by Ian Irvine
‘I don’t know what to do.’
He untied a canvas pouch hanging on his left hip and reached inside. Tali caught a faint glimmer through the weave, as if a glowstone had been uncovered, and a single tendril of emerald light quivered across her inner eye.
He withdrew a little cloth bag and held it out. ‘Take this.’
Both the glow and the light tendrils faded. ‘What is it?’ she said warily.
‘Silver, all I have. Not much.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘I’m not wealthy.’
Pride told her to scornfully reject his charity. Reason said she would need it, since she had no house to help her. Tali bowed and took the bag. Her hand was still trembling; she could not stop it. ‘Thank you, Lord Tobry.’ He was a good man. He would help her.
‘Just Tobry. My house has fallen; there’s nothing noble about me.’
He glanced along the path Rix’s flight had flattened through the bushes. A brown horse waited near the edge of the oasis. Tobry whistled and the horse pulled its reins free, trotted to the pool and drank noisily.
‘You’re leaving us behind,’ Tali said dully.
Escaping from the enemy had been the easy part compared to relations with her own people. Why had she taken Rix on? If she had bowed and thanked him she would be halfway to safety by now. The enemy would never catch riders on horseback.
Tobry mounted, grimacing and rubbing his bandaged shoulder. ‘My horse is worn out. It can’t carry me and both of you. I’ll bring Rix back.’
‘But — the enemy — ’
‘I won’t be long. But keep out of sight, just in case …’ He rode off.
‘Tobry!’ she cried, remembering her urgent news. ‘Cython is going to war in eleven days — no, ten days now.’
He whirled and came back. ‘How do you know?’
She told him about the stockpiled food, the preparations on the chymical level, the crates of weapons and the threats that they would soon put the Pale down. ‘What if my escape makes them bring forward their plans?’
‘Why would it? You’re just — ’ Tobry bit the rest off, then had the grace to look embarrassed.
‘Just a slave,’ said Tali. ‘A worthless Pale. Don’t worry, I’m used to it. They told us so every hour of every day.’
‘They won’t be saying it now. They’ll be working like a swarm of rats to discover how you escaped.’
‘What if they attack before Hightspall can get its army together?’
‘They’ll get a nasty surprise,’ said Tobry, though not convincingly.
Tali remembered what Tinyhead had said. ‘They’ve been planning this war for a thousand years. Hightspall is ready for war, isn’t it?’
‘Of course …’ He glanced at her, then away, biting his lip. ‘I’d better go.’
Hightspall isn’t prepared, she thought, but he dares not say so. He’s afraid I might be a spy. Tali knew what happened to spies and informers at a time of war. They were killed, but only after everything they knew had been tortured out of them.
As he rode away, her head began to throb, in the particular way it had when her enemy’s eyes had been looking out from Tinyhead’s eyes. She went back to the pool. Did her enemy know she was here? Was he directing the Cythonians to the oasis? Were they close?
Half an hour passed, then an hour, but Tobry did not return. Had he lied? Or what if he and Rix had run into a band of the enemy?
‘Rannilt?’ Tali called. The girl was up the tree again, keeping watch. ‘Any sign of them?’
‘No.’
‘What about the enemy?’
‘Can’t see no one.’
Tali was running out of options. They could not hide here; a small band of Cythonians could search the oasis in half an hour. Yet if she went back into the Seethings they would see her from a mile off.
‘Come down. You must be thirsty.’
Rannilt came creeping down, washed her face in the pool and took Tali’s hand. ‘Why did that wizard — ?’
‘What do you mean, wizard?’ cried Tali.
‘He had gramarye in his pocket,’ said Rannilt.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I saw it, clear as anything.’
Relief flooded her. Tobry was clever. He must know far more about magery than any slave, and he was a kind man who did not despise the Pale. Could he teach her? Yes, she would appeal to him. It was absurd to think that the only person who could teach her magery was her enemy. How would Mimoy know, anyway?
‘Tali?’ said Rannilt.
