Tears pricked his eyes when he thought about Irisis, his dearest friend, being tormented by the scrutators. No – he had to cling to hope, no matter how slender. Surely Yggur and Malien, two of the truly great figures from the Histories, were still at large? Yggur was a mancer of overwhelming power and cunning, a legend who had struggled against Rulke himself, back in the time of the Mirror, and even before that. Yggur was more than twelve hundred years old; had seen everything and survived everything. How could the scrutators beat him?

And yet… the Council had known where Yggur's secret defences lay, and had destroyed them from afar without being detected. What if Yggur had been targeted the same way, as he slept? If he was dead, all hope was lost.

The tower gave another of those plastic shudders that made his stomach lurch. Nish clutched the rod with both hands. Waves of colour like inverted rainbows shimmered in the air and, suddenly, he saw right through the stone dome, as he had that ghastly night last summer after his father, Jal-Nish, had forced Nish's hands into those uncanny quicksilver tears distilled from the destroyed node at Snizort.

He was looking into a seething hell – a cauldron of molten stone seemingly suspended in mid-air where the floor of the lower chamber had once been. What could be holding it up? The roiling globe drifted toward the side wall, only to be repelled back towards the centre. It rotated one way and then the other, emitting little bursts of glowing plasma that licked the soot-coated walls clean wherever they touched.

Nish could only imagine that the ferocity of the blast had been contained by some unknown aspect of Yggur's secret defences. He prayed that it stayed contained, for the radiating fury looked potent enough to consume the walls of the tower.