Gil Trilogy 1: Lady in Gil

by Rebecca Bradley

  The door swung open. I looked up with dread, expecting to see Lord Kekashr; but I would have preferred him to the woman who stood there. A strange and dazzling woman, heavily robed and rouged, hair shining and piled high, body tricked out at every possible point with feathers and furs and golden doodads and assorted lumpen jewels. Typical Sherkin lack of taste, I thought, though I'll admit she looked magnificent in a barbaric sort of way. I stared at her for a moment, and then closed my eyes. "Go away, Calla."

  "Tig, I need to talk to you."

  Her robe rustled closer to the pallet. Her cool fingers touched my cheek and I turned my face away.

  "Please, Tig. We should talk."

  "I don't see why. Go away."

  "Do you think I planned what happened back there?" She sat down on the pallet beside me. Helplessly I opened my eyes. Beyond her, the Sherkin guards watched with frank interest.

  "Well," I said, grinning sourly, "look at you."

  She grimaced and yanked at the tight bodice. "Damned uncomfortable, if you must know. It's those pocketing Koroskan handmaids."

  "Zealous, are they? You know, the Sherkin style of women's dress is designed to slow you down. They're a little afraid of their womenfolk."

  "I can believe it." She hesitated for a long moment, obviously nerving herself. "Tig?"

  "What is it, Calla?"

  "Don't hate me for what happened."

  I smiled. The slyness of her! I wanted to throw up again. "It's not going to work this time, Calla. Don't even try."

  "You think I'm a traitor, is that it?"

  "It's hardly a matter of opinion." I could hear my voice hardening.

  "Please listen, Tig—"

  "I suppose I should call you Krisht now. How long have you been betraying the Web, Krisht? Are you the little spider?"

  "No! That was Jebri, you were right. But I didn't know until you figured it out."

  "Was it you who sold Bekri?"

  "No! No! I never told my father anything. And he never asked me—it was a pact between us."

  "A pact with a warlord of Iklankish. Brilliant." My anger was starting to choke me. "I suppose it was on his orders that you slept with me."

  "What?"

  "I'll tell him what a good job you did, if you like—maybe he'll give you a bonus. You'd make a fine whore, Krisht; Flax read you rightly, you do belong in the shintashkr. You really had me believing for a while that you—" I had to break off then. The beach, Calla's face silvered by moonlight, rose to mock me.

  She reddened with outrage or embarrassment, or both. "Will you listen to me?"

  "Do I have a choice?" I stared up at her, loathing her—all the more bitterly because I had loved her the day before, and had a sickening suspicion that part of me was unable to stop loving her. "Say what you must, Krisht, and then go away."

  "Stop calling me Krisht. Listen. About three years ago, I was captured on the road to Malvi Point. Nobody in the Web ever knew about it—I'd been sent out alone to do some reconnaissance in the countryside and nobody expected me back for days."

  "Very convenient. Who sent you on this mission?"

  She looked startled. "It was Jebri. So even then—"

  "Go on."

  "I was taken straight to my—to Lord Kekashr. He knew who I was, or at least who my mother was. Myshalla. Bekri told you about her?"

  I nodded.

  "He told me I was his daughter, a Sherkint, no matter what my rearing had been. He was kind to me, Tig. He hoped that someday I would leave my mother's people and take my place as his daughter, but he was willing to wait until I did it of my own free will. He felt he owed me that." She was talking rapidly now, urgently, pleading with me to understand.

  "Actually," I said, "you were of more use to him where you were. Surely you saw through that."

  "But he never asked me to betray the Web! He never asked me about it at all—in fact, he may not have known I was part of it."

  "Oh, Calla," I said with feeling, "that was naïve."

  She jerked angrily at her ridiculous gown. "He kept me for a few days that first time. Not in the dungeons, you understand, but in a chamber in the Temple Palace, a beautiful place. He came to see me every day and just talked—little things, tales about Sher, about my half-sisters in Iklankish, things he had seen in his travels. At first I tried to attack him on sight, every time he came, but then I began to see him differently—"

  "Don't tell me. The father you never had. But what about the great-grandfather you did have? What about Bekri?"

