Vengeance

CHAPTER 7

The ice leviathan rolled over the shanty town beyond the eastern palace wall, pulverising it and squeezing its miserable occupants dry. Their blood foamed into the leviathan’s transparent tanks, the flattened husks were ejected at the rear. The tanks were already half full and one pass through the hive that was Palace Ricinus would fill them completely.

This is your fault, but you can stop it.

Go away, Rix gasped, but the split-ice voice kept echoing inside his head.

Two nights from now, at midnight, you will go down.

I won’t!

You will cut it out and bring it to me.

White worms were crawling all over Rix’s face. Go away!

It belongs to me.

Please leave me alone.

This is the only way for you to atone.

But I’ve done nothing wrong.

The voice became low, cunning. Remember the cellar, and the blood on your hands?

No, no, no!

Obeying me is the only way you can gain peace.

I’m not doing it. Get out of my head.

If you refuse, this is what will happen …

The leviathan crushed the outer walls of the palace, then the inner, before toppling a dozen towers and smashing the Great Hall, the wonder and the glory of Hightspall, to powder. Finally, as it loomed outside Rix’s tower, destroying everything that House Ricinus had achieved over four generations, coming directly for him because of what he’d done and what he refused to do, he screamed.

‘What’s the matter with you now?’

He roused, thrashing. A lovely young woman was shaking him, her breasts quivering in the golden light of his bedchamber. She was enchanting, all bosom and bottom and a waist that could be circled with a headband, yet he could not remember her name.

‘Blood,’ he whispered. ‘It squeezed the blood right out of them, into tanks.’

She thrust Rix back onto the pillows. ‘You’re sick! Sick as dog vomit.’

She marched out the door, across the hall and into Tobry’s bedchamber. There was a mutter of feminine complaint, then Rix heard Tobry’s amused drawl.

‘Sorry, Liana. There isn’t room.’

‘I’m not staying with him!’ cried Rix’s lover. ‘He’s off his head.’

Tobry sighed theatrically, then said, ‘Oh, all right. Squeeze up, girls.’

Laughter tinkled. Rix slumped against the headboard of his bed, shuddering.

‘I’m slipping out for a minute,’ said Tobry. ‘Don’t do anything I can’t do better.’

He came through, wrapping a robe around his lean, duel-scarred form. Tobry was only of middle height, wiry and not handsome, but there was a look in his grey eyes that every girl wanted more of and no mother could ever trust. He drew up a dainty chair and sat by Rix’s bed.

‘You’re dripping sweat. Another bad dream?’

‘Ugh!’ Rix rubbed his eyes, trying to wipe the images away. It was both his strength and his weakness that he could imagine the violence as clearly as if it had been painted. Two words kept ringing through his head and he could not rid himself of them. It’s time. IT’S TIME.

‘Worse?’

‘Much worse …and more urgent. I dreamed I was in my salon, in a trance … then moving pictures appeared on the heatstone … as if someone had sent them to me. Do you think that’s possible?’

‘Dreams come from inside, not out,’ said Tobry. ‘Wait here.’

He went out, then returned with a thick, square bottle and a vase-shaped goblet into which he poured a half measure of grey fluid.

Rix’s nostrils tingled. ‘What’s that?’

‘A traditional remedy — best to take it in a gulp.’

Rix did so, and wished he hadn’t. It seared up his nose, leaving him breathless and his eyes watering, then burnt all the way down. And it stank.

‘What the hell’s in it? Smells like stink-damp.’

‘Sulphur water plus various volatiles and mercapts.’ Tobry clapped Rix’s cheeks, grinning. ‘Rosy! It’s already doing you good.’

The nightmare was fading, though not the fear behind it. ‘They’re getting worse. I’ve got to get away, Tobe, I can’t take any more.’

‘Any more what?’

Rix told him about the ice leviathan. He did not mention the crackly voice like breaking ice, for he never remembered what it had said after he woke, but thought of the night after tomorrow made him feel so rotten that he wanted to run and never come back. ‘My nightmares are full of blood and butchery, and the fall of our house.’

‘After what happened to my family, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone,’ said Tobry.

‘The other night I dreamed someone was rubbing blood into my wounds. That’s got to be an omen, hasn’t it?’

‘Dreams don’t mean anything. Have a drink and go to sleep.’ Yawning, Tobry looked towards his bedchamber.

