Glenda Larke: The Heart of the mirage

would make their fortunes. Some of them were even right.

I halted for a moment, my head aching and the taste in my mouth foul. I couldn't even think straight. The Oracle had spoken to me, Ligea Gayed, and prophesied my future. Not many were so privileged. Why, then, did I feel so… besmirched?

I pushed the feeling away and directed my thoughts instead to assimilating the reality of my coming departure from Tyr. No more desert-season evenings spent at the open-air theatre to hear a new comedy i

from Crispin; no more sitting around a fire on a snow-season night with the Academy scholars, drinking punch and discussing Asculi's latest treatise or arguing about why the seasons change; no more pleasant hours spent at one of Nereus's musical evenings.

Kardiastan. Desert hell. Uncultured land of assassins and evil numina, of windstorms and rainless skies. May the wind of Acheron's Vortex take that bastard Rathrox!

I had no time, though, to dwell on the pleasant fantasy of an unpleasant end for my Brotherhood mentor, because my thoughts were jerked back to the present. Away from the safety of frequented streets, my senses had subconsciously roamed outwards to become aware of what was happening around me. It seemed my foolishness in crossing the Snarls while so richly dressed was going to bring me trouble: I was being followed. It served me right; I ought to have known better. I should have taken a litter.

I focused my attention. The people in the houses I ignored; those in the surrounding streets I allowed my senses to touch, taking note of their proximity, checking if they were a potential threat by testing their emotions. I found an irate woman and several sulky

children, a man consumed with an as-yet-unsatisfied lust in the company of a woman who seemed unenthusiastic – a whore perhaps? – and, out of sight down a parallel street, a crowd of young people exuding drunken amusement. No one I need worry about.

My follower was another matter. I flicked my senses behind and felt his emotions as a black cloud of violence and avarice, too full of malevolent anticipation to be ignored. Damn the man. Around the next corner, I stepped into the nearest recessed doorway of the lane to wait, and felt for my knife. It wasn't there, of course. No one carried a knife into an audience with the Exaltarch.

With growing badtemper and exasperation, I tracked the progress of my pursuer. When he rounded the corner into the lane and found I was no longer in sight, he hesitated a moment, then began to run. I hitched up my wrap and stuck out a foot at the precise moment he drew level; predictably, he sprawled face down in the dirt. I was on him before he had even determined what had happened, pinning him down with a knee in the middle of his back, immobilising him still further by twisting his right arm up behind him. I assessed him quickly: an ill-dressed individual, foul-smelling, not all that young, with neither the strength nor the skill to resist. His clothes were ragged, but I saw some embroidery on what was left of the collar: Quyr beadwork, unless I was much mistaken. Rebellion within the Quyr region and legionnaire attempts to subdue the insurgents had forced many Quyriots out of their mountain homes. Some had made their way to Tyr in search of a living – honest or otherwise; doubtless this man was one such.

'What did you want, helot?' I asked.

'N-nothin',' he stuttered in shock. 'Was just walkin' -'

I tightened my grip. 'Your first lie,' I said. 'The next earns you a broken bone. Why were you following me?'

'I wasn't, Domina -'

I shifted my hold slightly and broke his little finger. He yelped in pain and disbelief.

'Why were you following me?'

He was silent, so I began to apply pressure on his next finger.

'Don't -!' he yelled, too late.

'Were you after my purse? Shall I add a third finger to the tally?'

He howled briefly, but increased pressure soon brought a more comprehensible mumble of admission. His disbelief had melted into fear, his outrage vanished into a numbed acceptance, a common enough emotion of the underprivileged when faced with their superiors.

'Any other reason?'

'No – I swear in the name of the Goddess! Lady, please -'

I felt the truth of his answer and released the pressure a little. Ordinarily I would have continued to question him until I found a way I could use him; I'd have held the threat of imprisonment over him and enlisted him in my army of informants, but now – what was the use? I was off to Kardiastan and had no further need of informants… 'That could earn you a spell in the Cages, my friend,' I said. 'But you're lucky. I'm in a merciful mood today. Get going.'

I released him abruptly, and stood up. He scrambled to his feet, nursing his injured fingers. He opened his mouth to curse me, saw the look on my

face and changed his mind, then scuttled away down a side alley without a word.

I walked on, rubbing my aching head, wondering why my distaste for what had happened was so pronounced. Usually that sort of incident didn't worry me. This time, though, as the man's acidic hate for me lingered in the air after he had gone, I found myself wondering if my talents, especially those that gave me an awareness of other people's emotions, were worth having.

As a child I had been hurt again and again by my uninvited knowledge, until I'd learned to build a wall around my too-soft core. When I'd been very young, I'd thought everyone felt things the same way I did, and I'd gone on thinking so, until Aemid, my Kardi slave-nurse, had disabused me. She had drawn me aside one day, making sure no one overheard us, to say, 'You feel things others don't. You know things you shouldn't. And until you learn to control those feelings, to push aside that knowledge, to ignore all that comes to you unbidden, to squash it – until then, you will continue to be hurt. None of this inner knowledge of yours will do you any good, Ligea; don't listen to it. That way it will eventually stop coming to you.'

At first I'd tried to follow her advice. Then, one day I'd been saved from unpleasantness by knowing beforehand that some bullying young playmates of mine were waiting in ambush for me in our villa garden. Aemid, I decided, was wrong. The knowledge coming to me unbidden might often have hurt, but it also provided invaluable insights. Instead of crushing it, I nurtured it. I practised, I trained myself to listen, to be aware, to feel things others couldn't feel, to know what should have been unknowable. Slowly I learned to coax more nebulous intuitions into a coherent form

of awareness, to recognise vague feelings about the emotions of others as information to be read and interpreted. The extent of my abilities was my secret, and one I kept well. Aemid may have guessed I hadn't taken her advice, but she never said. Gayed, and later Rathrox, sensed I was different, that I was more perceptive than others, but I never explained my gift to them; I never let them know just how good I was.

Even so, it seemed Rathrox knew too much, and now, because of my abilities, I was being sent to Kardiastan. Worse, the Oracle was aware of my abilities too. What was it Esme had said about me? With powers to see behind the face. And with her blurting that out, the temple authorities – Antonia and her ilk – would know there was something odd about me too, blast them. The fewer people who knew what I could do, the more valuable my power was.

I sighed. No matter what, exile was far too high a price to pay for my talent.

The tangle of alleyways I followed led me into the heart of the Snarls, to what passed for a prison in Tyr: the Cages. Lesser criminals were sold into slavery and usually never found themselves here. The Cages were for the more violent felons, for those awaiting execution, for traitors and insurgents.