‘Shh, child, I’m trying to think.’ She had to go after Tobry and Rix. ‘Come on.’ Tali crammed her hat well down and put the robes on over her gown.
How had Rix known she was one of the Pale, anyway? If no Pale had ever escaped from Cython before, how could any Hightspaller know what they looked like, or that they bore a slave mark on their left shoulders?
She was trying to understand his reaction to her when a long-lost memory came flooding back, one she had suppressed after the terrible day in the cellar. By the time she found her way back to the Pale’s Empound, a day later, Tali had buried the memories so deep that, even as an adult, she had not been able to find them.
A handsome, black-haired boy, his eyes tormented and his fine clothes covered in vomit, reaching out to her mother’s hair then staring at the blood on his fingers. The look in Rix’s dark eyes had been vaguely familiar, but the way he had thrown up, like an animal in pain, was unmistakeable.
He was her first real clue to who had murdered her mother.
Rix was the boy from the cellar.
CHAPTER 36
An hour later, as darkness raced across Lake Fumerous towards the west, the hatches were lifted on nine cunningly concealed tunnels. Three lay close by the fishing towns on the southern shore of the lake, three more were scattered along the triangle of fertile farmland that made up Suthly County, on the eastern side of the Caulderon Road, and one was insolently close to the main gates of Caulderon.
Four thousand cloaked Cythonian warriors synchronised their chronos then, armed with shriek-arrows, pox-pins, cling-metal and other chymical horrors, made their silent way to the richest farming communities, the wealthiest towns and the most important bridges. At the appointed minute of the appointed hour, they attacked.
Carefully placed bombasts, exploding in pyrotechnic crimson arcs, collapsed three bridges and the left-hand side of the city gate. Fire-flitters, hurled in hissing swarms from small, wheeled pults, turned fields, warehouses and granaries into chymical furnaces. Sunstone grenadoes, tossed into palaces and hovels alike, imploded with silent, brain-numbing violence that rendered most of the occupants catatonic. Shriek-arrows cut swathes through those nobles and commoners who managed to claw their way out into the dark. Finally an epidemic of tiny pox-pins, falling in a whispering rain from the black sky, delivered their hideous cargo into the unfortunate survivors.
After ten minutes, one-fifth of the harvest of the region was ablaze. Hundreds of people were dead, thousands lay unconscious and thousands more were yet to feel the indigo buboes forming inside them. Hightspall did not know what had happened; not a single Cythonian had been seen. They withdrew to their tunnels, erasing their tracks as they went, to sleep like just warriors and dream of vengeance.
The other two tunnels opened onto the Seethings, one to the north of the Rat Hole and one to the south. Twenty soldiers emerged from the northern tunnel, led by a big captain, once handsome, with a deep, powerful voice. The left side of his face was pocked with craters so deep that the tip of a little finger could be inserted in them, surrounded by starkly white scar tissue.
‘Where is she, Wil?’ he said to a skinny little man of indeterminate age with blackened, empty sockets and a seeing eye tattooed in the middle of his forehead.
Wil the Sump fingered the platina containers secreted in his pouch. Just the thought of their deadly contents sharpened his inner eye. He needed to sniff — he ached for the pretty pictures alkoyl made in his mind and the burning bliss tha
t drove all his cares away.
He wiped his dripping nose. He had to find the one. No one else could do it. No one else could truly see. He turned away, took a surreptitious sniff and his eroded single nostril burned like chymical fire.
His heart pounded whenever he thought about the contest between the Scribe and the one. Who would prevail? The Scribe’s story, what he had read of it in the iron book, was sliding off track. But so was the one’s story Wil had seen in his shillilar, and he had to know how the story ended. Sometimes, under the influence of alkoyl, he imagined writing it himself.
Wil turned around once, twice, thrice, then pointed south-east.
‘The one, the one.’
‘Take us to her.’
‘You won’t hurt her, will you?’ said Wil. ‘She could change our story all by herself. I told the matriarchs so.’
‘And so the matriarchs told me.’ The captain fingered his Living Blade and said, below Wil’s hearing, ‘I guarantee that she will feel no pain.’
