Justice

by Ian Irvine

  She lathered a piece of soap, spread it across the stubble and shaved Tali’s head bare, save for her eyebrows. Lirriam rinsed her down and stood back, a small smile playing on her full lips. The effect was chilling.

  Tali managed to raise a hand. The skin was perfectly smooth, and her head felt naked and cold.

  “If you haven’t come for the pearl, then why—?”

  “I never said I hadn’t come for it,” said Lirriam. “I said I’m not here to take it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Lirriam slipped Incarnate over her head, holding it by its chain, then spoke another word of power. The air thickened and blurred, and at once Tali felt disconnected from everything around her, as if the room had been subtly separated in time and space from the rest of Castle Swire. The everyday sounds of the castle, which were normally distantly audible from here, faded away until the night was as quiet as death.

  Lirriam went behind Tali, lowered the flattest surface of the black stone to the top of her shaved head and stroked it across caressingly, barely grazing the skin.

  “Incarnate, Incarnate,” Lirriam said softly.

  Before she finished the stroke, Tali threw up so violently that vomit struck the door ten feet away. Her heart was still hammering and her breath coming in shuddering gasps. Her legs kicked convulsively.

  “Uurrgh!” she grunted. Her skin was covered in goose pimples. She felt hot and cold at the same time.

  Lirriam set down Incarnate, frowning. “I didn’t expect that.”

  She pressed her forefinger to each of Tali’s arms and legs, and then to her belly, subvocalising a word of power each time. All feeling faded from Tali’s extremities. A peculiar thudding crash penetrated the displacement Lirriam had cast over the room. It seemed to come from somewhere below them, in the lower levels of the castle.

  She stopped, her head cocked to the left, then went to the door and, with an effort, opened it. Lirriam stood there for a minute, listening, shrugged, locked the door again and resumed her work.

  Taking Incarnate by its chain, she chose another flat surface and stroked it across the top of Tali’s head from her brow to the back of her skull.

  “Incarnate. Incarnate?”

  Tali felt the most hideous feeling in her middle—her body was trying to vomit but nothing came up save a small surge onto her chin. Her legs and arms wanted to thrash but they could not move.

  Lirriam wiped Tali’s chin with a handkerchief, tossed it aside and continued with Incarnate, using one side of the irregular stone, then another. She stroked it down the length of Tali’s skull, across it at right angles, then across and across again on all the diagonals that passed across the master pearl.

  “Incarnate. Incarnate?” She was beginning to sound anxious.

  Tali felt a sharp, piercing pain in her head, but a different kind of pain from before. A pain she associated with her gift. Had Incarnate broken the block Grandys had put on Tali’s gift? She could not tell, though the feeling was coming back to her limbs.

  The cold was back as well, and the goose pimples, though not the feeling of fever. Tali felt cold all over now. Freezing. Her teeth began to chatter.

  A red spark lit in Incarnate’s black core, swelled until the central quarter of the stone glowed like a searching eye, and slowly contracted to a red point, though it did not go out completely.

  Lirriam swore softly. There came another muffled and curiously disconnected crash from downstairs, though this time she ignored it. All her attention was focused on Incarnate. She held it to her own forehead for a moment, then reached out to stroke it down Tali’s skull again. Tali reacted instantly and violently, instinctively knowing that Lirriam must not touch her again.

  “No!” she cried.

  Her arm jerked up, her clenched fist stopping just short of Lirriam’s chin, but a white balloon of force burst from Tali’s knuckles, swelled enormously and snapped Lirriam’s head backwards so hard that she landed onto her back. Her eyes were open, the pupils flicking wildly from side to side, though she did not seem able to move.

  Tali had her gift back for the moment, although the relentless throbbing at the top of her skull reminded her how perilous it was to use. She searched Lirriam, pocketed a heavy purse and strapped on her knife. It took precious time adjusting the straps to Tali’s more slender thigh. With an effort she rolled Lirriam over, stripped her coat off and turned, weak-kneed, to the door.

