Tali remembered what Tinyhead had said. ‘They’ve been planning this war for a thousand years. Hightspall is ready for war, isn’t it?’
‘Of course …’ He glanced at her, then away, biting his lip. ‘I’d better go.’
Hightspall isn’t prepared, she thought, but he dares not say so. He’s afraid I might be a spy. Tali knew what happened to spies and informers at a time of war. They were killed, but only after everything they knew had been tortured out of them.
As he rode away, her head began to throb, in the particular way it had when her enemy’s eyes had been looking out from Tinyhead’s eyes. She went back to the pool. Did her enemy know she was here? Was he directing the Cythonians to the oasis? Were they close?
Half an hour passed, then an hour, but Tobry did not return. Had he lied? Or what if he and Rix had run into a band of the enemy?
‘Rannilt?’ Tali called. The girl was up the tree again, keeping watch. ‘Any sign of them?’
‘No.’
‘What about the enemy?’
‘Can’t see no one.’
Tali was running out of options. They could not hide here; a small band of Cythonians could search the oasis in half an hour. Yet if she went back into the Seethings they would see her from a mile off.
‘Come down. You must be thirsty.’
Rannilt came creeping down, washed her face in the pool and took Tali’s hand. ‘Why did that wizard — ?’
‘What do you mean, wizard?’ cried Tali.
‘He had gramarye in his pocket,’ said Rannilt.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I saw it, clear as anything.’
Relief flooded her. Tobry was clever. He must know far more about magery than any slave, and he was a kind man who did not despise the Pale. Could he teach her? Yes, she would appeal to him. It was absurd to think that the only person who could teach her magery was her enemy. How would Mimoy know, anyway?
‘Tali?’ said Rannilt.
‘Shh, child, I’m trying to think.’ She had to go after Tobry and Rix. ‘Come on.’ Tali crammed her hat well down and put the robes on over her gown.
How had Rix known she was one of the Pale, anyway? If no Pale had ever escaped from Cython before, how could any Hightspaller know what they looked like, or that they bore a slave mark on their left shoulders?
She was trying to understand his reaction to her when a long-lost memory came flooding back, one she had suppressed after the terrible day in the cellar. By the time she found her way back to the Pale’s Empound, a day later, Tali had buried the memories so deep that, even as an adult, she had not been able to find them.
A handsome, black-haired boy, his eyes tormented and his fine clothes covered in vomit, reaching out to her mother’s hair then staring at the blood on his fingers. The look in Rix’s dark eyes had been vaguely familiar, but the way he had thrown up, like an animal in pain, was unmistakeable.
He was her first real clue to who had murdered her mother.
Rix was the boy from the cellar.
CHAPTER 36
An hour later, as darkness raced across Lake Fumerous towards the west, the hatches were lifted on nine cunningly concealed tunnels. Three lay close by the fishing towns on the southern shore of the lake, three more were scattered along the triangle of fertile farmland that made up Suthly County, on the eastern side of the Caulderon Road, and one was insolently close to the main gates of Caulderon.
Four thousand cloaked Cythonian warriors synchronised their chronos then, armed with shriek-arrows, pox-pins, cling-metal and other chymical horrors, made their silent way to the richest farming communities, the wealthiest towns and the most important bridges. At the appointed minute of the appointed hour, they attacked.
Carefully placed bombasts, exploding in pyrotechnic crimson arcs, collapsed three bridges and the left-hand side of the city gate. Fire-flitters, hurled in hissing swarms from small, wheeled pults, turned fields, warehouses and granaries into chymical furnaces. Sunstone grenadoes, tossed into palaces and hovels alike, imploded with silent, brain-numbing violence that rendered most of the occupants catatonic. Shriek-arrows cut swathes through those nobles and commoners who managed to claw their way out into the dark. Finally an epidemic of tiny pox-pins, falling in a whispering rain from the black sky, delivered their hideous cargo into the unfortunate survivors.
After ten minutes, one-fifth of the harvest of the region was ablaze. Hundreds of people were dead, thousands lay unconscious and thousands more were yet to feel the indigo buboes forming inside them. Hightspall did not know what had happened; not a single Cythonian had been seen. They withdrew to their tunnels, erasing their tracks as they went, to sleep like just warriors and dream of vengeance.
The other two tunnels opened onto the Seethings, one to the north of the Rat Hole and one to the south. Twenty soldiers emerged from the northern tunnel, led by a big captain, once handsome, with a deep, powerful voice. The left side of his face was pocked with craters so deep that the tip of a little finger could be inserted in them, surrounded by starkly white scar tissue.
‘Where is she, Wil?’ he said to a skinny little man of indeterminate age with blackened, empty sockets and a seeing eye tattooed in the middle of his forehead.
Wil the Sump fingered the platina containers secreted in his pouch. Just the thought of their deadly contents sharpened his inner eye. He needed to sniff — he ached for the pretty pictures alkoyl made in his mind and the burning bliss that drove all his cares away.
He wiped his dripping nose. He had to find the one. No one else could do it. No one else could truly see. He turned away, took a surreptitious sniff and his eroded single nostril burned like chymical fire.
His heart pounded whenever he thought about the contest between the Scribe and the one. Who would prevail? The Scribe’s story, what he had read of it in the iron book, was sliding off track. But so was the one’s story Wil had seen in his shillilar, and he had to know how the story ended. Sometimes, under the influence of alkoyl, he imagined writing it himself.
Wil turned around once, twice, thrice, then pointed south-east.
‘The one, the one.’
‘Take us to her.’
‘You won’t hurt her, will you?’ said Wil. ‘She could change our story all by herself. I told the matriarchs so.’
‘And so the matriarchs told me.’ The captain fingered his Living Blade and said, below Wil’s hearing, ‘I guarantee that she will feel no pain.’
The squad from the southern tunnel, the one closest to the Rat Hole, was captained by the squat, toad-faced woman called Orlyk. Behind her lurched a huge, empty-eyed man with a red, ruined face and a narrow hole burnt through his tiny head from front to back.
Orlyk jerked the barbed rope around his neck, dragged him all the way to the Rat Hole and knocked him down by the faint track that could still be seen through the grass.
‘Find the Pale slave called Tali, you treacherous hog-rat. Find the vile spell-caster this night, or die a cursed, unshriven traitor.’
Tears ballooned out Tinyhead’s raw eyelids, but they were stuck together and would not open. He grunted, groaned, then flopped out a white and black tongue and began to lick Tali’s scent from the grass.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 37
The wrythen made another fluttering circuit of his alkoyl still, and another. Despite centuries of planning, every single thing had gone wrong.
Deroe was breaking the possession. If he discovered where the host was, he would gouge the master nuclix out of her in a place the wrythen could not reach, which was practically everywhere, and the battle would be lost.