Vengeance

‘How will you ensure the critical moment?’ said Bloody Herrie. ‘You have not yet succeeded in commanding the boy-lordling.’

Lyf had been waiting for the question. ‘I soon will!’ His glee burst forth, unrestrained for the first time since his death.

‘You’d better explain,’ said Bloody Herrie.

‘The magian, Tobry, has chained Rixium to the heatstone in his salon — the very heatstone I’ve used to send nightmares to him these past ten years.’

‘But it carries no enchantment,’ said Bloody Herrie. ‘We don’t see — ?’

‘Heatstone doesn’t need enchantment,’ said Lyf. ‘It’s mine, of its very nature.’

That gained even Errek, First-King’s attention. ‘How?’

‘Because I died unshriven, my king-magery could not be passed on to the king-to-be, and thus our people have had no king to this day.’

‘We know this,’ snapped Bloody Herrie.

‘Neither could my king-magery take the way of the Abysm, to dissolution,’ said Lyf. ‘But it had to go somewhere. It drifted through solid rock for hundreds of years until it came to rest beneath the Seethings — and turned a hundred yards of stone to heatstone.’

‘Ahh!’ sighed Errek.

‘The king-magery is no more, but my connection to it remains, through the heatstone deposit and every stone cut from it. Now, bathed in its emanations and with no way to escape them, Rixium slips ever closer to the compulsion I’ve spent half his life reinforcing. The moment he sleeps it will take him over, and no power of the enemy’s, not even the Oathbreaker’s Blade, can break the compulsion until it carries him all the way to the bloody completion.’

CHAPTER 100

An hour after midnight the golden threads drawn from Rannilt snapped.

She sighed and shivered, but did not wake. Tali prayed that this was a good sign, and that Lyf had failed in whatever he was doing, but logic whispered that he had succeeded so well he no longer needed to rob a child.

Suddenly Tali’s shell burst open and the call was like five alarms going off together in Tali’s head — Lyf’s pearl was calling, and so were the other three, di-DA-doh, di-DA- doh, and her own pearl was answering. And then she felt a jarring rasp, as though a bone reamer were being sharpened.

Tali shot up in the blankets, her heart thundering, then scrambled across and shook Tobry’s shoulder. ‘He’s found me.’

He woke at once, if, indeed, he had been sleeping. ‘Who?’

‘Deroe, with the three pearls, and Lyf knows it too. I’ve got to go down. Tobry … will you help me?’ She wasn’t sure he would.

‘I want Rannilt saved as much as you do,’ he said deliberately. ‘And our enemies thwarted.’

But not a word about her. It hurt, but she had created the mess and she must live with it. She dressed quickly and stood looking down at the child. ‘I’m afraid to leave her here in case she … slips away.’

‘Bring her. The pearls are her only chance — if you get them.’

And if I don’t, Tali thought, and I probably won’t, better we die together than alone. She hefted Rannilt, who seemed to weigh nothing now. Tobry stood waiting, sword at his side. Rix’s eyes were still racing under their lids, and Glynnie and Benn were asleep, her arm protectively around him.

‘Why is the cellar at the heart of it?’ Tali said quietly.

‘It was once the private temple of Cythe’s kings. And it’s the only place Lyf could travel to as a wrythen.’

‘But why did Axil Grandys preserve it when he’d done his best to erase Cythe from the map? What did he hope to find in the cellar?’

Tobry had no answer.

‘What do you know about Deroe?’ said Tali.

‘Nothing. I haven’t found anyone who’s met him.’

Tobry led the way down, following the path the high constable and chief magian had broken with sledgehammers on the night of the Honouring. Tali followed, her thumbs pricking and her throat so dry that each breath rasped. The passage was as dark as a tomb, yet before they were within thirty yards of the cellar she knew it lay ahead. The hackle-raising smell gave it away: dry rot, mould, caked grime and the faint stench of long dead, poisoned rats.

Memories overwhelmed her. She was a little girl again, hand in hand with Iusia in her bid for freedom and trusting her mother’s judgement utterly. If only she had whispered her worries about Tinyhead …

Tobry slid the stone door open and went in, raising his lantern. Tali’s skin crawled — the cellar might have been closed the day she’d fled from it and only now reopened. All was as she remembered it — the broken crates she’d hidden between, the ferocious stone raptors, the black bench where they had laid her mother. She could not look at it or she would never stop remembering.

‘This is an evil place,’ she said, frozen in the doorway. ‘I can feel it. Something terrible happened here before the murders. Long before.’

‘But not wholly evil,’ said Tobry, softening at her stricken look. ‘In olden times, the kings of Cythe worked their healing magery on the land from here.’

‘How could anyone have the power to change the land?’

‘King-magery was rooted in the land.’ He walked around the cellar, elbrot out, touching things with it. ‘And Cythonian magery wasn’t spread out across thousands of magians, as ours is. King-magery was concentrated in one person, trained from birth to use it wisely and only for healing.’

‘But to heal this great land …’ It was beyond imagining.

‘Hightspall’s bounty comes at the cost of violent eruptions, devastating floods and landslides, and disasters of many other kinds. It’s a land much in need of healing and this is where the kings of Cythe did it. And because they did, pockets of good still linger here.’

‘Enough to heal Rannilt?’

‘I don’t know.’ Tobry stopped by a stone box the size of a large coffin, with a cracked lid. He slid it aside, looked in and said gently, ‘Here is best, for you and for her.’

She knew what lay inside; the chief constable had mentioned it after the Honouring. Tali paced across, as if in a funeral procession, and looked down at the bones of her mother and her three older ancestors who had been hosts to the ebony pearls. She had not known her ancestors — they had all died young — but her eyes burnt that her beautiful mother had been reduced to this sad little pile of bones.

‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I do feel something good here.’

He slid the lid over the bones. Tali laid Rannilt on the dusty surface, wrapped in her covers, and she sighed and breathed more steadily. Perhaps some protection did linger in the gracile bones of the four Pale women killed here.

Thump-thump.

‘What was that?’ Tali whirled, staring into a misty green gloom that Tobry’s lantern could not dispel.

‘Sounded like someone jumping down a step.’

Di-DA-doh, di-DA-doh!

‘Oh, poor Rix, leave him alone …’ said Rannilt in a croaky little voice. Her eyes were screwed tightly shut, as if she did not want to see.

‘What’s she talking about?’ said Tobry.

‘Lyf must be waking the compulsion on Rix.’ The call-clamour grew, di-DA-doh, di-DA-doh, along with the spiking headache, and now the three calls were coming from the one place. ‘And Deroe’s coming. He knows I’m here. Hide! I’ll try to gain his confidence, then you