Chimaera

EIGHTEEN

Gilhaelith shaded his eyes from the setting sun as he tried to make out the port, which had served Alcifer long ago, among the dense forest covering the shore. Could that blocky shape down to the left be it? He adjusted the sail of the dinghy, and then the tiller a fraction. Surely it had to be.

His escape from Fiz Gorgo had been uneventful, as had his trip up the west coast of Meldorin, east through the passage between Meldorin and Qwale and south again halfway down the Sea of Thurkad. It had taken longer than it would have done to walk from Fiz Gorgo across the width of Meldorin, but at least it had been safe. The lyrinx rarely attacked ships on the open sea, while anyone foolish enough to pass through the swamps of Orist into enemy lands would have been killed and eaten on sight. Gilhaelith had taken to the dinghy just that morning, for the ship’s captain had refused to go within a league of the fabled, haunted city, much less the lyrinx’s underground labyrinth of Oellyll, delved into the living rock beneath Alcifer and home to at least seventy thousand of the enemy.

Besides, Gilhaelith could not have walked across Meldorin to save his life. He hadn’t regained the strength he’d taken for granted in the hundred years and more he’d dwelt at beautiful Nyriandiol, and perhaps never would. Every stone of that great edifice had been chosen for its geomantic properties. Each had been shaped and placed so as to enhance the natural magic of the mountaintop, and to support him in his life’s endeavour – to understand the nature of the world and the forces that made it so. Without Nyriandiol, Gilhaelith was not a shadow of the master geomancer he’d been while he dwelt there.

He still yearned to complete his life’s endeavour, though Gilhaelith now doubted that he ever would. While trapped in sticky tar deep in the black pit of Snizort last summer, as the node had been about to explode, he’d done the only thing he could to save himself. He’d created a phantom, mathemantical crystal in his mind and used it to draw the power he’d needed to escape. He’d managed to drag himself to safety but in doing so the crystal had burst asunder, spearing its fragments through his brain and damaging part of it. The injury had further reduced his capacity for geomancy. What once had been effortless he now did only with the most prodigious labour, while some things he could not do at all.

But that had not been the worst of the damage. The phantom crystal fragments remained and whenever he drew power, even for the most trivial purpose, they burned more of his brain. Gilhaelith was faced with the worst of all choices. He could hope to prolong his life by never drawing power again, though without practising his Art, his life would be meaningless. Or he could attempt, by geomantic means, to locate and unmake every fragment of the phantom crystal. There lay his only hope of restoring himself to the greatness he’d once had, or at least to what shadow of it he could regain.

In that endeavour he’d spent his previous months at Alcifer refashioning his geomantic globe. He’d made it into the most perfect representation of Santhenar he could create, its lands, seas, mountains, rivers and icecaps, even down to the nodes themselves. It would give him the focus he needed to repair himself, though the work had done him more damage, of course. He’d completed it little more than a month ago, an unparalleled, agonising labour and, in the circumstances, a phenomenal work of genius. But then Matriarch Gyrull had sent him outside to take measurements of the field for her.

In reality she’d used him as an unwitting decoy to try to capture Tiaan and the thapter, and had almost succeeded. Instead, Tiaan had captured Gilhaelith and taken him to Fiz Gorgo. Without the geomantic globe, his agony had been complete and his death, or descent into irreparable brain damage, certain.

Unable to face that prospect, Gilhaelith had single-mindedly set out to get back to Alcifer, unwittingly betraying Fiz Gorgo to Ghorr in the process. He didn’t want to think about that.

He adjusted the sail again, taking advantage of an easterly wind-shift to speed towards the scrub-covered oblong that was undoubtedly the end of one of the breakwaters of the port. What would happen now? Even if he recovered his geomantic globe, using it to find and unmake those crystal fragments risked destroying his mind completely. He could scarcely bear the thought of his greatness reduced to a mindless, drooling vegetable – lyrinx fodder. Assuming that the lyrinx would allow him access to the globe at all. Matriarch Gyrull had been spying on him all the time he’d worked on the globe and had probably seized it in his absence. If she didn’t need him any more, he’d be sent to the slaughtering pens.

The thought checked him for a moment, for Gilhaelith had a horror of being eaten. It wasn’t right that a man so great as he could come to such an undignified end. Dare he go on, confronting such a fate? He took the numbers, to see what kind of omens there were for this choice. The once effortless calculations were now a great strain but the omens proved to be neither good nor bad. It was up to him to tilt fate one way or the other. He would go on. He would risk all to get back what he had lost, no matter what the consequences.

Gilhaelith brought the dinghy in to the eroded stone jetty and tied the painter to a gnarled root that had forced the stones apart. After heaving his canvas holdall up onto the barnacle-covered stone, he pulled himself after it, and froze.

Four lyrinx stood there, back against the shrubbery so that they had been out of sight from below. He recognised three of them: a young wingless male called Ryll; Liett, a young female with outer skin that was quite unarmoured and colourless, so that he could see the purple blood flowing beneath it; and Matriarch Gyrull, big and old with pouched eyes, battle-scarred armour and segments missing from her crest. And, further back, almost concealed by the shadows, the biggest lyrinx Gilhaelith had ever seen – a vast coal-black male with a golden crest. He was one and a half times Gilhaelith’s own majestic height, and probably five or six times his bulk. His folded wings drooped as though he was tired, though the lyrinx held himself erect and his golden eyes seemed to miss nothing.

‘I hoped you would come back,’ Gyrull said, reaching out and encircling Gilhaelith’s bony wrist with her clawed fingers. ‘Come with me, Tetrarch.’

When Gilhaelith had been safely penned in a stone chamber of the underground city, and a pair of zygnadrs, or sentinels, set to watch him, the four lyrinx repaired to an empty dining hall. There the coal-black male selected the lower half of a dead human male from a meat tray and tore it into two haunches, one of which he politely offered to the matriarch.

Gyrull shook her head. ‘I’m not hungry. I have much to think about. Go ahead, Anabyng. You must be hungry after your long flight.’

‘I confess I am,’ he replied. ‘I didn’t settle once in the last two days, so anxious was I to get home.’

Liett took the haunch and bit a chunk from the thigh muscle with her sharp grey teeth. Ryll reached into the tray for a lower leg joint. He hadn’t eaten human flesh for a good while, since there were few humans left in Meldorin. He absently twisted the foot off and tossed it back into the tray, then went across to the table with the others. He was about to tear into the tasty calf meat when Gyrull spoke.

‘I don’t like it, Anabyng. Why has the tetrarch come back?’

The black male chewed and swallowed before answering. Golden speckles broke out on his chest, in appreciation of the quality of the meat. ‘For the geomantic globe. It means more to him than his life, and he is a dead man without it.’

‘Were it up to me,’ said Liett, ‘he would be a dead man now, though I wouldn’t care to dine on his tainted flesh.’ Gilhaelith favoured the most exotic of diets: salted slugs, pickled wood-roaches and other kinds of vermin that not even the lowest of the lyrinx would have eaten but to save their lives.

‘We need him,’ said Ryll, putting down the leg joint untasted.

‘How is the flisnadr going?’ asked Anabyng, referring to the power patterner that Ryll and Liett had been trying to create for many months. ‘Have you made much progress since I left?’

Ryll took up his joint again, stared at the red flesh for a moment, then all at once let it fall on the table. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, human flesh, which he had enjoyed all his life, had lost its appeal. ‘There hasn’t been any progress, Great Anabyng. We’re bedevilled by the same problem that we’ve had from the beginning: linking the individual patterners, with their humans inside, to grow the flisnadr. And we still haven’t worked out how to use Gilhaelith’s geomantic globe to solve this problem.’

‘Then you’d better torture it out of him.’ Anabyng stripped the rest of the meat off the upper thigh, then bit off the protruding bone and crunched it noisily. ‘We’ve got to have it by the beginning of spring.’

‘What’s the matter, Anabyng?’ said Liett, devouring her haunch with gusto. ‘Why so soon?’

Anabyng’s head jerked up and his eyes glowed, though he did not speak.

Matriarch Gyrull struck the table with her fist. ‘Be so good as to use Anabyng’s proper title, daughter. He is our greatest hero of the battlefield, and the greatest in the Art, too. He earned his honour the hard way.’

Liett dipped her head in a perfunctory manner. ‘But I’m the daughter of the matriarch!’ she said sulkily.

‘Then it’s incumbent upon you to observe the proprieties, more than anyone.’

Liett’s eyes flashed. ‘You said we had to recreate ourselves to suit the new world once the war is won. That’s what I’m doing.’

‘Have you learned nothing?’ cried Gyrull. ‘You expect me to choose you as matriarch after me, yet you display few of the necessary qualities. Your lack of respect diminishes you, daughter.’

‘Name one person more suited to the honour than me,’ Liett said with an imperious tilt of the head.

‘Even Ryll is more suited to the honour than you,’ Gyrull replied deliberately, ‘and he is male.’

Anabyng spread his great maw wide, making a choking noise that Ryll could only interpret as a laugh. Ryll wasn’t laughing. To even compare him to a candidate for matriarch was mortifying. ‘Matriarch, you mock me,’ he said, hanging his head. His skin colours flashed red and purple and he felt an unusual burning sensation in his cheeks.

‘And insult me,’ cried Liett, giving him a savage look, as if he had deliberately undermined her.

‘By millennia-long custom we are led by a matriarch,’ said Anabyng, ‘and none of us would seek to change that.’

‘Nor I,’ said Gyrull. ‘I merely point out that, in the half-year since we returned from the fall of Snizort, the wingless one has set an example in the mastery of his Art, in strategic thinking about the war and the future, and in unassuming leadership. When he speaks, the common folk set down their tools and listen. You’d be well advised to follow Ryll’s example, daughter.’

Liett, incredulous, flashed out her beautiful wings and bared her teeth at Ryll, for all that she had long sought permission to mate with him, and he with her. Theirs was a volatile relationship.

‘Assuming you do wish to be a candidate for matriarch,’ said Gyrull. ‘On that display, I doubt it. Leave us, Liett.’

‘What?’ said Liett, belatedly folding her wings.

‘Leave us!’ Gyrull snapped. ‘I wish to speak about matters of importance with those mature enough to offer worthwhile opinions.’

Liett began to flounce away. She caught Ryll’s eye and he gave a little shake of the head. She snapped her teeth at him, a last display, then slunk out, head bowed.

‘I truly don’t know what I’m going to do with her,’ sighed Gyrull.

‘Send her to the battlefront,’ said Anabyng. ‘If she survives, it may make a leader of her yet. She does have a great talent, though it’s wilfully misdirected.’

‘I need her here,’ said Ryll hastily. Though he knew it made good sense, he couldn’t bear the thought of losing Liett. ‘To send her to battle, unarmoured as she is, would be to condemn her to death.’

‘Perhaps your feelings for her overpower your good sense,’ observed the black lyrinx.

‘No, Ryll is right,’ said Gyrull. ‘We do need Liett to complete the flisnadr; she has special abilities. Enough of that. What news from your scouting, Anabyng? Why do we need the device by the end of winter? I thought we had months more.’

‘The humans are too clever and cunning,’ said Anabyng. He crunched the rest of the thigh bone and slurped up the marrow. ‘I’m worried that they’ll come up with some fiendish new strategy over the winter.’

‘We have them on the run,’ said Gyrull. ‘We’ve defeated them time and again, and by spring we’ll have another ten thousand to set against them. I’m not afraid –’

‘There have been developments. The whole Council of Scrutators attacked Lord Yggur at Fiz Gorgo a few weeks ago but the chief scrutator was killed, along with many others. Only seven of their sixteen air-dreadnoughts escaped.’

‘I heard,’ said Gyrull. ‘But that’s something to celebrate, surely?’

‘Fusshte has taken over,’ said Anabyng, ‘and he’ll pursue us more relentlessly than Ghorr ever did.’

‘But he’s no leader,’ Gyrull said, dismissing the threat. ‘And leadership is what they need most desperately.’

‘I think …’ began Ryll tentatively. ‘Er, Great Anabyng …’ He squared his shoulders and tried to meet the male’s eyes boldly, though Ryll was only too conscious of his physical deficiency, his lack of wings. ‘This power in Fiz Gorgo, that can defeat the entire Council and all their soldiers and mancers, must be a threat to us. We’ve got to find out who they are and what their plans are. If a great leader should emerge from the present chaos we could have a hard time of it, since we’ve failed with the flisnadr. Gilhaelith –’

‘Indeed.’ Anabyng’s eyes met Gyrull’s. ‘I believe that’s the kind of strategic thinking you were talking about, Matriarch. We must extract everything Gilhaelith knows about Fiz Gorgo, without damaging him too much, then put him to work.’

‘Quite,’ said Gyrull. ‘What of the other humankinds?’

‘Lord Vithis has gathered all his Aachim around him. They’ve built camps near the Foshorn, by the south-western edge of the Dry Sea, planted gardens and harvested enough fish from the Sea of Thurkad to see them through the winter. Now they’re building vast stone structures at the Foshorn.’

‘Are they preparing for war against us?’ said Ryll.

‘There’s little sign of it,’ said Anabyng, ‘though I can’t say what they are up to. And if driven to it –’

‘Since they’ve broken with the old humans, at all costs we must avoid provoking them,’ said Gyrull. ‘Or the Stassor Aachim. Or the exiled ones, for that matter. What was their name?’

‘Clan Elienor,’ said Ryll. ‘Though without their constructs, and reduced to beggary on the shores of the Sea of Thurkad, Elienor can’t threaten us.’

‘If we attack them, Vithis might come to their aid despite sending them into exile. We must do nothing to provoke any of the Aachim, for we cannot fight them and the old humans. But it’s the old humans that worry me. They adapt too quickly, and they’re deadly inventive. We’d better step up the attacks on their manufactories.’

‘Indeed. And now I must rest for an hour or two,’ said Anabyng. ‘It was a wearying flight and I’m spent. After that, we’ll see what the tetrarch can tell us.’ He bowed to the matriarch, nodded to Ryll and went out.

‘You haven’t eaten your meal,’ Gyrull said to Ryll, glancing at the joint on the table.

He walked across and tossed it back in the tray. ‘I no longer enjoy the taste of human flesh, Matriarch. I’d like to talk to you about that … if you have the time. I’ve begun to feel that it’s wrong.’

‘Wrong?’ she said without emphasis.

He had no idea what she was thinking. ‘To eat the flesh of another sentient species, one that is, despite outward appearances, not so very different from ourselves, it just seems … I feel that it reduces us to the level of beasts. And we’re not beasts!’ he cried. Then he went on, more tentatively, ‘Are we, Matriarch?’

‘No, Ryll,’ she said softly. ‘We were artists once, and philosophers, with a noble culture that stretched back a thousand years. In those days our identity did not depend on warriors’ arts. We were once great, and we lost it all. No,’ she said reflectingly, ‘our ancestors abandoned the past so that we could survive in the void. We had no choice.’

‘This war stopped being about survival long ago,’ said Ryll. ‘It’s become existence, and it’s not enough. I want our culture back, Matriarch. I feel hollow inside, as if I’ve lost my soul. And I’m not the only one.’

‘Many of us have begun to feel that way,’ she said. ‘And we matriarchs are doing what we can to shape our people for the future, ill-fitted as we are for the task.’

‘Don’t say that, Matriarch,’ said Ryll. ‘You are the best of us; our guiding force.’

‘We were, in the void, and even in the early days here. But the world is changing too quickly, Ryll, and we’re too fixed in the old ways. We can’t guide you much longer. We must make way for a new generation, and I’m afraid …’

‘You, Matriarch?’ he said uncomprehendingly.

‘The war may soon be over but the peace will be even more dangerous for us, for our warrior caste is not fitted for it. Many of our people can conceive of nothing but war and don’t want to give up its glories, even for peace.’

‘We must find a way to change their minds,’ said Ryll.

‘They know nothing but war and if we take it away without giving them something else, they’ll be broken; people without a purpose. It’ll tear us apart. We matriarchs of the six cities have had much mindspeech on the topic this past year. We’re starting to try to shape the thinking of the progressives, like you …’

‘What about the warriors?’

‘The warriors too, as best we can,’ she said, ‘though with limited success. But they are disciplined and obedient to our edicts – in the void, anything else meant extinction. If all else fails, we will have to issue a Matriarchal Edict. It’s not been done since we made the decision to come out of the void, but I think they’ll obey. I think they’ll lay down their arms, but what happens after that I cannot say.’

‘We must replace our warrior culture with a sounder one, fitted for peace.’

‘With what we had before? How can we, Ryll?’

‘We can’t return to the past, Matriarch. All we can do is discover what we once were, and use the best of that heritage to shape our future here on Santhenar, after the war.’

Gyrull was smiling, and now she put an arm across his shoulders. ‘Your forethought constantly surprises me, Ryll. Come, let’s take a walk and you can tell me more.’

NINETEEN

‘How is he?’ said Nish from the doorway.

Four healers were gathered around the shrouded figure of Xervish Flydd, blocking Nish’s view, and he was reluctant to go closer for fear of the horrors he might see, to say nothing of the righteous wrath of the healers. Cryl-Nish Hlar, artificer, who had faced down the mighty, who had defied the greatest figures on Santhenar including the late and unlamented Ghorr, was afraid of these diminutive healers. He had no place here and no right, and he knew it.

The chief healer turned, regarding him with hard black eyes that saw all men as brutes. Her dark hair was pulled back so tightly that her brow and cheeks were shiny taut. Evee was younger than he, and only chin-high to Nish, who was a small man, but she had such presence that he stepped backwards.

‘I’m sorry. I – I was worried, you see. He – he’s an old friend and …’

‘Had you any part in this?’ she said, snapping back the sheet.

Nish didn’t look but still the red registered. Flydd was a ruddy brown colour between the lower belly, where the flaying had begun, and mid-thigh.

‘I – I wasn’t there,’ he stammered. ‘I couldn’t sleep, you see, and I went for a walk. I was in the tower when the air-dreadnoughts descended on us …’ Nish realised that he was babbling.

‘Boys’ games,’ she said scornfully, drawing herself up to her insignificant height. Evee, who was little, plain, stringy and completely covered in freckles, dominated him in every respect. ‘Men destroy and women are left to put it all together again.’

It isn’t like that, he wanted to shout, our whole world is at stake here, but there was no point in saying it; his pride didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except that Xervish Flydd should survive and be made whole again so that he could lead them against Nennifer. No one else would do.

‘I’m sure you’ll do everything you can for him,’ he said quietly, and went outside.

On their return, Yggur had assembled the soldiers, artisans and crew left behind when the scrutators had fled. There were nearly three hundred of them: about a hundred and fifty soldiers and almost as many artificers, artisans, prentices, deck hands, junior cooks and other workers both skilled and unskilled. He had offered each a choice: to enter his service at Fiz Gorgo, or money and free passage aboard the next trading vessels going to Lauralin. Most had opted to return to their homelands and families, though some fifty soldiers and forty workers had accepted his offer of service. Yggur questioned each of them, rejecting several, who were also given passage east, then took the oaths of the remainder. They, plus carpenters and masons hired from Old Hripton, were immediately put to work repairing Fiz Gorgo and strengthening its defences.

Nish had a more important obligation to attend to. It had taken him a day to find a place to bury Ullii, on a little rise covered in trees overlooking the bay, and another day to dig a deep enough grave through the heavy clayey soil. It was painful work with his gashed arm but he wouldn’t allow anyone to help. He had to set Ullii to rest by himself. He’d spent most of the third day gathering stones for a cairn and hauling them to the gravesite, for there were none nearby, then sitting by the mound afterwards in silent contemplation of what they’d had and all they had lost.

At the end of that day, Yggur called the company together after dinner. Malien was talking as Nish entered, late. Instead of eating he’d walked to Old Hripton and back to clear his head for the urgent work to come. It hadn’t worked – he couldn’t concentrate – he just kept reliving that desperate day in the tower and up on the amphitheatre, and the way it had ended.

Ullii was dead and he couldn’t come to terms with it. He kept seeing her as she’d been the first time they’d met, crouched in the corner of that dark room in the manufactory, rocking on her bare feet. And all the times afterwards: hiding in her basket in the balloon as they’d set off to try and track Tiaan down; climbing the slopes of Mount Tirthrax; making love in the balloon after they’d fought off the nylatl. Escaping Snizort with Flydd, many months later, when she’d been so angry with him about the baby and Nish hadn’t even known she was pregnant. And then the ultimate horror: Myllii with his arms around Ullii as if trying to carry her away, and Nish trying to stop him, and the knife sliding into Myllii’s back. The moment that had changed both their lives and surely had led inevitably to her death.

He’d talked to Irisis about that, and Malien. Ullii had been glad to go, they’d said. There had been nothing left for her in this world, and she’d wanted to atone for betraying them to Ghorr. Nish knew that as well as they did, but it didn’t help. He missed Ullii, with all her frailties and all her strengths, more than he could ever have imagined. Even though they’d had no future together, there had never been anyone like her. She’d been the mother of his dead son and, now she was gone, he had nothing left of Yllii either. Every time he thought about them, tears welled up under his eyelids. If he’d only done things differently they would both be alive.

Yggur cleared his throat and Nish realised that he’d stopped in the doorway, lost in his thoughts. Malien was beckoning him – he was late.

‘We have to decide today, now,’ she said in a low voice, once Nish was seated and the door sealed, ‘whether to go through with the attack on Nennifer. If we are to go, it must be now or not at all. Gilhaelith knew of our plan, and while I don’t think he would betray it deliberately, we can’t rely on it remaining a secret.’ She inclined her head towards Klarm.

The dwarf scrutator was sitting on the edge of the table with his legs dangling, toying with an enormous goblet of Yggur’s finest purple wine, for which he had a capacity entirely out of keeping with his small stature. He took a hearty swig, rubbed a trickle of wine off his chin, leaving a mark like a purple bruise, and nodded. ‘Aye. Now or never.’

‘What news of Flydd?’ said Yggur, scowling at the dwarf. Hospitality demanded that he offer wine with meals but, being a man of modest and constrained appetites himself, Klarm’s indulgence and sheer gusto aroused his ire. ‘It was his plan and I don’t see how we can succeed without him.’

‘The healers have wielded their Arts as only they can,’ said Klarm, setting down his goblet with a sigh of contentment. He took pleasure in provoking stern, conservative Yggur and in another frame of mind Nish would have been amused by it. ‘The damage to his body will heal after a fashion …’ Klarm trailed off, as reluctant as everyone else to talk about the true nature of Flydd’s injuries. The matter was too private and personal – as if, by talking about what had been done to his body, they were taking the flaying blades to his soul.

‘But the scars carved into his psyche may not?’ said Malien.

‘He won’t be the man he once was,’ said Klarm, not meeting her eye.

What did he mean by that? Nish thought. That Flydd would no longer be a man at all? Just what had the torturers done to him? No one would say.

Yggur rose and paced the length of the room, limping badly today. The blisters on his face and arms had disappeared but he was covered with dead, flaking skin. He rubbed at an arm and flakes rose on a current of warm air from the fire. ‘Can we do it without him?’

‘I’m not sure we can,’ said Malien. ‘The plan relied on Flydd’s knowledge of Nennifer, gained from working there for many years.’

‘I dwelt there for a good while,’ said Klarm, ‘and had charge of its security. I know Nennifer as well as any man, so if his plan relied on a flaw in the defences –’

‘We don’t know if it did or not,’ said Yggur. ‘We planned to talk about that on the way, to ensure that there was no chance of the secret being revealed. But Flydd was sure he could get us in.’

‘Fusshte will soon be as strong as Ghorr was,’ said Irisis, ‘and he’s even more cunning and treacherous, but he can’t win the war either. We have no choice, Yggur. The Council must be brought down without delay. If Flydd’s incapable, we’ll have to work out a plan with Klarm.’

‘I can’t say I’d be confident of the outcome without Flydd,’ said Yggur, ‘but I agree we have to try.’

‘When?’ said Klarm.

‘Our equipment and supplies haven’t been touched,’ said Malien. ‘It will only take hours to load them into the thapter and make ready for departure. We could go tomorrow afternoon if you wanted to.’

‘Let’s give Flydd a few days,’ said Yggur. ‘I’ll talk to the healers again. If fortune is on our side, he’ll be on the road to recovery by then.’

‘Fortune is a chancy beast,’ said Klarm. ‘I can’t say I’ve seen many of her smiles this past year.’

In the event, Flydd had emerged from the healers’ coma the day after the meeting and insisted on coming. He stated that he would be ready to go in two days’ time, curtly overrode the healers when they’d protested, and had not spoken a word since. He’d turned away all visitors, even Yggur. There was much speculation about his state of mind and health, though not even Irisis, normally so adept at ferreting out secrets, could glean anything from the healers.

‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this trip,’ Nish said to Irisis the night before they were due to depart. They were checking the supplies yet again. ‘How can he be in any state to go?’

‘He’s a tough old coot,’ said Irisis, who had been unusually quiet lately.

She’d hardly spoken to him since he’d come back from burying Ullii, though Nish often caught her giving him cool, assessing glances. She was much more reserved than previously and he couldn’t fathom why. He’d expected that, after all he’d done to save her and everyone else, she would have been more grateful, and he felt a little hurt.

‘From what I saw on the first day –’ Nish began.

‘I’d rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind,’ snapped Irisis. ‘If Flydd doesn’t want us to know, we should respect his wishes and mind our own business.’ She went out, keeping her back to him the whole time.

Nish stared after her, uncomprehending. Surely, on such a desperate mission, Flydd’s health, mental and physical, was their business?

The chief healer, Evee, insisted on accompanying Flydd and no one could dissuade her, which meant that the thapter no longer had room enough to carry everyone. On a long journey it could accommodate fourteen in considerable discomfort but with Flangers and six soldiers, and Klarm and Evee, they were now sixteen. And Evee’s supplies took up a lot of space.

The problem was solved by leaving Fyn-Mah behind to take charge of Fiz Gorgo, and by throwing together a dirigible sled to carry their gear and supplies. It was a small, semi-rigid air-floater with a cabin on the underside, which they planned to tow behind the thapter. It would greatly reduce the thapter’s manoeuvrability as well as slowing it, and was bound to make it cumbersome to take off and land, but they could see no other solution. And because it used the controller from Inouye’s air-floater, she would have no trouble coping.

And all the preparations had to be done in the utmost secrecy. Yggur had taken the precaution of caging up his skeets and sending them on a sea voyage, to be sure that no one could send a message to Nennifer after they’d gone. The name had never been mentioned in front of the soldiers and servants; in fact, the attack itself had never been discussed. As far as everyone in Fiz Gorgo knew, they were simply going on a long trip. Nonetheless, it was impossible to be too careful.

A week after Ghorr’s attack on Fiz Gorgo, on a windy, miserable autumn morning with sleet spitting at them from the west, all was ready. They assembled in the yard, waiting for Xervish Flydd.

They stood there for more than an hour, stamping their feet in a vain attempt to keep them warm, and blowing into their gloves. Finally even Yggur, who had been a model of patience ever since Flydd’s injury had been revealed, was driven to say, ‘Where the devil is the fellow?’

Shortly Flydd appeared, supporting himself on the shoulders of Evee and Fyn-Mah, and walking in a wretched grimacing shuffle. His skin was completely bloodless and with each halting step every muscle in his face shivered as he tried to prevent himself from crying out in agony.

Nish couldn’t bear to see the scrutator, who had once seemed to carry the whole of Santhenar on his scrawny shoulders, reduced to such emotional penury. ‘Surr!’ he cried, and ran across the yard to offer his arm.

As he approached, the scrutator wrenched back some control over himself and with a supreme effort shook off the pain, or at least drew it into himself. He stood up straight as Nish, realising belatedly what a blunder he’d made, stumbled to a halt in front of him. But he and Flydd had been through much together; they’d been comrades in the desperate times after the fall of Snizort, and surely Flydd would understand. Nish tried to make the best of it.

‘Surr,’ he said quietly. ‘May I assist you into the thapter?’

Flydd looked right through him. ‘Did I ask for help, Artificer?’ he ground out. Shaking off Evee’s arm, and then Fyn-Mah’s, he lurched unaided across the black paving stones in an appalling travesty of a careless stride. Every movement of every muscle showed the pain he was enduring, though his face was like stone.

Fyn-Mah cried, ‘Xervish –’ but broke off and put her hands over her face.

Evee let out an almost inaudible cry and ran after him, but he slashed at her with one hand and she fell back, biting her knuckles. She directed a furious glance at Nish. ‘Are you the biggest fool that ever was?’

Nish was beginning to think he was. Flydd had now reached the thapter but he didn’t stop there; he forced himself up the rungs of the ladder. The pride of the man was awesome, though Nish had to avert his eyes as Flydd struggled all the way up. It took him three attempts to get his leg over the side into the hatch, and heaving the second leg in wrenched a cry of anguish out of him, swiftly cut off. Nish thought he saw blood running down Flydd’s ankle, then he disappeared inside as if he’d fallen through the lower hatch.

After a brief hesitation Evee ran after him. The others followed, except for Fyn-Mah. Normally so cool and reserved, she was grinding her knuckles into her eyes. She turned away and walked back inside Fiz Gorgo, closing the door like a silent accusation.

‘That went well,’ observed Irisis as Nish came up to the side of the thapter.

Nish wanted to weep. ‘I was trying to help him.’

