Ian Irvine - Rebellion

He was splashing feebly when he realised that the atmosphere around the cistern had changed. The troops closest to the gates were lurching around, calling out drunken warnings.

Rix caught the rim and, after several attempts, managed to pull himself up until he could see over. A flight of arrows came whistling through the open gates and two soldiers slumped over the side of the cistern. One had a red-and-yellow feathered arrow right through his neck, the other was dead with three similar arrows in a tight group in the middle of his back. Several more men were hit and fell the other way.

His teeth chattered. What was going on? He was so cold that it was hard to think. The arrows bore the colours of Bastion Cowly. Someone must have got away during the attack and called back the men who had marched out that morning. Or perhaps they had seen the bonfire and knew what it meant. Grandys’ drunken debauches after taking a castle were legendary.

A second flight of arrows tore into Grandys’ troops, cutting down another seven, then a third flight. Grandys staggered around, an arrow deep in his right shoulder where the opal armour had cracked.

He reached back and after several attempts snapped off the shaft. “Attack, attack!” he bellowed.

But at the sight of their leader’s blood, and a quarter of their friends fallen to an enemy shooting from the darkness, a drunken panic set in and his troops fell over themselves to get away. Lirriam and the other three Heroes had disappeared.

The cold was unbearable now. Rix tried to pull himself out but his arms lacked the strength to heave his weight up the slime-covered side of the cistern.

Grandys fumbled for his sword but his sheath was empty. “Maloch?” he said thickly, looking around. “Maloch?”

He’d dropped the sword on a bench up near the bonfire, earlier, but perhaps was too drunk to remember. He caught sight of Rix, clinging to the edge, grinned and clenched an opal-crusted fist. As he was lurching towards Rix with murder in his eye, little Glynnie appeared to his left, swinging a six-foot baulk of timber.

“Try me, you stinking mongrel!”

Grandys turned and reached out, swaying, but too late. The baulk of timber, swung with all her strength, slammed into his face, breaking the opal armour off his nose and driving him backwards. He staggered around, then crashed against the side of the cistern next to Rix, blood pouring from his smashed nose.

“Rix is mine,” Glynnie said with deadly menace, and whacked Grandys again, splitting his left ear. “Touch him again and you die.”

Grandys’ eyes almost popped with astonishment and fury. He bellowed and tried to heave himself upright to go for her, and he was such a strong brawler that he could end her life with a single blow. Rix swung his right arm around Grandys’ throat and pulled it tight, trying to choke the life out of him, but did not have the strength.

Glynnie reversed the length of timber and jammed the broken end into Grandys’ belly. Brittle opal cracked and a grunt was forced out of him, though he did not seem badly harmed. She struck him between the legs. He let out a strangled roar, prised Rix’s arm from around his throat and swayed on his feet. Glynnie thumped Grandys over the back of the head, driving him to his knees.

“After them,” a man bellowed from outside the gateway. “Cut the gutless dogs down. Avenge our dead and restore the honour of Bastion Cowly.”

“Get out of sight!” hissed Rix, terrified that Glynnie would be shot by mistake.

“All Wil’s fault, Lord King,” said Wil as he reached the top, slobbering and gasping. He wiped his nose on his arm, which was crusted with dried blood and muck to the elbow. “Wil changed the ending. Wil got to atone.”

Tali looked over her shoulder. Lyf was only twenty yards away.

“How could you change the story, worm?” Lyf said coldly.

“Tried to fix Engine but everything went wrong.”

“Your mind is addled; you couldn’t get anywhere near the Engine. Where did you get alkoyl from? Have you been stealing from the stores again?”

“Wil not steal!” cried Wil, staggering towards Lyf and reaching out with his bony arms. “Collected it from Engine’s weepings.”

“Liar! Get out of my sight — no, first bring me the iron book you stole from Palace Ricinus.”

“Book gone, Lord King,” whispered Wil.

The feet of Lyf’s crutches squealed against the stone floor as he twisted around. “What happened to it?” he thundered.

“Melted book down, Lord King. Reforged the pages. Tried to write it again, but it didn’t work!” Wil howled. “Couldn’t make the writing go right.”

Tali looked from Wil to Lyf, whose face was drained of colour. He shot into the air so rapidly that his long boots slipped down, exposing his weakness, the stumps of his legs. “Go!” he thundered.

Wil cried out, tilted the flask up to his nose cavity and tilted it. Alkoyl fumed out, flesh sizzled, he gasped and cringed away down the ramp, weeping piteously.

Now! Tali thought. She slipped the small piece of heatstone out of her pouch and hurled it at Lyf’s stumps. It struck the left-hand stump with a loud crack, then clattered to the floor. Lyf let out a cry of agony and doubled over, clutching his shinbones.

Tali dared not try to get past him; her only choice was to flee down the curving ramp. She did not know where it went, but at least it led away from the heatstone deposit. She bolted down and, after a vertical descent of some fifty feet, entered a vast, open chamber several hundred yards long and wide, carved from the native rock, white marble.

Tali looked back. Lyf wasn’t in sight though she could hear his crutches on the ramp. Where could she hide?

The chamber’s rocky ceiling, more than thirty feet above her, was supported by pillars of carved stone, six feet square at their bases, arranged in intersecting arcs which resembled alchymical symbols. She ran down and took cover behind the nearest pillar. Wil had disappeared.

To her left, stacked against the side wall of the great chamber near the base of the ramp, was a hip-high cube of heatstone bricks. She wasn’t going anywhere near it. The chamber was softly lit by a number of glowstone plates mounted on the ceiling, but there were deep shadows too, plenty of places for her to hide — and for Wil to have hidden.

Where was he? Though he was addled, and seemed pitiful, Tali knew how dangerous he was. She had seen him choke Tinyhead, a big man, to death with those long, callused fingers. She could not see Wil, for the chamber was crowded with large, complicated pieces of equipment the like of which she had never seen before. He could be lurking anywhere.

Ahead were a variety of furnaces, some tall, narrow and made of grey iron, others squat constructions built from small, lime-green firebricks. Flues mounted beneath the ceiling carried the fumes away. She was on the forbidden alchymical level, and this curving ramp must be the way the Cythonians went up and down. Did the walled-off drive emerge somewhere on the other side? If it did not, she would be trapped here.

Tali scurried behind one of the firebrick furnaces and peered back towards the ramp. She could hear Lyf coming, the click of his crutches slow and deliberate. Keeping behind the furnaces, she scurried across towards the centre of the chymical level, to a cluster of distilling apparatuses.

The equipment in the room, she now realised, was arranged in clusters according to purpose — furnaces behind her, stills, alembics and retorts here, and to her right was an array of enormous flasks, their contents seething and bubbling on beds of heatstone bricks. One flask held a yellow fluid, thick as porridge. Another was watery and purple, with scintillas of silver rising and falling as it boiled.