Rebellion: Tainted Realm: Book 2

by Ian Irvine

  “Every Pale in Cython will die,” said Radl. “All your wives and husbands, all your children.”

  “Your families can’t help themselves; the Empound has been sealed off,” said Tali. “If you don’t save them, they die. Down the back there are crates of death-lashes, bombasts, grenadoes and fire-flitters —”

  Radl thrust her aside. “Arm yourselves and get ready to fight. Hurry – if we can get up the ramp quickly enough, we can take them by surprise.”

  Hundreds of Pale stormed down to the back to the weapons shelves. Others gathered heatstones from around the retorts and stills, or wrenched iron bars and other implements off the alchymical equipment, taking anything that could be used as a weapon. Tali returned to Holm, who was leaning against the wall, holding his head.

  “Have you seen Tobry?”

  “No,” said Holm.

  “I have. He’d turned shifter and was going berserker.”

  “Then I dare say they’ve cut him down by now,” Holm said quietly. He put a bloody arm around her shoulders.

  Tali glanced across to the ramp and her heart missed a beat. Lyf was halfway down it, a host of troops at his back. She pulled free. “They’re coming!”

  “Attack!” bellowed Lyf.

  Three hundred enemy charged down the ramp. Though they were greatly outnumbered by the Pale, the Cythonians wore chest armour and carried oval shields, and their first charge drove thirty yards across the chymical level before the Pale stopped them, fighting desperately with chuck-lashes and grenadoes, swords and knives, and drove them back to the foot of the ramp.

  “Attack from a distance with your grenadoes,” Radl shouted. “Don’t let them get close.”

  Enemy reinforcements appeared around the curve of the ramp, another couple of hundred. The company at the bottom assembled in ranks and charged again, and this time the Pale could not drive them all the way back. Their only advantage was in numbers and it was rapidly being neutralised. They were no match for the enemy in size, weaponry, armour or training, and if the Cythonians gained a foothold in the chymical level, the battle and the rebellion were lost.

  As Tali ran, she fumbled a couple of grenadoes out of her pack. Her breath was rasping in her throat and her legs were giving out. Thirty yards from the foot of the ramp she propped and hurled the first missile.

  “Like this!” she yelled.

  It went off at the feet of the enemy, taking down half a dozen of them. She hurled the second grenado but it slipped in her sweaty hand and fell short, exploding and blasting white stone everywhere, and leaving a foot-wide hole in the floor.

  The fighting was furious now, the bodies of Cythonians and Pale piled in heaps all around the base of the ramp and scattered across the floor for a hundred feet. There was so much blood that the fighters were slipping in it.

  It was Tali’s first close experience of a major battle, and it was horrible. People lay maimed and dying everywhere, screaming in agony, begging for help or to be put down, gasping farewell to loved ones or bitterly regretting that they had joined the failing rebellion. A few were cursing Tali’s name and all her ancestors.

  “Attack!” said Lyf, who was hovering twenty feet up, not far from the cube of heatstone blocks.

  The enemy re-formed their ranks and charged, driving through the front ranks of the Pale. Tali scrabbled frantically for another grenado, but the fighting was hand-to-hand now and she could not use it without endangering her own people. She hurled it up at Lyf instead. It burst on the wall next to him, showering him in chips of white stone. He zoomed away, bleeding from half a dozen small cuts, and she lost sight of him.

  The Pale were being driven back when a vast animal howl rang down the ramp. Suddenly the enemy were screaming and shouting and scrambling out of the way as a seven-foot caitsthe stormed through them, its claws tearing through leather armour into flesh and flinging bodies to left and right.

  “Stand firm,” said a burly sergeant. He put himself in the path of the beast and thrust out a javelin.

  The caitsthe smashed the shaft to pieces with a contemptuous backhander. Its next blow lifted the sergeant off his feet and drove him into the wall, breaking his neck. As it came raging down the ramp, the rest of the Cythonians scattered. It reached the floor, slipped in blood, then turned towards the nearest group of Pale, who stood there, mesmerised.