She relented and put her arm around his shoulders. ‘You know what a proud man he is, Nish. And you saw what Ghorr did to him. How do you think Flydd must feel, knowing that his friends are talking about his deepest torment and shame?’

‘If it were me, I’d want the support of my friends.’

‘Not if you’d been a scrutator. It’s a solitary profession and you have to hide your feelings. And especially your weaknesses.’

He said no more. They took their places in the thapter. Pilot Inouye stood at the controller of her dirigible, cast off the ballast and the little craft rose gently in the air. Yggur hadn’t wanted anyone inside in case something went wrong, but Inouye was happier that way and it eased the cramped conditions a trifle.

Nish stood with Irisis and Malien in the upper compartment of the thapter, looking out as they lifted off into the scudding cloud. Yggur was on the shooter’s platform at the rear, legs spread, cloak flapping behind him, appearing to relish the icy wind in his face.

Nish didn’t relish anything about the coming journey, though at least the war had gone quiet and there shouldn’t be too many disasters before the spring. The lyrinx didn’t fight in winter unless they had to.

He had enough to worry about. Evee had said that Flydd had been repaired, whatever that meant, though clearly he was far from recovered, and must be more hindrance than help on such a dangerous mission.

Nish had also begun to fret about Gilhaelith, the only outsider who knew of the planned attack. Since he’d made a fortune trading with the enemy, Gilhaelith was unlikely to have qualms about betraying them to the Council and, given the way Yggur had treated him from the moment they’d met, Nish wasn’t sure he’d blame him. Nish had doubts about the dwarf as well. Klarm had broken his oath to the Council, so why wouldn’t he break it again? The reward for betraying them would be unimaginable.

‘I overheard the healers talking about Flydd last night,’ Irisis said an hour or two later.

They were now sitting on the top of the thapter with their legs dangling down into the upper compartment. Irisis was swinging her long legs, quite at home there. Nish held on grimly, afraid that a sudden lurch could send them over the side. The thapter was dipping in and out of layers of cloud like wet, clinging fluff, and it was unusually bumpy.

‘Oh?’ Nish said sharply. He let go with one hand to wipe the cold condensation off his brow, then slapped his hand down again as the machine jolted in an updraught.

‘They don’t know what to make of him. He won’t talk. He won’t even look at them. They’re … they’re afraid for his sanity.’

‘Marvellous!’ said Nish. ‘And Flydd didn’t tell Yggur the details of the attack. It’s all in his head … Or was.’

‘He had hours of discussions with Malien and Yggur just before Ghorr attacked Fiz Gorgo,’ Irisis said.

‘But they only went through generalities, never the plan in detail. They agreed not to until we were on the way, just to be safe.’

‘Well, I just thought you should know.’

‘I’m glad you told me,’ said Nish. ‘It drives all the other worries right out of my head.’

TWENTY

‘So what’s Nennifer like, anyway?’ Nish asked Irisis.

It was late on their third day of travel and the thapter had just settled, as it must each night, onto the most isolated and desolate peak they could find. Only Malien could pilot the craft and she was still so weak that each day’s flying required long hours of recuperation.

She had taken all possible precautions to avoid being seen, flying in cloud wherever possible, and keeping clear of towns and densely inhabited areas, though there was always a chance that someone had spotted them. And if they had been seen, the Council’s unparalleled network of spies and informers would soon hear of it. Even now a skeet or a courier air-floater could be racing towards Nennifer with the news that the thapter had been seen in the sky over the Peaks of Borg.

‘You can’t imagine it,’ Irisis replied, climbing down the side of the thapter onto moss-covered rock. The night’s camp was halfway up an isolated ridge in the middle of the Ramparts of Tacnah, a series of rearing slopes of tilted greywacke, layered against the western edge of the Great Mountains like a leaning stack of cards. The high parts of the Ramparts caught moist breezes from the west and were, consequently, wet and cloud-covered for most of the year. A fine place for hiding, though dank, mosquito-ridden and inhospitable. ‘Nennifer is as hostile a place as anywhere on Santhenar, except the middle of the Dry Sea. It never rains there.’

Flangers and the other soldiers were already fanning out up and down the slope, making sure that there was no habitation nearby, though none had been seen before they settled. Nish watched them go, then moved into a cleft where a boulder bigger than the thapter had split in two. It was marginally sheltered from the wind. ‘Never rains? How can that be?’

A frog croaked from the dark recesses beneath the boulder. Another answered it from not far away. Irisis looked down and smiled.

‘Nennifer lies hidden in an angle between the Great Mountains and the range running down the east coast of Lauralin.’ She squatted down and drew on the mossy rock with a fingertip. ‘There are higher mountains all around and they catch all the moisture. I can’t think why the Council made their home there, save that it’s so isolated that no land attack could possibly succeed. Even in mid-summer there can be frosts, but at this time of year it’s hellish cold.’

‘Where do they get their food from?’

‘It used to be brought in, at fabulous expense, on great supply caravans that could only move for eight months of the year, though most now comes in on air-floaters. And their indentured peasants grow what crops they may in the valley bottoms, where there’s soil and water – turnips and other charming delicacies. Do you want to share a tent tonight?’

‘It’s a bit cold for camping, isn’t it?’

‘Better the cold than being cooped up in the thapter for another night. What with all the snoring, the whispering and Flydd’s nightmares, I’ve hardly slept a wink since we left. I like to sleep alone.’

‘If I was in your tent you wouldn’t be alone,’ said Nish.

‘You don’t count. If you dared to snore I’d thump you in the ear.’

He smiled. It seemed they were friends again. ‘With an invitation like that, how could I refuse?’

Two days later they were flying between the peaks of the northern Great Mountains. Not even the thapter could rise high enough to pass over them, and the air would have been too thin to breathe anyway. The barren valleys below were filled with concealing cloud. Though they were now close to Nennifer, Malien felt confident that they would not be seen. Most of the game animals had long since been killed for the scrutators’ tables, so she didn’t expect to encounter even a solitary hunter.

Flydd still hadn’t said a word, but at every stop he went further and further, driving himself relentlessly, though his characteristic crab-like scuttle had been replaced by a stiff-legged, twisting dance, the oddest walk Nish had ever seen. He supposed the healing skin, replaced by the healers’ Art, had pulled taut and was troubling him.

Malien called down the hatch to Yggur and Klarm, who came up. ‘We’re within four or five leagues. Dare we go closer?’

‘I think not,’ said Klarm after a brief glance at the forbidding mountainside passing by. ‘Set down wherever you can find a safe place.’

Malien curved around in a circle, signalling her intentions back to a fur-shrouded Inouye, before heading for a relatively bare, relatively flat patch on the rock-littered slope. The thapter settled, gravel grating underneath. Ten spans back the dirigible came to ground silently.

Irisis opened the upper hatch and gasped at the frigid blast that swept in. Nish pulled his fur-lined coat more tightly around him, the earmuffs down over his ears, and climbed out. As soon as his boot touched the ground he felt a pang of unease, but dismissed it. How could he feel otherwise, so close to Nennifer?

He had never been anywhere like this place. The surface was utterly barren, just shattered rock and grey gravel and grit as far as his eye could see. He saw no living thing: no birds in the sky, no animals on the horizon, no plants anywhere. There weren’t even lichens on the rocks.

‘What a wasteland!’ Nish said to Irisis, who had walked away a few steps and was nudging stones over with the toe of her boot. There was nothing underneath them either.

‘The perfect place for the arid souls of the scrutators,’ she said.

‘Shh!’ Nish gave her a meaningful glance.

Klarm stood behind her, his bowed legs braced against the wind. He’d had the calipers removed before they left Fiz Gorgo, though he still put his foot to the ground gingerly. ‘Take no mind of me,’ he said. ‘I always hated Nennifer and was never more glad than to see the back of it. And –’

‘What?’ said Nish.

‘To me, the choice of location was not suggestive of unparalleled strength and supreme majesty, as the Council would have it. It indicated a deep-seated insecurity and I always wondered …’

Again he trailed off, as if he scarcely dared to speak what he was thinking – a survival strategy, surely. Ghorr had not encouraged people to speak their minds, and that included the host of lesser scrutators who weren’t members of the Council.

‘What did you wonder?’ said Yggur, coming up beside the dwarf and turning his back to the wind.

‘What the Council is most afraid of,’ said Klarm. ‘It isn’t the lyrinx, for all that we’re losing the war. And certainly not their own people, thoroughly cowed after a century of the scrutators’ iron rule.’

Nish and Irisis exchanged glances but neither said anything. It wasn’t their place.

The wind gusted up, howling around the thapter and lifting the tethered dirigible a span into the air. They ran and held it down with their weight, and the effort of running those few steps left them breathless.

‘We can talk about that later,’ said Yggur. ‘Get the dirigible tied down before it blows away.’

‘There’s nothing to tie it to,’ said Nish. ‘You can’t drive a stake into this grit.’

‘Then it’ll have to be anchored to rock. Is something the matter, Malien?’

She had her hands over her eyes and was walking back and forth, taking tiny, sliding steps that rasped across the surface. Her head was bowed. She continued for another ten steps, rotated slowly on the ball of her right foot and came rasping back.

‘Malien?’ Yggur said sharply.

‘I’m not sure about this place.’

‘This campsite?’

‘No, Nennifer itself. I’m sensing a strain on the node.’

‘You’ll have to explain,’ said Yggur. ’Your Art and mine are totally different, remember?

‘I learned to be sensitive to such things,’ said Malien, speaking breathlessly, ‘while guarding the Well of Echoes in Tirthrax against the amplimet.’

‘Is the amplimet doing something to the node?’

‘No … At least I don’t think so. I feel that the amplimet has been contained, yet the node is under strain … like a ball of rubber squeezed between the heels of one’s hands.’

‘Irisis,’ said Yggur, ‘would you take your pliance and tell me what the field is like here?’

She withdrew it from between her breasts and squeezed it in her right hand. ‘It’s incredibly strong,’ said Irisis. ‘I can almost see it. With my eyes, I mean. I’ve never experienced such intensity.’

‘We’re close to one of the greatest nodes in the world,’ said Klarm. ‘Another reason why the Council chose to build Nennifer here.’

Nish was still feeling uneasy. He closed his eyes and a shimmering silver loop drifted across his inner vision. He tried to focus on it but it eluded him and disappeared.

‘The fields have been drawn right down,’ said Irisis. ‘They weren’t like this when I was here before. It’s as if the node is being sucked dry …’ She gave a spasmodic jerk. ‘Aah!’

Nish saw, or felt, a bright flash of blue; his eyes sprang open.

‘What is it?’ said Yggur.

‘It flared up,’ said Irisis shakily. ‘So strongly that I couldn’t keep it out. But now it’s died again.’

‘Can it be the node?’ said Yggur. ‘Is it bound to explode?’

‘No – it doesn’t feel like the time we went into Snizort.’

‘It’s not the node,’ said Flydd, lurching up behind them. He was staring over the edge of the mountain. ‘It’s nothing like that time …’

Everyone stared at him. ‘You spoke!’ said Irisis, her eyes lighting up. ‘Xervish … surr, you’re better!’

‘Am I, Crafter?’ He turned his eyes to her and they were as bleak as chips of stone. ‘I’m glad you think so.’

She quailed, and that did not happen often. ‘I – I –’

He turned away as if she wasn’t there and Nish saw the hurt, quickly veiled, in her eyes.

‘Then what’s going on?’ said Nish, memories of that dark time in Snizort rising up to choke him. ‘Why would the scrutators be using so much power?’

‘I think …’ Flydd seemed to be straining hard to see the unseeable. He bared his teeth. ‘They’re probing the amplimet, I’d say, hoping to master it and gain undreamed-of power. And there may also be a power struggle between the scrutators. Not a battle, but certainly intrigues and undermining of each other.’

‘But the chief scrutator –’

‘Ghorr was a thug and a bully –’ said Flydd. He broke off, rigid with rage, and had to force himself to calm down. ‘But he was also a natural leader, and he knew how to use the authority of the chief scrutator. So, despite his failures, he was unchallenged until the end. Fusshte has neither charisma nor natural authority. He repulses people and can only maintain power through terror.’

‘He’s capable of it,’ said Klarm, with an involuntary and uncharacteristic shudder.

‘The Council won’t vote Fusshte as their chief, for he doesn’t have the strength to dominate them. He may have seized the position after Ghorr’s death but, safely back in Nennifer, every scrutator will question his legitimacy. And after the fiasco at Fiz Gorgo, every ruler on Santhenar must be querying the fitness of the scrutators to rule the world.’

‘Will they rise up to overthrow the Council?’

‘Not yet,’ said Flydd. His eyes met Nish’s for a moment, though without any sign of warmth or fellow-feeling. ‘For a hundred years the scrutators have cut down every mancer, army officer, governor and provincial leader who showed signs of personal ambition. Subservience to their rule has been a prerequisite for survival and no one in Nennifer would have the initiative to mount a coup. But if the struggle isn’t resolved quickly, rebellion becomes a certainty, and that would be worse than having Fusshte as chief scrutator. Once authority is lost at the centre, the outskirts will swiftly fall.’

After the dirigible had been fastened to steel pegs driven into rock, Yggur sent two soldiers to look over the other sides of the ridge and report back. They soon returned, reporting that nothing could be seen but the same dismal vista in all directions. He set out sentries, relatively close to the thapter for their safety in case a blizzard swept in, and everyone else went below for dinner, after which they sat down to plan the attack.

‘Nennifer has but two entrances, front and rear, and each will be strongly guarded,’ said Flydd, who was sitting on the bench with a folded fur coat under his backside, though he still winced every time he shifted his weight. ‘They had a thousand troops here previously, of which Ghorr took four hundred to Fiz Gorgo. We think about a hundred returned, so they must still have seven hundred.’

Irisis studied him surreptitiously. Despite Evee’s claims, Flydd was just a grim husk of his former self. Every time she tried to speak to him the barriers went up, which hurt after all they’d been through together. But it wasn’t just her – he kept everyone at bay. Flydd was a driven man and the only thing keeping him going was his lust to smash the Council and grind them into the frozen gravel.

‘Every entrance and exit is watched,’ Klarm added. ‘Even the sullage tunnels that discharge over the precipice into the Desolation Sink, since Irisis and Ullii’s escape that way last year.’

‘What are they really afraid of?’ said Irisis.

Flydd’s eyes met hers and she knew he was remembering his drunken revelation about the Numinator, long ago at the manufactory. For a moment he seemed almost like his old self, but the shell closed over.

‘Nennifer’s only weak point is the roof,’ he said. ‘We’ll –’

‘It’s been strengthened since air-floaters were invented,’ said Klarm. ‘And further reinforced since the first thapter appeared.’

‘Then what are we doing here?’ said Yggur. ‘Flydd, all along you claimed that you had a way in. If that’s been closed off …’

‘We’re going in,’ Flydd said savagely, ‘if I have to tear the roof off with my bare hands.’

He looked around him like a jackal and for a moment his eyes flashed red. No one met his gaze. He was a man possessed by a demon.

After a minute or two his fists unclenched and he went on more calmly, ‘There’s a weakness in the roof defences. It occurred to me after we escaped last spring.’

‘What weakness is that?’ said Klarm sharply.

‘The sentinel covering the west fourth, fifth and sixth garrets was incorrectly built into the roof cavity. Its sensing crystals look sideways, not up, leaving a gap large enough to allow the thapter to land on the roof. It would have to be piloted with exquisite precision, of course, but –’

‘The gap isn’t there any more,’ said Klarm. ‘After your escape, Ghorr had the mancer responsible for the watch flayed alive and abandoned in the centre of the Desolation Sink to die. Afterwards I personally checked the roof sentinels, replaced the one you refer to and doubled their number, just to be sure. To be very sure,’ he added, rubbing one horny hand up the other arm. ‘I’m partial to my skin the way it is – in place …’ He trailed off, realising what he’d said.

Flydd’s stare was like shards chipped off the front of a glacier.

‘I beg your pardon, Xervish,’ said Klarm, but Flydd did not reply.

‘So we don’t have a way in,’ said Nish bitterly. ‘We’ve come all this way for nothing –’

No one said anything. Everyone was pointedly avoiding Flydd’s eye. Irisis studied him from the corner of hers. His seamed and puckered face became even more mask-like, though Irisis thought she could see through the cracks. Rage was the one thing keeping him going, and he’d just lost the only chance of dealing with his enemies. He was so overcome that he hadn’t even heard Nish.

‘So we can’t break in and we can’t sneak in,’ said Yggur. ‘I suppose it’s too much to ask that either of you know of a secret entrance or exit for the Council’s convenience?’

‘If there is, none but the Council knows of it,’ said Klarm. ‘But I doubt it very much. There’s no way in or out but the front and rear doors.’

‘What about a gate?’ said Irisis. ‘A portal such as those used in olden times to travel instantly across the world.’

‘All portals failed after the Forbidding was broken,’ said Yggur. ‘And no one knows how to create them anew, or even if it’s possible.’

‘Except the one Tiaan made in Tirthrax to bring the Aachim here. Malien knows how it worked,’ said Nish.

‘That doesn’t mean I could make one, even in Tirthrax,’ said Malien. And here it would be quite impossible.’

‘Yggur, you made a gate during the time of the Mirror,’ Nish persisted. ‘I’ve read about it in the Histories …’

‘Once the Forbidding failed two centuries ago, that way failed with it,’ said Yggur dismissively. ‘I know no other.’

‘Then we’re beaten before we begin,’ said Nish.

No one spoke. The wind shrilled around the hatch of the thapter. Flydd’s head was sunk in despair.

‘What a miserable place,’ said Irisis, shivering. ‘I’m not looking forward to my turn on sentry duty.’

‘I’d better make sure they’ve changed the watch,’ said Yggur, rising painfully and going up the ladder. ‘A man could freeze to death outside without realising it.’

‘He’s looking very weary,’ said Nish after Yggur had gone.

‘I feel the burden too,’ said Klarm.

Malien was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, peeling a warty green fruit the size of an orange. Inside, blood-red pyramidal segments were packed together in pairs, one up and one down, separated by yellow pith. She seemed far away as she arranged the segments neatly on an enamelled plate.

Shortly Yggur returned, clapping his gloves together. He took off outer and inner pairs and began to rub his hands over his face. ‘Malien,’ he said at last. ‘You’ve been quiet lately. What have you got to say?’

‘What makes you think I’ve anything to say?’ she said, selecting the smallest of the segments and popping it in her mouth.

‘I know you of old, remember. You have a plan in mind, don’t you?’

‘I wouldn’t call it a plan.’ She chose another segment.

‘An idea, then.’

‘A possibility occurred to me earlier but I dismissed it out of hand. It was too perilous to consider further.’

‘I don’t see how we can be in more danger than we’re already in,’ said Nish.

‘Do you not, Artificer?’ Malien looked at him, into him and through him with those ageless green eyes that had seen everything. ‘But of course, you’re barely out of childhood. You could not understand.’

Nish flushed and turned away. Irisis smiled inwardly. He never knew when to shut up. She noticed Yggur watching Malien with tense expectation.

‘More perilous than losing the war?’ he said at last.

‘I don’t know!’ she said forcefully, losing her calm for a moment. ‘That’s the problem.’

‘Then let’s hear your idea. Between all of us, we should be able to see the good and the bad in it.’

‘We don’t know what we’re doing, and we can’t know. I – no, it’s too perilous. Better we give up and go home, rather than attempt it.’

‘And leave the world to the scrutators?’ cried Nish.

Yggur waved him to silence. ‘What’s your idea, Malien?’

She arranged the remaining segments in a star shape, then moved the points in until they formed a circle, an unbroken barrier with a single segment in the middle. ‘Very well. There’s no way in from outside. But what about from inside?’

‘I don’t follow you,’ said Irisis.

Malien looked as though she regretted having it prised out of her. She glanced up the ladder as if to make sure that no one could overhear her, then lowered her voice. ‘I had in mind to try and wake Tiaan’s amplimet.’

TWENTY-ONE

‘I don’t understand,’ said Irisis. ‘No crystal can be used until it’s been activated, which we artisans call waking, so surely the amplimet has to be awake already.’

‘We Aachim use the word in a different way,’ said Malien. She let out a heavy sigh and her years fell upon her. ‘Since the moment Tiaan revealed the amplimet to me in Tirthrax I’ve been afraid of it, and I’m not the only one. Vithis was against its use from the beginning, and had not his people stood in peril of extinction he would never have allowed it.’

‘Then why did you let Tiaan keep it?’

‘What would I have done with it? I could not have remained in Tirthrax once the amplimet began to communicate with the node, nor taken it to any other place with a powerful node. Tiaan had used it safely for half a year and I judged it was better off in her hands.’

‘Until someone took it from her,’ said Nish.

‘I cannot see the future,’ said Malien frostily, ‘and I’m not so arrogant as to think I know better than everyone else.’

But you do think that, Irisis thought. It’s one of the defining characteristics of the Aachim, even you.

‘Besides,’ Malien went on, ‘back then I was just serving out my days, bidding a prolonged farewell to Santhenar and all I’d loved in it, before going to the Well. If not for Tiaan I would have left this world by now.’

‘A path I’ve also thought about taking,’ said Yggur. ‘Lives can be too long. What’s the point, when you’ve seen everything and done everything?’ he ruminated. ‘What changed your mind, Malien?’

‘By the time Tiaan returned to Tirthrax I’d seen just what a dangerous path the world was on. I had to act for the good of my own kind, and all humankind. That’s why I took Tiaan to Stassor, and why I subsequently disobeyed the edict of my people and carried her to safety.

‘But on our way west, I stopped to give succour to Clan Elienor, my distant kin, exiled for allowing Tiaan to escape from their custody. I sat down with the leaders of Elienor and they told me what they knew about amplimets.’ Her voice dropped. ‘And then I knew fear, as I’ve not known it since the time of the Mirror.’

‘What did they tell you?’ said Irisis in a whisper. It would have felt wrong to speak in a normal voice.

‘This isn’t the first amplimet to have been found. There was another, in the distant past of our own world, and it nearly brought my people undone.’

‘Really? What happened?’ said Yggur.

‘I don’t know, exactly. It was long before Clan Elienor’s time. Even their elders haven’t been able to uncover the details, though they discovered that the sacred Histories of Aachan were changed to hide the truth. There are bitter enmities behind the rivalries of the clans,’ Malien said. ‘Very bitter and longstanding ones. It’s no wonder Vithis’s plan to seize half of Santhenar has come to naught – the clans can’t even agree on the conquest of another world.’

‘Was it the crystal that was perilous,’ said Yggur, ‘or the bickering over it?’

‘Both, I think,’ said Malien. ‘But certainly the amplimet woke and began to draw power for itself, and no one could control it.’

‘Well, that was thousands of years ago,’ said Yggur. ‘The Art has moved on a long way since then. Maybe we should consider waking Tiaan’s amplimet, if it’s the only way we can get into Nennifer.’

‘We’ve always known that it needed a strong hand,’ said Flydd, a glint in his eye. ‘We’ve plenty of strong hands here, so let’s get on with it.’

‘Let’s not be hasty,’ said Yggur mildly. ‘I’d want to know what we’re letting ourselves in for, first. Explain what you mean about waking it, Malien.’

‘When Tiaan first saw the crystal,’ said Malien, ‘she said that it was awake, meaning that it was drawing power by itself. Not much power, only enough to make it glow, but some. Who knows how long it had been doing that? A thousand years? A million? And perhaps at some stage in that aeon, or later when Tiaan began to use it, it developed a kind of crystalline awareness. At Tirthrax it began to communicate with the node. I don’t know why, but it wouldn’t allow Tiaan to take it away in the thapter and later, when she tried to defy it near Nyriandiol, it caused the thapter to crash. It also communicated with the node at Snizort, though it hasn’t acted up since Tiaan fled. I dare say Vithis drove it back to its previous suspended state …’

‘From which you plan to rouse it,’ said Irisis, trying to understand. ‘What will happen if you succeed?’

‘I hope it will reach out to the node that sustains Nennifer,’ said Malien. ‘’

‘How is that going to help us?’

‘I think I can see what you’ve got in mind,’ said Klarm. ‘At the best of times, Nennifer uses most of the field. Now they’re using almost all of it; that’s why the node is under such strain –’

‘Once the amplimet reaches out to the node,’ said Flydd, ‘their devices will start to fail. They won’t know what’s going on and we’ll attack in the confusion.’

‘What if Fusshte realises it’s the amplimet?’ said Yggur. ‘He must have interrogated Tiaan by now.’

‘He won’t know what’s happened,’ said Flydd.

‘Wait on!’ Yggur was frowning. ‘What happens after the amplimet is roused?’

‘How do you mean?’ said Klarm.

‘Why does it communicate with the node? What’s it trying to do and how can it be stopped once we’re inside? How is it put to sleep again?’

‘That’s why I was reluctant to mention the idea in the first place,’ said Malien. ‘No one knows why it communicates with nodes, but it can be stopped by taking it out of range – twenty or thirty leagues in this case – or by putting it inside a sealed platinum box, which the field can’t penetrate.’

‘Have we such a box?’ said Yggur.

‘No, but we have the materials to make one,’ said Flydd. ‘It wouldn’t take long.’

‘And how do we wake it?’

‘I think I can do that,’ said Malien. Flydd’s eyes bored into her but she did not elaborate. Evidently she did not plan to share that secret.

‘What if they already keep it in a platinum box and we can’t wake it?’ said Yggur.

‘Then we’re beaten and will have to think of another plan,’ said Flydd. ‘But remember who we’re dealing with, Yggur. The Council is greedy and they’ve always seen sheer power as the way to win the war. Having finally got their hands on this wondrous amplimet, they’ll be working night and day to find out how they can use it.’

‘Cautiously, perhaps.’

‘When it comes to the Art, their mastery of devices has made them arrogant. They’re the most powerful group of mancers ever assembled for a common purpose, and they have hundreds of skilled mancers to do the dirty work and take the risks. So,’ Flydd said, ‘when the amplimet does wake, they’ll have no reason to assume that the interference has come from outside.’

‘How is waking it going to advantage us?’ said Yggur. ‘We can’t know what the amplimet will do, so how can we know where to attack Nennifer?’

‘We’ll have to be ready to take advantage of whatever opportunity comes our way,’ said Flydd.

‘That’s not good enough,’ said Yggur. ‘Even if the amplimet were to disable every sentinel and device in Nennifer, there will still be seven hundred guards to deal with. We can’t fight our way in.’

‘We’ve got to have a clear and specific plan.’ Klarm scratched his belly. ‘Would it be possible to direct the amplimet, so it creates an opportunity we can use?’

‘I’m reluctant to do that,’ said Malien.

‘Why?’

‘It … I’m afraid it might try to take control of me.’

There was a long silence. Xervish Flydd finally broke it. ‘Is there something you aren’t telling us?’

Malien looked anywhere but at him. It was the first time Irisis had seen her at a disadvantage.

‘Malien?’ said Yggur.

‘The one found on Aachan got out of control,’ she said with evident reluctance. ‘Whole clans were wiped out in a great cataclysm, though whether it was caused by the amplimet, or the clans fighting over it, no one will say.’

‘But you’re afraid it was the amplimet?’

‘I’m very afraid. That a crystal – an inanimate lump of rock – should communicate with a node is an abomination. This one has already woken once, so what does it want?’

‘A serious question,’ said Flydd, ‘though not one we can answer. We must rely on our own judgment, and I say we use the amplimet. What’s our alternative? Only to run away and hide until the Council’s incompetence finally brings our world to an end.’

‘How can an inanimate piece of crystal want anything?’ said Nish. ‘It’s absurd.’

‘How can it communicate with a node?’ said Malien. ‘I agree, the notion is preposterous. Nonetheless, the amplimet has done so, and that surely isn’t the end of it. It’s deadly and it can turn on you in an instant, as Ghaenis, son of Tirior, found to his cost.’

‘I’m going to destroy the Council and I’m prepared to take my chances on the amplimet,’ said Flydd. ‘If it takes control of me my troubles will be over. But I sense there’s more, Malien.’

The thapter creaked as the wind, which was increasing as nightfall approached, battered at its left flank.

‘There’s more,’ she said.

‘So if we follow Flydd’s plan,’ said Yggur, ‘we not only have to overcome the scrutators and all their forces; we’ve got to find the amplimet and shut it up in your platinum box with the utmost dispatch.’

‘Yes,’ Malien said faintly. ‘Why don’t we continue after dinner? I’m more fatigued than I thought.’

Flydd put on his coat and gloves, lurched up the ladder and went out into the dark.

After dinner Irisis had restless legs from being cooped up too long, so she went outside, pacing across the gritty ground. The night was overcast though not completely dark, and shortly the outline of one of the guards loomed up. ‘Flangers?’ she said softly.

‘Yes. What brings you out here?’

‘A need to stretch my legs. And too much company.’

‘I know what you mean,’ he said. ‘In truth, I’d sooner spend the whole night on watch than crammed into the bowels of the thapter.’

‘Quite. Which way did Flydd go?’

He pointed to the left. Irisis went right. She’d had enough of the scrutator for the moment. She climbed the slope for a few hundred paces but soon felt short of breath and sat down on a rock shaped like a toadstool. The thapter was out of sight, the world reduced to a few dark outlines.

