by Ian Irvine
A series of large, blurred footprints were steaming, the grass shrivelled around them and brown decay creeping out in all directions. What manner of beast was it?
In the light she saw a big, unmoving heap twenty feet ahead, a mound with long legs and guts spilled across the uneven ground. A dead horse, chestnut with a white mark on its forehead.
‘Beetle,’ said Tobry heavily. ‘Stay back.’
Tali wanted to be a thousand miles away. She knew what she was going to find next and could not bear to think about it, but she had to be sure. She had to keep searching, just in case. ‘Rannilt!’
There was no answer.
Tobry swung down from the saddle, drawing Rix’s sword. The elbrot’s light caused an answering shimmer along the curved blade.
‘Is the sword — ?’ said Tali.
‘It has an enchantment against magery.’
They stood together. Chunks had been bitten out of Beetle’s haunches, pieces of flesh the size of her head gone in single bites. Fear coiled up her backbone.
‘Where’s Leather?’ said Tobry, looking around.
‘What’s Leather?’
‘Rix’s horse. A huge, ugly brute, much tougher than poor old Beetle.’
Something gave a shrieking howl, a piercing note that rasped along every nerve fibre and echoed back from the rocky crest of the hill. It came from the same throat as those earlier cries.
Then a small golden light appeared between a group of rocks twenty yards ahead, a gentle, pulsing glow Tali recognised instantly, like a globe of sunshine held in cupped hands. Momentarily it lit up the small, skinny girl as though she were a princess, and Tali’s eyes flooded.
‘You’re alive,’ she whispered.
‘It’s a trap!’ shrilled Rannilt. ‘Run, Tali, run.’
CHAPTER 56
What was worse? What Lady Ricinus was going to do to him, or the nightmares that were bound to return once he was back in his chambers with that voice in his head, ordering him to commit a terrible atrocity.
As Tobry had said, Rix’s heritage was a honeyed trap. He would be better off abandoning it and galloping to the most distant outpost of Hightspall. He could still fight for his country there.
He was tempted to. Had it not been for his duty to his troubled house, he would have fled. Besides, wherever he went, Parby would come after him. The seneschal had been ordered to fetch Rix back and if he did not his own head would be on the line. Lady Ricinus did not permit failure.
‘Where are the enemy?’ he asked as they approached the city.
‘Scuttled back to their rat holes.’ Parby spat on to the grass. ‘They won’t find Caulderon such an easy target.’
‘You left before the attack, then?’ asked Rix.
‘Been searching for you for three days.’
Rix’s sole consolation was that the chancellor would be pleased with the intelligence he was bringing about the enemy’s weapons and tactics, and what the wrythen was up to. Not as pleased as if Rix had been able to provide advance warning of the war, but the news might be enough to get him out of Lady Ricinus’s clutches.
The road was full of refugees here, some pushing hand carts, some dragging their miserable possessions on skids, many staggering along with nothing save what they could carry on their bent backs. At every sound they whirled, staring, shaking. Rix saw terror in a thousand eyes.
The cavalcade passed two shattered towns and many razed villages. Here, in the rye fields to either side, burned crops were still smoking. The road turned a corner, passed through a copse of leafless trees and ahead, on the right, stood a rudely built stockade with guards patrolling outside the walls. Brown, greasy smoke rose from the far side, and they weren’t burning wood.
‘What’s going on here?’ He turned towards the stockade.
‘Stay back!’ said Parby.
Rix stood up in the stirrups to see over the wall, and quailed. The place was wreathed with stinking smoke, though not enough to hide the dozens of men, women and children imprisoned inside, some so covered in purple buboes that they could be seen from thirty yards away.
‘They’re be’poxed,’ said Parby. ‘We’ve seen the same, or worse, half a dozen times since the attack began.’
Driven into pens to die, Rix thought bleakly as they rode on. The living burnt the dead, and doubtless some who weren’t quite dead, on the pyre at the back — the last service the doomed ones could do for their country.
And all this in the first day of the war, from attackers no one had seen. The Cythonians had rained death and destruction on towns and villages, fish ponds and fields, using weapons no Hightspaller had ever encountered before. Then they retreated as silently as they had come.
