Vengeance

CHAPTER 31

The sky was visible through Tinyhead’s skull.

A hole the diameter of a thick wire had been burnt through his head from front to back, like a hole burnt through a plank with a red-hot poker. He swayed on his feet, his tongue flap-flopping like a spotted eel. A tendril of smoke drifted from the back of his head and white gloop continued oozing from his right ear, but the greater horror was that he was still alive.

Pain was shrieking through Tali’s temples and her face felt as though it was aflame. Was her enemy trying to attack her the same way? And if he could reach her from his unknown hiding place, was there any point running?

She had to. His power over her was uncertain, but the Cythonians milling in the shaft entrance were an immediate threat. She had to run now. But Tali could not move; her strained thigh muscles had locked in cramp.

Healing charm, healing charm. She massaged the muscles, subvocal-ising the charm, and the cramp eased, though the healing was far more draining than usual and would not last. The white torrent that had killed Banj had drained her to the marrow, and the damage from carrying the sunstone went too deep.

Tinyhead’s arm swung out, his fingers pointed towards the shaft house and one side collapsed on the guards inside. She looked sideways at his eyes. They were empty now, the yellow and the presence gone.

Pulling her orange hat well down, she took his knife and hobbled diagonally up the slope to a sheep-shaped outcrop near the rim of the valley. Crouched behind it, she sawed through the strap binding her wrists and tried to make sense of the images burned into her consciousness.

She’d learned a clue to the killers — Lay, part of a woman’s name — and had been close to discovering her enemy’s name as well, the man Tinyhead called Master. She would have succeeded had not Tinyhead, a Cythonian she had believed to be beneath contempt, called on his master to sacrifice him rather than be forced to reveal the name. And if so contemptible a man could reveal unexpected nobility, what did that say about -

‘Get after the slave,’ Orlyk yelled.

Tali peeped through the longer grass beside her rock as Orlyk and four others rounded the cluster of boulders and stopped, staring at Tinyhead. He was still lurching aimlessly, white clots quivering on his shoulders.

Orlyk doubled over and threw up into the grass. Tali ducked down and worked the charm on her churning belly but the icy sickness did not abate. The Cythonians would also blame her for the attack on Tinyhead. It might make them more cautious but they could not allow her to get away. If they were unable to take her back, their archers would shoot her down.

Orlyk ran up to the steep rim of the basin, looking all around. Tali shrank into the grass. If Orlyk saw Rannilt she would kill her on sight.

Orlyk returned to the boulders and issued orders. Two guards took Tinyhead by the arms, walked him to the broken shaft doors and inside. Orlyk followed. The remaining two guards, who were armed with Living Blades, kept watch. Tali could hear the keening of the thirsty blades.

She wriggled up a shallow fold towards the rim of the bowl, which here rose steep and bare. After making sure the guards weren’t looking her way, she wriggled across several yards of broken rock to the other side and looked out.

As the vastness of the Seethings opened out before her, both ground and sky began to seesaw. Chills ran down her arms and her heartbeat accelerated. She wrenched the hat brim down at front and sides, fighting the irrational dread. But she had to be able to see, had to know where to go.

The bowl was shaped like a crater at the top of a small, round peak, an oasis of green in the middle of a wasteland so barren that it might have been scorched with thermitto. Her mother had warned her of the dangers of the Seethings, and so had Waitie, who had also taught Tali geography. Her overwhelming urge was to scurry down the slope to cover, and hide, though first she must locate Caulderon. Once down into the flatlands of the Seethings it might be impossible to find.

The Seethings were mottled in reds, browns and yellows, littered with gigantic boulders and dotted with thousands of lakes, ponds and sinkholes, all steaming. Directly in front of her, not many miles away, a volcano reared up like a broken horn. Its slopes were brown and grey, as if everything that had once grown there had been swept away under landslides of ash, and grey clouds billowed from its top.

There were three large volcanoes called The Vomits, though she was not sure which one this was. The Brown Vomit, perhaps. Another, reddish Vomit lay to its left, partly concealed behind it. She could not see the third.

Behind her, across more steaming wasteland and grass-covered plains beyond that, a range of snow-blanketed mountains curved around on her left, growing higher and steeper until it disappeared behind The Vomits. The Crowbung Range. To her right, a little further than the closest Vomit, she made out an enormous blue lake.

After consulting her mental map she concluded that she was looking at the southern end of Lake Fumerous, maybe three miles away. Caulderon would be to the right along the shore, three times that distance, though if she headed east across the Seethings she should reach the main south road within five or six miles, and once there she should be safe.

