Gil Trilogy 2: Scion's Lady

by Rebecca Bradley

  "And after that?"

  "That's what nobody knows. Zaine is the limit of the known world. Of course there are those," I said, settling back happily, grinning up at the merciless sky, "specifically the Lucians, who believe the sea on the far side of Zaine pours down the side of an immense boiling cauldron, where the spirits of the wicked drown endlessly inside little wooden cages—surely you've read the Lucian Maledicta, Shree?"

  "I remember avoiding it," he said drily.

  "Very wise. Horrible minds, the Lucians. The gentle Plaviset, on the other hand, believe the earth to be a great pottery bowl of water covered by a tortoise-shell, the inner surface of which forms the sky—in which case there would be nothing much beyond Zaine but the line where the shell meets the rim of the bowl, and our fate would depend entirely on how hard we smashed into it. Whereas the Storican theory involves a great ring of fire encircling—"

  "Tig?"

  "Yes, Shree?"

  "What do you think is beyond Zaine?"

  "My own opinion?"

  "Your own opinion."

  "More sea." I smiled at him. "And more land, maybe. The unknown world."

  Shree sighed, after which we all sat quietly in the sun watching one of the navigators being hoisted up the forward mast to get a wider view, which was mildly entertaining because navigators tend to be overfed as well as arrogant. When that began to pall, Shree grunted and produced a long flat box out of his tunic pocket—the fingersticks. He looked at me questioningly.

  "Why not? There's nothing useful we can do, and nothing's going to be known for sure until the stars come out."

  So Shree dealt the sticks and we began the first of many games. As it happened, however, we did not have to wait for the stars to appear.

  The Frath Major came on deck not long after the sun reached the zenith. I was winning for once and Shree and Chasco between them owed me just under seventeen million gold Calloonic palots, or roughly six times the pre-storm value of the Tasiil and contents, including Rinn's jewellery. Since we didn't have any actual gold, we were using smashed tiles from the ruined gazebo as markers, at fifty thousand palots per fragment, and betting big. I waved genially at the Frath Major, but the stakes were too high for me to interrupt the game. He stood alone by the remains of the railing, looking over the ominously empty sea, until the captain and one of the navigators came up to him with humble salutes and engaged him in conversation.

  Suddenly, a cry from the bowsprit echoed the length of the ship. "Landsight!" We leapt to our feet, scattering fingersticks and chunks of tile over the deck, and ran towards the bow. We weren't the only ones, the Frath Major being just ahead of me in leaping down to the lower foredeck and the navigator just behind me. A little cluster of sailors on the forward point of the deck parted respectfully to let us through. Some of the faces were puzzled—others were distinctly fearful.

  The so-called landsight wasn't much to my weak eyes, nothing more than a distant disturbance in the water. Beside me, the Frath Major said softly in Miisheli, "Well, navigator?"

  The navigator was silent for a few moments, then said, "Wait a little, Great Frath, until we get closer."

  "Don't you recognize it?" Softly. Not well pleased.

  The navigator shot a despairing glance at the Frath Major; I got the feeling that more than his pride might be about to suffer, in that high Miisheli lords are unforgiving of incompetence in their underlings. But, looking around the faces of the other sailors as the current carried us on towards that insignificant pimple on the ocean's great green bum, I realized that not one of these experienced men of the sea had ever set eyes on this pimple before. I raised my eyebrows at Chasco. He answered in the fingerspeech: unknown.

  Better and better, I told myself. The known world would be a safer place if the Lady and I weren't in it. Rinn would be disappointed—she'd left half her jewels in Cansh Miishel. The Frath would be disappointed—whatever game he was playing was finished now, the gameboard upset, the pieces scattered. We were lost in the unknown.

  Or so I hoped.

  The landsight was close enough now so that even I could make out the shape. It was maybe the length of the Tasiil, a barren double-peaked chunk of rock rising almost sheer out of the water, no beach, no reef, no visible landing place, no trace of vegetation except for some dark patches near the waterline that might have been a scum of seaweed. The only sign that other beings had passed this way was a conical cairn of white boulders, which I judged to be about twelve feet tall, on the summit of the higher peak. That should have been diagnostic, if this were the known world. My hopes soared.

