Mother of Lies (7 page)

“Since before I was born, yes?”

The fake Nulist waited a beat before saying, “
Much
longer than that, lord Chies.”

Oliva chuckled, which was perhaps a mistake, but probably nothing would have stopped Chies now.

“Did you move that shutter, brother? It takes four men to put them up.”

“Master Dicerno did it. As he will have told you, the gods give strength to the pure in heart.”

Chies let out a surprised snigger.

“I have certainly told him that diffidence is a sign of good breeding,” Dicerno countered.

The boy’s eyes narrowed. “I saw my father just now and he’s in such terrible pain that I feel very upset. Will you give me some comfort, Nulist? Just a touch?” He extended a skinny arm.

Cavotti closed a huge hand around it. “Better, lad, I will show you how to work off your own worries.” He moved over to the doorway and out onto the terrace.

Chies perforce went with him, struggling, kicking, squealing. “Stop! You’re hurting! Let me go!”

“You don’t need holy Nula,” the giant growled. “See there? An agile youngster like you can easily scramble over that balustrade and jump down to the river wall. Run twice around the city as fast as you can, and you will find that all your cares have given way to a glow of healthy well-being.”

Released, Chies sprang away, rubbing the white marks on his arm and spitting anger like a cat. “I’ll find better shoes.” Without even a bow to his mother, he sprinted across the chamber and disappeared the way he had come.

The Werist came back in, chuckling. “Sorry, my lady, but I enjoyed that. I am a disgrace to Master Dicerno’s training.” He bowed again. “Marno Cavotti, at your service.”

“You dare manhandle my son?”

His eyes blazed. “You are lucky I didn’t break his neck, lady. At his age I was a prisoner at Boluzzi in compulsory Werist training. The only way to fail the course there was to
die
there. If you ran away you were run down—you know warbeasts can track like hounds? Ripped to pieces. Boys of thirteen, fourteen. They’d bring the scraps back to show us. No, my complaint against Stralg is even heavier than yours, my lady, and your precious bastard is lucky he’s still got his balls on right now.”

The preceptor moaned and was ignored.

“Boor!” Oliva had found a target for the fury she had been building all night. “It is you who may be lacking body parts very shortly. Chies has undoubtedly gone to ask the senior Mercy if she knows anything of a Brother Marno.”

“And after that how long for him to reach the Vigaelians?”

“A few minutes only.”

“My lady!” Dicerno squealed. “Cannot you send the palace guard to stop him? This is terrible!”

“We have time to attend to our business,” the Mutineer said calmly. “But the less you know the better, old man. Leave us. I suggest you quit the city the moment the gates are opened in the morning.”

“Do as he says, master.” Oliva dismissed the preceptor by turning her back on him. “Be quick, Cavotti. I don’t want you all over my clean floor.”

The big man laughed and tucked his hands inside his sleeves as if he had worn Nulist garb for years. “We can start by agreeing that we share no love for Stralg Hragson. There were about four sixty of us to start with in the school, half of us from Celebre. In the five years we were there, earning our collars, we were joined by six or seven times that many—boys kidnapped from all over the Face.”

“I know the history,” she said, imagining Chies bursting into the sanctuary, yelling out his questions, then taking off along the corridor like a mad guanaco. “What do you want of me?”

“I’ll get to that. We stayed and we worked and we won our collars. Stralg was dreaming … he’s basically just a thug bully, as you well know … dreaming of setting up a second empire here, to match the one he had on the Vigaelian Face. He expected us loyal Florengian Werists to run it for him when he went home. Expected us to be grateful, I suppose. We were initiated, the first of us. We swore the oaths. He came to Boluzzi in person for the ceremony, and by that time he’d been all around the Fertile Circle, stamping out opposition. He ruled the Face then. Two Faces. Dream come true. We were part of his great plan, the first crop from Boluzzi, donning the collars we can never shed. We swore eternal obedience, cheered him, and went off to our postings, but we’d agreed to meet back at the school after Stralg and his guards had left.”

