Vengeance

CHAPTER 100

An hour after midnight the golden threads drawn from Rannilt snapped.

She sighed and shivered, but did not wake. Tali prayed that this was a good sign, and that Lyf had failed in whatever he was doing, but logic whispered that he had succeeded so well he no longer needed to rob a child.

Suddenly Tali’s shell burst open and the call was like five alarms going off together in Tali’s head — Lyf’s pearl was calling, and so were the other three, di-DA-doh, di-DA-doh, and her own pearl was answering. And then she felt a jarring rasp, as though a bone reamer were being sharpened.

Tali shot up in the blankets, her heart thundering, then scrambled across and shook Tobry’s shoulder. ‘He’s found me.’

He woke at once, if, indeed, he had been sleeping. ‘Who?’

‘Deroe, with the three pearls, and Lyf knows it too. I’ve got to go down. Tobry … will you help me?’ She wasn’t sure he would.

‘I want Rannilt saved as much as you do,’ he said deliberately. ‘And our enemies thwarted.’

But not a word about her. It hurt, but she had created the mess and she must live with it. She dressed quickly and stood looking down at the child. ‘I’m afraid to leave her here in case she … slips away.’

‘Bring her. The pearls are her only chance — if you get them.’

And if I don’t, Tali thought, and I probably won’t, better we die together than alone. She hefted Rannilt, who seemed to weigh nothing now. Tobry stood waiting, sword at his side. Rix’s eyes were still racing under their lids, and Glynnie and Benn were asleep, her arm protectively around him.

‘Why is the cellar at the heart of it?’ Tali said quietly.

‘It was once the private temple of Cythe’s kings. And it’s the only place Lyf could travel to as a wrythen.’

‘But why did Axil Grandys preserve it when he’d done his best to erase Cythe from the map? What did he hope to find in the cellar?’

Tobry had no answer.

‘What do you know about Deroe?’ said Tali.

‘Nothing. I haven’t found anyone who’s met him.’

Tobry led the way down, following the path the high constable and chief magian had broken with sledgehammers on the night of the Honouring. Tali followed, her thumbs pricking and her throat so dry that each breath rasped. The passage was as dark as a tomb, yet before they were within thirty yards of the cellar she knew it lay ahead. The hackle-raising smell gave it away: dry rot, mould, caked grime and the faint stench of long dead, poisoned rats.

Memories overwhelmed her. She was a little girl again, hand in hand with Iusia in her bid for freedom and trusting her mother’s judgement utterly. If only she had whispered her worries about Tinyhead …

Tobry slid the stone door open and went in, raising his lantern. Tali’s skin crawled — the cellar might have been closed the day she’d fled from it and only now reopened. All was as she remembered it — the broken crates she’d hidden between, the ferocious stone raptors, the black bench where they had laid her mother. She could not look at it or she would never stop remembering.

‘This is an evil place,’ she said, frozen in the doorway. ‘I can feel it. Something terrible happened here before the murders. Long before.’

‘But not wholly evil,’ said Tobry, softening at her stricken look. ‘In olden times, the kings of Cythe worked their healing magery on the land from here.’

‘How could anyone have the power to change the land?’

‘King-magery was rooted in the land.’ He walked around the cellar, elbrot out, touching things with it. ‘And Cythonian magery wasn’t spread out across thousands of magians, as ours is. King-magery was concentrated in one person, trained from birth to use it wisely and only for healing.’

‘But to heal this great land …’ It was beyond imagining.

‘Hightspall’s bounty comes at the cost of violent eruptions, devastating floods and landslides, and disasters of many other kinds. It’s a land much in need of healing and this is where the kings of Cythe did it. And because they did, pockets of good still linger here.’

‘Enough to heal Rannilt?’

‘I don’t know.’ Tobry stopped by a stone box the size of a large coffin, with a cracked lid. He slid it aside, looked in and said gently, ‘Here is best, for you and for her.’

