Vengeance

CHAPTER 39

‘You’re a piece of work, you really are,’ said Tobry when he finally caught up to Rix, miles from the oasis.

Dark was settling shroud-like over the Seethings, though the way ahead was lit by wisps of marsh light and uncanny yellow glows from several of the lifeless pools.

Leather’s flanks were crusted with dried foam. Rix had dismounted and was leading her along a burnt-black isthmus meandering between a series of steaming ponds. The ground here was so hard that the horses’ hooves clicked with each step. The air had an alkaline tang and left a slippery, soapy taste in the mouth.

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ The anger had passed and he felt a sick emptiness now. He had behaved shamefully, but … how dare a Pale speak to him that way?

‘I do. Tali said — ’

‘I don’t want to hear it.’ Rix glared at his friend. ‘You fancy her. That’s why you’re taking her side.’

Tobry tried to smile but it wasn’t convincing. ‘You know me — I never get attached. And Tali said something rather interesting — ’

‘Whatever she said, I don’t believe it.’

Tobry’s jaw was clenched and so was his fist. ‘She said that the Pale spring from noble children, a hundred and forty-four of them, given by Hightspall as hostages to Cython a thousand years ago. And never ransomed.’

Rix kicked a stone into the pool to his right. It sank below the surface with a viscous gloop, as though it had plopped into a vat of glycerine. ‘You must like the wench. I’ve never seen you get so worked up about anything.’

Tobry ground his teeth and continued. ‘She said the Pale are enslaved, and beaten for the smallest infringement. She said her best friend was beheaded yesterday because she used magery to save herself from a flogging.’

‘She’s lying,’ Rix said half-heartedly, for he knew how hard it was to lie to Tobry. He could read people the way anyone else might read a map. Rix stared ahead, refusing to meet his friend’s eyes.

‘Tali said magery is forbidden in Cython.’

‘We know that.’

‘Will you listen!’ roared Tobry. ‘They kill every slave who shows a gift for it — even children. They were going to kill that little urchin hiding behind the tussocks — ’

Rix swung around. ‘WHAT?’

‘You heard.’

‘They kill children, because they have the gift?’

‘That’s what she said.’

Rix did not want to believe it, yet Tobry could sniff out a half-truth a mile away. ‘Can the Pale really spring from child hostages?’

‘Never ransomed, Tali said. Hightspall’s noblest children, abandoned to the enemy. She was furious about it.’

‘Why haven’t we heard about it before? Everyone knows the Pale are traitors. All the history books say so.’

‘How would you know?’ said Tobry. ‘You’ve never read a schoolbook in your life.’

Rix scowled. ‘Who has time for that rubbish?’

‘You saw the bruises on Tali, and the little girl was covered in them. Does that sound like they serve willingly?’

‘All right, I believe you,’ Rix snarled. If Tali was telling the truth, it made his behaviour even more inexcusable. ‘How did they escape from Cython?’

‘A question the chancellor will certainly be asking, once he hears.’ Tobry came up close. ‘Listen! Tali said they’re going to war in ten days.’

At last! Rix thought. ‘Then we’d better ride home like a hurricane.’ He took hold of the saddle horn.

‘Not yet.’

‘Why not?’ Rix snapped. If there was to be a war, his life would mean something at last.

‘The Caulderon road can’t be far ahead. We can send warnings with the first riders we meet — they’ll be a lot faster than our worn-out horses. Then we’re going back.’

Rix prepared to swing into the saddle. ‘There isn’t time.’

Tobry’s fingers dug into Rix’s shoulder, holding him back. ‘You’ve acted dishonourably to a woman and abandoned a child in danger. You can’t run away.’

‘I’m not running away,’ said Rix, all the more irritated with Tobry for pointing out the uncomfortable truth. Rix had offered Tali help, then insulted her and fled. His cheeks burnt. ‘All right! But if they’re not at the oasis, I’m not searching the Seethings for them. My house is in danger. My country.’

They had just reached the Caulderon road, a broad, well-built thoroughfare paved with slabs of white sandstone, when a crimson fireball erupted many miles to their right, bursting and billowing upwards in silence.

‘What the hell was that?’ said Rix. ‘Was it an eruption?’ Though it wasn’t in the right place. The Vomits were west of here, not east.

Small white flashes twinkled around the base of the fireball, and shortly flames lit up the rising cloud. Uncanny flames, not orange or red, but a lurid, unnatural crimson.

‘I’ve never seen any fire like that before,’ Tobry said slowly.

The ground quivered and thunder rumbled, though not normal thunder. It had a brittle, crackling quality.

‘New volcanoes sometimes appear from nowhere.’

‘It’s not a volcano.’ Tobry consulted his map by a glimmer of mage light. ‘Close to Gullihoe, I’d say.’

‘Then what is it?’ The answer was obvious but Rix did not want to jinx them by putting it into words. He looked up and down the road but saw no lights, no travellers. ‘We’d better find out.’

As they rode across undulating country, the dry grass swishing around the horses’ fetlocks, more fireballs appeared behind them. Two were towards the south coast of the lake on the far side of the Seethings, three others in the direction of Caulderon. Rix wheeled Leather about and drew his sword.