She felt sure that this attack would fail. Logic told her that they’d have little chance even with the best plan in the world. But this shambles – it couldn’t be called anything else – was laughable. They’d be killed or captured, and falling into the hands of the scrutators again filled her with dread.

She heard the footsteps long before she saw the shadow, and Irisis could tell by the sounds that it was Flydd, dragging himself up the slope. He took every opportunity to walk, forcing himself through the pain to recover his strength and mobility. She debated whether to say anything or not, but he was coming so close that she could hardly ignore him.

‘Scrutator,’ she said.

Flydd stopped a few paces away and she could just see his head move as he sought her out. ‘Ah,’ he said and came towards her.

She stood up. ‘You seem better, surr.’

‘Do I?’ he said bitterly.

‘Don’t start that with me,’ she snapped. ‘I’m fed up with it.’ Irisis wasn’t unfeeling by any means, but they desperately needed the old Flydd back.

‘I beg your pardon?’ he said coldly.

‘You know what I mean. We all know you’ve suffered. You don’t have to rub it in our faces every moment of the day.’

‘You don’t know anything about it, Crafter.’

‘That’s because you won’t talk about it.’

‘Do I have to expose my deepest torment to the world so people can sneer behind my back and use my shame against me?’

‘We’re not your enemies, Flydd. They’re inside Nennifer.’

‘Well, I can’t talk about it.’

‘Then I will,’ she said. ‘They castrated you, didn’t they?’

He stopped suddenly. ‘Is that what they’re saying?’

‘They’re not saying anything. But I am.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They’ve unmanned me. I’m just a hollow shell.’

‘You look the same to me,’ she said. ‘A little more battered and scarred, a lot more angry, but still Flydd. Still the same man I used to admire.’

‘But not one you’d have for a lover, eh?’

Irisis sighed. She’d been hoping not to have this discussion. ‘That was over long ago and you know it, Xervish, so stop using it against me. More to the point, stop using it to whip yourself.’

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘And nor would you, if the heart of your womanhood had been cut from you.’

‘Look, surr,’ she said. ‘We can’t understand what you’re going through, but you’ve got to get over it. We can’t do without you.’

‘So what I’m feeling inside doesn’t matter?’

She ignored that. ‘We’re all here because of you. It’s been your plan, and your object, ever since Snizort. Without you at your best, the attack can’t succeed. We’ll fall into the hands of the scrutators and what they’ll do to us next time …’

‘I see,’ he said coldly. ‘Walk on, Irisis.’

‘Surr?’ she said.

‘Leave me!’

‘I’m going!’ she snapped. ‘And when you’re done with feeling sorry for yourself, be done with the whining as well.’ And then she ran to escape his outrage.

Flydd returned an hour later. His face was pinched from the cold but he said nothing to Irisis, just sat down and took a sparing portion of bread, cheese, sausage and pickled vegetables.

‘If we’re going to do this, let’s put the plan together,’ said Yggur. ‘There’s still an army to be overcome, in the unlikely event that the Council and all their mancers are distracted by the amplimet. How do we get past that army?’

Malien didn’t answer.

‘What if we were to allow the amplimet to take control?’ said Irisis.

‘I presume you mean get out of control?’ said Yggur.

‘Yes.’

‘How do we know that it will?’

Everyone looked at Malien.

‘It must,’ said Irisis, ‘otherwise Malien wouldn’t have suggested it. She knows more than she’s letting on …’

‘Malien?’ said Yggur

Malien gave Irisis a cold stare. ‘Yes, that’s what I had in mind – the amplimet trying to take control of the node.’

‘Why didn’t you say so?’ snapped Yggur.

‘I’m constrained by my oath not to speak about our secrets,’ said Malien. ‘Already I’m treading a finer path than I care to.’

‘Considering that your people exiled you and sentenced you to clan-vengeance, you seem overly fastidious. How do you know the amplimet will do what we require?’

Again Malien hesitated before answering. ‘I don’t know what it will do if it’s unleashed. Amplimets are capricious.’

‘What if we were to threaten it?’ said Nish.

Irisis was amazed at Nish’s audacity. How could he, with neither talent for the Art nor any sensitive abilities, presume to tell the mighty their business?

‘That’s a good idea, Nish,’ Flydd said thoughtfully. ‘A very good idea. Provoke it and make it lash out. It’ll either go for the node, or attack what it perceives as the threat. The scrutators won’t know what hit them, and in the chaos we go in.’

‘I don’t like it,’ said Yggur. ‘We’ve no idea what we’re doing.’

‘It could do anything,’ said Malien. ‘And what if we can’t get to the amplimet, to put it in the platinum box?’

‘Our troubles will soon be over,’ said Flydd. ‘Unfortunately, it’s our only option so let’s vote on it right now. Do we provoke the amplimet and risk the consequences, or run home and let the Council drag the world to ruin?’

He went around the table one by one and wrung reluctant agreement out of them. ‘We’re all in save one. What say you, Malien?’

‘We do it,’ she said after a long hesitation, ‘and if it goes terribly wrong, I pray none of us live long enough to realise the enormity of our folly.’

TWENTY-TWO

As soon as the platinum box was finished they gathered their gear, shrugged on their heavy packs and climbed down the ice-crusted ladder into the darkness. They dared not take the thapter closer; the Nennifer field was under such strain that any drain of power from outside the fortress must arouse suspicion. It would take most of the night to get close enough to wake the amplimet. And even if they succeeded, they had to attack on foot, and in the blackest of nights, when not even the sentries on the watch-towers could see beyond their noses. That meant before midnight tomorrow night, when the moon rose.

Nish heard a series of clicks: Malien locking the thapter. They couldn’t spare any guards for it, not that a couple of guards could defend it anyway if a patrol came upon them. Nish shivered. Leaving the thapter so far away seemed like burning their boats behind them. He took a couple of noisy, crunching steps. It was impossible to move quietly on the loose gravel.

‘Hold on,’ said Irisis, taking him by the arm. ‘Flydd wants to say something.’

‘Why didn’t he say it inside?’ Nish grumbled, for his breath was already freezing on his moustache.

The dullest of glows appeared, lighting up the faces of the group. She pulled him into the circle, facing the wind. Nish’s eyes began to water and the tears to freeze.

‘Fusshte knows we have the thapter,’ Flydd reminded them. ‘He probably isn’t expecting an airborne attack but he’ll certainly be prepared for one. The only thing he can’t be expecting is an attack on foot.’

‘Because only the biggest fools on Santhenar would think of it,’ said Yggur sourly. ‘If we are to go for this folly, let’s get moving.’

‘Once we approach, we must be exquisitely careful,’ said Flydd. ‘The guards are always watching. Always waiting.’

Nish gathered his cloak around him, feeling out of his depth. There had been a long debate as to the safest method of waking the amplimet, or threatening it, most of which had been so arcane as to be incomprehensible. He wished he’d slept instead. His head throbbed from the stale air in the thapter and he had a leaden feeling behind his temples.

‘Flydd must be out of his mind,’ he muttered to Irisis. ‘Lust for revenge has blinded him to reality.’

She didn’t reply.

‘Malien is afraid,’ he went on. ‘Even Yggur is against it. I –’

‘We voted,’ she said in a dead voice. ‘We’re going in.’

‘But I –’

‘Shut up, Nish!’ Irisis hissed in his ear. ‘We’ve got a long march ahead and you’re not helping.’

‘And a horrible end when we get there.’

She must have picked up his despair, for Irisis turned and put her hands on his cheeks, looking into his eyes. ‘Oh, come on, Nish,’ she said more kindly. ‘You’ve been working towards this day since you escaped from Snizort.’

‘Doesn’t mean I’m not terrified,’ he muttered.

‘We all are. Anyway, I’m supposed to be the doom merchant. Don’t push me into the caring role – you know I’m not comfortable with it.’ Giving the lie to her words, she linked her arm through his and they set off.

It was a long and miserable trudge across the slopes of the mountain, as cold as anything he’d experienced, though nothing happened to distinguish one gritty, sliding step from another. Because of the altitude, walking was hard work and he was soon so short of breath that talking at the same time wasn’t worth the effort.

Near the tail end of that exhausting night they ran into a steep ridge of quartz that puckered the mountainside vertically like a badly healed sword slash. Klarm had noted it from afar, from the thapter. They felt their way up it in the dark, eventually finding a fissure large enough for the fifteen of them to hide in. Nennifer lay below and to the east, little more than a league away. They could go no further until Malien had done her work on the amplimet.

They put up a pair of tents, set out the guards and crawled in for whatever rest they could steal before the attack.

Malien cleared her end of the tent by the simple expedient of creating a golden bubble from her fingertips and allowing it to expand until it enveloped her completely. Whatever else it touched was pushed out of the way.

‘What’s she doing?’ whispered an awed Inouye.

Malien was dimly visible inside, sitting cross-legged with her eyes closed and her long fingers extended along her thighs. The shimmering luminescence of the globe cast moving lights and shadows across her face and body. She looked ageless, cunning, fey.

‘She has her own unique form of the Art,’ Yggur said quietly. ‘As do I. Hers doesn’t rely on the field, so she can scry without the scrutators detecting her.’

‘At least, we hope so,’ said Irisis.

Yggur glared at her, then went on. ‘We can, of course, draw on the field at need.’

‘How long is it going to take?’ said Nish.

‘However long it takes,’ snapped Flydd from his sleeping pouch. ‘Now keep your trap shut. I need my sleep.’

Flydd must be in constant pain, Nish thought charitably. He’d always been irascible, but now he was angry all the time. Nish wriggled around against the side of the tent, trying to find a comfortable position. Irisis elbowed him in the ribs. He sighed.

The golden bubble popped. ‘I’ve located the amplimet,’ said Malien.

‘What, already?’ The words burst out of Nish.

Everyone turned to stare at him. He flushed. ‘I thought it would take hours,’ he mumbled. ‘Thought there’d be time for sleep.’

No one said anything, which was worse than if they had.

‘It’s not sealed away,’ Malien said. ‘And, judging by the peculiar orientation of the field, the scrutators are working on it now. They must have barriers up to prevent the amplimet taking more than a trickle of power.’

‘Then they know the danger it represents?’ asked Yggur.

‘We have to assume that they’ve discovered everything Tiaan knows about it,’ said Flydd.

‘Tiaan has a way of revealing only what she wants to,’ said Malien. ‘But I agree – it’s safer to assume that.’

‘Then you’d better get to work,’ said Flydd.

Malien took several deep breaths, knitting and unknitting her fingers, but didn’t move.

‘You can wake it?’ said Flydd roughly.

She nodded stiffly. ‘I just don’t think I should.’

‘We’ve been through all that. Just get on with it!’

Nish had never heard anyone speak to Malien that way before. Her lip curled as she looked at the meagre old man. ‘In the circumstances, I will forgive that. Ah, but you know so little of what you’re asking.’

She regenerated her bubble, though this time it took on an opalescent translucency that reduced her to a hunched shape inside.

‘You can have your precious sleep now, Artificer,’ said Flydd.

Nish lay down and dozed off at once, only to be woken by a mutter from the other side of the tent. As he began to sit up, Irisis gripped his arm, warningly.

‘It worries me that the field is so strained,’ said Yggur. ‘One misjudgment –’

‘Let’s not speculate about that,’ Flydd said. ‘Get some sleep. You too, Klarm. You’ll need it before this is over.’

‘As will you,’ said Klarm. ‘We’re relying on you, Flydd.’

‘I don’t need much sleep these days. Master Flenser pruned me of all that was superfluous. Perhaps he did me a favour.’ He laughed harshly.

Yggur made no reply.

Nish closed his eyes and tried to get back to sleep, though now an image kept recurring – the red ruin which Flydd’s healer had revealed so fleetingly, and with such rage at man’s inhumanity to his own.

A long time later Yggur put his head out of the tent, looking up at the dark sky. A high overcast blotted out the stars and moon. ‘It’s coming dawn.’ He rubbed his stubbled cheeks. ‘Aah, it’s cold out.’

Flydd was sitting with his hands on his knees, exactly as he had been hours earlier, watching Malien.

‘Doesn’t look as though she’s having any success,’ said Yggur.

‘It’s taking too long,’ said Flydd, ‘and there’s nothing we can do to help her. This is Malien’s great task and if she can’t do it, no one can.’

Before dawn the sentries were drawn back inside the ends of the fissure. Everyone else spent the day cooped in the tents. This close to Nennifer they dared not go outside, for the risk of being seen was too great.

In mid-morning, Malien dissolved the bubble and crawled across to the food bag, where she made a scant meal of mouldy bread and hard cheese, and another of the knobbly fruits. She had trouble eating it; her hands and arms shook unceasingly. Washing the morsel down with gulps of water that spilled down her front and froze instantly, she flopped onto her sleeping pouch and fell into sleep.

Yggur and Flydd exchanged glances. Yggur jerked his head at the tent flap and went out. Flydd followed. They could be heard conversing in the fissure, though Nish didn’t catch a word.

‘What do you think they’re talking about?’ he said quietly to Irisis.

She rolled over, irritably pulling the sleeping pouch up around her ears. Nish turned onto his back, staring at the roof of the tent. Ice crystals were growing down from the ridgepole. He shivered and drew his fingers down the canvas wall. They left trails in the growing frost.

‘This is too big for any of us.’

Klarm’s voice, though soft, came from just behind Nish’s ear. He jumped. ‘What do you mean … er, Scrutator?’ Nish still wasn’t sure how to address the dwarf. In truth, despite Klarm having saved his life, Nish still felt uncomfortable with him. He rotated so he could see Klarm’s face.

‘Malien has just realised that what she’s trying to do isn’t possible. It’s too much for any mancer, or all of us together. Go to sleep,’ Klarm said abruptly. ‘It’s what you wanted.’ He got up and went out. The tent flap, stiff with ice, crackled as it fell back into place.

Nish, feeling vaguely uneasy, said softly, ‘Irisis?’

She didn’t reply. Irisis was asleep; Malien too, judging by the gentle snores issuing from the other end of the tent. There was no one to share his fears with. Inouye and Evee had been sent to the other, larger tent, occupied by Flangers and the soldiers.

He went across the litter of gear and sleeping pouches on knees and elbows. A buzz of conversation came from outside. Nish eased his head through the flap. Klarm sat hunched in his cloak just before the bend in the fissure, head tilted to one side as if listening.

Flydd and Yggur must be just around the corner – Nish could see the edge of Yggur’s long cloak draped over the rock. Unfortunately Nish still couldn’t hear. And what was Klarm up to? Had everything just been a plot to lure them here? Did he plan to betray them as the price of admission to the Council?

Long fingers wrapped around Nish’s ankle. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Malien said, soft and low.

He whirled, cracking his ear on the tent pole. A stalactite of ice fell on his head and shattered. Nish sat down, picking ice out of his hair. ‘Klarm’s up to something.’

She let go. ‘Do you think of Yggur and Flydd as fools?’

There was ice in his ear as well. He tried to get the fragment out but it melted, sending an icy trickle down to sear his eardrum. ‘Of course not.’

‘Then leave the worrying to them.’

‘What if the Council’s quest succeeds, and they learn to control the amplimet?’

‘They’ll have enough power to annihilate us.’

‘And if they fail and the amplimet gets … whatever it’s looking for?’

She looked him in the eye and for an instant Nish saw beyond the stern, almost ageless face. What was she thinking? Did she pity him?

‘Worse,’ she said almost inaudibly, and turned away.

TWENTY-THREE

Two frustrating days dragged by, and Malien spent most of that time isolated in the bubble, working at her incomprehensible task of locking onto the amplimet and forcing it to wake. When not doing that she lay in her pouch, panting or tossing in a restless sleep.

The conferences in the fissure became longer and more harried, Yggur more remote and imperious, Flydd more insanely driven. He would not be talked out of the attack, though after all this time no one saw any chance of it succeeding. To get away from them, Klarm had taken to climbing up the rocks in the dark. At least, that was what he’d said he was doing, though Nish wasn’t sure any more. He didn’t have any good reason to suspect the dwarf scrutator, but with so much time to fill in he’d come to doubt everything. And every hour the probability of chance discovery grew greater, as did the risk that the scrutators would master the amplimet first. Or the amplimet master them.

As the third night fell Malien was still going, but when she broke for a brief rest Yggur had to lift her into her sleeping pouch. Her skin had begun to wrinkle like a dried olive, and her shrunken eyes had a dull opacity as if she were developing cataracts.

‘Why is she so worn out?’ said Nish to Irisis, after Flydd and Yggur had just slipped out again.

‘Because she daren’t take power from the field. Malien is using an older Art but she has to draw it from herself, and she’s at her limit.’

‘I can’t do it,’ Malien said an hour later, pushing away the mug of honeyed tea Irisis was holding out for her. ‘Aftersickness is wearing me down and there’s no time to recover from it.’

‘Get some more sleep,’ said Yggur. ‘Flydd and I have been discussing another way.’

‘One that doesn’t require me?’ she said, lying down and closing her eyes.

‘We’ll still need you but we’ll be taking some of the load.’

They went out to discuss their plan. Klarm wasn’t there either. He’d gone climbing up the quartz ridge at dusk and still wasn’t back. He could have walked all the way to Nennifer by now, Nish thought.

‘Now I’m really worried,’ he said to Irisis.

She was sitting in the corner, sleeping pouch up around her waist, weaving a couple of dozen silver and gold wires into a complicated braid, part of a piece of jewellery she’d been working on for days. Being a jeweller had been her life’s ambition, stifled when she was a little girl by a mother who had invested the Stirm family’s future in her clever daughter. Irisis still planned to become a jeweller, ‘after the war is over.’

‘You started worrying the day you were born, Nish. Have a nap or something.’

‘I’ve had about forty naps since we’ve been stuck here. I couldn’t sleep to save my life.’

‘Then be quiet. I’m trying to work.’

‘Your fingers do the work by themselves,’ he observed. ‘You don’t need to think about it.’

‘That doesn’t mean I don’t work better without interruptions.’

‘I’m really worried.’

Irisis cast a glance over her shoulder at Malien, who was twitching in her sleep, and set her work aside with, charitably, just the gentlest of sighs.

‘What about?’

‘I think Klarm’s leading us into a trap.’

‘But he’s not leading us; Flydd and Yggur are.’

‘They call upon his knowledge of Nennifer all the time.’

‘I’m sure Flydd and Yggur are keeping an eye on him.’

‘They’re too distracted.’ Nish, realising that he was panting, took a deep breath. It didn’t help; he could feel panic rising and it was worse than he’d felt in other tight situations, because he was so helpless to do anything. ‘It’s out of control, Irisis, and there’s nothing you or I can do to stop it.’

‘In which case there’s no point worrying.’

She was almost supernaturally calm these days, or fatalistic. ‘That’s not like you,’ he said accusingly, as if she were letting the side down. ‘You hate waiting for things to happen, and you hate –’

‘Well, I’m sorry if I’m acting out of character!’ Irisis turned her back, pointedly taking up her braid again.

‘Sorry,’ Nish said automatically. ‘I – I’m out of my depth. This idea about waking the amplimet … it’s bound to go wrong.’

‘It’s the only plan we have, Nish.’

The flap was thrust open, scattering ice across the floor. Yggur came in, bent low, followed by Flydd and Klarm.

‘Time to go,’ said Yggur, going to his knees to shake Malien’s shoulder.

She sat up, bleary-eyed. ‘Already?’

‘I’m afraid so. We’ve got about half a league to go. We go over the ridge and down into the little valley where they grow their crops. We’ll get a bit of cover there. When we’re in place, we’ll work together. It’ll be easier down there, closer to the amplimet. If you seek it as before, I’ll lend you my shoulder when you need it.’ He hesitated. ‘That’s the idea, anyhow.’

‘Great,’ Nish muttered when they had gone out. ‘Now when it goes wrong we’ll lose them all.’

‘It’s no use,’ said Yggur a couple of hours after midnight, wiping hard granules of blown snow off his brow. He’d been working with Malien for ages, without success. ‘It’s hopeless.’

‘Let’s give it one last try,’ said Flydd.

‘The moon’s up. We’ll have to leave it until tonight.’

‘We must go on,’ said Flydd.

‘We’ve got to have darkness.’

‘Another day and neither you nor Malien will have the strength. And I’m not turning my back on the Council again.’

This time they were just above the valley floor, which was networked in dark and light greys by its dry irrigation ditches and the tufted remnants of the harvested autumn crop. They huddled in the long moon-shadow behind a cluster of hip-high boulders, while the wind shrieked all around them. To their left, a frozen stream in the bottom of the valley disappeared over the precipice into the abyss of the Desolation Sink.

‘Aftersickness is killing me,’ croaked Malien.

‘One more time,’ Flydd said grimly.

Malien grew the golden bubble around her and became a blurred outline. Yggur stood facing her, his hands at his sides. He whistled under his breath and a series of golden threads extended from the sphere towards his face.

Malien shifted her weight, Yggur threw up his arms as if off-balance, and for a moment the rock Nish crouched behind faded to translucency. His vision blurred then returned to normal, but his anxiety only intensified. He let out his breath in a loud hiss.

Flydd jabbed him in the ribs. ‘What’s the matter with you tonight?’

‘The amplimet is waiting for us,’ Nish burst out, ‘and it’s angry.’

Malien stood up on tiptoe, shuddering with the strain. Yggur turned his head as far as the filaments would allow. He seemed to be holding his breath.

‘It’s just a mineral,’ said Flydd. ‘It can’t feel anything. You’re projecting your own fears onto it.’

Malien seemed to be beckoning to Nish, as if saying, ‘Go on.’

‘It’s real,’ said Nish.

Everyone stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’ Flydd rasped.

Nish had no idea how he knew it, until the words formed and he spoke them aloud. ‘I can sense something … just as I did that night above Gumby Marth, after Father cast his alchymical spell on me and I saw the lyrinx stone-formed into the pinnacles. It’s a … a brittle rage, a crackling fury like a box of crystals being ground underfoot. The amplimet is tormented, and it hates the scrutators for shackling and probing it, and for blocking it from the field it so desperately needs. They’ve fenced it in with ice and now they’re forcing it …’

‘To what end?’ said Flydd.

‘I can’t tell.’ Nish slumped to the ground and it was all gone. He was just his normal prosaic self, with not a trace of the Art in him.

‘Ice,’ Yggur muttered, the golden threads twanging as his jaw moved. He swayed on his feet and nearly fell.

‘Heat quickly destroys any kind of hedron,’ said Irisis. ‘Cold never can, but it can slow it to a murmur. Why didn’t I think of that? That’s how they’ve made it safe to use.’

Flydd gave a mirthless snort. ‘And to think we’ve spent days trying to wake it without killing ourselves. To unshackle it, all we have to do is warm it up. It’ll lash out at the scrutators and then we go in.’

‘It may lash out at us,’ said Malien, slumping to the ground. ‘You can never tell what an amplimet will do.’

‘We don’t have any other option,’ said Flydd. ‘We must go on, no matter what the risk.’

‘You’re insane,’ she said in a wisp of a voice.

‘We – go – on!’ he ground out.

Another still silence.

‘If Malien can find it again I might be able to warm it up,’ said Yggur finally. ‘Though I’d have to be closer. I’ve not got much strength left.’

‘How close?’ said Malien, lying on her back on the frozen ground with her arms flopped by her sides.

Yggur joined her, breathing heavily. ‘Ideally, against the outside wall of Nennifer.’

‘The sentinels would pick you up before you got within a hundred spans,’ said Klarm.

‘How close can we get?’ said Flydd.

‘Five hundred spans is the closest I’d dare,’ replied Klarm, ‘and even that’s …’

‘Not good enough,’ said Yggur. ‘I can’t do it from so far away.’

‘Then we risk everything and go on,’ said Flydd in tones that would not be denied.

‘No closer,’ Malien begged as they crawled up the edge of the shallow valley towards the flat-topped promontory, out of which the foundations of Nennifer had been carved. Here there had been enough moisture to freeze the gravelly soil into an iron-hard aggregate, brutal on their hands and knees. ‘Please.’

‘I can’t do it from here,’ said Yggur as he’d said half a dozen times already. He could barely hold himself on all fours now. Aftersickness was crushing him and Malien was little better.

‘Hold him up, Nish,’ said Flydd, working some kind of illusion with the fingers of one hand. It made no difference as far as Nish could see but, after a whispered consultation, Malien and Yggur agreed to keep going.

They continued crawling up the side of the valley, thence onto a fluted ridge of sharp rock. The sky had clouded over but now the moon came out momentarily and Irisis, beside Nish, caught her breath. The sudden brightness lit up the paved parade ground and mooring field which extended from the vertical slash of the thousand-span-high precipice that fell into the sunken lands of the Desolation Sink, all the way, as flat as a table, to the front wall of Nennifer. Two air-dreadnoughts were moored in the central part of the parade ground, one not far from this end, the other midway.

Nennifer’s monumental bulk reared up before them, the biggest building in the world and one of the most brutal in its sheer functional ugliness. It made no concession to beauty, harmony, proportion or setting: in a world devoted to war, nothing mattered but the power of those who told the world how to fight and die. Behind Nennifer, mountains black and bare rose up to pierce the glowing sky.

They were no more than five hundred spans from the front of the building. From here they would be exposed every step of the way, and within range of the great javelards and catapults mounted on the walls. If the sentries saw them, they would be shot without warning.

‘Where’s the amplimet, Malien?’ said Flydd.

‘Somewhere in the middle of the building,’ she replied. ‘I can’t tell more from here. The third floor, or perhaps the fourth. No closer, please.’ She choked.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Nish.

‘Something is very wrong. We must turn back.’

‘We have to go on,’ grated Flydd.

‘No further. I’m begging you.’ Malien’s face was stark in the moonlight. ‘Take another step and the mission will fail.’

‘If we turn back, we’ve already failed. Neither of you have the strength for another attempt.’

Yggur raised his head, which was nodding like a puppet’s. ‘What’s that?’ he whispered, looking at a small stone structure a couple of hundred spans ahead and to their left, not far from the edge of the precipice.

‘It’s a shed where they keep the mooring cables for the air-dreadnoughts,’ said Klarm.

‘Will anyone be there now?’

‘No reason why there should be.’

‘We’ll do it in the lee of the shed,’ said Flydd, ‘if we can’t get inside.’

They went on their bellies across the ice-glazed paving stones, and every wriggle of the way Nish expected to feel the pulverising impact of a javelard. He could make out guards moving on the upper walls. Surely Flydd’s meagre illusion couldn’t conceal them from such an unceasing watch?

The shed was built of flat slabs of gneiss laid in courses like long thin bricks, the mortar deeply raked so that the joints were half a fist deep and wide. The door proved to be locked so they took shelter against the end wall, whose shadow provided partial screening while allowing them to see the front of Nennifer.

‘Keep still,’ whispered Flydd. ‘I’ll have to release the illusion now, and the guards never fail in their alertness at Nennifer.’

‘They fail at times,’ amended Klarm, ‘but then they die horribly, as an example to their fellows. And rightly so.’

Nish gave him a shocked glance.

‘A guard’s duty is to guard,’ Klarm elaborated, ‘and all may rest on it.’

They put their backs to the rough stones while Yggur and Malien did their best to overcome their aftersickness, then made ready for the final attempt.

The night grew wilder. The wind, howling around the angles of the shed, rasped at exposed skin with abrasive particles of ice. The last of the cloud blew away and the moon appeared, brilliant in the thin mountain air. Then, as they watched, a pair of rings grew around it, the spectral colours little more than shades of grey.

‘Two rings around the moon,’ said Klarm. ‘Not a good omen.’

‘It’s better than a moonbow,’ grunted Flydd.

‘Not much, and we may see one as it rises.’

‘Let’s get on with it,’ said Yggur. ‘Malien?’ The moonlight gave her face a bluish cast.

‘Are you all right?’ said Nish.

‘Just thinking,’ Malien said, ‘of all the ways it could go wrong.’

As soon as she and Yggur began, the crystal’s inanimate fury hit Nish like a blow to the stomach. For a minute he struggled to draw breath and, when it passed, his belly throbbed. They had no idea what they were dealing with.

Yggur and Malien were sitting side by side, she sagging in her bubble, he propped against the wall with his face enveloped in pale filaments. The bubble was dull this time, else it would have been visible in the shadows.

‘Ready?’ Yggur’s jaw moved oddly, as if the threads were working it like a puppet.

Malien’s affirmation was just a distant echo.

‘The amplimet is hungry for power,’ said Flydd. ‘All you have to do is melt the ice wards surrounding it.’

‘If we alert Fusshte’s mancers,’ said Malien, ‘they’ll shut it in a shielded box and we won’t be able to reach it.’

‘Then flood it with power directly. That’ll warm it up. But whatever you’re going to do, do it now. The guards patrol this area and they could come by at any time.’

Nish heard Malien’s inrushing breath, the bubble darkened and she let out a pained grunt.

‘Withdraw!’ gasped Yggur, but there was no reply. The bubble had gone black and nothing could be seen inside.

‘Come back, Malien, wherever you are,’ Yggur choked. He tried to get up and fell forward, right into the moonlight.

Everyone went still, knowing that the guards on the wall must have seen the movement. All at once Irisis leapt up, grabbed Yggur’s legs and began to drag him back.