Rix felt the tension ease, the horrors fade. Nothing shocked Tobry, nor could anything faze him and, though he took few things seriously, he was as solid as the foundations of Palace Ricinus.

‘It seemed so real. Could Cython be building an ice leviathan to attack us?’

‘They’d hardly use something that’d melt when the sun came out.’

‘And I keep having these feelings …’

‘Of impending doom?’ said Tobry helpfully.

‘As if the world is about to collapse around me.’ Rix glanced around the magnificent bedchamber, the walls of which were lined with yellow painted silk. The steepled cedar ceiling was inlaid with ivory and ebony, and touched with gilt. ‘Me, of all people. I mean …’

‘Unlike me,’ said Tobry with a wry grin, ‘you’re tall, handsome and heir to the biggest fortune in Hightspall. You turn twenty in a few weeks, and then you can spend as if there’s no — ’ He broke off. ‘Sorry.’

‘No tomorrow,’ Rix intoned darkly. ‘You might as well say it.’

‘Stop fretting over nothing. You may be a conservative, dim-witted, irresponsible layabout — ’ Tobry laughed. ‘In fact, you are.’

‘Thanks!’

‘But again, unlike me, you’ve never done anything truly bad. Or have you?’

‘Not that I know of,’ Rix muttered. So why did he feel so festering inside, as though Hightspall’s troubles ran right down the aeons to him?

‘Don’t take everything so seriously,’ said Tobry. ‘What can you possibly have to worry about?’

‘Apart from Father? And Mother’s crazy plan?’

‘I’m sure she’s thought it through,’ Tobry said carefully. ‘Lady Ricinus — ’

‘Oh yes. Mother calculates everything to a nicety.’ Rix bit the tip of his tongue at the disloyalty. ‘Forget I said that. I know she has our best interests at heart.’

‘She thinks of nothing save how to raise House Ricinus higher,’ said Tobry ambiguously. ‘And with plague and grandgaw bringing down the ancient families wholesale, there’s never been a finer time to better one’s own.’

‘House Ricinus hasn’t been touched by plague or pox in a hundred years,’ said Rix.

‘Something else to be thankful for.’ Tobry went across to the heatstone and put his back to it. ‘Why don’t you try a new painting? That’s cheered you up before.’

Rix was a gifted artist, the best of the new generation, the chancellor said, but now he felt goose pimples rising on his arms. ‘One or two of my paintings have been divinations. I’m afraid …’

‘That what you paint might come true?’

‘Or I might paint something I don’t want to see.’ Rix’s art was everything to him. It was truth in a land of lies, an island of beauty in a corrupt, ugly world, and the one thing that House Ricinus’s wealth had not bought.

He picked up a glass sphere from the bedside table and rotated it in his hands. Inside, a master craftsman had built a perfect model of Palace Ricinus in silver and gold — all eighty-eight towers, every dome and turret and buttress, even the fountains, pools and gardens. The chief magian himself had enchanted the sphere so it would mimic the weather outside, but lately it had only shown one season — wind-blasted winter.

‘Don’t drop it, whatever you do,’ said Tobry.

Rix had never liked it, priceless and perfect though it was, for magery unnerved him. He considered hurling the miniature into the fireplace. ‘Why not?’

‘Considering your nightmare, it would be a bad omen.’

Rix set the model back where it had come from, moodily watching the driving snow plastering the walls of the tiny palace, then sprang out of bed. He swung on a red and gold kilt and went down the hall to his salon, a six-sided chamber with a tented ceiling, dimly lit by an enormous heatstone. He looked at it askance, afraid of what he would see, for there was a wrongness about it, something brooding and baleful. But the heat-stone displayed only its normal enigmatic shimmer.

‘I could understand it if you were having the nightmares,’ said Rix over his shoulder.

He turned on the stopcock and caught a whiff of stink-damp. Using a flint snapper on a long pole, he ignited the gaslights in a series of small explosions and the rotten-egg stench was replaced by the cleansing odour of burnt sulphur.

‘Because I’m a gentleman fallen so low I have to live on my wits?’

‘You’re not a gentleman.’

‘No, I’m the Lord of Nothing,’ Tobry said drily, ‘family disgraced, ancestral manor burnt down, lands confiscated to pay our debts and not a penny to my name.’ He brushed away an imaginary tear. ‘Forced to rely on the charity of my friends, and sleep in their hard beds — ’

‘With soft women,’ retorted Rix, managing a smile. ‘My women.’

