Tobry stopped and studied the titles of the age-worn volumes on the top shelf, whose covers were written in the Hightspall script. ‘The Songs of Survival,’ he said, frowning. ‘Have you heard of them, Rix?’
‘I don’t even read Hightspall’s great books,’ snapped Rix. ‘Come on!’
Tobry turned to the second shelf. ‘The Lore of Prosperity. And the titles are, On Delven, On Metallix, On Smything, On Catalyz … Do they sound like instruction manuals to you?’
As he reached out to touch On Catalyz, Rix’s sword rattled in its scabbard. He dropped a hand to steady it but the sword shot upwards, slamming into his palm, and auras flared around all fourteen books.
Tobry whipped his hand back and the auras faded, but the aura around another book did not — a book made from grey sheet iron, with cast-iron covers, lying open on a pitted stone table. An engraver’s scriber lay beside the book and a corroded platina flask on its side on the table, as though cast there when empty. Most unnerving, the deeply etched letters on the open pages were the colour of burning blood.
‘The Solaces,’ Rannilt whispered.
‘What are the Solaces?’ Rix approached the iron book, warily.
‘Wil said they’re precious books that tell the matriarchs of Cython what to do.’
‘But what are they doing here?’ Rix bent over the open book.
‘Don’t touch anything,’ said Tobry, staring at the book through his elbrot, then shaking his head. ‘Rannilt, can you tell — ’
She was staring the other way, up at the point where the flaskoid passed back through itself. Her teeth chattered.
Rix could see nothing save a slight blur there. ‘What is it?’
‘Tali!’ Rannilt screeched, tearing her hand free and running forwards. ‘Look out! It’s waiting for you.’
CHAPTER 82
Icy waves crept down Tali’s back as the black pearl drifted off the disc and crept towards her outstretched hand. Was Lyf’s pearl responding to her own?
Take it and run! You don’t have to fight Lyf now. Steal the pearl and you damage him, and strengthen yourself to fight him on your own ground. And it’ll help the war too, and please the chancellor.
She was about to close her fingers around it when the gift rose inside her, though it had done that before only to retreat again. How could she bring it to the surface? It was a question Tali had asked a thousand times without ever finding an answer, but she sensed the answer was not far away.
You can only defeat your enemy with magery, but the only person who can teach you how to use your magery is your enemy.
Her head throbbed as though something hard — the master pearl? — was grinding against the inside of her skull, and the bands of colour were dazzling. She was close to a source of phenomenal power, but where was it? Within the pearl, or were pearls merely the key that unlocked a greater power?
And if unlocked, how could she use it? The white torrent that had shorn Banj’s head off had been uncontrollable, and she had been so ill afterwards that without Rannilt she would have been killed. But Banj had been just a man. To fight such a master as Lyf she too must have mastery, yet magery rarely came easily and mastery never quickly.
A first-day apprentice could not hope to defeat her master. Take the damned pearl and go, before he comes back.
The pearl quivered and, without knowing how, Tali understood that she was trespassing in a forbidden place. Not Lyf’s place, but something far older. Something private, sacred, never to be entered by her kind.
The pearl called like a lost, frantic child, and instinctively she tried to calm it, stroke it, but as her fingers grazed the black surface, patterns began to radiate inwards from all around the shaft and she did not need the spectible to see them.
Complicated bands of swirling colour, twisting and writhing, spinning out and frilling and coiling back on themselves, and every little bump and node and coil had its own coiled pattern that mimicked the greater structure, down to the smallest size that she could see. Could the pattern be the key to power? The temptation to look deeper, to win the prize, was irresistible.
She looked down, wondering where the Abysm led to. Tali stroked the pearl and sensed a throbbing power far below, beyond anything any mortal could wield. If she could take a tiny fraction of it, could she command her magery?
Ssst, sssst!
Now grey flecks and threads were revealed, whizzing down the shaft all around her, and she caught snatches of sonorous, solemn speech. The words made no sense, yet vague rumours rose unbidden — half-remembered conversations between Cythonians, overheard ages ago, about their most secret and sacred place. A place where none of them would think of venturing, the very conduit between creation and destruction, life and death …
Could this shaft be part of the Abysm down which Cythonian souls were said to pass after death? It must be, and her presence here was a dreadful sacrilege. Tali’s cheeks were scalding — not even in war would she willingly trespass on her enemy’s sacred places, but she did not know how to get out. There was no sign of the crack through which she had entered.
Way down, as far as she could see, something reflected brightly, the colours changing constantly as it moved. It was a tiny figure of a man, apparently carved from black opal. No, not tiny, it was life-sized, with furious, glaring eyes that could almost have been alive. It was drawn down, only to bob up again, over and over, as if something prevented it from going deeper. Was it a relic or offering cast into the Abysm to accompany a soul as it passed beyond?
It had nothing to do with her. Focus! Why had Lyf hidden the pearl here? For its protection, or did he haunt the Abysm because he had not been given the proper rituals after death? Because his spirit had never passed on, Tali knew that the sacred king-magery had been lost upon his death, and without it no new king could be crowned. Was that why he was so desperate to get the five pearls? To gain a new source of magery?
The pearl was still now. The rush of threads past her slowed, the snatches of speech faded, then Tali’s hair stirred in a warm up-current that carried with it a familiar oily-sweet odour with an underlying bitterness. Alkoyl — the deadly chymical fluid that had eaten that young woman’s leg off in the back tunnels of Cython, the stuff Wil had used to set the sulphur ground in the Seethings ablaze. Why was she smelling it here?
‘I’ll have to send down the Hellish Conduit for more,’ the master chymister had said, ‘if I can get anyone to go.’
He had shuddered as he spoke. Was the Abysm linked to the conduit, and if so, what lay at the other end of it that contained such awful power?
Tali dismissed the distracting questions she could not resolve. Take the pearl and run. She was reaching out for it, and it was trembling as if it yearned for her touch, when she heard that strident, angry, false call …
The facinore must have scented her and it was moving her way. Was the shadow shifter in the Abysm, or outside? Terror numbed her for a minute; Tali fought it down. Outside, she thought. Lyf would not allow that foul creature into such a holy place.
If she went out, it would attack. But she could not stay here either, because Lyf could return at any time. To take on the facinore, however, she had to have magery and lots of it.
She edged towards the pearl, trying not to alarm it. It occurred to Tali that, when she had used her gift as a child, she had also seen tangles of colour in her head. Each time, in a fury, she had snatched at one of those tangles and hurled it at her foe, not realising she was using a clumsy kind of magery.