Caught in Crystal: A Lyra Novel (25 page)

“Glyndon!” Kayl said in much the same tone she used to Mark and Dara. “Make sense.”

“Hmmm? Oh. It’s just an idea. Kevran was experimenting for a while with using different woods and herbs and so on as channels. He said once that he was going to have a compartment made in his rod, so he could see what effects he could get by using two different things at once.”

As he spoke, Glyndon picked up the oiled cloth that had wrapped the rod. He covered his hands with it and picked up the rod. For a long moment, he studied it, turning it over and staring down the length of it, then shifting it so the light caught it at different angles. Then he let his breath out in a little exclamation of satisfaction. He slid his hands along the oiled cloth to either end of the rod and gave a sudden, sharp twist.

The center of the rod came apart along a clean line. Kayl leaned forward. The joining had been painstakingly made; when the two halves were fitted together the crack was all but invisible. The left half of the rod ended in a short, grooved protuberance like the tang of a knife, but the right half of the rod had been hollowed out for some way. Kayl could see dried moss filling the cavity.

Glyndon set the solid half of the rod on the floor. “Have you got something I can use to pull this out?” he asked, indicating the moss-packed hole. “Under the circumstances, I’d rather not use my fingers.”

“Here,” Mark said before Kayl could reply. He pulled his dagger from his belt and offered it hilt-first to Glyndon. “Will this do?”

“Very well, I think,” Glyndon said, taking the dagger. He picked at the moss with the dagger’s point, then turned the rod over and shook it.

A shower of powdery moss fragments fell out of the hole. Glyndon muttered something and hit the rod sharply with the hilt of the dagger. A wad of moss dropped out and something hit the floor with a rattle. Kayl leaned forward. Something gleamed up at her from the center of the dry debris.

It was a piece of crystal about the size of her thumbnail.

K
AYL LEANED CLOSER, STARING
at the crystal. Three sides were perfectly flat and intersected at right angles, forming three straight edges. The fourth side was slightly curved and had an irregular rim, as though the crystal had been chipped… or as though it was a chip of something larger.

She looked up. Glyndon was staring at the bit of crystal and his face was gray. For a moment she thought he was
‘seeing’
things again, and she went cold. “Glyndon?” she said softly. “Do you know what that is?”

“I—no, it can’t be—I don’t—”

“Glyndon! What’s the matter with you? What can’t it be?”

“It can’t be from the Twisted Tower,” Glyndon whispered, his eyes still fixed on the piece of crystal. “It can’t be!”

“Is it magic?” Mark said curiously. “It doesn’t look like anything special to me.”

“Do you think you can tell whether something is magic just by staring at it?” Dara said scornfully.

“Don’t touch it!” Kayl said as Mark leaned forward, frowning.

“I wasn’t going to,” Mark said in an injured tone. “I was just
looking.”

“Look from a little farther away, then.” Kayl turned to Glyndon, who had recovered some of his color. “The same thought occurred to me—that crystal the Elder Mothers were talking about. But Kevran couldn’t have found anything in the Tower without the rest of us knowing.”

“I suppose so,” Glyndon said without conviction.

Kayl gave him a sharp look. “Do you know something I don’t?”

Glyndon’s head came up. “Quite a lot,” he said with the ghost of a smile. “Unless you’ve spent a couple of years studying on Varna since the last time we met.”

“Glyndon! Be serious. Did Kevran go back to the Tower that first night, when I thought he was helping you?”

“No,” Glyndon said flatly. His voice held an undercurrent of relief. “Kevran was with me all night.”

“Then there’s no way that crystal could be from the Twisted Tower. None.” Kayl wondered whether she was trying harder to convince Glyndon or to convince herself. She looked down at the crystal again and said slowly, “I suppose you’re sure that this is what was making Kevran’s rod do whatever it was doing?”

“Quite sure.” Glyndon picked up the two halves of the rod, one in each hand, and joined them together again. “See? There’s nothing special about it now.”

“It was Father’s!” Dara said indignantly.

“Then can I have it?” Mark said almost simultaneously.

“Not now,” Kayl said to Mark. She was beginning to wish she had sent the children somewhere else, anywhere else, while she and Glyndon discussed the rod. Not that she had anywhere to send them. She looked down at the crystal and sighed. “I suppose we ought to make sure,” she said, half to herself, and reached toward it.

