The Shadow of Tyr Read online

  Rathrox watched. She’s uneasy about it, though. I wonder why. I don’t remember a storm; she’s lying. Hiding something. I shall send someone to investigate further.

  ‘You know, there’s something I don’t understand,’ he added, after the silence threatened to become embarrassing and he had decided it might be worthwhile annoying her after all. She could be indiscreet, and therefore informative, when she was irritated. ‘You told me once that there is a cave behind the face of the Oracle. Why did the Cult of Melete ever start to use a young priestess to translate the muttering in the first place? One of your number could have hidden in the cave and pretended that Melete spoke Tyranian!’

  She glanced at the Imperial Guards on duty to make sure they could not hear, then said in furious protest, ‘The gods once truly spoke to the Selected! You have only to read the past histories to know that. Then—then they stopped speaking to us, but we continued the tradition of having a Selected. One day Melete at least will return, if not the others; I know it. And we will be ready.’

  He stared, wondering at her naivety. ‘Antonia, today’s histories will record Esme’s words as true, just as past scribes recorded the supposed words of their Selected of the Oracle as the true words of Melete.’

  Her expression pinched with anger. ‘You mock the Goddess, Magister.’

  No, Antonia, not the Goddess. Just you.

  How could a woman, who happily connived with the Exaltarch to deceive the public, be so silly? He wouldn’t mind betting the first High Priestess who started this whole Oracle deception had known exactly what she was doing. Probably thought using a Selected of the Oracle meant more visible power for the temple priestesses.

  Fortunately, he was saved from answering Antonia’s accusation by the summons for them both to enter the audience room.

  The Exaltarch was looking at an amulet when they entered, turning it over and over in his hands. ‘Lovely piece of work,’ he said by way of greeting, ‘if somewhat large. The King of Akowarn sent it for me to wear on my biceps. I think he is trying to pay me a compliment.’ He held it up to show the size. ‘He is suggesting I marry his eldest daughter.’

  ‘Doesn’t he know you are already married, Exalted?’ Antonia asked.

  ‘Perhaps he expects me to divorce. And he is offering a very attractive dowry, too. I think I shall accept.’

  ‘The Fasii will not be happy,’ Rathrox murmured, referring to the family of Bator’s third and present wife, Eriana.

  ‘Oh, I shan’t marry the girl. Just bring her here, procure the dowry and fob her off repeatedly with one excuse or another. After all, what’s the King going to do? Attack Tyr? Stop paying his vassal taxes? He’d never dare! But this is not what I brought you here to discuss. Rathrox, I want to know what you have heard from the Gayed woman about her progress in Kardiastan.’

  ‘The last message I received said she was about to leave Madrinya for the Mirage. She intends to bring down the rebel movement from within.’ He felt a moment’s smug pride. ‘I knew she’d do it. She’ll be the Mirager yet.’

  Bator put the amulet down and seated himself, indicating they should do likewise. ‘Do you mean to tell me she’s lost contact with our authorities there?’

  ‘Well, yes, for the time being. But by now she will have identified the rebel leader and found a way to enter the heart of their hiding place.’

  ‘And you are sure she won’t be seduced back to their way of life? They must know she is one of them by now; she has that jewel set in her palm.’ He frowned, the harsh lines of his face settling down into petulant creases. ‘I always said we ought to have had it cut out of her while she was still a toddling babe.’

  ‘And I told you Solad said removing the jewel kills the person. The one time we did it, as an experiment with another child, that’s exactly what happened. Yes, they will know she is one of them, obviously, as soon as they spot it. And I suspect they have welcomed her with open arms because of it. There are few enough of them left, thanks to us and Solad’s treachery. There’s no reason they should guess she’s Solad’s daughter, any more than she will ever find out unless we tell her. And no, she won’t betray us.’

  He smiled, enjoying the acumen of his own past planning. ‘Exalted, why else did we wait so long, but to make sure of that? She loves her country and serves her Exaltarch. She revels in her life in Tyr and the things her wealth buys her. She hated going to Kardiastan, and she can’t wait to come back. And she’s in love with a Stalwart tribune who’s fighting his way into the Mirage even as we speak.’

