The Heart of the Mirage (26 page)

But never alone.

When I went to him to let him know I wanted a private conversation, he turned from me and draped a friendly arm around Pinar’s shoulders. ‘Do you know Pinar is a cousin, Shirin?’ he asked, not looking at me. ‘Her mother and our parents were siblings. We intend
to marry as soon as the necessary arrangements are made.’

Pinar smiled pleasantly. ‘I hope we’ll be friends, Shirin.’

‘I’m sure we have no reason not to be,’ I replied, my voice smooth with deliberate blandness. They both heard my lie, of course, just as Temellin and I had heard hers. And when I turned away a little later, with my intended request still unspoken, I caught the look in Temellin’s eyes: pure, aching hunger—and I wondered how much Pinar would tolerate if she ever saw that look.

I knew my delay in telling Temellin the truth about myself was dangerous. The longer I left the telling of who I was and what I knew, the harder it would be to explain my delay in telling it. It wasn’t that the Mirage was in imminent danger from the Stalwarts—it would surely still be several months more before the legions arrived at the edge of the Mirage—but people would wonder at my reluctance to have given the information. How could I explain the truth: that I didn’t want Temellin to know of my past? When his eyes were on me, I was ashamed of having been a compeer; the thought he might despise me for what I had been was as unpleasant as his absence from my pallet. And I dreaded the poison Pinar would spread about the Legata Ligea; she might be able to turn Temellin’s trust into suspicion and contempt. Nor did I want to betray Favonius and his friends. I had found satisfaction and companionship in Favonius’s arms; the thought I might cause his death was lacerating. He didn’t deserve my betrayal.

Yet I also knew I must tell; if I didn’t, the invasion of the Stalwarts would come as a surprise with inevitably tragic results; if I didn’t, sooner or later someone would recognise and name me. Already Aemid might be talking to other Kardis, spreading a
warning about Ligea Gayed. There would be other slaves arriving from Madrinya or Sandmurram who might know my face…

Unfortunately, with Temellin’s deliberate unavailability, it was so easy for me to keep postponing my confession. So easy to rationalise the irrational, to say it would be better to put it off until my fellow Magor had come to know and trust me more. Easy, and stupid.

Perhaps love makes cowards of us all.

It wasn’t easy to settle into my new life. I had thought that as a Magoria, as Temellin’s sister, I would have a position of power. I was soon disabused of that notion. I was included in the councils, but anything I said was largely disregarded; with the exception of Temellin and a few others, I was considered to be a pseudo-Kardi and therefore untrustworthy. I had returned the Mirager’s sword, and taken the oath of the Covenant, yet neither helped. It wasn’t hard to see Pinar behind most of the distrust, but I couldn’t counterattack without jeopardising my position and hurting Temellin.

Garis defended me every chance he got, even telling the Magoroth how the Mirage Makers had changed the Covenant tablets for me to make them both beautiful and more understandable. He’d thought that would help. Instead, it alarmed those who shared Pinar’s distrust, prompting them into pressing for more restrictions on what I was made privy to, or what I was taught. ‘We can’t rely on the Mirage Makers to protect us against treachery,’ they said. ‘We have to do it ourselves.’

I was humiliated by my powerlessness, but trapped in my own deceit and woefully ignorant of all things Kardi, there wasn’t much I could do about it. Temellin
did try. He sensed my affinity for power and something in him recognised and sympathised with my need for challenge, but in the face of Pinar’s intransigence and the general prejudice against me, it was hard for him to offer me much.

I was also lonely. I hadn’t mastered the art of the two-level conversation the Magor took for granted. They spoke to one another as a matter of course in both words and quick flares of emotions. Sometimes they used words only as signposts, and conducted much of a conversation in cleverly differentiated displays of emotional reaction. They delighted in word plays where something was said, but immediately negated by the accompanying flash of a contrary sentiment, in a form of sardonic wit. In understanding their conversations, I was always a step or two behind, missing the nuances.

