Glenda Larke - The Heart of the mirage

before he could deepen the kiss I pulled back. His hand remained where it was; the shining flecks in his eyes flickered.

'I can't, Brand.' For once, I could read his emotions, and I rather wished I couldn't. I was aware of a deep bitter grief filling the room and knew how much I'd hurt him. He must have guessed it was more my disdain for a slave-lover, rather than any sisterly affection, that stopped me from desiring him. I felt shamed, and didn't understand why.

His hand slipped away and his eyes dropped. 'I'll take care of the sword, Legata,' he said, voice neutral. He went to pick up the wrapped weapon from where I had placed it on the table – and found he couldn't move it. Startled, he withdrew his hand. 'Ocrastes' balls – it's so heavyl How can you lift it?'

I was glad to change the subject and said, 'It is not heavy to me. Where shall I put it?'

He hesitated.

I quirked an eyebrow at him. 'Ah, you too, Brand? What are you afraid of? Numina?'

He looked at me, amused. 'If it is a numen's plaything, what does that make you?'

I made a wry face. 'What indeed?' Inwardly I just felt sick. I heard myself silently repeating the words, J am no immortal. Nor a numen. There are no such beings. Probably never have been…

He tried to diminish his unease with a laugh. 'Put it under the pallet against the wall. It will be safe there. No one will find it.'

I did as he suggested and turned to go. 'Thank you. Goodnight, Brand.'

'Goodnight, Legata.' There was a familiar trace of mockery in his voice and his emotions were once more veiled.

Soft-footed, I started back to the main sleeping quarters of the household. Oil lamps flickered in wall niches, the smell of the burning muted by the perfumes added to the fuel. The halls were dim and silent. My thoughts were a chaos of swearing. What in all Acheron's damnable mists was the bloody man thinking of? How could he possibly think I would respond to his lovemaking?

I embarked on another of those silly, futile conversations I sometimes conducted with myself: Your fault, Legata. It was you who insisted on treating him as a friend.

The reply: He is a friend, damn it. That's the way I wanted it. The way I still want it. I need a friend…

You wanted him in your bed. You wanted to say yes just then.

I am not going to bed my slave.

You could go back.

Shut up! ‹ I entered the corridor leading to my apartments. A single flame still burned at my doorway, unmoving, as if pasted onto its lamp. Others had guttered, dimming the passage. I walked on, preoccupied, towards my door, passing the silent row of statues with their marble faces made grim by the lack of light. And then that final lamp flame fluttered, dancing the shadows of those carved watchers.

Something had created a current of air at my door.

I stopped, uncertain of what I was seeing. The form of a man, yet he had no solidity. A transparent and ethereal man, a painting done on glass. No painting though. He moved.

I did two things at once, both instinctive. I stepped out of sight behind a statue, and I drew my knife. And stood mere, immobile, while all the hairs on my arms

rose up… The man walked through my door and into my bedroom. I had closed my door – and it was still closed. The man had walked through the polished planks of wood. And disappeared.

I didn't believe in shades of the dead. I was neither superstitious, nor given to hallucinations, nor easily deceived by tricks of the light or sleight of hand. I wanted a logical explanation. Yet, as I stood there in silence, peering out from under the arm of a life-sized statue of Bator Korbus mounted on a plinth, a shudder skidded up my spine. I took a deep breath and tried to remember exactly what I had seen.

A naked man about my height or a shade taller. Muscular, as well sculpted as a statue of a naked competitor in the annual games. I hadn't seen his face, but a fluidity to his movement spoke of a man still young in years. Hair too long for a Tyranian. He'd worn it, Kardi-style, tied back at the nape with a thong. His skin could have been Kardi brown, although it was hard to be sure when he had been so… ethereal. I had seen through him, I was sure of it, the way one could see through a glass of white wine held up to the light.

A shade had just entered my room. A shade from Acheron?

Or a god perhaps, in some… otherworldly form?

I couldn't believe I was thinking this. It was madness. What was happening to me?

I stayed where I was, still motionless. I thought of rousing the household, but quelled that thought immediately. I was a compeer, not some moondaft madwoman. I couldn't admit to being scared of a shade. And if I said I'd seen one, and no one else' did, then I was going to make myself an object of ridicule. So I remained where I was, sweating even in the cool of the night air, waiting for Goddess knows what.

Five minutes later, the shade walked back through the door. No, not walked. He seeped through the door. And stopped. And hovered, then slowly turned his face in my direction, his features too transparent to be recognisable. There was a dark circle on the back of his hand, like a wound.

I held my breath. My skin prickled. It was dark where I was, and he was in the light of the lamp outside my door. If his eyesight was normal he would find it difficult to see me, hidden as I was. However, he was alert, poised, holding himself the way I did when I was sending my senses outwards. I tried to sense him in turn, but couldn't. Not unexpected, I suppose, seeing he was only a ghost. Or a shade. Or something else equally intangible.

I thought: He can't see me, but he knows I'm here.

For a breath-halting moment, we stood like that. And then he turned and vanished, gliding away like wind-wafted mist.

Back in my own room a few minutes later, I saw nothing to indicate someone had entered while I'd been gone. Nothing had been disturbed. The floor was spotless.

I shook, as if the foundations of my life were crumbling and I could find no security. Too many things had happened that day; piling on top of all that had preceded. The mother-figure of my childhood had threatened me with death; the slave-brother of my adolescence had proclaimed himself lover; the abilities I had were taking on new and frightening dimensions in this, the land of my birth. I was either flirting with madness, or someone had drugged me into seeing things that couldn't exist, at least not in the land of the living.

Perhaps this was connected to what had happened back at the Meletian Temple in Tyr. A conspiracy to make me believe in the gods of the pantheon? To have me consult the temple priestesses, to seek out the cult of Melete? Well, I wouldn't do it. I was the logical compeer. I was the Tyranian who bowed to a goddess more as a matter of conformity than belief. Who hoped there was an afterlife awaiting, in a not-too-daunting Acheron, after the Vortex had whisked her away from her body- but who was not wholly convinced of any of it.

Come on, Ligea. You are the cool-headed compeer. Think.

I turned to the more solid of my reservations. I started to make a list in my head of the things that bothered me most, trying – in vain – for dispassion.

Who had wanted me to go to Kardiastan so badly they had connived with the Meletian High Priestess and the Voice of the Oracle to make it seem like a good idea? If it had been the Exaltarch himself, Bator Korbus, then why? I was not so important in the overall scheme of things, was I?

Why had the Prefecta's Kardi slave called me Theura? Did I really remember that word from my childhood, but applied to someone else? I looked down at my palm, at the swelling there that had so startled Othenid she'd dropped a pitcher and earned herself a beating. It had been so important to me as a child that I had tried to keep it hidden. No other Kardi I'd ever met had such a lump. Was it a curse, a blessing, an accident of birth that the Kardis had some superstition about? What did it mean? It had fitted so neatly into the hollow on the hilt ofMirAger's sword… I should have asked if anyone had noticed a lump on his hand. No, perhaps that wouldn't have been a good idea. I didn't want to draw attention to my own.