I embarked on another of those silly, futile conversations I sometimes conducted with myself: Your fault, Legata. It was you who insisted on treating him as a friend.
The reply: He is a friend, damn it. That's the way I wanted it. The way I still want it. I need a friend…
You wanted him in your bed. You wanted to say yes just then.
I am not going to bed my slave.
You could go back.
Shut up! ‹ I entered the corridor leading to my apartments. A single flame still burned at my doorway, unmoving, as if pasted onto its lamp. Others had guttered, dimming the passage. I walked on, preoccupied, towards my door, passing the silent row of statues with their marble faces made grim by the lack of light. And then that final lamp flame fluttered, dancing the shadows of those carved watchers.
Something had created a current of air at my door.
I stopped, uncertain of what I was seeing. The form of a man, yet he had no solidity. A transparent and ethereal man, a painting done on glass. No painting though. He moved.
I did two things at once, both instinctive. I stepped out of sight behind a statue, and I drew my knife. And stood mere, immobile, while all the hairs on my arms
rose up… The man walked through my door and into my bedroom. I had closed my door – and it was still closed. The man had walked through the polished planks of wood. And disappeared.
I didn't believe in shades of the dead. I was neither superstitious, nor given to hallucinations, nor easily deceived by tricks of the light or sleight of hand. I wanted a logical explanation. Yet, as I stood there in silence, peering out from under the arm of a life-sized statue of Bator Korbus mounted on a plinth, a shudder skidded up my spine. I took a deep breath and tried to remember exactly what I had seen.
A naked man about my height or a shade taller. Muscular, as well sculpted as a statue of a naked competitor in the annual games. I hadn't seen his face, but a fluidity to his movement spoke of a man still young in years. Hair too long for a Tyranian. He'd worn it, Kardi-style, tied back at the nape with a thong. His skin could have been Kardi brown, although it was hard to be sure when he had been so… ethereal. I had seen through him, I was sure of it, the way one could see through a glass of white wine held up to the light.
A shade had just entered my room. A shade from Acheron?
Or a god perhaps, in some… otherworldly form?
I couldn't believe I was thinking this. It was madness. What was happening to me?
I stayed where I was, still motionless. I thought of rousing the household, but quelled that thought immediately. I was a compeer, not some moondaft madwoman. I couldn't admit to being scared of a shade. And if I said I'd seen one, and no one else' did, then I was going to make myself an object of ridicule. So I remained where I was, sweating even in the cool of the night air, waiting for Goddess knows what.
Five minutes later, the shade walked back through the door. No, not walked. He seeped through the door. And stopped. And hovered, then slowly turned his face in my direction, his features too transparent to be recognisable. There was a dark circle on the back of his hand, like a wound.
I held my breath. My skin prickled. It was dark where I was, and he was in the light of the lamp outside my door. If his eyesight was normal he would find it difficult to see me, hidden as I was. However, he was alert, poised, holding himself the way I did when I was sending my senses outwards. I tried to sense him in turn, but couldn't. Not unexpected, I suppose, seeing he was only a ghost. Or a shade. Or something else equally intangible.
I thought: He can't see me, but he knows I'm here.
For a breath-halting moment, we stood like that. And then he turned and vanished, gliding away like wind-wafted mist.
Back in my own room a few minutes later, I saw nothing to indicate someone had entered while I'd been gone. Nothing had been disturbed. The floor was spotless.
I shook, as if the foundations of my life were crumbling and I could find no security. Too many things had happened that day; piling on top of all that had preceded. The mother-figure of my childhood had threatened me with death; the slave-brother of my adolescence had proclaimed himself lover; the abilities I had were taking on new and frightening dimensions in this, the land of my birth. I was either flirting with madness, or someone had drugged me into seeing things that couldn't exist, at least not in the land of the living.
Perhaps this was connected to what had happened back at the Meletian Temple in Tyr. A conspiracy to make me believe in the gods of the pantheon? To have me consult the temple priestesses, to seek out the cult of Melete? Well, I wouldn't do it. I was the logical compeer. I was the Tyranian who bowed to a goddess more as a matter of conformity than belief. Who hoped there was an afterlife awaiting, in a not-too-daunting Acheron, after the Vortex had whisked her away from her body- but who was not wholly convinced of any of it.
Come on, Ligea. You are the cool-headed compeer. Think.
I turned to the more solid of my reservations. I started to make a list in my head of the things that bothered me most, trying – in vain – for dispassion.
Who had wanted me to go to Kardiastan so badly they had connived with the Meletian High Priestess and the Voice of the Oracle to make it seem like a good idea? If it had been the Exaltarch himself, Bator Korbus, then why? I was not so important in the overall scheme of things, was I?
Why had the Prefecta's Kardi slave called me Theura? Did I really remember that word from my childhood, but applied to someone else? I looked down at my palm, at the swelling there that had so startled Othenid she'd dropped a pitcher and earned herself a beating. It had been so important to me as a child that I had tried to keep it hidden. No other Kardi I'd ever met had such a lump. Was it a curse, a blessing, an accident of birth that the Kardis had some superstition about? What did it mean? It had fitted so neatly into the hollow on the hilt ofMirAger's sword… I should have asked if anyone had noticed a lump on his hand. No, perhaps that wouldn't have been a good idea. I didn't want to draw attention to my own.
I thought of the sword: how could it be so heavy to Brand that he could not lift it, yet so light to me I could pick it up with two fingers of one hand? What was I? The bastard child of a goddess? Immortal? Someone who could see the shades of the dead? Kardi nobility? They say only the highborn fight in Kardiastan…
Remember – you are of the Magor… but from them you must always hide it.
All that had once been solid was dissolving. I shivered.
I did not know myself.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Two days later, there was a report, which the Prefect immediately showed to me, from the city of Madrinya, capital of Kardiastan. A legionnaire, who had been present at both the slave auction in Sandmurram and at the execution, swore he had seen Mir Ager in the capital, very much alive.
There was other news from Madrinya as well, none of it good. Within the city itself, no less than four senior legionnaire officers, all men known for the severity of their treatment of local people, had been found slain. All had burn marks on their chests, and in each case there was no evidence to indicate who was to blame. In addition, there had been a steady stream of slave escapes from the city. The situation was so dire some Tyranians were reluctant to allow their slaves any freedom at all. Requests were being made for legionnaires to stand guard on the houses of high officials to stop further runaways.
Few of the escaped slaves had been found. Even worse, a military caravan carrying new supplies of weapons from Sandmurram to Madrinya was missing, gone with as little trace as water poured into desert
sand. Forty legionnaires, their mounts and the carts of supplies they had been accompanying had simply vanished between one wayhouse and the next. The only clue was a report that a group of twenty or so shleth-mounted Kardis had been seen in the area. 'Terror riders,' Prefect Martrinus muttered.