by Ian Irvine
“To bitter defeat,” said Lyf.
“Even if you’ve got a hundred men waiting in the wings—even if you have a thousand—I’ll lead my men to victory.”
“I don’t have anyone waiting in the wings,” said Lyf, still smiling.
“Magery then. Whatever spell you’ve prepared, I can best it.”
“I have no spells prepared.”
“I thought as much,” said Grandys. “You’re all bluff and bluster, Lyf, and behind it there’s only craven emptiness.” He drew Maloch.
Belying his previous words, Lyf closed his fist on the ebony pearls, then pointed it at Maloch and subvocalised the words of a spell. The fool must be trying to use his reversal charm again. Grandys grinned savagely and surged forward.
Lyf thrust his fist at Grandys again, and again. Grandys stopped, one boot in the air. Could Lyf have developed a spell he knew nothing about? But nothing happened, and now he saw a hint of panic in his enemy’s eyes.
Grandys took another step, and another. The floor quivered a little beneath his feet but he took no notice. This close to the Vomits, the ground was always shaking.
“I have the simplest of all defences,” said Lyf, “but it’s enough to deal with you.”
He tapped the foot of his right crutch on a black tile and a twelve-foot-wide section of the floor beneath Grandys swung down. As he fell he made a desperate grab for the edge, but it was too far away.
“Maloch, hold me up!” he cried.
But Maloch did nothing to save him and he plunged into a deep stone pit whose base and sides were armoured with dozens of conical, foot-long spikes, so thickly clustered he would be hard pressed to avoid them.
“Maloch, get me out!”
The sword was dead in his hand; what had Lyf done to it this time? Grandys twisted in mid-air, contorting his body as best he could, and landed hard between the spikes. The breath was driven out of him and Maloch was jarred out of his hand. The hinged floor swung up again, leaving him in darkness, then retracted under the floor to his left to reveal Lyf’s head and shoulders beyond the far edge of the pit. He was watching, arms folded and expression unreadable.
As Grandys took hold of the nearest spike to heave himself to his feet, it snapped off at the base. Red-brown fumes gushed out and within seconds the battle wounds and grazes on his legs were stinging. He leapt backwards, flailing with his arms to prevent himself from overbalancing, but broke off several more spikes, which also spurted fumes.
They rose around him. Within seconds the myriad of small wounds he had taken in the battle were stinging and the skin exposed through his broken armour was beginning to blister, crack and weep. A wisp of the corrosive vapour went up his nose; he doubled over, gasping and choking and crashing about, breaking off more spikes, and more.
Grandys gasped down clean air, held his breath and groped beneath the heavy, floor-hugging fumes for Maloch. His hand closed around the hilt and he sought desperately to identify the enchantment Lyf had used. When he found none, fear coiled around his throat—a deeper fear than when Maloch had been frozen in its scabbard at Reffering. What if he could not get out of the pit? What if Lyf closed the hinged floor and left him here to choke to death?
It was not the first pit he’d been trapped in, though with Maloch’s protective enchantment every other pit had been easy to escape from. He’d simply held tightly to the hilt and the sword had flung him out.
But not this time; it made no attempt to save him.
“Lyf’s pearls must be blocking you, Maloch,” he forced out. “Attack the damned pearls.”
Maloch lay dead in his hand. The alchymical fumes were thickening around his lower limbs until he could no longer see anything below the knee. The fumes pooled inside his boots and his feet and calves began to burn so cruelly that even Grandys, who was inured to most forms of physical pain, could not keep still.
Lyf was now drifting in the air, twenty feet above the floor, looking down at him in his torment. Grandys could not read Lyf’s expression, though surely the bastard was gloating. Instinctively, Grandys pointed Maloch at Lyf to blast him down with magery, then let his arm fall. The sword’s enchantment wasn’t working; it was empty, useless.
