by Ian Irvine
The dinghy heaved a few inches out of the water but Rix lost his grip and the boat smacked down, cracking his jaw so hard on the planking that tears formed in his eyes.
“I can’t do it one-handed.” He frowned at the underside of the dinghy. “If I jam my bad hand through the rowlock —”
“You might do more damage,” said Glynnie.
“Not as much as the enemy will do if they catch us.”
Rix put his right hand through the rowlock, locked his fingers around the iron, then took hold of the gunwale with his left. “Ready? One, two, three, heave!”
He threw himself backwards, swinging his legs for extra leverage, and Glynnie did the same. Excruciating pain speared through his right wrist. He felt something tear and for an awful second thought his rejoined hand was going to rip off at the wrist. The side of the dinghy rose – rose until it was almost vertical – then teetered.
He gave another swing of his legs, felt an equally appalling pain in his wrist, then the dinghy passed the vertical and slapped down on the water with a noise that would have been audible a quarter of a mile away. It also smashed the bobbing lantern, leaving them in a smoky gloom.
“If they’re any kind of boatmen they’ll know what that sound means,” said Rix. Glynnie groaned. “Are you all right?”
“Bow cracked me on the shoulder,” she said. “It’s not broken.”
“Bail the water out. There’s a wooden pail tied to a rope.” He boosted her in.
“What are you doing?” said Glynnie, bailing furiously.
“Looking for the oars.”
He swam around the dinghy, found one and slid it over the side. “How’s it going?”
She tossed half a bucket of water in his face. “Oops, sorry! Nearly done.”
“Any sign of the enemy?”
“No.”
He swam around the dinghy again, and again, but could not find the second oar. He had to have it. One oar was useless.
“Another boat’s coming, Rix!”
He saw a light off to the left, higher than the flickering flames. Rix remembered that he’d attacked the captain with the other oar; it must be further out. He swam five or six yards and ran into it. He stroked back, slid the oar in, dragged himself over the transom and flopped into the bottom of the boat, landing on his injured wrist. He was hard pressed not to scream.
“Is there some trick to rowing?” muttered Glynnie. She had fitted the oars into the rowlocks but, being small, was having trouble catching the water with the oar blades.
“Long practice. I’ll have to do it.”
“But your hand, Lord…”
“I know,” he said savagely, for the pain was so intense that he was scarcely capable of thought. “Out of the way. Check on the other dinghies.”
She vacated the bench. “One’s racing at us. I can’t see the other.”
He thumped onto the middle bench, took hold of an oar with his left hand and slapped his dead right hand down on the other oar. “Tie it on.”
“What?”
He wasn’t capable of politeness. “Rope, there!” A loop of thin rope hung from under the gunwale. “Tie my hand to the oar.”
She cut a length of rope and did so. It took more time than he would have liked but her knot work was first class, secure yet allowing a degree of movement.
“Lord, you got to hurry,” whispered Glynnie.
Rix quickly fell into the rhythm he’d had as a youth, when he had rowed nearly every day, and soon the warmth was flowing back into his limbs. It was tiring work, though, and he could exert far less force with his bound hand, so he had to match the other to it. The rope was already chafing the skin off his inflamed wrist. Off the back of his dead hand too, though he did not give a damn about that.
“Stay low,” he said, fighting the pain, which was almost unbearable. “They could have bows.”
Glynnie’s glance told him that he made a bigger target than she did, and a far more likely one.
“They’re turning towards us,” she said. “Can you go any faster?”
“I’m saving my strength.”
“If you save it much longer —”
“Hold on,” said Rix.
“What for?”
“We’ll never outrun them. I’m going to try something else. Come right back. I need your weight at the stern.”
As Glynnie did so, the stern sank and the bow rose a little. The other dinghy was running a parallel course, only ten yards away and a couple of boat lengths behind. The lantern man held his lantern high as if to show their location to the third boat, or to the reinforcements. Rix might, just possibly, deal with one boat, but two was out of the question. It had to be now.
