by Ian Irvine
“Begone, child,” Errek said to Moley Gryle. “This is no place for youth.”
She stumbled up the tunnel, head down like a condemned criminal. Lyf levered himself down the uneven slope on his crutches. Errek drifted through the air beside him. The lower part of the tunnel was deeply buried beneath the flank of the Red Vomit and no one knew how far it went, or how deep. Warm air drifted up past them, scented with salt and sulphur and hot rock.
“So,” said Errek to Lyf, after several minutes.
“You know who I am?” said Lyf.
“I may have been dead ten millennia, but I’ve never passed beyond the Lower Gate.”
“Why not?”
“Niggling worries. And a need to keep watch over my land, powerless though I was to aid it.”
“You must have had some bitter moments in that time.”
“Watching you balls things up, you mean?”
Lyf flushed. “That’s not what I meant.”
“I also know why you’ve had the damned impertinence to drag me from my eternal rest.”
Errek, the wrythen of the first and greatest king of all, had been renowned not only as a hero, a scholar and the incomparable magian who had invented king-magery, but also as a good man and a just ruler. Before his accomplishments, Lyf’s greatest successes seemed trivial, and his failings monumental.
“What are you going to do about your adjutant?” said Errek.
“Moley broke the prohibition and used forbidden magery. She has to die.”
“Then why is she still alive?”
“She… saved my life,” said Lyf. “And dealt Grandys a blow he won’t soon recover from… and she’s an intuit, the best I’ve ever known.”
“She’s also a beautiful young woman and you like her very much.”
“Not the way you’re thinking,” Lyf said hastily. “She’s a friend; the best I can remember.”
“In that case, why do you torment her so?”
“What?”
“Moley Gryle knows she must die, yet you haven’t carried out the sentence, or even said anything about your intentions. That’s cruel, Lyf. Either execute her, or pardon her.”
“The prohibition is our First Law—”
“I know!” Lyf snapped. “I wrote the damned law… and I’ve often wished I hadn’t.”
“What would you do?”
“Am I king now?”
Lyf’s fist clenched around a pile of gravel. “No, of course not.”
“Then act like the king you are. Either change the law, or turn a blind eye to it. Now get to the reason you raised me.”
“The balance has tilted too far,” said Lyf. “I don’t know how the land can be healed—or even if it can.”
“What do you want to know?”
“What the Engine really is.”
“Is that why you’ve brought me down here? To be close to the Engine?”
“It’s miles away, deep below Mulclast.”
“I know where it is,” said Errek. “Or did you hope I might be able to tilt the balance, as I did back at the beginning?”
“I didn’t even hope you could do that,” said Lyf. “I know how constrained the powers of a wrythen are. Besides—”
“King-magery has passed on.”
“Passed on down the ages from you, until I lost it,” said Lyf. “And I don’t know how to get it back.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Why is the Engine causing such havoc? And how did it come to be?”
After a long pause, Errek said, “I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“My death was so traumatic that my memories of the previous months were lost. Anything else?”
“To recover king-magery, I need the master pearl. But if I do get king-magery back, can I use it to heal the land?”
“You used it before Grandys killed you. Why wouldn’t you be able to use it now?”
The question had an accusatory ring, as if Errek knew what was troubling Lyf. He did not reply at once, for this was his greatest worry and one he had, hitherto, kept to himself. But keeping it back from Errek would defeat the purpose of raising him.
“I’ve lost the ability to heal people,” said Lyf.
“When did you lose it?”
“I first noticed it was gone after the peace conference at Glimmering—”
“When Grandys attacked you and you ran for your life?”
Lyf flushed like an errant schoolboy. “Could he have stolen my gift?”
“From what I know of him,” said Errek, “it would be uncharacteristic. That all?”
“What if I can’t heal the land either?” Lyf said softly, for he could scarcely bear to utter the words aloud. “Has my life’s work been a failure? Are our present troubles all my fault—?”
“Because you spent two thousand years as a wrythen doing things that were doomed to fail?”
“How do you mean?”
“Instead of preparing for the future, you devoted your energy to two futile projects: trying to restore your people to a vanished past; and avenging your own betrayal.”
“Was I wrong to want to restore my people?” said Lyf.
“The clock can’t be turned back. You could have helped to build a new nation from the ashes. That would have been a worthy project.”
“I didn’t call you up from the dead to hector me about my mistakes,” snapped Lyf.
“What an ill-mannered fellow you are,” said Errek, crushingly. “I see no hope for you.”
Again the blood rushed to Lyf’s face, scalding his cheeks. He bent his head. “I’m sorry. I’ve been an utter fool. I can’t—”
“Abasement has no more appeal than arrogance.”
“I don’t know what to do,” said Lyf humbly. “Will you advise me?”
“Very well,” said Errek. “Don’t take Grandys on directly until you have king-magery. Once you do, strike with everything you have and finish him.”
“And in the meantime?”
“Find ways to further undermine his confidence in Maloch, and in himself.”
“I’ll put Moley Gryle to work on it at once.”
“Then you do plan to save her?”
“Yes; she’s the best asset I have—apart from you.”
