The fingers locked like manacles. ‘Stupid little scrag. Hold still.’ The woman’s voice was a croaky rasp, like the call of some aged bird.
‘Who are you?’ Tali whispered, struggling fruitlessly. There was something unnatural about the wiry fingers, which were draining the strength from her. ‘Are — are you taking me to Tinyhead?’
A bony fist cracked Tali on her sore ear. A series of lurching heaves took her backwards into a tunnel as black as her own terror. She was jerked around, thrust through a doorway and a latch clacked. The room was airless, confining and dank. She felt sure she was going to die here.
She swayed, so disoriented that she could hardly tell which way was up. ‘What are you going to do to me?’
‘Shut up.’
Tali gained the impression that her captor had an ear to the door. After a minute or two a brown, streaky glimmer appeared from that direction, and grew.
It revealed a tiny, birdlike Pale, a woman so ancient she was bald save for a few strands of white silk dangling from either side of a mottled skull with a jagged scar across the top. Her face was sharp as an axe, the eyes round like a bird’s eyes, the nose a parrot’s beak. Her shrunken lips appeared to have been sucked inside a toothless mouth and her fingers might have been lengths of wire knotted at the knuckles. As well as a grey loincloth, she wore a blouse made from frayed ragweed.
But Pale did not mean friend. The other slaves would either ignore her or betray her for the enemy’s favour. Tali assumed that this woman intended the latter.
The light, which sprang from her fingertip, was pure white where it shone on the wall, though transmitted through her broken nail it became a dingy brown.
The illuminated patch of wall was deeply sculpted to resemble a dripping forest in which every rock and fallen tree trunk was carpeted in bright green moss. Only the gritty stone beneath Tali’s feet told her that she was in a subterranean slave camp, not a primeval woodland.
‘Who — ?’ said Tali.
‘Shut it, you little turd!’
The eviscerated mouth had not moved. It sounded as though the words issued through the old woman’s gaping nostrils. Her head was tilted sideways like a crow studying an undersized worm and wondering if it was worth the effort.
Tali dragged her eyes back to the light, which was too bright to come from a chip of glowstone. Its source could only be magery, and no slave revealed that gift to a stranger — unless the old woman planned to kill Tali after getting what she wanted.
Tali tensed. Could she knock her aside and get away? But if she did, the old woman might sound the clangours.
‘Don’t try it,’ the old woman said.
‘Wasn’t going to,’ Tali lied.
‘My name is Mimoy,’ said the old woman, ‘and I’m dying.’
She didn’t look it. Though she was as aged and leathery as a mummy, her eyes were bright and her grip had been unbreakable. Perhaps that had been magery, too.
‘You are Thalalie vi Torgrist, of the noble House vi Torgrist,’ said Mimoy.
‘Yes,’ Tali said faintly.
‘You’re planning to break out of Cython,’ said Mimoy. ‘I require a service of you.’
Tali’s diaphragm spasmed, forcing the air from her lungs, and for several seconds she could not draw breath. How could Mimoy know her plans when she’d told nobody?
She focused on the second sentence. ‘A service’ could only mean blackmail — do what I say or I’ll betray you. Or was Mimoy a kwissler, here to lull Tali into admitting her plans? Planning to escape got you the Living Blade — after various tortures.
‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said hoarsely. A bead of sweat ran down her forehead into her left eye. She blinked it away.
The knotted-wire knuckles struck Tali’s ear where Orlyk had gashed her with the chuck-lash. Pain lanced through the lobe.
Mimoy dragged her forwards, pressing the forefinger nail of her unlit hand into Tali’s breastbone. ‘I’ve been watching over you all my life. I know everything about you.’
‘I’ve never seen you before,’ Tali said weakly.
Mimoy’s smile was as ragged as her nail. ‘Your mother tried to teach you your gift. She failed.’
The sweat bursting from Tali’s brow turned icy. Mimoy knew too much, and they were both going to die for it. ‘Wizardry is evil,’ Tali said, parrot fashion. ‘It’s forbidden to all save the lost kings of Cython.’
‘Iusia vi Torgrist failed,’ said Mimoy, prodding Tali to emphasise each word, ‘because your gift is not the feeble heritage magery of House vi Torgrist.’
‘Don’t say that word,’ Tali cried. How could the old woman talk so casually about the forbidden? ‘I have no gift.’
Mimoy indented a series of crescents down Tali’s breastbone. ‘When you were three, a slave boy was beaten in front of you and you were so furious that you made a geyser burst from the wall. It washed the guard a hundred yards down the tunnel and broke both his legs.’
Shivers crept up Tali’s bare arms. Could it be true? She vaguely remembered a flood, then her mother shrieking and carrying her away …
‘You next used magery when you were eight — ’
‘No,’ Tali moaned, shaking her head furiously. ‘I know nothing about it.’
‘Three days after your mother’s murder the man called Tinyhead, whose real name is Sconts, was discovered crawling along a distant tunnel, bleeding from the mouth, nose, eyes and ears. He claimed to have been attacked by a horde of slaves, yet there was not a mark on him.’
‘It wasn’t me.’
‘You struck him down with a spell of your own devising. You nearly killed him.’
‘It’s not true,’ Tali whispered.
She had suppressed most of the memories of the worst day of her life, though she could remember the rage. She had directed it at the big man who had betrayed her mother, willing his tiny head to explode. Had she really done that to Tinyhead, through a stone door? The grotesquely bulging skull and ruined face, still engorged with blood ten years later, was evidence that she had.
‘Yet your gift mostly fails you. It let you down yesterday when you tried to save your only friend. That’s why you forced a girr-grub down Lifka’s throat and stole her uniform.’ Mimoy’s white-filmed eyes were on the red-brown loincloth.
‘How do you know all that?’ Tali whispered. Ah, the small, hobbling shadow she had seen earlier. ‘You’ve been following me.’
‘Watched over you ever since your mother was killed,’ said Mimoy. ‘And over her mother before that. Failed and failed!’
‘Why? Who are you?’ Perhaps Mimoy didn’t intend to betray her after all. Tali restrained the surging hope. First, she had to know the price.
‘Your mother died because she was weak,’ Mimoy spat.
‘How dare you?’ Tali cried, restraining an urge to slap the old woman.
‘Also your grandmother, and your great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother. All murdered; all weak! Are you going to let the enemy kill you too?’
‘No!’ Tali snapped. ‘I’m strong.’
‘The first time I saw your quality was when you attacked Lifka,’ said Mimoy. ‘The same ruthless quality that’s made me the oldest Pale in Cython. One hundred and nineteen yesterday.’
‘A hundred and nineteen?’ Tali echoed. In Cython, anyone who lived to fifty was regarded as old. ‘No one lives to that age.’
‘Not naturally,’ said Mimoy.
‘What are you saying?’
Mimoy shrugged her skeletal shoulders. ‘You’re going to do me a service.’
Could the old woman be genuine? Mimoy’s eyes gave nothing away, but any Pale to survive so long with the gift would be adept at concealing her thoughts.
‘My mother told me to trust no one.’
‘Sound advice to a gifted child,’ said Mimoy, ‘but it won’t keep you alive until breakfast. Do you remember what else she told you?’