by Ian Irvine
“I never wanted you to,” said Tobry. “Saving your people is the only thing to do.”
That did not make it any easier.
“All right.” Tali looked across at the base of the ramp, where the fighting was again furious. “Holm, what do you want me to do?”
“Can you even the odds a little?”
She studied the lines of pillars arcing across the chymical level. “There are two ways to even the odds — by reducing their numbers, or increasing ours.”
“Yes,” said Holm.
“And I’m thinking that those pillars aren’t far from the entrance to the Empound…”
“How can you be sure?” said Tobry.
“Remember that green mist I mentioned earlier? It burst through into the wax-nut grottoes last year, and they’re around to the left from the Empound. And that acidulator is where the mist came from.” She indicated its shattered ruins.
“Might be an idea to check your map first.”
“I don’t have it.” She had dropped it when Wil attacked. There wasn’t time to go looking for it.
“If I can bring down those pillars,” Tali continued, indicating two beyond the apparatus, “it might crack open the entrance to the Empound and free all the Pale. With luck…”
“Better hurry,” said Tobry, glancing across the bloody battlefield.
“Is your magery strong enough to bring down those columns?” said Holm. “They’re massive.”
“No, it isn’t. I was thinking about heatstone.”
Holm shook his head. “It works all right on cracked rock, but doesn’t do much to the solid stuff.”
“What if we stacked half a dozen bombasts around one of the pillars and set them off?”
“Too powerful,” said Holm. “It’d probably kill everyone here.”
“I don’t know what else to do,” said Tali.
“Better think, fast.”
“I need time,” she snapped. “Create a diversion!”
“I’m not sure…”
“Find a way to distract them from me — and make it big!”
Holm ran across to the nearest melee, then led dozens of Pale to the rear of the chymical level. Shortly a signal rocket soared across the ceiling, struck the wall near the ramp and exploded with a shower of pyrotechnic sparks and clouds of red smoke.
Another followed it, but dipped low and shattered one of the great glass alembics to pieces. It must have been a rocket flare for it burned with a dazzling blue-white light. A brown, fizzing liquid began to creep from the alembic, across the floor.
In the far corner, a bombast went off with a shattering roar, hurling pieces of rock and metal for fifty yards. A furnace toppled, scattering glowing coals everywhere and adding its white smoke to the thickening air. A swarm of shriek-arrows screamed across towards the ramp, followed by the brilliant red sparks of a dozen fire-flitters.
Now that’s a distraction, Tali thought. How could she help the Pale, though?
It occurred to Tali that, when she’d whacked Lyf’s wrythen with the iron book in his caverns, months ago, those few droplets of diluted alkoyl had hurt him badly. Could she attack Lyf with alkoyl? Wil had carried a flask of the stuff, though he had probably taken it with him, wherever he had gone. If he had gone. No, she dared not let Lyf get close enough to toss alkoyl at him. But it reminded her of something else…
Lucky none landed on the little heatstone, Errek had once said. Why not? What was alkoyl, anyway? She knew that it was obtained from somewhere way down the Hellish Conduit, but where did it come from? Could it truly come from the Engine’s weepings, as Wil had said?
It fostered an alarming chain of thought. Cythonians believed that the Engine was a destructive force, forever trying to tear the land apart with great eruptions, earthquakes and other catastrophes. The king-magery that Errek had invented ten thousand years ago was a healing force and, as long as the two were in balance, all was well.
The balance between healing and destruction had been maintained for eight thousand years, until Grandys had killed Lyf in an attempt to seize king-magery for himself. Instead, king-magery had been lost and the land had not been healed in the two thousand years since.
Now the balance was rapidly tipping towards destruction, the eruptions and quakes were increasing, and Errek had said it was almost at the point where it could not be stopped. Where a cataclysm could destroy the land itself.
