Vengeance ttr-1

by Ian Irvine

  He threw it onto its back, exposing the belly. With one slash, Tobry unseamed it from the up-arching breastbone to the furry groin.

  ‘Hold its head back, Rix. It can still bite.’

  Rix thrust his sword in between its teeth. Tobry put a boot into its belly, heaved its steaming intestines out of the way and made a series of hacks, then thrust. When he raised his sword, it was skewered through the caitsthe’s twin livers.

  ‘Oh, well done,’ said Rix, though he caught his breath at Tobry’s recklessness. If a spot of caitsthe blood fell onto his raw chest, he could end up one of them.

  Tobry seemed to have drawn strength from the victory, for he was steady on his feet now. He flung the livers down ten yards away and fumbled a paper packet from a pouch on his belt. Tearing open the packet, he sprinkled grey powdered lead over the black livers, which began to squirm.

  ‘Oil, quick!’

  Rix snatched the lantern from Benn and poured half of the oil onto the livers. Tobry lit it and backed away hastily as it caught fire and white fumes belched up.

  ‘Cover your noses,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Lead fumes are deadly.’ He rinsed his bloody sword under one of the springs issuing from the wall. ‘What are you waiting for? Use your enchanted blade and cut the blasted door open.’

  Rix hacked across and back. This time, Deroe’s spell twanged apart.

  ‘Benn, Glynnie, go through.’ He looked back. ‘Tobe?’

  Tobry had a rag over his nose and was alternately looking from the fuming livers to the caitsthe writhing on the stone. It had been caught halfway between beast and man but would never complete the transformation now.

  ‘I’ve got to make sure the livers are destroyed. If they aren’t, it might restore itself.’

  ‘It won’t come back from that,’ said Rix. The livers were a charred mess covered in shiny, molten lead. ‘Come on.’

  An air current drifted the poisonous fumes towards the jackals. They retreated, coughing and howling. This is our chance, thought Rix. If we can seal the door against them …

  Tobry staggered and had to prop himself up on his sword. ‘Go! I’ll be along in a minute — ’

  A furious baying and howling began further up the passage, then a pack of jackals came rolling around the corner — ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred of them. They hurtled up and stopped just beyond the low-hanging fumes.

  Rix’s knees trembled. It was over. As jackal-men they would soon open the door and pull everyone down.

  ‘This is where it ends, Rix,’ said Tobry, panting. ‘Go through to Tali.’

  ‘You can’t fight that many jackals.’

  ‘Not as a man. But as a caitsthe I might.’

  Rix goggled. ‘That … that’s always been your greatest fear.’

  ‘It still is. But if I don’t, we’re all going to die, aren’t we?’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘A while back, you felt so dishonoured that you were going to ride out to die.’

  ‘And you chained me up,’ Rix said mildly. The fury was long gone.

  ‘That was wrong, but I don’t regret it — we needed you. Listen, Rix. I too was put to a terrible choice, many years ago, and I’ve got to atone for what I did.’

  ‘I can stop you,’ said Rix.

  ‘I know you can, but what would be the point? If I can hold the jackals back for five minutes, it’ll give you and Tali a good chance. Besides, even being a caitsthe is a kind of life …’

  Rix shuddered. He wanted to say, ‘Let me do it,’ but couldn’t. He would sooner die than turn shifter. ‘You’re a better man than I am, Tobe. But then, you always were.’

  A small piece of liver lay near Tobry’s right boot, perhaps left for such an emergency. Before Rix could stop him, Tobry bent, put it in his mouth and swallowed.

  Rix wanted to scream and punch the stone with his fists, but that would have been a poor way to honour his friend’s sacrifice. He saluted Tobry, then sprang through the door and slammed it behind him.

  The shrieks as Tobry transformed for the first agonising time were like a red-hot poker thrust through Rix’s belly.

  CHAPTER 105

  Deroe slapped his flaking hand across the three pearls, jeering like a malicious schoolboy, ‘Ha, ha, got you!’

  His wards flared brilliant orange, then Lyf was driven backwards out of sight and the crystal wall burst. A sharp fragment speared into Tali’s forehead, sticking there, and when she pulled it free, blood flooded into her eyes.

