The Heart of the Mirage (3 page)

‘Domina Ligea?’

Startled, I turned my drifting thoughts to the woman who stood before me: Antonia, the temple’s High Priestess. I had never spoken to her before, and she did not normally chat to devotees. I remained kneeling and inclined my head. ‘Reverence?’

I’d heard she was brought to the temple as a young girl, selected because of her great beauty and virtue. Now she was more matronly than beautiful, but regal nonetheless. And powerful. Had she withdrawn the support of the Cult of Melete from the Exaltarch, she could have threatened his power base—although, knowing what I did of Exaltarch Bator Korbus, he would have had her assassinated first.

‘The Oracle requests your presence.’

She could not have astonished me more. The
Oracle
? The Oracle did not speak to Ligea Gayed. In fact, the Oracle rarely spoke, and when it did, it was to kings and emperors or the very rich, not Compeers of the Brotherhood or even a general’s daughter. For one mad moment, I even wondered if the High Priestess had mistaken me for someone else.

I stood, still puzzled. ‘I am deeply honoured, Reverence.’

‘You are indeed,’ she said. Her voice was as dry as grape leaves in autumn.

She found my summons hard to believe too.

High Priestess Antonia took me behind the altar to the sanctum, that area of the temple not open to the public. Deep inside the building, we entered a small unoccupied room. ‘I must blindfold you,’ she said, taking a cloth from a hook. She meant me no harm, I could sense that much, so I acquiesced. However, with the blindfold on, I could see nothing and began to feel uneasy.

There was an odd noise, like the turning of a millstone grinding wheat. I thought,
Some kind of opening mechanism for a hidden entrance
, and filed the information away. Then she spoke again. ‘There are stairs.’ She hooked her arm into mine to guide me. I resented her touch, disliking my dependency on her, loathing my sudden sense of vulnerability.

A strong scent tickled my nostrils, redolent of some kind of incense, and after that I lost time, and touch. I floated, weightless. I saw colours—all shades of red, orange or yellow, each shade with its own smell: essence of poppies, wine, sulphur, wet earth, fermenting yeast. I think I laughed, although what was funny I could not have said. I heard the Goddess
herself whisper, chiding me for my lack of reverence. I was chastened, but resentful nonetheless. The next moment that had any clarity was when Antonia removed the blindfold.

I was somewhere else. I must have walked there, but had no recollection of having moved, no memory of time passing.
Vortexdamn the conniving vixen
, I thought, as a semblance of rationality seeped back. The blindfold must have been soaked with something.
She drugged me
. There was an irony in that, of course; we of the Brotherhood were not unfamiliar with such tricks, but I was not in the mood to appreciate the parallels.
Goddess
, I thought,
if they expose everyone who comes here to an elixir like that, no wonder there’s never been a coherent description of the Oracle.

I was assailed by more pungent smells, a mix of odours of the kind that might drift from an alchemist’s shop along the Marketwalk. I looked around. I was in an underground cavern. Light came only from flames burning in a bronze container—a bowl as wide as I was tall—set in the stone of the floor. ‘The Eternal Flame,’ Antonia murmured in my ear, ‘lit by the Goddess herself at the founding of Tyr and never extinguished since. It burns without fuel.’ She believed it, too. I nodded, but wondered if it weren’t fuelled from below, subterranean gases, perhaps. I always was a sceptical bitch.

She waved a hand at the wall of the cavern directly in front of us. ‘That is the Oracle.’ She gestured again, this time at a pale young woman seated in front of the wall. ‘The words of the Oracle will be interpreted for you by Esme, the Selected of the Oracle.’

Esme, as beautiful as a caryatid and almost as lifeless, did not look at me. Her eyes were wide and expressionless; her body swayed slightly. Behind her
something crouched and murmured, but whether it was a living creature or just a strange rock formation, I was not certain. The drug had left my mind fuddled and my senses blurred. My head was beginning to ache, irritated by the vapours. My eyes watered. The flickering of the Eternal Flame made shadows dance and writhe. The natural indents of the rough stone of the cavern wall behind Esme appeared to ripple. I saw in them a figure, huge, forbidding, lion-like, maned—yet with a man’s features centred in the otherwise feline head. Eyes and nostrils and mouth were depthless slits boring back into the rock, to viscera beyond. I shook my head to clear my thoughts. Vapours wafted through the creature’s orifices, smelling of brimstone and pitch, the breath of Acheron, from the netherworld beyond the Vortex, surely. And the being—if such it was—muttered. No language I had ever heard before issued from its throat.

