-cut flags, not very worn and with only a thin coating of dust—when Katla stopped her murmuring with a gasp. The light brightened.

  I looked up. Perhaps Tigrallef was tired of carrying the light around with him; the walls were now glowing in a great circle around us, along with the white-plastered dome of the ceiling. Seven arched doorways broke the circle at regular intervals, perhaps the entrances to the maze we had started to hear so much about. The stairwell we had arrived by was cut rudely between two of these, an obvious intrusion—the Wind and the Tree's own version of a direct approach.

  He was standing meditatively beside a table or perhaps a bier with something lumpy on it, shrouded under a tapestry woven with unfamiliar glyphs—gold on crimson, picked out here and there with silver. Beyond him, forming a semicircle along the curve of the wall, were seven of the least prepossessing statues I had ever seen, not forgetting my previous benchmarks of iconic ugliness, the cult fetishes of Uagolo and the lantern-jawed Master of Gafrin-Gammanthan. They were just over life-size and seemed to be formed out of dry mud, sculpted with a tool as sensitive and precise as a trench-digger's shovel; one was roughly doglike, one catlike, two vaguely reptilian . . .

  "And three in human form," I finished out loud. I would have slapped my forehead with recognition but I was too frightened to move. Arkolef sensibly sank down on the floor wrapped in his own arms and began to rock back and forth. Katla absent-mindedly patted his shoulder.

  "Things of legend," Tigrallef intoned in a mocking voice, "terrible creatures of the dark, things older than Fathan, older than Vizzath, older than everything on earth—how often, it seems, the myths have it half right."

  You're late.

  I could not tell who said that—one of them, none of them, all seven of them at once; but as I climbed back into my skin and stuffed my heart back down my throat, Tigrallef addressed himself to the dog-like one with a weary kind of courtesy. "No, Great Fierceness, we are not late. We are not even the one you're expecting."
<
br />   A heavy pause.

  But we know the Empire of First-Fire was brought to a dose. Are you not the heritor, come to build the Last Empire?

  Tigrallef swivelled to face one of the human-like figures. "We are not, Flaming One." Another heavy pause. "The heritor in question died a thousand years ago, near enough. His ashes were scattered from the summit of the Great Nameless First." And after a pause that was long enough to become socially awkward, he added, "He broke the bargain which our forefather Naar struck with you long ago. We are the unwilling result, and we have come to reason with you, perhaps to plead."

  Seven motionless mud idols mulled this over.

  You say the chosen heritor did not fulfill the prophecy.

  "That is correct, Fangs-As-Daggers-Swift-To-Rend."

  The chosen heritor did not free our power from the vessel nor build the Great Nameless Last.

  "Correct again. He built a kingdom under another name. He defied you, Old Ones. He abandoned the others of the Children of the Naar. He built his kingdom right over your heads, in the place of the Great Nameless First. He used the Harashil, but he gave it a face and form that was none of yours, and he did not open a way to your eyes and ears. He was prepared to leave you in darkness for ever. He let the empires of the Harashil be forgotten. He hid Naarhil from the ears of the faithful. The prophecy has thus been nullified, and the compact has already been broken. Therefore, we ask to be released from its terms. Let the Great Nameless Last remain unbuilt, and the world be left to go its own way."

  Strong disapproval filled the chamber. It smelt something like hot pitch and felt like a wave of icy water slapping across me. Kat flinched. The Priest-King reached up and found my hand. My eyes ached from watching those lumpen figures for any sign of life or movement, even any hint of where the damn voices were coming from; but the figures were dry mud, plain and simple, and they behaved like it. If these were the Old Ones who created our world, I would not have given a quarter-palot piece for the lack-talent who created them.

  My father, waiting patiently for the Old Ones to respond to his plea, which even I could tell was hopeless, laid his hands on the tapestry covering the bier. What he felt there seemed to interest him. Gently, he grasped one edge of the tapestry and began to draw it down.

  We have conferred. You are a twig of the Great Tree.

  "Yes, First-Fire."

  And you have broken the vessel of the Harashil.

  "We have, Icedrake."

  And the Tree has moved in the Wind, and the Wind has shaped itself to the Tree.

  "We suppose so, Many-Handed. The two have become one, if that's what you're trying to say."

  Then the prophecy is well enough fulfilled, though you are not the intended one. The compact stands. You shall build the Last Empire.

  Tigrallef's face hardened. "And then, Shining-of-Scales?"

  And then you shall yield up the Harashil and the seed of Naar, the innocent, the brave and the vessel of wrath, to be consumed; and we shall destroy this creation, as it was agreed in the beginning. There was a touch of impatience in the snake-thing's voice; the Old Ones were getting bored with stating the obvious. Tigrallef, however, had already returned to examining the object partially uncovered on the bier. Without looking up, he asked, "What does this one get out of it?"

  He shall join us in a new creation, and live for ever.

  "Yes," said my father, "that's what we thought. And it's exactly why he brought you from the void, isn't it?" With a sudden powerful movement, he jerked the tapestry off the bier and flung it across the chamber. "Come here," he rasped at us over his shoulder, "and bring your uncle with you. Come pay your respects to our forefather, the wise and mighty Naar."

  I suppose he had been tall and broad, an imposing man, well fleshed with healthy muscle and with a full head of hair, which was long and loose and still a glossy yellow. But the moisture had deserted his body; his lips had thinned and drawn away from his teeth; the fine muscles had shrivelled to strings under his skin, which itself was puckered and a dull blue-grey; his eyes had withered into hard little nuts under leathery eyelids.

