by Ian Irvine
His little finger twitched; pins and needles pricked all over his hand. And then — Rix flexed his index finger, and it moved. Tears sprang to his eyes.
“How did you do that?” he said hoarsely. “Who are you?”
Glynnie shook her head, slumped onto the other bench and wiped her brow with her forearm, leaving a streak of blood there. “I’m not a healer, nor a magian — just a maidservant.”
“I don’t understand…”
Glynnie tilted the metal cup towards him. The bottom was covered with a smear of blood.
“What’s that for?” said Rix.
“It’s the cup Tali used to try and heal Tobry. With her healing blood.”
“But she didn’t heal him. He’s dead.”
“Maybe shifters can’t be healed,” said Glynnie. “But Tali’s blood can heal ordinary wounds. That’s all I did.”
“Go on.”
“I covered both edges of your wrist with the blood left in the cup. It was frozen; I had to warm it in my hands. I pushed your hand and wrist together and held them. That’s all.”
Rix’s other hand was still clenched tightly around Maloch’s hilt. He let go. “You also used the protective magery of my sword.”
“I didn’t use it,” said Glynnie. “I only put it where it could do you some good.”
“You gave me back my hand. I can never thank you — ”
“It could get infected,” said Glynnie. “I’ll have to look after it.”
She stood up, swaying with exhaustion, and Rix realised how much he had taken her for granted. Why should the great Lord Rixium notice a little, freckled maidservant? Palace Ricinus had employed a hundred maids, each as replaceable as every other.
“Sit down,” he said, reaching up to her. “Rest. Let me wait on you.”
Her eyes widened; a blotchy flush spread across her cheeks. “You can’t wait on me.”
Glynnie washed the blood off her hands and forearms in the basin niche, then took a rag from her pack and scrubbed Benn’s grubby face and hands. He was half asleep and made no protest. She cleaned her blood-spotted garments as best she could, took stale bread and hard cheese from her pack, cut a portion for Rix and another for her brother, then a little for herself. She resumed her seat, nibbled at a crust, leaned back and closed her eyes. The flush slowly faded.
Her eyes sprang open. “Lord, we got to fly. They could be creeping after us right now.”
“Maloch will warn me. Rest. You’ve been up all night.”
“So have you.”
“I couldn’t sleep even if I wanted to. Hush now. I need to think.”
It was a lie. So much was whirling through his mind that he was incapable of coherent thought. Rix clenched his right fist, for the pleasure of being able to do so. It did not feel as natural as his left hand, and the scabbed seam around his wrist would leave a raised scar, but he had his hand back, and it worked. He could ask for nothing more.
“How did you know it would rejoin, Glynnie?”
“Didn’t. But the captain cut your hand off with that sword…”
“Yes?” he said when she did not go on.
“It’s supposed to protect you. So I thought… I thought it might not have severed your hand on all the levels…”
“What do you mean, all the levels?”
“I don’t know. Heard it mentioned by the chancellor’s chief magian one time… when…”
“When you were watching and listening?” said Rix.
“Servants spend half their time waiting,” said Glynnie. “I like to make sense of things. I thought, if your hand hadn’t been severed on all the levels, it might join up.”
He rested his back against the wall. Though it was deep winter in Caulderon, this far below the palace it was pleasantly warm. He raised his hand. Two places were still ebbing blood, though they were smaller than before. The healing was almost complete.
He closed his eyes for a minute, but felt himself sinking into a dreamy haze and forced them open. The enemy were too many and too clever. It would not take them long to discover which way he had gone, and if he were asleep he might miss Maloch’s warning.
He rose, paced across the square vault and back. Then again and again. His eyes were accustomed to the dimness now and the glowstone shed light into the corners of the vault. The stonework was unlike anything he had seen before. The wall stone was as smooth as plaster, yet the door frame, and each corner of the wall, was shaped from undressed stone, crudely shaped with pick and chisel. Though odd, it seemed right.
