by Ian Irvine
‘I’m not marrying some idiot who’ll run from my bed to my mother, taking her orders and reporting everything I do.’
‘You certainly wouldn’t want Lady Ricinus to know about your bedtime activities.’
‘I thought we came up here to kill something!’ Rix snarled. ‘If you don’t shut up it might well be you.’
He turned Leather towards the valley entrance, checked his spear was to hand, his bow and quiver, then shook the reins. Leather looked him in the eye as if to say, Do you really expect me to go in there?
‘The nag has more sense than either of us,’ said Tobry wryly.
It was dark as twilight under the canopy of the blood-bark trees, which clung to their leaves even in winter. The trunks, clotted with oozing red sap like the bloody wounds in his nightmares, grew so close together that he could not make out the obsidian walls of the valley to either hand. He felt their stifling presence, though.
The forest was silent apart from the horses’ breathing and the muffled thud of hoof beats. A narrow trail led up the valley beside a partly frozen rivulet and Rix made out the tracks of rabbits, a scrub turkey and two kinds of deer. Shortly he stopped in a glade, looking down at the remains of a hare — ears, tail, back feet and some intestines draped like a string of bubbles across the bloody snow.
‘Whatever ate that,’ said Tobry, no longer smiling, ‘it left no tracks. Yet a falling feather would mark this snow.’ He patted his trembling horse on the back of the head. ‘Steady, Beetle.’
Rix’s gut tightened. ‘I’ve heard reports of jackal shifters up here.’
Small creatures, no bigger than scrawny children when shifted to human form, but either as jackals or jackal-men they were deadly in a pack.
Tobry greyed beneath his tan. ‘I wish you’d mentioned that before.’
‘I only just thought of it. Where do they come from? The pits of Cython, I’ll bet.’
Tobry did not reply.
‘And to think the Pale serve the enemy there,’ said Rix. ‘Stinking traitors.’
‘Perhaps they don’t have a choice.’
‘Everyone has a choice.’
‘Including House Ricinus’s serfs,’ Tobry said sardonically. ‘They can work like dogs for a basin of gruel, or they can starve.’
‘They work for us. In return, we protect them, and that’s getting harder every year.’ Rix swallowed and looked around, hand on sword. ‘Tobe, do you think Hightspall is haunted?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘The winters are worse every year, our crops fail one season out of four, and now the ice — ’
‘Even the gramarye our ancestors brought here isn’t a shadow of what it was. Everything fails, everything decays, and soon the world will end.’ Tobry said it with ghoulish relish.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ Rix said hastily.
‘Really? What did you mean?’
‘Do you think our land is rising up against us?’
‘I’m not sure Hightspall was ever ours.’
‘Now you’re talking like the enemy,’ Rix snapped.
‘They were here first. We stole their land and drove them underground.’
Rix spat in the snow. ‘It was all the filthy savages deserved after they broke their sworn oath to the Five Heroes.’ He made the sacred helix over his head, heart and sword arm.
‘I don’t share your worship of our noble founders,’ said Tobry.
It was so close to sacrilege that Rix wanted to thump him. Sometimes a punch in the mouth was the only rebuttal for a man who did not believe in anything.
‘And I wouldn’t advise you to think of the Cythonians as savages,’ Tobry went on. ‘They’re a clever, cultured people.’
Rix snorted. ‘Where are their monuments, their palaces, their — ?’ Remembering the defaced statues, he broke off.
‘In the first years of the war, Axil Grandys ordered them razed to ground level. According to the Axilead, as I’m sure you know …’
‘Haven’t read it,’ Rix scowled. ‘Who’s got time to waste reading books?’
‘Don’t you want to know your enemy? It says that the sky turned red from their burning libraries. Red as the soil watered with their blood.’
‘They started it.’ Rix hastily changed the subject. ‘Anyway, something has to be done about the shifters.’
‘If you’d told me before I’d never have encouraged you.’ Tobry rose in his stirrups to check all around them. Sweat shone on his brow and his left knee had a tremor.
