Glenda Larke - The Heart of the mirage

I gave him a heartfelt look. 'Practice can be very boring.'

He laughed. 'Why don't you take a break sometimes? Go for a ride? You can borrow a shleth from the stables, you know, any time you want.'

I hadn't known, but from then on I rode out almost every day, sometimes with Garis, sometimes alone. During those rides I was close to happy, perhaps because it was then I felt an affinity to the land itself; to the Mirage Makers who were the land. At those time's I certainly couldn't believe they would deliberately harm me in order to obtain my unborn child. Alone on my pallet at night, my thoughts tended to be less comforting.

The worst part of those rides was when I came across the sores of the Ravage eating away at the land, swallowing its beauty and its joyful absurdities in those creeping excrescences of foulness. I once made the mistake of dismounting near one of these abominations, gagging on its stench, to take a closer

look. I shut out its hatred with a deliberate mind-block, but even so I could feel the hammer blows of vicious dislike against my mental shield. If it wanted to terrorise me, it succeeded. It took every particle of courage I had just to approach it close enough to look down into its depths.

As I stared into its green-black slime and saw past its surface to the horrors below, I wished I had not come. The dimness beneath was full of writhing, bestial forms exuding pus and other fluids, stinking of gangrenous flesh. At first I thought they were true animals, managing to survive in putrescence. Strange deformed things, but just creatures.

Then one of them rose up through the slime to poke its head out into the air, to look at me. Its body resembled a bulging caterpillar, except it was the size of a hound. Its head had tearing feeding parts and large, voracious eyes. Its gaze enveloped me with gleeful, cruel hunger… and I was back in another time.

Tyr. Ligea on her first job for Rathrox. She wanted so much to please him because she knew he would be reporting to Gayed. She was sixteen years old, sitting in the Brotherhood's interrogation rooms, a bleak place inspiring fear even in the innocent.

It wasn't an important case. Rathrox was just testing her. He'd discovered she had a knack of identifying a lie, and he'd asked her to accompany him to interview a number of suspects. He asked the questions; all she had to do was listen, and make a sign when a lie was uttered. She didn't find it difficult, until the fourth man was brought in. He was arrogant, bumptious, sure of himself, confident no one would be able to find him guilty of anything, and indeed, the evidence was slim.

Ligea didn't like him. He could not hide his emotions., from her, and they were vile. Outwardly, he was '

ordinary enough. He was a boat builder, neatly dressed, but when his eyes lingered on her, his thoughts were viciously predatory. Behind the bland exterior, behind his smile, there lurked the sentiments of a sadistic killer. His mind slavered, his emotions were raw and unrestrained. He told the truth when he protested his innocence of the minor treason Rathrox accused him of, but there were crimes far darker smouldering inside him. He terrified Ligea. She had never met someone so dark. She had never been so sure of someone's criminality.

Rathrox questioned him, and to each answer she had to give the sign that said he spoke the truth.

She thought: What if he goes free? He smiled at her, his lips curling up to charm. His eyes twinkled. The blackness within darkened. She could not read his intentions, but the way he felt about her was akin to the emotions of a starving dog offered red meat. Given the chance, he would have devoured her.

And when the next question came, she turned her hand over, palm up, to indicate a lie.

They sent him to the Cages on the strength of that, while they hunted for evidence. He was dead of disease within a month, and the case was closed. Ligea knew she'd murdered him as effectively as if she'd slid a knife into his heart. She'd lied and killed her first man…

Worst of all, perhaps, I never felt the slightest guilt. For others that followed perhaps, dead for other reasons, but not for that one.

I lay on the grass a few paces away from the Ravage with no idea of how I had come to be there. One moment I had been engulfed in those savage eyes, then I'd been back in my childhood reliving something as a spectator, in every detail. I'd had to wrench myself away, as dreamers suffering nightmares pull memselves

by an effort of will from a treacherous sleep.

¦ – • • ¦ ¦ ¦. – ¦•» -. – •

Shaken, I stood. Something had happened that I did not understand. And I wanted to know. I had to know. If I didn't understand the Mirage Makers, then the chances I was going to die seemed high. Temellin could say the Ravage was too evil to be a part of the Mirage, that it caused pain to the Mirage Makers and therefore must be something else, but that was spurious logic. The Ravage existed within the Mirage and nowhere else.

Foolishly, I returned to the edge of the Ravage to seek answers.

And the same thing happened again. I met the eyes of another of the creatures and was once again caught up in the past…

A much older Ligea. Twenty-five, and making a name for herself within the Brotherhood.

In Tyr society, however, she was regarded as a little strange. She was too intellectual, too uninterested in temple, too masculine, too forthright, too independent. She was occasionally seen in odd places or in odd company. Rumours abounded. At her age, she should have been married, of course, but there hadn't been too many proposals, and now she had openly taken a legionnaire lover. It was one thing for a Tyranian matron – who had already presented her husband with sufficient progeny – to behave that way, it was quite another to see an unmarried woman be so shameless.

And then General Gayed and his wife Salacia both died, leaving their adopted daughter heir by default. Ligea suddenly became eminently eligible because she had money. The change both irritated and amused her, and she could be abrupt with those who so presumed to court her. One, charming and personably plausible, had been the most persistent and the most ardent, protesting his admiration for strong women and his affection for

her. His name was Casmodius, and she might have believed him if she hadn't been able to read lies and sense emotions. In reality he despised her and inwardly he ridiculed her. He was not the wealthy man he professed to be, but a gambler trying to hide his losses from his creditors and society, with an eye on her fortune.

His hypocrisy was so profound, his lies so blatant, she determined to punish him. In public she played the affectionate friend, in private she teased and smiled and stroked his ego, even as she spoke of her feelings for Favonius, away in Quyr at the time. She tormented him with her unpredictable behaviour and fluctuating affections. At the same time, she used her position in the Brotherhood to gather information about his debts. When he finally lied once too often, and with promises of undying love implored her to marry him, she showed the extent of his debts to all his creditors and spread the tale all over Tyr. Within days, the whole of the city was despising Casmodius for his deceptions, ridiculing him for being so publicly mocked by the woman he had courted. Hounded by his creditors, he came in desperation to Ligea. She sent him away, laughing at his naivety. When he went to others he had considered friends, they turned away in contempt.

Within a week, he had taken poison and died…

I had felt no remorse then, either.

I tore myself back into the present. Once again I was lying on the grass, closer to the Ravage this time. Or was it that the Ravage had moved?

I stood up and looked at the patch of slime. Fingers of liquid oozed out of the main body of the Ravage, each rivulet crawling in my direction. It was coming closer. Shit, I thought. This is personal. It's aiming at me.