  The effects of Lirriam’s word of power had faded but Grandys’ enchantment could still be felt on the door. Tali had to get out. She drew on her pearl—terrible, spiking pain—broke the hold on the door and heaved it open. Now she could hear a loud clamour below, plus swordplay in several places at once. Men were shouting to one another in Herovian and Cythonian accents.

  The castle was under attack by Lyf’s troops! They had surely come for her and if they got inside in numbers it would not take them long to find this room. She had to escape now. The fighting must have been going on for some time, judging by the crashes she had heard earlier, though Lirriam’s spell had blocked most of the racket. Clearly, Grandys’ three hundred guards had not been enough to defend Castle Swire.

  Which way? Tali had been blindfolded when they’d brought her in and had seen nothing of the layout of the castle, though it wasn’t a large one and it could not be too hard to find her way out. As she looked left and right, trying to work out which way to go, there came a boom that shook the floor—a bombast going off. The Cythonians were blasting their way in. How had they known she was here? Perhaps they had tracked the call of the pearl, which meant they could find her if she used it again.

  Her head was still throbbing but she had to use magery again, whatever the risk. Tali drew power to cloak herself from human eyes, then blocked the call of her pearl the way Rannilt had taught her during their escape from Cython six months ago.

  “Grandys?” The cry was Lirriam’s, echoing hollowly inside Tali’s head as if Lirriam were using magery to speak across a distance. “We’re under attack by hundreds of Cythonians. We can’t hold out. Grandys?”

  Tali had no idea where Grandys was. He could have been outside in the castle yard for all she knew. Or ten miles away. She wasn’t waiting to find out.

  She edged down a sweeping set of stone stairs, reaching the bottom at the same time as a handful of Cythonian warriors burst in through the main doors at the far end of the hall. Her cloaking worked; they did not see her. None of the Herovian guards came after her. Did that mean all three hundred were dead?

  Tali shrank into a crevice behind the stairs until the Cythonians went by, and the old familiar feelings came back, of being a helpless slave whose only defences were lying, hiding, and saying, Yes, Master. Would she ever get over that upbringing, that life?

  She wasn’t a slave any more. When all the Cythonians had passed by, Tali wrapped the cloaking spell more tightly around herself, tossed meat and bread from a dining table into a bag, lifted a skin of small ale onto her shoulder, stole a hat and scarf from the pegs by the entrance and slipped out into the dark.

  And stepped onto a dying man.

  As her eyes adjusted to the darkness she saw that the area outside the main doors, and the yard beyond, was littered with bodies. Hundreds of bodies from a horrific battle that must have raged for an hour before the Cythonians finally prevailed.

  She took the first horse she came to, one of the enemy’s lathered mounts. She dared not risk the time it would take to find and saddle a fresh horse. When Tali rode through the open gates and out into the night, momentarily the euphoria of liberation was so strong that she felt she could do anything and take on anyone.

  Her gift was singing in her head. Reckless beyond caring, Tali headed south towards Caulderon. It was time to take on Lyf.

  PART TWO

  THE WYVERIN

  CHAPTER 35

  At a miserable village partway along the peninsula that led to Glimmering, Tali stood in the shadows, studying the small boats and cano
es drawn up on the shore. Dare she take one? She had almost drowned once and, though she now knew how to swim, she did not want to go out on the water by herself. But crossing the lake would be far quicker and safer than trying to reach Caulderon via land.

  She took the smallest canoe and set out. It was cold on the water; even with her hat pulled low and the scarf wrapped around her neck three times, the wind attacked her shaven head like an icy blade. The reckless fever of her escape was wearing off, she ached in every muscle and bone, and it was getting worse. In this condition she would never get to Caulderon—she was only minutes from collapse. She had to risk using her gift again.

  She endured the pain until she was out of sight of land, which did not take long with the stiff nor’wester at her back. Tali hunched down in the canoe and released her gift for the few seconds necessary to cast a full-body healing on herself. Agony sheared through her head, the worst she had ever felt—it was as if the top of her skull was being lifted off. She slumped over, gasping, as the pain came and went in splintery throbs. Was the master pearl about to break apart?

