Vengeance

CHAPTER 95

The butcher was right, Rix thought in the blackest part of that night. The taint on my house is so foul that only annihilation can cleanse the ground it stands on.

It was eating at him like a cancer. All the world despised him for being Ricinus, for betraying his own parents, and most of all for not dying with them. Why had the chancellor allowed him to live? To punish him even more?

The cherry wood month-clock said two in the morning. Despite the constant shaking and quaking, everyone else was asleep. Rix longed for that oblivion but sleep was a lifetime away. He rose quietly, pulled a cloak around him and went up to his frigid studio. The mess he’d made in his drunkenness had been cleaned away but all else lay as it had when he’d completed the cellar painting that had ruined his life.

Snow was falling thickly now, concealing the lights in the chancellor’s palace next door and even the eruptions, though their glare turned the night into ruddy twilight and the fat snowflakes to crystals the colour of engorged leeches.

Where was the cellar painting now? Probably taken by the chancellor. In its own way it was as much a masterpiece as the portrait, and he was a connoisseur of twisted arts. Rix lay on the settee, cloak wrapped around himself, and closed his eyes.

Ice creaked and cracked around him. A moving mountain was pulverising everything in its path as it ground towards the palace walls …

Tomorrow you will take her down. You will cut it out and bring it to me.

He woke so violently that he hurled himself off the settee. The voice was Lyf’s, and as Rix hit the floor he remembered his earlier promise to Tobry, and how he had failed to keep it. In the final cellar painting Rix had meant to take control of the divination about Tali, but he had been so drunk that he had allowed the divination to control him. Had his folly doomed her too?

He stood up, pressing his palms against the nearest window and peering out into the volcanic glare. Could Lyf drive him to commit an even worse betrayal — the murder of a friend?

No! The evil must be scourged from the flesh, the cancer burnt away. Lord and Lady Ricinus’s quick deaths could never make up for a hundred years of House Ricinus’s infamy, but the debt had to be paid and Rix was the only Ricinus left.

As he reached that resolution, calm settled over him. When the enemy reappeared he would ride out to battle against them and give his life away. It could never be full atonement, but it would end the threat to Tali and thwart her enemy, and deliver him to the peace he so craved.

It was enough. He slept at last.

Day dawned, almost as black as the night. The floor was shaking constantly now and a crack had appeared over the lintel of the entrance door.

‘The eruptions seem to be building to a climax,’ said Tobry.

As Rix joined him at the window, sparks jumped from his fingers. The sky was black as mud and gritty volcanic ash rained down. The malachite windowsills were inches deep in it; it covered the palace grounds like dark snow.

‘Can that be ice riming the shore of the lake?’ said Rix.

‘I’d say so.’

The lake was warmed by the same subterranean fires as had created the Seethings and Rix had never seen ice on it before, though it had cooled in recent years. He thrust open a window. It was achingly cold outside and the air tasted of burnt rock.

A yellow glow appeared under the trees down to the left, then drifted across the grounds, several yards up — a fiery sphere no bigger than a pumpkin. The air crackled; the globe jagged towards a majestic tree Rix had often climbed as a child, zipppp, and the trunk exploded like a firework. The ash rain fell, heavier than before.

‘What manner of vile weapon is that?’ said Rix, grieving for his childhood tree even though he had renounced all worldly things.

‘Nature’s own,’ said Tobry. ‘Ball lightning.’

Tali limped up, little and barefoot and rubbing her eyes, to stare out the window. ‘The land wants rid of us.’

‘And we’re running,’ said Tobry, ‘as fast as we can, on everything that will float.’

The circular harbour away to the right was jammed with hundreds of boats, all making for the entrance. The shoreline was a similar scene: fishing boats, yachts, merchant’s barges, canoes, even hastily built rafts were loaded with goods and heaved into the sullen waters.

‘How many do you think will reach the other side, and safety?’ said Rix softly. He might be doomed but he still cared about his people.

‘Not many,’ said Tobry. ‘Though the risk is less than staying here. I’m duck ing out for a minute. We have to know what’s going on.’ He went down.

Tali moved closer to Rix, shivering. He put an arm around her shoulders and they stood together, watching the uncanny storms out over the lake, storms that began from dark clouds only hundreds of feet up and discharged red lightning in all directions. Storms that were drifting towards the city.

Rix raised a hand to the iron window frame and static discharged, stinging his fingertips. Outside, the air was crackling continuously now and more ball lightning rolled across the grounds, two globes sometimes meeting in fiery incandescence. Over the city, dozens of lightning bolts were visible at any time, striking trees and manors and sparking fires, and then hitting a raft on the lake, returning it to logs and flinging a dozen passengers into the rime-flecked water.

