‘What are they?’
The man kicked with a bare foot, rolled onto his back, screamed and wrenched himself onto his side again, thrashing and keening. His nails tore at one of the nodules, which burst, discharging red-black pus with a foul smell. Rix leapt backwards.
Tobry passed his elbrot over the man and subvocalised several words. A blurred shadow appeared around him, kicking and squirming, then came into focus. It lurched up from the ground, reeled about and staggered backwards down the street. His shirt rose from the ground, fitted itself to him. He began to scratch and claw at himself as the sky rained millions of tiny streaks. Rix made out a thin squeal, the lost echo of the man’s first cry, perhaps, and the shadow faded into the night.
Tobry crouched and sniffed. ‘A new kind of pox, not one I’ve seen before, and it came from that rain of needles fired into Gullihoe by the enemy. Back away, Rix. You can’t do anything for him.’
Rix’s stomach heaved at the sight and the smell. ‘There’s no hope?’
‘He’s going to die most unpleasantly.’
‘I’ll put him out of his misery, then.’
‘At the cost of your own life?’
‘Tobe?’ said Rix.
‘The pestilence may be contagious.’
‘What pox is it?’
‘How the hell would I know?’
‘But … this is against all the rules of war. What scum would do this?’
‘The Five Heroes did it to the enemy two thousand years ago. I dare say that’s where they got the idea.’
Rix felt blood bloom in his cheeks. ‘This isn’t the time to undermine morale.’
‘It’s in the Axilead. Axil Grandys boasted that he collected plague corpses and catapulted them over the enemy’s walls.’
Rix put his hands over his ears. ‘Don’t tell me any more. Leave me some illusions.’
As they moved on, the man began to thrash and squeal. Rix quickened his pace, but down the street they saw more infected people, many more.
‘None of the dead are armed,’ said Rix. ‘They were taken by surprise. I can’t believe that the enemy would attack without declaring war.’
‘Axil Grandys did.’
‘Damn you, Tobe!’ Rix stalked away. ‘I’ve got to get home.’
‘The other blasts were much closer to home,’ said Tobry. ‘All Caulderon will know by now. Go if you must, but I’m staying. We can learn a lot about the enemy by the way they’ve attacked.’
Tobry was right. If they could decipher the enemy’s tactics it would be vital intelligence. ‘Why haven’t they put in a garrison?’ said Rix.
‘Maybe they don’t want to hold Gullihoe.’
Tobry continued down the street, using magery to reconstruct the attack. Ahead, a stocky young man lay on his back, milky eyes staring upwards. His clothes were charred on the left-hand side and his face was as red as sunburn, though there was no mark of injury on him.
‘Dead?’ said Rix.
Tobry nodded.
There were more bodies, though far less than the number Rix would have expected for a town as big as Gullihoe. No one called out to them, though they heard groaning coming from beneath rubble they could not have shifted without ropes and winches. The rest of the survivors had fled.
Ahead, a young woman also lay dead with sunburnt face and milky eyes. Her body was twisted, as though she had been writhing before she died, her fingernails broken where she had clawed at the ground.
Rix straightened her out, pulled her gown down and closed her staring eyes. A slash-shaped burn mark across her belly was deeply charred as if a length of red-hot metal had struck her.
Rix shivered. ‘Magery?’
Tobry waved his elbrot above the mark. Rix saw a linear flash and a shadow figure clutching at her belly. He shook his head. ‘Not an iota.’ He stood upright, looking grey and weary and twice his age. ‘But there’s something dark at work here.’
‘Tali had a welt on her shoulder,’ said Rix. ‘Nothing as bad as that, but the shape was the same.’
Tobry sniffed the charred wound. ‘Smells like an alchymical device.’
The hair rose on Rix’s scalp. ‘What kind of war is this, where they can do such destruction and we don’t know how?’
‘Magery isn’t telling me as much as I’d hoped. All the more reason to find Tali, who knows the enemy.’ He looked at Rix questioningly.
‘I’ve seen enough,’ said Rix. ‘If we’re going to find her, let’s go.’
They mounted and headed back, as fast as it was safe to ride in the dark.
‘Who are the Cythonians, anyway?’ said Tobry an hour later. They were riding down a country road and there was just enough light to see stubbled fields to either side. To their right, a series of small hills made dark mounds against the sky.
‘We know who they are,’ Rix said irritably.
‘We know who they were when they were called Cythians. We haven’t seen them in fifteen hundred years.’
‘What rot! Our traders deal with them at the Merchantery. We buy the damned heatstones off them.’
‘We don’t trade with them. Our traders deal with the Vicini outlanders, and they trade with Cython. I’ve never heard of anyone setting eyes on a Cythonian until we came on those unconscious ones at the Rat Hole.’
‘How did they come to go underground, anyway?’
Tobry gave him a sardonic glance. ‘Regretting the history books you didn’t read?’
‘I’m starting to see the use of them. But, Tobe, after they lost the war the Cythians were nothing but filthy degradoes, living in muck and killing each other. They were thought to have died out, then they reappeared as a force living underground where we couldn’t touch them — as the Cythonians. What happened?’
‘That’s a good question.’
‘Do you have a good answer?’
‘No one does … though I’ve heard that an early chancellor — just before they disappeared — tried to wipe them out in secret.’
Worms wriggled up Rix’s spine. ‘I haven’t heard that.’
‘It’s not in the history books, nor taught by the tutors. One night, according to the tale, bands of nameless mercenaries surrounded the degradoes’ three camps, locked the gates and set the camps ablaze. Then archers shot everyone trying to escape.’
‘The writer must have meant their army camps.’ Rix could justify the torching of an enemy army camp in wartime, though he would not have locked the gates.
‘They had no army, Rix. The degradoes hadn’t been allowed weapons since their defeat, two hundred years before. The camps were miserable shanty towns, even more squalid than the ones surrounding Caulderon, and they burnt like kindling.’
Rix shifted uneasily in the saddle. ‘How do you know the chancellor was behind it?’
His artist’s eye, sometimes a blessing but lately a curse, showed him every terrible detail clearly enough to paint it. He could hear the screams, see the flesh charring and smell the burnt bodies as though he was there.
‘Some of the mercenaries were so sickened by their part in genocide that they revealed the name of their paymaster.’
‘If the enemy were wiped out, how did Cython come about?’
‘No one knows. For two hundred years they were thought extinct, then suddenly it revealed itself — a new civilisation with defences we could never break — ’
‘Taunting us by their very presence,’ said Rix, half-heartedly, still seeing the burning camps.
‘The degradoes were a ruined people, raddled by pox and drink and sniffily,’ said Tobry. ‘So how did a handful of them — for any who did escape could have been no more than a handful — set up such a powerful civilisation, so quickly?’
Rix said nothing.
‘That may turn out to be the most vital question of all,’ said Tobry.
CHAPTER 40
‘I killed Overseer Banj with magery and I can do you too,’ Tali blustered. If she did not resist they would crush her like a slave, yet she knew she would pay for her defiance.