‘That’s a lot of mights,’ said Tobry.
‘I can’t think of any other way to save Rannilt. Or Caulderon.’
Rix let out a muffled gasp. His eyes were flicking back and forth beneath their lids as if he was having another nightmare. Since his house had already fallen it must be the other nightmare — the one he had painted, the future he had divined, where Lyf told him to go down and cut it out of her, and Rix obeyed.
Tali pulled her blankets up around her throat and chafed her aching hands. How could Lyf, who had not been able to leave his caverns, get to Rix from so far away? There was no spell or magery on him, nor any enchanted object nearby through which Lyf could have worked the compulsion. She had checked him with the spectible and Rix was — as Tobry had often joked — as lacking in magery as a log of wood. She had also checked his chambers and found no trance of an enchantment.
So how was Lyf sending the nightmares to him?
CHAPTER 99
All was ready. Now was the hour. Secure in his newly fashioned body, Lyf drifted to the top of the flaskoid to seek the advice of his ancestor gallery. And, if he could admit it, to gain their admission that he had been right after all.
For several minutes the shades of the kings and queens of old surveyed him in silence.
‘The facinore was both a treacherous and an ill-made beast,’ observed Queen Hilga, a white-haired spectre with enormous popping eyes and a penchant for pronouncing doom. ‘That body is liable to betray you when you can least afford it.’
‘Ah, delicious irony,’ said Errek, First-King. Though faded to a wisp, his voice remained strong and, with the perspective of ten thousand years, all human follies amused him.
‘I don’t follow,’ said Lyf coldly.
‘An aesthete king forced to cloak himself in so awkwardly fashioned — no, frankly — so hideous a guise.’ Errek chuckled.
Lyf scowled. He’d recreated the ancestors to support him, not mock him. ‘In wartime, perfection is a luxury. This body, while neither handsome, strong nor complete, frees me from a wrythen’s bondage. Are you not pleased that we’ll have our land back at last? And our vengeance?’
‘The tale has not yet played out,’ said Hilga. ‘We were a gentle, cultured people once. Now you’ve robbed our people of their past, disconnected them from the land and your so-called Solaces have turned them into a warped reflection of the enemy.’
‘It will be a tragic irony indeed if you’ve made it impossible for our people to live in harmony with the land,’ observed Errek. ‘Or for their kings to heal it.’
‘What else could I do?’ said Lyf. ‘They had been reduced to filthy, raddled degradoes; they would have been forever tainted by that past. Our only hope was to begin again: three unblemished matriarchs recreating our people from the youngest and least scarred of the children.’
‘You should have let our people go.’
‘I couldn’t bear the pain!’ Lyf cried.
‘Well,’ said Errek, ‘it can’t be undone now. But Lyf, before you go, enlighten us about those dreadful, er, feet.’
Lyf looked down at his twisted, nodular, bare-boned extremities and might have flushed, had facinore flesh been capable of it.
‘The traitor’s blade that clove off my feet bore an enchantment that, even after two thousand years, I cannot break. It took my strongest healing powers to fashion any kind of bone there, but no magery can clothe it in flesh.’
‘Not even the black flesh the facinore offered up to you?’ said Bloody Herrie.
‘Not even that. But I will have everything back, before the end.’
‘That will depend on the end,’ said Errek. ‘And now?’
‘I’ve restored the link to my most faithful servant,’ said Lyf, ‘and healed him as best I can. He’s about to convey my battle orders to the matriarchs.’
‘You can’t do battle until you hold the pearls in hand,’ said Hilga, her eyes protruding out of their sockets. ‘Should an enemy gain them, or worse, one of our own kind — ’
‘Do I not know it?’ snapped Lyf, vexed that his own creations, meant to support him, were more critical than ever. ‘I’ve ordered a horde of shifters into the tunnels. At the critical moment, my faithful servant will lead them the secret way to the cellar under Palace Ricinus.’
‘How will you ensure the critical moment?’ said Bloody Herrie. ‘You have not yet succeeded in commanding the boy-lordling.’
Lyf had been waiting for the question. ‘I soon will!’ His glee burst forth, unrestrained for the first time since his death.
‘You’d better explain,’ said Bloody Herrie.
‘The magian, Tobry, has chained Rixium to the heatstone in his salon — the very heatstone I’ve used to send nightmares to him these past ten years.’
‘But it carries no enchantment,’ said Bloody Herrie. ‘We don’t see — ?’
‘Heatstone doesn’t need enchantment,’ said Lyf. ‘It’s mine, of its very nature.’
That gained even Errek, First-King’s attention. ‘How?’
‘Because I died unshriven, my king-magery could not be passed on to the king-to-be, and thus our people have had no king to this day.’
‘We know this,’ snapped Bloody Herrie.
‘Neither could my king-magery take the way of the Abysm, to dissolution,’ said Lyf. ‘But it had to go somewhere. It drifted through solid rock for hundreds of years until it came to rest beneath the Seethings — and turned a hundred yards of stone to heatstone.’
‘Ahh!’ sighed Errek.
‘The king-magery is no more, but my connection to it remains, through the heatstone deposit and every stone cut from it. Now, bathed in its emanations and with no way to escape them, Rixium slips ever closer to the compulsion I’ve spent half his life reinforcing. The moment he sleeps it will take him over, and no power of the enemy’s, not even the Oathbreaker’s Blade, can break the compulsion until it carries him all the way to the bloody completion.’
CHAPTER 100
An hour after midnight the golden threads drawn from Rannilt snapped.
She sighed and shivered, but did not wake. Tali prayed that this was a good sign, and that Lyf had failed in whatever he was doing, but logic whispered that he had succeeded so well he no longer needed to rob a child.
Suddenly Tali’s shell burst open and the call was like five alarms going off together in Tali’s head — Lyf’s pearl was calling, and so were the other three, di-DA-doh, di-DA-doh, and her own pearl was answering. And then she felt a jarring rasp, as though a bone reamer were being sharpened.
Tali shot up in the blankets, her heart thundering, then scrambled across and shook Tobry’s shoulder. ‘He’s found me.’
He woke at once, if, indeed, he had been sleeping. ‘Who?’
‘Deroe, with the three pearls, and Lyf knows it too. I’ve got to go down. Tobry … will you help me?’ She wasn’t sure he would.
‘I want Rannilt saved as much as you do,’ he said deliberately. ‘And our enemies thwarted.’
But not a word about her. It hurt, but she had created the mess and she must live with it. She dressed quickly and stood looking down at the child. ‘I’m afraid to leave her here in case she … slips away.’
‘Bring her. The pearls are her only chance — if you get them.’
And if I don’t, Tali thought, and I probably won’t, better we die together than alone. She hefted Rannilt, who seemed to weigh nothing now. Tobry stood waiting, sword at his side. Rix’s eyes were still racing under their lids, and Glynnie and Benn were asleep, her arm protectively around him.
‘Why is the cellar at the heart of it?’ Tali said quietly.