Vengeance

CHAPTER 61

‘Tobe,’ said Rix. ‘You’ve known me a long time.’

They were in his studio again and he was trying not to look at the portrait, which was getting worse with each brushstroke. After Lady Ricinus’s last inspection the water had frozen in the taps.

‘All your wicked life,’ said Tobry. ‘I remember seeing you just after you’d been born. You weren’t a big baby, oddly enough. And extremely ugly — a veritable horror.’ He chuckled. ‘We spent a lot of time at the palace when you were little … before the scandalous fall of the House of Lagger.’

Rix could not manage a smile. ‘Do you remember being here when I was ten? Something happened back then and I was sick for ages.’

‘I’ve never known you to be sick,’ said Tobry. ‘You’re disgustingly healthy. Everyone in the palace is.’

‘I haven’t been sick since, but I nearly died that time. A fever or something, and afterwards I’d lost a whole month of my life. You must remember it.’

Tobry shook his head. ‘I wasn’t allowed to visit then. We were disgraced; the House of Lagger was sliding towards the precipice and all doors were closed to us.’ He walked away and stared out the window.

‘The nightmares started after I got well,’ said Rix.

‘Fever can do that to you.’

‘But they’ve never stopped. They’ve got worse.’

‘Sorry. What with the bankruptcy, mother’s disgrace, father’s suicide, the manor being burnt to the ground with everyone but me inside, and our creditors taking the rest of the estate, I don’t remember much about those years. Don’t want to remember, if truth be told.’ He looked at Rix. ‘You’re pale enough to be a Pale. You should have an early night.’

‘I can’t. The damned portrait. I’ll be up till three again.’

‘I’ll get out of your way. I’m going to check on Tali.’

‘At the abbey?’

‘Hildy wouldn’t take her, and then I was followed. I shook them off, dropped her at Torgrist Manor and made a false trail — ’

‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ said Rix. ‘Who followed her?’

‘I assume Hildy betrayed us to the chancellor.’

‘But Tali’s wounded. You did go back? You made sure she’s all right?’ Suddenly Rix understood why Tobry was so flat.

He looked sick. ‘I tried to, but all the mansions in that street were watched, front and back. If I’d gone into Torgrist Manor the chancellor would have known within minutes that she was there. I’m really worried about her.’

‘Has she got food? Warm clothes? Fresh bandages?’

‘No, nothing,’ Tobry said hoarsely.

Rix paced back and forth. ‘Damn it, Tobe, we’ve got to do something. At least, you have — they won’t let me out.’ He handed Tobry a jingling bag. ‘Bribe the guards. Get her away where she can be looked after, then come back. I’m not sure I want to be alone with this, tonight.’

He put the sketch back in the cupboard and closed the door.

When Rix could not bear to touch brush to the portrait again, it was four in the morning. Too exhausted to undress, he lay on the huge bed and blew out the lantern. Outside, big snowflakes were fluttering down in the moonlight.

The moment he closed his eyes, his father’s face reappeared in his inner eye, as it always did after a long close-up session. Rix did not try to blank it out; that never worked. He concentrated on the brushstrokes until they blurred into a miasma — a green mist wreathing across a dirty, windowless chamber.

Though he never wanted to see that image again, he had been waiting for it, even longing for it in a strange kind of way. It was horrible, yet cathartic — or would be once he had seen it all.

He went back to the studio, took the sketch from the cupboard and focused on the figure lying on the black bench. He thought it was a woman but could discover no more about her. At the head of the bench, two blurred shapes might have been people, though no amount of analysis could extract more from them.

But why would it? Last night he had done the sketch in a creative frenzy, not thinking at all. Rix made some tentative dabs at the shadows, though as soon as the paint went on he knew it was wrong.

Loading his largest brush with white, he painted the scene out and fixed the blank canvas in mind. Now he could sleep. He rubbed his eyes, yawned, picked up the small brush again and, without thinking, swept it across the canvas. A dozen strokes recreated the windowless chamber, another two dozen the miasmic background and the bench with the indistinct figure on it, the shadows at the end, the lot.

But now there was a diminutive figure off to the right. Was she the one who had been viewing the scene before? He did not think so. She looked too little, though the viewpoint would depend on where she had been standing. Yet why would he see through the eyes of a child? It did not make sense.

‘Still no faces?’ said Tobry from behind him.

Rix jumped and his brush spattered grey paint across the right-hand lower corner. ‘There’s nothing to identify any of them.’

‘That’s definitely a child, though. A small girl. And I can tell you one thing about her, from the way she’s standing.’

‘What’s that?’

Tobry wore a different coat but it still hung low on the left. ‘She’s scared. No, terrified — no, horrified.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘I have a gift for it.’ Tobry adjusted his coat. ‘How’s the portrait going?’

