She shook my hand away from her mouth. "Why?" Her brows were drawn together. "The Lady is broken and gone—the Scions of Oballef are just like other men now, so how can you be worth so much to the Miishelu? And if they wouldn't respect sanctuary, Valsoria might agree to hide you on one of the other islands until they're gone."
I hesitated. "The Lady can't be discounted so easily."
"What do you mean? You broke the thing, you told me so yourself."
I hesitated again. I half-expected the Lady to rise up and block me, to throw a golden screen between myself and my own words, but everything was dark and quiet inside my skull. In as few words as possible, I told Calla why, unhappily and against my will, I was still of absorbing interest to the powers that wanted to rule the known world. Her face set into bleaker and bleaker lines.
When I had finished, she reached up and broke off one of the hitherto-unmentioned blossoms from the bush over our heads, and moved her fingers from the lush petals to the dry dead stalk that held them.
"So the Scions are still cursed," she said softly.
"I'm very happy to hear you say that," I said, feeling both surprised and pleased. "I have trouble getting Shree and Chasco to see it as a curse."
"I'm thinking of Vero as well as you."
Her voice was dull, and I experienced a peculiar catching of the heart. That aspect of the matter had not occurred to me before. My son was also a Scion. Other dangers suddenly took shape, dark speculative structures built in my imagination out of the pieces of the truth I already held, but gaping here and there with great dark holes. Who else, I wondered uneasily, held pieces of the truth? The Bequiin Ardin, probably, and through him the Frath Major; the various assassins and ill-wishers who had inconvenienced me; perhaps the Divinatrix herself? After all, there was the possibility of the Naarhil texts . . .
"Calla," I said urgently, sitting up straight and putting my hands on her shoulders, "this is important. The history of the Sacellum, the words of the divination ritual—tell me everything you know."
She knew enough to fill only one page of my notebook when I returned to the Sacellum at dawn, but my speculations filled four pages more. I knew where we were now: one of Valsoria's many titles, rarely used and not widely known, was "the Heretrix of Vizzath." So this, I speculated, was the Vizzath of old, and the Lady had indeed been here before under a different name, as had my ancestors; and the empire of Vizzath had been mighty for a time, and then had fallen, as empires have a curious habit of doing. I scribbled away excitedly, with a strong feeling that the Lady was looking over my shoulder.
Calla knew of no books or scrolls in Valsoria's possession; the incantatory songs of the Daughters were learned by rote as novices, and it was forbidden to write them down, on pain of penalties of a thought-provoking ferocity. However—and my pen trembled as I recorded this—Valsoria had a sanctum into which no other Daughter was ever permitted, where no novices ever cleaned, and which no eyes but Valsoria's had seen since Hassana, the previous Divinatrix, had died; and Valsoria herself had first entered it on the eve of Hassana's death. It had been kept a closely guarded secret from the Sherank through all their centuries of brutal invasion and occupation, perhaps the only chamber in all of Vassashinay that had remained closed to them. Calla knew where it was and had seen the door, deep in the mountain, but it was locked, and only Valsoria held the key. There, I told myself, was where the Naarhil texts would be found. If they existed.
Shree came in at some point, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. He yawned and flopped down on my still-unused pallet.
"Don't tell me. A love poem."
"I wish it were," I said, frowning. I blotted the page carefully and tossed the notebook over to him. "Look at the last few pages."
Muscle by muscle, he became alert as he read, but he turned over the last page as if expecting something more substantial. "Vizzath, eh? You've mentioned that name before. Well, well, well." He tossed the notebook back. "This is fascinating, Tig, but I don't see why you're worried."
"Everything about the Lady and her history worries me. I wish we could leave tonight."
"I'm sure we could, if you'd call on the Lady."
"We've been through that." Annoyed, I opened the notebook in front of me, picked up my pen again and started to write, ignoring him.
"Forget I mentioned it." He got up. "We're just on our way down to the harbour to see how the lorsk is getting on. Don't fret, we'll be back in time for the Oracle. One thing: is there any way the Divinatrix can connect you with Calla? Or with the child?"