  ‘Come,’ said Deroe, touching her cheek, and again she was paralysed.

  He dragged her to the black bench, panting. Tali fought the paralysis with all her strength and again it eased a little. Outside, there was more baying of jackal shifters, more furious howling and a series of thumps that shook the door. How long before they killed Tobry and Rix, and broke through? Not long. Deroe was going to win and everyone else was going to die.

  The numbness faded. Tali swung the fragment of crystal at his right eye but he whacked her elbow with the chisel and she dropped the shard. He renewed the paralysis, heaved her onto the black bench then bent double, wheezing.

  Die! she prayed.

  He spat on the floor and turned away.

  As she lay there, Tali saw Rix’s cellar painting truly for the first time. It had been a divination. He had seen her future. The murdered woman was both her mother and herself, and she was cast back to the day when Iusia had lain here. The vision was so real that, momentarily, she was her mother. She screamed.

  The magian shuddered and blocked his ears. Taking up a crystal of pale green tourmaline, he passed it back and forth over the top of her head, his lips pursed and brow furrowed. It did not light up as — another memory surfaced — the stubby blue crystal had when Lady Ricinus had pointed it at her mother’s head.

  ‘Where is it?’ Deroe hissed. ‘Tell me. I must know where to cut.’

  Tali strained to wriggle a finger, a toe, but all she could move were her lips and tongue. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d care, you murdering swine.’

  ‘The least nick will ruin the pearl; it has to be plucked from a live host. Death, even if only a heartbeat ago, and the pearl’s vitality is lost.’

  Tali spat in his eye and braced herself for a return blow. If she was going to die, she would not die meekly like her mother.

  Deroe wiped his face, ran flaky fingers over her scalp then stood back, gnawing on a cracked nail. ‘What if I saw the top of the skull all around?’ he muttered, ‘then prise it off in one piece.’

  He shuddered. ‘That horrible paste of blood and bone and hair. Yecch! The grinding of the saw as it chews through bone! But I must have the master pearl. The others only keep the wrythen at bay. They can’t hold it out when it comes possessing; they can’t destroy it. It must be done, despite the blood and the slimy, oozing brains.’

  This was her living body he was talking about, and her pain, her suffering, her life meant nothing to him. Tali wanted to punch his cracked teeth through his tonsils. What could she do? Her inner magery would not return quickly — she’d drained her personal well with the blizzard. But what about an external power? She visualised the whirling, multi-coloured patterns she had seen in the Abysm and drew on one small part to try and break the paralysis. Nothing happened.

  Something was watching her. Someone. She rolled her eyes backwards. Lyf’s yellow eyes were back in the cracked stone face and he was studying her, consideringly.

  A small, quivering loop of brightness appeared, not in her inner eye, but in the air in front of her. Had he sent it so she could attack his enemy?

  You can only defeat your enemy with magery, but the only person who can teach you how to use your magery is your enemy. Could she learn magery from him?

  Or was it a trap? Probably, but how could she be worse off by trying it? She took hold of the loop, drew strength from it and her right index finger moved.

  ‘It’s the only way to be free of him, so it must be done.’

  Deroe was ta
lking to himself again. It sounded odd, though she supposed he had spent so much of his life in hiding that it was natural to him. He walked around the bench, eyeing her from all sides.

  ‘Make a cut all the way around the top of her skull, yes. Peel back the skin; expose the living bone and saw it like an eggshell. But she must be still as death. One twitch and all is ruined. That’s the way, and you can do it. Yes, you can. You must.’

  He sounded as though he was trying to talk himself into something unpleasant. Tali got another finger to move, then a third, but it would take more than that to save herself. She worked on releasing her right hand, freeing the arm.

  The magian rubbed his face furiously, as if scrubbing away blood, and flakes of skin drifted in the mage-light, lifting and circling in rising air. They reminded her of the flocking vultures she had seen out in the Seethings.

  He began to set out his instruments. So, he was afraid of blood. The thought of cutting her head open was practically making him sick. But he had done it to her great-great-grandmother and he would do it again.

  He picked up a lumpy herbal bolus, something to knock her out, she assumed. His other hand held the fatal knife. Do it now!