‘Someone has to keep the poor girls warm after they flee from your bed.’

The smile vanished; Rix wasn’t feeling that good humoured. ‘Make yourself useful and ring the bell. I’m starving.’

Tobry did so and, despite the hour, a manservant appeared at the outer door within seconds. Night or day, when the family rang, the servants jumped, or else. At the end of each month Lady Ricinus rated all the palace servants, and those in the lowest tithe were flogged as a lesson to all.

‘Food and drink, please, Choom,’ said Tobry. ‘Something traditional, I think.’

‘At once,’ said Choom, who was so old and thin that his joints creaked as he walked. He lowered his voice. ‘I heard a cry. Is the young master — ’

‘I’m afraid so.’

Rix scowled and stalked into his dressing room. Shortly Tobry joined him, wearing his own kilt, black shot with threads of scarlet and gold.

‘May I?’ Tobry said, indicating the racks of garments.

Despite their long friendship, he never presumed, and Rix appreciated that. He waved a hand. Tobry went down the other end of the rack, where Rix kept clothes in his indigent friend’s size. Rix selected a cream shirt, plain save for puffed-out shoulders and a diagonal sash of white lace across the front.

He climbed the stairs to his white studio, which encircled the core of his personal tower like a doughnut, and leaned on a malachite windowsill, looking down across the lawn to the shores of Lake Fumerous, the sapphire glory of Hightspall. The nightmare had been so real that he half expected to see the leviathan approaching, but the palace gardens, lit by a thousand hazy gaslights, were empty save for a gang of navvies in a trench, packing another layer of asbestos around the main hot water tubule.

‘Waste of time,’ said Tobry from behind. ‘The heat’s gone and it’s never coming back.’

Caulderon had been built on a geyser field and for two thousand years a network of tubules had carried hot groundwater around the city, but a century ago it had started to cool. Now, no amount of lagging could retain what little heat was left.

‘’Course it will,’ said Rix, without looking around. ‘We just have to delve deeper.’

‘The last hot-rock bakery went out of business two weeks ago, and it was four hundred feet down. And all the public scalderies have closed.’

‘No wonder the common folk are on the nose.’

‘In my grandfather’s day, even the poorest folk were well fed and clean.’

‘Why don’t they use heatstones?’

‘Your mother would love that.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Nothing,’ Tobry said hastily. ‘You have to be wealthy to afford heat-stones, Rix. Life in the shanty towns is grim, and getting grimmer. The steam mills and screw pumps have to be driven by firewood boilers and we’ve stripped every hill bare for ten miles — ’

‘Enough bad news,’ snapped Rix. ‘Did you bring anything to eat?’

He turned and Tobry was levitating a tray above his head.

Involuntarily, Rix clenched his fists. ‘Do you have to? You know I hate anything uncanny.’

‘It’s hardly magery at all,’ Tobry said mildly. ‘You know what a dilettante I am. Never done a day’s work in my life.’

A waggle of his fingers and the black bottle poured a goblet of a brown, foul smelling wine. The tray turned upside down and floated towards Rix, yet nothing spilled or fell. Despite Tobry’s self-deprecation, his forehead had a faint sheen. He was showing off, just to be annoying.

Rix resisted the urge to swat the tray out of the air. Stay calm. It’s just his way. He clung to the carved green windowsill until his heart steadied and the pounding in his ears stopped.

‘Why do you hate magery?’ said Tobry.

‘Don’t know. I always have, since I was a kid.’

‘Did someone use it on you once?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Mother protected me from everything.’ Rix took a goblet, sniffed and made a face. ‘Yuk! What’s this?’

‘Fishwine. It’s traditional. I know how important that is to you.’

Tobry was mocking him because House Ricinus was so recently risen. Rix sipped. The wine left a foul taste in his mouth, but he drank it anyway. He wasn’t going to be beaten that easily.

‘Did you bring anything to eat?’

Tobry handed him a flat oval of hard yellow clay, the size of a small platter. His eyes were gleaming; he seemed to be restraining himself.

‘What is it?’ Rix said suspiciously.

‘Hundred-year cod.’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘It’s a rare delicacy. Very traditional in the oldest families.’