  The tapestry had been his only covering aside from a silver loin plate and a square golden pectoral that reached from his collarbone to just above his navel. With morbid interest I noted his internal organs had not been removed, as they would have been in all six traditions I knew of that liked to mummify dead dignitaries. Where the arched ribcage ended, the skin was drawn tight over a coiled and petrified serpent, presumably his gut; there were a few other bumps and bulges I did not try to interpret.

  Katla asked, "Is he dead?"

  I stared at her in surprise—stupid questions were not Kat's style—but Tigrallef said, "Not in any ordinary sense."

  Five thousand years. It was getting easier to tell which of the Old Ones was speaking. This time it was the cat-thing with the long name. He has been waiting five thousand years, since the falling of the Great Nameless First, for the fulfillment and the yielding up.

  "Don't rush us," said my father. "After all that time, he can wait a few minutes longer. Kat, Vero, look at him!"

  We looked. I felt sick; no breakfast and too many stairs, and on top of it all a desiccated ancestor resembling an anatomy drawing from a Zelfic medical treatise, all bones and bits in place. Kat said, "I suppose you know all about him, Da."

  "His name is Naar. Six thousand years ago he was a great magician, and he opened a gate that would have been better left closed. Except it wasn't really anything like a gate."

  There was a compact made.

  "There was indeed, Shining-of-Scales. He gave you the forms of the Old Ones, didn't he, and fed you on worship; you lent him the powers each of you came with, bundled altogether in the composite persona called Harashil. Together you built great empires, and then you tore them down."

  "Why?" Katla broke in.

  Long silence.

  "Why?" she insisted. "What was the point of doing all that?"

  The answer came loftily from one of the human-likes. Eternity is very long.

  "Is that all?" Katla demanded, outraged. "You left a trail of shattered empires all around the world just to pass the time?"

  Empires always fall, Naarling child. We did nothing to the not-Naar that they would not do to themselves, were they able.

  "Shullshit," she said, "you played with us. You used us."

  We have an agreement. They were not talking to Kat any more—that was addressed to the Wind/Tree himself, still examining our distant forebear with what looked like impersonal distaste.

  "We were not party to the contract, Old Ones."

  Nevertheless, we have an agreement.

  "We were not even born at the time, Old Ones."

  Nevertheless, we have an agreement.

  "Yes," said my father sadly after a long silence, "we suppose we do. But there's still no hurry, is there?"

  He picked up the golden pectoral and held it close to his eyes, baring the magician's perfectly delineated breastbone and ribs, the colourless knots of his nipples. From where I stood I saw Tigrallef's strange eyes widen as he studied the metal square.

  "Tig?" I whispered. No reply. "Father? What is it?"

  He chuckled. "Twenty years we hunted for this. What a joke. What a pity. See this part here—it's where the Divinatrix went wrong—the structure's similar to the Greater Will, just a reverse twist in alternate lines. It's a good thing we didn't try out the partial copy we found in Khamanthana, there's no telling what we might have summoned from the void."

  My breath came back at last. "You're telling me it's the Will of Banishment?"

  "Yes." He smiled at me with great good humour. "So many things are clear to us now. Long ago, the first reading of this Will invited the powers to come through the—oh, let's go on calling it a gate. The second reading, were it ever to take place, would banish them and slam the gate in their—let's call them faces . . ."

  "Never mind the tupping terminology. What are you waiting for? Use the Will!" />
  He laughed out loud. "It's too late, Child of the Naar. We're going to build our empire. Shall we tell you an interesting fact? It will be just as terrible as the Harashil foretold."

  "No, Father—"

  "Yes." The black night in his eyes took on a reddish glow, faint at first. "We cannot stop ourself now. We'll take the entire world for our gallows block—no such empire will ever have existed, in history or before it. Our iron legions will raise the torture frames in Gafrin-Gammanthan and the whipping posts in Amballa, the Pleasure in Vassashinay, and the sharpened stakes in the fields of Calloon. Myr will be a desert of frozen bones, the sea around Itsant will be awash with rotting flesh. We will loose the Afadhnids on to Miishel and Grisot, Zaine will be a barren rock in the sea. The blood will run—"

  "Enough, Father, enough."

  "—torrents in the riverbeds of Canzitar, and—"

  "Enough! I do, I really do, have some picture of what you're planning."

  "You cannot begin to imagine," he said gently. "But if you know how to stop us, now would be the time."

  "Stop you? How could we possibly know how to stop you?" I demanded, almost indignantly.

  "Why do you think we brought you down here?" His lips were drawn back in a broad death's-head grin, like the rictus on the dead face of Naar. "Help us if you can, or else watch the fulfillment take shape. At this point we don't care. We—I—I— can hold out no longer."

  It is beginning. That was the cat-thing.

  It shall be terrible beyond measure. That was the dragon.

  It shall be the last. That was the one with lots of hands.

  Tigrallef's eyes shone red, holes into a Lucian hell. "Help me," he said. I jerked the golden pectoral out of his hands and scanned it desperately—gibberish. I'd never even seen the glyphs before. "How can we help you?" I shouted, but I could hardly hear myself in the rising shriek of a wind around the person of my father.

  Katla knocked the pectoral out of my hands. Her voice howled in my ear: "It's not time for that yet. Here!" I found one of my hands suddenly in Arkolef's trusting grip, the other being thrust towards Tigrallef by small iron fingers clamped around my wrist. "Take his hand," she screamed over the wind. "The innocent, the brave and the vessel of wrath, remember? Uncle's innocent, you're brave, and I'm bloody angry. Take Father's hand!"