Alkoyl, alkoyl? It wept from the destructive Engine, while king-magery was somehow locked up in heatstone. Could alkoyl be the antithesis to heatstone, just as king-magery was the healing force that balanced the chaos of the Engine? And if so, what would happen if alkoyl and heatstone were combined? Was that what Errek had been talking about?
Alkoyl was stored on this level, she knew. It had been mentioned during her escape from Cython, when the young woman’s leg had been eaten right through -
“She were up on the third elixerater,” the foreman had said, “toppin’ up the alkoyl level, but someone had taken the dribbler out. The whole flask poured in. Blew the elixerator to pieces, and a whole flask of precious alkoyl lost — ”
The someone who had done it surely had to be Wil, who knew where the alkoyl stocks were held; she had seen him sniffing it even before her escape from Cython. Was that what he had been up to when she’d glimpsed him earlier? Had he been looking for alkoyl on the store’s racks?
Tali had no idea what combining alkoyl and heatstone would do, but she had no other options. The enemy were still coming down the ramp and if she didn’t do something fast, the rebellion would end here.
Another rocket shot across the ceiling, then two more, each exploding in brilliant blue-white flares. A second bombast went off, followed by a long line of white fire that snaked a quarter of the way across the chymical level. Someone must have laid out a barrier of the red powder called thermitto, which burned so hot that it could cut straight through solid stone. Cythonian miners used it to cut and shape rock.
There was fighting everywhere now, furnaces and stills being toppled, retorts exploding in showers of glass, battles raging back and forth through the wreckage, though how they could see to fight Tali did not know. The smoke was thickening; in some places the visibility was only a few yards, and before long the fumes must bring everyone down.
She heard coughing behind her. Tali whirled. Lyf was hovering only ten yards away. She jumped.
“It’s time,” he said.
She bolted into the smoke, turned right around the smashed acidulator then left past a badly burned cluster of bodies. Lyf was not far behind, appearing and disappearing through the smoke. She ducked down, ran the other way and scuttled through the wreckage towards the shelves Wil had been climbing, taking advantage of every bit of cover she could. Lyf zoomed overhead; she froze under the overhang of what she assumed to be an elixerator until he disappeared in the smoke.
As she reached the rear of the chymical level she saw Wil again. He must have been lurking here all this time.
“Got to write ending,” he howled. “Engine going to end everything.”
He was staggering across the floor, dragging a platina demijohn behind him. He passed through the smoking crevice in the end wall and headed downwards.
Good riddance! She darted along the wall until she reached the shelves that held the alkoyl stores. The platina flasks were high up; she could see six of them. The walls and the shelves were badly corroded, the stone and metal partly eaten away. It was deadly stuff, and she shivered at the thought of what she was planning to do with it.
Tali dared not climb the shelves the way Wil had earlier — since Lyf was flying up near the ceiling, he was bound to spot her. What if she used magery to levitate a flask down? That would be perilous too; if she dropped it and alkoyl spilled on her, even a single drop, it would eat right through her.
Would levitating a flask of alkoyl constitute a great destruction? She did not think so — but what she was planning to do with it might. She focused her magery
on the central flask. Rise. It rose too quickly, and so did the one on its right. They were empty.
The third one was considerably heavier — so heavy that it wobbled as she levitated it and Tali felt a moment of panic that it was going to fall. It couldn’t break, being platina, but if the cap came off…
She managed to steady it and brought it down to the floor. Tali eyed the flask. A wisp of vapour was oozing out around the cap and she did not want to go anywhere near it, but everyone else here was putting their lives at risk and she could do no less.
“Charge!” an officer yelled in the guttural Cythonian accent. “Cut them down!”
The chymical level echoed to the sounds of hundreds of booted feet. She looked around but could see nothing through the smoke and wreckage save glows and flashes all over the place. Then she heard the distinctive thump of the seven fan levers being thrown, and the great box fans began to tick.
“Driving us into a corner!” yelled Holm. “If there’s anything you can do, do it now!”