A klaxon sounded from one of the corner guard towers. It was answered by half a dozen others, then a javelard spear screamed off the paving stone where Yggur’s head had been a moment before. Nish grabbed a leg and heaved, heedless that Yggur’s face was being dragged across the ground.

Another spear dug a span-long groove in the stone before Nish and Irisis got the big man around the corner.

‘And now we’re dead,’ Nish said.

‘Like hell!’ Irisis said savagely. ‘Run, while we still can. Maybe we can attack from the rear of Nennifer.’

‘We can’t carry Yggur and Malien,’ said Flydd.

‘Then leave them behind!’ she snapped. ‘I thought you were a ruthless scrutator, not a puling defeatist without any balls.’

Nish froze, holding his breath. Flydd gave a strangled gasp of outrage, but then a hail of heavy spears slammed into the far wall, flinging shattered rock everywhere.

‘Come on!’ she hissed. ‘The soldiers will be on their way.’

‘It’s too late –’

Malien’s sphere expanded then shrank again as if she was breathing it in and out. Its surface roiled, solidified like the shell of a nut then turned transparent again. They could now see her inside, working desperately with her hands as if trying to contain something too hot or bright to touch.

A catapult ball tore half the roof off the shed, showering them with broken tiles and splinters of wood. One of the soldiers, hit on the head, slumped sideways without a sound.

‘Another couple of those and there’ll be nothing to hide behind,’ said Flangers, flicking fragments of tile out of his crossbow. ‘They can pick us off without risking a man.’

‘The scrutators don’t care about risking a thousand men,’ said Klarm. ‘Now that the shock has worn off, they’ll want us alive.’

Malien doubled over, holding her midriff, but forced herself upright and extended her fists in front of her. The shell burst into fragments that fizzed to nothingness in the air. She brought her fists together with a spray of light and stood swaying on her feet for a moment before sliding into a crumpled heap.

‘The amplimet was waiting,’ she said faintly. ‘I couldn’t contain it.’

In the distance something went crack, like a long, brittle crystal being snapped in two.

‘What happened?’ asked Flydd.

‘I don’t know.’ Malien could barely speak. ‘There was no resistance at all. As soon as I pushed, the wards gave way like rotten ice … as if they’d been eaten away from inside.’

‘The amplimet must have already woken,’ said Klarm. ‘It had set a trap for the scrutators but got us instead. Now there’s an irony for you.’

‘So we just wait for Fusshte to take us?’ said Irisis.

No one said anything. The barrage had stopped; now the klaxons were cut off in mid-cry. The guards were equally silent. Not a sound came from the length and breadth of Nennifer.

Nish could feel the tension building. His skin prickled and his diaphragm began to thud back and forth like a beaten drum. He swallowed and his ears popped, but the pressure on his eardrums was still there. He did it again and again. It made no difference.

The moonlight faded like a slowly lidded eye. When it shone out again the double rings were brighter than before.

‘Why haven’t the guards come after us?’ he said.

‘They’re afraid to move,’ said Irisis.

Nish’s diaphragm was beating so hard he could barely draw breath. Afraid?

‘What was that?’ hissed Flangers.

The wind had died down too, and they heard a curious noise.

‘It sounds like rushing water,’ said Irisis, looking towards the precipice only a dozen spans away.

‘Any water on the ground would be frozen iron-hard at this time of year,’ said Nish.

She wriggled across to the edge, keeping within the shed’s shadow, but came straight back.

‘It’s rushing out of a fissure in the cliff and freezing as it falls.’

‘Funny we didn’t hear it before,’ said Nish. The ground gave the faintest tremor. ‘Did you feel that?’

‘Earth tremblers are common here,’ said Klarm.

Again they heard that brittle crunching, though this time it was like a clanker’s metal feet grinding across a field of crystals and crumbling them to shards. There came a drawn-out, subterranean rumbling and the ground shook hard enough to toss Irisis off her feet.

‘We’re not finished yet,’ said Flydd, standing up and lurching back and forth with a maniacal glint in his eye.

‘What have we done?’ gasped Malien. ‘Yggur …?’ She looked around wildly.

‘He’s unconscious,’ said Flydd dismissively. ‘Overcome by aftersickness. He’ll be no further use tonight.’

‘The amplimet’s broken free,’ said Malien, climbing to her feet and bracing her back against the shed as the vibrations grew stronger. ‘We’ve got to stop it before it gets out of control.’

‘How can we, Malien?’ Turning away, Flydd gave a series of low-voiced orders to the troops and they readied for action.

‘You don’t understand. It’s … It’s …’

‘What?’ At the expression on her face he spun around and caught her by the lapels of her coat. ‘What is it?’

‘I … think it’s come to the second stage of awakening,’ she said, then her eyes rolled back in her head.

Flydd cursed and let her fall. ‘Two down.’

Nish was shocked by his callousness, even in this desperate situation. The Flydd he’d once known so well had been replaced by a ruthless stranger.

‘Second stage of awakening?’ said Klarm. ‘What’s she talking about, Flydd?’

‘I don’t think I want to know.’

There came a tearing screech, like metal being torn apart, followed by a low shudder that shook more fragments of roof slate onto their heads and shoulders. They moved down to the corner where the structure was still sound, and Nish peered across the mooring ground. The shuddering grew stronger; then, with a deafening roar, a boiling shaft of light the width of a room burst up through the roof of Nennifer. Coloured particles whirled around and up until the column faded against the bright moon. And then the whole world moved.

‘What the hell was that?’ said Flydd, picking himself up. The ground beneath their feet was still quivering.

‘I don’t know,’ said Klarm. The whites of his eyes were showing. ‘But I suggest we run for our lives.’

‘We’ll be seen,’ said Flydd.

The rings around the brilliant moon had given way to a gigantic moonbow. The ground shook again and parts of the moonbow disappeared as if washed away. The parade ground wrenched sideways, hurling them against the wall. Nish’s hand went straight through a crack, to his bemusement. He wrenched it out just before the crack snapped closed, losing the skin along his right thumb. The soldier who’d been hit on the head got up, shakily.

‘Move!’ roared Flangers, hurling Nish out of the way. He picked up Malien and ran with her as the shed collapsed behind them.

Nish lay where he’d been thrown, unable to believe what he was seeing. A series of ground waves spiralled out from Nennifer, heaving solid paving stones in the air and shaking the tethered air-dreadnoughts like balloons in a storm. The first wave threw him up and backwards, and it was like being hit by a moving clanker. He’d just landed on his shoulder when the second wave tossed him head over heels. Falling head-down, he saw the ground coming up and threw out his arms to break his fall, but it dropped away again.

‘Run!’ Flydd heaved Nish to his feet. Irisis had taken Malien from Flangers, who was struggling to lift Yggur.

‘Which way?’ Nish gasped.

‘Towards Nennifer, you bloody fool. This is our chance.’

But they’ll see us! Nish thought. He watched them go, thinking they’d lost their minds, until another shock knocked him down and the outer edge of the parade ground began to tilt beneath his feet. And then he ran until his heart was bursting. Ahead, a knife-edged crack appeared, curving out from the centre of Nennifer. The inner side rose and the outer fell, leaving a cliff a third of a span high. Irisis pushed Malien up it, then went over in one great bound, her bright hair flying in the moonlight. Flydd scrambled over, followed by several of the soldiers. Nish made a last effort and smelt a whiff of brimstone as he sprang.

The crack opened visibly beneath him and clouds of misty dust boiled out. The groaning in the depths was like the prisoners in the dungeons of Nennifer suffering their daily torments.

He landed on the high side, skidding on his knees, out of breath. Surely he was the last? No, one of Yggur’s soldiers was labouring up the slope carrying another, who looked to have broken his leg.

He was almost to the cliff when the outer section of the parade ground dropped sharply. The man with the broken leg screamed. His partner, straining with all his might, lifted the injured soldier above his head and tossed him up onto solid ground. Reaction sent him sliding the other way, down the steadily increasing slope of the falling slab.

The soldier put his head down and even made a little ground before the slope grew so steep that he could gain no traction on it. He clung on with hands and knees, looking up at them in despair as the whole great slab of parade ground, fifty spans wide and about two hundred long, ground off, carrying him over the cliff into the vast abyss of the Desolation Sink.

TWENTY-FOUR

‘What have we done?’ said Nish, lying on the ground with his hands over his face.

Flydd jerked him to his feet. ‘I don’t know, but we’re going to make the best of it.’

The whole of Nennifer was shaking and, it seemed, the mountains behind them. More slabs of parade ground fell into the Desolation Sink and springs burst out of the ground, freezing instantly to brittle fountains. The tethers snapped on the nearer of the air-dreadnoughts, which lifted sluggishly on its flabby airbags.

Spiralling lines of force appeared in Nish’s inner eye, radiating out from the point whence that column of light had originated. His head whirled and he felt a sudden attack of nausea, like lying down when very drunk. Weird visions fleeted through his mind – the vast bulk of Nennifer as transparent as a glass maze; magnified views of one part of it, then another. Distant cries carried to him as if the people were standing close by. Then the enormous building was cut into curving slices and slowly forced apart by a boiling white nothingness.

It had to be an hallucination, but how come he could still think clearly? Klarm let out a cry of disbelief. Nish blinked, turned towards the dwarf scrutator and the vision was gone.

Klarm raised his right arm, pointing with one finger. With wrenching shrieks, like blades piercing his eardrums, Nennifer was sliced into dozens of segments along the spiralling planes he’d seen earlier. For a moment the segments stood in place, slightly offset from each other, their edges as sharp and sheer as razor cuts. It wasn’t right; it could not be real; but there they stood.

Then in an instant the planes or dimensions shifted, but Nish couldn’t take that in – his mind refused to believe his eyes. He doubled over, trying to retch out the head-spinning nausea.

Irisis wiped his face with his coat sleeve. ‘Are you all right?’

He had to lean on her for a moment. Nennifer still stood but the segments had been rearranged, as if they had been withdrawn into another dimension, shuffled like a deck of cards then put back in place. Curve lay perfectly against curve but Nennifer was no longer rectangular. It now resembled a spoked wheel and some of the segments – the layers of the original building – were exposed like slices through a cake.

The air shimmered and the front of the building warped as though a distorting lens had passed along it. Dust devils whirled up. Sections here and there, now unsupported, crumbled to rubble, while the rest of the edifice stood as solidly as if it had been built that way. In the brilliant moonlight, people could be seen at the windows, up on the battlements and in sections that had been sliced open.

The subterranean noises became a grinding roar that blocked out every other sound. Nish smelt the earthy pungency of ground-up rock. Clouds of dust billowed out, obscuring parts of the building, and by the time it began to clear they were all coated.

‘Did the amplimet do all that?’ whispered Flydd, his self-possession gone.

‘The Council didn’t throw Nennifer down,’ Klarm replied shakily.

The ground shook again, hurling men and women from the battlements. One of the surviving front doors was flung wide and people – servants, soldiers, mancers in capes and gowns – boiled out of it, fleeing for their lives. Others climbed out of every hole and crack, threading the front of Nennifer with figures like ants from a stirred-up nest. A few jumped from upper floors, though they did not get up again.

The cracked remnants of the parade ground gave a last, self-satisfied shudder and all was still once more. In the distance, someone was shouting orders but the fleeing people took no notice.

‘Look out,’ said Nish, brushing dust from his nose. His eyebrows were thick with it. ‘They’re coming our way.’

‘Just act terrified and aimless,’ said Irisis, blinking dust out of her long eyelashes.

A battered group of people stumbled by, not giving them a second glance, and disappeared. Others followed.

‘Do we have to go in?’ said Nish. ‘Surely this means the end of the Council.’

‘I should have listened, Malien,’ Flydd sounded as if he had a throat full of gravel. ‘It’s woken. What’s the amplimet going to do now?’

Malien, lying on the ground with her eyes closed, did not reply.

Irisis reached out and caught hold of Nish’s fingers. ‘I’m scared,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t want to go in there.’

Coming from the bravest person he knew, that was chilling. He slid his cold hand into hers. ‘Neither do I.’

Klarm waddled across to Flydd. ‘I don’t see what we can do, Xervish. It’ll be like a maze inside.’

‘One where every path leads to a blank wall,’ said Flydd. He thought for a moment. ‘We must go in. We’ve got to make sure of the Council – you can bet they’ve survived – and attempt to secure the amplimet. And find Tiaan.’

‘If she’s alive!’ growled Klarm.

‘You’d better hope she is,’ whispered Malien. ‘She may be the only one who can restrain the amplimet now.’

‘We’ll never find it in that chaos,’ said Klarm. ‘Or her.’

‘I will lead you,’ said a vaguely familiar voice from the crumbled rock along the edge of the cloven parade ground.

Klarm whirled, groping for his short blade.

‘Hold!’ cried Flydd. ‘Hold, damn it.’

Klarm slowly lowered his arm.

‘Come forth,’ said Flydd. ‘Slowly.’

A man emerged, empty hands out in front of him. His back was to the moon and Nish could make out no more than an outline. He was of middle height and slim.

‘Surr,’ said the man.

Suddenly Nish knew him. ‘Eiryn Muss!’

‘Or someone taking his shape,’ said Irisis.

‘No, it’s Muss all right,’ said Flydd. ‘Where the hell have you been all this time, Prober Muss? I sent you to do a job months ago and you didn’t report back.’

‘You sent me to find news of the flying construct, surr,’ said Muss. ‘And I followed the webs of lies and rumour to Lybing where, unfortunately, I came to the notice of Scrutator Fusshte. He knew I served you, of course. And my worth.’

Flydd grunted, which could have meant anything.

‘Fusshte offered me a choice,’ Muss went on. ‘To serve him, or die the death prescribed for the trusted servant of a traitor. What could I do, surr? Dead I would be no use to you. I chose to serve Fusshte, for that was the only way to discharge my oath and duty to you. And, after all, much of the scrutators’ intelligence flows through him.’

‘He’s a master of lies and deceit,’ said Klarm. ‘As are you, Prober Muss. Any man sworn to Fusshte is no good to us.’

‘Surr,’ said Muss. ‘I –’

‘Eiryn Muss served me faithfully for a very long time,’ said Flydd, though in a neutral voice.

Klarm just looked at him. Flydd met his stare. Finally Klarm said, very dubiously, ‘And in all that time he gave you no cause to doubt him?’

‘Not in the least degree,’ said Flydd.

What was Flydd playing at? In Nish’s travels with him after fleeing Snizort, Flydd had more than once wondered at Muss’s personal agenda.

‘Explain yourself, Muss, if you can,’ said Flydd. ‘And be quick about it. Time presses upon us.’

‘I’ll save you more time than you’ll lose by questioning me, surr. Fusshte brought me here to assist him and, in time, made me his Master of the Watch. I learned much about flying constructs, surr, and other matters of interest to you.’

‘You conveyed not a jot of it to me,’ snapped Flydd.

‘Fusshte did not allow me access to the message skeets,’ said Muss.

‘How could he stop a man of your talents?’

‘He put a specific ward around their pens, proof against whatever guise I might put on. I did everything I could to find a way –’

‘Fine words,’ said Klarm, ‘but they mean nothing.’

‘Neither could I leave Nennifer by air-floater or mountain camel caravan,’ said Muss. ‘All escapes were warded against me, and I’m not hardy enough to cross the mountain paths alone.’

‘Few are,’ said Flydd. ‘This seems enough –’

‘Without proof of loyalty his words are empty,’ said Klarm. ‘I spent months here after my leg was smashed, and this man seemed all too close to Fusshte then. He even admits that he’s Fusshte’s sworn servant.’

‘What say you, Eiryn Muss?’ said Flydd. ‘Can you offer any proof to convince my doubting companions?’

‘Only this,’ said Muss. ‘I detected your coming yet did not give you away.’

‘Prove it,’ said Klarm.

‘You did not come straight here in the thapter,’ said Muss. ‘You flew by in the cloud before turning to approach from the west. Your thapter towed another craft, a balloon of some sort, and landed some four or five leagues beyond the mountain to the north.’

Klarm rocked back on his heels. ‘Really? When was this, Prober Muss?’

‘Four days ago,’ Muss said without hesitation. ‘Late in the afternoon.’

‘And how did you detect our coming, Prober?’

‘My profession has its secrets, surr,’ said Muss with dignity, ‘and I’ll no more reveal them than you would yours. I will say only that, in addition to my own talents and devices, as Master of the Watch I monitor all the sentinels in Nennifer.’

‘Who else knows of our coming?’ rapped Klarm. ‘The entire Council, or just Fusshte?’

‘I told no one. Indeed, I kept the knowledge from them.’

‘Which makes you a treasonous oath-breaker,’ cried Klarm, vindicated. ‘And no doubt a liar as well.’

‘My oath to Scrutator Flydd remained valid,’ Muss said simply. ‘Subsequent oaths were made under duress and therefore had no force.’

‘Flydd had been cast out by the Council,’ said Klarm, ‘which unbinds all oaths.’

‘My oath was to the man as well as the scrutator,’ said Muss. ‘I deemed that it held.’

Klarm did not relent. ‘Flydd was condemned and made a non-citizen. By law, no oath to a non-citizen can remain valid.’

‘It remained binding to me. I can say no more.’

‘I cannot trust –’

‘Enough, Klarm!’ snarled Flydd. ‘It is, as you point out, a matter of trust. I choose to trust my man and there’s an end to it.’

Klarm inclined his head and stepped backwards. ‘As you will,’ he said, though his eyes did not leave the face of the prober.

‘Well, Muss,’ said Flydd. ‘I expect you know why we’re here. What can you do for us?’

‘If you would give me a moment, surr.’ Muss turned away, consulting an instrument he kept concealed under his cloak. Coloured gleams briefly illuminated the fabric.

‘Hey!’ cried Klarm, grabbing his arm. ‘What are you doing?’

‘My eidoscope is linked to the sentinels,’ said Muss, pulling away. ‘It enables me to see truly, even in this chaos, though the sentinels are failing now.’

‘What do you see, Muss?’ said Flydd.

‘The scrutators have survived the collapse and guard the amplimet still. You won’t easily get to either.’

‘But it is possible?’ said Flydd. ‘You can lead us to it?’

‘I believe so,’ said Muss. ‘Though even for me, the dislocation of Nennifer will not be easy to track through.’

‘What about Artisan Tiaan? Does she live?’

‘Unless she died in the dislocation. I expect I can find her.’

‘Tell me about the amplimet. What is its state?’

‘Ah!’ said Muss pregnantly. ‘Not being a mancer, surr, I cannot say.’

‘What do you know, Muss?’

‘The Council has been probing the crystal, very carefully, ever since they brought it back from Fiz Gorgo. And I understand, surr, though I’ve not been able to confirm it with my own eyes, that they’ve contained it to prevent it drawing more than a trickle of power.’

‘With ice wards,’ said Flydd. ‘But they’ve been melted; that’s how it got free.’

‘Ice was just the inner ward,’ said Muss. ‘There were outer wards as well.’

‘What were they?’ said Klarm eagerly.

‘I know no more than that,’ Muss said. ‘And beyond the wards was a circle of adepts, just in case …’

‘In case?’ said Flydd.

‘I was unable to discern the contingency they were guarding against.’

‘And you call yourself a spy,’ said Klarm.

‘The Council guards its secrets jealously,’ said Muss. ‘Though I dare say it bears upon what you’ve done to destroy Nennifer, for all that you had no idea what you were doing.’

‘Thank you, Muss,’ snapped Flydd. ‘Such speculations exceed your mandate. Lead us within, if you please.’

‘Hold just a moment,’ said Klarm. ‘I think this fellow knows more than he’s telling us. Prober Muss, pray enlarge upon your previous statement. What do you know about our doings?’

Muss glanced at Flydd but found no relief there.

‘Well?’ said Klarm. ‘What does a humble prober know about the Art?’

‘Nothing, surr,’ said Muss, his normally impassive face showing the faintest sign of discomfort.

‘Come now, Eiryn Muss,’ said Flydd. ‘Don’t treat us like fools. You’re far more than a humble prober, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t know what you mean, surr.’

‘Of course you do. One of the reasons you’re such a brilliant spy is that you have a hidden talent, in the true sense of the word. You’re a mancer too, Eiryn Muss, but of a very rare kind.’

‘I –’ Muss shook his head. ‘No, surr …’

‘You’re a morphmancer, Muss – you can take on the shape and appearance of any human, or any creature, roughly your own size. You can go anywhere, and disguise yourself as anyone, and no one will ever know it’s you.’

Muss, who had regained his self-control, scarcely reacted this time. All Nish caught was a slight tightening of the fists, a momentary flexure of the brows.

‘I can take on certain shapes and appearances, surr,’ Muss said, ‘but my essential nature remains unchanged. Therefore any ward or sentinel set against me will keep me at bay no matter how I change my shape. I tried to enter the chamber where the amplimet is held, but the sentinels would not allow it. Therefore I know not, of my own eyes, what went on in there.’

‘You just said your eidoscope was linked to the sentinels,’ said Klarm.

‘Only to read them. I can’t change their settings.’

‘What does your eidoscope tell you about what we did?’ said Flydd.

‘I believe,’ Muss said carefully, ‘though I do not know, that you managed to bypass the wards and the rings of mancers surrounding the amplimet. You melted the ice wards –’

‘That was our intention, but the ice wards had already been eaten away from within,’ said Flydd. ‘The amplimet must have done that, so it must have already woken, secretly.’

‘You forced power into the amplimet,’ said Muss, ‘allowing it to take control of the field for an instant. It lashed out, killing the ring of adepts and causing the dislocation of Nennifer, before the Council brought up another ring of ward-mancers to reinforce the wards that now contain it again.’

‘Are you sure they’ve contained it?’ said Malien, trying to sit up but failing. She lay down, cradling her head in her hands. ‘It’s under their control?’

‘For the moment,’ said Muss. ‘Though it may not remain so. Once they tire, or if Fusshte decides that there’s no more to lose …’

‘Are the Council united in this?’ said Klarm shrewdly. ‘One would have thought that Fusshte …’

‘They weren’t,’ said Muss. ‘Had you chosen subterfuge over action I would have led you inside. You might have taken advantage of their intriguing to seize control. That’s not possible now – they’re united by their fear of the amplimet. Your rash stroke has made your task far more difficult.’

‘You forget yourself, Prober!’ snapped Flydd.

‘You taught me to speak plainly,’ said Muss.

‘There’s a difference between plain speaking and insolence. Does the Council know we’re here?’

‘They must do,’ said Klarm. ‘The guards fired on us.’

‘The guards fired on a shadowy movement,’ said Muss. ‘I explained it as a mountain goat wandering onto the parade ground.’

Flydd regarded him dubiously. ‘Really?’

‘False alarms aren’t uncommon. The guards are taught to shoot on sight, then go and see what they’ve shot.’

Flydd nodded. ‘So even in this supposedly impregnable fastness the Council feels insecure. How interesting. Can you get us inside without alerting the guards?’

The spy consulted his concealed instrument. ‘The sentinels have failed now and we can get in anywhere, if we’re quick. Once the guards recover from the dislocation they’ll renew their watch on the perimeter.’

‘Very well. Lead us in, Prober, without delay.’

‘Where do you wish to be taken, surr?’ said Muss.

‘To the chamber where the amplimet is held,’ said Malien from the ground. ‘Before anything, we must put it –’

‘Can you help us?’ said Flydd. ‘Are you fit, Malien?’

‘Alas,’ she said, ‘I can’t even stand.’

‘And Yggur is still unconscious,’ said Flydd. ‘Aftersickness won’t release him today, so we can’t take on the amplimet yet.’

‘The Council are close by the warding chamber,’ said Muss.

‘And they’ll be in disarray, so we’ll try to overpower them. Only then can we attempt to deal with the crystal.’

‘Once you bring them down,’ said Malien quietly, ‘their hold on the amplimet will fail and you may not be able to control it.’

‘I can see no other way,’ said Flydd. ‘We can’t delay any longer. Where can we safely leave our disabled, Prober?’

‘There, surr,’ said Muss, indicating a corner section of wall jutting out from the front of the building. ‘It’s solid and sheltered from the wind; as safe as anywhere.’

Which isn’t saying much, Nish thought. They left Malien and Yggur inside, along with the soldier with the broken leg, plus food, drink and cloaks to cover them, and Evee to do what she could for their hurts.

‘Splendid,’ said Flydd, visibly gathering his resolve. ‘Take us within, Muss.’

TWENTY-FIVE

The stream of fleeing people had dropped to a trickle, now following an ant trail of refugees that led around to the rear of Nennifer, where there would be shelter from the biting wind.

‘This way will be quicker,’ said Muss. ‘Try not to attract attention.’

‘What about a disguise?’ said Flydd.

‘Your own mother wouldn’t recognise you under all that dust, surr.’

Muss led them across the tilted, shattered stones of the parade ground, keeping to the low side of an upthrust bank of rubbly rock that curved towards the former entrance of the fortress. In the drifting dust and smoke it was hard to follow him. Though Muss was undisguised, he tended to blend into his surroundings.

‘He’s almost as weird as the rest of the place,’ Irisis said quietly to Nish. ‘I don’t trust him, despite his fine words.’

Nish didn’t have the energy to worry about anything else. ‘He knew we were here. He could have betrayed us any time in the past few days, had he wanted to.’

‘He’s up to something,’ she muttered.

Muss, ten or fifteen paces ahead, stopped and looked directly at her, before heading off again.

Irisis shivered. ‘And he’s fey.’

Nish put an arm around her but the sudden movement made his head spin again. He gagged and pulled away.

‘Are you all right?’ Irisis said sharply.

‘This place makes me dizzy.’

‘I feel it too.’ She touched her pliance with a fingertip. ‘Whatever the amplimet did to the dimensions, they haven’t quite gone back to normal.’

Where the rubble bank branched into two, Muss stopped for everyone to catch up. ‘Best if we go in here.’

The curving slice of building in front of them was shaped like a fingernail paring cut in half. The short straight end still had its outer wall, but the exposed side, which protruded several spans further than the neighbouring slice, revealed a section through all the above-ground floors of Nennifer. The lower floors were intact and contained their original contents, but the upper two levels were in disarray, their floors and ceilings partly crumbled.

Muss sprang lightly up onto the lowest floor, which stood two-thirds of a span above the ground, and disappeared.

‘What –?’ said Klarm.

The spy reappeared, his image wavering as if seen through the surface of a rippled pond. Nish felt an almost overwhelming urge to throw up.

Irisis steadied him until the nausea faded. ‘Perhaps if you close your eyes?’

‘Fat lot of use I’ll be then, when we’re attacked.’

‘You won’t be any use if you’re hurling your breakfast up all over yourself.’

‘We didn’t have any breakfast!’ he said miserably.

‘You’ll be fine then. Hold my hand while we go through.’

Klarm looked back, frowned, then flipped himself up onto the floor. This time Nish couldn’t control his stomach. Once he’d finished, Irisis took his hand and led him to the edge. ‘Close your eyes,’ she hissed as Flangers swung himself up.

Nish did so. ‘Ready?’ Without waiting for him to answer, Irisis took him under the arms and heaved him up, grunting with the effort.

His stomach tied itself in knots as he passed through a chilly, wetly-clinging barrier, but the nausea faded as he landed on the floor inside. He stood up, steadfastly looking the other way as Irisis came through.

The room appeared to have been the sleeping chamber of a senior mancer, or possibly a scrutator, for it was lavishly appointed with rugs, tapestries and furniture made of inlaid ebony and other rare timbers. An ivory wand lay in the middle of the rug, broken in half.

‘Which way?’ said Flydd, moving in behind Muss and taking him by the upper arm.

Muss went still. ‘I don’t like to be touched, surr,’ he said stiffly.

Flydd didn’t let go, and the pair stood frozen for a full minute before Muss gave a slight dip of the head and Flydd stepped back.

‘I still have to find the way,’ said Muss, looking around. He glanced down at the eidoscope in the folds of his cloak, then opened a door and slid through it. They waited. His head appeared around the door. ‘This way.’

Irisis muttered something rude. Flydd directed a fierce scowl at her. ‘If you are to lead, you must also learn when to trust.’

‘I’d trust Muss more if he had a personality,’ she retorted. ‘I’ve known him for years, yet I have no idea what he thinks or feels, about anything. He’s a machine.’

‘One who’s served me faithfully and well, and never let me down, which is all that matters. Now be quiet. This place could still be full of enemies.’

‘They’ve all run away save the scrutators and their pet mancers.’

‘Really?’ said Flydd, thrusting at her his seamed and puckered face, all bone and gristle. ‘A good seven thousand people dwelt in Nennifer and there could be many still inside.’

She pulled away, scarcely abashed, but drew her sword. Oddly, Flydd had lost the bitter fury of the past days. The duress seemed to have driven him back to his normal irascible self, which she was used to dealing with. Nish moved closer to her. The dust made everyone else look grubby but it only heightened her beauty.

He’d expected to be fighting his way in, but the monumental corridor proved empty apart from blocks of stone, scatterings of plaster and overturned pieces of furniture. One or two wall globes still glowed further on, and moonlight streaming in through fissures provided irregular slashes of illumination. The walls and ceiling were webbed with cracks, while pieces of plaster were falling all the time.

‘One more shock and the rest of this will come down,’ Flydd said with unsettling good humour.

It was the first time Nish had seen a smile on the scrutator’s face since the rescue at Fiz Gorgo. ‘You look awfully cheerful about it.’ It was incomprehensible in such a situation.