  The beast – Tali could not think of it as Tobry, for there was no more humanity in its eyes than when he had attacked her after her disastrous attempt to heal him – would tear them apart.

  “Emergency potion!” hissed Holm.

  Tali felt in her pack for the little bottle. Where had she put it? Her fingers closed on a bundle deep down and she heaved it out, praying that the bottle hadn’t been broken in all the fighting.

  “Hurry!” said Holm, running out and putting himself between the caitsthe and the Pale.

  Her injured wrist throbbed. It was a struggle to get the bottle out, and then she could not open it. Holm ducked around the caitsthe and caught it from behind but it whirled and hurled him ten feet across the floor.

  The caitsthe bounded after the Pale. Tali leapt between it and them. “Tobry, stop!”

  It gave no hint of recognition. Tali could not open the tightly sealed bottle so she flung it into the caitsthe’s gaping mouth. Broken glass could do no lasting harm to a shifter that could heal any injury in minutes.

  It crunched up the bottle, the thick grey contents oozing out and mixing with its blood. It grabbed Tali and drew her towards the great maw that could tear her arm off in a single snap. She screamed and tried to pull free but it was many times as strong as she was.

  “Stop it!” roared Holm, thumping the caitsthe over the back of the head with a heatstone brick.

  It turned slowly, extending its claws, then fell to its knees. The potion was working. Its claws were retreating back into its fingers, the cat jaw slowly changing to a man’s.

  Tobry’s eyes looked out of the caitsthe’s yellow eyes. They met hers and recognised her. Tali saw a deep shame in his eyes, and a flush passed up his downy cheeks.

  “Thanks,” he said in a thick, growling voice, and fell on his face.

  “But for what?” she said quietly.

  Holm dragged Tobry away from the arena of battle, which now resumed.

  There was a colossal boom behind her. She looked around as the great glass still toppled. It looked as though someone had thrown a grenado at it. Behind it, one of those large flasks of quicksilver had been broken by a projectile and the silvery metal was creeping across the floor. And quicksilver was poisonous to breathe.

  “More grenadoes!” she yelled. “Drive them back.”

  “It’s not working,” said Holm. “Their reinforcements are still coming down.” He surveyed the battle. “And I can see them at the drive now. We’ve got nowhere to go, and they can attack us from both sides. It’ll all be over in ten minutes… Unless…”

  “What?” said Tali.

  “The time has come for you to make the final choice about your magery.”

  A brick descended into the pit of her stomach. You can be a destroyer or a healer, but not both.

  CHAPTER 102

  Had Tali acted more quickly to attack the gauntlings at Tirnan Twil, its people and its treasures might have survived. Now she faced the choice again. Her life was going around in circles.

  Tobry was on his feet, though he was grey and exhausted. His skin had gone baggy and he looked shrunken, for the caitsthe state burned energy at a staggering rate. His eyes were still yellow and he was covered in down – this time he hadn’t turned all the way back.

  The only hope for him, and that a tiny one, was healing magery, which would definitely be a great healing, if it could be done at all. But the chance of success was tiny, and the risk enormous. Could she justify it?

  She looked around at the dying Pale and knew that she could not. If she used her gift on a healing, she would not just be condemning these Pale here, but the others as well
– all eighty-five thousand of them.

  “I’m sorry, Tobry,” she said. “I can’t choose healing.”

  “I never wanted you to,” said Tobry. “Saving your people is the only thing to do.”

  That did not make it any easier.

  “All right.” Tali looked across at the base of the ramp, where the fighting was again furious. “Holm, what do you want me to do?”

  “Can you even the odds a little?”

  She studied the lines of pillars arcing across the chymical level. “There are two ways to even the odds – by reducing their numbers, or increasing ours.”

  “Yes,” said Holm.

  “And I’m thinking that those pillars aren’t far from the entrance to the Empound…”

  “How can you be sure?” said Tobry.

  “Remember that green mist I mentioned earlier? It burst through into the wax-nut grottoes last year, and they’re around to the left from the Empound. And that acidulator is where the mist came from.” She indicated its shattered ruins.

