The Heart of the mirage

'I'll tell him. But don't wait up.'

He turned on his heel and left.

Temellin did not come to see me until the next day. He was not alone; Brand was with him.

Brand entered first, his expression as unreadable as ever. He didn't speak, but he came up to me and raised the back of his hand to my cheek in an intimate gesture of caring far more moving than any kiss would have been. I looked away from him to Temellin. I sensed a tinge of shame and uncertainty about the Mirager as he watched the two of us.

He did not greet me. He said flatly, 'You wanted to see me?' and then walked across the room, avoiding eight or nine fish swimming around in an expanse of apparently unconfined water at head-height, to stand with his back to the hole in the wall.

From where I stood he was a silhouette, rigid and forbidding. He continued, 'You have an unlikely tale about a Stalwart invasion of the Mirage. I asked Aemid what she knew about it. She said, not unexpectedly, that she had never heard of it. So now I'm going to ask Brand, because if there is such a thing planned, I'm sure you would have told him. Tell me what you know about it, Brand – and remember I can detect lies.'

Brand looked at me helplessly, his anger at Temellin growing.

I intervened. 'He knows nothing.'

'She didn't tell me everything. Only those things where she thought my advice would be useful,' Brand said.

Temellin looked unconvinced. 'That's not what Aemid says. She says Ligea always asked your advice.' He sighed. 'You're loyal, I'll say that for you, Brand. What I can't understand is why. She'd put a slave collar around your neck again the moment she had the chance.'

'Ligea freed me before we ever came to the Mirage. She has paid me for every year of my service to her or to her father. I give my loyalty to her because she is worthy

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of it, not because I am ordered to do so. In fact, she has been asking me to leave her, to seek a life of my own.'

Temellin looked at him, astonished. 'Then why didn't you?'

'I didn't want to leave, that's why. And I'm glad I didn't. Ligea's damned lucky she didn't die in the dining hall with your sodding sword in her heart – how could you do that to a woman who gave you all the love she had to give? She would have died for you half a dozen times over, but you couldn't trust her, could you?' His voice was so thick with contempt he could scarcely speak. 'When I think of the way she felt about you -'

'It seems she has fooled you just as she fooled us.'

'Ligea and I were brought up together. There's nothing I don't know about the way she thinks. She was raised by men who tried to twist her into a coldblooded instrument of their revenge. They tried, but they didn't succeed, because she could never quite reconcile what they tried to make of her with what she knew herself to be. They tried to sharpen her into a ruthless killer; instead, she made torture obsolete in the Cages of Tyr. How could you have loved her, and not sensed her capacity for loving?'

'You're the one who is mole-blind -'

Brand shook his head, his stare in Temellin's direction unforgiving. 'I remember the day I arrived at General Gayed's house in Tyr. He'd just bought me, cheap, at a slave auction. I was twelve years old, a dirty, skinny, ill-fed boy who had spent two whole years on auction blocks, being passed from one foul slave dealer to another across the Exaltarchy. I'd been beaten, starved and abused in ways you probably haven't even heard of. My parents were dead, my home and my inheritance stolen from me, my body used.'

He turned away from Temellin, apparently to look at the fish. I doubt he really saw them, though. 'I remember seeing Ligea for the first time. I think Gayed had bought me as a sort of joke, to see what she'd do with me. I was hardly a quality slave. He'd got me from the docks in Tyr where they sell the dross of the slave trade. Most girls brought up the way Ligea was would have scorned me, sent me to be die middenboy in the stables. She looked me over and I could see her anger growing. But she wasn't angry at me, or even at her father.

'"Who beat you like that?" she asked. It was a hard question to answer – I'd been beaten so many times – but I gave her the name of the slaver who'd inflicted the last and most vicious beating. I never spoke of it again, and neither did she, but ten years later, when she had the means to do so, she had that man banned from the slave trade and his assets impounded by the State for tax evasion.

'She was ten years old when she saw me for the first time. She could have seen the dirt, the sullen face, the ugliness of an undernourished body – but she didn't. She saw only the abuse. And hated it.

'I was her slave for eighteen years before she freed me. I never felt less than her friend, for all that she maintained the conventions of a slave-owner relationship. I know that as a compeer she's killed people, condemned others to a lifetime in the Cages of Tyr, but I've never known her to be less than fair, or to harm anyone who wasn't a criminal. Her special abilities saved as many people from torture or wrongful imprisonment or execution as condemned them to such.'

He looked across at Temellin. 'But what's the use in talking to you – you've made up your mind, haven't -,:: -L – M, Jk.- wr M.

you? Condemned her on the word of your bitch-wife and a prematurely old nurse who hadn't the spine to tell her charge the truth about herself when she was a • child. You aren't fit to lead a nation, Temellin. Even with all your powers you still don't recognise the truth when the smell of it is in your nostrils. Vortexdamn you, you had everything I would have given the world for, and you tried to kill her. If I were free, I'd run a sword through your innards sooner than I'd look on your face again.' He turned his back and went to stand by the door, his dismissal of his jailer as rudely abrupt as he knew how to make it.

And Temellin accepted the dismissal. He called someone to come and escort the Altani back to his room.

I hoped Brand understood the look I gave him as he left. It was the only way I had to say thank you. He'd been my slave, and he could still defend me. I had never been so humbled.

r Ikv -R'-v It was hard to be alone with Temellin.

I opted to keep the conversation away from the personal and said, 'The Stalwarts are coming. And that's the truth. You are supposed to be able to distinguish a lie when you hear it.'

'Can I, though, with you? If Brand had known about them, I would have believed you. But he didn't. And why, if you had changed your loyalties, did you not tell me of this invasion before? You would take an oath to serve Kardiastan, and yet you wouldn't mention an intended attack on the country; worse still, on this part of it – the Mirage? Everything that you've done, Shirin, begs to make me wonder about your honesty. It begs me to wonder if you can do what others can't, and disguise your lies in the same way we can all hide our

emotions.' He sounded rational and unemotional, but I could feel his contempt. And his pain. 'There was one other person who deceived us with his lies. We don't know who it was, but we do know it was one of us. A Magoroth. We trusted, because we didn't believe we could be deceived. And he brought Tyranian legionnaires into the Shimmer Feast, and killed our parents, yours and mine, and all our cousins, all the babies in the nursery and our whole way of life. I can never risk that happening again. Never!

His resolution, as hard as the iron in his voice, was thick in the air about him, but so was his underlying horror. He believed he had come close to another such abomination occurring because of me. And he was right. I had come to the Mirage with the intention to betray them all. And what then? Would I have stood by and watched while the legionnaires killed babies, and thought it a job well done? Dear Goddess, what had I been?

I ripped away all the covers from my inner mind, let him sense whatever he wanted, bared myself to him as I had never done to anyone before. Even so, the words did not come easily. 'Temel, I was too ashamed to tell you the truth. Ashamed of what I had been. Ashamed of the role I played in strengthening the Exaltarchy. And I was afraid you would despise me, reject me. I was going to tell you eventually – I just wanted you all to know me better first. It was what I wanted to tell you about, the day you arrived back from Sandmurram. I knew I could not delay any longer.' Everything I said sounded weak to my ears. Ridiculous. I had been a Brotherhood Compeer, and here I was describing the doubts and frailties more appropriate to an adolescent girl. Yet it was the truth.