I stared at Esme. She was young, though her skin had the unhealthy pallor of the chronically ill, and her eyes remained unfocused. Her voice, when she started to speak, was a monotone, but it oozed truth. She believed all she said.

I assumed she was supposed to be interpreting the mumble of the Oracle behind her as she intoned:

‘Ligea will travel by land and sea and beast

To places new and far,

She will hunt the fierce hunter to the east

Who seeks our world to mar

And kills our noble emperor’s time of peace.
’

I blinked. One part of me hoped—with sardonic scepticism—that the Oracle’s poetry was better than Esme’s translation. The rest of me was appalled by the
content of her lines.
How could she know what I had only just learned myself?
I moved, attempting to obtain a better view of the Oracle, but Antonia had a firm grip on my arm and jerked me back.

Undeterred by my grunt of exasperation, Esme continued:

‘With powers to see behind the face,

With ears to hear a lie,

Ligea shall bring victory to this chase,

And deal death to traitors sly.

All power in her wide embrace,

None will again deny

Ligea Gayed her rightful place.’

I was aghast. How could she—or the Oracle—possibly know of my talents? Acheron’s mists, the Oracle couldn’t
really
be percipient, could it?

Legend said so. History gave us records of prophetic verses, written in far more memorable poetry than this. The religious maintained that the Oracle was our conduit to the advice of the gods.

I felt sick. Damn it, Antonia was listening as my secrets were spilled from this silly girl’s lips in infantile rhymes…

She droned on, the poetry even more execrable.

‘A Legata shall journey back to Tyr,

To lay tribute at her ruler’s feet;

Wreath’d, feted, granted gifts of gold,

Honoured at her nation’s desire,

Her tale by poets shall be retold.’

Fortunately, that seemed to be all. Esme stared blankly at the opposite wall in silence. The Oracle’s
murmuring continued, but there was no more translation.

Antonia shook my arm. ‘That must be all that is for your ears,’ she said. ‘Allow me to blindfold you again—’

I jerked my arm away and snapped at her. ‘No. No more dulling of my senses. Show me the way out.’

Her eyes flashed, anger roiling with unexpected intensity. ‘The Brotherhood has no power here that we do not freely concede,’ she hissed. ‘All who come before the Oracle are blindfolded. This cavern is part of the Sacred Way, not a path for the undedicated to know.’

‘Very well.’ I freed the end of my wrap from my waist and wound it around my head to cover my eyes. ‘Now lead me out.’

She was silent for a moment, then grabbed my elbow and pulled me after her. I stumbled blindly in her wake for what felt like an age, but was probably no more than five minutes. As far as I could tell, we traversed the cavern of the Eternal Flame to some kind of tunnel which ended in steps. We ascended these, then I heard the scraping sound once more and we were back in the room behind the sanctum.

I unwound the end of my wrap. Antonia stood before me, glaring. ‘With the Brotherhood behind you, you think you are untouchable. But before the Goddess, you are no more than each intake of mortal breath. All you are is easily snatched away, Compeer Ligea.’ Her use of my title confirmed her knowledge of my Brotherhood status, something I preferred to hide from Tyr’s highborn. She added, ‘Don’t mock the Goddess, or you will live to regret it.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ I replied, schooling my tone to a careful neutrality. There was no point in upsetting the Temple High Priestess if it were avoidable. ‘Nor would I mock the Oracle. It has given me, er, food for
thought.’ In truth, it had been worryingly accurate, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. ‘I trust that what you and Esme learned today remains unsaid to others.’

‘We are servants of the Goddess. We keep many secrets.’

Not quite the promise I hoped for, but obviously all I was going to get. I nodded to her and left the temple.

Outside, I had to narrow my eyes against the glare of midday light. My mind seethed with all I had seen as I descended the stairs to the Forum Publicum. The crowd there was thinning now that the heat was so intense. Most of the well-to-do had headed home, leaving the streets to the slaves and the poor, but I had something I needed to do.

Noting the fineness of my clothing, litter carriers hurried up to offer their services, but I waved them away and started to walk. I wanted to be alone while I digested all that had happened. I slipped into the labyrinth of streets and alleys leading to the poorer sections of the central city, the area called the Snarls. The change from wide, well-kept public spaces to the closed-in squalor of poverty was rapid; the stink of open drains and rotting rubbish cloyed as the crowds disappeared. Beneath my feet, the smoothness of wellswept pavements gave way to the hard-packed earth of potholed lanes. No marble façades here, no creepershaded courtyards. The buildings were of crumbling rough-hewn stone, the rooms cramped, the windows and doorways narrow and mean, the occupants lean and tough. This was the other, more regrettable face of Tyr; but then, I supposed any centre as great as this city had to attract the scavengers as well as the cultured. Most who eked out an inadequate living in the Snarls were not citizens, but a mix of nationalities attracted to the capital of the Exaltarchy, thinking they
would make their fortunes. Some of them were even right.

