by Ian Irvine
He cleaned the hollow needle of a graver and filled it with diluted alkoyl, the last of his hoarded store. The wrythen had to be exquisitely careful using it, for alkoyl was inimical both to his plasm and to most things he had created here in his five-fold caverns. The graver was made of purest platina, yet alkoyl would eat through it before he finished the iron book. No other substance could contain it at all.
He had to complete the book, if the alkoyl lasted, and transmit the completed pages to the Chamber of the Solaces as soon as he could find the strength for such challenging magery. The Consolation of Vengeance had to be finished soon. His people must be ready when the call came.
As the wrythen set his graver to the page, he was summoned. He did not have to go; nothing and no one had any hold on him. But in life he had been a decent and an honourable man, so he rose to the top of his home cavern.
Spaced around his lovingly imagined ancestor gallery, looking out from spectre sculptures as perfect as mind and memory could create, a hundred and seven pairs of regal eyes measured him. Their collective reign had lasted three thousand, six hundred and forty-two years; their wisdom could not be measured by any set of numbers. He had shaped them from his own plasm, had long relied on them for company, advice and support, had argued every point of his plan innumerable times, yet still they spoke to him, even the angry, red-throated shade of Bloody Herrie, in a single voice.
Don’t do this!
It’s the only way to save our people, the wrythen said, though what he meant was, It’s my sole reason for being. Without the urge to vengeance he would have faded to a miserable ghost a thousand years ago.
We have no people — with your blasphemous Solaces you’ve constructed these Cythonians just as you made us. And these caverns. And the vile shifters down below.
What are you talking about? said the wrythen. Our blood runs in Cython’s veins.
But nothing else. They’ve lost our language, been robbed of our history -
I won’t discuss it, he said coldly. It was our only hope.
This must stop now, said Queen Hilga, whose luminous eyes protruded past her eyelashes. Errek, tell him.
The faded wisp of Errek First-King, so old that he found all human follies amusing, was not smiling now. The price is too high.
They destroyed our cities, our libraries and our art, said the wrythen, and profaned all we held sacred.
A monstrous crime, said Hilga, but all things have their hour and their ending.
Posterity is rife with oblivion, said Errek wryly. Let it go.
I CAN’T!
The wrythen returned to the iron book but was too agitated to finish the page. What if they were right? Since he could not speak to the matriarchs and they had no way to contact him, there was no way to judge their preparedness.
Like a trapped moth, he flitted around his home cavern, which he called a flaskoid. It resembled an upside-down alchymister’s flask, save that the long neck looped down and up again, passing through its own wall and up through the bulb, its inside becoming its outside then its inside again. Though he had etched it in four dimensions out of solid rock, the shape even confused him at times.
Settling to the base of the loop, he drifted along the shelves of his memory library to the lovingly recollected epics that sustained him in the darkest times. Today they offered no comfort. All he saw were flames leaping high as the treetops as the treasures of ten millennia had been burned, along with the curators who had tended them. The epics of Cythe existed only through him now and, once he was gone, all would be lost.
But before that — vengeance.
Weeks had gone by and the wrythen still had to write the ending of the iron book. He drifted alongside the towering condenser of his platina still, tapping each of its thousand coils, but it yielded not a drop. The apparatus could only extract a few drops of alkoyl from the breath of the Abysm in a year, and even that was a sacrilege. The ending of the book would take twenty drops of the magical fluid, at least.
Frustrated, he ploughed up through solid rock to the top of the cloud-piercing crag. In warmer years the passage had been effortless but today every atom dragged through him like an anchor caught in weed. As a bodiless wrythen he was tied to his caverns. Bound forever, unless …
He could not afford to dream. His head slid through black ice into moving air, then stopped. Even here, a mile above the home cavern, it was warmer than down below.
