The Heart of the mirage

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The trouble was this: I was by no means at ease with written Kardi. I'd had little opportunity to study it.

Well, I certainly had both the time and the opportunity now. Quietly I thanked the Mirage Makers for their extravagant answer to my request, and in the days following I began to go through the books, sorting them out into those of no conceivable interest, such as the tide timetable, and those I would like to read. I did wonder if I'd be allowed to keep the library, but if Reftim reported it, no one did anything about it. It didn't take me long to realise the lack of interest was just as well. Had the Magor known of the treasure I now possessed, they would surely have separated me from it, for among the books were twenty-two volumes dealing with the power of the Magor.

Twenty-two volumes written by Magorofh, dating prior to the Tyranian invasion – some of them more than five hundred years prior – written as manuals for students, each dealing with different aspects of Magor art. Some of what was written there I already knew, but the rest took my breath away as I began to realise the possible extent of Magor powers. A fully trained Magoroth could call up a localised windstorm strong enough to flatten a shleth; he could conserve air in the body and walk under water or mimic death; he could shut off pain and not feel; he could produce light, abort a baby, kill a person or start a fire – all with his cabochon. He could hear a whisper spoken two hundred paces away or see acutely enough to note the twinkle in a windhover's eye as it drifted the skies.

Abort a baby.

It was easy. I could abort someone else's, or my own, simply by laying the cabochon on my lower abdomen and conjuring the right words in the right way^^

I learned the words. I studied the texts to make sure different books outlined the same method, and they did. No latent maternal instinct arose to usurp my normal indifference to the thought of motherhood. No concern for an unborn child, scarcely started along the path of its life, came to overwhelm my sense of self-preservation. This was going to be so easy. I could live. I could stop being haunted by the knowledge I might die with the child ripped from my womb, sacrificed against my will in order to fulfil a bargain I'd had no say in.*. i

I laid my hand in the correct place, and opened my mouth to say the words – and couldn't do it.

I, who'd slid a knife into several people during my years as a compeer and then walked away without a qualm, couldn't kill the life growing in me. It wasn't the Mirage Makers who stopped me. It was the thought that this was Temellin's child, and I couldn't kill his son.

The next morning when I awoke, I thought about that. I thought of all Brand had said about the woman I had been. And after breakfast, I turned to the books, skimming through volume after volume, looking for references to the Ravage. Most authors who mentioned it subscribed to the theory that it was a disease. The Mirage Makers, the theory went, were living beings and as such were prone to infection, just as humans were. The Ravage was a disease or an infection like gangrene or a suppurating abscess. The creatures inside the Ravage were the animals that lived inside such infection. One writer even postulated that little creatures lived inside our infections too, but we couldn't see them because they were small, just as no, one would be able to see what was in the Ravage if it

were scaled down in size. Needless to say, I didn t give any credit to that idea.

In the past, the Magoroth had attempted to cure the sores in the same way as they might try to cure an abscess or gangrene, by cleaning them out and washing the wound left in the land. It hadn't worked. None of the texts had mentioned the kind of hallucination I had suffered. No one seemed to have been attacked with such intense personal hatred as I had been.

I continued to explore the books, my hunt fuelled by a desperation only partially choked down to a manageable level. And finally I found a writer who had another theory. Perhaps, he wrote, the Ravage was caused by the evil of the creatures within, rather than the other way around. The creatures were evil, ergo, the effect they had was also evil. The author offered no evidence to back his idea, and I wasn't sure I agreed with him, either.

I knew the things I'd seen in the Ravage weren't true creatures. They weren't like insects or worms. I'd felt them as much as seen them, and I'd never before felt anything that wasn't human. The emotions of normal animals were as closed to me as they were to anyone else. I knew a growling dog or a spitting cat was angry when I saw and heard them, not because I sensed the rage. I puzzled over this, even wondering if the Ravage creatures were some form of deformed human.

In the end, I decided the hatred of the Ravage beasts for me, and the Mirage Makers' need of a child, were linked. At a guess, the Mirage Makers believed a Magoroth child who became a Mirage Maker would make them strong enough to win the ongoing battle with the Ravage. The Ravage wanted me dead because they wanted to stop the Mirage Makers getting hold of my child.

I had to be careful, or I was going to die, killed by the Ravage. Or by the Magoroth, to settle Solad's murderous bargain with the Mirage Makers. And I couldn't expect the Mirage Makers to help me.

I sighed. My future was looking increasingly grim.

