Vengeance

CHAPTER 107

‘We’ve got to have a fire, Rix, or Rannilt will die.’

A freezing wind spat ice crystals in Tali’s face. They had gathered at the top of Rix’s cracked tower to see the end. Since Lyf had four pearls now and she could not use the master pearl within her, the end would not be long in coming.

Rannilt lay still, cocooned in blankets. Tali had on all the clothes she possessed, and one of Rix’s cloaks, yet she was shuddering convulsively. It was six-thirty in the morning and just starting to get light. In the distance, all three Vomits were erupting again, an unequivocal portent of the fall of a nation.

‘Caulderon is finished,’ Rix said harshly.

He looked down at the child and his face softened. He limped down the stairs, shortly to reappear lugging his easels.

Rix smashed them to kindling and lit a fire in a corner of the wall. Tali winced with every symbolic splinter he fed to the flames.

‘Burning your bridges?’ said Tobry, who was slumped on a bench in an exhaustion so total that she wondered if he would ever move again.

Tali laid Rannilt on a bench beside the fire. The child was no better after all, but no worse, either. The wind howled in between the columns, whirling smoke in their faces. This defeat is due to my failures, she thought. I didn’t protect Rannilt and I couldn’t help Rix when he most needed it. Then I lied to Tobry and he lost hope. But my biggest failure was with Lyf. I should not have hesitated.

In the background, another failure nagged at her. Something that might have made the difference if only she could have thought of it, but she could not dredge the memory up.

Glynnie and Benn carried up a forequarter of deer from the palace stores. Glynnie cut it up and they threaded chunks of red meat on skewers and set them over the fire. Juices dripped and sizzled on the coals. Tali stared at the feast, her mouth flooding. The only meat slaves were given in Cython was poulter, and that was only once a year.

‘What’s going to happen now?’ she said.

Rix stared over the wall, his jaw clenched. ‘I should have jumped the other night.’

‘What’s that?’ quavered Benn, who was standing on a bench looking towards the gates of Caulderon.

A lean, footless outline had appeared above the gates, a mid-air manifestation hundreds of feet high.

My people, it boomed, I am Lyf, your last, lost king. Two thousand years ago the enemy’s Five Heroes betrayed and murdered me, but even in death I could not leave my people unprotected. As a wrythen I have watched over you all this time, guiding your matriarchs via the secret books called the Solaces.

Tali started. ‘I forgot the iron book. We can’t let him get it back.’

‘Forget it,’ said Rix. ‘It’s over.’

Lyf’s shattered shinbones were still smoking. See how they treat your king, as foully as they have brutalised our beautiful Cythe. Yet the very land rebels. The earth rains fire down on them, the waters rise to tear down their filthy shanty towns. Even the eternal ice draws in all around to crush them into oblivion.

Cythe is close to ruin and will need much healing. We must take it back before it’s too late.The invaders deserve no mercy and will be given none. Take Caulderon, now!

The top of Tali’s head, where she had touched the needle point to it, throbbed. She rubbed it and her finger came back bloody. Memories stirred, of blood and alkoyl, and those fleeting words on the iron book.

‘I know how to stop him. Rix, come on!’

She ran for the roof door, yelling over her shoulder. ‘Look after Rannilt. We won’t be long.’

‘What are we doing?’ said Rix as he caught her on the stairs.

She hurtled down. ‘I saw it, but I didn’t take it in.’

‘Saw what?’

‘The iron book was written with alkoyl that he distilled drop by drop from the Abysm. Remember that tube of alkoyl Wil dropped in the cellar? We can write our own ending.’

‘How? We can’t read the damned book.’

The flood of hope was choking her; Tali could barely speak. ‘Blood,’ she gasped.

‘You’re making even less sense than usual.’

She stopped on the fourth landing to catch her breath. ‘Last night a drop of my blood fell on the book and for an instant I saw words there, but I was too exhausted to take anything in. Blood must decode the book and, if we write our own ending, it’ll stop Lyf.’

‘Even if that were true,’ said Rix dubiously, ‘he’s got four pearls. Why does he still need the book?’

They ran on. ‘Because his magery is bound up with everything he’s written in the Solaces. Everything he’s done in the past thousand years has been directed towards his ending, but he never got the chance to write it. If we write our own ending, it’s got to be a powerful blow to him. It could change everything.’

‘But it’s just a book.’

‘If your paintings can divine the future, why can’t a book written with powerful magery change it?’

‘I’ll take your word for it.’

