‘You’ll still be here when I come out?’ asked Tali.
‘We have our orders,’ said the other guard, who was compact and had a cap of black, dancing curls. ‘Go!’
She shot a crossways glance at the tall guard and Tali saw fear in their eyes, skilled fighters though they were. They crawled through the vine thicket and disappeared. She was on her own.
Hunching down out of the keening wind, she tried to plan. The chancellor might be desperate but he wasn’t reckless; he would not have sent her here unless her chance of succeeding outweighed the risk of losing her. Tali took comfort from that thought — until she remembered that he did not know about the master pearl. He would never have risked it.
It was perishing here, yet the cave was worse: it was breathing out air frigid enough to shatter iron, a bone-aching cold that sucked the resolve from her. How could she hope to beat a wrythen who had surmounted death for two thousand years and was driven by such implacable purpose? A wrythen who possessed an ebony pearl and knew how to use it?
The master pearl had to be cut out of living tissue. If he knew she was here, he would try to take it. Or would he? If he could extract the pearl himself, why had he directed Tinyhead to carry her to the murder cellar in Caulderon? Why involve others and take such a risk of being robbed of the pearls — as, indeed, he had lost three of them? Perhaps he could not take them himself.
She edged down the passage at the rear of the cave. She had no lantern but there was enough light for an underground dweller like herself to see by. Ahead, the centre of the passage was heaped with broken stone where Lyf had brought the roof down and knocked Tobry out. The caitsthe’s corpse was gone but she could smell its blood.
She shoved her arms deep into her fur-lined pockets and was veering left where the rubble was lowest when she felt a shivery pain in her shins and heard an outraged whisper, Oathbreaker’s blade!
Tali shot around, staring into the gloom. Rix had hurt the wrythen here and driven it off. Were the words and the pain just an echo of Lyf’s trauma, or did he know she was coming? Was he already sharpening the knife?
She went on, so cold that a deadly lethargy, almost impossible to fight, was creeping over her. Every surface was glazed with pearly layers of ice, so slippery that it was a struggle to walk. She did not recall Tobry mentioning ice; the change must have come since he was here. But why? Could Lyf be behind the ice packs encircling Hightspall? No, that was absurd; no man could wield such power — could he?
At the maze of passageways she put the spectible over her eyes and saw, by the faint twinkle of magery, which path to take. She lurched on and reached the junction Tobry had mentioned. One way led down to shifter pens but her hackles rose at the thought of going near them. The other plunged to an uncanny cavern where the wrythen dwelt. But which was which?
The air was so cold it carried no scent. Because it felt right, she took the glassy-walled path, which became a steep set of steps leading down beyond sight. In the semi-darkness, where the stone beneath her could barely be distinguished, she had to concentrate on every step.
After taking three steps she knew it was too easy. Where were the shifters, the alarms and traps? Lyf had been outraged at Rix and Tobry’s trespass, so why didn’t he show himself?
Tobry had said the stairs ended in mid-air, but this one ran down into a space she struggled to understand even when it resolved into a tall chamber that resembled an upside-down flask bent around and through itself. It felt unnatural, though Tali could not see it clearly enough to know why. She measured each step, careful to make no sound. Lyf could be anywhere, watching from the shadows, hiding within the wall, preparing to strike.
Her heart was beating erratically — racing one minute, deathly slow the next, and sometimes missing beats altogether. Her blood seemed to be thickening in her veins, her heart fighting to pump at all. She swung her arms, clenched and unclenched her fists, though it did not help.
Statues ringed the circular top of the chamber, at least a hundred of them, all dressed like the images of kings and queens she had seen in Cython. Their eyes followed her, and she sensed both rage and curiosity, though none moved, none spoke.
She reached the bottom of a twilight world, turned left and gazed about her in wonder. It was like being inside one of the glass retorts she had seen chymisters carrying in Cython — was that symbolic? — though this one was upside-down with the bulb high above her and the broad neck curving down, flattening at the base where she stood and sweeping up again to pass, impossibly, through its own wall halfway up.
Away to her left towered a platina-distilling apparatus a good twenty feet high. Three chairs shaped like beans were grouped around a low table with an egg-curve sculpted out of it. A library in the distance held more books than she had seen in her life, magnificent volumes inlaid with silver, gilt and slivers of precious stone. She ran light-footed to the bookcases and reached for the nearest book but her fingers passed through it with only the faintest resistance. A wrythen might have read it but she could not.
Another book lay open on a lectern, an illuminated volume of verse, perhaps an epic, though she could not read the words. She blew on the edge and the page turned to reveal another lovely illumination, then another, so perfect that the book must have taken half a lifetime to complete. But then, the wrythen had lived for a hundred and fifty lifetimes; time must hold a very different meaning for him. As she studied the pages, waves of sorrow washed over her, as though the books were the last record of masterpieces that no longer existed.
But not what she was here for. She tried to imagine the coming confrontation. How could she defend herself when she did not know how Lyf would attack? If only she could use her pearl. She longed for it, hated it, feared it.
Tali looked through the spectible and reeled at the radiance flooding from it. There was magery everywhere: in the books, the chairs and table, the walls and floor, the row of standing statues high above — and the wrythen fluttering in the gloom ten yards away!
She jumped, gasped and sprang backwards, but it continued to hang a foot above the floor, rippling like an empty suit in a breeze. After her clattering heart steadied, she studied it through the spectible. The aura haloed around it was static, while every other enchanted object had a moving aura.
Seen directly, the wrythen was translucent and its eyes had a fixed and empty stare. Lyf wasn’t here! What could its empty form tell her about him?
She saw a man apparently only a few years older than herself, neither tall nor short, with the silvery ghosts of kingly tattoos on his face and throat. He wore a short, flaring cape over a loose blouse and silky pantaloons bunched at mid-calf, below which protruded several inches of shattered bone.
Had Tobry mentioned that the wrythen’s feet had been hacked off? She had a vague memory of it. Why hadn’t Lyf, who clearly had created everything here, restored them? Did he stay this way as a reminder of what had been done to him? Well, his absence was her opportunity, though a fraught one. It might only take him seconds to return.
Where would he keep the pearl? It would be hidden so no casual intruder could stumble upon it. Tali scanned the cavern through her spectible, trying to filter out the auras that streamed out from books and tables, the walls of the cavern, the kingly statues high above, and even the junction where the cavern looped up like the neck of an alchymist’s retort before passing back through its wall …
She froze, staring at the junction, through which she had fleetingly glimpsed a single, striking aura. Tali moved her head left, right, left again. Ah, there it was, a circle of quiescent blackness unlike anything she had seen before. Could it be his ebony pearl?