Let Caulderon be unscathed, Rix prayed. But all he could think of was an enemy impossibly powerful, advancing on the unprepared city.
‘Holy Gods!’ cried Parby an hour later, as they came within sight of the gates of the city.
He reined in, and the troop stopped behind him, dismayed and not a little afraid. Rix, who had seen the blasted bridge near Gullihoe, was not surprised, though he was alarmed. Destroying an undefended bridge out in the country was one thing. Bringing down half of the massive and well-defended city gate was another entirely.
‘How did they get close enough to do that?’ said Rix.
The left side of the towering city gates, a thick-walled bulwark fifty feet across and sixty high, had been blown to bits. Rubble and charred timber lay everywhere, and bodies too, and the left-hand gate was propped up with poles, for its hinge pins had been blown out.
There were heavily armed guards everywhere, and more officers than in the New Year’s military parade, most of them milling around in fearful confusion. Rix saw no evidence that anyone had taken charge and longed to do so. He’d make the bastards jump to attention.
‘What news from the provinces, Lord Rixium?’ said a voice on his left.
Rix did not recognise the speaker, who was dressed in a captain’s uniform of viridian and mustard, with a red ribbon around his cockaded hat. The uniform did not appear to have been washed in a fortnight and there were food stains down his front.
‘Bad,’ said Rix, curling his lip. ‘Gullihoe is half destroyed and abandoned, and the bridge over the river has fallen.’
He rode through the gates. Inside, hundreds of shanty dwellers were carrying stone to shore up the wall under the direction of a team of harried masons.
‘If the enemy can do such damage without even being seen, what will it be like when they attack in force?’ said Parby, who had been an officer many years ago. ‘How can they be kept out?’
As Rix assessed the defences through the lens of war, his spirits plummeted. Caulderon had outgrown its walls hundreds of years ago and almost as much of the city now lay outside as within. Houses, inns and warehouses had been built right up to the ancient walls, offering the enemy ten thousand hiding places for an attack. From the higher buildings they could fire into the city and it would take an army many times the size of Caulderon’s to defend it.
‘The only way to protect the city is to clear every building for two hundred yards around the wall,’ he said.
‘That would take weeks,’ said Parby. ‘And you’d have a thousand shopkeepers at your throat.’
‘They’ll change their minds when the enemy starts shooting pox pins at them.’
‘Well, at least the defences of Palace Ricinus are in good condition.’
‘But our walls run for half a mile,’ said Rix. ‘We’d need thousands of men to defend the palace, and we’ve only got three hundred. What are we going to do, Parby?’
‘Our damnedest!’ Parby looked around at his troops, then lowered his voice. ‘We’re glad you’re back, Lord Rixium. Someone has to take charge, and the men will follow you anywhere.’
It was the closest the starchy seneschal had ever come to criticising his lord and lady. ‘I’ll do my best,’ said Rix.
Despite the attack, the mood inside the city walls
was cheerful. Few people seemed to be taking the threat seriously.
‘We crushed the scum once and we’ll do it again,’ said a tiny, ancient woman, clay pipe clamped between her two remaining teeth. ‘Reckon I could take down three of ’em myself.’
Rix shook his head in disgust and rode on, past the public scalderies and steam rooms, now closed forever because the geyser fields had recently gone dry, then the silent steam-driven mills and crushers of the manufactory quarter. On every corner, crowds of cold, hungry people had gathered, and they all stared at him.
It was growing dark and the lamplighters were out, their tasselled nose plugs inserted, lighting the stink-damp fuelled street lamps. Rix kept a safe distance away. Stink-damp gas, also tapped from underground, was a deadly poison that you could only smell when it was at its thinnest. It was also heavier than air, tended to collect in cellars, sumps and hollows, and was wont to explode without warning.
His gloom deepened as they rode up the long drive of Palace Ricinus, then around the corner past the baroque greenhouses full of tall, spiky-leaved castor oil plants, the family symbol. He glanced towards the rear of the palace and his own tower. The navvies were still in their trench, fruitlessly winding asbestos around the hot water tubule to keep the remaining heat in. The water had been cooling for years and was now only tepid.
