by Ian Irvine
He stared at her, mutely.
“The portrait Rix painted of his father,” she added, “where he was killin’ the wyverin.”
On the last word, Tobry reached out with both arms as if he longed to embrace the beast, and made a yearning sound. Shivers radiated out from the back of Glynnie’s neck and along her arms. Something was terribly wrong with him.
“Lyf ordered Salyk to destroy the portrait, but she didn’t,” said Rannilt patiently. “She hid it, and you know where.”
He reached out again, as if wyverin was the only word he had understood.
“You should’ve sorted this out before we left,” said Glynnie. “If we’ve come all this way for nothing—”
Rannilt quelled her with a cold stare and turned back to Tobry. “Rix needs this portrait to beat evil old Axil Grandys. Where is it?”
He remained mute.
“This is hopeless,” said Glynnie.
“Shut up!” snapped Rannilt. “Tobry, Salyk saved your life after the chancellor had you chucked off Rix’s tower.”
Tobry showed no reaction.
“I know you remember her,” said Rannilt, a tremor creeping into her voice. “She looked after you while you got better… but the enemy put her to death because she betrayed—”
His quivering moan rent the night silence. He crouched, hands covering his eyes as if trying to hide from what they had done to her. Dry sobs wracked his gaunt frame.
Rannilt put her arms around him. “Sorry, sorry.”
Glynnie clutched her knife and stared around her, sure the guards would come to investigate the noise.
After several minutes Rannilt tried again. “Where did Salyk hide the portrait, Tobry?”
He sprang to his feet, knocking her over, and darted down the hill. Rannilt and Glynnie had to sprint to catch him. At the edge of the park he headed down the middle of the street, in plain sight of any guard within a hundred yards.
Rannilt tried to drag him onto the footpath where there were deep shadows. “You can’t walk down the road,” she hissed. “You’ll be seen.”
He resisted her and continued. Glynnie followed, feeling dreadfully conspicuous. If they were seen, the city guards would shoot them without warning.
After several hundred yards Tobry turned left along a broad road, empty at this time of night, and continued for another couple of minutes towards a large, square building built of grey stone. As they approached, Glynnie saw carved words over the entrance in the ornate Cythian script—Hall of Representation. She had not heard the name before. The doors were closed. A lantern glowed in a small guard booth on the left-hand side.
Tobry turned right and headed down a shadowed alley towards the rear of the hall.
“How are we going to get in?” said Glynnie, trotting behind him.
“Shh!” said Rannilt.
Though she gave the impression of having faith in Tobry, Rannilt’s breathing was quick and agitated. Tobry pressed against the wall; in the darkness, Glynnie could not tell what he was doing. What was going on in his shifter-addled brain?
A door opened inwards with a faint grating noise. They followed him down a pitch-dark corridor and around several corners. He slid a door sideways and they entered a vast, high-ceilinged hall lit by foot-long cylinders of yellow glowstone mounted on brass wall brackets.
The main doors at the far end of the hall were painted dark green. The open centre of the hall contained about thirty huge statues and sculptures of men and women carved from cream stone, and arranged in small groups as if they were in conversation, or arguing in one case. There were also half a dozen huge sculptures of mythic beasts, each standing in isolation. The beasts were shaped from pieces of yellow or red timber, some as much as six feet across and three times as high, each cut from a single tree trunk.
The side and end walls were hung with a series of paintings, drawings and tapestries ranging in size from a handspan to many yards high and wide. They appeared to represent important scenes from Cythian history.
Tobry went to a large painting depicting a group of robed men and women in an open-air forum—actors or debaters. He pulled the painting away from the wall, looked behind and released it. He continued past several small engravings on copper plates, then a three-foot-square portrait of a nobleman, to a large tapestry and again checked the back.
“Did Salyk hide the portrait stuck to the back of a painting?” said Glynnie.
“I suppose she must have…” Rannilt checked behind a small charcoal sketch, then a head-and-shoulders drawing of a long-faced child with two front teeth missing.
“It won’t be behind those.”
