Vengeance

put in a garrison?’ said Rix.

‘Maybe they don’t want to hold Gullihoe.’

Tobry continued down the street, using magery to reconstruct the attack. Ahead, a stocky young man lay on his back, milky eyes staring upwards. His clothes were charred on the left-hand side and his face was as red as sunburn, though there was no mark of injury on him.

‘Dead?’ said Rix.

Tobry nodded.

There were more bodies, though far less than the number Rix would have expected for a town as big as Gullihoe. No one called out to them, though they heard groaning coming from beneath rubble they could not have shifted without ropes and winches. The rest of the survivors had fled.

Ahead, a young woman also lay dead with sunburnt face and milky eyes. Her body was twisted, as though she had been writhing before she died, her fingernails broken where she had clawed at the ground.

Rix straightened her out, pulled her gown down and closed her staring eyes. A slash-shaped burn mark across her belly was deeply charred as if a length of red-hot metal had struck her.

Rix shivered. ‘Magery?’

Tobry waved his elbrot above the mark. Rix saw a linear flash and a shadow figure clutching at her belly. He shook his head. ‘Not an iota.’ He stood upright, looking grey and weary and twice his age. ‘But there’s something dark at work here.’

‘Tali had a welt on her shoulder,’ said Rix. ‘Nothing as bad as that, but the shape was the same.’

Tobry sniffed the charred wound. ‘Smells like an alchymical device.’

The hair rose on Rix’s scalp. ‘What kind of war is this, where they can do such destruction and we don’t know how?’

‘Magery isn’t telling me as much as I’d hoped. All the more reason to find Tali, who knows the enemy.’ He looked at Rix questioningly.

‘I’ve seen enough,’ said Rix. ‘If we’re going to find her, let’s go.’

They mounted and headed back, as fast as it was safe to ride in the dark.

‘Who are the Cythonians, anyway?’ said Tobry an hour later. They were riding down a country road and there was just enough light to see stubbled fields to either side. To their right, a series of small hills made dark mounds against the sky.

‘We know who they are,’ Rix said irritably.

‘We know who they were when they were called Cythians. We haven’t seen them in fifteen hundred years.’

‘What rot! Our traders deal with them at the Merchantery. We buy the damned heatstones off them.’

‘We don’t trade with them. Our traders deal with the Vicini outlanders, and they trade with Cython. I’ve never heard of anyone setting eyes on a Cythonian until we came on those unconscious ones at the Rat Hole.’

‘How did they come to go underground, anyway?’

Tobry gave him a sardonic glance. ‘Regretting the history books you didn’t read?’

‘I’m starting to see the use of them. But, Tobe, after they lost the war the Cythians were nothing but filthy degradoes, living in muck and killing each other. They were thought to have died out, then they reappeared as a force living underground where we couldn’t touch them — as the Cythonians. What happened?’

‘That’s a good question.’

‘Do you have a good answer?’

‘No one does … though I’ve heard that an early chancellor — just before they disappeared — tried to wipe them out in secret.’

Worms wriggled up Rix’s spine. ‘I haven’t heard that.’

‘It’s not in the history books, nor taught by the tutors. One night, according to the tale, bands of nameless mercenaries surrounded the degradoes’ three camps, locked the gates and set the camps ablaze. Then archers shot everyone trying to escape.’

‘The writer must have meant their army camps.’ Rix could justify the torching of an enemy army camp in wartime, though he would not have locked the gates.

‘They had no army, Rix. The degradoes hadn’t been allowed weapons since their defeat, two hundred years before. The camps were miserable shanty towns, even more squalid than the ones surrounding Caulderon, and they burnt like kindling.’

Rix shifted uneasily in the saddle. ‘How do you know the chancellor was behind it?’

His artist’s eye, sometimes a blessing but lately a curse, showed him every terrible detail clearly enough to paint it. He could hear the screams, see the flesh charring and smell the burnt bodies as though he was there.

‘Some of the mercenaries were so sickened by their part in genocide that they revealed the name of their paymaster.’

‘If the enemy were wiped out, how did Cython come about?’

‘No one knows. For two hundred years they were thought extinct, then suddenly it revealed itself — a new civilisation with defences we could never break — ’

‘Taunting us by their very presence,’ said Rix, half-heartedly, still seeing the burning camps.

‘The degradoes were a ruined people, raddled by pox and drink and sniffily,’ said Tobry. ‘So how did a handful of them — for any who did escape could have been no more than a handful — set up such a powerful civilisation, so quickly?’

Rix said nothing.

‘That may turn out to be the most vital question of all,’ said Tobry.

CHAPTER 40

‘I killed Overseer Banj with magery and I can do you too,’ Tali blustered. If she did not resist they would crush her like a slave, yet she knew she would pay for her defiance.

The guards formed a line with her in the middle and Tinyhead ahead of her, and roped themselves together. Orlyk waddled down the line, inspected Tali’s bonds then brought a meaty knee up into her belly.

Tali hit the baked earth, the stars going in and out of focus. A guard unshuttered his lantern and the bluish light of a glowstone shone into her eyes.

‘We can drag you all the miles back to the shaft,’ said Orlyk, ‘grinding your face off against the ground. I’d enjoy that.’

Tali’s back felt as though she was still carrying the sunstone. She tried to get up but there was no strength in her legs. The guards heaved her upright and jerked on the rope. She stumbled on, the bindings already chafing her wrists and despair whispering in her ear. Rannilt would not find help. Lost in the Seethings on a dark night, the terrified child would be lucky to survive. It’s waitin’ in the dark, she had said. Waitin’, waitin’.

Tali’s last hope, in Tobry, was fading by the minute. Rix must have refused him. She could only rely on herself. Well, she had been in hopeless situations before and succeeded. She would find a way.

‘I met two Hightspallers back at the oasis,’ said Tali, testing her bonds. They did not budge. ‘Powerful men riding fast horses. They’ll come howling out of the darkness and cut you down.’

‘Hightspall despises the Pale. They won’t come,’ sneered Orlyk.

Tali flexed her wrists until the skin tore, trying to stretch the bonds enough to slip a hand free. The rope did not give. ‘How do you know that?’

‘We feed stories to the heatstone merchants.’

‘What stories?’

‘About how lovingly the Pale serve us. Your people lap up every word.’