Vengeance

CHAPTER 65

The inner peace faded and Tali was back on the red settee with her thigh throbbing and her belly so empty that it hurt. She ate as much bread, cheese and sausage as her small stomach could hold, fighting the urge to gobble like a starving slave and steal the rest for later.

‘Why can’t you reach my magery?’ she said with her mouth full.

‘It’s not like any other magery I’ve come across.’

‘My great-great-great grandmother, Mimoy, said that too.’

‘Then she was a wise woman.’

‘She was a rude, cranky cow who never thought about anyone but herself.’ Tali was still annoyed at how she had been manipulated, and about Mimoy dying without telling her anything.

‘How else could she have lived so long in Cython?’

Tali wasn’t listening. ‘If my enemy can only be beaten by magery, and I can’t reach mine — ’

‘I dare say the chief magian could help you, though …’

‘He’d have to give me up to the chancellor, wouldn’t he?’

‘Unfortunately.’

‘What about that ancient device you mentioned the other day? A spy-probe, was it?’

He started, then put his hands on his cheeks, staring fixedly at the wall.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Tali.

‘I’ve just realised where Rannilt must be. In the chancellor’s palace.’

‘Why would he want her?’ But the answer was obvious.

‘She also knows enough of Cython’s secrets to be valuable, and he’s got agents all through Tumbrel Town. They would have picked her up within minutes of her fleeing Luzia’s murder.’

‘Where is the chancellor’s palace?’

‘Next door.’ Tobry pointed left, out the window.

She lurched to the pane. ‘Next door’ clearly had a different definition to the fabulously wealthy — she could just make out the ice sheathed spires of another palace further along the slope of the hill. It was smaller than Palace Ricinus, a fierce, spiky building, black stone edged with red. She did not like the look of it.

‘It’s the most heavily guarded place in Caulderon,’ said Tobry. ‘Don’t even think about going after Rannilt.’

‘I wasn’t,’ she lied. Of course she was going after her. Will you be my mother? Little Rannilt had no one else, she must be desperate, and she had done her all for Tali. ‘He — he won’t hurt her, will he?’

‘The chancellor does nothing unnecessarily. Besides, he’ll want her fit for questioning, for making maps of Cython and telling all she knows.’

That made sense. Tali lay down. Heal, heal! But her small gift of healing seemed to have gone the way of her magery. ‘What’s he like?’

‘He’s an ugly little runt … and they say he has depraved tastes …’

‘But?’

‘He’s a cunning and brilliant man who thinks of everything.’

‘Everything except the possibility of war,’ said Tali sourly.

‘Just weeks ago, he convinced Lord Ricinus to pay for the Third Army,’ Tobry pointed out.

She pressed her thigh. Heal, heal, Rannilt needs us. ‘What were you telling me? Oh yes, the pry-probe.’

‘I talked to some people about it,’ said Tobry. ‘It’s called a spectible, and it’s in the chancellor’s collection, but I don’t think it works any more.’

‘ Nothing works,’ she muttered. ‘Every avenue is blocked.’

It occurred to her that, since Tobry had known Rix all his life, he might know something about the time of the murder. But she would have to put it carefully.

‘Did you know Rix well, when he was a kid?’

‘Until he was five or six. I’m five years older but we spent a lot of time together. I suppose he was a substitute for Nimry, the little brother I lost …’

‘What happened to him?’

It took Tobry a long time to answer. He was rubbing his eyes. ‘He was such a bright little boy; sweet tempered, too. He was killed by a jackal shifter when he was four. Killed and eaten,’ he said savagely. ‘He — it — got into the nursery and killed all the little cousins … I found them … I was only nine …’

‘That must have been terrible,’ Tali said softly.

‘It was the beginning of the end of my house.’

‘So you didn’t see Rix much after he was six?’

He looked away, eyes unfocused, jaw knotted. ‘The noble House of Lagger was in its death throes at that time, and they were so drawn-out and horrible that I don’t remember much else. Anyway, I wasn’t allowed to visit House Ricinus then. I didn’t see Rix again until he was twelve. He insisted that I be invited to his birthday week and we’ve been friends ever since.’

She knew he was telling the truth, which meant he hadn’t been around when Rix was ten. Another blockage. What else could she do?

‘Why are you gritting your teeth like that?’ said Tobry.

‘My thigh is a little painful.’

‘I’m not surprised, after walking all that way underground. And no one saw you in the halls?’

‘I’m good at hiding and looking ordinary — ’

‘You could never look ordinary,’ he said so passionately that her chest shivered. ‘Here, allow me.’

He put a hand on her thigh, over the wound, and murmured a healing charm. ‘You were saying?’

Under his warm hand, something stirred in Tali, causing her to lose her train of thought. She yearned towards him, confused by the unfamiliar feelings. She wanted to know him better, and perhaps she wanted what her mother and father had found in each other, too, but she could not allow anything to distract her from her quest.

‘And then, if I really need to hide, I press my fingers against my slave mark — that’s what the Cythonians call it, but to me it’s always signified the noble House of vi Torgrist — and it helps. Most of the time.’

‘I see it as noble, too.’

The hidden hurt burst out of her. ‘But not Rix! He threw up when he saw it. I’ll never forget that. Never!’

‘He’s a better man than you think. And I’m a worse one. You can’t go wrong by putting your trust in him, but you can with me.’

‘I trust both of you.’ But you more …

He waved a hand, as if to say that he had lost interest. ‘Show me your thigh.’

Tali pulled the pantaloons up as far as they would go, unwrapped the bandage and pressed the area. She winced.