They reached the dimly lit chaos of Rix’s salon. ‘Run down and grab the alkoyl tube,’ said Tali. ‘I’ll look for the book — ’

‘It’s found,’ said Rix.

A white-faced Wil was crouched on the far side of the salon, hugging the iron book to his hollow chest. ‘Wil’s book now,’ he whimpered. ‘Wil’s got to be the Scribe.’

He turned his raw eye sockets on her, jumped, then squeezed through a ragged crack in the wall, squirted alkoyl around its edges and was gone.

‘After him!’ Tali yelled.

Rix held her back. ‘Nothing can get through there now.’ He put a brawny arm around her waist and turned her back to the steps. ‘We tried.’

‘Not hard enough,’ she said bitterly. Why hadn’t she listened to the inner voice last night, when it had whispered about the book?

He was still holding her, lifting her so her feet skipped over each step. ‘What more could anyone have done?’

‘I don’t know,’ she wailed. ‘Everything I’ve tried has gone wrong. I’m useless.’

Rix smiled, the first she had seen from him in days. ‘You broke out of Cython where no other Pale ever had.’

Tali sniffed.

‘And you saved Rannilt’s life. You can’t dismiss that so easily.’

‘All I gave her was one lousy week.’

‘Rannilt would say it was the best week of her life.’

‘I suppose so,’ she said grudgingly. ‘But my quest has failed. I’m — ’

‘The killers are all dead,’ said Rix.

‘But I don’t feel any better.’ She turned to look up at him. ‘What’s the matter with me? I thought the pain would go away once they’d been punished, but it’s as bad as ever.’

‘You’re asking me for advice,’ Rix said wryly.

‘Yes.’

‘The pain has nothing to do with the killers, only with the crime you and I witnessed. The pain is inside you, and only you can deal with it.’

‘Lyf’s not dead!’ said Tali. ‘That’s why it still hurts.’

‘And you’re determined to ignore the truth,’ said Rix, restraining himself with an effort. ‘You found his weakness, you hurt him badly, and he’s lost the iron book. You’ve done more than you could have hoped for. Isn’t it enough?’

Tali had to think about that. ‘It’s more than I ever expected, but nothing will be enough until Lyf pays for his crimes. And he never will, now.’

‘He’ll pay,’ said Rix. ‘But not today.’

As they reached the top, the sun tipped the horizon and a cascade of bombast blasts rippled along the south-eastern wall of the city, half a mile from the main gates where the First Army waited in its ranks. When the dust and smoke blew away, a section of wall a quarter of a mile long was gone and the enemy soldiers were scrambling over the rubble. Another great force was attacking from the unwalled lake shore.

‘They’re encircling the First Army on three sides,’ said Rix directly, reporting on the scene through his telescope. ‘They’ve pinned our soldiers between the gates and the buildings along the avenue. They’re blocking all the side streets …’

‘But our soldiers are better than theirs,’ said Benn. Even standing on the bench, he only came up to Rix’s shoulders. ‘We’ll beat ’em, Lord, won’t we?’ His voice went shrill and he fought to hold back tears.

Rix put an arm across the boy’s shoulders. ‘I wish I could say so. Hop down, lad. You don’t need to watch.’

But Benn, though white-faced and trembling, shook his head. ‘Got to see what they do to us, Lord. Got to know.’

The enemy began to cut the First Army down, rank by rank, for the soldiers had no defence against Cythonian ferocity, their unusual tactics or their strange, chymical weaponry. From other breaches in the wall, more enemy streamed in to trap the Second and Third Armies.

‘If House Ricinus hadn’t paid for the Third Army,’ said Rix, ‘would those men be dying now?’

‘Yes, they would,’ said Tobry, whose eyes never left Rannilt’s blanched face.

‘Caulderon will fall within the hour,’ said Rix.

‘Is there no hope?’ Tali was still praying for a miracle.

‘None,’ said Tobry. ‘And little for you, if Rix still retains his suicidal urge. If anyone can get you across the mountains to plan the counterattack, he can.’

‘We’re going to fight,’ said Rix. ‘And win Caulderon back. Gather your gear. We’ll take the chancellor’s secret way.’

Before they could move, a squad of burly troops burst through the tower door, wearing the livery of the chancellor’s personal guard, and the chancellor followed. The tubby, balding chief magian was there too.

The chancellor inspected Rix, the servants, Tali, then Tobry’s cat-like ears, and smiled. ‘I told you to leave this place and never return,’ he said to Glynnie and Benn.