“Why not?”
“The portrait was six or seven feet long… and nearly as tall as me. It must have been five feet high. We’d better be quick. If the guard comes inside to check—”
Glynnie ran from one large artwork to the next, lifting each away from the wall to check behind it. Rannilt crouched, rested a scrap of paper on her knee and laboriously wrote something on it.
The anxious minutes passed. Glynnie was halfway around the hall, Tobry approaching from the other direction, and she was beginning to think the portrait wasn’t here. After all, Salyk had hidden it months ago and if the paintings were ever taken down it would have been discovered at once.
She looked up at the next painting, a serene landscape threatened by black storm clouds, with the ominous red sails of an approaching fleet in the background. It told the story of the First Fleet, bringing the Five Heroes who would soon destroy the eight-thousand-year-old kingdom of Cythe.
She eased the frame away from the wall. A shaft of light from a nearby glowstone slanted along the back of the painting—and touched the wyverin’s vast, searing eye.
“Got it!” she said softly.
Rannilt came running. Tobry ambled away. The landscape painting, which was set in a broad frame of etched grey metal, was very heavy. Glynnie heaved it upwards with both hands to free it from its hooks, then began to lower it to the floor to cut the portrait free.
Clang, clang, clang. The sound was shockingly loud in the empty hall.
Within seconds a guard appeared from a concealed doorway ten yards away, a lantern in his left hand and a heavy, red-leather-covered nightstick in his right. He was a big, muscular fellow with a battle-scarred face, a milky left eye and an embittered cast to his mouth. A former soldier, Glynnie thought. He raised the lantern and its light shone full on her and Rannilt.
“Intruders!” he bawled.
He stared at Glynnie, his lips moving, as if trying to identify her. She dropped the painting and went for the knife on her hip, but the heavy frame landed hard on her left instep and the knife went skidding across the floor. Her four new throwing knives were in her little pack, out of easy reach.
“You’re the filthy spy who got away from Murderers’ Mound.” The guard’s jaw muscles hardened as he studied Rannilt. “And you’re a stinking Pale.”
He shone his lantern around the hall but it did not reveal Tobry. Glynnie prayed that he hadn’t wandered away, thinking his job done.
“Intruders!” the guard bellowed. “Inside the hall!”
When there was no response he ran at Glynnie, swinging the nightstick, and struck her an agonising blow to the right shoulder that knocked her off-balance. He whaled out at her left knee, crack. She fell hard; it felt as though he had broken her kneecap.
She was trying to get up when he clouted Rannilt viciously over the forehead, knocking her off her feet. She lay where she had fallen, blood flooding down her face from a long cut below the hairline. The guard struck her again and turned back to Glynnie, his teeth bared. He was enjoying this.
She began to hop towards her knife, knowing he wanted to beat her unconscious, or kill her. She supposed he would get a medal for disposing of two intruders by himself.
He swung at her. Glynnie ducked under the nightstick and made a desperate, one-legged dive for the knife, trying to protect her injured knee as she lan
ded, but it struck the hard floor and such a piercing pain shot through her knee that she screamed. The guard’s nightstick swished as he raised it for a bone-breaking blow she could not avoid. She covered her head with her arms.
Whack, across the small of her back. Whack, whack into her ribcage as she tried to crawl away. The blows flattened her to the floor and she felt a rib crack.
With a roar so ferocious that it rippled the tapestries, Tobry hurtled out from behind a blocky statue of a mountain kobold, shifting to a caitsthe as he came. The guard squealed in terror and swung the nightstick at him but it was useless against the most deadly shifter of all. The caitsthe swatted the guard’s arm aside, breaking it, then struck him a blow to the throat that almost took his head off. He fell, blood gushing from his neck, and lay there kicking one foot, choking on his own blood.
Glynnie crawled to her knife, then forced herself to her feet. The caitsthe had picked up Rannilt and was cradling her in its red-and-black-furred arms, looking down at her and crooning.
“The other guards will be here any second,” said Glynnie.
