Ian Irvine - Rebellion

Other clusters contained kinds of equipment she could not identify, although she had heard the names mentioned in her slave days — abluters, sublimaters, crystallisers, elixerators, calciners…

Something clacked behind her and she spun around, thinking that Wil was creeping up on her. Clack-clack . All she could see were a dozen kinds of stills, any of which would suffice to hide the little man.

Three towering stills made of glass reminded her of Lyf’s great glass still that she had seen in his caverns. She crept between them, knife in hand. Nothing to her left; nothing to her right. Clack-clack . The tallest glass still, twenty feet high, hissed steam from a top vent, ssss . Tali stifled a screech.

Steady, steady — you’re jumping at shadows. But Wil was lurking somewhere in these shadows, and he had cause to hate her.

She edged around a pot-bellied still made from sections of riveted copper. Pipes arose from its top, looping and twisting before passing through a water bath and then into glass flasks. Ahead, a small platina still was set in an open space well apart from everything else. Thick stone walls curved around it, though she could not tell whether they were intended to protect the platina still, or the equipment nearby.

Away to her right, some tall pieces of glassy equipment were illuminated by yellow lights so bright that they dazzled her. Tali didn’t know what they were and wasn’t planning to go that way. In here, the light was her enemy.

Then she saw Wil — the wretched creature was down the back of the chamber, creeping up an iron ladder towards a rack of silvery demijohns. He had a furtive air. What was he up to? She looked back but Lyf still wasn’t in sight. Why was he taking so long? Waiting for reinforcements?

Tali crept after Wil. The nearest half of the rear wall, a hundred yards long, was covered in shelves and racks of chymicals stored in glass bottles, jars and demijohns. There were huge flasks full of deadly quick-silver, the liquid metal that was heavier than lead, jars of powders that were coloured viridian, lurid orange, bright yellow, blue, and many that were white or black. Jars full of waxy-looking metals, stored under oil. Flasks that fumed and jugs that smoked. The air had a peculiar metallic tang.

The second half of the rear wall was stacked with crates that bore the rictus symbol of death-lashes. Other stacks were marked with the symbols for grenadoes and pyrotechnic flares. She also recognised barrel-shaped bombasts, and there were stacks of crates that could have had any kind of horror inside.

A faint whistling sound alerted her. Lyf was drifting down the ramp, flying five feet above the floor, his dark eyes darting this way and that. Tali armed herself with a death-lash and took cover behind a stack of barrels. Where was Wil? He had disappeared again. She scurried across the chymical level, darting from one piece of equipment to another, looking for a way out.

Her legs ached, and so did her back; it must be three in the morning, at least. She had been going full bore for many hours, without food or drink.

On the far side she spied another ramp leading up, a straight one this time. It had to be the walled-off drive Holm had tried to break through. She scuttled that way, took cover behind one of the square pillars and looked up the drive. Hammers were pounding on the wall and she could see a number of cracks in it, but the Pale did not look like breaking through.

And even if they did, all they would find down here was Lyf. Tali hastily scanned the tunnel above with her mage glass. The image was clear this time, and perfectly in focus, though she wished it was not.

The tunnel was empty — she saw no sign of friend or foe. But a stream of blood, several feet wide, was creeping along the floor towards her viewpoint. Tali gasped and clutched at her chest, for she had seen that image before somewhere. Where?

It had been in Madam Dibly’s wagon, on the way across the mountains to Rutherin. Tali’s mental image of that moment was so clear that she could still remember how sluggishly the blood had flowed, still smell the faint tang of iron. She could smell it now. Tali sniffed, took her eye from the mage glass and looked around, puzzled.

And then it came, first a series of finger-width trickles seeping through cracks at the base of the wall and flowing down the centre of the drive. But as she watched, the skin on the back of her neck crawling, the trickles strengthened and merged, and slowly widened until flowing blood covered the floor of the drive from wall to wall.

Pale blood, she had no doubt. Gallons and gallons. The slaughter had begun.

She had to take Lyf on right now, or her people were going to be exterminated. She looked around frantically. The alchymical level was a dangerous place; what could she use to attack him? Her pilfered death-lash would not suffice.

Again the bright lights caught her eye. Fifty yards away, green mist was rising from three exotic apparatuses, each a honeycomb of yellow glass with green fluids bubbling through a network of internal conduits. Ten-foot-wide squares of glowing sunstone, suspended above each apparatus, lit it with a brilliant yellow light. Bricks of heatstone were stacked around the bulbous bases, heating the acid-green fluid to a furious boil.

She felt sure that these devices were acidulators, because the green mist looked like the blistering fumes that had burst up through the floor last year. What if she lured Lyf towards the nearest acidulator, then hurled a piece of heatstone and smashed it to bits? It would be a deadly ploy, as liable to kill herself as him, but she could not last much longer. It was time for desperate measures.

She plodded towards the acidulators, keeping out in the open this time so Lyf would see her, and watching him from the corner of an eye. He changed course and raced through the air in her direction.

She hurled her death-lash at him, missed, and scrambled in under the base of the first acidulator, to the stacked bricks of heatstone. Pain sheared through her head, as bad as she had ever felt, and the heat radiating down onto her was blistering. The acids in the acidulator boiled and seethed, right above her head. If the flask burst, or Lyf broke it, her death would be agony beyond description.

She jerked out a heatstone brick, rolled over and scrabbled out the other side of the acidulator as Lyf came hurtling across. He hovered, fifteen feet away. Tali held the brick up.

“Stop, or I’ll use it.”

“Smash the acidulator and it’ll do you far more damage than me.”

She knew it, too; most of it was above her. But trying to kill Lyf wasn’t the answer. His death wouldn’t stop his people from killing the slaves — it would only make their vengeance more furious.

Wait! Could she turn her earlier, bitter moment back on him? Could she make him think that his failure to stop her had put his people at risk? If she could, it would give the Pale a chance.

“Give up,” he said. “There’s no way out, and I can summon my people in an instant.”

“Then why haven’t you?”

He did not reply.

“I can knock some of your people unconscious,” said Tali. “Maybe even all of them.” It was a bluff — she had no idea how far the effects would extend, if it worked at all. There was also a possibility that the burst would strengthen him.

He eyed the brick of heatstone in her hand. “How?”

“The same way as I did in the shaft when I escaped from Cython — when I dropped my sunstone down the shaft and it imploded. It knocked all the Cythonians nearby unconscious — those it didn’t kill outright — yet it had no effect on the Pale.”

“The ones who were knocked unconscious woke within half an hour, unharmed.”