Vengeance

was prettier, Tali conceded, apart from the drooping lower lip which accentuated the vacant look in her eyes. Lifka wasn’t as curvy, but appeared stronger. Her thighs were more muscular, there were callused indentations on her shoulders and her face and hands were lightly tanned, which was odd, since no sunlight ever penetrated into Cython …

Tali was wondering about that, trying to understand it, when the ghost of a plan whispered into her mind. Could it be possible?

‘Aren’t ya scared?’ said Lifka, chewing with her mouth open.

‘Of them?’ Tali put on her most disdainful voice.

‘No, of him.’

Her stomach turned a back flip. The biggest Cythonian she had ever seen stood in the eel-mouth entrance, staring at her. His biceps were the size of her thighs, yet he had a tiny head no larger than a two-year-old’s. A peculiar, purplish head, bulging in all the wrong places.

Tali had blocked out most of what had happened in the cellar that day ten years before, but she could never forget Tinyhead. Could this Cythonian be the same man? The man who had promised to show Iusia the way out, then betrayed her?

She did not think so. His head had neither been misshapen nor purple.

Then he flopped out a disgusting white-coated tongue flecked with black spots like crawling blowflies.

Yes, it was.

CHAPTER 10

‘Free, free, and not a care in the world,’ Rix exclaimed as the sun rose.

Tobry raised an ironic eyebrow. His horse, a neat chestnut with a white blaze on its forehead and a muzzle that always seemed to be smiling, rotated its hairy ears as if it could not believe what it was hearing.

‘All right, one or two cares.’ Rix drew the frigid air into his lungs and sighed. ‘But I can breathe up here; I’m not choked, stifled, cramped.’ He wouldn’t suffer the nightmares here, either. He never had them anywhere but at the palace.

‘Cramped? Your chambers are the size of a small mansion. No, make that a large mansion.’

‘I was born to live under the stars,’ Rix said lyrically, sweeping his arms towards the heavens, ‘to tickle fish in icy streams with my bare hands, to — ’

‘To paint in your studio while a hundred servants wait on your smallest whim.’

Rix scowled. ‘After the stinking portrait is completed I may never paint again.’

Tobry and his horse both snorted. ‘It’s the one thing in your life that has nothing to do with house and heritage. You can’t give it up.’

‘Watch me!’

‘If you had to choose whether to give up painting or your inheritance, I believe you’d renounce your inheritance.’

‘Have you been at the flask while I wasn’t looking?’

After an exhilarating race along the moonlit highway in the night, they were now mile-high in the Crowbung Range, which squeezed around Lake Fumerous and the city of Caulderon like the coils of a constrictor. Spear-point peaks pricked the belly of the sky behind them. Ahead, a monstrous bluff of tortured rock blocked a third of the horizon. It was snowing gently and bracingly cold.

Away to the right, the Red Vomit rumbled, shaking snow from tree branches and blasting steam and ash higher than any storm cloud could reach.

‘Cursed Vomits,’ said Rix.

A change in the wind had drifted volcanic ash over House Ricinus’s south-western estates for the past month, ruining the autumn crops, collapsing roofs and costing the family’s treasury a fortune it no longer had.

‘Cythonian legend says Lake Fumerous filled the hole where a fourth Vomit blew itself to bits in ancient times,’ said Tobry.

‘If this one goes up, Caulderon will cease to be,’ said Rix, his good mood fading, ‘and probably half of Hightspall.’

‘Look on the bright side. Cython won’t want to fight us for it any more.’

‘I see menace and doom everywhere, and all you can do is make jokes?’

‘If you really want to see my dark side, I’ll indulge you this once.’

While Tobry sometimes hinted about his family’s troubles, he had never spoken about them openly. Maybe he needed to. ‘I’m listening,’ said Rix.

‘Did I ever tell you what really brought down the House of Lagger, or the terrible part I played in it — when I was a boy of thirteen?’ Red flecks danced in Tobry’s eyes.

Rix could not bear to look into them. ‘Perhaps some other time,’ he said hastily, and twitched the reins. ‘C’m on, Leather.’

The great horse, black as the inside of a chimney and ferociously loyal, trotted to a rock platform that looked over the mountain chain encircling the fertile lands of central Hightspall, and towards the broad South Plains and the sea beyond.

He wished he had kept straight on. The strait between Hightspall and the long southern island of Suden was choked by icebergs, and that had never happened before.

Tobry came up beside him. ‘Until two hundred years ago, House Lagger’s richest estates were in Suden.’

‘And now?’ said Rix.

‘Buried under half a mile of ice. Everyone and everything lost.’

The wire-handled sword rattled in its scabbard. As Rix steadied it, an image flashed into his mind — a statue of a screaming man, rudely carved from a single piece of black opal, his arms and legs spread as though he was falling. Rix jerked his hand away and the image disappeared. He touched the hilt with a fingertip, but this time saw nothing.

He swallowed, looked where Tobry was pointing and goose pimples ran up his arms. ‘No wonder I dream about ice leviathans.’

The coastline of Suden was ice-locked as far as he could see, and to either side the cliffs of oceanic ice crept ever north, closing in on Hightspall from the south, west and east. The northern sea passages remained open, but for how long? Only the most reckless sea captains dared venture into the mazy pack ice these days, and few returned.

‘What’s to become of us, Tobe? Is Hightspall to die under endless ice?’

Tobry shrugged. ‘Or a fiery eruption.’

‘The chancellor has doubled the prize,’ said Rix. ‘To fifty thousand.’

‘What prize?’ Tobry was studying the strait with Rix’s telescope.

‘For anyone who can turn the ice sheets back. Mother says the chief magian has thirty assistants working on ice-wasting spells.’

Tobry swung the telescope towards the descending moon. ‘Gramarye can no more turn back the ice than stop the moon in its orbit.’ The dire thought seemed to cheer him up.

Rix took a swig of water but his throat felt just as arid afterwards. ‘Is this the end of the world, then?’

‘The world endures. But Hightspall may not.’

‘You’re not helping my mood,’ Rix muttered. ‘Let’s go hunting.’

After a few hundred yards, the path angled to the right around a finger-like rock. Slantwise to the left, in front of the monstrous bluff, lay the slot-like entrance of a narrow valley, still dark inside, whose bare walls rose steeply to east and west.

Further right, a red, triangular peak rose out of a stubble of pines like a pointed head. A round opening near its base resembled a yawning mouth. ‘Is that …?’

‘Catacombs of the Kings,’ said Tobry. ‘A sacred place in old Cythe. We’re not going there.’

‘Afraid of ghosts?’ Rix teased.