“Kayl!” Glyndon said in alarm. He bent forward hastily, also reaching for the crystal. Simultaneously, their fingers touched it.

The circular room was full of light. Large, arched windows were spaced at regular intervals around the curving walls, providing an uninspiring view of the dead valley below. The side wall where the stairway came up was covered with a tapestry in cream and crimson, and more tapestries hung between the windows. A cream-colored frieze circled the wall just below the high, domed ceiling. The only furnishings were a marble bench on one side and the waist-high pedestal in the center of the room, where the huge crystal cube rested. The place should have seemed pleasant and airy; instead, Kayl felt as if she were standing in a tomb.

The wizards were all clustered around the pedestal, muttering over the crystal. Kevran was taking measurements, while Glyndon hunched over one side, feeling for any irregularities in the surface. Varevice and Beshara seemed to be arguing about something; Evla was staring into the cube as if she were in a trance. Only Barthelmy and Kayl hung back. Barthelmy watched Odevan standing behind his mistress in an attitude of respectful attention. Kayl prowled the perimeter of the room, looking for conventional, nonmagical threats.

“I give up,” Kevran said at last. “The thing’s a perfect cube, as near as I can tell, and that’s
all
I can tell.”

“You’ve done better than I have,” Varevice said sourly. “I’ve done every spell I can think of, and that lump of rock is still just a lump of rock.”

“Odevan!” Beshara said peremptorily. “Can you see anything?”

The
sklathran’sy
came forward and pressed his long, spidery fingers against the top of the crystal. “No, Mistress.”

“Could it be witch-glass?” Evla asked. “I can’t think of anything else that’s so dead to magic.”

Beshara looked speculatively at the Crystal. “I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re probably right. It’s a pity, in a way; we’ll have to destroy it now.”

“Destroy it?” Glyndon said, looking up from his crouch beside the cube. “Why?”

“Beshara’s right,” Varevice said reluctantly. “If it is witch-glass, a lump this size would account for that odd echo in the Elder Mothers’ seeing spells.”

“Not to mention the blur in the ones the High Mage cast,” Beshara put in. “I’m afraid the only way of stopping the interference is to break the cube up into smaller chunks.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Glyndon said. “Especially since we still aren’t sure what this really is.”

“Have you some alternate suggestion?” Beshara asked sweetly.

“We could try breaking off a small piece to test,” Kevran said. “That ought to at least tell us what the cube is made of.”

“But that will spoil the cube!” Glyndon objected.

“I don’t like the idea either, but I think it’s the only way we’ll ever find out what we need to know,” Varevice said.

“And it’s better than just breaking it up.”

Evla nodded agreement. Glyndon looked from one to another, then threw up his hands. “All right, then, go ahead. You will anyway. Just don’t slip and hit me instead.” He crouched and began again his examination of the Crystal’s surface, his palms pressed flat against one vertical side of the cube.

“Everyone agrees, then?” Kevran asked, looking at the other magicians. “All right.” He drew his dagger and raised it over his head, then brought it down, hilt first, in a hard, sharp blow on one corner of the crystal cube. The Crystal rang with a high, pure note, but did not break. Kevran raised the dagger and brought it down again.

With a loud crack, a small corner of the cube broke off. The ringing of the crystal filled the chamber, still a single high note but without the same purity. Momentarily, it mingled with Glyndon’s scream of anguish; then he collapsed forward over the top of the crystal cube, his hands still pressed against its surface.

Evla was on her feet at once, bending over the unconscious Varnan. Kayl started forward to see if she could help.

“Behind you!” Barthelmy’s cry of warning snapped Kayl’s attention away from Glyndon. She turned, and took an involuntary step backward.

A thick, dull blackness was oozing from the wall behind her. It spread rapidly, forming a dark, wet curtain that shut out the light from the windows, then began creeping forward like a cat stalking. Kayl drew her sword and backed away. The blackness wiggled and moved up another foot. She heard screams and shouting behind her, but she could not take her attention off of the black thing long enough to glance around. Somehow she was certain that if she did, it would engulf her.