Tali sighted on various landmarks that she should be able to see from the Seethings, and was making her way down, taking advantage of the cover of a boulder here, a gully there, when someone rose up from behind the bush in front of her.

Tali jumped, then muffled her cry of surprise. ‘Rannilt — I thought you’d be miles away by now.’

‘Where would I go?’ said Rannilt, taking her hand. ‘Who’d look after me?’

A vague unease stirred but Tali thrust it away. ‘Where’s your hat?’

Rannilt looked around vaguely. ‘Left it over there.’

‘Get it, or the sun will cook you like poor Sidon in the heatstone mine.’

Rannilt scurried away to retrieve her hat and pulled it down until it shaded her narrow shoulders.

A few hundred yards further on, the grassland merged into a band of woodland sweeping down a series of corrugated hills. They had to reach the trees before the enemy came over the rim. But even if they got as far as the Seethings they would be visible for miles on the flat surface. And they were bound to leave tracks …

One worry at a time. Tali was hobbling down the slope when Rannilt said, ‘What about old Mimoy?’

There was only one way to say it. ‘She’s dead.’

Rannilt took a shuddering breath and cried, ‘But I saw her move!’

Tali froze. The girl must have imagined it. After losing all that blood, after being thrown down the slope, Mimoy could not be alive. Her body had been dumped further around the curving rim of the basin and wasn’t visible from here but, if they went back to check, any guard coming to the crest of the hill would see them at once.

‘You’re not goin’ to leave her there, are you?’ Rannilt said anxiously.

Tali swallowed, her dry throat rasping. Just when she’d thought she had a chance.

‘Of course not.’ She took the girl’s cold hand. ‘The things you say, child.’

They spotted Mimoy’s body twenty feet down from the rim, dumped like an unwanted bag of bones. Her cane lay a few yards further on. The slope where she lay was bare of any kind of cover.

‘Rannilt, can you do a tricky job for me while I get Mimoy?’

She nodded vigorously.

‘Can you creep to the top and check on the enemy without being seen? You’ll have to be really careful.’

Rannilt’s eyes shone. ‘Anything for you, Tali.’

She bent low and darted up the slope.

‘Quietly!’ hissed Tali.

Rannilt turned to wave, tripped and fell headlong, sending stones clattering down. Tali winced. Had the sound carried? She limped across to Mimoy and lifted her head. There was blood on the grass and on her torn ragweed blouse, and she was cold. Tali felt sure she was dead, until Mimoy’s left eye fluttered.

A clicking sound issued from her wattled throat, a whispered, ‘Where?’

Mimoy’s clouded eye focused on Tali, who saw a desperate longing there. She chewed on a knuckle. Mimoy was almost dead and every second they remained here increased the risk of discovery, but she could not ignore the entreaty in the old woman’s eyes.

Tali smoothed Mimoy’s wrinkled brow. ‘In Hightspall. Mimoy, you’re the first Pale to escape Cython — the very first.’

She picked the old woman up, every strained muscle groaning. How could she still be alive? Only by the agency of her own gift.

‘Hightspall,’ Mimoy sighed. ‘Home, at last.’ She looked up and her lipless mouth cracked into a grin. ‘Ha, ha! Beat you, Evvie. You said I’d never do it.’

Tali wondered who Evvie was. Probably some childhood rival, dead for a hundred years.

Mimoy’s bones settled, she gave a tiny groan and Tali thought she had died, but the old woman wheezed, ‘Lay me in the good earth, won’t you, daughter?’

A fist squeezed the air from Tali’s lungs. It was too much to ask. The time it would take to dig a grave and bury the selfish old woman would eat up their one chance of escape. She should offer Mimoy the comfort of a lie, then abandon her the moment she died. It was the sensible thing to do, the only way Tali could hope to escape, warn her people and complete her own quest. The dead had no needs, only the living.

But when Tali looked down at the ache in the old woman’s eyes she could not say no to her.

‘Yes, Mimoy. You’re going to tell me the names of Mama’s killers, and I’m going to lay you in the good earth of Hightspall. Where would you like to rest?’

‘Tell you when we get there.’

‘Psst!’ said Rannilt from above. ‘Someone’s comin’ out the shaft.’

She ducked down. ‘Get my cane, brat,’ said Mimoy.

Rannilt handed it to Mimoy, who promptly whacked her with it.

Tali snatched the cane. ‘What did you do that for?’

‘You chose her over me. Give it here.’

‘So you can whack her again?’ Tali snapped the cane over her knee and threw the pieces away.

Pain speared through her head. She stumbled and fell to her knees.

‘You’ll come to regret that,’ Mimoy said maliciously. ‘Cane, now!’