The Heart of the Mirage Page 4

  Assailed by the stench of the Cages again, I almost gagged. It was an effort to turn to one of the duty guards and ask to be shown cage number twenty-eight, an effort to breathe normally and ignore the rats slinking in the gutters, their fur stiff with filth. I could almost feel compassion for Markis Dorus, even though he had played at treason. He was eighteen years old, a pampered lad with an overzealous tongue who’d suddenly found out the world could be a vicious and unfriendly place to the unwise.

  He sat alone, hunched up at one end of his cage, his hair matted, his clothing filthied, his skin scabbed with dirt. Flies buzzed around his head. He looked well enough in spite of the grime, and there was food and water in covered containers at his feet. His family evidently kept him well supplied, which was more than could be said for some of the other lowlife incarcerated around him.

  I didn’t bother to speak to him. My business was not with Markis, but with his father, and gloating over the lawless I’d brought to justice held no attraction for me. The majority of those imprisoned here were murderers, rapists, kidnappers, traitors—men and women warped with cruelty, dissipation and greed. I knew the hideousness of their crimes better than most, but I took no pleasure, as some highborn did, in seeing them mired in misery. I wanted to check that Markis was well, and that done, I turned my back on them all and set off through the Snarls once more.

  It was a relief to emerge at last into the Artisan Quarter. The laneways of this part of the city may have been narrow, but at least they were paved and clean, the stone walls kept repaired and whitewashed. Doors and windows were shuttered and barred at this time of the day as shop-owners and householders dozed somewhere behind them: it was the siesta hour.

  When I reached my destination, Dorus the Jeweller’s, I paused until I was sure I was unobserved. I tugged at the bellpull, but it was a while before the door was unbarred and opened. The man in the doorway stared at me, his expression blank as he failed to recognise me dressed as I was. Then his plump face paled. ‘Compeer…Holy Goddess—!’ He gestured me inside, but not before giving a swift glance into the street in an agony of terror. ‘Compeer, if someone were to recognise you—’

  ‘No one saw me, Dorus. Do you have the information?’

  ‘Yes, yes! Upstairs. But it’s more than my life is worth to be seen talking to you!’ He indicated a chair in the darkest corner of his workroom. ‘Stay here, Lady Compeer, please. I’ll get it.’

  I ignored the chair and wandered about the shop while he was gone, looking at some of the silver pieces he had been crafting. I wasn’t particularly interested in jewellery, although I had a lot, inherited from my adoptive mother. I never used any of it. The only piece I habitually wore was my own personal-seal ring. Still, I could appreciate the fine filigree done by Dorus. He worked mainly in silver, and many of his pieces were set with polished stones. I recognised the smoky topaz of northern Tyrans, red and black corals from the Sea of Iss, golden amber from the Island of Inge—and agates from Kardiastan. I ran a finger over the cut surface of a large piece of pink and white agate, and tried to remember why its geometric patterns seemed familiar.

  A moment or two later, Dorus was back with a clay tablet. A pronounced tremor in his hands prompted me to take it from him before he dropped it. ‘The names of everyone involved,’ he whispered. He made an effort to control the shaking. ‘They’ll kill me if ever they find out.’

  ‘They won’t hear it from me.’ I glanced at the list. ‘You’ve done a good job.’ I extracted a coin from the purse hidden in the folds of my wrap.

  ‘I don’t want your tainted money,’ he said in revulsion. ‘Some of them are my friends!’

  ‘They are traitors, plotting the overthrow of their monarch. They will get the justice they deserve.’

  ‘My—my son?’

  ‘He is well, as I am sure you know. I doubt this sojourn in the Cages will do him any harm; I hope it will do him some good. If this list is as comprehensive as it looks, he will be released by nightfall tomorrow. I keep my promises, Dorus.’ I started towards the door, but a quixotic impulse made me turn back to say, ‘Markis is a young fool who let his silly ideals get him into trouble once, and may do so again. But he does love you. If you are wise, you will tell him what you had to do to gain his freedom. He will keep your secret, and his fear of putting you in a similar position again will keep him out of trouble.’ I had intended to keep in reserve the propensity of Dorus’s son to do foolish things, a lever I would be able to use against the jeweller in the future, but what was the point when I wouldn’t be here to exert pressure on the handle? I flipped the gold coin in Dorus’s direction. ‘Use it to buy him a new set of clothes. He’ll need them after three weeks in the Cages.’

