Vengeance

Deroe’s legs kicked and his arms thrashed; grey saliva dribbled from his gaping mouth, then brown foam. Was he having a fit? No, he was shamming. He made it to his knees and slashed at her with the bone saw. Tali wove aside, kicked out the way Nurse Bet had taught her and struck him under the jaw, almost breaking her toes. His head snapped back and he was driven onto the beak of the stone raptor. He convulsed, slid off and she felt the last of his power over her fade.

She ran back for the knife to finish him. Justice be damned; Tali burnt for revenge. But as she loomed above the magian, ice-blue vapour began to ooze from around his eyeballs, a miasma that began to pull together into a face as solid as history itself and as stern as justice denied. A face that would give no quarter even after two thousand years.

‘Kill him,’ gurgled Deroe, slimy bubbles extruding from his mouth to burst on his lip and chin. ‘If not for me, then for Hightspall. Kill Lyf now and the war is over.’

‘How?’ said Tali, a dawning hope warring with her instinctive fear that Deroe was lying.

‘I set a mind-trap for him in case he tried to possess me again, and it’s forcing him out before he’s ready. He can’t do anything about it, but I’m dying. I can’t close the trap, but you can. Catch him with the soul grip-pers, then destroy him with the pearls.’

The soul grippers must be the parasol skeleton Deroe had flexed earlier. ‘There’s only three pearls,’ said Tali.

‘Use the master pearl before he recovers. Now!’

‘You said it couldn’t be used inside the host.’

‘I lied.’

And perhaps he was lying now. Deroe was a liar and a murderer many times over. How many lives had he destroyed over the past hundred years? How many families had he torn apart? Whatever he wanted, she should do the opposite.

‘He’s your real enemy,’ he sobbed. ‘I’ve never been more than his puppet. Kill him while you can!’

Tali did not believe him, and wasn’t sure he was dying, either, but the miasma dribbling from his raw eye sockets was thinning now. Lyf’s face was almost complete. What was there to lose by doing as Deroe asked? Everything, or nothing?

Tali snatched the parasol from the bench, and the disc with the pearls. She limped back to Deroe, pointing the parasol at Lyf’s face. ‘Like this?’

‘ Close!’ said Deroe in a magian’s command.

The skeletal arms of the parasol closed on the misty face, which writhed and shifted and tried to stream away, but could not escape. Tali touched each of the pearls with the fingers of her right hand, these enchanted, marvellous spheres that had been cultured inside her closest female ancestors, and she felt a connection there that no one else could have used.

‘ Kill!’ whispered Deroe, reaching for the pearls.

Tali pulled them away. She was not giving him a chance.

‘ DIE!’ said Lyf.

There came a wet, tearing sound from inside Deroe’s head. His eyes went the muddy brown of his blood, then blood began to ooze from his eyes, his nose, his mouth and ears. He fell back and the breath whispered out of him. He was dead.

Tali looked down at the body. Another of the killers was dead; another stage passed on the long road of her quest, but all she could see was the pathetic man-boy trapped within that crumbling shell.

Deroe’s wards failed. The misty face dissolved into air and Lyf streaked back through the wall into his facinore body. Then, a thousand times more powerful, he tore the wall apart.

‘For my weeping country,’ he said softly, and soared out, racing for the pearls.

Tali had only seconds to command them. She put her hand across the three and drew deep within her. Each of her murdered ancestors had hosted one of the pearls, each had lived their short lives with a pearl growing inside her, connected physically and emotionally, as she was linked to her ancestors and to her pearl. Surely, even if she could not use the pearl inside her, there had to be a familial connection she could employ to command the other three.

But before she could try, a small, skinny man came stumbling down the corkscrew stairs, crying, ‘She the one. Look out, Lord, she the one!’

Wil the Sump hit the floor so hard that she heard a rib crack, and a needle-tipped alkoyl vial slipped from his pouch and rolled across the floor towards her. She hastily moved her foot aside. Wil bounced to his feet in oblivious ecstasy.

Lyf froze in mid-air, then hovered fifteen feet away. ‘What do you mean, the one?’

Tali was astounded. She had always assumed Lyf knew about the one. Was there any way she could use this before he thought it through?

‘Wil had shillilar about the one rewriting the book,’ said Wil. ‘Changing the ending. Matriarchs tried to kill her to stop shillilar coming true.’

Lyf looked from Tali to Wil, then back to Tali, weighing the implications.

Tali was pressing her hand against the pearls, trying to read the imprint of how Deroe had used them, when Rix leapt through the door, sword in hand, and slid it closed. He was spattered with blood, and very pale.

‘What’s happened to Tobry? He’s not — ?’ She could not say it.

‘A hundred jackal shifters came; no way to stop them. One of us had to make a stand or they would have broken through and killed us all. Tobry sent me to get you away. To give Hightspall a chance.’

While Tobry died alone, facing his worst nightmare? This could not be borne. Tali spun towards Lyf and her lips were forming the word, Die! when he extended a hand. Silver cords unreeled from it into Rannilt’s chest, into Rix’s and out through the doorway towards Tobry.

Rix tried to pull the cord free but it snapped tight. He gasped and doubled over, clutching at his heart.

‘With the pearls you may, perhaps, find the power to end me,’ said Lyf to Tali. ‘But if you try, with my last breath I will tear out their hearts. Who will you sacrifice, to end me? The dying child who has given her all for you? The friend outside who endures his nightmare in a vain attempt to protect you? Or the tainted hero forced to choose between betraying his family and helping you?

‘Or for the sake of vengeance, will you sacrifice all three?’

CHAPTER 106

On her mother’s body, on Mia’s blood, Tali had sworn unbreakable oaths, and now her fingers were quivering on the pearls. By killing Lyf — if she could — she might end the war, or at least delay it until Hightspall could defend itself, and thousands of people who would otherwise die would live. Was that the one’s true purpose?

And why not do it? Rix longed for death, Rannilt was slipping away and, outside, the shifters would soon take Tobry, if they had not already. A painless end was the greatest kindness she could do her friends.

But if she broke her oaths, saved her friends and let Lyf go, a host of innocent people would pay with their lives. She could see them in her mind’s eye, folk she had encountered on the way into Caulderon last time: a crippled girl hobbling on broken crutches, that wailing baby whose limbs were like sticks, the white-haired ancient staggering under the weight of his ailing wife. All were begging her to save them, all dreading she would condemn them.

The chancellor would sacrifice his allies and not be troubled by it afterwards, and perhaps he would be right to do so, for Lyf would never give in. If she let him live, his armies would crack Caulderon open and he would revenge himself on the whole city. What point saving her friends if they were going to die anyway?

Tali’s fingers clenched. She was about to use the pearls when Lyf looked up and smiled, and she choked. He wanted to see the failure in her eyes. He wanted revenge on her most of all.

Damn him! The reckless fury she had suppressed ever since Mia’s death boiled up and Tali saw another way