Gil Trilogy 1: Lady in Gil

by Rebecca Bradley

  * * *

  28

  THE LEDGE CONTINUED. It was only a couple of spans wide and the rock ballooned above it so that we had to stand slant-bodied with a hand on the clammy wall, but we could see it stretching away from us, almost on the waterline, until it passed around the curve of the Gilgard cliff and was lost to sight. The high-water mark was just above waist level.

  "By the Lady, I wish we'd known about this ledge before!" Calla said. "A secret entrance to the Gilgard—"

  "Do you think the tide's coming in or going out?"

  "How would I know?"

  "We'll find out soon enough. Come on."

  In fact, the tide was coming in, and fast. It came flush with the ledge, then lapped over it; it licked at our ankles and then tugged at them, gaining power with each incoming wave. By the time a tiny wedge of beach came into sight, the water was halfway to our knees and we had to brace ourselves against the strong suck of every retreat.

  The beach was a little pocket of shingle, the first outlier of the flatland that collared the Gilgard on three sides; not much further, and we should encounter the first pickets of the Sherkin guard. But it was enough for the moment to collapse on to the shingle, to rub our soaked and aching calves, to stretch the arms cramped from steadying our bodies against the convex rockface. The mountain loomed over us, sheer and smooth and dizzying; it seemed to extend upwards indefinitely, as if the sky had suddenly polarized into stone and air. Beside me, Calla gasped and covered her eyes with her arm. "It's toppling over," she moaned.

  "It does look like that," I agreed, "but it's only an illusion. You see, the—"

  "Never mind."

  "But—"

  "I don't want to know. Come on, we're wasting time."

  I sighed. Knowing what was ahead, part of me was quite happy to waste time. But the thought of Bekri was a goad; also the conviction that, were we to stop too long, the cold and the numb fatigue that was spreading slowly through our bodies would paralyse us completely. Shaking ourselves like dogs, we set off over the curve of jagged granite boulders that lay between us and the city.

  We came too suddenly on to the edge of the main beach. I had been expecting—dreading—to hear Sherkin patrols long before we got that far. The sea-wall stretched away from us towards the harbour, where the fishing boats and the Sherkin warships lay peacefully at anchor. Too peacefully. It was late afternoon; the fishermen should have been unloading the early catch, or readying the boats for the night-time trawl. At the very least, the menders of nets and cleaners of keels should have been working around the boats pulled half out of the water on to the beach, but not a soul was in sight, neither Sherkin nor Gilman. Only the sluggish susurration of the waves and the whisper of sand grains crawling in a light breeze broke the silence.

  Hugging the sea-wall, we crept to the first set of steps and stood listening. The silence was pervasive and unnerving. No feet, no wains on the corniche above our heads. No market sounds. No voices, though I knew very well that a drinking house was located directly across the corniche, and should have been uproarious at that time of day. I looked at Calla, who shook her head. Her eyes were enormous with puzzlement.

  "Something's wrong," she whispered.

  I didn't bother to reply. Cautiously, we set our feet on the sea-stairs and climbed; as our faces came level with the pavement, we could see that the corniche was indeed deserted. The drinking house was closed and shuttered. Along the street, the stalls of a tiny fishmarket leaned dejectedly together, empty of sellers, buyers and fish. No smoke rose from any of the chimneys, nor from the smokeholes of the hovels festering around the buildings. We climbed the rest of the stairs wordlessly and stole along the corniche.

  "I feel like we're being watched," Calla whispered. I could feel it too—as if a thousand eyes were following our progress and a thousand breaths were being held until we had passed. "Nonsense," I said. We turned up the same street I had followed on my first memorable morning in Gil: deserted.

  "Two days," Calla muttered. "We've only been inside since yesterday morning. What could have happened in such a short time?"

  A plague? I thought. Like Calloon in the Year of Chastening, when three out of four swelled with the poison until their skins burst like rotten fruit? Their memorians had written of silent streets, where the dead lay where they had fallen, and the living fled, and the only sound was the buzz of carrion-flies; and even the flies were silent when they grew too gorged to move. I sniffed the air, but the stench seemed to have no more of death in it than usual. A thin dog drifted out of an alley, saw us, rooted unconcernedly in a pile of rubbish, drifted back into the alley. Nothing else moved.

