A lantern glowed among the pipes as the far end. She hesitated in the doorway. The bells hinted at something distant, long forgotten and rather sad. She went in a step or two, thinking to ask Gilhaelith about the sounds.
‘Gilhaelith?’ she called softly.
There was no answer, but at the distant edge of hearing there came another peal. Again a memory struggled fruitlessly to get free. Perhaps he was among the pipes. There were tens of thousands of them – a veritable forest of wood and metal. She edged forward, feeling the thudding of her heart. This was his private place and she should not be here, but the bells called to her and she had to know what they were saying.
The great room was empty, though a two-handled cup of mustard-water steamed on a pedestal next to the organ console, and beside it lay the amplimet. She picked it up. He must have just gone out. She looked around but could not see the bells. Odd. Across the room she made out a great glass sphere, slowly rotating on its stand as if on a cushion of air.
Even from two steps away she could feel the cold. Patches of feathery frost clung to its northern and southern poles, disappearing and re-forming as it turned. Tendrils of vapour drifted lazily away, rising or falling in the air. It looked like some kind of scrying sphere. Edging closer, she reached out with a fingertip, but drew back as pinpoints of light sparkled on a globe of the world, under the glass. Some specks were brighter than others and one, at Tirthrax, positively glowed. Perhaps it was a representation of its node.
Curious, she reached out again. Other bright specks were scattered across Lauralin and the surrounding islands. She was able to pick the node at Booreah Ngurle straight away, though it was far from being one of the brightest. She examined the globe. Kalissin was bright but the node at the manufactory was not visible – not the least pinprick. Cold fear settled over her. Had the manufactory been destroyed, its node drained dry? That might mean Tiksi was gone too – and her mother.
It probably meant nothing of the sort, Tiaan told herself, and there was no way of telling, so it was foolish to construct worries out of light and shadow on the glass. As she turned away, she felt a cold ache in the bones of her left hand, which held the amplimet. She almost dropped it. Tiaan threw her hand up to her chest and the amplimet went out.
Letting out a cry of anguish, she stared at the crystal. There was no glow, no spark, nothing. Had she destroyed it, and all her plans, by bringing it to the globe?
Tiaan closed her fist around the amplimet, squeezing hard. What was she to do? Staring up at the dark ceiling, she noticed a needle-thin blue-white ray reflecting from a point near the skylight. She traced it down to its origin, a point on the globe near the southern pole, which had rotated to the top. A spot on a boomerang-shaped island glowed so brightly that it outshone all other nodes.
She bent towards the globe. The island lay in the centre of a long sea. What was its name? One end was the Kara Ghâshâd, or Burning Sea, the other the Kara Agel, Frozen Sea. The island had a single peak in the centre. It was the Island of Noom. Tiaan knew nothing about the place but as soon as she remembered the name, dread settled over her. She drove the walker backwards by instinct.
Halfway across the room, the slender ray went out, as did all the other specks of light on the globe. She opened her fist, hoping to see the amplimet restored, but it was as dark as before. Still moving, she backed into something she had not seen, for it was covered in a black dustcloth. It gave forth the low, mournful peal she had heard before.
She pulled off the cloth, which could have covered a good-sized shed. Beneath, a carillon of bells was suspended from a small iron tower. Four of the bells were identical, each larger than a witch’s cauldron and spaced well apart at the corners of a square. Hanging in the centre was a fifth bell, elongated like a gooseberry and large enough to cover her from head to foot. It was made of glass, though she could not see through it.
Creeping into the middle of the carillon, she lowered the walker to look under the bells. The four metal bells were just like ordinary village bells. The fifth had no clapper and may have been designed to ring in sympathy with the others. The glass was mirror-silvered inside.
Belatedly realising that she had no right to be poking around here, she was turning away when the amplimet shone out and, beneath the glass bell, she saw a lock of black hair which looked just like her own.
She eased in between the bells, spreading the walker’s legs until she could pick up the lock. It was her hair, surely. No one in these parts had hair like hers. Coming up again, she happened to glance into the bell and was so struck by the deformed reflections in its mirrored surface that she rose inside to see. Everywhere she looked she saw herself, and every movement twisted and changed her. She went still but the reflections continued to shift, warp and change. Get away quick, she thought, but something pulled her back.
She was looking at a dark-haired man holding a little black-haired baby, which was crying. The amplimet flared and the images dissolved as if she were looking into a soothsayer’s crystal ball. A different man turned to her. He wore a half-mask of burnished metal but she knew it was Jal-Nish. The look in his eye made her stomach recoil.
She thrust the amplimet at the reflection. He looked surprised, then vanished as the light echoed back and forth. It took ages before she made out anything else. The reflections moved like ripples on a pond, slowly clearing to silver. She closed her fist around the amplimet again but the surface stayed bright, as if the light was swirling within the glass.
She made out a tower, twisted like barley sugar, in a frozen landscape of black rocks hung with ice of the same colour. In the distance, the sea was covered with jumbled ice floes and crevasses. The scene dissolved, a new image formed and she was standing at a woman’s shoulder as she walked down an endless stair. And someone was behind her but Tiaan was afraid to look back.
Down, down she went, with measured tread, never looking around. The woman came to the bottom, reaching out with old hands for a greatly corroded iron ring on an ancient door that had once been blackened by fire and never cleaned.
Tiaan swallowed. Her hand on the walker’s controller was slippery with sweat. What was behind the door?
‘No!’ someone roared.
A hand went over her hand. The walker dropped and lurched sideways, cracking her head on the rim of the bell. It rang and the vision, or seeing, vanished. The walker clattered out from beneath the carillon.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Gilhaelith shouted, dragging her away from the bells. The walker’s rubber feet skittered on the floor.
It was like being snatched from a dream. ‘I –’ she said. ‘I – I saw a lock of my hair on the floor – and then I looked up. Were you scrying out my life?’
‘Of course, as I do everyone who comes within my realm. What did you see?’
‘A man with a baby. It might have been my father.’ She hoped so. She so longed for him. ‘Then Jal-Nish the perquisitor, wearing a metal mask. And lastly, a woman walking down the steps of a bleak tower.’
‘The Tower of a Thousand Steps. You are lucky, Tiaan. There are many powers in this world and few as benign as I. They do not like being spied upon. Had I not come back, you would now be wishing you were dead. What were you doing here?’
‘I heard the bells. They seemed to be calling to me.’
He started. ‘Calling? What then?’
‘I was looking at your glass sphere but the amplimet went out and a spot on the globe sent a ray right up to the ceiling.’