  ‘She still honours her adoptive father,’ Antonia added. ‘I often saw her praying at his tomb.’

  Rathrox nodded. ‘It was the perfect moment to send her to wreak havoc on the country of her birth; couldn’t have been better. A little younger and she may well have been more interested in finding out who she was. Now she just wants to be with the tribune and get them both back to Tyr, covered in glory.’

  ‘Then my idea of having the Oracle speak to her was a good one,’ the Exaltarch said, nodding in satisfaction. ‘Any woman would be flattered at being singled out for attention by the Meletian Oracle of Tyr, even one as hardened as she is.’

  Rathrox had his doubts whether the promises of wealth and adulation, made by the Oracle at Bator’s instigation, had meant much to Ligea, but he wasn’t about to argue the point. ‘Of course. Nothing less than brilliant.’ Perhaps that sounded sardonic. Hurriedly, he added without—he hoped—any hint of sarcasm, ‘It gave her even more to come home for.’

  ‘The moment you hear from her again, bring me word. I am anxious about the Stalwarts. If she is in the Mirage, perhaps she will be able to send word of them. If she has learned the secret of crossing those strange sands—what was the name of them again? The Shiver Barrens?—then she should be able to send a message out.’

  ‘Of course, Exalted.’

  ‘And now there is this matter of the annual prophecy.’ He picked up a scroll from a side table and handed it to Antonia. ‘Here are the details. I would like the Oracle to speak of the need for young men to join the legions and for the wealthy to donate money to our coffers in order for us to defeat the sorcerers and numina of Kardiastan. I expect the trademaster to be admonished because our shipbuilders have insufficient wood. I expect the Imperial Historian to be urged to write a history of my military successes. I expect the Prefect Urbis to be encouraged to supply more tax money in the coming year. I expect the Assorian moneymaster to be told non-citizens should show their gratitude more…’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Arcadim Asenius fingered the note he had hidden in the sleeve of his robe. Just two lines, unsigned, neatly lettered, on a small piece of papyrus delivered earlier to his counting house.

  Come and see me tonight. Don’t tell anyone I am back in Tyr.

  A handful of words, but enough to make his stomach churn. The lettering was Ligea Gayed’s, and when a rich patron of the Asenius Counting House requested your presence, you obliged. So he was now sitting in a curtained litter being borne through the streets on his way to the Villa Gayed.

  I should have turned down the opportunity to manage Ligea’s affairs, right at the beginning. It is against the Great God’s order for a woman to behave as she does…

  And yet he liked her.

  He wondered at himself. How could he, an Assorian moneymaster, enjoy the company of a Tyranian woman who was the antithesis of all he thought a woman should be? She was immodest. She behaved like a man. She wasn’t even that attractive, although she…He hunted for the right word. She fascinated, that was it. She fascinated.

  You silly old fool. She fascinates the way a snake fascinates its prey.

  The litter lurched and swayed. He grimaced in exasperation and clutched at the sides. They must be approaching the necropolis and the fools of litter bearers had started to run, fear lending them the energy. Idolaters. If only everyone believed in the One True God, the world would be a less fearful place.

  The pace slowed as
they mounted the steps up the hill, and then turned into Senators’ Row. An anachronism, that name. There were no more senators in Tyrans, not since the first Exaltarch had seized power almost fifty years before. There was no Advisory Council now, either. The present Exaltarch, Bator Korbus, had done away with them too. Arcadim tried to push that thought away. It was all part of a recurring nightmare for an Assorian: when one man gathered all the strands of power into his hands, he looked for scapegoats if things went wrong and who better to blame than people who were both foreign and rich?

  There was no torch burning outside the Villa Gayed. The linkman, holding his own brand high, pounded at the door in the gate. Arcadim clambered out. His shaved head felt cold in the cool of the evening air and he coughed as he breathed in the smoke from the burning pitch. ‘Wait for me,’ he told the men, ‘no matter how late I am.’

