‘It’s surprising that you got on at all,’ said Flydd, ‘considering …’
‘Considering that he despised anyone with physical imperfections,’ chuckled Klarm. ‘Ghorr sneered at everyone less imposing than himself, and loathed those who had a greater physical presence.’
‘An insecure man, despite all his natural gifts. Unlike yourself.’
‘I came to terms with what I am long ago. It’s the inner man that counts, not the fragile shell that carries it around.’
Flydd paused a moment, as if pondering that. ‘You say the strongroom was locked with chief scrutator magic,’ Flydd ruminated, ‘the secret of which is passed on to the new chief scrutator only when the old one is on his deathbed, or in some equally dire extreme. Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Klarm?’
‘I’m not sure I am,’ said Klarm.
‘I am,’ interjected Irisis, suddenly perking up. Her wits were many steps ahead of Nish’s. ‘None of the scrutators were with Ghorr when he died, so the secret can’t have been passed on. Fusshte wouldn’t have been able to discover what lay inside the chief scrutator’s strongroom.’
‘That would have driven him into a fury,’ Flydd chuckled. ‘Being chief but not having the keys to the treasure chest. But now the Art sustaining Nennifer has failed, perhaps the scrutator magic has failed as well. Yes – that’s why Muss is heading for the strongroom. He’s after something inside. Is this what he was trying to engineer all along?’
‘I presume so,’ said Klarm.
‘Does that mean we can expect a visit from Fusshte as well?’ said Nish, plodding dully along. He couldn’t contemplate yet another struggle. He was utterly, utterly burned out. How was it that Flydd could drive himself on?
‘After Flydd’s awesome display to overpower the amplimet,’ said Klarm, ‘Fusshte will be running as fast as he can.’
‘That will be the strongroom ahead,’ Klarm said a while later, heaving himself up a pile of stone blocks towards an imposing steel door, once concealed by maroon velvet drapes which now hung from the left side, all tattered and covered in dust. The door was ajar. ‘Quiet now. It looks like he’s already within.’
They eased up behind him: Flydd followed by Flangers, Irisis and Nish, nursing his arm. Flydd put his head around the door, then beckoned.
Nish slipped through the gap in his turn. He was standing in a gloomy hall made of some dark stone that soaked up the glimmers of moonlight coming through the cracked roof. After much eye-straining he discerned a square door at the far end. It seemed to be moving – no, it was the hall that appeared to stretch and contract before his eyes. He couldn’t look at it.
It’s an illusion, Nish told himself, a deception meant to keep out those who don’t belong here. So the scrutator magic hasn’t completely faded. He moved forwards a step and ran into Irisis’s back. He hadn’t even seen her.
‘What’s going on?’ he whispered.
She put a hand on his arm – the good one, fortunately – and the illusion faded somewhat. ‘Eiryn Muss is up at the far door,’ she whispered right into his ear. ‘He’s trying to get in.’
As Nish’s eyes adjusted he made out the faintest shadow there, though it didn’t have Muss’s outline. It was taller and broader, and with a hint of wings, like a very small lyrinx. Why that shape?
‘Ah!’ said Flydd as gently as a sigh. ‘He’s done it. He’s through.’
The shadow disappeared, though Nish did not see it move. Flydd held up his hand. ‘Give him a moment. We don’t want to scare him off.’
There came a distant rumble – another collapse – and the floor heaved subtly beneath them. Flydd waited until it had stopped, then moved on. A yellow glow appeared in the strongroom and brightened sufficiently to light up the hall and dispel the illusion.
They reached the inner door, which was made of black steel a hand-span thick, bonded to the solid stone wall on steel hinges thicker than Nish’s upper arm. Both walls and door were scorched as if great heat had been applied in an attempt to force the lock.
‘Looks like Fusshte’s work,’ said Flydd. ‘How it must have vexed him not to gain access to Ghorr’s treasures.’
Approaching the door, Nish was assailed by a powerful feeling of wrongness, then every muscle in his body went rigid. He couldn’t even move his tongue; he was like a living statue. Flydd turned, wove his hand in a circle above him, and then above Irisis and Flangers, and they could move again. Klarm had not been immobilised, though he walked as if his joints had rusted up. Flydd did the same for him.
‘This is a forbidden place,’ said Klarm in a croaky whisper. ‘No man or woman, bar the chief scrutator, has passed this door in the hundred years since it was built. And though the old Council has fallen, its edict freezes my very marrow now that I pass it.’
‘Ah, but the Council has fallen,’ said Flydd, equally quietly. ‘No edict of theirs has power any more. We may do whatever we have the strength to bear.’ He eased through the door, though not without a wrenching shudder that gave the lie to his words.
Nish passed through without further effect. The strongroom proved larger than he had expected, and was still intact. It was illuminated by the soft yellow glow of an oil lantern. Nish could smell the sulphurous tang of the quick-match Muss had struck to light it. There was enough light to reveal gorgeously patterned marble- and travertine-clad walls that could have graced an emperor’s palace.
The strongroom formed a perfect cube some seven or eight spans on a side, though it proved empty apart from a small square table carved from green serpentine, polished to bring out the oily sheen of the rock, a throne-like chair cut from a single emerald, and a large glass sphere, mirrored on the outside, suspended from a frame like a globe of the world.
Eiryn Muss stood with his back to them in the middle of the room, the eidoscope up to his right eye, scanning back and forth across the far side of the room. He flipped one lens out, another in, rotated the ones on either end and scanned that part of the room again.
‘What’s he doing?’ whispered Nish.
Flydd reached back and crushed his good wrist. Nish fell silent, though Muss gave no sign of having heard. He made a minor adjustment to one lens and scanned a third time.
‘Ah!’ Muss groped around in the air like a blind man. His probing fingers touched something and he shaped the air around it, murmuring under his breath.
The air suddenly swarmed with phantoms: lost spectres or ghosts of grim Nennifer. Muss dissolved from the vaguely lyrinx shape to that of the grossly fat, bald-headed halfwit, the guise in which Nish had first known him. It stirred uncomfortable memories.
Muss morphed again, this time into an unfamiliar figure, a stocky merchant clad all in green apart from a brown hat shaped like a pudding bowl. Colours streamed across his back as the garments adjusted to his new shape. Nish wondered why he was doing it, or if he even realised that he was.
The merchant’s stubby fingers cupped the air above the chair as if feeling his way around a pair of spheres the size of melons. He sighed, clapped his hands and a metal case, shaped like two round balls joined together, appeared on the chair. The outside, mirrored like the globe on its stand, revealed distorted images of Muss, though each image was different. The left-hand one showed a short, round man, the right a puny, deformed lyrinx. The group of watchers in the background were not reflected at all.
‘How very curious,’ Klarm breathed. ‘Can the outside be a reflection of the interior?’
‘Perhaps when you called him chimaera, Irisis, you saw more truly than you knew,’ said Flydd. ‘Be ready to rush him as soon as he opens it.’