Vengeance

CHAPTER 68

At last, said the wrythen, the host is where I want her. I have the alkoyl and everything is in place. Now to pull the pieces together.Why the Solaces? clamoured the ancestor kings and queens. Why did you remake our people in a new image?

He did not reply. Even if he had blundered there, he could not turn now. His next task was to complete the last leaf of The Consolation of Vengeance then, via the heatstone, wake the embedded command in Rixium. He was close to breaking point and the wrythen was confident that tonight he could tip Rixium over the edge. If necessary, he would take control of Tobry as well. It would be so much easier in the palace, where both men were bathed in the emanations from that enormous heatstone.

Yes, tonight Rixium would take Tali down and do the deed, and once the wrythen had the master nuclix he would use Tobry to dispose of the thieving magian, Deroe. Then the wrythen would kill Tobry from within, Rixium from without, and all five nuclixes would be his.

But he still had that niggling worry about the Herovians rising again. The wrythen had enlisted the intellects of all one hundred and seven ancestors in a collective mind-search for the Immortal Text but they had not found a trace of it. Surely it must have been destroyed.