Rebellion

CHAPTER 94

The guard post was open, the guard lying dead inside. The Pale streamed out behind Tali, men and women both, barefooted and silent.

She led them along to the subsistery. Outside its grinning-eel-shaped entrance was an open assembly area, the roof of which was held up with a dozen slender, carved columns. It was about fifty yards by forty, barely large enough to accommodate the three thousand Pale who had followed.

Holm and Tobry were waiting in the service corridor beside the assembly area, with Tali’s pack.

“It worked, then?” said Holm.

“Not exactly. Radl’s taken over.” Tali explained the new plan.

“It’s better than the previous plan,” said Holm. “I can’t say I ever liked it.”

“Neither did I,” said Tali. She slipped her pack on; there wasn’t time to get dressed. She felt hideously self-conscious wearing only a loincloth in front of her friends, but arming the Pale was more important than her own modesty. “Any news?”

“Had to kill a few guards,” said Tobry. “No sight of a courier, though.”

“Doesn’t mean anything,” said Tali. “He could have come a number of ways.”

Tobry was looking better since he’d thrown up, though it aroused the old fear — if he’d thrown up the potion before he’d absorbed all of it, how long before the shifter madness rose again?

It was another pointless worry. She would keep an eye on him and be ready to use the emergency dose if he started to shift… assuming she could. Tobry was a strong man and, in shifter form, twice as strong again. With an effort she buried that worry as well.

“Take this with you,” said Holm, handing her a little brass implement on a lanyard; a stubby cylinder with lenses at either end, like an inch-long telescope. “It’ll help with that problem we talked about earlier.”

“What problem?”

“Getting an overview of an underground battle. Tobry and I put it together while we waited.”

“But what is it?”

“A mage glass,” said Tobry. “Focus it on any part of your map and it’ll show you what’s happening there.”

“More or less,” said Holm.

“Can I talk to our captains with it? Give them orders?”

“Of course not.”

Then it probably wasn’t going to be much use, but she hung it around her neck.

“Have you got the map?” said Holm.

“In my pack.” She looked around. “Let’s get the Pale armed.”

Tobry and Holm had cracked the locks on the armoury and the nearby storerooms and laid out crates of swords, knives, chisels, hammers and many other kinds of tools. They had also broken into the heatstone store and opened boxes containing small cut pieces of heatstone, which were used for a myriad of heating purposes. As the last of the Pale collected their weapons, Tali’s head began to throb.

She was explaining how to hurl pieces of heatstone so they would break and go off like grenadoes when the clangours sounded from a dozen places at once, and a terrified cry echoed down the corridor.

“They’re coming!”

There was instant panic, Pale running in all directions, crashing into one another, jamming in the exits and trampling any who fell. Radl’s plan had failed before it began. The element of surprise had been lost, the guards at the exits were alerted, and now the little Pale army faced a greatly superior enemy.

“What do we do?” said Tali. They could not collapse the tunnel into the enemy quarters now — they could not get to it.

“Only two choices,” said Holm. “Attack or run. And I don’t like either.”

“We’ve nowhere to run to — if we can’t beat them, we’ll never get out. We’ve got to fight. Form up your ranks,” she yelled. “Weapons at the ready.”

No one took any notice. “This is hopeless,” said Tali, arming herself with more pieces of heatstone. “I don’t know why I came here.”

“At least they’ll die on their feet, not their knees.” Holm looked over her shoulder. “Here they come.”

A band of Cythonians were forcing their way in through the main entrance, at least fifty, though Tali wasn’t tall enough to see how many ranks there were behind the leaders. They were armed with short swords, the best weapon for fighting in confined spaces, and the officers among them wore leather armour.

Radl sprang up on a table. “They’re only a handful,” she bellowed. “We can take them.”

She leapt down with a chunk of heatstone in each hand, hurled them across the assembly area at the advancing enemy, and before the missiles landed she was racing forwards, armoured only by her loincloth and her amber skin.