‘Progress, though I still hate it.’

Rix took a last look at the sketch then whited it out, wishing he could wipe his own imagination as easily. ‘What have you got in your pocket?’

‘A packet of powdered lead.’

‘What on earth for?’

‘I’ve a mortal fear of shifters, and especially caitsthes.’

‘A mortal fear?’ Rix said curiously, then remembered the look in his friend’s eyes when the caitsthe had been on his back — a terror that had nothing to do with dying, or being torn apart by the beast, but of something that to Tobry was far worse.

‘If we meet another one, I’ll be ready to burn its livers with powdered lead. Have I told you how the war is going?’

‘Disastrously, you said, and I don’t want to hear it again right now. How did you get on with Tali?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘What!’

‘She wasn’t anywhere in Torgrist Manor. I don’t know where she’s gone.’

‘How hard did you look?’ cried Rix, chafing because Lady Ricinus’s guards prevented him from going after Tali. ‘What if she’s lying in a fever somewhere? Dying?’

Tobry was unnaturally pale. ‘I looked everywhere, believe me.’

‘Maybe the chancellor has her.’

‘I hope not. He’s not a nice fellow.’

‘He’s been good to me.’

‘Don’t ever get on his bad side.’

That night he slept badly, troubled by feverish dreams, though there were neither shapeshifters nor leviathans in them, nor that voice urging him to do something terrible. He had not heard it since they had left for the mountains. The dreams were about his sketch.

After waking at first light he went to the window, looking out on the snowy palace gardens but not seeing them. Who was the little girl, and why did she look horrified? Why was the sketch seen from the viewpoint of a child anyway? And why did it have such an air of menace?

The inspiration might have come from one of those violent, old-fashioned paintings that had come with the Palace when House Ricinus bought it, generations ago. Rix remembered being frightened of them as a child. They had also been masterpieces, the study of which, later on, had done much to develop his own genius.

Yet he did not think Tobry was right this time. More strongly than ever, Rix felt that he was sketching something he had seen before; though why did it seem so remote? Had it been something innocuous he’d seen before that terrible illness, leaving his memories distorted by the fever that had nearly killed him? He did not think so. Rix felt sick every time he worked on the sketch, as though he was glorifying a crime. Or wondering whether he’d been complicit in it.

Who could tell him? Certainly not Lady Ricinus, who had passed Rix into the care of Nurse Luzia and a succession of tutors when he had been a toddler — ah!

He opened the door and said to one of the guards, a sallow, crook-nosed fellow he had never seen before, ‘Would you inform Lady Ricinus that I wish to visit my old nurse, Luzia, down in Tumbrel shanty town?’

‘Of course, Lord Rixium. Er, Lady Ricinus will want to know why.’

‘Surely I don’t need a reason to visit Nurse Luzia?’

‘I’m afraid so, Lord Rixium. Lady Ricinus was most adamant.’

‘Then tell her I wish to talk to Luzia about the good old days — when I was happy.’

The guard bowed and withdrew, shortly to return. ‘I’m sorry, Lord Rixium,’ he said, deeply embarrassed. ‘Lady Ricinus requires the portrait to be completed first.’

‘Bitch!’ cried Rix.

The word escaped him before he realised that he was talking to a servant but, good servant that he was, the guard pretended he had not heard. No doubt he would tell Lady Ricinus, though. Keeping anything from her ladyship would earn the guards a place in the monthly flogging tithe. He went into Tobry’s room.

‘Tobry.’ Rix shook him awake.

‘Yes?’

Rix lowered his voice. ‘Come up. I need you to do something for me.’

Tobry pulled on a kilt and followed. ‘Why can’t we talk down here?’

Rix did not answer until they were upstairs in the tower. He opened the window so the wind howled past and, even if someone had been standing two yards away, they would not have heard a quiet conversation.

‘I’m not entirely sure that mother doesn’t have some kind of spying device set up down there.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Find me a way out so I can talk to Luzia. I need to ask her about when I was ill.’

‘I’ll see what I can come up with,’ said Tobry. ‘I’ll need a bit for expenses.’

Rix tossed him a coin bag.

‘What are you doing today?’ said Tobry, pocketing it.

‘What the hell do you think? The cursed portrait — there are only five days left.’

Tobry returned that night, after dark, whistling.

‘What are you so happy about?’ snapped Rix.

‘Bad day?’

‘I hate Father! I hate Mother even more, and I curse this stinking portrait to the Pits of Perdition.’

Tobry inspected it. ‘It’s going well, all things considered. Though the subject seems even darker than before. Grimmer. Bleaker.’

‘I can only paint what I paint.’ He put his mouth close to Tobry’s ear. ‘Any luck?’