  “Might be an idea to check your map first.”

  “I don’t have it.” She had dropped it when Wil attacked. There wasn’t time to go looking for it.

  “If I can bring down those pillars,” Tali continued, indicating two beyond the apparatus, “it might crack open the entrance to the Empound and free all the Pale. With luck…”

  “Better hurry,” said Tobry, glancing across the bloody battlefield.

  “Is your magery strong enough to bring down those columns?” said Holm. “They’re massive.”

  “No, it isn’t. I was thinking about heatstone.”

  Holm shook his head. “It works all right on cracked rock, but doesn’t do much to the solid stuff.”

  “What if we stacked half a dozen bombasts around one of the pillars and set them off?”

  “Too powerful,” said Holm. “It’d probably kill everyone here.”

  “I don’t know what else to do,” said Tali.

  “Better think, fast.”

  “I need time,” she snapped. “Create a diversion!”

  “I’m not sure…”

  “Find a way to distract them from me – and make it big!”

  Holm ran across to the nearest melee, then led dozens of Pale to the rear of the chymical level. Shortly a signal rocket soared across the ceiling, struck the wall near the ramp and exploded with a shower of pyrotechnic sparks and clouds of red smoke.

  Another followed it, but dipped low and shattered one of the great glass alembics to pieces. It must have been a rocket flare for it burned with a dazzling blue-white light. A brown, fizzing liquid began to creep from the alembic, across the floor.

  In the far corner, a bombast went off with a shattering roar, hurling pieces of rock and metal for fifty yards. A furnace toppled, scattering glowing coals everywhere and adding its white smoke to the thickening air. A swarm of shriek-arrows screamed across towards the ramp, followed by the brilliant red sparks of a dozen fire-flitters.

  Now that’s a distraction, Tali thought. How could she help the Pale, though?

  It occurred to Tali that, when she’d whacked Lyf’s wrythen with the iron book in his caverns, months ago, those few droplets of diluted alkoyl had hurt him badly. Could she attack Lyf with alkoyl? Wil had carried a flask of the stuff, though he had probably taken it with him, wherever he had gone. If he had gone. No, she dared not let Lyf get close enough to toss alkoyl at him. But it reminded her of something else…

  Lucky none landed on the little heatstone, Errek had once said. Why not? What was alkoyl, anyway? She knew that it was obtained from somewhere way down the Hellish Conduit, but where did it come from? Could it truly come from the Engine’s weepings, as Wil had said?

  It fostered an alarming chain of thought. Cythonians believed that the Engine was a destructive force, forever trying to tear the land apart with great eruptions, earthquakes and other catastrophes. The king-magery that Errek had invented ten thousand years ago was a healing force and, as long as the two were in balance, all was well.

  The balance between healing and destruction had been maintained for eight thousand years, until Grandys had killed Lyf in an attempt to seize king-magery for himself. Instead, king-magery had been lost and the land had not been healed in the two thousand years since.

  Now the balance was rapidly tipping towards destruction, the eruptions and quakes were increasing, and Errek had said it was almost at the point where it could not be stopped. Where a cataclysm could destroy the land itself.

  Alkoyl, alkoyl? It wept from the destructive Engine, while king-magery was somehow locked up in heatstone. Could alkoyl be the antithesis to heatstone, just as king-magery was the healing force that balanced the chaos of the Engine? And if so, what would happen if alkoyl and heatstone were combined? Was that what Errek had been talking about?

  Alkoyl was stored on this level, she knew. It had been mentioned during her escape from Cython, when the young woman’s leg had been eaten right through —

  “She were up on the third elixerater,” the foreman had said, “toppin’ up the alkoyl level, but someone had taken the dribbler out. The whole flask poured in. Blew the elixerator to pieces, and a whole flask of precious alkoyl lost —”

  The someone who had done it surely had to be Wil, who knew where the alkoyl stocks were held; she had seen him sniffing it even before her escape from Cython. Was that what he had been up to when she’d glimpsed him earlier? Had he been looking for alkoyl on the store’s racks?

