Vengeance

The other two tunnels opened onto the Seethings, one to the north of the Rat Hole and one to the south. Twenty soldiers emerged from the northern tunnel, led by a big captain, once handsome, with a deep, powerful voice. The left side of his face was pocked with craters so deep that the tip of a little finger could be inserted in them, surrounded by starkly white scar tissue.

‘Where is she, Wil?’ he said to a skinny little man of indeterminate age with blackened, empty sockets and a seeing eye tattooed in the middle of his forehead.

Wil the Sump fingered the platina containers secreted in his pouch. Just the thought of their deadly contents sharpened his inner eye. He needed to sniff — he ached for the pretty pictures alkoyl made in his mind and the burning bliss that drove all his cares away.

He wiped his dripping nose. He had to find the one. No one else could do it. No one else could truly see. He turned away, took a surreptitious sniff and his eroded single nostril burned like chymical fire.

His heart pounded whenever he thought about the contest between the Scribe and the one. Who would prevail? The Scribe’s story, what he had read of it in the iron book, was sliding off track. But so was the one’s story Wil had seen in his shillilar, and he had to know how the story ended. Sometimes, under the influence of alkoyl, he imagined writing it himself.

Wil turned around once, twice, thrice, then pointed south-east.

‘The one, the one.’

‘Take us to her.’

‘You won’t hurt her, will you?’ said Wil. ‘She could change our story all by herself. I told the matriarchs so.’

‘And so the matriarchs told me.’ The captain fingered his Living Blade and said, below Wil’s hearing, ‘I guarantee that she will feel no pain.’

The squad from the southern tunnel, the one closest to the Rat Hole, was captained by the squat, toad- faced woman called Orlyk. Behind her lurched a huge, empty-eyed man with a red, ruined face and a narrow hole burnt through his tiny head from front to back.

Orlyk jerked the barbed rope around his neck, dragged him all the way to the Rat Hole and knocked him down by the faint track that could still be seen through the grass.

‘Find the Pale slave called Tali, you treacherous hog-rat. Find the vile spell-caster this night, or die a cursed, unshriven traitor.’

Tears ballooned out Tinyhead’s raw eyelids, but they were stuck together and would not open. He grunted, groaned, then flopped out a white and black tongue and began to lick Tali’s scent from the grass.

PART TWO

PURSUIT

CHAPTER 37

The wrythen made another fluttering circuit of his alkoyl still, and another. Despite centuries of planning, every single thing had gone wrong.

Deroe was breaking the possession. If he discovered where the host was, he would gouge the master nuclix out of her in a place the wrythen could not reach, which was practically everywhere, and the battle would be lost.

Now the wrythen’s own people were hunting the host, planning to kill her for escaping, and that would ruin the nuclix. But if they realised it was inside her, and took it, it would destroy them.

He had to get to her first, but how? His faithful servant was somewhere in the Seethings, still clinging to a shambling kind of life, though there was no way to reach him. However, Rix’s friend Tobry must be exhausted, and sooner or later he would relax his guard. When he did, the wrythen would renew the link, possess Tobry and send him after the host.

But what if Tobry broke free?

Only one weapon remained, the facinore, though it sickened the wry-then to use it. It was a reminder of how far he had fallen, and he had a healthy fear of it, too. The facinore’s strength was its changeability and it was evolving rapidly, becoming harder to command by the day, but there was no choice.

Activating the pathways imprinted in the creature when he had created it by the uncanny art of germine, the wrythen sent it the image of the host he had seen through his faithful servant’s eyes, then imitated the strident, angry call of the master nuclix she bore.

She is in the Seethings. Locate her via this call and bring her to the cellar, unharmed.

In the labyrinth between the caverns and Cython, the facinore stopped suddenly, head cocked. It gave a savage nod, scraped a morsel of deliciously decayed flesh from between its teeth and swallowed it, then loped away.

CHAPTER 38

‘Are you all right?’ said Rannilt, creeping up beside Tali.

She sat by the water, shivering. She could not stop remembering now.

The skull-shaped cellar that had stunk of poisoned rats. Her mama darting and weaving as she tried to lead the hunters away from her little daughter. The masked woman so cold and cruel. The tall, round-bellied man, afraid to stand up to her. The shiny knife, the nail sticking deep into Tali’s hip, the woman standing on Mama’s chest as though she were rubbish and her frail ribs snapping like wishbones.

Tali jumped up, caught sight of her reflection in the still pool, and cried, ‘Mama!’

‘Tali?’ said Rannilt anxiously.

Tali could not look away. There were no mirrors in the Empound and she had never seen her face clearly before, but it could have been Iusia looking up at her. She studied every detail, tears stinging in her eyes as she remembered all the good times. Despite their slavery, she had always felt safe before Iusia had been killed.

She dashed the tears away and rage surged so furiously that her jaw clicked. How dare they treat her mama that way? She had never done anything to hurt them. How they were going to pay.

But first she had to find the killers and Rix was the best lead she had. Why had he been in the cellar anyway? Tobry had said that Rix was not a bad man, but had he, even as a boy, been part of the crime? Tali could not believe that of any child … yet she had a faded memory of blood on his hands.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Rannilt.

Tali shuddered and pulled the coarse robes around her, struggling to think. Her plan had collapsed. She had assumed that, as the first Pale ever to escape from Cython, she would be welcomed home as a hero. In reality, the Pale were despised as traitors. And there was no House vi Torgrist to help her. She had no one in the world save this grubby little urchin staring at her so anxiously.

Tali forced a smile. ‘When I looked at my reflection in the water, for a minute I thought it was my mother. Don’t fret, I’m all right now.’