“Lyf’s speedy victories weren’t due to his superior armies after all. They came because he used colossal amounts of magery.”
“Why is that important?”
“If magery is failing everywhere, he won’t be able to use it in battles to come. It evens things out.”
“It explains why mine has been so hard to use,” said Tali.
“Which brings me back to the link between your pearl, your magery and heatstone. Why would its emanations create pearls and be linked to their magery?” Holm paced to the entrance again, strode back. “Got it!”
“Got what?”
“Heatstone was unknown in the ancient world. So what brought it into being?”
“No idea,” said Tali.
“Yes, you do,” said Holm. “It was created by a great and powerful event, to do with magery, long ago…”
“I don’t know enough about history — ”
“Yes, you do.”
She stared at Holm. “Are you talking about Lyf’s lost king-magery?”
“It seems the most likely answer.”
“Are you saying that, after Lyf’s death, his king-magery sank into the earth and turned a great area of rock to heatstone?”
“It explains the link between heatstone and the pearls, and their magery. It explains everything — and raises a worrying question.”
“But king-magery was a vast force,” said Tali. “Far greater than any other kind of magery. So why is it failing?”
“Maybe it isn’t. But lesser kinds of magery we know are dwindling. It’s time to test yours. Let’s see if the helmet has worked.”
Tali looked into her inner eye, and for the first time in the real world she saw the coloured loops and whorls that held power. They were dull, though, far weaker than they had appeared in the Abysm. She reached to the nearest loop and drew power. Her skull throbbed.
She pointed her right hand at the wall.
“Not there,” Holm said hastily. “You might bring a hundred tons of iceberg down on our heads.”
She went to the entrance and pointed at the edge, down near the waterline.
Ice, break!
Three feet of iceberg shattered and cascaded into the water.
“Power and control,” said Holm. “I’m impressed. How are you feeling?”
“My head hurts, though not as badly as I would have expected.” She shivered.
Tali went inside and pulled her coat around her.
“Well, you can’t expect miracles.”
“What was the worrying question?”
“What?”
“You said the link between heatstone, the pearls and magery raised a worrying question.”
He frowned. “King-magery was only ever used by the kings — and ruling queens — of Cythe. And only for healing the wounded land and people.”
“Why is that worrying?”
“On becoming king, every Cythian king of old made the choice to use the great power of king-magery only for healing, not for destruction — because to do otherwise would be disastrous.”
“How do you know this?”
“I told you, I’ve always been fascinated by both history and magery. Each king had to affirm his choice, for healing, in a great public ceremony.”
“What’s the worrying bit?”
“Your magery comes from heatstone, which formed from king-magery. If you use magery for purposes inimical to healing, it’s likely to damage your ability to heal.”
“I wasn’t planning on doing much healing,” said Tali.
“That’s all right then,” said Holm.
“Why?”
“I believe that, with pearl magery, you can be a destroyer or a healer, but not both. You have to choose — then keep to that choice — forever.”
CHAPTER 36
The whole of Palace Ricinus had been torn down, save for Rix’s leaning tower. The rubble had been cleared away and the land dug deep to expose the foundations of the kings’ palace that had stood here in ancient Cythe, when the royal city had been called Lucidand. Lyf had sketched the great buildings of the city as he remembered them before the First Fleet came, and given the sketches to his architects. Soon he would make a start on the restoration.
“This is an unhealthy obsession, Lyf,” the shades of his ancestors kept telling him. “Our past means nothing to your people any more.”
There were a hundred and six of these shades, and each, in life, had been one of the greater kings or ruling queens of old Cythe. Lyf had created them, his ancestor gallery as he liked to think of them, during his long exile as a wrythen. For centuries he had relied on them for advice and support, though latterly their advice had mostly been contrary, and he was fed up with it.
“It does, it does,” said Lyf.
“No, it doesn’t,” said Bloody Herrie, the angriest and most contrary shade of them all. He rubbed his red, hacked throat. “The remnants of old Cythe were extinguished when our degrado camps were burned by the enemy and you allowed the last of our people to die.”
“Not the last — just the last of the adult degradoes. They were fatally corrupted. We had to start again, with the children. The untainted ones.”
“Your aim may have been noble, but in doing so you wiped our past clean. You took those children and remade our people from them, but they have no history save the one you fabricated for them, in your blasphemous Solaces. Why should any of this matter to them? Let Cythe go, Lyf.”
“I can’t!” he cried.
The kings’ temple had been restored to its simple, ancient beauty. Yet, though every flagstone had been torn up, cleaned, and the soil for a yard beneath it had been removed and replaced, still the foul odour lingered.
But all would be well, in time. After the war had been won Lyf would use king-magery to heal his land and his troubled people.
“I’ll have the daily war report,” he said to his waiting generals.
“The chancellor is playing at war in the south-west,” said General Hramm, “but he’s plagued by self-doubt and struggling to make alliances. We can discount him.”
“I never discount an enemy until his head is impaled on a pole,” said Lyf. “The chancellor may be down, but he’s a wily, formidable foe. He may be making his case look worse than it is to gull us. Redouble the watch. Urge our saboteurs and insurrectionists to greater efforts. Undermine him every way we can.”
“It will be done, Lord King. In the north-west, there have been a number of skirmishes north of Bledd. Though none to trouble us.”
“What about the hunt for the slave, Tali, and my master pearl? Surely you have some good news there?”
General Hramm looked all around the room.
“Well?” said Lyf.
It burst out. “Tali escaped from Fortress Rutherin with a man called Holm. They were pursued out to sea but escaped again, sinking most of the pursuing boats. Lizue found them in the Southern Strait and attempted to take Tali’s head in a bag — ”
“Well?” said Lyf.
“Tali beat Lizue in combat, threw her overboard, and she was eaten by a shark.”
Lyf reeled. “Not Lizue! She was my best. How do you know this?”
“Her gauntling came back, eventually…”
“Yes? Go on.”
“The bond between gauntling and rider is strong, Lord King, and when she died in so bloody a way, the balance of its mind was broken. It turned renegade and dropped an oil bombast onto Holm’s boat. It burned and sank.”
“It sank?” Lyf stared into empty space. Could two thousand years of planning be defeated by the malice of a deranged shifter? He had created shifters specifically to terrorise the enemy and the irony was too painful to contemplate. “What about Tali?”
“Her fate isn’t known. The gauntling was badly injured by a crossbow bolt, and fled. I’m sorry, Lord King. The treacherous beast will be put down once it’s found, of course.”
Lyf clacked back and forth on his crutches, struggling to breathe, then whirled and stalked to the pearls. Taking them in his hand, he sent out the call. It was not answered, but neither did he feel the painful emptiness that would signify the master pearl had been destroyed.