Vengeance

CHAPTER 56

What was worse? What Lady Ricinus was going to do to him, or the nightmares that were bound to return once he was back in his chambers with that voice in his head, ordering him to commit a terrible atrocity.

As Tobry had said, Rix’s heritage was a honeyed trap. He would be better off abandoning it and galloping to the most distant outpost of Hightspall. He could still fight for his country there.

He was tempted to. Had it not been for his duty to his troubled house, he would have fled. Besides, wherever he went, Parby would come after him. The seneschal had been ordered to fetch Rix back and if he did not his own head would be on the line. Lady Ricinus did not permit failure.

‘Where are the enemy?’ he asked as they approached the city.

‘Scuttled back to their rat holes.’ Parby spat on to the grass. ‘They won’t find Caulderon such an easy target.’

‘You left before the attack, then?’ asked Rix.

‘Been searching for you for three days.’

Rix’s sole consolation was that the chancellor would be pleased with the intelligence he was bringing about the enemy’s weapons and tactics, and what the wrythen was up to. Not as pleased as if Rix had been able to provide advance warning of the war, but the news might be enough to get him out of Lady Ricinus’s clutches.

The road was full of refugees here, some pushing hand carts, some dragging their miserable possessions on skids, many staggering along with nothing save what they could carry on their bent backs. At every sound they whirled, staring, shaking. Rix saw terror in a thousand eyes.

The cavalcade passed two shattered towns and many razed villages. Here, in the rye fields to either side, burned crops were still smoking. The road turned a corner, passed through a copse of leafless trees and ahead, on the right, stood a rudely built stockade with guards patrolling outside the walls. Brown, greasy smoke rose from the far side, and they weren’t burning wood.

‘What’s going on here?’ He turned towards the stockade.

‘Stay back!’ said Parby.

Rix stood up in the stirrups to see over the wall, and quailed. The place was wreathed with stinking smoke, though not enough to hide the dozens of men, women and children imprisoned inside, some so covered in purple buboes that they could be seen from thirty yards away.

‘They’re be’poxed,’ said Parby. ‘We’ve seen the same, or worse, half a dozen times since the attack began.’

Driven into pens to die, Rix thought bleakly as they rode on. The living burnt the dead, and doubtless some who weren’t quite dead, on the pyre at the back — the last service the doomed ones could do for their country.

And all this in the first day of the war, from attackers no one had seen. The Cythonians had rained death and destruction on towns and villages, fish ponds and fields, using weapons no Hightspaller had ever encountered before. Then they retreated as silently as they had come.

Let Caulderon be unscathed, Rix prayed. But all he could think of was an enemy impossibly powerful, advancing on the unprepared city.

‘Holy Gods!’ cried Parby an hour later, as they came within sight of the gates of the city.

He reined in, and the troop stopped behind him, dismayed and not a little afraid. Rix, who had seen the blasted bridge near Gullihoe, was not surprised, though he was alarmed. Destroying an undefended bridge out in the country was one thing. Bringing down half of the massive and well-defended city gate was another entirely.

‘How did they get close enough to do that?’ said Rix.

The left side of the towering city gates, a thick-walled bulwark fifty feet across and sixty high, had been blown to bits. Rubble and charred timber lay everywhere, and bodies too, and the left-hand gate was propped up with poles, for its hinge pins had been blown out.

There were heavily armed guards everywhere, and more officers than in the New Year’s military parade, most of them milling around in fearful confusion. Rix saw no evidence that anyone had taken charge and longed to do so. He’d make the bastards jump to attention.

‘What news from the provinces, Lord Rixium?’ said a voice on his left.

Rix did not recognise the speaker, who was dressed in a captain’s uniform of viridian and mustard, with a red ribbon around his cockaded hat. The uniform did not appear to have been washed in a fortnight and there were food stains down his front.

‘Bad,’ said Rix, curling his lip. ‘Gullihoe is half destroyed and abandoned, and the bridge over the river has fallen.’

He rode through the gates. Inside, hundreds of shanty dwellers were carrying stone to shore up the wall under the direction of a team of harried masons.

‘If the enemy can do such damage without even being seen, what will it be like when they attack in force?’ said Parby, who had been an officer many years ago. ‘How can they be kept out?’

As Rix assessed the defences through the lens of war, his spirits plummeted. Caulderon had outgrown its walls hundreds of years ago and almost as much of the city now lay outside as within. Houses, inns and warehouses had been built right up to the ancient walls, offering the enemy ten thousand hiding places for an attack. From the higher buildings they could fire into the city and it would take an army many times the size of Caulderon’s to defend it.

‘The only way to protect the city is to clear every building for two hundred yards around the wall,’ he said.

‘That would take weeks,’ said Parby. ‘And you’d have a thousand shopkeepers at your throat.’

‘They’ll change their minds when the enemy starts shooting pox pins at them.’

‘Well, at least the defences of Palace Ricinus are in good condition.’

‘But our walls run for half a mile,’ said Rix. ‘We’d need thousands of men to defend the palace, and we’ve only got three hundred. What are we going to do, Parby?’

‘Our damnedest!’ Parby looked around at his troops, then lowered his voice. ‘We’re glad you’re back, Lord Rixium. Someone has to take charge, and the men will follow you anywhere.’

It was the closest the starchy seneschal had ever come to criticising his lord and lady. ‘I’ll do my best,’ said Rix.

Despite the attack, the mood inside the city walls was cheerful. Few people seemed to be taking the threat seriously.

‘We crushed the scum once and we’ll do it again,’ said a tiny, ancient woman, clay pipe clamped between her two remaining teeth. ‘Reckon I could take down three of ’em myself.’

Rix shook his head in disgust and rode on, past the public scalderies and steam rooms, now closed forever because the geyser fields had recently gone dry, then the silent steam-driven mills and crushers of the manufactory quarter. On every corner, crowds of cold, hungry people had gathered, and they all stared at him.

It was growing dark and the lamplighters were out, their tasselled nose plugs inserted, lighting the stink-damp fuelled street lamps. Rix kept a safe distance away. Stink-damp gas, also tapped from underground, was a deadly poison that you could only smell when it was at its thinnest. It was also heavier than air, tended to collect in cellars, sumps and hollows, and was wont to explode without warning.

His gloom deepened as they rode up the long drive of Palace Ricinus, then around the corner past the baroque greenhouses full of tall, spiky-leaved castor oil plants, the family symbol. He glanced towards the rear of the palace and his own tower. The navvies were still in their trench, fruitlessly winding asbestos around the hot water tubule to keep the remaining heat in. The water had been cooling for years and was now only tepid.

Lady Ricinus was waiting at the monumental front doors, as he had known she would be. The chief guard would have signalled her the moment Rix passed through the gates.

Sweat soaked through his shirt, front and back. He would sooner have faced another dozen of the enemy — at least he knew how to combat them. He had no idea how to deal with Lady Ricinus, but as a dutiful son not yet of age he could not disobey her direct orders. Not when Hightspall was at war.

He had not expected his father to be there as well. It was Lady Ricinus’s doing, of course, and to have enlisted Lord Ricinus in the cause of disciplining her errant son, her fury must have been monumental.

She would not display it in public, though. She stood outside the door, as rigidly upright as one of their drill sergeants, and presented her polished and powdered cheek for him to kiss.

‘Welcome home, Rixium,’ she said through a mouthful of canines.