“The first time I saw Grandys’ body in the Abysm,” said Tali, “I had a feeling that something was terribly wrong.”
“I’m sorry,” said Rix. “It seemed like the answer to all our problems.”
“It was a brilliant idea,” said Tobry. “And if that’s all there was to it, I dare say it would have worked. But Maloch had other ideas.”
Rix turned to look back at the black sinkhole. Tendrils of steam, as they rose from it, showed the colours of the rainbow.
Maloch rattled violently and lifted itself a foot out of the scabbard. Rix closed his left hand around the hilt and savagely jammed it back in.
Tali walked up to the edge of the Abysm and a pungent whiff of alkoyl made her head spin. She held her breath, looked down at the writhing shadows and opaline gleams in the uncanny blackness, and felt such fear as she had never known.
As though the world itself stood on the edge of annihilation.
CHAPTER 60
Deep in the blackened shaft of the once-white Abysm, the petrified man who had been Axil Grandys, and was now a solid lump of opal the size and shape of a man, roused from aeons-long crystal dreaming.
What had woken him? His opaline eyes were stinging, his nose burning from a pungent vapour gushing up the shaft. A vapour that made his nose bleed and glorious visions form behind his eyes.
He shook them off. He was not a man to seek refuge in chymical visions. All he craved was reality. But as the reality of what had been done to him and the other four Herovians struck him, he felt such a rage that it shook the shaft.
In the blackness far below, Lirriam and Yulia were also rousing, though they could not move either. Had Grandys’ tongue and throat not been solid opal he would have screamed with fury and frustration.
Another memory wisped up from his crystal dreaming. A recent memory: the destruction of his heritage at Tirnan Twil. Every book, every paper, every artefact and personal item had been burned in a furious, hour-long conflagration.
How could this have happened? Memory showed him a pale, blurred face — a woman who might have saved Tirnan Twil but had not. Rage, rage!
But then — ah, sweet joy! His right hand, his focus, guide and protector. Maloch was nearby! The sword had protected him so well, all his life, that one day Grandys had forgotten the peril he was in and laid it aside while he went for a swim. That day, that very hour, his enemy struck.
Before Grandys had left Thanneron on the First Fleet, in search of the Promised Realm, potent magery had been imbued within the sword to guide and protect him. Now he called to it.
After an agonising delay it recognised him.
Get — me — out! said Grandys.
Maloch’s magery continued the de-petrifaction, though painfully slowly, and from the inside out. But the sword-bearer was riding away and the job was not near done. Could Grandys hold him back and draw enough magery to complete the process? Even escape the Abysm?
He tried to call the sword using his own, weaker magery. It would have worked had he been able to utter a single word, but he had not yet regained the ability to speak aloud. He reached towards Maloch, tried to draw the power he needed from it by thought alone, and almost succeeded.
Almost.
Then Maloch was carried out of range and its magery faded. Was he to be trapped here until true death took him? Now that he had been de-petrified internally, he could truly die. Grandys sucked in the alkoyl-laden air, praying it would be enough to restore flesh from stone. It had to.
After a lifetime of gleeful bad deeds, Grandys feared death as no other man could.
CHAPTER 61
Lyf tossed on his modest sleeping pallet in the kings’ temple, continually dozing and waking with a jerk after each few minutes of oblivion. Every day his servants cleansed the temple, and every night the stench came back, worse than before, but he would sleep nowhere else. By tradition the king slept in his temple whenever he was in the city, and tradition was one of the things that sustained him. That, and vengeance.
He woke in terror from his recurrent nightmare — the Five Heroes’ original attack on him in this temple — to find his shin stumps throbbing mercilessly. The sword, the terrible sword. He could have no rest until it was unmade.
Thought of it hurled him back to the terrible time of his murder, when the whole world of Cythe was toppled.
“No,” he cried, “No! Never again!”
His spectral ancestors gathered around him, soothing him.
“Grandys is stone, as ever was,” said white-eyed Rovena the Wise. “You need never fear him again. Rise above it, Lyf, and continue with your plans. Crush the upstart at Garramide, then meet with the chancellor’s envoys on your terms.”
With their support, Lyf rose above his fear. “I will,” he said. “But until peace is agreed, if it is, I’ll prosecute the war with unmitigated fury. And the first target will be Garramide. I want that sword.”
CHAPTER 62
Rix knew there was no hope of saving Garramide now.
He gave no explanation to his ne’er-do-wells, and said not a word on the long ride home. Tali, Tobry and Holm were talking among themselves and shooting him increasingly anxious looks, but he ignored them. He almost wished Maloch had dragged him into the Abysm.
No, never again would he contemplate that way of escape. Even if Garramide was doomed, he was going to fight all the way.
He ran through all the preparations that had been made to defend the fortress. The bombast-battered walls had been repaired, the weakest points strengthened and raised, and the broken gate repaired and reinforced. The storerooms and armouries were full, the cisterns topped up, and his troops were as well trained as they could be in the time. What else could he do?
On reaching Garramide late that night, he dismissed his men and spoke briefly with Swelt, who had no further news of the advancing army. The fortress was calm, so he went to his chambers, put a bottle in one pocket of his coat and a goblet in another, and headed up to the observatory.
Taking a pot of white paint, he blocked out the mural with fierce strokes, then laid a second thick, opaque layer across the brushstrokes of the first, and a third coat diagonally across the others, until no trace of Grandys remained.
That done, he uncorked the bottle, filled the goblet and went to toss it back in a gulp. No, time is rapidly running out. Treat each moment, and each small pleasure, as though it’s your last.
Rix turned the lantern down, pulled his coat around him, closed his eyes and took a sip, allowing the wine to flow back across his tongue. Ah, that was good. He had another sip, which was better.
A worry intruded — why the sword wanted to get back to Grandys. Rix put it aside for later but another followed it — the possible mutiny. It could wait until the morning, when he would identify the ringleaders and deal with them. Even the lord of Garramide was entitled to a few moments of peace.
He emptied his mind. The next hour was about the wine. Just savouring the wine, sip by careful sip. Minutes passed between sips; it took half an hour to empty the small goblet. He poured another without opening his eyes, drank it too.
Rix set the goblet down. The urge to swill the whole bottle had passed. He leaned back in the chair and might have dozed for a while. He did not know or care. He roused, yawned, stretched and opened his eyes. And his hair stood up.
The image was reappearing on the wall through three thick layers of white. As he watched it ghosting through, Rix was alarmed to realise that the image had changed. Grandys was still contorted, but definitely not in agony. He was in a crouch, half twisted around so he was looking straight out of the wall, and his right hand was extended as if reaching out for his sword.