  I glanced around again at the sailors' faces, finding a selection of furrowed brows, pursed lips, puzzled eyes, until I came to one, the most unexpected of all, the last man on the ship (except myself) whom you'd expect to identify an oceanic landsight, and found the face tight with shock, the eyes wide with recognition. Discreetly, I poked him in the side.

  "Shree," I hissed into his ear, "what's the matter with you? You look like you've seen a ghost."

  "I have." He made no attempt to keep his voice down. The Frath Major turned to him, frowning.

  "Do you know this place, Warlord?"

  Shree, his eyes still fixed on the island, nodded.

  "Then tell us." The Frath scowled at his navigator, who cowered, probably foreseeing himself swabbing decks by sunset.

  Shree pushed forward, his eyes not leaving the island. His hands were clenched into fists. When he reached the bowrail, he leaned over it to peer intently down into the calm, clear water.

  "Well, then?" demanded the Frath Major, in the voice of a man who resents having to ask more than once. "Tell us where we are, Warlord."

  And still Shree gazed into the water, then back to the island as if calculating its distance from the ship, then back to the water.

  "Don't blame the navigator, Great Frath," he said. "There's no reason for a sailor to know this place."

  "Then how do you know it?" The Frath was reaching the limit of his patience, but Shree only smiled.

  "I grew up under its shadow," he said.

  The words seemed to echo in the hush. The Frath's frown deepened. As for me, I could feel ice starting to form along my backbone and spread through the surrounding tissues.

  "I was taken to that cairn to make sacrifice, on the day I became a man," Shree went on calmly. "He was a prisoner of war—Glishoran, I think. The first blood I ever spilled, may the gods of Glishor forgive me, but that's how things were in the warcourt of Sher."

  At the mention of Sher, the sailors around us began to mutter restlessly. The Frath, his face pale, gazed at the island with dread in his eyes. Shree seemed not to notice; he carried on in the same quiet, nostalgic tones.

  "If you asked the protection of Raksh," he said, "you first had to give him something, and blood was the only thing he had any use for. Speaking as a memorian, I'm sure that accounts for much of the history of Sher." He narrowed his eyes, peering not at the island but at the smooth water around its base. "The temple might be visible if the sea's clear enough—it wasn't far below the summit."

  I forced myself to move, to swing Shree around and take him by the shoulders.

  "Where are we?"

  He shook himself free, a touch of colour returning to his face. "Come now, Tig, you must have figured it out by now. It's the Tooth of Raksh, Sher's holy mountain; and, I suppose, all that's left of Sher—above water, anyway." He took me in turn by the shoulders, swung me to face the island, the holy mountaintop, and pointed down into the clear, sunlit waters. "Take a good look, Scion of Oballef. Iklankish should be directly below us."

  * * *

  16

  THE SAILORS WERE mumbling charms against danger, against the dead, against the dark hosts of vengeful spirits said to inhabit the water that covered lost Iklankish, but I barely heard them. My eyes were following the shafts of sunlight down into the water, through the green-tinted clarity of the upper layers, deep into the murkier bands where the light beg
an to spread itself, mote by golden mote, among the suspended particles and the little moving shadows.

  "Careful, Tig." Shree was still holding my shoulders, but I pulled free to bend far over the rail, straining my eyes to follow the sunshafts—hardly noticing when one kind of gold merged with another, and the two rose together to draw me down. Their combined pull was irresistible.

  "Tigrallef?"

  "Scion!"

  The voices faded. The water felt warm on my skin, and not particularly wet—I found myself wondering if a fish is any more conscious of the water surrounding it than a bird is conscious of the air. I also wondered what would happen when I needed to breathe, but the impulse never came.

  I fell slowly, arms and legs spread, pinwheeling through the water like a starfish in a smooth downwards spiral. The seabed was dim below me, obscured by grey clouds of ooze, or silver clouds of fish, but now and then when the clouds parted I caught a glimpse of concentric circles and intersecting lines, a suggestion of pattern and symmetry blurred by the bottom sediments. Then I broke through the clouds and the drowned city of Iklankish was spread out below me like a faded map of itself.

