Justice

by Ian Irvine

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “It’s hard to kill a shifter.”

  “I know.”

  “When I strike it’ll probably turn him, and in caitsthe form he’ll be three times stronger. A caitsthe can heal most injuries in seconds by partial shifting. You’ll have to be quick.”

  “I know.” Tali’s fingers tightened around the hilt of the knife. She rubbed her knuckles with her left hand.

  “Cut straight across the belly, left to right, then heave out—”

  “Get on with it!” she screeched.

  Rix swallowed audibly, rubbed a large signet ring on his middle finger, then raised the sword in a trembling hand. But before he could strike, someone came belting through the trees towards them. A pale, skinny girl, about ten years old.

  “Stop!” she screamed. “I can heal him.”

  “Not in front of Rannilt,” Tali hissed.

  “What kind of a man do you think I am?” Rix snapped.

  Tali dropped the knife and ran to grab Rannilt. Even chained, Tobry was too powerful, too dangerous. Rannilt stopped.

  “You can’t heal anyone,” said Tali, spreading her arms wide. “You lost your healing gift when Lyf attacked you in the caves that day. He stole your magery, remember?”

  “He didn’t, he didn’t!” cried Rannilt. “You’re lyin’.”

  She darted around Tali, under Rix’s outstretched arm, and ran towards Tobry.

  “Stop her!” said Tali.

  Rannilt, a little, waif-like figure, reached out to Tobry. Her arms were scarred, her skinny fingers crooked from having been broken repeatedly when she’d been a bullied slave girl.

  “I can heal you,” Rannilt said softly, standing on tiptoes and gazing earnestly up at Tobry. The air between them seemed to smoulder. “I got to heal.”

  Tobry made a small, yearning movement, as if allowing her to try, but came up against the chains and let out a roar. Rannilt jumped backwards, her thin chest heaving. After a few seconds she took a small step towards him.

  “You got to let me try,” she said to Tali. “Tobry’s my friend.”

  “No one can heal him,” said Tali. “Rix, grab her.”

  Rix sprang and tried to drag Rannilt away. She kicked him in the shins, drove her bony shoulder hard into Tali’s breast, knocking her off her feet, and ducked past.

  “You’re not killin’ him!”

  Rannilt shoved the brazier over, scattering coals across the ground, then took hold of the packet of powdered lead and tried to tear it open. The tough paper did not give. She took it between her sharp little teeth.

  “Put that down!” roared Rix. “It’s deadly poison.”

  Rannilt spun on one foot and hurled the packet against a rock. It burst open, scattering lead dust everywhere.

  “You’re not murderin’ Tobry,” she shrieked.

  The ground shook so violently that she fell to one knee. The quakes and tremors had been coming for days now but this one seemed different. Stronger. Tali turned to Rix.

  “Was that—?”

  “The Big One?”

  The land heaved and a crack opened fifty yards away, squirting dust into the air like a fountain. Rannilt let out a squawk.

  The earth gave forth an enormous, grinding groan. A wave passed through the ground, tossing the three of them off their feet. A larger wave followed, and a third, larger still. Tali was thrown backwards across the grass; her head cracked against a stone and dust filled her eyes and nose. A series of wrenching roars was followed by ground-shaking thumps. She opened her eyes but could not see.

  The earth groaned like a giant in torment. Rannilt screamed and bolted.

  Rix roared, “Look out!”

  He heaved Tali into the air, carried her for four or five long strides, then dived with her as the ground shuddered one final time. Then came a colossal, thundering crash.

  She wiped dust out of her eyes and looked around. Rix was on his knees a couple of yards away, gasping. Many of the trees along the stream had been toppled.

  “That was too close,” he said.

  She sensed something behind them—huge, blocking the morning light. Tali turned slowly. The gigantic tree had been wrenched out by the roots and its trunk lay in a deep indentation in the soft ground only a few yards from her. Tobry’s chains ran around the trunk and disappeared below it. The crown of the tree had been smashed and broken branches were scattered across a large area. Bees buzzed frantically around a dislodged hive. Rannilt was nowhere to be seen.