‘It’s war! Come on.’

Tobry caught the reins. ‘They’ll be long gone by the time we can reach Caulderon.’

‘What if they’re not? What if they’re in the city?’ Was this what his nightmares meant? Were they blasting the palace walls right now, butchering his helpless people and murdering children they suspected of having the gift?

‘Caulderon isn’t that unprepared. We can’t do anything for them, but we may be able to help Gullihoe.’

Rix strained forwards. ‘I’ve got to fight.’

‘We could learn vital intelligence in Gullihoe.’ Rix did not reply. ‘Besides,’ Tobry added, ‘the enemy might still be there. You could put that sword to good use.’

It was well after ten o’clock when they crested a gravel-topped hill and looked down on the smoke-wreathed ruins of the stone town. The central arch of the thousand-year-old bridge across the river had fallen. The granaries, warehouses and barges along the shore were ablaze, and hundreds of cottages, and the mayoral mansion lay in ruins.

‘What can have done this?’ said Rix. He sniffed the smoky air. ‘That’s not blasting powder.’

‘Something far stronger,’ Tobry said quietly. ‘I don’t like this, Rix.’

They rode down, keeping to the shadows, though it soon became evident that the attackers had gone. Dead lay everywhere in the main street, women, children and men, yet few bore any sign of injury.

‘What’s going on?’ said Rix, more unnerved than he would have been by a battlefield full of dead. ‘How can the enemy kill without leaving a trace?’

He crouched beside an elegantly dressed old woman who lay in the middle of the street as if she had fallen asleep. A red wig lay beside her; her own hair was white, wispy and scant. The only sign of trauma was a dribble of blood from her ears. The child beside her had a bloody nose and red eyes, but no bruises or evident wounds.

‘I’m not seeing any enemy dead,’ said Tobry, who was walking down the middle of the street, sword in hand. ‘Nor any spears, arrows or other abandoned weapons. Nothing to indicate a fight.’

Rix checked another group of bodies: a stout woman with grey hair, dressed like a nurse, and two little boys in nightgowns, all dead without a mark on them. Rix felt a sharp pain in the centre of his chest, as though they had been his own sons.

Tobry emerged from the doorway of a substantial home. ‘There’s been no looting either.’

‘What kind of enemy doesn’t loot afterwards?’

A long pause, then Tobry said, ‘One that values nothing of ours. Or expects to soon have it all.’

‘I don’t like that kind of talk.’

Someone groaned, not far away. He swung down and made his way towards a half-naked figure convulsing in the shadow cast by a broken wall, a short, balding man with skinny little legs and a massive belly.

‘Stop!’ Tobry said urgently.

Rix froze, blade out, eyes searching the shadows. Tobry conjured a tiny light from his fingertips and came up beside him.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Rix.

The light touched on the man’s bare back and side, where the skin was embedded with dozens of small spines like red pins.

‘Looks like he’s backed into a needlebush,’ Rix added.

The man made a clotted sound in his throat. His watering eyes were blank — he did not appear to have seen them. Rix was bending over when Tobry drove a shoulder into him, knocking him out of the way.

‘Don’t touch anything!’

Rix took another look at the man, whose skin was red and raised around each of the spines. Purple nodules were swelling visibly as though a handful of bean seeds were embedded under the skin. He felt his hackles rising.

‘Those aren’t needlebush spines,’ said Tobry.

‘What are they?’

The man kicked with a bare foot, rolled onto his back, screamed and wrenched himself onto his side again, thrashing and keening. His nails tore at one of the nodules, which burst, discharging red-black pus with a foul smell. Rix leapt backwards.

Tobry passed his elbrot over the man and subvocalised several words. A blurred shadow appeared around him, kicking and squirming, then came into focus. It lurched up from the ground, reeled about and staggered backwards down the street. His shirt rose from the ground, fitted itself to him. He began to scratch and claw at himself as the sky rained millions of tiny streaks. Rix made out a thin squeal, the lost echo of the man’s first cry, perhaps, and the shadow faded into the night.

Tobry crouched and sniffed. ‘A new kind of pox, not one I’ve seen before, and it came from that rain of needles fired into Gullihoe by the enemy. Back away, Rix. You can’t do anything for him.’

Rix’s stomach heaved at the sight and the smell. ‘There’s no hope?’

‘He’s going to die most unpleasantly.’

‘I’ll put him out of his misery, then.’

‘At the cost of your own life?’

‘Tobe?’ said Rix.

‘The pestilence may be contagious.’

‘What pox is it?’

‘How the hell would I know?’

‘But … this is against all the rules of war. What scum would do this?’

‘The Five Heroes did it to the enemy two thousand years ago. I dare say that’s where they got the idea.’

Rix felt blood bloom in his cheeks. ‘This isn’t the time to undermine morale.’

‘It’s in the Axilead. Axil Grandys boasted that he collected plague corpses and catapulted them over the enemy’s walls.’

Rix put his hands over his ears. ‘Don’t tell me any more. Leave me some illusions.’

As they moved on, the man began to thrash and squeal. Rix quickened his pace, but down the street they saw more infected people, many more.