“This was
your
plan,
your
mutiny, how you got your name.” She thought Chies wouldn’t come back through here. He’d go around by the west stairs. That would hardly slow him at all, not the way he could move those long legs. Yet the Mutineer was showing no signs of haste, almost as if he were dragging this out.

“I was one of the ringleaders. The others are all dead now. On the chosen night we broke in and there was a fight. Oh, was there a fight! By the time the blood congealed, all the instructors were dead and so were most of us. There were twenty-four Werist survivors—me and twenty-three others. About four sixty cadets threw in their lot with us, and some senior probationers too. The young ones we had to leave. We told them to scatter and look out for themselves, but we knew Stralg would get them.”

Oliva imagined Chies hurtling down the stairs four at a time, belting along the arcade to the main gate …

“The Fist realized his mistake at once and ordered us hunted down, every Florengian Werist killed on sight. We were trying to stay ahead of him and train the cadets at the same time. Mutineers, fugitives, oathbreakers, partisans, guerrillas—call us what you will. It was a year before we were strong enough to double back and ambush one of his patrols. He lost five times as many as we did, but in those days he could afford the losses. That was how it went the first few years. But gradually we gained in numbers. We recruited, we trained, and
the more we had the more we could get
! Understand?”

Dicerno had gone, taking his lamp. The palace seemed deserted and very silent without the wind. She felt as if she were alone in it, standing chatting with a madman.

“Yes, yes! What are you getting at?”

Chies would have to talk his way past the men on the gates, who had orders to send guards with him when he went out. No, of course he’d go out the bolt-hole from the laundry, the one he thought nobody else knew about. That would save him a run around the stables, too. Twelve gods!

“Getting
to
, my lady. We are
getting to
the final payoff. Two years ago we finally had as many collars as Stralg did and were training faster than he could bring men over the Edge. That was the turning point. He’s limited by the Ice on the other side, you see. Their seasons are more extreme over there, and—”

“So you think you can beat him?”

“He’s beaten now. He knows it. The problem is to kill off the survivors with as few collateral deaths as possible. You heard about Miona?”

She shivered. “Conflicting stories.”

“Believe the worst of them,” Cavotti said grimly. “Stralg billeted a host in the town. We surrounded it and torched it. You know how peasants burn the stubble and the vermin run out with their fur—”

“Please!”

“He lost seventeen or eighteen sixties. That was two years’ reinforcements gone in one night.”

“And how many civilians died?”

“All of them, basically. It was not a small town.”

“Atrocity!”

“Regrettable. But for Stralg it was the beginning of the end. Hardly a sixday goes by without a battle now. Piaregga, Reggoni Bridge … two sixties here, three there. I am nibbling him to death, my lady! He cannot stand these losses. We can match him body for body and still get stronger.”

Horrible! Horrible! “What do you want of me?” she yelled. Why was Cavotti talking so much? It was almost as if we were waiting for the Vigaelians to get there and kill him. Chies belting along the alley, almost at the barracks …

Cavotti pulled a face. “I want to stop Celebre becoming another Miona, of course. It’s my home, too, and the smell of burning babies isn’t something you ever forget. Look at your maps, lady of Celebre. His escape route to Vigaelia goes past your city. He’s falling back as slowly as he can, but we’re driving him, and very soon now he will have to make a stand. Where better than here?” The big man’s raspy voice rose to fill the hall: “He has about three-sixty-sixty left. How do you feel about that many ice devils occupying your city, Mistress? For half a year while the Vigaelian winter has the pass sealed?

Gods!
“No!” A mere dozen was more than it could stand now.

Chies
must
be at the barracks by this time, yelling for the flankleader. Werists moved like birds. It was their speed that made them so deadly. They’d come straight over the walls.