  Calla laid a hand on my arm. "Listen."

  A concerted tramp-tramp of booted feet, and at least two horses, maybe three. They were in the next cross-street, still distant, but moving our way. We dived for the shelter of the nearest hovel, pushed past the ragged blanket in the entry—and stopped in confusion. A semicircle of wide eyes, of pinched and nervous faces, surrounded us in the gloom. Calla, recovering first, held her hand in a dusty chink of light, and signed: friends. The older woman nodded and we hunkered down on the floor, completing the circle.

  With the tramping from the street in our ears, Calla asked silent questions. What's happening? Why are the streets empty?

  How can you not know? Orders from Kekashr. The name was a claw drawn across the throat.

  Why?

  When has he needed a reason?

  When was the order made?

  This morning. The Pleasure for anyone caught on the street. The Claws for the slightest noise. Keep quiet.

  The patrol had turned into the street, and was approaching with cruel slowness. The younger woman turned a set face down to her sleeping baby. Three small children with aged eyes sat calm and unmoving and perfectly silent, holding hands. I thought of Callefiya's son, safe in Exile—until such time as the Flamens would send him, disastrously primed, to Gil. As the smart clatter of feet and hooves passed the hovel, I looked down at my hands, and found that the knuckles were white around a knife I could not remember drawing. The patrol reached the end of the street, turned on to the corniche, and faded into the distance. Calla stood up.

  We'll endanger you no longer.

  The woman raised her hand to reply, but we were already on our way out of the door. Knowing that inside each hovel crouched a circle of terrified innocents, the desertion of the streets took on another dimension of wrongness and despair. We crept along, hugging the shadows at the edge of the pavement, uncomfortably aware that the topmost towers of the Gilgard commanded a view of the whole city.

  Calla grabbed my elbow. "Did you hear that?"

  "Yes—but I don't think I believed it." It came again, drunken, mournful and woefully off-key; the Lament for the Lady, the unofficial anthem of the new Gil. Just to hum the air meant an appointment with the clawed whips. Mysheba had taught me a few of its countless stanzas, and I had written down as many as I could gather; these lines I did not recognize, a scatalogical and unflattering speculation on Lord Kekashr's personal habits. Despite the circumstances, my fingers itched for a pen.

  "He's out of our way," Calla said. "We should leave him, but—"

  "If a patrol finds him, he's a dead man."

  We looked at each other helplessly, then turned in the direction of the singer. He was not hard to find, sprawled comfortably on a high-piled midden in the centre of a crossroads only a street away, bawling to the sky; but as we started towards him from the far end of the street, a thunder of hooves suddenly echoed off the silent housefronts. I pulled Calla into the shelter of a gaping doorway. "Too late," she groaned. The lament cut off abruptly; then the horses screamed. A shout in Sheranik, also truncated, and a series of almighty thuds and the crashing of metal; Calla swore and stepped into the street before I had time to move, took one look, swore again, and vanished towards the action.

  I stepped out. At the end of the street, one horse kicked feebly on the ground. Two
others lay like collapsed tents in their billowing caparisons. The bodies of five or six men were spilled around them, dressed in the black, silver and scarlet of Kekashr's crack troops. As I watched, the last survivor fell to his knees, pushed off his helmet and clawed at his throat. The singer rose from the midden and finished him off with one swipe of a heavy club.

  I ran up the street in Calla's wake. By the time I reached her, a dozen men and women in Gillish rags had materialized and were silently stripping the dead of their weapons and armour and securing ropes to the horses and dragging them away. Calla and I stood speechless on the edge of this scene of model efficiency, ignored until the singer from the midden came up to us and pulled the hood away from his face.

  "Hawelli!" Calla gasped. She recovered herself. "I should have known it was you—you never could carry a tune."

  He grinned. "You must admit I can organize. Did you see that? Beautiful! Perfect! The fourth patrol we've wiped out today, and I'll wager old Crockjaw still doesn't know about the first three."

  "Crockjaw?" I asked.

