“How many levels are there?” said Tali.
“Thirty-three,” said Rezire, who was heading up into the fifth level.
“It seems an odd way to protect their treasures,” said Tali.
“Ah,” said Rezire, “but Tirnan Twil wasn’t built to protect the Heroes’ treasures.”
“Why was it built?”
“To exhibit and glorify their lives.”
“So all this stuff — ?”
“Items that would be seen as treasures by those who worshipped the Five Heroes.”
“Oh!”
“This level is entirely devoted to the papers of Axil Grandys,” said Rezire.
The layout was the same as for the rooms below. Five embayments, each with widely set shelves of thick glass, though here the glass had a purple tinge rather than yellow. There was a small blackwood desk to the left, and three wooden benches.
“The embayment to your immediate left contains Axil Grandys’ papers relating to the Two Hundred and Fifty Years War,” said Rezire. “At least, the first decade of it, when he led our armies.”
“Before he disappeared and was never seen again,” Holm said quietly.
These shelves held hundreds of bound volumes, some books, some journals, some ledgers of accounts, though most were collections of papers that had been bound together.
“The next embayment,” Rezire continued, “has documents dealing with the establishment, laws and government of Hightspall. The third embayment, his household accounts and personal papers. The fourth, correspondence with the other Heroes and important figures of the day, and the fifth, miscellaneous papers. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
He bowed and went up the ladder.
“What are we looking for?” said Tali quietly, so her voice would not carry.
“The key,” said Holm, drawing her away into the corner of the room and lowered his voice even further.
“I know that. But what could it be?”
“Just about anything.”
“Then how are we — ?”
“You’re not thinking, Tali. Lyf wants the master pearl because it’ll help him to locate the key. And you’ve got the pearl…”
“So I need to look at everything that Grandys had, and see if anything resonates.”
The room contained thousands of volumes. It would take hours just to take them down and look at them. Tali took down a volume at random, Lessons from the Esterlyz Campaign, and flipped the pages.
Holm sat on a bench, staring at the shelves.
“I hadn’t realised it would be this hard to read,” she said. Grandys’ handwriting was spare, as befitted the simplicity of Herovian life and philosophy, but the language had changed in two thousand years and many of the words and expressions were meaningless.
Holm said something she could not make out. She was turning back to the book when again she had that feeling that someone was watching her — no, looking down at her.
She went to the ladder hole and looked up. There was no one in sight save a white-haired woman labouring up a ladder three levels above. She walked around the room, trailing her fingers across the spines of the books, but they told her nothing. She did the same with the two lower shelves, then the one higher than that, which was as high as she could reach.
“Nothing,” said Tali. “Holm, I don’t think it’s here. Do you think — ?”
“You’re the one with the pearl.”
“I think I’ll try the next level.”
It contained an array of weapons and armour — swords, daggers, war axes, bows and crossbows, and other weapons she did not know the names of, dozens of different kinds of each.
“They don’t look like Cythonian weapons,” she said to Holm, who had come up behind her.
“They’re not, so they definitely didn’t come from Lyf’s temple. You don’t have to worry about them.”
It made her task a little easier. She wandered across to the opposite embayment, and recoiled. The shelves contained dozens of severed, embalmed heads, some worm-eaten and others, judging by the odour and appearance, beginning to decay despite the embalming fluid.
“Did Grandys collect these?” said Tali.
“Afraid so. Tells you what kind of man he was.”
She went up to the level above that, which was a portrait gallery. There were nine portraits of Axil Grandys, plus several of each of the other heroes, but she gave them only a cursory glance. They hadn’t come from Lyf’s temple either.
The far embayment contained five portraits of Lyf, the young king of old. This is more like it, she thought.
“Would he have had portraits of himself in his temple?” she said to Holm.
“It hardly seems likely. It was his private temple; no one else ever entered there save at his invitation.”
Four of the portraits were formal ones, masterly but stiff and over-formal. She continued to the fifth, a grimy, battered little miniature entitled Self-Portrait of the Newly Crowned King, Age 18. It showed Lyf in his temple, looking boyish, anxious and vulnerable.
“So he was eighteen when he became king,” said Tali, drawn to the lonely figure despite all he had done since. “The same age as me.”
“And not much older when they betrayed him and walled him up to die,” said Holm. “Any resonance from it?”
“No.” She went closer. “But it’s so dirty, it’s hard to see what he was like.”
Tali continued around the portraits, but felt that feeling of foreboding again. She shuddered.
“What’s the matter?”
“I keep feeling that we’re being watched.”
She drew a tiny amount of power and probed with her magery, above her, where the forebodings seemed to be coming from. They were diffuse and spread out over a wide area. What could it mean?
Tali looked up; looked down. Her foreboding was growing with every thickening breath, every racketing heartbeat.
“It feels like the danger’s above us… But not directly above. Not in the spike.”
Tali paced around the five-lobed level. She had never felt claustrophobic in Cython, yet she felt trapped in this tower suspended over one of the most glorious views in Hightspall but lacking a single window. She had to see out; she was practically choking. She ran up the ladder to the next level. A young archivist, clad in green robes, was huddled over an object in an unlighted lobe of the room.
“Excuse me?” she cried.
He seemed surprised that she had addressed him, but bowed and said, “Yes, my lady?”
“Is there a window nearby? I’ve got to see out!”
“Tirnan Twil was designed without windows in the library and archive rooms, my lady.”
“Anywhere?” she said thickly.
“In the early days, when the world was less benign, our designer had an eye to defence. Between a number of the levels there are places for sentries to hide and watch. And even defend if necessary, though I hardly think — ”
“Where?” she screamed, barely restraining herself from shaking him. “Where’s the nearest?”
“Just above, my lady. Would you like me to — ?”
“Yes!” she shrieked. “Now!”
He bolted up the ladder, as if to escape her. As it passed through the hole to the floor above, he reached out to his left and opened a small, concealed door. He stepped through into a low-ceilinged service level, dark and musty.
“This way, my lady.”
He had to crouch, and even Tali had to bend her head under the low ceiling. She followed him. Fifteen feet across, a pair of shutters had the same five-lobed shape as the tower.
He threw them, revealing a window set in the yard-thick wall. “There you are, my lady,” he said with a trace of condescension. “You’ll be all right now. You’re not the first — ”
He was turning away when something outside caught his eye. He thrust himself against the window, staring up, then heaved on a lever and the thick glass groaned out and down. He leaned out, his mouth hanging open.