She picked up the flask by its handle and headed across to where the spare heatstone blocks were stacked in that hip-high cube against the wall, not far from the bottom of the ramp where the battle had begun. If alkoyl set the heatstone off, it could knock most of the enemy down, perhaps block the ramp, and give the Pale the advantage. The cube wasn’t in the perfect place for that — it was a bit far away from the ramp — but she had to work with what she had.
The air thinned a little and she saw that there was still fighting at the ramp. She could go no further. She ducked beneath the overhang of a toppled furnace, took a deep breath, wrapped her hands in a piece of rag torn from the bottom of her shirt and twisted the cap off the flask.
The rag began to smoke; her fingers and palms were blistering. She wiped them on the floor. It began to smoke as well. She scrubbed her fingers against the stone. All right. She had to do it now.
She began to levitate the flask across the alchymical level. Did such magery constitute a great destruction? Not yet. Twenty yards to go. Ten.
“Don’t do it!” Lyf roared, and she saw him streaking towards the flask. “Everyone, get to shelter!”
Tali felt a twinge of alarm, but she had no choice; nothing else could help the Pale now. She tightened the grip of her magery on the flask. Five yards; three; one. The flask was above the cube of heatstone blocks when Lyf caught hold of it and tried to heave it away. She held it with all the strength of her magery; she had been saving it for this moment. But her strength wasn’t equal to his. He was dragging the flask out of her grasp.
She forced on the base and tried to tip the flask upside-down. He jerked it out of her grip. She thrust hard and the flask tipped sideways.
Tali was too far away to see what happened, but she envisaged it clearly in her mind’s eye. A single thick drop of alkoyl, glowing a faintly luminous green, quivered on the lip of the flask, then fell.
Lyf turned in mid-air and fled, still holding the flask. A stream of alkoyl poured from it, unheeded, onto the floor, which began to fizz and fume.
“Up the ramp!” he said in a magnified voice that echoed back and forth across the ruined chymical level.
The disciplined Cythonian troops disengaged from the fighting and obeyed instantly. Tali scrambled behind a column and covered her face with her hands.
Nothing happened. A minute passed. She could hear her heart thumping, but nothing else save the Cythonians pounding up the ramp and the soft-footed Pale pattering the other way.
She was about to peer around the side of the column when she remembered what had happened to Holm. Tali tightened her fists and counted down another minute. As she said fifty-four, something went zipppp from the direction of the cube of heatstone. There came a monumental flash of green light, which darkened to blue then violet.
She went blind for a few seconds. Her whole body began shuddering violently and she could not stop it. Her head was so heavy that she could not hold it up. Then the whole world seemed to implode, and a green flash, the echo of the first, speared through her head. She felt pain such as she had never felt before, as if something inside her head was collapsing into a mote and dragging everything surrounding it, including the bones of her skull, into the centre, to annihilation.
The pain vanished and she could see and hear again. Behind her, rock was shrieking and crashing and grinding as it was torn apart, but, oddly, there weren’t any pieces falling around her. There was no dust, either, though she could feel the air rushing past towards the cube of heatstone, faster and faster. She wasn’t game to move, or even open her eyes, but Tali dared a quick check with her gift.
And gasped. The cube of heatstone was gone, and so was the floor beneath it and the wall immediately behind it — it had been annihilated. The wall rock was shattering to small pieces, which were drawn down so fast that they made streaks, into the incandescent spot where the cube had been, then vanishing. The dust and smoke were hurtling into it too, and every object on the floor nearby, including the many dead and dying.
A great bite had been taken out of the enemy ranks — all those who had passed within thirty yards of the cube as they raced for the ramp had vanished. But that wasn’t all. Not nearly.
The incandescence faded, revealing a large hole in the floor. The hole in the wall behind it, and in the rocky ceiling above, were widening — the ceiling hole was already twenty yards across and growing rapidly as the unsupported rock crumbled and fell into oblivion. Thirty yards, fifty, eighty, a hundred and fifty, three hundred — was it going to suck all Cython down there?
