by Ian Irvine
“Have you ever seen anything like it?” said Tali.
“It’s ugly,” said Rannilt. “I hate it.”
Tali thought it astoundingly beautiful, but did not say so. A beautiful coffin, marred only by yellow and brown smoke-staining around the small windows.
As they trudged down to the central of the five arches, the knot grew in her stomach. What would it be like inside? She prayed that the bodies had burned to ash and there would be nothing recognisable of the people she had met here.
“We’ll have to be really careful crossing the arch,” said Tali. “It could be icy.”
Rannilt took her hand again and they crept across. The wind was stronger here and kept tugging at them as if it wanted to hurl them off. Tali’s foreboding grew. They reached the entrance, which was open – she had blasted the door off as she and Holm escaped.
“You’d better wait outside,” said Tali.
Rannilt, even enveloped in her thick coat and fur-lined trousers, was shivering. “Why?”
“It’s not going to be very nice inside.”
“Seen hundreds of dead bodies. Not waitin’ here. Too cold.”
Rannilt had seen far more than any child her age ever should, but Tali conceded that she was right. It was miserably exposed here on the centre of the arches. “I suppose so.”
They went in. The lowest level was heaped hip-high with ash and debris that had fallen down through the ladder hole from the upper floors. In places, the ash had been scoured into ripples and little dunes by wind, and the walls were covered in soot. Thankfully there were no bodies, no bones, and the tapestry of Axil Grandys that had so alarmed her last time had burned away, leaving only a heap of carbonised threads.
“What are you lookin’ for?” said Rannilt.
Tali had known Rannilt would ask, and for hours she had been debating what to tell the child. The key was a deadly secret and Rannilt did not need to know about it, but she had to tell her something.
“A silvery circlet that’s worn around the forehead.” She drew a fore-finger across the top of Rannilt’s forehead and around to complete a circle.
“What’s it for?”
“I can’t tell you that, but it is important.”
“Has it got magery in it?”
“Not a skerrick.”
“Oh!” said Rannilt.
“You sound disappointed.”
“If it did have magery, I could have found it for ya.”
“Could you really?”
“Of course.”
Tali couldn’t always tell whether Rannilt was stating a fact or being fanciful, as with her absurd contention that she could heal Tobry. She filed her statement away for later.
“If it’s here, my pearl should tell me,” said Tali.
“Then you don’t need me at all.”
“Of course I need you. Coming up?”
“Think I’ll wait here,” Rannilt said sniffily.
Tali climbed the steel ladder, which ran up thirty feet to the circular hole through into the next level. The ladder was unaffected by the fire, though each rung bore a little pile of ash or flakes of charred paper.
There was ash on this floor, too, a peaked ring of it around the ladder, tapering away on all sides to a fine powder. Other little heaps marked the spaces where things had burned away – in one embayment, two square piles were all that remained of Syrten’s oddly shaped baby shoes. In another, an elongated pile must be the ash from Lirriam’s wooden flute, carved for her by her grandfather an impossible age ago in the ancestral homeland, Thanneron.
But neither was what Tali was looking for, and thus far there had not been a peep from her pearl. Surely, if the circlet was here, the master pearl ought to have woken.
Had it done anything unusual the last time she was here? The pearl had troubled her, she recalled, and the premonitions had led her to discover the attacking gauntlings.
She went up several more levels. Nothing. Nothing.
She climbed into the seventh, the portrait gallery, looked around and let out a shriek.
“Tali?” called Rannilt, from below.
“It’s all right.” Tali pressed her hand to her thundering heart. “I was just startled.” She could hear Rannilt coming up the rungs. “Stay there. You don’t need to see this.”
“Comin’ up.”
The walls were coated with greasy soot, the kind that comes from burning meat. The portraits had all burned away save one that had been painted on an iron plate. No trace of the image remained apart from a few darker patches. But that was not what had startled her.
It was the bodies.
Twenty-one of them, evenly spaced around the embayed walls. All seated with their backs to the wall, their legs crossed and their hands resting on their knees. All looking upwards, as if to infinity. All charred, though none of them had burned away. Perhaps the smoke and the heavy air had put the fire out. Enough remained for her to identify several of them – the neat, compact form of the curator, Rezire; the three pilgrims, their yellow robes burned away; and the gawky figure of the young archivist who had opened the window for Tali.
“Why are they sittin’ like that?” said Rannilt, eyes wide.
“Maybe they didn’t want to leave their home.”
“But it was on fire!”
“Or maybe they got this far and could go no further… Come on.”
She climbed several more ladders and saw more bodies, but the master pearl remained silent, and Tali knew in her heart that it was not going to tell her anything.
“It’s not here. We’ve come all this way for nothing. Let’s go down.”
“If it’s not here,” said Rannilt, “where can it be?”
“I don’t know, child,” Tali said heavily. “But I need to find out fast, before our enemies do. Let’s go.”
Despite the risk, she would have to spy on Lyf again, and she’d better do it as soon as possible. But not here.
In the middle of the arch Rannilt looked back. “It’s horrible. You should bring it down.”