‘Yes. Come upstairs.’

Tobry had smuggled in a long length of woven strapping with hooks on either end. ‘We’ll go out the far window and over the wall into Tumbrel Town. It’ll be easier that way.’

‘And we won’t be seen?’

‘I’ve spread a few coins around. The shanty kids were glad to have them. Come on.’

Outside the window it was overcast, freezing and black as a caitsthe’s livers. Rix could not see a thing save for the enemy’s blazing arrows arcing over the distant city wall.

‘Don’t they ever stop?’

‘Only to come back with a new weapon,’ said Tobry. ‘It was fire ribbon this morning — horrible stuff that sticks to the skin and burns all the way down to the bone.’

‘Don’t tell me any more. I want to enjoy the next hour.’

‘It’ll be nice to see Rannilt again,’ said Tobry.

‘It will,’ said Rix. He did not mention Tali, and neither did Tobry, though Rix knew he was still trying to find her.

As they went down, a strong wind kept banging Rix against the side of his tower, grating the skin off his knuckles, but it was worth it.

‘This is just like old times,’ he said when they touched down at the bottom and crept across the grounds. ‘You and me, sneaking out after we’d been confined to our quarters.’

‘Save that there’s a war on and we’re losing.’

‘Cheerful sod, aren’t you?’

‘Sorry. I’ve got a bad feeling about tonight.’

‘Anything in particular?’

‘Everything.’

They climbed over an unguarded section of wall and down into an alley. Two small boys came scampering up. Tobry gave them a silver coin each.

‘Wow!’ Rix heard the smaller boy say. ‘Thanks, Lord Tobry.’

‘Guard our climbing irons and keep a sharp lookout for my enemies,’ Tobry said in a melodramatic whisper, ‘and there’ll be another one each when we get back.’

‘What enemies?’ said Rix. ‘You could stagger from one side of Tumbrel Town to the other in a drunken stupor and the meanest footpad wouldn’t touch you.’

‘It makes the lads feel that they matter. They don’t have much in their lives.’

‘Speaking of which, I wonder how Rannilt is getting on with Luzia?’

‘Like a chick with a mother hen, last I saw,’ said Tobry. ‘Rannilt only stops talking to draw breath. It’s done my cynical old heart a power of good to see her cared for; and see her looking after Luzia, too.’

They made their way through the alleys to a slightly better part of Tumbrel Town, where Rix stopped at a small, single-roomed hut and rapped at the door. There was no answer.

‘It’s late,’ said Tobry. ‘Luzia’s probably asleep.’

‘She never goes to bed before two,’ said Rix.

‘She’s always up, a’doing.’ ‘She’s old now. Rannilt’s probably tired her out.’

Rix knocked again, and a third time. ‘I hope she’s not ill.’

‘I told Rannilt what to do if Luzia took a turn, and left coin for a healer. Though with those healing hands of hers, Rannilt would hardly need one.’

‘It’s a mighty healer that can heal old age,’ said Rix.

He lifted the latch, put his head through the door and shivers crept across his scalp again. ‘Something’s not right, Tobe. What’s that smell?’ He knew, though. It was the smell that haunted his nightmares.

‘Blood,’ said Tobry, pushing past and creating a fist of light in the dark room. ‘Don’t come in.’

Too late. Dear old Luzia, Luzia who had made Rix’s childhood bearable, was dead in her red-drenched bed. Her throat had been savagely cut, only the vertebrae holding her head in place. And it had been done recently, for she was still warm.

Rix had seen plenty of violence in his time and would have said he was inured to it, but this was like one of his nightmares brought to life. His head was whirlpooling and if Tobry had not helped him to a three-legged stool he would have fallen down. Waves of hot and cold passed through his middle; he felt like throwing up. He looked away, praying that he had imagined it, looked back and gagged.

‘Who?’ he gasped. ‘Not the girl, surely?’

Tobry did not dignify that with an answer. He was walking around the little hut, touching the plank table, water jug, the ends of the bloody bed and the door latch, as if reading their stories through his fingertips.

‘Where’s Rannilt?’ said Rix, clutching the sides of his stool, which seemed to be rocking like a dinghy in a heavy sea. ‘Have they killed her too?’

‘Shut up, I’m trying to think.’

Tobry waved his elbrot around the room. People-shaped shadows rose and fell, though if they had a story to tell Rix could not read it.

Abruptly, Tobry bent over Luzia, holding the elbrot to the hideous gash across her throat. ‘Incredible!’ he hissed.

‘What?’ said Rix. The sickness was getting worse; it was all he could do to remain in the hut.

‘The ends of the gash are healed,’ said Tobry.

Rix could not look. Not at the ruin of poor, kindly Luzia. ‘Ugh,’ he said, hand over his mouth.

