The Heart of the Mirage (36 page)

She was turning her own blade against herself, forgetting even now that a weapon could not harm its owner. The sword refused to sever her hand, and jerked out of her grip instead. In its place she seized on a hunk of stone debris and used it to batter at the glowing blade she still held. A flash of light, a smell of seared flesh. She gave a scream of pure agony. I looked down at my cabochon. Still a flicker of colour there. I coaxed back the power until the stone was glowing again. I thought, briefly, of using it to cut off her hand, the one clutching my sword. I doubted it would save her life—hadn’t someone told me removing a cabochon meant death? I thought about it, then thought of Brand, and sent the fire of my cabochon to sink deep into her chest. The screaming was sheared off as life ceased and she collapsed.

I wanted to rest. I wanted to give my body time to heal. I wanted to give my mind time to accept what had happened. I wanted to give myself time to recover from the shock. I wanted time to forget the look on Pinar’s face.

I wanted time to grieve for Brand. To feel the pain, the guilt, the precious love that wasn’t the right love.

Brand…

I was not given time.

I heard something in my mind, ordering me, not doubting my obedience. It did not come as a surprise, but it was unwelcome nonetheless.
Now,
it said, but not in words. In concepts. In pictures. In emotions. At a guess, without the song of the Shiver Barrens, the Mirage Makers found communication difficult.

Action. Offer. Time. Consequences. I interpreted, hoping I understood:
With your own sword. We shall guide your hand. Hurry, or the child will die.

I untied Pinar’s clothing, my fingers clumsy with distaste. Then I took up my sword from where it now lay free of Pinar’s grip, placed the tip to the bared skin and waited. I could have sworn I felt a hand, as chill as spring water, close over mine and press down. The edge of the blade opened up a gash from navel to pubic hair. My eyes were blurred with unshed tears as I saw the womb displayed before the blood ran and covered it. I reached in with a hand to lift the organ out, cutting it away from the body that had sheltered it. Then I felt my cabochon encircle the child inside, swaddling him with protective power to keep him safe.

I held Temellin’s son nestled in my palm and my tears spilled over. He was so tiny.

‘
What in the name of the Magor are you doing?
’

I looked up, startled.

Garis was pushing himself away from the floor, his eyes wide with shock and revulsion. ‘What abomination have you committed? You—you—
numen
! Sweet cabochon, Pinar was right! Oh, Mirage damn my wretched soul,
what have I done
?’

I looked at him in silence, my own distress overwhelming me. I wanted to speak, to explain, to erase the horror on his face, but he had started to fade
away. I looked at him in puzzlement as he lost solidity, then any semblance to reality. He had disappeared and so had Brand and Pinar and the wreckage of the room. I was standing in total blackness, swathed in it.

I looked down at my precious burden, feeling its life, not seeing it, but knowing it was there.

Well?
I asked.
What now?

As I stood there, the floor still solid beneath my feet, in a blackness so thick I could feel it, that last sight of Garis calling the light into his sword and looking at me in horror was etched into my brain, along with the detailed image of the remains of the room. The wooden ceiling sagging in smoking tatters. The floor, gouged and pitted, littered with stone rubble and dust. Holes large enough to walk through gaping in the walls. Piles of splintered wood scattered around the walls. Brand lying against one wall, rolled there by the forces Pinar and I had unleashed, his deep redbrown hair with its copper flash dusted with dirt, his body half buried under broken wood and a tattered something that may or may not have once been a pallet. One arm outstretched towards me as if in rebuke.

His death hurt me so much I couldn’t even consider it true. He
couldn’t
have died. Not
Brand
.

Nearby lay the Miragerin-consort. The expression on her face, caught in the rictus of death, was one of utter terror. Her eyes bulged, her mouth gaped open in a silent, endless scream. Her left hand was scarified
into bloodied pulp, her arm burned and charred to the elbow. A burn on her chest revealed the manner of her death, unmistakably the mark of a cabochon. And then the worst—the thing that horrified Garis so much—the bared, violated body; the gash where something had been ripped out…

Garis standing there, so young and so hurt I wanted to take him in my arms and tell him it all wasn’t as bad as he thought.

