The Heart of the Mirage (10 page)

‘Well, yes, I did. I slipped out of my wrap and put my hands on him—where it counts, you know. And he was as flaccid as a wilted flower. He
laughed
. He
dared
to laugh at me and said I was as sexless as a neutered gorclak.’

I gave the faintest of smiles. ‘I don’t suppose you let him get away with that?’

‘I went to claw him. There was nothing he could have done; he was chained up like a bale of shleth
pelts. I would have made
him
as sexless as a neutered gorclak—’

‘But?’

‘I couldn’t. He stopped me somehow. There was a sort of barrier—I couldn’t
see
anything, but it was there nonetheless. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. He was a Kardi numen. There are numina here, you know. Strange things happen all the time, you’ll see.’ She shivered. ‘Well, I guess I always knew if you play with fire you get burnt. Goddess, how I
hate
this country.’

I rose to my feet. ‘Thank you, Domina. I don’t think I will need to put any of this on file.’ I smiled blandly and left the room.

After dinner that night, I waited until the whole house was quiet and the last of the slaves had gone to bed before reaching under my divan to take out the weapon I had hidden there. I examined it again, running my hand over the hilt, touching the smoothness of the glass-like material in the short blade. It had a—a
perfection
about it, a flawless essence to it, and I began to wonder if it had not been crafted by mortal man. I considered the myriad stories about gifts from the gods: arrows from the Goddess of the Hunt, books from the God of Wisdom, dream powder from the Goddess of Sleep.

Swords from…Melete? Ocrastes? Ridiculous!

I prayed to Melete, on occasion, I gave money to her temples, but that was more habit or expediency than conviction. In my heart of hearts, I was dubious about the existence of any of the pantheon of gods and goddesses who supposedly governed the different aspects of Exaltarchy life. Yet, as I sat there with that sword in my hand, I felt it was somehow god-given. The idea was so outlandish it confused me, a confusion overlaid with the memory of that golden
woman tearing away her anoudain and snatching up a similar weapon…

Vortex, I couldn’t have been born of a goddess, surely?

My whole body rebelled at the thought. I was no immortal. I was just me, Ligea of Tyr…

And then the inner doubt spoke again:
You are a woman who knows when others lie. Who senses emotions on the air as easily as pungent scents or evocative sounds, who has a touch that apparently sometimes takes away pain. Is that normal?

I had faced death in Brotherhood service, but I’d never felt the fear I felt right then.
Immortal
. Doomed never to age and die, to be condemned to watch all I knew vanish into old age and death and dust, waiting for an end that never came…I could think of nothing worse. Better to be insane. Perhaps I was. I sank down on my knees beside the divan and rested my forehead on the sword hilt. I took calming breaths and tried to clear the tendrils of doubt before they could permeate deeper. I was Ligea. Brotherhood Compeer. I was better than this.

Unbidden, my mind ranged outwards until it touched the familiar. Brand, sleeping somewhere below in the slave quarters. I calmed, and began to think again.

Silently, I took up the sword and left my apartments. If the Prefect posted guards, they must have all been outside in the gardens or beyond the walls, because I met no one. My bare feet made no sound on the marble floors as I made my way, after several wrong turns, to Brand. I paused outside his door, checking with my senses that I did indeed have the right place. Then I took a night lamp out of its niche in the passage and let myself in, glad I had insisted on a single room for him, a privilege of a favoured slave. I shut the door behind me.

The room was not much bigger than a cupboard. A low table and a raised platform for the sleeping pallet were the only two items of furniture. I put the lamp and the still-wrapped sword on the table, next to an empty jug, and looked around. Brand, clad only in a loin cloth and half covered in a blanket, was sound asleep and gently snoring. His clothes hung on a hook behind the door, his personal pack was on the floor—all he owned, if a slave could ever be said to own anything. It seemed pitifully little after thirty years of life.

‘Brand?’ I asked quietly. He didn’t stir. I sat on the edge of his pallet and shook his arm. Even then it took several rough shakes before I elicited a response. At a guess, that jug had contained wine, and the Prefect’s Tyranian slaves had been more than hospitable to an Altani freshly arrived with news of Tyr. Brand had been feted that evening.

He struggled awake, befuddled with wine and sleep and still not opening his eyes. ‘Who’s tha’?’

‘It’s only me, Brand. Legata Ligea.’

He opened one eye. And spoke, a tentative ‘Ligea?’ The eye stared at me, puzzled, and then I felt the other emotion in him. When he reached out a hand to touch my bare shoulder, I was—in my astonishment—unable to move. He murmured, ‘Sweet Goddess…I have dreamed of this, but never thought—’

‘No,’ I said in a rush, aghast, and leapt to my feet. I wanted to unhear the words, to have them unsaid. ‘No. You misunderstand. I brought the weapon down. I wanted you to hide it. I thought if I kept it in my room, Aemid would find it, and it’s important she doesn’t know about it.’

