The only hope for him, and that a tiny one, was healing magery, which would definitely be a great healing, if it could be done at all. But the chance of success was tiny, and the risk enormous. Could she justify it?
She looked around at the dying Pale and knew that she could not. If she used her gift on a healing, she would not just be condemning these Pale here, but the others as well — all eighty-five thousand of them.
“I’m sorry, Tobry,” she said. “I can’t choose healing.”
“I never wanted you to,” said Tobry. “Saving your people is the only thing to do.”
That did not make it any easier.
“All right.” Tali looked across at the base of the ramp, where the fighting was again furious. “Holm, what do you want me to do?”
“Can you even the odds a little?”
She studied the lines of pillars arcing across the chymical level. “There are two ways to even the odds — by reducing their numbers, or increasing ours.”
“Yes,” said Holm.
“And I’m thinking that those pillars aren’t far from the entrance to the Empound…”
“How can you be sure?” said Tobry.
“Remember that green mist I mentioned earlier? It burst through into the wax-nut grottoes last year, and they’re around to the left from the Empound. And that acidulator is where the mist came from.” She indicated its shattered ruins.
“Might be an idea to check your map first.”
“I don’t have it.” She had dropped it when Wil attacked. There wasn’t time to go looking for it.
“If I can bring down those pillars,” Tali continued, indicating two beyond the apparatus, “it might crack open the entrance to the Empound and free all the Pale. With luck…”
“Better hurry,” said Tobry, glancing across the bloody battlefield.
“Is your magery strong enough to bring down those columns?” said Holm. “They’re massive.”
“No, it isn’t. I was thinking about heatstone.”
Holm shook his head. “It works all right on cracked rock, but doesn’t do much to the solid stuff.”
“What if we stacked half a dozen bombasts around one of the pillars and set them off?”
“Too powerful,” said Holm. “It’d probably kill everyone here.”
“I don’t know what else to do,” said Tali.
“Better think, fast.”
“I need time,” she snapped. “Create a diversion!”
“I’m not sure…”
“Find a way to distract them from me — and make it big!”
Holm ran across to the nearest melee, then led dozens of Pale to the rear of the chymical level. Shortly a signal rocket soared across the ceiling, struck the wall near the ramp and exploded with a shower of pyrotechnic sparks and clouds of red smoke.
Another followed it, but dipped low and shattered one of the great glass alembics to pieces. It must have been a rocket flare for it burned with a dazzling blue-white light. A brown, fizzing liquid began to creep from the alembic, across the floor.
In the far corner, a bombast went off with a shattering roar, hurling pieces of rock and metal for fifty yards. A furnace toppled, scattering glowing coals everywhere and adding its white smoke to the thickening air. A swarm of shriek-arrows screamed across towards the ramp, followed by the brilliant red sparks of a dozen fire-flitters.
Now that’s a distraction, Tali thought. How could she help the Pale, though?
It occurred to Tali that, when she’d whacked Lyf’s wrythen with the iron book in his caverns, months ago, those few droplets of diluted alkoyl had hurt him badly. Could she attack Lyf with alkoyl? Wil had carried a flask of the stuff, though he had probably taken it with him, wherever he had gone. If he had gone. No, she dared not let Lyf get close enough to toss alkoyl at him. But it reminded her of something else…
Lucky none landed on the little heatstone, Errek had once said. Why not? What was alkoyl, anyway? She knew that it was obtained from somewhere way down the Hellish Conduit, but where did it come from? Could it truly come from the Engine’s weepings, as Wil had said?
It fostered an alarming chain of thought. Cythonians believed that the Engine was a destructive force, forever trying to tear the land apart with great eruptions, earthquakes and other catastrophes. The king-magery that Errek had invented ten thousand years ago was a healing force and, as long as the two were in balance, all was well.
The balance between healing and destruction had been maintained for eight thousand years, until Grandys had killed Lyf in an attempt to seize king-magery for himself. Instead, king-magery had been lost and the land had not been healed in the two thousand years since.
Now the balance was rapidly tipping towards destruction, the eruptions and quakes were increasing, and Errek had said it was almost at the point where it could not be stopped. Where a cataclysm could destroy the land itself.
Alkoyl, alkoyl? It wept from the destructive Engine, while king-magery was somehow locked up in heatstone. Could alkoyl be the antithesis to heatstone, just as king-magery was the healing force that balanced the chaos of the Engine? And if so, what would happen if alkoyl and heatstone were combined? Was that what Errek had been talking about?
Alkoyl was stored on this level, she knew. It had been mentioned during her escape from Cython, when the young woman’s leg had been eaten right through -
“She were up on the third elixerater,” the foreman had said, “toppin’ up the alkoyl level, but someone had taken the dribbler out. The whole flask poured in. Blew the elixerator to pieces, and a whole flask of precious alkoyl lost — ”
The someone who had done it surely had to be Wil, who knew where the alkoyl stocks were held; she had seen him sniffing it even before her escape from Cython. Was that what he had been up to when she’d glimpsed him earlier? Had he been looking for alkoyl on the store’s racks?
Tali had no idea what combining alkoyl and heatstone would do, but she had no other options. The enemy were still coming down the ramp and if she didn’t do something fast, the rebellion would end here.
Another rocket shot across the ceiling, then two more, each exploding in brilliant blue-white flares. A second bombast went off, followed by a long line of white fire that snaked a quarter of the way across the chymical level. Someone must have laid out a barrier of the red powder called thermitto, which burned so hot that it could cut straight through solid stone. Cythonian miners used it to cut and shape rock.
There was fighting everywhere now, furnaces and stills being toppled, retorts exploding in showers of glass, battles raging back and forth through the wreckage, though how they could see to fight Tali did not know. The smoke was thickening; in some places the visibility was only a few yards, and before long the fumes must bring everyone down.
She heard coughing behind her. Tali whirled. Lyf was hovering only ten yards away. She jumped.
“It’s time,” he said.
She bolted into the smoke, turned right around the smashed acidulator then left past a badly burned cluster of bodies. Lyf was not far behind, appearing and disappearing through the smoke. She ducked down, ran the other way and scuttled through the wreckage towards the shelves Wil had been climbing, taking advantage of every bit of cover she could. Lyf zoomed overhead; she froze under the overhang of what she assumed to be an elixerator until he disappeared in the smoke.
As she reached the rear of the chymical level she saw Wil again. He must have been lurking here all this time.
“Got to write ending,” he howled. “Engine going to end everything.”
He was staggering across the floor, dragging a platina demijohn behind him. He passed through the smoking crevice in the end wall and headed downwards.