‘I’ve been looking forward to this day since Snizort. I feel almost restored.’ A momentary spasm distorted his features, but he overcame it.

‘Do you think there are going to be aftershocks?’

‘Bound to be,’ said Flydd. ‘Muss?’

Muss had stopped in a corner of the wall, again scrying under his cloak. ‘That way.’ He pointed to the right, across a mess of rubble and timber that marked the junction with the next building slice.

The rubble contained three partly crushed bodies; none had died pleasantly. ‘It doesn’t look too safe to me,’ said Nish, averting his eyes. ‘There could be a crevasse below that, or anything.’

‘Or nothing,’ Muss said cryptically.

‘What if we crossed up there,’ said Irisis, pointing to the next floor. ‘See the beam that’s fallen across?’

They went out and along to a stair that led to the next floor, then walked the beam in single file, a miniature nightmare to add to the rest of Nish’s horrors. It was precariously balanced on shifting chunks of stone and every movement made it wobble.

They passed diagonally across part of a prentice artisan’s training room, or so Irisis judged from the boxes and displays of crystals and other artefacts, each with its crudely lettered instruction cards. The front right and rear left corners of the room had been shorn off, replaced by a masonry wall on the one hand and a triangular section of room containing only a pair of butcher’s blocks on the other. The second block, illuminated by a puddle of moonlight, held a partly carved ham and a neatly severed hand and arm, still holding the carving knife. The arm had hardly bled at all, though the fingertips were as white as the ivory wand Nish had seen earlier.

At the door, Muss checked his instrument. This time Irisis, who had been watching for it, caught a quick glimpse of brass rods and mottled lenses. Muss pointed to the right, down a narrow hall.

They were just gathering behind him when Klarm said, ‘We’re being watched.’

‘What do you mean?’ Flydd asked in a low voice.

‘I don’t know, precisely, but I can feel it.’

‘It?’ whispered Flydd.

‘I believe so.’ Klarm cast a quick glance across the displays of crystals on the far side of the room.

Irisis followed his gaze. The reflection off one particular crystal, a deep green tourmaline, gave it a predatory look. ‘I think we should get out of here right away.’

No one argued. On the other side of the door, Flydd said, ‘I can feel the amplimet now. It may be contained but it’s not controlled. It’s extending a web of filaments throughout Nennifer. And it’ll use any crystal or device capable of drawing power. We’d better hurry.’

They hastened along the hall, but had just turned the corner when they heard a distant screaming that sounded as if it came from dozens of throats. Muss stopped so suddenly that they ran into him. He sniffed the air. ‘Phantoms and spectres from the dungeons. Nothing to worry about.’

Irisis shivered and moved closer to Nish. ‘I saw more than enough of them in Ghorr’s cells. Such torments the scrutators’ prisoners have suffered here.’

He took her arm. And we’ll be joining them before long.

‘The amplimet’s blocking us,’ said Flydd as they stumbled down another dark, shattered hall only to be confronted by yet another dead end.

‘How can it?’ Klarm replied. ‘We’re just following him.’ He directed another suspicious glare at Muss’s back.

‘Perhaps it’s blocking his eidoscope,’ said Irisis. She still hadn’t seen the device clearly, for Muss only used it in the shadows.

Eiryn Muss turned to face them. ‘Not even an amplimet can influence my eidoscope. Its Art is designed to see true, no matter what.’

‘How can you possibly know what an amplimet is capable of, and you a mere prober?’ Klarm said coldly.

The derogatory emphasis made Nish flinch.

‘I chose to remain a prober because that was how I could best serve my scrutator,’ said Muss without emotion. ‘Had I wished otherwise, I could have attained the highest position any spy can aspire to.’

‘More words,’ said Klarm.

‘But in this case, true words,’ Flydd interjected. ‘Muss could have been a master spy a decade ago. I recommended him many times.’

‘Does your eidoscope see the webs and meshes the amplimet has drawn throughout this place to spy on us?’ said Klarm. ‘How else could you know that it’s not controlling what you see?’

‘It’s not,’ Muss said stolidly.

‘Lead on, Muss,’ said Flydd.

‘It’s not far now, surr,’ said the prober.

‘Let’s plan our attack,’ said Flydd. ‘How many soldiers are guarding the warding chamber?’

‘None, surr. No one would dare enter that place without authority, and the entrance is closed with scrutator magic.’

‘Ah, but can we break it?’

‘Between you and me, I think so,’ said Klarm.

‘Fusshte will have his guard on call,’ said Flydd.

‘Many died in the dislocation,’ said Muss, ‘and others have been ordered to their posts, but certainly some will be nearby.’

‘Can you get us past them, Muss?’

‘I believe so, but you’ll have to be ready to fight.’

They went on, though after about ten minutes Muss stopped and stood to one side with his arm pointing down the corridor. ‘Go down there.’ He gave a series of directions. ‘Then follow your nose as far as it takes you, and go straight up.’

‘Muss?’ said Flydd.

‘You’re close, surr. You’ll smell the place before you go much further.’

‘Lead on, Prober,’ said Flydd.

‘I can’t go on,’ said Muss with a distracted look.

‘Why not?’ Klarm said.

‘I only spy. I don’t go into dangerous places.’

‘The hell you don’t –’ cried Klarm.

In a second, Muss morphed from his normal self into a shaggy, ape-like creature. As Klarm leapt at him, Muss skin-changed to the appearance of the wall behind him and vanished.

‘Grab him!’ Klarm yelled, but Muss was gone. Klarm stood there with clenched fists, breathing heavily.

‘You shouldn’t have pushed him,’ said Flydd.

‘He’s run, Xervish, which proves that my doubts were well founded. He brought us here for a purpose and the more I think about it, the more it worries me. What if he’s told Fusshte we’re here?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Flydd. ‘I believe what Muss said.’

‘And what he left unsaid?’ said Irisis. ‘He hasn’t brought us here to serve you. He wants something and he can’t get it from the scrutators.’

‘That’s what I’m worried about,’ said Flydd.

TWENTY-SIX

Flydd hurried them across a series of dark rooms that had been chopped in half, stumbling over bodies on the floor. They did not stop to look at them. They climbed down into the next segment of the building, a dining hall that had been turned upside down and fitted neatly back into place, though what had been the ceiling was now strewn with upside-down trestles, benches, trenchers and cutlery. Oddly, the globes on the walls were still working. The place smelled of boiled turnip, the vegetable Nish hated most. It had been a staple back in the manufactory.

Something squelched underfoot. He had trodden in a bowl of yellow gruel, as sticky as glue. He kicked it aside and it skidded across the floor to shatter against a bench.

‘Quiet!’ hissed Flydd, appearing to look every way at once. ‘What was that?’

‘I didn’t hear anything unusual,’ said Klarm in a low voice.

To Nish’s mind, every sound was unusual and some were uncanny. The groan of timbers deformed under weights they were never intended to bear; the sporadic crash and crumble of plaster or masonry; the trickling rivulets of dust and grit; the alternate soughing, whining and whistling of the wind across the severed edges of stone and tile; the cascades of water from twisted pipes and the surging ooze and plop of waste from shattered drains. And then there were the wails and groans of those trapped in the wreckage and the shrieking of the spectres forced from their dungeon homes. The cries seemed to come from every direction.

They went on, Nish’s boot sticking to the floor with every step, through the far door into a frigid stone canyon. The roof was gone, as well as the floors above, while the walls to either side stretched up, bare and unclimbable, for a good twelve spans. The opposite wall was crusted with frozen runs of brown muck that had a sewer stink. Moonbeams angled along it, touching silver gleams here and there.

‘Help!’ came a distant cry. ‘Please … help me. Oh please, please.’ It sounded like a child.

Flangers turned that way, searching the darkness.

‘No, Sergeant,’ said Flydd, laying a hand on his arm. ‘If we stop to render aid to one, all may fail.’

‘But it’s a kid, surr,’ Flangers said in a choked voice.

‘I know,’ Flydd said gently, ‘but we must go on.’ He looked left, then right. Then left again. ‘Bloody Muss! I don’t know which way.’

‘Left,’ Klarm said without hesitation.

No one asked how he knew. At the far end they clambered up a pile of rubble two storeys tall, over a precariously founded stone arch and onto a bridge formed by a crumbling stretch of lath and plaster ceiling that had fallen from somewhere above. It spanned a chasm at least three storeys deep. Something flickered redly in the depths, though there was no smoke.

‘I don’t think that’s going to support our weight,’ said the biggest and heaviest of the soldiers. ‘Better look for another way.’

‘We haven’t time,’ said Flydd. ‘It looks solid enough. A couple of beams are holding it. Just tread carefully.’

‘That’s all right for you,’ Irisis grumbled. ‘You don’t weigh more than a cupful of fleas.’

‘I’d better go first then, in case you fall and carry the lot with you,’ said Flydd callously. He stepped out onto the bridge, which was mottled white and black in the moonlight, the black patches barely distinguishable from the holes.

Klarm followed, stepping confidently. Nish went after him, trying to place his feet precisely where the dwarf’s had gone, though it was awkward owing to the greater length of his stride. Four steps out from the edge, his right foot went through a patch of plaster. Nish tried to scramble back but was too far off-balance. He fell forwards, his left knee punched a hole through more plaster and he fell. He threw his arms out and managed to hook the left over the supporting beam.

‘Help!’ he roared, but the others were well back and Flydd five or six steps ahead.

Nish was flailing desperately, the weight inexorably straightening his arm, when Klarm sprang, landed with his stumpy legs straddling the two beams and caught Nish by the collar. Legs spread-eagled like a gymnast, Klarm strained until his eyes stood out of his head.

Nish knew the little man couldn’t do it. The beams slipped, Klarm wobbled back and forth and threw out his free arm to balance himself.

Flydd took a step towards them. More plaster crumbled.

‘Don’t move!’ cried Klarm.

Flydd froze. Klarm bellowed like a buffalo. His face and neck had gone purple and there was a bead of saliva on his lower lip. His arm trembled; then, with agonising slowness, he lifted Nish’s dead weight a fraction.

‘Reach up with your right foot, lad,’ he said after he’d raised Nish a couple of hand-spans. ‘You’ll have to take the strain. I’m not tall enough to lift you all the way, and if the beams slip again we’re both gone.’

Nish felt for the beam, stretching sideways and up, but his calf muscles knotted. He couldn’t allow them to cramp. He eased back, stretched again and his foot touched the side of the beam.

‘You’ll have to get your foot on top,’ said Klarm, the sinews in his neck standing out like cords. ‘Push sideways and you’ll force the beam away – and I’m already doing the splits.’

Up, up Nish reached. The beam slipped again and he saw the agonised expression on Klarm’s face as he was forced to stretch even further. Nish hooked his heel over the top of the beam, took a little of the strain and, almost miraculously, the beam came back towards him. He levered, Klarm lifted and with a heave and a shudder Nish was on the beam, clinging to it with his legs dangling down either side.

He was drenched in sweat, his heart hammering, and his knees had turned to rubber. Nish looked back at the silent group. No miracle at all. Irisis and Flangers had linked arms around the beams, taken the strain and pulled them together.

‘Thank you,’ he said quietly.

Klarm extended a hand and lifted Nish to his feet. Nish wobbled after him, this time stepping exactly where the little man had and, ten or twelve steps later, reached the other side. He turned to watch the rest of the party.

‘What’s that funny smell?’ said Irisis when she was halfway across. She stopped to sniff the air, no more troubled by the crossing than if she’d been walking down a path.

‘I can’t smell anything,’ grunted Flangers as he edged his way after her, looking green.

‘It’s a sweet, gassy odour.’ Irisis took another breath. ‘Not unpleasant.’

‘Round here, nice smells can mask … other things,’ said Klarm, kneading the muscles of his calves. ‘I’d not breathe too deeply if I were you.’

‘Muss did say to follow our noses,’ said Irisis.

‘And you know what I think about his advice.’ He sniffed the air. ‘It’s coming from that direction.’

They went along a narrow service hall, relatively free of debris, then up a steep, straight staircase that ran on for three floors. In several places the steps were covered in rubble or broken plaster, and further up by a large, intricately carved soapstone cabinet that had fallen on a stout, muscular woman with closely cropped grey hair. Blood trickled down the steps from the back of her head.

‘She’s dead,’ said Flydd after a cursory examination. ‘Was she carrying it to a place of safety?’

‘Stealing it in the confusion, more likely,’ said Klarm, ‘else she’d have had someone to help her.’

‘It’s hard to see how she could have hoped to profit from it. She could hardly carry it through the mountains.’

‘People don’t always act rationally in a disaster.’

‘I’ll bet the scrutators did,’ said Flydd, moving around the dead woman and up. ‘They’ll have a refuge somewhere in here.’

‘I doubt if any hiding place could be proof against what’s happened here,’ said Klarm. ‘The force that sliced Nennifer up and rearranged it came from outside our three dimensions.’

‘Where are all the people?’ said Nish.

‘Probably sucked through a dimensional wormhole into the void,’ speculated Irisis gloomily. ‘Like we’re going to be before too long.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Flydd. ‘They would have fled through the rear doors and windows. If they’ve any sense they’ll be in the air-dreadnought yard around the back. Even if the walls collapse, it’s sheltered from the wind and they can make fires there.’

‘Getting back to the amplimet,’ said Klarm, ‘how are we supposed to master it without Yggur or Malien?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Flydd.

‘Seems as though we came all this way without a proper plan and we still don’t have one.’

‘There’s no point to having a plan, since we don’t know what we’re going to find.’

Klarm looked unconvinced. The statement did nothing for Nish’s confidence either. ‘It’s awfully quiet,’ he said. The creaking had stopped, the cries for help faded long ago. There was no sound but the distant wind.

They kept climbing, only to be confronted by an appalling stench on the fourth floor.

‘Slowly now,’ said Flydd.

The air was hot up here. Klarm pressed open an iron door with a fingertip, and reeled back. If the smell had been bad lower down, it was revolting here, and the walls were covered with a greasy film of soot.

‘It smells like burnt meat, or leather. Or hair.’

‘Perhaps all three,’ said Flydd, crumpling a corner of his cloak in his fist and breathing through it.

Nish pulled his sleeve down and held it over his nose, which didn’t help much since the cloth stank of vomit. He glanced at Irisis, who looked green.

‘What do you think has happened?’ he whispered.

‘Be quiet,’ hissed Flydd.

Irisis allowed him to move ahead, then said out of the corner of her mouth, ‘The scrutators aren’t roasting us a welcome dinner.’

Nish couldn’t even smile. They went through a second iron door, which was ajar due to the warping of its frame. The third door had been sealed with scrutator magic which it took Flydd and Klarm a considerable effort to break. The gap between door and floor was coated with soot.

A fourth door confronted them, this one partly open. It was made of chased bronze, soot-stained in places, elsewhere banded with swirling patterns of colour from being overheated.

The smell was even more nauseating. Flydd reached out to the bronze door but drew back before his fingers touched the surface. ‘It’s still hot!’

He tried to force it with his boot but the hinges were stuck. Flangers levered it open with the hilt of his sword and carefully put his head through. He beckoned behind him with one hand.

They passed through into a large, open space and stopped as one. There was just enough light to show that the chamber was shaped like a hemisphere. The charred reek was overpowering. Klarm made a muffled noise in his throat. Nish wanted to be sick, though fortunately he had nothing left to bring up. Behind him he could hear someone spewing liquidly.

His eyes began to pick out details. An oval central dais, about five spans long, was partly shielded by head-high blades of faceted rose quartz, preventing Nish from seeing what lay within, though he assumed it was the amplimet. Water had trickled down the sides where the inner ice wards had melted, and there were puddles on the floor. A metal column, the size of a substantial tree trunk, ran from one end of the dais up through the ceiling. So Muss hadn’t sent them to the scrutators’ lair after all. Surrounding the rose-quartz walls stood what Nish had thought were nine statues carved out of ebony, or obsidian, though their surfaces were rough and dull. It was only when Flydd put up his hand and light streamed forth that Nish realised his mistake.

The statues were the remains of nine men and women, the scrutators’ chief mancers, he presumed.

‘Just as Eiryn Muss said.’ Flydd gave Klarm a significant glance.

They had been turned to charcoal where they had stood, anthracised in place as they strove to work some mighty magic on the amplimet. No, not charcoal. It looked like black, honeycombed flesh, as if the living bodies had turned to char where they stood and escaping gases had foamed it up before it solidified. The statues were perfect replicas of the humans they had once been, save for the empty eye-sockets and various glistenings and dribbles, like wax that had run down the sides of a candle. Imagining the horrors they’d been through before they died, Nish’s skin crawled.

‘They must have been probing the amplimet,’ said Klarm. ‘And it didn’t like it. It’s a warning to us all.’

TWENTY-SEVEN

Something skittered along the curved far wall. Irisis couldn’t see what it was. She moved further out into the room, though shadows lay all around and she still felt exposed. The scrutators could be anywhere.

‘A warning to the Council, too,’ said Flydd. ‘Fusshte must be paralysed with terror.’

‘He’ll get over it,’ Klarm said dryly. ‘He’s the ultimate opportunist. Well, do we go for the crystal or the Council?’

Irisis looked the other way, only then seeing, in the semidarkness around the circumference of the room, another ring of mancers, each standing with left arm outstretched and hand up, as if holding the whole world at bay. There were fifteen of them, and the right hand of each clutched a device that vaguely resembled her pliance, though presumably much more powerful. The mancers stood as still as the carbonised statues, apart from the faint tremble of an outstretched arm here, a pulse throbbing in a throat there; and apart from the wide, staring eyes, which revealed such terror in their hard and rigid souls as Irisis had never before witnessed. The mancers knew what their fate would be once the concentration of any one of them faltered, as sooner or later it must.

‘If we go for the amplimet we may be caught in the cone of control these ward-mancers have over it,’ said Flydd. ‘Yet, if we attack the Council, their hold could fail and the amplimet break free.’ He considered for a moment, gazing at one of the ward-mancers though not seeing her. ‘The Council would be less risky, I think.’

‘How so?’ said Klarm.

‘Given the fate of the inner ring, would you put your shoulder to the same wheel? Or would you stand back and let your mancers take the strain?’

‘I’d stand with my people,’ said Klarm. ‘How could any man do otherwise? Better it cost me life than honour.’

‘Quite,’ said Flydd, ‘though Fusshte would see it differently. Better the limb be amputated than the whole body die. Nothing is more important than the Council, so the Council must survive even at the cost of everything and everyone surrounding it. Can we attack Fusshte without risking their hold on the crystal?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Klarm.

They moved through the ring of ward-mancers, Irisis passing by a dumpy, white-haired woman whose eyes did not even register her. The ward-mancers’ vision was turned elsewhere.

‘How can we find Fusshte in all this chaos?’ said Flydd. ‘Curse you, Eiryn Muss.’

‘I’m sensing something above us,’ said Irisis, crushing her pliance in her fist, the better to see.

‘Are they drawing on the field?’ said Flydd.

‘The reverse …’ Irisis tried to make sense of what she was seeing, which wasn’t easy. The patterns were weirdly truncated, as if the dimensional dislocation that had sliced up Nennifer had done the same to the fields. ‘There must be hundreds of little devices still working here – globes and so forth. I can see where they’re drawing on the field all over the place.’

‘Then what’s the problem?’ said Klarm roughly.

She screwed her eyes closed, furrowing her brow. ‘That’s just it. It all looks normal except, directly above this room –’ she nodded upwards, ‘– it’s completely blank. It’s as if the field doesn’t extend through that space. And that’s impossible.’

‘The Council has shielded its bolthole,’ rapped Klarm. ‘They’re afraid to come out. Come on.’

Flydd didn’t move. ‘If they’re afraid to use power, so should we be.’

‘So we rush them and overwhelm them with physical force,’ said Klarm. ‘It’s the one thing they won’t be expecting.’

‘Let’s hope Muss was right about the guards,’ said Flydd, eyeing their little group.

He went back through the four metal doors and looked around. ‘Straight up, Muss said. Ah!’

He headed for a set of coiling metal stairs that looked as though they’d been jammed diagonally down through the roof. As he stepped onto the first tread the stairs shook as if the only thing holding them was the shattered hole through the ceiling. A span below that, the outside curve and rail had been shorn away leaving the treads dangling precariously.

Klarm followed, then the four surviving soldiers and Flangers, Nish and Inouye, who carried a short sword as though it were a walking stick. She’d be no use in a battle. At the first coil of the stairs Nish looked down at Irisis, who had stopped on the bottom step. ‘Is something the matter?’

She shook her head but couldn’t clear away the after-images of the field. ‘I … think so. Everything’s so strange here; I can’t get my bearings. And …’

‘What is it?’

‘I can’t help feeling that we’ve missed something.’

‘I feel the same,’ said Nish. He looked up. The others had passed the damaged part of the stair and were disappearing through the ceiling.

Above the ceiling the stair continued, more wobbly than before, eventually terminating just below a broken hole in the slate-clad roof. They scrambled up and through onto the roof. Not far away, the remains of an open-sided, glass-roofed passage led into a broad dome that stood some twenty spans above the roof on pillars of basalt. The dome, although tilted at a slight angle, was intact, but the roof surrounding it had been sliced and reassembled in many places.

‘Careful now,’ said Flydd as they headed for the passage and the entrance to the dome. ‘There could be guards inside.’

The wind howled around the dome, though not loudly enough to block out the cries of the injured in the rear yard. A bonfire blazed in the far corner and throngs of bewildered, bedraggled people stood around it, staring at the flames.

With a crash and a shudder, a section of Nennifer to their west collapsed. The mass of people surged away towards the far wall of the yard.

‘Poor devils,’ said Flydd. ‘Without food or water they can’t last long, and they know it.’

‘They’re brutes, all of them,’ said Irisis, recalling her previous treatment here.

‘Aye,’ said Klarm. ‘Corrupted by cruel masters, but human beings nonetheless.’

Seeing no guards, they pressed on, acutely aware that the amplimet could overcome the ward-mancers at any moment. At the entrance to the dome, Flydd and Klarm laid their bare hands on the door, sensing the magic that closed it. Flydd asked Klarm a question which Irisis didn’t catch. Klarm shook his head. Irisis crept closer. Flydd moved his hands across the door, taking one position after another. He looked down at Klarm, who gave another shake of the head.

Flydd swore, stepped back and bumped into Irisis. ‘Would you get out of the way?’ he snapped.

She gave him room. ‘Will it warn them if we break the magic?’ he said to the dwarf.

‘Very probably,’ said Klarm.

They put their heads together, low down, and Irisis couldn’t see what they were doing, but shortly the door came open. No klaxon went off, though that didn’t mean there was no alarm. Flydd beckoned and they went through. ‘I’ll seal it to any but us,’ he said. ‘It won’t keep scrutators or mancers out but the guards won’t be able to get through.’

He did so, looking haggard as he turned from the door. Aftersickness was wearing him down and there was so far to go, the worst yet to be faced.

The space inside the dome consisted of a single open chamber, some fifty spans across, dimly lit by globes suspended from the ceiling on long chains. The central area was divided up by a maze of long tables, workbenches and cabinets, while the outer ring of the chamber was completely empty. Irisis wondered why. The walls contained tapestries and paintings glorifying the Council, and there were statues and busts of scrutators everywhere. Irisis saw many busts of Ghorr, carved in marble, obsidian and even granite. She wanted to knock them off their pedestals.

From the look of the devices laid out on the benches, the chamber was the Council’s private workroom. In the centre a spherical turret was mounted on a metal stalk five or six spans high. Clusters of conduited bell-pulls ran out from one side of the turret, as well as flared pipes that Irisis assumed to be speaking tubes. Through the wide windows, standing at sloping tables, she saw five scrutators.

Fusshte, identifiable at a distance by his meagre, misshapen frame, had his back to them and stood by himself. The other four scrutators made a tight group on the other side of the turret. Irisis recognised Scrutator Halie, a small dark woman who’d once been a kind of ally of Flydd’s, and Scrutators Barbish, Ying and Eober.

‘The four surviving scrutators have been forced to side with him,’ said Flydd, ‘and they don’t like it. Now, if we can just –’

Too late. They’d been seen. The group of scrutators leapt for their consoles. Fusshte stood frozen for a moment, staring in disbelief as Flydd waved jauntily at him, then disappeared from view.

They dived behind the benches. ‘Did you see the swine?’ crowed Flydd. ‘He had no idea we were within a hundred leagues of Nennifer.’

‘He’ll soon realise that we were behind the amplimet’s liberation,’ said Klarm. ‘That’ll terrify him.’

‘Until he works out that we don’t know what we’re doing,’ retorted Flydd. ‘Come on – we’ve got to attack while he’s still off-balance. Soldiers – split into two pairs. Narm and Byrn, go around to the right; Yuddl and Qertois, take the left flank. Weave through the benches to attack the turret from the sides with crossbow fire. I’ll hit it from our left front. Flangers, come with me. Klarm, take the right front approach. Inouye, go with him as a messenger.’

‘What about us?’ said Nish and Irisis at the same time.

‘Stay here. Irisis, keep an eye on the field and watch for the unexpected. Nish, guard her back.’

They scattered.

‘I’ve just had a horrible thought,’ said Nish after a minute’s inactivity.

‘So have I.’

‘What is it?’

‘You go first. We’re probably thinking the same thing anyway.’

‘Fusshte has another option Flydd didn’t think of: to divert the amplimet’s attention to us. While it’s attacking us, Fusshte’s ward-mancers might be able to permanently contain it. And then he can use all the power he wants.’

A long interval of silence was punctuated by the creaking of the foundations, a distant collapse, and then the thunder of thousands of terrorised people in the yard stampeding again.

‘Let’s hope he doesn’t think of that,’ said Irisis, holding her pliance against her temple. ‘Though of course he will.’

Nish waited, but when she didn’t go on he said, ‘Was that what you were thinking?’

‘Unfortunately not. The scrutators won’t dare direct power from the field against us. If they did, the amplimet could ride it back and overwhelm them. But they can still use devices that store power, and there are plenty here. Nennifer reeks of the Art.’

‘So Flydd and Klarm could be walking into a trap.’

‘They’re bound to be.’

Something whirred across the room, high up, and a chilly eddy touched the back of Nish’s neck. ‘What was that?’ he whispered.

‘I don’t know.’ She moved closer to him. ‘Can you see what’s going on?’

Nish eased his head above the bench and caught a fleeting scuttle from the left of the turret, though he couldn’t identify it. ‘I haven’t got a clue.’

The whirr sounded again, and closer. A serrated flash of light was followed by a mechanical shrilling that set his teeth on edge. Someone far off cried out.

‘That sounded like Klarm!’ Irisis’s eyes were closed and her pliance was enclosed in her hands, which were extended in front of her as if in prayer. He’d never seen her look so uncertain.

Another flash, a thud, a scream, and then a grinding sound like metal teeth cutting through bone.

‘Get back!’ Flydd roared. ‘Baaack!’

‘No!’ one of the soldiers roared. ‘Behind you –’

Swords clashed on metal, then something shot straight up from beside the turret. The light caught it as it revolved in the air – a small object, toothed like a cogwheel. A glassy sphere with a brown circle on one side, resembling a mechanical eyeball, arced after it. It seemed to look down on them, a yellow light blinked back the other way, and the sphere disappeared behind the cabinets.

The speaking tubes gave forth a deep, throbbing blast that shook dust down on Irisis’s hair. It went on and on, and only at the end did Nish realise that there were words in it.

‘Guards! Guards! To the scrutators’ dome at all speed.’

‘What are we supposed to do now?’ said Nish, risking another glance over the bench.

Pfft! A crossbow bolt scored a groove across the timber, embedding dozens of splinters into his right cheek. He ducked down and began to pick them out.

‘I don’t know. The scrutators have outwitted us.’

‘Should we go to Flydd’s aid?’

‘Better to die in battle than fall into Fusshte’s hands. Let’s do it. A last stand together, Nish.’

She was about to stand up when Nish heard a low clattering sound in the alley of benches and cabinets to their left. He jerked her down. Three bolts screamed through the space where she’d been about to lift her head.

Clatter, rasp-clatter came from around the corner.

‘What’s that?’ He cocked his head.

It came darting this way and that, a device like a metal ball with rubber tyres running around it in three directions, and a pair of whirling scythes the length of knife blades sprouting from either side. It bumped against a cabinet and the blades chopped straight through the wood. It then spun around twice, thumped against the outside wall, turned and headed straight for Nish.

‘How the hell are we supposed to fight that?’ said Irisis.

‘I don’t know, but I sure hope there aren’t more of them.’

TWENTY-EIGHT

‘Keep your head down!’ Irisis hissed.

Nish ducked but this time no one fired. They didn’t need to; this whirring menace would cut them off at the ankles.

Nish stepped forward like a batsman facing a bowler and swiped at the spinning ball with his sword. It darted the other way, bounced off the wall and came at him, blades whirring.

He stumbled backwards, was stopped by the bench and lashed out. Again the ball shot sideways; his sword tip just missed the scything blades. Before he was ready for another swing it spun towards his right foot, turning at the last moment. A blade chopped through the side of his boot into his foot.

Nish yelped and leapt high. The ball rolled back then raced at him again. He bounced on one foot, hacking at his attacker, left, right then left again. His second blow dug into one of the circular tyres, sending the ball whirling like a top, but the tyres spun the other way, bringing it to a smoking stop, and it went at him again.

