The Rose of the World (28 page)

At once, images began to flood through him; images of horror and debauchery, of petty cruelties and great sins, until his skull was filled to overflowing with them and he had to scream and scream to let them out into the world whence his brother had enacted them. The body beneath him now became rigid, then thrashed as wildly as an unbroken horse. Tanto’s eyes flew open. Bright and black with malice and fury, they fixed on his younger sibling – the pathetic weakling brother he had always despised. Anger turned soon to terror as it became clear that Saro would not relent. Terrible groaning sounds began to come from the Tormentor, emerging urgent but muffled by the bandages and his brother’s determined grasp. Saro shut his eyes, kept them clamped hard shut, and held on grimly, warding off the sights Tanto offered him – the rapes, the wickednesses, the murders, the tortures, the burnings and rackings and amputations; all the wanton hurts he had inflicted on cats and dogs and horses and men and women and slaves and so many others who had done him no wrong.

Even in this invalid, bloated state, Tanto was remarkably strong. His struggles seemed to last for an eternity. In the long, long time it took for his brother’s life to ebb away, Saro felt something break deep within him, and knew the act was changing him forever. Even in death, it seemed, Tanto had achieved another victory.

‘Enough!’

The voice was harsh with fury. Saro fell sobbing upon his brother’s still form, exhausted in both flesh and soul. Disconnected words babbled from his lips, a cacophony of nonsense. Then rough hands grabbed his shoulders, dragged him away from the corpse and set him on his feet, while others pinioned his arms behind his back and secured his wrists with thick rope.

‘By the Goddess, what have you done?’ Tycho Issian, the Lord of Cantara, strode past his guards into the gloomy cell and looked down at the figure on the floor, its eyes gazing glassily into the darkness. He made a superstitious sign and prodded the corpse with his foot, then prodded harder when the first attempt elicited no response. Waves of blubber shuddered down the length of Tanto’s trunk, but the eyes maintained their bloodshot, congealing stare in a face gone purple with blood and panic.

‘This sneaking mountebank warned us as much – ’ Tycho hefted into view the still-bleeding head of poor Plutario, his eyes rolled upwards, his visage his own once more – ‘when we chanced upon him trying to escape our mercy. We could hardly believe what he told us: yet now we see it for ourselves. To kill your own brother is a most heinous crime—’

But Saro was not even looking at the man who berated him so, or at the bloody prize he carried. The babbling had trickled to a whispering halt and his shocked gaze was fixed on something else entirely.

Bemused that neither his outrage, nor the shocking trophy was holding the young murderer’s attention, Tycho turned to ascertain the source of Saro’s fascination.

Out in the passage between the cells a most incongruous sight met his bewildered eyes. There, between two of his trusted militia stood the man they had just taken prisoner – the guard who had so treacherously allowed this foul deed to take place – with his uniform half-ripped from him and his features, lit by the torch one of the soldiers carried, in an apparent state of flux. Even as he stared, he saw how it wavered between one paler, more aquiline form and the swarthy visage disturbingly similar to that of the man who held a dagger at his throat. It was almost as if one face floated beneath the second, first one gaining precedence, then the other.

The glamour was beginning to fail. Virelai would have known as much from the despairing look in Saro’s eyes, even if it were not for the queasy sensation he was experiencing, or the fact that if he stared down the length of his nose he could see a shimmering blur which came momentarily into focus white and fine, then havered back to a nose which was dark and fleshy, complete with hair-sprouting mole.

The men, who had not till now looked closely at their prisoner, having taken him swiftly in the heat of action, now began to make warding signs and back away in fear.

‘Manso . . .’ a sergeant breathed, staring between the two. ‘Which of you is Manso?’

‘I am, you twat!’ the second man shouted. ‘What in Falla’s fires are you talking about, Gesto? You just took fifteen sodding cantari off me ten minutes ago upstairs!’

Virelai hung his head, too tired and miserable to contest what was soon to be a hopelessly lost battle. His sorcery was failing him; and he had failed his friend, and now they would both die horribly.

The next thing he knew, his head was being forced roughly upwards. Tycho Issian’s mad eyes stared and stared. Virelai quailed away, but the southern lord was intent and held him still, grasping his chin in a vicelike hand. Where before there had been fury and disgust in the man’s face, now there was a strange avidity, a desperate greed which seemed to consume him from within. His eyes burned with it as with a terrible lust.