‘Baked?’ Rix sniffed the clay, which had no odour.

‘No, just matured for a hundred years. Or more.’

Rix cracked the clay, gingerly. The hundred-year cod was brown as peat, hard, and had no odour. ‘This isn’t one of your jokes, is it?’

‘Would I joke about Hightspall’s noble traditions?’

‘You make fun of everything else I hold dear.’

Rix picked a small piece out with the corner of a knife, put it in his mouth then, gagging, ran to the window and spat it out. ‘That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever tasted.’

‘Too traditional for you?’ Tobry was smirking.

Rix scrubbed his mouth with a handkerchief. ‘I don’t see you eating any.’

‘I only live for the present.’

Rix stalked away and uncovered a ten-foot-long canvas on which a nobleman in blood-spattered coil-armour was severing the head of a monstrous wyverin. The lava-streaked volcanoes in the background were nearly complete, and the wyverin had been painted in intricate detail, even down to the reflections in each pearly scale, but the nobleman was little more than a sketch. Only the purple, bloated nose looked finished.

‘Not your father’s best feature,’ Tobry said quietly.

How long could Lord Ricinus keep it up, Rix wondered. Surely the drinking would kill him before much longer. What had driven him to such sodden excess, anyway?

‘How can I do it to him?’ he said aloud.

‘I’m sure he’d want you to paint him the way he is.’

‘Father wouldn’t give a damn. It’s Mother who ordered the portrait, and if it’s not finished in time she’ll crucify me. But that’s not what I meant.’

Rix opened a pot of red ochre and dabbed some on his palette. He mixed colours, picked up a large brush then threw it down with another heavy sigh.

‘You used to love painting,’ said Tobry, sitting down. He brought out a liqueur bottle from behind his back, filled his own goblet and leaned back.

‘I still do.’ Rix selected a smaller brush. ‘When I’m working, all my troubles disappear, but this picture won’t come right.’

‘Your heart’s not in it,’ said Tobry. ‘You don’t want to do it.’ He sipped the liqueur and his eyes rolled upwards in bliss.

Rix’s knuckles whitened around the brush, which snapped. He tossed it aside, irritated by the pleasure his friend could take from the simplest things while he, Rix … ‘Of course I want to do it,’ he said. ‘It’s for Father’s great day.’

‘When is his Honouring?’ said Tobry.

Rix glanced at the cherry wood month-clock by the stairs. The knife-blade hands seemed to be spinning towards him. He blinked, focused and it was just a clock.

‘Eleven days,’ he said ominously. At this rate he wouldn’t have his father’s face finished by then, and the whole portrait had to be completed by the Honouring. That it not be done was unthinkable, for he was a dutiful son, and yet …

‘Would you like me to leave you alone?’

‘You’d better get back to my women,’ Rix said curtly, collecting crimson paint on the tip of another brush.

Laughter echoed up the stairs. ‘They seem happier without me.’ Tobry rubbed his chin. ‘And considering how hard I tried to please them, I find that a tad ironic.’

‘You find everything ironic.’ Rix dabbed at the line of his father’s twisted mouth, then scraped it off. ‘You don’t take anything seriously.’

‘With the world about to end in ice or fire,’ Tobry said lightly, ‘why should I? Life is a joke at our expense. I sometimes wonder if the entire universe isn’t a farce.’

As Rix reached out to the canvas, he felt the palace closing around him like dungeon walls. He was exhausted, but if he went back to bed the nightmare would batter him again, and again. He could not stay here, must not be here the night after tomorrow -

‘Are you all right?’ said Tobry.

‘What?’ Rix felt dislocated, as though a segment had been snipped from his life.

‘You’ve been as still as a gargoyle for a good five minutes.’

Rix cast the brush down. ‘I can’t do it … Come on.’

‘Where are we going?’ Tobry rose lazily, goblet in hand.

‘Anywhere but here.’ Rix thought for a moment. ‘Let’s go hunting in the mountains.’ He held his breath, waiting for Tobry to tell him what a bad idea it was, hoping he would. ‘Don’t try to talk me out of it,’ Rix said half-heartedly.

‘I wasn’t planning to. I love it when people run away from their responsibilities.’

‘I’m not running away — ’ Of course he was, and Lady Ricinus would be furious. Rix stopped, wryly imagining her listing him into the month’s flogging tithe. He wouldn’t put it past her.