  It was built on what used to be a coastal plain between the mountain and the sea—it was rather like a small mountain itself, a kind of artificial volcanic cone, a series of massive circular walls centred on and rising towards a great round citadel bristling with towers. I looked around for the satellite city of the warcourt, but it was lost in the turbid shadows of the Tooth of Raksh.

  And still I fell. This was so clearly a dream, and such a painfully interesting one, that I had no fear of being pulped when I hit bottom. The towers spun towards me, closer and closer; I could see now that they were topless, crumbling, and that sea-vines with long sinuous leaves were twined lushly around them as ivy might smother the stones of a ruin on land.

  And still I fell. In moments I was among the towers glancing into empty window-holes as I dropped past them, brushed by the waving fronds of the sea-vines, glimpsing murals inside more fantastic than any human hand had ever painted—murals of seagrowths and coiled shells and anemones in soft luminous colours; saw the street approaching, twisted in the water like a cat, and landed with a gentle thump on my two feet, ankle-deep in ooze.

  I looked around in the green twilight. I was on a street of tall cheek-by-cheek houses, actually shells of houses, all the roofs gone and the wooden doors and shutters eaten to nothing, the stones suspended perilously over gaps left by vanished wooden beams, balanced as though a touch might send the whole fragile construction tumbling into the ooze. Over the seaweed-ridden tops of the houses, I could see one of the great city walls rising, so thickly shrouded in seawrack that it looked like the world's most overgrown garden hedge.

  "Anybody here?" I called out. There was no reply except a current wafting windlike past my face and stirring the sediment into little whorl-devils at my feet; also, perhaps, a few curious fish, but I saw them only at the corners of my vision, and they were gone before I could turn.

  A metal nameplate was set into the wall beside a door down the street; I skated across to it, raising a knee-high carpet of ooze, and found the inscription was still legible although the plate itself had corroded into a film of metal on the stone: Kasakr, Apothecary. At last, one of my victims had a name. I scratched at the metal with my fingernail and watched as it flaked off and floated downwards in a lazy shower.

  "Hoy! Kasakr? Anyone?" No one. That annoyed me—it was my dream, a product of my own guilty conscience, and if I wanted to be harrowed by hosts of reproachful phantoms, that was my right. It was the only reason I could think of for being there. "Come out, you poor murdered sons of shulls!" I shouted. "I'm here! Come and get me!"

  There was a clatter behind me; I whirled hopefully, but it was only a loose stone giving up the struggle to stay in balance. No accusing faces appeared at the windows, no fleshless hands reached for me out of the yawning doorways. I was getting frustrated.

  "Come on now," I called. "I'm the one who did it. I murdered you. You've been haunting me for six years, damn it—why stop now?"

  A spangled fish nosed out of a gaping window to see what the row was about and gave me a long, cold stare. That was all the response I got. In a sudden fury, I kicked at a mossgrown stone lying beside the doorway; realized too late it was a skull, banged my own forehead against the jamb in remorse, picked up the skull and tenderly dusted the silt off it. Kasakr the Apothecary? I thought not. The skull was too small, more likely a relic of one of my younger victims. I held it for a moment, then replaced it gently where I had found it, turned and trudged away.

  The street curved around to meet one of the radial avenues, broad and perfectly straight, that cut Iklankish into four equal quadrants. I paused on the intersection, convinced for a moment that I was not alone. The illusion was short-lived. Down the centre of the avenue stood a long queue of green man-monsters with misshapen heads, goitred throats and great humps on their backs, their grand conquering postures bloated by seamoss and colonies of limpets. These, I supposed, were the statues of the Hammers of Iklankish; Shree had described them to me as being of dubious decorative value to begin with, and they hadn't aged well. Their still, swollen faces glared at me as I passed.

