Vengeance

CHAPTER 88

Shortly after Tobry left, Lady Ricinus appeared. ‘They told me you’d come slinking back. Is it done?’

‘It’s done,’ Rix muttered. Shame burned him. He could not look her in the face.

‘It had better be perfect.’

He led her upstairs and she inspected the completed portrait, her small eyes darting.

‘It will do. Box it up. I’ll send for it in the morning.’ She went out without a word of thanks.

Good riddance! He never wanted to see it again. After he had crated up the portrait, Rix slumped on the couch, feeling oddly empty and not knowing what to do with himself.

The month-clock on the wall said ten-thirty p.m. Twenty-four hours until Lord Ricinus’s Honouring, which was to take place immediately after the Honouring Ball. Would Lord and Lady Ricinus lead the dancers onto the floor of the Great Hall? That would be a sight to see — his father and mother holding each other close, pretending that they had not despised each other for twenty years.

Distractedly, Rix re-sketched the cellar scene on the big canvas, then sat back with a goblet of wine, deliberately not looking at his work. Even the urgency to see the faces of the killers paled before the looming catastrophe if Lady Ricinus succeeded in her plot against the chancellor. Or if the chancellor had lied, and he planned to bring her down …

His head was spinning. He had drunk a bottle and a half on an empty stomach. Too damn bad. Rix filled another goblet, blinked at the canvas, then went to his palette to mix colours. As he was doing so, something began to nag at him about the sketch, something he had promised Tobry he would do, but it would not come to mind.

When he began to paint, Rix did not have to think about it, for he had all the colours in his inner eye: the dingy grey-greens of the streaked and oozing cellar walls; the slimy, brown-stained flagstones; the pearly lustre of the black bench; the stacks of crumbling crates, their grey timbers dotted with yellow mould and threaded with white dry rot; the piled barrels on the other side. The blonde of the young woman’s hair contrasting with the reflective gold of the tongs. The eerily beautiful ebony pearl highlighting the shiny beads of blood clinging to it.

Blood. A gloved hand was rubbing it into his wounds again, murmuring softly all the while. Rix shook off the nightmare, took another goblet and began to work. His eyesight was blurring now but that did not matter — his subconscious was guiding his hand.

Later, when he had to squint to stop seeing double, Rix was astonished to discover the canvas covered in paint. It was long after midnight; he had been working furiously for hours. He reached for the bottle but it was empty. He kicked it across the floor and it rang against the other two.

Had he really drunk three bottles? He could not remember finishing the second, much less opening a third. Rix looked around for another but there were no more up here.

At the top of the steep steps he had just enough wit to realise that his only way down was by falling. He staggered back to the painting, pressing on his eyes to fuse the two wavering images into one. There was something he had to see, though he could not remember what. A vital, urgent revelation -

Something dragged him out of unconsciousness. As Rix tried to sit up, his head spun sickeningly. It was still dark outside, and he was so drunk he could barely stand up.

His sword was propped against the wall. Using it as a walking stick, going with exaggerated care so he did not stab himself in the foot, he wavered to the painting and blinked at it. His head was slowly revolving though the blurred vision had gone.

The painting was complete, yet utterly different to the meticulous realism of his father’s portrait. The murder scene was an anguished work, done with furious strokes that made little sense up close. He backed away and the scene glided into focus, imagined as perfectly as memory.

There was the little girl, fist up to her mouth as she stifled a scream. Her blue eyes were huge, her hair not quite as golden as now, but there was no doubt who she was. He remembered her furious cry as he had scrambled up the stairs, ‘I’m going to get you.’

There was the young woman on the slab, freshly killed. It could almost have been Tali as an adult, save that the blonde hair was too pale.

And there were the killers.

‘No!’ Rix gasped. ‘No, no, no!’

The wine came up in a paroxysmic heave that splattered the floor for yards around. His brain was shrieking, his head splitting, and the one thing he could do, that he had to do, was get out of there.

He lurched up the stairs to the next level of his tower, unlocking the door with shaking hands. He had to be alone; he could not bear the thought of meeting anyone. Up he went, and up, past the little observatory he had not used in years, eight flights in all to the topmost, open floor. Around him, nine slim columns supported the zinc roof that rose in a barley-twist spiral for another fifty feet. The shoulder-high outside wall was covered in yellow tiles, now glazed with ice.

Rix lay down on a snow-covered bench and bawled like a baby for the family now lost forever. When his tear ducts were as dry as the saline flats of the Southern Seethings, he crawled across to the nearest wall. He had to end this tainted house that, clearly, had been bloodstained for generations.

But would his death end it? The chancellor cared only for the survival of Hightspall and might even reward Lady Ricinus if that ensured her cooperation. Rix staggered down again. He had to make sure; had to put House Ricinus beyond recovery.

Shortly, he returned to the roof. The cellar picture swam in his mind, but the two faces, though much changed now from ten years ago, remained perfectly clear. They did not have a sorcerous bone between them, so why had they killed Tali’s mother for the ebony pearl? Surely not just for the money?

The faces of Lord and Lady Ricinus.

His own mother and father.

And why had he, Rix, been there?

He would never know. There was only one way to make up for the evil of such a family, and the dishonour of betraying them. He was going to end it now.

He climbed onto the tower wall, swung a leg over it, slipped on the ice-glazed tiles, and fell.

CHAPTER 89

The iron book burned red-hot in Tali’s dreams, as if its maker had cast it back into the chymical furnace to forge its pages anew. She jerked awake in the makeshift bed concealed under Tobry’s big bed. It had been after three in the morning when Tobry had brought them to Rix’s chambers, which were unguarded now the portrait had been completed.

Rannilt whimpered in her sleep. ‘Leave me alone. Didn’t do it, didn’t do it.’

Tali put an arm across her shoulder. The girl clung to her briefly, then sighed and rolled over. Her steady breathing resumed. She seemed a little better now.

After Rix left them on the road, it had taken ages for Tobry to sneak them into the city unseen, and he’d had to hide Tali and Rannilt in a damp tunnel on the other side of the city all day. The hidden entrance into Rix’s scalderium had been blocked and Tobry had to wait until the early hours to bring Tali and Rannilt into the palace. Tali had collapsed into sleep the moment she lay down.

Now, though still exhausted, she was wide awake. She had hurt Lyf with the iron book but he would attack again, and he knew her weaknesses now. He knew she had little control over her magery, knew where she had gone and probably where she was now. He would try again for the pearl, and it would not be long.

Her mother’s killers would not have given up, either. Had Rix completed the cellar painting and discovered who they were? He was not here to ask, and neither was the sketch.

With every passing minute the killers must be drawing closer, eliminating possibilities and following clues to track her down. Lady Ricinus would be doing the same. She would be desperate now, with the Honouring and the deadline of the chancellor’s ultimatum only hours away …