The Heart of the mirage

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 littie 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.

• til ' i-iBk – a. "-"rasrid^

'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?'

T 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?

My breathing quickened, my heart thumped. Temellin's son… it could have been mine. Don't think about all that could go wrong. Don't think.

I continued, 'I was surrounded by such love, such caring. Perhaps I should have spoken to Garis, told him to tell Temellin it went well.'

'I didn't know whether I should say anything about the baby, about why you did it, or not. In the end, I didn't.'

'He probably wouldn't have believed you anyway. And Temellin will, I think, know what I have done once Garis says what he saw.' I looked down at my hands. They were red with dried blood. 'Pinar's…' I said and added, puzzled: 'Ah, Goddess, Brand, why do I feel as though I killed part of myself? I hated her. I shouldn't feel this way…'

I staggered against him and he caught me, holding me with gentle tenderness. 'You are ill.'

'I don't think so, but I must rest. A few days… I've overextended my use of power.'

"Vbrtexdamn it, Ligea! I loathe this stuff. Look at you! You are as weak as an unweaned kitten.'

'Are you still with me, Brand?'

He sighed, then nodded. 'So far.' But even as he said the words I sensed an unease inside him: a strange reluctance which I couldn't put a name to, but which fingered me with sorrow.

It was three days before I was strong enough to ride on, before I had renewed enough of what my battle with Pinar had taken from me. I was still Magor-weak, but my body at least was sufficiently strong to continue the journey.

That third morning, when I came down the stairs carrying my saddlebags, I knew something was wrong even before I stepped outside. I could smell it. The stink of the Ravage, that vicious hate for me, personally mine – it hung in the air like the stench of sewerage in the Snarls of Tyr on a hot day.

Pinar's grave had disappeared. In its place, another foul green-black sore. The Ravage had evidently searched for the source of its doom-bringer, traced her – and found her already dead. It had erupted in a baffled magma of rage, swallowed her remains and grave into a new seething inflammation in the skin of its host. Now I felt its delight in its consumption of dead flesh; I felt its rejoicing in the silent agony of the Mirage Makers.

I could feel it casting around for me, the one who had brought its doom into the weave of the Mirage. It was a disease in search of a victim, an assassin in search of its supposed nemesis: in search of me. Damn them to Acheron's deepest hell, I hadn't solved my problem at all. " ^

Brand looked over my shoulder at the place where the grave had been. 'Ah,' he said, in that thoughtful way of his. 'I think perhaps you were right, Ligea. About • the reason for the Mirage Makers wanting a Magor baby, I mean. I don't think the Ravage liked what happened one little bit.'

i

A

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Brand and I sat on our shleths at the top of an escarpment and looked across at the Alps. Neither of us had ever seen anything like these mountains before. Ragged peaks scarified the sky, ploughs to snag and shred the wisps of clouds forming there. Mountainsides plunged down, sheer-walled, into shadowed canyons. Snow whipped away from crests in wind-blasted flurries. A landscape of extremes, ruggedly beautiful or grimly forbidding, scenery to be enjoyed – or a barrier to be conquered.

'They crossed those?' Brand asked. 'On gorclaks? By all that's holy, how was it possible?'