I couldn't risk telling Temellin about the baby. If Pinar got to hear of it, and if she knew the nature of Solad's bargain, she'd be lobbying the others to sacrifice me and my son. I knew how strongly the Magor felt about the covenant between themselves and the Mirage Makers. I knew they would want to uphold any new agreement Solad had made. Without it, there would eventually be no Mirage Makers.

And who better to supply the child than a Tyranian compeer they didn't trust? Which left the question: would Temellin sanction my killing, even if I were unwilling? There had been a time when he wouldn't have contemplated it. But now? He wouldn't like it, but if he were under pressure from the others? Perhaps he now despised me enough to do it without a qualm. The difficult part would be to offer his own son…

As soon as he found out I was pregnant, he would have to order my death. He really didn't haye any choice. Without the Mirage Makers' support, there would be no Magor – and I was expendable. One supposedly traitorous woman's life in exchange for a whole way of life and the health of the land. It was a bargain.

If I had been truly Kardi, brought up a Magoria, believing in the greater good of my fellow Magoroth, perhaps I would have made the sacrifice gladly. But I wasn't. Underneath I was still Ligea, and she was the kind of person who'd go to her death kicking and screaming every inch of the way…

The powerlessness of my existence gnawed at me. Imprisonment, I found, was something not taken too kindly by even the remnants of Ligea, Brotherhood Compeer. It wasn't the feeling of confinement that tortured, although that was bad enough. It was the feeling I had no influence over anyone, and even less over my own future. I could die one night, unexpectedly, if the Ravage came, and I could do nothing about it. I wanted to talk to someone about it. But there was no one. I considered mentioning it to Reftim, the miasma of his antipathy followed him into the room with every visit. He would have seen me dead without hesitation, and his attitude was doubtless a reflection of every Magor in the Maze. I was so Goddessdamned lonely.

I turned back to my studies of Magor magic, as recounted in the books.

And found out how Temellin had escaped the might of Tyrans. An imprisoned Magoroth of skill could use his cabochon to burn through the iron of manacles, produce pain in people bathed in its light, or raise a temporary ward between his skin and the blows rained on him. The one thing Temellin couldn't have done was make smoke appear out of nowhere. Anything like that would have been an illusion – a mirage – and mirages were banned to the Magor. Ciceron, the officer in charge of the execution, must have been right: something had been sprinkled on the wood of the execution pyre beforehand. Which meant, not surprisingly, that others had helped Temellin to escape.

Of more surprise to me was the discovery that the Magor could enhance their hearing if they wished. My true identity could have been discovered mucrj^arlier ^

if Temellin or Pinar or one of the other Magor had listened in on my conversations with Brand. But they hadn't. Evidently, strong Magor distaste for invading another's privacy prevented such an action, although I suspected that where Pinar was concerned, it was perhaps more likely she just hadn't listened at the right times.

The days of my incarceration began to fly past. I hunched over the books, reading and rereading, then practising what I learned. Garis had already shown me much that was helpful; even so, I made mistakes. After three days of trying to light a candle from a distance, as Pinar had done, I finally produced a beam of light, set fire to my desk and crumbled part of the wall. My next attempt melted the candle to an unusable lump of wax and shattered the holder to powder. Fortunately, I improved with time. Even more luckily, the Mirage Makers repaired the damage before Reftim entered my room again.

I learned how to draw a ward of a simple kind around myself with my cabochon. It would not prevent a skilled Magor from entering that space, but it ensured I would always know when they did. It meant I could not be surprised by an intruder while I was asleep.

Nor could I be poisoned. It was comforting to have in writing what I had already assumed to be true: the passing of my cabochon over food or water would always betray a poison into displaying itself. However, no one tried poison again; all food brought to me was just as it should have been.

Unhappily, a ward drawn with swords, such as the one imprisoning me, could not be broken by the person who was the object of it. The door to my room remained unlocked. Anyone else could come and go

through it, but if I tried, I walked into a barrier as solid as gorclak horn.

The first month of my imprisonment passed, then the second. The life within me continued to grow; I was aware of it even though it was still too early for it to make its presence felt with discernible movements. I made no move to tell Temellin. I didn't want to give the Magoroth the excuse to kill me.

Temellin never came near me anyway. Sometimes I wondered if he knew just how solitary my confinement was, and if he did know, whether he cared. I yearned to hear from him – a word, some expression of concern or interest, something, but day after day passed in silence. When I was feeling especially low, it seemed as if the world out there had forgotten my existence and I was doomed to live as a sort of peripheral being, someone who could never enter the mainstream of life where things happened, and who was therefore only half alive. For someone who had loved power, who had once loved to make things happen, it was a bitter situation.