Warm enough to feel the tension in sinews long gone to dust, in finger-nails splintered from the stone with which his enemies had walled him in to die, in shinbone stumps where his feet had been hacked off with that accursed blade — Oh, yes! Vengeance, once he completed the Consolation. If his people followed the plan …
Swallowing the self-doubt, he looked around. From here he could see the whole of the great island he still called Cythe, which the enemy had renamed Hightspall, and south across the berg-crusted strait to ice-capped, uninhabitable Suden, two hundred miles away. To the north, he was pleased to see that the Brown Vomit was erupting again. One or other of the three Vomits had been erupting for the past hundred and seventy years, their ash sifting down on the bountiful lands of central Hightspall like grey flour, crushing the enemy’s houses, burying their stock and choking the rivers with sludge.
Had it gone too far? What if the eruptions never stopped? What if they got worse? The cauldron at the heart of the world was unstable, he knew. But how unstable?
A king’s highest duty was to protect his realm and it was torment to see his country so ravaged, but there was no other way to bring Hightspall to its knees. Volcanoes had made his country, then blown it to pieces and created it anew. Cythe was resilient; it was forever, and so were his people. When the enemy was no more, his people could come home.
But what would they return to? The wrythen wanted to weep for the ancient cities torn down, the temple gardens sown with salt, and for that desperate time when his noble people had been reduced to a handful of nomadic origines and a few thousand contemptible degradoes.
Save for the wrythen’s intervention they would have vanished from the world, for the invading Hightspallers had set out to erase ten thousand years of history and they had been ruthlessly thorough. Only the king had stood in their way then, only the wrythen now. But he dared not weep — tears etched quessence out of him and he remained desperately weak.
The ash might not be enough, nor the poxes and pestilences that followed it. Nor even the vicious shifters he’d created with the blasphemous art of germine. Before ordering his remade people from their underground hiding place he must be sure.
The ice.
Further south, the globe-circling pall of ash and fume blanketed the sky all the way to the southern pole. The once mighty mountains of Suden were no more than pimples standing above mile-thick ice sheets and the ice crept further north each year. It would soon batter down the walls of accursed Hightspall, then freeze it solid like blood congealing in blocked veins.
It was time.
Back in his home cavern, the wrythen avoided the accusing eyes in his ancestor gallery and drifted down the curve to the cleft where the flaskoid passed back through itself in the fourth dimension.
He had to fold himself over seventeen times before he could fit through the infinitesimal cleft. New dimensions exploded out around him, then he was floating in the white shaft of the Abysm beside a disc of grass-green viridium, on which sat his prize, his joy and his terror. It was both the source and the limit of his magery. It represented all that had been lost, yet the means by which it might be regained. Though it sustained him, it must finally be the mode of his beautiful annihilation.
It was no bigger than a marble yet it represented the world; and it had taken him sixteen hundred years to create. It was so black that, even in the brightest light, it looked like a hole in the air, an emptiness nothing could fill, a cold that no fire could warm.
It was a nuclix. An ebony pearl.
Binding it to himself with magery
so that the intangible could retain the tangible, he floated, holding his sensitive shin stumps well away from the wall of the shaft, and cupped the nuclix in his hands, waiting for the call.
Shortly it came, faint as the mewling of a newborn kitten.
He waited.
Nuclixes longed for the completion of unity, and after several minutes the second whispered its answer, followed by the third’s shout and finally the dry chuckle of the fourth, the nuclix he’d been reaching for in the cellar when that thickening spell had blocked him.
Rage washed through the wrythen, that a third-rate magian had robbed him of treasures belonging to him alone. Until the Hightspallers invaded, magery had been a sacred and healing force belonging solely to the king. The enemy had perverted it, as they had corrupted beautiful Cythe, and he felt a special hatred for their magians.
He crushed the emotion — the three stolen nuclixes were still where the thief had hidden them. They would be his in time. He waited, as he had done so many times, for the fifth and last call.
The nuclix that had not yet answered.
The master.
A lesser shade might have twisted its plasm into knots. But if the king had not learned patience while starving to death walled up in a tomb, his wrythen had done so in the centuries of crushing defeat that had followed.