Worse, I was unable to utilise my emotions as speech. Having schooled myself always to hide the way I felt, I found it difficult to use deliberate emotional display in order to give another level of meaning to my words. In the end, the Magoroth spoke to me the way they did to the non-Magoroth: in ordinary speech. They were polite enough, but the end result was a subtle exclusion from their ranks.

The person who kept me from going mad with frustration was Garis. If he did use emotion to speak to me, he slowed it down so that I could understand. He took his duties to me seriously and wanted no misunderstanding between us. He’d come to me in my room immediately after the oath-taking ceremony that first morning and told me it was time for my first lesson. ‘We’ll start with the art of building wards,’ he’d said without preamble. ‘Now the first thing you have to be aware of—’

There were two kinds of power available to a wearer of the gold cabochon, I discovered. The first was power that came through the sword, the second was power straight from the cabochon. ‘All the most powerful wards are built with the aid of the sword,’ he said. ‘So these are not available to the two lower ranks of the Magor.’ He unsheathed his sword and fitted it into his left palm. ‘There’s one thing you must never do, and that’s put your cabochon into another’s sword hilt.’

‘Why not?’ I asked, guiltily remembering I had done just that with Temellin’s weapon.

‘Once you have tuned a sword, any sword, to your cabochon, it can never be turned against you, even in the hands of an enemy. Nor can it be used to build a ward you could not break. Of course, none of the Magoroth would turn his sword on another Magor, but to deliberately tune another’s sword to your cabochon is to show your distrust of a fellow Magor, and that would be a terrible insult. It is never done.’

‘I’ll remember that,’ I said gravely, and he went on with the lesson. He showed me how to draw a square of protection around myself with sword and conjurations. Inside this, I—and anyone else—would be safe from intrusion. He also showed me how to achieve the converse: to confine a person, or people, within a warded area. ‘They are not actually as much use as you’d think,’ he warned. ‘You can’t make them too big, not much larger than this room, in fact. If you did, you’d be sick for a month. It takes health and strength to build wards. Moreover, protection wards for yourself only work if you stay within them, so you can’t use them while travelling. They won’t last forever, either; nor can you keep rebuilding them. You’d tire yourself out.’ Nothing was done without a
price. Each time something was warded, each time conjurations were uttered, personal strength and sword strength were depleted, a depletion only time and rest would cure. Use magic too much and you could end up prone to illness, dying of anything from pneumonia to apoplexy.

‘Tell me about healing power,’ I asked him. ‘How effective is it?’
Can you save the life of someone who has a baby ripped from her?

‘It’s not as effective as we’d like,’ he admitted. ‘My mother has made it her speciality. She says that all we can do is heal something that has a chance of healing anyway. We make the chance a certainty. And we speed up the healing process.’

‘No miracles?’

‘No miracles.’

As the days went by, Garis progressed to more active uses of the sword. He taught me how to use it in a more conventional way, then how to supplement fighting strokes with its power. I learned how to send forth a narrow beam of cold light that could sear or melt anything in its path for three or four paces beyond the tip of the weapon, and I began to learn how to control the power so that it could be used for delicate tasks—such as breaking open a slave collar.

I was determined to learn it all. One day, I would put it to good use. If Pinar and others of the Magoroth thought I was going to be some kind of wall decoration, never actually doing anything except exist, they would have to rethink; I was going to be a power in this land.

In the meantime, I was glad to tire myself out. It helped me to sleep. It helped me to forget that somewhere out there the Mirage Makers might have an interest in my death because they coveted a child;
that somewhere out there was the Ravage, which apparently loathed us all; that right here within the Maze, the man I loved was about to marry a woman who had tried to kill me.

And so I was grateful for those nights when I was so tired I would collapse onto my pallet and drop into an exhausted sleep that kept me insensible till dawn.

Inevitably, when I awoke in the first light of the day, it was to find a new room waiting for me. The Mirage Makers were trying everything in their repertoire—a whole gamut of humorous idiocies—to find something to drive away the hollowness inside me. I knew there was nothing that would help, but they went on trying. Far from making me happy, however, their attention sent shivers of dark fear through me. I remembered walking the Shiver Barrens; I remembered the visions. I touched the place where my child grew, and wondered if the Mirage Makers worked to please me because they wanted him healthy—for them to take. I tried to take comfort from knowing the Convenant forbade them to kill. In my more optimistic moments I thought perhaps they just wanted to show their benevolence so that I would never use my powers against them, never use my Magor sword to spill their lifeblood as one vision had shown.

