‘It was once the private temple of Cythe’s kings. And it’s the only place Lyf could travel to as a wrythen.’
‘But why did Axil Grandys preserve it when he’d done his best to erase Cythe from the map? What did he hope to find in the cellar?’
Tobry had no answer.
‘What do you know about Deroe?’ said Tali.
‘Nothing. I haven’t found anyone who’s met him.’
Tobry led the way down, following the path the high constable and chief magian had broken with sledgehammers on the night of the Honouring. Tali followed, her thumbs pricking and her throat so dry that each breath rasped. The passage was as dark as a tomb, yet before they were within thirty yards of the cellar she knew it lay ahead. The hackle-raising smell gave it away: dry rot, mould, caked grime and the faint stench of long dead, poisoned rats.
Memories overwhelmed her. She was a little girl again, hand in hand with Iusia in her bid for freedom and trusting her mother’s judgement utterly. If only she had whispered her worries about Tinyhead …
Tobry slid the stone door open and went in, raising his lantern. Tali’s skin crawled — the cellar might have been closed the day she’d fled from it and only now reopened. All was as she remembered it — the broken crates she’d hidden between, the ferocious stone raptors, the black bench where they had laid her mother. She could not look at it or she would never stop remembering.
‘This is an evil place,’ she said, frozen in the doorway. ‘I can feel it. Something terrible happened here before the murders. Long before.’
‘But not wholly evil,’ said Tobry, softening at her stricken look. ‘In olden times, the kings of Cythe worked their healing magery on the land from here.’
‘How could anyone have the power to change the land?’
‘King-magery was rooted in the land.’ He walked around the cellar, elbrot out, touching things with it. ‘And Cythonian magery wasn’t spread out across thousands of magians, as ours is. King-magery was concentrated in one person, trained from birth to use it wisely and only for healing.’
‘But to heal this great land …’ It was beyond imagining.
‘Hightspall’s bounty comes at the cost of violent eruptions, devastating floods and landslides, and disasters of many other kinds. It’s a land much in need of healing and this is where the kings of Cythe did it. And because they did, pockets of good still linger here.’
‘Enough to heal Rannilt?’
‘I don’t know.’ Tobry stopped by a stone box the size of a large coffin, with a cracked lid. He slid it aside, looked in and said gently, ‘Here is best, for you and for her.’
She knew what lay inside; the chief constable had mentioned it after the Honouring. Tali paced across, as if in a funeral procession, and looked down at the bones of her mother and her three older ancestors who had been hosts to the ebony pearls. She had not known her ancestors — they had all died young — but her eyes burnt that her beautiful mother had been reduced to this sad little pile of bones.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I do feel something good here.’
He slid the lid over the bones. Tali laid Rannilt on the dusty surface, wrapped in her covers, and she sighed and breathed more steadily. Perhaps some protection did linger in the gracile bones of the four Pale women killed here.
Thump-thump.
‘What was that?’ Tali whirled, staring into a misty green gloom that Tobry’s lantern could not dispel.
‘Sounded like someone jumping down a step.’
Di-DA-doh, di-DA-doh!
‘Oh, poor Rix, leave him alone …’ said Rannilt in a croaky little voice. Her eyes were screwed tightly shut, as if she did not want to see.
‘What’s she talking about?’ said Tobry.
‘Lyf must be waking the compulsion on Rix.’ The call-clamour grew, di-DA-doh, di-DA-doh, along with the spiking headache, and now the three calls were coming from the one place. ‘And Deroe’s coming. He knows I’m here. Hide! I’ll try to gain his confidence, then you come in behind him and take the pearls.’
Thump-thump.
Tobry went out into the very pitch of darkness. Tali turned down the lantern and waited. The greenish mist hung in curtains, the foul air was thick in her nostrils and her terror was rising. She was in the murder cellar and if this went wrong she would suffer the fate that all her life she had dreaded. The fate that Rix’s sketch had divined for her. That Rix himself would do to her, if the compulsion on him could not be broken. But how could it be broken when no one knew how Lyf had put it on him?
Thump-thump. The call-clamour faded.
An old man materialised two feet above the floor, right in front of her, and grabbed her wrist before she could dart away. He landed unsteadily, thump-thump, made a thread-like mesh of light with his fingers and she saw a darting head on a wrinkled, tortoise neck. The grey eyes were rimmed with black; a spreading cloudiness partly obscured the pupils. Cracked, flaking skin ran up his arms into the cavernous sleeves.
His grip was an old man’s grip, feeble and shaky and no match for hers, save that a sweaty numbness had spread out along her arm from his touch. She fought the terror — where were the pearls? Tobry could not attack until he knew Deroe had them. The magian’s hands were empty and his grey robes had no pockets she could see, though they could be on the inside.
He scratched the crusted skin on his left wrist and grey flakes, brown with old blood, stuck under his long nails. Raising his hand, Deroe stared at the flakes and the blood. His mouth hung open and he was breathing noisily, as though it was a struggle to draw in enough air. His breath wasn’t so much foul as dead, and it fogged her mind.
‘What do you want?’ Tali croaked.
She had to stick to the plan — get him to hold Lyf back, then deal with Deroe. Only with his pearls would she have a chance of fighting Lyf.
He scratched at his wrist again, breaking the papery skin. Muddy, grey-brown blood ebbed out.
‘Lyf’s coming,’ said Tali, eyeing the stone head on the end wall. She had seen Lyf’s eyes there as a girl. ‘And he has a body now, a better one than yours.’
‘But I have his pearls,’ Deroe crowed. The high pitch, like a boy whose voice had not yet broken, jarred with the decrepit old man’s body.
‘Wards!’ he said. A series of fist-sized globes appeared, studding the edges of the oval ceiling. They were pretty things, patterned in grey and white swirls like polished agate, and each had a moving glow as though a perpetual flame flickered inside.
‘He won’t get through now,’ Deroe piped. ‘Barrier!’
A grey, transparent sheet blocked the doorway. Tobry hit it with his shoulder from the other side but bounced off.
Tali’s numbness faded a little. ‘You paid House Ricinus to cut out the ebony pearls. You had my mother killed, and my grandmothers back for three generations. Why?’
‘Wasn’t my fault,’ he whined, staring at the top of her head as if figuring out where to cut. ‘I didn’t grow the ebony pearls in them.’
‘You ordered their deaths.’
‘They should have stayed away. They made me kill them.’
‘You contemptible little worm!’ She struck him in the face.
He fell to his knees and it surged out of him like the draining of a blocked privy. ‘You can’t know what it’s like, being possessed. What did I do to him? I was just a lad, exploring in the ruins, collecting things no one wanted. I didn’t mean any harm. Then he slithered intomy head and squatted there like a toad, sneering at my terror and pouring his venom into me. He has such hate for us … such hate …’
His fingernails tore the skin of his wrist again, three long, ebbing cuts. It would have been the time to strike, had she known where the pearls were.
‘He forced me to take the first pearl for him,’ said Deroe. ‘She was such a pretty little thing, your great-great-grandmother, and he made me gouge the pearl out of her head. Ah, the pain! I feel it to this day. I had no choice; I could not resist him. Not then.’