by Ian Irvine
“I’ll get onto it,” said Radl. “What’s your new plan?” She wasn’t so arrogant now that her own plan had failed so badly.
“Holm is going to break a way down to the chymical level. He needs sl —” Tali had almost said slaves. “He needs people with initiative, and heatstone, plenty of it. Can you —?”
“Damn right,” said Radl, raising a bloody sword. She wore an enemy’s belt over her loincloth, with a dozen red chuck-lashes dangling from it. She gestured to her followers. “Come on!”
“Then round everyone up and bring them here,” Tali yelled after her.
She picked up a small crate of heatstone pieces in her good hand, using her gift to try and block the pain that speared through her head. She was heading past the toadstool grottoes when she caught a whiff of its heavy, cloying smell, a mixture of earthy, fishy, fetid and foul odours. Dozens of kinds of edible toadstools were cultured there, plus some of the dangerous ones.
In an instant she was back in the grottoes, reliving her years of slavery with Mia. Poor, hapless Mia. She had been a good friend, better than Tali had deserved, and her own recklessness had led to Mia’s death.
She balanced the box on her knee, wiped her eyes with her free hand and hurried on. Past the breeze-room where she had hidden the day of Mia’s death, and where she had first met Rannilt. Tali could hear the water-driven box fans ticking, pumping fresh air down to the lower levels. She continued along to the sloping drive, twenty feet wide and nine feet high, that ran down to the chymical level.
The floor of the drive was scored with paired wheel grooves where hundreds of laden wagons had been hauled up the slope by teams of Pale women. Tali assumed the wagons had been laden with chymical weapons for the war. As she had expected, the drive was now closed off a third of the way down by a wall of stone. There was an iron door in the left-hand side but it was locked.
Holm was already at the wall with two other Pale, a thin man with his arm in a sling made from a yellow loincloth, and a white-haired young woman. Under his direction they were attaching clusters of heatstone pieces to the wall with eel glue. Tali could smell it from here. Holm was fitting together a small clockwork device.
Radl ran by, carrying a large crate on her shoulder. Tali stumbled after, her breasts bouncing painfully with each movement. Her feet hurt, too. It was months since she had gone barefoot and her soles had lost their former toughness. She stumbled, fell forwards and dropped her crate with a crash.
Radl spun around. So did Holm. They were staring at the crate. How much force did it take to set off a piece of heatstone? Some burst easily when thrown, others not at all. And if one piece went off, would it detonate all the others? Was that what Holm was relying on here?
The crate did not go off. Radl shook her head pityingly and ran back the way she had come.
“Try not to do that again,” said Holm. He tightened three nuts, then wound his mechanism with a brass key, clack, clack. “Not sure my old heart can take it.”
“Sorry. Where’s Tobry? I haven’t seen him since we armed the Pale.”
“No idea.”
Tali could hear distant shouting and the sound of sword on sword, but it was impossible to tell which direction the racket was coming from. She had a bad feeling, though.
She checked with the mage glass. Fighting was now going in so many places that she could not keep the whole battle in her head. The Pale were advancing in a couple of small tunnels, but retreating everywhere else.
“What do you know about the chymical level?” said Holm.
“Only rumours. It’s secret, because it’s where they make a lot of their weapons – chuck-lashes, shriek-arrows, bombasts, grenadoes, and so on. I’ve heard they have great retorts there, and furnaces, kilns, distilling apparatuses…”
“Anything useful to us?” Holm fitted his apparatus in the middle of the central heatstone cluster.
“I don’t know. The only time we heard anything about the chymical level was after accidents. Last year an explosion at one of the acidulators sent a green mist gushing up into our level. Burned out the lungs of dozens of Pale; some of the enemy too.”
“Sounds unpleasant.”
“People are always dying in horrible accidents here. There was one at the elixerater just before I escaped. A woman had her thigh eaten through from spilled alkoyl… I saw it. Her leg just… fell off.” She shuddered. “Why do you ask?”
“If this bang smashes something nasty on the chymical level, it could make it awkward.” Holm stood up, his knees cracking, and rubbed his back. “Why am I doing this, at my age? I should be tucked safely in my bed.”
“Hoy, old man!” It was Radl, at the top of the drive. “Make it quick. They’re breaking through.”
Holm flicked off a latch. His mechanism made a series of clicking sounds, each louder than the previous one.
“Go!” he said to the two Pale who had been helping him.
They ran up the slope. Tali and Holm followed hastily.
“Around the corner, I think,” he said. “You never know…”
They turned the corner. Tali could hear fighting coming from both directions. She checked the map with her mage glass, and wished she hadn’t.
“I hate this thing,” she muttered.
“And I went to so much trouble to make it,” he said, mock sorrowfully.
“It shows me how the battle is going, and tells me every bit of bad news, but I can’t do anything about any of it. Like here, for instance.”
She focused on the main tunnel up near the subsistery. “A hundred enemy are finishing off a small band of Pale. In the next tunnel, I can see hundreds of armed Pale who could come to the rescue – if only they knew help was needed. But they don’t and I’ve no way of telling them.”
“Send a messenger.”
