Vengeance

‘You were right about the weather,’ he said, talking for the company. ‘You’re always right and I should have listened.’

He was dragging Tobry through the vine thicket when a jackal let out a barking howl. Tobry’s unconscious body twitched, his eyes shot open, staring straight up, then his blistered eyelids shuddered shut.

Rix gripped his friend’s shoulder. For the cry of a jackal shifter to break through Tobry’s unconsciousness, his terror of them must be monumental. And I led you up here, he thought. I pressured you to stay even when the danger became obvious, and you put your fears to one side because you can never let a friend down.

‘Sorry, Tobe. Some friend I am.’

Every second’s delay was a ticking heartbeat further from survival. Rix crawled along the low passage through the vine thicket, heaving Tobry behind him. If a single jackal shifter attacked in here, they would both die.

There was no sign of the horses when he reached the lower side of the vine thicket, and panic flared. Rix fought it down. One thing at a time. He propped Tobry against a tree and checked him all over. The skull beneath the bloody bruise felt sound, yet his eye sockets were almost black beneath the weeping blisters and his eyelids were hot. What had the wrythen been up to?

Tobry’s pupils were dilated, though at least they were the same size. If it was only a mild concussion, he would recover with no more than a bad headache. But if the concussion was severe, he could die.

And if the wrythen had done something to him, something unnatural? Then the Gods help him, for Rix would not be able to.

CHAPTER 24

The wrythen tasted fear on the ice-laden air. He felt it quaking the bones of his native land, heard it in the cracked howling from the shifter pens in his doubly coiled germinerium.

His form shifted and churned. After that savage dissection yesterday, he could not settle into his true shape, and his phantom stumps ached worse than they had when his feet had been freshly severed.

But that was nothing to his terror of the accursed sword whose magery he could never forget. The very sword with which that Herovian brute had hacked off his feet all those centuries ago, when the wrythen had still been a man.

He had sworn revenge on the five who had been involved, and as a wrythen had taken it. The sword had been lost long ago; he had thought it destroyed. Now, at the moment he was poised to take back Cythe, it appeared again, wielded by a warrior like an enemy risen from the dead — Rixium, of the House of Ricinus. The very boy whose nightmares the wrythen had shaped via the heatstone all these years. A boy now grown to a formidable man, and where had he found that vile sword?

In desperation, the wrythen had attempted to command Rixium via the compulsion inside him, and it should have worked. Years of the whispering nightmares had almost broken him, yet with the sword in hand he had proven unexpectedly resistant. The sword had worked its cursed magery yet again, one that the wrythen could not defeat, for neither magery nor sword were native to Hightspall and he did not understand either.

Determination had always been the wrythen’s great strength, but the old self-doubt was creeping back. Had he made a fatal blunder? He hovered, tugging restlessly on his fingers. There were many things he could do, though he could not choose between them. He no longer had confidence in his own judgement.

Seeking the only comfort available to him, he floated to the top of his cavern, then recoiled. All one hundred and seven figures in his ancestor gallery were roaring, Desist!

The king is supposed to heal the land, not corrupt it, spat scar-faced Ruris. He had been the greatest master of spagyre, the healing art, that had ever lived, yet Ruris had refused to use it to heal himself. You have profaned what you should have held sacred.

At thought of what he had done in his spagyrium, the wrythen flushed. His memory library offered no surcease, either. It only reminded him of all that had been lost. And as for his germinerium — one of the creations caged there gave even him the horrors.

It’s the only way to ensure our people’s survival, he said coldly. The enemy bitterly resent the price they must pay for heatstones. They will soon decide to take them for themselves, using their profane magery.

An army of a hundred thousand would founder on the defences of Cython, said the shade of Rovena the Wise. Her long white hair was in constant motion, like feathers drifting in a breeze.

Remember the tactics they used in the Secret War? What if they poison the streams that Cython’s Siphons draw from? Or seed anthrax into the air breathers? Or empty wagon loads of brimstone into one of the tunnels and set fire to it? They could wipe our people out in a day. We have to strike first.

The wrythen had not drawn breath in two millennia, but suddenly he was choking on the horror of his people’s annihilation. It could not be endured.

Every man has his allotted span, said Errek First-King. Every people, too. If Cython’s time is up, let it go.

I can’t let my people go, he cried. The thought was pure agony, the worst he had ever felt. I won’t!

Better they vanish than you continue this monstrous sacrilege, thundered Ruris. How dare you distil alkoyl from our holy Abysm! How dare you perform that profane nucleation spell in the place of sacred dissolution?

The wrythen hurtled away until their ghostly recriminations could no longer be heard. There is a way. Focus!

But he was too agitated, too afraid that the Herovians were rising again. Only one remedy remained, one he doled out to himself grudgingly lest it lose its effect. A hundred and forty years had passed since he’d last resorted to it.

The wrythen slipped into the sacred Abysm, then down, down to the glittering speck that floated far below. The speck became a statue carved from black opal, the figure of a great warrior contorted in bone-snapping torment.

As the wrythen looked upon the remains of his ancient enemy, he felt the tension ease, the self-doubt fade. The warrior had been a tyrant everyone had thought invincible; he had torn Cython apart. Yet the wrythen had brought him down and frozen him in perpetual agony.

As the man, so too his people. Only vengeance could cleanse the tainted land.

Calmly now, he returned to his chamber. Time to get on with it. But first — Rix.

The nightmares embedded in Rix’s heatstone had implanted the required orders, guilts and fears so he would obey when the call came, but the wrythen, unable to travel into Palace Ricinus, had no insights into either Rix’s adult mind or his character.

He had seemed slow-witted yet, after the way he had dealt with the caitsthe, the wrythen could deny neither Rix’s courage nor the power of his sword arm. Indeed, there was much to admire in him, and in olden times they might well have become friends. But Rix could become a great leader of men, a deadly and unpredictable opponent.

Had the wrythen created his own nemesis? Could he still use Rix, or must he destroy him? The wrythen’s plan depended on surprise. Rix must not get back to Caulderon with his news and his deadly blade, nor the other, far more clever man, that wielder of foul magery whose mind and gift the wrythen had gone so close to taking.

Should he send shifters after Rix and cut him down? The man was exhausted, injured and burdened with the unconscious friend he had refused to abandon, which revealed a nobility the wrythen had not expected in the enemy.

Killing him was the easy solution, but without Rix the wrythen would be forced to rely on Deroe, who had betrayed him thrice already. And Deroe was growing stronger by the day.

No, Rix must be back at the palace when the host girl was brought to the cellar. Once there, the compulsion would drive him down to do the bloody business …