When Caleh finally came to see me, with messages of support from Brand, it was all I could do to stop myself from crying in gratitude at her presence. Although she had received permission to see me, she was obviously uneasy, uncertain of how much she should tell me. Brand, she said, was well and asking me not to worry about him; Temellin was also well, but was becoming known for his bad temper. 'He doesn't know what to do about you,' she said sagely, 'and people are saying the thought of your imprisonment preys on him. Ah, Magoria, Brand tells me you truly wanted to serve Kardiastan, and I believe him. He is too shrewd to be deceived.' She shook her head in sorrow as she left, saying, 'I don't know how all this is going to end.'

I didn't know, either. J;*

The only other person I had any real contact with was Reftim and he rarely spoke. He was polite, and perhaps his silence was more my fault; he always answered if I spoke to him first. Most of the time, though, he wouldn't even meet my eyes and I guessed – I hoped – he was bitterly ashamed of his part in the attempt to poison me. I wondered sometimes if he had deliberately told no one of my library as a way of compensating me; I found it hard to believe -Pinar would have tolerated my having access to all those books, had she been aware of them.

One other person who did have contact with me – of an oblique kind – was Garis. After the first two or three days of my imprisonment he sent me a bunch of flowers via Reftim, and continued to do so every few days. There was never any note or message, but I was touched. I hoped it meant he was not convinced of my utter perfidy.

Two days after Caleh's visit, I noted Reftim was upset, so I asked what was the matter, saying, 'Surely it can't be all that bad, can it? You look as if your father-in-law has moved into your bedroom!'

He looked at me with distressed eyes that seemed – out of place in his clown-like face. 'The Ravage has come to the city,' he said. 'It swallowed up several of the houses on the south side during the night, just like that.' He clicked his fingers in illustration. 'Four families disappeared.'

I remembered what the howdah-shleth driver had said to me, about the Ravage being so close. One day we'll wake up to find a swathe of it destroying the Maze like legionnaires on the rampage.

Sickened and frightened, I turned away.

And so the days passed. I exercised rigorously, I ate, I slept and every other minute of every day was spent either reading, or exerting my will on that delicate curve of golden stone in my palm, inveigling it to do my bidding – without reducing everything in its path, myself included, to a heap of ashes.

And then came the shock: the thrilling, breath-robbing, devastating shock.

I was seated at my desk, browsing through a book entitled The Mirager: His Powers and Responsibilities, when I came across it, the passage that made a mockery of everything Zerise had said about Sarana and Shirin and me. A passage that took away one pain, only to replace it with another, just as tearing. A passage that changed everything.

On the death of the ruling Mirager (or Miragerin), I read, the dead ruler's heir will walk the Shiver Barrens and be given a Mirager's sword. If they already have a sword, they will exchange it.

At the same time, this new Mirager or Miragerin will be given the conjurations that will bestow cabochons on the newborn. This information is given only to the ruling Mirager or Miragerin, and is not bestowed on any other Magoroth; nor is any other sword capable of bestowing cabochons. For this reason, the ruling Mirager or Miragerin should take special care of their sword. No other will ever be given to them…

My first thought was one of protest: but this is wrong. I had been given the conjurations under the Shiver Barrens. I knew how to bestow a cabochon; the Mirage Makers had shown me in the vision. Presumably my sword was capable of producing the gems. Yet Temellin was the Mirager.

I sat there, thoughts tumbling through my head, and the truth came, a crushing avalanche of knowledge

roaring into my consciousness in a single wave, too much to absorb all at once.

This information is given only to the ruling Mirager \ or Miragerin – I looked up from the book. The Miragerin. Goddess, that was Sarana, not Shirin.

The Mirage Makers had told me, implanting the knowledge through the indelible clarity of one of their visions, but I hadn't seen it. My own memories had told me, but I hadn't thought them through.

… nor is any other sword capable of bestowing cabochons.

The behaviour of the Magoroth had told me, but I had forgotten. Only now did I recall the reverence with which they had treated Temellin's newly recovered sword. Garis had told me, but I had missed the significance of what he'd said: 'Until Temellin grew up a bit, no newborn Magor children received their cabochons.' Temellin had told me, but I hadn't realised: 'You don't know it, love, but you've just saved my life -' Sweet Melete, if I had not returned his sword to him, he would have had to kill himself so that someone else would become the Mirager – and receive a new Mirager's sword.

Dear Goddess, I was Sarana, daughter of Solad and Wendia; I was Miragerin of Kardiastan; I was the little girl in the shleth howdah who had watched her mother jump out to her death at the hands of the legionnaires led by General Gayed of Tyr.

I was the girl who had become a pawn of Tyrans, a hostage who had enslaved a nation.

•I

SARimA