Justice

by Ian Irvine

  “And Rannilt—queen,” Tobry said unexpectedly. “Rannilt—make world—better place.”

  Rannilt did not look up this time.

  Rix jumped up. “Stir up the fire, Glynnie, and fetch out the best goblets. Benn, run down to Catlin and declare a feast, for everyone. I’ll bring up a barrel of our finest wine—we’ve got a whole world to celebrate.”

  When the needs of the servants and soldiers had been taken care of, and the children on the far side of the room, Rix pulled the shutters, drew the chairs closer to the fire, and handed around brimming goblets of a mature red that his great-aunt had laid down in the first year of her marriage, more than fifty years ago. They clinked their goblets and raised them.

  “To a better world—Radian.”

  Tali settled back in the shadows and sipped her wine, rather tentatively. She had never had a head for drink but, perhaps because the master pearl was gone, found that she could tolerate this wine very well. She drank the whole goblet and closed her eyes, thinking about the future Errek had laid out for her: the possibility that she might outlive everyone she knew. A long, lonely life seemed more a curse than a blessing.

  “It’s time,” Tobry said after an hour had gone by and everyone was feeling mellow.

  Fear shafted through her and her eyes sprang open. “Time for what?”

  “Shifters end—with world that’s ended.”

  “No!” cried Rannilt. “Tobry, you can’t go!”

  “Shifter curse,” said Tobry. “Hurts too much. Never be free.”

  He leaned back in his chair, and Tali saw that not even Rannilt could stop him this time. Tobry was in emotional torment from the shifter curse, the residue of the shifter madness, and perhaps her rejection too. He just wanted it to end.

  Tali sat beside him and took his hand. To her surprise, Rannilt gave way to her.

  “We don’t want you to go,” said Tali. “I don’t want you to go.”

  “Holding you back,” said Tobry. “Need—move on.”

  “I don’t want to move on. I failed you badly, but the best times of my life were spent with you, and I want to be with you.”

  “What best times?”

  “When Rannilt and I met you out in the Seethings and you were kind to me after—after Rix was not. When we saved each other, also in the Seethings. When you carried me to the ruins of Torgrist Manor that time. When we fought Lyf and the facinore in the wrythen’s caverns. When you took me to the Honouring Ball. What a night that was! I couldn’t dance a step,” Tali said dreamily, “yet when I was in your arms I was the belle of the ball.”

  Tobry favoured her with the lopsided smile that lit up his face and took years off him. “Yes,” he said softly. “That was—best time.”

  “I loved you,” she said. “Love you. Yet I failed you, over and over.”

  “Don’t want—talk,” said Tobry.

  “I have to tell you. I’ve got to acknowledge how terribly I let you down.”

  “No!” said Tobry.

  “But—”

  “Forgive you.”

  “But you can’t… I haven’t—”

  “Forgive you,” he repeated. “Shut up—arms around—last time.”

  Tali shuddered. Was this it? She could not speak; fear rose up her throat until it was choking her. She hugged him tightly and did not ever want to let go.

  After a minute he pulled away and lay back in his chair. The deeply etched lines on his face seemed to dissolve as the tension drained from him. Rannilt laid her twisted hands on him but it did not seem to help.

  He began to breathe shallowly. A flush developed on his face and throat. He went redder and grew hotter until he was drenched in sweat. He cried out, gasped, and fell silent.

  The minutes passed into an hour, two, three. Tali did not move from his side. She was afraid to turn away in case it turned out to be his last moment, and when she turned back he would be gone.

  Rannilt came and went with damp cloths and mugs of water. The fever passed, as quickly as it had come. His breathing was shallow now, the flush fading to grey. He breathed out, but did not breathe in.

  “No!” Tali wailed.

  Rannilt leapt over her and shook Tobry. His head lolled from side to side.

  “Queen-magery!” said Rannilt.

  She laid her hands on his head. “No,” she said, shaking her head. She moved her hands to his heart, frowned, pursed her lips, then lowered them to the region of his liver.