He turned sharply as if to veer across the bows of the second dinghy and escape into a patch of smoky fog.
“Faster!” cried the lantern man. “Don’t let them get away.”
The second dinghy accelerated. Then, when only a few yards separated them, Rix sharpened his turn until his craft was perpendicular to the other. His bow slammed into the enemy dinghy amidships and he dug deep with his oars, using all the strength he had to drive the high bow up over the side of the other dinghy which, with three burly Cythonians aboard, sat low in the water.
The crash threw the rower and the other man off their benches and the lantern man over the side, then the weight of the bow drove the enemy’s gunwale under. Water poured in. Rix kept rowing desperately until, with the front half of his dinghy lying over the other one, it sank.
The rower went with it, leaving his discarded set of oilskins floating on the water. The other man made a desperate leap, caught hold of the bow of Rix’s dinghy and swung himself in. He was going for his sword when Glynnie swung the wooden bucket around her head on its rope. Rix ducked as it passed perilously close to his forehead, then cracked the rower in the face. He fell backwards, dazed. Glynnie took hold of his feet and tipped him over, and Rix ran him down.
“Great bucket work,” he said, admiring her presence of mind.
Glynnie reached over and hauled in the oilskin coat. The trousers had sunk.
The lantern man, still holding his lantern on its pole, slid beneath the water. The lantern fizzed and went out, leaving them in darkness apart from a handful of the brightest stars. The lantern of the third dinghy was just visible through the smoke, a couple of hundred yards off. Rix took up the oars and rowed quietly into the darkness.
Glynnie looked back at the lights of Caulderon, barely visible through fog and smoke. She sniffled. “Do you think he suffered?” she said softly.
“No,” said Rix. “I don’t think Benn suffered at all.”
“I – I know we can’t go back. We don’t even know where to look…”
“But it feels wrong to be leaving him,” said Rix. “As though we’re letting him down.”
“We’ll come back, won’t we?” Her voice was barely audible. “We’ll find out what happened to Benn.”
She had to think that, though Rix knew how faint the hope was. “Yes, we will.”
Glynnie rubbed her eyes, then leaned forwards. “Your wrist needs tending.”
“I’ll put up with it. Let’s put as much distance between the enemy and us as we can. Get your coat on.”
Glynnie took her heavy coat from its waterproof bag and pulled it around herself. “Where’s your pack?”
“Lost it in the fighting.” He donned the oilskin coat, which was wet on the inside and tight across the shoulders, but better than nothing. “Rowing will keep me warm. Get some sleep.”
Glynnie hunched down out of the wind but did not sleep. She was weeping silently; weeping for Benn.
Rix rowed on, shaken by the chymical attack. It meant that Lyf wanted him dead at any cost, and wherever he went, he would be hunted ruthlessly. If they caught him they would kill Glynnie too.
She was all he had left now. At all costs he had to protect her, and there was only one way to do that. He had to find a place for her, as far away from himself as
possible.
CHAPTER 13
The chancellor carried out his threat at once. His guards hauled Tali down to his chambers and he called a junior healer, who took blood while he stood beside her. Tali watched it pumping into the bottle and thought that it did not look as red as previously. Had they taken too much? Was the new blood she was making no good?
“Anything?” said the chancellor.
“No. But when it happened before —”
“You kept it from me. Try harder.”
“I must protest,” said the healer.
“Get out!” said the chancellor.
She went, tight-lipped.
He bent over Tali until his crooked nose touched hers. “If you’d told me when it happened, I might have been able to find this key. But all my spies in Caulderon are dead now. All I have is you, and if I have to break you to get this secret, I will.”
Tali fought down her panic, and her terror of another reliving of her ancestor’s murder, and focused on her memory of the temple – the skull-shaped chamber, the freshly scrubbed stone walls. Suddenly the master pearl began to beat in her head like a pumping heart. Her vision blurred and she was in another time, another place. But it wasn’t the temple, not as it was now.