“In time she’ll prove more important than me. One more thing, and it’s urgent.”
“What’s that?”
“Grandys has captured Thalalie vi Torgrist and sent her north to one of his fortresses. Once he cuts out the master pearl, Cython’s fate will hang in the balance.”
Lyf sat down abruptly and wiped his brow. “Which fortress?”
“You’ll have to find out.”
“And then? What should I do?”
“Take her back, of course.”
“From Grandys’ own fortress?”
“Yes. You must act swiftly, and with exquisite care. If you fail, or if Tali dies, Cython loses.”
CHAPTER 19
Mad Wil screamed for ten hours, non-stop. By that time his throat was bleeding and his larynx was so swollen that he could make no sound save a rasping gasp. In his agony, he kept it up for another two hours before the Engine’s luminous radiance shut down his overheated brain.
The ground continued to heave, for he had grossly interfered with the Engine at the heart of the world, and that had tilted the balance to the brink of disaster. Quakes had shaken the land from north to south, east to west. They had sent the whole side of a mountain thundering down into a valley far below, burying the town of Quivering a hundred feet deep and wiping twenty-nine villages, three manors and an abandoned Cythian temple off the map.
They had also cracked the solid lid of the great magma chamber, eleven miles below the surface, that fed the Red Vomit. With irresistible force, searing gases and scalding water began to lever the crack apart, seeking the fastest path to the surface.
Soon, soon.
Wil should have died long ago, for the infernal radiance from the Engine had bli
stered him like a roast chicken, but perhaps the alkoyl he had long been addicted to had counteracted the effects of the radiance on his flesh. Or perhaps he was being saved for a greater purpose.
Three days later he roused, tried to sit up, and screamed. His muscles had been baked to knotted strings and his skin was a thick layer of char beneath which the sinews stood out like cords.
He levered himself to the stubs of his feet. He was a blackened, twisted mess of scar tissue, barely human. Wil turned his empty eye sockets towards the Engine and he could sense the heat shimmering off it. The level of the water was lower now, because of what he had done, and the Engine was much hotter, but he could no longer feel it—he was quite refractory now.
He stretched this way and that until he could move more freely, then groped around him. The platina bucket lay on the tunnel floor where he had dropped it. The alkoyl it had held was gone; it had eaten a yellow-rimmed hole down through the solid stone, further than he could reach.
No, a dribble of alkoyl remained in the bucket. How he longed for it, and the bliss that sniffing always gave him. He put his head in the bucket and took a deep whiff. His muscles convulsed involuntarily, hurling him backwards, and a piercing pain sheared through his skull. His stomach heaved but it was empty.
Wil let out a howl of frustration, then picked himself up, crawled back to the bucket and took another careful sniff. Again his body hurled him backwards. His face was swelling and he felt spots erupting on his charred cheeks. He had become allergic to the one good thing in his life. He couldn’t touch alkoyl, yet he couldn’t bear to be without it.
He lay on the floor and screamed. Everything in his life had gone bad and now he was denied the one solace he had left.
“Not fair!” he shrieked, pounding the stone until pieces of charred skin flaked away. “All Wil ever wanted was to be special. To matter.”
After he had been the first to read Lyf’s iron book, The Consolation of Vengeance, Wil had been special. But later the Matriarchs had demanded he tell them about the one—the slave girl he had seen in that shillilar, or foreseeing, after he’d read the book. The golden-haired little slave girl called Tali who had to die to prevent her from changing the world.
Wil couldn’t let them kill that little girl. He just couldn’t. She was going to change the ending of the book and he had to know how the story ended. The true story. He loved stories more than anything.
So Wil had lied to the Matriarchs. He had told them that the girl he’d seen in his shillilar had black hair and olive skin, and that her mother had cleaned out the effluxor sumps. The Matriarchs had immediately rounded up all the little slave girls of the right age who fitted the description, and put them to death in front of Wil, to make sure they’d got the right one. The one.
But he had fooled the Matriarchs. Though the pain had been terrible, he hadn’t given Tali away. He still had nightmares about that day.
“I didn’t want to hurt anyone!” he screeched.
“Yes, you did,” said the jeering, mocking part of himself. “You developed a taste for death when you witnessed those little girls being put down, didn’t you, Wil?”
“Didn’t, didn’t!” wept Wil.
“Before each child was slain the Matriarchs asked you the same question: Are you sure these are the right girls? You had the choice to save each girl, or condemn her. And each time, thirty-nine times, you condemned an innocent little girl. You’re the real murderer, Wil.”
“It wasn’t my fault! The Matriarchs did it, not me.”
“You condemned those black-haired girls. You, who had always been powerless, loved having the power of life and death over children far more helpless than yourself. You’re a killer, Wil, and you love it.”
“Wil doesn’t!” he cried. “Wil hates it.”
Yet for months now, when there was no other way to relieve his pain, he would creep the miles along the Hellish Conduit and up into Cython, and there he would seek out one of the Pale, man or woman, it didn’t matter, and strangle them.
He wanted to go to Cython now.
Someone had to pay.