I relented and put the pen down. "No, thank the gods. Calla swears she's never mentioned me. The Vassashin still think Verolef was fathered by a Sherkin. There's nothing to connect us."
"What about Calla's reaction when she first saw us? How did she explain that?"
"She told them she'd suddenly felt ill."
"I hope they believed her."
I smiled wryly. "She spent much of the evening making herself throw up, just to add a certain colour to her story."
"Good for her." Shree nodded with appreciation. "My cousin always was a resourceful girl. I'm looking forward to meeting her again."
We heard Chasco and Coll talking in the corridor; Shree went to the door and stopped beside it. "Don't worry so much, Tig," he said, "as long as the Lady behaves herself for the next couple of days, I think we'll be safe." He waved and went out, and I heard the three of them clumping confidently down the corridor. I sighed, wishing I could be so sure of a happy outcome.
The next two days and nights passed uneventfully. The Lady kept pretty much to herself, although the crockery continued to suffer. I continued to spend my daylight hours alternately tickling and smoothing Rinn's feathers, filling pages and pages of my notebook with puzzled speculations, snatching what glimpses I could of Calla and my son, and worrying—above all, worrying. Something wrong was in the air, but I could not guess what—I could not even tell whether the Lady shared my sense of danger and foreboding. Nobody else did.
Rinn was happy. On the first of those afternoons, in the middle of a spate of rubbish about some property dispute on the outskirts of Vass, Valsoria produced a dramatic reference to snakes in my beloved's hair—not, one would think, the kind of prophecy to produce anything but disgust, but Rinn took the meaning that Valsoria intended her to take. As far as she was concerned, the viper crown was as good as on her head. The next afternoon produced nothing relevant, but by then she was content to wait for the main event. The fire-gods had already proven their good sense.
The Divinatrix continued to pay me no obvious attention, appearing only for the rites of the Oracle. I could think of no way to get more information about the Naarhil texts, and doubted that the attempt would be worthwhile anyway; I had to balance my curiosity and the dim chance of learning something about the Caveat against the very real risk of endangering our escape. And I didn't need the Lady's oft-repeated warnings, since I was already dubious about Valsoria and her motives.
I will write no more about my meetings with Calla on the moon-washed mountainside; I am only a memorian, not a poet. But the tedious days and glory-filled nights passed somehow, and at last it was the morning of the night on which we were to make our quiet departure from Vassashinay; the morning on which everything began to go seriously strange.
* * *
32
I DIDN'T BOTHER to undress that morning, just threw myself on top of the bedclothes when I could no longer keep my eyes open and fell instantly asleep. It had been very hard to part from Calla at dawn. The formless anxiety that had weighed on me for days felt heavier; our escape plan seemed transparent and foolhardy, a child's scheme for playing a trick on its elders. However, since I could see no better alternative, I had watched Calla walk away from me, followed her at the agreed interval and contented myself with scribbling my fears into my notebook as soon as I was back at my table in the Sacellum. When I fell asleep at last, a couple of hours after dawn, my dreams were troubled.
What awoke me was an uproar in the courtyard below my window—shouts, heavy boots, slamming doors—and feet pattering urgently along the corridor outside my door. I lay still for a moment, trying to untangle the strands of my Iklankish dream from what my ears told me. My first clear thought was that the Sacellum was under attack, and this seemed to be confirmed when I was awake enough to stagger to the window. The courtyard was swarming with Miisheli uniforms, the red robes of the Daughters swirling through a melee of battleskins and flashing armour. A shock went through me that splintered to tinderwood every stick of furniture in the room.
Be calm, Scion.
At second glance, nobody was killing anybody. All the weapons in sight were safely in their scabbards or leg-sheaths. The Daughters were neither screaming nor defending themselves; most of them, indeed, were ducking through the mill of troopers with great armloads of bedlinen or crockery. The only confrontation in sight was between Han-Frath Zimin, standing with his back to me in a posture of stubborn insistence, and Lorosa, one of Valsoria's red-surpliced chief priestesses. I could not hear Lorosa's words over the other noise, but she was standing with her arms akimbo and her head back and every so often she would poke at Han-Frath Zimin's breastplate to emphasize a point. The Han-Frath was bravely standing his ground.
