Tinyhead, still sliding forwards and barely outrunning the spreading cracks, looked over his shoulder. The trapped woman was still now, her face the colour of a boiled lobster. Three more guards had also gone in and their desperate efforts to escape only sank them deeper. The heat would kill them in minutes, and then they would slowly cook.
‘Master,’ whispered Tinyhead, shaking his head from side to side as he slid on. What must it have cost him to put his master’s needs ahead of the lives of his own people? ‘Master, I will never fail you … but the price … the price is very high.’
Tali thought so too. Five more guards dead because she had dared to escape where no one else ever had. Where would it end? Her toes curled at the thought of such a death.
Orlyk, whose face and chest were drenched in blood, tossed another two death-lashes high and hard, trying to break through the crust and plunge Tinyhead in. One landed short, the other went over his head, but Tinyhead was adept at this game now. He found a smooth path to the left and soon they were out of range.
His foot struck a rough patch that was no longer crust, he stepped up onto indurated ground and all was solid underneath him. They were safe. By the time Orlyk’s remaining troops reached this point, he would have disappeared into the maze of the Seethings.
Safe, ha! Tali thought with a bitter smile — if she could not free herself, she’d merely have swapped one unpleasant death for another. And even if she did escape, how far would she get with bound hands when Hightspall was at war and the enemy were swarming everywhere?
So the night proceeded, one step, then another and another. Tinyhead must have been exhausted but his grip on her never relaxed. Their passage through the Seethings was punctuated by his tormented cries to his master. She tried to ignore them. Could she extract the name his master had blocked last time?
‘Who killed my mother?’ she said quietly.
He did not reply. In the darkness to their left, a geyser spurted, the water having a violet luminescence. It went up so far into the frigid night that the spray falling on them was icy.
Tali worked her chafed wrists back and forth, attempting to free her hands, but the ropes had been tied too cunningly. ‘Who’s your master, Tinyhead?’
He stopped. The ruined mouth stretched wide, though no one would have called it a smile, and he opened his free hand. On his palm lay the shrivelled Purple Pixie, complete but for the tip of its pointed hood.
‘Only ate enough to unblock. Not enough to lose control.’ He tossed it away.
He was recovering rapidly, physically and mentally, and would soon be back to the strength he’d had when she first met him. If she was to escape, she had better try soon.
Tali gave an experimental wriggle. His arm clamped so tightly around her chest that she could not draw a full breath.
‘Know what you’re about,’ said Tinyhead. ‘On guard.’
He began to trot, weaving between a myriad of pools and mires, quick-mud seethes and holes that, despite the phosphorescent water in them, appeared to have no bottom. Tali looked back and could no longer see the glowstone lanterns. It would take a miracle for Orlyk to catch them in this dark and deadly labyrinth.
Little consolation to her. She contemplated the possibility that Tinyhead would get her to the murder cellar after all. Caulderon could not be more than seven miles from here. Once out of the Seethings he could reach the city before dawn, even in the dark, and get inside, too. Tinyhead was a driven man. He would find a way.
An hour went by, and another, and Tali was counting down the miles. They must be close to the north-eastern edge of the Seethings. The ponds, mires and sunken lands were further apart now and she had not seen a geyser in ages. How far to Caulderon? Five miles? Four? She could see lights in the distance, probably the thickly clustered villages of Suthly County on the other side of the main road. Not long at all.
The land was lumpy here, covered in nodules and round mounds. She could hear bubbling to left and right, and a slow, oily gurgling issued up through crusted cracks. The air had the acrid smell of sulphur.
She rubbed the painful weal across her belly. Unarmed and exhausted as she was, what could she do to save herself? Tinyhead would avoid all forms of habitation, but in the densely populated land ahead a chance meeting was likely. She had to be ready to call for help.
He stopped abruptly. More lights appeared, brighter than before, revealing that the ground, the lumps and the nodules were solid yellow sulphur. But the lights were both ahead and to either side now. They weren’t village lights, they were glowstone lanterns, though not Orlyk’s.
‘She the one,’ came a familiar voice from the darkness, an awed, enraptured voice. ‘Found her. She the one.’
Wil the Sump was at the head of a second squad of Cythonians and he had led them straight to her.
CHAPTER 42
Tinyhead let out another of those shivery groans. ‘Master? I can’t turn on my own people. Not again.’
His master, if he had heard, gave no answer.
‘Put the slave down, Sconts, and get out of the way,’ said a voice from the darkness. A deep voice, confident in its authority.
Tinyhead tightened his grip around Tali’s chest. The white-coated tongue licked his ruined lips as he looked for a way of escape, but the lights blocked three sides now and distantly, on the fourth, Tali saw more glowstone lanterns. Orlyk was coming.
Tinyhead’s eyes fixed on a gap in the lights ahead. His muscles tensed and his bulging head swung from side to side as he assessed his chances. Tali’s right ear was squashed against his chest and she could hear the breath crackling in his lungs. Was he going to run?
‘She has to die,’ said the deep voice, and an annular blade shone as it was raised above the speaker’s head — a Living Blade. ‘Here and now.’
‘Wil saved her,’ moaned Wil. ‘She Wil’s now.’
‘She may not die at your hands,’ said Tinyhead, and bolted towards the gap.
Down a gentle slope he pounded, through a patch of shadow and straight into a concealed pit of mud, the reason for the gap. But there was no crust here and he let out a gasp as his feet sank deep. For a second she thought he was going to be trapped the way Orlyk’s troops had been, but his feet found the base of the shallow pit, his thighs bunched and drove him through the hot, knee-deep mud.
Steam gushed up from each footfall and pungent gases stung Tali’s nostrils, but Tinyhead was an automaton no wound or pain could stop. He reached solid ground, his mud-coated feet slipping and skidding as he climbed a gentle slope, and drove for the gap between the guards. He almost made it.
The man to the left hurled his sword, hilt forwards, its flat end striking Tinyhead above the ear. He let out an explosive grunt, dropped Tali and began to stagger around blindly. The blow had driven him back into the zombie state he’d been in after the hole had burnt through his head.
Tali landed on her shoulder, the impact numbing her whole arm, and was struggling to her feet when the guard dived on her, flattening her on the yellow ground. He put his knees in the middle of her back and held her down with all his weight. Two more guards stood to either side, their blades out-thrust, and the others ran in and held Tinyhead at bay. It was over.
He shook his head, then reeled off into the darkness, wailing, ‘Master, I failed you.’
The man giving the orders said, ‘Take a firm grip on the slave. Should she escape again, our families will suffer the fate set down for her.’
The guard took his weight off Tali, keeping hold of her arms. The captain was a strong, handsome fellow with a clear brown eye and a confident manner. Then he turned, and the other side of his face was a ruin of raised white scars and deep pock marks. The survivors of that explosion on the lower levels of Cython a few years ago had looked like this.