It was a horribly familiar place, despite it being in darkness, for it reeked of mould and damp, rotting wood and the stench of poisoned, decaying rats. She was looking back in the murder cellar underneath Palace Ricinus, the chamber that had once, in the distant days of old Cythe, been the Cythian kings’ private temple. The place where they had worked their king-magery to heal the land and its people.
But Axil Grandys had violated the temple and, beginning nineteen hundred years later, the lords and ladies of Palace Ricinus had debauched it by committing foul murders there. Four murders. Tali’s closest female ancestors.
A pinpoint of light on the far side of the cellar grew to a candle flame, flickering as it was lit and raised high. But this was not the cellar as Tali knew it, piled high with rotten crates, empty barrels and other discarded things. This cellar was almost empty, the only furnishings being a line of stone bins along the walls and a simple wooden bench in the centre —
Sulien’s heart was beating furiously; the floor was damp under her bare feet. She looked left, looked right. Why had she been led here, so far from home? And why, oh, why hadn’t she listened to Mimoy? Her mother had warned her to trust no one, but the young man had been so handsome and charming and kind, and all her life she had yearned for a little kindness. There was precious little among the Pale slaves, who treated each other more ruthlessly than their slave masters did.
The young man had disappeared the moment she had entered the room. Sulien had called out to him but her voice had echoed so alarmingly in the vast, empty room that she dared not call again. Yet the silence was worse.
Crack!
The sound raised the little hairs on the back of Sulien’s neck, for it was like the sound their masters’ chymical chuck-lashes made when they went off across a slave girl’s bare back. Sulien had not felt one herself, for Mimoy had taught her the rule of survival harshly – obey or suffer.
Her mother was a hard woman but a good teacher, and until today Sulien had not disobeyed any of her lessons. Even now, as a grown woman with a little daughter at home in the Empound, she was afraid of her mother. What had made Mimoy so hard and suspicious? Did it have to do with the terrible scar across the top of her head, which she would never talk about?
Another candle appeared to Sulien’s left, a third to her right. A stocky, well-dressed woman carried one candle, a beanpole of a man another. She could not see who carried the third candle but she could smell him: the pungent odour of a man dehydrated to stringy meat, twanging lengths of taut sinew, and brittle bone. He was the one she was really afraid of.
Sulien revolved on her small feet. What could they want of her? It had to be a mistake – she was just a little slave, of no value to anyone, and surely if she told them so they would let her go.
She smoothed down her sweat-drenched loincloth, raked her fingers through her blonde hair to tidy it, then put on a feeble smile and stepped into the light.
“Hello,” she said. “I’m Sulien and I’m lost. Can you tell me the way back to the Pales’ Empound?”
The desiccated man stopped, staring at her, then rubbed his forearms. Flakes of dry skin whirled up through the light of his candle. He swallowed; he seemed nervous. And so was the beanpole on her right. He did not want to be there. The stocky woman was the one driving them. Sulien turned to her and stretched out a hand. Surely, as one woman to another —
“How dare you approach me!” raged the stocky woman, “Filthy Pale swine. Take her and hold her down.”
Only now did Sulien understand how naïve she had been, how foolish to trust the handsome young man, but it was too late. She tried to run but the tall man darted and caught her with arms almost the length of her own body. He held her tightly, then stood there as if he didn’t know what to do with her.
The woman was another matter. She struck Sulien in the belly so hard that it drove all the wind out of her. She slumped in the man’s arms while he carried her to the bench and laid her on it.
“You paid a fortune for the little bitch, Deroe,” the woman said to the desiccated man. “Come and take it.”
Deroe’s mouth worked and his shoulders heaved, as though he was going to be sick, but he got out his bone gouging tools and moved slowly towards Sulien —
With a convulsion of horror, Tali separated from her great-great-grandmother and tried to block out the vision, the nightmare. But she could not; it only made things worse. At the same time that Tali was herself observing the sickening violence being done to her great-great-grandmother, she was also Sulien —
Trapped.
