by Ian Irvine
The equipment in the room, she now realised, was arranged in clusters according to purpose – furnaces behind her, stills, alembics and retorts here, and to her right was an array of enormous flasks, their contents seething and bubbling on beds of heatstone bricks. One flask held a yellow fluid, thick as porridge. Another was watery and purple, with scintillas of silver rising and falling as it boiled.
Other clusters contained kinds of equipment she could not identify, although she had heard the names mentioned in her slave days – abluters, sublimaters, crystallisers, elixerators, calciners…
Something clacked behind her and she spun around, thinking that Wil was creeping up on her. Clack-clack. All she could see were a dozen kinds of stills, any of which would suffice to hide the little man.
Three towering stills made of glass reminded her of Lyf’s great glass still that she had seen in his caverns. She crept between them, knife in hand. Nothing to her left; nothing to her right. Clack-clack. The tallest glass still, twenty feet high, hissed steam from a top vent, ssss. Tali stifled a screech.
Steady, steady – you’re jumping at shadows. But Wil was lurking somewhere in these shadows, and he had cause to hate her.
She edged around a pot-bellied still made from sections of riveted copper. Pipes arose from its top, looping and twisting before passing through a water bath and then into glass flasks. Ahead, a small platina still was set in an open space well apart from everything else. Thick stone walls curved around it, though she could not tell whether they were intended to protect the platina still, or the equipment nearby.
Away to her right, some tall pieces of glassy equipment were illuminated by yellow lights so bright that they dazzled her. Tali didn’t know what they were and wasn’t planning to go that way. In here, the light was her enemy.
Then she saw Wil – the wretched creature was down the back of the chamber, creeping up an iron ladder towards a rack of silvery demijohns. He had a furtive air. What was he up to? She looked back but Lyf still wasn’t in sight. Why was he taking so long? Waiting for reinforcements?
Tali crept after Wil. The nearest half of the rear wall, a hundred yards long, was covered in shelves and racks of chymicals stored in glass bottles, jars and demijohns. There were huge flasks full of deadly quick-silver, the liquid metal that was heavier than lead, jars of powders that were coloured viridian, lurid orange, bright yellow, blue, and many that were white or black. Jars full of waxy-looking metals, stored under oil. Flasks that fumed and jugs that smoked. The air had a peculiar metallic tang.
The second half of the rear wall was stacked with crates that bore the rictus symbol of death-lashes. Other stacks were marked with the symbols for grenadoes and pyrotechnic flares. She also recognised barrel-shaped bombasts, and there were stacks of crates that could have had any kind of horror inside.
A faint whistling sound alerted her. Lyf was drifting down the ramp, flying five feet above the floor, his dark eyes darting this way and that. Tali armed herself with a death-lash and took cover behind a stack of barrels. Where was Wil? He had disappeared again. She scurried across the chymical level, darting from one piece of equipment to another, looking for a way out.
Her legs ached, and so did her back; it must be three in the morning, at least. She had been going full bore for many hours, without food or drink.
On the far side she spied another ramp leading up, a straight one this time. It had to be the walled-off drive Holm had tried to break through. She scuttled that way, took cover behind one of the square pillars and looked up the drive. Hammers were pounding on the wall and she could see a number of cracks in it, but the Pale did not look like breaking through.
And even if they did, all they would find down here was Lyf. Tali hastily scanned the tunnel above with her mage glass. The image was clear this time, and perfectly in focus, though she wished it was not.
The tunnel was empty – she saw no sign of friend or foe. But a stream of blood, several feet wide, was creeping along the floor towards her viewpoint. Tali gasped and clutched at her chest, for she had seen that image before somewhere. Where?
It had been in Madam Dibly’s wagon, on the way across the mountains to Rutherin. Tali’s mental image of that moment was so clear that she could still remember how sluggishly the blood had flowed, still smell the faint tang of iron. She could smell it now. Tali sniffed, took her eye from the mage glass and looked around, puzzled.