  As he bent to press the bolus into her mouth, Tali snatched the knife and drove the point deep into her wrist, through the artery. Blood spurted and she directed it over his face in red, splatting gouts.

  Deroe shrieked in disgust and backed away, dropping the bolus. Tali rolled off the bench, forced her numb legs to hold her upright and lurched after him, spraying blood into his eyes, his nose, his mouth. His eyes rolled up and he staggered away, whimpering.

  Tearing strips off her gown, she made a pad with one strip and a bandage with the other and tied the pad over her bleeding wrist, using one hand and her teeth. But Deroe was coming again. Tali hurled the bone saws, grinders, gougers and reamers at him, one after another. They all missed save the heavy, tapered reamer, which struck him between the eyes and embedded there, quivering.

  Deroe reached up to tear it out, saw his brown blood dribbling from its handle and, with a thin, terrified cry, fell to his knees. She ran after him, knocked him onto his back and tried to twist the reamer in. A pointed knee crashed into her hip, knocking her aside.

  Before she could attack again he sat up, wrenched the reamer from his forehead and thrust it at her belly, though the feeble blow did no damage. She kicked it out of his hand. More blood ebbed sluggishly from the wound, forming coiled brown ribbons down each side of his nose.

  He was struggling to rise when a yellow streak shot across the room and through the dribbling hole between his eyes. Lyf’s facinore body might not be able to pass Deroe’s wards, but Lyf’s consciousness had slipped between them and repossessed his enemy.

  Deroe’s legs kicked and his arms thrashed; grey saliva dribbled from his gaping mouth, then brown foam. Was he having a fit? No, he was shamming. He made it to his knees and slashed at her with the bone saw. Tali wove aside, kicked out the way Nurse Bet had taught her and struck him under the jaw, almost breaking her toes. His head snapped back and he was driven onto the beak of the stone raptor. He convulsed, slid off and she felt the last of his power over her fade.

  She ran back for the knife to finish him. Justice be damned; Tali burnt for revenge. But as she loomed above the magian, ice-blue vapour began to ooze from around his eyeballs, a miasma that began to pull together into a face as solid as history itself and as stern as justice denied. A face that would give no quarter even after two thousand years.

  ‘Kill him,’ gurgled Deroe, slimy bubbles extruding from his mouth to burst on his lip and chin. ‘If not for me, then for Hightspall. Kill Lyf now and the war is over.’

  ‘How?’ said Tali, a dawning hope warring with her instinctive fear that Deroe was lying.

  ‘I set a mind-trap for him in case he tried to possess me again, and it’s forcing him out before he’s ready. He can’t do anything about it, but I’m dying. I can’t close the trap, but you can. Catch him with the soul grip-pers, then destroy him with the pearls.’

  The soul grippers must be the parasol skeleton Deroe had flexed earlier. ‘There’s only three pearls,’ said Tali.

  ‘Use the master pearl before he recovers. Now!’

  ‘You said it couldn’t be used inside the host.’

  ‘I lied.’

  And perhaps he was lying now. Deroe was a liar and a murderer many times over. How many lives had he destroyed over the past hundred years? How many families had he torn apart? Whatever he wanted, she should do the opposite.

  ‘He’s your real enemy,’ he sobbed. ‘I’ve never been more than his puppet. Kill him while you can!’

  Tali did not believe him, and wasn’t sure he was dying, either, but the miasma dribbling from his raw eye sockets was thinning now. Lyf’s face was almost complete. What was there to lose by doing as Deroe asked? Everything, or nothing?

  Tali snatched the parasol from the bench, and the disc with the pearls. She limped back to Deroe, pointing the parasol at Lyf’s face. ‘Like this?’

  ‘ Close!’ said Deroe in a magian’s command.

  The skeletal arms of the parasol closed on the misty face, which writhed and shifted and tried to stream away, but could not escape. Tali touched each of the pearls with the fingers of her right hand, these enchanted, marvellous spheres that had been cultured inside her closest female ancestors, and she felt a connection there that no one else could have used.

  ‘ Kill!’ whispered Deroe, reaching for the pearls.

  Tali pulled them away. She was not giving him a chance.