Though they had often hunted together, and frequently talked about the hunting and killing of shifters, Rix had never encountered one, and this was a side of Tobry that he had never seen before. Rix had never known Tobry to be afraid of anything. Surely he wasn’t worried about the little beasts? ‘What’s the matter?’
‘You do know what happened to my grandpere? My mother’s father?’
‘Can’t say that I do.’
‘It was hushed up on the orders of the chancellor himself. Would have been disastrous for morale.’
After a pause, Rix said, ‘I’m going on. If it’s too much for you, go home.’ It was a low thing to say, for no man was braver than Tobry, but a fire was burning in Rix’s veins and he did not take it back.
Tobry forced a smile. ‘I’ll not run out on you. Though,’ he persisted, ‘surely it’s the job of your house magians to deal with shifters and other uncanny creatures?’
‘What sort of lord orders hirelings out to do the dangerous work?’
Tobry’s look said, Every other lord but you.
They rode up a steep track where little snow had settled and the ground to either side was ankle-deep in purple moss. The blood-barks had given way to tall pines whose branches were crusted with cinnamon-scented resin. Between the hanging needles, the sky was as grey as the zinc roof sheeting on Rix’s tower.
‘There’s enough snow in those clouds to bury this valley thigh-deep,’ said Tobry. ‘If we don’t turn back soon, we won’t be going home for a week.’
Rix could imagine Lady Ricinus’s fury when she’d heard that he had sneaked out of the palace in the middle of the night. She would curse him for giving his word about the portrait then breaking it, for letting down his father on his Honouring Day, for jeopardising her plans for House Ricinus …
In a numbing flash of insight, he understood that his mother had never loved him. He was just the means to raise House Ricinus to the most exalted heights, and if she were thwarted she would turn on him, as he had often seen her savage his father.
‘Are you all right?’ said Tobry.
Rix realised that he had cried out. ‘It’s nothing.’ But the realisation that he was just a tool to Lady Ricinus was everything, everything.
Even so, until he came of age he owed his mother obedience, and Rix did not neglect his responsibilities. Well, apart from the portrait, he thought uncomfortably.
‘We’ll just go to the bluff, then turn back.’
He did not want to go home today. Once he returned to the palace the nightmares would come again, and the voice he could never remember, ordering him to do something dreadful …
The resin pines terminated in a crescent of open ground littered with fallen boulders. Beyond, a vine thicket was so closely intergrown that no one could have pushed through it, though paths made by small animals wove beneath the tangled vegetation.
‘And there she is,’ said Tobry.
The wall of indurated rock that was Precipitous Crag reared another mile above them, black, cold and forbidding.
‘There are caves here somewhere,’ said Rix. ‘But I’d want a hundred men at my back before going inside one. Keep an eye out for tracks.’
The vine thicket ran parallel to the curving base of the crag. As they rode towards it, Rix’s stomach clenched — the boulder-strewn crescent was perfect for predators waiting in ambush.
‘What did happen to your grandfather, Tobe?’
The muscles knotted along his friend’s jawline. �
��Bitten by a shifter. Stupidly, our house magians tried to save him.’
‘Why was that a mistake?’
Tobry swung down off Beetle and pointed at something with his spear. ‘Fresh tracks.’
The backs of Rix’s hands prickled; he could not escape the feeling that they had been lured into this confined space. ‘Made by what?’
Tobry crouched in the snow. ‘These paw prints are as big across as my hand.’
As Rix was dismounting, Tobry dropped his spear, drew his sword and cried, ‘Stay there!’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘No claw marks.’
‘Retractable claws? So it’s not a wolf or any other kind of dog — ’
Leather whinnied and went up on her back legs. Rix clung on with his knees, realising he should not have looked around, but up.
Tobry was sprinting for his horse when a red-and-black cat the size of a lion streaked down from an overhanging branch. Its whiptail extended behind it straight as a broom handle, its claws were extended, its small ears flattened against its head.
‘Go left!’ Rix bellowed. If the cat struck, it would bite through Tobry’s spine — or tear his throat out.
Tobry threw himself sideways and the cat missed, though two claws ripped through the back of his left shoulder. The sword flew from his hand and he landed hard, rolling over through the snow and leaving red smudges behind him.