  Then burst, damn you! Burst and end it!

  The pain was so bad that the end of everything could come only as a relief. She laid her head on her folded arms and tried to endure it…

  The canoe swung sideways and water splashed over the bow onto her head and back, so shockingly cold that it roused her. It seemed to help with the pain as well. She sat up sluggishly, wiping her head with Lirriam’s coat. There was something she needed to do right away but she was too dazed to think of it.

  Taking up the paddle, Tali turned the drifting vessel south. Her healing would wear off before long and when it did the pain would return, perhaps worse than before. She had to reach Caulderon first, find a hiding place and plan her attack.

  She had been paddling for an hour when she heard a single, sharp ringing sound in her head and froze in horror—she had not closed off her gift after the healing. Had it been sending out the call all this time? Could Lyf have located her? Or those soldiers who had attacked Swire with such desperate ferocity? They had been heading directly for her room, as if some track or trace had been leading them there. If they could locate her, going after Lyf was the worst thing to do. He would be forewarned.

  Tali closed off her gift and tried to judge her position. Though it was misty on the lake, the glow of Caulderon was bright now. It could not be more than a mile away, and she judged that it was too late to turn around. If her enemies had tracked the call to the point where she had closed it off, there would be no escape if they found her on the lake, nor at the shoreline. The safest place was Caulderon, where she could disappear among a hundred thousand people.

  She paddled harder, and after another quarter of an hour she made out land ahead. Where to enter? Tali judged that it was too risky to go to shore here—if the call had been heard, and tracked, they would know she was approaching Caulderon from the north. Trying, as far as possible, to keep to the banks of fog on the water, she navigated around the long peninsula on which the city had been built. On a map it rather resembled a crouching panther.

  On the south side she paddled to shore in a rocky cove that stank of sewage. In the gloom she made out a trio of large stone pipes, discharging their foul waste into the water. Tali backed the canoe away a hundred yards, to a sloping shelf of rock, and crawled out over the bow. She considered the canoe for a moment, wanting to keep it for her escape, then shook her head and pushed it out. If she left it here, it would be a clear sign of where she had landed. It drifted away and disappeared in the fog.

  She hunched down, released her gift for a second and wrapped her cloaking spell around her. Thus armoured, she turned Lirriam’s coat inside out to disguise its quality. Her hat had blown off on the lake so she pulled the hood over her bare head and slipped through a gap in the broken city wall, into Caulderon.

  From her concealed position on the repaired lake wall of the former Palace Ricinus, Tali saw that the palace was gone. The whole vast, incredibly ornate and staggeringly beautiful complex of buildings, that had struck such awe into her when she had seen them from Tobry’s horse five months ago, had been razed to ground level. Only the wall surrounding the grounds, and the gate tower from which Lord and Lady Ricinus and their principal retainers had been hung and drawn, remained.

  The gates were heavily guarded. Even concealed by her cloaking spell it had taken her hours to slip by the sentries and get onto a section of the wall, a presently unoccupied guard post, where she could see inside.

  Her gift was clamped off tightly to block the call but Tali did not feel secure. Guards patrolled the wall ceaselessly, passing by her shadowy hiding place every few minutes, and she could not be sure that the grounds were not protected by other Cythonian devices—such as explosive mines or deadly pit traps—that she was all too aware of from her slave days.

  The ruined grounds had been restored and now comprised a green, sloping lawn dotted with ancient trees. A circular cluster of yellow stone buildings, two hundred yards across, four storeys high and supported on rows of columns, had been erected in the centre, where the core of the palace had been. These structures were open at ground level, allowing a view through the columns to the centre of the circle, to the place that had been the heart of the capital of ancient Cythe.