  She shook her head sadly. "I can never make you understand, Tigrallef. They're both my people. My father let me go after a few days, but he begged me to see him when I could, and told me how to contact him in secret. I didn't for a long time, but something pulled me back in the end."

  "And so you became a traitor. And now Bekri's in the south dungeon."

  "I did not betray the council! How can you even think that?"

  "You betrayed me, why not others?"

  She flounced angrily to her feet. "I saved you. When you were taken in the levy, I saved you. I went straight to my father and asked him to have you released. If I weren't Kekashr's daughter, you'd be grubbing in a mine in Iklankish this very minute."

  "Did you tell him then who I was?"

  She sat down again, with great dignity. "No, or he'd never have let you go. I told him you were my lover."

  That struck me as the best joke I'd heard all day. I exploded into laughter. "So you even betrayed your poor father! I'll bet he won't like that when he finds out. You should have given me to him then, you know, and saved us all a lot of trouble."

  "Stop it, Tig! How can I explain? Calla and Krisht are two separate people; I had to make it so. Remember, whatever is done by half of me is treachery to the other half. Can you understand that?"

  I was too strangled by rage to try—to my later, bitter regret. "Why," I asked, "did you choose this particular time to betray your Gillish side? Why not a minor bit of treachery to practise on?"

  "I didn't mean to," she said. "When I went with you into the between-ways, it was to help you find the Lady and overthrow my own father, I swear it—but when the moment came, I could not decide." She was genuinely pleading by now. "Don't you see? I was going to put the Lady into your hands, but Shree called me by my other name and I—I got confused. I didn't know what to do. And then Shree came and took the Lady from me, and I didn't have to decide any more. If you had reached me first—"

  "Stop." I turned over on the pallet so that my back was to her and concentrated ferociously on the pain in my shoulder.

  "Nobody can understand except Shree," she said, half to herself.

  "Shree?" I rolled back to glare at her. "So he's another in your stable, is he? I should have guessed."

  "There's been nothing between us," she retorted. "His mother was a Gilwoman, that's all. He's riding the same dragon's back as I am."

  "So you want me to pity you?"

  "No." Her face changed. She leaned over me. "Listen carefully, and I'll tell you what I want. You told me only a few hours ago that you loved me."

  "Don't remind me."

  "Well, you can have me. We can be together. And on the throne of Gil." Her hands were twisted together.

  "What in the Lady's name are you talking about?"

  "Listen. My father will be happy to make an alliance between us; he'll make you the Priest-King, Tig, he'll sail away and leave you to rule in Gil. You'll have won after all, you'll have liberated the island."

  "And what does he want in return?"

  "Don't be such an idiot." She was definitely the same Calla, Sherkint baubles or not. "Some small favours, that's all."

  "Would these small favours happen to involve conjuring the Lady for him?"

  "Well—yes. But not to use against Gil. He promised me that."

  "He promised? What a relief."

  She leaned closer to look into my eyes. "So you'll do it? You'll accept?"

  "Never. Not even to save m
yself from the Gilman's Pleasure. I know what he wants—Gil's just a stepping stone. He wants Iklankish. He won't give up Gil and he'll gain the whole empire, plus the League of Free Nations in the end. He wants the whole world. I will not help him to get it."

  "But he promised me—"

  "I suppose he sent you here with this obscene offer?"

  She drew herself up proudly. "It's a good offer. He'll break you if he has to, to get your cooperation, but he doesn't want to. And I don't want him to, either. I love you, Tig."

  "You love me?" I gaped at her.

  "That's what I said, isn't it?" she snapped. "Nobody ordered me into your bed, not my father, not Bekri, not the council, not anybody—I'm not a whore, I came to you because I wanted to, and I love you. Please believe me."

  I stared up at her, speechless. Her face twisted with desperation.

  "Tell me that you believe me."

  I searched my soul. Suddenly, try as I might, I could not find the blinding fury that had been there only a moment before. Anger, yes. Sadness, loss, longing—plenty of those. The main ingredients, however, were a deathly weariness and an overwhelming sense of futility. Nothing mattered any more. I turned my back to Calla and muttered into the rough blanket, "I believe you."

  Her voice quickened with hope. "Then you'll do it? Say you'll do it, for your own sake and mine. For Gil's sake."

  Laughter bubbled up bitterly from somewhere deep in my entrails. I crushed it with difficulty. "I can't."