She knew what lay inside; the chief constable had mentioned it after the Honouring. Tali paced across, as if in a funeral procession, and looked down at the bones of her mother and her three older ancestors who had been hosts to the ebony pearls. She had not known her ancestors — they had all died young — but her eyes burnt that her beautiful mother had been reduced to this sad little pile of bones.

‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I do feel something good here.’

He slid the lid over the bones. Tali laid Rannilt on the dusty surface, wrapped in her covers, and she sighed and breathed more steadily. Perhaps some protection did linger in the gracile bones of the four Pale women killed here.

Thump-thump.

‘What was that?’ Tali whirled, staring into a misty green gloom that Tobry’s lantern could not dispel.

‘Sounded like someone jumping down a step.’

Di-DA-doh, di-DA-doh!

‘Oh, poor Rix, leave him alone …’ said Rannilt in a croaky little voice. Her eyes were screwed tightly shut, as if she did not want to see.

‘What’s she talking about?’ said Tobry.

‘Lyf must be waking the compulsion on Rix.’ The call-clamour grew, di-DA-doh, di-DA-doh, along with the spiking headache, and now the three calls were coming from the one place. ‘And Deroe’s coming. He knows I’m here. Hide! I’ll try to gain his confidence, then you come in behind him and take the pearls.’

Thump-thump.

Tobry went out into the very pitch of darkness. Tali turned down the lantern and waited. The greenish mist hung in curtains, the foul air was thick in her nostrils and her terror was rising. She was in the murder cellar and if this went wrong she would suffer the fate that all her life she had dreaded. The fate that Rix’s sketch had divined for her. That Rix himself would do to her, if the compulsion on him could not be broken. But how could it be broken when no one knew how Lyf had put it on him?

Thump-thump. The call-clamour faded.

An old man materialised two feet above the floor, right in front of her, and grabbed her wrist before she could dart away. He landed unsteadily, thump-thump, made a thread-like mesh of light with his fingers and she saw a darting head on a wrinkled, tortoise neck. The grey eyes were rimmed with black; a spreading cloudiness partly obscured the pupils. Cracked, flaking skin ran up his arms into the cavernous sleeves.

His grip was an old man’s grip, feeble and shaky and no match for hers, save that a sweaty numbness had spread out along her arm from his touch. She fought the terror — where were the pearls? Tobry could not attack until he knew Deroe had them. The magian’s hands were empty and his grey robes had no pockets she could see, though they could be on the inside.

He scratched the crusted skin on his left wrist and grey flakes, brown with old blood, stuck under his long nails. Raising his hand, Deroe stared at the flakes and the blood. His mouth hung open and he was breathing noisily, as though it was a struggle to draw in enough air. His breath wasn’t so much foul as dead, and it fogged her mind.

‘What do you want?’ Tali croaked.

She had to stick to the plan — get him to hold Lyf back, then deal with Deroe. Only with his pearls would she have a chance of fighting Lyf.

He scratched at his wrist again, breaking the papery skin. Muddy, grey-brown blood ebbed out.

‘Lyf’s coming,’ said Tali, eyeing the stone head on the end wall. She had seen Lyf’s eyes there as a girl. ‘And he has a body now, a better one than yours.’

‘But I have his pearls,’ Deroe crowed. The high pitch, like a boy whose voice had not yet broken, jarred with the decrepit old man’s body.

‘Wards!’ he said. A series of fist-sized globes appeared, studding the edges of the oval ceiling. They were pretty things, patterned in grey and white swirls like polished agate, and each had a moving glow as though a perpetual flame flickered inside.

‘He won’t get through now,’ Deroe piped. ‘Barrier!’

A grey, transparent sheet blocked the doorway. Tobry hit it with his shoulder from the other side but bounced off.

Tali’s numbness faded a little. ‘You paid House Ricinus to cut out the ebony pearls. You had my mother killed, and my grandmothers back for three generations. Why?’