Once the master nuclix answered, the thief magian, Deroe, would try to take it. He must be killed. The wrythen could not take the nuclix himself, nor have the host brought here, because nuclixes were wildly unstable after extraction. It had to be taken by one of the enemy, but he would never use the man or the woman from the cellar, sickening predators that they were.
What about the boy?
He had been traumatised by the killing and, clearly, felt tainted by the blood on his own hands. Now the wrythen realised that the boy had been bathed by the aura of a heatstone since infancy. A heatstone — if only they knew!
For hundreds of years the wrythen had railed against Cython’s vile heatstone trade with the enemy, but at this irony he allowed himself a small smile. Hightspall believed it was robbing a crushed enemy. In reality, it had carried the infected seed into its palace garden. Yes, with the heatstone the boy could be moulded, all unwitting, and once the fifth nuclix answered he would cut it out.
Months passed as the wrythen tweaked the heatstone from afar, setting it up to shape and influence the boy, and it was not easy. Though the wrythen knew where the boy lived, he could not travel there, and could only reach him when he was in dreaming sleep. Nonetheless, over the slow march of the years, the wrythen could command the lad as effectively as if he had possessed him.
Weeks went by.
Months.
Years, and still the wrythen lacked the strength to transmit the next set of pages to the Chamber of the Solaces. Ten years passed before a loud, angry call shivered the silence. The master nuclix was fully formed and it yearned for union with the lesser four.
It was time.
The wrythen knew nothing about the host’s identity. All he could read was a roaring rage, so youthful and furious that it made him smile, for the Pale were cowed creatures whose anger threatened no one but themselves. And because all those with the gift had been culled, they were the only safe hosts.
Taking up a pale-blue ovoid like the egg of a small bird, he touched it to his forehead. Far away and deep underground, his sole servant stirred.
Master?
The host is a slave girl who has just come of age. Bring her to the cellar, unharmed, two nights from now.
How will I find her without a name, Master? There are many, many Pale.
Enquire of the overseers. The woken nuclix will trouble her and she lacks self-control. She will draw attention to herself. But tell no one.
No one, Master?
The host is a threat to Cython. No one must ever know about her.
Not even the matriarchs?
Especially not the matriarchs. You must protect the host from all dangers, and sacrifice yourself before you allow anyone to know what she carries.
Willingly, Master.
The wrythen drew quessence from the small store left to him and traced a link for twenty-six miles: out of the Crowbung Range, north-east around the treble cones of The Vomits, above the scalded lands and boiling mud pools of the Seethings then across the edge of bottomless Lake Fumerous which filled the chasm where the fourth Vomit had once stood two miles high, to the capital city of enemy Hightspall, Caulderon.
To a dirty, crumbling chateau overlooking the lake. To an upper room where the withered magian, Deroe, sat at a table before a selection of arcane instruments. His left hand was raised, ready to snatch the appropriate weapon at the first hint of intrusion.
The wrythen’s consciousness edged along the link. Carefully now. The terrified magian had wards everywhere, in layers overlapping layers, but there was a way through. The wrythen bypassed the wards, wrapped himself octopus-like around Deroe’s mind before he had time to use his carefully prepared defences, and took possession again.
It sickened him to occupy such a foul instrument, but if he was to recover the stolen nuclixes there was no choice. Being physically bound to the caverns, the wrythen could only travel to two places: the mind of the magian he had first possessed a century before, when the blasphemer had broken into the Catacombs of the Kings, greedy for plunder; and the cellar that had once been the wrythen’s own temple, where for aeons the kings had worked their magery to heal the land of Cythe.
You heard the call, the wrythen said into Deroe’s mind. You know the last of the five is ready. The host will be brought to the cellar two nights from now, but this time, I will take delivery.
‘Damn you,’ whined Deroe.