  "Kekashr, our esteemed governor." Hawelli beamed at me triumphantly—also smugly. "My lord Tigrallef! Still alive. Congratulations. And do you still think we're helpless against the might of Sher?"

  "Yes."

  His smile stiffened, but remained in place. "Why? You've seen what can be done with clever planning and a few simple dart-tubes. And this is only the first stage."

  "How much venom have you got for the darts?"

  "At this rate, enough to account for eleven or twelve patrols. It's quick, it's quiet, it's clean, and we can hide any traces before moving on to set up the next trap. They can't touch us—we know every twist in the city, and they don't even know yet they've been bitten."

  "Fleabites," I said. "They'll start to wonder soon about these missing patrols. And what happens when you run out of venom?"

  "We're the heirs of every Sherkin we kill." He waved at a pair of Gilmen trotting off around the corner, bearing between them a stretcher heaped with captured armour and weapons. The last of the Sherkin corpses, stripped to the skin, was being hauled unceremoniously out of sight into a nearby building. Already the street was empty except for ourselves and one Gilman with a rake, who was busily rearranging the patterns left in the dust.

  "I'm impressed," I said softly. "But there are several thousand Sherkin troopers here, and hundreds of thousands in Sher. Will you take all of them on? And didn't you promise Bekri you'd do nothing—"

  "Bekri! There's a point. I assumed that you'd have been with Bekri and the council—but of course, I'm very glad to see you. Both," he added after a pause.

  "Bekri is why we're here," Calla began. "We've come to warn him. There's a raid planned on the council, and a traitor—oof."

  I removed my heel from her instep. "Hawelli Flamen," I said with maximum formality, "we have important business to discuss with the Council of Flamens. May I say that I admire what you are doing, and wish you well, and even give you my blessing, but we must leave—"

  "To see Bekri? I hope not."

  "Why?"

  "Because Bekri is in the Gilgard. You're too late."

  * * *

  29

  HAWELLI DETAILED A little Gilwoman, hardly more than a child, to guide us through the deserted streets to what he darkly called his "warbase." It had been a mansion of some importance, judging by the ornamentation and massive spread of the facade, but it was a shell now, the roof and upper floors having long since collapsed into a mountain of matchstick rubble contained by the standing walls. Our guide led us to a well-concealed hole in the forecourt and then pattered off on some other errand; we descended to find ourselves in a long, stone-vaulted cellar that had somehow withstood the weight of the wreckage, cut into segments by a succession of low arches. A busy swarm of revolutionaries, working in near-total silence, greeted Calla with a frenzy of welcoming fingerspeech, and me with curious looks.

  Calla and I were installed in a corner and given clean britches, cloaks and tunics in exchange for our damp street-rags. We requested and received two pairs of magnificent Sherkin boots from the latest haul. Some sort of healing muck was smeared on the slashes the seabeast had made in my leg, and a loaf and two beakers of lukewarm, grease-clotted shull broth were produced, tasting at that moment like the finest gourmet delicacy ever to come out of Oballef's kitchens. None of this did anything for my spirits; too late thudded like a drum between my temples.

  Hawelli appeared, stopped to give orders, and joined us. "I don't have much time—another trap is nearly in place. Have you been well taken care of?"

  "Yes," I said, "but—"

  "Good. Now, I have some plans about how I can use you."

  I blinked at him, surprised. "Me? You want to use me?"

  "Yes. You'll be a figurehead—naturally, I shall retain command, but it might hearten the people to know that a Scion of Oballef is in Gil. If they remember what that means, of course. Don't worry, I won't ask you to do anything dangerous."

  Beside me, Calla drew herself up with the wrathful dignity that I had come to know too well, since it was usually directed at me. This time, she was glaring at Hawelli. "If you had the slightest idea," she said stiffly, "what the Scion has been doing in the last two days, you would know that he sneers at danger."

  I dropped my beaker of broth. Hawelli looked from Calla to me and back again and raised his eyebrows.

  "There's to be no more talk of using him, as if he were a shit-hoe or a broom," Calla went on severely. "If anything, you should be laying your weapons at his feet and offering him your loyalty."