My second thought was just about as bad as my first: that the Frath Major had somehow caught wind of Rinn's designs on the viper crown and sent a small army of troopers to carry us all back to Vass in chains, and what price the lorsk then? But that didn't explain the bedlinen; I was puzzling over this when a hush fell on the courtyard and all faces turned to the entrance. The troopers in sight snapped to attention. A moment later, a small party of men moved into my field of view and towards the centre of the courtyard. At the same time, Valsoria herself emerged from the processional door and came to meet them. I counted seven Fraths Minor, the Satheli envoy, the Bequiin Ardin, Lillifer the Burgher of Vass—and the Frath Major.
Shree and Chasco burst into my room about then. They stopped short at the door, looking around at the wreckage of the furniture, then at each other, shaking their heads. Shree clucked his tongue as they picked their way over to the window.
"Raksh knows how we're going to explain this to the housemistress," he said. "The crockery was one thing—"
"Forget the housemistress," I snapped. "Have you seen who's here?"
"Your honourable cousin-by-marriage was coming up the road a few minutes ago. You mean him?"
"Look for yourself."
Lillifer and the Frath Major were bending over the Divinatrix a few feet away from the others, talking earnestly. The Frath straightened and beckoned to Han-Frath Zimin. A few soft words into the Han-Frath's ear, a few barked commands from the Han-Frath, and the milling troopers quietly formed themselves up and marched towards the main gate, leaving only a squad of a dozen or so at a short distance from the party of Fraths Minor. The conference continued.
"What's happening? Any idea?" Turning from the window, I noticed that Chasco had a small water-skin slung across his shoulder and both he and Shree were powdered with dust from the road.
Shree grimaced through the window. "We were going down to the harbour for a last check on the lorsk and met this lot coming up. There's trouble in Vass, Tig, bad trouble."
"What is it? Troopers out of control? Insurrection? What?"
He shook his head, still keeping an eye on the group in the courtyard. "Sickness. A plague."
I shut my eyes and had a momentary vision of people dancing in the dark square of Vass—or was it Gil? "What plague? What kind of sickness?"
"I don't know anything more about it," Shree said grimly, "but Han-Frath Zimin stopped us on the road and advised us not to go down the mountain. They're afraid it's going to break out in Villim next."
"What kind of plague?"
"I told you, I don't know!"
I went to sit down on the chair, remembered it wasn't there any more and instead began to hunt among the debris for my notebook, thinking furiously.
"What are we going to do, Tig?"
I found my notebook and blew the wood-dust and splinters off it. "I suppose we'll leave tonight, as we planned."
"By midday, there'll be a small army of Miisheli troopers camped outside the main gate," Shree reminded me.
"There is another gate—I don't know where, but Calla uses it when she comes back from meeting me."
"But—"
"Quiet, Shree, I'm trying to think." I paced up and down the room, kicking up clouds of sawdust that reminded me of something—what was it? It came to me at last: the billows of ooze that followed my footsteps on the drowned streets of Iklankish. I stood still and forced myself to concentrate.
"Tig?"
"I'm all right. Tonight will still be best, before this damned plague takes hold in Villim or spreads to the Sacellum. I'll get a message to Calla, arrange a place to meet her in the courtyard, and we'll all go down together, tonight. No, wait! Chasco."
"My lord Tigrallef?"
"You'll go down now; we'll find some way to cover for you here. If the Miishelu are still setting up camp, there should be enough confusion for you to slip through to the roadhead without being noticed. You were in the Web, you can get through if anyone can. Go down to Villim, take delivery of the lorsk—can you sail it by yourself?"
"Yes, my lord."
"Good. Move it out of Villim. I remember when we were looking down on the harbour, I saw a cove away from the main beach, around a point of black rock—do you know where I mean?"
