Rebellion: Tainted Realm: Book 2

by Ian Irvine

  “Well, what do you think is going on?”

  Holm took another look. “I think they’ve turned renegade. I think they’re out for revenge because you killed Lizue and gravely injured her gauntling. They’re not attacking Tirnan Twil for itself – they’re trying to kill you.”

  “Sounds a bit far fetched.”

  “Gauntlings are vengeful, malicious and not entirely sane – madness is the bane of many kinds of shifters.”

  Tali checked on the gauntlings. “They’re circling in towards the top of the spike. If they are planning to attack, it won’t be long. Should we go up and help?”

  “By the time we haul ourselves up another eight hundred and fifty feet of ladders, any attack will be long over.”

  “Then I’ve got to choose, right now – healing or destruction.”

  Holm said nothing.

  “If I use it for destruction, what will happen if I need to heal someone to save their life?”

  “I suspect you won’t be able to heal anyone with magery, ever again.”

  “I don’t know how to decide.”

  “If you freeze because you’re afraid of the future, you’ll never make any choice. You’ve got to choose now.”

  Tali had been through this before, before healing Holm’s skull. Her frantic gaze fell on the scars on his brow and nose. “If I do choose destructive magery, could it undo the healing magery I did on you?”

  “Possibly.”

  The gauntlings were using their little arms to heave barrels out of their panniers.

  “They’re going to attack,” she said without turning around.

  No answer. He had gone.

  If she did not act, some of the people of Tirnan Twil were bound to die. She had to bring down the gauntlings, and if she could it would be a great destruction that would set the course of her gift forever.

  Tali began to prepare for a magery greater than anything she had ever used before. She had to stop two dozen gauntlings and she only had minutes to do so – assuming that she could draw enough power, and focus it at such a distance. The way magery was failing everywhere, that was debatable.

  But she was the one. This was what her gift was for and it was part of the great battle of the age. She reached deep, found power, then, in her mind’s eye, located each of the twenty-four gauntlings.

  They were arcing out and around and back in towards the spike, the single vulnerable point of Tirnan Twil. Their paths resembled a flower with twenty-four perfect petals.

  She was about to direct her power at the gauntling coming in from due south, intending to burn its wing mounts away and send it plunging two thousand feet to the base of the gorge, when the image in her inner eye blurred. Then, ever so slowly, it changed.

  Tali was staring at a man’s face. A face that was familiar even though it was out of focus. A large, florid face. Shudders ran up her back and sweat dripped from the palms of her hands. She had seen that face in the Abysm, and the impossibly contorted body. Lyf had turned his greatest enemy to black opal and hurled his body into the Abysm. But the expression on the man’s face was different here. He wasn’t screaming in agony. He was roaring with rage.

  The sweat froze on her palms. Her tongue filled her mouth and a weight on her shoulders was crushing her to the floor. Grandys was dead, turned to stone nearly two thousand years ago, so why did she keep seeing his image? Was it some kind of omen, like Rix’s painting that had divined the future?

  Was she some ignorant peasant, fearfully reading the sky for omens? No, she was the Lady Thalalie and the fate of many rested on her making the right decision.

  Grandys’ furious face vanished. Tali drew on her magery, focused it to a killing spell and checked out the window. But the sky was empty. She was looking up at the spike when flames burst out of dozens of slits near its tip, forming another beautiful red flower there, a deadly crimson one. She was too late. The gauntlings had attacked the tower’s weak point and fire was roaring out of the condenser slits.

  And if Rezire’s people could not stop it from setting the top level alight, the embers would cascade down the ladders, level by level. Tirnan Twil had nothing to stop it coming all the way down.

  CHAPTER 46

  “Can’t you block the slits?” said Tali.

  “We could, if we had people stationed up there,” said Rezire. “But it takes an hour to do so…”

  “And the gauntlings can attack in minutes,” said Holm, “if that’s their intention.”

