Justice

by Ian Irvine

  There wasn’t time to attempt a rescue, for the condemned prisoners would be surrounded by guards now. They were paraded through the streets to the place of execution, Murderers’ Mound in Tumulus Town. The Cythonians made a public spectacle of their executions, and they made sure that the condemned could not be freed on the way.

  Her cloaking spell had worn off and Tali was disguised as a grubby street boy. How could she rescue Glynnie now? Tali had seen far too much death in her eighteen and a half years and did not want to witness any more, especially not the hanging and drawing of a friend.

  And yet she headed for Murderers’ Mound. If she were there, an opportunity might come. It certainly would not if she took the coward’s way out and stayed away.

  Murderers’ Mound was in the centre of the most desperate, overcrowded, reeking slum in all Hightspall—Tumulus Town. It had been the first part of Caulderon to be captured by the Cythonians, who had burst into the slum from deep tunnels they had secretly excavated years before.

  Tumulus Town, which was home to ten thousand of the most miserable people in the city, had been brutally subdued, and a detachment of the Cythonian army was still garrisoned there to keep the embittered populace cowed. One way of doing that was the weekly executions, which were both a spectacle and a lesson.

  Murderers’ Mound turned out to be a steep-sided grey hill topped by a scaffold-henge where seven people could be executed at once. It had been used for public executions since ancient times and, by tradition, the bodies were burned on an open hearth below the eastern side of the mound.

  The ashes were then scattered across the mound, which had grown steeper over the aeons until it was forty feet across and rose twenty-six feet high. With its steep, crumbling sides and purple top it resembled an over-ripe boil that, for weeks after rain, oozed a thick, foul sludge like brown pus.

  Half-burnt leg bones, jawbones, bits of skull and teeth were exposed in the eroding sides of the mound, which were bare of any vegetation. Not even the families of the victims dared to take their bones away, since doing so was widely believed to doom the whole family. The coarse, alkaline soil supported only a thatch of purplish, withered grass on the top.

  Twenty feet from the south-western side of the mound, next to a rocky outcrop, Lyf had erected a tall stone gate facing Cython, to commemorate the place where his troops had emerged from the tunnels to occupy Tumulus Town. Since the Pale rebellion and the fall of Cython, however, the door that led into the tunnels had been securely locked.

  Murderers’ Mound was surrounded by a fifty-yard-wide annulus of bare land, the only open space in Tumulus Town. It might have been green once, but every blade of grass had been worn away centuries ago and now it was a dustbowl when dry, and a mud-filled doughnut after rain or snow. Beyond it reared a three-storey wall of rotting tenements, grubby little shops, tiny booths and labyrinthine alleys. Tumulus Town was a filthy, reeking firetrap so rickety that if one building collapsed it was common for a dozen others to follow.

  But the grand height of the mound afforded the slum dwellers a fine view of the weekly executions, and several hundred grimy wretches had already gathered at the outside edge of the annulus, awaiting the show. A dozen guards patrolled the inner ring, making sure the wretched citizenry kept well back.

  Tali had discarded Lirriam’s coat which, even worn inside out, was too fine for her current disguise. She had hacked a ragged circle out of the back of the coat to use as a hat, which she held on with twisted threads looped under her chin. It attracted no attention; the slum dwellers wore as motley an assortment of rags and cast-offs as she had seen anywhere.

  Tali had worked dirt into her pants and shirt until they were a dun colour, then rubbed her filthy hands over her face and shaven head. She looked like any of thousands of street lads and, as long as she spoke in the same kind of grunts, attracted no attention.

  She ambled around Murderers’ Mound several times, trying to think of a plan, but came up with nothing. The spectators kept well back from that dire place, so anyone approaching the mound would stand out. Besides, the crumbling ash cliffs were unclimbable. The only way up was via stone steps on the sloping eastern side, but she could not climb them without being seen by the guards. Her cloaking spell had worn off and she dared not draw on her fragile pearl to renew it—it could be one time too many.

