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Kerik is wide awake again and he and Tobi are laughing about something. He watches and realises they are working together to impersonate Damon. With Kerik mouthing the words and Tobi supplying Damon’s voice. “I am the One Man Army.”

They find a narrow, twisty flight of stairs that leads to a small attic room that is clearly used as a pillow chamber. The floorboards are covered by a thin rug, the bed is large and draped in faded silks. The room contains little more. On a small chair beside the bed is nothing but a dusty washing bowl. One small window set in the sloping ceiling shows the night sky.

Lyr lies down on the bed and rolls onto his belly. Jemel pulls up the chair and sits down beside him. Elric sits on the floor, ready with parchment, ink and a large flask of bark tea. Xan brings the candlestick he holds close, letting the gold light shine down over Lyr’s back.

Perl, who has joined them in the room, simply leans against the wall, looking nervous.

Lyr turns his head and buries it in his arms. He feels Jemel lifting his chiton and the feel of his fingertips touching his back once again. They prickle, like a distant echo of the searing when these words were burnt into him. He shifts. It feels as if the skin of his back is lifting a little, no longer part of him.

Softly Jemel says, “Do you remember a woman called Pershel who read these runes in the Rose Palace?”

Lyr turns his head to look at Jemel. “Yes,” he says. I remember her. He does. A woman robed as a Bride of Zai. Her fingers had been shaking as she ran them over his skin. She’d hidden it, but Lyr is sure she had been more concerned about what she’d seen in those runes than she had betrayed to the others in that room.

“Do you remember what part she read?” Jemel says.

“No. I couldn’t see. I am sorry. Is it important?”

“I don’t know yet,” Jemel says.

Lyr lies back down, flat on the bed. Jemel is silent for a moment. There is no sound in the room. Everyone simply waits, until Jemel says, “Elric, let’s begin..”

34

JEMEL

The runes are tiny, covering every part of Lyr’s back. They are not in simple even lines, but run everywhere in confusing directions, backwards and forwards. A lot of Jemel’s time is taken up in just finding the right places, tracking lines of the text as they spiralled.

But once he finds the parts about the Five Fae Princes defeating the Bellator, the words come to him. He stops to consult with Elric at times. He is useful. He does not really know Ur-Ambolk, but he does know Old Magaar, which the runes sometimes warp into and when they do, Jemel brings Elric forward to discuss the exact meaning of some of the words.

And Elric writes everything down with sober patience. His hand is not as good as Jemel's, who was trained to write beautifully since he could hold a quill, but it is quite acceptable and he can write fast. Interesting considering that Jemel knows what Elric was in the Rose Palace, trained in something else.

Elric, Jemel thinks sourly, would not be so weak that he would be unable to look at a man simply because he spread his legs for him. All the time Jemel has been working he has been aware of Xan, tirelessly holding and moving the lamp. Watching Jemel while Jemel, in return, ignores him.

His head begins to ache. First a distant tension behind the eyes, that he can blink away. But it grows. He touches his temples. Not enough sleep. Days and nights in a dungeon cell. The horrors of the day. His vision starts to blur and he has to will himself to keep going.

In this way, ignoring the pains in his head and his heart as best he can, Jemel works on and on, hunched over on a bed covered with faded silks and tattered, blood-red velvet.

Eventually Elric has a pile of papers covered in Jemel’s words. As Jemel leans back, he wonders if he can do more without resting, his eyesight is failing and his head hurts so much it sickens him. He closes his eyes and massages his eyeballs with his fingers, seeing strange flashes in the darkness. Before he can say a word about it, the chamber door opens and Damon steps into the room, “How goes it?”

Jemel cannot ignore the way Lyr moves as Damon appears. A subtle change in his body, shifting towards Damon, like a flower to the sun.

Jemel nods, “The Bellator were sealed in a vault beneath the Amber Forest,” he says, relaying one of the first things he translated.

“We know this.”

Jemel nods. “The vault was sealed with the blood of a Bellator. They slew the leader. The King of the Earth and that was how the vault was closed.”

“So they did kill this Bellator? They killed the King of the Earth?”

“Yes,” Jemel says. “According to the Books of Alios, that was done with the five blades. The five blades, all at once wielded by the five princes, will kill a Bellator. Or, at least, that killed the King of the Earth and sealed the others inside the vault with his spilt blood.”

Damon’s face is very serious. “So we need Atticul? We need to capture him and kill him this way?”

“I believe so. If Batreous meant for us to do as they did in the Books of Alios. I think we also need to do it in the Amber Forest. I think that place may have a particular power. It is the domain of the Bellator, afterall.”

“We know that Atticul planned to travel north after the Ascension,” Damon says. “I do not know if the events that have transpired will change that. We need to find out. If he does, we should let him go. Meet him there and slay him before he can open the vault. Is there a specific ritual?”

“There are some spelled words to speak. I have them.” As Jemel says this, Elric holds up his pile of papers.