  "Why not? Have you got any better ideas? You can't save the world now, Tig, I'm sorry, but you can't. At least save us."

  "There's nothing left to save."

  "Then what are we going to do?" An anguished cry.

  "There is one thing," I said softly, turning back to her. She looked at me with a resurgence of hope. I hooked my fingers into her awful bodice and pulled her face close to mine, as if meaning to kiss her. Very quietly I murmured, "You could put a knife in Kekashr's throat."

  The light died in her eyes. "I can't do that. He's my father." Her face hung over me, a tear dropped from one of her eyes and rolled down my cheek. Not very gently, I pushed her away. I had known it was useless; each of us was asking the other to do the impossible.

  She swiped at her tears with an angry gesture, as if they irritated her, and said harshly, "You must accept my father's offer."

  I held my fingers in front of her face and curved them in the no that cannot be withdrawn nor negotiated nor mitigated by changed circumstances, the rarely used no that means for ever. She went pale.

  "I told you on the beach there were things you didn't know about me," she whispered. "You said they didn't matter."

  "I was wrong."

  "You said you loved me."

  "So I did. But it means nothing now."

  She looked at me long and hard, her face becoming strangely calm.

  "I'll never see you again anyway," I said. "Once your precious father knows you can't subvert me, he'll send you packing on the first ship to Iklankish. You're a Sherkint now, your place is in Sher."

  She shook her head. "He promised he wouldn't send me away from Gil."

  I sighed, infinitely weary. "Another promise. You never learn, do you?"

  Her mouth tightened. "It's no use talking to you when you're like this. I'll come later." She rose to go.

  I watched her walk away from me towards the door. The first heat of a fever shimmered in front of my eyes. For a moment Calla was nameless, faceless and doomed; the door was the maw of a high-masted black ship, bound for Sher—or worse. Choking, I sat up and called her name. She turned eagerly at the door, took a pace towards me, halted, hovered. "What is it, Tig? Have you changed your mind?" As soon as she spoke, the hallucination dissolved.

  I lay back. The sight of her was agony. She looked small and distant, on the far side of a desert of impossibilities; we were already lost to each other, youth was soured, all hopes were false, love was suffering a sort of living death. I searched my soul again, this time for one kind word to be the last I'd ever give her, but the futility of it drained my strength. I closed my eyes.

  "Tig?"

  Tight-lipped, wet-eyed, I raised my hand in the air and sketched the sign of final goodbye.

  The door slammed behind her.

  * * *

  33

  "POOR FOOL." THE voice grated out of the air vent near the ceiling. The guards jerked like puppets and became upright and very severe. Seconds later, part of the wall pushed open and Lord Kekashr, followed by the omnipresent Shree, stepped into the room.

  "Wonderful invention," Calla's father said in Gillish, "these between-ways of yours—I wish the little spider had told us about them long ago. Remind me, Shree, to reproach him for that, among other things. Are you comfortable, Scion?"

  "Not really." I looked up at him, repelled. His face was an exercise in sharp edges and hard flat surfaces, dominated by the dagger nose, meshed with razor-slash wrinkles, ornamented with a livid scar that started near one ear and sliced across his chin. He had enviable teeth, most of which were visible. I remembered a similar smile on the jaws of a Storican river-devil, in the bestiary on Sathelforn—as I recall, the creature had just eaten a tourist. Lord Kekashr's smile had precisely that air of self-congratulation.

  "You're quite right about sending Krisht to Iklankish. It's easy to see you're an intelligent young man," he said pleasantly, settling himself on the same bit of pallet that Calla had recently vacated, "more intelligent, anyway, than your halfwitted relations. If not for Krisht, you might even have beaten me to the prize. I'm sure you're far too intelligent to oppose me now."

  "Intelligence has nothing to do with it."

  "Really? Then how about pain?" He watched my face intently. "Fear? Loyalty to friends? Yes, Shree, I think we'll try loyalty first. That is, when the Scion has had a chance to consider." He laid one hand heavily across my forehead. "He's already feverish. Good."

  I closed my eyes and pulled away from his hand. Kekashr chuckled.

  "Don't fret yourself, Scion. We won't really start chatting until the fever is higher—just a few easy little questions for now. You are Tigrallef, Cirallef's son? Eh? Don't be stupid, young man, save your spirit for the questions that matter."