He was fighting the possession, growing stronger all the time, but the wrythen did not fight back. Nor did he look for the nuclixes Deroe had stolen in the hope of driving his possessor out. The master nuclix was Deroe’s bait, the cellar a fatal trap. When Deroe came, he would bring the three with him.
And he would die.
It was time to mobilise the rich boy, now grown to a man. Time to send him the final nightmare, a horror like no other, and embed within it a command that must be obeyed.
Soon the wrythen would be strong enough to begin transmitting the completed sections of the iron book. Once that was done, with freshly distilled alkoyl he would begin on the last, terrible page. Then, when he had all five nuclixes …
Ruin upon his enemies.
Vengeance for his dispossessed people.
Annihilation and rebirth for his beloved country.
CHAPTER 5
He’s coming for me. There’s no way out. He’s going to take me to the cellar and they’re going to hack my head open like Mama’s and there’s no way out. He’s coming for me.
Round and round it cycled, as it had ever since Tali had read her father’s horrifying letter this morning. To survive, she had to escape, though in a thousand years no Pale slave ever had. There was only one way to gain your freedom here — the way Tali’s mother had been given hers.
‘Your eyes are really red,’ said Mia, arms folded over her pregnant belly. ‘Something the matter?’
They were in the sweltering toadstool grottoes where they worked twelve hours a day, every day of the month, every month of the year. At times the drifting spore clouds were thick enough to clog the eyes.
‘Stupid spores,’ Tali lied. ‘They gunk everything up.’
‘You look terrible. Have a break; I’ll do this row for you.’
‘Thanks, Mia.’
Tali had woken in the middle of the night feeling as if a stone heart was grinding against her skull with every beat. And with each beat, brilliant reds and yellows swirled madly in her inner eye, like beams trying to find the way out of a sealed lighthouse until, with a spike of pain, they burst forth and she collapsed into sleep.
When the work gong had dragged her into wakefulness this morning, the inside of her skull felt bruised. She de
sperately needed to think, to plan, but now the colours were back, spinning like clay on a potter’s wheel, and fits of irrational anger kept flaring. She had to restrain herself from smashing the toadstool trays against the bench.
He’s coming for me and there’s no way out. They’re going to cut a hole in my head, just like Mama. No way out, no way out!
Tali pressed her cheek against the wet wall and after a minute the colours faded, the headache died to a dull throb. Take deep breaths and stay calm. Don’t do anything silly. You’ve got time. He might not come for months, even years. Mama had been twenty-six, after all.
Her racing heartbeat steadied and Tali wiped her face. ‘I’m all right now.’
‘Be careful. The Cythonians are really agitated today.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. Keep your head down and don’t attract attention.’
Tali managed a smile. ‘When did I ever do that?’
‘I’m always getting you out of trouble.’ Shaking her head fondly, Mia turned away to her work.
The grottoes were a series of broad, low-ceilinged tunnels linked by arched doorways. Cages filled with fat-bellied fireflies provided a bluish light that barely illuminated the walls, which were sculpted to resemble a forest by moonlight — a humid glen whose every surface was covered in fungi, like the grottoes themselves. The air was so heavy with their mixed earthy, fishy, foetid and garlicky odours that it made Tali heave.
The floor shook, grinding the stone trays against the benches. It had been shaking all day. What was the enemy up to in the secret lower levels? Was that why they were so touchy?
‘Tali, try to look like you’re working.’
‘Sorry.’
Today’s job, one of the worst of her slave duties, was de-grubbing the harvest. Tiered stone benches running the length of each grotto were stacked with trays of edible toadstools and mushrooms, dozens of kinds, plus leathery cloud ear fungi and giant red puffballs as big as Tali’s head. The puffballs had to be cut and bagged carefully lest they gush clouds of stinging flame-spores everywhere. In the darkest corners, tiny toadstools sprouted in clusters like luminous white velvet, though Tali wasn’t fool enough to stroke them. They were delicious when properly cooked, but deadly to touch in their natural state.