  ‘ DIE!’ said Lyf.

  There came a wet, tearing sound from inside Deroe’s head. His eyes went the muddy brown of his blood, then blood began to ooze from his eyes, his nose, his mouth and ears. He fell back and the breath whispered out of him. He was dead.

  Tali looked down at the body. Another of the killers was dead; another stage passed on the long road of her quest, but all she could see was the pathetic man-boy trapped within that crumbling shell.

  Deroe’s wards failed. The misty face dissolved into air and Lyf streaked back through the wall into his facinore body. Then, a thousand times more powerful, he tore the wall apart.

  ‘For my weeping country,’ he said softly, and soared out, racing for the pearls.

  Tali had only seconds to command them. She put her hand across the three and drew deep within her. Each of her murdered ancestors had hosted one of the pearls, each had lived their short lives with a pearl growing inside her, connected physically and emotionally, as she was linked to her ancestors and to her pearl. Surely, even if she could not use the pearl inside her, there had to be a familial connection she could employ to command the other three.

  But before she could try, a small, skinny man came stumbling down the corkscrew stairs, crying, ‘She the one. Look out, Lord, she the one!’

  Wil the Sump hit the floor so hard that she heard a rib crack, and a needle-tipped alkoyl vial slipped from his pouch and rolled across the floor towards her. She hastily moved her foot aside. Wil bounced to his feet in oblivious ecstasy.

  Lyf froze in mid-air, then hovered fifteen feet away. ‘What do you mean, the one?’

  Tali was astounded. She had always assumed Lyf knew about the one. Was there any way she could use this before he thought it through?

  ‘Wil had shillilar about the one rewriting the book,’ said Wil. ‘Changing the ending. Matriarchs tried to kill her to stop shillilar coming true.’

  Lyf looked from Tali to Wil, then back to Tali, weighing the implications.

  Tali was pressing her hand against the pearls, trying to read the imprint of how Deroe had used them, when Rix leapt through the door, sword in hand, and slid it closed. He was spattered with blood, and very pale.

  ‘What’s happened to Tobry? He’s not — ?’ She could not say it.

  ‘A hundred jackal shifters came; no way to stop them. One of us had to make a stand or they would have broken through and kille
d us all. Tobry sent me to get you away. To give Hightspall a chance.’

  While Tobry died alone, facing his worst nightmare? This could not be borne. Tali spun towards Lyf and her lips were forming the word, Die! when he extended a hand. Silver cords unreeled from it into Rannilt’s chest, into Rix’s and out through the doorway towards Tobry.

  Rix tried to pull the cord free but it snapped tight. He gasped and doubled over, clutching at his heart.

  ‘With the pearls you may, perhaps, find the power to end me,’ said Lyf to Tali. ‘But if you try, with my last breath I will tear out their hearts. Who will you sacrifice, to end me? The dying child who has given her all for you? The friend outside who endures his nightmare in a vain attempt to protect you? Or the tainted hero forced to choose between betraying his family and helping you?

  ‘Or for the sake of vengeance, will you sacrifice all three?’

  CHAPTER 106

  On her mother’s body, on Mia’s blood, Tali had sworn unbreakable oaths, and now her fingers were quivering on the pearls. By killing Lyf — if she could — she might end the war, or at least delay it until Hightspall could defend itself, and thousands of people who would otherwise die would live. Was that the one’s true purpose?

  And why not do it? Rix longed for death, Rannilt was slipping away and, outside, the shifters would soon take Tobry, if they had not already. A painless end was the greatest kindness she could do her friends.

  But if she broke her oaths, saved her friends and let Lyf go, a host of innocent people would pay with their lives. She could see them in her mind’s eye, folk she had encountered on the way into Caulderon last time: a crippled girl hobbling on broken crutches, that wailing baby whose limbs were like sticks, the white-haired ancient staggering under the weight of his ailing wife. All were begging her to save them, all dreading she would condemn them.

  The chancellor would sacrifice his allies and not be troubled by it afterwards, and perhaps he would be right to do so, for Lyf would never give in. If she let him live, his armies would crack Caulderon open and he would revenge himself on the whole city. What point saving her friends if they were going to die anyway?