He scrambled up, fully awake now, and coldly sober, hope dead in his eyes at my rush of words. He cut off
his emotions from me as he said, ‘My apologies, Legata. I was half asleep, and I fear I had too much to drink this evening.’ But even as he said the words, we both knew it was too late to take back what had just happened.

‘Oh, Brand,’ I said, trying to hide how appalled I was. ‘I’m sorry. I never guessed. You—you hid it so well.’ But then, he always had kept his emotions hidden. Ever since we were children together. Damn, damn,
damn
.

‘What was the point? I’m just a slave and you had Tribune Favonius.’ He glanced across at me with a calculating look. ‘He’s not here now. You must be missing him.’

‘Yes, but—Oh, Brand. Oh damn it, you are—you are like a brother to me. I don’t think of you that way.’ My thoughts were more shocked:
Acheron’s mists! You’re my slave!
I couldn’t be having this conversation. I didn’t
want
to have this conversation!

‘A
brother
?’ he said bitterly and then, echoing my thought, ‘I’m your
slave.’
He raised a hesitant hand to touch my hair. ‘I’ve never been your brother. And a slave you could bed, for all that custom dictates otherwise.’

‘But we were brought up together.’
Don’t say it, Brand. Don’t say it.

‘That doesn’t make us siblings. And it’s not love of Favonius that stops you, either. You don’t love him.’ He said that with utter certainty.

‘No—no, I suppose not. He’s a friend and he fulfils a need.’

‘I could also be that. And I wouldn’t ask for more than I could have.’ He trailed his fingers from my hair to my face. ‘I have loved you since I was a boy; in all those years, I’ve learned to be content with very little.’ He bent to kiss me, gently brushing my mouth with his lips and moving his hand to cup my breast, but
before he could deepen the kiss I pulled back. His hand remained where it was; the shining flecks in his eyes flickered.

‘I can’t, Brand.’ For once, I could read his emotions, and I rather wished I couldn’t. I was aware of a deep bitter grief filling the room and knew how much I’d hurt him. He must have guessed it was more my disdain for a slave-lover, rather than any sisterly affection, that stopped me from desiring him. I felt shamed, and didn’t understand why.

His hand slipped away and his eyes dropped. ‘I’ll take care of the sword, Legata,’ he said, voice neutral. He went to pick up the wrapped weapon from where I had placed it on the table—and found he couldn’t move it. Startled, he withdrew his hand. ‘Ocrastes’ balls—it’s so
heavy
! How can you lift it?’

I was glad to change the subject and said, ‘It is not heavy to me. Where shall I put it?’

He hesitated.

I quirked an eyebrow at him. ‘Ah, you too, Brand? What are you afraid of? Numina?’

He looked at me, amused. ‘If it
is
a numen’s plaything, what does that make you?’

I made a wry face. ‘What indeed?’ Inwardly I just felt sick. I heard myself silently repeating the words,
I am no immortal.
Nor a numen. There are no such beings. Probably never have been…

He tried to diminish his unease with a laugh. ‘Put it under the pallet against the wall. It will be safe there. No one will find it.’

I did as he suggested and turned to go. ‘Thank you. Goodnight, Brand.’

‘Goodnight, Legata.’ There was a familiar trace of mockery in his voice and his emotions were once more veiled.

Soft-footed, I started back to the main sleeping quarters of the household. Oil lamps flickered in wall niches, the smell of the burning muted by the perfumes added to the fuel. The halls were dim and silent. My thoughts were a chaos of swearing.
What in all Acheron’s damnable mists was the bloody man thinking of? How could he possibly think I would respond to his lovemaking?

I embarked on another of those silly, futile conversations I sometimes conducted with myself: Your fault, Legata. It was you who insisted on treating him as a friend.

The reply: He
is
a friend, damn it. That’s the way I wanted it. The way I still want it. I
need
a friend…

You wanted him in your bed. You wanted to say yes just then.

I am not going to bed my slave.

You could go back.

Shut up!

I entered the corridor leading to my apartments. A single flame still burned at my doorway, unmoving, as if pasted onto its lamp. Others had guttered, dimming the passage. I walked on, preoccupied, towards my door, passing the silent row of statues with their marble faces made grim by the lack of light. And then that final lamp flame fluttered, dancing the shadows of those carved watchers.

Something had created a current of air at my door.