I halted for a moment, my head aching and the taste in my mouth foul. I couldn’t even think straight. The Oracle had spoken to me, Ligea Gayed, and prophesied my future. Not many were so privileged. Why, then, did I feel so…besmirched?

I pushed the feeling away and directed my thoughts instead to assimilating the reality of my coming departure from Tyr. No more desert-season evenings spent at the open-air theatre to hear a new comedy from Crispin; no more sitting around a fire on a snow-season night with the Academy scholars, drinking punch and discussing Asculi’s latest treatise or arguing about why the seasons change; no more pleasant hours spent at one of Nereus’s musical evenings.

Kardiastan. Desert hell. Uncultured land of assassins and evil numina, of windstorms and rainless skies. May the wind of Acheron’s Vortex take that
bastard
Rathrox!

I had no time, though, to dwell on the pleasant fantasy of an unpleasant end for my Brotherhood mentor, because my thoughts were jerked back to the present. Away from the safety of frequented streets, my senses had subconsciously roamed outwards to become aware of what was happening around me. It seemed my foolishness in crossing the Snarls while so richly dressed was going to bring me trouble: I was being followed. It served me right; I ought to have known better. I should have taken a litter.

I focused my attention. The people in the houses I ignored; those in the surrounding streets I allowed my senses to touch, taking note of their proximity, checking if they were a potential threat by testing their emotions. I found an irate woman and several sulky
children, a man consumed with an as-yet-unsatisfied lust in the company of a woman who seemed unenthusiastic—a whore perhaps?—and, out of sight down a parallel street, a crowd of young people exuding drunken amusement. No one I need worry about.

My follower was another matter. I flicked my senses behind and felt his emotions as a black cloud of violence and avarice, too full of malevolent anticipation to be ignored. Damn the man. Around the next corner, I stepped into the nearest recessed doorway of the lane to wait, and felt for my knife. It wasn’t there, of course. No one carried a knife into an audience with the Exaltarch.

With growing badtemper and exasperation, I tracked the progress of my pursuer. When he rounded the corner into the lane and found I was no longer in sight, he hesitated a moment, then began to run. I hitched up my wrap and stuck out a foot at the precise moment he drew level; predictably, he sprawled face down in the dirt. I was on him before he had even determined what had happened, pinning him down with a knee in the middle of his back, immobilising him still further by twisting his right arm up behind him. I assessed him quickly: an ill-dressed individual, foul-smelling, not all that young, with neither the strength nor the skill to resist. His clothes were ragged, but I saw some embroidery on what was left of the collar: Quyr beadwork, unless I was much mistaken. Rebellion within the Quyr region and legionnaire attempts to subdue the insurgents had forced many Quyriots out of their mountain homes. Some had made their way to Tyr in search of a living—honest or otherwise; doubtless this man was one such.

‘What did you want, helot?’ I asked.

‘N-nothin’,’ he stuttered in shock. ‘Was just walkin’—’

I tightened my grip. ‘Your first lie,’ I said. ‘The next earns you a broken bone. Why were you following me?’

‘I wasn’t, Domina—’

I shifted my hold slightly and broke his little finger. He yelped in pain and disbelief.

‘Why were you following me?’

He was silent, so I began to apply pressure on his next finger.

‘Don’t—!’ he yelled, too late.

‘Were you after my purse? Shall I add a third finger to the tally?’

He howled briefly, but increased pressure soon brought a more comprehensible mumble of admission. His disbelief had melted into fear, his outrage vanished into a numbed acceptance, a common enough emotion of the underprivileged when faced with their superiors.

‘Any other reason?’

‘No—I swear in the name of the Goddess! Lady,
please
—’

I felt the truth of his answer and released the pressure a little. Ordinarily I would have continued to question him until I found a way I could use him; I’d have held the threat of imprisonment over him and enlisted him in my army of informants, but now—what was the use? I was off to Kardiastan and had no further need of informants…‘That could earn you a spell in the Cages, my friend,’ I said. ‘But you’re lucky. I’m in a merciful mood today. Get going.’

I released him abruptly, and stood up. He scrambled to his feet, nursing his injured fingers. He opened his mouth to curse me, saw the look on my
face and changed his mind, then scuttled away down a side alley without a word.