Vengeance

CHAPTER 85

‘Take it back!’ Tali shrieked as Rannilt’s little globe shot across the chamber.

Lyf was smiling, reaching out for it with Tobry’s glowing elbrot. Rannilt evaded Tali’s clutching fingers, raced across the chamber and tried to draw the globe back, but it shot up beyond her reach.

The facinore’s skull-crackers snapped at Rix’s head. Tali choked, but the paralysis broke and Rix ducked and whirled, striking up at it and re-severing both arms in the one blow. Its legs shrank, it stumbled, the fluttering shadows withdrew to a dark band surrounding it, then began to flare and fade. With a screechy whine, the facinore dwindled until it was smaller than Rix, and then it backed away.

Tobry lurched forwards, stiff-legged, stretching up on tiptoes for the drifting globe. Rix swung the sword at his friend’s neck. Rannilt wailed and covered her eyes. Tali choked.

But Rix twisted and lifted the blade at the last instant, slamming the flat of it into the side of Tobry’s head and he crumpled, unconscious. His eyes emptied and Lyf’s yellow eyes reappeared in the wrythen’s empty form, which filled like a balloon, soared up to catch the golden globe and thrust it into its chest. Its middle — Lyf’s middle — darkened until Tali could no longer see through it, as if it were changing from wrythen to a real being.

Lyf was floating ten feet high, out of reach of the sword he so feared. White bone gleamed in his shin stumps and he was staring at Rannilt as if he had never met anyone like her before. Then he smiled and met her eyes and pointed a finger. Rannilt was panting now, shaking her head, covering her eyes and trying to get away, but he whispered, Come forth, and more golden light burst from her. Taking hold of a thread of it, he reeled it in and rolled it into a ball around his arm.

Rannilt collapsed with a little sigh. Lyf thickened further and, while the golden draw continued, extended his left hand towards the armless facinore. It let out a squeal of fear as it was pulled towards him. Lyf clenched a fist around the upper part of its shadow and drew it into his chest. Rannilt heaved like a caterpillar on a leaf. The facinore screamed, a shrill, ugly sound as, bit by bit, its shadow halo was stripped away and also incorporated into Lyf.

Without it the facinore was a gaunt, shuddering monster, a scrawny thing all bone and sinew and stringy lengths of desiccated muscle. Lyf gestured and a second globe was wrenched from Rannilt’s mouth. She moaned, faint and feeble now, and Tali felt a pang of fear. Lyf was taking so much from the little girl, how could she survive?

Lyf swallowed the globe and momentarily his chest glowed golden-red, as if real blood was beginning to flow in him. He was getting stronger every second. Tali willed her gift to come. If it did not, she could not save Rannilt or any of them.

Rix took a slow step towards Lyf, who held up a hand. Rix ground to a halt as though the air had set hard to hold him back. Lyf gestured towards the facinore’s legs, twirling his fingers. The facinore screamed as a layer of muscle was stripped off its legs in sprays of black blood, then drifted towards Lyf. He continued to twirl his fingers and the muscle strips wrapped around his wrythen legs like lengths of ribbon, slowly building them into reality, all the way down to his stumps.

Tali covered her eyes, peeped through her fingers and covered her eyes again, shuddering at how quickly his power had grown. His chest pulsed red, gold, red — he was using Rannilt’s life force and gift to cannibalise the facinore’s body into his own, and if he was this strong with only part of a body, she dared not imagine what he could do when it was completed.

Lyf drew the elbrot from Tobry’s hand, pointed it at Rix’s head and spoke, mind to all their minds.

Ten years I have worked my compulsion on you. Now you are mine and you must atone.

‘No, Rix!’ Tali screamed. ‘He’s a stinking liar and a murderer. Don’t listen to anything he says.’

Rix might not have heard her, for he choked and the tip of his sword struck the floor, scattering chips of smoking stone. He jerked his head from side to side as if his neck joints were fused together.

‘Done nothing wrong,’ he slurred.

Remember the blood?

Rix dropped the sword, clang, stared at his hands then rubbed them furiously on his coat as though they were smirched with blood. Tali remembered the blood on the boy’s hands, in that cellar of long ago, and her scalp crawled. Such was Lyf’s power that even she wondered what Rix had done.

She fought it and spoke the words she no longer quite believed. ‘He’s a liar, Rix. You’ve done nothing wrong.’

