He turned sharply as if to veer across the bows of the second dinghy and escape into a patch of smoky fog.
“Faster!” cried the lantern man. “Don’t let them get away.”
The second dinghy accelerated. Then, when only a few yards separated them, Rix sharpened his turn until his craft was perpendicular to the other. His bow slammed into the enemy dinghy amidships and he dug deep with his oars, using all the strength he had to drive the high bow up over the side of the other dinghy which, with three burly Cythonians aboard, sat low in the water.
The crash threw the rower and the other man off their benches and the lantern man over the side, then the weight of the bow drove the enemy’s gunwale under. Water poured in. Rix kept rowing desperately until, with the front half of his dinghy lying over the other one, it sank.
The rower went with it, leaving his discarded set of oilskins floating on the water. The other man made a desperate leap, caught hold of the bow of Rix’s dinghy and swung himself in. He was going for his sword when Glynnie swung the wooden bucket around her head on its rope. Rix ducked as it passed perilously close to his forehead, then cracked the rower in the face. He fell backwards, dazed. Glynnie took hold of his feet and tipped him over, and Rix ran him down.
“Great bucket work,” he said, admiring her presence of mind.
Glynnie reached over and hauled in the oilskin coat. The trousers had sunk.
The lantern man, still holding his lantern on its pole, slid beneath the water. The lantern fizzed and went out, leaving them in darkness apart from a handful of the brightest stars. The lantern of the third dinghy was just visible through the smoke, a couple of hundred yards off. Rix took up the oars and rowed quietly into the darkness.
Glynnie looked back at the lights of Caulderon, barely visible through fog and smoke. She sniffled. “Do you think he suffered?” she said softly.
“No,” said Rix. “I don’t think Benn suffered at all.”
“I–I know we can’t go back. We don’t even know where to look…”
“But it feels wrong to be leaving him,” said Rix. “As though we’re letting him down.”
“We’ll come back, won’t we?” Her voice was barely audible. “We’ll find out what happened to Benn.”
She had to think that, though Rix knew how faint the hope was. “Yes, we will.”
Glynnie rubbed her eyes, then leaned forwards. “Your wrist needs tending.”
“I’ll put up with it. Let’s put as much distance between the enemy and us as we can. Get your coat on.”
Glynnie took her heavy coat from its waterproof bag and pulled it around herself. “Where’s your pack?”
“Lost it in the fighting.” He donned the oilskin coat, which was wet on the inside and tight across the shoulders, but better than nothing. “Rowing will keep me warm. Get some sleep.”
Glynnie hunched down out of the wind but did not sleep. She was weeping silently; weeping for Benn.
Rix rowed on, shaken by the chymical attack. It meant that Lyf wanted him dead at any cost, and wherever he went, he would be hunted ruthlessly. If they caught him they would kill Glynnie too.
She was all he had left now. At all costs he had to protect her, and there was only one way to do that. He had to find a place for her, as far away from himself as possible.
CHAPTER 13
The chancellor carried out his threat at once. His guards hauled Tali down to his chambers and he called a junior healer, who took blood while he stood beside her. Tali watched it pumping into the bottle and thought that it did not look as red as previously. Had they taken too much? Was the new blood she was making no good?
“Anything?” said the chancellor.
“No. But when it happened before — ”
“You kept it from me. Try harder.”
“I must protest,” said the healer.
“Get out!” said the chancellor.
She went, tight-lipped.
He bent over Tali until his crooked nose touched hers. “If you’d told me when it happened, I might have been able to find this key. But all my spies in Caulderon are dead now. All I have is you, and if I have to break you to get this secret, I will.”
Tali fought down her panic, and her terror of another reliving of her ancestor’s murder, and focused on her memory of the temple — the skull-shaped chamber, the freshly scrubbed stone walls. Suddenly the master pearl began to beat in her head like a pumping heart. Her vision blurred and she was in another time, another place. But it wasn’t the temple, not as it was now.
It was a horribly familiar place, despite it being in darkness, for it reeked of mould and damp, rotting wood and the stench of poisoned, decaying rats. She was looking back in the murder cellar underneath Palace Ricinus, the chamber that had once, in the distant days of old Cythe, been the Cythian kings’ private temple. The place where they had worked their king-magery to heal the land and its people.
But Axil Grandys had violated the temple and, beginning nineteen hundred years later, the lords and ladies of Palace Ricinus had debauched it by committing foul murders there. Four murders. Tali’s closest female ancestors.
A pinpoint of light on the far side of the cellar grew to a candle flame, flickering as it was lit and raised high. But this was not the cellar as Tali knew it, piled high with rotten crates, empty barrels and other discarded things. This cellar was almost empty, the only furnishings being a line of stone bins along the walls and a simple wooden bench in the centre -
Sulien’s heart was beating furiously; the floor was damp under her bare feet. She looked left, looked right. Why had she been led here, so far from home? And why, oh, why hadn’t she listened to Mimoy? Her mother had warned her to trust no one, but the young man had been so handsome and charming and kind, and all her life she had yearned for a little kindness. There was precious little among the Pale slaves, who treated each other more ruthlessly than their slave masters did.
The young man had disappeared the moment she had entered the room. Sulien had called out to him but her voice had echoed so alarmingly in the vast, empty room that she dared not call again. Yet the silence was worse.
Crack!
The sound raised the little hairs on the back of Sulien’s neck, for it was like the sound their masters’ chymical chuck-lashes made when they went off across a slave girl’s bare back. Sulien had not felt one herself, for Mimoy had taught her the rule of survival harshly — obey or suffer.
Her mother was a hard woman but a good teacher, and until today Sulien had not disobeyed any of her lessons. Even now, as a grown woman with a little daughter at home in the Empound, she was afraid of her mother. What had made Mimoy so hard and suspicious? Did it have to do with the terrible scar across the top of her head, which she would never talk about?
Another candle appeared to Sulien’s left, a third to her right. A stocky, well-dressed woman carried one candle, a beanpole of a man another. She could not see who carried the third candle but she could smell him: the pungent odour of a man dehydrated to stringy meat, twanging lengths of taut sinew, and brittle bone. He was the one she was really afraid of.
Sulien revolved on her small feet. What could they want of her? It had to be a mistake — she was just a little slave, of no value to anyone, and surely if she told them so they would let her go.
She smoothed down her sweat-drenched loincloth, raked her fingers through her blonde hair to tidy it, then put on a feeble smile and stepped into the light.