Vengeance

CHAPTER 27

Tali was frozen to the step. Though she knew Banj was going to kill her, obedience was so ingrained that it was a struggle to ignore his direct order. But she had to fight it.

‘I’m not letting Rannilt be killed by that vicious toad,’ she muttered, avoiding Banj’s stare. No, she had to be stronger. She must openly defy him — for her own sake, nothing less would do. Raising her head, Tali steadied her shaking knees, looked Banj in the eye and said firmly, ‘I refuse. Damn the matriarchs, damn Cython and damn you. I’m the one!’

Banj’s handsome features registered shock at the defiance, perhaps more so at the secret she should have known nothing about. Purple crept up his cheeks and he glanced over his shoulder. ‘Archers?’

‘Not here yet.’ Orlyk waved the crimson and yellow death-lash. ‘But with this I can sever her backbone from twenty feet away.’

‘Are you her overseer?’ Banj said stiffly.

Orlyk bent her head in angry submission.

Banj drew the Living Blade with which he had beheaded Mia. Red-tinged rainbows wavered around its transparent annulus and it began to keen gently as he lumbered up the steps. Tali retreated, knowing he would catch her before the top. Rannilt convulsed again and light blazed out of her in all directions. Tali could barely hold the jerking girl; it was all she could do to keep climbing.

‘Not now, Rannilt, please.’ Tali hugged her tightly, hoping to overcome her inner torment, but Rannilt did not respond.

Tali looked up desperately. Despite Mimoy’s earlier words, she was waiting at the doors, watching. The pressure in Tali’s head was almost unbearable now, and every flash from Rannilt’s fingers set off such a whirling of the coloured lights in her inner eye that she had to clutch at the rail to hold herself up.

‘Stop, slave!’ Banj, only two flights below her now, was taking three steps to her one.

‘Mimoy!’ Tali cried. ‘Help me.’

Mimoy did not reply.

‘Please don’t kill Rannilt,’ Tali begged Banj. ‘She didn’t ask for the gift. It just came to her.’

Banj was inexorable. ‘Magery is forbidden, obscene, and an abomination.’

‘But she’s an innocent little girl.’

‘Hightspall’s magery was conceived in treachery and birthed in blood. No one bearing its taint is innocent.’

‘Kill her and it makes you a child-murderer.’

Banj’s eyes slid away from hers, but he said, ‘All those bearing the taint must be put down. It’s our law and I swore to uphold it.’

‘It proves you’re nothing but savages!’ she shouted. ‘Your ancestors were too gutless to fight Hightspall so they enslaved its children.’

Banj’s dark eyes flashed. ‘Oh, we fought,’ he said softly. ‘For two hundred and fifty years our ancestors battled the barbarian invaders. If not for their sly, depraved magery, Cythe would still be ours.’

He said it with such passion that Tali had no reply. Her knees were shaking; she could carry Rannilt no further. Prising the girl’s arms from around her neck, Tali put her on the steps above the landing. Rannilt whimpered and reached out blindly, the warm yellow light flowing in waves from her fingertips.

Tali could only see Banj severing the little girl’s head. She shook her. ‘Rannilt, wake up. You’ve got to run, now.’

She did not wake, and Tali had no choice. She had to fight Banj bare-handed or they would both die. She stumbled to the front of the landing, facing him in the defensive posture Nurse Bet had taught her. Tali had practised the moves ten thousand times but had never fought a real opponent, much less an armed one. She would be lucky to get in one blow before he killed her, yet even one blow was more than her gentle mother had dared. Even one blow would be a blow for justice and an inspiration to all the Pale. The enemies were only human. They could be beaten. Though not here, not by her.

As she raised her hands, the pressure in her head grew until her skull bones creaked. The colours swirled furiously, she lost vision for a second and when it came back Banj was on the step below the landing, only six feet away, the annular blade pointing at her breast.

‘Surrender, Tali,’ he said, using her name for the first time. He inclined his head to her, then reached out as if to take her hand.