  Besides, even if she could rescue Glynnie in front of dozens of guards and a crowd of many hundreds, there was no hope of getting her to safety. None of the slum dwellers would help outsiders to escape. They wouldn’t dare.

  Therefore, Glynnie was going to die.

  It was windy here, and Tali’s crude hat provided no protection to the sides and back of her head. She casually moved in behind the protection of the memorial gate, a trilithon that stood ten feet high. The locked door within the gate, which led down to the Cythonian tunnels, was so small that even she would have had to stoop to pass through.

  As she stood there, Tali caught a faint, familiar whiff of the earthy underground, a smell that raised conflicting emotions: her happy childhood before her mother’s murder, the nightmare afterwards, her search for the cellar where it had taken place and her long hunt, still incomplete, to bring all the killers to justice—

  A sudden thought occurred to her. If she could free Glynnie, they might, just possibly, escape underground. Assuming they could get past all the guards.

  “They’re comin’,”a filthy, cross-eyed lad shouted. “They’re comin’ to be hanged, yippee!”

  Everyone rushed to the far side of the mound to see the chained prisoners being driven up the zigzagging road. People began shouting curses, insults and death threats. In Tumulus Town, whether you were an enemy, an ally or even one of their own, to be accused was to be guilty, and the guilty deserved death. An execution was the best form of entertainment available in Tumulus Town, if not Caulderon itself.

  If Tali was to do anything, she had to act now. The lock was a heavy affair that could only be opened by a particular triangular key. Tali had seen hundreds of similar locks in Cython, and Holm had once shown her how the mechanisms worked. With that knowledge, she ought to be able to open it with magery.

  Dare she draw on the pearl again? Opening a lock would not take much from the pearl, but it could still be too much. She had to take the risk. Tali touched the lock, unsealed her gift for a second, only long enough to draw power and work the mechanism, and sealed it again.

  And then the pain came, like a chisel being driven through the top of her skull. Her knees crumbled; she snatched at the lock to support herself and leaned against the door to conceal her weakness; her agony.

  She counted to ten and felt a little better. Tali wiped her eyes, then checked over her shoulder. The slum dwellers were staring down the road, eagerly awaiting their first glimpse of the condemned, and the guards had their backs to her, watching the watchers. No one was looking at her.

  She slipped through the door, closed it behind her and immediately felt back in her element. The smell of dust and mould, earth and damp and decay was hauntingly familiar, and so was the almost impenetrable gloom which heightened her other senses.

  After prowling around for a minute or two she saw how the Cythonians had managed to mine up through hard rock without alerting anyone to their presence. There had been a passage here before. An ancient tunnel, judging by the look of the stone, that had opened at Murderers’ Mound. It had been blocked an aeon ago, then forgotten, and the scaffold-henge had been built on top.

  And rebuilt over and again as the death ash rose higher. When it had come time for the invasion, all the Cythonian miners had to do was blast out the last few feet of rock to open a hole beside the mound.

  The roof rock under Murderers’ Mound was cracked from the weight of all that wet ash, and an ash-coloured paste was slowly exuding through the largest crack. The clayey muck hung down for a foot until it broke off under its weight and formed gooey dollops on the floor.

  At some stage the enemy miners
had found it necessary to support the cracked roof with a pair of timber pit props, though they were slender and slightly bowed under the weight. Timber had always been precious underground, and Tali supposed there hadn’t been time, at the end, to build a proper stone supporting wall. They had started one but it had never been finished, and after Caulderon fell it had no longer been needed.

  As Tali eyed the bowed props, a mad idea surfaced, no more than a third of a plan. Was there time? She put her ear to the door but could hear nothing. She felt a spasm of panic. Surely the hangings could not be over already.

  No, she had heard that the enemy made a great spectacle of the executions, and she had only been inside a few minutes. She eased the door ajar and heard the roar of the throng, the jeering and insults as the doomed prisoners were escorted up the hill. They would be here in minutes and she had to be outside beforehand—once they arrived she could not come through the door without hundreds of people noticing.