‘Wasn’t my fault,’ he whined, staring at the top of her head as if figuring out where to cut. ‘I didn’t grow the ebony pearls in them.’

‘You ordered their deaths.’

‘They should have stayed away. They made me kill them.’

‘You contemptible little worm!’ She struck him in the face.

He fell to his knees and it surged out of him like the draining of a blocked privy. ‘You can’t know what it’s like, being possessed. What did I do to him? I was just a lad, exploring in the ruins, collecting things no one wanted. I didn’t mean any harm. Then he slithered intomy head and squatted there like a toad, sneering at my terror and pouring his venom into me. He has such hate for us … such hate …’

His fingernails tore the skin of his wrist again, three long, ebbing cuts. It would have been the time to strike, had she known where the pearls were.

‘He forced me to take the first pearl for him,’ said Deroe. ‘She was such a pretty little thing, your great-great-grandmother, and he made me gouge the pearl out of her head. Ah, the pain! I feel it to this day. I had no choice; I could not resist him. Not then.’

His whining self-justification sickened her. How could his suffering compare to the victims’? But she forced herself to say, ‘That must have been agony for you.’

‘It was,’ he wailed, as if this was his first confession. ‘It was. And none my fault. He made me do it.’

‘Tell me about my great-grandmother,’ said Tali. ‘How did it go with her?’

‘Lyf thought he still controlled me,’ said Deroe with a wink and a leer, as though she ought to admire his murderous cunning, ‘but the touch of the first pearl had woken a gift I never knew existed. A tiny gift, no match for his, yet with it I drew magery from him whenever he possessed me. And when he did not, which was most of the time, I made my plans to outwit him and take the second pearl for myself.’

‘With the aid of House Ricinus.’

‘They were greedy for gold, and with the magery I’d learned from Lyf I could find cartloads of gold. The old Lady of Ricinus extracted the pearl for me, held it in the host’s life’s blood until Lyf was so weak that the possession broke and he was drawn back to his caverns, then I gave her gold for it.’

You stinking mongrel, how dare you boast about killing my ancestors? If Tali’s magery had come then, she would have splattered the walls with him. He didn’t seem like a man at all; rather, a selfish, immature but incredibly powerful boy trapped in an old man’s decaying body. She could not predict what he would do next.

‘Clever,’ she said, nearly choking on her words. ‘But Lyf must have been furious.’

‘He was bound to his caverns, he could not come after it.’

‘But when he repossessed you — ’

‘I’d already put the pearl out of reach. You have no idea of the agony I endured, but he could neither find the pearl nor force me to give it up.’

‘And the same for the third and fourth pearls, when they were mature?’

‘Lyf dared not send his own people after the pearls, and could not take them himself, yet he could not possess anyone but me. He had no choice but to use me. Each time he tried harder to outwit me; each time I beat him, ha, ha. I have three, and he only has one.’

His voice had a sing-song quality now. From the look in his eyes, he expected her to applaud his cleverness. ‘Once I have the master pearl I’ll be able to command his pearl, too. And then,’ he said viciously, ‘I’ll stamp him to pieces like a toad in the garden.’

Tali fought the urge to smash his yellow teeth in. ‘Aren’t you afraid I’ll use the master pearl to control your three? I too have a gift, magian.’

His face lit and Tali realised, uncomfortably, that he had been hoping she would ask.

‘I worked that out as a boy,’ he chortled, ‘after he made me take the first pearl. Your thrice-grandmother had the gift stronger than you, and she tried to fight me, the stupid bitch! But the pearls aren’t meant to be used within the host and she fell into a swoon, bleeding from the eyes and ears.’ He shuddered. ‘The emotional connections are too dangerous; the host can never control it.’

No wonder Tali’s every attempt to take control of her gift had failed, and would always fail. It could not be done.

‘How is the pearl made safe, then?’ she said dully.

He came closer. ‘It must be cut from the living host, severing all connection with her, then healed for three days in her healing blood.’

