by Ian Irvine
“I don’t see you giving up your life’s blood.”
“If my blood had healing powers, I would do so gladly, but I can only heal with my hands.” Dibly studied her fingers. The knuckles were swollen and her fingers moved stiffly.
“You’re not a healer, Madam Dribbly, you’re a butcher. Are you making blood pudding from my left-overs? If it heals so well, you could live forever on it.”
“Bare. Your. Throat!”
It wasn’t wise to make an enemy out of one so exalted, who was, in any case, following the orders of the chancellor. But Tali had to fight. Robbed of her friends, her quest, and the man she had only realised she loved when he had been condemned in front of her, resistance was all she had left. She didn’t even have the use of her magery. Afraid that Lyf would lock onto it and track her down, she had buried her gift so deeply that she could not find it again.
It wasn’t right that Lyf, the man ultimately responsible for her mother’s death and the deaths of her other ancestors, was not only free, but stronger than ever. Yet Tali, even as a slave, had not been as powerless as she was now. One thing had not changed, however – her determination to escape and bring him to justice.
Resistance was useless here. If she did not obey, Dibly would call her attendants and they would not be gentle. Tali took off her jacket and unfastened her high-collared blouse, her cold fingers fumbling with the buttons. She pulled it down over her shoulders, then lay back on the camp stretcher, shivering.
The chancellor’s cavalcade had fled the ruins of Caulderon three days ago, using powerful magery to cover their tracks. Now they were high in the Crowbung Range, heading west, travelling at night by secret paths and hiding by day. It had been cold enough in Caulderon, but at this altitude winter was so bitter that everyone slept fully clothed. Tali had not bathed since they left, and itched all over. As a slave in Cython, she had bathed every day. Going without all this time was torment.
Madam Dibly passed a broad strap across Tali’s forehead and pulled it tight.
“What’s that for?” Tali cried.
Straps were passed around both her arms, above the elbows, then Dibly waved a cannula, large enough to take blood from a whale, in Tali’s face. The slanted steel tip winked at her in the lantern light.
“Were you to move or twitch with this deep in your throat,” the healer said with the ghoulish relish peculiar to her profession, “it might go ill for you.”
“Not if you know your job,” Tali said coldly.
“I do. That’s why I’m strapping you down. And if you curb your insolence I might even unstrap you afterwards.”
The healer set a pyramid-shaped bottle, made from green glass, on the floor. It looked as though it would hold a quart. So much? Tali thought. Can I live if they take all that? Does the chancellor care if I don’t?
Dibly crushed a head of garlic and rubbed the reeking pulp all over her palms and fingers to disinfect them. Tali’s stomach heaved. The smell reminded her of her years of slavery in the toadstool grottoes. One of the most common toadstools grown there had smelled powerfully of garlic.
The collapsed vessel of a boar’s artery ran from the cannula to the bottle. Madam Dibly inspected the point of the cannula and wiped Tali’s throat with a paste of crushed garlic and rosemary. She could feel her pulse ticking there.
Why did her blood heal? Was it because she was Pale and had spent her whole life in Cython? If so, her healing blood was not rare at all – all eighty-five thousand Pale could share it. Or was there more to it? Did it have anything to do with the master pearl in her head? The missing fifth ebony pearl that everyone wanted so desperately?
“Steady now,” said Dibly.
The cannula looked like a harpoon. The old healer’s snaggly teeth were bared, yet there was a twinkle in her colourless eyes that Tali did not like at all. She was taking far too much pleasure in what she was about to do.
“W-will it hurt?” said Tali.
“My patients never stop whining and squealing, but it isn’t real pain.”
“Why don’t we swap places?” said Tali. “You bare your grimy, wattled old neck and I’ll stab the cannula into it up to the hilt, and we’ll see how pig-like your squeals are.”
Madam Dibly ground her yellow teeth, then in a single, precise movement thrust the cannula through Tali’s carotid artery and down it for a good three inches.