I remembered it vividly. My hand clasping another that was the representation of the Mirage Makers. Then two images: one where the hands melted into one another in unity, the other where I severed the Mirage Maker’s hand in a way that suggested I killed him. Them. Killed them
all…

The future wasn’t sure. I had a choice. I just had to work out which choice was best for me. For my son. The trouble was, how could I tell?

I saw little of Brand during those days. He had elected to join the troops the Magor were training,
troops to be used against Tyranian legions. The ordinary Kardis were enthusiastic soldiers, and Brand was an apt pupil even though he was coming to it relatively old. He was soon promoted to officer rank, and was a popular leader, inspiring loyalty in spite of his foreign blood.

He no longer had a problem with the language. Ever since we’d arrived in Kardiastan, he’d been building on what he’d already learned from Aemid and me over the years, improving every day until now he was fluent. He never lost his accent, but as far as I could see, most of the Kardi girls seemed to think that was part of his charm.

I wondered sometimes why he elected to become a soldier. Boredom? Or revenge? Perhaps a little of both. Tyrans had made him a slave, now here was a chance for him to fight the Exaltarchy and help bring about a nation’s freedom. I wondered, too, why the Magor trusted him so much. I asked Garis that, and he laughed. ‘Brand may be able to hide his feelings from you, Shirin, and sometimes from us too. But he can’t hide lies. Temellin believes Brand is an honourable man.’

I watched the troops exercise one morning, and it was a revelation. Just to see his rapport with the men, the clever way he could manipulate the small squad under his command into doing better, and still have them admire him as a man. He wasn’t like Temellin—he had none of Temellin’s easy camaraderie—but he’d earned their respect and admiration in spite of being an outsider.

Yet as I watched, I felt sick inside. This man had been a slave for most of his life, deemed to be unworthy of my friendship, considered to be the property of others, with no recourse to the very laws
that Tyrans considered its finest achievements. For twenty years he’d had the same rights as an animal: none. I could have had him whipped, or sold, or starved, or killed. I could have given him away to one of my friends to bed.

In Tyr, we referred to our slaves not as men or women, but as ‘speaking tools’.

And as I watched Brand, that memory made me sick with shame. Twenty years. What a Vortexdamned
waste
. And then another thought came, so obvious, yet revelatory nonetheless: how much untapped potential there was in Tyrans’s thousands of slaves…

Now, at least, Brand seemed content enough, and had taken up with my maid, Caleh: a vivacious girl with a kind heart. She had been badly abused during her time as a slave and had been man-shy, until Brand helped her, with infinite gentleness and complete lack of his usual cynicism, to forget.

Yet sometimes when he looked at me, even with his emotions shielded, I could tell his desire was as strong as ever.

The day before the scheduled wedding of the Mirager and his cousin, two incidents broke the routine of the previous days for me. The first occurred when I was alone in the training hall after Garis and I had been practising some swordplay. I put my weapon down on a bench and wiped my sweaty face and neck with a towel, thinking of a hot bath and a rest, trying
not
to think of the ceremony planned for the next day.

When I heard the sound of the door opening behind me I did not bother to turn, or even to reach out with my mind to see who it was—until a sudden pain shot into my hand from my cabochon.

I whirled to find Pinar standing there, smiling, her left hand fitting tight around the hilt of my sword.
‘First rule of a wise Magor, Shirin. Keep your sword in its sheath at your belt.’

I felt like a lump of mountain ice on sale along Tyr’s Marketwalk. She could have killed me, right then, and we both knew it. I said, ‘I did not think I needed to do so here.’

‘And I never thought I would need to protect myself by fitting my cabochon to another’s hilt.’

‘You have no need to fear me, Pinar. I would not hurt my brother’s wife.’ At least, I didn’t
think
I would. Not if she behaved herself…

‘You know the significance of what I have just done, I think. Your sword cannot harm me.’