Then it stopped.
Tali opened her eyes. She was trembling all over and her fingers and palms were still stinging. She rubbed them on the floor; several layers of blistered skin sloughed off. She rose slowly and looked around the other side of the pillar.
Lyf was nowhere to be seen. There was no dust in the air. No smoke. Nothing save a blue-green, shimmering rainbow arching above the hole in the floor, now slowly fading.
The annihilation hole formed a perfect oval five or six yards across, though behind it the wall rock had been eaten away for three or four times that distance, and it had led to the collapse of an enormous area above. Near the left-hand corner of the rear wall, the crevice down which Wil had passed was blackened and smoking.
Lyf came hurtling across from the far side. She expected him to turn on her, and if he had she could not have defended herself, but he raced past and up the curving ramp. At the top he scanned the collapsed area and his face hardened. He looked down at Tali.
“You’ve made your choice. Destruction. It can never be unmade.”
CHAPTER 103
Axil Grandys thrust aside the naked brunette he had been groping for the past hour, put the spy-scope to his eye and touched the wire-bound hilt of Maloch with his free hand. The trace slid into view, showing Rix and Glynnie together. Sooner or later they would lead him to Tali and, when he took the three of them, his revenge would be such a horror that people would still be talking about it in a thousand years.
The humiliation of Rix’s escape must be avenged, though Grandys had been planning to let him get away, anyway. The trace on Rix was intended to show Grandys where Tali had been hidden, and soon it would.
“Rufuss!” he bellowed.
The cadaverous man appeared at once, as if he had been lurking outside. He probably had. He was quite insane. But he could be relied on in certain matters.
“Grandys?” said Rufuss.
Grandys tossed him the spy-scope. “Follow Rixium, but don’t alert him. Eventually, he will lead you to Tali. When you can do so without being discovered, bring her to me unharmed.”
“What about the other two?”
“They can wait. Just Tali.”
“What will you do to her?” said Rufuss, licking his lips.
Grandys wasn’t going to mention the master pearl. He didn’t trust anyone with that knowledge, and certainly not Rufuss. “I’m going to have my revenge.”
&n
bsp; “Shall I bring her back here?”
Grandys suppressed his impatience. “Of course not — we won’t be here. We’re marching to war, overnight.”
“War with whom?”
“With everyone, of course.”
“But we’ll be outnumbered many times.”
“That’s how I like it. It will make my victory all the greater. Bring her to me at the battle plain of Reffering.”
CHAPTER 104
What had she done? Tali did not know. She looked across to the ramp. There was no fighting, no noise save for the rhythm of marching soldiers and the groans of the injured. The Pale stood in a circular mass in the wreckage-clotted centre of the chymical level, pressed close together as if for comfort. The enemy were racing up the ramp towards the part of Cython that had collapsed.
She used the pillar to pull herself to her feet and was edging towards the annihilation hole when she heard that sound again, zipppp, and felt a breeze on the back of her neck. Something that had been suspended in the hole had hurtled down like a piston, drawing air after it.
The rock around the hole looked solid. She crept to the edge and peered in, gingerly. All was black. Something glowed orange, deep down, then it went black again and the breeze died away.
“You all right?” said Holm.
His face was soot-stained, his grey hair had gone a smoky yellow-brown, and his eyes were red and watering.
“Don’t know,” said Tali, trembling. “I feel a trifle… fragile. Hot and cold at the same time.”
He peered up through the enormous hole in the wall and ceiling. It was dark up there and she could not tell what part of Cython had collapsed.
“What did you do?” said Holm.
“One drop of alkoyl landed on the heatstone stack. Just one drop.”
He frowned at her. She explained what she had done, and how Errek’s words had inspired her to do it.
“I think you’re right,” said Holm. “Alkoyl and heatstone must be the antithesis of each other, just as king-magery and the Engine are opposites. One creates, the other destroys, and both are necessary. But if that balance tilts — ”