‘It’s healed in for a good inch on either side. I wouldn’t have thought that possible.’ He looked around at Rix. ‘Luzia didn’t heal, did she?’

‘No.’

‘Rannilt must have tried to save her. She must have a mighty gift.’

‘But not good enough to replace all that blood.’

‘Where’s she run to?’ said Tobry. ‘Wait here. I’ll take a look outside.’

Rix lurched to the door. Nothing could keep him in this slaughterhouse by himself. Why Luzia? She’d never hurt anyone. Why, why?

Tobry found no sign of Rannilt.

‘Poor child,’ he said. ‘After finding Luzia like that, and trying to save her, she must be out of her mind.’

Rix did not reply. The nightmare was taking over and he had no idea how Tobry got him back over the wall and up into his tower. He vaguely remembered the reeking alley, and his friend taking care to pay the lookout boys the two silvers he had promised them. For a man who professed to believe in nothing, Tobry was meticulous in discharging his obligations.

After that, all was as much a blur as the fevered month when Rix had been ten. It was impossible that Tobry’s wiry frame could have hauled Rix’s bulk three levels up to the window of his tower. Utterly impossible, yet when Rix awoke in his bed at dawn the following morning, the scrape marks down his chest and arms could only be explained by his being dragged up over raw-cut stone.

He snapped upright and all he could see was blood. Blood and the gaping mouth and staring eyes of an old woman who had never had a bad word for anyone. A woman he had loved as he could never have loved his own mother.

‘How could anyone do that to her?’ Rix said, and wept until his dry eyelids rasped like grit rubbed on a plate. ‘In her whole life, Luzia never hurt a soul.’

‘We live in troubled times,’ said Tobry, holding Rix in his arms. ‘There’s violence everywhere. People will rob an old lady for the contents of her pantry — ’

Something rang false in his tone, and Rix thrust him away. ‘Never lie to me, Tobe. You don’t believe that for a minute.’

After a pause, Tobry said, ‘No, I don’t.’

‘Why did she die?’

‘To stop her talking to you about the time of your fever, I expect.’

‘Are you saying — ?’

‘I point no fingers. Anyone inside the palace might have murdered Luzia. Or anyone outside.’

‘How would they know I wanted to talk to her?’

‘You know what the palace is like.’

‘I don’t, actually.’

‘The servants gossip, and so do all the noble hangers-on.’

Rix had no discrimination left. ‘People like you, you mean?’

There was a longer pause before Tobry replied, in tones carefully neutral, though not neutral enough to disguise his feelings from someone who knew him as well as Rix did. Rix had hurt him.

‘If someone knows a piece of gossip or scandal,’ said Tobry, ‘everyone in the palace knows. Plus their families, and everyone who visits the palace or trades with it.’

‘Why did she have to die, Tobe? Why Luzia?’ It came out as a howl.

‘I don’t know.’

Rix staggered out of bed. ‘Get me a drink.’

Tobry had brought a flask with him, circumventing Lady Ricinus’s prohibition on more than one bottle a day, and this was a good one. Rix lurched up to his studio and emptied a quarter of it down his throat in one swallow.

‘That’s spirits,’ said Tobry, taking the flask, ‘and if you drink the lot it’s liable to kill you.’

‘Father drinks three bottles of spirits a day,’ Rix snarled, making a grab for the flask.

Tobry held it out of reach. ‘Then he must have a liver the size of a whale. What are you doing?’

Rix had gone to his storeroom door. ‘I have no idea.’

He dragged out the whited-out sketch, filled his brushes with scum-brown and miasma-green, and swiftly recaptured the essence of the dark chamber. Stroking another brush through luminous white pigment, he carved out the woman on the table. He did not know what he was painting; the strokes appeared on the canvas without conscious thought and, once they were there, he had no idea what they meant.

‘What about her face?’ said Tobry.

Rix blinked drunkenly at the sketch. The woman on the black bench — it was definitely a woman now, wearing only a rag around her hips — was small and slender, with pale skin and hair, though her face was a blank oval. The shadows at her head were hardly more defined than before, though he could tell that they signified a man and a woman.

He looked for the child away to the side, but she was not there. This time his unconscious mind had not conjured her at all.

‘Rix?’ said Tobry.

‘Yes?’

‘Do you really need to know what happened, all that time ago? If it killed Luzia — ’

‘Don’t say it.’ Her death had struck Rix as few others could have. It was as though his real mother had been murdered. ‘Why did Luzia have to die, Tobe? Explain that to me.’

‘I can’t.’

‘ It’s not fair.’

‘The world isn’t fair,’ said Tobry. He paused, then said, ‘That’s what Tali was trying to tell you.’