  The slave who answered the door was expecting him. She washed his feet in the entry hall and just as she was patting them dry with a towel, Ligea appeared. He rose to greet her, started to smile—then saw her face. Shock choked his throat. His welcome died unspoken, his inner thoughts emerging as a more chaotic God of my fathers, what has happened to her? Not even six months since he’d last seen her, and she was now rake-thin, her face gaunt and—gouged. A deep, puckered crater scarred her cheek as though flesh had been ripped out and thrown away. And what in all of God’s Elysium had she done to her hair? It was usually gold-streaked, falling in curls from a clasp high on her head. Now it was plain brown, roughly cut short, as straight and lustreless as hemp fibre. Hades, his own beard, curled and perfumed and threaded with pearls, was more attractive.

  He was appalled. If he’d passed her in the street he would never have recognised her.

  ‘Welcome, Master Arcadim,’ she said.

  He licked dry lips and wondered what to say to a woman who must have been to Hades and back since they’d last met. He settled finally on a neutral, ‘Welcome back to Tyr, Domina. I am sorry to see you have had some, er, trouble in Kardiastan.’

  She raised her hand to her cheek. ‘This? Yes, I am afraid so.’ She shrugged and led him into one of the inner rooms, where yet another shock awaited him. Her Altani slave was lounging on a divan, a goblet of wine in one hand, very much at home. He rose as Arcadim entered, but the casual movement spoke of the superficial manners between equals, not the obsequiousness of a slave or even the deference of a lowborn citizen. His slave collar was gone and, even more puzzling, one of his arms appeared to have been withered.

  Ligea said, ‘You know Brand of Altan, I believe?’

  Arcadim floundered. What the Hades was she doing, expecting a guest to greet a slave, or even an exslave, as an equal? ‘Not officially, no,’ he said, ‘although he has delivered your messages to my counting house on occasion.’ He bowed low to display the tattoo on his shaved pate—the all-seeing eye of God—in ritual greeting, then addressed his next remark to the Altani. ‘As a member of a family who made their initial wealth gathering salt and soda from dry lakebeds, I’m always glad to see people come up in the world.’ There. Let them make of that what they will.

  The Altani grinned at him. ‘But as Ligea’s man of affairs, you are as suspicious as a pinch of that salt about to be dropped into boiling water.’

  Arcadim betrayed his surprise at the audacity of the reply by being just a shade too slow to answer. ‘Something like that, yes,’ he said as they sat. But he couldn’t relax. This was all wrong. His business acumen, gathered over a lifetime of deals and haggling, jangled its warning. The Altani was neither timid nor embarrassed. Don’t take him lightly, the warning said, there’s nothing withered about this man’s wits.

  ‘Master Arcadim,’ Ligea said, ‘thank you for coming. I asked you here this evening because there is going to be a major change in the way we interact, if you wish to continue as my moneymaster. We have much to discuss.’

  Thoroughly alarmed, he replied, ‘I hope I have not given offence, Domina, that you would consider changing your man of business.’ He indicated the scrolls he carried. ‘I have here the accounts of all that has taken place in your absence. I am sure you will find them in order.’

  ‘I am sure of that, too,’ she agreed, waving away the scrolls. ‘Leave them on the table and I will go through them after you have left. Right now, I have a question. Do you regard the business done on behalf of a patron such as myself privileged?’

  ‘Of course.’ His alarm was clanging so noisily inside his head it could have been a port bell rung to signal the approach of an invasion fleet. ‘Assorian banking families have attained our present position in the Exaltarchy because we are trusted. To be worthy of that trust, we maintain the strictest confidentiality.’

  ‘What if those who represent the Exaltarch were to ask you to divulge information?’

  Arcadim liked to think of himself as being in the prime of life, his swollen joints notwithstanding, but when she asked that question, he felt suddenly aged. Far too old to be worrying about treason. He hedged. ‘What—what kind of information do you mean, Domina?’

  ‘Where one of your patrons is hiding his money. Where the person concerned hides himself.’

  His confidence slipped still further. ‘As far as I know, none of my patrons is in hiding.’

  ‘Ah, but perhaps you don’t know that one of them is guilty of rebellion.’