“He’d be cut down before he got there. I need more people, Holm. I need the ones who stayed behind in the Empound, but I can’t get to them either.”
“Didn’t you say there were eighty-five thousand Pale?” said Holm.
“Counting children and mothers with young children. Maybe thirty thousand could fight, though only a tenth of those followed us.”
“And the rest will die anyway.” He shook his head. “Poor fools.”
Tali shivered. It did not bear thinking about, but she could not stop herself. “If there was a way to get them out…”
She checked with the mage glass, and swore. “The enemy have blocked the Empound off with an iron gate.”
Thousands of slaves had gathered on the Empound side of the gate. They would be able to hear the fighting but they could not get out.
Holm didn’t answer. “It’s been too long,” he said, frowning. “It should have gone off minutes ago.”
As he put his head around the corner of the drive, the clusters of heatstone went off in a series of shattering blasts. Holm reeled backwards, his arms outspread, then landed on his back.
Tali ran to him. Blood was pouring from a triangular gash on his forehead and it brought back bad memories of the time he’d been struck down on the south coast. She studied the wound, put her hand on his forehead and tried to heal it.
A series of small thumping bangs shook the tunnel behind her. It sounded as though the Pale were using heatstone more effectively now. The blasts must have temporarily stopped the enemy advance, for a host of Pale surged past. Many had bloody, untended wounds but there was nothing Tali could do for them. Holm had to take precedence.
Another group appeared, sent by Radl, then another. There were more blasts in the other direction and more Pale appeared, wild-eyed and desperate.
“We’re the last,” said a hairy, bloody-chested man. “Ah! So many dead.”
Tali tried to estimate how many Pale had passed. Surely less than two thousand. So few. How could they hope to win now? Or had they already failed?
Holm wasn’t responding. She lifted her hand, checked the wound in case she had missed something, and began the healing again.
/> Radl stopped beside her, covered in sweat and gasping. “Damage won’t hold the enemy back for long. Is the way open?”
Tali peered through the whirling dust. “Looks like it’s still blocked. You might have to blast it again.”
“I’ll get onto it.” Radl looked down at Holm. “Leave him. He’s finished.”
Radl checked the tunnel behind her, then took a red chuck-lash from her belt and hurled it up to the left. Someone shrieked.
“I can’t leave him,” said Tali. “Help me.”
“Do you know how many of my people I’ve had to abandon to die alone?” Radl said furiously.
For a moment, Tali thought Radl was going to stab her. “Holm understands the enemy’s devices and traps,” she said hastily. “Without him, we can’t get out the exit.”
“How the hell are we going to get out if we go down to the chymical level?”
“Have you got a better idea?”
“No.”
Tali gnawed her lower lip. “Where’s Tobry?”
“No idea.”
“I’ve got to find him. We need his magery more than ever now.”
Radl heaved Holm over her shoulder and carried him down towards the wall, which was cracked in several places but not broken through. The biggest Pale began attacking it with sledgehammers.
Tali went the other way. “Anyone seen Tobry?”
No answer.
She heard shouting from up the drive, then the clashing of weapons and the screams of the dying. A band of some twenty Pale, mostly women, ran down. Two thin, leathery men followed, looking as though they had been baked in the heatstone mines, like Tali’s poor father.
They were so dazed that she did not think they recognised her. She picked up a fragment of heatstone and held it in her fist, waiting for the pursuing enemy. There they were, half a dozen of them. She hurled the fragment to land at their feet. Two soldiers fell and the rest retreated.
Using the mage glass, she scanned the tunnels for Tobry and saw him at once. He was several hundred yards away, and this time the image was absolutely clear. He was backing along the passage, bleeding from both upper arms and the right shoulder, and shaking badly.
And, she noted with alarm, there was a downy growth on his cheeks, between the four days’ growth of beard. Was he turning?
“Tali?” he said, his voice the barest croak. “Need my potion, now.”
If he could not take it in the next few minutes, he would have a full-blown attack of shifter madness. And she had it in her pack.
Tali checked on the map to make sure of the quickest route, then turned and ran, along the main tunnel and around a corner. Three passages opened up before her. She took the left one and was racing along it when she realised that she had never been this way before; this passage had not been here when she was a slave. But the floor was worn, and there was dust on the wall carvings, so it wasn’t newly built, either.
She stopped. This wasn’t right. Many parts of Cython were forbidden to the Pale, but how had she got into one? As she turned back, a door slid across ahead of her, sealing the passage. She turned again and her nemesis stood there.
“You fell into my trap,” said Lyf.
CHAPTER 97
“I lured you to Cython with a lie,” said Lyf, smiling. He wore boots and still supported himself on crutches, though he wasn’t holding them – they were moving of their own accord.
“W-what?” Tali felt numb; she couldn’t think.
“I never planned to put the Pale to death. Do you really think I’m such a monster as to repay Hightspall’s genocide with my own?”
She didn’t reply. Yes, she thought. I think you are such a monster.
“But now your people have rebelled and attacked their lawful masters,” he went on, “what can my people do but cut them down – in self-defence?”