Prickles ran down her front at his mark of respect — Banj was honouring the doomed one. He was no savage. He was a decent man, within his limits. She shook her head. ‘You’ll have to kill me … Banj.’

No slave dared speak a Cythonian’s name to his face, but Tali wasn’t going to die a slave. She was any man’s equal.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, another first in a day of firsts, and bowed as he had bowed to Mia before he decapitated her.

Tali had never heard a Cythonian say sorry to a slave before. Banj drew back the Living Blade in the precise, balletic movement prescribed for execution of slaves with the gift. Tali had to get in the first blow, or die. She sprang forwards, swinging at his neck with the rigid edge of her right hand. Such a blow might bring down a frail slave, though she had little hope of hurting Banj through those corded neck muscles.

Perhaps disconcerted that a little Pale was attacking him, he swayed backwards and her blow missed. The Living Blade began to keen, the blood waves racing across it.

Rannilt screamed and the golden light seared out from her. The colours in Tali’s inner eye went wild, the pressure in her head made her skull creak and she felt a warm gush as if something had burst open. Then, as she frantically tried to beat Banj’s out-arcing blade with a backhanded strike, needles of boiling whiteness burst from her fingertips.

Tali tried to pull away but her arm continued its inexorable sweep. With a hypersonic screech the whiteness swept across the Living Blade, shattering the annulus of transparent metal and spraying splinters into Banj’s face, throat and chest. Blood sprang from a dozen wounds, then to Tali’s horror her white-light needles carved across his throat, peeling the skin back before tearing all the way through, cutting off his hoarse scream and sandblasting the wall with fragments of bone.

Banj’s body toppled backwards, slid down a dozen steps and came to rest, his blood flooding down to pool on the landing below. His handsome head bounced down the stairs, following the curve of the ten-sided shaft, and thudded bloodily into Orlyk’s thick shins.

Her toad mouth was sagging, her eyes black and white buttons in her grey face. Her arm twitched involuntarily and the death-lash went flying across the shaft, exploding so violently that it carved an s-shaped groove in the stone. She backed towards the doorway, along with the rest of the enemy, then bolted.

The white needles vanished. The colours in Tali’s head were gone, the pressure too. Her knees gave, she fell against the wall and her head began to throb. Her fingertips were speckled with blood as if by a hundred pin-pricks — the only sign of the magery that had torn out of her. But the rise of her gift gave her no joy. She felt sick at the thought of what it had done.

‘How did that happen?’ she said dazedly, turning away from the shambles and crouching before Rannilt to block her view. ‘What were those white needles?’

Had she seen? Tali hoped not. She shook the child, gently.

Rannilt sat up and her eyes sprang open. The golden light was gone. She looked her normal self again. ‘You’re all bloody. Tali, you all right?’

Tali wiped her face on her sleeve. ‘What have I done?’

‘Saw it in my mind’s eye,’ Rannilt whispered. ‘You saved me. With magery.’

She said it as though it was the most wonderful thing in the world. Had she no memory of her golden display? Had she not seen what Tali had done? Perhaps it was for the best.

‘Run! Get reinforcements,’ Orlyk bellowed from below.

A grey face appeared in the doorway, looking up, then ducked out of sight. Tali clung to the rail. Her head had never hurt this badly before. She could barely see.

‘Tali, come,’ whispered Rannilt.

‘Can’t — move.’ Tali felt faint, and cold, and so weak she could barely hold her head up.

Rannilt took her hand, hauled her to her feet and put a skinny arm around her waist. ‘I’m lookin’ after you. I’ll never leave you, never.’

Tali submitted to her, confused and shivering and unable to speak. She kept seeing Banj’s head flying off, then Mia’s, then Banj’s again. And blood. So much blood. When she’d used magery before, it had never been like that. It had never been visible; it had never killed before. Where had that tearing white hail come from?

Something had jumped from Rannilt to her. Had the golden force flowing from the girl kindled that deadly fire in Tali? The light-storm had burst out as if she were just a conduit for a greater force.