  “If you turn off the taps,” said Tali, “it’ll stop fire coming down the pipes.”

  “However if the top level of Tirnan Twil should be set alight,” said Rezire, “burning books and embers will cascade down through the ladder holes. There’s no way to seal them.”

  “Then you’ve got to stop the gauntlings.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  Tali tore at her hair. Could Rezire be that obtuse? But then, he was a man of learning. Battle and bloodshed wasn’t real life to him, as they had become to her. War was something he read about in dusty old books. She looked to Holm to take the lead but he waved a hand as if to say, continue.

  “You have defensive magery, don’t you?” said Tali.

  “We used to, devices of great power brought from ancestral Thanneron, but they failed long ago.”

  “They failed?”

  “The land fights back. Most of the old magery has failed. Everything fails in the end, even steel and stone…”

  Rezire sounded resigned, accepting, and she could not comprehend it.

  “Not Tirnan Twil!” said Tali. “Send men up to the tower top, armed with bows and spears.”

  “What would they do?”

  “Attack the gauntlings. Drive them away from the air slits. Hurry!”

  Rezire went to the ladder hole and shouted orders. Tali looked out the window at the circling gauntlings.

  “Are they carrying riders?” said Holm.

  “No.”

  “So what are they doing here?”

  “They could be just spying for Lyf.”

  “Then why so many of them? One would be enough to shadow us here.”

  “I’ve ordered my most reliable people up to the defences,” Rezire said dolefully, “but I fear it will do little good. Those attributes that make a good fighter are of little value in our work.”

  “Then you’d better tell your people that they don’t have much time to escape – just in case it is an attack.”

  “Tirnan Twil is our home, our hope, our life, our future.”

  “If the gauntlings attack the air slits, some of your people may die.”

  “Everyone dies, Lady Tali.”

  “Not before their time.”

  “If Tirnan Twil’s time has come, so has ours.”

  He trudged off, bent-shouldered and flat-footed.

  “You’ve been very quiet,” she said to Holm, who was looking up through the window.

  “I’m wondering why the gauntlings are circling the tower. If they knew you were coming here – and presumably they’ve been spying on us from on high – why didn’t they try to capture you on the way?”

  “And carry me to Lyf?” said Tali. “I don’t know.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Holm, staring at her. “I don’t think they’re under Lyf’s command at all.”

  “Why not?”

  “He wouldn’t order them to attack this place with you inside. That would risk losing the master pearl.”

  “Then who is commanding them?”

  “No one,” he said grimly.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We talked about gauntlings after Lizue was killed, if you recall. They’re troublesome, rebellious creatures, and Lyf would never send them out on attack without a rider to command them.”

  “Well, what do you think is going on?”

  Holm took another look. “I think they’ve turned renegade. I think they’re out for revenge because you killed Lizue and gravely injured her gauntling. Th
ey’re not attacking Tirnan Twil for itself – they’re trying to kill you.”

  “Sounds a bit far fetched.”

  “Gauntlings are vengeful, malicious and not entirely sane – madness is the bane of many kinds of shifters.”

  Tali checked on the gauntlings. “They’re circling in towards the top of the spike. If they are planning to attack, it won’t be long. Should we go up and help?”

  “By the time we haul ourselves up another eight hundred and fifty feet of ladders, any attack will be long over.”

  “Then I’ve got to choose, right now – healing or destruction.”

  Holm said nothing.

  “If I use it for destruction, what will happen if I need to heal someone to save their life?”

  “I suspect you won’t be able to heal anyone with magery, ever again.”

  “I don’t know how to decide.”

  “If you freeze because you’re afraid of the future, you’ll never make any choice. You’ve got to choose now.”

  Tali had been through this before, before healing Holm’s skull. Her frantic gaze fell on the scars on his brow and nose. “If I do choose destructive magery, could it undo the healing magery I did on you?”

  “Possibly.”

  The gauntlings were using their little arms to heave barrels out of their panniers.

  “They’re going to attack,” she said without turning around.