Tali’s knees wobbled. She had given him the justification he needed, and this was his revenge for what she had done to him in the murder cellar. She had doomed the people she had come here to save.
“You manipulated me all along,” she whispered. “Your revenge must be sweet indeed.”
He clunked towards her. “This isn’t revenge, it’s war, and I didn’t incite your people to rebel and attack their lawful masters. You did!”
“You’re not our lawful masters,” she said dully. “You enslaved us.”
“Slavery is perfectly legal.”
“Not in my country.”
“Ah, but you aren’t in your country, are you? You’re in mine, the Pale too, and my laws apply.”
In the distance she could hear the clash of swords, an occasional thump as a piece of heatstone went off, and the distinctive, high-voiced cries of her people. Death cries. “How long have I been your dupe?”
“I discovered that you were spying on me a few weeks ago,” said Lyf.
“And you’ve been feeding me lies ever since.”
“Didn’t you wonder that, every time you spied on me, I was talking about the same thing?”
“The key to king-magery.” What a fool she’d been to think she could outwit Lyf.
“Just so. I needed the master pearl to lead me to the key, but you were too well guarded. So why not put the idea into your head – perhaps you would find the key for me.”
“It wasn’t at Tirnan Twil.”
He came forwards again, shrugged. “No matter. I’ve had a better idea.”
The piece of heatstone in her loincloth pouch was hot against her belly. She felt its square outline through the fabric. Was there a way to use it?
“How did you know?” she said limply.
“I’ve been aware of your blood oath for some time. It showed me the way to lure you here, and the last time you spied on me I managed to overhear you, briefly.”
“So that’s what the leaf of the iron book was all about – to lure me here like the fool I am.”
“There’s no shame in being fooled by me.” Lyf was only a few feet away. Within striking distance.
What was his weakness? Magery might be weakening everywhere, but here in his realm, so close to the vast heatstone deposit that held his lost king-magery, his gift was bound to be stronger than hers.
She could not harm him with heatstone, either. In the caverns, when she had broken that little heatstone, it had empowered him. What about his legs? Since he still used crutches, she assumed that he had not found a way to restore his amputated feet.
His eyes narrowed; he was about to attack. Tali dived, not at him but for the left-hand crutch, which supported his most damaged leg. She caught hold of it and wrenched. He teetered but it didn’t come free – it was bound to him with magery. She landed on her back, kicked upwards with both legs at the other crutch and sent it flying.
As Lyf crashed to the floor, he reached out and called the crutch to him; he was already rising as it came skidding across the stone. Tali couldn’t fight him, he was too strong. She turned and bolted down the dimly lit tunnel.
Shortly she reached an intersection. She had planned to go left and circle around to get back to the Pale, but the left passage was blocked. She went right, loping along, trying to get ahead. The next passage to the left was also blocked, and so was the way directly ahead.
He seemed to be driving her to the right, but why? What was down that way? The whole world was silent now, save for the audible thumping of her heart. She stopped, checked the passage each way, then located herself with the map. She wasn’t far from the heatstone mine, though this passage approached it from an unfamiliar direction. Was he driving her that way, deliberately exposing her to the heatstone that would hurt her and strengthen him?
The mage glass revealed fighting all around the toadstool grottoes and the drive down to the chymical level. The Pale still had not broken through and now they appeared to be trapped; the enemy were advancing along the main tunnel from either direction. She put map and glass in her pack and stumbled on.
Tali didn’t know this passage, which was cut throu
gh grey stone with a bluish tint. Her head began to throb, the bones of her skull to creak – she must be approaching the heatstone mine.
There was no sign of Lyf so she checked the map again – and wished she had not. The blurry image in the centre of the lens was Tobry, shifted to a caitsthe and rampaging up a tunnel, his great mouth stretched wide in an insane howl. He had gone berserker and was flinging bloody bodies to right and left, but the scene was out of focus all around him and she could not tell if the bodies were Pale or the enemy. She frantically tried to focus the mage glass, but lost him, and in the chaos she could not find him again.
“Tobry!” she screamed. It was one of her darkest moments; the berserker madness meant that his end could not be far away. And Holm could not help him, even if he were able to get close, because Tali still had the emergency potion in her pack.
She plodded on down the blue tunnel, the emanations from the unseen heatstone mine hurting more with every step. She had to keep ahead of Lyf, though she felt sure he was driving her, herding her.
I can heal him… It was Lyf, speaking into her mind.
He was either trying to tempt her, or rattle her so she gave herself away, and she wasn’t having it. She could play that game too. It’s the catalyz you’re looking for, isn’t it?
Lyf did not reply, and she sensed that he was thinking fast. If she knew its name, did she also know its purpose – the deadly secret that only one person in the world was allowed to know?
And I know what it is, said Tali. The platina circlet.
She sensed rage – or was it fear? She could not tell. She tried to check on Tobry but using the mage glass hurt her now and she could not get it to focus. All she could see was a surge of bodies – one mass dark, the other pale – and a blurred mass of running people flecked with red.
She had to keep ahead of Lyf long enough to find a way to beat him. But the longer she took, the stronger the heatstone would make him, and the more of her people would be killed. They needed her desperately but there was no way to get back to them.