And then it came, first a series of finger-width trickles seeping through cracks at the base of the wall and flowing down the centre of the drive. But as she watched, the skin on the back of her neck crawling, the trickles strengthened and merged, and slowly widened until flowing blood covered the floor of the drive from wall to wall.
Pale blood, she had no doubt. Gallons and gallons. The slaughter had begun.
She had to take Lyf on right now, or her people were going to be exterminated. She looked around frantically. The alchymical level was a dangerous place; what could she use to attack him? Her pilfered death-lash would not suffice.
Again the bright lights caught her eye. Fifty yards away, green mist was rising from three exotic apparatuses, each a honeycomb of yellow glass with green fluids bubbling through a network of internal conduits. Ten-foot-wide squares of glowing sunstone, suspended above each apparatus, lit it with a brilliant yellow light. Bricks of heatstone were stacked around the bulbous bases, heating the acid-green fluid to a furious boil.
She felt sure that these devices were acidulators, because the green mist looked like the blistering fumes that had burst up through the floor last year. What if she lured Lyf towards the nearest acidulator, then hurled a piece of heatstone and smashed it to bits? It would be a deadly ploy, as liable to kill herself as him, but she could not last much longer. It was time for desperate measures.
She plodded towards the acidulators, keeping out in the open this time so Lyf would see her, and watching him from the corner of an eye. He changed course and raced through the air in her direction.
She hurled her death-lash at him, missed, and scrambled in under the base of the first acidulator, to the stacked bricks of heatstone. Pain sheared through her head, as bad as she had ever felt, and the heat radiating down onto her was blistering. The acids in the acidulator boiled and seethed, right above her head. If the flask burst, or Lyf broke it, her death would be agony beyond description.
She jerked out a heatstone brick, rolled over and scrabbled out the other side of the acidulator as Lyf came hurtling across. He hovered, fifteen feet away. Tali held the brick up.
“Stop, or I’ll use it.”
“Smash the acidulator and it’ll do you far more damage than me.”
She knew it, too; most of it was above her. But trying to kill Lyf wasn’t the answer. His death wouldn’t stop his people from killing the slaves – it would only make their vengeance more furious.
Wait! Could she turn her earlier, bitter moment back on him? Could she make him think that his failure to stop her had put his people at risk? If she could, it would give the Pale a chance.
“Give up,” he said. “There’s no way out, and I can summon my people in an instant.”
“Then why haven’t you?”
He did not reply.
“I can knock some of your people unconscious,” said Tali. “Maybe even all of them.” It was a bluff – she had no idea how far the effects would extend, if it worked at all. There was also a possibility that the burst would strengthen him.
He eyed the brick of heatstone in her hand. “How?”
“The same way as I did in the shaft when I escaped from Cython – when I dropped my sunstone down the shaft and it imploded. It knocked all the Cythonians nearby unconscious – those it didn’t kill outright – yet it had no effect on the Pale.”
“The ones who were knocked unconscious woke within half an hour, unharmed.”
“Half an hour is a long time to be unconscious in the middle of a battle,” Tali said pointedly. “It only takes a slave t
en seconds to cut a throat.”
He blanched. “Anyway, heatstone doesn’t have the same effect.”
“But sunstone does,” said Tali.
She hurled her heatstone brick up at the centre of the huge sunstone above the acidulator and ran for her very life, towards a cube-shaped iron furnace ten yards away.
The heatstone burst against the lower side of the sunstone, crump, imploding with a hot flash of light and causing a sharp pain behind her ears. She looked back. The sunstone seemed to be undamaged. No, cracks were radiating out from the centre. Get to shelter, quick!
