Gil Trilogy #2:
Scion's Lady
Rebecca Bradley
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Also by Rebecca Bradley
LADY IN GIL
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Scion's Lady
Rebecca Bradley
ACE BOOKS, NEW YORK
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If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are
either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and
any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments,
events or locales is entirely coincidental.
SCION'S LADY
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with
Orion Publishing Group, Ltd.
PRINTING HISTORY
Victor Gollancz hardcover edition / 1997
Vista mass-market edition / 1998
Ace mass-market edition / December 2000
All rights reserved. Copyright © 1997 by Rebecca Bradley.
Cover art by Jerry Vanderstelt.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced
in any form without permission.
For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
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ISBN: 0-441-00788-0
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1
THE MARKETPLACE WAS in ruins; lush green things pushed up through rifts in the tumbledown stalls, mantled the wormy wood, sprang thick and gross and unhealthy from the poisoned mud. The Lady stepped down from the pedestal in Oballef's Fountain, wiping the paint from her face with the back of her marble hand. She glanced at me incuriously and glided away.
Above me, the grid trembled. I looked up and saw eyes, one at each nexus, silver pupils irised with black iron—the spikes, foreshortened, just as they always looked. They watched me as I strained against the fetters and the band of leather around my chest. From somewhere, a hiss; the grid shook itself purposefully and began to slide downwards in its oiled grooves, its progress measured in thickness of a hair, the points glittering, the squares of sky beginning to swell.
Calla sat down beside me on the platform, holding the fair-headed boy in her lap. Her face overhung mine. "What did you expect, Tig?" she asked. "Gratitude?"
"Of course not."
"Power? Fame?"
"You know me better than that."
"Love?"
"Never again. Not since you died."
She raised her eyebrows. "What, then?"
While I thought about it, I looked beyond her at the points of the Pleasure. The spikes were perceptibly larger. Behind the bars of the grid, the sky was shot with fire. Seawater dripped from Calla's hair and rolled down my face like tears.
"I expected this, I suppose."
But Calla and the dreamchild always faded away at this point; and next, if the dream were allowed to go on, there would come the thunder, the roar of an almighty wave, the wails of the damned; and then the green foam-edged slab of water would be poised a thousand feet above me, and the wails would turn to screams, and the green slab would start to fall out of the sky, slowly at first, as slowly as the grid of the Pleasure, spiked with the whitened bones of ships, crushing the towers, drowning the screams—I knew it all by heart. I forced my eyes open and wiped the tears off my face with the corner of the blanket. After a moment, I swung my feet off the pallet.
Faintly, from the city far below my window, I heard early morning sounds: unoiled wagons creaking to market, criers of fresh milk and cooked gruel, the plaints of small armies of dogs and roosters. There was no sound from the other cubicles except for Angel's deep, regular snore. The dream's aftertaste began to fade. Still wiping my eyes, I stumbled to the writing room and set to work.
This was the pattern of my mornings for six years—the first six years after Gil was liberated, the first years after the Lady in Gil and I, between us, sank the continent of Sher into the ocean and upset the delicate balance of the world. It was part of the pattern I expected to follow for all the remaining mornings and days and nights and years of my life: pottering about in the archives until death claimed me, absorbed in my work, celibate, happy in my small way, disturbed only by my dreams. I should have known better.
The archives were tucked away in a corner of the Temple Palace, reached from the main royal quarters via a long corridor, a steep staircase and an anteroom choked with old packing crates and broken furniture. Apart from the chambers we had cleared and stocked with bookshelves and scroll-racks and writing tables, the rooms on that level were either empty or still littered with rubbish left over from the Sherkin occupation. Shree and Angel and I slept, along with our not very committed pupils, in a large, low-ceilinged room which the Sherank had cut into cubicles for the governor's personal bodyguard decades ago. We were grubby, ink-stained, probably malnourished, often smelly and fishbelly pale from too little sun, and it was rare that anybody else came near us. It was lovely.
That morning, the morning of the night on which my life changed again, I was reviewing a scroll that had arrived on the latest ship from Sathelforn. It had been commissioned and funded by the new Compact of Nations, and represented a full year's labour by the Lucian Clerisy, a collective of venerable scholars. The margins were expensively illustrated, the calligraphy incomparable, the paper thick and smooth as cream; the text, on the other hand, was unrelieved shull droppings. When Angel and Shree joined me in the writing room, I was gloomily calculating how many real books we could have acquired for the same outlay of cash.
Shree, still picking his teeth from breakfast, pulled the scroll towards him and read a few lines. After six years of warming a chair in the archives, he still looked and moved like a fighting man, but he could translate from the Lucian almost as fast as I could. He chortled and then laughed out loud and pushed the scroll back at me.
"I don't see the humour in this, Shree," I said crossly. "This compilation of lies cost us nearly a quarter of the year's allowance."