Tali screamed. It felt as though her throat had been penetrated by a spike of glacial ice. For some seconds her blood seemed to stop flowing, as if it had frozen solid. Then it resumed, though it all appeared to be flowing down the boar’s artery, dilating it and colouring it scarlet, then pouring into the green glass bottle.
It was already an inch deep. The watching healer separated into two fuzzy images and Tali’s head seemed to be revolving independently of her body, a sickening feeling that made her worry about throwing up. What would happen if she did while that great hollow spike ran down her artery? Would it tear out the other side? Not even Dibly could save her then.
Tali’s vision blurred until all she could see was a uniform brown. Her senses disconnected save for the freezing feeling in her neck and a tick, tick, tick as her lifeblood drained away —
The brownness was blown into banners like smog before the wind and she saw him. Her enemy, Lyf! She shivered. He was feeling in a crevice in the wall. She cried out, involuntarily, for he was in a chamber that looked eerily like the cellar where her eight-year-old self had seen her mother murdered for her ebony pearl. It had the same half-domed shape, not unlike a skull…
It was the murder cellar, though everything had been removed and every surface scrubbed back to expose the bare stone of the ceiling and walls. Before being profaned by treachery and murder, this chamber had been one of the oldest and most sacred places in ancient Cythe – the private temple of the kings.
What was Lyf doing? He was alone save for a group of greybeard ghosts – Tali recognised some of them from the ancestor’s gallery he had created long ago in the wrythen’s caverns. Lyf had a furtive air, lifting stones up and putting them down, then checking over his shoulder as though afraid he was being watched.
“Hurry!” said a spectre so ancient that he had faded to a transparent wisp, though his voice was strong and urgent. “The key must be found. Without it, all you’ve done is for nothing.”
What key? What could be so vital that without it everything Lyf had done – saving his people and capturing the great city at the heart of Hightspall – was as nothing? And who was this ancient spectre who was telling the king what to do?
The blood-loss vision faded and she saw nothing more.
“You shouldn’t bait her, Tali. Madam Dibly is just doing what I ordered her to do.”
Tali was so weak that she could not open her eyes, but she recognised the voice coming from the folding chair beside the camp bed. The chancellor.
“Ugh!” she said.
She tried to form words but they would not come, and that frightened her. She had been robbed of far more than two pints of blood. Part of her life and health had been taken from her. She was enslaved again, but this was far worse than the enslavement she had endured in Cython. There she’d had a degree of freedom, and vigorous health. There, those who worked hard and never caused trouble were relatively safe.
But the chancellor was using her like a prized cow – she was fed and looked after to ensure she could be milked of the maximum amount of blood. And once her body gave out, would she be discarded like a milkless cow?
There was also Rannilt to consider. If the blood-taking could weaken Tali so drastically, what must it be doing to the skinny little child who had been near death only days ago?
“You can stop all this,” said the chancellor. For such a small, ugly, hunchbacked man, his voice was surprisingly deep and authoritative.
“How?” she managed to whisper.
Her eyes fluttered open. She was in his tent, the largest of all, and she saw the shadow of a guard outside the f
lap. The man was not needed; Tali lacked the strength to raise her head.
The side of her neck throbbed. She felt bruised from shoulder bone to ear.
“I know you’re holding out on me,” said the chancellor. “Tell me what I need to know and I’ll order Madam Dibly to stop.”
Had Tali not been so weak, she would have started and given her secret away. If he guessed that she hosted the fifth pearl inside her, the master pearl that could magnify his chief magian’s wizardry tenfold, how could the chancellor resist cutting it out?
Hightspall was losing the war because its magery had dwindled drastically over the centuries. With the master pearl the chancellor could have it back. With the master pearl, his adepts might even command the four pearls that Lyf held. He might win the war, and even undo some of the harm Lyf’s corrupt sorcery had done to Hightspall. Such as the shifters that Lyf had created for one purpose only – to spread terror and ruin throughout the land, and turn good people into ravening monsters like themselves.
