Vengeance ttr-1

by Ian Irvine

  ‘What are you so happy about?’ snapped Rix.

  ‘Bad day?’

  ‘I hate Father! I hate Mother even more, and I curse this stinking portrait to the Pits of Perdition.’

  Tobry inspected it. ‘It’s going well, all things considered. Though the subject seems even darker than before. Grimmer. Bleaker.’

  ‘I can only paint what I paint.’ He put his mouth close to Tobry’s ear. ‘Any luck?’

  ‘Yes. Come upstairs.’

  Tobry had smuggled in a long length of woven strapping with hooks on either end. ‘We’ll go out the far window and over the wall into Tumbrel Town. It’ll be easier that way.’

  ‘And we won’t be seen?’

  ‘I’ve spread a few coins around. The shanty kids were glad to have them. Come on.’

  Outside the window it was overcast, freezing and black as a caitsthe’s livers. Rix could not see a thing save for the enemy’s blazing arrows arcing over the distant city wall.

  ‘Don’t they ever stop?’

  ‘Only to come back with a new weapon,’ said Tobry. ‘It was fire ribbon this morning — horrible stuff that sticks to the skin and burns all the way down to the bone.’

  ‘Don’t tell me any more. I want to enjoy the next hour.’

  ‘It’ll be nice to see Rannilt again,’ said Tobry.

  ‘It will,’ said Rix. He did not mention Tali, and neither did Tobry, though Rix knew he was still trying to find her.

  As they went down, a strong wind kept banging Rix against the side of his tower, grating the skin off his knuckles, but it was worth it.

  ‘This is just like old times,’ he said when they touched down at the bottom and crept across the grounds. ‘You and me, sneaking out after we’d been confined to our quarters.’

  ‘Save that there’s a war on and we’re losing.’

  ‘Cheerful sod, aren’t you?’

  ‘Sorry. I’ve got a bad feeling about tonight.’

  ‘Anything in particular?’

  ‘Everything.’

  They climbed over an unguarded section of wall and down into an alley. Two small boys came scampering up. Tobry gave them a silver coin each.

  ‘Wow!’ Rix heard the smaller boy say. ‘Thanks, Lord Tobry.’

  ‘Guard our climbing irons and keep a sharp lookout for my enemies,’ Tobry said in a melodramatic whisper, ‘and there’ll be another one each when we get back.’

  ‘What enemies?’ said Rix. ‘You could stagger from one side of Tumbrel Town to the other in a drunken stupor and the meanest footpad wouldn’t touch you.’

  ‘It makes the lads feel that they matter. They don’t have much in their lives.’

  ‘Speaking of which, I wonder how Rannilt is getting on with Luzia?’

  ‘Like a chick with a mother hen, last I saw,’ said Tobry. ‘Rannilt only stops talking to draw breath. It’s done my cynical old heart a power of good to see her cared for; and see her looking after Luzia, too.’

  They made their way through the alleys to a slightly better part of Tumbrel Town, where Rix stopped at a small, single-roomed hut and rapped at the door. There was no answer.

  ‘It’s late,’ said Tobry. ‘Luzia’s probably asleep.’

  ‘She never goes to bed before two,’ said Rix.

  ‘She’s always up, a’doing.’ ‘She’s old now. Rannilt’s probably tired her out.’

  Rix knocked again, and a third time. ‘I hope she’s not ill.’

  ‘I told Rannilt what to do if Luzia took a turn, and left coin for a healer. Though with those healing hands of hers, Rannilt would hardly need one.’

  ‘It’s a mighty healer that can heal old age,’ said Rix.

  He lifted the latch, put his head through the door and shivers crept across his scalp again. ‘Something’s not right, Tobe. What’s that smell?’ He knew, though. It was the smell that haunted his nightmares.

  ‘Blood,’ said Tobry, pushing past and creating a fist of light in the dark room. ‘Don’t come in.’

  Too late. Dear old Luzia, Luzia who had made Rix’s childhood bearable, was dead in her red-drenched bed. Her throat had been savagely cut, only the vertebrae holding her head in place. And it had been done recently, for she was still warm.