  Tali wrapped her arms around herself and stared at the fatal spot. It had been so quick. She sagged.

  “Do you think, even a shifter—?” she began, not looking at Rix. She was afraid to see the truth in his eyes.

  “No,” said Rix. “No chance at all.”

  An ache formed in her middle, a vast upwelling of loss that spread all through her. Her eyes stung. “It’s for the best, isn’t it?” But she wanted to scream and pound her fists into the dirt.

  “He wouldn’t have felt a thing.”

  Rix took her right hand with his good hand. It enveloped hers completely. They bowed their heads for a minute, remembering Tobry as he had been before the shifter curse took him.

  Rannilt! “Where’s Rannilt?” Tali pulled free, ran the length of the fallen trunk and clambered onto the highest branch, staring around her. Her voice rose. “Rix, I can’t see her.”

  “She’s safe.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She ran that way as the tree fell.” He pointed west across the grassland.

  “I’ll go after her…”

  But Tali slid down and plodded back to Tobry’s chains. Her legs felt so heavy it was an effort to walk. She stared at the chains as if her gaze could penetrate the ground to the body beneath. Her eyes filled with tears. She wiped them away. “You’d better get going—you’ve got an army to command.”

  Rix swallowed. “Assuming I can. I’ve never led more than fifty men before—and that ended in disaster.”

  “Rubbish! You led hundreds of people when Garramide was besieged—you saved the fortress.”

  “It’s not the same as leading an army of five thousand into battle.”

  Before the chancellor died, last night, he had outraged his generals by giving the command of Hightspall’s army to Rix.

  “The chancellor despised me for betraying my own mother,” Rix went on. “And rightly so.”

  “You had no choice. She committed high treason—and murder.”

  “And yet, she was my mother,” Rix said bitterly. He paced across the grass, then whirled. “Why did he give me the command?”

  Tali knew that Rix had always been troubled by self-doubt. He had to pull himself together, fast. “You earned his respect. He believed you were the only man with a hope of leading our army to victory.”

  “Then he was a fool!” Rix snapped. “Lyf’s army is fifty thousand strong. Axil Grandys has ten thousand hardened veterans, and a genius for leadership. All I have is five thousand men who’ve known only defeat… and three failed commanders who hate my guts.”

  “The Pale are on our side.”

  “Five thousand former slaves, mostly small, undernourished, untrained and poorly armed.”

  “I’m also Pale,” said Tali softly. “Also small, undernourished and untrained.”

  Rix managed a fleeting smile. “So you are—yet you led the slaves’ rebellion in Cython, and won their freedom. You’ve changed our world. I have to be positive.”

  His grey right hand, from which he had gained the name Deadhand, twitched. He froze, his lips parted.

  “What is it?” said Tali.

  “I dreamed about the portrait last night…”

  “The one you painted for your father’s Honouring?”

  “Yes…”

  The portrait, which portrayed Lord Ricinus killing a wyverin—a winged beast like a two-legged dragon—had been intended to symbolise him vanquishing House Ricinus’s enemies. But sometimes Rix’s
paintings held messages about the future, and the portrait had contained a hidden divination—that Rix’s father and his house would fall.

  The Honouring had begun in triumph. House Ricinus had been raised to the First Circle—the greatest and oldest families in Hightspall. But the night had ended in disaster, with Lord and Lady Ricinus condemned to death by the chancellor for high treason, the fall of House Ricinus, and Rix utterly disgraced.

  “But in my dream the picture had changed,” said Rix. “The wyverin was only pretending to be dead; it was rising to kill Father. And the Cythonians say…”

  “What?” said Tali.

  “When the wyverin rises, the world ends.”

  “Whose world—ours, or theirs?”

  “I don’t know. But there’s more to the portrait than I ever intended. There’s something I’ve missed…”

  CHAPTER 2

  Leaving Tali to find Rannilt, Rix ran for the army camp, which was a mile and a half away on the other side of the hill. He had to get ready for a battle he couldn’t hope to win, yet had no option but to fight.

