Vengeance

CHAPTER 14

Lifka’s principal recreation was chewing her dinner and she spent several open-mouthed minutes churning each morsel to a slimy pulp. Eyes averted from the repulsive sight, Tali handed over three shrivelled Purple Pixies, keeping another two. She felt stronger now. She had a plan and she was going to escape.

Most of the slaves had left the subsistery, but she hurled her defiance at those who remained, and they looked away — no doubt they considered her doomed. Damn you! she thought. I’m going to escape. I’m going home.

While Lifka vacantly gnawed a bone, Tali surreptitiously poked a red and yellow girr-grub deep into the orange flesh of her poulter leg. At the thought of what the grub would do, her cheeks grew hot. Though surely one grub would not cause lasting harm.

Lifka pushed back her chair and Tali rose hastily, tucking a small piece of yam into the inside pocket of her loincloth for her pet mouse, Poon.

‘Left yer poulter leg,’ said Lifka tonelessly.

Any other slave, including Tali, would have stolen it. ‘Not hungry,’ she lied, swallowing a mouthful of saliva. ‘You can have it.’

‘Goody.’ Lifka pulled off shreds of crisp skin as she headed towards her cell, slipped them into her mouth and yawned. ‘Think I like ya after all.’

The grudging admission did not make Tali feel any better. And what if Lifka was blamed for the crimes Tali was planning to commit, or punished as her collaborator? Surely no Cythonian would imagine Lifka to be part of a conspiracy? But if Tali did escape they would have to blame someone.

Her cheeks burnt, but Iusia and Mia cried out for justice and Tali had no other hope of getting it. No slave would help her. Anyone who learned her plans would betray her, and Tinyhead was coming in a few hours. If Lifka had to suffer for a day or two, that was too bad.

‘Goin’ ta bed,’ said Lifka.

Tali walked with her past the ever-guarded gates of the Cythonians’ living area, whose name translated as Away from Home, then around a bend and through the carved entry hall of the Pale’s Empound, where the wall dioramas changed dramatically.

No gentle, domestic-scale scenery here. Rather, a series of savage landscapes — cataracts in roaring flood, catastrophic eruptions, a forest torn apart by a hurricane, monster waves eating away at empty shores — and everywhere among the devastation, hungry eyes smouldered, warning the Pale of the consequences of trying to escape. Tali could not look at them. Even if she did get away, how would she cross such alien places to civilisation?

The enemy was paranoid about insurrection and every adult slave had her own tiny stone cell, these being clustered in tiers around each assembly area like chunks of curved honeycomb around an oval plate.

‘If you don’t eat that drumstick,’ said Tali as they approached Lifka’s cell, ‘someone will steal it.’

‘Mind yer business.’ Lifka went into her cell and closed the door.

Anyone else would have gobbled the poulter leg at once. It had not occurred to Tali that Lifka would keep it for later. Now what was she supposed to do? Tinyhead might have lied. He could be coming now. She turned and kept turning, afraid that he would appear behind her with his blowfly tongue hanging out.

No, taking Tali out of Cython and selling her to the enemy was an act of treachery punishable by execution. Tinyhead would abduct her when there were no guards around to ask uncomfortable questions. He would come late at night.

The logic was sound, but Tinyhead also hated her and nothing he’d said could be trusted. She paced around the assembly area, which was empty, listening each time she passed Lifka’s door, but heard nothing to indicate that she had swallowed the girr-grub.

A shadow hobbled past the entry to the Empound, fifty or sixty yards away. Tali’s heart stopped, thinking it was Tinyhead, but the figure was too small and skinny. In the dim light it could have been Mad Wil. What had he meant by ‘You the one’?

She told herself that he wasn’t called Mad Wil for nothing. But he was also known for his morrow-sight, and he had seemed to recognise her. Tali checked again. The figure was too short for Wil. It must be a slave going to the squattery.

She squinted through the triangular peephole in Lifka’s door. The slave girl was on her bunk, apparently asleep. Tali pushed on the door, then hesitated. To attack another Pale, to injure someone who had done her no harm, went against everything her mother had brought her up to believe in.

If you can’t do it, you die.

She rolled three prickly girr-grubs in the palm of her hand. Should she use them all, to make sure? No, it might be a fatal dose. Tali put two back and kept the smallest, a squirming, blind-eyed creature whose brilliant red and yellow zigzags shrieked danger.

As she put her hand to the painted door, another of her mother’s sayings came to mind — harm no innocent. Lifka wasn’t exactly innocent, and she certainly wasn’t nice, but she hadn’t harmed Tali either. Yet Tali had sworn justice on her mother’s body, on Mia’s blood. She had to keep those promises and there was no other way.

Heart pounding, throat choked down to a thread, she eased Lifka’s door open and slipped into the gloomy cell. The walls were unpainted, the floor waxy smooth from a thousand years of pacing slaves, and the solitary decoration was Lifka’s red-brown loincloth hanging from a peg jammed into a crack. She lay on the stone bed-shelf, eyes closed and slack mouth wide, asleep.

Her legs and arms were hard with muscle from years of lugging heavy sunstones, and Tali dared not risk a fight she was bound to lose. She had to do it while Lifka was asleep.

Squeezing the girr-grub until its green innards oozed out, Tali reached towards Lifka’s mouth, then hesitated. Could a whole girr-grub seriously harm the girl, even kill her?

Lifka’s eyes shot open and before Tali could move a hard fist slammed into her jaw, lifting her off her feet. She hit the floor, head ringing, then Lifka was on her, slapping her face and clawing at her eyes in a frenzy.

