And then it came, first a series of finger-width trickles seeping through cracks at the base of the wall and flowing down the centre of the drive. But as she watched, the skin on the back of her neck crawling, the trickles strengthened and merged, and slowly widened until flowing blood covered the floor of the drive from wall to wall.
Pale blood, she had no doubt. Gallons and gallons. The slaughter had begun.
She had to take Lyf on right now, or her people were going to be exterminated. She looked around frantically. The alchymical level was a dangerous place; what could she use to attack him? Her pilfered death-lash would not suffice.
Again the bright lights caught her eye. Fifty yards away, green mist was rising from three exotic apparatuses, each a honeycomb of yellow glass with green fluids bubbling through a network of internal conduits. Ten-foot-wide squares of glowing sunstone, suspended above each apparatus, lit it with a brilliant yellow light. Bricks of heatstone were stacked around the bulbous bases, heating the acid-green fluid to a furious boil.
She felt sure that these devices were acidulators, because the green mist looked like the blistering fumes that had burst up through the floor last year. What if she lured Lyf towards the nearest acidulator, then hurled a piece of heatstone and smashed it to bits? It would be a deadly ploy, as liable to kill herself as him, but she could not last much longer. It was time for desperate measures.
She plodded towards the acidulators, keeping out in the open this time so Lyf would see her, and watching him from the corner of an eye. He changed course and raced through the air in her direction.
She hurled her death-lash at him, missed, and scrambled in under the base of the first acidulator, to the stacked bricks of heatstone. Pain sheared through her head, as bad as she had ever felt, and the heat radiating down onto her was blistering. The acids in the acidulator boiled and seethed, right above her head. If the flask burst, or Lyf broke it, her death would be agony beyond description.
She jerked out a heatstone brick, rolled over and scrabbled out the other side of the acidulator as Lyf came hurtling across. He hovered, fifteen feet away. Tali held the brick up.
“Stop, or I’ll use it.”
“Smash the acidulator and it’ll do you far more damage than me.”
She knew it, too; most of it was above her. But trying to kill Lyf wasn’t the answer. His death wouldn’t stop his people from killing the slaves — it would only make their vengeance more furious.
Wait! Could she turn her earlier, bitter moment back on him? Could she make him think that his failure to stop her had put his people at risk? If she could, it would give the Pale a chance.
“Give up,” he said. “There’s no way out, and I can summon my people in an instant.”
“Then why haven’t you?”
He did not reply.
“I can knock some of your people unconscious,” said Tali. “Maybe even all of them.” It was a bluff — she had no idea how far the effects would extend, if it worked at all. There was also a possibility that the burst would strengthen him.
He eyed the brick of heatstone in her hand. “How?”
“The same way as I did in the shaft when I escaped from Cython — when I dropped my sunstone down the shaft and it imploded. It knocked all the Cythonians nearby unconscious — those it didn’t kill outright — yet it had no effect on the Pale.”
“The ones who were knocked unconscious woke within half an hour, unharmed.”
“Half an hour is a long time to be unconscious in the middle of a battle,” Tali said pointedly. “It only takes a slave ten seconds to cut a throat.”
He blanched. “Anyway, heatstone doesn’t have the same effect.”
“But sunstone does,” said Tali.
She hurled her heatstone brick up at the centre of the huge sunstone above the acidulator and ran for her very life, towards a cube-shaped iron furnace ten yards away.
The heatstone burst against the lower side of the sunstone, crump, imploding with a hot flash of light and causing a sharp pain behind her ears. She looked back. The sunstone seemed to be undamaged. No, cracks were radiating out from the centre. Get to shelter, quick!
She dived over the left side of the furnace and threw herself into shelter behind it. From the corner of an eye she saw Lyf streaking away, covering his face. Tali covered hers with her arms, put her head between her knees and -
The sunstone implosion occurred in absolute silence but with a light so bright that she could see it even with her arms over her eyes. The pain was so bad that she screamed. Heat washed over her — a torrid incandescence that would have turned her to char in an instant had she been in its direct path; just as the unfortunate guards in the sunstone shaft had been carbonised that day.
Then it was gone, still in silence. Now a hissing whistle began behind her and rose up the register until it was so banshee-shrill that her teeth began to ache. A dreadful fear struck her as she realised what was happening. Most of that burst of radiant heat had passed directly down onto the acidulator, superheating the acids inside to steam, and when the glass could take no more pressure -
She leapt up and ran. Nothing mattered now save getting as far away as possible, and keeping as much heavy apparatus between her and the acidulator as she could.
She had just passed behind the platina still when the acidulator went off with a shattering blast that hurled glass and fuming green fluids halfway across the chymical level. Green fumes boiled out and up — the same deadly, blistering fumes that had killed dozens of Pale after the accident last year. Tali covered her face with her hands and prepared to die.
CHAPTER 100
Glynnie bent to pick something up, then scuttled around behind the cistern, into the shadows. Grandys reeled up the yard into the darkness as several dozen troops stormed through the gates. Rix assumed they were the men who had marched off to join the chancellor’s army. He lowered himself into the water until they passed, then scrabbled helplessly at the edge.
“Here,” whispered Glynnie, who had crept around the side of the cistern and was sliding one end of her bloodstained length of timber in.
With his failing strength, Rix dragged himself onto it and clung there, panting. It was all he could do.
“Give me your hand,” said Glynnie.
He reached up. She caught his left hand, and with Glynnie pulling and Rix heaving, he reached the rim and toppled off onto the cobblestones.
“So cold.” He wrapped his arms around himself, shuddering violently.
“Wait here,” said Glynnie, looking around. “Won’t be long.” She darted up towards the fire.
“What — you doing?” said Rix. “If he comes back — ’
Neither Grandys nor the other Heroes were anywhere to be seen, though Rix could hear fighting not far away. His teeth chattered.
“Glynnie?” he said hoarsely.
Never before had he felt so afraid. Even in Grandys’ drunken state he was a ferocious enemy. He could well rally his troops and defeat the attackers, and the moment he did he would be back, intent on bloody vengeance against the woman who had struck him down.
Rix crawled across to the dead men, found the heaviest sword and used it to push himself to his feet. A cold wind gusted in through the gates, striking through his wet clothes to the bone, for it was well below freezing now. Without dry gear he would soon collapse. Rix began to strip the biggest of the dead men, though it was slow work one-handed; his good fingers were as numb as the dead ones.
Glynnie came running back, carrying a chunk of roast rump the size of a pumpkin and dragging a sack. She wrenched the coat and pants off the man who had the arrow through his neck, and threw them into the sack.
“Horses, quick!” said Glynnie. “Where are the stables?”