Revenger 9780575090569 by Alastair Reynolds

Author:Alastair Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2016-07-27T23:00:00+00:00

13

I tried to escape. To start with, at least they did me the dignity of not locking me in my room. On my first attempt, in the long-shadowed purple of dusk, I got as far as the front steps of the house before my father blocked any further progress. I struggled, but I was still weak and even though he wasn’t much stronger it didn’t take much effort to bring me back under control.

Afterwards, he had to sit down on a chair in the hall, mopping the sweat off his brow.

‘Oh, Fura,’ he said. ‘You’ve got your mother’s fight in you, and it’s to your credit that you’d do this for your sister. But the sooner you accept that she’s already gone, and she’d never have wanted . . .’

‘Don’t ever tell me what Adrana would and wouldn’t have wanted,’ I said. ‘I knew her. You never did.’

I think it was the cruellest, hardest thing I ever said in my life, and once those words were out of my mouth nothing in the worlds could take them back.

But they’d needed to be said.

I tried again the following night. That time I only got as far as the connecting passage to the front hallway, and found it locked. My father had been waiting for me.

‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to make this house a prison, Fura, but if you won’t abide by my wishes . . .’

I kept trying, night after night. Each time I got a little less far. The house was large and rambling and there were passages and stairways that were rarely used, as well as back doors and service entrances, but I soon exhausted all the obvious possibilities. I began to entertain silly fantasies of climbing out of rooftop windows, working my way down drainpipes, but even if I got out of the main building, I’d still have the main gates to face.

I was tormented by the thought of letting Adrana down. I should never have let Vidin Quindar bring me home; should have fought him in Trevenza Reach, or escaped him on the clipper. But I’d tried, hadn’t I? The same futile, dispiriting thoughts chased each other in a spiral of deepening misery. All I wanted was to slip under them and reach the dark, healing fathoms of deeper unconsciousness.

But something wouldn’t allow it.

My attempts at sleep kept being interrupted by a sense of movement; a sense that someone – or something – was with me in the room, going about some quick, furtive business. At last this disturbance was enough to snatch me to full, irritated wakefulness. I thought it might be Doctor Morcenx, paying me a nocturnal visit. I rose from my sweat-saturated pillow, propping myself up on my arms.

I was alone. The room was silent and still. But a faint pattern of lights was moving across the opposite wall. I stared at it through gummed eyes, unable to make sense of what I was seeing. Patches of colour danced on the wall.

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