Rix stepped forwards, carrying his sword, with light-footed menace. ‘I ordered them home,’ he lied. ‘I protect my servants with my own life, sir. Every one of them.’

The chancellor shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’ He turned towards Tali, his eyes glittering.

‘I did what you asked of me,’ she said defensively.

His voice was ice smashing on an anvil. ‘You neglected to mention the most vital secret — that the wrythen was Lyf.’

She had not dared, knowing that he would ask dangerous questions.

‘Had I known Lyf was our enemy,’ the chancellor grated, ‘had I known he had been plotting against us for two thousand years, had I known he wrote the Solaces to guide his people every step of their way back to power, I would never have sent you to the Crag.’

‘I hurt him,’ Tali said feebly. ‘It made him pull back his army.’

‘For a day and a half!’ He was like a cobra waiting to strike, and Tali knew she had made a deadly enemy. ‘You also strengthened him immeasurably and drove him out, bent on vengeance.’

She could not deny it. ‘Lyf’s only attacking the armies. He’s not killing indiscriminately.’

‘Yet!’ The word was a whiplash. ‘But once my people have been enslaved and forced to tear Caulderon down, he will.’ The chancellor pulled her aside, saying in a low voice, ‘I know you’re holding out on me — ’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Tali blustered. She had not mentioned her murdered ancestors at the Honouring, but too many people knew the truth. He would soon guess that she bore the master pearl.

‘Take your hands off her,’ Rix snapped.

‘You consider the girl who attacked your helpless, drunken father and knocked him out a friend?’ said the chancellor.

Rix froze with his hands outstretched. ‘Tali? Tell me this isn’t true.’

‘He — he swung the bottle at me,’ said Tali, feeling sick. ‘I only pushed him. I didn’t mean to hurt him.’

‘I know what Father was like,’ he said coldly. ‘Why didn’t you tell me he was hurt?’

Her denials and half-truths had been instinctive, a slave’s way of keeping out of trouble. How bitterly she regretted them now. ‘It — I — the guards were looking after him — I was afraid — ’

‘Never make excuses to me!’ Rix stalked off.

The chancellor turned to Tobry, wrinkling his nose. ‘As for the shifter-cat, the law requires that it be put to death.’

‘No!’ cried Tali.

‘I was aware of the penalty before I ate the beast’s liver,’ said Tobry, with a trace of his old insolence.

The chancellor gestured to an attendant carrying a flask and a sealed box. ‘You have the powdered lead?’

‘Yes, my lord,’ said the attendant.

‘Stand ready to burn the livers the moment they’re taken.’

Tali stepped in front of Tobry and spread her arms. ‘There has to be a way to save him.’

‘There isn’t, as he knows better than any,’ said the chancellor.

‘What’s he talking about?’ said Tali, twisting to look up at Tobry’s furred cheeks.

‘His grandfather was bitten by a jackal shifter and House Lagger tried to save him,’ said Rix. ‘Though I’ve never known why that was such a mistake.’

‘You can’t bring anyone back,’ said Tobry. ‘Once you’re fully a shifter, you remain one until you die. They should have put Grandfather down, but he was greatly loved and the best magians in the land were called in to break the shape-shifting curse.’

‘But they didn’t succeed?’ said Tali.

‘It looked as though they had but, inside, the shifter madness was taking him, and he stalked the halls by night, hunting his own family. He got into the nursery, killed my little brother and all the young cousins, and turned several others, though it was years before we realised the culprit was Grandfather.’

‘Oh, Tobry, I’m sorry.’

‘Father had no choice but to hunt down his own father-in-law. It tore our house apart.’

‘But there’s more, isn’t there?’ said Tali, seeing the pain in his cat eyes now and remembering things he’d said previously.

Tobry stared back through time and space. ‘I was thirteen,’ he whispered. ‘Just a kid. When Father called for help I didn’t understand what was going on. Grandfather still had the shifter’s strength and he was going to tear Father’s throat out. What could I do? I saved Father; I killed my grandfather.’

‘You could have done nothing else,’ said Rix.

‘Mother went out of her mind and Father was destroyed by the guilt — not for trying to do what had to be done, but for failing and calling on a boy to do a man’s job. Afterwards, Mother burnt Lagger Mansion down with the rest of the family inside it, all save me.’

Tobry looked into Tali’s eyes. ‘So I’m certainly not going to inflict — ’

‘I don’t have time for this,’ said the chancellor to his guards. ‘Cut the beast’s livers out.’