Gil Trilogy 2: Scion's Lady

by Rebecca Bradley

  "I'm coming to it," I said. The scrubber had finished inside the chamber now, and was busily stoning the step in front of the processional door. It would not be long now. "She drifted like that for several days; probably in the same current that caught the Tasiil, because she remembers passing an island that sounds like the Tooth of Raksh, and she said the sea for miles around it was covered with debris and floating bodies—"

  I paused here. Now I could see it for myself, the flotsam of Sher: Calla's little boat bumped along the barnacled hull of a great ship, turtleways in the water like the back of a whale with a skin condition; nosed through great mats of greenery, roots and all, floating islands that spun slowly in the current and broke apart and formed themselves again on either side of her; and all around there were knots and clumps and crowds and whole concourses of the people of Sher, all silent, all bloated. A wooden chair, wondrously carved and satin-seated, kept pace with the smallboat for a long time before becoming entangled in one of those floating islands; a tapestry undulated gently on the surface of the waves nearby. Calla retrieved this one artifact and used it to shade herself from the sun, but how could I have known that? She had not mentioned it. The only sound in my ears was the sea-kites squabbling over the greatest abundance of carrion they would ever know . . .

  "Go on," said Shree.

  "What? Sorry. Where was I? Oh yes—she drifted for days, she said, until the food was gone and the water was almost gone, and by then she must have crossed the whole of Sher, because she was picked up by fishermen from Vassashinay who were combing the flotsam above Kishti on the south coast. She says half the houses in Vassashinay are furnished with Sher's leavings. Of course they saw the ruins of her dress and thought she was a Sherkint, and some of them were in favour of sacrificing her then and there to the seagods, but others thought she'd make a tastier morsel for the volcano—look there, Shree."

  A young man in a white robe was crossing the courtyard. He stopped and exchanged a few words with the woman scrubbing the doorstone, and then laughed and stepped over her and vanished through the processional door. I felt my heart thudding like a pestle.

  Shree said impatiently, "So? That's the Kalkissann, isn't it? We've seen him already."

  "No. He's not the Kalkissann." I watched the doorway with fierce intensity, but it remained empty.

  Shree sighed. "You're getting worse by the day. Raksh knows what you'll be like in your old age. Just get on with your story, I'm almost starting to believe you."

  "They brought her to Vassashinay and gave her to the Sacellum," I said obediently, not ceasing to watch the doorway. "She told them she was a Gilwoman being borne off to Iklankish—so the Divinatrix examined her and confirmed her story, and took her into the Sacellum as a Daughter, and here she is. Then—"

  "Hold on a minute. What do you mean, confirmed her story? The Vassashin knew our customs as well as anyone, poor sods; she'd have to be a pregnant concubine for the governor of Gil to be sending her to Iklankish."

  "Exactly."

  "But Calla wasn't—"

  I let my gaze leave the doorway long enough to give him my most dazzling smile. His jaw dropped.

  "You don't mean—"

  I nudged him to shut up. Action in the courtyard. The youth was just coming out of the processional door, carrying an archery target and a sack. The fair-headed child was right behind him. Shree looked from him to me and back again, and leaned on the windowsill murmuring a string of Sheranik oaths in a voice of pure wonder.

  "That child," I said, "is the Kalkissann, the Great Saviour. But the name Calla calls him by is Verolef—the Scion's tag, notice. The Lady would have let her drown without a thought, except that she was carrying a Scion inside her. And so here they are—the two of them."

  Behind us, the legs of the table and pallet began to tap on the stone-flagged floor. I swung around and glared at them both. "Stop that," I said. They stopped immediately. I turned back to the window, forgetting them at once, and lost myself in the spectacle of my son at his lessons.

  The first thing I noticed, bless heaven, was that he looked more like Arkolef's child than mine. He was wearing a short brown shift that ended at his shapely brown knees, and there was no hood this time, so that his bowl of bright yellow hair shone in the sun. When he took the small willow-bow from his tutor, he moved like a natural athlete, sturdy and graceful, and his first shot struck the target not far from its centre.

