Ian Irvine: Rebellion

When the brush was empty he touched up his sketch with the charcoal, using his left hand. Taking more blood on the paintbrush he continued, eyes unfocused so he could not influence the work; painting on blind inspiration.

After a while he began to feel weary and drained. He often did at the end of a painting session. He dabbed at his wrist but it was no longer bleeding. The last section of the wound had sealed over and he had nothing left to paint with.

He glanced at the stick of charcoal and realised that it wasn’t some animal bone, cast onto the fire after dinner. It was part of a human arm bone, the smaller bone of the forearm.

Rix tossed it away with a shudder and let the brush fall. He slumped onto his seat, head hanging, arms dangling, longing to lie down and sleep. He fought it; the longer they delayed, the more difficult it would be to get out of Caulderon. He shivered. Why was it so cold? His fingers were freezing.

The fingers of his right hand were hooked and he could not straighten them. They no longer moved when he willed them to. And they were cold; dead cold. The tips of his fingers weren’t pink any more, but blue-grey, and grey was spreading towards his hand.

“Lord, what have you done?” cried Glynnie.

He started and looked around wildly. She was on her feet, staring at the painting on the wall. Red as blood it was, black as charred bone. Rix blinked at it, rubbed his eyes and recoiled.

It still showed the glade by the stream, but it was no longer enchanting. The sky was blood-dark and its reflection turned the water the same colour. There were two figures in the clearing now, a man with a sword and a woman with a knife. No, three. The third was up against the trunk of the largest tree, chained to it, helpless.

It was Tobry, and his shirt had been torn open, baring his chest.

The man was Rix, the woman, Tali, and they were advancing on Tobry, preparing to murder their best friend. But he was already dead, so what could it mean? Was it meant to symbolise the way Tali and Rix had, without meaning to, destroyed Tobry’s last hope, leaving him with no choice but to sacrifice himself to the fate he most feared? Or could the mural be an expression of Rix’s own sickening guilt? Or did he bear Tobry a secret resentment because the chancellor had forced Rix to choose between Tobry’s life and betraying his own, evil mother?

Am I even more dishonourable than I’ve been made out to be? Rix thought.

Cold rushed along the fingers of his right hand, then across his hand to the wrist. Blue followed it, slowly turning grey. All feeling vanished up to the wrist and Rix felt sure it would never come back.

Henceforth he would go by another name.

Deadhand.

Like the first trickle down a drought-baked river bed it came. But it wasn’t a river bed, it was a paved corridor, the stone walls of which were carved into scenes of forest glades — it was the main tunnel in the underground city, Cython. It wasn’t water either, for it was thick and red and sluggish, and had a smell like iron.

“ Bare your throat,” said the chancellor’s principal healer, Madam Dibly, a scrawny old woman with a dowager’s hump.

Tali was jerked out of her daze and the vision of that red flood vanished. “My — throat ?”

“To best preserve its potency, your healing blood has to be taken fast. And the carotid artery is the fastest.”

“Why not take it directly from my heart?” Tali snapped. “That’d be even quicker.”

The old healer’s pouched eyes double-blinked at her. “I don’t like the treacherous Pale, Thalalie vi Torgrist, and I don’t like you. It’s a great honour to serve your country this way. Why can’t you see that?”

“I don’t see you giving up your life’s blood.”

“If my blood had healing powers, I would do so gladly, but I can only heal with my hands.” Dibly studied her fingers. The knuckles were swollen and her fingers moved stiffly.

“You’re not a healer, Madam Dribbly , you’re a butcher. Are you making blood pudding from my left-overs? If it heals so well, you could live forever on it.”

“Bare. Your. Throat!”

It wasn’t wise to make an enemy out of one so exalted, who was, in any case, following the orders of the chancellor. But Tali had to fight. Robbed of her friends, her quest, and the man she had only realised she loved when he had been condemned in front of her, resistance was all she had left. She didn’t even have the use of her magery. Afraid that Lyf would lock onto it and track her down, she had buried her gift so deeply that she could not find it again.

It wasn’t right that Lyf, the man ultimately responsible for her mother’s death and the deaths of her other ancestors, was not only free, but stronger than ever. Yet Tali, even as a slave, had not been as powerless as she was now. One thing had not changed, however — her determination to escape and bring him to justice.

Resistance was useless here. If she did not obey, Dibly would call her attendants and they would not be gentle. Tali took off her jacket and unfastened her high-collared blouse, her cold fingers fumbling with the buttons. She pulled it down over her shoulders, then lay back on the camp stretcher, shivering.

The chancellor’s cavalcade had fled the ruins of Caulderon three days ago, using powerful magery to cover their tracks. Now they were high in the Crowbung Range, heading west, travelling at night by secret paths and hiding by day. It had been cold enough in Caulderon, but at this altitude winter was so bitter that everyone slept fully clothed. Tali had not bathed since they left, and itched all over. As a slave in Cython, she had bathed every day. Going without all this time was torment.

Madam Dibly passed a broad strap across Tali’s forehead and pulled it tight.

“What’s that for?” Tali cried.

Straps were passed around both her arms, above the elbows, then Dibly waved a cannula, large enough to take blood from a whale, in Tali’s face. The slanted steel tip winked at her in the lantern light.

“Were you to move or twitch with this deep in your throat,” the healer said with the ghoulish relish peculiar to her profession, “it might go ill for you.”

“Not if you know your job,” Tali said coldly.

“I do. That’s why I’m strapping you down. And if you curb your insolence I might even unstrap you afterwards.”

The healer set a pyramid-shaped bottle, made from green glass, on the floor. It looked as though it would hold a quart. So much? Tali thought. Can I live if they take all that? Does the chancellor care if I don’t?

Dibly crushed a head of garlic and rubbed the reeking pulp all over her palms and fingers to disinfect them. Tali’s stomach heaved. The smell reminded her of her years of slavery in the toadstool grottoes. One of the most common toadstools grown there had smelled powerfully of garlic.

The collapsed vessel of a boar’s artery ran from the cannula to the bottle. Madam Dibly inspected the point of the cannula and wiped Tali’s throat with a paste of crushed garlic and rosemary. She could feel her pulse ticking there.

Why did her blood heal? Was it because she was Pale and had spent her whole life in Cython? If so, her healing blood was not rare at all — all eighty-five thousand Pale could share it. Or was there more to it? Did it have anything to do with the master pearl in her head? The missing fifth ebony pearl that everyone wanted so desperately?

“Steady now,” said Dibly.

The cannula looked like a harpoon. The old healer’s snaggly teeth were bared, yet there was a twinkle in her colourless eyes that Tali did not like at all. She was taking far too much pleasure in what she was about to do.