CHAPTER 20
Glynnie was fifty yards away, coming back through the lines of sleeping men, when Libbens knocked Rix down and Krebb and Grasbee dragged him away to court martial him. But any court martial of theirs would be mere lip service. She had only minutes to save him.
She followed Libbens until she knew where they were taking Rix, then raced through the dimly lit camp to Holm’s tent.
“Holm?” she hissed. “Holm, wake up!”
He was a still shape in the darkness. Had they killed him already? No, he was deeply asleep. She heaved him over onto his back.
“Holm!”
He woke abruptly. A hand clamped onto her wrist and twisted hard.
She yelped in pain. “It’s me, Glynnie!”
He sat up. “What’s the matter?”
“The generals have taken Rix. They’re going to court martial him, then kill him.”
Holm held his head between his hands, then shook it. “Where?”
“The senior officers’ tent.”
“Where’s Jackery?”
“Asleep, I’d say.”
“He’s a good man. Find him and send him there. Go!”
Glynnie raced away. With the enemy so near, and the need for instant readiness, the soldiers were in their bedrolls on the ground, fully dressed. Jackery’s squad was over on the east side, but so were another thousand men.
She reached the eastern edge of the camp, gasping for breath, and looked around.
“Jackery?” she said quietly.
No answer. “Jackery!”
“Piss off!” said a sleepy voice, not far away. “We’re trying to sleep.”
How long would they allow for the court martial? There might only be ten minutes before those gutless scum took Rix from her forever. She felt a scything pain in her chest.
“Where’s Sergeant Jackery?” she yelled.
“Eastern corner. Go away!”
Glynnie ran along the rows, tripped over a man out of line, recovered, flailing wildly, then stepped on another man’s belly in the dark. He sat up, roaring in pain and fright.
“Sorry,” she panted.
She leapt over another man and ran on. What were they doing now? Beating Rix to a pulp? Or were they halfway through the “court martial”? They could not afford to take long. When the troops were woken, Rix had to be dead, executed as a traitor, so there would be no choice but to accept the authority of the rebels.
“Sergeant Jackery,” she yelled. “Sergeant Jackery?”
“Who wants me?” said a deep voice only yards away.
She ran to him, clutched at him desperately, then leapt backwards, flushing in the dark. She barely knew the man.
“It’s Glynnie! Libbens has taken Rix and they’re going to kill him any minute.”
“Where?” He was already out of his bedroll and pulling his boots on.
“Senior officers’ tent. Holm—Holm said to go straight there.”
“You armed?” said Jackery.
She felt her belt sheath. “Yes.”
“Run and find out what’s going on. Don’t let them see you. We’ll be two minutes.” He turned away, rousing his men.
Glynnie bolted through the ranks towards the senior officers’ tent, which stood apart from the other tents and wagons, then stopped. Libbens had guards around the tent, two at the front and two at the back. She fought down an attack of panic and tried to think. If Holm and Jackery planned to storm the tent, the sentries would warn the traitors inside and they would kill Rix.
The front and right side were well lit by lanterns. The shadows were deepest on the far left corner. She slipped across, went down on her belly and wormed her way to the corner of the tent. Could she collapse it on them? No, it was too big and she would never get to the pegs at the front without being seen. She eased up the corner of the tent and put her head in.
Grasbee, Krebb and L
ibbens were inside with their backs to her. Four guards were up near the entrance and another soldier stood to the right, leaning on the handle of an axe. The executioner. Where was Rix? Surely not dead already? Pain tightened to a fist in her chest; pain that paralysed her for a few seconds.
Libbens swung his right arm; she heard a thump, a groan. Libbens moved and she saw Rix, bound hand and foot to the central tent pole. His face was so bruised and swollen he was barely recognisable. They must have beaten him constantly since they took him. His shirt had been torn open and she saw bruises on his chest, too. Why did they hate him so much?
But perhaps it was lucky they wanted to make him suffer before he died, otherwise they could have executed him by now.
“How your parents used to lord it over us from your palace,” spat Krebb. “Not so lordly now, are you, Ricinus? How does it feel?”
“You won’t fight Grandys because you’re in thrall to him, you cowardly swine,” said Libbens, punching Rix in the kidneys. “You’re just as treacherous as your mother, just as foul as your father.”
Rix groaned and dribbled blood.
Grasbee heaved at the steel gauntlet Rix wore over his dead hand, wrenched it off and held up Rix’s arm. His dead, grey hand pointed straight up.
“How can a man’s severed hand be put back save by the foulest sorcery? It can only be the same sorcery that allowed Grandys and his cronies to come back from the dead.”
“Haven’t got a magical bone in my body,” gasped Rix.
“You won’t have an unbroken bone when we’ve finished with you, you stinking, treacherous mongrel.”
They attacked him again, and every blow Rix took was a blow to Glynnie’s own heart. They wanted to batter him to pulp before they killed him, and there was nothing she could do to stop them. Where were Holm and Jackery? She put her head out but there was no sign nor sound of them.
What if they had been taken as well? What if it was all up to her? Glynnie drew her knife. One inexperienced girl against eight tough soldiers could only end one way, but if she was Rix’s only hope she had to try.