bone-breaking left hook to the jaw took down the next man. Rix was thrusting at the third when the captain kicked his feet from under him, stretching him prone on the flagstones.
‘Take his right hand,’ said the chancellor. ‘With Maloch.’
Rix must have been dazed, for he did not move. This could not be happening. Tali brought her knee up into one guard’s groin and he doubled over. The other man, knowing she had to be protected at all cost, hesitated. She chopped him across the larynx with the side of her hand, evaded a third guard and ran at the captain.
But before she could reach him, the captain raised Maloch and, with a savage blow, severed Rix’s right hand at the wrist. His hand shot into the air, struck her on the knee then flopped onto her foot like a bloody spider. Tali jumped, instinctively flicked it aside, shuddered and had to look away.
Rix let out a roar and staggered to his feet, his wrist pouring blood. The captain struck him on the back of the head with the sword hilt and he collapsed.
Tali ran for Tobry, but before she could reach him, and before Tobry could shift, the guards raised him high and hurled him head-first from the top of the tower.
Rannilt woke, screaming and spraying golden light in all directions, and it took three soldiers to hold her while another wound layers of cloth across her mouth. Only on the fifth winding could they block out the dreadful sound.
Tali stared at the wall where Tobry had gone over. Could he survive such a fall — more than a hundred feet? Surely it would even kill a shifter, and Tobry had not fully shifted, had he? She did not see how he could have completed it in time. Her healing blood had doomed him.
She stumbled to the nearest wall and drove the top of her head into the stone, trying to smash the cursed pearl that had robbed her of every good thing in her life and brought her nothing but despair. But the pain, terrible though it was, could not mask the agony that would never end.
A guard stopped her. Others held her while her bloody head was bandaged and her wrists bound. Tali did not struggle. It felt as though her heart had been cut out. She stared at the wall until the soldiers led her away, then went with them, indifferent to her fate, weeping until her burning tear ducts ran dry.
She was alone again. Every friend she made, every bond she formed, ended in a disaster of her own making. She had failed them all when they most needed her. Iusia had been right, back at the beginning — but for the wrong reason.
You’ll never be hurt if you
CHAPTER 109
Lyf stood on crutches at the top of Rix’s tower, brooding. Had he done the right thing by his people? The urge for vengeance had carried them to their first victory but, even if the rest of Hightspall fell as quickly, could they ever regain the gentle, harmonious society they’d had before the First Fleet came? Or had he fatally corrupted them, alienated them forever from their own land?
Now was not the time for self-doubt. He addressed the officers and soldiers gathered outside the front entrance of Palace Ricinus.
‘You have done well. The city is ours. Identify all the Herovians, separate them out and march them to the special place. Then, take the rest of the Hightspallers into slavery. Gather their provisions and carry them to the warehouses on the lakefront. Collect all the enemy’s weapons. Lock them in the four designated armouries and make sure they are well guarded.’
‘My king, these things are already being done,’ called the squat, muscle-bound General Hillish, ‘and will be done as you order. And then?’
‘Sift the rubble of Lord Rixium’s salon and find the iron book.’
‘At once, my king.’ Hillish gave the orders. ‘And then?’
‘Scour the city for a vicious little tome called the
‘It will be done.’ Hillish looked at Lyf, expectantly. ‘And finally?’
‘Do unto Hightspall as Hightspall did unto us,’ said Lyf.
‘My king?’
‘Visit an equal ruin on Caulderon as its Five Heroes did to our city of Lucidand, which stood here until the invaders came. See where Lucidand’s foundations have been exposed by the great tidal wave?’
Lyf gestured towards the ravines carved through the lower grounds, and the stonework visible there. ‘Burn Caulderon’s libraries and raze its temples. Leave not one stone laid by Hightspall standing on another.’
‘Even this palace?’ said the general. ‘My king, it’s a creation of unsur-passed beauty. Perhaps there’s more to the enemy than we know. I would not have thought them capable of it.’
‘Especially this palace,’ snapped Lyf. ‘It was once home to the brute Axil Grandys, who murdered me and plotted Cythe’s ruin. When Caulderon is grit and ashes we will rebuild Lucidand according to the ways of old Cythe. Begin with Palace Ricinus. Leave nothing save this tower, which will stand in its cracked ruin as a monument to our victory, and a warning to the enemy that all their works are doomed to fall.’
Their bombasts had toppled twenty-two of the palace towers when a young female soldier came panting up to Lyf, hauling an enormous rectangle wrapped in cloth. She dragged it across, avoiding a puddle of congealed blood.
‘My king,’ she said, bowing to the ground and blushing, ‘I found this out the back. General Rochlis told me to bring it to you for assessment.’
When she took off the covering, Lyf caught his breath. The painting was mesmerising — a defeated wyverin pretending to be dead while a dissipated warrior posed before it. It was magnificent, yet terrible — the noble creature secretly waiting for the moment to strike at the strutting, deluded warrior whose life’s failures were etched deep into his face. Clearly, the painting was a metaphor for the two races and their forever war, and a warning — to both sides.
‘It’s a masterpiece.’ He knew at a glance who had painted the portrait, and what it had cost him. ‘The finest work of theirs I’ve ever seen.’
‘Even the common soldiers think so,’ the girl said, shivering. Every child in Cython knew how to paint and carve; every Cythonian could tell the difference between good art and bad.
Lyf closed his eyes, reliving the pain of long ago as Cythe’s treasures had been smashed and torched by the barbarian enemy, and remembering his own despair at the loss of everything he cared about. Was Rix’s painting evidence that even the despised Herovians had changed? It portrayed a cultured and creative side Lyf neither wanted to see nor admit to.
Yet had he not grown over the centuries? Could he not rise above the urge to slake his grief in vengeance? He wanted to. A truly great king would have, knowing that was the way to end the war.
He tried, but the bitterness of two thousand years could not be overcome. Far better that the enemy be seen as brutes without any redeeming features. It would make it easier to deliver them to the final resolution when the time came. That was the other way to end the war.
He opened his eyes. The painting was magnificent but, as Errek, First-King had once pointed out,
‘Burn it.’
CHAPTER 110
In a passage far below Rix’s demolished salon, Wil the Sump hugged the iron book to his hollow chest and howled at the stones. No one loved books the way he did, and he had believed the iron book to be perfect, but it wasn’t. His life had been robbed of meaning.
‘Scribe got it wrong,’ he sobbed. ‘Scribe’s story untrue. Ruined the iron book.’
But Wil could not believe in
