Ian Irvine - Vengeance

Curved stone tables in various sizes, shapes and colours were scattered around the chamber like an eel’s inner organs, while the kitchen slaves doled out the rations from a heart-shaped counter in the middle. All this month it had been eel-head and mushroom stew with yellow pea bread, though not on Lyf’s Day.

Tali caught the haunting aroma from the doorway and her mouth flooded. The slaves were only given meat on the Cythonians’ most important day of the year, Lyf’s Day. The anniversary of the day their last and greatest king, Lyf, had disappeared two thousand years before.

From her lessons with Waitie, Tali knew that Hightspall also celebrated Lyf’s death, though for a different reason. Hightspall knew Lyf as a liar and oath-breaker who had signed a solemn charter with the Five Heroes, then repudiated it. His treachery had caused the Two Hundred and Fifty Year War between Hightspall and Cythe, which had ended with the Cythians’ ruinous defeat. Centuries later, the broken survivors had taken refuge in their deepest mines, named their underground realm Cython, and had never come out again.

Heads turned as she entered, then a tall slave stood up, Tali’s enemy since they were little girls together, the beautiful Radl. Her black hair shone like anthracite, her eyes were the colour of unpeeled almonds and her skin had the glow of rubbed amber. Radl’s man had been executed last year, baked to death between two heatstones, and since then she had become feral. No one knew who she would turn on next, but she kept the Pale in her section in line more ruthlessly than any overseer.

‘Give it to her,’ said Radl, raising her arms.

The slaves rose, their glares fixed on Tali, blaming her for Mia’s death. Tali faltered. There were no guards inside the subsistery and the women could beat her to paste if Radl so ordered it.

Radl let out a low hiss, then table by table the slaves took it up until the hall echoed, sssssssssss . As Tali tried to stare them down, her face grew so hot it must have been glowing.

Don’t let them beat you. If you can’t take this, how can you hope to survive and escape? She forced herself to take another step, then another. Radl raised her hands like a chorus mistress and the women pulled together on their benches, three hundred unifying against one. The hissing rose and fell, the pressure of all that hatred undermined Tali and her courage cracked.

As she turned to flee, fighting to maintain a wisp of dignity, she noticed a small blonde slave sitting by herself near the entrance to the kitchens, head bowed over her dinner. She was not hissing; indeed, she seemed oblivious to what was going on. The slave was Lifka, and in appearance she was almost Tali’s double.

Lifka’s silence gave Tali heart. She stared down the slaves, met Radl’s eyes and raised her chin in defiance, then went to the serving bench for the feast.

Baking trays held a number of crispy-skinned poulters, each with their four fat drumsticks upright. Cythonian legend held that Lyf had created the four-legged fowl with the magery called germine , as a gift to his suffering people.

A serving slave put the smallest drumstick on a square slate, added some curly, baked roots, a wedge of transparent glass-eel cake and a minute bowl of prawn-head soup. After decanting a measure of the purple-black drink called hulee into a narrow vase until foam rose above the top, she handed the slate to Tali.

Eyeing the glorious drumstick she would not be able to stomach, she took a seat opposite Lifka. Tali met her eyes and said in her most friendly voice, ‘Hello, I’m Tali.’

Lifka inspected Tali’s plate, drool beading on her lower lip, but did not answer.

Tali fished a prawn scale off the top of her soup and sipped the gloriously fatty broth. Through the kitchen doorway she could see slaves cleaning the oval heatstone ovens and benches, and other slaves on their knees, scrubbing the floor. No dirt or grime was permitted in Cython.

The top of her skull throbbed and she looked away; the uncanny shimmer of heatstone always unnerved her. Tali plucked a couple of charred pinfeathers from the poulter leg and put them on the edge of her platter, already tasting the gamy orange flesh from childhood memory. She sniffed the hulee , which she had never had before, then gagged and shoved it aside.

‘Yuk. It smells like the seepage from the compost pits.’

‘I’ll have it,’ Lifka said eagerly.

Tali pushed it across the table top and Lifka drained it in a gulp, as if afraid another slave would take it off her. She shuddered, licked the clinging foam from the vase with a pointed tongue, then bit the curly end off a baked piece of horse-parsnip.

The hissing died away, the pressure eased and Tali realised she was ravenous. The gobbled length of baked yam was a nutty explosion in the mouth, the spicy dregs of the prawn-head soup made her tongue tingle. She nipped a corner off the glass-eel cake, which had a pleasant tang but was otherwise flavourless.

Tali gave Lifka a tentative smile.

The vacant eyes inspected her. ‘Ya look like me. Though yer not as pretty.’

Tali had never met anyone like Lifka, who uttered whatever thoughts came into her empty head. She studied her, side-on.

With her shaggy gold-blonde hair, high brow and neat, oval face, Lifka looked remarkably like Tali. She was prettier, Tali conceded, apart from the drooping lower lip which accentuated the vacant look in her eyes. Lifka wasn’t as curvy, but appeared stronger. Her thighs were more muscular, there were callused indentations on her shoulders and her face and hands were lightly tanned, which was odd, since no sunlight ever penetrated into Cython …

Tali was wondering about that, trying to understand it, when the ghost of a plan whispered into her mind. Could it be possible?

‘Aren’t ya scared?’ said Lifka, chewing with her mouth open.

‘Of them ?’ Tali put on her most disdainful voice.

‘No, of him.’

Her stomach turned a back flip. The biggest Cythonian she had ever seen stood in the eel-mouth entrance, staring at her. His biceps were the size of her thighs, yet he had a tiny head no larger than a two-year-old’s. A peculiar, purplish head, bulging in all the wrong places.

Tali had blocked out most of what had happened in the cellar that day ten years before, but she could never forget Tinyhead. Could this Cythonian be the same man? The man who had promised to show Iusia the way out, then betrayed her?

She did not think so. His head had neither been misshapen nor purple.

Then he flopped out a disgusting white-coated tongue flecked with black spots like crawling blowflies.

Yes, it was.

‘Free, free, and not a care in the world,’ Rix exclaimed as the sun rose.

Tobry raised an ironic eyebrow. His horse, a neat chestnut with a white blaze on its forehead and a muzzle that always seemed to be smiling, rotated its hairy ears as if it could not believe what it was hearing.

‘All right, one or two cares.’ Rix drew the frigid air into his lungs and sighed. ‘But I can breathe up here; I’m not choked, stifled, cramped.’ He wouldn’t suffer the nightmares here, either. He never had them anywhere but at the palace.

‘Cramped? Your chambers are the size of a small mansion. No, make that a large mansion.’

‘I was born to live under the stars,’ Rix said lyrically, sweeping his arms towards the heavens, ‘to tickle fish in icy streams with my bare hands, to — ’

‘To paint in your studio while a hundred servants wait on your smallest whim.’

Rix scowled. ‘After the stinking portrait is completed I may never paint again.’

Tobry and his horse both snorted. ‘It’s the one thing in your life that has nothing to do with house and heritage. You can’t give it up.’