His feet burned and blistered; they were now dancing of their own accord like a sailor doing the hornpipe, faster and more frenzied every second, yet nothing he could do could mitigate the agony and, no matter how desperately he willed his feet to be still, they would not answer him. He went staggering from one side of the pit to the other, snapping off more and more spikes and setting off ever more jets of the corrosive fumes until he had to face the agonising truth.
Lyf had beaten him.
Lacking either the ability or the magery to fly, there was nothing Grandys could do to save himself. The pit was far too deep to leap out of and its sides were also lined with spikes, sharp enough to impale him yet so fragile that the smallest sideways pressure snapped them. If he could not get out, he was going to die. There was only one thing to do, and he did it with uttermost, galling reluctance.
“Lirriam!” he bawled.
She came to the edge of the pit and looked down. “Yes?” she said sweetly.
He went crashing from one side to the other. His boots felt as though they were filled with acid. “Get me out.”
She folded her arms across her bosom. “You told me not to interfere.”
“And now I need your help.”
“Are you begging?”
He almost choked on his own bile. “Yes, I’m begging.”
“What a sweet sound that is. But it’s not enough.”
“What do you want?”
“The truth about Urtiga’s death.”
Grandys’ throat narrowed until he could hardly breathe. Above the other side of the pit, Lyf watched them, unmoving. It did not look as though he planned to interfere.
“Urtiga?” Grandys said hoarsely.
“Yes.”
“What about her death?” said Grandys.
“She was the greatest, the noblest, and the most farseeing of all Herovians—it’s why she was made Envoy. I don’t believe either Rufuss or Syrten killed her, Grandys, and I know damn well Yulia didn’t. That only leaves you. I think you killed Urtiga—to get Maloch.”
His throbbing feet carried him back and forth, crushing more spikes, and back and forth. His skin was being eaten away, the flesh beneath it starting to dissolve. “What does it matter?” he choked. “She died two thousand years ago.”
“To the world it’s been two thousand years,” said Lirriam, “but time stopped for us Heroes the moment Lyf turned each of us to opal. To me Urtiga’s murder was only fourteen years ago, and justice must be done to her. Did you—or didn’t you?”
Only the truth would serve; Lirriam would detect a lie instantly, and then she might well leave him here to die.
“Yes, I killed her, dammit! But Maloch came willingly to me afterwards. It’s served me, and me alone, ever since.”
Lirriam’s eyes went hard. She was barely breathing. “It also served Rixium.”
By sheer force of will Grandys forced his feet to stop moving. “Only until I returned from opal, when it abandoned him at once… for me! Now get—me—out!”
She stared at him for so long that he began to fear for his life. Then she held up Incarnate and pointed it at Lyf, who flew backwards out of the way. Lirriam pulled a thin coil of rope from her pack, knotted one end around her waist, tossed the rest of the coil over the edge of the pit to Grandys and walked backwards out of sight.
Shortly the rope went tight. He climbed it like a sailor, threw himself over the edge onto the floor of the temple, rolled over and over until he was well away from the pit, then dragged desperately at his boots.
They were full of broken pieces of corroded opal armour that had already lost its colour and gone the dull grey of ash. He wrenched his wet, stinking socks off, and the skin of his feet and ankles came off with them, exposing red-raw, weeping flesh extending halfway
to his knees. He lurched to his feet, staggered to a water-filled font and plunged his feet and calves in.
“Aaarrgh!” he cried, and had to scrub at his eyes to conceal the shameful tears of agony—the first he had ever shed publicly.
“How does it feel, Grandys?” Lyf said quietly.
Grandys looked up. “At least I still have my feet.”
“But you’ll never be free of the pain, until the day you die. For every spasm of agony I’ve felt where you amputated my feet, you’ll feel three spasms in yours. There will come a day when you’ll want to cut off your own feet—to do to yourself what you did to me—just to escape the torment.”
“I doubt it,” gritted Grandys. “When you turned me to opal I became inured to pain.”
“And yet you weep. My alchymical fumes eat opal away and bring pain redoubled and redoubled.”
“You’re in no position to make threats. You’re all alone, and I’ve got thousands of men outside.”
