Vengeance

walking into a trap. Even if they were not, without magery escape seemed impossible.

She had planned to slip through into the loading station and practise putting on the leather harness, but the maze entrance was blocked by crisscrossing bars, and beyond them, guards were pacing. There was no sign of Mimoy.

It was almost time for the breakfast gong. If Mimoy didn’t appear soon, it would be too late. When Tali and Lifka did not join the lines outside their cells to march to work, the guards would go looking for them. Tali’s crime would be discovered and the hunt would be on.

Could she escape without magery? Fifty yards back she had passed a series of storerooms stacked with crates and boxes. She slipped inside the first storeroom and sat in the dark, wondering if she could impersonate Lifka without magery.

It could go wrong in so many ways: if the guards checked each slave before they donned the harness; if she could not get Lifka’s speech or mannerisms right; if Lifka had already been found; if the sunstone proved too heavy; if what Lifka hadn’t told Tali was vital …

Her burdens came down on her with the weight of a sunstone. If the guards caught her, they would cut everything off. If Tinyhead took her, her family’s enemy would hack her head open while she was still alive. If the matriarchs found her, she would be killed without ever knowing why the one was such a threat.

There was a reason why no Pale had ever escaped — it was impossible. Thus far, all she had done was run and hide, but there was nowhere else she could run to.

Yet she had sworn a binding oath and, no matter what else happened, the oath remained: unbreakable, unyielding, stiffening her spine no matter the burden. She would go on, to the bitterest end, or die in the attempt. She would not break her oath.

The breakfast gong sounded and her empty stomach rattled. Tali consumed the mouse-gnawed poulter leg shred by shred and, to a half-starved slave, it was the most delicious thing she had ever eaten.

If Mimoy did not turn up, Tali was going to put on the performance of her life. She wasn’t just going to look like Lifka, she would become her in every way. She was rehearsing how her double moved, the way she spoke, the drooping lower lip and the glazed look in the girl’s eyes, when her thumbs pricked.

Scutter-clack.

There was something in the storeroom with her, high up. Something guard ing the crates. One of the beasts rumoured to guard the secret levels of Cython? Tali rose to a crouch, arms up to protect her face. Could it see her? She strained for any sound that would tell her where it was, what it was. Was it on top of the crates to her left, or the ones on the right? She had to pass between them to reach the door, and it could go for her face or attack her throat.

She was creeping along, arms stretched out to either side so she did not blunder into the stacks, when a fingertip picked up the faintest vibration in the side of a crate. Was it inside?

Using the poulter bone, she felt for a gap between the boards of the crate and poked the bone in. It touched something hard, with a complicated, curved shape … and serrations. Scutter-clack-snap. The bone was torn from her fingers and crunched to splinters.

Tali scrambled away, fingertips stinging. It sounded like the skritter that had made that bloody assault on Sidon’s calf. Each crate must hold dozens of them, and there were dozens of crates. What were they for? Why were they stored here? What if they got out?

From the feebly lit passage, she watched the storeroom door until her heart stopped pounding. The skritters had to be for hunting and attacking, but the Pale did not need to be hunted …

An unpleasant suspicion arose. Why had their rations been cut when Cython was producing more food than ever? She peered into the next storeroom, which was full of boxes. More skritters?

A foreman’s coat hung from a peg on the wall. She wrapped it around her hands and eased up the lid of the nearest box, sweating. It contained spearheads, hundreds of them. The next box was the same, and the one after.

In recent days, several guards had talked about getting rid of the Pale, as if Cython would soon have no need for them. And the foremen below had been ordered to get everything ready by the end of the month at any cost.

Cython was going to war, a war they must have been planning for a very long time, and they now held the advantage. Hightspall occupied the Cythonians’ ancestral land of Cythe; their maps showed every inch of it and they could swarm out through secret tunnels anywhere, any time.

Hightspall, however, knew nothing about Cython, for no Hightspaller had ever been allowed inside the underground realm. Its few entrances were defended by a maze of traps, dead ends and killing rooms for any enemy who broke through.

Unless Hightspall was prepared for war in eleven days, it would not have a chance.

CHAPTER 20

Rix’s lungs were burning, but he could never run fast enough to escape what was behind them. Or what lay ahead.

As the caitsthe went up on its toes, Tobry let out a shuddery moan and Rix knew their lives hung from a cobweb. If Tobry cracked they would both fall.

‘Keep going,’ he panted. ‘Better a hundred shifters than that uncanny wrythen.’

‘Easy for you to say,’ Tobry said hoarsely. ‘You’ve got an enchanted sword.’

‘If we get through, I’ll take the shifter.’

‘Damned if — ’

Another bolt of tormented sound screamed overhead, struck the fissured roof further along and, crack-crack, began to pick the stone apart. Rix looked back and a scream bubbled up his throat — the wrythen was like something out of his night horrors.

The broken rock formed a rubble waterfall and diving through it was a lottery, their survival a matter of chance. But chance was better than the certainty if they were trapped with the thing behind them.

‘Go!’ Rix cried, and they dived together.

Rock was falling on the left and right sides of the gap, dust billowing out to obscure what little light there was. The roof gave an almighty groan and he knew that it was all coming down. His ankle shrieked as he soared over the rubble, small rocks whacked him on the back and buttocks, then the mountain fell in.

Broken stone was flying everywhere, bouncing off the walls, raprapping down his backbone, stinging his left ear. He hit the floor hard, skinning both elbows, rolled over and raised his sword in the one movement. Where was the caitsthe?

Until the dust settled, the creature would be impossible to see while it stood still, no more than a shadow when it moved. Though no doubt it could scent him. Rix suppressed a sneeze, put his back to the wall and probed with the blade. Despite the exertion, he was freezing — the depths of the tunnel seemed to be breathing up cold. Where was it? It could strike from anywhere and he would not see it until it was too late.

He could not see Tobry, either. ‘Tobe?’ he whispered.

No reply. Rix swept the flat of his sword around like a paddle but it did not touch flesh. Tobry was either unconscious or dead. Rix was on his own with one enemy before him and another at his back, and if they attacked together he would die.

Why was the caitsthe here, anyway? What was it guarding? What didn’t the wrythen want him to see?

He couldn’t see it now, but he could feel it coming as an icy ache in places where he had never felt anything before — inside his arm and leg bones, in the marrow — and a creeping and crawling of the skin on the back of his thighs. Whatever it was, it was no honest, natural creature. Why didn’t it attack? What was it waiting for? Was it driving them towards the caitsthe … or was the caitsthe penning them in for the wrythen?

Their survival depended on the answer.

‘Tobe?’ he repeated.