‘None of the dead are armed,’ said Rix. ‘They were taken by surprise. I can’t believe that the enemy would attack without declaring war.’

‘Axil Grandys did.’

‘Damn you, Tobe!’ Rix stalked away. ‘I’ve got to get home.’

‘The other blasts were much closer to home,’ said Tobry. ‘All Caulderon will know by now. Go if you must, but I’m staying. We can learn a lot about the enemy by the way they’ve attacked.’

Tobry was right. If they could decipher the enemy’s tactics it would be vital intelligence. ‘Why haven’t they put in a garrison?’ said Rix.

‘Maybe they don’t want to hold Gullihoe.’

Tobry continued down the street, using magery to reconstruct the attack. Ahead, a stocky young man lay on his back, milky eyes staring upwards. His clothes were charred on the left-hand side and his face was as red as sunburn, though there was no mark of injury on him.

‘Dead?’ said Rix.

Tobry nodded.

There were more bodies, though far less than the number Rix would have expected for a town as big as Gullihoe. No one called out to them, though they heard groaning coming from beneath rubble they could not have shifted without ropes and winches. The rest of the survivors had fled.

Ahead, a young woman also lay dead with sunburnt face and milky eyes. Her body was twisted, as though she had been writhing before she died, her fingernails broken where she had clawed at the ground.

Rix straightened her out, pulled her gown down and closed her staring eyes. A slash-shaped burn mark across her belly was deeply charred as if a length of red-hot metal had struck her.

Rix shivered. ‘Magery?’

Tobry waved his elbrot above the mark. Rix saw a linear flash and a shadow figure clutching at her belly. He shook his head. ‘Not an iota.’ He stood upright, looking grey and weary and twice his age. ‘But there’s something dark at work here.’

‘Tali had a welt on her shoulder,’ said Rix. ‘Nothing as bad as that, but the shape was the same.’

Tobry sniffed the charred wound. ‘Smells like an alchymical device.’

The hair rose on Rix’s scalp. ‘What kind of war is this, where they can do such destruction and we don’t know how?’

‘Magery isn’t telling me as much as I’d hoped. All the more reason to find Tali, who knows the enemy.’ He looked at Rix questioningly.

‘I’ve seen enough,’ said Rix. ‘If we’re going to find her, let’s go.’

They mounted and headed back, as fast as it was safe to ride in the dark.

‘Who are the Cythonians, anyway?’ said Tobry an hour later. They were riding down a country road and there was just enough light to see stubbled fields to either side. To their right, a series of small hills made dark mounds against the sky.

‘We know who they are,’ Rix said irritably.

‘We know who they were when they were called Cythians. We haven’t seen them in fifteen hundred years.’

‘What rot! Our traders deal with them at the Merchantery. We buy the damned heatstones off them.’

‘We don’t trade with them. Our traders deal with the Vicini outlanders, and they trade with Cython. I’ve never heard of anyone setting eyes on a Cythonian until we came on those unconscious ones at the Rat Hole.’

‘How did they come to go underground, anyway?’

Tobry gave him a sardonic glance. ‘Regretting the history books you didn’t read?’

‘I’m starting to see the use of them. But, Tobe, after they lost the war the Cythians were nothing but filthy degradoes, living in muck and killing each other. They were thought to have died out, then they reappeared as a force living underground where we couldn’t touch them — as the Cythonians. What happened?’

‘That’s a good question.’

‘Do you have a good answer?’

‘No one does … though I’ve heard that an early chancellor — just before they disappeared — tried to wipe them out in secret.’

Worms wriggled up Rix’s spine. ‘I haven’t heard that.’

‘It’s not in the history books, nor taught by the tutors. One night, according to the tale, bands of nameless mercenaries surrounded the degradoes’ three camps, locked the gates and set the camps ablaze. Then archers shot everyone trying to escape.’

‘The writer must have meant their army camps.’ Rix could justify the torching of an enemy army camp in wartime, though he would not have locked the gates.

‘They had no army, Rix. The degradoes hadn’t been allowed weapons since their defeat, two hundred years before. The camps were miserable shanty towns, even more squalid than the ones surrounding Caulderon, and they burnt like kindling.’

Rix shifted uneasily in the saddle. ‘How do you know the chancellor was behind it?’

His artist’s eye, sometimes a blessing but lately a curse, showed him every terrible detail clearly enough to paint it. He could hear the screams, see the flesh charring and smell the burnt bodies as though he was there.

‘Some of the mercenaries were so sickened by their part in genocide that they revealed the name of their paymaster.’

‘If the enemy were wiped out, how did Cython come about?’

‘No one knows. For two hundred years they were thought extinct, then suddenly it revealed itself — a new civilisation with defences we could never break — ’

‘Taunting us by their very presence,’ said Rix, half-heartedly, still seeing the burning camps.

‘The degradoes were a ruined people, raddled by pox and drink and sniffily,’ said Tobry. ‘So how did a handful of them — for any who did escape could have been no more than a handful — set up such a powerful civilisation, so quickly?’

Rix said nothing.

‘That may turn out to be the most vital question of all,’ said Tobry.