Vengeance

CHAPTER 11

As Rix took his sword back, the shadows dwindled and the nightmare faded. ‘Oddly, I feel better when it’s in my hand.’

He swept it through the air. He was not a reckless man — unlike Tobry when one of those dark moods overcame him — but now Rix longed for the cleansing of violent action.

‘And that doesn’t bother you?’

‘Why should it?’

‘Where did you say the sword came from?’

‘No idea. It’s been in the family for ages.’ Rix was irritated by Tobry’s persistence. ‘Let’s go hunting.’

‘Not up there.’

‘There are more predators around than last year, and they’re hungrier.’

‘Stands to reason, with the winters getting harder every year. But I don’t — ’

‘Winter is weeks away, yet they’re already attacking our outlying steadings and killing our serfs. Our scouts say they come from the Crag.’

‘That’s why House Ricinus has an army,’ said Tobry. ‘It’s not your responsibility.’

‘Army isn’t as big as you think.’

‘Then hire mercenaries.’

Rix looked away. ‘It’s not a good time.’

‘Why ever not? House Ricinus could buy the chancellor himself.’

Rix started; Tobry was awkwardly close to the truth. ‘Our treasury is a trifle short.’

‘Oh, come now,’ said Tobry.

How could Rix tell him about the wealth his drunken father had squandered, or the fortunes outlaid by social-climbing Lady Ricinus in bribes and kickbacks to a purpose only she knew? Even Rix, inexperienced though he was, could have managed House Ricinus better.

‘As the heir to House Ricinus,’ he said pompously, ‘it’s my duty to protect my lands and my people.’ It was another excuse. To avoid going home he would even lie to his best friend.

Tobry shook his head in disbelief. ‘You’re a throwback. The heir never risks his own life — especially when he has no brothers or sisters.’

Rix had often wondered why his mother, who was obsessed with the family line, had only one child. Had she refused to do it a second time, or did the problem lie with his father? Was that why Lord Ricinus drank, or was the problem because of his drinking?

‘Earlier, you said I was running away from my problems, and it’s true.’

‘It’s an endearing weakness,’ said Tobry. ‘I wasn’t suggesting you become responsible.’ He spat on the rocks.

‘I come of age in a few weeks. It’s time I started acting like the next lord.’

‘Until you are of age, leave the worrying to your parents.’

‘They’re not doing any worrying!’ Rix cried. ‘They’re making things worse.’

‘Besides, you need to marry and produce an heir.’

Rix frowned, not sure what he was hinting at. ‘Coming from you, that’s rich.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘You’re five years older. Where’s your heir?’

‘I’ve got nothing to pass on save a ruined name. I don’t need an heir.’ He studied Rix sidelong, grinning. ‘Actually, a good woman could be the making of you. I might have a word to Lady Ricinus about my cousin, Callista. Lovely girl, after a while you hardly notice the crossed eyes — ’

‘You swine! Don’t you dare.’

His friend arched an eyebrow. ‘Touched upon a sore point, have I?’

‘Mother has lined up half a dozen candidates already,’ snapped Rix. ‘All mindless, simpering and controllable.’

‘It’s a mother’s right to propose suitable wives,’ Tobry said sententiously. ‘And as a dutiful son …’

‘I’m not marrying some idiot who’ll run from my bed to my mother, taking her orders and reporting everything I do.’

‘You certainly wouldn’t want Lady Ricinus to know about your bedtime activities.’

‘I thought we came up here to kill something!’ Rix snarled. ‘If you don’t shut up it might well be you.’

He turned Leather towards the valley entrance, checked his spear was to hand, his bow and quiver, then shook the reins. Leather looked him in the eye as if to say, Do you really expect me to go in there?

‘The nag has more sense than either of us,’ said Tobry wryly.

It was dark as twilight under the canopy of the blood-bark trees, which clung to their leaves even in winter. The trunks, clotted with oozing red sap like the bloody wounds in his nightmares, grew so close together that he could not make out the obsidian walls of the valley to either hand. He felt their stifling presence, though.