‘Those poor people,’ said Tali. ‘Is there anything — ?’

‘It’s the most merciful end they could come to,’ said Rix. ‘Come down into the warm.’

He was turning away when the floor jerked half a yard to the left, then back again, tossing them both off their feet and turning the easels over. Brushes and paint pots went flying. The windows rattled; glass burst out of several panes, scything across the room. Outside, masonry thundered to the ground.

‘What was that?’ said Tali.

‘One of the palace towers falling,’ said Rix. ‘Only eighty-seven to go.’

‘Pardon?’ said Tali.

As he got up, the dark sky lit up more brightly than day. The ash clouds cleared and he saw across to the Brown Vomit as it went into full, terrifying eruption.

‘What’s happened to the mountain?’ said Tali, holding onto the windowsill as the floor jerked again.

An enormous chunk of the right side of the volcano, up near the crater, had vanished. A series of dark flecks partially eclipsed the red lava fountains, flecks that must be rocks hundreds of yards across, blown miles into the air. And when they fell -

‘Run!’ Tali yelled.

Rix caught her by the arm, steadying her. ‘There’s nowhere to run to. If one of those rocks hits the palace we die without ever knowing it.’

‘What if they fall into the lake?’

He did not answer. The floor shook three times as chunks of rock thundered to the ground out in the Seethings. Another tower toppled then, half a mile away, a mansion collapsed into boiling dust.

And then he saw it, a gigantic piece of the mountain wheeling across the sky out over the lake, rising, seeming to hover for a second, then plunging down. Momentarily the lake vanished in an explosion of boiling water, and when it cleared …

‘What’s happened to the water?’ said Tali, winding her arms around Rix.

The lake had receded, exposing its muddy bed out for a hundred yards and grounding eleven boats plus a raft built from the side of a timber cottage. All along the shore, people shouted and pointed at the marvels exposed in the mud. Children ran to gather stranded fish and eels.

‘No!’ whispered Tali, going up on tiptoes to see more clearly. She put her head out the window and shrieked, ‘Grab the children. Get out of the way!’

‘They can’t hear you,’ said Rix, who had been slower than Tali to realise what was going to happen. ‘They’re dead anyway. They just don’t know it.’

And then it came, a swell that rose until it must have been a hundred feet high, racing towards the shore faster than a galloping horse. Now the people screamed; now they ran, abandoning their boats and rafts and even their children, labouring through the mud in desperate attempts to get to the safety of the shore.

But the swell became a monster wave towering above them, breaking and thundering and crashing down onto boats and rafts and people, then picking them up and driving them towards the lake wall to smash them, and it, to bits.

Rix clung to Tali without realising he was doing so. As the wave struck the shore, in the lower grounds of the palace a column of pressurised water spurted two hundred feet in the air from some long forgotten tunnel, carrying ancient stonework, snow and turf with it.

The earth heaved, then disappeared under a boiling brown flood of muddy water, broken bodies, smashed boats and the rubble of the wall itself. It surged up the slope, drowning the navvies working in the tubule trench, smashing the castor oil greenhouses to bits and racing towards the palace doors.

‘Should we go higher?’ said Tali, eyeing the stairs up to the higher levels.

‘The flood’s spending itself. It’s nearly done.’

It tore through the downhill wing of the palace, rose higher and curled around to wash the blood off the front steps and cover them in mud. The water stilled. Objects bobbed to the surface, then it slowly ebbed, leaving a strandline of ruin curving across the grounds — trees and timber, stone and drowned animals and bodies all tangled together.

As the water retreated, carving ten-foot gullies through the lawn, the ground heaved and a scattering of sinkholes appeared across the lower grounds, exposing ancient ruins Rix had not known were there.

After the first flood withdrew, and the succeeding, smaller waves had passed, the shanty towns had vanished along with the lake wall. The city defences had been breached for three miles along the shore and could not be repaired, for the stones lay under the water.

‘Nature does the enemy’s work for them,’ said Tobry, coming up.

‘Hightspall is tainted,’ said Rix. ‘The reek has to be cleansed from it. And the biggest stink of all is right here. As soon as the enemy reappear, I’m riding out to face them — alone.’

‘Rix?’ said Tobry.

‘I took the wealth and the privilege, and all the good things that came from it. Now there’s a price to pay and I’m the only one left to pay it.’

‘Better you pay it by staying here with us.’

‘I betrayed my own parents, Tobe. No matter what they’d done, I can’t escape that dishonour. I can’t live with myself any longer.’