  Shree draped his arm around my shoulders as we watched. This was rare for him. He had stopped swearing, and made no comment when I had to turn around to reprove the furniture again. There was a broad smile on his face throughout.

  After we'd watched for a while he said, "He's got promise, but that tutor's a three-fingered clown. When we're out of here, I'll teach the boy how to shoot and fight properly."

  I smiled back. "And I'll make sure he knows how to reckon and read."

  We watched for a long time, until Chasco came in and I had another welcome chance to tell Calla's story, while the sun smiled down like a promise on the Sacellum and, far above us, the mountaintop grumbled and spat fire.

  * * *

  29

  AT THE APPOINTED time, an hour before the sun reached the zenith, a party of novices came to rout us out and ready us for the first rites of the divination. They carried buckets of warm water scented with herbs for us to wash ourselves in, plain white robes for us to put on after, and no solid food, only trays of a bitter broth in which I thought I detected a taste of masollar. When we were properly washed, dressed and dosed, the novices led us into the courtyard.

  The archery target was gone and there was no sign of my son or his tutor, but Calla was there among many others; I recognized her by the black surplice and also by the greeting she flashed at me with her fingers while pretending to adjust her veil. Shree drew his breath in sharply and I knew he had seen the greeting as well. There was no sound from Chasco, but that was characteristic—he had accepted the news of her survival with well-bred restraint and a few matter-of-fact questions.

  I saw at that time what I had been too dazed to realize before, that Calla was no ordinary Daughter of Fire. The black surplice set her apart, of course, but she was also one of only three standing directly behind the Divinatrix, well in front of the massed columns of red robes and veils. I felt a surge of pride in Calla, pride that she had risen to such high rank by her own qualities in this foreign place, and pride that my son Verolef, the Kalkissann, was held in reverence by an entire nation. I was still not thinking very clearly.

  Rinn was being quite tractable, for her. I could not help wondering how she looked in Calla's eyes. Her hair was a glittering rainbow flowing loose down her back, and the white robe gave her a virginal aspect that struck me as almost unbearably funny. She stood beside me, swaying slightly, possibly a little befuddled still by the masollar, while the Divinatrix raised her stubby arms in the long flame-coloured sleeves and began to speak.

  Shree was on my other side, and I felt him stiffen a few seconds before I stiffened myself. What we were hearing could not be real—but the longer I listened, the surer I became that my ears were telling the truth. The nonsense syllables unwinding in a long string from Valsoria's mouth were familiar, and were not, strictly speaking, nonsense. She rolled them out with impressive power for such little lungs, and the Daughters responded with a strange melodic roar at the end of every line, something like this:

  Elas aro aro tili

  Pilian aro elian

  Elas caro calos pili

  Aro aro elian

  Pili pilian varo eli

  Pilian aro elian

  Elian aro calos vili

  Aro aro elian . . .

  And so forth. Valsoria's dark eyes were fixed on my face as she intoned line after line, stanza after stanza, of a language that I had never understood, but which had been drummed into my head from earliest childhood, the lost language that Oballef had brought with him to Gil, the tongue in which the Wills and the Caveat were couched.
Although the sequences and combinations were unfamiliar, there was no question about the words. Inside, I felt revulsion struggling with the excitement of being handed the key to a long-locked treasure-house.

  Then the Lady addressed me directly, her words resonating through Valsoria's chant. Scion—I told you the Great Tree, the Naar, was once rooted in this place.

  So you did, so you did. Whatever the Naar is. But this—Lords of Fathan, what a find this is! And tucked away all this time, behind the back of nowhere—

  Beware of Valsoria. She is more and less than she seems. I guided you here to find that Other, and now that we have found him, we must take him and go.

  Yes, I fully intend to—but this is unbelievable! Why, maybe she can translate the Caveat for me—

  The Divinatrix is less than she seems. She speaks with the tongue of the Naarhil, but she does not know all that it means. She cannot help you. And she would not help you—she is more than she seems. The Harashil was not intended for her kind. Think of Itsant. Think of Myr. Think of Fathan. Think of Gil . . .

