“Go slowly and tread carefully, child. If you slip here, you can fall a thousand feet.”
“Better take my hand,” said Rannilt. “Walk next to the cliff and you’ll be all right.”
“You’re a great improvement on Holm,” said Tali when they were halfway up. “He made jokes at my expense all the way.”
“Probably tryin’ to distract ya from falling over,” Rannilt said wisely.
Finally they reached the top and turned onto the broader cliff path along the ravine. A cold wind blew down it, driving the snow into their eyes and plastering it on their cheeks. Tali’s belly ached — they had eaten the last of her food hours ago.
They turned the corner, the snow thinned and there it was, still standing, a slender, towering spike mounted over the ravine at the intersection of five colossal stone arches.
“Have you ever seen anything like it?” said Tali.
“It’s ugly,” said Rannilt. “I hate it.”
Tali thought it astoundingly beautiful, but did not say so. A beautiful coffin, marred only by yellow and brown smoke-staining around the small windows.
As they trudged down to the central of the five arches, the knot grew in her stomach. What would it be like inside? She prayed that the bodies had burned to ash and there would be nothing recognisable of the people she had met here.
“We’ll have to be really careful crossing the arch,” said Tali. “It could be icy.”
Rannilt took her hand again and they crept across. The wind was stronger here and kept tugging at them as if it wanted to hurl them off. Tali’s foreboding grew. They reached the entrance, which was open — she had blasted the door off as she and Holm escaped.
“You’d better wait outside,” said Tali.
Rannilt, even enveloped in her thick coat and fur-lined trousers, was shivering. “Why?”
“It’s not going to be very nice inside.”
“Seen hundreds of dead bodies. Not waitin’ here. Too cold.”
Rannilt had seen far more than any child her age ever should, but Tali conceded that she was right. It was miserably exposed here on the centre of the arches. “I suppose so.”
They went in. The lowest level was heaped hip-high with ash and debris that had fallen down through the ladder hole from the upper floors. In places, the ash had been scoured into ripples and little dunes by wind, and the walls were covered in soot. Thankfully there were no bodies, no bones, and the tapestry of Axil Grandys that had so alarmed her last time had burned away, leaving only a heap of carbonised threads.
“What are you lookin’ for?” said Rannilt.
Tali had known Rannilt would ask, and for hours she had been debating what to tell the child. The key was a deadly secret and Rannilt did not need to know about it, but she had to tell her something.
“A silvery circlet that’s worn around the forehead.” She drew a fore-finger across the top of Rannilt’s forehead and around to complete a circle.
“What’s it for?”
“I can’t tell you that, but it is important.”
“Has it got magery in it?”
“Not a skerrick.”
“Oh!” said Rannilt.
“You sound disappointed.”
“If it did have magery, I could have found it for ya.”
“Could you really?”
“Of course.”
Tali couldn’t always tell whether Rannilt was stating a fact or being fanciful, as with her absurd contention that she could heal Tobry. She filed her statement away for later.
“If it’s here, my pearl should tell me,” said Tali.
“Then you don’t need me at all.”
“Of course I need you. Coming up?”
“Think I’ll wait here,” Rannilt said sniffily.
Tali climbed the steel ladder, which ran up thirty feet to the circular hole through into the next level. The ladder was unaffected by the fire, though each rung bore a little pile of ash or flakes of charred paper.
There was ash on this floor, too, a peaked ring of it around the ladder, tapering away on all sides to a fine powder. Other little heaps marked the spaces where things had burned away — in one embayment, two square piles were all that remained of Syrten’s oddly shaped baby shoes. In another, an elongated pile must be the ash from Lirriam’s wooden flute, carved for her by her grandfather an impossible age ago in the ancestral homeland, Thanneron.
But neither was what Tali was looking for, and thus far there had not been a peep from her pearl. Surely, if the circlet was here, the master pearl ought to have woken.
Had it done anything unusual the last time she was here? The pearl had troubled her, she recalled, and the premonitions had led her to discover the attacking gauntlings.
She went up several more levels. Nothing. Nothing.
She climbed into the seventh, the portrait gallery, looked around and let out a shriek.
“Tali?” called Rannilt, from below.
“It’s all right.” Tali pressed her hand to her thundering heart. “I was just startled.” She could hear Rannilt coming up the rungs. “Stay there. You don’t need to see this.”
“Comin’ up.”
The walls were coated with greasy soot, the kind that comes from burning meat. The portraits had all burned away save one that had been painted on an iron plate. No trace of the image remained apart from a few darker patches. But that was not what had startled her.
It was the bodies.
Twenty-one of them, evenly spaced around the embayed walls. All seated with their backs to the wall, their legs crossed and their hands resting on their knees. All looking upwards, as if to infinity. All charred, though none of them had burned away. Perhaps the smoke and the heavy air had put the fire out. Enough remained for her to identify several of them — the neat, compact form of the curator, Rezire; the three pilgrims, their yellow robes burned away; and the gawky figure of the young archivist who had opened the window for Tali.
“Why are they sittin’ like that?” said Rannilt, eyes wide.
“Maybe they didn’t want to leave their home.”
“But it was on fire!”
“Or maybe they got this far and could go no further… Come on.”
She climbed several more ladders and saw more bodies, but the master pearl remained silent, and Tali knew in her heart that it was not going to tell her anything.
“It’s not here. We’ve come all this way for nothing. Let’s go down.”
“If it’s not here,” said Rannilt, “where can it be?”
“I don’t know, child,” Tali said heavily. “But I need to find out fast, before our enemies do. Let’s go.”
Despite the risk, she would have to spy on Lyf again, and she’d better do it as soon as possible. But not here.
In the middle of the arch Rannilt looked back. “It’s horrible. You should bring it down.”
“Even if I could, it would be a great destruction. Tirnan Twil should stand, as a monument to failed ambition.” Tali frowned. “This is the second time I’ve been here looking for the key, and the second time I’ve found nothing…” She paused. “What does that remind me of?”
Rannilt shrugged.
They went out and retraced their steps: across the arch, along the cliff paths, now terrifying because the snow had stopped and Tali could see all the way down to the rocks at the bottom of the ravine, then through the tunnels and down, finally, to the place where they had tethered the horse. It was just on darkness when they got there.
It had pawed away the snow in a circle to get at the withered grass and moss beneath. They gathered wood, drank from an ice-covered stream and Tali lit a fire.
“What’s for dinner?” said Rannilt.
“Nothing.”
Tali contemplated the prospect of a cold night with an empty belly and the same for breakfast. Her stomach growled.
“Nothin’?” Rannilt repeated.
“We left the camp last night with nothing save what we had in our pockets, remember?”
“But we didn’t eat my food. We ate yours.”