Rebellion

CHAPTER 99

“All Wil’s fault, Lord King,” said Wil as he reached the top, slobbering and gasping. He wiped his nose on his arm, which was crusted with dried blood and muck to the elbow. “Wil changed the ending. Wil got to atone.”

Tali looked over her shoulder. Lyf was only twenty yards away.

“How could you change the story, worm?” Lyf said coldly.

“Tried to fix Engine but everything went wrong.”

“Your mind is addled; you couldn’t get anywhere near the Engine. Where did you get alkoyl from? Have you been stealing from the stores again?”

“Wil not steal!” cried Wil, staggering towards Lyf and reaching out with his bony arms. “Collected it from Engine’s weepings.”

“Liar! Get out of my sight — no, first bring me the iron book you stole from Palace Ricinus.”

“Book gone, Lord King,” whispered Wil.

The feet of Lyf’s crutches squealed against the stone floor as he twisted around. “What happened to it?” he thundered.

“Melted book down, Lord King. Reforged the pages. Tried to write it again, but it didn’t work!” Wil howled. “Couldn’t make the writing go right.”

Tali looked from Wil to Lyf, whose face was drained of colour. He shot into the air so rapidly that his long boots slipped down, exposing his weakness, the stumps of his legs. “Go!” he thundered.

Wil cried out, tilted the flask up to his nose cavity and tilted it. Alkoyl fumed out, flesh sizzled, he gasped and cringed away down the ramp, weeping piteously.

Now! Tali thought. She slipped the small piece of heatstone out of her pouch and hurled it at Lyf’s stumps. It struck the left-hand stump with a loud crack, then clattered to the floor. Lyf let out a cry of agony and doubled over, clutching his shinbones.

Tali dared not try to get past him; her only choice was to flee down the curving ramp. She did not know where it went, but at least it led away from the heatstone deposit. She bolted down and, after a vertical descent of some fifty feet, entered a vast, open chamber several hundred yards long and wide, carved from the native rock, white marble.

Tali looked back. Lyf wasn’t in sight though she could hear his crutches on the ramp. Where could she hide?

The chamber’s rocky ceiling, more than thirty feet above her, was supported by pillars of carved stone, six feet square at their bases, arranged in intersecting arcs which resembled alchymical symbols. She ran down and took cover behind the nearest pillar. Wil had disappeared.

To her left, stacked against the side wall of the great chamber near the base of the ramp, was a hip-high cube of heatstone bricks. She wasn’t going anywhere near it. The chamber was softly lit by a number of glowstone plates mounted on the ceiling, but there were deep shadows too, plenty of places for her to hide — and for Wil to have hidden.

Where was he? Though he was addled, and seemed pitiful, Tali knew how dangerous he was. She had seen him choke Tinyhead, a big man, to death with those long, callused fingers. She could not see Wil, for the chamber was crowded with large, complicated pieces of equipment the like of which she had never seen before. He could be lurking anywhere.

Ahead were a variety of furnaces, some tall, narrow and made of grey iron, others squat constructions built from small, lime-green firebricks. Flues mounted beneath the ceiling carried the fumes away. She was on the forbidden alchymical level, and this curving ramp must be the way the Cythonians went up and down. Did the walled-off drive emerge somewhere on the other side? If it did not, she would be trapped here.

Tali scurried behind one of the firebrick furnaces and peered back towards the ramp. She could hear Lyf coming, the click of his crutches slow and deliberate. Keeping behind the furnaces, she scurried across towards the centre of the chymical level, to a cluster of distilling apparatuses.

The equipment in the room, she now realised, was arranged in clusters according to purpose — furnaces behind her, stills, alembics and retorts here, and to her right was an array of enormous flasks, their contents seething and bubbling on beds of heatstone bricks. One flask held a yellow fluid, thick as porridge. Another was watery and purple, with scintillas of silver rising and falling as it boiled.

Other clusters contained kinds of equipment she could not identify, although she had heard the names mentioned in her slave days — abluters, sublimaters, crystallisers, elixerators, calciners…

Something clacked behind her and she spun around, thinking that Wil was creeping up on her. Clack-clack. All she could see were a dozen kinds of stills, any of which would suffice to hide the little man.