The squad from the southern tunnel, the one closest to the Rat Hole, was captained by the squat, toad-faced woman called Orlyk. Behind her lurched a huge, empty-eyed man with a red, ruined face and a narrow hole burnt through his tiny head from front to back.
Orlyk jerked the barbed rope around his neck, dragged him all the way to the Rat Hole and knocked him down by the faint track that could still be seen through the grass.
‘Find the Pale slave called Tali, you treacherous hog-rat. Find the vile spell-caster this night, or die a cursed, unshriven traitor.’
Tears ballooned out Tinyhead’s raw eyelids, but they were stuck together and would not open. He grunted, groaned, then flopped out a white and black tongue and began to lick Tali’s scent from the grass.
PART TWO
PURSUIT
CHAPTER 37
The wrythen made another fluttering circuit of his alkoyl still, and another. Despite centuries of planning, every single thing had gone wrong.
Deroe was breaking the possession. If he discovered where the host was, he would gouge the master nuclix out of her in a place the wrythen could not reach, which was practically everywhere, and the battle would be lost.
Now the wrythen’s own people were hunting the host, planning to kill her for escaping, and that would ruin the nuclix. But if they realised it was inside her, and took it, it would destroy them.
He had to get to her first, but how? His faithful servant was somewhere in the Seethings, still clinging to a shambling kind of life, though there was no way to reach him. However, Rix’s friend Tobry must be exhausted, and sooner or later he would relax his guard. When he did, the wrythen would renew the link, possess Tobry and send him after the host.
But what if Tobry broke free?
Only one weapon remained, the facinore, though it sickened the wry-then to use it. It was a reminder of how far he had fallen, and he had a healthy fear of it, too. The facinore’s strength was its changeability and it was evolving rapidly, becoming harder to command by the day, but there was no choice.
Activating the pathways imprinted in the creature when he had created it by the uncanny art of germine, the wrythen sent it the image of the host he had seen through his faithful servant’s eyes, then imitated the strident, angry call of the master nuclix she bore.
She is in the Seethings. Locate her via this call and bring her to the cellar, unharmed.
In the labyrinth between the caverns and Cython, the facinore stopped suddenly, head cocked. It gave a savage nod, scraped a morsel of deliciously decayed flesh from between its teeth and swallowed it, then loped away.
CHAPTER 38
‘Are you all right?’ said Rannilt, creeping up beside Tali.
She sat by the water, shivering. She could not stop remembering now.
The skull-shaped cellar that had stunk of poisoned rats. Her mama darting and weaving as she tried to lead the hunters away from her little daughter. The masked woman so cold and cruel. The tall, round-bellied man, afraid to stand up to her. The shiny knife, the nail sticking deep into Tali’s hip, the woman standing on Mama’s chest as though she were rubbish and her frail ribs snapping like wishbones.
Tali jumped up, caught sight of her reflection in the still pool, and cried, ‘Mama!’
‘Tali?’ said Rannilt anxiously.
Tali could not look away. There were no mirrors in the Empound and she had never seen her face clearly before, but it could have been Iusia looking up at her. She studied every detail, tears stinging in her eyes as she remembered all the good times. Despite their slavery, she had always felt safe before Iusia had been killed.
She dashed the tears away and rage surged so furiously that her jaw clicked. How dare they treat her mama that way? She had never done anything to hurt them. How they were going to pay.
But first she had to find the killers and Rix was the best lead she had. Why had he been in the cellar anyway? Tobry had said that Rix was not a bad man, but had he, even as a boy, been part of the crime? Tali could not believe that of any child … yet she had a faded memory of blood on his hands.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Rannilt.
Tali shuddered and pulled the coarse robes around her, struggling to think. Her plan had collapsed. She had assumed that, as the first Pale ever to escape from Cython, she would be welcomed home as a hero. In reality, the Pale were despised as traitors. And there was no House vi Torgrist to help her. She had no one in the world save this grubby little urchin staring at her so anxiously.