As Lady Ricinus had done, putting the pearl inside that green-metal glove filled with Iusia’s blood. ‘And killing the host,’ Tali said.

Closer. ‘The trauma is great, but it’s separation from the pearl that kills.’

If I can’t rely on the master pearl, Tali thought, I’ll have to outwit him of his three. And then, deliver him to my own justice, since there’s none to be had in Caulderon.

Oh, how he would pay.

Reaching out with his free hand, he stroked the top of her head, though not in any sensuous way. Deroe cared nothing for the human flesh, only what had been cultured within.

Tali’s scalp crept and her mother’s cries echoed within her skull, then the splintery gouging sound she had not recognised as a little girl. She tried to dart away but toppled forwards. His magery had fixed the soles of her boots to the floor, and now Tali knew fear as she had never known it before. If she could not break his magery, his tools would soon bore through her skull.

Deroe sniggered, turned to the black bench and reached up with his hands. The mesh of light threads that had been clinging to his fingers hung in the air there, illuminating the bench with a ragged cone of light. The greenish mist drifted back and forth through it, highlighting the edges of the cone. The poisoned-rat smell thickened in Tali’s nostrils.

He wiped the bench with a rag. The black, slightly domed bench top had the gleam of the ebony pearl in Rix’s finished painting — a pearl at the centre of the skull-shaped cellar like the pearl in her mother’s head, and now her own.

He walked into the darkness. Objects clicked and rattled as though he was feeling in a cluttered cupboard. Tali heaved and lunged but could not tear free. Deroe came back carrying a small, upside-down parasol on a stand, though the silver ribs lacked any fabric covering.

‘What’s that for?’ she said.

He did not reply.

In his other hand he had a circular disc made of white wood, as thick through as her closed fist and the diameter of her open hand. Five round depressions had been cut into the top, four at the corners of a square and the fifth at the centre.

He took three black pearls from a case lined with yellow velvet and put them in the depressions at three corners of the square. Tali struggled to draw breath. Each pearl had been cultured in one of her ancestors. Which was her mother’s? They looked identical. The top right depression, and the slightly larger hollow in the middle, remained empty.

After fixing the parasol upright on a small table near the head of the bench, Deroe closed and opened its metal arms, set the pearls beneath, rotated the disc by ninety degrees, then nodded.

Now me. And Tali still could not move her feet.

He took a small hammer and narrow chisel from a bag. Was that to crack her skull? Now a thin-bladed saw, a steel gouger and two reamers, which he handled as gingerly as a first-day apprentice in a slaughterhouse. As though he was afraid to use them …

A savage urge for vengeance boiled inside her. If she got the chance she would jam them through his wattled throat. But how could she beat him? What were his weaknesses?

In a land where it was rare to live beyond sixty, he had to be double that, at least. Either he had lengthened his life by uncanny means, or the pearls had. But the greater the magery, the greater the cost, and it had cost Deroe dearly. Was that why he seemed as decayed inside as he was decrepit outside? And with those clouded eyes, his sight must be poor. If she moved swiftly once he freed her feet, she might beat him.

He turned and shuffled towards her. Tali tried to look like a terrified slave. It wasn’t hard; the urge to scream was overwhelming. Her stomach muscles were so tight that it was difficult to breathe. Outside, Tobry was hacking at the grey barrier and attacking it with flashes of emerald magery, but he made no impression on it.

As Deroe reached out, she avoided his eyes in case her own gave her away. His crusted hand touched her biceps and her feet came free. She swung, fast as a striking adder, burying her fist in his belly below the diaphragm and driving it up.

Tali was strong for her size and there was so much power behind her small fist that she felt his papery skin tear. The blow forced air from his lungs and he doubled over, gasping. His spell broke and the light threads went out, leaving the cellar in darkness save for the faintest glimmer from her lantern, which she had left on the other side of the stacked crates.

Tali dived for the pearls.

But Deroe called them up, high above her head, to him.