The only person who can teach you how to master your gift is your enemy, Mimoy had said. Could Tali do so by reading how he’d used his pearl?
The junction was high up, the wall of the cavern smooth. She tore off her pack, gloves, boots and socks, and scrambled onto the wall. It had a clinging feel, like soft rubber. She went up it in a rush, and fell. And up again. And fell.
The third time, by digging her nails into the springy surface, she reached the junction where the neck passed through its own wall in that way that baffled the eye. Clinging on with toes and one hand, knees trembling with the strain, she peered through the spectible, searching for the pearl.
The junction was so narrow that a hair could not have passed through it. Nonetheless, it was where she’d seen the pearl. Tali put the spectible away, pressed both hands against the wall and rested her head on the junction. What to do?
With a dazzling flash and a splitting-skull pain, she was drawn towards the junction. And hurtled through it — but not out the other side.
She was inside a white, cylindrical shaft extending up and down beyond sight. It was softly lit though she could not tell where the light came from. Below her the whiteness, perhaps the whole shaft, appeared to be rotating slowly.
She was floating above an enormous drop! Tali’s head spun, she made a grab for the side but found nothing to grip and began to fall, though not nearly as fast as she would have done in the real world. Where was she falling to? She could see only white.
Magery, she thought, if ever I needed you, stop me!
She stopped, hanging in mid-air, but had magery done it, or the shaft itself? She had been floating at the beginning, after all. Tali looked for the ebony pearl, a sphere of perfect black, but saw only white. The spectible showed neither, rather a catastrophe of colours so brilliant that she could not think for them. After clicking the left-hand knob, the brightness reduced a thousandfold and she saw magery streaming out of the walls, but no little circle of blackness.
Yet she had seen it from outside; it had to be here. She scanned the white walls, covering every inch, clicked to reduce the brightness another thousandfold and suddenly it stood out against the pale — a tiny knot of intense colours emerging from a crevice above her. She reached up towards it and slowly rose in the shaft.
It wasn’t a crevice, rather a concealed opening in the wall, invisible to the eye but revealed by the spectible. The perfect hiding place — no thief could steal what he did not know was there.
And there it was, resting on a flat disc of grass-green metal — a little globe of black. The ebony pearl. Lyf’s pearl. Could it be the first of the five, cut from her great-great-grandmother’s head a hundred years ago? There was no way of knowing. She extended her fingers towards it and heard a small, mewling peep, its call. Tali’s mental shell burst open and, before she could close it, her own pearl answered.
Lyf’s pearl called again, a higher note, a question. What question, though, and what had her own pearl replied? Tali shivered; it was as if the pearls had their own agenda. As her pearl responded to the second call, pain speared through her skull and rainbows of light cascaded through her inner eye, colours she did not know existed.
Lyf’s pearl kept calling and she sensed a desperate urge for completion with the other pearls. What would happen if it found what it was looking for?
She reached out to the pearl. It retreated. She reached further. It retreated further.
‘Don’t run away,’ she said quietly. ‘I have one too. You were hosted in one of my ancestors, and all the pearls are linked to me, so why would I harm you?’
The pearl stopped, quivering a little.
Without thinking, Tali said, ‘Come!’
And, with another peeping call, it came.
CHAPTER 80
‘Die, magian, die!’
But Deroe struck back, sending a mind-numbing spell whispering towards Lyf. Lyf twisted, allowing it to sigh past, then caught his enemy with a nerve-fire enchantment that made him gasp and twitch with a million pain pricks.
Deroe fired a thesaurus of emotions, trying to overwhelm Lyf with aggres sion and alienation, shame and bewilderment and rage, melancholy, spite and a hundred other conflicting feelings all at once. The assault would have driven any ordinary man mad, but over the aeons Lyf had mastered his own mind. He used the cool aggression to reinforce his own, allowed the other emotions to glance off him like hailstones from a helm and struck back.
Deroe screamed like the stunted boy he was inside, threw up a barrier and huddled behind it, whimpering, ‘Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me.’
But despite the whining, he was far from beaten.
Inside the magian’s head, the battle had been going on for half a day, veering from imminent victory to looming defeat and back again. Deroe, an old man emotionally frozen in adolescence at the time Lyf had first possessed him, could never be Lyf’s match in wit or magery. However, Deroe had a real human body to draw upon and it gave him far more strength than Lyf could take from the wrythen form he had left behind in his distant caverns. The longer the struggle went on the weaker Lyf became, and the greater the likelihood that Deroe would cast him out permanently.
If Deroe ever realised how physically weak Lyf was, if Deroe knew for a moment that Lyf could be beaten, he would attack mercilessly. Deroe had to die.
But he had the three stolen nuclixes close to hand to bolster his power at need, while Lyf’s, the weakest of the five, could not be used at all from so far away. Unable to match Deroe’s strength, and afraid to use magery that might be turned against him, all Lyf had left was cunning, and patience.
And knowledge of a weakness Deroe was not aware of. A vessel in his brain had a flaw and, if it could be induced to rupture, the magian’s death would come within minutes. Not so fast that his death would trap Lyf too — for that was the greatest peril of fighting a man while possessing him — but too quick for Deroe to save himself with magery.
Lyf had been subtly attacking the flaw for hours, picking at it with what little force he could muster while the mental struggle went on. It was like trying to cut a pipe with a feather, yet in time a feather can wear away rock and he was close now. Just a hundred more strokes. Just fifty. Just thirty -
The call shrieked through his mind, but this time it was his nuclix, calling frantically — an intruder had entered his caverns. And The Consolation of Vengeance lay open on its table, unprotected. What if the intruder stole it? Or worse, catastrophically so because the last leaf was blank — what if the intruder wrote another ending and transmitted it to the Chamber of the Solaces?
Lyf burned quessence like a spendthrift, desperate to see, to know. The intruder was the host, Tali, and somehow she had gained entrance to the white shaft of the Abysm, his nucleatory. How had she got in?
Again this admirable enemy confounded him by going where no living human should have been able to go. It had not occurred to Lyf that one person could easily penetrate the sacred Abysm — someone who also had a nuclix. She was close to the source; her master nuclix might already be charging itself from it and if she took his nuclix, the plans of two thousand years would collapse.
He had to fly at once.
But Lyf could not simply disengage from Deroe. That would leave him exposed and vulnerable for an eternal minute, time enough for the magian to strike. Lyf had to ease out of Deroe’s mind so subtly that he did not realise what was happening.
Deroe, correctly interpreting Lyf’s inactivity as weakness, struck a ferocious blow. Lyf deflected the worst of it, yet it hurt him, and in reflex he hit back with the nerve-fire enchantment. It failed, as he should have known it would — Deroe was too subtle a foe to be caught by the same spell twice.