  Tali ducked inside and made a tiny glimmer of light from her fingertips. It was trivial magery to her now, though even that small drawing made her head throb anew. She saw that the roof supported the whole weight of the scaffold-henge and Murderers’ Mound and if either of the props gave, it was bound to collapse. But could she make it collapse at the right moment?

  Tali made and discarded plans, one after another. Lacking timber or rope, she could not build a mechanism to yank either prop out, or topple the pile of rubble in the far corner against it. The first prop was wet from seeping water, which ruled out a fire. No, wait, the second prop was wet at the base but the dampness had only crept partway up it. The top was dry.

  There was no more time; it would have to do. She drew more power—more pain, an axe splitting her skull bone in two—and directed fire against the pole, three-quarters of the way up, where one side was splintered. It took a long time to catch; she had to spray fire at it for the best part of a minute before it caught strongly. Her head was shrieking with pain by then and she could barely stand up. She had done too much.

  Tali dashed cold water into her face from one of the puddles on the floor. It revived her a little but she would have to act quickly; she did not have much strength left, or much time. After noting the precise location of the fire, and the prop, she slipped through the door and closed it, and barely in time. As she stepped out from the shelter of the archway, trying not to be noticed, the seven prisoners were flogged up the hill past the jeering slum dwellers.

  Their leg shackles were unfastened, though their hands were bound. The execution guards, one for each prisoner, were taking no chances. One by one, the prisoners were forced up the steep steps to the top of the mound. The first two prisoners were men so thin they might not have eaten in a month. They were followed by an oddity in Hightspall: an exceedingly fat old woman, her flesh jiggling with every step. Then two more men, dirty and wild-eyed, each with several weeks’ growth of beard.

  Glynnie came next, looking much younger than her seventeen years, her red hair rising and falling in the wind. She stopped halfway, looked around, and Tali saw her lips move, as if in a prayer. Or a desperate plea.

  Benn, I’m sorry.

  A Cythonian guard poked her in the back with a spear butt and she moved up, a blank look on her face now, as if she had resigned herself to passing beyond the material world.

  The last prisoner was another woman, a toothless crone who muttered and snarled and swore vile oaths at the crowd, the guards and the other prisoners. She spat at the guards, taking no notice of their blows, then pulled her skirts up above her knees and, belying her age, thrust past Glynnie and capered up the steps all the way to the top.

  There she raised her hands to the sky as if calling doom on her enemies, then leapt onto the first platform of the scaffold-henge and put the noose around her neck. The guards raced after her but she let out a mad cackle, kicked the lever and fell through the trapdoor.

  The spectators began to mutter among themselves and wave their fists. Evidently they felt robbed; the hangings were supposed to be a proper spectacle. The Cythonian guards patrolling the annulus forced the watchers back with short spears. Up at the scaffold-henge, the execution guards waited until order had been restored.

  Tali had to act now, though she had no idea how her plan would play out. Even if the prop burned through enough to snap, it was possible that the roof might hold for a minute, or even an hour. Alternatively the whole mound could collapse, crushing prisoners and guards alike under the stone henges and the weight of twenty-six feet of ash and rock. Being buried alive would be a far more unpleasant end for Glynnie than a quick death by hanging.

  One of the execution guards read the seven names aloud, taking his time, then the guards began to put the nooses around the six prisoners’ necks. Glynnie was forced at spear point onto the platform. There was no time for Tali to worry about being caught, the call being detected, or even dying should the pearl burst inside her head. She had to act now.

  She opened the block, drew power from the pearl and directed everything at the burning patch on the prop below the mound. The bones of her skull creaked, though this time she felt no pain. She wondered why. Her jaw clicked; her ears popped.

  There came a rush of air, a gush of smoke around the sides of the archway door, then a fluid surge of ashy sludge from the side of Murderers’ Mound. Then another surge. The top of the mound quivered. One of the stone scaffold uprights tilted a few degrees. The fat woman cried out in terror.

  The guards, each standing with a noose in hand, ready to slip it over a prisoner’s head, stared at each other.