  “The twin livers!” she shrieked. “That’s the true core of a shifter cat. It’s gotta be. That’s why no one’s ever healed a shifter—they were healin’ the wrong place.”

  She pressed her hands down hard, trembled, and the golden light that had so characterised her ever since she came into her gift exploded from her fingers.

  “Queen-magery,” she repeated, as if trying to call it when she did not know where it was—or perhaps what it was.

  The golden light bathed Tobry’s midriff; it seemed to pass into him. His face went red. He jerked convulsively and Tali saw a bulge grow under Rannilt’s hands. Another bulge grew, a smaller one.

  “It ain’t workin’,” said Rannilt. “What’s wrong?”

  Rix started, then ran across the room and took the wrapped package from the coat he had been wearing at the Abysm. He unwrapped the circlet and put it on Rannilt’s head. It slipped down to her ears. He tilted it up at the front and down at the back so she could see.

  Rannilt pressed down again. Tobry groaned; he thrashed and howled. His fingers hooked and clawed at her. The shifter side was fighting her all the way.

  “A king’s magery was used to create shifters,” said Rix. “So queen-magery, in the hands of the rightful ruler, ought to be able to heal him from the shifter curse.”

  The smaller bulge under Rannilt’s twisted fingers shrank and shrank again. The howling died away. Tobry’s eyelids fluttered. The red washed from his face, replaced by jaundice yellow that deepened until even his empty eyes and lips were that colour. Rannilt pressed harder.

  “Queen-magery,” she called for the third time.

  The second, smaller bulge continued to shrink until it disappeared. The larger bulge also shrank, though only a little. Tobry gave another jerk. A twitch. The yellow began to fade, first from the whites of his eyes, then from his lips and fingernails, and finally from the rest of his skin.

  He slept for ten minutes, then his eyes opened, and this time they weren’t empty. They were the old familiar grey, and the whites were white, with those little bloodshot patches Tali remembered in the corners.

  Rannilt lifted her hands. “Not lettin’ you die,” she said to Tobry. “I need you for my teacher.”

  “There are far better teachers than I, child,” said Tobry, a trifle haltingly, though in the old, familiar voice. “Cleverer teachers. Harder-working and more knowledgeable.”

  “And less sarcastic,” Rix said with feeling, remembering his own youth.

  “But I want you,” said Rannilt.

  Tobry smiled weakly, then raised his open hands, palms upward, as if to say, What can I do? She’s beaten me. “Then you shall have me, my little queen.”

  He sat up and the strain was gone from his face, the tension that came from the shifter constantly attacking the man.

  “Is the curse gone?” said Tali, suddenly feeling so light that she could have been weightless again, as she had been in the Abysm. It did not seem possible—no one could heal a shifter. She knew. She had tried. “Really gone?”

  “I told you I could heal him,” said Rannilt. “After we met at Glimmering, at the peace conference, I told you.”

  “Yes, you did,” said Tali. “And lots of times after that. But I never believed you.”

  Rannilt looked down at her hands, which were red and swollen. She looked up again and Tali saw that she looked older, at least thirteen. The others had noticed it, too.

  “You’ve aged in the healing,” she said, alarmed. “Rannilt, you look two years older.”

/>   “I know.”

  “You’ve got to hold back your gift. You’re just a kid and you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

  “I’m never holdin’ back from healin’,” said Rannilt. “Never, ever.”

  “But if healing a shifter has aged you two years, how much more life will you lose if you try to heal the land?”

  “It’s gunna take years to learn enough queen-magery to heal the land.” Rannilt was glowing, radiant. “Years and years.”

  “But… you’re just a little girl.”

  “And since the night Mama died beside me, when I was three, all I’ve ever wanted was to heal.”

  CHAPTER 96

  Despite yesterday’s optimism, Rix knew they had to face up to some hard realities, and the sooner the better.

  It was 9 p.m. and they were in his rooms again—the adults in the salon and the children, apart from Thom, out in the anteroom. Through the window he could see the eerily glowing portal in the distance. It was still spinning slowly in the air, high above the rubble-filled crater where the wyverin had fallen.

