Ian Irvine - Vengeance

Tali’s hair stood up. Over the years she had seen many slaves injured by rock falls, accidents and cruel Cythonian punishments, but she had never heard such an awful cry. She slipped Poon into her pocket and backed away. The passage was broad here and there was nowhere to hide, though behind the effluxor sump she noted a recess in the left-hand wall. She squeezed into it and crouched in the shadows.

A vibration in her pocket was Poon nibbling at the poulter leg, but Tali didn’t begrudge her. The least she could do was to set her free with a full belly.

The screaming grew louder and shortly a group of hurrying figures appeared, all Cythonian: a tall man and a stocky one carrying someone on a stretcher, a bald man wearing a foreman’s sash and a thin, elderly fellow in the red gown of a master chymister. He was dreadfully scarred about the face, hands and arms, and carried a platina bucket. A heavy, green, slightly luminous fluid, dripping from the stretcher, smoked where it touched the stone floor. A drop fell on a clump of straw, which caught fire and burnt with a bright red flame.

From the other direction, a white-haired female healer, bearing the annular cheek tattoos of a master, came hurtling past Tali’s hiding place, robes flapping.

‘What happened?’ she panted. ‘Put her down.’

The bearers set the stretcher down in the light of a glowing fungi plate, thirty yards from Tali. The injured woman shrieked and writhed.

‘Hold her,’ yelled the healer, ‘or she’ll tear that leg right off.’

The bearers held the young woman down. The scarred chymister glanced at her leg and gagged. Tali rose to her feet, staring in awful fascination at the melon-sized hole in the woman’s thigh and the sickening brown fumes rising from it. Poon came creeping out of the pocket and poked her head above the waistband of the loincloth. Tali stroked her silky fur.

‘What took you so long?’ said the healer.

The foreman stared at the floor before him, wringing his meaty hands. ‘Took the miners all afternoon to dig ’er out.’

‘I don’t understand how this happened,’ the healer said furiously. ‘Alkoyl must be contained in capped platina ware at all times, yet it’s dripped all over her leg. Don’t you bother to follow the procedures?’

Tali had never heard the word alkoyl before, though everything done below was a secret.

‘We follow ’em to the letter.’ The foreman looked as though he wanted to sink through the floor. ‘Had urgent orders from the matriarchs, yesterday morning. All us foremen did — abluters, crystallisers, sublimaters, the lot! And down on the smything level, too.’

‘Matriarchs’ orders?’ the healer said sharply. ‘What orders?’

‘Get everything ready by month’s end, and no excuses.’

That’s only eleven days away, thought Tali. What are they up to?

‘Why wasn’t I informed?’ the healer said coldly.

‘I don’t know, Master Healer.’

‘Go on.’

The foreman glanced at the woman on the stretcher and his face crumpled. ‘We were workin’ double time. It had to be done at any cost .’

‘So you cut corners.’

‘Never! I check the alkoyl store every time we use it. You don’t muck around with that stuff. Twice I checked, last night. The dribblers were in and all the caps were double-tight.’

‘So what happened?’ said the healer, tapping one foot.

The white-faced foreman looked down at the victim. ‘She were up on the third elixerator, toppin’ up the alkoyl level, but someone had taken the dribbler out. The whole flask poured in.’ He groaned. ‘Blew the elixerator to pieces, and a whole flask of precious alkoyl lost — ’

‘And a woman dying in agony,’ the healer said caustically.

‘My little sister, Flix,’ said the foreman, burying his face in his hands and weeping so violently that his whole body heaved.

‘How could this happen? You must have made a mistake.’

The master chymister, shaking his head, drew the healer away from the others. ‘It’s not the first time a flask has been interfered with,’ he said quietly, ‘or a dribbler removed. Someone’s been stealing alkoyl for ages.’

‘But … that’s preposterous,’ said the healer. ‘No Pale is allowed down — ’

‘It’s not a Pale. It’s one of us, and we can never catch him.’

The healer goggled at him, then returned to the woman, who let out a chilling scream and fell silent. The healer, her face blanched, gingerly lifted away the severed, fuming leg and put it down against the wall. Poon squeaked and hid.

‘I’m sorry, Hyme,’ the healer said to the foreman, ‘there’s nothing anyone can do. Alkoyl is dissolving her flesh and bones, and it can’t be neutralised.’ She turned to the thin man dressed in red. ‘Master Chymister, you’d better fetch your stilling apparatus. You’ll want to recover as much as you can.’

‘Won’t be enough,’ he croaked, as if his throat was as scarred as his face. ‘And we can’t do without it. I’ll have to send down the Hellish Conduit for more, if I can get anyone to go.’ He shuddered. ‘After last time — ’

‘If no one else can take that path, you must do your duty,’ the healer said coldly.

‘I always do my duty. And look what it’s done to me.’

Once the chymister had headed back the way he had come, the healer gestured to the stretcher bearers. They picked up their burden and the grim cavalcade passed by Tali, out of sight. As it did, she smelled blood and seared flesh, and under that, very faint, an unnaturally sweet, oily odour with a hint of bitterness. A vaguely familiar odour. Where had she smelled it before?

She went towards the severed leg, which was still smoking against the wall. The green fluid had already eaten pits in the stone, each the depth of a knuckle, and the odour was strong enough to sting her nose from yards away.

Wil’s nose was eaten away on the inside. Could he be the thief? He had been sniffing something from a platina tube, she recalled. Tali backed away. Whatever it was, and whatever urgent chymical purpose the enemy needed it for, she wanted to know no more about it.

The incident had cost her another twenty precious minutes. Tinyhead could not be far behind. Her options were closing off one by one and all she could do was run.

She lifted Poon out, kissed her head and set her down beside the effluxor. ‘Off you go, little Poon. You’ll be a lot safer on your own.’

Poon looked up at Tali reproachfully then, when she gently urged her away, took off towards the darkened hole in the wall. She was outside it when a ginger cat sprang from the rubble and pounced.

Poon squeaked once, then went limp. The cat carried her away, grinning.

As Tali fled, so shocked she was unable to weep, she could not but see the parallel with her own fragile existence.

Tobry walked through solid rock and vanished.

‘Tobe?’ said Rix, unnerved.

‘Maybe the caitsthe’s hurt worse than we thought,’ Tobry said from inside.

‘More likely it’s putting on an act to lure us in.’

It wasn’t the caitsthe he was most afraid of, though. It was the illusion — or the wizardry behind it. Who had made it, and what was it protecting?

Tobry came out again. ‘And maybe it’s circled back to kill the horses and strand us here.’ He chuckled. ‘We’re a dismal pair, aren’t we?’

Rix grimaced. At times his friend’s relentless nihilism grew irksome, yet he could not have done without him. Damn it, he thought, I’m going through. Taking his sword in hand, he walked into the illusion.

It parted around the blade like a twinkling curtain and he found himself in a broad, lens-shaped cave that, oddly, was far colder than it had been outside. Even odder, he could see the vine thicket and the forest beyond — the illusion only worked one way. The floor had been swept so clean by the incessant wind that the single fist-sized stain was a bloody signpost pointing into the dark.