The forest was silent apart from the horses’ breathing and the muffled thud of hoof beats. A narrow trail led up the valley beside a partly frozen rivulet and Rix made out the tracks of rabbits, a scrub turkey and two kinds of deer. Shortly he stopped in a glade, looking down at the remains of a hare — ears, tail, back feet and some intestines draped like a string of bubbles across the bloody snow.

‘Whatever ate that,’ said Tobry, no longer smiling, ‘it left no tracks. Yet a falling feather would mark this snow.’ He patted his trembling horse on the back of the head. ‘Steady, Beetle.’

Rix’s gut tightened. ‘I’ve heard reports of jackal shifters up here.’

Small creatures, no bigger than scrawny children when shifted to human form, but either as jackals or jackal-men they were deadly in a pack.

Tobry greyed beneath his tan. ‘I wish you’d mentioned that before.’

‘I only just thought of it. Where do they come from? The pits of Cython, I’ll bet.’

Tobry did not reply.

‘And to think the Pale serve the enemy there,’ said Rix. ‘Stinking traitors.’

‘Perhaps they don’t have a choice.’

‘Everyone has a choice.’

‘Including House Ricinus’s serfs,’ Tobry said sardonically. ‘They can work like dogs for a basin of gruel, or they can starve.’

‘They work for us. In return, we protect them, and that’s getting harder every year.’ Rix swallowed and looked around, hand on sword. ‘Tobe, do you think Hightspall is haunted?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘The winters are worse every year, our crops fail one season out of four, and now the ice — ’

‘Even the gramarye our ancestors brought here isn’t a shadow of what it was. Everything fails, everything decays, and soon the world will end.’ Tobry said it with ghoulish relish.

‘That’s not what I meant,’ Rix said hastily.

‘Really? What did you mean?’

‘Do you think our land is rising up against us?’

‘I’m not sure Hightspall was ever ours.’

‘Now you’re talking like the enemy,’ Rix snapped.

‘They were here first. We stole their land and drove them underground.’

Rix spat in the snow. ‘It was all the filthy savages deserved after they broke their sworn oath to the Five Heroes.’ He made the sacred helix over his head, heart and sword arm.

‘I don’t share your worship of our noble founders,’ said Tobry.

It was so close to sacrilege that Rix wanted to thump him. Sometimes a punch in the mouth was the only rebuttal for a man who did not believe in anything.

‘And I wouldn’t advise you to think of the Cythonians as savages,’ Tobry went on. ‘They’re a clever, cultured people.’

Rix snorted. ‘Where are their monuments, their palaces, their — ?’ Remembering the defaced statues, he broke off.

‘In the first years of the war, Axil Grandys ordered them razed to ground level. According to the Axilead, as I’m sure you know …’

‘Haven’t read it,’ Rix scowled. ‘Who’s got time to waste reading books?’

‘Don’t you want to know your enemy? It says that the sky turned red from their burning libraries. Red as the soil watered with their blood.’

‘They started it.’ Rix hastily changed the subject. ‘Anyway, something has to be done about the shifters.’

‘If you’d told me before I’d never have encouraged you.’ Tobry rose in his stirrups to check all around them. Sweat shone on his brow and his left knee had a tremor.

Though they had often hunted together, and frequently talked about the hunting and killing of shifters, Rix had never encountered one, and this was a side of Tobry that he had never seen before. Rix had never known Tobry to be afraid of anything. Surely he wasn’t worried about the little beasts? ‘What’s the matter?’

‘You do know what happened to my grandpere? My mother’s father?’

‘Can’t say that I do.’

‘It was hushed up on the orders of the chancellor himself. Would have been disastrous for morale.’

After a pause, Rix said, ‘I’m going on. If it’s too much for you, go home.’ It was a low thing to say, for no man was braver than Tobry, but a fire was burning in Rix’s veins and he did not take it back.

Tobry forced a smile. ‘I’ll not run out on you. Though,’ he persisted, ‘surely it’s the job of your house magians to deal with shifters and other uncanny creatures?’

‘What sort of lord orders hirelings out to do the dangerous work?’

Tobry’s look said, Every other lord but you.

They rode up a steep track where little snow had settled and the ground to either side was ankle-deep in purple moss. The blood-barks had given way to tall pines whose branches were crusted with cinnamon-scented resin. Between the hanging needles, the sky was as grey as the zinc roof sheeting on Rix’s tower.