“Even if I could, it would be a great destruction. Tirnan Twil should stand, as a monument to failed ambition.” Tali frowned. “This is the second time I’ve been here looking for the key, and the second time I’ve found nothing…” She paused. “What does that remind me of?”
Rannilt shrugged.
They went out and retraced their steps: across the arch, along the cliff paths, now terrifying because the snow had stopped and Tali could see all the way down to the rocks at the bottom of the ravine, then through the tunnels and down, finally, to the place where they had tethered the horse. It was just on darkness when they got there.
It had pawed away the snow in a circle to get at the withered grass and moss beneath. They gathered wood, drank from an ice-covered stream and Tali lit a fire.
“What’s for dinner?” said Rannilt.
“Nothing.”
Tali contemplated the prospect of a cold night with an empty belly and the same for breakfast. Her stomach growled.
“Nothin’?” Rannilt repeated.
“We left the camp last night with nothing save what we had in our pockets, remember?”
“But we didn’t eat my food. We ate yours.”
“You mean you’ve got some left?”
Rannilt turned out her pockets. A cube of journey-cake the size of a man’s fist, a thick, spicy sausage six inches long, a handful of nuts and a purple carrot. Having spent most of her life in a half-starved state, because the other slave children had picked on her and stolen her dinner, Rannilt pilfered food wherever she found it and squirrelled it away for later.
“What a treasure you are,” cried Tali, embracing her.
The word reminded her about Tirnan Twil being a monument to failed ambition – but not Grandys. “The objects there weren’t his treasures,” Tali said aloud. “Rezire said, they were things that would be seen as treasures by those who worshipped him.”
“Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,
” Rannilt said sleepily.
“Grandys would never have put his own treasures on display at Tirnan Twil. We’ve been looking in the wrong place. He was still hoping to uncover the secret of king-magery, so he would have hidden everything carefully.”
“The servants of Garramide were always talkin’ about ancient treasures,” said Rannilt.
“That must be what Swelt was hinting at when he died,” cried Tali.
“About Grandys’ daughter?”
“Yes, but she wasn’t his real daughter. It explains everything.”
Rannilt yawned.
“Garramide is one of the greatest fortresses in Hightspall,” Tali went on. “It must have cost a fortune, but blood was everything to the Herovians. Grandys woudn’t have gone to all that expense to protect an adopted daughter.”
“Why not?”
“She wasn’t of his blood – so she wouldn’t be that important to him. What if she was part of his cover, to conceal that Garramide was built to protect his real treasures – including everything he’d taken from Lyf’s temple? And it’s all still there?”
“Are we goin’ back to Garramide?” said Rannilt.
“We’d better – before Grandys hears that Lyf is searching for the key.”
Once the child was asleep, Tali prepared herself, then probed out with exquisite care towards Lyf’s temple. She thought he had detected her before, and if he had, he was bound to be on alert, but she had to know what he was doing.
The connection was easy this time. Too easy? She waited until her heart had steadied, then peered into the temple.
Lyf was standing on his crutches, looking towards the rear of his temple, where all one hundred and six of his ghostly ancestors were arrayed in a semicircle, facing him.
“We’ve been over this a dozen times,” said Errek First-King. “The balance is tipping rapidly, and if it goes much further, the Engine will shake the land to pieces.”
“I fear to go near it,” said Lyf. “I still remember the agony when those specks of alkoyl landed on me in my caverns – and that was spent alkoyl. In its native form —” He shuddered.
“Lucky none landed on the little heatstone,” Errek said wryly. “But you must go on. You’ve got to heal the land while it’s still possible. It’s your first and most important duty.”
“How can I? The key hasn’t been found.”
“Then find it, before Grandys does.”
“I don’t know where else to look.”
“If you can’t, it’s the end,” said Errek.
“If it is, I’m going to make sure of him first,” Lyf said grimly. “I’m striking with everything I have.”
“He’ll be expecting that.”
“I dare say, but my forces outnumber his five to one. And we have weapons we haven’t used yet. Weapons he’s never seen before. We’ll crush him.”
“What if you don’t? Have you considered that?”
“I’ve considered everything. If the worst happens, we still have Cython.”
“Which has eighty-five thousand Pale. Eighty-five thousand too many, if it’s our final bolthole. What are you going to do about them?”
Lyf did not speak for a long time. Then he said in a flat voice, “The Pale cannot stay. Nor can we allow them to leave, knowing all the secrets of Cython.”
“Then the Pale must die,” said Errek.
As Tali wrenched free, her binding oath tightened until it was choking her. This was the moment she had been dreading. She had to return to slavery and save the Pale. And she had no idea how it could be done.
There was no possibility of going to Garramide now. There wasn’t time. She would have to pray that Grandys did not realise Lyf was searching for the key. If he discovered it was the circlet, he would know exactly where to find it.
Her ride west to join her allies at Nyrdly felt like the ride of the damned.
CHAPTER 85
“Tali, can we talk about this mad plan of yours?” said Tobry, moving his horse alongside hers.
It was the day after she had rejoined the chancellor’s company at Nyrdly. Tali and Tobry were riding across the plain of Reffering, the site of an ancient battle a few miles from the chancellor’s camp.