Nish tripped over a fallen chair and landed flat on his back. The ball, its blades clacking, darted up between his legs. He couldn’t get his sword to it in time.

Whoomph. Irisis’s heavy cloak smothered the deadly blades. Nish propelled himself out of the way, sliding on his back. Lifting a granite bust of Ghorr off its pedestal, she turned it upside down and dropped it on the still quivering bundle, which smashed satisfyingly. The nose broke off the bust.

Irisis eased her cloak away and the blades fell to the floor. The ball lay on its side, crushed, an ooze of green grease coming from inside. She turned a bench over in front of them and another behind, walling off the lane, then put the slashed cloak on.

‘Thanks.’ Nish poked a finger through the gash in his boot. The injury didn’t seem too serious. He got up.

Another of those eyeball objects arced across the room. A series of flashes – red and green, followed by an eye-searingly brilliant white – came from one side of the turret. Others burst from its rear.

‘At least they’re still alive,’ said Irisis. ‘Well, some of them.’

‘But for how much longer? And when the guards get here …’

‘I don’t hear anyone running,’ said Irisis. ‘Perhaps they can’t find a way through the dislocation.’

‘I wouldn’t bet my life on it.’

The bright lights faded, returning the chamber to its previous gloom. Along to Nish’s left something scraped against timber. ‘Did you hear that?’ he whispered. ‘They’re coming.’

‘I’ve been expecting it.’ She gave him her hand. ‘Ready?’

He clasped it, gulped and nodded stiffly. Drawing his sword, he swung it through the air a few times. A bolt whistled over his head and smacked into the wall, releasing a little cloud of plaster dust that drifted around the circumference of the chamber.

There came a rustle from the direction of the scrape; an odd, tentative sound. ‘That didn’t sound very scary,’ said Nish. ‘Shall we go at them?’

‘Can’t hurt.’

I’ll bet it can, Nish thought. ‘All right.’ He stepped over the bench, ducked low as he passed a gap, then crept forward, sword out. What was waiting for them? Soldiers in ambush? More of those scything balls? Or any of a myriad of uncanny devices of war the artificers of Nennifer had created in the past decade, some under the supervision of Xervish Flydd himself?

The suspended globes faded to a dull yellow; the gloom thickened. The scratching came from just ahead. A lump throbbed in the pit of Nish’s stomach and the sword slipped in his sweating fingers.

Courage! he told himself. Die like a man, if you must die. He took a step, hesitated, then another. It was just around the corner. Nish glanced over his shoulder at Irisis. She was crouched low, her sword flicking from side to side like a viper’s tongue.

The speaking tubes rumbled again. ‘Guards!’ came Fusshte’s voice. ‘To me, to me.’

Nish went another step. Something rustled in the darkness and he went up on his toes and sprang.

‘Stop!’ Irisis hissed.

A small pale face and huge dark eyes looked up at him and he stayed his stroke at the last instant. It was Pilot Inouye, crawling along the floor, a trail of blood coming from her left leg.

Nish sheathed the sword and dropped to his knees beside her. ‘What’s happened?’ he said.

‘Guards came from – behind. Two of Yggur’s men – dead. Flydd and Klarm – pinned down. Can’t get free.’

‘And they sent you for help?’ said Nish, drawing up the leg of her pants. Inouye’s slender calf had been cruelly gashed, probably by another of those scything balls. ‘They want us to come to their aid?’ He already knew it was hopeless.

‘No,’ she gasped. ‘You can’t do anything …’

Nish tore off the hem of his undershirt. It was none too clean but he had to stop the bleeding. He began to bind the wound. Inouye winced, and tears sprang to her eyes, but she made no sound.

‘What does Flydd want us to do?’ said Irisis.

Inouye was growing paler by the second. ‘Flydd can’t use power … nor scrutators against him. But … soldiers coming. Flydd says, find Tiaan and bring her … bring her … Must not let her …’ Her head flopped sideways to the floor. ‘Malien …’ Her eyes closed. She was breathing shallowly and her lips had no colour at all.

‘What’s she trying to say?’ said Nish.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Irisis.

‘Why does Flydd want Tiaan?’

‘No one else can hope to control the amplimet,’ Irisis conjectured. ‘If Tiaan can, it’ll break the stalemate and Flydd can attack.’

‘Doesn’t sound like much of a plan,’ said Nish. ‘Where the bloody hell is Tiaan anyway?’

‘Muss …’ whispered Inouye, opening her eyes momentarily.

‘We’ll have to find the sneaky little bastard first,’ spat Irisis. She jerked her head at Nish and moved away. He followed. ‘What are we supposed to do?’ Irisis went on. ‘We can’t carry Inouye and she can’t walk.’

‘She’s lost a lot of blood,’ said Nish, not understanding what she was getting at.

‘We’ll have to leave her here, Nish.’

He shook his head. ‘I can’t.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘We’ve turned our backs on too many people already. I keep hearing their cries for help, just as I did at the battle of Gumby Marth. I had to leave them to die and I swore I’d never do that again.’

‘This means survival, Nish, for all of us, and all our hopes.’

‘But Inouye is one of us. She’s done all that’s been demanded of her and we’ve given her nothing in return.’

‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ she said between her teeth. ‘You’ve got to steel yourself, Nish. This is just like any other battle. It’s cruel, but the injured have to be left behind. If we stop to help them we’ll all die, in vain.’

Her words roused memories he wasn’t strong enough to face. Nish had left Gumby Marth a hero, though that had been diminished by the hundreds of soldiers he’d had to abandon because they’d been too badly injured to walk. He could still see the agony on their faces, but what he most remembered was their bewilderment – that their sacrifices had been repaid so cruelly.

‘Nish?’ she shook him.

‘What if it were me?’

She looked away. ‘It isn’t.’

‘All right!’ he said furiously. ‘But we can’t just leave her lying on the floor.’

Irisis hesitated, then nodded. ‘I’ll find a hide for her.’

Nish turned back. Inouye opened those tragic eyes and reached up to him with one hand. ‘Don’t leave me,’ she said in a cracked voice.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, picking her up.

‘Don’t let me die,’ she whimpered. ‘My children –’

‘You’re not going to die, Inouye.’

‘In here, Nish.’ Irisis was pointing to the top shelf of an open cabinet. ‘It’s the best we can do.’

Nish carried Inouye across. ‘Don’t leave me,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t leave me, don’t leave me.’ She was shuddering with terror.

He tried to ignore it, sliding her onto the shelf and pushing her to the back. She reached out to him but Nish ducked out of the way. He couldn’t meet her eyes. ‘We’ll be back soon.’ They probably wouldn’t be back at all.

Inouye began to wail in a low scratchy tone.

‘Bloody little fool!’ hissed Irisis. ‘Do you want to attract them to you? Lie still and shut up and you may yet survive.’

Inouye kept on wailing until Irisis whacked her. The noise stopped immediately.

‘Come on,’ Irisis muttered, red in the face.

They hurried towards the entrance, keeping low. ‘Did you have to hit her so hard?’ said Nish. ‘The poor little …’

‘You can shut up as well, Cryl-Nish Hlar, unless you want the other hand,’ Irisis said savagely.

It heartened him to discover that she wasn’t as unfeeling as she made out. They slipped out through the mage-locked door, which plucked at them like a thousand rubber fishhooks. Irisis stopped on the landing, one hand to her ear.

‘Can you hear anything?’

‘Only people groaning in the yard, poor devils,’ said Nish.

‘No, the reinforcements are on their way. Let’s get out of their path.’

They moved off the stairs into a narrow space, a sliver of green-tiled floor between two moss-covered outer walls. ‘How are we supposed to find Muss?’ said Nish.

‘I imagine he’ll find us. I didn’t believe his story for an instant. He left Flydd months ago because he was no longer useful. Then, when Flydd turned up here and the scrutators’ downfall looked likely, Muss changed sides again. He does it as easily as he changes his shape. He led us in because he wanted something that he couldn’t get himself. The amplimet, presumably.’

‘Why would he want it?’ said Nish. ‘He’s not –’

‘For decades he concealed that he was a powerful adept,’ she said in a low voice. ‘What else is he? No one knows. Muss will be close by, waiting to see who gets the upper hand and working out how he can use them to his advantage.’ She lowered her voice. ‘He’ll tell us where to find Tiaan. The stalemate won’t suit him any more than it does us. But the instant he tells us, we grab him.’

Grabbing a morphmancer didn’t seem like a very good idea to Nish. ‘What then?’

‘We bind his hands and stop his mouth so he can’t morph into another shape, and take him with us. I want the wretch where I can see him for the rest of our time here.’

‘He could be rather a handful.’

‘Then club him over the head! Whoever isn’t with us is against us, Nish.’

They were nearing the warding chamber when Nish heard the sound of massed footsteps, below and to their left. ‘That must be Fusshte’s reinforcements.’

Irisis pulled him into a rubble-choked cavern where two walls had fallen against each other to form a space shaped like a tent. While they waited, Nish couldn’t help wondering how solid the structure was.

A squad came tramping along the gritty corridor, ten men led by a stocky captain, followed a minute later by a second squad and then a third. The captain stopped, looking around in puzzlement at the dislocated walls and the stair which patently had crashed through the roof. ‘Which way?’

No one seemed to know. They turned back down the corridor, stopped again and the captain called, ‘Master Muss?’

He came towards them, reluctantly, and after a brief exchange pointed back the way they had come. The soldiers tramped off and Muss came on, stopping directly outside Nish and Irisis’s hiding place. ‘Well?’ he said.

‘It’s a stalemate,’ said Irisis. ‘Flydd and Klarm are pinned down. They can’t get to the scrutators’ turret and the scrutators can’t reach them. They’re afraid to use power.’

Muss stared into her eyes as if he suspected her of holding something back. ‘Then Fusshte will take them sooner or later.’

‘And that doesn’t suit you, Muss?’ said Irisis.

‘We’ve got to find Tiaan,’ Nish burst out. ‘She may be able to control the amplimet.’

‘Tiaan …’ Muss stared into the dusty distance. ‘I don’t think – she’s not been treated well. Unless she trusts you, you may not get anything out of her.’ His eyes seemed to look into Nish’s head.

Nish coloured. ‘Well, she’s all we have left.’

Taking the eidoscope out from under his cloak, Muss turned away. Nish peered around him. The morphmancer pushed in one spangled lens and rotated it, pulled out another, spun a third and peered through the end. He scratched his ear, performed more rotations with his eye and cheek to the end lens, then said, ‘Follow me.’

After some minutes of trekking quite as dangerous as the trip in, and rather more crowded with wailing spectres, they reached the solid wooden door of what, from the dank smell, had been a basement dungeon cell. It now lay two floors above ground level.

‘Tiaan’s cell,’ said Eiryn Muss.

Nish tried the door but it didn’t budge.

‘It’s held fast by scrutator magic,’ said Muss. ‘You’ll have to break the door to get inside.’

‘It’s solid ironwood,’ said Irisis. ‘It’d take half an hour to get through it with an axe. And we don’t have an axe.’ She stared at him expectantly.

After a long hesitation, Muss used his eidoscope again, this time not seeming to care that they saw it. Nish didn’t think that was a good sign. Muss frowned, shape-shifted a couple of times, returned to his normal form, then reached out and seemed to put his arm right through the stone beside the door. He did something on the other side and the door came open.

They pushed in. Tiaan lay on a straw-filled palliasse, staring at the ceiling. She was filthy, her clothes even filthier, and her black hair formed a tangled mass. Her arms and legs were shaking. Nish approached her tentatively, for Tiaan mistrusted him, and with good reason. And she felt the same way about Irisis.

‘Tiaan?’ he said softly.

She turned her eyes toward him, without recognition, then looked back at the ceiling. A louse the length of Nish’s fingernail crawled up her neck into her hair. She didn’t appear to notice.

‘Tiaan?’

She turned, and this time her eyes widened. She lurched to her feet, batted feebly at a point to the right of Nish, gave a gasp of horror and tried to climb the wall behind her.

Nish caught her as she fell back on the palliasse. ‘It’s like she’s seeing ghosts.’

‘Perhaps she thinks we are ghosts.’

‘What do we do with her?’ said Nish.

‘I have no idea. And to add to our troubles, bloody Muss has disappeared again.’

TWENTY-NINE

They carried Tiaan back through the spectre-infested chaos, taking turns. She did not resist. Indeed, Tiaan hardly knew they were there.

‘What’s the matter with her?’

Nish had stopped for a breather on a floor made of smashed slabs of pink gneiss that crunched and crackled underfoot. In the distance, a segment of Nennifer crumbled with a roar that shook the walls. Glass objects, warped like figures in a torture chamber, fell off a shelf. Collapses were happening all the time now.

‘She’s been in the depraved hands of Fusshte,’ said Irisis, frowning at the three corridors that led on. ‘It would drive anyone out of their mind.’

‘He’s slimy and squalid, but he’s not a fool. Tiaan can do things no one else has ever been able to, and he wouldn’t break her and lose that talent.’

‘I’ll take her now.’ Nish hefted Tiaan off his shoulder onto Irisis’s. Irisis grimaced. ‘She stinks.’

‘And that’s not all.’ Raking his fingers though his short hair, Nish plucked off a fat louse which he flicked away with his thumb. He scratched under his arm. ‘I think she’s given me fleas as well.’

‘Poor Nish. How you must be suffering.’ She looked around. ‘Surely we’re getting close to the warding chamber?’

‘I think so. It’s not easy to remember the way.’

They continued on, struggling between head-high piles of rubble, or over them. Confronted by a particularly large heap, with beams sticking out of it like the spines of a sea urchin, Nish said, ‘This wasn’t here when we came through.’

She picked her way around to the left, Tiaan flopping on her shoulder. ‘There’s not much holding Nennifer up. Once any slice fails, the ones on either side of it are doomed to follow. The whole lot could come down without warning.’

He stayed where he was, unsure if they were going in the right direction. ‘You don’t have to be so damned cheerful about it.’

‘The joys of fatalism, Nish. When you have no expectations, every extra moment of life is a blessing and a wonder.’ She gave him a beatific smile over her shoulder.

‘Humbug!’

‘I think it’s this way,’ she said, moving around the other side of the rubble pile.

Nish climbed up onto the heap and peered over into the gloom. Their path was blocked by tilted slabs of floor and ceiling which had collapsed on one another like a deck of cards. ‘No, we’ll have to go back to that junction where we went right, and take the middle way. Do you need a hand?’

Irisis hefted Tiaan higher onto her shoulder and turned back. At the junction she checked the other corridors. ‘I don’t think it was either of these. Bloody Muss! What’s he up to?’

Nish was too weary to answer. He put his hand on the wall and a small section collapsed, revealing a cavity than ran in to the limit of sight. He hopped backwards in case the rest came down, but the wall didn’t move. Once the dust had settled he sniffed the air coming from the hole. ‘I can smell that stink again. The warding chamber must be this way.’

‘Surprised you can smell anything over Tiaan,’ Irisis grumbled, coming up to the cavity. ‘Can you take her?’

Nish hauled Tiaan through, heaved her onto his shoulder and set off, following his nose.

Tiaan let out a low moan and began to thrash. Nish, who was negotiating a pile of rubble higher than his head, landed hard on one knee on a broken piece of stone and cried out. Tiaan jerked herself out of his arms. Crouching on all fours, she gave him a strange sideways glance and scuttled up the pile.

‘No you don’t!’ Irisis threw herself after Tiaan and caught her by the ankle.

Tiaan let out a thin squeal and kicked furiously. Irisis clamped her other hand around the smaller woman’s calf, holding her until Nish twisted one arm behind her back, whereupon Tiaan ceased to struggle and her eyes fluttered closed.

‘What’s the matter with her?’ he panted.

Irisis shrugged. ‘Do you think we should tie her up?’

He shook his head. ‘We need her to cooperate when we get there and … you know how she feels about us.’

‘We’d better keep moving. We’ve taken too long already …’

Time may well have run out, Nish thought. A small war could have been fought at the other end of Nennifer and they wouldn’t have been aware of it.

They struggled on. Tiaan wasn’t a big woman but the strain of carrying her was telling. Nish ached in every muscle.

‘We must be nearly there,’ said Irisis as they stopped briefly, ‘though I don’t recognise this place.’ The burnt-flesh smell was sickening.

‘I think we’re approaching the warding chamber from the other side.’ What were they supposed to do once they got there?

‘So the scrutators’ workroom and turret must be above us. Now what?’ said Irisis as if she’d read his thought. ‘Did Flydd want us to take Tiaan to him, or to the warding chamber?’

‘The chamber, surely? We’ve no way of getting to him.’

‘Inouye was trying to tell us something,’ Irisis recalled. ‘But she couldn’t get it out. Should I go up and ask her?’

‘She’s probably unconscious,’ said Nish, guilt rising up to overwhelm him. What had Inouye ever done to harm anyone?

They were pressing on towards the final door into the amplimet chamber when Tiaan’s eyes sprang open. She quivered in Nish’s arms then said clearly, ‘Put me down.’

Nish did so gladly. Tiaan wavered on her feet, steadied herself and looked around, as alert as she had previously been apathetic. She glanced at Irisis, then Nish, without seeming to recognise either of them. Tiaan faced the door, cocking her head as if listening, then smiled.

What’s going on? Nish mouthed to Irisis. She signed that she didn’t have a clue. He pointed to the door. Irisis puffed out her cheeks, looked back the other way, then ruefully scratched herself.

A stub of wall collapsed behind them, sending a cloud of dust billowing in their direction. Someone called out in the indeterminate distance. Tiaan started.

‘That sounded like Flydd,’ said Irisis.

‘I don’t think we’d hear him from here.’

They listened but the cry was not repeated. A crystalline crackle came from inside the chamber and Nish suddenly knew that they’d made the wrong choice.

‘It’s waiting for us!’ he hissed. ‘We’ve got to go up to –’

The crackle sounded again, peremptory this time. Tiaan stopped quivering; a joyous smile spread across her dirty face and she bolted for the last door.

Irisis threw herself forward and got two fingers into Tiaan’s collar. Tiaan swung around, clenched her two hands into a mallet and clubbed Irisis across the side of the head. Tiaan tore free and darted through the door into the warding chamber.

Nish cursed and raced after her. ‘That’s what Inouye was trying to tell us. To keep Tiaan away from the warding chamber.’

He crashed through the door. Tiaan was nowhere to be seen.

‘All the signs were there,’ said Irisis, ‘and we missed them. Fusshte hadn’t mistreated Tiaan, he’d only neglected her. Tiaan was suffering withdrawal from the amplimet and the first thing she’d do would be to go for it.’

The room was noticeably warmer than before, and the reek of burnt flesh and hair even more overpowering, if that was possible.

‘I don’t see her,’ said Nish, taking a couple of steps.

Irisis dragged him back. ‘Remember what happened to the inner ring of mancers.’

‘But if we don’t stop her –’

‘Tiaan may be suffering withdrawal, but she’s seen other people die through the amplimet. She’ll make sure it recognises her before she goes too close.’

‘There’s no saying it will allow her near. What are we supposed to do?’

‘I – I’ve got no idea, Nish. I can’t make sense out of anything.’

Irisis had always been a leader and her indecision dismayed him. ‘I’ll stay here and see if I can catch her. Run up to the dome chamber and shout a warning to Flydd.’

She smiled at that. ‘Don’t be silly, Nish. There’s nothing you can do here, but I may be able to. Go up. Run as though all our lives depend on it. And … be careful. You’ve got the most dangerous job.’

Nish ran, though it was not until he’d passed through the last door and was halfway up the shuddering metal stairs that he realised she’d deceived him. The safest person in the warding chamber, if anyone could be safe from the amplimet, was someone who had neither talent for the Art nor ability to draw power from the field.

He stopped, afraid for her, but then went on. Irisis had made her decision and it wasn’t up to him to undermine it. Besides, there was no time. He could feel the tension building second by second.

Nish was just stepping off onto the roof when the back of his neck crawled, as if someone was watching him. He looked left, then right, but saw nothing. He headed for the walkway, cursing an over-active imagination.

The attack came without warning – a colossal thump in the back that drove him face-first into the roof. He tried to scramble away but was struck in the back of the neck and around the sides of the head by someone who was kneeling on his back, pinning him down.

The weight wasn’t inordinate – a woman or a compact man, and not one with much experience of fighting. The blows hurt but had done no great damage, apart from his nose which felt as if it was broken.

He took a deep breath, tensed and heaved with all his strength, rolling at the same time. His attacker went flying. Nish kept rolling, came to his feet and threw himself at the man. It was a man, a young fellow not much bigger than Nish. Nish didn’t waste time. He punched his assailant in the belly, kneed him in the jaw when he doubled over, lifting him to his toes, and followed that with a left hook that rattled the fellow’s teeth. His head hit the wall and he shifted right before Nish’s eyes, becoming a shaggy, dazed, but very small bear.

Nish hit him and he shifted again, into a small wingless lyrinx. ‘Muss, you bloody treacherous bastard!’ Nish roared, clamping his fingers around the leathery throat and banging the crested head against the wall.

Muss shifted to a much smaller person, a beautiful, buxom young woman, black of hair and eye. Nish lost his grip and hesitated for a moment. The code against harming women was so strong that it momentarily overrode his reason.

Muss brought his knee up into Nish’s groin, thrust him out of the way and bolted for the stairs. By the time Nish recovered, the spy was out of sight. Nish didn’t go after him. Trying to ignore the agony in his groin, he staggered across the roof towards the dome.

He eased through the door, keeping a sharp lookout. The chamber was as gloomy as before, though an occasional fitful burst of light came from the direction where Flydd and Klarm had been pinned down. At least one of them must be at large.

Nish didn’t try to get to them; he would certainly be captured. All he could do was shout, which would alert Fusshte as well. Nothing he could do about that. He raised his voice and roared, ‘Flydd!’

The flashes stopped. The room went dark, then he heard Fusshte’s voice. ‘That’s Cryl-Nish Hlar. Get him!’

‘About time!’ yelled Flydd. ‘Where’s Tiaan?’

‘She got away. She’s in the warding chamber.’

Flydd cursed. ‘You damn fool – I told you – never mind. Nish, we got two of the scrutators but the other three are blocking us. Run down and smash the warding barriers – the rose-crystal blades around the amplimet. Hurry.’ He paused, then said in a lower voice, as though to his comrades, ‘Now!’

A gigantic flash of purple light illuminated the chamber and the dome. Thunder reverberated back and forth. Nish was starting for the door when he felt the floor move underfoot. At first he thought that the whole chamber was collapsing, but the movement was constant and only in one direction. The floor was moving, drawing back underneath the walls. That was why the outer ring of the chamber had been empty.

It slid away from the centre in radial sections, revealing that the scrutators’ turret was founded on a column that ran down through the floor. It looked like the column that ran up from the warding chamber. Sections of false floor rotated out and up and snapped into place, creating circular ranks of seating as in a stadium, or a theatre with a central stage. That’s what it was – a theatre for displays of power and terror. The scrutators loved their public spectacles.

Ducking low, Nish made his way to the edge. The warding chamber, several floors below, now formed the stage of the theatre. He could see the dais with its rose-crystal barriers, and outside them the shadows of the nine anthracised mancers. Tiaan was standing between them, staring at the barriers.

She could get to the amplimet before anyone else could reach the warding chamber. What then? Disaster, he suspected. And doom for Irisis, wherever she was. His heart turned over at the thought.

Flydd had ordered him to smash the rose-crystal barriers. He couldn’t jump – the dais was a good twenty spans below. Nish turned and bolted for the door.

THIRTY

Once Nish had gone, Irisis began to creep around the circumference of the warding chamber behind the ring of fifteen mancers, who were standing as silent and motionless as before. Her stomach hurt. Fatalist that she was, she was still vain enough that she didn’t want to be slain in some grotesque or disfiguring way.

A swift sword thrust between the ribs, or in through the back, she found herself thinking. That won’t make too much of a mess. But no severed limbs or spilled guts, and definitely not anthracism. The sight of those oozing, foamed-up statues of char and bone, once men and women as proud as herself, filled her with unspeakable horror.

Irisis heard a footfall off to her left and shook herself free of morbid reflections. She’d spent far too much time wallowing in that sort of thing lately. How was she to capture Tiaan while preventing the amplimet from destroying them both? If she drew no power at all, not even the tiny amount required to check on the state of the field, she might be all right. But then again, the amplimet might be able to take control of her pliance and direct power straight at her. She didn’t know what it was capable of.

She passed in front of one of the living ward-mancers – the dumpy old woman she’d noted earlier. Her whole body was shuddering now, and her eye had a deranged, unblinking stare. Her mouth hung open on the left side but was twisted closed on the right, as if she’d had a stroke. Saliva ran down her chin, sliming the breast of her robe. Surely she couldn’t hold out much longer.

Irisis circled the room. The other fourteen mancers were in a similar condition. Though none had yet failed, they were close to cracking. When they did, they would die as gruesomely as the inner circle, and so would she.

She circled the room again but saw no sign of Tiaan. At all costs she must stop the amplimet breaking free until Flydd got here, though how was she to do that?

She couldn’t do anything to support the ward-mancers. Tiaan was the key, but would Tiaan try to contain the amplimet or help it get free? Another unknown. Irisis went down on hands and knees and began to crawl towards the dais. The stench was truly revolting, and as she eased between two of the carbonised mancers, her head brushed a hanging hand. A finger tangled in her hair and broke off. Irisis raked it out furiously. The crunchy, bubbly feel of the remnant made her gag.

She still hadn’t seen Tiaan, though surely she would be close to the rose-crystal barriers. Irisis didn’t think Tiaan would have gone inside yet – she’d sound out the amplimet first. She could be patient now; this close, her withdrawal would ease.

And then the unexpected happened. The ceiling shook and, with a whirring of oiled rods, separated into radial segments that moved fractionally apart and began to slide away from the centre, exposing a twelve-sided hole. It slowly enlarged to reveal, far above, the scrutators’ turret with its elongated speaking trumpets, surmounting its column like a flower at the end of a tall thick stalk.

As the ceiling opened, benches concealed within it rotated up and locked into place, creating a theatre whose central stage was the warding chamber with its two rings of mancers, the outer ring scarcely more alive than the black inner one. And central to it all, the oval ward-walls of rose quartz guarding the as yet unseen treasure, and the steel column ascending from inside.

Flashes lit up the distant curve of the dome, the bell-pulls and speaking trumpets disengaged from the scrutators’ turret and then, silently, the turret began to inch down the column. Did the scrutators now have what they’d wanted all along? It seemed so. They must have planned some great spectacle once they’d mastered the amplimet.

Shouts and battle cries echoed down from above, along with the sound of sword on sword and the clang of crossbow bolts on metal. Craning her neck, Irisis saw a small group of people running around the circumference of the upper chamber, darting between the seats as they tried to find a way down. She thought she recognised Flydd. And yes, that small, rolling shape was definitely Klarm.

But without a rope there was no way down. The walls of the warding chamber were intact, for it had been protected from the dislocation. Flydd and Klarm would have to take the precarious metal stair, but before they were halfway down, the turret would have reached the dais.

Turning back to the dais, Irisis caught a glimpse of a dark head moving along the base of one of the tall blades of rose crystal. It was Tiaan, down on hands and knees. A glimmer grew inside the wards at the opposite end to the column; a blue-green flicker made patterns on the walls. It seemed the amplimet was responding to her nearness. Calling her?

The flicker became a pulse, and each time it brightened the ring of mancers let out a collective groan. They wouldn’t be able to hold the amplimet back this time. Its light seemed to shine right through the small crawling figure. Once Tiaan found a way past the wards it would either be the end of her, or of everything.

Irisis hesitated only long enough to think of what was going to happen if she passed between the wards. Taking a deep breath, she followed.

As Nish came through the dome door onto the roof he was caught from behind and his arms pinned. He struggled to get free but was held too cunningly.

‘The game has been set up,’ Eiryn Muss’s voice was soft in Nish’s ear. ‘No one can stop it now. Let them work it through.’

Nish threw his head back, trying to ram it into the spy’s face. Muss held him and drove a knee into his kidneys. The pain was so excruciating that Nish fell to his knees. Muss tied his hands using a length cut from a coil of rope that hung from his hip.

‘Why are you doing this?’ Nish ground out.

‘I have my reasons and they go back a long way. And, no, I’m not a traitor. I no longer serve anyone but myself.’

‘Why, Muss?’

Muss hauled Nish up a narrow ladder that ran up the outside curve of the dome. Muss had learned from his earlier defeat. This time he wore the guise of a stocky, muscular man in a soldier’s uniform.

At the top, he levered open a small service hatch and pushed Nish through onto a balcony covered in icicles. He tied Nish’s hands to the semicircular cast-iron railing. Where Nish’s wrist momentarily touched the frigid iron, his skin stuck to it and tore as he jerked away.

‘Aah!’ he yelped.

Muss looked down and, to Nish’s surprise, lengthened the rope. Not from compassion, Nish felt sure. He’d not seen Muss evince any such emotion, but neither was he one to inflict needless suffering.

‘A fine spy nest,’ Muss observed, glancing into the warding chamber. ‘One can see everything from here. I’ve often used it when the scrutators were at their meetings.’

