Tali bent over him. ‘Who killed my mother?’
‘Lay-lay-lay-’ he gasped, white tongue lolling from his open mouth.
‘Is that the woman’s name? Layla, Ladis, Layyalie?’
‘Lay-’ Tinyhead’s eyes rolled, then focused on somewhere behind her. ‘No!’ he said, trying to scramble away on his back like a four-legged spider. ‘Get away.’
There was nothing behind her — he was beginning to hallucinate. She was almost out of time; forget the woman’s name. Tali took him by the shoulders and whispered, ‘Who do you serve?’
‘The dead — the dead — ’
Tinyhead convulsed so violently that she was knocked aside, then stood up and began to reel about, waving his arms and bellowing incoherently. ‘M — M — Master — ’
Someone shouted, ‘I heard something, over there,’ from the direction of the shaft. Orlyk.
Tali only had seconds to get the name. Still hidden behind the boulders, she said, ‘Who is your master?’
‘Master …’
Tinyhead jerked like a loose-stringed marionette, then his left arm stilled and, moving at a calm purpose at odds with the rest of his uncontrollable body, he drew from his pouch the blue ovoid he’d been toying with earlier. It was glowing again.
‘Master? Help me, Master.’
His hand smashed the ovoid against the right side of his blistered forehead and blue light fled in all directions, leaving a small blue-green blob like thick jelly stuck to his brow. His dilated pupils contracted to pinpoints, swung onto Tali and focused like twin telescopes.
She gasped, for the air had gone so frigid that her lungs crackled with each breath. His eyes had turned an eerie yellow and someone was looking out of them, someone cold as death, patient as time, radiating rage and an implacable determination. The House vi Torgrist’s enemy had found her.
‘The name!’ hissed Tali, praying that the Purple Pixie still had some influence over Tinyhead.
‘Master — is … is — ’
With a boiling hiss, the blob vanished. Smoke rose from a small circle burned deep into Tinyhead’s forehead, then something white and gluey squirted from his left ear. He swayed in a circle but remained on his feet.
A piercing pain stabbed through Tali’s own brow. Her head began to throb like a beating heart and suddenly she felt exposed, naked, vulnerable. Her enemy knew where she was, yet she knew nothing about him.
Behind her, the Cythonians were shouting down the shaft for reinforcements, yelling at Tinyhead, gasping, choking.
Whatever he knew about her enemy, it was lost.
And Tali had but seconds to get away.
CHAPTER 30
Something was very wrong. The scheme the wrythen had fed, nurtured, honed and tweaked for so many centuries, his plan that was in the last but one stage of completion, was sliding off track like a wagon on wet clay. And if the plan failed, all failed, for he had invested everything in it.
The last nuclix — the fifth — was the master, and once he held it his power would rise a thousandfold. He might even get his long-lost body back, might live again rather than merely existing. Everything rested on the master nuclix now. If he lost it, if even the least of Cython’s enemies obtained it, the plan would fail so utterly that it would be better never to have begun it. His people would be driven from their underground refuge and expunged.
He had tried to anticipate every problem and find a solution. Deroe might attempt to break free and add the master nuclix to the others he had stolen, but the wrythen had a plan to stop him and get them back. The Hightspallers who had cut out the other nuclixes might try to take the fifth for themselves, and ruin it. Or sell it to one of their own. He had schemes for those eventualities too.
Of all possible failures, it had not occurred to the wrythen that his one faithful servant might be outwitted by the miserable slave girl who was the host. The Pale were half-starved, illiterate and contemptible, a beaten race from which all those manifesting the gift for magery had been culled long ago.
The girl hosting the master nuclix should have been as cowed as the others — she should have gone blindly to her doom. Why, then, was the wrythen’s blue signal ovoid shrieking out a warning of imminent betrayal?
He shot towards it and, as he touched the ovoid, saw his servant outside Cython’s sunstone shaft, fifteen miles away. The man was raising his own ovoid to his forehead, crying, ‘Master? Help me, Master.’
Then he smashed it there -
The shockwave of its destruction split the wrythen’s ovoid and tore him to fluttering wisps. His disembodied consciousness did not try to pull himself together — there wasn’t time.
It should not have been possible, but he forced himself along the link formed between the two ovoids, settled into his servant’s addled mind then cut through the hallucinations to look out from his eyes.
And the wrythen’s distant heart-plasm stopped.
The host girl was a slip of a thing, barely out of childhood. She should have had no gift, yet it burnt in her so brightly that he could see the flares wavering all around her. And she was clever, too. Without using her gift, she had beaten his servant. Unease fluttered within him — who was she?
‘Tell me the name!’ she hissed to his servant.
And his servant, all restraint destroyed by the hallucinogenic toadstool, tried to answer. ‘Master — is … is — ’
The wrythen’s name could not be revealed. Though it would throw his plan into utter disarray, he had no choice but to burn through his faithful servant’s brain.
Ah, how it hurt, even worse than the cursed sword. It felt as though a hole had been burnt through the wrythen’s own head from front to back. There were hot needles in his eyes and his vision went redly in and out of focus as though blood was running down his servant’s eyeballs. The slave girl was staring at his servant in horror, her small hands beating the air.
With a supreme effort, the wrythen took command of his smouldering consciousness. Think! Several of his people had gathered by the shaft doors and would soon come after the girl. He could not allow them to catch her — if they killed her, the master nuclix would be ruined and his plans set back by decades. But if they discovered the nuclix and kept her alive until they cut it out and used it, his plan would fail utterly and, in the end, Cython would be destroyed.
His servant’s vision was fading, the man’s tongue flopping uncontrollably from his mouth. The wrythen had to act quickly. His people had to be kept back, no matter the price. He raised his servant’s twitching right arm, reached towards the arched roof over the shaft and directed all the power that remained in him at the keystones.
Stone grated on stone. The bones of the earth groaned and there came a dull rumble as part of the shaft house collapsed, crushing the guards inside, his own people whom he had dedicated his life to protecting.
Look what I have become, he thought bitterly as his consciousness was hurled back to his home cavern. But the girl — what a magnificent creature she was. The fire in her almost equalled his own. A tragedy that one so gifted had to die.
He dragged himself up to the ancestor gallery to confess his folly. His long-dead nerves should not have been capable of feeling pain, yet pain throbbed through each phantom limb and digit.
I have made terrible blunders, he said to the massed faces, and the wrythen bent his head to them. Yesterday I sent the facinore -
You made afacinore? cried Rovena the Wise, her voice shivering. What if it breaks free and turns on our people?
It won’t, the wrythen said uncomfortably.
You can never tell with them. Never!