  I emerged into the deserted street, indifferent to the hatred that followed me.

  I was used to it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The moment I entered the front hall of my villa on the fashionable side of town, I was greeted, as usual, by a slave. This time it was Aemid, once my nurse and now my personal handmaiden. Glad to be out of the desiccating heat of the desert-season, I sat on the entry stool in the cool while she undid my sandals and knelt to wash the dust from my feet with water smelling of lemon blossom.

  I tried to relax and let the tensions of the day slip away along with the grime. It wasn’t easy. When I gazed around it was to look on something I was about to lose. I loved this house; I had been brought up here. I had played my first games on the terrace, read my first books in the library, ridden my first horse in the garden, taken my first lover in one of the bedrooms. After the death of my adoptive parents, I rid the rooms of much of the ostentation that had irked me as a child, so now it was all I desired. I liked to think I had chosen the best of Tyranian style and rejected the more florid embellishment that Salacia, my adoptive mother, had so admired.

  The cool marbled hall, the elegant statuary decorating the wall niches, the great fireplaces that burned whole logs in the snow-season, the way rooms opened out on to fountained courtyards—l loved it all. If I listened, I could hear the splash of water mingling with the soft murmur of pink and grey mellowbirds. If I glanced through the archways to my right, I would see the vines, now rich with fruit, that covered the atrium. If I drew breath, it was to smell the trumpet flowers and lemon blossom, and just a wisp of freshly baked bread from my own kitchen ovens. If I reached out my hand, I would touch the soft velvet of the cold-weather drapes we drew closed to keep the room warm when the fires were lit and the wall fountains were heated.

  This was the only home I could ever remember having.

  And I had to leave it.

  I looked back at Aemid and waved a hand at the foot basin. ‘Since when has this been your job?’ I asked, using the Kardi language, as I always did when talking to her. ‘Where is Foressa—or Dini?’

  She gave a grunt. ‘They’re busy.’ It was a lie and both of us knew it. Before I could chide her, she blurted, ‘What did the Exaltarch want with you?’

  I smiled softly, touched that she had been worried. ‘Something I never expected: he wants me to go to Kardiastan. With the rank of Legata, what’s more.’

  I was totally unprepared for the effect of this news on her. She jumped to her feet, dropping the sponge she had been using, and stood swaying, her fists clenched, her breath loud and rough. The normal olive-brown tint of her skin blotched unevenly, the lines on her face burrowed deeper.

  ‘Aemid! Are you all right? What in Vortex has come over you?’ I was awash in her emotions: joy and fear and panic in equal parts.

  She didn’t answer. Her eyes dropped to the sponge, but she didn’t pick it up. Water ran in rivulets over the marble tiles. ‘When?’ she asked at last, the word a strangled sound in the back of her throat.

  Seeing she was not going to fall, I released the supporting hold I had taken on her arm. ‘I don’t know; as soon as I can wind up my affairs here and obtain a sea passage. A week perhaps. I will have priority on any coastal vessel.’


  ‘Wind up your affairs—?’

  ‘It’s very doubtful I shall be coming back for a while. What’s upset you so, Aemid? Are you worried I’ll leave you behind, or that I’ll take you with me?’ I looked at her uncertainly.

  ‘Could I—is it possible? That I can go with you?’

  ‘Well, of course, if that’s what you want.’ I was puzzled. ‘I had no idea you felt so strongly about Kardiastan. All I’ve ever heard about the place seems to indicate it’s damned inhospitable; a hellhole with a climate worthy of the Vortex of Death. Melete’s heart, why would you want to return there? You belong here by now, surely.’

  Aemid did not reply. She knelt and began to towel my feet dry with trembling hands, her grey head bent.

  I went on, ‘I shall take Brand as well, and I shall keep a skeleton staff here to maintain the house and gardens, but the other slaves will have to be sold. I can always buy another household in Kardiastan. You may tell the others. Tell them I shall see that they go to good homes.’

