Mother of Lies by Dave Duncan Read Free Book Online

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