The top landing was covered in pulverised rock and there was no sign of the other guards, save for one whose remains were fused to the right-hand wall beside a hat rack, like a blackened bas relief. The rays from the sunstone implosion had turned him to char, though the stone around him and the hats on the rack were unmarked.

Rannilt put her skinny fingers over Tali’s eyes, as if to protect her. They reached the exit, a square arch of stone whose pair of carved stone doors stood open.

‘Careful.’ Tali clung to the door for a moment, for her legs felt as though the bones had been removed. ‘Guards out there.’

Rannilt slipped out, but soon returned. ‘They’re lyin’ on the ground with their eyes closed.’

Unconscious like the ones at the loading station, Tali prayed. Why had the blast knocked them down yet left her and the other Pale unharmed? It was an important question for later — if they escaped.

‘It’s beautiful outside, Tali,’ said Rannilt, eyes wide. ‘Oh, come see!’

Tali roused. All her life she had dreamed of Hightspall and now it was only a few steps away. She rubbed her eyes, longing for it, then the girl took her hand and led her out into a world she had never seen, into the glorious sunlight of an autumn morning, to her beloved country at last.

Though it was not long after sunrise, the daylight was so bright that her eyes flooded with tears. Tears for the homeland she had never seen, and the mother and father who had sacrificed their lives to try and find it. She wiped her face and was looking around when her head spun and she had to grab Rannilt’s shoulder.

‘What’s the matter?’ said the girl, gazing in open-mouthed wonder. ‘Tali, look at all the flowers. I can see a hundred kinds.’

‘It’s — too big,’ said Tali. ‘I–I didn’t realise it would go so far, in every direction.’

In Cython, no chamber or passage extended more than a few hundred yards without a bend or barrier. All her life she had been used to tunnel vision, to having walls on either side and a roof close above her head. Now she was surrounded by a vast emptiness and the dome of the sky was rocking. It felt as though it was going to overturn on her head.

Her heart raced and she felt a peculiar tingling in her fingers. It was hard to breathe; she swayed on her feet; suddenly she felt cold, ill, dizzy.

Rannilt caught her by the arm. ‘You’re shakin’ all over. What’s the matter?’

Tali’s mouth was so dry she could barely speak. She turned her head and the sky seemed to detach from the earth. Instinctively she covered her face with her arms.

‘Be all right in a minute,’ she croaked. ‘Hat, hat!’

But the tingling and dizziness were getting worse, and she had never felt this way before. What was wrong? She wanted to scream and run but could not move. A wave of dread passed over her; she needed to huddle in a hole, covering her head, blocking out the world she had so longed for and which now felt utterly alien.

Rannilt came back, wearing a bright orange, broad-brimmed hat and carrying another. She gave the hat to Tali, then gasped and backed away, a hand over her mouth.

A huge Cythonian rose from behind one of the defensive walls, and he was so covered in blood and burns and weeping blisters that for a second she did not recognise him. He had a remarkably small, bulging head, all blackened save for the streaming eyes, and his charred clothes were falling to pieces. A small, egg-shaped blue stone, the one that had lit up as she dropped the sunstone, hung around his neck. How had Tinyhead survived? Why wasn’t he unconscious like all the other Cythonians?

‘Tali, run!’ yelled Rannilt.

But even when Tinyhead came stalking towards her, she could not move. The tingling ran up her arms, down her legs to her toes, and her heart was beating so wildly it must soon burst. The sky began to rock violently and she felt sure it was going to overturn. Was she dying? Going mad?

Tinyhead caught her arms, wound a leather belt three times around her wrists and jerked it tight.

‘Oh, Master,’ he slurred through red-raw lips. ‘Master, I have her at last.’

He looked around for Rannilt but the child had vanished.

‘Mimoy, help,’ said Tali in a whispery croak.

‘There is no help.’ Tinyhead heaved her out through the defensive walls surrounding the shaft.

The old woman lay sprawled over a low stone barricade, blood running from her mouth. More blood than Tali would have imagined Mimoy’s tiny body could hold.