‘That’s spirits,’ said Tobry, taking the flask, ‘and if you drink the lot it’s liable to kill you.’
‘Father drinks three bottles of spirits a day,’ Rix snarled, making a grab for the flask.
Tobry held it out of reach. ‘Then he must have a liver the size of a whale. What are you doing?’
Rix had gone to his storeroom door. ‘I have no idea.’
He dragged out the whited-out sketch, filled his brushes with scum-brown and miasma-green, and swiftly recaptured the essence of the dark chamber. Stroking another brush through luminous white pigment, he carved out the woman on the table. He did not know what he was painting; the strokes appeared on the canvas without conscious thought and, once they were there, he had no idea what they meant.
‘What about her face?’ said Tobry.
Rix blinked drunkenly at the sketch. The woman on the black bench — it was definitely a woman now, wearing only a rag around her hips — was small and slender, with pale skin and hair, though her face was a blank oval. The shadows at her head were hardly more defined than before, though he could tell that they signified a man and a woman.
He looked for the child away to the side, but she was not there. This time his unconscious mind had not conjured her at all.
‘Rix?’ said Tobry.
‘Yes?’
‘Do you really need to know what happened, all that time ago? If it killed Luzia — ’
‘Don’t say it.’ Her death had struck Rix as few others could have. It was as though his real mother had been murdered. ‘Why did Luzia have to die, Tobe? Explain that to me.’
‘I can’t.’
‘ It’s not fair.’
‘The world isn’t fair,’ said Tobry. He paused, then said, ‘That’s what Tali was trying to tell you.’
CHAPTER 62
Tali huddled in the thorn bush as Tobry and Rannilt galloped away. Half a minute later she heard one of the riders follow. The other did not.
He must be watching, waiting for any movement that would give her away. It was freezing here, the bush was prickling her, the sky was rocking wildly and she needed to pee, but Tali did not move. She was an old hand at hiding, the best in Cython, and she had the patience of a slave.
She needed it. A small, wrinkled man with the hooded eyes of a hawk climbed onto the wall and paced along it, bobbing and ducking his head. He went up the overgrown carriage drive, around the back and reappeared from the other side. He went out and she heard the horse walking down the street.
The temptation to move was overwhelming, her need to pee desperate. Tali clenched down and waited, and ten minutes later she saw him again, head bobbing, hawk eyes scanning the grounds from an inconspicuous corner of the wall.
Only after another hour did she dare to wriggle out, turn the other way and gaze upon her ancestral home. Torgrist Manor was small and plain and very old. But it was hers. Her eyes misted.
Part of the left-hand wall had collapsed, the front door had rotted away and most of the roof was gone. And yet, as Tali looked down a broad hall floored in black flagstones caked with dust, she felt such a powerful sense of rightness that she could hardly breathe. This is my place, she thought. I’m home.
But the searchers would come back. She could not stay here. Besides, Rix was her best clue and she had to get into the palace. She felt sure there had to be a tunnel from Torgrist Manor to Palace Ricinus. Days ago, Tobry had said that the last Lady Torgrist had tried to escape underground with her children to the palace down the hill.
Tali sat in each cobwebbed, roofless room until its smell was embedded in her memory, then crawled back and forth, searching for that distinctive subterranean odour.
Shortly, at the corner of a wall behind the stairs, she scented a tunnel, then located the sensitive stone that opened into it. Time had corroded the pins on which the stone rotated and she had to clean out all the joins. She levered it open with the head of a bronze shovel she found out the back, and she was in.
The sky stopped heaving. Going underground was like being home and she felt an inexplicable yearning for the familiar, orderly spaces of Cython. Safe at last, Tali curled up in a dry corner of the tunnel and did not wake for a day and a half.
Hunger roused her. She had nothing to eat and her thigh throbbed with every movement, though there were no signs of infection. She limped down the tunnel, which descended steeply for fifty yards before running on down a gentle decline.
After walking for twenty minutes or more, Tali caught a whiff of a faint, unpleasant odour — mould and muck, rotting wood and things long dead and decayed to nothing — and her hair stirred. The mother and children had either been walled up to die, or had been slaughtered in the tunnels, to keep the plague at bay. She fought the fear down. The spirits of her own family could not hurt her.
Besides, the smell was chillingly familiar. She sniffed again and her hackles rose: dry rot, mould, grime and the faint whiff of vermin poisoned a long time ago. What did that remind her of?
She held her lantern up. Was it coming from the roof? No; the seeps running down the passage walls were clear and odourless. She shrugged and moved on.
Having lived all her life in Cython, where there were no signposts, Tali was used to making maps in her head. From the direction and downward slope of the passage, and the number of steps she had walked, she had to be under the grounds of Palace Ricinus. Shortly she reached a dead end and smelled a fruity odour. Wine?
Tali sat down to rest her leg. She had wasted too many opportunities with Rix. She should have confronted him and demanded to know why he had been in the cellar at the time of the murder. If she put it to him bluntly, his reaction was bound to give something away.
She found a concealed door, tugged and centuries of dirt broke away, but as she put her head through, she heard the call again. She stood in the doorway, trembling, and after a few seconds she heard a new answer.
It was neither the distant, elegant note she had heard several times now, which she associated with the wrythen, nor the false mimicry of his depraved facinore. This answer was a discordant three-note sequence, di-DA- doh, strong and clear as though it came from somewhere close by, di-DA- doh, di-DA- doh, repeating over and over like an unanswered question. And there was something about it that put her nerves on edge — a ragged, self-pitying whimper. Definitely not the wrythen.
Someone else was looking for her, and who else could it be but her mother’s killers? Di-DA- doh?Di-DA- doh? Tali swayed and had to grab hold of the door jamb. From the clarity of the notes they had to be within Caulderon.
Her initial impulse was to run back to the manor, but the comfort it offered was an illusion. Nowhere was safe. Everyone wanted something from her, or wanted to do something to her, and no one except Rix and Tobry would help her. And with the wrythen trying to possess Tobry, could even he be trusted utterly?
Di-DA- doh?Di-DA- doh? A whining, boy-like voice spoke in her head. It wasn’t my fault. The stupid bitch made me kill her.
Tali froze. It wasn’t the voice of the big man who had come after her in the cellar. Was there another conspirator? The voice had a yammering tone she had never heard before and would never forget.
Fury, bright and burning, drove away her panic. These people had killed her mother; they had to pay. Momentarily, Tali indulged herself with thoughts of black and bloody revenge, of killing them the same way, but at the thought of doing such violence to another her stomach heaved and her cheeks burnt.