But I couldn’t. I was rooted to the spot, rendered first dumb and then horrifically blind with only the memory of his face before me. The blackness was so total I felt the air itself had turned to pitch. It was a relief to inhale and realise I could still breathe. To realise I was still alive.

A moment later, all my fears dropped away like shed skin. I was swaddled in love, a gentle flooding emotion quite unlike anything I had ever felt before. A totally unselfish love accepting me exactly the way I was, requiring nothing of me except my existence. A united love of many individuals…

And inside my head, those wordless ideas: Time. Patience.

I waited.

And realised I could still hear what was happening in the room.

Comfort followed hard after the love, soothing me, attempting to take away my grief, but every sound I heard was a slash of painful memory. Someone retching. A rustle of movement. Then a groan, partly of pain, partly of anguish.

Then a voice. ‘Brand?’ Garis’s voice. ‘Brand? Oh, Ravage hells—’

I could no longer see or sense emotion, but I was hearing everything as if I were still standing there in
that room watching. Thumps and scrapes: Garis flinging off the debris to uncover Brand’s body. An intake of breath at what he found, followed by sounds of unidentifiable movement. I tried to shut it out, not to hear. To concentrate on what was happening to me.

I was still standing motionless, Temellin’s son in my hands. The blackness was just as solid. The love was still there, unquestioning and total, the comfort doing its best to trickle through me, to find and fill all those crevices where grief lurked and hurt. The burden I carried felt marginally lighter.

Then Garis’s voice again, coming out of the darkness like an arrow of light. ‘Come on, Brand, fight it, you great lunk. You can’t die yet—I won’t let you.’

Tears came, but I couldn’t wipe them away. I still couldn’t sense Brand. Garis I could feel, but not Brand. Didn’t that mean he was dead? Oh, Goddess, tell me that just means he was unconscious. Tell me I was wrong…

It wasn’t the Goddess who replied; it was the Mirage Makers. Concept: Death. Image: Brand. Concept: Negation.
He was not dead, not yet.
But then I heard the sob in Garis’s voice, the despair and exhaustion. And I couldn’t help. I couldn’t lend my healing to his, I couldn’t move. Brand still might die while I stood invisible and helpless just a pace or two away, yet so far off I could have been in another world.

Time passed so slowly.

I should have tired, but the darkness seemed to support me. My arms did not ache even as the hours passed. The Mirage Makers did not speak, but neither did their love falter. Almost indiscernibly the thing I carried lost its reality, lightened in my hands, to become less substantial, until I held a wraith, a being
created from nothing more substantial than mist or sunlight.

Occasionally I heard Garis make a movement from the other side of the darkness, but I could not identify his actions. I had no proof Brand was alive—until I heard his voice.

Weak, hardly more than a whisper. ‘Garis?’ It could have been the final mutter of a dying man; I had no way of knowing.

Garis’s reply: ‘Yes, it’s me.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Healing a great gash in your belly. Lie back and let it happen.’

A moment’s silence, then Brand again. ‘Pinar did it. Where’s Ligea?’

‘Who? Oh, Shirin. I don’t know. I think she’s all right.’ His bitterness speared me. ‘Pinar is dead.’

And still more silence, like the blankness of death.

It was several more hours before either of them spoke again. Then it was Brand’s voice I heard, stronger now, no longer the voice of a dying man. My heart rejoiced, but the saner part of me wondered how it was possible. His hold on life had surely been as tenuous as a last solitary thistledown resisting the tug of the wind. And Garis was hardly an experienced healer. How then had he saved someone so close to death? It didn’t seem to make sense.

I heard Brand ask Garis, ‘Did you see what happened?’

‘No. I was knocked out. But Shirin was alive at the end of it all. Then she, er, sort of disappeared.’ He kept his fear tightly clutched within, yet I felt it anyway. ‘I don’t know where she went. I can sense her, though. It’s strange; it’s as if she is close by, but also somehow
remote at the same time.’ The sound of water being poured, then a pause. ‘How do you feel now?’

