‘No!’ whispered Tali, going up on tiptoes to see more clearly. She put her head out the window and shrieked, ‘Grab the children. Get out of the way!’
‘They can’t hear you,’ said Rix, who had been slower than Tali to realise what was going to happen. ‘They’re dead anyway. They just don’t know it.’
And then it came, a swell that rose until it must have been a hundred feet high, racing towards the shore faster than a galloping horse. Now the people screamed; now they ran, abandoning their boats and rafts and even their children, labouring through the mud in desperate attempts to get to the safety of the shore.
But the swell became a monster wave towering above them, breaking and thundering and crashing down onto boats and rafts and people, then picking them up and driving them towards the lake wall to smash them, and it, to bits.
Rix clung to Tali without realising he was doing so. As the wave struck the shore, in the lower grounds of the palace a column of pressurised water spurted two hundred feet in the air from some long forgotten tunnel, carrying ancient stonework, snow and turf with it.
The earth heaved, then disappeared under a boiling brown flood of muddy water, broken bodies, smashed boats and the rubble of the wall itself. It surged up the slope, drowning the navvies working in the tubule trench, smashing the castor oil greenhouses to bits and racing towards the palace doors.
‘Should we go higher?’ said Tali, eyeing the stairs up to the higher levels.
‘The flood’s spending itself. It’s nearly done.’
It tore through the downhill wing of the palace, rose higher and curled around to wash the blood off the front steps and cover them in mud. The water stilled. Objects bobbed to the surface, then it slowly ebbed, leaving a strandline of ruin curving across the grounds — trees and timber, stone and drowned animals and bodies all tangled together.
As the water retreated, carving ten-foot gullies through the lawn, the ground heaved and a scattering of sinkholes appeared across the lower grounds, exposing ancient ruins Rix had not known were there.
After the first flood withdrew, and the succeeding, smaller waves had passed, the shanty towns had vanished along with the lake wall. The city defences had been breached for three miles along the shore and could not be repaired, for the stones lay under the water.
‘Nature does the enemy’s work for them,’ said Tobry, coming up.
‘Hightspall is tainted,’ said Rix. ‘The reek has to be cleansed from it. And the biggest stink of all is right here. As soon as the enemy reappear, I’m riding out to face them — alone.’
‘Rix?’ said Tobry.
‘I took the wealth and the privilege, and all the good things that came from it. Now there’s a price to pay and I’m the only one left to pay it.’
‘Better you pay it by staying here with us.’
‘I betrayed my own parents, Tobe. No matter what they’d done, I can’t escape that dishonour. I can’t live with myself any longer.’
CHAPTER 96
Tali did not try to dissuade Rix. In his current mood, nothing could change him. Besides, it hardly seemed to matter now.
Nature’s omens were clear — the sea ice was thickening and closing in on the coast, the cataclysmic eruptions and the roaring waters were conspiring to bring Hightspall down. The enemy would soon return and there was no lake wall to keep them out. The end could not be far away now, for any of them.
Least of all for Rannilt, who was fading by the hour. Tali sat by the sleeping child’s side, watching the hours drag by on Rix’s month-clock and holding the thin fingers that not even the great heatstone could warm. No medicine in the palace had roused Rannilt; neither Tobry’s magery nor the small power of Tali’s healing hands could help her. Whatever was draining the life from her, they could not touch it.
‘I’m sorry, Rannilt,’ Tali whispered as she chafed the child’s cold hands. ‘You gave everything for me and I can’t do the same for you. I tried, and I failed. Failed at everything.’
Her quest for justice had come to naught. The storm of magery that had killed Overseer Banj had been a life for a life, but in his own way Banj had been a good man obeying his laws and doing his duty. She had done no justice to him.
Lord and Lady Ricinus had deserved to die, no doubt about it, though how could their executions be justice when such grave injustice had been done to every servant in the palace?
Had she achieved anything at all? Her escape had not caused the war, but it had brought it forward. Had she remained in Cython, and Rix and Tobry had returned to Caulderon to warn that war was brewing, Hightspall would have had ten days’ warning and might have driven the enemy back.
But her greatest blunder was with Lyf. By failing to protect Rannilt, Tali had allowed Lyf a source of power he’d had no chance of finding as a wrythen, not to mention the physical body he could not have obtained by himself.
Her head throbbed. A knot beneath the top of her skull went cold, then hot. Rannilt’s pallid face blurred and shifted, then a wave of nausea flooded through Tali and she had to run to the scalderium to throw up in the basin.
She was washing her face in icy water when her mental shell burst open and her pearl sent out a frantic call, as if trying to call the other pearls to it. She forced the shell closed and slumped onto the side of the tub, fantasising about hacking the pearl out herself. It was an alien thing inside her and she dreaded what it was going to do — or make her do — next.
She looked up and Tobry was frowning at her. ‘You look like — ’
‘Just tormenting myself with my failings.’ Tali put on a feeble smile.
‘I know all about that,’ said Tobry. ‘Have you talked to Rix lately? I’m really worried about him.’
‘He won’t listen to anything I say.’
Tali returned to Rannilt and to her agonising. The chief magian had said that the master pearl could command the others, but how?
What else did she know about pearls? Hers had woken when the sunstone smashed in the shaft, liberating her magery briefly and uncontrollably. Her pearl was also affected whenever she was near a heatstone — it was one of the first things she’d noticed after she reached Rix’s chambers. The pearl seemed more agitated here.
Rannilt jerked in her sleep. As Tali stroked her chilly brow, she sensed Lyf working, but what was he doing? Wrapping strands of wrythen muscle around something, she thought, though not his legs or any limb this time. This object was hardly bigger than her fist, and almost complete. He sighed, pointed a finger, and the object went
Tali could not have said why it filled her with such dread. He might be days away from having a working body, even weeks, but she did not think so. She could sense his exultation. And a physical body would free him from being bound to his caverns. With a body, he could roam wherever he wished.
He would go to the cellar that had once been the most sacred part of the kings’ palace, the place where the other pearls had been cut from their hosts. Perhaps, with a body of his own, Lyf could take it for himself.
‘Tobry, tell me about Lyf.’
‘You know him better than I do.’
‘Tell me what you know.’
‘He was younger than Rix when he disappeared, only nineteen. Lyf was quiet, their history books say, reserved or shy. Nonetheless, a hospitable man who welcomed the First Fleeters when they came. Some of the enemy historians said he was too trusting, but Cythe had seen neither war nor invasions in thousands of years.’
‘Was he clever?’
‘He had a keen mind. Had his brother the king not been gored to death on a hunt, Lyf would have been a scholar and a poet. He loved art and books and beautiful things, and it’s said his mastery of calligraphy was almost magical.’
