When Taal and Uddo start to make fun of Nau’s carapace, referring to her as the Illim Tortoise, Tana’s anger gets the better of him; he sprints through the dark gallery towards his enemies. On reaching them he grabs Taal by the throat and pushes him to the floor before proceeding to choke him, all the time shouting that the despicable plan will fail because he has recorded all ingredients of the antidote in the marble of the wall. The medusa’s frantic, luminous letters write Tana’s cries into the dark, but no one takes the trouble to read them. For a few moments Uddo stands over the two kings as they scramble about the floor in each other’s clutches, just watching. Then she lifts from the wall one of the bronze shields that an unimaginative palace decorator has had hung in each of the corridors and dashes it against Tana’s head.
Stunned, Tana falls flat on his face. The calls of the birds ring out and the palace is stirring from sleep; in the lower galleries strips of light appear and then vanish; there is the sound of voices and footfalls on the stairs. When he sees guards running up the stairs towards them, Taal begins to panic, but Uddo — for whom villainy has always been an exact science — keeps a cool head. Within seconds the troops are in the seventh-floor gallery. Uddo tells them that thieves have broken into the palace; it was they who inflicted the injury on Tana when he caught them red-handed. Now they are hiding in the rooms of the lower floors. As soon as the men leave, Uddo picks up the aquarium with the luminous medusa as if it were a lantern and carries it to the opposite side of the gallery. In the restless blue light she examines the wall. Nau is still propped up against the wall like a broken beam. Uddo lifts the aquarium to the level of her adversary’s face and watches with satisfaction as the terrified eyes flit to and fro in the distorted, radiant-blue mirror. Then Uddo continues her inspection of the wall until she finds the inscription in the marble.
Uddo always wears a little white pouch on her waist. Theories and rumours abound as to its contents. I can divulge that it contains a first-aid package for use in everyday situations of difficulty in which Uddo might have cause to find herself. For Uddo everyday situations include betrayal, intrigue, blackmail, poisoning and mortal combat. Concealed in the pouch are five sachets made of fine paper, the colours of their powders showing through. Among these is the white powder that brought about Nau’s illness. Now Uddo pulls out a sachet of red powder. Then she fishes the medusa out of its aquarium and drops it onto the paved floor. For a few moments the medusa squirms pitifully; then its light goes out. Uddo pours the powder into the aquarium before throwing its transformed contents at the marble panel.
As it trickles down the panel, the red liquid obscures the ingredients of Tana’s transcription. The red solidifies rapidly until all that remains of the inscription is thirteen isolated letters on islets of grey. Uddo might easily obliterate these, but she leaves them exposed as an act of malice, imagining Tana standing over them, trying desperately to piece together the words they grew out of. Uddo looks approvingly on her work, this poem of hate made up of thirteen lost letters; then she turns to Nau and leans against her, knocking her over. The queen hits the slabs with a boom and proceeds to roll along the corridor; Nau rattles down the first staircase and then the second, knocking the marble and bronze statues of the galleries out of her path as if they were skittles. Soon she is pursued by a booming herd of rolling statues. The last of the staircases flings her towards the fountain; she is dashed against its metal base, which rings like a bell, then caught and deluged by statues.
At the place which told of Uddo’s pouch, there was an unusually fat pocket. I opened this in the expectation it would contain details of the countries of origin, composition and preparation of the medicaments concealed in the individual sachets. But there was an altogether different explanation for the pocket’s bulk. The author was having a joke at the reader’s expense: instead of describing the contents of the sachets, he had filled the pocket with small-scale representations. (The reader’s initial confusion was compounded by the fact that the pockets of the Book were practically the same colour and shape as Uddo’s pouch.) The five sachets of the Book reminded me of tea-bags; powders of five different colours were visible inside them. Having read this passage, Karael decided she would change it. (Her replacement was more of a thriller, in which the struggle was joined by two tamed cheetahs kept by Tana in the palace.) While she was at it, Karael tore off the pocket with the miniatures of Uddo’s sachets. I kept it as a souvenir and I still have it packed away somewhere.
While Tana is still unconscious, Taal and Uddo leave the palace and head back to Devel; in all the confusion no one spares them a second thought. As soon as he regains consciousness, Tana sets up a search party for Nau, which scours the palace all night before discovering Nau under the pile of statues by the fountain. It soon becomes apparent that there is no tool in existence that is powerful enough to scratch the coating of red from the marble panel nor any solvent that is effective against it. Tana offers a reward to anyone who can invent such a tool or solvent, yet still he does not lose hope that he will remember the ingredients he was told by the blue light of the medusa. Gradually he calls to mind thirty of them, but of course this is not enough for the creation of the antidote. He wanders the palace oblivious. Before his eyes there are thirteen swirling letters; these summon other letters in an unceasing swarm, forming thousands of real and non-existent words that always disintegrate. One day a fugitive Devel academician arrives on Illim. This scientist has some familiarity with Uddo’s murderous chemistry and is able to give Tana details of a solution guaranteed to dissolve the red coating on the marble panel. The substances needed for the production of the solution prove relatively easy to find, but the liquid becomes active only after a certain red gemstone has been submerged in it for several days. Only one such gemstone is known to be in existence, and sad to say this is in a casket that belongs to Taal.
Silver ball
I am returning to my writings about the island after an interval of two days. Although I do not wish to try your patience, dear reader, I would like to tell you of my experiences since my last dispatch. But perhaps you need to know immediately whether Tana succeeds in stripping the marble panel of its red coat; perhaps you loathe digressions and dislike books that take you in the course of a single paragraph from a Prague apartment to the tropics and a shack made of reeds, or from the calm of the here-and-now to the picturesque court of a despot of ancient times — before, in the very next paragraph, taking you back where you started, as if nothing has happened. If this is true of you, I wish to assure you that I have no intention of bending your will to mine: should you choose to skip the next few pages, I will not hold it against you. Imagine that they are written in the form of a fold-out strip on thin reed-paper which is inserted in a white pocket and which you do not open. You have my word for it that in the chapters to come we shall return to Illim and Tana and Taal. Gato, too, will make an appearance, and as you learn about an expedition to Devel, the fact that you have skipped a few pages will not compromise your understanding of the adventure.