Nish looked down but couldn’t see Irisis or Tiaan. ‘Who are you?’ said Nish.

‘Eiryn Muss, the perfect spy.’ There was a hint of emotion in his voice. Bitterness?

‘The morphmancer,’ said Nish. ‘How did you come to be a mancer and no one knew about it, in this place dedicated to the perfection of the Secret Art?’

‘I never wanted the things they wanted,’ said Muss. ‘Not gold, nor power nor domination, nor the gratification of the senses. I had no need to show off my Art. I was content to bide my time.’

‘For what?’ Nish cried in frustration. Muss was a creature of shadows, an illusion. Whenever pushed, he retreated to places no one else could go.

‘Shh!’ said Muss. ‘The pieces are moving into place.’

The scrutators’ turret was halfway now, still inching down its column. On the far side of the upper chamber, among the seats, Nish made out a hobbling Flydd and several companions, trying to find a way down to the warding chamber. They looked in bad shape.

‘What’s Fusshte up to?’ Nish said aloud.

‘I suppose he wants Flydd to think that he’s going after the amplimet …’

Flydd and his companions had disappeared. Nish hoped they’d made a break for the stairs.

‘But Fusshte isn’t?’

‘He’s too scared,’ said Muss. ‘He now knows that he can never understand the amplimet. What man can? It’s inanimate, a crystal that has somehow, over the aeons, woken. Its needs, desires, urges are incomprehensible.’

‘And Fusshte’s purpose is?’ said Nish. Muss’s words were as confusing as everything about him.

‘He wants to force the amplimet to strike at Flydd. As soon as Flydd draws power to defend himself, the amplimet will turn that power against him. And while it’s diverted, Fusshte surely hopes to bind it to himself. If he succeeds, he’ll have all the power he could ever want. And all his opponents will be dead.’

‘How is Fusshte going to do that?’ said Nish, to keep Muss talking while he tried to think of a plan. Muss avoided fighting so he could hardly be good at it. Nish had to attack violently, without warning.

Muss, peering down at the dais through his eidoscope, permitted himself the faintest of smiles. ‘He’s got scores of mancers and artificers. He’ll have them attack the amplimet while making it appear that Flydd is doing so. There’s no risk to him that way.’

‘But plenty to the mancers and artificers, I’ll bet.’

‘What does any scrutator care if his servants live or die, as long as he gets what he wants?’ Again that hint of bitterness. ‘And now, they come.’

Flydd and another man close behind, possibly Flangers, eased in through the door of the warding chamber and seemed to be trying to sneak between the circle of juddering mancers. The darting figure of Klarm appeared, then a second soldier.

A hatch flipped open on the far side of the chamber and Flydd threw himself down, cursing as a purple ray lanced past his head. It illuminated the tip of one of the rose-crystal wards, the light slowly spreading down until the whole ward glowed pink.

Nish could feel tension building, charging up everything from the floor of the lower chamber to the tip of the dome. His hair and beard were drawn upwards and a shock leapt from the metal rail to his hand. Below, someone let out a moan of horror.

Behind the hatch from which the ray had come, a man screamed, his voice rising higher and higher until it became a cracked falsetto which was abruptly cut off. Something burst with a pulpy splat, like a melon dropped from a great height.

Red mush began to ooze from the partly open hatch, then brown fumes. Nish averted his eyes. The scrutators’ turret had stopped some five spans above the dais and he could see Fusshte inside, seeming to direct his forces like a concertmaster directing musicians.

The tension began to charge up again. Another ray zapped from an aperture beside the first hatch, followed by a third from the other side of the room. Each just missed Flydd’s hand before lighting up the rose-crystal wards. It was intended to look as if Flydd were attacking the wards, but the amplimet wasn’t deceived. The consequences in each case were just as quick, bloody and horrible.

The speaking horns boomed. ‘Guards, guards! To the warding chamber.’

Flydd scuttled for the rose-crystal wards, dived over the fallen corpse of one of the carbonised mancers and lay still. The corpse exploded to fragments. Flydd rolled out of the way.

‘The amplimet isn’t fooled,’ said Nish. ‘It’s not attacking Flydd.’

‘He’s clever,’ said Muss. ‘He’s not defending himself.’

‘Why doesn’t the amplimet attack the turret?’ said Nish.

‘It’s shielded with platinum.’

Flydd appeared and disappeared like a dolphin swimming in the surf. Corpses, benches and other paraphernalia burst all around him. Fusshte had given up on the wards and was now directing the attack at Flydd.

‘He’ll soon have nowhere left to run,’ said Nish.

An enormous flash lit up the chamber and Fusshte began waving furiously. Several dozen apertures opened at once and rays stabbed across and across, like solid rods of light in the enveloping darkness.

The amplimet struck back. The rays of light bounced back and forth, then froze solid a couple of spans above the floor, forming a network through which the turret could barely be seen. Fusshte looked dismayed; he didn’t seem to be able to communicate with his people. His mancers and artificers died gruesomely behind their hatches. More red mush oozed out, and more brown fumes, then the attack faltered.

Flydd, crouching between two carbonised mancers, fell to his knees. His hands were moving though Nish couldn’t imagine what he was trying to do. Tiaan was lying on the dais, turning her head one way and then the other.

One carbonised mancer was blown apart at the shoulders, the other at the waist. Flydd was thrown backwards and something small, cubic and shiny flew from his hands – the platinum box. He felt around on the floor but couldn’t seem to find it in the gloom.

The attack entered a new phase. The few surviving hatches opened and their occupiers came forth. Flangers began duelling with an artificer mounted atop an articulated device like an iron caterpillar. Klarm was running through the obstacles in figure-eights with a giant of a man in close pursuit. One of the carbonised mancers fell on Flydd, its black chest shattering on his head. He rolled out from under, spitting out char.

The speaking horns boomed again, and this time there was a panicky note in the cry. ‘Guards, guards! To the warding chamber.’

‘They’re not coming,’ said Muss. ‘I’ve laid illusions all around to keep them out.’

The huge soldier darted, caught Klarm by the ankle and lifted him high, one hand around each leg as if to tear him in two. Flydd went after him and the giant backed out the door, swinging the dwarf in one hand and kicking the door shut in Flydd’s face. Flydd heaved at it with his shoulder. Flangers ran to his aid and they went after the giant. The artificer pursued them, crashing through the iron doors in his iron caterpillar.

The room was empty apart from Irisis and Tiaan, and the silent ward-mancers. Tiaan came to her feet, moving in slow-motion, her eyes fixed on something Nish couldn’t see. She extended her arms towards it and took a step forwards, whereupon a long shadow flashed between the wards and took her around the knees. It was Irisis. Nish’s heart seemed to be blocking his gullet. What was Irisis doing inside? She couldn’t pass safely through the wards.

Tiaan began to struggle furiously and one foot caught Irisis on the jaw. Her head cracked into the rose-quartz ward behind her. Irisis slumped to the floor and Nish lost sight of her in the shadows.

Tiaan stepped over her and rose to her feet, reaching out with both arms. A sullen red glow illuminated her face. She looked like a rapt sleepwalker moving slowly towards the amplimet and Nish knew that, once she got it and lifted it high, the crystal would be free.

And Irisis would be its first victim.

THIRTY-ONE

Nish acted instinctively. If he didn’t save Irisis, no one could. Bracing his back against the rail he kicked out with both feet, striking Muss so hard in the chest that he slammed into the wall.

Sliding his rope around the rail, he tore the knife from Muss’s belt and awkwardly hacked himself free. He had to get down to the warding chamber and there was only one way to reach it in time.

He snatched the coil of rope and fled down the ladder, then into the dome. Knotting the rope around his waist, he ran around the inner edge of the room, looking down into the dome chamber. A third of the way around the circle Nish skidded to a stop, whipped the free end of the rope around a bench and tied it tight. He gauged the distance to the dais, ran on for ten steps and hurled himself over, praying that he’d judged correctly. If the rope was too long, he’d hit the floor hard enough to snap his thigh bones, or worse.

Nish fell free for an awfully long time, passed through the network of frozen light then swung in an arc across the chamber. He curved down, his feet almost touching the floor, then up straight towards one of the remaining carbonised mancers, a broad, shapeless woman wearing a pointed leather hat, now mainly char.

There wasn’t time to try and sway out of the way. He smashed side-on into the corpse, shattering it into stinking fragments that clung all over him. The blackened head went flying across the floor.

The impact set Nish spinning on the rope as he shot up towards the far wall and through the beams again, trying to clear the char and muck out of his eyes. He got one eye open just before he reached the top of the wall. He saw Tiaan move, calculated the necessary swing and pushed off with one foot. Now on a different trajectory, he flashed between the rose-crystal wards just as Tiaan, arms outstretched, sprang for the amplimet. He cannoned into her chest and she went flying off to the left. Nish spun the other way and thudded into the base of another of the wards.

Low down, it was solid as rock. Something went crack and a brilliant pain shot up Nish’s right arm. He’d broken it. Momentum gone, he orbited around the inside of the wards, passed out through a gap then in again, and rotated on the end of the rope several times before grounding against the ward that had broken his forearm.

The amplimet sat in the middle of a small alabaster pedestal, its central spark throbbing balefully. Tiaan was nowhere to be seen. Nish wiped crumbly bits of black foam from his face and looked down. Irisis lay directly below him, staring up.

‘How are you?’ he said haltingly, supporting his arm.

Irisis sat up, rubbing the back of her head, and winced. She inspected her fingers, which bore a faint bloody smear. ‘Just a bump on the head. What’s the matter with your arm?’

‘Broken.’

‘That wasn’t very smart.’ She grinned and unfastened the rope from around his middle.

‘I didn’t do it deliberately.’ Nish could hardly think for the pain shooting up his arm.

Again the speaking horns trumpeted their plaintive cry for help, but it wasn’t answered. The turret could no longer be seen through the frozen light which, oddly, shed no illumination downwards.

‘What do we do now?’

‘We find the damn platinum box,’ Irisis said quietly. Tiaan wasn’t in sight, though she couldn’t be far away. ‘We get the crystal into it any way we can, wire the lid on tight and chuck the box into the hottest fire we can make.’

He glanced back at the amplimet. ‘Not so loud.’

‘It can’t hear, Nish. It isn’t alive.’

‘Heat will end it.’ Despite all the trouble it had caused them, Nish was uneasy about destroying such a precious thing.

‘It’s the only solution, but no one else is going to do it. They all want to make use of the wretched thing, though it’s too dangerous for anyone to use safely. Even Malien is afraid of it, Nish. Doesn’t that tell you all you need to know? Once it’s gone, there will be nothing anyone can do about it.’

‘Flydd will crucify you,’ said Nish. ‘And me.’

‘I’d do it anyway. Some objects are just too deadly to have around. I’d better look for the box.’

‘It fell over there.’ He pointed.

Irisis began to crawl out between the wards. Nish tried to keep to her heels, but it wasn’t easy to crawl with a broken arm.

‘What if it’s watching us?’ he said, supporting himself on his left hand. His right clutched at his coat buttons in a vain attempt to take the weight off his forearm.

‘I don’t think it can do anything to you, since you have no talent for the Art whatsoever.’

‘So people keep telling me,’ he murmured. ‘Can you see the box?’

‘No.’

‘Do you think Flydd’s still alive?’

‘How would I know?’

‘What if everyone’s dead but us? It might be better if the scrutators do succeed.’

‘What?’ she hissed in outrage.

‘If we can’t replace the Council with honest leaders, because they’re all dead, what’s the point of bringing it down? That can only result in anarchy, and the lyrinx will defeat humanity all the sooner. You can’t seize power, Irisis, and neither can I.’

Irisis stared at her long and elegant fingers for a moment and Nish regretted airing his worries. What could be gained by putting his fears on her?

‘Since we don’t know that our friends are dead,’ said Irisis, ‘we must assume that they’re not. We hold true to our purpose, Nish.’

She began to worm her way through the debris. It seemed darker than before. Nish couldn’t keep up and was resting on his good arm when it occurred to him that they’d left Tiaan unwatched. She was the key, and always had been.

‘I’m going back to keep an eye on Tiaan,’ he said.

Irisis didn’t answer. He couldn’t see her and didn’t know if she’d heard. Not daring to shout his intentions, in case Fusshte could hear, he made his painful way back to the rose-crystal wards.

He couldn’t see her at first, for Tiaan lay on her belly at the base of the alabaster pedestal, looking like any other bit of debris littering the blasted room. It wasn’t until Nish eased his head between the wards, and her dark eyes moved, that he realised she was there.

Tiaan was taking a more cautious approach this time. She raised herself to her hands and knees, her eyes darting around the room, then up. The turret was becoming visible again as the frozen light faded. Her shoulders quivered. She looked like an animal ready to pounce. What would she do once she got the amplimet? Could she control it, or was it already controlling her? Judging by the feral look in her eyes, it could be, in which case it was just an arm’s length away from its goal.

As she stared raptly at the crystal on the pedestal, Nish slipped through the gap. He had to be ready. The instant she sprang, so must he, whatever it cost him.

Up in the turret, a movement caught his eye. Fusshte was leaning out, almost as rapt as Tiaan. Whatever she was up to, he was waiting for it. He had something in his hand – a net or a metal basket. Fusshte dared not touch the amplimet, and he’d failed to force it to attack Flydd, but once it was in Tiaan’s hands it would be different.

Tiaan quivered. She was going for it. Nish swayed forward and pain shot up his arm. He had to ignore it.

She sprang and so did he, but too late. Her upstretched hands closed around the amplimet and tore it from its mounting. She let out a cry of bliss but, even before Nish crashed into her, Tiaan went rigid and her eyes became blank.

He threw his good arm around her slender waist. Tiaan flopped like a doll, then her eyes focussed. ‘Get away!’ she cried, beating at his face with her free hand.

Nish bent his head and took the blows, since he had no way of defending himself. Tiaan had gone into a frenzy, clubbing him over the ears.

She hit him on his broken nose and the agony made him let go. Tiaan raised the amplimet above her head, took three small steps and light streamed out, illuminating the chamber so brightly that he had to shade his eyes. Nish felt, rather than heard, a brittle crackling that might have been interpreted as laughter.

Fusshte froze halfway out of the turret; even the ring of ward-mancers ceased their violent shuddering. Chills oscillated down Nish’s spine. The amplimet had what it wanted at last.

Tiaan’s black hair stood straight up, she went as rigid as the carbonised mancers and her eyes bulged from their sockets as if poked out from the inside. Her mouth fell open. Steam wisped out, followed by a liquid gurgle, an attempted cry for help.

A shining net of woven platinum mesh fell from an embrasure of the turret to envelop her and was jerked sideways, toppling her off her feet. As Tiaan hit the floor the light from the amplimet faded, before flaring even brighter and more ominously.

In an instant the warding chamber went wild. The faintly glowing globes on the walls exploded, flinging chips of stone in every direction. The rose-crystal wards flushed a brilliant pink. The ward-mancers fell to their knees, their faces contorted as they struggled for control. Their terror was absolute – they were going to die as hideously as the inner ring had and there was nothing they could do to prevent it.

In the turret, Fusshte and two other scrutators were desperately flailing the wires to the platinum net, trying to get its opening over Tiaan’s feet so they could pull it closed and cut the amplimet off from the field. Unfortunately the mesh had caught on Tiaan’s heels, they couldn’t free it and the amplimet was surging ever closer to complete control.

Flydd hadn’t come back and Nish couldn’t see Irisis, so what was he to do? If he did nothing, the amplimet would take control. Or he could pull the mesh over Tiaan’s feet, stopping the amplimet but giving Fusshte all he wanted. Which should it be?

Tiaan began to kick and struggle, tearing at the unyielding mesh and trying to pull it off her, though her movements were uncoordinated. Perhaps it was the crystal telling her what to do.

‘Nish!’ Irisis was hissing at him from the shadows.

He spun around, trying to make her out in the smoky gloom.

‘Nish, you bloody fool. They’re trying to lift her up. You’ve got to stop them.’

‘Have you found the box?’

‘Not yet.’

Tiaan’s feet were already half a span in the air. Fusshte had realised that if he lifted the mesh by the drawstring wires, there was a good chance Tiaan’s feet would slip in.

Nish stumbled across the rubble. Halie and another female scrutator were leaning out of the embrasure of the turret, struggling to lift Tiaan and the heavy platinum mesh by its wires while Fusshte tried to hold the opening closed. They were making hard work of it.

Nish threw himself onto the net and the sudden load proved too much for the two slight women. One, not Halie, cried out, thudded head-first to the floor and didn’t move again. The mouth of the net fell open.

The amplimet flared dark, then bright. Panicking, Nish pulled the mesh down over Tiaan’s feet and drew the drawstring tight, whereupon Fusshte let out a cry of triumph and hurled a blast of light that set fire to Nish’s coat. He let go of the drawstring. The hole eased open and Fusshte froze, arms outstretched. The flames were singeing the hair on the back of Nish’s neck as he shrugged out of the coat.

‘Irisis?’ he yelped. ‘What am I supposed to do?’

‘Hold her until I get there.’

That proved more difficult than it sounded, for Tiaan was thrashing in the net, and the amplimet letting out blinding rays. Nish ended up sitting on her, jerking the mouth of the net closed then open again, hoping to prevent the amplimet going all the way or Fusshte using his Art.

Irisis staggered up, bruised, bloody and covered in dust and char, but she had the platinum box open in her hand. ‘Pull it off her, quick.’

Nish slid off and began to heave at the platinum mesh. It was incredibly heavy and Tiaan’s furious thrashing kept tearing it out of his good hand. He took the other end, Irisis stumbled round to join him and together they got the net up past Tiaan’s ankles. Her calves emerged. The mesh came up over her thighs, and the further they lifted it the more overpowering the light from the amplimet became.

As they drew it up Tiaan’s chest she let out a cry, half pain, half ecstasy, and raised her right hand high inside the mesh. Irisis gasped, dropped the box and began staggering around in a circle, tearing at her coat and shirt, ripping it in her desperation. She got her hands inside, pulled out her pliance and jerked the chain so hard that it snapped. She threw her pliance onto the floor and leaned against one of the rose-crystal wards, panting. A trail of smoke wisped up from her shirt.

Fusshte was hanging over the embrasure, mouth gaping open. He flung a metal goblet at Nish, but it missed. Nish hauled the net up and over Tiaan’s head. Only her arm to go.

The circle of ward-mancers wailed and collapsed. Only Tiaan’s arm and wrist, and the amplimet, were covered. Just the platinum mesh bunched around her arm held the amplimet back. She whipped her arm out and the crystal, in a roaring, cataclysmic crescendo, drove for the third stage of awakening it so urgently craved.

The skin of Tiaan’s fingers began to smoke but she was in such ecstasy that she wasn’t aware of it. Nish stood frozen in horror, thinking that it was going to anthracise them both, like the gruesome remnants all around. He threw his good arm around Tiaan’s chest, crushing her against him, and even tried to hold her with the broken one. Tiaan struggled listlessly.

‘Irisis, the box!’ he screeched.

In a wild instant, reality was overturned. Irisis took one step towards Nish and fell into the floor. Waves passed through the walls, floor and ceiling as if they were rubber. The solid walls became transparent, revealing the shadowy, sliced-up jumble that was the rest of Nennifer. It seemed to stretch to infinity like reflections in a pair of mirrors.

Irisis caught hold of Nish’s trailing cloak and pulled herself out. Parts of the floor were solid, other parts like jelly. She turned towards Tiaan, though it was like trying to push against a hurricane. Irisis leaned forward into the blast, put her head down and forced with all her strength.

Something rang off Nish’s skull and a soldier’s metal helm clattered onto the floor – Fusshte again. Nish staggered under the blow but didn’t look up. He just concentrated on holding Tiaan.

Irisis was nearly there. Tiaan began to struggle furiously, to kick and scream. Irisis reached out and caught her by the coat, dragging Tiaan and Nish to her. She tried to pull down Tiaan’s arm but it was as straight and hard as a metal rod. Tiaan belaboured Irisis with her other hand, stabbing at her face with stiff fingers. One blow caught Irisis in the eye and she gasped and had to let go.

Tiaan tried to wriggle free. She slipped in Nish’s grasp and in desperation he butted his head at the inside of her elbow. Her arm folded, the amplimet fell from her numb fingers and Irisis scooped it out of mid-air, thrust it into the platinum box and slammed the lid down.

The tension, and the impossibilities, cut off abruptly. All the lights went out in Nennifer as the Art that sustained it failed. Tiaan’s knees collapsed and she subsided gently on the rubble, wailing as if her heart was broken. The moon shone down through the dome onto the still, silent figures in the centre and the ring of ward-mancers crumpled around the periphery. Everyone was waiting for something to happen.

‘Now what?’ said Nish, hanging onto Irisis to prevent himself from falling.

‘The ward-mancers are free to use power without risking instant annihilation. Fusshte too. They’ll try to get the box.’

‘Take it!’ shouted Fusshte.

Nish prepared for the hopeless defence, but the fifteen ward-mancers came to their shaky knees and began to crawl away.

‘What are you doing?’ screamed Fusshte. ‘Attack them. Kill them and bring the box to me.’

The ward-mancers took no notice. They kept on crawling towards the door, head to tail like a line of caterpillars on a branch.

‘He asked too much of them,’ said Irisis. ‘They’ve broken. We’ve got a chance. Come on.’

Before he could move, Scrutator Fusshte stood up on the sill of the embrasure, a rope in his hands, preparing to slide down. Nish watched helplessly. He couldn’t fight scrutator magic and, with the amplimet at the third stage, he dared not open the box.

Fusshte had one leg over the side when a bloody, wild-eyed Flydd hurled himself through the door. He stopped there and Fusshte did too, staring at him. The crawling ward-mancers froze.

Flydd hobbled across the chamber and extended his hand. After a long hesitation, Irisis put the platinum box in it and Flydd raised his arm, holding the box high. Fusshte’s eyes followed it but he did not move.

‘We’ve been enemies since the day you bribed Ghorr to admit you to the Council,’ Flydd said, loud enough for the whole room to hear. ‘Oh yes, I know all about that, and before I’ve finished with you the whole world will know your other dirty secrets, Fusshte. You schemed, bribed, lied and slaughtered your way to power. I might even have forgiven you that, had you used your talents to help win the war, but you were happy for the war to go on forever. It kept your kind in power and you used that power to be rid of anyone who threatened you. Especially me.’

Fusshte said not a word, nor did his eyes leave the platinum box.

‘You condemned me to be flayed alive,’ Flydd went on, ‘you and Ghorr. You laughed at my agony and sneered when the torturers cut my manhood away. But a man can still be a man without his male parts, as a man can have them and be no true man at all. I swore I’d bring you down for that alone, no matter what it cost me, to show that I was more a man than you.’

Fusshte made no reply. The ward-mancers began coming to their feet. He gestured frantically at them but one by one they folded their arms and stood there in a line.

‘Here is the amplimet you so craved, Fusshte.’ Flydd shook the platinum box. ‘I challenge you for it – man against man. None of these witnesses will interfere.’

Beside Nish, Irisis drew in a sharp breath. Nish’s heart began to pound. Fusshte’s snake eyes glittered. His bony hands tightened on the rail of the turret and he leaned over, dark tongue darting through his lips. He was surely planning some treacherous attack that Flydd wouldn’t anticipate.

Nish glanced at Flydd, a small, battered and bloody old man who was practically collapsing with weariness. Yet Flydd would not give in and he used that iron will to drive himself upright. His eyes never left his enemy’s and his stare never faltered. Nish could hardly breathe as the moment was drawn out to its snapping point.

Fusshte moved blindingly fast, bringing his concealed hand up and hurling a dagger. It caught the light as it flashed across the room and Nish was sure it was going to plunge into Flydd’s right eye.

Flydd tilted his head to the left, the dagger skimmed his ear and embedded itself in the wall. Fusshte reached down for another weapon but Flydd flipped open the platinum box and the flickering glow of the amplimet lit up the room. Holding the box in front of him, Flydd reached in, plucked the crystal out and raised his fist. It glowed blood-red.

‘Xervish!’ cried Irisis. ‘Put it back. It’ll anthracise you.’

Flydd did not hesitate. How can he dare, Nish thought. Isn’t he afraid? Surely he can’t hope to hold the amplimet back by himself?

Flydd’s fist began to pulse, pink to blood-dark. The strain showed in the muscles of his face – would he control the crystal or would it turn him to reeking char?

No one moved. Fusshte’s tongue flickered across his lips again. A minute passed. Two. Three.

Flydd’s arm trembled; his body jerked, and suddenly Fusshte had a crossbow in his hand and was drawing a bead on Flydd’s forehead. Nish looked for something to throw but couldn’t find anything save chunks of charcoal.

‘Surr!’ Nish cried. ‘Get out of the way.’

Fusshte wound the cranks and the bow creaked as it bent. His finger moved for the lock lever.

Before he could fire, Flydd roared, ‘You’re mine, Fusshte. Mine!’ He thrust his arm high and strained until the tendons in his neck stood out.

Fusshte had his finger on the lever but before he could release it the wire of the crossbow glowed red and sagged away.

The amplimet flared and faded. Steam burst from Flydd’s nostrils. He strained again, his fist rock-steady though his arm had the faintest tremor. Flydd grunted, groaned, steam or smoke burst from his mouth and for a moment it looked as if his fist was dripping blood.

‘You’re mine!’ he cried, rising up on tiptoes. ‘Mine. Back, I say – all the way back.’

The crystal flared to coruscating brilliance, Nish gasped, and then the glow went out completely.

Flydd staggered and nearly fell, but recovered and extended his hand towards Fusshte, the amplimet pointing from his fingers. The central spark wasn’t blinking at all. ‘Mine!’ he roared.

Fusshte dropped the useless crossbow as if it had grown too hot to hold. His black-rimmed mouth gaped open and a mewling cry of terror issued forth. He threw himself backwards into the turret, which shook free and began to slide down the column until it crashed into the dais.

Flydd slipped the dull crystal back into its box and softly closed the lid. He headed for the turret, staggering in his weariness. Nish and Irisis followed warily, but when they peered in Fusshte and Halie were gone.

Flydd closed his eyes and pounded the sides of the turret in his anguish.

‘I expected more of Fusshte,’ said Nish, ‘after the way he faced down Ghorr at Fiz Gorgo.’

‘The chief scrutatorship was within his sights, back then,’ said Irisis. ‘But Flydd’s towering attack on the amplimet has crushed Fusshte’s hopes forever. He can’t hope to match the strength Flydd has just displayed, and the ward-mancers have repudiated him. If Fusshte can’t command their loyalty, all he can do is run.’

Shortly, Nish picked out his spidery shadow, high on a rope ladder that ran up the other side of the column. Fusshte was too high to attack and soon disappeared into the darkness. Halie, the other surviving scrutator, was close behind him.

‘They can’t get far,’ said Nish, leaning back against Irisis. ‘It’s over.’

‘That was the bravest, most reckless deed I ever saw,’ Irisis said to Flydd. ‘You could have –’

‘And I so very nearly did,’ said Flydd. ‘I was sure it would be the end of me.’

‘And yet you did not falter.’

‘I told myself I had to keep going, that there was no other option. And to my shame, there was a touch of pride in it as well. I had to prove that I was still a man.’

‘A touch of pride isn’t such a bad thing,’ said Irisis.

‘It was so near. And yet, it’s still not over.’ He looked up but Fusshte and Halie had disappeared.

Flydd climbed onto the top of the turret, turned to survey the ward-mancers and extended his hands towards them, then to the others in the chamber.

‘The two surviving scrutators have fled,’ he said so softly that Nish had to strain to hear, ‘abandoning Nennifer to the fate they brought upon it. Their Council is disbanded. Scrutator Klarm and I will take their place until a new regime can be installed. Does anyone challenge our edict?’

None of the ward-mancers spoke, though they bowed their collective heads. ‘Then it is done,’ said Flydd. ‘Go, inform the guards that a new council is in charge, and that Scrutators Fusshte and Halie must be held for trial and execution. Tell everyone to assemble in the air-dreadnought yard, well away from the walls, for the remains of Nennifer will soon collapse. Everyone must collect what food and clothing they can gather on the way.’ He turned to Nish, Irisis, Flangers and Klarm.

‘It’s not over yet. We must make sure that the amplimet has been driven back to the lowest stage of wakening, where it was when Tiaan found it. I’ve done the first part of the job, but it’s mancer’s work and none of you need be bothered about it.’

‘Let’s go home,’ said Irisis.

One of the seats rattled up above, and Nish looked up to see Muss’s slender figure disappear from the rail of the dome chamber.

‘First we have a mite of unfinished business to attend to,’ said Flydd. ‘After him, and be quick about it.’

‘What’s going on?’ said Klarm.

‘That’s what I’d like to know. All I know is that Eiryn Muss has been waiting for this moment for a very long time.’

‘And probably engineered it,’ said Nish.

Flydd gave him a keen glance. ‘He probably did.’

‘He’s a chimaera,’ said Irisis.

Flydd started. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Unwittingly, you’ve put your finger on the very key to his nature, though you don’t realise it. He is a chimaera and I don’t know how to deal with him.’