“Not now,” she said. “I’m trying to think.”
“I don’t want you going back to Cython.”
“Neither do I, but I swore a blood oath.”
“Nobody could hold you to it. Not for this.”
“The point of a blood oath, as you well know, is to hold oneself to the purpose.”
“Even so —”
“My friend Mia was executed in Cython for using magery – magery she was only using because of something stupid I’d done. I swore to make up for what had been done to her, and my mother, by saving the Pale. I can’t break that oath.”
“It doesn’t mean you have to go back. We should be looking for the circlet.”
“There isn’t time. Lyf’s planning to put the Pale to death. I heard him say so.”
“If you do this, you’ll either end up dead, or enslaved again.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” she shouted. “Do you imagine I don’t think about it constantly? Go away. You’re only making things worse.”
Tobry whirled his horse and rode off. Tali immediately regretted her outburst, but she felt relieved, too. He radiated anxiety and she could not deal with it as well.
If they caught her, and they probably would, they would make an example of her to rival the greatest horrors of the war.
When she returned, the chancellor was alone in his quarters, a large space created by stretching tent canvas over four walls of the ruined fortress at Nyrdly. He spent all his time there these days. The old chancellor would have punished her for riding off after Grandys’ attack, but when she had returned with Rannilt all he’d said was, “You’re back! About bloody time.”
His poisoned arm had been amputated but it had not cured what ailed him. He was in great pain and increasingly withdrawn. If it came to war, how could he hope to lead his troops?
“My army still hasn’t arrived and now I’m worried,” he said as she entered.
“The weather’s been bad.”
“Not that bad. And few of my former allies have answered my call. There’s anarchy and rebellion in the south-west, around Rutherin. Lyf holds Bleddimire, and the centre and the south, while Grandys will soon have everything north of Lake Fumerous.”
“That still leaves the Nandelochs.”
“For how long? My army, if it gets here, comprises only nine thousand men, and I’m struggling to recruit more because they’re all flocking to Grandys.”
“Nine thousand makes a fine army,” Tali said more stoutly than she felt.
“The Cythonians have crushed bigger ones, and they’ve got ten times that many, most dug in, in cities where it would take many times their number to get them out. I can’t beat them, Tali. I have to face that.”
“So you’re saying Hightspall is lost.”
“The Hightspall we knew, yes.”
“What about Grandys?”
“He’s recruited an army of ten thousand in a few weeks and led them to a succession of brilliant victories. Their morale is so high that in a month he could double that number. But he’s not going to do anything for us.”
All the more reason for Tali to go her own way – to Cython.
“This plan is lunacy,” said Tobry that night. “The matriarchs have had months to put new defences in place.”
Tali, Tobry and Holm were in a large tent on the far side of the encampment from the chancellor’s quarters. In his increasingly reclusive state there was little chance of him catching them, but Tali was keeping as far away as possible. If he heard about her plan he would have her locked away. Though he had threatened to send her to Cython months ago, Tali now knew that he could not have been serious. Not for a second would he risk the loss of her master pearl.
“I know,” said Tali. “But if I can’t save the Pale, who
can? Will you come with me – just until I get inside? I… I know it’s a lot to ask, but I need magery to get in – your kind of magery.”
“If you’re determined to go, I’ll go with you, all the way. What have I, a doomed shifter, got to lose?” There was no bitterness in Tobry’s voice now. He had come to terms with his fate.
“I’m coming too,” said Holm.
“No, you’re not,” said Tali. “I couldn’t possibly ask it.”
“You’re not asking. I’m offering.”
“You’ll probably be killed.”
“I’m an old man, and I’ve got much to atone for. It’s my choice.”
Tali wiped tears out of her eyes. “Thank you.”
“How many enemy are there in Cython?”
“Um, before the war, there were about three hundred thousand. But a hundred thousand troops came out, men and women.”
“And most have been joined by their families,” said Tobry. “It’s said that more than a quarter of a million Cythonians came out, all up.”
“So there might be thirty thousand left in Cython,” said Tali, “and a third of them trained guards and soldiers.”
“Ten thousand isn’t many to guard eighty-five thousand Pale,” said Holm. “No wonder Lyf wants to get rid of them.”
“The Pale are unarmed,” cried Tali. “Untrained! They’ve got no leaders and they’ve been bred to be docile and apathetic. I don’t see the threat.”
“But you must see the problem. How the hell are you going to get them to rebel?”
“I don’t know?”
“And if they have to fight —”
“I’m hoping not to fight – just to make a break for the closest exit.”
“If you don’t mind me saying so,” said Holm, “that’s not a very good plan.”
“I know!” cried Tali, “but it’s the best I can come up with.”
“Putting the escape plan aside for the moment,” said Tobry, “how are we to get into Cython? The defences are supposed to be unbreachable.”
“Holm’s already thought of that.”
Holm went out, shortly returning with a little old man whose back was as curved as a bow. When she’d first met the fellow, Tali had assumed that he never washed, but he was not so much grimy as encrusted with dark grit. His cracked hands and arms, his gnarled and twisted feet, and even the top of his head, were embedded with particles of rock ground into him over a lifetime of labour.