Obeying me is the only way you can gain peace.

‘Get out of my head!’ cried Rix.

It belongs to me. You will cut it out of her and bring it to me.

The top of Tali’s head throbbed. Rix was cracking, falling under Lyf’s power, and any minute now he would break.

Rix’s cheeks shivered as if worms were crawling under the skin. ‘Go away, leave me alone.’ He groaned and bent for the sword.

You are mine. I own you.

Rix’s fingers closed over the hilt of the sword.

Cut it from her.

He hefted the sword.

Not with that! Lyf tossed down a tool with a circular cutting edge. Cut it out now!

An image flashed through Tali’s head — the murder cellar, the way Rix had sketched it. She heard a tooth crack in his tightly clenched jaw, then he took a slow, grinding step towards her and the look in his eyes was not Rix at all. Lyf had taken command of him. Was this the end?

Tobry was unconscious, Rannilt dying and Rix was out of control. Tali had to do something and, if her magery would not work, all she had left was her own strength. Lyf might not be expecting physical attack from a small woman he had always underestimated.

With an effort, she heaved the iron book off the table and swung it out to one side, for it was incredibly heavy. Rix stopped as if he had been frozen to the floor.

Put that down! Lyf shot towards her, arms outstretched.

She swung the heavy book, slowly at first, then gathering momentum that would make it difficult to stop, and as Lyf dived she smashed him in the face.

The blow passed right through his translucent wrythen head, driving his more solid upper body backwards. Blood-red ink — or red-tinged alkoyl — was driven out of the etched letters in the book to form seething globules inside his skull.

Lyf screamed.

The pearl in the Abysm shrieked and so did Tali’s own, agonisingly, then, faintly, the three distant, stolen pearls. She let out a sigh, and knew that the master of the three pearls had realised where she was. Then the half-wrythen with the legs made from a facinore fell to the floor like an empty cloak.

Where was Lyf? Had he possessed Tobry again? No, Tobry still lay unconscious. Tali’s head was shrieking, but she scanned the chamber through the spectible and caught a flash from the corner of an eye as Lyf’s disembodied consciousness hurtled through the crack into the white shaft of the Abysm. The crack vanished.

Her fingers stung from the iron book. She dropped it on the table and Tobry shot upright as if propelled by a spring. Pale and dazed and swaying, he looked down at his right hand in bewilderment. It was swollen and purple; huge, fluid-filled blisters covered his palm and fingers, burns from the bursting heatstone. Then he must have remembered, for the colour rose to his face and she saw the sick horror in his eyes. He raked at his skull as if it carried some vile infestation, then doubled over, retching.

Rix shook his head as though waking from a nightmare. With a roar that echoed through the flaskoid chamber, he snatched the titane sword, jamming it through the facinore’s mouth and out the back of its head. It flopped and fell, twitching beside the empty wrythen, but did not die. Lyf must be keeping it alive until he could strip the rest of its flesh from it.

Tali fell to her knees beside Rannilt, who lay as still as before, and pressed her hands to the girl’s chest. ‘Heal, heal!’ she whispered, but her hands did not warm, nor did Rannilt react.

‘Come on,’ said Rix, lifting the child, ‘before Lyf comes back. Bring the book.’

Tali wrapped it in a piece hacked from the hem of her coat and pulled on her discarded boots. Tobry recovered his charred elbrot. Then they went up, looking over their shoulders all the way. They passed out through the cave mouth and down the bloodstained rubble where the bodies of the two women were nothing but bones, and under the vine thicket to the horses. Several jackal shifters lay broken there, kicked to death. There were eyes all around in the darkness.

Tobry would not meet Tali’s eye. Rix hacked at every branch they passed as if the whole world was his enemy. Rannilt lay in Tali’s arms, breathing steadily now, a little colour had returned to her pale cheeks, but nothing could wake her.

A defeat or a victory? Tali had not beaten the wrythen, as the chancellor had hoped. Rather, the intrusion had strengthened Lyf. Nonetheless, she had gained some understanding of her magery and almost taken his ebony pearl, and he had been shaken to be attacked in his hitherto inviolable realm. The facinore, the most potent of his shifter creations, was finished, and they had his iron book. It was a victory of sorts — or would be when Rannilt woke.

If Rannilt woke.