Ian Irvine - Vengeance

Tobry did not reply.

‘And to think the Pale serve the enemy there,’ said Rix. ‘Stinking traitors.’

‘Perhaps they don’t have a choice.’

‘Everyone has a choice.’

‘Including House Ricinus’s serfs,’ Tobry said sardonically. ‘They can work like dogs for a basin of gruel, or they can starve.’

‘They work for us. In return, we protect them, and that’s getting harder every year.’ Rix swallowed and looked around, hand on sword. ‘Tobe, do you think Hightspall is haunted?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘The winters are worse every year, our crops fail one season out of four, and now the ice — ’

‘Even the gramarye our ancestors brought here isn’t a shadow of what it was. Everything fails, everything decays, and soon the world will end.’ Tobry said it with ghoulish relish.

‘That’s not what I meant,’ Rix said hastily.

‘Really? What did you mean?’

‘Do you think our land is rising up against us?’

‘I’m not sure Hightspall was ever ours.’

‘Now you’re talking like the enemy,’ Rix snapped.

‘They were here first. We stole their land and drove them underground.’

Rix spat in the snow. ‘It was all the filthy savages deserved after they broke their sworn oath to the Five Heroes.’ He made the sacred helix over his head, heart and sword arm.

‘I don’t share your worship of our noble founders,’ said Tobry.

It was so close to sacrilege that Rix wanted to thump him. Sometimes a punch in the mouth was the only rebuttal for a man who did not believe in anything.

‘And I wouldn’t advise you to think of the Cythonians as savages,’ Tobry went on. ‘They’re a clever, cultured people.’

Rix snorted. ‘Where are their monuments, their palaces, their — ?’ Remembering the defaced statues, he broke off.

‘In the first years of the war, Axil Grandys ordered them razed to ground level. According to the Axilead , as I’m sure you know …’

‘Haven’t read it,’ Rix scowled. ‘Who’s got time to waste reading books?’

‘Don’t you want to know your enemy? It says that the sky turned red from their burning libraries. Red as the soil watered with their blood.’

‘They started it.’ Rix hastily changed the subject. ‘Anyway, something has to be done about the shifters.’

‘If you’d told me before I’d never have encouraged you.’ Tobry rose in his stirrups to check all around them. Sweat shone on his brow and his left knee had a tremor.

Though they had often hunted together, and frequently talked about the hunting and killing of shifters, Rix had never encountered one, and this was a side of Tobry that he had never seen before. Rix had never known Tobry to be afraid of anything. Surely he wasn’t worried about the little beasts? ‘What’s the matter?’

‘You do know what happened to my grandpere? My mother’s father?’

‘Can’t say that I do.’

‘It was hushed up on the orders of the chancellor himself. Would have been disastrous for morale.’

After a pause, Rix said, ‘I’m going on. If it’s too much for you, go home.’ It was a low thing to say, for no man was braver than Tobry, but a fire was burning in Rix’s veins and he did not take it back.

Tobry forced a smile. ‘I’ll not run out on you. Though,’ he persisted, ‘surely it’s the job of your house magians to deal with shifters and other uncanny creatures?’

‘What sort of lord orders hirelings out to do the dangerous work?’

Tobry’s look said, Every other lord but you .

They rode up a steep track where little snow had settled and the ground to either side was ankle-deep in purple moss. The blood-barks had given way to tall pines whose branches were crusted with cinnamon-scented resin. Between the hanging needles, the sky was as grey as the zinc roof sheeting on Rix’s tower.

‘There’s enough snow in those clouds to bury this valley thigh-deep,’ said Tobry. ‘If we don’t turn back soon, we won’t be going home for a week.’

Rix could imagine Lady Ricinus’s fury when she’d heard that he had sneaked out of the palace in the middle of the night. She would curse him for giving his word about the portrait then breaking it, for letting down his father on his Honouring Day, for jeopardising her plans for House Ricinus …

In a numbing flash of insight, he understood that his mother had never loved him. He was just the means to raise House Ricinus to the most exalted heights, and if she were thwarted she would turn on him, as he had often seen her savage his father.

‘Are you all right?’ said Tobry.

Rix realised that he had cried out. ‘It’s nothing.’ But the realisation that he was just a tool to Lady Ricinus was everything, everything .

Even so, until he came of age he owed his mother obedience, and Rix did not neglect his responsibilities. Well, apart from the portrait, he thought uncomfortably.

‘We’ll just go to the bluff, then turn back.’

He did not want to go home today. Once he returned to the palace the nightmares would come again, and the voice he could never remember, ordering him to do something dreadful …

The resin pines terminated in a crescent of open ground littered with fallen boulders. Beyond, a vine thicket was so closely intergrown that no one could have pushed through it, though paths made by small animals wove beneath the tangled vegetation.

‘And there she is,’ said Tobry.

The wall of indurated rock that was Precipitous Crag reared another mile above them, black, cold and forbidding.

‘There are caves here somewhere,’ said Rix. ‘But I’d want a hundred men at my back before going inside one. Keep an eye out for tracks.’

The vine thicket ran parallel to the curving base of the crag. As they rode towards it, Rix’s stomach clenched — the boulder-strewn crescent was perfect for predators waiting in ambush.

‘What did happen to your grandfather, Tobe?’

The muscles knotted along his friend’s jawline. ‘Bitten by a shifter. Stupidly, our house magians tried to save him.’

‘Why was that a mistake?’

Tobry swung down off Beetle and pointed at something with his spear. ‘Fresh tracks.’

The backs of Rix’s hands prickled; he could not escape the feeling that they had been lured into this confined space. ‘Made by what?’

Tobry crouched in the snow. ‘These paw prints are as big across as my hand.’

As Rix was dismounting, Tobry dropped his spear, drew his sword and cried, ‘Stay there!’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘No claw marks.’

‘Retractable claws? So it’s not a wolf or any other kind of dog — ’

Leather whinnied and went up on her back legs. Rix clung on with his knees, realising he should not have looked around, but up .

Tobry was sprinting for his horse when a red-and-black cat the size of a lion streaked down from an overhanging branch. Its whiptail extended behind it straight as a broom handle, its claws were extended, its small ears flattened against its head.

‘Go left!’ Rix bellowed. If the cat struck, it would bite through Tobry’s spine — or tear his throat out.

Tobry threw himself sideways and the cat missed, though two claws ripped through the back of his left shoulder. The sword flew from his hand and he landed hard, rolling over through the snow and leaving red smudges behind him.

‘Caitsthe!’ he gasped, eyes bulging from his sockets. ‘Rix, run! You can’t save me.’

The most dangerous shifter of all. And Tobry was terrified of shifters.

The caitsthe’s leonine head swung towards Rix, as if it had recognised his name. To his knowledge, nobody had ever killed a caitsthe in single combat. He hurled his spear, but Leather dropped to four hooves and it missed by the length of the shifter’s black whiskers.