Vengeance

find out? Might the book be translated with magery? Why did it smell faintly of alkoyl? What was alkoyl, anyway?

Why were there never any answers? She flipped the iron page, a ragged edge tore her finger and a speck of blood fell on the bottom of the book. As she was wiping it off the etched glyphs seemed to blur into words, though when she rubbed her weary eyes and looked again she saw only glyphs, as unreadable as ever.

The book was densely clotted with magery — she could tell without resorting to the spectible. What was the magery for? She turned the last, blank leaf. Who was supposed to write the ending? Lyf, or the Matriarchs?

Tali fantasised about writing it herself, turning his plan back on him and his vengeance into her just retribution. Why not? She was the one, after all. But before she could write it, she must discover how to read it. And then she would need alkoyl to etch her words into the iron.

Beside her, Rannilt jerked, stiffened and cried out. Tali dismissed the fantasy and sat up, the covers falling around her and the book hitting her knee with a painful thump.

The child’s eyes opened wide and she said in a little, awed voice, ‘He’s coming!’

Her eyes closed, then her mouth opened and a tiny bubble of golden light was pulled out of her, trailing threads like a bandage torn from a healing wound. The bubble spiralled upwards and vanished, but another followed it, then another.

Tali was stroking Rannilt’s brow when the ragged, three-note sequence went off in her head, di-DA-doh, though this time the calls were close and seemed to come from three different directions. Had Deroe separated the pearls so he could triangulate the location of the master pearl?

‘What’s the matter?’ Tobry, beyond the far end of the heatstone, and not illuminated by it, was only an outline in the dim salon.

‘Lyf’s on his way,’ said Tali. ‘Deroe too. Whoever gets the master pearl first can control the others and take all. What do we do?’

‘We wait.’

Trapped in the palace in a besieged city, she had no way to escape either hunter. But was there a way to use them against each other? She glanced across at Rix, who was still sitting upright, eyes closed. As much by the lack of tension in his face as by the rise and fall of his chest, she knew he slept at last.

‘What if I were to lure Deroe into the cellar?’ she whispered to Tobry.

He did not look at her. ‘Lyf’s been trying to trap Deroe for years, and he’s never succeeded.’ The implication was that she had no hope.

‘But until now, Lyf’s had no body and hardly any power. And he’s been bound to the caverns. The only place he could go from there is to the cellar. Besides, I’ve thought of a plan Lyf could never use.’

‘Go on,’ he said dubiously.

‘Deroe must be a very old man, yet when I heard his thoughts the other day, he sounded like a whining boy — as though his emotions were frozen at the moment Lyf possessed him. And I think he’s desperately lonely. No one likes him, no one cares for him, yet that’s what he yearns for. If I listen to his troubles and pretend to care, I might discover how he uses the pearls and command his three with my own. Then, when Lyf comes, I might be able to take control of his as well — ’

‘That’s a lot of mights,’ said Tobry.

‘I can’t think of any other way to save Rannilt. Or Caulderon.’

Rix let out a muffled gasp. His eyes were flicking back and forth beneath their lids as if he was having another nightmare. Since his house had already fallen it must be the other nightmare — the one he had painted, the future he had divined, where Lyf told him to go down and cut it out of her, and Rix obeyed.

Tali pulled her blankets up around her throat and chafed her aching hands. How could Lyf, who had not been able to leave his caverns, get to Rix from so far away? There was no spell or magery on him, nor any enchanted object nearby through which Lyf could have worked the compulsion. She had checked him with the spectible and Rix was — as Tobry had often joked — as lacking in magery as a log of wood. She had also checked his chambers and found no trance of an enchantment.

So how was Lyf sending the nightmares to him?

CHAPTER 99

All was ready. Now was the hour. Secure in his newly fashioned body, Lyf drifted to the top of the flaskoid to seek the advice of his ancestor gallery. And, if he could admit it, to gain their admission that he had been right after all.

For several minutes the shades of the kings and queens of old surveyed him in silence.

‘The facinore was both a treacherous and an ill-made beast,’ observed Queen Hilga, a white-haired spectre with enormous popping eyes and a penchant for pronouncing doom. ‘That body is liable to betray you when you can least afford it.’

‘Ah, delicious irony,’ said Errek, First-King. Though faded to a wisp, his voice remained strong and, with the perspective of ten thousand years, all human follies amused him.

‘I don’t follow,’ said Lyf coldly.

‘An aesthete king forced to cloak himself in so awkwardly fashioned — no, frankly — so hideous a guise.’ Errek chuckled.

Lyf scowled. He’d recreated the ancestors to support him, not mock him. ‘In wartime, perfection is a luxury. This body, while neither handsome, strong nor complete, frees me from a wrythen’s bondage. Are you not pleased that we’ll have our land back at last? And our vengeance?’

‘The tale has not yet played out,’ said Hilga. ‘We were a gentle, cultured people once. Now you’ve robbed our people of their past, disconnected them from the land and your so-called Solaces have turned them into a warped reflection of the enemy.’

‘It will be a tragic irony indeed if you’ve made it impossible for our people to live in harmony with the land,’ observed Errek. ‘Or for their kings to heal it.’

‘What else could I do?’ said Lyf. ‘They had been reduced to filthy, raddled degradoes; they would have been forever tainted by that past. Our only hope was to begin again: three unblemished matriarchs recreating our people from the youngest and least scarred of the children.’

‘You should have let our people go.’

‘I couldn’t bear the pain!’ Lyf cried.

‘Well,’ said Errek, ‘it can’t be undone now. But Lyf, before you go, enlighten us about those dreadful, er, feet.’

Lyf looked down at his twisted, nodular, bare-boned extremities and might have flushed, had facinore flesh been capable of it.

‘The traitor’s blade that clove off my feet bore an enchantment that, even after two thousand years, I cannot break. It took my strongest healing powers to fashion any kind of bone there, but no magery can clothe it in flesh.’

‘Not even the black flesh the facinore offered up to you?’ said Bloody Herrie.

‘Not even that. But I will have everything back, before the end.’

‘That will depend on the end,’ said Errek. ‘And now?’

‘I’ve restored the link to my most faithful servant,’ said Lyf, ‘and healed him as best I can. He’s about to convey my battle orders to the matriarchs.’

‘You can’t do battle until you hold the pearls in hand,’ said Hilga, her eyes protruding out of their sockets. ‘Should an enemy gain them, or worse, one of our own kind — ’

‘Do I not know it?’ snapped Lyf, vexed that his own creations, meant to support him, were more critical than ever. ‘I’ve ordered a horde of shifters into the tunnels. At the critical moment, my faithful servant will lead them the secret way to the cellar under Palace Ricinus.’