  The sky had clouded over and a keen southerly drove scattered raindrops into his face. He reached the top of the hill, looked east towards his army, and stopped, panting. His stomach gave an anxious quiver. He rubbed his face with both hands, drew a deep breath and released it in a rush. What if he couldn’t do it?

  The sacked generals hated him. Rix could not guess how the troops felt, though every man would know he had betrayed his own mother. He’d had no choice—her conspiracy to have Hightspall’s chancellor assassinated in wartime was high treason, the blackest crime in the register.

  And yet, and yet… his own mother…

  Rix’s parents had died the cruel deaths ordained for traitors. Though the chancellor had spared Rix, he was forever tainted by their crimes and his own betrayal. In time the world might forget or forgive him, but Rix never would. It was too monstrous.

  His stomach gave another flutter. He fought an urge to run the other way, and keep running. No, it was his duty to take command, to fight for his country and protect his troops. He had to find a way. He ran on, reached the camp and stopped, looking around in dismay.

  The place was in chaos and the troops were milling around, lead-erless; he couldn’t see an officer anywhere. The quakes had toppled hundreds of tents, several were on fire, and a steaming crevasse ran through the middle, a roaring fan-geyser gushing up from its centre for a good fifty feet. Drifting plumes of steam obscured the part of the camp that lay beyond.

  To Rix’s left a fault scarp had lifted the ground by several feet. Further left, the pond from which the camp had drawn its water was an empty expanse of mud and dying eels, which the cooks were collecting in baskets. A hundred feet further on, a broad area of soil had liquefied to grey quick-mud. How the hell was he supposed to fight in country like this?

  A weedy soldier slouched by, dragging a notched sword so blunt that he would have been hard pressed to cut an onion with it.

  “Hoy!” said Rix.

  The soldier ignored him.

  “You, dragging the sword, here!”

  He turned towards Rix, disinterestedly. Either he did not recognise his new commanding officer or he was too ill-disciplined to care.

  “What news of the enemy?” said Rix.

  The soldier shrugged.

  “The Cythonians? Grandys’ army?” said Rix.

  “No one tells us nothin’.”

  Rix clenched his fist, thought better of it and thrust it in his pocket. “Get that sword sharpened.”

  Where was he to start? He was looking vainly for a familiar face among the five thousand milling men when a meaty hand caught him by the left shoulder and jerked him around. General Libbens!

  “You’re a bastard, Deadhand!” snarled the chancellor’s former general, who had led his army to a crushing defeat in Rutherin several months ago, and blamed his officers for it. “A stinking traitor from a treasonous House, and you got only command by foul sorcery—”

  Rix was used to this kind of abuse—he’d had it, one way or another, for months—though he wasn’t taking it from his officers.

  “I don’t know any sorcery. I couldn’t cast a spell to save my life.” No, he must not sound apologetic. He had to take charge. “This camp is a shambles. Why haven’t you pulled the men into line?”

  “Our commanding officer was away, communing with a mad shifter.”

  “That’s why we have a chain of command, you incompetent fool. No wonder the chancellor sacked you. Put the camp to rights, now!”

  Libbens’ red face darkened to a bruised purple. His right hand drifted towards the hilt of his sword.

  “Draw on your commander and you hang,” Rix said coldly.

  Judging by Libbens’ expression, he wanted to hack Rix’s head from his shoulders and mutilate his corpse; he wanted it so badly he was shaking. He stalked off, bellowing at his officers.

  Spiders hunted one another down Rix’s spine. Then, from the far side of the camp, someone let out a long, agonised scream. A man’s scream, followed by a high-pitched whinnying.

  He squinted through the drifting steam but could not see man or horse. The ground quivered and the injured man let out a shrill, bubbling shriek of agony. Rix pinpointed the direction and ran, dodging around the collapsed tents. He leapt a foot-wide crevasse; his feet sank ankle-deep in a patch of soft earth; he drove on and, twenty yards ahead, saw it.