Tali forced a smile. ‘When I looked at my reflection in the water, for a minute I thought it was my mother. Don’t fret, I’m all right now.’
‘She must have been very beautiful.’ Rannilt twined her arms around Tali, sighing and snuggling.
‘Yes, she was,’ Tali said absently.
‘Why was that big man so nasty? How could anyone not like you?’
Tali gave her a hug. Why did Rix hold the Pale in such contempt? Did he blame them for not escaping from their masters? It was like a sick joke, save that Rix believed every word he had said. The woman in the cellar had called Iusia Pale scum, and if everyone in Hightspall thought that way, Tali and Rannilt would be in more danger in their homeland than they had been in Cython. What could she do? How could she go on when everything she believed in was regarded as a lie?
Someone had been lied to, but she did not think it had been the Pale. They had definitely been taken to Cython a thousand years ago as child hostages, for she had often heard the Cythonians laugh about it. And she did not think the Pale had made up the story about being noble. Therefore, Hightspall’s view of the Pale was wrong — wickedly so.
‘Your slave’s mark is better than mine,’ said Rannilt.
‘Nonsense, child,’ said Tali.
It was true, though. Rannilt’s mark was just a squiggle burnt into her shoulder, while Tali’s was an elegant pattern of lines and swirls, identical to her family seal and as beautiful as it was old.
She ran a finger around it. To the Cythonians, the slave mark had been a sign of eternal bondage. To Rix it was the mark of treachery and collaboration — it raised feelings so powerful that he had thrown up at the sight of it. But to her it would always be the symbol of House vi Torgrist, one of the oldest of the noble houses, and of vi Torgrist’s strength, longevity and steadfastness. It was also a symbol of hope — that she could succeed despite the opposition of both her enemies and her own people.
Tali pressed the seal against her arm, leaving a white impression there. It made her feel better so she made a series of marks down her arm. She was the last of her line and the heir to House vi Torgrist, therefore, her house wasn’t extinct. It was up to her to raise it again. After she had gained justice for Mama, Grandmama, Great-Grandmama and Great-Great-Grandmama, that’s what she was going to do.
Despite Rix’s threat, and the foul things he had said about her, she had to find a way to get the truth out of him. And she had better hurry; night was bound to bring the enemy.
>
Her thoughts turned to Tobry, who had magery in his pocket and might be able to help her uncover her own. Tobry had been kind to her, and clearly he did not despise the Pale — another positive. Her world was beginning to tilt back.
Tali tried to rise but could not move. ‘Help me up, Rannilt. My muscles have locked.’
As the girl heaved her to her feet, every bone and sinew protested. Tali hobbled around the pool like old Mimoy until her muscles came back to life.
‘Where are we goin’?’ said Rannilt.
‘After Rix and Tobry.’
‘But he was so mean to you.’
‘Not as mean as the enemy will be.’
‘If he does it again, he’ll be really sorry.’
The girl’s fierce loyalty warmed Tali more than she could have imagined. A third positive. ‘Yes, we’ll fix him.’
She drank from the pool, bathed her hot face and told herself that the open spaces could not harm her. It was a silly, irrational phobia and she was going to overcome it. She wove grass into a band and tied the hat brim down to her eyebrows. Her legs and back ached down to the bones, but pain was a slave’s lot and she had learned to endure it.
‘I’m a really hard worker,’ said Rannilt. She was plodding along, exhausted and trying to hide it. They had been following Rix’s tracks for hours.
There was no sign of anyone in the scorched lands. It was late afternoon now, at most an hour of daylight left. Tali walked faster. The Seethings was no place to navigate after dark.
Her head was aching again. She kept seeing the swirling lights and coloured patterns, and twice more she heard that distant note in her inner ear, pealing like an unanswered question. She had first heard it as the sunstone imploded and had associated it with freedom and liberation. Now it sounded angry.
‘I can wash clothes and carry water,’ said Rannilt. ‘And when I clean fish, I don’t leave a speck of meat on the bones.’