Good riddance! She darted along the wall until she reached the shelves that held the alkoyl stores. The platina flasks were high up; she could see six of them. The walls and the shelves were badly corroded, the stone and metal partly eaten away. It was deadly stuff, and she shivered at the thought of what she was planning to do with it.
Tali dared not climb the shelves the way Wil had earlier — since Lyf was flying up near the ceiling, he was bound to spot her. What if she used magery to levitate a flask down? That would be perilous too; if she dropped it and alkoyl spilled on her, even a single drop, it would eat right through her.
Would levitating a flask of alkoyl constitute a great destruction? She did not think so — but what she was planning to do with it might. She focused her magery on the central flask. Rise. It rose too quickly, and so did the one on its right. They were empty.
The third one was considerably heavier — so heavy that it wobbled as she levitated it and Tali felt a moment of panic that it was going to fall. It couldn’t break, being platina, but if the cap came off…
She managed to steady it and brought it down to the floor. Tali eyed the flask. A wisp of vapour was oozing out around the cap and she did not want to go anywhere near it, but everyone else here was putting their lives at risk and she could do no less.
“Charge!” an officer yelled in the guttural Cythonian accent. “Cut them down!”
The chymical level echoed to the sounds of hundreds of booted feet. She looked around but could see nothing through the smoke and wreckage save glows and flashes all over the place. Then she heard the distinctive thump of the seven fan levers being thrown, and the great box fans began to tick.
“Driving us into a corner!” yelled Holm. “If there’s anything you can do, do it now!”
She picked up the flask by its handle and headed across to where the spare heatstone blocks were stacked in that hip-high cube against the wall, not far from the bottom of the ramp where the battle had begun. If alkoyl set the heatstone off, it could knock most of the enemy down, perhaps block the ramp, and give the Pale the advantage. The cube wasn’t in the perfect place for that — it was a bit far away from the ramp — but she had to work with what she had.
The air thinned a little and she saw that there was still fighting at the ramp. She could go no further. She ducked beneath the overhang of a toppled furnace, took a deep breath, wrapped her hands in a piece of rag torn from the bottom of her shirt and twisted the cap off the flask.
The rag began to smoke; her fingers and palms were blistering. She wiped them on the floor. It began to smoke as well. She scrubbed her fingers against the stone. All right. She had to do it now.
She began to levitate the flask across the alchymical level. Did such magery constitute a great destruction? Not yet. Twenty yards to go. Ten.
“Don’t do it!” Lyf roared, and she saw him streaking towards the flask. “Everyone, get to shelter!”
Tali felt a twinge of alarm, but she had no choice; nothing else could help the Pale now. She tightened the grip of her magery on the flask. Five yards; three; one. The flask was above the cube of heatstone blocks when Lyf caught hold of it and tried to heave it away. She held it with all the strength of her magery; she had been saving it for this moment. But her strength wasn’t equal to his. He was dragging the flask out of her grasp.
She forced on the base and tried to tip the flask upside-down. He jerked it out of her grip. She thrust hard and the flask tipped sideways.
Tali was too far away to see what happened, but she envisaged it clearly in her mind’s eye. A single thick drop of alkoyl, glowing a faintly luminous green, quivered on the lip of the flask, then fell.
Lyf turned in mid-air and fled, still holding the flask. A stream of alkoyl poured from it, unheeded, onto the floor, which began to fizz and fume.
“Up the ramp!” he said in a magnified voice that echoed back and forth across the ruined chymical level.
The disciplined Cythonian troops disengaged from the fighting and obeyed instantly. Tali scrambled behind a column and covered her face with her hands.
Nothing happened. A minute passed. She could hear her heart thumping, but nothing else save the Cythonians pounding up the ramp and the soft-footed Pale pattering the other way.
She was about to peer around the side of the column when she remembered what had happened to Holm. Tali tightened her fists and counted down another minute. As she said fifty-four, something went zipppp from the direction of the cube of heatstone. There came a monumental flash of green light, which darkened to blue then violet.
She went blind for a few seconds. Her whole body began shuddering violently and she could not stop it. Her head was so heavy that she could not hold it up. Then the whole world seemed to implode, and a green flash, the echo of the first, speared through her head. She felt pain such as she had never felt before, as if something inside her head was collapsing into a mote and dragging everything surrounding it, including the bones of her skull, into the centre, to annihilation.
The pain vanished and she could see and hear again. Behind her, rock was shrieking and crashing and grinding as it was torn apart, but, oddly, there weren’t any pieces falling around her. There was no dust, either, though she could feel the air rushing past towards the cube of heatstone, faster and faster. She wasn’t game to move, or even open her eyes, but Tali dared a quick check with her gift.
And gasped. The cube of heatstone was gone, and so was the floor beneath it and the wall immediately behind it — it had been annihilated. The wall rock was shattering to small pieces, which were drawn down so fast that they made streaks, into the incandescent spot where the cube had been, then vanishing. The dust and smoke were hurtling into it too, and every object on the floor nearby, including the many dead and dying.
A great bite had been taken out of the enemy ranks — all those who had passed within thirty yards of the cube as they raced for the ramp had vanished. But that wasn’t all. Not nearly.
The incandescence faded, revealing a large hole in the floor. The hole in the wall behind it, and in the rocky ceiling above, were widening — the ceiling hole was already twenty yards across and growing rapidly as the unsupported rock crumbled and fell into oblivion. Thirty yards, fifty, eighty, a hundred and fifty, three hundred — was it going to suck all Cython down there?
Then it stopped.
Tali opened her eyes. She was trembling all over and her fingers and palms were still stinging. She rubbed them on the floor; several layers of blistered skin sloughed off. She rose slowly and looked around the other side of the pillar.
Lyf was nowhere to be seen. There was no dust in the air. No smoke. Nothing save a blue-green, shimmering rainbow arching above the hole in the floor, now slowly fading.
The annihilation hole formed a perfect oval five or six yards across, though behind it the wall rock had been eaten away for three or four times that distance, and it had led to the collapse of an enormous area above. Near the left-hand corner of the rear wall, the crevice down which Wil had passed was blackened and smoking.
Lyf came hurtling across from the far side. She expected him to turn on her, and if he had she could not have defended herself, but he raced past and up the curving ramp. At the top he scanned the collapsed area and his face hardened. He looked down at Tali.
“You’ve made your choice. Destruction. It can never be unmade.”
CHAPTER 103
Axil Grandys thrust aside the naked brunette he had been groping for the past hour, put the spy-scope to his eye and touched the wire-bound hilt of Maloch with his free hand. The trace slid into view, showing Rix and Glynnie together. Sooner or later they would lead him to Tali and, when he took the three of them, his revenge would be such a horror that people would still be talking about it in a thousand years.