  Hawelli's mouth twitched at the corners. "Fine," he said. He extracted a dart-tube from his cloak and tossed it on the floor at my feet. "Satisfied, Calla?"

  She glowered, but I picked up the dart-tube and handed it back to him. "Don't fight, children, please. Hawelli?"

  "Yes, my lord Scion?"

  "Tell me about the raid on the council." It was too painful to ask directly about Bekri. Hawelli gave me a suspicious look, then one of his famous shrugs, accepting the switch of topic.

  "It was midmorning, while the council was meeting. Lord Shree was in command of the raiding party. They went directly to the tapestry chamber, grabbed everybody in sight and hauled them straight off to the Gilgard. I'm told it was over in minutes. Calla, I'm also told that Malviso and Big Sor were killed."

  She bowed her head, and raised it again with tight lips and dry eyes. I put my hand on her shoulder.

  "And the curfew?" I asked.

  "Instant. Before the prisoners were halfway to the castle, the heralds were in every square in Gil. Kekashr gave us half an hour to get indoors, though he started grabbing Pleasurebait a few minutes early, the pocketing bastard. When I heard about the council, I knew it was time to act."

  "Who was taken?" I asked quietly.

  "Everyone in the chamber, plus a few others. Maybe thirty altogether. Mysheba and some of the other women managed to get the children away, and Faruli was off delivering a baby—fortunately, for we'll need a healer before this uprising is done. And the Second Flamen wasn't with the council, so he's safe."

  "Jebri? But he hardly leaves Bekri's side. Why wasn't he there?"

  "Ask him yourself. He's somewhere about."

  I looked around. He was not visible in that segment of the cellar, nor through the archway into the next, where the captured weapons and uniforms were being sorted and gloated over. "How did he know where to find you? Did he know about this place?"

  "No, we found him. I think Sibba brought him in."

  Calla started and asked, "Sibba's one of yours?"

  "To the core. Most of the youngsters have been aching for real action. Bekri was out of touch."

  "Out of touch? Hawelli Flamen, how can you be so ungrateful? Who was it that founded the Web? Where would we all be without him?" Calla was indignant again, but I was still thinking about Jebri. Why, today of all days, had he been absent from the tapestry chamber, and at the cruci
al hour? No doubt there was a valid explanation; I badly wanted to hear it.

  "Have Jebri fetched," I broke in.

  Hawelli appeared glad of the diversion, although he raised his eyebrows again at my tone. He motioned to one of the young boys nearby. "Go find the Second Flamen. Tell him the Scion of Oballef wants to see him." The boy ran off. Hawelli ignored me and turned back to Calla. He sighed heavily, like a man who is at some pains to come to terms with a fool. "This is not a good moment for us to quarrel, Calla. I withdraw my remarks, if it makes you feel better, although I still insist—never mind. What's important is that you're here now, and it's our chance to fight back at last. Join with me on the next raid; come and strike a blow with me against the enemy."

  "What about Lord Tigrallef?"

  "The Scion will stay here—however brave you say he is, we shouldn't risk him until we need to."

  I sneezed. "I'm touched by your concern for my safety, Hawelli Flamen, but—"

  "Don't take it personally," he interrupted. His tone was not very friendly. "I'm just aware of your value to the people."

  "As a symbol?"

  He looked wary. "Something like that."

  "I'm sorry, I don't have the leisure to be a symbol. Thanks for the broth." I pulled on one of the Sherkin boots. It was too big.

  "Where do you think you're going?"

  "Back to the Gilgard, just as soon as I've seen Jebri."

  Hawelli laughed incredulously. "You're mad. How are you going to get into the Gilgard now?"

  "I have my ways." I pulled the boot off and stuffed some rags into the toe. This time, it fitted. While I started on the other boot, Hawelli stood up and leaned over me. "What if I don't let you go?"

  "Could you pass me the cloak, please?"

  He passed it automatically. I crammed the heel of bread into an inner pocket and stood up. Hawelli moved back a pace, shaking his head. "Calla, can you talk to this lunatic?"

  She was already on her feet, booted and cloaked. "I'll talk to him on the way to the Gilgard."