beans were grouped around a low table with an egg-curve sculpted out of it. A library in the distance held more books than she had seen in her life, magnificent volumes inlaid with silver, gilt and slivers of precious stone. She ran light-footed to the bookcases and reached for the nearest book but her fingers passed through it with only the faintest resistance. A wrythen might have read it but she could not.
Another book lay open on a lectern, an illuminated volume of verse, perhaps an epic, though she could not read the words. She blew on the edge and the page turned to reveal another lovely illumination, then another, so perfect that the book must have taken half a lifetime to complete. But then, the wrythen had lived for a hundred and fifty lifetimes; time must hold a very different meaning for him. As she studied the pages, waves of sorrow washed over her, as though the books were the last record of masterpieces that no longer existed.
But not what she was here for. She tried to imagine the coming confrontation. How could she defend herself when she did not know how Lyf would attack? If only she could use her pearl. She longed for it, hated it, feared it.
Tali looked through the spectible and reeled at the radiance flooding from it. There was magery everywhere: in the books, the chairs and table, the walls and floor, the row of standing statues high above — and the wrythen fluttering in the gloom ten yards away!
She jumped, gasped and sprang backwards, but it continued to hang a foot above the floor, rippling like an empty suit in a breeze. After her clattering heart steadied, she studied it through the spectible. The aura haloed around it was static, while every other enchanted object had a moving aura.
Seen directly, the wrythen was translucent and its eyes had a fixed and empty stare. Lyf wasn’t here! What could its empty form tell her about him?
She saw a man apparently only a few years older than herself, neither tall nor short, with the silvery ghosts of kingly tattoos on his face and throat. He wore a short, flaring cape over a loose blouse and silky pantaloons bunched at mid-calf, below which protruded several inches of shattered bone.
Had Tobry mentioned that the wrythen’s feet had been hacked off? She had a vague memory of it. Why hadn’t Lyf, who clearly had created everything here, restored them? Did he stay this way as a reminder of what had been done to him? Well, his absence was her opportunity, though a fraught one. It might only take him seconds to return.
Where would he keep the pearl? It would be hidden so no casual intruder could stumble upon it. Tali scanned the cavern through her spectible, trying to filter out the auras that streamed out from books and tables, the walls of the cavern, the kingly statues high above, and even the junction where the cavern looped up like the neck of an alchymist’s retort before passing back through its wall …
She froze, staring at the junction, through which she had fleetingly glimpsed a single, striking aura. Tali moved her head left, right, left again. Ah, there it was, a circle of quiescent blackness unlike anything she had seen before. Could it be his ebony pearl?
The junction was high up, the wall of the cavern smooth. She tore off her pack, gloves, boots and socks, and scrambled onto the wall. It had a clinging feel, like soft rubber. She went up it in a rush, and fell. And up again. And fell.
The third time, by digging her nails into the springy surface, she reached the junction where the neck passed through its own wall in that way that baffled the eye. Clinging on with toes and one hand, knees trembling with the strain, she peered through the spectible, searching for the pearl.
The junction was so narrow that a hair could not have passed through it. Nonetheless, it was where she’d seen the pearl. Tali put the spectible away, pressed both hands against the wall and rested her head on the junction. What to do?
With a dazzling flash and a splitting-skull pain, she was drawn towards the junction.
She was inside a white, cylindrical shaft extending up and down beyond sight. It was softly lit though she could not tell where the light came from. Below her the whiteness, perhaps the whole shaft, appeared to be rotating slowly.
She was floating above an enormous drop! Tali’s head spun, she made a grab for the side but found nothing to grip and began to fall, though not nearly as fast as she would have done in the real world. Where was she falling to? She could see only white.
Magery, she thought, if ever I needed you, stop me!
She stopped, hanging in mid-air, but had magery done it, or the shaft itself? She had been floating at the beginning, after all. Tali looked for the ebony pearl, a sphere of perfect black, but saw only white. The spectible showed neither, rather a catastrophe of colours so brilliant that she could not think for them. After clicking the left-hand knob, the brightness reduced a thousandfold and she saw magery streaming out of the walls, but no little circle of blackness.
Yet she had seen it from outside; it had to be here. She scanned the white walls, covering every inch, clicked to reduce the brightness another thousandfold and suddenly it stood out against the pale — a tiny knot of intense colours emerging from a crevice above her. She reached up towards it and slowly rose in the shaft.
It wasn’t a crevice, rather a concealed opening in the wall, invisible to the eye but revealed by the spectible. The perfect hiding place — no thief could steal what he did not know was there.
And there it was, resting on a flat disc of grass-green metal — a little globe of black. The ebony pearl. Lyf’s pearl. Could it be the first of the five, cut from her great-great-grandmother’s head a hundred years ago? There was no way of knowing. She extended her fingers towards it and heard a small, mewling peep, its
Lyf’s pearl called again, a higher note, a question. What question, though, and what had her own pearl replied? Tali shivered; it was as if the pearls had their own agenda. As her pearl responded to the second call, pain speared through her skull and rainbows of light cascaded through her inner eye, colours she did not know existed.
Lyf’s pearl kept calling and she sensed a desperate urge for completion with the other pearls. What would happen if it found what it was looking for?
She reached out to the pearl. It retreated. She reached further. It retreated further.
‘Don’t run away,’ she said quietly. ‘I have one too. You were hosted in one of my ancestors, and all the pearls are linked to me, so why would I harm you?’
The pearl stopped, quivering a little.
Without thinking, Tali said, ‘Come!’
And, with another peeping call, it came.
CHAPTER 80
‘Die, magian, die!’
But Deroe struck back, sending a mind-numbing spell whispering towards Lyf. Lyf twisted, allowing it to sigh past, then caught his enemy with a nerve-fire enchantment that made him gasp and twitch with a million pain pricks.
Deroe fired a thesaurus of emotions, trying to overwhelm Lyf with aggres sion and alienation, shame and bewilderment and rage, melancholy, spite and a hundred other conflicting feelings all at once. The assault would have driven any ordinary man mad, but over the aeons Lyf had mastered his own mind. He used the cool aggression to reinforce his own, allowed the other emotions to glance off him like hailstones from a helm and struck back.
Deroe screamed like the stunted boy he was inside, threw up a barrier and huddled behind it, whimpering, ‘Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me.’
But despite the whining, he was far from beaten.
Inside the magian’s head, the battle had been going on for half a day, veering from imminent victory to