Tali flung her heatstone at the same time. It burst at the feet of the leading rank of the enemy, the blast killing several and knocking others down, shrivelling their hair and setting their clothes alight. The Pale let out a ragged cheer.

“Come on!” screamed Radl.

Pain speared through Tali’s skull, as it always did when heatstone or sunstone was broken nearby though, to her dismay, none of the enemy had been knocked unconscious. Maybe that only happened with sunstone.

She staggered after Radl, and so did a horde of Pale. The enemy, disconcerted by the unprecedented defiance of their slaves, beat out the flames and retreated, leaving their dead and injured. The Pale swarmed over the bodies, arming themselves with swords, knives and chuck-lashes, which they hurled after the retreating Cythonians.

“Don’t waste the chuck-lashes,” Tali yelled, donning a leather chest plate and helmet from a small Cythonian woman, and taking an odd-shaped crossbow and a bag of quarrels. “Hold onto them until the enemy are close.”

The enemy surged again, and were again driven back, though this time more than half of the fallen were Pale. Tali wound the crossbow, aimed and fired. One less Cythonian to fight. But then they came again, in armour in a flying wedge.

“Use the heatstones!” Tali screamed. “Throw them all at the same time.”

It was no use. The Pale weren’t trained to fight as a team. The enemy drove deep into the milling slaves, and the slaughter was terrible.

The Pale dropped their heatstones, broke and ran backwards into the broad tunnel that ran from the assembly area towards the toadstool grottoes. The enemy came after them, killing more and more.

Holm caught Tali’s arm and shouted in her ear, though she could not make out what he was saying over the clamour.

“What?” she yelled, dropping the crossbow, which was an encumbrance at close quarters, and duelling a tall Cythonian left-handed.

Holm jerked her backwards just in time. “This isn’t working! They know how to fight down here and the Pale don’t. They aren’t using heatstone effectively — they’re letting the enemy get too close. Weight, strength and armour are everything in hand-to-hand battles, and the Pale don’t have it.”

“I know. But I don’t know what to do.”

“See if you can bring the roof down in front of the enemy.”

“How’s that going to help?”

“It’ll give the Pale a chance to regroup, and you the time to beat some useful tactics into them.”

“Have you got any heatstone?”

“Yes, here.” He thrust several chunks into her hands.

Tali’s head shrieked but she had to ignore it. “Radl! Bring them back. Back!”

The bloodiest fighting was just ahead, and Tali recognised Radl’s tall, splendid figure, fighting a desperate rear-guard action that was doomed to failure.

Tali hurled a piece of heatstone past her, taking down the two people Radl was fighting and opening up a gap between her and the next squad of the enemy. She checked the roof rock. She wasn’t sure how well heatstone would work against solid rock, so a spot where the roof was fissured was her best hope.

Several dozen armoured Cythonians were lumbering towards her, brandishing swords and flinging chuck-lashes that exploded to her left and right. She waited until they were only twenty feet away, then hurled another piece of heatstone up at the fissured tunnel roof, ten feet above them.

The burst brought down yards of rock and three of the enemy disappeared beneath the fall. The ones behind retreated, their clothes smoking, watching her warily. She hurled another chunk of heatstone and more roof caved in, rubble bouncing on rubble until billowing dust blocked all sight of the enemy.

Tali shoved the littlest piece of heatstone into her pouch and made her way back through the Pale to Holm. “Boost me up, quick.”

He lifted her onto his shoulders.

“Retreat,” Tali screamed. She had to scream or she would never have been heard. “This way.” She pointed down the tunnel, away from the enemy.

“Where to?” yelled the man with the big fists and the twisted foot. What was his name? Balun.

“To the exit,” someone shouted, and a band of Pale stampeded, carrying Holm and Tali along with them.

“We can’t reach the Merchantery Exit from here,” yelled another Pale. “We can’t get to any exit.”