The Heart of the Mirage (29 page)

I woke in the morning to a different room. Tucked away in a cabinet that had not been there before was a practical and welcome addition: a bathroom. The Mirage Makers had evidently noticed my discomfort at having to use a pail supplied the night before by my jailers; I was touched by this sign of pragmatic thoughtfulness.

The other changes were less useful. There was a large hole in the outside wall as if the Mirage Makers wanted me to feel I was not actually imprisoned at all. I knew differently. I could feel the warding and knew, hole or not, I was imprisoned as effectively as if I were chained. The other walls were now covered with drawings, all ridiculous: people with three eyes and lopsided faces, or with four arms and no legs, or who were half man, half insect. There were hundreds upon hundreds of them, all doing different things—standing on their heads, swimming in the sky, cutting their toenails with an axe, drinking soup from a sieve, birthing flowers from their breasts…If I had been in the mood for absurdities, I could have spent hours examining them, hunting out their riddles, laughing over their delights.

Instead, I remained most of the day lying on my pallet, looking at a ceiling made of rippling waves of water that defied gravity, and seeing none of it. An Illuser I didn’t know came with my meals. He told me his name was Reftim and he was carefully neutral when he spoke to me. He was a small rotund man, with rounded features, a puffball nose and the face of a market joke-teller, but I sensed his antipathy and did not make the mistake of equating his jovial looks with his character. However, he was polite enough and, in answer to my first question, he told me Brand was also confined to his room. I asked him to tell Temellin I must see him and he promised to pass on the message.

But Temellin didn’t come.

Later in the day, Reftim did bring Aemid to see me.

She looked wretched. Her face was swollen, her eyes reddened. I wanted to hug her, comfort her, but my sense of betrayal stopped me. She should have had faith in me.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Her eyes were fixed on the floor. ‘I couldn’t let you betray my land.’

‘Our land,’ I amended. ‘I wasn’t going to. You should have known me better.’

She met my gaze then, and her expression hardened. ‘I did. That’s the trouble. I saw what you became. You became like him. Gayed. You even had the same look in your eyes, the look of someone who doesn’t care what happens to others as long as you reach your goal.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I know it’s my fault. And I deserve punishment. I think this must be it—to see you here, imprisoned like this. To know that the little girl who so bravely hid her cabochon from them because her mother told her to…To see her become the woman I see now, trapped here for the
rest of her life. All because I allowed it to happen. I failed you. I’m sorry, Ligea. I’m so, so sorry.’

She started crying and turned from me. Reftim led her through the ward and out of the room. I averted my face so he wouldn’t see the tears welling up in my own eyes. She was right. I had tried so hard to be like Gayed. And I had promised her I wouldn’t pose as a Kardi, only to break that promise without a second thought? That was the person I had become.

The next day, I asked to see Korden. He came, bringing all his dislike and distrust with him, none of which he bothered to conceal. ‘Well?’ he asked without preamble, but I could see that the room startled him. In addition to the wall drawings, one corner now contained a floating set of multicoloured bubbles, each the size of a man’s fist and full of moving pictures portraying an insane world of animals that became people, people who became flowers, stars that talked and similar absurdities.

‘Several things,’ I said. ‘You can be as arbitrary as you like with me, but Brand deserves better. A fair hearing. After all, anything else smacks too much of Tyrans, does it not?’

‘In matters of treason, it is the will of the Mirager that prevails,’ he said stiffly.

‘Brand can hardly be said to have committed treason. He is not Kardi,’ I snapped. ‘You know Brand cannot lie to you. See to it the Mirager is fair. It is your duty as one of the Magoroth, surely.’

‘What else?’

‘I would like to know my fate.’

‘Most of the Magor are pressing for your execution. But we Magoroth have voted to allow the Mirager to take the ultimate decision by himself. You are his sister,
after all. Besides, you are—unfortunately—his heir, which means it is difficult to subject you to the ordinary processes of Magor law anyway. Although there are many who feel we shouldn’t bother with niceties like that.’

‘I would like to see him.’

‘He does not want to see you.’

‘Do I get no opportunity to defend myself?’

‘That is also the Mirager’s decision.’

‘Rough justice, eh?’

His lips tightened, but he said nothing.

