Vengeance

The wrythen faltered. The struggle had left him desperately short of quessence and he had no safe way of getting more. It was all he could do to hold his severed plasm together. He would never find the strength to get to the cellar and do what must be done.

Wait! If he plundered the gift of Rix’s friend, Tobry, it would last him for weeks. And once he had the fifth nuclix he would cut Rix down, then topple him and the cursed sword down the Hellish Conduit to be consumed by the Engine far below.

Three packs of jackal shifters hunted out in the valley. And shifters, being his own creatures, could be commanded from a mile away. He sent a compulsion to the leader of the closest pack.

Bring the smaller man here. Let the big one go. No feeding.

The wrythen headed across to the linked spirals of his germinerium. The next task should have been a week and a half away, for he did not have quite enough alkoyl to complete The Consolation of Vengeance. Initiating the plan without completing the book was reckless, but Rix’s escape had changed everything. And he dared not contact his faithful servant in Cython again. The matriarchs must never know about him.

After settling into the frigid depths, the wrythen stopped outside a cage whose bars were made of green olivine. Within was a shifting creature, part shadow, part flesh, the greatest horror he had ever shaped. Even from this distance he could feel the pressure of its infected psyche. The despair it radiated was eating at his own resolve.

It wasn’t ready. Its mind was only half formed, making it dangerous even to a wrythen and difficult to control, but it was all he had. He opened the cage.

Hold out your hand, the wrythen said softly, and the facinore obeyed. He had not been sure it would. He focused on the creature’s dark palm, then seared his message there.

Run to Cython, he said. Seek out the matriarchs and show them your hand.

The facinore loped off, its open right hand swinging. Even when it was fifty yards away the wrythen could read the blazing letters there.

MAKE WAR.

CHAPTER 25

The sunstone did not fall.

The weight was crushing Tali against the rail, preventing her from drawing breath. She shook herself frantically, trying to dislodge the stone. The guards were only one flight above her and could reach her in a leap. She had to get rid of it now.

She gave an almighty heave. The sunstone slid from its pouch, rasped across the back of her head and fell.

When the weight left her back an even heavier weight slipped from her heart. She watched it plummet towards Tinyhead and, momentarily, all her cares were gone. The enemy would kill her but at least she had ended her mother’s betrayer.

Then the blue stone around Tinyhead’s neck emitted an angry blink of light and he moved so fast she lost sight of him.

‘Look out!’ yelled the guard above. She heard him scrambling up again, desperate to get to the outside door.

‘Get down!’ shrieked another guard. ‘Cover yourselves.’

Used to obeying instantly, Tali scrunched herself up against the wall of the landing and yanked the leather pouch over her as the sunstone hit the steps far below and smashed. There came an immense flash, so bright that she could see it through the leather, and white rays seared up the shaft. It was as bad as the time the pyrites calciner had exploded, punching a hole through a small floatillery and scalding twenty slaves to death with superheated steam, save that this cataclysm took place in silence empty as a vacuum.

Her head throbbed and a single, pure note sounded in her inner ear, like the highest note of a clarinet. She did not want it to stop, she yearned for it as much as any Pale had ever yearned for Hightspall, but it died away in a little upturn, like an unanswered question.

In the silence that followed, the bracelet burned around her ankle as if all those pointed spikes had turned red-hot, then tinkled and fell off. Her slave mark turned to ice embedded under the skin.

The shaft shook so violently that Tali’s head cracked against the wall. Scalding reds and yellows whirled and tumbled, then pain screamed through her skull as it had the night before last, when she had come of age. Shattered rock hammered at the underside of the landing, glancing off the rails and skidding up along the walls. A whirlwind of dusty air carried the pungency of overheated stone and the stench of burning flesh. She scrunched against the wall, sure she was going to die. Gravel rained onto the leather pouch, pressing it against her, and it was burning hot.

Finally it ended and the eerie silence resumed. She heard no shouts, no cries of pain, no sound at all. She shoved the pouch off and the thick leather was deeply charred on the outside, though not as charred as she would have been without it. So that’s why the slaves were so afraid of dropping a sunstone, why the edges of the steps had been glassy, why the stone at the bottom was soot-stained. A churning power lay at each sunstone’s core and, when liberated, it was deadly.

As she stood up on shaky knees, a long object, black and smoking and trailing a burnt meat stench, fell past and smashed below her. She caught at the rail. Her head felt so peculiar, hot and bruised, that it was a struggle to focus, but she had to make sure of Tinyhead. She could not see him. Surely he must be dead.

It was her chance to escape, though she would have to be quick — the cataclysm would bring armed troops running from all directions, thinking Cython was under attack. If she could slip by the guards stationed outside, she might get away.

She hesitated. After the sunstone implosion, and Tinyhead’s rib-shattering blow, could Mimoy still be alive? Tali could not see the base of the shaft for dust. There was no way to tell without going down, nor any time to do so. And the wicked old woman had planned to use Tali — only a fool would risk everything to check on her. In Cython it was every slave for herself.

But the Pale had been slaves for the past thousand years because the enemy had pitted them against each other, and they could only survive the coming war by working together. What’s more, Mimoy had been struck down trying to help. Tali, imagining what it must have cost the old woman hobbling all this way on her ruined feet, could not abandon her.

Her head throbbed and a series of coloured patterns drifted through her inner eye, as if she were looking ever deeper into a maze of brightly coloured loops and whorls that were continuously expanding around her. Tali shook herself and the colours faded, though now she felt a tight fullness in her head, a build-up of pressure that longed for release. She squeezed her head between her palms and the pressure eased, though it did not entirely disappear.

Covering her nose, she felt her way down the gravel-littered steps. On nearing the bottom, she put her hand down on something that crunched and crumbled — her hand had broken through into a chest turned to charcoal. Tali gasped and sprang aside, shaking off sticky red char and shuddering violently. Tinyhead? No, the body wasn’t big enough.

In her brief life she had seen more than enough dead people: many killed in ghastly work accidents; a few, like Mia, executed by the guards; suicides hanging in their cells or twisted in convulsions from eating Sprite Caps; an occasional woman killed in a fight over a man; her mother murdered in the cellar. But she never got used to it. Only minutes ago this object had been a living, breathing guard. Her enemy, and yet a man, and she had done this to him.

She had not intended to harm anyone save Tinyhead but, she rationalised, the Cythonians would kill her without a qualm. To survive, save her country and punish her mother’s killers she must be prepared to kill them.

She did not have to like it, though.