‘Caitsthe!’ he gasped, eyes bulging from his sockets. ‘Rix, run! You can’t save me.’
The most dangerous shifter of all. And Tobry was terrified of shifters.
The caitsthe’s leonine head swung towards Rix, as if it had recognised his name. To his knowledge, nobody had ever killed a caitsthe in single combat. He hurled his spear, but Leather dropped to four hooves and it missed by the length of the shifter’s black whiskers.
Rix’s free hand was already raising his massive, wyverin-rib bow. As he nocked an arrow to the string, the caitsthe sprang onto Tobry’s back, crushing him into the snow, which spurted up all around him like a trodden-on puffball. The shifter opened its jaws wide enough to bite off Tobry’s head, then turned to Rix as if taunting him.
Tobry twisted sideways and there was a paralysed terror in his eyes that Rix had never seen before. It was not the fear of being maimed or dying, but something deeper, more primal. Then, with an effort Rix could only admire, Tobry pulled himself out of the paralysis.
‘Fly!’ he gasped. ‘You can’t kill it with a hundred arrows.’
Injuring the caitsthe could only make things worse, but if Rix didn’t fire his dearest friend was dead.
CHAPTER 12
Tali didn’t have years left. She didn’t even have days. Only hours, and not many of them.
‘He wants to kill ya dead,’ said Lifka. There was no malice in her tone, nor even dislike. Only indifference.
Tinyhead blocked the entrance, there was no other way out and no Pale would defend her against a Cythonian. No matter what he did to her, they would see nothing, admit to nothing. The self-defence arts Nurse Bet had taught Tali could not save her, either; Tinyhead was big enough to snap her backbone over his knee.
Her headache was like a ball hammer whacking the same bruised spot inside the top of her skull. She couldn’t think. She would be lucky to stand up.
‘He’s comin’ in,’ said Lifka. ‘Hope he doesn’t ruin our special dinner.’
She did not say it maliciously — Lifka appeared to be quite unfeeling. Tali felt an urge to punch her in the throat.
Tinyhead was weaving between the tables, heading this way. He looked from Lifka to Tali, frowning, perhaps struggling to tell them apart, then focused on Tali. His bloodshot eyes bulged and fury rose from him like steam — he loathed her. She clenched her thighs under the table in a vain attempt to stop her knees from trembling. What had she ever done to him?
Close up, his little head was covered in grotesque bulges, as if it had been pumped up with blood to bursting point. His ears were quivering purple monstrosities, engorged like overfed leeches, his eyes so crimson they appeared to be bleeding. The nose, once small and neat, protruded from his face like a segment of red cauliflower, while ragged scars radiated out from his mouth.
‘How did you find me?’ Tali whispered.
‘Asked the overseers.’
Not only had this morning’s fit of rage led to Mia’s death, it had betrayed Tali to an enemy who otherwise might not have found her for months.
‘Why do you hate my family?’ She had to know.
Tinyhead’s hand rose to his left ear, touched it with a fingertip, and he winced. ‘Hate?’ he said in bemusement. He was staring at her mouth, avoiding her eyes.
‘Me, then? Why do you hate me?’
‘Did this to me.’ Tinyhead indicated his ruined face.
‘I’ve never touched you. The last time I saw you I was only eight.’
He stooped and, before she realised what was happening, caught her ankles and tipped her onto her back on her bench. What was he doing? Cythonians never touched Pale if they could help it. Tali tried to pull free but he raised her legs until only her head and shoulders were touching the bench, holding her slight weight easily.
Dimly, Tali realised that every slave in the subsistery was on her feet. Drool threaded Lifka’s lower lip and the excited gleam in her eyes was mirrored in all their eyes — another slave’s suffering was the best entertainment available in Cython.
He extruded his white tongue, which was so enormous she could not imagine how it fitted inside his mouth, and licked the sole of her left foot, heel to toes.
Ugggh! Tali heaved, tasted baked yam in the back of her throat, then the fury fountained up and she thrust her hands out at Tinyhead. And, yes, this time her gift was rising with it. It was coming. It was nearly here, and she was going to make him pay for betraying her mother.