‘I’d encourage you to neglect all your duties,’ said Tobry, studying the canvas. ‘For instance, it can’t possibly take eleven days to finish this. Leave it ’til the last night, then fling the paint on with a bucket. None of the philistines at the Honouring will know the difference.’

Had Tobry been talking to anyone else, Rix would have laughed. ‘Oh, shut up and come on. Bring the liqueur.’ Was he turning into his drunken father already? ‘No, leave it.’

‘What say I bring it and you don’t have any?’ Tobry said cheekily.

‘I suppose we might need it,’ Rix rationalised. ‘For the cold, I mean.’

He had to get away from Lady Ricinus who controlled every minute of his life, from the terrorised servants and the beautiful palace which was as suffocating as a coffin. Tobry didn’t know how lucky he was, having nothing.

Rix ran down the stairs to the dressing room, exchanged his kilt for mustard-yellow woollen trews, selected a pair of black knee-boots and heaved them on. He reached for his favourite weapon, a magnificent red broadsword he had been given on his seventeenth birthday, then hesitated.

‘Is that a new one?’ said Tobry, pointing to a battered scabbard at the back. A square hilt, tightly wound with worn black wire, protruded from it.

‘Actually, it’s a family heirloom, and ages-old. Mother told me to use it but I don’t like it.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s too light. I’m afraid it’ll break,’ Rix lied.

Tobry carried the scabbard out into the salon, drew the sword, sliced the air across and down, then diced it. ‘It’s beautifully balanced.’ He flicked the tip, ting. ‘Lovely metalwork. It’s titane, almost unbreakable. And damnably hard to forge.’

It had a bluish tint and the blade was slightly curved, like a sabre, though it had cutting edges on front and back. An inscription down the blade was so worn as to be illegible save for the first two words, Heroes must.

‘Heroes must?’ said Tobry, looking from the blade to Rix, then back to the blade. ‘What does that remind me of?’

Rix had no idea. ‘Mother said it’s enchanted to protect its owner,’ he said reluctantly. His throat tightened. He thumped his chest a couple of times to clear his air passages.

Tobry ran a finger along the flat of the blade and pale yellow swirls appeared in the air around it. ‘No ordinary charm, though.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s not meant to work against soldiers, or wild beasts.’

‘Really? What’s the good of it, then?’

‘It protects against magery.’

Sweat formed in Rix’s armpits. ‘Why would anyone attack me with magery?’

‘I can’t imagine,’ Tobry said drily. He handed it to Rix and went out.

The sword jerked like a dowsing rod and swung around until its quivering tip pointed towards the heatstone. For a few seconds Rix strained to hold it, then it stilled like any other lifeless blade.

Was the magery of a sword enchanted to protect its owner worse than the attack of some uncanny creature? Probably not. He slammed it into its scabbard and belted it on, shuddering. After considering his kilt, head to one side, he tossed it into his bag in case the weather turned warm.

Tobry reappeared with a small case containing balms and potions, bandages and needles.

‘What’s that for?’ said Rix irritably.

‘When some beast tears your legs off, I’ll be able to sew the loose skin over your stumps,’ Tobry said casually.

Rix felt a phantom pain at mid-thigh level, but shook it off.

‘Why go at this time of night?’ asked Tobry.

‘It’ll be light when we get there.’

‘And by the time the servants wake Lady Ricinus, she won’t be able to order you back.’

Rix didn’t bother to reply. Tobry knew him better than he knew himself.

‘What are we hunting?’ Tobry went on.

‘I don’t care, the more savage the better. I need to cleanse myself.’

‘Of what?’

‘I can’t tell! But there’s something wrong inside me.’

‘Drinking and wenching aren’t crimes. Even Lady Ricinus encourages you in that.’

‘I’d feel better if she disapproved. What kind of a mother urges her only son into debauchery?’

Tobry opened his mouth, but wisely closed it again.

‘Something is badly wrong with the world,’ said Rix. ‘And I feel as though it’s all down to me.’

‘Hightspall’s troubles began over a century ago.’

‘I know. Yet I still feel it’s my fault!’

Tobry frowned at that. ‘Well, I’m not sure that killing some unfortunate beast is the answer.’

‘Right now,’ Rix said bleakly, ‘it’s the only answer I’ve got.’