Like Tobry, her first and only love turned into the kind of beast he had dreaded becoming all his life. But Tobry’s suffering was over.
Should she give up the master pearl? It wasn’t that simple. According to Deroe, ebony pearls could not be used properly within – or by – the women who hosted them, though he might have been lying. She could not tell. To gain their full strength, the pearls had to be cut out and healed in the host’s blood, which was invariably fatal. Tali could only give up the pearl by sacrificing her own life.
Someone nobler than her might have made that sacrifice for her country, but Tali could not. Before escaping from Cython she had sworn a binding blood oath, and until she had fulfilled it she did not have the freedom to consider any other course.
“Don’t know… what you’re talking about,” she said at last.
“You’re lying,” said the chancellor. “But I can wait.”
“You’re a failure, Chancellor. You’ve lost the centre of Hightspall and you’re losing the war.”
He winced. “I admit it, though only to you. According to my spies, Lyf is already tearing down Caulderon, the greatest city in the known world, and rounding up a long list of enemies.”
She hadn’t thought of that. “What’s he going to do to them?”
“Put them to death, of course.”
“But that’s… evil!”
The chancellor sighed. “No, just practical. It’s what you do when you capture a city – you hunt down the troublemakers and make sure they can’t cause any trouble.”
“Does that include Rix?” said Tali.
“I’m told he’s number one on Lyf’s list.” The chancellor smiled wryly. “I feel a little hurt – why aren’t I on top?”
“I wish you were!” she snapped, then added, “I couldn’t bear it if Rix was killed as well.”
Though the chancellor despised Rix, he had the decency not to show it this time. “He’s a resourceful man. He could have escaped.”
“You chopped his hand off!” she said furiously. “How’s he supposed to fight without a right hand?”
“To escape a besieged city you need to avoid attention, not attract it.”
After a lengthy pause, he continued as though her problems, her tragedies, were irrelevant. Which, to him, they were.
“The enemy hold all of central Hightspall – the wealthy, fertile part. Now I’m limping like a three-legged hound to the fringes. But where am I to go, Tali, when the ice sheets are closing around the land from three sides? What am I to do?”
This was the strangest aspect of their relationship. One minute he was the ruthless master and she the helpless victim; the next he was confiding in her and seeking her advice as though she were his one true friend.
The chancellor was not, and could never be, her friend. He was a ruthless man who surrounded himself in surreal, twisted artworks, and with beautiful young women he never laid a finger on. He was not a kind man, or even a good one, but he had two virtues: he held to his word and he loved his country. He would do almost anything, sacrifice almost anyone, to save it, and if she wasn’t strong enough, if she didn’t fight him all the way, he would sacrifice her too.
“Why ask me? Where are you running to, Chancellor, with your tail between your crooked little legs?”
His smile was crooked, too. “I’ve been insulted by the best in the land. Do you think your second-rate jibes can scratch my corrugated hide?”
Tali slumped. She was so weak that five minutes of verbal jousting was all she could manage.
“Is all lost, then?” she said faintly.
He took her hand, which was even more surprising. The chancellor was not given to touching.
“Not yet, but it could soon be. I fear the worst, Tali, I’m not afraid to tell you. If you know anything that can help us, anything at all…”
She had to distract him from that line of thought. “Do you have a plan? For the war, I mean?”
“Rebuild my army and forge alliances, so when the time comes…”
“For a bold stroke?”
“Or a last desperate gamble. Possibly using you.”
Tali froze. Did he know about the ebony pearl? She turned to the brazier, afraid that her eyes would give her away.
“You gave me your word,” he went on.
Not her pearl. Worse. He was referring to the promise he had forced out of her in his red palace in Caulderon. That one day he might ask her to do the impossible and sneak into Cython to rouse the Pale to rebellion.
She did not consider the promise binding since it had been given under duress. But the blood oath she had sworn before escaping from Cython was binding, and it amounted to the same thing. With Cython depopulated because most of its troops had marched out to war, the vast numbers of Pale slaves there were a threat at the heart of Lyf’s empire.