I breathed in, deeply. I had made up my mind. It was time to make irrevocable my decision on whether I was Tyranian or Kardi. Time to bring an end to lies, to deceit, to keeping my options open. And yet, it was so hard to say the next words, to discard publicly the values of a lifetime and replace them with other principles. Ligea Gayed was difficult to kill.

‘Korden,’ I began, ‘when I was still in Tyrans I heard of a plan to attack the Mirage from the west. The legion known as the Stalwarts was to be sent across the Alps—’

He laughed and his scorn swirled around him. ‘What is this, some kind of joke? Next, you’ll be telling me they intend to bring their gorclaks across the peaks. The mountains are impassable.’

‘The plan is a serious one. Taking into account the difficulties of the terrain, the amount of preparation involved, and considering the seasons, I estimate the forces will arrive in less than three months’ time. A whole legion; three thousand on foot perhaps, and another seven hundred mounted Stalwarts, on gorclak.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. No such force could ever cross the Alps!’

‘Your parents’ generation underestimated Tyrans. Don’t make the same mistake. Especially not of the Stalwarts.’ I frowned, baffled by the intensity of his disbelief. ‘You know the truth when you hear it. Why, then, should you doubt me?’

He remained contemptuous and angry. ‘Believe me, we have talked about little else lately. We have come to the conclusion that you must be able to do what we cannot: hide a lie. How else could you have walked among us concealing your identity so cleverly? Temellin even slept with you without sensing your duplicity! You are an enormous danger to us. You represent something we always felt was impossible: a liar in our midst.’

I stared at him, suddenly aware of another emotion, inadequately concealed, lingering around him. Korden was in a state of shock.

I tried to explain. ‘I didn’t lie to any of you. I just didn’t tell all the story. There’s a difference. You can see that, can’t you?’

But he couldn’t. The Magor not only didn’t lie, they didn’t try to deceive. And the ordinary Kardi, awed by the reputation of the Magor, would never have tried, either. What I had done was unthinkable, and it had left them reeling. Their only explanation was that I was able to conceal lies; therefore nothing I said could be automatically believed.

He said finally, ‘I can’t possibly imagine what you hope to gain by telling this tale about the Stalwarts.’

‘Tell Temellin. And tell him I must see him.’

‘I’ll tell him. But don’t wait up.’

He turned on his heel and left.

Temellin did not come to see me until the next day. He was not alone; Brand was with him.

Brand entered first, his expression as unreadable as ever. He didn’t speak, but he came up to me and raised the back of his hand to my cheek in an intimate gesture of caring far more moving than any kiss would have been. I looked away from him to Temellin. I sensed a tinge of shame and uncertainty about the Mirager as he watched the two of us.

He did not greet me. He said flatly, ‘You wanted to see me?’ and then walked across the room, avoiding eight or nine fish swimming around in an expanse of apparently unconfined water at head-height, to stand with his back to the hole in the wall.

From where I stood he was a silhouette, rigid and forbidding. He continued, ‘You have an unlikely tale about a Stalwart invasion of the Mirage. I asked Aemid what she knew about it. She said, not unexpectedly, that she had never heard of it. So now I’m going to ask Brand, because if there is such a thing planned, I’m sure you would have told him. Tell me what you know about it, Brand—and remember I can detect lies.’

Brand looked at me helplessly, his anger at Temellin growing.

I intervened. ‘He knows nothing.’

‘She didn’t tell me everything. Only those things where she thought my advice would be useful,’ Brand said.

Temellin looked unconvinced. ‘That’s not what Aemid says. She says Ligea always asked your advice.’ He sighed. ‘You’re loyal, I’ll say that for you, Brand. What I can’t understand is
why
. She’d put a slave collar around your neck again the moment she had the chance.’

‘Ligea freed me before we ever came to the Mirage. She has paid me for every year of my service to her or to her father. I give my loyalty to her because she is worthy
of it, not because I am ordered to do so. In fact, she has been asking me to leave her, to seek a life of my own.’

Temellin looked at him, astonished. ‘Then why didn’t you?’

‘I didn’t want to leave, that’s why. And I’m glad I didn’t. Ligea’s damned lucky she didn’t die in the dining hall with your sodding sword in her heart—how could you do that to a woman who gave you all the love she had to give? She would have died for you half a dozen times over, but you couldn’t trust her, could you?’ His voice was so thick with contempt he could scarcely speak. ‘When I think of the way she felt about you—’

‘It seems she has fooled you just as she fooled us.’

