“Your mind is addled; you couldn’t get anywhere near the Engine. Where did you get alkoyl from? Have you been stealing from the stores again?”
“Wil not steal!” cried Wil, staggering towards Lyf and reaching out with his bony arms. “Collected it from Engine’s weepings.”
“Liar! Get out of my sight — no, first bring me the iron book you stole from Palace Ricinus.”
“Book gone, Lord King,” whispered Wil.
The feet of Lyf’s crutches squealed against the stone floor as he twisted around. “What happened to it?” he thundered.
“Melted book down, Lord King. Reforged the pages. Tried to write it again, but it didn’t work!” Wil howled. “Couldn’t make the writing go right.”
Tali looked from Wil to Lyf, whose face was drained of colour. He shot into the air so rapidly that his long boots slipped down, exposing his weakness, the stumps of his legs. “Go!” he thundered.
Wil cried out, tilted the flask up to his nose cavity and tilted it. Alkoyl fumed out, flesh sizzled, he gasped and cringed away down the ramp, weeping piteously.
Now! Tali thought. She slipped the small piece of heatstone out of her pouch and hurled it at Lyf’s stumps. It struck the left-hand stump with a loud crack, then clattered to the floor. Lyf let out a cry of agony and doubled over, clutching his shinbones.
Tali dared not try to get past him; her only choice was to flee down the curving ramp. She did not know where it went, but at least it led away from the heatstone deposit. She bolted down and, after a vertical descent of some fifty feet, entered a vast, open chamber several hundred yards long and wide, carved from the native rock, white marble.
Tali looked back. Lyf wasn’t in sight though she could hear his crutches on the ramp. Where could she hide?
The chamber’s rocky ceiling, more than thirty feet above her, was supported by pillars of carved stone, six feet square at their bases, arranged in intersecting arcs which resembled alchymical symbols. She ran down and took cover behind the nearest pillar. Wil had disappeared.
To her left, stacked against the side wall of the great chamber near the base of the ramp, was a hip-high cube of heatstone bricks. She wasn’t going anywhere near it. The chamber was softly lit by a number of glowstone plates mounted on the ceiling, but there were deep shadows too, plenty of places for her to hide — and for Wil to have hidden.
Where was he? Though he was addled, and seemed pitiful, Tali knew how dangerous he was. She had seen him choke Tinyhead, a big man, to death with those long, callused fingers. She could not see Wil, for the chamber was crowded with large, complicated pieces of equipment the like of which she had never seen before. He could be lurking anywhere.
Ahead were a variety of furnaces, some tall, narrow and made of grey iron, others squat constructions built from small, lime-green firebricks. Flues mounted beneath the ceiling carried the fumes away. She was on the forbidden alchymical level, and this curving ramp must be the way the Cythonians went up and down. Did the walled-off drive emerge somewhere on the other side? If it did not, she would be trapped here.
Tali scurried behind one of the firebrick furnaces and peered back towards the ramp. She could hear Lyf coming, the click of his crutches slow and deliberate. Keeping behind the furnaces, she scurried across towards the centre of the chymical level, to a cluster of distilling apparatuses.
The equipment in the room, she now realised, was arranged in clusters according to purpose — furnaces behind her, stills, alembics and retorts here, and to her right was an array of enormous flasks, their contents seething and bubbling on beds of heatstone bricks. One flask held a yellow fluid, thick as porridge. Another was watery and purple, with scintillas of silver rising and falling as it boiled.
Other clusters contained kinds of equipment she could not identify, although she had heard the names mentioned in her slave days — abluters, sublimaters, crystallisers, elixerators, calciners…
Something clacked behind her and she spun around, thinking that Wil was creeping up on her. Clack-clack. All she could see were a dozen kinds of stills, any of which would suffice to hide the little man.
Three towering stills made of glass reminded her of Lyf’s great glass still that she had seen in his caverns. She crept between them, knife in hand. Nothing to her left; nothing to her right. Clack-clack. The tallest glass still, twenty feet high, hissed steam from a top vent, ssss. Tali stifled a screech.
Steady, steady — you’re jumping at shadows. But Wil was lurking somewhere in these shadows, and he had cause to hate her.
She edged around a pot-bellied still made from sections of riveted copper. Pipes arose from its top, looping and twisting before passing through a water bath and then into glass flasks. Ahead, a small platina still was set in an open space well apart from everything else. Thick stone walls curved around it, though she could not tell whether they were intended to protect the platina still, or the equipment nearby.
Away to her right, some tall pieces of glassy equipment were illuminated by yellow lights so bright that they dazzled her. Tali didn’t know what they were and wasn’t planning to go that way. In here, the light was her enemy.
Then she saw Wil — the wretched creature was down the back of the chamber, creeping up an iron ladder towards a rack of silvery demijohns. He had a furtive air. What was he up to? She looked back but Lyf still wasn’t in sight. Why was he taking so long? Waiting for reinforcements?
Tali crept after Wil. The nearest half of the rear wall, a hundred yards long, was covered in shelves and racks of chymicals stored in glass bottles, jars and demijohns. There were huge flasks full of deadly quick-silver, the liquid metal that was heavier than lead, jars of powders that were coloured viridian, lurid orange, bright yellow, blue, and many that were white or black. Jars full of waxy-looking metals, stored under oil. Flasks that fumed and jugs that smoked. The air had a peculiar metallic tang.
The second half of the rear wall was stacked with crates that bore the rictus symbol of death-lashes. Other stacks were marked with the symbols for grenadoes and pyrotechnic flares. She also recognised barrel-shaped bombasts, and there were stacks of crates that could have had any kind of horror inside.
A faint whistling sound alerted her. Lyf was drifting down the ramp, flying five feet above the floor, his dark eyes darting this way and that. Tali armed herself with a death-lash and took cover behind a stack of barrels. Where was Wil? He had disappeared again. She scurried across the chymical level, darting from one piece of equipment to another, looking for a way out.
Her legs ached, and so did her back; it must be three in the morning, at least. She had been going full bore for many hours, without food or drink.
On the far side she spied another ramp leading up, a straight one this time. It had to be the walled-off drive Holm had tried to break through. She scuttled that way, took cover behind one of the square pillars and looked up the drive. Hammers were pounding on the wall and she could see a number of cracks in it, but the Pale did not look like breaking through.
And even if they did, all they would find down here was Lyf. Tali hastily scanned the tunnel above with her mage glass. The image was clear this time, and perfectly in focus, though she wished it was not.
The tunnel was empty — she saw no sign of friend or foe. But a stream of blood, several feet wide, was creeping along the floor towards her viewpoint. Tali gasped and clutched at her chest, for she had seen that image before somewhere. Where?
It had been in Madam Dibly’s wagon, on the way across the mountains to Rutherin. Tali’s mental image of that moment was so clear that she could still remember how sluggishly the blood had flowed, still smell the faint tang of iron. She could smell it now. Tali sniffed, took her eye from the mage glass and looked around, puzzled.