  No answer. He had gone.

  If she did not act, some of the people of Tirnan Twil were bound to die. She had to bring down the gauntlings, and if she could it would be a great destruction that would set the course of her gift forever.

  Tali began to prepare for a magery greater than anything she had ever used before. She had to stop two dozen gauntlings and she only had minutes to do so – assuming that she could draw enough power, and focus it at such a distance. The way magery was failing everywhere, that was debatable.

  But she was the one. This was what her gift was for and it was part of the great battle of the age. She reached deep, found power, then, in her mind’s eye, located each of the twenty-four gauntlings.

  They were arcing out and around and back in towards the spike, the single vulnerable point of Tirnan Twil. Their paths resembled a flower with twenty-four perfect petals.

  She was about to direct her power at the gauntling coming in from due south, intending to burn its wing mounts away and send it plunging two thousand feet to the base of the gorge, when the image in her inner eye blurred. Then, ever so slowly, it changed.

  Tali was staring at a man’s face. A face that was familiar even though it was out of focus. A large, florid face. Shudders ran up her back and sweat dripped from the palms of her hands. She had seen that face in the Abysm, and the impossibly contorted body. Lyf had turned his greatest enemy to black opal and hurled his body into the Abysm. But the expression on the man’s face was different here. He wasn’t screaming in agony. He was roaring with rage.

  The sweat froze on her palms. Her tongue filled her mouth and a weight on her shoulders was crushing her to the floor. Grandys was dead, turned to stone nearly two thousand years ago, so why did she keep seeing his image? Was it some kind of omen, like Rix’s painting that had divined the future?

  Was she some ignorant peasant, fearfully reading the sky for omens? No, she was the Lady Thalalie and the fate of many rested on her making the right decision.

  Grandys’ furious face vanished. Tali drew on her magery, focused it to a killing spell and checked out the window. But the sky was empty. She was looking up at the spike when flames burst out of dozens of slits near its tip, forming another beautiful red flower there, a deadly crimson one. She was too late. The gauntlings had attacked the tower’s weak point and fire was roaring out of the condenser slits.

  And if Rezire’s people could not stop it from setting the top level alight, the embers would cascade down the ladders, level by level. Tirnan Twil had nothing to stop it coming all the way down.

  CHAPTER 47

  “How the blazes did you survive, Tobe?” said Rix late that night, after all the injured in the healery had been attended to and Glynnie had finally been relieved. “You fell a hundred feet, head-first, from my tower. It beggars belief.”

  The blizzard had struck in earnest and was blowing a near hurricane, with snow so thick and blinding that a man outside could not see his extended hand. Rix had no fear of the enemy attacking again while it raged, for they would die of exposure before they reached the top of the wall. Until it passed they would lie huddled in their miserable tents, wishing they were back in the warmth and safety of Cython. But once the blizzard passed, it would be on again.

  Tobry did not reply. He was leaning towards the fire, staring fixedly into the flames.

  Rix studied his old friend covertly, looking for signs of shifter in him, but saw none. Even after Tali had used her healing blood on Tobry, his cheeks had been downy, his eyes rounder, and his ears slightly furry and pointed. Tobry’s eyes, Rix remembered, had still had a tinge of caitsthe yellow. There was no trace of it now; though bloodshot, they were the grey they’d always been. Her healing blood had worked, then.

  The chancellor would be so pleased.

  Tobry raised his glass, studied the play of light through the wine, and sipped appreciatively. “A fine cellar the old dame had. I wonder your mother’s bandits didn’t ship it away as well.”

  “They might have done had Swelt not realised what they were up to, and hidden the best of the drink in one of the abandoned cisterns.”

  “Is he a drinking man?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then I praise him all the more.” Tobry raised his glass. “It’s a wonder none of the household gave the game away.” He was a renowned cynic.

