Tali could not speak for a minute or two. “I’m horrified by all you’ve been through,” she said at last. “But I still have my arms around you and I’m not letting go. Once again, I’m offering you my healing blood. If three doses aren’t enough, I’ll give you five. If not five, then ten. If not ten — ”
“You would let me suck you dry like a gigantic leech?”
“I’m not calling you that.”
“If there were any hope for me, I’d be tempted. But after the first few days, the shifter change cannot be reversed.”
“What about healing magery?”
“No, never!” he cried, pulling her arms from around him and retreating to the other side of the bed.
“Why not?”
“Just no.”
“Well,” she said, “if that’s what you are, I can accept it. I don’t care that you’re a shifter. I want you anyway.”
He shook his head, then urged her off the bed, so gently that it broke her heart.
“You can’t have me, Tali. I’d be a danger to you and everyone around you.”
“I don’t care! I’m not giving you up.”
“Then I’ll have to put it in terms you can’t possibly misunderstand.”
“What’s that?”
“Were I to look on your loveliness through a shifter’s eyes,” he said bitterly, “all I would see is meat.”
Outside the door, Blathy removed her ear from the keyhole, smiled venomously, then ran to spread Tobry’s secret through the fortress.
CHAPTER 54
In one of several co-existing shafts of the Abysm, a man hung spreadeagled, trapped in aeons-long crystal dreaming. He was dreaming about the burning of Tirnan Twil and the destruction of the Five Herovians’ priceless heritage.
In one of those dreams, he saw the blurred face of a young woman who — he believed — had possessed the magery to save Tirnan Twil, yet at the vital moment had held back. It felt like a personal attack on him and had to be avenged. But it could never be.
He gave way to helpless, choking rage.
CHAPTER 55
Wil’s plan had failed utterly.
After weeks of labour he had succeeded in erasing the story Lyf had written on the iron book called The Consolation of Vengeance. He had melted the book down, using trickles of heat from a perilous source near the Engine. He had even recast the heavy covers of the book, and the thirty individual cast iron leaves that made it up, and succeeded in binding them together so the pages would turn.
Now he hurled it down in disgust, for it was a lumpen travesty of the beautiful original. Wil knew true beauty when he saw it, but he was utterly incapable of creating it. And his calligraphy was worse. Though he had been practising it on the walls of the Hellish Conduit for weeks, his best attempts were hideous scrawls. He was useless at everything.
Everything save strangling Pale slaves up in Cython.
He was very good at that, very quick, when the need became unbearable and the only way to ease his own pain was to crush the throat of someone smaller than himself. Wil’s fingers, hard as the iron he had spent so much time working, closed around their slender necks and squeezed the life out of them. Though none of them was the one he wanted to squeeze. He should have done it when he was with the one, out in the Seethings. It was all her fault.
But that was not what he was here for.
He was here for the book — and the story it told. He had to rewrite the book. The story mattered more than anything. He would keep searching until he found a way.
In the meantime, Wil had something else to worry about. The Engine had developed a tiny, intermittent wobble, hardly noticeable, but it bothered him. He had tried to fix it by altering the flow of water through the myriad conduits that flowed through the Engine, but that had made it worse. It had also sent clouds of alkoyl vapour billowing up the fan cracks in the rock above, towards the Abysm.
Wil froze, staring at the cracks, his heart crashing back and forth. What if this changed the story yet again?
But then a tendril of alkoyl drifted towards him, and ah, the chymical bliss.
All his troubles went away.
CHAPTER 56
“Bitch,” said Blathy, every second time she passed Tali in the halls. Every other time she said, “Slut!”
Tali had not been to Tobry’s room again, nor had he come anywhere near hers, yet vile rumour had spread faster than the fire that had incinerated Tirnan Twil. By the time she entered the breakfast hall the following morning, everyone in Garramide save the lord himself knew that she slept with a filthy shifter. And she wasn’t taking the abuse any longer.
Tali spun around, thrusting her right arm out the way she’d done when she had killed Banj, directly up at Blathy’s throat. “What did you say?” she hissed.
“‘Slut!’ I said. What are you going to do about it?”
“I’ve got magery enough to tear your head from your shoulders,” Tali said recklessly.
“I know you have.” Blathy opened her blouse to bare her throat, and right down to her cleavage. “Go on, then.”
With her hair cascading down her back, her head tilted back and the arrogant smile that dared Tali to do it, Blathy had a barbaric grandeur that was mesmerising. She was prepared to wager her life on her assessment of Tali’s character, and take the consequences if her guess was wrong, and that made her a terrifying opponent.
One Tali could not beat. Even had the magery been at her fingertips, she could not kill Blathy in cold blood. Her threat had been empty and now her bluff had been called. She lowered her arm.
Blathy grinned savagely and turned away without a word. None were needed to reinforce her victory.
“It’s not true!” Tali cried, in a voice that rang from one end of the hall to the other. “But if it was, I’d be proud to have so brave and decent a man as Tobry Lagger as my mate.”
After that, the atmosphere wasn’t merely foul. It was poisonous.
“My chambers. Now!” said Rix, his face matching the gale raging outside.
Tali put down the potato she was peeling in the galley, washed her hands, then, avoiding all other eyes, headed upstairs.
“Did you see the lord’s face?” said a swarthy maid with an unfortunate figure. “He’s gunna give the slag what for. Put her out the door, I shouldn’t wonder. And serve the scrawny cow right.”
Tali was tempted to march back down the steps and punch the maid through the stone wall into the privies behind. She froze in mid-step, rotated on one foot to stare her down, before coming to her senses and turning away.
“She can’t get a real man,” the maid sneered. “She’ll be doing it in the pigsty next.”
As Tali whirled, a pair of steely fingers caught her elbow.
“It’s not about you,” Holm said in her ear. “Don’t make it worse.” He drew her upwards.
“I’ve been perfectly nice to them. Why do they have to be so horrible?”
He pretended to consider the question. “Apart from the fact that you’re beautiful, clever and famous?”
“I’m not famous.”
“Notorious, then. Apart from the fact that you’re on speaking terms with the chancellor, the lord of the manor, and Lyf himself, and you’ve had more adventures in a couple of months than they’ll have in ten lifetimes?”
“I wouldn’t call them adventures. More like nightmares.”
“They seem like adventures to maids who live lives of endless drudgery, and the best man they can hope for is a one-legged veteran with hair growing out of his ears. Of course they want to bring you down to their level.”
“Are you escorting me to Rix’s chambers, or making sure I don’t run away?” said Tali.