  "Where is the Lady?" I asked.

  The Stone of Callilef, flashing on Kekashr's finger, made a more effective weapon than my ancestor could have known. Even a light blow drew blood. "All in good time. Now tell me—who is the man with the beard?"

  "The what?"

  He opened up the other cheek. "You do know who I mean. The hairy one who was cutting a way into the caves for you when my nephew interrupted him."

  "Hairy?" I opened my eyes in time to see Kekashr's hand smashing down again. The direct hit on my mouth hardly registered—Angel must be free, or why would Kekashr be asking?

  "Uncle," said Shree quietly in Sheranik. Kekashr paused with his arm raised, and looked enquiringly at his nephew. "He could be telling the truth, my lord Uncle. The bearded man escaped into the caves long before the Scion and Krisht came along—there's nothing to say they know him."

  "Nothing," Kekashr retorted, "except the long tongue of coincidence. Would it not seem odd to you, Nephew, if he and the hairy man should be in the same forsaken arsehole of the Gilgard within a few hours of each other, and yet be strangers? It would seem very odd to me."

  "But Krisht confirms it, my lord Uncle."

  Lord Kekashr smiled grimly. "That means nothing. Krisht has not quite decided whose throne she's behind. She could lie to us as easily as she did to this Scion."

  "But she's your daughter."

  "All the more reason to mistrust her. You know me, Nephew." He shook with mirth.

  "Yes," said Shree impassively.

  Kekashr stopped laughing and bent on his nephew a sharp and contemplative look—not the sort of look I'd fancy receiving myself, although Shree seemed unperturbed. What was more disturbing to me was the sudden, short-lived shadow of Calla in Kekashr's barbed
features, especially in the set of the eyes and the long-lipped cut of the mouth, leaving no question about her parentage. The look continued for a long few moments before Kekashr returned his face to me.

  "Yes, she's a tricky one, my Krisht," he said, switching to Gillish. "A credit to her old father. Don't you agree, Tigrallef? What a pity you turned her down! Don't you want to be Priest-King in Gil?"

  "Not really. Anyway, that title is not in your gift," I mumbled. My lips were already swelling.

  Lord Kekashr bent closer to examine his handiwork. "The whole world is in my gift. I have the Lady."

  "Go ahead and use her. I'd love to see that."

  The Stone of Callilef descended again. "I'm sure you would. I saw what happened to the old Flamens."

  I licked the blood off my lips and said nothing.

  "That's right, save your voice for later. Look at him, Shree! Whatever can Krisht see in him?"

  "I wondered that myself, Uncle, when I took him to her in Malvi." Shree's calm face appeared above me, flickering a little around the edges as my fever took hold. "Of course, we didn't know at that point who he was."

  The beast-smile again. "Naughty Krisht. I'll give her a fatherly talking-to about that." The Hammer of Iklankish brought his eyes to within a few inches of my face; they approached me slowly, slowly, like the iron spikes of the Pleasure. "Never mind," he said. "I have him now—and the Lady—and absolutely no mercy. Under the circumstances, I can forgive my erring child."

  He left me with the promise, or threat, of a quick return. The guards relaxed after he departed and began to swap what passed for jokes in Sheranik, very raw and with little in the way of punchline. Little, anyway, that a non-Sherkin would laugh at.

  Angel was alive and free. Kekashr was mystified about him, and uneasy. Calla had not (yet) betrayed Angel; nor, it seemed, could she have told her father about Lissula and the other shints—for if she had, then Kekashr would not have needed to question me about the mysterious hairy man. These were the only crumbs of comfort I had, and they made up far less than a feast. Where was Bekri? What was happening to him and to the others? What was my future? I hated to think. Calla having failed to tempt me, Kekashr would not dare put the Lady into my hands until I was well and truly broken; speculating on how he might do that (based on my extensive reading on the subject of Sherkin atrocities) was a high road to panic. My body began to shake—only partly fear, I realized; partly also an omen of the rising fever. I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling, breathing hard, trying to think of nothing at all. The pain was much like Sherkin music—a deep, throbbing drumbeat from my shoulder, a shrill and discordant note from my lacerated cheeks.