Tinyhead’s face swelled, wrinkles popping, ears expanding like little pink balloons. His cheeks went scarlet and his red eyes rolled up. ‘Master?’ he gasped.
Someone dropped a stone platter, which shattered, bringing her to her senses, and the gift drained away. Blood was dripping from Tinyhead’s nose and Tali, trembling, knew how close she’d come. If he reported the attack she would be sent to the acidulatory, where the corrosive fumes of vitriol, aqua fortis and spirits of salts, made there for unknown chymical purposes, etched even stone away. There she would die within weeks, blind, toothless and blistered inside and out, of blood-lung.
She began to shudder uncontrollably. Fool! Remember your quest. He’s not your real enemy. He’s nothing.
‘You — abomination!’ he said thickly, as though it hurt to speak.
He licked the sole of her other foot, then dropped her legs as though she was poisonous. The soles of her feet were slimy-sticky, the skin crawling as if something was burrowing under it.
‘Late tonight, when no one is watching,’ he said so softly that not even Lifka would have heard. ‘Wherever you run, wherever you hide, I’ll find you.’ Tinyhead walked out.
The slaves sat down, scowling and muttering. Tali’s head was pounding and the hall seemed to be rocking like the deck of a ship. She groped for the edge of the bench and clung to it, scrubbing the soles of her feet against the stone floor until they stung, but she could not get rid of the slimy feeling.
Late tonight, when no one is watching. Only hours to save herself, and nearly finding her gift meant nothing — next time she looked, it would not be there. She needed help, but who to ask, when having the gift was a death sentence. No Pale would dare admit to it.
Lifka wiped her lower lip, irritably. She had hoped to see Tali’s blood. ‘Work in the grottoes, don’t ya?’
Tali pressed her hands against her hot cheeks. Acid seared the back of her throat and the pit of her stomach was throbbing. It was a struggle to think, but if she was to turn the glimmer of hope she’d had earlier into a plan, she had to know more about Lifka. ‘Yes. What about you?’
‘Carry sunston
es up for rechargin’,’ said Lifka.
Only the most biddable and trustworthy slaves were allowed to do that vital job. Tali studied her double more closely. The heavy work explained Lifka’s muscular thighs and flat feet, while the calluses on her shoulders would be from the sunstone harness.
Most of the light in Cython came from caged fireflies or pottery plates encrusted with luminous fungus, or from glowstones from the mine. But in the underground vegetable farms, and everywhere else that bright light was required, only sunstones would do.
They were cut from the halo of morphosed rock surrounding the heatstone mine, but their light only lasted for a week or two, after which they had to be lugged up the shaft to the one place in Hightspall where Cythonians were permitted to go, a little green valley in the middle of the Seethings. Once the stones had been recharged in sunlight they were carried down again.
‘It must be hard work.’ Tali’s faint hope retreated. She did not think she could even lift a sunstone.
‘Like doin’ it,’ said Lifka. ‘Workin’ is better than thinkin’.’ She frowned at Tali, as if suspecting her of cogitation, then said, ‘Grow Purple Pixies in yer grotto?’
Tali shook her head. The little toadstools caused terrible visions, and sometimes madness. ‘We weed them out and chuck them in the composter.’
Lifka’s blue eyes revolved in a dizzying spiral. She glanced around, then licked her drooping lower lip. ‘Love ’em. Can you get me some?’
‘Stealing from the grottoes earns us a chuck-lashing. Besides, they’re locked at night.’
‘Take some from the composter.’
‘I’m already on a warning,’ said Tali.
Lifka leaned across the table. ‘I’ve seen Hightspall,’ she said slyly. ‘It’s forbidden to talk about it, but for three Purple Pixies I’ll tell ya what it’s like.’
Tali’s heart gave a little jump. Apart from the trusted few who carried up the sunstones, in a thousand years no slave had felt wind or rain, had walked barefoot on grass or smelled a flower, had heard the call of a bird or the buzz of a bee. No other slaves had seen the sun in fifty generations; thus they were called the Pale.