  Aemid’s head swung up in shock. ‘There’s no slavery in Kardiastan!’

  I stared at her. ‘What in the world are you thinking of? Weren’t you yourself enslaved there? And what of all the newly arrived Kardi thralls you see here in Tyr from time to time? Of course there is slavery in Kardiastan!’

  ‘Oh—yes. Yes, of course,’ she muttered, flushing. ‘I was just—For a moment, I was remembering how it once was.’

  ‘Aemid, you haven’t been there for, what? More than twenty-five years? You were taken while the Kardiastan Uprising was still in progress, I know, but that was a long time ago. Those wars are long over; Kardiastan has long been a province of the Exaltarchy, and where the Exaltarch rules, there is always slavery. It is the natural order of things that the conquered should serve their masters. Now go and tell Brand I want to see him after I bathe. I have the stink of the Cages on my skin and I won’t feel clean until I’ve washed. You can send Dini in to do my hair.’ She nodded, apparently in control of herself again, but as she left the room, I noticed her hands trembled.

  When I emerged from my bedroom a while later, clean at last and dressed more comfortably in loose trousers and a long loose top, it was to find Brand waiting for me.

  Like Aemid, Brand was a house slave. The red flecks in the brown of his irises and the red flash over his forehead in his otherwise brown hair proclaimed his blood to be Altani. Altan Province was one of the conquered nations to the south of the Sea of Iss—but Brand never spoke of his home any more than Aemid did. He had been a gift from General Gayed to me on my tenth anniversary day. Twelve years old then, a defiant boy, skinny and undersized. Now he was a large man, taller by a head than I was, with a width to match his height and a strength to match his width.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ I said. ‘Did Aemid tell you what the Exaltarch wanted?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, Domina. Or should I say, um, Legata?’

  A slave’s existence had so instilled caution in him that his expression always had about as much animation as the standing stones of northern Tyrans. Right then, though, I suspected he was mocking me, but I couldn’t tell for certain. Of all the people I had ever known, he alone was unreadable to me. I said, ‘I think you know damned well that I don’t care what you call me, although a little respect from time to time would be nice.’

  ‘Of course, Domina.’ The tiniest of pauses, then, ‘Legata.’

  I resisted an impulse to throttle him. ‘I do want to know what you think about the posting to Kardiastan, however.’

  ‘Ah.’ Serious now, he considered a moment before replying. ‘I think the Magister Officii fears you.’

  I nodded. ‘And I fear you are right. I’ll be a long time away. How do you feel about it, Brand?’

  ‘Slaves don’t have opinions on matters like that, er, Ligea. Where you go, I go, unless you will it otherwise.’

  I gave him a sharp look, but I could not penetrate the mask he wore. He ignored my glance with unruffled urbanity. Gods above, I thought, twenty years as a slave, eighteen of them as my guard-servant, and none of it has destroyed either your dignity or your bloody pride, has it? Brand still knew his own worth, and he showed the world he valued himself. It often came as a shock to strangers when they noted his bronze slave collar. My friends warned me of the dangers of allowing helots too many liberties; I took no notice. My less charitable acquaintances spread the rumour I was besotted with my own thrall.

  I was far from besotted. In fact, at moments like this, I felt more inclined to strangle the man. ‘I should sell you before I go, preferably to the Domina Aurelia,’ I growled, naming the highborn wife of the Prefect Urbis of Tyr, a woman as stupid as she was frivolous. Her male slaves dressed in pink, had their hair curled and their faces plastered with cosmetics. She’d made me an offer for Brand once, after I visited her villa with him in attendance. I’d enjoyed telling him that, just for the rare joy of seeing his expression change.

  He pretended to consider the suggestion. ‘No, I don’t think so, if you don’t mind. However, a position as a guard in that whorehouse for the highborn in Via Dolce, now…’

  I rolled my eyes. All I had heard from the slave quarters of the Villa Gayed over the years suggested Brand didn’t much like to sleep alone. ‘Sorry to thwart your amorous tendencies, Brand, but you are coming with me to Kardiastan. Naturally.’