She dived over the left side of the furnace and threw herself into shelter behind it. From the corner of an eye she saw Lyf streaking away, covering his face. Tali covered hers with her arms, put her head between her knees and —
The sunstone implosion occurred in absolute silence but with a light so bright that she could see it even with her arms over her eyes. The pain was so bad that she screamed. Heat washed over her – a torrid incandescence that would have turned her to char in an instant had she been in its direct path; just as the unfortunate guards in the sunstone shaft had been carbonised that day.
Then it was gone, still in silence. Now a hissing whistle began behind her and rose up the register until it was so banshee-shrill that her teeth began to ache. A dreadful fear struck her as she realised what was happening. Most of that burst of radiant heat had passed directly down onto the acidulator, superheating the acids inside to steam, and when the glass could take no more pressure —
She leapt up and ran. Nothing mattered now save getting as far away as possible, and keeping as much heavy apparatus between her and the acidulator as she could.
She had just passed behind the platina still when the acidulator went off with a shattering blast that hurled glass and fuming green fluids halfway across the chymical level. Green fumes boiled out and up – the same deadly, blistering fumes that had killed dozens of Pale after the accident last year. Tali covered her face with her hands and prepared to die.
CHAPTER 100
Glynnie bent to pick something up, then scuttled around behind the cistern, into the shadows. Grandys reeled up the yard into the darkness as several dozen troops stormed through the gates. Rix assumed they were the men who had marched off to join the chancellor’s army. He lowered himself into the water until they passed, then scrabbled helplessly at the edge.
“Here,” whispered Glynnie, who had crept around the side of the cistern and was sliding one end of her bloodstained length of timber in.
With his failing strength, Rix dragged himself onto it and clung there, panting. It was all he could do.
“Give me your hand,” said Glynnie.
He reached up. She caught his left hand, and with Glynnie pulling and Rix heaving, he reached the rim and toppled off onto the cobblestones.
“So cold.” He wrapped his arms around himself, shuddering violently.
“Wait here,” said Glynnie, looking around. “Won’t be long.” She darted up towards the fire.
“What – you doing?” said Rix. “If he comes back –’
Neither Grandys nor the other Heroes were anywhere to be seen, though Rix could hear fighting not far away. His teeth chattered.
“Glynnie?” he said hoarsely.
Never before had he felt so afraid. Even in Grandys’ drunken state he was a ferocious enemy. He could well rally his troops and defeat the attackers, and the moment he did he would be back, intent on bloody vengeance against the woman who had struck him down.
Rix crawled across to the dead men, found the heaviest sword and used it to push himself to his feet. A cold wind gusted in through the gates, striking through his wet clothes to the bone, for it was well below freezing now. Without dry gear he would soon collapse. Rix began to strip the biggest of the dead men, though it was slow work one-handed; his good fingers were as numb as the dead ones.
Glynnie came running back, carrying a chunk of roast rump the size of a pumpkin and dragging a sack. She wrenched the coat and pants off the man who had the arrow through his neck, and threw them into the sack.
“Horses, quick!” said Glynnie. “Where are the stables?”
“Don’t know,” said Rix.
“Hold this.” Glynnie thrust the roast into his hands. She must have taken it from a spit because it was still gloriously hot. She looked around. “Down there. Come on.”
He held it against his chest. The warmth helped. He staggered after her, his boots squelching with every step. The horses had been unsaddled and fed, and were in their stalls.
Glynnie chose a bay mare with dark brown ears, Lirriam’s mount. Rix looked around for the biggest. Grandys was constantly riding his horses to death and his latest mount, down the far end, was a wild-eyed black stallion some eighteen hands high.
Rix stuffed the piece of beef in one of Grandys’ saddlebags, calmed the horse with his hands, then heaved the saddle on and tightened the straps. It was all he could do to mount the beast via the side of the stall. Glynnie was waiting near the doors. She took a blanket from the sack, cut a hole through the middle and threw it to him. He put his head through the hole and gathered the blanket around him.
“How are you doing?” she said anxiously.
“Better.”
