Rix did so, and wished he hadn’t. It seared up his nose, leaving him breathless and his eyes watering, then burnt all the way down. And it stank.
‘What the hell’s in it? Smells like stink-damp.’
‘Sulphur water plus various volatiles and mercapts.’ Tobry clapped Rix’s cheeks, grinning. ‘Rosy! It’s already doing you good.’
The nightmare was fading, though not the fear behind it. ‘They’re getting worse. I’ve got to get away, Tobe, I can’t take any more.’
‘Any more what?’
Rix told him about the ice leviathan. He did not mention the crackly voice like breaking ice, for he never remembered what it had said after he woke, but thought of the night after tomorrow made him feel so rotten that he wanted to run and never come back. ‘My nightmares are full of blood and butchery, and the fall of our house.’
‘After what happened to my family, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone,’ said Tobry.
‘The other night I dreamed someone was rubbing blood into my wounds. That’s got to be an omen, hasn’t it?’
‘Dreams don’t mean anything. Have a drink and go to sleep.’ Yawning, Tobry looked towards his bedchamber.
Rix felt the tension ease, the horrors fade. Nothing shocked Tobry, nor could anything faze him and, though he took few things seriously, he was as solid as the foundations of Palace Ricinus.
‘It seemed so real. Could Cython be building an ice leviathan to attack us?’
‘They’d hardly use something that’d melt when the sun came out.’
‘And I keep having these feelings …’
‘Of impending doom?’ said Tobry helpfully.
‘As if the world is about to collapse around me.’ Rix glanced around the magnificent bedchamber, the walls of which were lined with yellow painted silk. The steepled cedar ceiling was inlaid with ivory and ebony, and touched with gilt. ‘Me, of all people. I mean …’
‘Unlike me,’ said Tobry with a wry grin, ‘you’re tall, handsome and heir to the biggest fortune in Hightspall. You turn twenty in a few weeks, and then you can spend as if there’s no — ’ He broke off. ‘Sorry.’
‘No tomorrow,’ Rix intoned darkly. ‘You might as well say it.’
‘Stop fretting over nothing. You may be a conservative, dim-witted, irresponsible layabout — ’ Tobry laughed. ‘In fact, you are.’
‘Thanks!’
‘But again, unlike me, you’ve never done anything truly bad. Or have you?’
‘Not that I know of,’ Rix muttered. So why did he feel so festering inside, as though Hightspall’s troubles ran right down the aeons to him?
‘Don’t take everything so seriously,’ said Tobry. ‘What can you possibly have to worry about?’
‘Apart from Father? And Mother’s crazy plan?’
‘I’m sure she’s thought it through,’ Tobry said carefully. ‘Lady Ricinus — ’
‘Oh yes. Mother calculates everything to a nicety.’ Rix bit the tip of his tongue at the disloyalty. ‘Forget I said that. I know she has our best interests at heart.’
‘She thinks of nothing save how to raise House Ricinus higher,’ said Tobry ambiguously. ‘And with plague and grandgaw bringing down the ancient families wholesale, there’s never been a finer time to better one’s own.’
‘House Ricinus hasn’t been touched by plague or pox in a hundred years,’ said Rix.
‘Something else to be thankful for.’ Tobry went across to the heatstone and put his back to it. ‘Why don’t you try a new painting? That’s cheered you up before.’
Rix was a gifted artist, the best of the new generation, the chancellor said, but now he felt goose pimples rising on his arms. ‘One or two of my paintings have been divinations. I’m afraid …’
‘That what you paint might come true?’
‘Or I might paint something I don’t want to see.’ Rix’s art was everything to him. It was truth in a land of lies, an island of beauty in a corrupt, ugly world, and the one thing that House Ricinus’s wealth had not bought.
He picked up a glass sphere from the bedside table and rotated it in his hands. Inside, a master craftsman had built a perfect model of Palace Ricinus in silver and gold — all eighty-eight towers, every dome and turret and buttress, even the fountains, pools and gardens. The chief magian himself had enchanted the sphere so it would mimic the weather outside, but lately it had only shown one season — wind-blasted winter.
‘Don’t drop it, whatever you do,’ said Tobry.
Rix had never liked it, priceless and perfect though it was, for magery unnerved him. He considered hurling the miniature into the fireplace. ‘Why not?’
‘Considering your nightmare, it would be a bad omen.’
Rix set the model back where it had come from, moodily watching the driving snow plastering the walls of the tiny palace, then sprang out of bed. He swung on a red and gold kilt and went down the hall to his salon, a six-sided chamber with a tented ceiling, dimly lit by an enormous heatstone. He looked at it askance, afraid of what he would see, for there was a wrongness about it, something brooding and baleful. But the heat-stone displayed only its normal enigmatic shimmer.
‘I could understand it if you were having the nightmares,’ said Rix over his shoulder.
He turned on the stopcock and caught a whiff of stink-damp. Using a flint snapper on a long pole, he ignited the gaslights in a series of small explosions and the rotten-egg stench was replaced by the cleansing odour of burnt sulphur.
‘Because I’m a gentleman fallen so low I have to live on my wits?’
‘You’re not a gentleman.’
‘No, I’m the Lord of Nothing,’ Tobry said drily, ‘family disgraced, ancestral manor burnt down, lands confiscated to pay our debts and not a penny to my name.’ He brushed away an imaginary tear. ‘Forced to rely on the charity of my friends, and sleep in their hard beds — ’
‘With soft women,’ retorted Rix, managing a smile. ‘My women.’
‘Someone has to keep the poor girls warm after they flee from your bed.’
The smile vanished; Rix wasn’t feeling that good humoured. ‘Make yourself useful and ring the bell. I’m starving.’
Tobry did so and, despite the hour, a manservant appeared at the outer door within seconds. Night or day, when the family rang, the servants jumped, or else. At the end of each month Lady Ricinus rated all the palace servants, and those in the lowest tithe were flogged as a lesson to all.
‘Food and drink, please, Choom,’ said Tobry. ‘Something traditional, I think.’
‘At once,’ said Choom, who was so old and thin that his joints creaked as he walked. He lowered his voice. ‘I heard a cry. Is the young master — ’
‘I’m afraid so.’
Rix scowled and stalked into his dressing room. Shortly Tobry joined him, wearing his own kilt, black shot with threads of scarlet and gold.
‘May I?’ Tobry said, indicating the racks of garments.
Despite their long friendship, he never presumed, and Rix appreciated that. He waved a hand. Tobry went down the other end of the rack, where Rix kept clothes in his indigent friend’s size. Rix selected a cream shirt, plain save for puffed-out shoulders and a diagonal sash of white lace across the front.
He climbed the stairs to his white studio, which encircled the core of his personal tower like a doughnut, and leaned on a malachite windowsill, looking down across the lawn to the shores of Lake Fumerous, the sapphire glory of Hightspall. The nightmare had been so real that he half expected to see the leviathan approaching, but the palace gardens, lit by a thousand hazy gaslights, were empty save for a gang of navvies in a trench, packing another layer of asbestos around the main hot water tubule.
‘Waste of time,’ said Tobry from behind. ‘The heat’s gone and it’s never coming back.’
Caulderon had been built on a geyser field and for two thousand years a network of tubules had carried hot groundwater around the city, but a century ago it had started to cool. Now, no amount of lagging could retain what little heat was left.