Vengeance

the tiny palace, then sprang out of bed. He swung on a red and gold kilt and went down the hall to his salon, a six-sided chamber with a tented ceiling, dimly lit by an enormous heatstone. He looked at it askance, afraid of what he would see, for there was a wrongness about it, something brooding and baleful. But the heat-stone displayed only its normal enigmatic shimmer.

‘I could understand it if you were having the nightmares,’ said Rix over his shoulder.

He turned on the stopcock and caught a whiff of stink-damp. Using a flint snapper on a long pole, he ignited the gaslights in a series of small explosions and the rotten-egg stench was replaced by the cleansing odour of burnt sulphur.

‘Because I’m a gentleman fallen so low I have to live on my wits?’

‘You’re not a gentleman.’

‘No, I’m the Lord of Nothing,’ Tobry said drily, ‘family disgraced, ancestral manor burnt down, lands confiscated to pay our debts and not a penny to my name.’ He brushed away an imaginary tear. ‘Forced to rely on the charity of my friends, and sleep in their hard beds — ’

‘With soft women,’ retorted Rix, managing a smile. ‘My women.’

‘Someone has to keep the poor girls warm after they flee from your bed.’

The smile vanished; Rix wasn’t feeling that good humoured. ‘Make yourself useful and ring the bell. I’m starving.’

Tobry did so and, despite the hour, a manservant appeared at the outer door within seconds. Night or day, when the family rang, the servants jumped, or else. At the end of each month Lady Ricinus rated all the palace servants, and those in the lowest tithe were flogged as a lesson to all.

‘Food and drink, please, Choom,’ said Tobry. ‘Something traditional, I think.’

‘At once,’ said Choom, who was so old and thin that his joints creaked as he walked. He lowered his voice. ‘I heard a cry. Is the young master — ’

‘I’m afraid so.’

Rix scowled and stalked into his dressing room. Shortly Tobry joined him, wearing his own kilt, black shot with threads of scarlet and gold.

‘May I?’ Tobry said, indicating the racks of garments.

Despite their long friendship, he never presumed, and Rix appreciated that. He waved a hand. Tobry went down the other end of the rack, where Rix kept clothes in his indigent friend’s size. Rix selected a cream shirt, plain save for puffed-out shoulders and a diagonal sash of white lace across the front.

He climbed the stairs to his white studio, which encircled the core of his personal tower like a doughnut, and leaned on a malachite windowsill, looking down across the lawn to the shores of Lake Fumerous, the sapphire glory of Hightspall. The nightmare had been so real that he half expected to see the leviathan approaching, but the palace gardens, lit by a thousand hazy gaslights, were empty save for a gang of navvies in a trench, packing another layer of asbestos around the main hot water tubule.

‘Waste of time,’ said Tobry from behind. ‘The heat’s gone and it’s never coming back.’

Caulderon had been built on a geyser field and for two thousand years a network of tubules had carried hot groundwater around the city, but a century ago it had started to cool. Now, no amount of lagging could retain what little heat was left.

‘’Course it will,’ said Rix, without looking around. ‘We just have to delve deeper.’

‘The last hot-rock bakery went out of business two weeks ago, and it was four hundred feet down. And all the public scalderies have closed.’

‘No wonder the common folk are on the nose.’

‘In my grandfather’s day, even the poorest folk were well fed and clean.’

‘Why don’t they use heatstones?’

‘Your mother would love that.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Nothing,’ Tobry said hastily. ‘You have to be wealthy to afford heat-stones, Rix. Life in the shanty towns is grim, and getting grimmer. The steam mills and screw pumps have to be driven by firewood boilers and we’ve stripped every hill bare for ten miles — ’

‘Enough bad news,’ snapped Rix. ‘Did you bring anything to eat?’

He turned and Tobry was levitating a tray above his head.

Involuntarily, Rix clenched his fists. ‘Do you have to? You know I hate anything uncanny.’

‘It’s hardly magery at all,’ Tobry said mildly. ‘You know what a dilettante I am. Never done a day’s work in my life.’

A waggle of his fingers and the black bottle poured a goblet of a brown, foul smelling wine. The tray turned upside down and floated towards Rix, yet nothing spilled or fell. Despite Tobry’s self-deprecation, his forehead had a faint sheen. He was showing off, just to be annoying.

Rix resisted the urge to swat the tray out of the air. Stay calm. It’s just his way. He clung to the carved green windowsill until his heart steadied and the pounding in his ears stopped.

‘Why do you hate magery?’ said Tobry.

‘Don’t know. I always have, since I was a kid.’

‘Did someone use it on you once?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Mother protected me from everything.’ Rix took a goblet, sniffed and made a face. ‘Yuk! What’s this?’

‘Fishwine. It’s traditional. I know how important that is to you.’

Tobry was mocking him because House Ricinus was so recently risen. Rix sipped. The wine left a foul taste in his mouth, but he drank it anyway. He wasn’t going to be beaten that easily.

‘Did you bring anything to eat?’

Tobry handed him a flat oval of hard yellow clay, the size of a small platter. His eyes were gleaming; he seemed to be restraining himself.

‘What is it?’ Rix said suspiciously.

‘Hundred-year cod.’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘It’s a rare delicacy. Very traditional in the oldest families.’

‘Baked?’ Rix sniffed the clay, which had no odour.

‘No, just matured for a hundred years. Or more.’

Rix cracked the clay, gingerly. The hundred-year cod was brown as peat, hard, and had no odour. ‘This isn’t one of your jokes, is it?’

‘Would I joke about Hightspall’s noble traditions?’

‘You make fun of everything else I hold dear.’

Rix picked a small piece out with the corner of a knife, put it in his mouth then, gagging, ran to the window and spat it out. ‘That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever tasted.’

‘Too traditional for you?’ Tobry was smirking.

Rix scrubbed his mouth with a handkerchief. ‘I don’t see you eating any.’

‘I only live for the present.’

Rix stalked away and uncovered a ten-foot-long canvas on which a nobleman in blood-spattered coil-armour was severing the head of a monstrous wyverin. The lava-streaked volcanoes in the background were nearly complete, and the wyverin had been painted in intricate detail, even down to the reflections in each pearly scale, but the nobleman was little more than a sketch. Only the purple, bloated nose looked finished.

‘Not your father’s best feature,’ Tobry said quietly.

How long could Lord Ricinus keep it up, Rix wondered. Surely the drinking would kill him before much longer. What had driven him to such sodden excess, anyway?

‘How can I do it to him?’ he said aloud.

‘I’m sure he’d want you to paint him the way he is.’

‘Father wouldn’t give a damn. It’s Mother who ordered the portrait, and if it’s not finished in time she’ll crucify me. But that’s not what I meant.’

Rix opened a pot of red ochre and dabbed some on his palette. He mixed colours, picked up a large brush