Three towering stills made of glass reminded her of Lyf’s great glass still that she had seen in his caverns. She crept between them, knife in hand. Nothing to her left; nothing to her right. Clack-clack. The tallest glass still, twenty feet high, hissed steam from a top vent, ssss. Tali stifled a screech.

Steady, steady — you’re jumping at shadows. But Wil was lurking somewhere in these shadows, and he had cause to hate her.

She edged around a pot-bellied still made from sections of riveted copper. Pipes arose from its top, looping and twisting before passing through a water bath and then into glass flasks. Ahead, a small platina still was set in an open space well apart from everything else. Thick stone walls curved around it, though she could not tell whether they were intended to protect the platina still, or the equipment nearby.

Away to her right, some tall pieces of glassy equipment were illuminated by yellow lights so bright that they dazzled her. Tali didn’t know what they were and wasn’t planning to go that way. In here, the light was her enemy.

Then she saw Wil — the wretched creature was down the back of the chamber, creeping up an iron ladder towards a rack of silvery demijohns. He had a furtive air. What was he up to? She looked back but Lyf still wasn’t in sight. Why was he taking so long? Waiting for reinforcements?

Tali crept after Wil. The nearest half of the rear wall, a hundred yards long, was covered in shelves and racks of chymicals stored in glass bottles, jars and demijohns. There were huge flasks full of deadly quick-silver, the liquid metal that was heavier than lead, jars of powders that were coloured viridian, lurid orange, bright yellow, blue, and many that were white or black. Jars full of waxy-looking metals, stored under oil. Flasks that fumed and jugs that smoked. The air had a peculiar metallic tang.

The second half of the rear wall was stacked with crates that bore the rictus symbol of death-lashes. Other stacks were marked with the symbols for grenadoes and pyrotechnic flares. She also recognised barrel-shaped bombasts, and there were stacks of crates that could have had any kind of horror inside.

A faint whistling sound alerted her. Lyf was drifting down the ramp, flying five feet above the floor, his dark eyes darting this way and that. Tali armed herself with a death-lash and took cover behind a stack of barrels. Where was Wil? He had disappeared again. She scurried across the chymical level, darting from one piece of equipment to another, looking for a way out.

Her legs ached, and so did her back; it must be three in the morning, at least. She had been going full bore for many hours, without food or drink.

On the far side she spied another ramp leading up, a straight one this time. It had to be the walled-off drive Holm had tried to break through. She scuttled that way, took cover behind one of the square pillars and looked up the drive. Hammers were pounding on the wall and she could see a number of cracks in it, but the Pale did not look like breaking through.

And even if they did, all they would find down here was Lyf. Tali hastily scanned the tunnel above with her mage glass. The image was clear this time, and perfectly in focus, though she wished it was not.

The tunnel was empty — she saw no sign of friend or foe. But a stream of blood, several feet wide, was creeping along the floor towards her viewpoint. Tali gasped and clutched at her chest, for she had seen that image before somewhere. Where?

It had been in Madam Dibly’s wagon, on the way across the mountains to Rutherin. Tali’s mental image of that moment was so clear that she could still remember how sluggishly the blood had flowed, still smell the faint tang of iron. She could smell it now. Tali sniffed, took her eye from the mage glass and looked around, puzzled.

And then it came, first a series of finger-width trickles seeping through cracks at the base of the wall and flowing down the centre of the drive. But as she watched, the skin on the back of her neck crawling, the trickles strengthened and merged, and slowly widened until flowing blood covered the floor of the drive from wall to wall.

Pale blood, she had no doubt. Gallons and gallons. The slaughter had begun.

She had to take Lyf on right now, or her people were going to be exterminated. She looked around frantically. The alchymical level was a dangerous place; what could she use to attack him? Her pilfered death-lash would not suffice.

Again the bright lights caught her eye. Fifty yards away, green mist was rising from three exotic apparatuses, each a honeycomb of yellow glass with green fluids bubbling through a network of internal conduits. Ten-foot-wide squares of glowing sunstone, suspended above each apparatus, lit it with a brilliant yellow light. Bricks of heatstone were stacked around the bulbous bases, heating the acid-green fluid to a furious boil.