‘Stronger. I don’t suppose you’re going to say it, but I know I was near death then, and you brought me back. I am in your debt.’ Another pause. ‘Shall we bury her?’

‘Cabochon knows how I am ever going to tell Temellin this—’ Garis sounded sick and his voice faded. ‘I shall ride after him today. He must be told.’ I felt the ragged edges of his despair.

‘And the Stalwarts?’

‘I no longer believe in them, Brand. Or in her. Somehow she distorted what should have been true. She has power, but it is not like ours. It is tainted.’

‘No.’

They were silent for a time. Two men agreeing to disagree.

‘And you, what will you do?’ Garis asked him.

‘Wait here for her. She will be back.’

‘You witless Altani ass! She doesn’t deserve anyone’s loyalty.’

‘Because she killed Pinar? Come on, Garis, what else could she have done? Pinar was the one who attacked her. I almost died because Ligea hesitated to kill her. That’s when Pinar did this to me.’

More silence.

Then Brand’s: ‘Let’s get her buried.’

‘Are you sure you’re strong enough?’

‘A five-year-old could probably flatten me with a cooked turnip, though I think I can help you carry a body. I don’t know what you did, Garis, but it was nothing short of miraculous. You don’t look so chirpy yourself, come to think of it.’

‘All power has its price. That five-year-old would only need half a turnip to knock me into next week…’

I listened to them leave the room, and relief brought my tears back.

A little later, I was aware of a change in the darkness around me, a thickening. My hands seemed empty. Concepts in my head: Completion. Appreciation.
It is done. We thank you.
A hand—a mirage of substance rather than vision?—took mine and clasped it. I felt a flood of gratitude, not from one but from a host of individuals, each giving me their blessing through that one hand. Then there seemed to be a movement in the darkness and I felt what might have been lips against my cheek, a kiss as light and as soft as the brush of a falling snowflake. An illusion, of course. Their attempt at a human gesture.

I was once again standing in the room, blinking in sunlight.

I was desperately weak. I had to clutch the wall to support myself as I made my way downstairs, reeling from step to step like a wood-possum drunk on fermented fruit. Then, just as I reached the outside door, I heard Brand say, ‘You’re going immediately?’

I stopped, leaning against the wall. I could see the two of them through the gap of the half-open door. Garis was holding the bridle of a shleth and Brand, stripped to the waist, was seated on a boulder nearby. An ugly wound ploughed raw and fresh across his stomach. Behind him, a mound—not there the night before—was covered with flowers, living ones: the Mirage Makers paying homage to the mother of their newest companion.

But it was Brand who held my attention. He was…changed. I reached out, trying to touch his mind, to gauge his emotions. As always, he shielded himself, yet still I felt he was different. He reminded me of someone. A moment later, I had it. He reminded me of a Magor
child. He had the same faint hint of undeveloped Magorness as such children had before they learned control of their cabochons.

And that was surely impossible.

Garis nodded in answer to Brand’s question. ‘Are you sure you won’t come with me?’

‘I’m sure. Garis, I don’t know what you’re thinking, but whatever it is, you’re doing Ligea—Shirin—an injustice. Why don’t you wait until she returns? She can explain—’

‘There can be no explanation that would justify what she did. None.’ He knew I was there, of course. He must have sensed my presence. He wanted me to hear.

‘There is, you know. She told me—’

‘And you believe everything she says, don’t you? You’re even more gullible than I was! She hated Pinar because Pinar had Temellin, so she slaughtered her. She’s a dangerous killer. I don’t want to see her, Brand, because if I do I will try to fry her and probably end up dead myself. She murdered Pinar; she’d make crow bait out of me. I’d give a lot to know how she managed to fade out of that room, though,’ he added thoughtfully as his anger died. ‘She must have learned from those Magor books.’