‘There’s enough snow in those clouds to bury this valley thigh-deep,’ said Tobry. ‘If we don’t turn back soon, we won’t be going home for a week.’

Rix could imagine Lady Ricinus’s fury when she’d heard that he had sneaked out of the palace in the middle of the night. She would curse him for giving his word about the portrait then breaking it, for letting down his father on his Honouring Day, for jeopardising her plans for House Ricinus …

In a numbing flash of insight, he understood that his mother had never loved him. He was just the means to raise House Ricinus to the most exalted heights, and if she were thwarted she would turn on him, as he had often seen her savage his father.

‘Are you all right?’ said Tobry.

Rix realised that he had cried out. ‘It’s nothing.’ But the realisation that he was just a tool to Lady Ricinus was everything, everything.

Even so, until he came of age he owed his mother obedience, and Rix did not neglect his responsibilities. Well, apart from the portrait, he thought uncomfortably.

‘We’ll just go to the bluff, then turn back.’

He did not want to go home today. Once he returned to the palace the nightmares would come again, and the voice he could never remember, ordering him to do something dreadful …

The resin pines terminated in a crescent of open ground littered with fallen boulders. Beyond, a vine thicket was so closely intergrown that no one could have pushed through it, though paths made by small animals wove beneath the tangled vegetation.

‘And there she is,’ said Tobry.

The wall of indurated rock that was Precipitous Crag reared another mile above them, black, cold and forbidding.

‘There are caves here somewhere,’ said Rix. ‘But I’d want a hundred men at my back before going inside one. Keep an eye out for tracks.’

The vine thicket ran parallel to the curving base of the crag. As they rode towards it, Rix’s stomach clenched — the boulder-strewn crescent was perfect for predators waiting in ambush.

‘What did happen to your grandfather, Tobe?’

The muscles knotted along his friend’s jawline. ‘Bitten by a shifter. Stupidly, our house magians tried to save him.’

‘Why was that a mistake?’

Tobry swung down off Beetle and pointed at something with his spear. ‘Fresh tracks.’

The backs of Rix’s hands prickled; he could not escape the feeling that they had been lured into this confined space. ‘Made by what?’

Tobry crouched in the snow. ‘These paw prints are as big across as my hand.’

As Rix was dismounting, Tobry dropped his spear, drew his sword and cried, ‘Stay there!’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘No claw marks.’

‘Retractable claws? So it’s not a wolf or any other kind of dog — ’

Leather whinnied and went up on her back legs. Rix clung on with his knees, realising he should not have looked around, but up.

Tobry was sprinting for his horse when a red-and-black cat the size of a lion streaked down from an overhanging branch. Its whiptail extended behind it straight as a broom handle, its claws were extended, its small ears flattened against its head.

‘Go left!’ Rix bellowed. If the cat struck, it would bite through Tobry’s spine — or tear his throat out.

Tobry threw himself sideways and the cat missed, though two claws ripped through the back of his left shoulder. The sword flew from his hand and he landed hard, rolling over through the snow and leaving red smudges behind him.

‘Caitsthe!’ he gasped, eyes bulging from his sockets. ‘Rix, run! You can’t save me.’

The most dangerous shifter of all. And Tobry was terrified of shifters.

The caitsthe’s leonine head swung towards Rix, as if it had recognised his name. To his knowledge, nobody had ever killed a caitsthe in single combat. He hurled his spear, but Leather dropped to four hooves and it missed by the length of the shifter’s black whiskers.

Rix’s free hand was already raising his massive, wyverin-rib bow. As he nocked an arrow to the string, the caitsthe sprang onto Tobry’s back, crushing him into the snow, which spurted up all around him like a trodden-on puffball. The shifter opened its jaws wide enough to bite off Tobry’s head, then turned to Rix as if taunting him.

Tobry twisted sideways and there was a paralysed terror in his eyes that Rix had never seen before. It was not the fear of being maimed or dying, but something deeper, more primal. Then, with an effort Rix could only admire, Tobry pulled himself out of the paralysis.

‘Fly!’ he gasped. ‘You can’t kill it with a hundred arrows.’

Injuring the caitsthe could only make things worse, but if Rix didn’t fire his dearest friend was dead.