  A second crevasse, a great tear in the ground, three feet across at its widest and a couple of hundred yards long. A horse’s head and neck protruded out of it, thrashing back and forth. Rix could see the terror in its brown eyes. Half a dozen soldiers were standing around the crevasse, staring, though none made any attempt to help the trapped beast.

  Rix skidded to a halt at the edge, leaned over, then sprang backwards. The crevasse cut through deep, crumbly soil and soft rock that could collapse at any moment. The horse was caught by the chest, trapped in a vertical position and kicking helplessly. One of its front legs was broken and it could not be saved. It would have to be put out of its agony.

  “Help!” an unseen man groaned.

  Rix went sideways until he could see past the horse. Two men were trapped further down, where the sides of the crevasse bulged in. The smaller fellow had blood around his mouth and nose, and the right side of his chest was bowed inwards as if the horse had kicked him. Broken ribs and a punctured lung, Rix judged—almost certainly a death sentence.

  The ground shuddered and the horse kicked instinctively, thud. The man with the crushed chest let out another bubbling cry, fainter this time. The other man was supporting his right arm with his left, as if his collarbone was broken. With such an injury he had no chance of getting himself out.

  “Help! Please help.”

  The desperate cry came from much further down. A shiver ran up the back of Rix’s neck as he peered into the shadowed depths. The crevasse widened below the bulge, then narrowed steadily as it went down, and far below he made out another three trapped soldiers. One fellow was alternately whimpering and moaning, a dreadful, hackle-raising sound. The second man was thrashing violently as if having a panic attack. The third soldier, the highest, made no sound, though the whites of his eyes were luminous in the gloom.

  They were at least forty feet down. Rix’s throat clamped at the thought of being trapped in such a place, either starving to death or slowly suffocating when the soil fell in on them. Or, most horrible of all, being slowly squeezed to jelly as the crack closed again…

  How was he to get the injured men out when they could not help themselves? He probed the edge of the crevasse with one foot. The soil cracked; it would not support his weight.

  Dozens of soldiers were gathering along the crevasse. “Get me three sturdy poles,” said Rix, “six inches through and at least ten feet long. No, make it twelve feet long. Plus a hundred and fifty feet of rope and a block and tackle.”

  The soldiers looked past Rix, as if s
eeking confirmation of the order. Libbens was behind him, scowling. Libbens stamped a foot. The edge of the crevasse crumbled and he leapt backwards.

  “It’s not worth the risk,” said Libbens. “Leave them.”

  Rix fought down his fury. “You’re a coward as well as a fool, Libbens.” He met the eyes of his troops. “I’m your commanding officer and the least of my men is worth the risk.” He pointed to the nearest group of soldiers. “You! Fetch the gear, now.”

  After a momentary hesitation, they ran. Libbens walked away, stiff with outrage. Rix paced the length of the crevasse, looking for a safer way to reach the trapped men, but there was none. The best way was straight down, here where it was widest, but first the crippled horse had to be put down and hauled out.

  The man with the crushed chest let out another scream. Rix looked around. “I need a volunteer…”

  The soldiers backed away. He cursed them under his breath. What kind of miserable army had he inherited?

  “Come back here!” They returned, slowly. He took a deep breath, then roared, “Rope, now!”

  A soldier came running with a coil of rope. Rix cut it in half and knotted an end of one length around his chest, under the arms. He pointed to the four most reliable-looking men, in turn, and tossed the coil to the nearest.

  “You four, take hold of the rope and hold tight. Don’t let it out until I tell you. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the leading man.

  Rix backed to the most solid edge he could see, four feet from the horse’s head. The ground began to crack underfoot. “Pay the rope out slowly as I go down. Don’t let me drop, all right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He stepped backwards over the edge, creating a shower of earth, but as soon as his weight came on the rope he dropped sharply.

  “I said hold it!” he bellowed.

  He stopped, hanging in the middle of the crevasse, facing the trapped horse. It lowered its head to his level; it was panting and foam-covered strands of saliva hung from its mouth. A lump of earth thudded onto its back. Its eyes rolled and it kicked backwards, connecting with a pulpy thud. The soldier with the crushed chest made a gurgling sound. Rix winced.