And all this in the first day of the war, from attackers no one had seen. The Cythonians had rained death and destruction on towns and villages, fish ponds and fields, using weapons no Hightspaller had ever encountered before. Then they retreated as silently as they had come.
Let Caulderon be unscathed, Rix prayed. But all he could think of was an enemy impossibly powerful, advancing on the unprepared city.
‘Holy Gods!’ cried Parby an hour later, as they came within sight of the gates of the city.
He reined in, and the troop stopped behind him, dismayed and not a little afraid. Rix, who had seen the blasted bridge near Gullihoe, was not surprised, though he was alarmed. Destroying an undefended bridge out in the country was one thing. Bringing down half of the massive and well-defended city gate was another entirely.
‘How did they get close enough to do that?’ said Rix.
The left side of the towering city gates, a thick-walled bulwark fifty feet across and sixty high, had been blown to bits. Rubble and charred timber lay everywhere, and bodies too, and the left-hand gate was propped up with poles, for its hinge pins had been blown out.
There were heavily armed guards everywhere, and more officers than in the New Year’s military parade, most of them milling around in fearful confusion. Rix saw no evidence that anyone had taken charge and longed to do so. He’d make the bastards jump to attention.
‘What news from the provinces, Lord Rixium?’ said a voice on his left.
Rix did not recognise the speaker, who was dressed in a captain’s uniform of viridian and mustard, with a red ribbon around his cockaded hat. The uniform did not appear to have been washed in a fortnight and there were food stains down his front.
‘Bad,’ said Rix, curling his lip. ‘Gullihoe is half destroyed and abandoned, and the bridge over the river has fallen.’
He rode through the gates. Inside, hundreds of shanty dwellers were carrying stone to shore up the wall under the direction of a team of harried masons.
‘If the enemy can do such damage without even being seen, what will it be like when they attack in force?’ said Parby, who had been an officer many years ago. ‘How can they be kept out?’
As Rix assessed the defences through the lens of war, his spirits plummeted. Caulderon had outgrown its walls hundreds of years ago and almost as much of the city now lay outside as within. Houses, inns and warehouses had been built right up to the ancient walls, offering the enemy ten thousand hiding places for an attack. From the higher buildings they could fire into the city and it would take an army many times the size of Caulderon’s to defend it.
‘The only way to protect the city is to clear every building for two hundred yards around the wall,’ he said.
‘That would take weeks,’ said Parby. ‘And you’d have a thousand shopkeepers at your throat.’
‘They’ll change their minds when the enemy starts shooting pox pins at them.’
‘Well, at least the defences of Palace Ricinus are in good condition.’
‘But our walls run for half a mile,’ said Rix. ‘We’d need thousands of men to defend the palace, and we’ve only got three hundred. What are we going to do, Parby?’
‘Our damnedest!’ Parby looked around at his troops, then lowered his voice. ‘We’re glad you’re back, Lord Rixium. Someone has to take charge, and the men will follow
It was the closest the starchy seneschal had ever come to criticising his lord and lady. ‘I’ll do my best,’ said Rix.
Despite the attack, the mood inside the city walls was cheerful. Few people seemed to be taking the threat seriously.
‘We crushed the scum once and we’ll do it again,’ said a tiny, ancient woman, clay pipe clamped between her two remaining teeth. ‘Reckon I could take down three of ’em myself.’
Rix shook his head in disgust and rode on, past the public scalderies and steam rooms, now closed forever because the geyser fields had recently gone dry, then the silent steam-driven mills and crushers of the manufactory quarter. On every corner, crowds of cold, hungry people had gathered, and they all stared at him.
It was growing dark and the lamplighters were out, their tasselled nose plugs inserted, lighting the stink- damp fuelled street lamps. Rix kept a safe distance away. Stink-damp gas, also tapped from underground, was a deadly poison that you could only smell when it was at its thinnest. It was also heavier than air, tended to collect in cellars, sumps and hollows, and was wont to explode without warning.
His gloom deepened as they rode up the long drive of Palace Ricinus, then around the corner past the baroque greenhouses full of tall, spiky-leaved castor oil plants, the family symbol. He glanced towards the rear of the palace and his own tower. The navvies were still in their trench, fruitlessly winding asbestos around the hot water tubule to keep the remaining heat in. The water had been cooling for years and was now only tepid.
Lady Ricinus was waiting at the monumental front doors, as he had known she would be. The chief guard would have signalled her the moment Rix passed through the gates.
Sweat soaked through his shirt, front and back. He would sooner have faced another dozen of the enemy — at least he knew how to combat them. He had no idea how to deal with Lady Ricinus, but as a dutiful son not yet of age he could not disobey her direct orders. Not when Hightspall was at war.
He had not expected his father to be there as well. It was Lady Ricinus’s doing, of course, and to have enlisted Lord Ricinus in the cause of disciplining her errant son, her fury must have been monumental.
She would not display it in public, though. She stood outside the door, as rigidly upright as one of their drill sergeants, and presented her polished and powdered cheek for him to kiss.
‘Welcome home, Rixium,’ she said through a mouthful of canines.
CHAPTER 57
Lord Ricinus slouched against a marble column, reeking of so many kinds of grog that he might have been swilling from the slops bucket in one of the lakefront taverns. He probably had been, Rix thought ruefully. The last vestiges of Father’s discernment had gone up against the wall long ago.
‘Well done, Son,’ he said, shaking Rix’s hand.
Rix was shocked to discover that his father’s grip, once so crushing, was now soft, almost pulpy. A mirror to the inside?
‘Father?’ said Rix, not sure what he was referring to.
‘For fighting through the encircling hordes. Killed a good few of them, I dare say?’
‘A good few.’ Rix took a deep breath. He knew what his mother was going to say, but if he were quick he might bamboozle Lord Ricinus into pre-empting her. ‘Father, now we’re at war I request leave from my duties to our house, to fight for my country.’
Lord Ricinus understood, at least, and he wanted to say yes, but Lady Ricinus had got to him first.
‘Your mother requires a word with you, and you’ll obey her as you would me. Family unity is all in these troubled times, Son.’
‘Yes, Father,’ said Rix dismally, longing for a drink. Was he going to turn into his father? Were the seeds of his own destruction already sprouting in him?
‘Come within, Rixium,’ said Lady Ricinus. ‘There are matters we must discuss.’ Her iron-hard lips thinned to blades. She looked down. ‘Where’s the sword I gave you?’
‘I–I lent it to Tobry.’
‘Get. It. Back,’ she said through her teeth. ‘Keep it by you,
It raised a question that increasingly bothered him. He looked to his father. ‘I can’t read the inscription. Where did the sword come from, anyway?’
Lord Ricinus made a face. ‘From
‘Mother’s side?’ Rix cried. Her family were of no account and it diminished the sword, somehow. ‘Where did
