Dave Duncan - Mother of Lies

Dantio crossed to Snakeskin.

Tranquility adjusted her route so that eventually they must meet face-to-face. She waited in a doorway as he dodged ever closer, then stepped out in his path.

“Dantio?”

He yelled in terror, dropped his burden, and fled off into the crowd. She watched him doubling around through alleys and courtyards until he went to ground under a wooden doorstep, wriggling down in the filth like a human worm. She took the shortest route there and laid down his food sack at the end where his head was.

“Dantio,” she said, “the seers in the palace see you. When you are missed, Satrap Eide will ask where you are and they will tell him. They don’t want to, but they have no choice-they must answer any question a hostleader asks.”

He was trying very hard to keep his weeping silent. He had opened some of the half-healed welts on his back.

“Then the lady Saltaja will have you flogged again. I heard her threaten you with double next time. I know she meant it.”

“You’re another!” said a muffled whimper.

“Yes, I’m a seer, but I’m not on duty just now. I am trying to help you. Why not come out and we’ll talk about it?” This was outright meddling. She made a mental note to reprimand herself severely.

After a moment he began to wriggle. She reached down to help him and the moment their hands touched, she learned that he was a seasoner. She had never encountered seasoning before. It was so rare that the instructors at Bergashamm could only describe what they had been taught themselves. The only known living seasoners were Stralg Hragson and Saltaja Hragsdor. Now much more than compassion fueled Tranquility’s interest in the hostage.

She walked Dantio back to the palace while explaining about the wicked compact and why he would always be caught if he tried to run away. She did not mention that she had been present in the palace during his last flogging, enduring his agony and terror.

“I promised my brothers,” he said, over and over. “Benard and Orlando. I promised my brothers I would go back for them.”

“Saltaja is a very evil woman, Dantio. She never makes an idle threat. If you continue to defy her, she will keep increasing the punishment until she kills you.”

He said he believed, but she could feel the untruth. Racked by homesickness and imagined guilt, the boy was so desperate that he truly did not care.

That night she sent an urgent message to the Eldest, in Bergashamm.

Tranquility was in the duty room the next day when Satrap Eide sent a summons for a Witness. Guessing the problem, she looked and saw Dantio already on the far side of Triangle. She sent Ember to answer the satrap’s call because her range was not great, but Ember found the boy anyway. Her dismay when she had to report where he was moaned through the palace like eldritch funeral horns. Eide sent Werists to bring him back, and Saltaja sentenced him to a dozen lashes, four on each of three days.

Sick with horror, Tranquility fled to the Home of Holy Nula to consult the Senior Mercy, Mother Dolerian, who was a distant cousin of hers. Dolerian was tall and spare, but wore her years well. Her hair was silver, her face un-lined, and not a wrinkle marred the fall of her brown robe. So great was the calm she projected that even to sit in the same room with her was to feel one’s burdens grow lighter. She was sympathetic in this case, but not cooperative.

“Punishment is never pleasant, Lonia dear,” she said. “But obviously the brat is stubborn and will have to learn his lesson.”

“Lesson? You call that a lesson? She started with a leather belt, went on to a stick and now she’s using the plaited leather whip they use on adult criminals! Wielded by a Werist! It cuts his flesh to the bone. And three separate floggings! Flogging unhealed cuts hurts much more. This is inhuman!”

Dolerian sighed and nodded. “But if the trollop finds out that we have been easing his suffering, Lonia, won’t she simply increase the punishment?”

That was a very valid argument, for almost nothing happened within the palace without Saltaja hearing of it. Nulists were the kindest, most sympathetic of people by definition, but Mother Dolerian was stubborn, and nothing Tranquility could say would change her mind, not even angry sneers that she must be afraid of the Queen of Shadows. Defeated, Tranquility crawled back to a palace aflame-it seemed to her-with a boy’s torment.

For a thirty after his ordeal on the whipping post, Dantio was kept in solitary confinement. Typically, when Saltaja eventually sent for him, it was in the middle of the night. As always she wore black, even to a black wimple and black cuffs covering her hands. She sat on a black throne in a black room lit by a single lamp, so almost nothing was visible except her corpse-pale, strangely elongated face. This treatment had been known to reduce strong men to gibbering terror, but the boy kept his poise. He was too young to see that such courage just increased his danger.

“If I release you, will you run away again?”

“Honored lady, I have learned my lesson. I swear I never will.”

The seers eavesdropping in the duty room felt his duplicity like a slap in the face.

Saltaja was skeptical, too. “That is good,” she said. “From now on you will report to the guard four times a day, and if you fail to do so just once, boy, I will have you gelded and your ears cropped. You believe me?”

The boy said, “I do believe you, honored lady,” but his reservations were obvious to the watching seer. First you will have to catch me.

The Eldest responded to Tranquility’s report by agreeing that seasoning had never before been detected in one so young. She directed Tranquility to be extremely diligent, which meant that meddling would be overlooked, within reason. She also ordered that a Witness be assigned full-time to study this Dantio Celebre. Tranquility took on that job herself, and set out to win the boy’s trust. She invited him repeatedly to her tiny home near the palace, talking endlessly with him and listening while he poured out his troubles. He had a great curiosity about Vigaelian history, customs, and-ominously-geography. He was clever, gentle-mannered, and impossibly stubborn.

Tranquility had written to the Kosord and Tryfors lodges, and early in the new year they replied with reports that Dantio’s brothers were surviving or even thriving. She passed on this good news, of course. Amazingly, both had turned out to have seasoning also, and the entire Maynist cult was soon buzzing over this discovery. More hostages and slaves arrived from Florengia, so that dark skin became a less freakish sight in Skjar.

In the spring, Dantio broke his parole. Knowing more geography now, he went downstream to Ocean. By the time the hue and cry was raised, he had stowed away aboard a ship and the ship had weighed anchor. The satrap had to send another in pursuit of it.

Tranquility hurried to the sanctuary of Sinura on Broom Creek. There was a minor sanctuary within the palace, but Broom Creek was the Healers’ headquarters and the senior Healer in Skjar was Ferganfar Narson.

She had known Ferganfar since childhood, when they had been neighbors in the potters’ quarter. As a youth he had been godlike, a handsome giant, and if he had shown any romantic interest in little Lonia next door, holy Mayn would have had to have gotten by without Sister Tranquility. From those humble origins he had risen far. Now he dressed in silk and dwelt amid fine rugs and amberwood furniture, looking out on vistas of cataracts and lily ponds. The icon of his goddess on the wall was inlaid with jade and seashell. Physically he had not fared so well-stooped and almost crippled, a shrunken remnant of what he had been. Life had written suffering on his face as scribes inscribed clay