  He paled, desperately rummaging through his thoughts trying to identify which one of his patrons had been so incredibly stupid—and so fiendishly clever that Arcadim had not had an inkling of what they were doing. He took a deep breath and settled for far more disclosure than was comfortable. ‘Compeer,’ he said, giving her the Brotherhood title to indicate that he knew she must be questioning him in that capacity, ‘don’t ask it of me. I cannot disclose such information, not even if you were the Magister Officii himself.’ His guts roiled and he had desperate need of a lavatory. Damn it, why did his bowels always let him down when he was stressed?

  ‘You would hide the treason of one of those who use your services?’ she asked, relentless.

  ‘I know of no such treason. If one of my patrons has been so, um, indiscreet, he failed to inform me of it.’

  ‘Treason is a little more than indiscretion, Arcadim. Had you known, would you have told?’

  ‘I would refuse to manage the affairs of a traitor.’

  ‘And the knowledge you had of his affairs?’

  ‘Confidentiality is our creed, Domina. How can I deny the creed we live by? We would not knowingly channel money in our control to treasonous activities. But Assorian bankers, or moneymasters as you call us here in Tyr, do not divulge confidential information. Normally we are not asked for it. The Magister Officii, indeed the Exaltarch himself, is aware of this. After all, neither of them would be happy if his own moneymaster were to leak details of his financial dealings.’

  ‘You know the Brotherhood has ways of encouraging people to tell the truth.’

  He felt faint. ‘In this case, I don’t think they would learn anything to their advantage, Compeer. I don’t even know to which one of my patrons you are referring.’

  ‘Myself, Master Arcadim. Myself.’

  He stared at her, eyes wide with shock, heart thundering in his chest. ‘Is—is this some kind of test?’

  ‘No, far from it. I want you to sell all my property, including this house, and convert it into gold and silver or pearls before my assets are seized. You must do this with a minimum of fuss. The longer it takes the Magister Officii to hear what I am doing, the better. And he is not to know I am back in Tyr.’

  Arcadim’s eyes grew wider. I don’t think I want to listen to this. I’m sure I don’t want to listen to this. His panic broke out in the form of a line of sweat along his shaven upper lip. ‘Domina, I—I am sorry, but in that case I would like to resign as your moneymaster.’

  ‘You disappoint me, Arcadim.’

  He tried to keep a grip on his panic, to hold it in, but it was as elusive as a handful of coins es
caping his fingers. Desperate, he said, ‘If you do this, and there is a suspicion I might have knowingly aided you, my monies will be forfeit, and my life and that of my family likewise.’ To his horror, he felt tears form at the corner of his eyes. He plunged on. ‘Domina, I am not a man of action. I am a fifty-year-old banker who is at home only in his counting house. My joints bother me in damp weather. My wife nags me to find pious and thrifty wives for my sons. My sons nag me to find pretty women who will not nag to be their wives. My daughters nag me for handsome husbands who will not beat them. My slaves steal from me and gossip about me behind my back. Those are all the problems I need. I don’t want to die of fever in the Cages!’ He resisted the temptation to wipe his face with the sleeve of his robe. Confound the woman; to think he used to like her!

  ‘Arcadim, Arcadim, do you know why I left my money in your hands all these years? Because you were willing to take carefully considered risks. I want you to take another.’ She smiled at him, but on that scarred face, a smile was terrifying. ‘At the moment, every Assorian moneymaster has his coins in the same purse, and the purse is that of Bator Korbus’s Exaltarchy. Your position here can be as uncertain as the Exaltarch’s digestion.’

  She poured wine from the carafe in front of her into a pewter goblet, handed it to him and then refilled the Altani’s. ‘Look around you, Arcadim. There are already the rumblings of rebellion in Kardiastan and Quyr and Altan. Soon there will be rebellion right here, in Tyrans. Where will Assorian moneymasters be if that rebellion were to succeed? You need one of your number who deals with the rebels to tell you what is happening. Imagine if such information enabled Assoria to shrug off the shackles of vassalage!’

  Arcadim was out of his depth, unable to find footing. His heart spiralled down, spinning out of control as panic spilled from the last vestiges of his hold.

  He put his goblet, untouched, down on the low table in front of him. Wine slopped and he barely noticed. ‘Domina, I think it’s best you seek another moneymaster.’