‘Virelai . . .’ he breathed; then: ‘Virelai?’ he asked sharply.

‘Yes,’ said Virelai mournfully. ‘It is indeed Virelai.’

Tycho Issian grinned – an awful, manic expression which made his mouth stretch so wide that the sorcerer thought for one benighted moment the lord would savage him with those wicked white teeth that gleamed at him now in the gloom.

‘Virelai . . .’ This time the name was almost a caress, Tycho spoke it so softly. ‘Your sorcery has improved immeasurably since last I saw you. And without that damned cat, as well. Those Forent Castle girls . . . ah . . .’ He sighed. ‘Whatever spell of seeming you used on them may have changed their appearances considerably; but they never looked at all like the one they were designed to. Yet just now I saw you with my own eyes and believed you to be Manso, to the bone – until the illusion wore off.’

For the face he looked upon was no longer that of the lumpen guard’s captain but unmistakably that of the pale man, the one who had once tried to sell him the Rosa Eldi, the one who had lost her and bungled all attempts to regain her before the northern king had snatched her away; the one who had given tin the appearance of silver for weeks on end – enough that he had been able to trade a fortune out of it – but had never yet managed to make one human being look exactly like another. He took in those fine, pale features, the almost colourless eyes with their flat black pupils, dilated now so the iris showed as no more than a thin corona, the sharply boned nose, the angular planes of the cheeks and jaw, the finely delineated lips and the long, pale, braided hair and he laughed, a huge, echoing sound in the small space of the dungeons. It was a disconcerting sound to hear in the Miseria: the mad, the maimed and the half-dead in cells up and down the corridors that bled away from the central chambers woke from whatever pain-filled reverie they had drifted into and (where they had the arms to do so) hugged themselves anxiously, wondering what would follow such a bizarre and inappropriate noise.

‘Ah, Virelai!’ the Lord of Cantara exclaimed, drawing the sorcerer into a deep and unwelcome embrace ‘What wonders shall we achieve together now?’

Repulsed by this unwanted intimacy, Virelai drew back. ‘I c-cannot work magic for you, lord!’ he stuttered.

‘Cannot, or will not?’ The tone was menacing.

Virelai’s whole body quivered with fear. He could not quite believe he had said what he had said; surely had not meant to say it at all, would take it back in a heartbeat . . .

Again the southern lord laughed, but this time the sound was sepulchral. ‘Bring the lad here,’ he called back over his shoulder.

Two of the guards dragged a resistant Saro out of the cell. As he passed, Saro’s gaze swept across Virelai’s face. The look in his eyes was pleading, intense. Minutely, he shook his head, but whether it was an involuntary jerk or a meaningful signal it was impossible to tell.

‘Take this idiot boy away, strip him and nail him to the crossframe in the Campo,’ Tycho ordered. ‘He shall witness the performance of his brother’s last invention. I believe we have two hundred Footloose and heretics who will fuel a good blaze. That would surely be the most fitting tribute to Tanto’s genius.’ He paused, then added with silky ease, ‘And make sure you sew his eyelids wide open so he does not miss any detail of their punishment. It will be good for his soul, to see so many who sully Falla’s name chastised by her cleansing fires, so that he may travel to the Goddess in a state of grace when I despatch him to the Lady myself.’

‘No!’ Virelai was agonised. Here, in prospect, was the vision the crystal had shown him, the insight into evil which had prompted him to make this fateful journey to try to save his friend. He fell to his knees and grasped Tycho’s rich velvet robe in both hands. ‘Do not do this, my lord!’ he cried. ‘I have seen a vision of this terrible scene, and it brings no honour to your lordship’s name!’

‘How touching, Virelai,’ the southern lord declared with a grim smile. ‘But it will not avail you to concern yourself with his fate, or with my good name, for as soon as the Vingo boy is dead, I am going to strip the hide from you, strip by tiny strip until you relent or die.’