  Tali was scrunched up against Tobry, her eyes closed. He was reading The Wicked Lords and Ladies of Garramide, a small book, of questionable taste, bound in cracked green leather. Rix noticed that he was squinting, as if he needed spectacles. Tobry’s ordeal had aged him in other ways, too—his face held more lines than a man of twenty-five should have, and many more scars. His hair was peppered with grey and sometimes he moved like a man twenty years older.

  As Tobry looked down at Tali, his face took on a wary expression. Rix had often seen it lately, as if he had been hurt too deeply and was afraid to give himself completely. Yet in other respects he was the old Tobry, the friend who had stood by Rix for the past ten years, and that was, unquestionably, a miracle.

  He studied the others, in turn. Glynnie, his joy, was staring into the fire, her slender frame wracked by occasional shivers. He often heard her crying out in the night; sometimes he carried her to his bed and held her, and in his arms her nightmares eased, though he did not know how to heal what really ailed her—the murder she had committed to save his life. Only time could do that. At least, he hoped it could…

  Jackery sat in a corner, beside Thom in his wheeled chair. They had become friends and Rix often saw them discussing the merits of various kinds of walking aids, and how the locomotion of people on crutches or in wheeled chairs might be improved.

  Jackery was whittling a wooden lower leg out of a piece of timber. He also planned to carve himself a foot and upper leg, and he’d spoken to the master smith about designing knee and ankle joints. Rix did not see how an artificial leg could be made to work, but Jackery was determined to walk again. With brilliant crafts-manship and sheer persistence, aided by a touch of magery, perhaps he would.

  Rannilt was visible through the doorway, standing at the far end of the anteroom. She was studying a primer on magery, practising it with sweeping hand gestures, knocking over lamps and cups and everything else in her way.

  Thom wheeled his chair out the door and over to Benn, and they began playing a game of cards. Rix watched them for a while. Thom was laughing like any normal, carefree boy, and it gladdened Rix’s heart.

  He returned to his easel; he was trying to paint the wyverin while his right hand remained alive. He wanted to show it fighting, feeding and flying, and to capture its majesty and its ferocity while he could still remember it clearly, but his painting would not go right.

  With a grimace, he dropped his brush on the table. “We need to talk,” he said quietly. “We’ve got some tough decisions to make.”

  Jackery put his carving down, swept the wood shavings up in a dustpan, hopped to the fire and tossed them in. The fire flared; he hopped back to his chair and sat with a thud. Rix perched on the arm of the chair beside him.

  “Go on,” said Tali.

  Rix glanced at Rannilt and lowered his voice further. “I don’t want to undermine Rannilt…”

  “But?”

  “The land needs healing urgently, but king-magery takes years to learn—”

  “And many years to master,” said Tobry.

  “Many years,” Rix echoed. “How can she learn enough to heal it in time? What if it’s already past the point of no return? What if we only have months left? Or weeks?”

  “Or days,” Tali said direly. “I don’t see how we can find out, Rix. No one can approach the Engine without suffering Radl’s fate, and we can’t make a gate to look into it, either.”

  “Even so, we’ve got to plan for the worst.”

  “What is the worst?” said Jackery, kneading the muscles of his thigh above the stump, and wincing. “I’m not up on all this.”

  “The worst,” said Tali, “is a far greater eruption than the one we’ve just been through. The worst is the Engine making Hightspall blow itself to bits… and if that happens, the end may come so quickly that there’ll be nothing we can do—save die!”

  “Since there’s nothing we can do about that,” said Tobry, “there’s no point worrying about it. We’ve nowhere to go, anyway; there’s nothing beyond Hightspall but endless ice.”

  “I haven’t fought all this way to give up now,” Rix snapped.

  Out in the anteroom, Rannilt stopped in mid-gesture. She looked at Rix, smiled vaguely, then swept her arms out in an extravagantly uncontrolled gesture. Crash! Another of his great-aunt’s porcelain statuettes broken.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  No one spoke. After several minutes Rix rose heavily, clipped a piece of paper onto the easel and took a stick of charcoal. After touching the talon blade for inspiration he did a sketch at lightning speed. This time, though he had not planned it, it showed the wyverin in its vast and gloomy lair.

