Vengeance

CHAPTER 80

‘Die, magian, die!’

But Deroe struck back, sending a mind-numbing spell whispering towards Lyf. Lyf twisted, allowing it to sigh past, then caught his enemy with a nerve-fire enchantment that made him gasp and twitch with a million pain pricks.

Deroe fired a thesaurus of emotions, trying to overwhelm Lyf with aggres sion and alienation, shame and bewilderment and rage, melancholy, spite and a hundred other conflicting feelings all at once. The assault would have driven any ordinary man mad, but over the aeons Lyf had mastered his own mind. He used the cool aggression to reinforce his own, allowed the other emotions to glance off him like hailstones from a helm and struck back.

Deroe screamed like the stunted boy he was inside, threw up a barrier and huddled behind it, whimpering, ‘Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me.’

But despite the whining, he was far from beaten.

Inside the magian’s head, the battle had been going on for half a day, veering from imminent victory to looming defeat and back again. Deroe, an old man emotionally frozen in adolescence at the time Lyf had first possessed him, could never be Lyf’s match in wit or magery. However, Deroe had a real human body to draw upon and it gave him far more strength than Lyf could take from the wrythen form he had left behind in his distant caverns. The longer the struggle went on the weaker Lyf became, and the greater the likelihood that Deroe would cast him out permanently.

If Deroe ever realised how physically weak Lyf was, if Deroe knew for a moment that Lyf could be beaten, he would attack mercilessly. Deroe had to die.

But he had the three stolen nuclixes close to hand to bolster his power at need, while Lyf’s, the weakest of the five, could not be used at all from so far away. Unable to match Deroe’s strength, and afraid to use magery that might be turned against him, all Lyf had left was cunning, and patience.

And knowledge of a weakness Deroe was not aware of. A vessel in his brain had a flaw and, if it could be induced to rupture, the magian’s death would come within minutes. Not so fast that his death would trap Lyf too — for that was the greatest peril of fighting a man while possessing him — but too quick for Deroe to save himself with magery.

Lyf had been subtly attacking the flaw for hours, picking at it with what little force he could muster while the mental struggle went on. It was like trying to cut a pipe with a feather, yet in time a feather can wear away rock and he was close now. Just a hundred more strokes. Just fifty. Just thirty -

The call shrieked through his mind, but this time it was his nuclix, calling frantically — an intruder had entered his caverns. And The Consolation of Vengeance lay open on its table, unprotected. What if the intruder stole it? Or worse, catastrophically so because the last leaf was blank — what if the intruder wrote another ending and transmitted it to the Chamber of the Solaces?

Lyf burned quessence like a spendthrift, desperate to see, to know. The intruder was the host, Tali, and somehow she had gained entrance to the white shaft of the Abysm, his nucleatory. How had she got in?

Again this admirable enemy confounded him by going where no living human should have been able to go. It had not occurred to Lyf that one person could easily penetrate the sacred Abysm — someone who also had a nuclix. She was close to the source; her master nuclix might already be charging itself from it and if she took his nuclix, the plans of two thousand years would collapse.

He had to fly at once.

But Lyf could not simply disengage from Deroe. That would leave him exposed and vulnerable for an eternal minute, time enough for the magian to strike. Lyf had to ease out of Deroe’s mind so subtly that he did not realise what was happening.

Deroe, correctly interpreting Lyf’s inactivity as weakness, struck a ferocious blow. Lyf deflected the worst of it, yet it hurt him, and in reflex he hit back with the nerve-fire enchantment. It failed, as he should have known it would — Deroe was too subtle a foe to be caught by the same spell twice.

He’s crumbling, ha, ha! Deroe hooted like a schoolboy and attacked with seven spells at once, spending power promiscuously to overwhelm his enemy.

Suddenly, even as Lyf sensed Tali reaching out for his nuclix, he was fighting for his life. Every instinct screamed at him to withdraw and run, but he had to maintain his defences and go slowly, slowly. Deroe must not realise what was going on.

Lyf sneaked through a low blow and the magian howled, but did not retreat behind his barriers this time. The advantage was his, and if he kept up the assault it was only a matter of minutes.

Then Lyf saw Tali’s fingers close over his nuclix and it went to her with a little sigh. Catastrophe was only a breath away. He thought furiously. Even if she stole his pearl, she did not know how to use it. And it was a long way out of the cavern; an even longer way back to Caulderon. The worst could not happen. But what if it did?

The facinore should be close to the caverns by now. So profane a creature could not enter the Abysm, but the moment Tali emerged with the pearl she must be taken. Lyf directed his failing strength into a command to the facinore. A command he prayed it would obey.

Find the host. Hold her.

Do not feed!