Vengeance

There was a scuffle behind him and Tobry hit the ground, dropping his sword into the snow. The pack leader had leapt on him from around the trunk, pulling him off his feet and cracking his head against it.

As Rix swung around, the jaws tightened, the teeth passing through his trews and pricking the skin. Why didn’t the jackal bite? Why was it just holding him?

‘Tobe?’ he called, but Tobry was too dazed to answer.

Only one thing could be preventing them from indulging their natural viciousness. The beasts must be acting on the wrythen’s orders and it wanted them alive. Rix could do nothing to save them. Only Tobry could, but how to get through to him?

‘TOBE!’

Tobry grunted. Two more jackals sank their teeth into his collar and began to drag him up the slope, pulling his weight easily across the snow.

‘You’re letting me down, Tobe,’ said Rix. ‘You owe me.’ What a lie that was.

‘Ugh?’

‘I saved your miserable life. You could at least do the same for me.’

‘Can’t,’ Tobry groaned.

‘Useless bastard! Use your damned magery.’

Tobry’s limp fingers stiffened. He raised his head and managed to focus on Rix, then the jackal with its jaws around his calf. Pressing one hand against the elbrot in his pocket, Tobry pointed the other. With a muffled crack, snow blasted out of a trench stretching from his fingers to the jackal and every tooth in its head shattered. Its jaws snapped convulsively on Rix’s calf, which was like being bitten with a mouthful of gravel, then it ran, howling.

Another jackal came at Rix, and another, but blood-fury was driving him now and he bisected both with the one stroke. He leapt at another, spearing it through the chest. Rix whirled and, refusing to admit any pain from his ankle, took a hopping bound towards Tobry, who was holding his head with both hands. Snatching up Tobry’s fallen sword, Rix hurled it left-handed past his ear and through the skull of the brindled pack leader.

It fell dead, and immediately the pressure eased. The remaining two jackals retreated several feet, stinking saliva dripping from their black tongues, then ran. A horse whinnied, there was a gruesome thud, then the first jackal came flying through the air, a mangled mess.

Beetle, Tobry’s black-faced nag, poked its head out from between the trees. Leather was behind it.

‘I told you so,’ said Tobry feebly. ‘Put me in the saddle, there’s a good fellow — ’

Rix heaved Tobry onto his saddle and slapped Beetle on the left flank. ‘Go!’

Beetle bolted. Rix wrenched Tobry’s sword from the jackal’s skull, dragged himself into Leather’s saddle and followed. A second pack of jackals came loping down, then stopped, their tongues lolling.

‘What happened to that liqueur?’ said Tobry later, as they passed the entrance to the Catacombs of the Kings and all the upside-down heads. Rix, who might have died and been reborn in the past hours, no longer thought the insult a good idea.

He took the flask from the saddlebags and passed it across. Tobry took a deep swig and offered it back.

Rix shook his head. ‘I’ve never felt less like a drink in my life.’

‘I’ve never wanted one more.’ Tobry took another healthy swig. ‘How’s your head?’

‘Better. Ankle?’

‘No better.’

After a while, Tobry said, ‘That didn’t go so well.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Well,’ Tobry was trying to sound his normal self and almost pulling it off, ‘we’ve no idea what the wrythen is up to but we know it’s bad, the snow is getting thicker by the second, you’ve got one day less to finish the portrait, Lady Ricinus will be apoplectic by now — ’

‘I meant, don’t tell me about it,’ Rix snarled.

‘And to cap it off,’ Tobry continued, ‘you came all this way to kill something big, and haven’t.’

He didn’t know the caitsthe was dead and there wasn’t time to explain. ‘I still might!’ Rix brandished his sword.

Tobry chuckled and urged Beetle on.

Rix followed, trying to make sense of all that had happened. Something had changed the moment the wrythen had recognised his sword. Where had it come from? Traitor’s blade. Liar’s blade. Oathbreaker’s blade, he had said, and suddenly the attack had become personal, vengeful. He wanted revenge for an injury done in the past, by some previous owner of this sword.

And he had committed House Ricinus to memory.

CHAPTER 27

Tali was frozen to the step. Though she knew Banj was going to kill her, obedience was so ingrained that it was a struggle to ignore his direct order. But she had to fight it.

‘I’m not letting Rannilt be killed by that vicious toad,’ she muttered, avoiding Banj’s stare. No, she had to be stronger. She must openly defy him — for her own sake, nothing less would do. Raising her head, Tali steadied her shaking knees, looked Banj in the eye and said firmly, ‘I refuse. Damn the matriarchs, damn Cython and damn you. I’m the one!’

Banj’s handsome features registered shock at the defiance, perhaps more so at the secret she should have known nothing about. Purple crept up his cheeks and he glanced over his shoulder. ‘Archers?’

‘Not here yet.’ Orlyk waved the crimson and yellow death-lash. ‘But with this I can sever her backbone from twenty feet away.’

‘Are you her overseer?’ Banj said stiffly.

Orlyk bent her head in angry submission.

Banj drew the Living Blade with which he had beheaded Mia. Red-tinged rainbows wavered around its transparent annulus and it began to keen gently as he lumbered up the steps. Tali retreated, knowing he would catch her before the top. Rannilt convulsed again and light blazed out of her in all directions. Tali could barely hold the jerking girl; it was all she could do to keep climbing.

‘Not now, Rannilt, please.’ Tali hugged her tightly, hoping to overcome her inner torment, but Rannilt did not respond.

Tali looked up desperately. Despite Mimoy’s earlier words, she was waiting at the doors, watching. The pressure in Tali’s head was almost unbearable now, and every flash from Rannilt’s fingers set off such a whirling of the coloured lights in her inner eye that she had to clutch at the rail to hold herself up.

‘Stop, slave!’ Banj, only two flights below her now, was taking three steps to her one.

‘Mimoy!’ Tali cried. ‘Help me.’

Mimoy did not reply.

‘Please don’t kill Rannilt,’ Tali begged Banj. ‘She didn’t ask for the gift. It just came to her.’

Banj was inexorable. ‘Magery is forbidden, obscene, and an abomination.’

‘But she’s an innocent little girl.’

‘Hightspall’s magery was conceived in treachery and birthed in blood. No one bearing its taint is innocent.’

‘Kill her and it makes you a child-murderer.’

Banj’s eyes slid away from hers, but he said, ‘All those bearing the taint must be put down. It’s our law and I swore to uphold it.’

‘It proves you’re nothing but savages!’ she shouted. ‘Your ancestors were too gutless to fight Hightspall so they enslaved its children.’

Banj’s dark eyes flashed. ‘Oh, we fought,’ he said softly. ‘For two hundred and fifty years our ancestors battled the barbarian invaders. If not for their sly, depraved magery, Cythe would still be ours.’

He said it with such passion that Tali had no reply. Her knees were shaking; she could carry Rannilt no