  Rix had seen plenty of violence in his time and would have said he was inured to it, but this was like one of his nightmares brought to life. His head was whirlpooling and if Tobry had not helped him to a three-legged stool he would have fallen down. Waves of hot and cold passed through his middle; he felt like throwing up. He looked away, praying that he had imagined it, looked back and gagged.

  ‘Who?’ he gasped. ‘Not the girl, surely?’

  Tobry did not dignify that with an answer. He was walking around the little hut, touching the plank table, water jug, the ends of the bloody bed and the door latch, as if reading their stories through his fingertips.

  ‘Where’s Rannilt?’ said Rix, clutching the sides of his stool, which seemed to be rocking like a dinghy in a heavy sea. ‘Have they killed her too?’

  ‘Shut up, I’m trying to think.’

  Tobry waved his elbrot around the room. People-shaped shadows rose and fell, though if they had a story to tell Rix could not read it.

  Abruptly, Tobry bent over Luzia, holding the elbrot to the hideous gash across her throat. ‘Incredible!’ he hissed.

  ‘What?’ said Rix. The sickness was getting worse; it was all he could do to remain in the hut.

  ‘The ends of the gash are healed,’ said Tobry.

  Rix could not look. Not at the ruin of poor, kindly Luzia. ‘Ugh,’ he said, hand over his mouth.

  ‘It’s healed in for a good inch on either side. I wouldn’t have thought that possible.’ He looked around at Rix. ‘Luzia didn’t heal, did she?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Rannilt must have tried to save her. She must have a mighty gift.’

  ‘But not good enough to replace all that blood.’

  ‘Where’s she run to?’ said Tobry. ‘Wait here. I’ll take a look outside.’

  Rix lurched to the door. Nothing could keep him in this slaughterhouse by himself. Why Luzia? She’d never hurt anyone. Why, why?

  Tobry found no sign of Rannilt.

  ‘Poor child,’ he said. ‘After finding Luzia like that, and trying to save her, she must be out of her mind.’

  Rix did not reply. The nightmare was taking over and he had no idea how Tobry got him back over the wall and up into his tower. He vaguely remembered the reeking alley, and his friend taking care to pay the lookout boys the two silvers he had promised them. For a man who professed to believe in nothing, Tobry was meticulous in discharging his obligations.

  After that, all was as much a blur as the fevered month when Rix had been ten. It was impossible that Tobry’s wiry frame could have hauled Rix’s bulk three levels up to the window of his tower. Utterly impossible, yet when Rix awoke in his bed at dawn the following morning, the scrape marks down his chest and arms could only be explained by his being dragged up over raw-cut stone.

  He snapped upright and all he could see was blood. Blood and the gaping mouth and staring eyes of an old woman who had never had a bad word for anyone. A woman he had loved as he could never have loved his own mother.

  ‘How could anyone do that to her?’ Rix said, and wept until his dry eyelids rasped like grit rubbed on a plate. ‘In her whole life, Luzia never hurt a soul.’

  ‘We live in troubled times,’ said Tobry, holding Rix in his arms. ‘There’s violence everywhere. People will rob an old lady for the contents of her pantry — ’

  Something rang false in his tone, and Rix thrust him away. ‘Never lie to me, Tobe. You don’t believe that for a minute.’

  After a pause, Tobry said, ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Why did she die?’

  ‘To stop her talking to you about the time of your fever, I expect.’

  ‘Are you saying — ?’

  ‘I point no fingers. Anyone inside the palace might have murdered
Luzia. Or anyone outside.’

  ‘How would they know I wanted to talk to her?’

  ‘You know what the palace is like.’

  ‘I don’t, actually.’

  ‘The servants gossip, and so do all the noble hangers-on.’

  Rix had no discrimination left. ‘People like you, you mean?’

  There was a longer pause before Tobry replied, in tones carefully neutral, though not neutral enough to disguise his feelings from someone who knew him as well as Rix did. Rix had hurt him.

  ‘If someone knows a piece of gossip or scandal,’ said Tobry, ‘everyone in the palace knows. Plus their families, and everyone who visits the palace or trades with it.’

  ‘Why did she have to die, Tobe? Why Luzia?’ It came out as a howl.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Rix staggered out of bed. ‘Get me a drink.’