Cavotti smiled, exposing more tooth enamel than humans should have. “Then join us, my lady! Give me the signal, and I’ll slip my men into Celebre before the garrison knows what’s happening. I swear that I can control them. They’ll behave. They’re patriots, Florengians all, and they despise the Vigaelian scum. They want to show they’re better.” He thrust out a great paw, like a bear’s. “Shake on it! Sixty-sixty of my men in Celebre and we’ll deny it to Stralg. We’ll cut him off from his base and bleed him to death on the plains.”

Shake?
She would not touch his murderer’s hand if she were drowning. Piero was dying reviled, childless, and detested. “Never! You would make this city a battlefield. Don’t you understand that my husband has been labeled coward and lackey and lickspittle all these years because he gave up his own happiness and mine just to
save
Celebre from sack? It worked. This city survived when most didn’t, although many people still won’t admit he was right. And now you would have me throw that all away?”

The Werist glowered at her angrily, then paused a moment as if listening. “I must go.” He hauled off his cowl, exposing Weru’s brass collar. Below such classically perfect features it seemed even more of an obscenity than usual.

Would the Vigaelians believe Chies’s fantastic story of Cavotti in the palace? But he didn’t need to say the Mutineer’s name, just that there was a Florengian Werist. They knew Chies, they’d trust him.

They
must
be on their way by now.

“Your husband did as he saw right, lady, to stop Stralg from sacking the city as he’d sacked Nelina. But I am offering you a garrison to defend you.
At your invitation.”

“And who rules Celebre then? The dogs would be worse than the wolves.” What of the hostages Stralg held, her children? “Stralg showed fifteen years ago that Werists can run up stone walls like rats.”

“Not when those walls are defended by other Werists, my lady. I didn’t dare storm Miona with him in there.”

“No, you burned it! And he would burn Celebre. No! No! Never! Begone! If I weren’t certain that Chies had gone to summon Stralg’s men, I would do it myself. Leave!”

Somewhere in the palace something bayed.

The Mutineer snorted. “Oh, hear that! That’s shocking! Take that beast’s name, Packleader. Well, it’s been a joy talking to you, sweet lady. We must do this more often. Put it to your council and send me a signal if you change your mind. The best landmark in the city is the canopy on the temple of Veslih. I expect it’s all covered with bird droppings?”

“Go!” She could hear something coming, many things. “Go! Go! Go! Go!”

“Needs cleaning. If you change your mind, put up a scaffolding around the tholos as if you’re going to clean it. That’ll be the signal. We’ll move in.” The big man clasped her shoulders and moved her aside as if she were a child. “Now, I really must dash. Don’t stand in the opening, woman; you’ll get run over.”

He grabbed her hand to kiss it and was gone, racing across the terrace.

Then she guessed where he thought he was going, but that way was blocked. “There are knives on the weir!” she screamed.

She turned to the noise inside. Three … four … great beasts bunched in the doorway of the presence chamber, snarling and spitting, claws screeching on the tiles. She caught a fleeting glimpse of brass collars half-hidden by silver manes as they flashed across the hall, out through the opening, going almost too fast to see, going so fast she felt the wind stir her robe. More scraping claws and bestial baying as they saw their prey, then they were all gone in flying leaps over the balustrade.

MARNO CAVOTTI

heard the warbeasts’ fury as he dived from the parapet. He very nearly dashed his brains out on a floating tree trunk, which was not part of the plan. It must have blown down within the city itself, because the Puisa River entered Celebre through siphons under the north wall. Floating debris remained in the pool outside, while any would-be intruder who tried to swim through the tunnels would be swept against bronze gratings and drowned.

He surfaced, rolled over on his back, and floated. Even if the Vigaelians had followed him in, they would not find him now. The world was silent when his ears were submerged, but stars were starting to show through the clouds, so the storm had gone. If he could just pull off this escape, he could rank his trip a complete success. Hoodwinking an aging, pompous pedant and a terrified bereaved mother was no great feat to brag of, but news of his visit here, far behind Stralg’s lines, would fan the flames of freedom.