  “What’s going on?” said a hawk-nosed guard who wore a bright yellow bandanna around his wrinkled neck. “Is it another quake?”

  “Murderers’ Mound has survived a hundred quakes,” said a moon-faced female guard, evidently their leader. “Get it done.”

  Tali could tell that the prop wasn’t burning fast enough to prevent the hangings. In one more minute the remaining prisoners would be dead. She looked down with her inner eye, fixed on the blazing prop and directed a mental blast of white fire at it. Blazing splinters flew everywhere, the prop shattered and the rock crazed above it.

  Then the roof fell in.

  CHAPTER 37

  Rannilt kept sharing Tobry’s recurring dream. Or was it a nightmare?

  He was walking through the dark—through some cavernous underground space, judging by the way his footsteps echoed—where the air reeked of bat dung. He kept reaching out and up with both arms as if towards some monstrous, shadowy beast. Rannilt gained the impression that he was offering himself, but why?

  Was it a longing for healing? Or for oblivion?

  “Whatever it is out there, it can’t heal you,” said Rannilt. “No one can heal you but me.”

  He took no notice.

  “Besides,” she added, taking an enormous risk now, though it was one she had to take. “Tali needs you. Tali loves you and she’s waitin’ for you.”

  Tobry’s howls shattered her nightmare. A hundred thousand bats took flight from their roosts on the walls and roof of the black slate cave where Tobry and Rannilt had sheltered for the night. The bats went wheeling through the air in a smoky cloud and out the entrance.

  Tobry bolted out into the dark, still howling. Rannilt rubbed sleep out of her eyes, then sat cross-legged on a knob of rock, thinking things through.

  “Well, that didn’t work,” she said laconically, and went after him.

  It took hours to find him, even though his smell was now so rank and shifter-like that she could scent him downwind a quarter of a mile away. He was lying on a steeply-dipping shelf of slate only inches from the edge of a forty-foot drop. The jagged layers must have been digging into his flesh but he gave no sign that he was aware of the discomfort, or even of his surroundings.

  She approached slowly, step by small step. There was blood around his mouth, stuck with bits of yellow fur. Rannilt stopped, shivering. He’d been feeding—and as a shifter, not a man
. Dare she go closer? If the shifter was still in charge he might have no control over it.

  But then, if the shifter was truly in charge, it could hunt her down no matter what she did or how cleverly she hid.

  “Tobry?” she said softly, taking another step, and another, until she was only feet away. Her heart was a frantic bird trying to escape a cage.

  He reached out over the drop with both arms, as he had in the bat cavern, but made no sound. She did not like the look in his eyes; it looked like desperation. He made a sound in his throat as if he were trying to speak, though no words came.

  She met his eyes. “You’re tryin’ to tell me somethin’,” said Rannilt. “But you can’t speak. Is that because you turned shifter a while ago, to feed, and now the curse is takin’ hold again?”

  He slashed at her with his right hand. His nails were bloody and thickened, like a caitsthe’s claws. The blow skimmed the knee of her pants.

  “You’re scared, aren’t you? Scared you’re gunna turn all the way and you won’t be able to turn back. Scared you’re gunna kill me. Scared you’re gunna eat me.”

  He growled and slashed again, tearing her pants this time. She wanted to run for her life; it took all her will power to stay there and to hold his gaze. His eyes had a lot of caitsthe yellow in them again. Goose pimples rose on her arms. She tried to force them down again, to show she wasn’t afraid, but the little bumps told otherwise.

  “Don’t do that,” she said. “These pants are the only ones I’ve got.”

  He slashed again, though this time he missed by inches.

  “Lie down,” said Rannilt. “I’m gunna try and heal you again.”

  He snapped, snarled and crunched a piece of crumbly rock in one bloody fist.

  “I’m not gunna hurt you,” she said.

  He did not move.

  “Don’t you trust me?” said Rannilt.

  His eyes widened. In shock, or was it involuntary laughter? They stared into each other’s eyes for a minute or two, then he lay back on the rough stone, shifter-still, save for the muscles of his splinted arm, which were trembling.