  Stop! I'm thinking, Lady, that even if Valsoria can't translate the Caveat, she may have enough texts here to enable me to decipher it myself. And maybe then I'll know how to get rid of you.

  (I had not intended that last to come out, but it is hard to dissemble when you're talking to someone inside your own head.) The Lady answered: the two are one, seed of the Excommunicant. And when you need to know what the Caveat means, I shall tell you.

  What was that? What did you say?

  Ask, and I shall tell you—in our own time.

  Abrupt silence internally, while externally Valsoria's voice rose in pitch and the ancient words continued to roll into the hot noontime air. Damn the Lady! I was shaking with fury. Maybe I had never asked her directly what the Caveat meant—but she knew my mind, didn't she? She was right inside it, by Fathan! She knew very well I'd be eager to understand the Caveat, quite apart from any scholarly obsession, so that I could know the nature of the surpassing oddness that had fallen on me and was deepening day by day. I railed at her in my head, probably mouthing the words and grinding my teeth too, because I sensed Rinn glancing sideways at me. I grunted when Shree's elbow dug warningly into my other side. Valsoria chanted on without losing her rhythm, but she was watching me as an eagle watches a fox cub that has wandered from the den. Calla, behind her, was standing straight and still with her knuckles whitened over the handle of the oil-jar. I got the impression that she was watching me through her veil, and was worried by what she saw. I smoothed my face with some difficulty and pressed my lips together.

  Lady in Gil—Harashil—whatever you are—why didn't you tell me this before?

  Did you not know you could ask me? The two are one, twig of the Great Naar—yours the will, mine the hands, ours the power. Ask me anything.

  I swallowed my rage. All right, I'll do that: what is the Caveat? Tell me what the words mean?

  This is not our day, Scion.

  I'd have gone for her throat then if she'd had one, but I was distracted at that point anyway by the first tremors of quite a respectable earthquake, which may or may not have been my doing; after all, we were standing on the flank of a restless volcano that was fully capable of shaking without my encouragement. Whoever was doing it, the fire-gods or me, it had the peculiar effect of calming me down, whereas Rinn shrieked with terror, the Divinatrix paused in her chanting and even the Daughters, who must have been accustomed to this sort of thing, showed signs of disquiet at the long duration of the tremors. When at last the ground stopped shaking, the Lady seemed to be gone, and no amount of mental bellowing could attract her attention.

  At least the earthquake, if I could take credit for it, supported the theory that had been forming in my mind: that the Lady's magical activities took place mainly when my rational mind was being assaulted by some powerful emotion. I went over what incidents I could remember—it could be grief and anger, for example, that almost choked the Primate to death on a mouthful of wine, terror that sent the parth-asp packing, fury that shook the ground, joy that drew flowers out of dead bushes and grass out of bare rock, destroyed crockery and set the furniture dancing. The storm that blew the Tasiil off course could have arisen out of shock at realizing I had not destroyed the Lady, mixed with disgust at the jubilant Miisheli preparations for spilling yet more barrels of blood. Admittedly, I was half-asleep for the grisly death of the Frath Minor, my would-be assassin, but that was not a counterproof: sleep could lower the barriers of my reason as effectively as emotion.

  What bothered me most was that the effect seemed to be strengthening, as if, with every day that passed, the spark of my own soul came closer and closer to being swallowed by the flaming great bonfire that was the Lady; as if, despite my best efforts at resistance, the two were truly becoming One. And if this were the case, and I could find no way to stop the slow, insidious process of melding—who, or what, would that One be?

  Shree prodded me from behind. Valsoria's chant was finished and she had already turned around and was pacing along an aisle opened for her through the congregation of Daughters, preceded by Calla and the two in scarlet surplices. Though nothing was said, it seemed to be taken for granted that we supplicants would follow them. Taking Rinn by the elbow, I paced slowly behind the Divinatrix towards the processional door.

