Vengeance

fourth basement.

‘We survived without heatstones in the olden days. We can do without again.’

‘It was a lot warmer in the olden days.’

‘When I’m lord, we’ll abandon the filthy trade. And … and I’ll personally tumble the Rat Hole down on the enemy.’

‘If you mean the shaft where the Pale carry the sunstones up — ’

‘Filthy white slugs!’ Rix snapped. ‘Mother is right about them. The Pale should be put down. When I think about them going over to the enemy, willingly living with them for the past thousand years — ugh! They sicken me.’

‘Everything is black and white to you, isn’t it? There’s no middle ground.’

‘Everything is black and white,’ said Rix. ‘The Cythonians have always been our enemies, and they always will be. Since the Pale choose to serve them, they should suffer the punishment due to traitors.’

They rode out of the fog. Ahead, the rocky path wound down through forest hung with tendrils of mist.

‘Be that as it may,’ said Tobry, ‘any attack on the Rat Hole would be a declaration of war.’

‘We should declare war on the mushroom eaters,’ said Rix. ‘Why pay their usurious prices for heatstones when we can take them for ourselves? We should wipe them out once and for all.’

‘We fought a two-hundred-and-fifty-year war against them, if you remember your history lessons, and they’re still around.’

‘We drove them out of Hightspall. Sent the bastards creeping underground.’

‘But they got the better of us in the Ten Day War — and in the Secret War two hundred years ago.’

‘I’ve never heard of a Secret War.’

Tobry smirked. ‘It was a secret. Hightspall tried to poison their water, among other dirty ways to wage war. But it failed.’

‘Next time it’ll be different,’ said Rix, raising his sword as if commanding a company of Hightspall’s finest. He cried, ‘To fight for my country — ’

‘Watch the cliff!’

Rix swerved Leather to the centre of the track then rose up in his stirrups, cutting and parrying at an imaginary foe. ‘When I come of age in two weeks, I’m going to raise an army.’

Tobry’s horse shied sideways. ‘And pay for it how?’

‘Um … I’ll train the best of our serfs.’

Tobry rolled his eyes. ‘Armies are expensive, wars ruinously so. You’ll need all the profits from your heatstone monopoly to pay for it.’

‘Er …’

‘And once your war begins, there won’t be any heatstone trade. Where will you get the money then?’

‘If everyone was like you,’ Rix snapped, ‘we’d never go to war.’

‘Now you’re talking like a brawling barbarian.’ Tobry sighed. ‘Rix, there are no good wars.’

‘Nonsense. Defending one’s country is the highest calling of all. I don’t understand you, Tobe.’

Tobry rode on. ‘No, you never have.’

‘Sooner or later we’ll have to fight them.’

‘I don’t see why.’

‘If the land is rising up against us, I reckon they’re behind it.’

‘Behind what, specifically?’

‘The winters that get colder every year. The wet summers where our crops struggle to ripen — ’

‘We can hardly blame the enemy for the weather.’

‘We have weather wizards,’ said Rix. ‘Why can’t they?’

‘Cythonians hate and despise all forms of magery.’

‘So they say!’ Rix sneered.

‘No, it’s a matter of faith to them. Besides, even our best weather magians can’t do more than cause a cloudburst here, a local frost or gust of wind there. To change the very climate of Hightspall is beyond all their spells put together.’

‘What about all the new plagues and poxes, then? And the shifters — ’ Rix reined in again, trying to pull his jumble of worries together.

‘What’s the matter now?’ said Tobry.

‘The caitsthe. The packs of jackal shifters. The breeding pens in the wrythen’s cavern. Tobe — they’re getting ready for war.’

Tobry stared at him. ‘For once, I believe you’re right. And jackal shifters first appeared a hundred years ago, which means Cython has been planning war for a long time.’

‘I don’t know what to make of the wrythen, though.’

‘The enemy is forbidden to do magery, so it’s doing magery for them. And if they do attack, we’ll lose.’

Rix jerked on the reins, restraining an urge to knock Tobry off his horse. ‘That’s traitor’s talk.’

‘Is Hightspall ready to fight?’

‘Our armies could march within a week … or two. Well, a month, anyway.’

‘A month! Wars have been lost in days — ugh!’ Tobry hunched over, pressing his palms against his blistered eyes.

‘Are you all right?’ Had the wrythen left something inside him?

‘I’ve felt worse.’

‘I wish you’d heal your eyes. They look horrible.’

‘I thought you were against magery,’ said Tobry.

‘I’ll make an exception in this case.’

Tobry put his hands over his eyes and subvocalised a healing charm.

Rix studied his eyes. ‘Didn’t do any good.’

‘It takes time to work.’

At this lower altitude, the track was fringed with aromatic shrubs. A fleeting ray of sunlight penetrated the clouds before they closed again and the chill wind picked up. The slopes to either side were clad in Haunted Rosewood forest, the small-leaved trees so dense that it was black inside. It had no better reputation than the valley they were running from.

It was late afternoon after a night without sleep, and Tobry was swaying in the saddle. They would have to camp soon, though Rix wanted nothing more than to get out of the mountains as quickly as possible. Even the deadly Seethings would be better than this. At least, camped by a geyser or boiling mud lake, it would be warm. He thought longingly of freshly poached trout.

‘Our generals’ tactics come from the first war,’ Tobry said, as though an hour’s silence had not passed. ‘They’re way out of date.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘The next war won’t be fought that way.’

‘If our tactics worked then,’ said Rix, ‘why wouldn’t they work now?’

‘The enemies have long memories. And they could strike anywhere, through tunnels built in secret hundreds of years ago.’

‘We’ll tunnel down to them.’

‘Whenever we’ve tried, they’ve collapsed our tunnels and killed our best miners.’

‘Then we’ll attack their entrances.’

‘Every way into Cython is a maze. We’d need ten times their number to break in, and even then we’d lose most of our men.’

‘You’re starting to piss me off, Tobe,’ Rix snarled.

He whirled and galloped down the path, hacking at the shrubbery with his sword. Hightspall was going to win. They had to. He wiped his blade and, feeling a trifle foolish, rode back.

And had another flash of the ice leviathan grinding over the walls of his beautiful palace — surely a