These walls are crying out for a mural, he thought, and his hand rose involuntarily to the wall, as though he held a brush. He cursed, remembered that there was a child present and bit the oaths off. Again his hand rose. Painting had been his solace in many of the worst times of his childhood, and Rix longed for that solace now.
“Lord?” said Glynnie, softly.
“It’s all right. I’ll wake you if anything happens. Sleep now.”
She trudged across, holding out a long object, like a stick or baton, though it took a while for him to recognise it as one of his paintbrushes.
“Thought you might need it,” she said.
“After I finished the picture of the murder cellar, I swore I’d never paint again.”
“Painting is your life, Lord.”
“That life is over.”
“It might help to heal you.”
He took the brush. His restored hand felt like a miracle, but it would take a far greater one to heal the inner man who had betrayed his mother and helped to bring down his house.
Yet if he could lose himself in his art, even for a few minutes, it would do more for him than a night’s sleep. Rix set down the brush, since he had no paint, and looked for something he could use to sketch on the wall. There was charcoal in the ashes of the ancient campfire, though when he picked it up the pieces crumbled in his hand.
Behind the ashes he spied several lengths of bone charcoal. He reached for a piece the length of his hand and the thickness of his middle finger. His fingers and thumb took a second to close around it, then locked and he began to sketch on the wall. His hand lacked its previous dexterity so he drew with sweeps of his arm.
He had no idea what he was drawing. This was often the case when he began — it worked better if he did not think about the subject. On one notable occasion he had done the first sketch blindfolded, and the resulting painting had been one of his best. The chancellor had called it a masterpiece.
It had also been a divination of the future, and Hightspall’s future was bleak enough already. If there was worse to come, he did not want to know about it in advance.
As he worked, Rix tried to work on an escape plan. It would not be easy, for the enemy occupied the city and guarded all exits. They knew what he looked like and, being one of the biggest men in Caulderon, he had no hope of disguising himself. There were many tunnels and passages, of course, and some led out of the city, but the enemy were masters of the subterranean world and he had little hope of escaping them there. The tunnels would be patrolled by jackal shifters and other shifters. They could sniff him out a hundred yards away.
That only left the lake. Having dwelt underground for well over a thousand years, the Cythonians could have little knowledge of boats, while Rix had been sailing since he could walk. And many forgotten drains led to the lake. Some had been exposed by the great tidal wave several days ago, burst open by the pressure of water. If he could get Glynnie and Benn onto a boat, they would have a hope.
The worn length of bone charcoal snapped. He selected another from the ashes and sketched on.
If he succeeded in escaping, where could he go? Not over the sea; Hightspall was almost ice-locked. For centuries the ice sheets had been spreading up from the southern pole to surround the land, as they had already enveloped the long, mountainous island called Suden.
Southern Hightspall was mostly open farmland that offered few hiding places; his way must be to the rugged west or the mount
ainous north-east.
He had lost everything, but the chancellor had also given him something — the Herovian heritage Rix had not known he had. He ran his fingers along the weathered words down Maloch’s blade — Heroes must fight to preserve the race. Who were the Herovians, anyway? They had come here two thousand years ago on the First Fleet, a persecuted minority following a path set down in their sacred book, the Immortal Text, searching for their Promised Realm.
They had been led by Axil Grandys, the founder of Hightspall, and his allies who together made up the Five Herovians, or Five Heroes as they were to become known.
“It’s beautiful,” sighed Glynnie. “Where is it?”
Rix focused on his sketch, almost afraid to look. It showed a pretty glade by a winding stream, the water so clear that cobbles in the stream bed could clearly be seen. Wildflowers dotted the grass. Hoary old trees framed the glade and in the distance was a vista of snowy mountains.
He let out his breath with a rush. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen the place before.”
Glynnie returned to the bench, put her arm around Benn and her eyes closed. For the first time since he had known her, she looked at peace. Rix laid down the charcoal, sat on a block of stone and compared his hands. His wrist still throbbed and his fingers tingled. When he opened and closed his hand it moved stiffly, though less stiffly than before.