  He took a sip of wine and moved back a few feet. The sketch was far from perfect but it was better than any of today’s paintings. Not bad at all.

  “What’s that?” Tobry said sharply.

  “Where?” said Rix.

  “There.” Tobry pointed to the area below the wyverin’s elongated snout.

  “It’s just shading.”

  “No, it’s not.” Tobry levered himself to his feet like an old man. “There! The woman.”

  “I didn’t draw a woman—”

  Rix bent down and then he made her out. Though the figure was only strokes and squiggles, it was definitely a buxom woman. Lirriam! She was reaching up with a stone, holding it below the wyverin’s open eye—and the stone had a spark in the centre.

  “What’s she doing?” Tali rose and stood beside Tobry, staring at the sketch.

  He did not answer.

  “We saw her fall to her death,” said Glynnie.

  “But she fell with the Waystone in her hand,” said Tali. “The stone that can make portals. If she made one as she fell… and called the wyverin through… it could be alive too.”

  Rix considered that possibility and didn’t like it at all. “We don’t know that either her or it is alive.”

  “This drawing says they are,” said Tali.

  “It’s just a bloody sketch,” he said irritably. He tore it off the easel to cast it into the fire. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  Tobry extended an arm to block him. “Your father’s portrait was just a painting, Rix. Yet it predicted the fate of the land—and the doom of two men.”

  “Bah!” Rix tossed the sketch on the table and turned away.

  “Why don’t you draw it again?” said Glynnie. She went to the window and stood there, looking out into the night.

  “No, paint it,” said Tali.

  “We’ve been through this kind of thing before,” Rix said irritably, thinking about his cellar sketch that had shown Tali’s mother, or Tali, or possibly both of them, being killed for an ebony pearl. His divinations were never simple, never clear. “I’m not doing it again.”

  Tali picked up the sketch and examined it in the firelight. “The wyverin’s eye is open! Lyf ’s sleep spell must have broken.�
� She peered at the small figure. “What is she up to?”

  Jackery leaned forward. “She’s holding the Waystone under the wyverin’s eye, letting its tears flow over the stone.”

  “She’s trying to wake it!” Tali cried.

  “But it’s already awake,” said Rix.

  “Not fully. When the stone’s fully awake it glows crimson all the way through…” She glanced towards the window. “So that’s why the portal is still out there.”

  “Why?”

  “The Waystone must have been awake enough to create a portal, but not to open it all the way—”

  “Open it to another world, you mean?” said Tobry.

  “Lirriam said she wanted to go someplace where she could start afresh… and there’s nowhere in our world she can do that.”

  A red flash lit the salon through the window, then faded.

  “It’s gone,” Glynnie said softly.

  “The portal?” Rix and Tali said at the same time.

  “It flashed crimson, shot down towards the crater and disappeared.”

  “Then Lirriam’s gone,” said Rix, “and she’s not coming back.” He went to the window. “I hope she finds what she’s looking for.”

  “What is she looking for?” said Tobry.

  “Her ancestral people, I suppose. The folk Errek said had been ‘treacherously exiled from their own world’—whoever they are.”

  “I think Tobry knows who they are,” said Rannilt, standing in the doorway.

  “Do I, my little queen?” said Tobry, smiling fondly at her.

  “You kept sayin’ the same word when we were in the wyverin’s lair. It sounded like a name. ‘Khar—, Khar—’ or somethin’.”

  “Did I?” He frowned. “Kharoon! The exiled people who cast Herox out were called Kharoon… or was it Kharon?”

  “How do you know that?” Tali said curiously.

  “I must have got it from the wyverin,” said Tobry, “when we communed mind-to-mind, two beasts in pain.”

  A pink flush crept up Tali’s pale face. She looked away.

  “If Lirriam does find her people,” Rix said slowly, “I wonder what they’ll make of her?”