The thing moved forward. The light in the room dimmed as it blocked more of the windows. Kayl cut at it with her sword, but the blackness closed behind the blade like molasses flowing together behind a knife. She slashed at it again, and again, and felt the balance of her blade change in her hand. She looked down and saw that the metal was dull and pitted, and the edge of the sword visibly eaten away.

She retreated again and glanced around. Her companions, except for Glyndon, were casting spell after spell at the dripping black curtain, with no apparent effect. The blackness covered half the chamber wall now—including the door to the stairway. They were trapped.

A long tendril whipped out from the blackness and wrapped itself around Odevan’s waist. The demon screamed in agony and tore at it with his hands. Beshara and Barthelmy cried out together, but it was Beshara who dove forward to grab Odevan’s arm. With her free hand she sent a gout of fire at the tentacle. The blackness continued to draw Odevan closer, and Beshara with him. She did not release her hold, even when the black thing overwhelmed them.

Kayl wanted to turn her head away, but she did not dare. Another tentacle flashed toward her; she slashed at it and deflected it enough to dodge the rest of the way out of its path. She heard Evla scream, and her heart contracted.

Glyndon was leaning heavily against the crystal, shaking his head as if to clear it. Kayl shouted at him to do something; they needed everyone, even a groggy Varnan wizard. Then a wave of mental agony struck her and she staggered, knowing that one of her star-sisters was dead. The blackness oozed closer, and Kayl slashed at it angrily, hopelessly, uselessly…

“Mother? Mother, are you all right? Mother?”

Dara’s voice, growing more and more frantic, brought Kayl back to herself. The crystal had rolled a little away from her hand and Glyndon’s; looking at it, she shuddered. She forced herself to look up and meet Dara’s worried gaze. “It’s all right, Dara. I’m fine. I think.”

“Are you sure? You looked…” Dara stopped, shaking her head for lack of any better description.

“There’s no harm done,” Kayl said. She glanced across at Glyndon, then turned back to Dara. “Would you and Mark go down and get a couple of mugs of wine from the innkeeper? It will break the warding, but I don’t think that matters much anymore, and Glyndon and I could use them.”

Mark and Dara exchanged glances, and Dara nodded. They slipped out of the room. Kayl looked back at Glyndon as the door closed. “Are you all right? You look a little…” She made an ambiguous gesture.

“I’m fine,” Glyndon said with an attempt at a smile. “I think that thing just brought back the worst effects of last night’s ale.”

“Maybe next time you won’t drink so much of it, then,” Kayl said, trying to match his tone. “And I thought you told me it was winter wine.”

“It was.” Glyndon shook his head experimentally. “At least the effects of the crystal don’t last as long as the effects of the wine. What did it do to you?”

“Nothing like that, but then I wasn’t drinking last night. This time I remembered a circular room at the top of the Twisted Tower, with a big cube of crystal.”

Glyndon looked up quickly. “I saw the same thing. A vision…”

“That was no vision,” Kayl said flatly. “It was a memory. An impossible memory. We never got past the door at the top of the stairs; the black thing was waiting for us.”

Glyndon did not answer. Kayl stared at him, an unwelcome suspicion growing in her mind. “We never got past the top of the stairs,” she repeated. “Did we?”

Glyndon looked miserable. “Kayl, please don’t ask me.”

“Then explain to me how I can remember something that never happened.”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t? What did you do while I was fighting that black thing?”

“I don’t know!” Glyndon all but shouted.

Kayl studied him, and the anguished self-doubt in his expression shook her to the core. “Tell me what you do know, then,” she said in a quieter voice.

“I tried to use the Crystal,” Glyndon said. “I thought the black thing was its guardian; that’s why it appeared when Kevran knocked the chip off the corner of the Crystal. I thought if I could reach the black thing through the Crystal somehow… It didn’t work.”

“But you did do something.”

“I don’t know what or how. I don’t remember anything about the Twisted Tower after I tried to reach into the Crystal, except for some vague images of fighting on the stairs.”

“None of us seem to remember that fight very clearly,” Kayl said in a grim tone. “But you’ve known about the Tower room and the Crystal all these years, haven’t you? Why didn’t you say anything?”

“And make you all certain I’d gone mad?” Glyndon said bitterly. “The visions were bad enough without claiming I remembered something nobody else did.”