Ian Irvine - Rebellion

“W-will it hurt?” said Tali.

“My patients never stop whining and squealing, but it isn’t real pain.”

“Why don’t we swap places?” said Tali. “You bare your grimy, wattled old neck and I’ll stab the cannula into it up to the hilt, and we’ll see how pig-like your squeals are.”

Madam Dibly ground her yellow teeth, then in a single, precise movement thrust the cannula through Tali’s carotid artery and down it for a good three inches.

Tali screamed. It felt as though her throat had been penetrated by a spike of glacial ice. For some seconds her blood seemed to stop flowing, as if it had frozen solid. Then it resumed, though it all appeared to be flowing down the boar’s artery, dilating it and colouring it scarlet, then pouring into the green glass bottle.

It was already an inch deep. The watching healer separated into two fuzzy images and Tali’s head seemed to be revolving independently of her body, a sickening feeling that made her worry about throwing up. What would happen if she did while that great hollow spike ran down her artery? Would it tear out the other side? Not even Dibly could save her then.

Tali’s vision blurred until all she could see was a uniform brown. Her senses disconnected save for the freezing feeling in her neck and a tick, tick, tick as her lifeblood drained away -

The brownness was blown into banners like smog before the wind and she saw him. Her enemy, Lyf! She shivered. He was feeling in a crevice in the wall. She cried out, involuntarily, for he was in a chamber that looked eerily like the cellar where her eight-year-old self had seen her mother murdered for her ebony pearl. It had the same half-domed shape, not unlike a skull…

It was the murder cellar, though everything had been removed and every surface scrubbed back to expose the bare stone of the ceiling and walls. Before being profaned by treachery and murder, this chamber had been one of the oldest and most sacred places in ancient Cythe — the private temple of the kings.

What was Lyf doing? He was alone save for a group of greybeard ghosts — Tali recognised some of them from the ancestor’s gallery he had created long ago in the wrythen’s caverns. Lyf had a furtive air, lifting stones up and putting them down, then checking over his shoulder as though afraid he was being watched.

“Hurry!” said a spectre so ancient that he had faded to a transparent wisp, though his voice was strong and urgent. “The key must be found. Without it, all you’ve done is for nothing.”

What key? What could be so vital that without it everything Lyf had done — saving his people and capturing the great city at the heart of Hightspall — was as nothing? And who was this ancient spectre who was telling the king what to do?

The blood-loss vision faded and she saw nothing more.

“You shouldn’t bait her, Tali. Madam Dibly is just doing what I ordered her to do.”

Tali was so weak that she could not open her eyes, but she recognised the voice coming from the folding chair beside the camp bed. The chancellor.

“Ugh!” she said.

She tried to form words but they would not come, and that frightened her. She had been robbed of far more than two pints of blood. Part of her life and health had been taken from her. She was enslaved again, but this was far worse than the enslavement she had endured in Cython. There she’d had a degree of freedom, and vigorous health. There, those who worked hard and never caused trouble were relatively safe.

But the chancellor was using her like a prized cow — she was fed and looked after to ensure she could be milked of the maximum amount of blood. And once her body gave out, would she be discarded like a milkless cow?

There was also Rannilt to consider. If the blood-taking could weaken Tali so drastically, what must it be doing to the skinny little child who had been near death only days ago?

“You can stop all this,” said the chancellor. For such a small, ugly, hunchbacked man, his voice was surprisingly deep and authoritative.

“How?” she managed to whisper.

Her eyes fluttered open. She was in his tent, the largest of all, and she saw the shadow of a guard outside the flap. The man was not needed; Tali lacked the strength to raise her head.

The side of her neck throbbed. She felt bruised from shoulder bone to ear.

“I know you’re holding out on me,” said the chancellor. “Tell me what I need to know and I’ll order Madam Dibly to stop.”

Had Tali not been so weak, she would have started and given her secret away. If he guessed that she hosted the fifth pearl inside her, the master pearl that could magnify his chief magian’s wizardry tenfold, how could the chancellor resist cutting it out?

Hightspall was losing the war because its magery had dwindled drastically over the centuries. With the master pearl the chancellor could have it back. With the master pearl, his adepts might even command the four pearls that Lyf held. He might win the war, and even undo some of the harm Lyf’s corrupt sorcery had done to Hightspall. Such as the shifters that Lyf had created for one purpose only — to spread terror and ruin throughout the land, and turn good people into ravening monsters like themselves.

Like Tobry, her first and only love turned into the kind of beast he had dreaded becoming all his life. But Tobry’s suffering was over.

Should she give up the master pearl? It wasn’t that simple. According to Deroe, ebony pearls could not be used properly within — or by — the women who hosted them, though he might have been lying. She could not tell. To gain their full strength, the pearls had to be cut out and healed in the host’s blood, which was invariably fatal. Tali could only give up the pearl by sacrificing her own life.

Someone nobler than her might have made that sacrifice for her country, but Tali could not. Before escaping from Cython she had sworn a binding blood oath, and until she had fulfilled it she did not have the freedom to consider any other course.

“Don’t know… what you’re talking about,” she said at last.

“You’re lying,” said the chancellor. “But I can wait.”

“You’re a failure, Chancellor. You’ve lost the centre of Hightspall and you’re losing the war.”

He winced. “I admit it, though only to you. According to my spies, Lyf is already tearing down Caulderon, the greatest city in the known world, and rounding up a long list of enemies.”

She hadn’t thought of that. “What’s he going to do to them?”

“Put them to death, of course.”

“But that’s… evil!”

The chancellor sighed. “No, just practical. It’s what you do when you capture a city — you hunt down the troublemakers and make sure they can’t cause any trouble.”

“Does that include Rix?” said Tali.

“I’m told he’s number one on Lyf’s list.” The chancellor smiled wryly. “I feel a little hurt — why aren’t I on top?”

“I wish you were!” she snapped, then added, “I couldn’t bear it if Rix was killed as well.”

Though the chancellor despised Rix, he had the decency not to show it this time. “He’s a resourceful man. He could have escaped.”

“You chopped his hand off!” she said furiously. “How’s he supposed to fight without a right hand?”

“To escape a besieged city you need to avoid attention, not attract it.”

After a lengthy pause, he continued as though her problems, her tragedies, were irrelevant. Which, to him, they were.

“The enemy hold all of central Hightspall — the wealthy, fertile part. Now I’m limping like a three-legged hound to the fringes. But where am I to go, Tali, when the ice sheets are closing around the land from three sides? What am I to do?”