Virelai had never been a brave man. Even when the sensations of his body had been diminished, he had still feared the concept of pain. With horrible clarity he remembered the flight he and Tycho Issian had made from the burning tent at the Allfair, how Tycho had laid about him indiscriminately with his sharp little knife, stabbing and cutting his way to freedom. He remembered the beatings and the humiliations he had suffered at the other’s hands. He knew he would carry out to the letter exactly what he threatened, and enjoy every second of it. Now, following the awakening of his being, the reinvigoration of his flesh, by whatever Alisha had done to him with the deathstone, he knew that his experience of pain would be even more excruciating than anything he had previously endured. He knew, too, that Tycho Issian was a cruel and vengeful man, that to assist him in his endeavours was to ally himself to evil. But how could he let his friend die, and in such vile circumstances? He bowed his head, torn apart by this terrible dilemma, remembering Alisha Skylark’s words to him in the desert south of this city:
You have a great choice to make, Virelai, and upon it will rest all there is that is worth saving in the world . . .
But how could he know which choice to make? He knew so little, and all he did turned out badly.

Rosa of the World, Falla hear me
, he prayed silently
. Forgive me the many sins I have committed against you, and help me to do the right thing now.

Then he raised his head and fixed his eyes unwavering on Tycho’s black gaze. ‘Saro has already endured too much,’ he said softly. ‘And if he is harmed in any way, I will die before I work the smallest act of magic for you, lord.’ Even as the words trembled from his lips, and for a few seconds he felt a great peace descending on him, a deep calm like a blessing. Surely, he had made the right choice. But as swiftly as the calm had entered him, his certitude ebbed away, leaving him feeling emptied out and despairing.

The Lord of Cantara’s eyebrows twitched, then shot skywards. He was not often surprised by the way men behaved, for he always expected the worst of them, and was thus rarely disappointed. He shrugged and beckoned to the guards. ‘Take the Vingo boy to the finest suite of rooms in the castle and make him comfortable there,’ he declared, and watched as they tried unsuccessfully to mask their surprise. ‘Tell the steward he is to be accorded every honour and hospitality, and to fetch him a chirurgeon without delay; but he is not to leave the rooms except under guard. No one is to do him the least harm; and if any man amongst you speaks a word of what has occurred here I will have his tongue, his eyes and his bollocks removed, roasted and fed to his children. Are you clear about that?’ The men all nodded swiftly. ‘And take that . . . abomination – ’ he gestured to the bloated corpse of Tanto Vingo – ‘down to the burning pit and do away with it with pitch and flame. If any ask you where he may be, tell them I have sent him to be with his uncle.’ He smiled thinly. Then he turned to Virelai. ‘We have a bargain. Mind you do not renege on it, for I hold your comrade in trust, and I think you know what I am capable of if you displease me in any way.’

Virelai nodded mutely, and knew himself a damned man.

Seventeen

Dreams

The seithers, who are the oldest folk on Elda, maintain that the Three – the Lord, the Lady and the Beast – speak often to the people of the world in their dreams; for only then do they have time to pay attention to what they are being told, without the distraction of illness and childcare, husbandry and household management, lawsuits, social engagements, penury and feuding to come between their conscious minds and matters of greater importance. Those whose dwellings have foundations on crystal-bearing rock are known to have the strongest dreams, for the deities of Elda have always channelled their energies in this way; but even those on the sea may be touched by the gods, for water is a good conductor of dreams. However, there are those in the world who through obsession or obstinacy close themselves to the messages they are sent and, waking from a restless sleep, wilfully continue to pursue the path they have chosen, even though it may mean their death, or worse . . .

In a strange ship propelled by unseen spirits and guided by an ancient man whose beard streams behind him in what is no natural wind, Aran Aranson dreams of his home in Rockfall, of his wife – young as she had been when first he wooed her – running down the strand to meet him at the harbour with her red hair loose to her waist and her keen eyes searching the standing crew of the approaching ship, and in his sleep he smiles . . .

Urse One-Ear lies curled into a ball in the lee of a great tree and shivers, for night has fallen swiftly in the southern continent and the air is chill. But he carries some protection from the one who set him this task and so he will not die as others might in this inimical place from lack of shelter, food or water. He has tracked a great animal by day and by night since being transported to this place; now as he dreams, he sees its huge spoor stretching away into infinity, five-toed footprints in earth, in rock, in air. It is all he thinks about awake, all he dreams of when he sleeps. There is nothing else left to him, or so it seems . . .