  Tobry had brought a flask with him, circumventing Lady Ricinus’s prohibition on more than one bottle a day, and this was a good one. Rix lurched up to his studio and emptied a quarter of it down his throat in one swallow.

  ‘That’s spirits,’ said Tobry, taking the flask, ‘and if you drink the lot it’s liable to kill you.’

  ‘Father drinks three bottles of spirits a day,’ Rix snarled, making a grab for the flask.

  Tobry held it out of reach. ‘Then he must have a liver the size of a whale. What are you doing?’

  Rix had gone to his storeroom door. ‘I have no idea.’

  He dragged out the whited-out sketch, filled his brushes with scum-brown and miasma-green, and swiftly recaptured the essence of the dark chamber. Stroking another brush through luminous white pigment, he carved out the woman on the table. He did not know what he was painting; the strokes appeared on the canvas without conscious thought and, once they were there, he had no idea what they meant.

  ‘What about her face?’ said Tobry.

  Rix blinked drunkenly at the sketch. The woman on the black bench — it was definitely a woman now, wearing only a rag around her hips — was small and slender, with pale skin and hair, though her face was a blank oval. The shadows at her head were hardly more defined than before, though he could tell that they signified a man and a woman.

  He looked for the child away to the side, but she was not there. This time his unconscious mind had not conjured her at all.

  ‘Rix?’ said Tobry.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you really need to know what happened, all that time ago? If it killed Luzia — ’

  ‘Don’t say it.’ Her death had struck Rix as few others could have. It was as though his real mother had been murdered. ‘Why did Luzia have to die, Tobe? Explain that to me.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘ It’s not fair.’

  ‘The world isn’t fair,’ said Tobry. He paused, then said, ‘That’s what Tali was trying to tell you.’

  CHAPTER 62

  Tali huddled in the thorn bush as Tobry and Rannilt galloped away. Half a minute later she heard one of the riders follow. The other did not.

  He must be watching, waiting for any movement that would give her away. It was freezing here, the bush was prickling her, the sky was rocking wildly and she needed to pee, but Tali did not move. She was an old hand at hiding, the best in Cython, and she had the patience of a slave.

  She needed it. A small, wrinkled man with the hooded eyes of a hawk climbed onto the wall and paced along it, bobbing and ducking his head. He went up the overgrown carriage drive, around the back and reappeared from the other side. He went out and she heard the horse walking down the street.

  The temptation to move was overwhelming, her need to pee desperate. Tali clenched down and waited, and ten minutes later she saw him again, head bobbing, hawk eyes scanning the grounds from an inconspicuous corner of the wall.

  Only after another hour did she dare to wriggle out, turn the other way and gaze upon her ancestral home. Torgrist Manor was small and plain and very old. But it was hers. Her eyes misted.

  Part of the left-hand wall had collapsed, the front door had rotted away and most of the roof was gone. And yet, as Tali looked down a broad hall floored in black flagstones caked with dust, she felt such a powerful sense of rightness that she could hardly breathe. This is my place, she thought. I’m home.

  But the searchers would come back. She could not stay here. Besides, Rix was her best clue and she had to get into the palace. She felt sure there had to be a tunnel from Torgrist Manor to Palace Ricinus. Days ago, Tobry had said that the last Lady Torgrist had tried to escape underground with her children to the palace down the hill.

  Tali sat in each cobwebbed, roofless room until its smell was embedded in her memory, then crawled back and forth, searching for that distinctive subterranean odour.

  Shortly, at the corner of a wall behind the stairs, she scented a tunnel, then located the sensitive stone that opened into it. Time had corroded the pins on which the stone rotated and she had to clean out all the joins. She levered it open with the head of a bronze shovel she found out the back, and she was in.

  The sky stopped heaving. Going underground was like being home and she felt an inexplicable yearning for the familiar, orderly spaces of Cython. Safe at last, Tali curled up in a dry corner of the tunnel and did not wake for a day and a half.

  Hunger roused her. She had nothing to eat and her thigh throbbed with every movement, though there were no signs of infection. She limped down the tunnel, which descended steeply for fifty yards before running on down a gentle decline.