The caitsthe made no response, and neither did Rannilt, who was slumped in his arms, her eyes closed. Her forehead and half her face were covered in blood. An awful lot of blood…
Glynnie was looking for the exit when she recalled the portrait. She turned the painting over and poked her knife under the canvas glued to the back, facing inwards. She paused—now why was that odd? She shrugged and continued. It was only glued around the edges; she pushed the knife all the way around, breaking the glue, and rolled the portrait. There wasn’t time to look closely at it.
The caitsthe wiped the blood off Rannilt’s forehead, then bolted with her towards the main doors. Glynnie sheathed her knife and hopped after them, praying that the caitsthe was going back to the gate. Praying that the shifter reversion wasn’t permanent. Praying that it wouldn’t decide to eat Rannilt—
It hit the green doors with a massive shoulder, bursting them open, and stormed outside. As she hobbled after it, using the tightly rolled canvas as a walking stick, she heard shouting, then hoarse cries. She reached the doors in time to see the caitsthe batter a quartet of lantern-waving guards aside, cradling Rannilt in one arm and flailing at them with the other. One guard fell, bleeding from chest and shoulder; his lantern rolled across the ground, leaving a burning trail of oil behind it, then going out. The other guards scattered.
In the darkness, she caught another enigmatic flash of the wyverin’s eye. Glynnie lost sight of the caitsthe. She hoped that it would soon revert to Tobry; that the gate would still be open, and it would work in reverse. If it only went to the temple they were lost.
A noise behind her rendered all such fears irrelevant. The guards, emboldened by the caitsthe’s disappearance, were after her.
“Tobry?” she yelled uselessly. “Rannilt?”
No response. Glynnie drew her knife and tried to go faster, employing an awkward hopping limp, but the few hundred yards up the hill to the ruined temple might as well have been miles; there was no way she was going to make it.
She would have to fight.
The leading guard was not far behind; she could hear his heavy breathing. She spun on her good leg, aimed and threw her knife in a single fluent movement. It struck him between the ribs on the left side, carving a deep gash there before falling out. It wasn’t a serious injury but he looked down at the blood flooding from his side and evidently thought he’d been dealt a mortal wound. He moaned, fell to his knees and frantically tried to staunch the bleeding with both hands.
Glynnie fished another knife from her pack and held it up so the other two guards could see it. She backed away, propping herself up with the rolled portrait.
“I’ve got three more knives,” she said loudly. “And I can hit an eyeball from thirty feet away.”
The lie helped. They kept coming, though more slowly and warily. But then she heard a discordant clanging from the direction of the hall, as if a cracked bell was being thumped with a hammer. The alarm had been raised, and in a few minutes the hilltop would be swarming with guards.
She ran, alternately limping and hopping and trying vainly to ignore the agony in her knee, up to the park surrounding the temple. The caitsthe was at the Sacred Gate, thirty yards away, still carrying Rannilt.
“Wait!” Glynnie screamed.
Rannilt raised her head, looked up at the caitsthe and blanched visibly. “Glynnie?” she said shrilly. “Wait for Glynnie.”
The caitsthe growled.
“Stop that!” said Rannilt.
It took several loping steps towards Glynnie, carrying Rannilt so lightly that she might have been weightless. The guards froze, then began to back away. The caitsthe reached Glynnie and stopped, staring down at her as if it did not know what it was doing there, then loped back to the gate.
Ignoring Rannilt’s cry of “Stop!” and her flailing fists, it leapt in, transformed into Tobry as it passed through the gate, and vanished.
Glynnie staggered on, cursing him. It felt as though there was broken glass under her kneecap, cutting deeper into flesh and bone with every step. The guards whooped and ran after her, closing the distance rapidly now.
She hurled two of her knives, one after another. The first missed. The second struck a guard in the shoulder, a superficial wound. He plucked it out and flung it at her. She ducked, lurched on and reached the gate only yards ahead. He dived at her, swinging his sword while he was still in mid-air. She wove aside, forced her throbbing knee to one last effort and fell into the gate.