  Tali had no idea what combining alkoyl and heatstone would do, but she had no other options. The enemy were still coming down the ramp and if she didn’t do something fast, the rebellion would end here.

  Another rocket shot across the ceiling, then two more, each exploding in brilliant blue-white flares. A second bombast went off, followed by a long line of white fire that snaked a quarter of the way across the chymical level. Someone must have laid out a barrier of the red powder called thermitto, which burned so hot that it could cut straight through solid stone. Cythonian miners used it to cut and shape rock.

  There was fighting everywhere now, furnaces and stills being toppled, retorts exploding in showers of glass, battles raging back and forth through the wreckage, though how they could see to fight Tali did not know. The smoke was thickening; in some places the visibility was only a few yards, and before long the fumes must bring everyone down.

  She heard coughing behind her. Tali whirled. Lyf was hovering only ten yards away. She jumped.

  “It’s time,” he said.

  She bolted into the smoke, turned right around the smashed acidulator then left past a badly burned cluster of bodies. Lyf was not far behind, appearing and disappearing through the smoke. She ducked down, ran the other way and scuttled through the wreckage towards the shelves Wil had been climbing, taking advantage of every bit of cover she could. Lyf zoomed overhead; she froze under the overhang of what she assumed to be an elixerator until he disappeared in the smoke.

  As she reached the rear of the chymical level she saw Wil again. He must have been lurking here all this time.

  “Got to write ending,” he howled. “Engine going to end everything.”

  He was staggering across the floor, dragging a platina demijohn behind him. He passed through the smoking crevice in the end wall and headed downwards.

  Good riddance! She darted along the wall until she reached the shelves that held the alkoyl stores. The platina flasks were high up; she could see six of them. The walls and the shelves were badly corroded, the stone and metal partly eaten away. It was deadly stuff, and she shivered at the thought of what she was planning to do with it.

  Tali dared not climb the shelves the way Wil had earlier – since Lyf was flying up near the ceiling, he was bound to spot her. What if she used magery to levitate a flask down? That would be perilous too; if she dropped it and alkoyl spilled on her, even a single drop, it would eat right through her.

  Would levitating a flask of alkoyl co
nstitute a great destruction? She did not think so – but what she was planning to do with it might. She focused her magery on the central flask. Rise. It rose too quickly, and so did the one on its right. They were empty.

  The third one was considerably heavier – so heavy that it wobbled as she levitated it and Tali felt a moment of panic that it was going to fall. It couldn’t break, being platina, but if the cap came off…

  She managed to steady it and brought it down to the floor. Tali eyed the flask. A wisp of vapour was oozing out around the cap and she did not want to go anywhere near it, but everyone else here was putting their lives at risk and she could do no less.

  “Charge!” an officer yelled in the guttural Cythonian accent. “Cut them down!”

  The chymical level echoed to the sounds of hundreds of booted feet. She looked around but could see nothing through the smoke and wreckage save glows and flashes all over the place. Then she heard the distinctive thump of the seven fan levers being thrown, and the great box fans began to tick.

  “Driving us into a corner!” yelled Holm. “If there’s anything you can do, do it now!”

  She picked up the flask by its handle and headed across to where the spare heatstone blocks were stacked in that hip-high cube against the wall, not far from the bottom of the ramp where the battle had begun. If alkoyl set the heatstone off, it could knock most of the enemy down, perhaps block the ramp, and give the Pale the advantage. The cube wasn’t in the perfect place for that – it was a bit far away from the ramp – but she had to work with what she had.

  The air thinned a little and she saw that there was still fighting at the ramp. She could go no further. She ducked beneath the overhang of a toppled furnace, took a deep breath, wrapped her hands in a piece of rag torn from the bottom of her shirt and twisted the cap off the flask.

  The rag began to smoke; her fingers and palms were blistering. She wiped them on the floor. It began to smoke as well. She scrubbed her fingers against the stone. All right. She had to do it now.