With a sigh, Che sagged back against the windowsill. He rested the garrotte in his lap as the woman dropped her hand.
'Can you not use the door like everybody else?' she demanded, scowling now.
'Hello, mother,' he said.
The woman busied herself for a moment with tidying up. She dragged the sheet from the bed, sprayed a mist of cloying perfume into the air, which smelled of wild lotus and scratched at the back of his throat. Finally she paused and, with a questioning frown disturbing her fine features, turned back to him.
'Are you here to kill me?' she inquired, with a nod towards the garrotte wire.
'Of course not,' he protested 'I was instructed to count coup, then return to the Temple immediately.'
'So you are here on an exercise then. But what possessed them, I wonder, to send you after your own mother?'
Che remained calm on the surface, as always, though within him a quiet rage was building. 'I don't know,' he admitted. 'You normally live on the floor above this one, surely?'
'Ah,' she purred, as though realizing a sudden truth. 'Yes, of course. They had me moved here just this morning.'
As she stepped closer, he could smell a musky after-scent. She smiled at him, almost seductively, the only smile that she seemed to know.
'I wonder,' she mused, 'what you would have done if they had ordered you to throttle the life from your own mother?'
Che frowned. He tucked the garrotte away among the folds of his robe, unable to meet her eyes. 'I wonder, too, if you would have enjoyed your lovemaking quite so much had you known your only son was dangling just outside the window.'
She turned away at that remark, pulling her thin robe tighter about herself.
'You shouldn't goad me, then,' he said to her stiffened back.
She crossed to a table, poured water from a jug into a crystal glass, several slices of orange peel bobbing upon the surface.
His mother – though that term still came to Che with some difficulty – remained beautiful for all her years. She was forty-one now he reckoned, despite any vain lies to the contrary. She was also in no way the same woman he had remembered being his mother when he was a youth, living in Q'os's most affluent suburb, without a care in the world.
In fact, that mother of his childhood memory had never existed at all. Nor had that life.
What Che had suddenly discovered in the monastery, on the morning of his twenty-first birthday, was this: every memory he retained of life before his exile to Cheem had been fake. They had all been implanted within his head for the younger Che to assume as real.
Upon awakening that morning he had realized this quite clearly; and that his mind had, in some way been instructed to remember it on the precise day of his twenty-first birthday. Like a surging tide his real memories had washed through the previous foundations of his life, carrying them away like so much useless flotsam. In their place, Che had suddenly known that he was no son of a rich merchant family at all. Instead he was a simple bastard, his father unknown, and his real mother a devoted Sentiate in one of the many love cults found within the Mannian order, in which Che had originally been raised as an Acolyte, a priest in the making.
When the tide of recall had swamped him, Che had been left floundering and breathless and with only a single purpose in which to hold on to: leave Cheem, return to Q'os.
It wasn't until his eventual return to the capital that he discovered precisely what had been done to him. Che had been used for the Empire's own purposes. They feared the Rshun, it seemed, and years before, they had deemed it prudent to send one of their own novices to train as one of these secretive assassins, in the hope of gaining information on them not only of their ways and methods but more importantly their location, in case the Empire ever had need to combat the order.
They had chosen Che for this particular task by a selection process unknown to him. Perhaps it had been a random choice. Perhaps he had shown some aptitude for such work. For several moons they had subjected his thirteen-year-old self to an intensive regime of mental manipulation, drugged beyond stupefaction as they talked him clear out of his young mind, repressing crucial memories, planting and reinforcing others.
Of course it had shocked Che to the core, these revelations. Without time to find his feet again after his return, even to be certain of his own identity again, the imperial Regulators had questioned Che for a full moon by using truth drugs and hypnosis to strip the smallest of details from him. Satisfied that he had been plucked clean, they ordered the tip of each little finger to be chopped off as part of his initiation into Mann. And let it be known how pleased they would be if he continued in his vocation as an assassin – not as Rshun, of course, but as one of their own.
They had left him no choice in the matter.
'Water?' asked his mother, crossing the room with the glass held out to him.
Che accepted. He drank it in one swallow, and for a moment he simply sat there, savouring the taste of it in his mouth.
The world intrudes, though, on all moments of quietness.
I must know why they sent me here today, to feign the murder of my own mother. Sweet Ers! Look at her, the empty-headed bitch. In her devotion to them, she believes they are merely playing games with us.
For a moment he wanted to seize and shake her slender body in his grip, then slap her hard across the face, again and again, until she woke up to all of this – these lives that he and she were both living.
Instead, Che cleared his throat. 'How are you?' he asked.
'Mm? Oh, I am well, thank you.' She was seated in front of her mirror now, untangling her long golden curls with a fine-toothed comb carved from bone, her hair a luxury of her Sentiate calling. She paused to glance at his reflection. 'Really, I am well. It has been a good season, what with the festival and all.' As her comb encountered a stubborn knot, she held out a fist of blonde hair and tugged the comb lightly to tease it through. 'In fact I am better than well – I feel wonderful, as though I was a young girl again. I have become the main object of desire for one of Sasheen's high priests. Me! Can you believe it?'
'Yes, I think I caught sight of his bare arse just now.'
'Rainee? Oh no, my dear, oh no, the very thought of it. No, he is merely one of my regulars. Farando is of a different mould entirely. Alas he is indeed a little ugly, but he has strength, power, position, and he plies me with gifts and fine nights out in the city. I could not ask for more.
'And you,' she asked, twisting to face her son. 'How are you?'
Che was scratching at his elbow; not absently, but with a will. 'I am fine,' he said, and inside he thought: She does not recall it is my birthday.
'Your skin looks better today. Is the ointment working?'
Yes, she had given him another new ointment to try out, in the hope that it might soothe the scaly rashes that forever afflicted him. He shrugged – a measured, careful gesture, like all his movements.
'If only I could remember what I used on you when you were young.' She shook her head, exasperated. 'It's lost to me. Am I getting old, do you think? Mm?' She studied her reflection in the mirror. 'Has my face begun to turn away from the sun at last – along with my memory?'
'You're old enough for melodrama, I'll give you that. I'm glad that you are well, mother, but I must leave you now.'
'So soon?'
'I'm being timed on this exercise. And I must find out what this is about.'
Che climbed on to the windowsill, but turned back for a final remark. 'Something is wrong in this,' he said. 'Be careful.'
He was gone even as she opened her mouth to say farewell. 'Oh,' she said, instead.
She returned to her reflection, humming softly as she raked her golden curls, taking care not to notice the rhythm of a heaving bed resounding through the floor just above her head.