If either guard followed her, she would die. She thought they were going to come through but at the last second they baulked. The gate twisted her stomach into a figure-eight and carried her away.
Only then did she realise what had been so odd about those glimpses of the wyverin’s eye. The first time, the portrait had been facing inwards, and the second time it was rolled up, so how could she have seen the eye, or anything else?
Unless the portrait wanted to be found…
Suddenly, taking it home to Garramide did not seem like such a good idea.
CHAPTER 65
Tali spent an agonising day and a sleepless night sick with guilt, trying to work out how to repair the damage she had done, and how to find the courage to act on it. Radl had been right, except for one small detail—Tali was worse than the worst things Radl had said about her. The way she had treated Tobry proved it.
She was creeping down to the Black Hole, trying to avoid being seen, when she ran into Rix and discovered that Rannilt and Tobry were gone.
“They went to Caulderon?” she cried. “Through some mysterious enemy gate?”
“Yes. With Glynnie.”
She caught his arm with both hands. “What if they’re caught and killed? What if the gate’s a trap? Or it takes them to the wrong place? Or it’s booby trapped? How could you let them go?”
Rix prised her hands free, irritably. “It had to be done,” he snapped. “And with Grandys so close I can’t leave the fortress.” It was clear that he was worried sick about Glynnie; about the three of them. “Why did you have to treat Tobry so cruelly? Don’t you have an ounce of empathy in your body?”
“I used it all up rescuing Glynnie for you,” Tali snapped, and bolted back to her hide.
The minutes inched by; the hours did not seem to move at all. She endured most of a second sleepless night waiting for them to come back. Finally, unable to bear the agony any longer, she went up onto the wall, doubly wrapped in one of Rix’s spare oilskin coats against the driving rain.
Tali spent the rest of the night pacing around the wall, staring into the darkness in the direction of the ruins at Turgur Thross. She avoided Rix and the other guards and vainly tried to divert herself from her endlessly cycling guilt. It did not work.
Few of the guards spoke to her, save Nuddell, and that suited her. She did not want to talk to anyone. She just wanted to wear the night away and, in the morning, see Tobry, Ra
nnilt and Glynnie coming across the plateau.
They did not come in the morning, nor the middle of the day. It wasn’t until late that afternoon that Glynnie’s grey horse appeared. Its small rider, presumably Glynnie, was almost completely hidden by a huge oilskin-wrapped rectangle which Tali assumed to be the portrait.
A second horse followed, but its saddle was empty. Where were they? The ten minutes Tali waited, as the rider rode to the gates, were the longest she had ever experienced.
If Rannilt and Tobry were dead, she would bear the guilt all her days. She knew why Rannilt had gone—the whole of Garramide knew. The child couldn’t wait to take Tobry away from that “mean, nasty woman”.
“Where’s Tobry?” Tali gasped as the rider, definitely Glynnie, rode through the gates. “Where’s Rannilt? They’re not—?” She could not utter the words.
“They’re safe,” Glynnie said wearily.
She passed the wrapped rectangle down to a guard. “Careful,” she said. “Don’t bang it on anything.”
“Why did you leave them behind?” said Tali. “I don’t understand why you’d do that.”
“They’re coming… later on. Rannilt wanted some time alone with Tobry.” Glynnie looked directly at Tali. “To repair the damage.”
Tali flushed. “She’s a ten-year-old girl. How could you leave her in charge?”
“She needs time to heal him.”
“She can’t heal! Lyf stole her gift.”
“Tobry was doing pretty well until you came along,” Glynnie said coldly.
Glynnie swung down, slipped and had to cling to the saddle for a moment. She straightened up, took the wrapped rectangle and trudged across the muddy yard, limping a little.
“You got the portrait,” said Tali, trotting after her.
“Yes.”
“From Caulderon?”
“Yes.”
“That must have been dangerous.” The moment she said it, it sounded stupid.
“The city’s still under martial law and civilians can’t move at night. Fortunately we didn’t have to go far. Salyk hid the portrait almost in plain view, stuck to the back of a Cythonian painting.”