  I turned inwards on the avenue, towards the centre of the city, following the swathe of the road to a grand, high-jambed gateway with massive green copper gates hanging askew from their hinges. It was not easy going. Dream or not, I had to wade through waist-high beds of sea grass, clamber over slippery pillars, menacing hillocks of seamoss that might once have been chariots or horses or humans, spongy tussocks that grabbed at my feet and had things in them, nasty unsavoury things, sharp things, gelid things, things that popped under pressure; I tried to swim over them, but that apparently contravened the logic of the dream, and I was obliged to do it the hard way. It seemed to take hours to reach the gate.

  At last the remains of the lintel hung precariously far above me. The rest of it was on the ground, partially blocking the gate, overlying something that looked like a riding-litter, very fancy under a coating of mud and slime. As I scrambled across it, I saw that the passenger was still lolling inside it on great mouldy puffballs of cushions, but he was not the accuser I was searching for. Only the sea vines twined around him were keeping his bones together, and he moved only in response to the current. I stepped inside the gate.

  Before me was the citadel, the Hub of Iklankish, sometime residence of the Princes of Sher. A broad compound separated the gate from what appeared to be a grand entrance to the inner citadel, but the destruction was more dramatic here and the enclosure was impassably choked. I gave up immediately and started to turn away—there was a whole city to wander about and reproach myself in—but then a flicker of light inside the cavernous ruin of the keep caught my eye.

  It was the Lady. I should have known she'd be somewhere about. She floated out through the shattered doorway of the citadel, and I noted with interest and some envy that her feet, unlike mine, were keeping well above the top of the debris. Her features were indistinct through the drifting silver hair, but I thought she had a look of Rinn this time. She glanced around as she approached me and made a deprecating gesture at the drowned courtyard, the rubble, the tottering towers of the citadel.

  I said, "Why do you get to swim, when I have to walk?"

  She gazed at me through her cloud of hair and started to drift away inside the enclosure, along the inner edge of the great city wall. She was beckoning to me to follow. I thought it over and concluded I should. Perhaps this very detailed hallucination wasn't the work of my guilty conscience after all; perhaps the Lady had brought me here for a purpose of her own, in which case I was partly curious and partly eager to get it over with. With a sigh, I set off, clambering and picking my way after her through the rubble.

  The debris formed a treacherous slope up the inner face of the great wall, partly stabilized in places by seamoss and creepers, but still as awkward to climb as a gravel s
cree on a mountainside. As I toiled upwards I caught glimpses of what composed the mound—a motley jumble of bones and skulls and smashed furniture, distinctively Sherkin tableware (I'd washed a few in my time), beakers and krishank and broken pots and fragments of masonry, all softly blanketed with a layer of slit. The Lady was hovering about halfway up the slope, meditating on something at her feet.

  I managed the last few feet on my hands and knees and examined the spot without being impressed. It looked like the same pathetic mix of rubbish as the rest of the slope. I glared up at the Lady.

  "So what?" I demanded.

  She didn't reply, just continued staring at the same spot, so I muttered a bit and followed her example. This time, a little current riffled the surface of the silt, exposing something that glittered in the dim light with the true and incorruptible gleam of gold. I reached down and uprooted a patch of waterclover, flicked away an indignant crab and cleared away the silt.

  He was buried to the neck in the rubble and his head was flung back as if he'd been trying to catch a last glimpse of the sky before he died. The lower jaw was pushed to one side, giving the skull a sneer rather than the death-grin I had seen too many times. A gold hoop was lying in about the right position to have been hanging from his vanished earlobe, but it was not the object that had gleamed at me through the silt.

  Around the vault of the skull, pinning down a few wisps of hair that might once have been red, was a gold circlet—heavy and ostentatious and not at all to my taste, spiked with great gaudy chunks of crystal and jade. A princely diadem, Sherkin-style. Carefully, I uncrowned the Prince of Sher, admired the bauble for a moment, then tossed it away and watched it tumble downslope until it was lost among the other rubbish.

  "Empires always fall, Scion."

  Startled, I looked up. "Not usually into the water, Lady."

  "But empires always fall," she repeated.

  "I know. Twitches in the eyelid of eternity, that sort of thing. Did you bring me down here just to tell me that?"