‘It’s hot,’ said Tobry. ‘Let me feel your armpit.’ She raised her arm and he pressed his fingers in. ‘The wound is hot, but you’re not.’ He studied her thigh as though he had not seen one before. ‘It’s healing, though it would have healed a lot quicker if you’d kept off it.’

‘If I’d kept off it, you’d be possessed by the wrythen and I’d have been taken by the facinore.’

He chuckled. ‘No need to get snarky. You must have a strong constitution.’

‘In Cython — ’

‘Only the strong survive,’ he said, sighing. ‘And those who can survive, those who flourish there, are strong beyond us normal folk.’

Tobry decanted the wine from the black bottle, took a healthy swig and poured the red crust thrown by the wine into a saucer. He spooned half onto the entry wound, soaked the middle of a clean bandage in the rest and bound it up.

‘And now,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to make arrangements and you need to sleep.’

He lifted her legs onto the couch, tossed a blanket over her and bent to blow out the lantern.

‘Leave it,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be in the dark just yet.’ Tali knew she would not sleep.

He turned the lantern down and went.

Rix did not come back. What if she had killed his father? Tali tried to tell herself that it was an accident but knew any court would see it differently. She had knocked down the Lord of the House, on whom everything rested, and the whole house would see her punished for it.

She limped to the window, stood in the darkness beside it where she could not be seen from below, and looked down. The wall of the tower fell away sheer and, even without an injured leg, she could not have climbed down without a rope. How was Tobry going to get her down that?

From this angle there was no evidence that Hightspall was fighting a desperate war that was likely to end in its destruction, or that Tali’s enemies were closing in. The beautiful grounds were threaded with lights all the way down to the lake and the lawn was dusted with snow. It looked like a fairy kingdom, but Palace Ricinus was an enchanting trap. And Rannilt had to be rescued.

As she was returning to the couch, she noticed a large painting on an easel on the far side of the room, though only the back of the canvas could be seen from here. It must be the portrait Rix was doing for the Honouring.

She turned the lantern up, carried it around the other side and stopped, staring in wonder and alarm. He had a marvellous gift — the portrait was almost alive. The enormous winged creature draped across the bloody ground should have been dead, for a sword had been thrust through its heart, but the look in its eyes told otherwise. It was like some mythical beast playing dead, waiting to tear its attacker apart as he roared his vain triumph.

Her eyes drifted to the scalded landscape, which was not unlike the barren, boiling Seethings, and the rearing volcanic peaks in the background. They too were savage, tortured and uncontrollable. What had Rix said about Hightspall — the very land is rising up against us. The mountains looked as though they stood ready to blast Hightspall apart and bury the ruins in a hundred feet of red-hot ash.

And then to the man.

At first glance Lord Ricinus stood tall and proud, the heroic victor standing over the vanquished beast. But only until she looked at his face. Rix had not painted his father as a young man who might have slain such a magnificent creature, but as the raddled sot he was now.

There was something terrible in Lord Ricinus’s eyes — a shrinking away from the world, a refusal to see. The mouth was a ragged twist, the cheeks mottled the colour of bruises, and the nose was a monstrosity, a ruin, a bulging blob of red writhing with distended purple veins. A nose covering up the failed man behind it.

She shuddered and looked away. The portrait was mesmerising, yet horrible. And it was also an omen. A metaphor for the struggle now taking place between rising Cython and crumbling Hightspall, and for the fall of houses and nations. Why would Rix paint something so opposed to everything he believed in? Or had he not yet realised what he had done?

Tali looked back, for there was something familiar about the style of it — no, the savagery of the scene it depicted. Yet how could there be? The only art she was familiar with was Cythonian, and it belied their cruel nature. Their murals and wall dioramas were reflective scenes of mountains, lakes, rivers and meadows, yearning back to the distant time when their world had been at peace. Sometimes animals were depicted — deer, rabbits, birds on branches — but always alive and unharmed. Their art neither glorified the brutality of nature or the dominance of humankind.

So why was the violent realism of this portrait so familiar? She could not think.

As she was returning to the couch, Tali remembered Tobry taking a smaller canvas into the storeroom, as if he had not wanted her to see it. Why not? Had Rix been painting her? She crept to the top of the steps but saw no light below, heard no sound. She opened the storeroom door.

It was full of canvases though, as far as she could tell, all were blank. The storeroom smelled of oil paint and her nose led her to a small canvas at the back, stretched tightly on a wooden frame. She lifted it out, leaned it against the front of the stack and held up the lantern.

Her heart began to gallop.

She was eight again, a terrified slave girl cowering in the skull-shaped cellar with all those terrible paintings on the walls — that’s where she had seen them — and the stink of poisoned rats clotting in her nostrils. Tali looked closer, and choked.

There, on her back on the black bench, lay her beautiful mama. She had been sketched without a face, and the two people standing behind her head were also unidentifiable, but it was undoubtedly Iusia — and those were her murderers.

Tali shuttered the lantern and sat in the dark, rocking back and forth. Her legs had gone so weak that she could not have stood up again. Rix must know who the murderers were.

She shone a glimmer on the sketch again, shuddered and hastily closed the door, but could not stop the cascading memories: the tall man with the round pot of a belly hunting her with that enormous knife; the nail digging into her hip; the wee running down her legs from sheer terror.

Tali blew out the lantern and stood at the window, watching the snow-flakes settle on the lovely grounds but not seeing a thing.

Was Rix protecting the killers? Had he lured her here? No, he had done everything possible to prevent her from coming to the palace …

And yet, could it be a coincidence that he and Tobry had found her so soon after she had escaped? Tobry, whom she would have trusted — had trusted — with her life, had hastily hidden the sketch. What did he know that he wasn’t telling her?