  ‘Naturally.’ His tone was as dry as crumbled brick dust.

  More veiled mockery, I supposed. I sighed inwardly and changed the subject. ‘Something else, um, interesting happened today.’

  He raised an eyebrow and waited, alert to my altered tone.

  ‘The Oracle asked to see me.’

  Everything about him stilled. When I didn’t immediately explain, he said, ‘As you say, interesting. From what I have heard, it is more normal for people to beg to see the Oracle, than the other way around.’

  I nodded again. ‘Indeed. And as I understand it, there is quite often a considerable…donation to the temple involved before the Oracle obliges.’

  He gave a half-smile. ‘And you are not known for your generosity to religious cults.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There was a deputation from the Meletian Temple at the door today, asking for donations for the Moon Festival. A coincidence, do you think?’

  ‘Probably. They come every year. And are disappointed every year. They take enough from me at normal service collections.’ Even as I spoke, though, I was wondering. Was this all a trick to increase my donation? Show the power of prophecy to the unbeliever in order to extract some of her wealth? I heard tales of unscrupulous temple priestesses from time to time. It was no more mad than the thought that the Oracle had the ability to predict the future. No, I thought, I won’t believe that. If the gods did indeed intervene in our everyday life, if the Oracle always spoke the truth, then there would never be disasters such as the Kardiastan Uprising, or the earthquake deaths just last year in Getria, our sister city in the mountains. We would have been warned.

  ‘So, what message was it the Oracle wanted to impart?’ Brand’s question abruptly grounded my thoughts once more.

  ‘That’s just it. Nothing much at all. Merely that I was going to take a journey to look for a traitor and I would be successful and rewarded as a consequence. Substantially rewarded.’

  ‘And is that true?’

  ‘As far as I know it, yes.’

  ‘No details as to how you were to catch your prey? No helpful hints?’

  ‘None.’

  He had put his finger on the real puzzle of what had taken place, of course. There had been nothing in what I was told that was useful—so why was the message necessary?

  I detailed exactly what I had seen and heard, marshalling my own recollections into coherent order, dismissing the more outlandish of my hallucinations. As I recited Esme’s actual words, his smile broadened into a grin. When I was a child, Brand had accompanied me to all my school lessons; these days he stood behind me at every poetry readi
ng, musical evening, theatre performance, Academy debate. He knew execrable verse when he heard it. He said, ‘So, the Oracle is a bad poet?’

  ‘The worst. Or else Esme is a poor translator.’

  ‘They paint a rosy future for you. A little, um, fulsome in the promises, though, don’t you think?’

  ‘Somewhat.’ I frowned. ‘The whole thing is odd.’

  ‘You know what it sounds like to me? All that talk of “rightful place” and being wreathed, feted, honoured and celebrated in epic poetry? It’s as if they are saying: “You’re not getting what you deserve. Go to Kardiastan and you will get that, and more.” They are appealing to your sense of injustice.’

  My frown deepened. ‘I don’t feel hardly done by!’

  ‘They might think you do. Do you believe in the Oracle, Domina?’

  ‘In its connection to the divine? Or in the truth of its predictions?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Well, the temple priestesses maintain that if any of the gods want to communicate, they do so through the Oracle. But if a god is divine and powerful, then why the need for an intermediary? If we are to believe the myths, in the past they spoke to people directly. So, do I believe in the connection to the divine? Probably not. I am more inclined to think none of it is true, or ever was true.’

  He remained silent, so I went on to the second part of his question. ‘Nowadays, people go to the Oracle because they want to know the future. They want advice on the outcome of their more momentous decisions: whether to invest money, invade a neighbouring country, marry into a certain family. From what I’ve heard, the advice is often couched in such obscure language it is ambiguous and therefore easily moulded afterwards to what happens. You know the sort of thing: “Marry that woman and a great commercial dynasty will be founded.” No one actually says whose dynasty. The more ambiguous it is, the greater the chances the prediction will come true.’

  He nodded. ‘Clever. But your prediction was not ambiguous. It clearly foretold your success and rewards.’