Tali tried to push her off but Lifka jerked her up by the shoulders and shook her violently. Her small teeth were bared and her eyes had the sick gleam Tali had seen when Tinyhead had come into the subsistery — Lifka wanted blood. She lifted Tali higher. What was she doing? She was planning to slam her head against the floor, smash it open like a melon, and Tali was not strong enough to stop her.

She thrust the squashed girr-grub deep into Lifka’s open mouth and jammed the heel of her hand against it. In an instant the girl’s hands fell away, she began to jerk and shudder, then went rigid.

Tali scrabbled backwards out of reach. Lifka’s eyes were starting from their sockets, green-tinged mucus flooding from her nose and mouth. She heaved, made a gagging sound, her face went scarlet and her open hands trembled as if on springs.

Was she choking? Having a fit? Fatally poisoned? Tali was bending over the girl when she jack-knifed upright and a torrent of vomit roared over Tali’s left shoulder, onto the wall. Yellow, fizzing streaks oozed down, the stone bubbling from Lifka’s stomach acids. Flecks of vomit stung Tali’s neck and ear as Lifka fell back.

The smell made her belly heave. She fought it down and turned Lifka onto her side so she would not choke. Blood-tinged mucus dribbled from her swollen mouth. Her lips and tongue were blistered, her fingers opened and closed. She moaned.

Tali wiped her face, tilted her head then gave her a drink from the clay jug beside the bed. The water came straight up.

‘Sorry,’ Tali whispered. ‘I’m really, really sorry.’

Tali was lifting her onto the bed-shelf, as gently as she could, when Lifka’s fist struck her under the chin. The back of Tali’s head hit the floor and the cell went out of focus.

She roused slowly, pain splitting her head in two, lying on the floor with no memory of what she was doing there. She had been doing something urgent. What? The memory would not come, though she knew that a long time had passed and she should not be here.

Tali rolled over and forced herself to her knees. The back of her head had a lump and her whole jaw ached …

Someone groaned nearby and she smelled vomit. The cell reeked of it — Lifka’s cell. The memories flooded back. How long had she been unconscious? Tali scrambled up.

Lifka was breathing shallowly. Yellow blisters clustered around her mouth and vomit had dried on her left cheek. What if she was seriously ill? It was too late to back out now. Tali put her hands on the girl’s belly, then on her raw mouth, and worked the best healing charm she knew.

There was nothing more she could do. Every passing minute increased the probability of Tinyhead coming. She had to go now.

Tali studied the girl’s spasming figure. Was the deception possible? Tali’s own lack of shoulder calluses was an obvious difference, one that only a deception or concealment spell could fix, and getting that spell was her next task.

She could emulate the protruding lip, the low, colourless voice, the slow movements. What else? Tali’s green loincloth marked her as a slave from the grotto gardens, so she swapped it for the red-brown rag the sunstone carriers wore.

A series of little dot-like scars ran around Lifka’s left ankle, though Tali could not imagine what had caused them. Lifka’s feet were broader, lightly tanned, and her arches were flattened from carrying the heavy sunstones, but who looked at a slave’s feet? As long as slaves were hard-working and obedient, they were invisible, weren’t they?

No, best be sure. Once Tali reached the sunstone station she would use a glamour to disguise her feet — assuming someone could release her gift. And if not, she would die.

‘Why?’ groaned Lifka. A tsunami rolled up her belly and she fountained masticated vegetables onto her own face.

Tali wiped the muck out of the girl’s eyes and rinsed her off. ‘Tinyhead will kill me if I don’t escape.’

‘Tell guards — cut everythin’ off,’ Lifka slurred. ‘Glad. Hate you!’ She turned her face to the wall.

Tali squirmed. ‘I’m really sorry. I had no choice.’

‘Won’t escape. Die, horribly, ha, ha — blurrggghh.’ Up it came again, streaked with green bile now.

Tali washed the vomit off with the last of the water. ‘I’m going to get away,’ she said firmly, though she was beginning to doubt that she’d get as far as the sunstone shaft. If such a simple plan could go so wrong so quickly, how could she pull off the difficult parts?

‘Didn’t tell ya everythin’, did I?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Not sayin’.’ Lifka bared slime-coated teeth, puked onto the wall beside her bed-shelf and lay still, breath rasping in her raw throat.

After tossing a ragweed blanket over the girl, Tali took back the poulter leg, then hurried down the painted tunnels to her own cell, ten minutes away, picking the girr-grub out of the poulter flesh as she walked. She felt self-conscious in the sunstone carrier’s red-brown loincloth and, if she encountered anyone who knew Lifka, she was lost.

This time she saw no one. In her cell, Tali was washing her hands when she realised how easily she could have saved Mia. If she’d only thought to shove a mucky finger into Mia’s mouth, girr-grub slime would have made her violently ill. Tali could have cleaned up the birth mess, hidden the dead baby until Banj had gone and the healers had taken Mia away, then buried it in the composter. By the time Mia recovered from the girr-grub she might have come to terms with her loss, and no one need ever have known about the grey baby.

Tali stared at the wall, rubbing her eyes with the backs of her hands. Why hadn’t that occurred to her? No matter how hopeless things were, there was always a way out. She just had to find it.

Her pet mouse squeaked. Poon had grey fur, small feet and big ears, and Tali loved her. She poked the piece of yam into the ramshackle cage she had fashioned from poulter bones and gum. Poon took the yam in her front paws, ate it with delicate nibbles and looked up for more.

‘Sorry,’ said Tali. ‘Had greater need of it.’ She swallowed. ‘Poon, I’ve got to set you free.’

She unlatched the cage, stroked the mouse’s ears and set her on the floor. ‘Go,’ she whispered. ‘Run and hide.’

Poon stood up on her back legs, reaching for the swinging cage.

‘I’m scared to leave my cage, too,’ said Tali.