One of the ebbing wounds had closed; the other still oozed blood. Idly, Rix wiped it away with the paintbrush, then studied his blood in the bluish light of the glowstone. It looked richer than before, almost purple. He admired the colour for a moment, as artists are wont to do then, without thinking, stepped across to the sketch and began to paint.
When the brush was empty he touched up his sketch with the charcoal, using his left hand. Taking more blood on the paintbrush he continued, eyes unfocused so he could not influence the work; painting on blind inspiration.
After a while he began to feel weary and drained. He often did at the end of a painting session. He dabbed at his wrist but it was no longer bleeding. The last section of the wound had sealed over and he had nothing left to paint with.
He glanced at the stick of charcoal and realised that it wasn’t some animal bone, cast onto the fire after dinner. It was part of a human arm bone, the smaller bone of the forearm.
Rix tossed it away with a shudder and let the brush fall. He slumped onto his seat, head hanging, arms dangling, longing to lie down and sleep. He fought it; the longer they delayed, the more difficult it would be to get out of Caulderon. He shivered. Why was it so cold? His fingers were freezing.
The fingers of his right hand were hooked and he could not straighten them. They no longer moved when he willed them to. And they were cold; dead cold. The tips of his fingers weren’t pink any more, but blue-grey, and grey was spreading towards his hand.
“Lord, what have you done?” cried Glynnie.
He started and looked around wildly. She was on her feet, staring at the painting on the wall. Red as blood it was, black as charred bone. Rix blinked at it, rubbed his eyes and recoiled.
It still showed the glade by the stream, but it was no longer enchanting. The sky was blood-dark and its reflection turned the water the same colour. There were two figures in the clearing now, a man with a sword and a woman with a knife. No, three. The third was up against the trunk of the largest tree, chained to it, helpless.
It was Tobry, and his shirt had been torn open, baring his chest.
The man was Rix, the woman, Tali, and they were advancing on Tobry, preparing to murder their best friend. But he was already dead, so what could it mean? Was it meant to symbolise the way Tali and Rix had, without meaning to, destroyed Tobry’s last hope, leaving him with no choice but to sacrifice himself to the fate he most feared? Or could the mural be an expression of Rix’s own sickening guilt? Or did he bear Tobry a secret resentment because the chancellor had forced Rix to choose between Tobry’s life and betraying his own, evil mother?
Am I even more dishonourable than I’ve been made out to be? Rix thought.
Cold rushed along the fingers of his right hand, then across his hand to the wrist. Blue followed it, slowly turning grey. All feeling vanished up to the wrist and Rix felt sure it would never come back.
Henceforth he would go by another name.
Deadhand.
CHAPTER 3
Like the first trickle down a drought-baked river bed it came. But it wasn’t a river bed, it was a paved corridor, the stone walls of which were carved into scenes of forest glades — it was the main tunnel in the underground city, Cython. It wasn’t water either, for it was thick and red and sluggish, and had a smell like iron.
“Bare your throat,” said the chancellor’s principal healer, Madam Dibly, a scrawny old woman with a dowager’s hump.
Tali was jerked out of her daze and the vision of that red flood vanished. “My — throat?”
“To best preserve its potency, your healing blood has to be taken fast. And the carotid artery is the fastest.”
“Why not take it directly from my heart?” Tali snapped. “That’d be even quicker.”
The old healer’s pouched eyes double-blinked at her. “I don’t like the treacherous Pale, Thalalie vi Torgrist, and I don’t like you. It’s a great honour to serve your country this way. Why can’t you see that?”
“I don’t see you giving up your life’s blood.”
“If my blood had healing powers, I would do so gladly, but I can only heal with my hands.” Dibly studied her fingers. The knuckles were swollen and her fingers moved stiffly.