Sooner or later he would decide to deal with the threat, and that was where Tali’s blood oath came in. She had sworn to do whatever it took to save her people. But before she could hope to, she would have to overcome her darkest fear – a return to slavery.
CHAPTER 3
Like the first trickle down a drought-baked river bed it came. But it wasn’t a river bed, it was a paved corridor, the stone walls of which were carved into scenes of forest glades – it was the main tunnel in the underground city, Cython. It wasn’t water either, for it was thick and red and sluggish, and had a smell like iron.
“Bare your throat,” said the chancellor’s principal healer, Madam Dibly, a scrawny old woman with a dowager’s hump.
Tali was jerked out of her daze and the vision of that red flood vanished. “My – throat?”
“To best preserve its potency, your healing blood has to be taken fast. And the carotid artery is the fastest.”
“Why not take it directly from my heart?” Tali snapped. “That’d be even quicker.”
The old healer’s pouched eyes double-blinked at her. “I don’t like the treacherous Pale, Thalalie vi Torgrist, and I don’t like you. It’s a great honour to serve your country this way. Why can’t you see that?”
“I don’t see you giving up your life’s blood.”
“If my blood had healing powers, I would do so gladly, but I can only heal with my hands.” Dibly studied her fingers. The knuckles were swollen and her fingers moved stiffly.
“You’re not a healer, Madam Dribbly, you’re a butcher. Are you making blood pudding from my left-overs? If it heals so well, you could live forever on it.”
“Bare. Your. Throat!”
It wasn’t wise to make an enemy out of one so exalted, who was, in any case, following the orders of the chancellor. But Tali had to fight. Robbed of her friends, her quest, and the man she had only realised she loved when he had been condemned in front of her, resistance was all she had left. She didn’t even have the use of her magery. Afraid that Lyf would lock onto it and track her down, she had buried her gift so deeply that she could not find it again.
It wasn’t right th
at Lyf, the man ultimately responsible for her mother’s death and the deaths of her other ancestors, was not only free, but stronger than ever. Yet Tali, even as a slave, had not been as powerless as she was now. One thing had not changed, however – her determination to escape and bring him to justice.
Resistance was useless here. If she did not obey, Dibly would call her attendants and they would not be gentle. Tali took off her jacket and unfastened her high-collared blouse, her cold fingers fumbling with the buttons. She pulled it down over her shoulders, then lay back on the camp stretcher, shivering.
The chancellor’s cavalcade had fled the ruins of Caulderon three days ago, using powerful magery to cover their tracks. Now they were high in the Crowbung Range, heading west, travelling at night by secret paths and hiding by day. It had been cold enough in Caulderon, but at this altitude winter was so bitter that everyone slept fully clothed. Tali had not bathed since they left, and itched all over. As a slave in Cython, she had bathed every day. Going without all this time was torment.
Madam Dibly passed a broad strap across Tali’s forehead and pulled it tight.
“What’s that for?” Tali cried.
Straps were passed around both her arms, above the elbows, then Dibly waved a cannula, large enough to take blood from a whale, in Tali’s face. The slanted steel tip winked at her in the lantern light.
“Were you to move or twitch with this deep in your throat,” the healer said with the ghoulish relish peculiar to her profession, “it might go ill for you.”
“Not if you know your job,” Tali said coldly.
“I do. That’s why I’m strapping you down. And if you curb your insolence I might even unstrap you afterwards.”
The healer set a pyramid-shaped bottle, made from green glass, on the floor. It looked as though it would hold a quart. So much? Tali thought. Can I live if they take all that? Does the chancellor care if I don’t?
Dibly crushed a head of garlic and rubbed the reeking pulp all over her palms and fingers to disinfect them. Tali’s stomach heaved. The smell reminded her of her years of slavery in the toadstool grottoes. One of the most common toadstools grown there had smelled powerfully of garlic.
