Ian Irvine - Rebellion

Another followed it, but dipped low and shattered one of the great glass alembics to pieces. It must have been a rocket flare for it burned with a dazzling blue-white light. A brown, fizzing liquid began to creep from the alembic, across the floor.

In the far corner, a bombast went off with a shattering roar, hurling pieces of rock and metal for fifty yards. A furnace toppled, scattering glowing coals everywhere and adding its white smoke to the thickening air. A swarm of shriek-arrows screamed across towards the ramp, followed by the brilliant red sparks of a dozen fire-flitters.

Now that’s a distraction, Tali thought. How could she help the Pale, though?

It occurred to Tali that, when she’d whacked Lyf’s wrythen with the iron book in his caverns, months ago, those few droplets of diluted alkoyl had hurt him badly. Could she attack Lyf with alkoyl? Wil had carried a flask of the stuff, though he had probably taken it with him, wherever he had gone. If he had gone. No, she dared not let Lyf get close enough to toss alkoyl at him. But it reminded her of something else…

Lucky none landed on the little heatstone , Errek had once said. Why not? What was alkoyl, anyway? She knew that it was obtained from somewhere way down the Hellish Conduit, but where did it come from? Could it truly come from the Engine’s weepings , as Wil had said?

It fostered an alarming chain of thought. Cythonians believed that the Engine was a destructive force, forever trying to tear the land apart with great eruptions, earthquakes and other catastrophes. The king-magery that Errek had invented ten thousand years ago was a healing force and, as long as the two were in balance, all was well.

The balance between healing and destruction had been maintained for eight thousand years, until Grandys had killed Lyf in an attempt to seize king-magery for himself. Instead, king-magery had been lost and the land had not been healed in the two thousand years since.

Now the balance was rapidly tipping towards destruction, the eruptions and quakes were increasing, and Errek had said it was almost at the point where it could not be stopped. Where a cataclysm could destroy the land itself.

Alkoyl, alkoyl? It wept from the destructive Engine, while king-magery was somehow locked up in heatstone. Could alkoyl be the antithesis to heatstone, just as king-magery was the healing force that balanced the chaos of the Engine? And if so, what would happen if alkoyl and heatstone were combined? Was that what Errek had been talking about?

Alkoyl was stored on this level, she knew. It had been mentioned during her escape from Cython, when the young woman’s leg had been eaten right through -

“ She were up on the third elixerater,” the foreman had said, “toppin’ up the alkoyl level, but someone had taken the dribbler out. The whole flask poured in. Blew the elixerator to pieces, and a whole flask of precious alkoyl lost — ”

The someone who had done it surely had to be Wil, who knew where the alkoyl stocks were held; she had seen him sniffing it even before her escape from Cython. Was that what he had been up to when she’d glimpsed him earlier? Had he been looking for alkoyl on the store’s racks?

Tali had no idea what combining alkoyl and heatstone would do, but she had no other options. The enemy were still coming down the ramp and if she didn’t do something fast, the rebellion would end here.

Another rocket shot across the ceiling, then two more, each exploding in brilliant blue-white flares. A second bombast went off, followed by a long line of white fire that snaked a quarter of the way across the chymical level. Someone must have laid out a barrier of the red powder called thermitto , which burned so hot that it could cut straight through solid stone. Cythonian miners used it to cut and shape rock.

There was fighting everywhere now, furnaces and stills being toppled, retorts exploding in showers of glass, battles raging back and forth through the wreckage, though how they could see to fight Tali did not know. The smoke was thickening; in some places the visibility was only a few yards, and before long the fumes must bring everyone down.

She heard coughing behind her. Tali whirled. Lyf was hovering only ten yards away. She jumped.

“It’s time,” he said.

She bolted into the smoke, turned right around the smashed acidulator then left past a badly burned cluster of bodies. Lyf was not far behind, appearing and disappearing through the smoke. She ducked down, ran the other way and scuttled through the wreckage towards the shelves Wil had been climbing, taking advantage of every bit of cover she could. Lyf zoomed overhead; she froze under the overhang of what she assumed to be an elixerator until he disappeared in the smoke.

As she reached the rear of the chymical level she saw Wil again. He must have been lurking here all this time.

“Got to write ending,” he howled. “Engine going to end everything .”

He was staggering across the floor, dragging a platina demijohn behind him. He passed through the smoking crevice in the end wall and headed downwards.

Good riddance! She darted along the wall until she reached the shelves that held the alkoyl stores. The platina flasks were high up; she could see six of them. The walls and the shelves were badly corroded, the stone and metal partly eaten away. It was deadly stuff, and she shivered at the thought of what she was planning to do with it.

Tali dared not climb the shelves the way Wil had earlier — since Lyf was flying up near the ceiling, he was bound to spot her. What if she used magery to levitate a flask down? That would be perilous too; if she dropped it and alkoyl spilled on her, even a single drop, it would eat right through her.

Would levitating a flask of alkoyl constitute a great destruction? She did not think so — but what she was planning to do with it might. She focused her magery on the central flask. Rise . It rose too quickly, and so did the one on its right. They were empty.

The third one was considerably heavier — so heavy that it wobbled as she levitated it and Tali felt a moment of panic that it was going to fall. It couldn’t break, being platina, but if the cap came off…

She managed to steady it and brought it down to the floor. Tali eyed the flask. A wisp of vapour was oozing out around the cap and she did not want to go anywhere near it, but everyone else here was putting their lives at risk and she could do no less.

“Charge!” an officer yelled in the guttural Cythonian accent. “Cut them down!”

The chymical level echoed to the sounds of hundreds of booted feet. She looked around but could see nothing through the smoke and wreckage save glows and flashes all over the place. Then she heard the distinctive thump of the seven fan levers being thrown, and the great box fans began to tick.

“Driving us into a corner!” yelled Holm. “If there’s anything you can do, do it now !”

She picked up the flask by its handle and headed across to where the spare heatstone blocks were stacked in that hip-high cube against the wall, not far from the bottom of the ramp where the battle had begun. If alkoyl set the heatstone off, it could knock most of the enemy down, perhaps block the ramp, and give the Pale the advantage. The cube wasn’t in the perfect place for that — it was a bit far away from the ramp — but she had to work with what she had.

The air thinned a little and she saw that there was still fighting at the ramp. She could go no further. She ducked beneath the overhang of a toppled furnace, took a deep breath, wrapped her hands in a piece of rag torn from the bottom of her shirt and twisted the cap off the flask.