“How long can you ride without getting warmed up?” She studied him in the light slanting in through the doorway. “You saved me when we were in the lake, remember? I know how bad it gets.”
“Death from hypothermia is a risk I’ll have to take. If Grandys catches us —”
“I know. How long?”
He got out the hot slab of beef and held it against his chest, under the blanket.
“Can probably manage an hour.”
“Which way?” said Glynnie. “I don’t know this country.”
“North,” said Rix.
“Which way is that?”
“Keep the moon on your right. The deeper we go into Lakeland, the more little lakes there are, and the harder it’ll be to trace us.”
They rode quietly away, and only when they were out of sight over the hill did they spur their horses to a trot, the fastest pace that was safe over rough ground in darkness. It was a clear night lit by a half moon, but windy and miserably cold, and the quicker they went the more it penetrated Rix’s damp blanket. Finally, when they were five or six miles away, some time after midnight and in broken country with hundreds of little lakes and pools, he signed to her to stop.
“Can’t go – any further.”
She went ahead, riding around the edge of a lake until she found a protected spot against a north-facing cliff, where it would be safe to light a fire. They dismounted and Glynnie kindled a little blaze, then held a blanket up to break the breeze while Rix stripped, dried himself and put on the dry clothes taken from the dead man. He donned two coats, wrapped the blanket around himself and sat by the fire.
“You smell like roast beef,” said Glynnie, kneeling before him with a little pot of a Herovian ointment she must have stolen from Bastion Cowly.
“Feel like frozen beef.”
She dug her fingers into the ointment and began to smooth it across his battered face. He winced.
“You’re going to look a mess in the morning,” said Glynnie.
“Least – there’ll be – a morning.”
“Don’t talk. It wastes warmth.”
Glynnie laid a spare blanket on the ground between the fire and the cliff, sat down and began to cut pieces off the slab of beef. It was still steaming in the middle. Rix slumped opposite her.
“Eat!” she said, handing him a piece.
“Don’t think I can swallow.”
“Try. It’ll warm you.”
He swallowed a small piece, then another.
“Thank you,” he said hoarsely.
“We did it together.”
He didn’t have the strength to argue. “I was so afraid for you. I was sure —”
“But you never gave in. Will he come a
fter us?” said Glynnie. “If he survives the fight?”
“He’ll survive. And come after us.”
“Now?” Her voice was a little higher than usual.
Rix shook his head. “Too drunk. His debauches always end with him collapsing, unconscious. He’ll sleep for ten hours, then wake with a bad head and more bile than a wounded caitsthe. He’ll rant and swear bloody revenge, and run anyone through who looks at him sideways, but he won’t come after us until he’s stone sober and has finished brooding about his humiliation.”
“And then…”
Rix felt sick at the thought of what Grandys would do to Glynnie. “He may not come for a week. But when he does, he’ll hunt us with the same viciousness as he storms a castle. Nothing and no one will stand in his way. He always wins.”
She trembled. “Not always. We beat him last night.”
“You did. And we were lucky.”
“It still counts as a win.” She got up and made tea, stirred in honey from the honeycomb and handed him the mug. “Well, if we’re going to die, let’s make our deaths worthwhile.”
He wrapped his bruised fingers around the hot mug. “Er – what do you have in mind?”
“Would you say that Grandys’ reputation is the key to his success?”
“It’s a big part,” said Rix, unsure where she was going.
“Then the best way to undermine him would be to make people laugh at him.”
Rix shivered. “I don’t think that’s ever happened.”
“If it got out that he’d been beaten up by a woman, a no-account little maidservant, it’d do him more damage than a defeat on the battlefield.”
“How would it get out?”
“We’re riding west to join the chancellor’s army. It should be at Nyrdly by now. We’ll announce Grandys’ defeat at every town and village on the way. In a couple of days, the way news spreads in Hightspall, the whole country will know about it.”
“What if they don’t believe us?”