Vengeance

‘House Ricinus is conservative and full of prejudices,’ said Tobry. ‘Rix isn’t a bad man … not really. Bastard!’ he said under his breath.

‘I don’t know what to do.’

He untied a canvas pouch hanging on his left hip and reached inside. Tali caught a faint glimmer through the weave, as if a glowstone had been uncovered, and a single tendril of emerald light quivered across her inner eye.

He withdrew a little cloth bag and held it out. ‘Take this.’

Both the glow and the light tendrils faded. ‘What is it?’ she said warily.

‘Silver, all I have. Not much.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘I’m not wealthy.’

Pride told her to scornfully reject his charity. Reason said she would need it, since she had no house to help her. Tali bowed and took the bag. Her hand was still trembling; she could not stop it. ‘Thank you, Lord Tobry.’ He was a good man. He would help her.

‘Just Tobry. My house has fallen; there’s nothing noble about me.’

He glanced along the path Rix’s flight had flattened through the bushes. A brown horse waited near the edge of the oasis. Tobry whistled and the horse pulled its reins free, trotted to the pool and drank noisily.

‘You’re leaving us behind,’ Tali said dully.

Escaping from the enemy had been the easy part compared to relations with her own people. Why had she taken Rix on? If she had bowed and thanked him she would be halfway to safety by now. The enemy would never catch riders on horseback.

Tobry mounted, grimacing and rubbing his bandaged shoulder. ‘My horse is worn out. It can’t carry me and both of you. I’ll bring Rix back.’

‘But — the enemy — ’

‘I won’t be long. But keep out of sight, just in case …’ He rode off.

‘Tobry!’ she cried, remembering her urgent news. ‘Cython is going to war in eleven days — no, ten days now.’

He whirled and came back. ‘How do you know?’

She told him about the stockpiled food, the preparations on the chymical level, the crates of weapons and the threats that they would soon put the Pale down. ‘What if my escape makes them bring forward their plans?’

‘Why would it? You’re just — ’ Tobry bit the rest off, then had the grace to look embarrassed.

‘Just a slave,’ said Tali. ‘A worthless Pale. Don’t worry, I’m used to it. They told us so every hour of every day.’

‘They won’t be saying it now. They’ll be working like a swarm of rats to discover how you escaped.’

‘What if they attack before Hightspall can get its army together?’

‘They’ll get a nasty surprise,’ said Tobry, though not convincingly.

Tali remembered what Tinyhead had said. ‘They’ve been planning this war for a thousand years. Hightspall is ready for war, isn’t it?’

‘Of course …’ He glanced at her, then away, biting his lip. ‘I’d better go.’

Hightspall isn’t prepared, she thought, but he dares not say so. He’s afraid I might be a spy. Tali knew what happened to spies and informers at a time of war. They were killed, but only after everything they knew had been tortured out of them.

As he rode away, her head began to throb, in the particular way it had when her enemy’s eyes had been looking out from Tinyhead’s eyes. She went back to the pool. Did her enemy know she was here? Was he directing the Cythonians to the oasis? Were they close?

Half an hour passed, then an hour, but Tobry did not return. Had he lied? Or what if he and Rix had run into a band of the enemy?

‘Rannilt?’ Tali called. The girl was up the tree again, keeping watch. ‘Any sign of them?’

‘No.’

‘What about the enemy?’

‘Can’t see no one.’

Tali was running out of options. They could not hide here; a small band of Cythonians could search the oasis in half an hour. Yet if she went back into the Seethings they would see her from a mile off.

‘Come down. You must be thirsty.’

Rannilt came creeping down, washed her face in the pool and took Tali’s hand. ‘Why did that wizard — ?’

‘What do you mean, wizard?’ cried Tali.

‘He had gramarye in his pocket,’ said Rannilt.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I saw it, clear as anything.’

Relief flooded her. Tobry was clever. He must know far more about magery than any slave, and he was a kind man who did not despise the Pale. Could he teach her? Yes, she would appeal to him. It was absurd to think that the only person who could teach her magery was her enemy. How would Mimoy know, anyway?

‘Tali?’ said Rannilt.

‘Shh, child, I’m trying to think.’ She had to go after Tobry and Rix. ‘Come on.’ Tali crammed her hat well down and put the robes on over her gown.

How had Rix known she was one of the Pale, anyway? If no Pale had ever escaped from Cython before, how could any Hightspaller know what they looked like, or that they bore a slave mark on their left shoulders?

She was trying to understand his reaction to her when a long-lost memory came flooding back, one she had suppressed after the terrible day in the cellar. By the time she found her way back to the Pale’s Empound, a day later, Tali had buried the memories so deep that, even as an adult, she had not been able to find them.

A handsome, black-haired boy, his eyes tormented and his fine clothes covered in vomit, reaching out to her mother’s hair then staring at the blood on his fingers. The look in Rix’s dark eyes had been vaguely familiar, but the way he had thrown up, like an animal in pain, was unmistakeable.

He was her first real clue to who had murdered her mother.

Rix was the boy from the cellar.

CHAPTER 36

An hour later, as darkness raced across Lake Fumerous towards the west, the hatches were lifted on nine cunningly concealed tunnels. Three lay close by the fishing towns on the southern shore of the lake, three more were scattered along the triangle of fertile farmland that made up Suthly County, on the eastern side of the Caulderon Road, and one was insolently close to the main gates of Caulderon.

Four thousand cloaked Cythonian warriors synchronised their chronos then, armed with shriek-arrows, pox-pins, cling-metal and other chymical horrors, made their silent way to the richest farming communities, the wealthiest towns and the most important bridges. At the appointed minute of the appointed hour, they attacked.

Carefully placed bombasts, exploding in pyrotechnic crimson arcs, collapsed three bridges and the left-hand side of the city gate. Fire-flitters, hurled in hissing swarms from small, wheeled pults, turned fields, warehouses and granaries into chymical furnaces. Sunstone grenadoes, tossed into palaces and hovels alike, imploded with silent, brain-numbing violence that rendered most of the occupants catatonic. Shriek- arrows cut swathes through those nobles and commoners who managed to claw their way out into the dark. Finally an epidemic of tiny pox-pins, falling in a whispering rain from the black sky, delivered their hideous cargo into the unfortunate survivors.

After ten minutes, one-fifth of the harvest of the region was ablaze. Hundreds of people were dead, thousands lay unconscious and thousands more were yet to feel the indigo buboes forming inside them. Hightspall did not know what had happened; not a single Cythonian had been seen. They withdrew to their tunnels, erasing their tracks as they went, to sleep like just warriors and dream of vengeance.