Lady Ricinus was waiting at the monumental front doors, as he had known she would be. The chief guard would have signalled her the moment Rix passed through the gates.
Sweat soaked through his shirt, front and back. He would sooner have faced another dozen of the enemy — at least he knew how to combat them. He had no idea how to deal with Lady Ricinus, but as a dutiful son not yet of age he could not disobey her direct orders. Not when Hightspall was at war.
He had not expected his father to be there as well. It was Lady Ricinus’s doing, of course, and to have enlisted Lord Ricinus in the cause of disciplining her errant son, her fury must have been monumental.
She would not display it in public, though. She stood outside the door, as rigidly upright as one of their drill sergeants, and presented her polished and powdered cheek for him to kiss.
‘Welcome home, Rixium,’ she said through a mouthful of canines.
CHAPTER 57
Lord Ricinus slouched against a marble column, reeking of so many kinds of grog that he might have been swilling from the slops bucket in one of the lakefront taverns. He probably had been, Rix thought ruefully. The last vestiges of Father’s discernment had gone up against the wall long ago.
‘Well done, Son,’ he said, shaking Rix’s hand.
Rix was shocked to discover that his father’s grip, once so crushing, was now soft, almost pulpy. A mirror to the inside?
‘Father?’ said Rix, not sure what he was referring to.
‘For fighting through the encircling hordes. Killed a good few of them, I dare say?’
‘A good few.’ Rix took a deep breath. He knew what his mother was going to say, but if he were quick he might bamboozle Lord Ricinus into pre-empting her. ‘Father, now we’re at war I request leave from my duties to our house, to fight for my country.’
Lord Ricinus understood, at least, and he wanted to say yes, but Lady Ricinus had got to him first.
‘Your mother requires a word with you, and you’ll obey her as you would me. Family unity is all in these troubled times, Son.’
‘Yes, Father,’ said Rix dismally, longing for a drink. Was he going to turn into his father? Were the seeds of his own destruction already sprouting in him?
‘Come within, Rixium,’ said Lady Ricinus. ‘There are matters we must discuss.’ Her iron-hard lips thinned to blades. She looked down. ‘Where’s the sword I gave you?’
‘I–I lent it to Tobry.’
‘Get. It. Back,’ she said through her teeth. ‘Keep it by you, always.’
It raised a question that increasingly bothered him. He looked to his father. ‘I can’t read the inscription. Where did the sword come from, anyway?’
Lord Ricinus made a face. ‘From her side of the family.’
‘Mother’s side?’ Rix cried. Her family were of no account and it diminished the sword, somehow. ‘Where did they get it?’
Lady Ricinus looked outraged but did not reply. A servant held the door open and Rix followed Lady Ricinus down the hall to her suite of offices. She had lost weight lately; her limbs were becoming stringy and it did not suit her.
Rix’s father was shambling into a side passage when she said, more sharply than she normally would have in public, ‘Lord Ricinus, if you please.’
He made a stumbling about-face.
Inside his mother’s offices, Rix waited for Lady Ricinus to seat herself at her tiny desk, and for Lord Ricinus to slump onto a settee close to the nearest decanter. He looked longingly at it and she waved an irritable hand. Rix perched on the edge of the other settee, which creaked under his weight. The immaculate chamber had a faint rotten egg smell from the stink-damp lamps, though only someone who had been out in the open would notice it. Rix smiled to himself.
His mother’s nostrils flared as she looked at him and he tensed, involuntarily. She was not half his weight yet she dominated him in every respect.
‘Did you set out to deliberately undermine all the work I have done for this house over the past three years, Rixium?’ she said quietly. She seldom raised her voice; she felt it to be vulgar. Her gaze filleted him. ‘Or are you so stupid that you don’t understand when I give you a simple instruction?’
‘I’ve been having the nightmares again,’ he said, knowing how lame he sounded. ‘I had to get away for a bit.’
‘To risk your life doing things any paid soldier of this house could do better?’