I stopped, uncertain of what I was seeing. The form of a man, yet he had no solidity. A transparent and ethereal man, a painting done on glass. No painting though. He moved.

I did two things at once, both instinctive. I stepped out of sight behind a statue, and I drew my knife. And stood there, immobile, while all the hairs on my arms
rose up…The man walked through my door and into my bedroom. I had closed my door—
and it was still closed
. The man had walked through the polished planks of wood. And disappeared.

I didn’t believe in shades of the dead. I was neither superstitious, nor given to hallucinations, nor easily deceived by tricks of the light or sleight of hand. I wanted a logical explanation. Yet, as I stood there in silence, peering out from under the arm of a life-sized statue of Bator Korbus mounted on a plinth, a shudder skidded up my spine. I took a deep breath and tried to remember exactly what I had seen.

A naked man about my height or a shade taller. Muscular, as well sculpted as a statue of a naked competitor in the annual games. I hadn’t seen his face, but a fluidity to his movement spoke of a man still young in years. Hair too long for a Tyranian. He’d worn it, Kardi-style, tied back at the nape with a thong. His skin could have been Kardi brown, although it was hard to be sure when he had been so…ethereal. I had seen through him, I was sure of it, the way one could see through a glass of white wine held up to the light.

A shade had just entered my room.
A shade from Acheron?

Or a god perhaps, in some…otherworldly form?

I couldn’t believe I was thinking this. It was madness.
What was happening to me?

I stayed where I was, still motionless. I thought of rousing the household, but quelled that thought immediately. I was a compeer, not some moondaft madwoman. I couldn’t admit to being scared of a shade. And if I said I’d seen one, and no one else did, then I was going to make myself an object of ridicule. So I remained where I was, sweating even in the cool of the night air, waiting for Goddess knows what.

Five minutes later, the shade walked back through the door. No, not walked. He
seeped
through the door. And stopped. And hovered, then slowly turned his face in my direction, his features too transparent to be recognisable. There was a dark circle on the back of his hand, like a wound.

I held my breath. My skin prickled. It was dark where I was, and he was in the light of the lamp outside my door. If his eyesight was normal he would find it difficult to see me, hidden as I was. However, he was alert, poised, holding himself the way I did when I was sending my senses outwards. I tried to sense him in turn, but couldn’t. Not unexpected, I suppose, seeing he was only a ghost. Or a shade. Or something else equally intangible.

I thought:
He can’t see me, but he knows I’m here
.

For a breath-halting moment, we stood like that. And then he turned and vanished, gliding away like wind-wafted mist.

Back in my own room a few minutes later, I saw nothing to indicate someone had entered while I’d been gone. Nothing had been disturbed. The floor was spotless.

I shook, as if the foundations of my life were crumbling and I could find no security. Too many things had happened that day; piling on top of all that had preceded. The mother-figure of my childhood had threatened me with death; the slave-brother of my adolescence had proclaimed himself lover; the abilities I had were taking on new and frightening dimensions in this, the land of my birth. I was either flirting with madness, or someone had drugged me into seeing things that couldn’t exist, at least not in the land of the living.

Perhaps this was connected to what had happened back at the Meletian Temple in Tyr. A conspiracy to make me believe in the gods of the pantheon? To have me consult the temple priestesses, to seek out the cult of Melete? Well, I wouldn’t do it. I was the logical compeer. I was the Tyranian who bowed to a goddess more as a matter of conformity than belief. Who hoped there was an afterlife awaiting, in a not-too-daunting Acheron, after the Vortex had whisked her away from her body—but who was not wholly convinced of any of it.

Come on, Ligea. You are the cool-headed compeer. Think.

I turned to the more solid of my reservations. I started to make a list in my head of the things that bothered me most, trying—in vain—for dispassion.

Who had wanted me to go to Kardiastan so badly they had connived with the Meletian High Priestess and the Voice of the Oracle to make it seem like a good idea? If it had been the Exaltarch himself, Bator Korbus, then why? I was not so important in the overall scheme of things, was I?

Why had the Prefecta’s Kardi slave called me Theura? Did I really remember that word from my childhood, but applied to someone else? I looked down at my palm, at the swelling there that had so startled Othenid she’d dropped a pitcher and earned herself a beating. It had been so important to me as a child that I had tried to keep it hidden. No other Kardi I’d ever met had such a lump. Was it a curse, a blessing, an accident of birth that the Kardis had some superstition about? What did it mean?
It had fitted so neatly into the hollow on the hilt of Mir Ager’s sword…
I should have asked if anyone had noticed a lump on his hand. No, perhaps that wouldn’t have been a good idea. I didn’t want to draw attention to my own.