‘Ligea and I were brought up together. There’s nothing I don’t know about the way she thinks. She was raised by men who tried to twist her into a cold-blooded instrument of their revenge. They tried, but they didn’t succeed, because she could never quite reconcile what they tried to make of her with what she knew herself to be. They tried to sharpen her into a ruthless killer; instead, she made torture obsolete in the Cages of Tyr. How could you have loved her, and not sensed her capacity for loving?’

‘You’re the one who is mole-blind—’

Brand shook his head, his stare in Temellin’s direction unforgiving. ‘I remember the day I arrived at General Gayed’s house in Tyr. He’d just bought me, cheap, at a slave auction. I was twelve years old, a dirty, skinny, ill-fed boy who had spent two whole years on auction blocks, being passed from one foul slave dealer to another across the Exaltarchy. I’d been beaten, starved and abused in ways you probably haven’t even heard of. My parents were dead, my home and my inheritance stolen from me, my body used.’

He turned away from Temellin, apparently to look at the fish. I doubt he really saw them, though. ‘I remember seeing Ligea for the first time. I think Gayed had bought me as a sort of joke, to see what she’d do with me. I was hardly a quality slave. He’d got me from the docks in Tyr where they sell the dross of the slave trade. Most girls brought up the way Ligea was would have scorned me, sent me to be the middenboy in the stables. She looked me over and I could see her anger growing. But she wasn’t angry at me, or even at her father.

‘“Who beat you like that?” she asked. It was a hard question to answer—I’d been beaten so many times—but I gave her the name of the slaver who’d inflicted the last and most vicious beating. I never spoke of it again, and neither did she, but ten years later, when she had the means to do so, she had that man banned from the slave trade and his assets impounded by the State for tax evasion.

‘She was ten years old when she saw me for the first time. She could have seen the dirt, the sullen face, the ugliness of an undernourished body—but she didn’t. She saw only the abuse. And hated it.

‘I was her slave for eighteen years before she freed me. I never felt less than her friend, for all that she maintained the conventions of a slave-owner relationship. I know that as a compeer she’s killed people, condemned others to a lifetime in the Cages of Tyr, but I’ve never known her to be less than fair, or to harm anyone who wasn’t a criminal. Her special abilities saved as many people from torture or wrongful imprisonment or execution as condemned them to such.’

He looked across at Temellin. ‘But what’s the use in talking to you—you’ve made up your mind, haven’t
you? Condemned her on the word of your bitch-wife and a prematurely old nurse who hadn’t the spine to tell her charge the truth about herself when she was a child. You aren’t fit to lead a nation, Temellin. Even with all your powers you still don’t recognise the truth when the smell of it is in your nostrils. Vortexdamn you, you had everything I would have given the world for, and you tried to kill her. If I were free, I’d run a sword through your innards sooner than I’d look on your face again.’ He turned his back and went to stand by the door, his dismissal of his jailer as rudely abrupt as he knew how to make it.

And Temellin accepted the dismissal. He called someone to come and escort the Altani back to his room.

I hoped Brand understood the look I gave him as he left. It was the only way I had to say thank you. He’d been my slave, and he could still defend me. I had never been so humbled.

It was hard to be alone with Temellin.

I opted to keep the conversation away from the personal and said, ‘The Stalwarts
are
coming. And that’s the truth. You are supposed to be able to distinguish a lie when you hear it.’

‘
Can
I, though, with you? If Brand had known about them, I would have believed you. But he didn’t. And why, if you had changed your loyalties, did you not tell me of this invasion before? You would take an oath to serve Kardiastan, and yet you wouldn’t mention an intended attack on the country; worse still, on this part of it—the Mirage? Everything that you’ve done, Shirin, begs to make me wonder about your honesty. It begs me to wonder if you can do what others can’t, and disguise your lies in the same way we can all hide our
emotions.’ He sounded rational and unemotional, but I could feel his contempt. And his pain. ‘There was one other person who deceived us with his lies. We don’t know who it was, but we do know it was one of us. A Magoroth. We trusted, because we didn’t believe we could be deceived. And he brought Tyranian legionnaires into the Shimmer Feast, and killed our parents, yours and mine, and all our cousins, all the babies in the nursery and our whole way of life. I can never risk that happening again.
Never
.’