  After walking for twenty minutes or more, Tali caught a whiff of a faint, unpleasant odour — mould and muck, rotting wood and things long dead and decayed to nothing — and her hair stirred. The mother and children had either been walled up to die, or had been slaughtered in the tunnels, to keep the plague at bay. She fought the fear down. The spirits of her own family could not hurt her.

  Besides, the smell was chillingly familiar. She sniffed again and her hackles rose: dry rot, mould, grime and the faint whiff of vermin poisoned a long time ago. What did that remind her of?

  She held her lantern up. Was it coming from the roof? No; the seeps running down the passage walls were clear and odourless. She shrugged and moved on.

  Having lived all her life in Cython, where there were no signposts, Tali was used to making maps in her head. From the direction and downward slope of the passage, and the number of steps she had walked, she had to be under the grounds of Palace Ricinus. Shortly she reached a dead end and smelled a fruity odour. Wine?

  Tali sat down to rest her leg. She had wasted too many opportunities with Rix. She should have confronted him and demanded to know why he had been in the cellar at the time of the murder. If she put it to him bluntly, his reaction was bound to give something away.

  She found a concealed door, tugged and centuries of dirt broke away, but as she put her head through, she heard the call again. She stood in the doorway, trembling, and after a few seconds she heard a new answer.

  It was neither the distant, elegant note she had heard several times now, which she associated with the wrythen, nor the false mimicry of his depraved facinore. This answer was a discordant three-note sequence, di-DA- doh, strong and clear as though it came from somewhere close by, di-DA- doh, di-DA- doh, repeating over and over like an unanswered question. And there was something about it that put her nerves on edge — a ragged, self-pitying whimper. Definitely not the wrythen.

  Someone else was looking for her, and who else could it be but her mother’s killers? Di-DA- doh?Di-DA- doh? Tali swayed and had to grab hold of the door jamb. From the clarity of the notes they had to be within Caulderon.

  Her initial impulse was to run back to the manor, but the comfort it offered was an illusion. Nowhere was safe. Everyone wanted something from her, or wanted to do something to her, and no one except Rix and Tobry would help her. And with the wrythen trying to possess Tobry, could even he be trusted utterly?

  Di-DA- doh?Di-DA- doh? A whining, boy-li
ke voice spoke in her head. It wasn’t my fault. The stupid bitch made me kill her.

  Tali froze. It wasn’t the voice of the big man who had come after her in the cellar. Was there another conspirator? The voice had a yammering tone she had never heard before and would never forget.

  Fury, bright and burning, drove away her panic. These people had killed her mother; they had to pay. Momentarily, Tali indulged herself with thoughts of black and bloody revenge, of killing them the same way, but at the thought of doing such violence to another her stomach heaved and her cheeks burnt.

  She reminded herself that she was an agent of justice, and justice had to be sure, even-handed and unemotional. With an effort, she closed the shell and the di-DA- doh sequence was gone.

  Once her knees had steadied, Tali slipped through the doorway and found herself in a real cellar, rectangular with a low, flat ceiling. Barrels of beer, wine and mead stood in wooden racks. Across the way, racks of dusty bottles extended for a hundred feet. Beyond that, steps led up. She sat on one of the middle steps, wondering how to proceed.

  Since she knew nothing about the palace, making any kind of plan was impossible. First, get in, then worry about finding Rix. But what if she could not? What if he would not see her? No, they were friends now. He would help her, and hide her. And she really wanted to see Tobry again.

  She was heading up the steps when a door above her clicked. She blew out her lantern and hid behind the racked bottles, only to realise that the cellar reeked of burnt fish oil and the smell was bound to be noticed.

  A big man came staggering down, the light of his lantern dazzling her. What was the matter with him? Belching like a drain, he swayed to the racks of bottles, took the first that came to hand and turned away. He was so drunk that he could barely stand up.

  The man turned back, his flabby belly wobbling, and she smelled sour drink on his breath. He began to sniff the air; he knew someone had been here. What if he searched the cellar? She took hold of a bottle. If he came close she would have to attack an innocent man, as she had already attacked poor, stupid Lifka. Tali’s quest was leading her on paths her mother would have found hard to forgive.