  “Things are different in the provinces,” said Rix. “Country folk cleave to their own and nurse their loyalties, and the old dame was greatly loved. But even had she not been, they would not have willingly given up Garramide’s wealth to interlopers from Caulderon.”

  “From wicked House Ricinus, as was,” said Tobry.

  “We’re the same now, you and I,” Rix said without thinking. “Both ruined men whose houses have fallen.”

  “Not quite the same,” said Tobry curtly.

  Rix, assuming he was referring to Rix’s inheritance of Garramide, bit his tongue.

  “You’ve fallen on your feet, at any rate,” Tobry added.

  Rix snorted. “There are people here who would gladly cut my throat.”

  “You don’t seem too worried.”

  “Once the enemy turned up, the servants realised that I’m the only one who can save them. My enemies had to pull their heads in – for a while, anyway.”

  Rix leaned back in his chair. They were in the grand dame’s salon, a long rectangle of walnut-panelled walls with a painted ceiling twenty feet above them. The salon was a cold room, though with their chairs drawn up on either side of the fire it was almost cosy. It was the first time he had been able to relax since the war began.

  “You were going to tell me your tale,” said Rix.

  “Later, if you don’t mind.” The wind howled outside the shuttered windows and Tobry shuddered, as if at some unpleasant memory. “The places I’ve been over the past weeks, the sights I’ve seen, have almost robbed me of the power of speech. I need to take it slowly.”

  Rix leaned back in his chair, studying his friend through the side of his glass. Tobry could be moody, and after all he’d suffered as a child, no wonder.

  “No hurry. More wine?”

  Tobry looked at him absently, then waved the bottle away. Rix wasn’t sure what disturbed him more – that Tobry had been through a nightmare, or that he could refuse a second glass of the finest wine Rix had ever tasted.

  “Am I talking too much?” said Rix. “Would you prefer I left you alone?”

  “No!” Tobry said sharply. “My own company is the last thing I want. I’ve had far too much of it, and presently my mind isn’t a
fit state to visit, much less live. Tell me about yourself, and Glynnie and Benn. And… and Tali,” he said in a rush, “if you’ve got any news of her.”

  “I wish I had. I haven’t heard a whisper since the chancellor took her away.”

  Tobry hunched down in his chair, reached for his glass, found it empty and said, “Think I will have another drop.”

  Rix filled it to the brim. Tobry gulped it, spilling red wine down his chin without realising it. Rix pointed it out.

  “Sorry.” Tobry wiped his chin. “Been living like a pig for weeks. Hiding in drains, eating rats and other vermin. When you’re bedding down in a sewer, manners don’t seem so important.” He looked up. “I spent most of that time searching for news of Tali and Rannilt, and the chancellor.”

  “That bastard!”

  “Indeed,” said Tobry. “But there was none, and I’m sure if the enemy had caught them I’d have heard about it. No, he ran away with his tail between his legs, somewhere west I’m guessing. But he’s got Tali so well hidden by magery that no one knows where she is. After I exhausted my last lead, I came looking for you.”

  “Any news of the war?”

  “Probably less than you have, given Swelt’s network of informers. I can tell you that the centre of Caulderon lies in ruins – torn down so Lyf can rebuild old Lucidand.”

  “Any chance of a rebellion?”

  “If there’s one thing the enemy know, it’s how to subdue a conquered people. They practised on the Pale for a thousand years.”

  “You mean there’s no chance,” said Rix.

  “Lyf has fifty thousand troops in Caulderon, and the first thing they did was make a death list – all our leaders, military officers, thinkers, plus known troublemakers like you and me. The scaffolds have been working overtime. At the first hint of opposition, they round up all the ringleaders and put them to death.”

  “And now Bleddimire is going the same way. Is there any resistance in the provinces? Anywhere at all?”

  “Not that I’ve heard. Lyf’s victories have been too quick, too overpowering, too terrible… and, for want of a better word, too magical. Rebels die swiftly and unpleasantly, and most local lordlings prefer to grab what they can get to fighting for their country – the gutless scum.”