“You may force me from my temple, yet I do believe I’ve won,” said Lyf. “And will return to win again.”
“You may have topped me in this battle,” Grandys spat. “But know this, Lyf! Though you run, you can never run fast enough to outrun me. Within days I’ll have the master pearl and the key to king-magery. And once I do I’ll put you down like the mangy, legless dog you are.”
“Unless I get it first!” said Lyf, and vanished.
Grandys glanced towards Lirriam, wondering what she really wanted. She did not say a word, which bothered him even more. He stumbled to the temple doors, leaving bloody footprints on the tiles, unsealed the doors and thrust them open.
“This is what we came for!” he bellowed. “Tear this place apart. Destroy it utterly.”
He stood aside to let his troops through. A thousand men flooded in and began smashing and hacking. Smoke belched up as the foul Cythonian treasures were burned.
Grandys watched the destruction, scowling. It should have been the perfect ending to an astonishing victory, yet no matter how much desecration they did he took no pleasure in it. Lyf had robbed him of the triumph that was rightfully his, and having to beg Lirriam to save him was so galling that his insides burned more painfully than his raw feet.
“First you allow Rixium to live, and now Lyf,” said Lirriam. “I begin to doubt your courage, Grandys.”
“Lyf attacked Maloch.”
She raised an eyebrow. “But you said there was no way. You said the sword was perfectly defended.”
Grandys tasted bile; he wanted to spit it in her face. He ground his teeth and resisted the urge. “He must have used a new kind of spell to block it.”
Her voice was soft, gentle and oh-so-reasonable. “No, he didn’t. Surely you realised that Lyf’s show of the ebony pearls, the subvocalised spell words, the hand gestures, the look on his face when they failed, were all an act designed to disguise his true defence. He did nothing save open the pit and let you fall in.”
Ice formed on his intestines. “What are you saying?”
“I was watching Lyf carefully. There was no spell… which can only mean the sword is looking for a new master.”
How she was loving this. He wanted to take her head clean off her shoulders, but that would mean the end of the Five Heroes—perhaps the end of everything. With a supreme effort he restrained himself. “No, it’s not.”
“Then what are you going to do? How can you recover from this humiliation?”
“I have a plan for the endgame, and they’re both in it.”
He limped away, his knees unaccustomedly weak. What if she were right? What if Maloch was preparing to leave him for a new master—Rixium perhaps? Grandys tried to think things through and come up with a plan, but every thought led into a tangle he could not undo. He was the greatest warrior of all time, and the most successful general. Why had it suddenly gone wrong?
“Lord Grandys?” said a young lieutenant from outside. He was a fresh-faced giant, a pureblood Herovian.
Grandys limped to the door. If anything, the pain was getting worse. He had to get out of here.
“What the hell do you want, Urfis?” he snarled.
Urfis flinched. “Three of the townsfolk beg an urgent audience.”
“Why?”
“They lead a rebel alliance, Lord Grandys. They plan an uprising and seek our aid to help take Caulderon back.”
His right foot gave an unbearable throb. His toenails were turning black and lifting off. “No,” snapped Grandys.
Lirriam spun around, staring at him in disbelief.
Urfis was sweating. “Could you clarify your instructions, Lord Grandys?”
“I won’t give them an audience. I won’t help them.”
The sweat was flooding down Urfis’s boyish face now.
“May I ask why, Lord Grandys? So I can explain—”
The agony in his feet and legs was so unbearable that he did not have the strength to talk. He could think of nothing save fighting their way out of Caulderon while they still could, and that was not going to be easy.
“My spies have told me all about the rebels, Lieutenant Urfis. They’ve failed twice. They’re a power-seeking rabble with not a single pureblood Herovian among them. They have no hope of succeeding and I won’t help them.”
“Lord Grandys? I don’t understand.”
“This attack was merely a demonstration, Lieutenant. A strike at the heart of Lyf’s empire and a shattering blow to Cythonian morale. But not even I can hold Caulderon with the men I have left. Not when Lyf has twenty thousand in the city, and a greater army only a day’s march away at Mulclast.”