"It's not lies, Tig," he chuckled, "it's politics. Diplomacy. Fascinating. Listen to this preface, Angel." He picked up the scroll again, and started to translate out loud. "But, lo, in the seventy-third year of the Sherkin Empire, the gods of all nations made a compact among themselves to destroy the pride and wickedness that was Sher, and sent a great wave that swallowed up Sher and the great cities of Sher, even Iklankish the Capital in the west and Krin in the north and Kishti in the south, and all the peoples that were in Sher, and sank them beneath the sea, destroying Sher by water as in ancient times they destroyed Fathan by fire. And everywhere, in all the nations and the islands, the peoples rose up and threw off the evil yoke, and slaughtered the Sherank in their strongholds, and scuttled their ships, and burned their engines of war, and swept all their fouln
ess from the surface of the earth, for the Sherank were accursed, and their works were accursed. And so, by the grace of the gods of all nations, the new age of peace and plenty began."
"Propaganda," I muttered. "Expensive propaganda."
"Oh, Tig, stop moaning about your precious budget. You're just upset because you and the Lady aren't mentioned."
I sniffed. "Not true. I'm happy to let the gods of all nations, and anybody else, take the credit for destroying Sher. But I strongly object to the other nonsense."
"Slaughtering the garrisons? Destroying the works of the accursed Sherank? Beginning a new age of peace and plenty?" Shree grinned.
I could not share his amusement. It was true that the surviving Sherkin garrisons had been given a rough time at first, but in the end there had been more deals struck than death-blows; many a kinglet owed his continued health to a regiment or two of well-paid Sherkin mercenaries. And far from destroying any traces of the accursed Sherank, the peoples of all the nations etc. had been more apt to salvage what materiel the bastards left behind, to use against each other. Naturally, the eminent Lucian scholars found it impolitic to mention any of this.
Shree was still chuckling over the scroll, pointing out the richer falsities to Angel with his inkstained forefinger. Angel was shaking his grizzled head; I thought maybe there was distress behind the hair on his face, but it was not easy to tell. "Shut up for a minute, will you, Shree?" I said. "Angel, what are you thinking?"
He took the scroll out of Shree's hands, treating it with all the deference that written matter always called out in him, but none of the usual affection. "Peace and plenty?" he said, as one might quote a mention of the sun rising in the west. "Do they believe that?"
"Of course they don't." Shree patted Angel's shoulder.
"Then why do they write it?"
Shree sighed. "It's politics, Angel, I'll explain it to you."
He tried. Angel knew all about cruelty, betrayal, torture, destruction and rape from a lifetime of watching the Sherank through vents in the castle walls, but he still found diplomacy a puzzle. While Shree tried to untangle the issues for him, I shut my ears and wandered to the window. The city lay spread out below me.
The years of reconstruction had made little difference that was visible from that angle. Foul tracts of hovels and smoking tips still sprawled along the old corniche and down to the outskirts of the city, although new villas in fastidiously walled gardens rose here and there. I could see that Lissula's grand new brothel, in a prime location near the harbour, was already barnacled with lean-tos. The Sherkin revetments, built of pillaged stones, had themselves been pulled apart for building material, leaving the city crossed with pale linear scars like the marks of an old beating.
I leaned out, suddenly interested. A massive wind-galley was just gliding into sight around the edge of the harbour, ablaze with yellow and crimson pennons that fluttered on every spar and line from bow to stern. As I watched, she slid through the gap in the breakwater and rolled majestically towards one of the quays. She dwarfed everything else in the harbour. I broke into Shree's seminar to call the others to the window.
"Miisheli colours, aren't they?" asked Shree after a few moments. He sounded surprised. "Why is Gil so honoured, a miserable little backwater like this?"
"Who knows?" A flash of colour by the harbour caught my eye. Even while the ship was mooring, a phalanx of tiny green figures was moving on to the quay, headed and footed by ranks of green banners. The Flamens, out in force, and so early in the day; only an important visitor would get them from their soft beds at this hour.
I turned to the others. "Have you heard anything about this?"
"Not a whisper." Shree shrugged. Angel looked blank.
"What on earth would they want in Gil?"
"It's more likely the Primate wants something from them," said Shree. "I'll bet he spent the last week coaching Arkolef in how to grovel with the dignity befitting a Priest-King. That's another of the arts of diplomacy, Angel."
The gangplank was already being lowered from the Miisheli ship. Sunlight flashed on a forest of raised trumpets, but the fanfare was too distant to carry. "Don't be cruel about my brother," I said absently, intent on the scene at the harbour. "He can't help being stupid. And if the Primate is getting Gil some help from Miishel, then I wish him well for a change."
"You wish him well? That's a terrible precedent, Tig."
"Oh, perhaps. But he seems to be leaving me out of it this time."
