Vengeance

then and I was sick for ages.’

‘I’ve never known you to be sick,’ said Tobry. ‘You’re disgustingly healthy. Everyone in the palace is.’

‘I haven’t been sick since, but I nearly died that time. A fever or something, and afterwards I’d lost a whole month of my life. You must remember it.’

Tobry shook his head. ‘I wasn’t allowed to visit then. We were disgraced; the House of Lagger was sliding towards the precipice and all doors were closed to us.’ He walked away and stared out the window.

‘The nightmares started after I got well,’ said Rix.

‘Fever can do that to you.’

‘But they’ve never stopped. They’ve got worse.’

‘Sorry. What with the bankruptcy, mother’s disgrace, father’s suicide, the manor being burnt to the ground with everyone but me inside, and our creditors taking the rest of the estate, I don’t remember much about those years. Don’t want to remember, if truth be told.’ He looked at Rix. ‘You’re pale enough to be a Pale. You should have an early night.’

‘I can’t. The damned portrait. I’ll be up till three again.’

‘I’ll get out of your way. I’m going to check on Tali.’

‘At the abbey?’

‘Hildy wouldn’t take her, and then I was followed. I shook them off, dropped her at Torgrist Manor and made a false trail — ’

‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ said Rix. ‘Who followed her?’

‘I assume Hildy betrayed us to the chancellor.’

‘But Tali’s wounded. You did go back? You made sure she’s all right?’ Suddenly Rix understood why Tobry was so flat.

He looked sick. ‘I tried to, but all the mansions in that street were watched, front and back. If I’d gone into Torgrist Manor the chancellor would have known within minutes that she was there. I’m really worried about her.’

‘Has she got food? Warm clothes? Fresh bandages?’

‘No, nothing,’ Tobry said hoarsely.

Rix paced back and forth. ‘Damn it, Tobe, we’ve got to do something. At least, you have — they won’t let me out.’ He handed Tobry a jingling bag. ‘Bribe the guards. Get her away where she can be looked after, then come back. I’m not sure I want to be alone with this, tonight.’

He put the sketch back in the cupboard and closed the door.

When Rix could not bear to touch brush to the portrait again, it was four in the morning. Too exhausted to undress, he lay on the huge bed and blew out the lantern. Outside, big snowflakes were fluttering down in the moonlight.

The moment he closed his eyes, his father’s face reappeared in his inner eye, as it always did after a long close-up session. Rix did not try to blank it out; that never worked. He concentrated on the brushstrokes until they blurred into a miasma — a green mist wreathing across a dirty, windowless chamber.

Though he never wanted to see that image again, he had been waiting for it, even longing for it in a strange kind of way. It was horrible, yet cathartic — or would be once he had seen it all.

He went back to the studio, took the sketch from the cupboard and focused on the figure lying on the black bench. He thought it was a woman but could discover no more about her. At the head of the bench, two blurred shapes might have been people, though no amount of analysis could extract more from them.

But why would it? Last night he had done the sketch in a creative frenzy, not thinking at all. Rix made some tentative dabs at the shadows, though as soon as the paint went on he knew it was wrong.

Loading his largest brush with white, he painted the scene out and fixed the blank canvas in mind. Now he could sleep. He rubbed his eyes, yawned, picked up the small brush again and, without thinking, swept it across the canvas. A dozen strokes recreated the windowless chamber, another two dozen the miasmic background and the bench with the indistinct figure on it, the shadows at the end, the lot.

But now there was a diminutive figure off to the right. Was she the one who had been viewing the scene before? He did not think so. She looked too little, though the viewpoint would depend on where she had been standing. Yet why would he see through the eyes of a child? It did not make sense.

‘Still no faces?’ said Tobry from behind him.

Rix jumped and his brush spattered grey paint across the right-hand lower corner. ‘There’s nothing to identify any of them.’

‘That’s definitely a child, though. A small girl. And I can tell you one thing about her, from the way she’s standing.’

‘What’s that?’

Tobry wore a different coat but it still hung low on the left. ‘She’s scared. No, terrified — no, horrified.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘I have a gift for it.’ Tobry adjusted his coat. ‘How’s the portrait going?’

‘Progress, though I still hate it.’

Rix took a last look at the sketch then whited it out, wishing he could wipe his own imagination as easily. ‘What have you got in your pocket?’

‘A packet of powdered lead.’

‘What on earth for?’

‘I’ve a mortal fear of shifters, and especially caitsthes.’

‘A mortal fear?’ Rix said curiously, then remembered the look in his friend’s eyes when the caitsthe had been on his back — a terror that had nothing to do with dying, or being torn apart by the beast, but of something that to Tobry was far worse.

‘If we meet another one, I’ll be ready to burn its livers with powdered lead. Have I told you how the war is going?’

‘Disastrously, you said, and I don’t want to hear it again right now. How did you get on with Tali?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘What!’

‘She wasn’t anywhere in Torgrist Manor. I don’t know where she’s gone.’

‘How hard did you look?’ cried Rix, chafing because Lady Ricinus’s guards prevented him from going after Tali. ‘What if she’s lying in a fever somewhere? Dying?’

Tobry was unnaturally pale. ‘I looked everywhere, believe me.’

‘Maybe the chancellor has her.’

‘I hope not. He’s not a nice fellow.’

‘He’s been good to me.’

‘Don’t ever get on his bad side.’

That night he slept badly, troubled by feverish dreams, though there were neither shapeshifters nor leviathans in them, nor that voice urging him to do something terrible. He had not heard it since they had left for the mountains. The dreams were about his sketch.

After waking at first light he went to the window, looking out on the snowy palace gardens but not seeing them. Who was the little girl, and why did she look horrified? Why was the sketch seen from the viewpoint of a child anyway? And why did it have such an air of menace?

The inspiration might have come from one of those violent, old-fashioned paintings that had come with the Palace when House Ricinus bought it, generations ago. Rix remembered being frightened of them as a child. They had also been masterpieces, the study of which, later on, had done much to develop his own genius.

Yet he did not think Tobry was right this time. More strongly than ever, Rix felt that he was sketching something he had seen before; though why did it seem so remote? Had it been something innocuous he’d seen before that terrible illness, leaving his memories distorted by the fever that had nearly killed him? He did not think