"Yes, my lord."
"Anchor there and wait for us. We'll come. Tonight if we can, otherwise tomorrow night, or the night after that, but wait for us."
Chasco grinned and started to raise his hand in the formal parting salute of a Gillish officer-of-the-guard—but stopped himself, and answered in the Web's fingerspeech instead: the Lady be with you.
"She will, she will," I muttered. "Oh, and Chasco! Wait."
He stopped by the door and looked at me questioningly. I ran to the ruins of my clothes-box and poked around until I'd unearthed the satchel holding the few scrolls and books I'd brought with me, and the roll of pens. Shoving the notebook in on top, I thrust the satchel into his hands.
"Take this with you. How many palots are left?"
He caught his breath sharply. "Thirty-eight, my lord." He looked over at Shree, who dug the pouch out of his tunic. I took it and counted out five coins, and handed the rest over to Chasco.
"We'll keep some in case we need to pay a few bribes. You take the rest and see what herbs and physics are worth buying in the marketplace. Wortroot if you can get it, it's good for several kinds of plague, also calfgrass, melis powder and dried corm. Verlessence, if you see any. But Chasco—get out of the marketplace as quickly as you can. Keep your distance from anyone you talk to, and talk to as few people as possible. Do you understand?"
"I understand very well, my lord."
I clapped his shoulder and added a fervent blessing in the fingerspeech. When he was gone, Shree startled me by snapping his fingers in applause.
"Very decisive, Tig. You see, you can take charge when you need to. Myself, I'd forgotten I was carrying the palots. He wouldn't have got far trying to claim the lorsk without the chandler's bonus in his hand."
"If the chandler's there to take it," I said unhappily. "This plague worries me."
"This furniture worries me," said Shree, "and I wonder what the Frath Major will make of it."
"The Frath Major will be delighted, if we can't prevent him from seeing it, because it will confirm all his hopes about me. Come on." I was already brushing myself off and making for the door.
We intercepted the Frath Major and his faithful shadow, the Bequiin, at the foot of the stairs. I stopped dramatically and then rushed to embrace the Frath in the Miisheli fashion.
"Cousin!" I cried. "What a surprise!"
"Is it?" The Frath Major looked at me keenly. I reached past him to greet the Bequiin Ar
din, but the Frath Major moved to block me. The Bequiin stood with his head cast down and the hood of his grey robe pulled forwards.
"Yes, my dear cousin," I said, "a great surprise. I didn't expect to see you until tomorrow evening at the earliest, in Vass. Did you come to have your fortune told as well?" I saw the Bequiin glance up at this, and our eyes met for a broken moment—his were beaten and hopeless.
"We came to escape the plague." the Frath said flatly. "Have you not heard what is happening?"
"Not a word, cousin."
He eyed me suspiciously, as if he suspected me of starting the plague myself. "These islands are cursed," he said bitterly when he'd finished his scrutiny. "They have all gone mad in Vass—they prance about in the streets with pus rolling down their faces, faugh! Bodies lie about in the bushes since yesterday, and nobody thinks to move them or to burn them. Badly managed! No organization! If Miishel had the running of these islands, we would make a few changes."
"The Sherank tried that, I believe."
He bridled at my innocent tone. "Do not jest, Scion. I have seen many plagues, but never a plague like this. When the Tasiil is seaworthy—"
"When will that be?"
He frowned. "Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps the day after. Alas, she was pulled up the rollers just before the plague became known, and I have ordered her down again after the most serious repairs have been finished. We—"
He stopped and whirled around as Coll approached with one of the Daughters behind him. As she stepped past him to greet the Frath Major, I caught sight of the black surplice. Clever Calla, I thought with relief—there was another problem solved. She didn't turn her head in my direction, but it was her hands I was watching anyway. They were held in front of her, low down, out of the Frath's sight, and anyone who saw them might have thought that she was twisting her fingers out of pure nervousness.
Gil Trilogy 2: Scion's Lady Page 24