  We stepped through into the chamber I had glimpsed from the outside, a small bare room, longer than it was wide, with a heavy wooden door in each of the walls. Those on either side of us were small and plain, and I guessed they led to the Daughters' living quarters, but the doorway straight ahead of us was high and broad and double-leafed, with blackstone lintel and jambs that appeared featureless at first glance—only when I was passing through them did I see they were carved in intricate low relief with hundreds upon hundreds of minutely detailed hieroglyphs. I had a feeling that the doorframe was much older than the building it was now set into.

  It led into a corridor broad enough for four to walk abreast, which after a few steps began to slope downwards, and then levelled out again after a few more. Ahead of us, far beyond the reach of the dim light from the foyer, a faint red glow silhouetted the figures of the Divinatrix and her three lieutenants. I counted my paces as we passed along the corridor, and calculated that it was nearly two hundred feet from end to end. We were moving deep into the mountain—I began to understand how the Sacellum, which looked so small from the outside, could house so many Daughters.

  The air thickened and grew hotter as we advanced along the corridor towards the diffuse red glow. From behind us came the voices of the Daughters chanting as they followed, the music blurring and swelling in that confined space until it seemed that a thousand-strong choir was on our heels. All at once the silhouettes of the four figures ahead of us appeared to grow shorter and then to vanish into the floor; a few steps further, and I could see why.

  Rinn and I were standing in a portal midway along the curved edge of a great cavern, a buried amphitheatre, its ceiling arching up into shadows, its floor sloping down and around like a fan-shaped section cut out of a funnel. Except for the wedge of smooth stone floor descending straight from the doorway, the sides of this funnel were terraced into twenty or more rows of curved stone benches, enough seating to accommodate all the Daughters I'd seen and still be half-empty.

  The red glow was emanating from a large circular well at the point of the fan—at least eighteen feet across, I estimated as we walked down the stone ramp towards it, with a low stone parapet dividing it from the lowest tier of benches. It appeared to be bisected by a black stripe of darkness, which, as we got closer, turned into a narrow stone bridge spanning it from the foot of the ramp to a raised platform, like a stage, cutting further into the heart of the mountain; and on that stage, one Daughter in a plain scarlet robe was kneeling before a massive black altar. The floor was warm under our feet.

  Valsoria continued alone across the bridge to join the solitary Daughter, while Calla and her
two colleagues stopped to bar the way, the three of them standing shoulder to shoulder across the bridgehead. Out of curiosity, I moved around them to the parapet and peered down into the well. A blast of burning air hit my face; the well was a stone-lined pit floored with liquid fire that simmered and bubbled and cast up tortured vapour-shapes, only a few feet below me. Live lava, molten lava. One of the Daughters, not Calla, grasped my arm to pull me away; Calla herself motioned to me to sit in the lowest tier of benches, closest to the well, with Rinn on one side of me and Coll and Shree on the other. Chasco and the Vassashin supplicants were in the same tier, on the far side of the ramp.

  I looked across the pit of fire to the platform. The Divinatrix was standing with her face towards us, between the kneeling Daughter and the altar. Her eyes were closed, her hands were on the girl's veiled head and she was chanting to herself. The Daughters entered carrying lighted candles and spread themselves, tier by tier, throughout the amphitheatre. Their song echoed from wall to wall, and was the purest and most intricate harmony I had ever heard. Every word that I could pick out was in Oballef's forgotten language.

  Shree nudged me and I looked quickly back at the platform. Calla and her cohorts were just filing across the bridge—no handrails, I noted, one false step and they'd be shrieking cinders within a second or two. Valsoria had her back to us now, and her arms were raised over her head as she addressed something invisible to me, deep in the shadows beyond the altar. I wondered uneasily if the kneeling girl was going to have something gruesome and final happen to her, like a quick fling over the parapet into the bubbling flames; but I was about to learn that human sacrifice can take many forms, and not all of them are immediately fatal.