  The land had been cut away there to form, or rather to reveal, a long-buried circular amphitheatre dating back to ancient times, well before the arrival of the First Fleet that had turned Cythe upside-down. At the centre of the amphitheatre rose the oval domed roof of the king’s personal temple. A sloping ramp led into the temple at the northern end of the oval.

  In the peaceful past, she knew, any citizen of Cythe had been entitled to come to the amphitheatre to watch their king go about his duties or, on those days of the year so allocated, to petition him to resolve a grievance or perform a healing.

  Now there were sentries everywhere. Six men and six women stood guard outside the temple door, while at least fifty more patrolled in interlocking circles in and under and around the circle of buildings. It told her one thing, though. Lyf must be in residence.

  How to get to him? The iron resolve that had driven Tali in the early hours of her escape was wearing off. The healing was fading and her spearing headache had come back so strongly that it was a struggle to think clearly. The churning nausea she had felt after Lirriam touched her with Incarnate had also returned.

  Guards patrolled the top of the wall, marching stiff-legged, in pairs, and the next pair were coming her way. Tali hunched further into the angle of the guard post. She was taking a huge risk just being here. Was it worth it? How could she get to Lyf now?

  The guards were close. She tried to draw on that near magical ability she’d had as a child, to blend into the background so she would not be noticed. They came marching past, their blue caps fluttering in the breeze. A tall man and a short, stocky woman whose broad face reminded Tali of Orlyk, the vicious Cythonian guard who had taken such pleasure in tormenting her.

  The woman stopped suddenly, three yards away.

  “What is it?” said the tall guard in a rich, rolling burr.

  The stocky woman turned, all the way around, then went to the wall, only feet from Tali, and stared over into the grounds of the palace.

  “I thought I sensed something,” she said. “Or someone, close by.”

  “An intruder?” His head, on a remarkably long neck for a man, rotated this way and that.

  “I can’t say.”

  She leaned over to look down at the base of the wall. The man joined her, his head bobbing up and down, tortoise-like. They spent a minute or two there before crossing to check the outside of the wall, bordering the lake. Tali tried not to breathe. Even if her cloaking charm held, they could walk into her.

  The guards paced five yards, stopped and checked over the wall again, both sides.

  “I can’t see anything unusual,” said the man. “Do you still sense it?”

  �
��Yes, though not so strongly. Do you think we should report it? I don’t want to alarm—”

  “Our instructions are to report everything, no matter how trivial.”

  “It’s just a feeling, no more.”

  “Feelings matter. Besides, Lyf’s adjutant has ordered utmost vigilance.”

  “Oh?” said the woman.

  “A spy was caught two days ago, after sailing across the lake.”

  “One of Grandys’ spies?” said the woman.

  “Possibly. A Hightspaller girl, once a maidservant in the palace that formerly stood here.”

  Tali started and almost gave herself away. It need not be Glynnie. It could be anyone—the palace had had dozens of maidservants, after all. Though how many of them would be sailing into an enemy-occupied city?

  “Has she been executed yet?” said the woman.

  “She’s still being questioned. It’s complicated.”

  “How so?”

  “She carried a Herovian night-shard, but she’s also the girl who helped Lord Deadhand escape from Grandys.”

  Definitely Glynnie!

  “Splendid!” said the woman. “There will be much she can tell us about Grandys, and Deadhand, before she dies.”

  “The next batch of executions are set for sunset. She’ll spill her guts before then.”

  “And after she’s hanged, the executioners will spill them for real, for the entertainment of the gawking slum dwellers,” said the woman. “I’ll go and make my report.”

  Tali did not move until they had gone. This changed everything—the guards would be on even higher alert now, and it meant she had no chance of getting anywhere near Lyf, or his temple.

  But she had to rescue Glynnie and she did not have much time to do it. Nor much of her cloaking spell left.

  CHAPTER 36

  Three o’clock passed, and Tali still had not found the cells where the condemned prisoners were held. Four p.m. Four-thirty. Her hope of rescuing Glynnie was fading as swiftly as Tali’s own strength. At five o’clock she stopped looking.