Helpless.
Watching the hideous tools approach the top of her head.
The victim having no idea what her captors’ intentions were until the toothed tube ground into the top of her skull. Her great-great-granddaughter knowing all too well what was going to happen and being utterly powerless to stop it, for it had happened almost a hundred years ago.
Sulien screaming and writhing until, suddenly, the cord between the present and the past snapped, taking her with it.
Tali was sitting upright, gasping. Her fists were clenched so tightly that she could not open them, and the pain in the top of her head went on and on, as if that ebony pearl – the very first – had been gouged out of her.
The nightmare was so much worse because she had seen the same thing happen to her mother. And because two weeks ago it had almost been repeated on herself.
“Well?” said the chancellor.
She couldn’t tell him what she’d seen. If he knew that another of her ancestors had been killed for a pearl, he would realise she bore the master pearl. But she had to tell him something. “I just relived my mother’s murder.” Her heart was still racing. “I can’t look again!”
“Not today, at any rate,” said the chancellor, ominously.
The guards took her back to her cell. Half of them had occupants now. On Tali’s right was a black-clad, sour-faced fellow who wore a perpetual scowl when he looked at her; she called him the Sullen Man. Evidently he knew her reputation as a traitor.
On the other side was an astonishingly pretty young woman whose mass of shining black curls hung halfway down her back. She had been imprisoned for some unspecified theft or fraud. Her name was Lizue and she seemed remarkably cheerful about her plight, evidently thinking that she would soon be released. Given her charm and physical assets, Tali did not doubt it.
Lizue and Rannilt were already chattering through the wall though, presumably because of Tali’s reputation, Lizue did not speak to her.
Tali lay on her bed, still shaken by the reliving. She tried to ignore the smouldering gaze of the Sullen Man, then realised that his eyes were fixed on Lizue who, as far as Tali could tell, had never once glanced his way.
/> Built into a niche in the far wall of the corridor outside Tali’s cell was a ten-foot-high water clock, a beautiful device made of brass, with three pink and gold dials, one for the hours, one for the days and one for the months. It was incredibly ancient, and must have been of great value, for an attendant appeared each morning to rub it down and polish its rock crystal dial covers.
Tali wondered what it was doing down here. It seemed out of place next to the cells, until she remembered that this level had once been a grand, ornate chamber. It had been divided up into cells at a later date. The water clock kept stopping, however, and, not long after she was returned to the cell, a man called Kroni was sent to fix it.
He was an oldish fellow, lean and middling tall, with sparse grey hair and a short grey beard. His face and hands were weathered the colour of cedar wood, and his fingers were crisscrossed with pale scars. He spent hours taking parts out of the clock and putting them back, to no avail. He’s not a clock mechanic, Tali thought. And I’ll bet his name isn’t Kroni, either – that’s too obvious a reference to time. The chancellor must have sent him down to spy on me.
Well, he wasn’t going to see anything, and she could not put off talking to Rannilt any longer. She was drawing on the wall with a piece of white stone.
“Child?” Tali said, “I need to talk to you.”
Rannilt was so absorbed in her drawing that she did not look up for some time. “Yes, Grizel?”
Mutely, Tali held out her bitten and scabbed wrist.
“What happened?” said Rannilt. “Does it hurt? Let me heal it.”
“No!” Tali said sharply.
Rannilt’s lower lip trembled.
“Your healing gift is gone, child.”
“No, it’s not!” Rannilt wailed.
“Yes, it is. Madam Dibly told me. Lyf must have stolen it.”
“He didn’t! He didn’t! He didn’t!” Rannilt wept.
“Anyway,” said Tali, discontinuing the fruitless argument, “You did this to me and it can’t ever —”
“Don’t say that!” Rannilt howled. “It’s not true. You saved my life. I’d never hurt you. Never, ever, ever!”