Garis shook his head in an expression of sorrow and went to fetch his saddlebags from where they lay on the ground nearby. He looked little more than a boy. His charm and his good looks, the curling lashes and the unusual tawny eyes—they all accentuated his youth rather than his maturity. He had performed a miracle that would have taxed a strong man, but for all that, he was vulnerable. Garis would carry the mental scars of this day just as long as Brand would carry the physical ones.

‘Garis—’ Brand said.

Garis cut him short. ‘Don’t bother, Brand. You’re even worse than Temellin! The woman has made a fool of you. Of us all. At least Temellin knew enough to ward her. Vortex only knows how I am going to tell him what my foolishness has wrought here. How do you tell a man you were responsible for the death of his wife?’ He mounted his animal. ‘Full life, Brand.’

‘Full life, Garis.’ Brand touched the rough scarring at his waist. ‘I hope I can repay you one day.’

‘You can repay me by putting your blade through her.’ The youth wheeled his mount and rode back up the track.

Brand watched him go.

I stepped out into the sunlight. ‘Not a very happy farewell,’ I said. ‘He’s going to torment himself with his foolishness and his supposed cowardice all the way to Temellin.’

He spun around in shock. He stared, taking in my exhaustion, the dirt and blood still streaking my clothing and hands. ‘Ligea…’ His voice was gentle with concern.

‘I thought I had killed you with my foolishness.’ I held out a hand to him. ‘Can you forgive me?’

He took my hand, supporting me. And I felt again that faint whisper of undeveloped Magorness. He said, ‘It is always better to err on the side of compassion.’

‘Is it? Pity can be as big an error as hate. I have loved Temellin with a passion I’ll never find again, but you have been my closest friend; I do not know that I could have gone on living, knowing I had caused your death.’

He was moved; I felt the trickle of his unconcealed emotion. ‘It was not you who brought me to the edge of death; it was Pinar. And Garis was able to save me.’

‘How? How in all the mists of Acheron did he do it?’

He looked uncomfortable. ‘He didn’t have the power himself, so he cut out Pinar’s cabochon. It powdered and he put the powder in my wound. He told me just then he got the idea from some old tale of a Magor who committed suicide by removing his cabochon and giving it to save a friend he had mortally wounded in an argument.’ He shivered, not liking anything to do with powers he didn’t understand. ‘It seems to have done the trick.’ That explained his sudden attainment of a faint Magor’s aura, and I blessed Garis for his inspiration.

‘Garis says time will eliminate it from my system and I’ll be as good as new. But you—where have you been, Ligea? I was worried.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. Here, but not here. Knowing the love of the Mirage Makers, giving them the child…’

He glanced around, every line of his body an eloquent expression of his unease. ‘Are they separate…minds?’ Poor Brand. How he hated this!

I nodded. ‘I think so, although perhaps not in the sense we think of separation. There are many entities and each has a separate…personality, but there can be no dissension between them because they are all part of the same whole: the Mirage. Do I make sense?’

‘I think it is sick. They are each trapped, prisoners in one body—’

‘No, it is not like that. It is wonderful. They are a unity.’

‘And the child? You have delivered Temellin’s son to these—these creatures?’

‘Yes. He is part of them now. In this—’ I touched a flower on a bush near me. The glitter from its petals stuck to my hand and I brushed it to the ground in a
shower of silver ‘—or in that. He is already all around us. He has been received with love, such great love: something larger, more perfect than we can ever know, and it is our loss.’

Brand said flatly, ‘He will go mad.’

I shook my head. ‘No. He will never miss what he has not known. His mind will grow, his personality will develop just as it would have done had he been born in the normal way. He was part of his mother; now he is part of the Mirage. He will never know what it is to be a separate creature, so how can he miss it?’ I remembered the pain the Ravage gave to the Mirage and shivered. I had delivered Temellin’s son to be a part of that pain until such time as he was old enough to bring an end to the suffering. Goddess, what if he died in there? What if he couldn’t cure the illness of the Mirage anyway? What if he lived in constant pain for the rest of eternity?