He stopped, swaying on his feet and utterly bewildered. The dust began to settle. His mouth gaped; his eyes flicked back and forth as though he was watching a fast-moving scene. He frowned, nodded and extended his right hand as though mixing paint on a palette. Then, with sweeping movements of an invisible brush, Rix painted a moving picture in the air for all to see.
It was another scene set in this cellar, though the filth and clutter was gone. The walls were carved with gentle Cythian dioramas, the floor marked with the swirls of a kingly tattoo. As Rix imagined the scene, he painted it so vividly that Tali could have been there.
But this was not a divination — it was a revelation.
A slender young man stood at the door, wearing the scarlet king’s robes of old Cythe. He held out his arms, welcoming five Hightspallers into the most sacred place he knew, the private temple where he worked king-magery to heal his land. The temple was bright with light, and uncluttered. A simple stone altar stood at the far end. The young man, Lyf, indicated a low table and the visitors sat around it, talking merrily while he treated them as honoured guests, bringing them food and drink, and serving them with his own hands.
The biggest of the Hightspallers, a florid, yellow-haired giant, produced a parchment document, evidently a charter or contract, and handed it to Lyf. The jollity faded; he read it, frowning, then shook his head.
The giant scowled and brandished a slender book at Lyf, pointing to the words on a particular page. Lyf scanned the text, thrust the book away as though he had read an obscenity and stood up, furiously indicating the door.
One of the women — thin-faced, with a prow of a nose and hair cropped close like a soldier — drew a swirling object like an elbrot and pointed it at Lyf. He stared at it as if he did not know what it was.
The elbrot lit a muddy green, like the misty light in an endless swamp, like the light that pervaded the murder cellar. Lyf convulsed, recovered, then ran for his staff which stood by the door. The elbrot flashed and he was brought down, trembling all over and his legs thrashing. The yellow-haired man dragged him to the table and, while the other four held him down, put a quill in his hand. The elbrot flashed a third time and, though Lyf fought the enchantment with all his strength, his hand inscribed his kingly signature on the charter.
The five shook hands, grinning and congratulating one another as if they had just won a kingdom. The king collapsed, shuddering violently. The yellow-haired man drew a curved sword — the same sword that now hung by Rix’s side — and said something to the others, laughing.
They cried ‘No!’ as one, but he strode to the fallen king and, with a mighty blow, hacked his feet off, then stood them on the king’s own altar as a bloody trophy. The five dragged Lyf out, his stumps trailing blood, like a living corpse to be disposed of.
The final image hung in the air for a minute, slowly fading. Rix stared at it as if he had no idea what he had done or how he had done it, then his shoulders slumped. It was over.
‘That can’t have been the Five Heroes,’ said Tali, dismayed. ‘That brute of a man wasn’t Axil Grandys. It’s a mistake; a lie …’
But she knew it to be truth as only Rix could portray it. She had also recognised the dark-haired woman as Sporrealie, the Hero she had always revered.
Tali could not take it in. The revelation was too shocking, the betrayal too monstrous, the implications too far-reaching. The Hightspall she loved was based on a lie, the realm irredeemably tainted at the moment of its founding.
No one spoke. Rannilt lay quietly again, her golden light gone. Rix was swaying, his eyes staring. Behind his protective wards, Deroe let out a brief, incongruous snigger. He, alone among them, had not been affected by the imploding heatstone.
The stone face cracked and crumbled. Now Lyf’s face could be seen behind it, cold and implacable. Only Deroe’s wards held him out, but for how long?
‘Two days before that scene,’ said Lyf, speaking aloud this time, ‘I saved the yellow-haired man’s life, and that is how he repaid me. It was just the first betrayal by your glorious Five Herovians, who used their foul Immortal Text to justify stealing our land. Then they walled me up, bleeding from my stumps, in a forgotten catacomb. Left me to die unshriven in unholy darkness, screaming and clawing at the walls.’
‘Why?’ Tali whispered.
‘To prevent my king-magery being passed on. Axil Grandys planned to destroy our kingship and take the magery for himself.’
‘Is that why he tore down the rest of your city, yet preserved this cellar?’
‘It wasn’t a filthy, rat infested hole then,’ Lyf said bitterly. ‘The king’s healing temple was the very crux of Cythe. But until Grandys’s living petrifaction at my wrythen hands — oh, yes, I made him pay! I turned him to opal and hurled him into the Abysm, to spend eternity in helpless agony — he haunted this place, carrying out his profane experiments that have befouled it forever, vainly trying to find the lost secret of king-magery.’
Rix shivered, closed his eyes, then opened them again. So the opalised man was Axil Grandys. Rix’s sword had once been Grandys’s sword and he was Lyf’s enemy. But had the sword led Rix to the caverns to attack Lyf, or to recover Grandys’s opalised body?
‘Now you understand,’ said Lyf, ‘why the land you plundered so ruthlessly rises up to cast you out. You don’t know how to heal it and would not if you could. Your presence is a blight, a corruption of all good things.’ He gestured to Rix. ‘The compulsion still binds you. Cut out the pearl.’
Rix studied Tali for a moment as though he had never seen her before, then turned back to Lyf. ‘I am unbound. You have no hold on me, nor ever will again.’
‘Do it,’ grated Lyf, ‘or I shall visit such torment on you — ’
Rix spread his arms, making an offering of his own body. ‘No pain you inflict on me can atone for my house’s crimes or my own betrayals.’
He turned his back on his enemy as if to say, Do your worst.
The face withdrew, then the cracks in the stone lit yellow as Lyf attacked the wall. Deroe’s agate wards began to rattle and shake, flaring and dying and flaring again. Little chips of stone spalled from them and fell all around. How much longer could they hold Lyf out?
‘Tali, I can never repay you,’ said Rix, misty-eyed. ‘How did you free me?’
‘It wasn’t me. Tobry must have broken your heat — ’ Tali choked on the thought.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘When my sunstone imploded in the shaft, it burned the Cythonians to char. Tobry — ’ She choked. ‘How could he survive such a blast?’
Rix rocked backwards, staring into infinity. ‘Despite what everyone thought, even me, he was always the greater man. If he’s given his life for us, we must honour him by the manner of our own living — and dying.’
Tali took his hand. It was warm and strong. Her own fingers ached from the cold. ‘What now?’
‘I can’t fight magians.’ He drew his sword. ‘Use your gift on Deroe.’
‘It spent itself when the heatstone burst.’
‘Can’t you get it back?’
‘I’ve never been able to command it. Deroe said ebony pearls are too unstable to be controlled by the host. They have to be cut out first.’
‘Then we’ll find another way,’ said Rix.
Staggering footsteps sounded in the passage outside, then Tobry called, ‘Tali, Rix?’ He sounded at the extreme of exhaustion.
‘Tobry?’ Tali cried. He was alive and that was all that mattered.
He lurched to the transparent barrier, supported by Glynnie, and clung to the door frame, his burnt hands smearing red on the stone.
She gasped. His hair had been burnt away and his chest was a mass of weeping blisters.