Glenda Larke - The Heart of the mirage

By the time she had finished, I had flung on a shawl and was sprawled casually in die room's only chair.

She came to stand before me, sword sheathed, hands on her hips. 'What is the meaning of all this?' she asked. "Why do the Mirage Makers do this for you?'

I shrugged. 'Perhaps to compensate for my wrongful imprisonment?'

'Temellin should have killed you. You are dangerous to us somehow -'

I made a gesture of weariness. 'Pinar, don't be moondaft. Soon you'll be convincing yourself I really did try to kill you and not the other way around.'

'What I did was justified. You are still a danger to us. And just as bad, having to imprison you here like this is devastating Temellin. He is tortured by guilt. Guilt! As if he has anything to be guilty about! I've tried to tell him we'd all be better off if you were dead, but he won't listen.'

I raised an eyebrow, the mockery a cover to my own pain. 'Poor Pinar, only a few weeks married, and already your husband ignores your suggestions?'

The tight expression on her face reminded me of Rathrox when he was planning revenge on someone who had slighted him.

The feeling remained, even when she'd gone. For the first time in my adult life, I had no control over my own destiny. I'd never felt so helpless and frustrated. So powerless. I doubt if anyone could have devised a more effective form of revenge than this one.

The next morning, as usual, Illuser-reftim brought my breakfast and left it on the desk. Normally he gave a swift look around to see what changes had been wrought during the night; this time he didn't seem interested. There wasn't anything new anyway, nor had anything been taken away. The fish were still

swimming in their unconfined waters and occasionally one would poke its nose out into the air before withdrawing into the safely of its element. Reftim ignored them, ducked his head in my direction without looking at me, either, and left the room as quickly as he could.

Worried by his behaviour, I went to the desk and sat down. Fresh bread, a glass of juice, a pot of hot herbal tea, smoked fish, fresh fruit. My normal breakfast. I stared at it without appetite.

I jabbed my knife into the fish, more in a gesture of disgust at my situation than with any intent of eating it. And smelled something that didn't seem quite right: a faint whiff of unpleasantness. It was vaguely familiar and, a moment later, I knew why: it reminded me of the Ravage.

I stared at the fish; it looked normal. I opened up my palm and passed my left hand over the meal without believing anything would come of such a gesture, yet as I looked, I saw a writhing black mass appear in the middle of the fish. In revulsion I flung the tray and all its contents away from me, smashing them from the desk onto the floor.

Some time later, Reftim returned to clear away the tray. His face glistened with sweat and his initial step into the room, even before his glance took in the empty desk and the food on the floor, was the palsied movement of an old man. Then he paled, the colour draining from his plump face so fast I thought he would faint. His guilt was obvious, but I knew he was not the initiator. I stood leaning against the door, waiting while he wordlessly cleaned up the mess. When he had finished and was on his way out with the tray, I did not move and he was forced to stop in front of me.

'In all my years working for the Brotherhood, I never poisoned anyone,' I said.

The colour returned to his face as rapidly as it had left it. 'Magoria -' he began, but his shame strangled any further words in the back of his throat.

'Do you think the Mirager would approve?'

He did not reply.

I knew I had no hope of him reporting the attempt, not when he himself was involved. 'Tell Pinar she will have to do better than that,' I said and stood aside to let him pass.

Once he had gone, I crossed the room to the desk and hit the desktop with the flat of my right hand, all my repressed anger and frustration surfacing. My helplessness was suffocating me. I plunged away from the desk, forgot the uncontained water and splashed into it, sending fish flying about the room.

"Vortexdamn you!' I shouted, venting my rage on the Mirage Makers. 'Do you think a poisoned baby is going to do you any good? Why don't you find some way of getting me out of this? Or at least send me something useful, like a – a – a book!'

For a moment I continued to stand, hands clenched by my sides, and then calm prevailed.

I bent to pick up the fish flopping on the floor and stuffed them back into what was left of the water.

The morning after the poisoning attempt, I didn't have to look far to see what changes had occurred during the night. The fish and all the other useless additions to the decor had gone. Instead, the room was lined from ceiling to floor with bookshelves, each shelf packed with vellum-bound volumes and scrolls.

I had never seen such a collection outside of the Public Library in Tyr; it was rare for even the most scholarly of individuals to have more than three or four treasured volumes. Copying a book cost money and not many people could afford them.

I rolled off my pallet and ran my eye along the roughly tooled spines of the closest shelf: all were written in Kardi. The first book was a compendium on Kardi freshwater fish, with illustrations. The next was a tome consisting mainly of dates and figures and, as far as I could make out, it detailed the heights and times of the coastal tides of Kardiastan for their entire five-year cycle. The next was a philosophical work, with a title I couldn't understand, written by a past Mirager; something, I thought, about the morality of using supernatural powers on people who had none.

The trouble was this: I was by no means at ease with written Kardi. I'd had little opportunity to study it.

Well, I certainly had both the time and the opportunity now. Quietly I thanked the Mirage Makers for their extravagant answer to my request, and in the days following I began to go through the books, sorting them out into those of no conceivable interest, such as the tide timetable, and those I would like to read. I did wonder if I'd be allowed to keep the library, but if Reftim reported it, no one did anything about it. It didn't take me long to realise the lack of interest was just as well. Had the Magor known of the treasure I now possessed, they would surely have separated me from it, for among the books were twenty-two volumes dealing with the power of the Magor.

Twenty-two volumes written by Magorofh, dating prior to the Tyranian invasion – some of them more than five hundred years prior – written as manuals for students, each dealing with different aspects of Magor art. Some of what was written there I already knew, but the rest took my breath away as I began to realise the possible extent of Magor powers. A fully trained Magoroth could call up a localised windstorm strong enough to flatten a shleth; he could conserve air in the body and walk under water or mimic death; he could shut off pain and not feel; he could produce light, abort a baby, kill a person or start a fire – all with his cabochon. He could hear a whisper spoken two hundred paces away or see acutely enough to note the twinkle in a windhover's eye as it drifted the skies.

Abort a baby.

It was easy. I could abort someone else's, or my own, simply by laying the cabochon on my lower abdomen and conjuring the right words in the right way^^

I learned the words. I studied the texts to make sure different books outlined the same method, and they did. No latent maternal instinct arose to usurp my normal indifference to the thought of motherhood. No concern for an unborn child, scarcely started along the path of its life, came to overwhelm my sense of self-preservation. This was going to be so easy. I could live. I could stop being haunted by the knowledge I might die with the child ripped from my womb, sacrificed against my will in order to fulfil a bargain I'd had no say in.*. i