Rebellion

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.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m Sulien and I’m lost. Can you tell me the way back to the Pales’ Empound?”

The desiccated man stopped, staring at her, then rubbed his forearms. Flakes of dry skin whirled up through the light of his candle. He swallowed; he seemed nervous. And so was the beanpole on her right. He did not want to be there. The stocky woman was the one driving them. Sulien turned to her and stretched out a hand. Surely, as one woman to another -

“How dare you approach me!” raged the stocky woman, “Filthy Pale swine. Take her and hold her down.”

Only now did Sulien understand how naive she had been, how foolish to trust the handsome young man, but it was too late. She tried to run but the tall man darted and caught her with arms almost the length of her own body. He held her tightly, then stood there as if he didn’t know what to do with her.

The woman was another matter. She struck Sulien in the belly so hard that it drove all the wind out of her. She slumped in the man’s arms while he carried her to the bench and laid her on it.

“You paid a fortune for the little bitch, Deroe,” the woman said to the desiccated man. “Come and take it.”

Deroe’s mouth worked and his shoulders heaved, as though he was going to be sick, but he got out his bone gouging tools and moved slowly towards Sulien -

With a convulsion of horror, Tali separated from her great-great-grandmother and tried to block out the vision, the nightmare. But she could not; it only made things worse. At the same time that Tali was herself observing the sickening violence being done to her great-great-grandmother, she was also Sulien -

Trapped.

Helpless.

Watching the hideous tools approach the top of her head.

The victim having no idea what her captors’ intentions were until the toothed tube ground into the top of her skull. Her great-great-granddaughter knowing all too well what was going to happen and being utterly powerless to stop it, for it had happened almost a hundred years ago.

Sulien screaming and writhing until, suddenly, the cord between the present and the past snapped, taking her with it.

Tali was sitting upright, gasping. Her fists were clenched so tightly that she could not open them, and the pain in the top of her head went on and on, as if that ebony pearl — the very first — had been gouged out of her.

The nightmare was so much worse because she had seen the same thing happen to her mother. And because two weeks ago it had almost been repeated on herself.

“Well?” said the chancellor.

She couldn’t tell him what she’d seen. If he knew that another of her ancestors had been killed for a pearl, he would realise she bore the master pearl. But she had to tell him something. “I just relived my mother’s murder.” Her heart was still racing. “I can’t look again!”

“Not today, at any rate,” said the chancellor, ominously.

The guards took her back to her cell. Half of them had occupants now. On Tali’s right was a black-clad, sour-faced fellow who wore a perpetual scowl when he looked at her; she called him the Sullen Man. Evidently he knew her reputation as a traitor.

On the other side was an astonishingly pretty young woman whose mass of shining black curls hung halfway down her back. She had been imprisoned for some unspecified theft or fraud. Her name was Lizue and she seemed remarkably cheerful about her plight, evidently thinking that she would soon be released. Given her charm and physical assets, Tali did not doubt it.

Lizue and Rannilt were already chattering through the wall though, presumably because of Tali’s reputation, Lizue did not speak to her.

Tali lay on her bed, still shaken by the reliving. She tried to ignore the smouldering gaze of the Sullen Man, then realised that his eyes were fixed on Lizue who, as far as Tali could tell, had never once glanced his way.

Built into a niche in the far wall of the corridor outside Tali’s cell was a ten-foot-high water clock, a beautiful device made of brass, with three pink and gold dials, one for the hours, one for the days and one for the months. It was incredibly ancient, and must have been of great value, for an attendant appeared each morning to rub it down and polish its rock crystal dial covers.

Tali wondered what it was doing down here. It seemed out of place next to the cells, until she remembered that this level had once been a grand, ornate chamber. It had been divided up into cells at a later date. The water clock kept stopping, however, and, not long after she was returned to the cell, a man called Kroni was sent to fix it.

He was an oldish fellow, lean and middling tall, with sparse grey hair and a short grey beard. His face and hands were weathered the colour of cedar wood, and his fingers were crisscrossed with pale scars. He spent hours taking parts out of the clock and putting them back, to no avail. He’s not a clock mechanic, Tali thought. And I’ll bet his name isn’t Kroni, either — that’s too obvious a reference to time. The chancellor must have sent him down to spy on me.

Well, he wasn’t going to see anything, and she could not put off talking to Rannilt any longer. She was drawing on the wall with a piece of white stone.

“Child?” Tali said, “I need to talk to you.”

Rannilt was so absorbed in her drawing that she did not look up for some time. “Yes, Grizel?”

Mutely, Tali held out her bitten and scabbed wrist.

“What happened?” said Rannilt. “Does it hurt? Let me heal it.”

“No!” Tali said sharply.

Rannilt’s lower lip trembled.

“Your healing gift is gone, child.”

“No, it’s not!” Rannilt wailed.

“Yes, it is. Madam Dibly told me. Lyf must have stolen it.”

“He didn’t! He didn’t! He didn’t!” Rannilt wept.

“Anyway,” said Tali, discontinuing the fruitless argument, “You did this to me and it can’t ever — ”

“Don’t say that!” Rannilt howled. “It’s not true. You saved my life. I’d never hurt you. Never, ever, ever!”

Tali tried again. “Look, I do understand, but — ”

“No, no, no! Why are you bein’ so horrible?”

Rannilt collapsed on her bunk, weeping so piteously that Tali said no more.

The child had another nightmare that night, though the first Tali knew of it was when Rannilt’s teeth sank into her wrist. She tried to push Rannilt away but she scrambled onto Tali’s chest, pressing her down with two bony knees and holding her wrist with both hands while she lapped at her blood with quiet, clinging desperation. Tali whacked at her feebly, then Rannilt toppled off onto her own bunk and was instantly asleep.

Tali did not think she would ever dare sleep again. Her wrist was aching, the top of her head throbbing and the pearl was again beating like a frantic heart. For a few horrified seconds she thought the loss of blood was going to drive her into reliving Sulien’s murder again.

The feeling passed but the terror did not. What if Lyf was trying to get at her through Rannilt?

Tali sat up all the following night, determined to repulse Rannilt when next she came to her veins, but the girl had no nightmares and slept soundly all night. Tali snatched what sleep she could during the day after that. She felt sure she was safe in daytime. Safe from her, at least, but not from the chancellor. What would he do next time? She could not face that nightmare again.

“You’re looking mighty well today, Rannilt,” said Kroni, the clock attendant, who had his hands in the bowels of the clock mechanism again. “It must be good to be back with your old friend, Grizel.”

“No, it’s the diet,” Tali said sourly.

The old man glanced at her. “Doesn’t seem to be doing you any good.”

“Every bloodsucker in the fortress is using me. Most of all, the chancellor.”

“I’m sure he’s doing his best for Hightspall,” said Kroni.

“There is no Hightspall!” she snapped. “The enemy is tearing down the best of it and a hundred vultures are making civil war over the rest.”

“How would you know that,” he said in a steely voice, “when you’re confined to your cell with no visitors?”

“Just a guess.” Tali turned away, her heart beating erratically. She knew because the chancellor had confided in her. Why, why had she blurted it out to his spy?

She lay on her bunk and closed her eyes. Kroni was right about Rannilt, though. Every day she looked stronger; less scrawny and waif-like. The scars on her arms and legs, where the other slave girls had tormented her, were fading and her formerly sallow skin had developed a golden bloom. Healing blood indeed.

And of all the people who had taken her blood, Rannilt was the one Tali did not begrudge. She would have given it to her willingly.

She could not but resent the way it was taken, however.