She felt sure that these devices were acidulators, because the green mist looked like the blistering fumes that had burst up through the floor last year. What if she lured Lyf towards the nearest acidulator, then hurled a piece of heatstone and smashed it to bits? It would be a deadly ploy, as liable to kill herself as him, but she could not last much longer. It was time for desperate measures.

She plodded towards the acidulators, keeping out in the open this time so Lyf would see her, and watching him from the corner of an eye. He changed course and raced through the air in her direction.

She hurled her death-lash at him, missed, and scrambled in under the base of the first acidulator, to the stacked bricks of heatstone. Pain sheared through her head, as bad as she had ever felt, and the heat radiating down onto her was blistering. The acids in the acidulator boiled and seethed, right above her head. If the flask burst, or Lyf broke it, her death would be agony beyond description.

She jerked out a heatstone brick, rolled over and scrabbled out the other side of the acidulator as Lyf came hurtling across. He hovered, fifteen feet away. Tali held the brick up.

“Stop, or I’ll use it.”

“Smash the acidulator and it’ll do you far more damage than me.”

She knew it, too; most of it was above her. But trying to kill Lyf wasn’t the answer. His death wouldn’t stop his people from killing the slaves — it would only make their vengeance more furious.

Wait! Could she turn her earlier, bitter moment back on him? Could she make him think that his failure to stop her had put his people at risk? If she could, it would give the Pale a chance.

“Give up,” he said. “There’s no way out, and I can summon my people in an instant.”

“Then why haven’t you?”

He did not reply.

“I can knock some of your people unconscious,” said Tali. “Maybe even all of them.” It was a bluff — she had no idea how far the effects would extend, if it worked at all. There was also a possibility that the burst would strengthen him.

He eyed the brick of heatstone in her hand. “How?”

“The same way as I did in the shaft when I escaped from Cython — when I dropped my sunstone down the shaft and it imploded. It knocked all the Cythonians nearby unconscious — those it didn’t kill outright — yet it had no effect on the Pale.”

“The ones who were knocked unconscious woke within half an hour, unharmed.”

“Half an hour is a long time to be unconscious in the middle of a battle,” Tali said pointedly. “It only takes a slave ten seconds to cut a throat.”

He blanched. “Anyway, heatstone doesn’t have the same effect.”

“But sunstone does,” said Tali.

She hurled her heatstone brick up at the centre of the huge sunstone above the acidulator and ran for her very life, towards a cube-shaped iron furnace ten yards away.

The heatstone burst against the lower side of the sunstone, crump, imploding with a hot flash of light and causing a sharp pain behind her ears. She looked back. The sunstone seemed to be undamaged. No, cracks were radiating out from the centre. Get to shelter, quick!

She dived over the left side of the furnace and threw herself into shelter behind it. From the corner of an eye she saw Lyf streaking away, covering his face. Tali covered hers with her arms, put her head between her knees and -

The sunstone implosion occurred in absolute silence but with a light so bright that she could see it even with her arms over her eyes. The pain was so bad that she screamed. Heat washed over her — a torrid incandescence that would have turned her to char in an instant had she been in its direct path; just as the unfortunate guards in the sunstone shaft had been carbonised that day.

Then it was gone, still in silence. Now a hissing whistle began behind her and rose up the register until it was so banshee-shrill that her teeth began to ache. A dreadful fear struck her as she realised what was happening. Most of that burst of radiant heat had passed directly down onto the acidulator, superheating the acids inside to steam, and when the glass could take no more pressure -

She leapt up and ran. Nothing mattered now save getting as far away as possible, and keeping as much heavy apparatus between her and the acidulator as she could.

She had just passed behind the platina still when the acidulator went off with a shattering blast that hurled glass and fuming green fluids halfway across the chymical level. Green fumes boiled out and up — the same deadly, blistering fumes that had killed dozens of Pale after the accident last year. Tali covered her face with her hands and prepared to die.