Urfis saluted and withdrew.
Grandys looked inside. The temple was in ruins. “Enough!” he roared. “Withdraw.”
When they were assembled outside, he said. “We’ve done what we came to do, and now we have to fight our way out. We have a greater task ahead.”
“Really?” drawled Lirriam. “What now?”
“Rixium Ricinus. I’m going to take him and publicly dismember him, alive.”
“So you keep saying, but when?”
“In the endgame, which is not far off.”
He headed back towards Swire, more afraid than ever. Lirriam was right; Lyf had used no spell. Maloch had simply refused to protect Grandys. What if it was preparing to abandon him—for Rixium?
CHAPTER 49
“I may have had another small victory over Grandys, but my people paid for it,” said Lyf, leaning closer to the fire and rubbing his blue fingers. No heat could warm them. “How many troops did we lose this time?”
“General Hramm’s latest dispatch says 5600,” said Moley Gryle.
“And the fighting isn’t finished yet.”
They were in the front sitting room of the former chancellor’s palace, a red and black, debauched monstrosity of a building next door to the temple grounds. Lyf had originally ordered it demolished along with Palace Ricinus but had subsequently countermanded the order, for reasons he did not fully understand himself. It was one of the few great buildings from the Hightspall era still standing, and almost completely intact.
“How did you do it?” said Moley Gryle. “Did you use some new spell on Maloch?”
“No,” said Lyf.
“Then how—forgive me, Lord King. I have no right to your secrets.”
“You have every right. When the pit was being made, I secretly lined its floor, sides and lid with sheets of platina, the only known substance that can form a barrier against magery.”
“I didn’t know it could.”
“Few people do, thankfully. Then, once Grandys was in the pit, Maloch was powerless…”
“Are you saying that after Lirriam got him out, Maloch would have aided him again?”
“Yes—had he thought to try it. But Grandys was too troubled, and in too much pain, and my little trick worked. Let’s hope it keeps on worrying him until the end.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“Leave me now, Mole
y,” said Lyf. “See I’m not disturbed.”
She bowed and went to the door, then came back. “If I might advise you, Lord King…”
“Yes?” he said tersely.
“You’ve kept secret your encounter with Grandys at Reffering. No one knows save your King’s Guard and me.”
“What of it?”
“I think you should spread the news about that victory, and your win in the temple. Let everyone know that Grandys can no longer rely on Maloch. It’ll gladden our people’s hearts, and undermine him.”
“Good idea,” said Lyf.
When she had gone he summoned the wrythen of Errek First-King. “You know what’s happened?”
“I haven’t returned to my tomb,” said Errek, sardonically. “I just haven’t been visible.”
Without thinking, Lyf gestured him to the other chair by the fire, and indicated a flask and a goblet.
Errek chuckled. “I’ve no weight to take off my aged feet. I would certainly enjoy a glass of that liqueur, had I only the capacity to taste it. Ah, to feel its fire surging through my ethereal veins!”
“My small victories over Grandys only throw his vast wins into sharper relief,” Lyf burst out. “What must I do to defeat him, Errek?”
“I’ve said it before. Leave the war to your commanders.”
“They haven’t done well either. But Grandys has burned men getting to this point, and he’s not recruiting them as quickly as he used to. His allure is fading and even if he fights his way out of Caulderon—”
“As he will,” said Errek. “If he does, he’ll be lucky to have three thousand men left. You’ve got fifty thousand. Even Hramm should be able to do something with those odds. Have you found Tali?”
“No, but a spy tells me the rebels contacted him to make a deal.”
“And Grandys agreed?”
“My spy didn’t know.”
“What deal?”
“It wasn’t specified, though I’m afraid…”
“They offered him Tali,” guessed Errek.
“And he’s got Holm the surgeon, so he’ll soon have the pearl—”
“Then it’s time to go on the road,” said Errek.
“What for?”