“You’re not a healer, Madam Dribbly, you’re a butcher. Are you making blood pudding from my left-overs? If it heals so well, you could live forever on it.”
“Bare. Your. Throat!”
It wasn’t wise to make an enemy out of one so exalted, who was, in any case, following the orders of the chancellor. But Tali had to fight. Robbed of her friends, her quest, and the man she had only realised she loved when he had been condemned in front of her, resistance was all she had left. She didn’t even have the use of her magery. Afraid that Lyf would lock onto it and track her down, she had buried her gift so deeply that she could not find it again.
It wasn’t right that Lyf, the man ultimately responsible for her mother’s death and the deaths of her other ancestors, was not only free, but stronger than ever. Yet Tali, even as a slave, had not been as powerless as she was now. One thing had not changed, however — her determination to escape and bring him to justice.
Resistance was useless here. If she did not obey, Dibly would call her attendants and they would not be gentle. Tali took off her jacket and unfastened her high-collared blouse, her cold fingers fumbling with the buttons. She pulled it down over her shoulders, then lay back on the camp stretcher, shivering.
The chancellor’s cavalcade had fled the ruins of Caulderon three days ago, using powerful magery to cover their tracks. Now they were high in the Crowbung Range, heading west, travelling at night by secret paths and hiding by day. It had been cold enough in Caulderon, but at this altitude winter was so bitter that everyone slept fully clothed. Tali had not bathed since they left, and itched all over. As a slave in Cython, she had bathed every day. Going without all this time was torment.
Madam Dibly passed a broad strap across Tali’s forehead and pulled it tight.
“What’s that for?” Tali cried.
Straps were passed around both her arms, above the elbows, then Dibly waved a cannula, large enough to take blood from a whale, in Tali’s face. The slanted steel tip winked at her in the lantern light.
“Were you to move or twitch with this deep in your throat,” the healer said with the ghoulish relish peculiar to her profession, “it might go ill for you.”
“Not if you know your job,” Tali said coldly.
“I do. That’s why I’m strapping you down. And if you curb your insolence I might even unstrap you afterwards.”
The healer set a pyrami
d-shaped bottle, made from green glass, on the floor. It looked as though it would hold a quart. So much? Tali thought. Can I live if they take all that? Does the chancellor care if I don’t?
Dibly crushed a head of garlic and rubbed the reeking pulp all over her palms and fingers to disinfect them. Tali’s stomach heaved. The smell reminded her of her years of slavery in the toadstool grottoes. One of the most common toadstools grown there had smelled powerfully of garlic.
The collapsed vessel of a boar’s artery ran from the cannula to the bottle. Madam Dibly inspected the point of the cannula and wiped Tali’s throat with a paste of crushed garlic and rosemary. She could feel her pulse ticking there.
Why did her blood heal? Was it because she was Pale and had spent her whole life in Cython? If so, her healing blood was not rare at all — all eighty-five thousand Pale could share it. Or was there more to it? Did it have anything to do with the master pearl in her head? The missing fifth ebony pearl that everyone wanted so desperately?
“Steady now,” said Dibly.
The cannula looked like a harpoon. The old healer’s snaggly teeth were bared, yet there was a twinkle in her colourless eyes that Tali did not like at all. She was taking far too much pleasure in what she was about to do.
“W-will it hurt?” said Tali.
“My patients never stop whining and squealing, but it isn’t real pain.”
“Why don’t we swap places?” said Tali. “You bare your grimy, wattled old neck and I’ll stab the cannula into it up to the hilt, and we’ll see how pig-like your squeals are.”
Madam Dibly ground her yellow teeth, then in a single, precise movement thrust the cannula through Tali’s carotid artery and down it for a good three inches.
Tali screamed. It felt as though her throat had been penetrated by a spike of glacial ice. For some seconds her blood seemed to stop flowing, as if it had frozen solid. Then it resumed, though it all appeared to be flowing down the boar’s artery, dilating it and colouring it scarlet, then pouring into the green glass bottle.