‘I didn’t start out — ’
‘Don’t lie. You went hunting jackal shifters.’
‘They’re harmless. Not much worse than wild dogs, really — ’
‘They’ve taken dozens of our peasants and plenty of our guards — and turned three of them. Three good men who had to be put down.’ She fixed him with a frosty eye. ‘I inspected the portrait in your absence …’
The damned portrait. Rix’s hands were trembling. He clenched them around his knees, fantasising about snatching the decanter from his astonished father and swigging the lot.
‘It’s nearly done,’ he lied. ‘It won’t take me long.’ The smile he put on felt like a death rictus.
‘Seven days remain until the Honouring, and if the portrait is not done it will be a slap across Lord Ricinus’s face. The powers will interpret it as disunity, and the survival of our house depends on absolute unity. You will not leave your quarters until the portrait is complete.’
‘But we’re at war,’ he cried, leaping from the settee. ‘Surely you’ve heard what the enemy did to Gullihoe, and half a dozen other towns?’
‘Craven surprise attacks. When they’re face to face with our mighty armies they’ll run like the rats they are.’
‘I don’t think so. They’ve been preparing for this for hundreds of years. They’ve got new weapons that we don’t know how to fight.’
‘What would you know about it?’ she said coldly.
‘I was in Gullihoe not long after they attacked. They destroyed the place without losing a single man.’
‘They’re all cowards in Gullihoe,’ she sneered. ‘I’ve spoken to the chancellor and he assured me that we have the enemy’s measure.’
‘I’ve got to see the chancellor; I have important news.’
‘It can wait.’
‘No, he’ll be expecting me. He might have a command for me.’ Rix knew he sounded desperate, but it was his only way out.
Her small eyes glowed and he knew the hope was going to be dashed. Lady Ricinus had anticipated this escape, and blocked it.
‘At your father’s request,’ she said, and her smile was so snake-like that he expected her to lick her lips with a forked tongue, ‘the chancellor has given you a special exemption — ’<
br />
This was too much. ‘I don’t want an exemption,’ Rix bellowed, leaping to his feet. ‘I want to do my duty.’
Two white spots appeared on her cheeks. ‘How dare you shout at me,’ she said, her voice even lower and more controlled. ‘Sit down, boy. You’re not of age and you have no heir. Perform that duty and we will allow you to risk your life, but only in the defence of Palace Ricinus.’
‘But …’ Rix looked imploringly towards his father. ‘Lord Ricinus … Father … you know I have to defend my country …’
Lord Ricinus buried his nose in his goblet. Rix wanted to smash it over his head. He steadied himself and made a last, desperate bid for freedom.
‘Everyone will call me coward, Father. They’ll say I’m hiding behind mother’s skirts because I’m too gutless to fight.’
Lord Ricinus looked up sharply at Lady Ricinus. ‘The boy has a point.’
‘No!’ said Lady Ricinus.
‘A coward and the son of a coward, that’s what they’ll say,’ Rix said bitterly.
Lady Ricinus rose deliberately to her feet, took six precise steps to Rix and struck him across the face. The blow rocked him, for all that he had been expecting it, but he controlled his face as rigidly as she did her own. She returned to her tiny desk.
‘House Ricinus takes no notice of barking curs,’ she said thinly. ‘The servants will not allow you out of your rooms without a note written in my hand — and not one borne by you.’
Damn. He had been planning on forging one — another of his less reputable skills.
‘I will allow you one bottle of wine a day,’ she went on, ‘since you take after your father and can’t produce anything worthwhile when sober.’ She studied her empty desk, her cruel mouth down-turned. ‘And one bed mate. I shall select one I deem suitable.’
‘Like hell!’ he cried. ‘I’ve had enough of you interfering in my life.’
‘Do you think I relish it?’
‘Yes!’ he cried. ‘I know you do.’
She studied him as if he were a recalcitrant child, her nostrils flaring. ‘Until you come of age, you will do as Lord Ricinus and I say. And then there’s Lagger. He’s always been a bad influence on you and I’m not sure you should associate — ’