"I'm not surprised, after the fiasco you made when the Bashee of Plav was here." Shree glanced at me, grinning. I had to grin back.
"It was an accident, Shree. That ridiculous ritual robe—"
"—and the time you took a book to the Tatakil envoy's feast—"
"I knew there'd be speeches."
"—not to mention the time you dropped a rock sample on your uncle the High Prince of Sathelforn's toe—"
"My uncle didn't mind. He thought it was funny."
"The Primate was furious."
"I remember." We chuckled together, even Angel. "Maybe he's realized at last that I'm unfitted for the duties of a prince. I hope so—there's more than enough to do in the archives. Which reminds me, Shree, we'll be going out tonight."
Shree's grin disappeared. He sighed. "Not another cult?"
"Another cult." I went to the table, dug around in the papers for my notebook.
"Who told you about it? That scruffy-looking scragger who came to see you in the middle of the night?"
"That's the one."
"I didn't like the looks of him, Tig."
"He's a good informant," I said, frowning, shuffling the papers aside. At last I unearthed my notebook and found the entry. "This one will be Cult Number Forty-three, the Fiery Hand. Founded about ten days ago, meets nightly on the Thread-of-Gold."
"Is it urgent?"
"Could be. My informant says it could fold at any moment."
"Oh, all right." Shree turned from the window with resignation and trudged over to his worktable. Then the pupils trooped into the room and my last normal day in the archives started in earnest.
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2
"TOO MANY BLOODY temples in this town. Where's the bloody taverns?"
The man from Tata pushed past me out of the portal of the House of the Fiery Hand. It was true the name was deceptive, also true that Gil was oversupplied with dubious places of worship, but we weren't short of taverns either. I pointed the Tatakil further down Thread-of-Gold Street to the House of the Green Door, which really was a tavern. Still muttering, he wove away. The acolyte at the door, as shabby as the temple he guarded, watched reprovingly.
"We offered him deliverance from the wrath to come," he murmured, shaking his head.
"I think he wanted a drink." I motioned to Shree. We each placed a token in the acolyte's outstretched palm and bowed our way past him.
The portal led into a narrow, grimy corridor lit by one feeble torch. At the end was a plain door, beyond which a few chanting voices seemed to be searching for the same tune. The air was redolent of decaying vegetation: old cabbages, onions, pikcherries well past their prime, the too-sweet tang of citrus fuzzed with mould. Shree wrinkled his nose as we stumbled along on the warped floorboards. "Has your brother passed a law," he complained, "that says these places have to smell bad?"
"It is a consistent feature," I admitted. I took a deep breath, knowing the air would be worse inside the sanctuary, and pushed the door open.
The service was in progress. The noise was coming from four straggly priests in white caftans, who were dancing as they sang—that is, they were shuffling their feet in a slightly embarrassed fashion and waving their hands about in time to the chanting. Since they were all wearing oversized wooden gloves, flat-palmed, crudely carved and badly gilded, the effect was reminiscent of the Fan Dance then popular in the whorehouses.
We took our places in a halfmoon of devotees squatting on the floor. Discreetly, I pulled out my not
ebook and began to jot things down. My part was to describe the physical details of each gimcrack temple, the regalia and the celebrants, while Shree kept track of the ritual, the chants and the high points of the sermon. This self-inflicted study threatened to be endless, given the renewable supply of subjects; for whenever one ephemeral little faith was suppressed by the Flamens or died a natural death, two or three others sprouted in its place. Recording them was a thankless task—nobody else was interested, the Flamens actually disapproved, and the most we could hope for in the end was a series of volumes that nobody would want to read, on a phase of Gillish history that everybody would want to forget. It was just the sort of enterprise we memorians love.
I still have my notes on the Fiery Hand, but they are not easy to read through the splatters of blood on the page. The temple was a converted tailoring establishment. Hook-rails were still nailed to the ceiling, wound about with desiccated flowers; a price list was legible through thin whitewash on one wall. The altar itself, with its smelly heap of rotting vegetable offerings, was an old six-legged cutting table masked with a cheap cloth. Affixed to the wall above it was the eponymous Fiery Hand, supposedly a miraculous object risen in flames from the sea, actually a large chunk of driftwood that looked vaguely like a hand if you squinted at it. Its gilt, illiberally applied, was peeling off in patches. Not counting us, there were seven devotees, the four priests and two acolytes. A severe woman hovering by the door with a rent-box in her hands was not, I think, part of the congregation.
The chanting quavered to a close. One of the priests sat down, and was hauled to his feet again by hissed imprecations from the others. Not very well rehearsed, I noted. Somebody prompted them from behind the door, which was open a crack; they jumped to stand in pairs on either side of it, forming a kind of archway with their big wooden gloves. The door opened. The high priest swept through.
Gil Trilogy 2: Scion's Lady Page 1