THIRTY-TWO

Tiaan was secured and one of the soldiers carried her out to where Yggur, Malien and Evee had been left. Everyone else went after Eiryn Muss at the best pace they could muster. It wasn’t impressive – they were all beyond exhaustion – but the cold spurred them on. In exposed areas it was crippling, for the Art sustaining Nennifer had completely failed now. All the globes had gone out and what remained of the structure was crumbling visibly in the moonlight. Not a minute went by but that another segment fell into ruin.

‘Where would Muss go?’ said Flydd, the only one of them who wasn’t staggering. His hair was white with dust, his lips like bloodless worms, his scarred and puckered skin glassy tight. He had bloodstains small and large all over him and his clothes were in shreds, but his eyes were gleaming beacons. The impossible victory had been achieved and he’d exacted a partial revenge for his torments. The amplimet’s box hung from his hip in a net made from a section of platinum mesh, just to be sure, and both were secured to his waist with a fine steel chain.

Klarm shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea.’

Something occurred to Nish. ‘Xervish, at Gumby Marth you said –’

‘When I want you to blab about my affairs I’ll let you know,’ Flydd said coldly.

‘Aren’t you being a bit hard on the lad, Xervish, after all he’s done?’ said Klarm, lurching on the leg that had previously been in calipers.

‘Humph!’ Flydd snorted, casting Nish a piercing glance from beneath his single brown and hairy eyebrow. The mad grin of triumph came back. ‘If our subordinates are to earn our trust, they must learn when to keep their mouths shut. Which way here?’

Klarm held up an oil-fed lantern he’d found in the upper chamber and passed it back and forth over the dusty rubble. Nish couldn’t make out anything from its flickering yellow glow.

‘This way,’ said the dwarf, gesturing with the lantern towards a crumbling opening on their left.

They followed him in silence, too worn and weary to speak. Nish’s broken arm hadn’t been set yet, and indeed, he wasn’t sure anyone but Irisis realised that it was broken. Irisis was stumbling along with her eyes almost closed. There had been no time to eat, drink or rest before the pursuit had begun. Nish was in such pain that he couldn’t think, and every step up onto the rubble, or down off it, sent another spasm up his arm. The pain ran all the way to the base of his skull, where it lodged as a brilliant, white-hot glow.

‘I’ve got a feeling he’s heading for the chief scrutator’s strongroom,’ Klarm went on after they’d scrambled through another three half-collapsed building segments, following Muss’s trail through the dust. ‘Which is off his private mancing chambers – at least, it used to be.’

‘How can you tell where he’s going?’ Flydd said wearily. The grin was fading.

‘Just a hunch.’

‘I’ve never been to the strongroom. Have you?’

‘Once,’ said Klarm. ‘Though only to the outer door, and the inner was sealed with potent scrutator magic all the time I was there. Chief scrutator magic, at that – I could sense it from the other side of the room. It pleased Ghorr for me to know about it, I think. He liked to emphasise his superiority in little ways as well as big.’

‘It’s surprising that you got on at all,’ said Flydd, ‘considering …’

‘Considering that he despised anyone with physical imperfections,’ chuckled Klarm. ‘Ghorr sneered at everyone less imposing than himself, and loathed those who had a greater physical presence.’

‘An insecure man, despite all his natural gifts. Unlike yourself.’

‘I came to terms with what I am long ago. It’s the inner man that counts, not the fragile shell that carries it around.’

Flydd paused a moment, as if pondering that. ‘You say the strongroom was locked with chief scrutator magic,’ Flydd ruminated, ‘the secret of which is passed on to the new chief scrutator only when the old one is on his deathbed, or in some equally dire extreme. Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Klarm?’

‘I’m not sure I am,’ said Klarm.

‘I am,’ interjected Irisis, suddenly perking up. Her wits were many steps ahead of Nish’s. ‘None of the scrutators were with Ghorr when he died, so the secret can’t have been passed on. Fusshte wouldn’t have been able to discover what lay inside the chief scrutator’s strongroom.’

‘That would have driven him into a fury,’ Flydd chuckled. ‘Being chief but not having the keys to the treasure chest. But now the Art sustaining Nennifer has failed, perhaps the scrutator magic has failed as well. Yes – that’s why Muss is heading for the strongroom. He’s after something inside. Is this what he was trying to engineer all along?’

‘I presume so,’ said Klarm.

‘Does that mean we can expect a visit from Fusshte as well?’ said Nish, plodding dully along. He couldn’t contemplate yet another struggle. He was utterly, utterly burned out. How was it that Flydd could drive himself on?

‘After Flydd’s awesome display to overpower the amplimet,’ said Klarm, ‘Fusshte will be running as fast as he can.’

‘That will be the strongroom ahead,’ Klarm said a while later, heaving himself up a pile of stone blocks towards an imposing steel door, once concealed by maroon velvet drapes which now hung from the left side, all tattered and covered in dust. The door was ajar. ‘Quiet now. It looks like he’s already within.’

They eased up behind him: Flydd followed by Flangers, Irisis and Nish, nursing his arm. Flydd put his head around the door, then beckoned.

Nish slipped through the gap in his turn. He was standing in a gloomy hall made of some dark stone that soaked up the glimmers of moonlight coming through the cracked roof. After much eye-straining he discerned a square door at the far end. It seemed to be moving – no, it was the hall that appeared to stretch and contract before his eyes. He couldn’t look at it.

It’s an illusion, Nish told himself, a deception meant to keep out those who don’t belong here. So the scrutator magic hasn’t completely faded. He moved forwards a step and ran into Irisis’s back. He hadn’t even seen her.

‘What’s going on?’ he whispered.

She put a hand on his arm – the good one, fortunately – and the illusion faded somewhat. ‘Eiryn Muss is up at the far door,’ she whispered right into his ear. ‘He’s trying to get in.’

As Nish’s eyes adjusted he made out the faintest shadow there, though it didn’t have Muss’s outline. It was taller and broader, and with a hint of wings, like a very small lyrinx. Why that shape?

‘Ah!’ said Flydd as gently as a sigh. ‘He’s done it. He’s through.’

The shadow disappeared, though Nish did not see it move. Flydd held up his hand. ‘Give him a moment. We don’t want to scare him off.’

There came a distant rumble – another collapse – and the floor heaved subtly beneath them. Flydd waited until it had stopped, then moved on. A yellow glow appeared in the strongroom and brightened sufficiently to light up the hall and dispel the illusion.

They reached the inner door, which was made of black steel a hand-span thick, bonded to the solid stone wall on steel hinges thicker than Nish’s upper arm. Both walls and door were scorched as if great heat had been applied in an attempt to force the lock.

‘Looks like Fusshte’s work,’ said Flydd. ‘How it must have vexed him not to gain access to Ghorr’s treasures.’

Approaching the door, Nish was assailed by a powerful feeling of wrongness, then every muscle in his body went rigid. He couldn’t even move his tongue; he was like a living statue. Flydd turned, wove his hand in a circle above him, and then above Irisis and Flangers, and they could move again. Klarm had not been immobilised, though he walked as if his joints had rusted up. Flydd did the same for him.

‘This is a forbidden place,’ said Klarm in a croaky whisper. ‘No man or woman, bar the chief scrutator, has passed this door in the hundred years since it was built. And though the old Council has fallen, its edict freezes my very marrow now that I pass it.’

‘Ah, but the Council has fallen,’ said Flydd, equally quietly. ‘No edict of theirs has power any more. We may do whatever we have the strength to bear.’ He eased through the door, though not without a wrenching shudder that gave the lie to his words.

Nish passed through without further effect. The strongroom proved larger than he had expected, and was still intact. It was illuminated by the soft yellow glow of an oil lantern. Nish could smell the sulphurous tang of the quick-match Muss had struck to light it. There was enough light to reveal gorgeously patterned marble- and travertine-clad walls that could have graced an emperor’s palace.

The strongroom formed a perfect cube some seven or eight spans on a side, though it proved empty apart from a small square table carved from green serpentine, polished to bring out the oily sheen of the rock, a throne-like chair cut from a single emerald, and a large glass sphere, mirrored on the outside, suspended from a frame like a globe of the world.

Eiryn Muss stood with his back to them in the middle of the room, the eidoscope up to his right eye, scanning back and forth across the far side of the room. He flipped one lens out, another in, rotated the ones on either end and scanned that part of the room again.

‘What’s he doing?’ whispered Nish.

Flydd reached back and crushed his good wrist. Nish fell silent, though Muss gave no sign of having heard. He made a minor adjustment to one lens and scanned a third time.

‘Ah!’ Muss groped around in the air like a blind man. His probing fingers touched something and he shaped the air around it, murmuring under his breath.

The air suddenly swarmed with phantoms: lost spectres or ghosts of grim Nennifer. Muss dissolved from the vaguely lyrinx shape to that of the grossly fat, bald-headed halfwit, the guise in which Nish had first known him. It stirred uncomfortable memories.

Muss morphed again, this time into an unfamiliar figure, a stocky merchant clad all in green apart from a brown hat shaped like a pudding bowl. Colours streamed across his back as the garments adjusted to his new shape. Nish wondered why he was doing it, or if he even realised that he was.

The merchant’s stubby fingers cupped the air above the chair as if feeling his way around a pair of spheres the size of melons. He sighed, clapped his hands and a metal case, shaped like two round balls joined together, appeared on the chair. The outside, mirrored like the globe on its stand, revealed distorted images of Muss, though each image was different. The left-hand one showed a short, round man, the right a puny, deformed lyrinx. The group of watchers in the background were not reflected at all.

‘How very curious,’ Klarm breathed. ‘Can the outside be a reflection of the interior?’

‘Perhaps when you called him chimaera, Irisis, you saw more truly than you knew,’ said Flydd. ‘Be ready to rush him as soon as he opens it.’

‘Why not rush him now?’ said Nish. ‘Just to be sure.’

‘We may not be able to open the case.’

Eiryn Muss inspected the double case, turned it over and around, and scanned it from end to end with the eidoscope, muttering under his breath all the while. Another swarm of phantoms appeared up near the ceiling. He set the eidoscope down on the green table, passed his hands over the locks of the double case, caressed them with his fingertips as if playing a keyboard, then pressed down hard. Snap, snap.

‘Don’t move until he opens it and takes out what’s inside,’ said Flydd.

Gingerly, Muss lifted the top of the right-hand spherical case. There came a reflected flash. The inside was mirrored just like the outside.

Muss let out a choked gasp, then threw up the top of the other case.

‘Nooooooo!’ he wailed, as though all the demons of the underworld were clawing at his soul.

THIRTY-THREE

‘Take him!’ hissed Flydd.

They rushed him, though they need not have bothered. Muss was in such agony that he was oblivious to their presence. Even when they seized his arms and bound them behind his back, he made no attempt to resist.

‘It was all a lie,’ he said, writhing and twisting as if his intestines were full of thorns. ‘They weren’t there at all. Ghorr never had them.’

‘What isn’t there?’ said Flydd. ‘Out with it, Muss.’

‘The tears,’ Nish said suddenly. ‘The tears created by the destruction of the Snizort node.’

The scales fell visibly from Xervish Flydd’s eyes. ‘You bloody deceitful bastard, Muss!’ he said savagely. ‘So that’s what you were after all along. You weren’t my faithful servant at all. You were just using me until your opportunity came.’

Eiryn Muss looked like a man with the disembowelling hooks deep in his belly. The impassive prober that Nish and Irisis had known, the spy who’d not shown a flicker of emotion no matter what, had disappeared. Muss was in agony and showing it.

‘Forty years I sought for even the tiniest piece,’ he wailed. ‘Forty wretched years, and all for nothing.’

‘Piece of what?’ said Klarm.

‘Nihilium,’ Flydd grated. ‘The purest substance on Santhenar and the very fount of the Art. The tears of the node are made of it. Why would you betray me so, Muss?’

Muss looked up at him. ‘Betray you? I embarked on this search before I ever heard your name.’

‘You gave me your oath, to serve me truly and me alone.’

‘And so I have, whenever it did not conflict with my prior purpose.’

‘I begin to understand,’ said Klarm. ‘It was you, Muss, who tampered with the node-breaker after the Council gave it to Flydd. It had to be you, for I saw it, tested it and found it perfect, then sealed it under scrutator magic into its case. Those seals weren’t broken until Flydd took the node-breaker into the tar pits of Snizort. No one else could have broken the magic that sealed that case, for no one else ever had charge of it. No one but you, Eiryn Muss, morphmancer or whoever you are.’

Flydd went purple in his wrath and Nish stepped hastily out of the line of fire.

‘You deceitful, treacherous wretch,’ Flydd raged, seizing Muss by the throat and shaking him like a rat. ‘You stinking hypocrite. You changed the node-breaker so that it would destroy the node, and almost certainly the man who had been ordered to use it. Me, Muss!’ He shook him again. ‘You were happy for me to die as long as you achieved your goal, and you dare claim to have served me faithfully. Why, Muss, why?’

‘To create the tears, of course,’ said Irisis. ‘Muss needed nihilium for some purpose of his own, and the only way he could gain any was to destroy a node in a particular manner. But you thought the tears would form at the node-breaker, didn’t you, Muss? That’s what you were searching for so desperately when we met you in Snizort, after the node exploded.’

‘I created them,’ said Muss insistently. ‘The tears were mine.’

‘But you couldn’t find them,’ said Nish, ‘and by the time you realised that they’d been created at the node itself, they were gone. Flydd, Ullii and I saw my father take them, leaving no witnesses alive – at least, none that he was aware of. Father took the tears to the ruinous defeat at Gumby Marth and lost them to the lyrinx.’

‘Jal-Nish was an alchymist,’ mused Flydd, ‘and the tears were an alchymist’s dream. No substance holds the print of the Art more tightly.’

‘Father practised with them every night,’ said Nish, ‘and his mastery grew apace, though not as quickly as his hubris. He led the army into the cul-de-sac of Gumby Marth to lure the lyrinx in after him, planning to boost his alchymical Art with the tears and crush the enemy utterly. Not for the sake of a mighty victory, just to gain a place on the Council of Scrutators.’

‘And had he done so, with all that nihilium at his disposal,’ said Flydd, ‘not even Ghorr could have stood against him. Jal-Nish would soon have dominated the Council, and then suspended it to rule the world in his own name. But, unfortunately for him, his Art was not up to his ambition.’

‘He was a minor mancer, no more,’ said Klarm. ‘And yet he very nearly succeeded.’

‘He came up against a mighty opponent,’ said Nish. ‘The greatest mancer-lyrinx I’ve ever seen. And went within an ell of defeating him.’

‘And that’s why you went to Gumby Marth after the battle,’ said Flydd to Muss. ‘You came looking for the tears, but again you were too late. Jal-Nish was dead and the tears were in the hands of the enemy, beyond even your talents to find.’

‘Ghorr boasted that he’d found them buried in the battlefield,’ said Muss brokenly. ‘He was cock-a-hoop about it.’

‘I’ll warrant he never showed them to anyone,’ said Flydd.

‘He never did. Though once, just before the fleet left to hunt you down, he displayed the sealed cases to the Council of Scrutators.’

‘He was lying to bolster his shattered reputation,’ said Flydd, unable to conceal his contempt. ‘How did he survive so long?’ He swung around to Muss. ‘Tell me, Prober, how long have you secretly opposed me? You were accused even back at the manufactory, as I recall …’

‘It was you all along!’ Irisis almost lost control and took a step towards Muss. ‘You sabotaged Tiaan’s work and put the blame on me. You drugged her, then killed the poor stupid apothek to conceal it, and Nish and I were whipped to the bone for your crimes. We’ll bear the scars until the day we die.’

‘You weren’t whipped just for that,’ Flydd said mildly. ‘You two weren’t entirely blameless. Enough, Irisis. Leave him to me.’

Irisis dropped her fists and turned away into Nish’s arms, tears running down her dirty face, and only then did he realise how deeply the whipping had cut into her soul. She’d pretended it didn’t matter, and had even fought with her scarred back bare during one attack on the manufactory, exposing it to a thousand people. He should have known better. To have her beauty so marred had hurt her far more deeply than the whipping.

Flydd’s face hardened. ‘The only man who recognised you for what you were, Muss, was Foreman Gryste. He threw you into a cell, but no cell could hold a morphmancer. You used your Art to break out, concealed the pieces of platinum in his room that condemned him as corrupt, and fled.’ His voice quavered. ‘And I convicted poor unhappy Gryste on that tainted evidence. I was so sure he was the traitor that I refused to listen. I failed my own standards of justice and executed an innocent man.’ Flydd was shaken. ‘Why, Muss?’

‘You were never going to give me what I was looking for. I had to have an aggressive, ambitious master, one who would do anything to become scrutator. Jal-Nish was the only candidate.’

‘So you decided to undermine the manufactory to discredit and destroy me.’

‘It wasn’t personal,’ said Muss. ‘I liked and admired you, but you just wouldn’t do.’

‘I wondered how Jal-Nish always seemed to anticipate me,’ said Flydd. ‘You were spying on me and reporting to him.’

‘You don’t know what it’s been like.’

‘What is it like?’ Flydd said savagely. ‘Who are you really, Muss, apart from a liar, a murderer and a traitor?’

‘I was a prentice mancer once, here at Nennifer, or rather, a mancer’s prentice – a lesser creature entirely. I was young, handsome and clever, and I thought I had the whole world in front of me. Fool that I was, I didn’t realise what my master really wanted me for. I meant nothing to him. I was no more than a living body to be used and discarded once his Art had ruined me. I wasn’t the first – who knows how many boys and girls were brought to this place, to advance the scrutators’ twisted Art.’

‘He was trying to create a weapon of war from you?’ guessed Irisis.

‘A chimaera.’ Muss nodded in her direction. ‘You think of a chimaera as a phantom: a horrible, unreal creature of the imagination. But there’s another, darker kind of chimaera: a creature made by blending the tissues of two distinct species into one.

‘My master bound me to a drugged lyrinx and used one of the Great Spells, a spell of regeneration, to create a chimaera from us – a human with the strength and chameleon ability of a lyrinx. A bastard creature that could be bred like maggots, grown to adulthood in a decade and trained into an army powerful enough to take on our enemies on the battlefield.’

‘But it didn’t work,’ said Flydd. ‘It couldn’t have.’

‘I survived the transformation but I was no stronger than before, and wracked by pain. My blended tissues, seemingly integrated, were constantly at war with each other. My mind was outwardly human, inwardly a blend of human and lyrinx, and it could never be at peace. I didn’t know whether I was human or lyrinx, but I understood that I was a beast and a monster. And the joke was not yet played out. The failed spell had reproduced neither the lyrinx’s female organs of generation, nor my own male ones. It left me sexless, the worst cruelty of all, and made me useless to my master. He blamed me for the failure of his spell, mocked me for the monster I was, then had me knocked on the head and hurled out of Nennifer onto the kitchen middens for the swine to tear to pieces.’

Muss met their eyes, one by one, and continued.

‘But I survived, for two qualities of the lyrinx I had in abundance. I could flesh-form far better than any lyrinx, for it was part Art and part innate ability, and I could do it to myself. It hurt brutally at first, but I persisted until I had gained enough mastery to assume any form roughly my own size, and use my chameleon ability to mimic whatever external appearance I cared to. To survive inside Nennifer I had to become a morphmancer beyond compare, and I had to go back in. I couldn’t live outside, nor cross the mountains alone.

‘I killed a lowly prentice and took his place. I regretted the necessity but, after all, I’d saved the lad from a fate as bad as my own. And then I set out to learn everything I could about the spell that had so disastrously transformed me, in the hope that one day I might undo it. Years passed; a decade. In one guise, then another, I learned everything there was to be known about the regeneration spell. Even how to reverse it.’

‘Why didn’t you?’ said Nish.

‘It wasn’t enough to just know how. Being a mancer of only moderate talent, I needed great power, perfectly focussed, to work the smallest of charms, and on my own I could never hope to use any Great Spell. But then, by pure serendipity, I hit upon another way. If I could gain a small piece of nihilium, I could imprint the spell on it, then attempt to undo what had been done to me. But not even the Council of Scrutators possessed such a treasure. After years of spying I was unable to discover nihilium anywhere on Santhenar. I had, however, learned that it might be created if a node were destroyed in a particular way, by feeding power back into it.’

‘Why didn’t you do it yourself?’ said Irisis.

‘You privileged people think everything is easy,’ he snapped. ‘But fate distributes talents thinly, and seldom where they’re most needed. I lacked the Art to control the destruction of a node, and no amount of hard work or self-belief could change that. I had to find a great and powerful patron to do it for me, but I feared the Council members too much to try and influence them. I had to leave Nennifer, but in the outside world there was only one position I was suited for. So I became a prober, a junior spy to Scrutator Xervish Flydd.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought …’ began Nish.

‘I made a perfect spy, for in addition to my morphmancing talent, I was stoic, patient and painstaking. After all I’d been through, I had to be. Having two minds in one, as it were, I read character very well. And being a chimaera, I find it easy to unravel what is hidden, confused, concealed or enciphered. To bolster that talent even further I made my eidoscope, to see the true forms of things, to make sense out of what is confused or hidden, and to find the true path through a maze.’

‘But you weren’t a fighter,’ said Nish.

‘Despite being part lyrinx I was physically weak, and my warring tissues magnified the least injury into a debilitating agony. I had to be careful to avoid conflict. My best defence was to hide.’

‘Well, it’s all over,’ said Klarm. ‘Tie him up, someone, then let’s collect our wounded and go home. I’ve had enough of Nennifer.’

‘You spent years spying on the scrutators,’ Irisis said thoughtfully. ‘What do you know about the Numinator, Muss?’

‘Not here, you bloody fool!’ snapped Flydd, quelling her with a glare of such ferocity that Irisis stepped backwards out of the way.

Eiryn Muss let out an inarticulate cry and skin-changed to the swirling patterns of the marble wall behind him. Within thirty seconds he was practically invisible. He cast a glance over his shoulder in the direction of the emerald throne and began to back away, his skin tones shifting to match whatever he passed in front of.

‘What’s going on?’ Klarm seized Muss by the wrist and held him easily. ‘What is this Numinator, Flydd? Are you telling me that there’s a higher power?’

‘Not here, Klarm,’ Flydd said warningly.

‘Why not?’ Klarm’s voice rose. ‘Start out as you mean to go on, Flydd. No more secrets. After what we’ve gone through, we deserve an answer.’

‘I’ll tell you once we get back to the thapter,’ said Flydd. ‘It’s not … safe.’

‘Poppycock!’ said Klarm. ‘We’re the only power left in this place.’

‘And as the chief power, I say not now. If we don’t collect our injured friends soon they’ll freeze to death. I’m at the end of my strength and we’ve got a lot of work yet to do.’ He tapped the platinum box pointedly and trudged to the door.

Klarm didn’t budge. ‘Eiryn Muss, you’re the perfect spy, and were spying long before you left this place to go into Flydd’s service. There can’t be any secret you didn’t delve into in all your time here. Tell us about this mysterious Numinator.’

Muss wiped cold sweat off his brow with his free hand. He tried to shape-change but Klarm did not let go and, after several transformations, the prober reverted to his customary form.

‘I don’t think –’ Muss broke off at the rumble of a distant collapse. The mirrored globe shuddered on its stand and the deformed reflections danced.

‘Now!’ Klarm snapped.

‘I’d also like to know,’ said Nish, feeling that he’d earned the right to defy Flydd this once. ‘I heard …’ Flydd had told him but he dared not say it, ‘… that the Council of Scrutators danced to the Numinator’s tune. How can the most powerful people in the world be cowed by someone no one has ever seen?’

Muss licked lips so dry and fissured that they crackled.

‘And be quick about it,’ said Klarm. ‘If I never see Nennifer again after today, it’ll be too soon.’

‘The Numinator created the Council of Scrutators in the first place,’ said Muss.

‘What?’ cried Flydd, who was halfway through the door. He came back slowly, now showing his age and aftersickness with every dragging step.

‘It was well over a hundred years ago …’ said Muss. ‘The Numinator – he or she, no one knows – took over the existing Council of Santhenar and shaped it to his own purposes …’ another glance over his shoulder, ‘… only one of which was to win the war. The war wasn’t going so badly then. The lyrinx were few and didn’t threaten the whole world.’

‘What were the other purposes?’ said Klarm.

‘Controlling the world was one. Rewriting the Histories, in particular the Tale of the Mirror, was another. A third was collecting information on every person: their ancestry, looks, family traits, habits and talents, and compiling the bloodline registers.’

‘What for?’ said Nish.

‘No one knows,’ said Muss. ‘A copy of each register was placed in this room, and from here it vanished.’ His head jerked up and he stared at the emerald throne as if expecting the dread personage of the Numinator to materialise there.

The emerald throne remained as it was. Muss was gazing up at something, unblinking, and his eyes widened perceptibly. He was looking at the mirrored globe.

Nish glanced at it and the little hairs stirred on his arms. The room and its contents were still reflected there, but none of the people were. He edged towards the door. ‘As Flydd said, there’s Tiaan, Malien and Yggur to be recovered, and little Inouye, if she’s still alive. We can sort this out later.’

‘I think so too,’ said Flydd, who had come back into the room. ‘Let’s go, Klarm.’

At a faint humming sound, like a swarm of bees a long way away, Muss’s mouth gaped open and his eyes bulged. With a convulsive jerk he tore free of Klarm’s hand and bolted for the door.

‘Don’t let him get away!’ yelled Klarm.

To the distant music of tubular bells the mirrored globe became as clear as glass, revealing a roiling sphere inside as bright and burning as the sun. A ray of light burst from it and fingered the surface of the table before creeping along to the eidoscope, which was still lying there. The lenses rotated of their own accord; a mass of coloured rays shot from the other end and touched Muss on the back.

Just inside the door, Muss gasped, turning slowly and with evident unwillingness, until he faced the eidoscope. The rays expanded to cover his entire body. His clothes faded and were revealed as flesh-formed protrusions of skin and tissue, mimicking the colour and texture of the real thing. They dissolved back into him and Muss stood naked and sexless, a neuter with the body of a human but the massive crested head and toothed maw of a lyrinx.

And then he shifted into two, the images superimposed. One was a weathered man of some sixty years, the other a small, aged female lyrinx. The images separated fractionally, blurred together again then sprang apart. The lyrinx image went into a crouch; the man turned as though to flee, but only managed a couple of steps before the other was on him, attacking him savagely, clawing and biting.

The two images merged, blurred and faded back into Muss, though the battle continued as his body went to war on itself. The skin of his chest bulged out as if pushed from inside. Wounds appeared without any seeming cause – three long tears across his belly like claw marks; a chunk out of one shoulder; a gouge on his lower thigh. A bulge moved down from his diaphragm, pushing his stomach out until the watchers could see the shape of his organs outlined against the stretched skin.

It moved up through his chest while he choked and gagged, then the skin burst at his throat and he was torn apart from the inside out. Muss fell into a bloody heap on the floor, the light from the eidoscope faded and the mirror became reflecting once more.

They looked at one another, their faces taut with horror.

‘What was that?’ said Irisis.

‘The vengeance of the Numinator,’ said Flydd. ‘A mancer of surpassing power and, it appears, one who guards his privacy jealously.’

‘But what –?’ Irisis continued.

‘Do you really want to ask that question here, after what we’ve just seen,’ said Flydd.

‘All things considered,’ said Klarm, ‘I think we should go now.’

He was nearly knocked down in the rush for the door.

Outside and well away from the strongroom, they stopped to splint Nish’s broken arm. Dawn had broken by the time they reached the place where they’d left the injured. Malien had recovered from her aftersickness and volunteered to go and bring back the thapter.

‘Where’s Yggur?’ said Flydd.

‘He recovered suddenly an hour ago and went off, saying he had business to attend to,’ she said.

‘You’d think this was a birthday party,’ Flydd muttered. ‘I suppose we’ll have to drag him out from under the rubble. As if we don’t have enough to do.’

Before he could organise a search team, Yggur came limping in, carrying Inouye in his arms.

‘She had a panic attack when she was left in the cupboard,’ he explained. ‘I could sense her pain from down here.’

He passed her to Irisis, who hefted the slight burden in her arms. Inouye moaned and reached out for Yggur. He laid a hand on her brow, her eyes closed, and with a little sigh she settled into sleep.

‘What about Tiaan?’ said Nish relieved of his fears for Inouye.

‘I locked her in that little room at the back,’ said Malien. ‘She wasn’t rational and I didn’t have the strength to deal with her.’ She went out.

‘Tiaan is in withdrawal,’ Flydd said quietly. ‘Artisans have sometimes gone mad from it. Leave her to Evee. We’ve got work to do. The survivors will be dead within days unless we take command.’

‘We?’ said Klarm.

‘The scrutators were led by a chief with absolute authority, so we must replace him with a different kind of rule. A council –’

‘They called themselves a council,’ said Klarm. ‘If we use the same name, people will think that nothing has changed.’

‘If we change it, we’ll spend years fighting usurpers and opportunists instead of the enemy. I propose that the new council’s members be myself, Klarm, Malien, Yggur and –’

‘I won’t be part of any council,’ said Yggur. ‘And I suspect Malien won’t either.’

‘I’ll do my best to persuade her when she gets back,’ said Flydd. ‘Have the guards taken Fusshte?’

‘Unfortunately he got away in an air-dreadnought,’ said Yggur, ‘along with Scrutator Halie and more than a hundred soldiers.’

‘He would have needed more than one air-dreadnought to carry them …’ Flydd said slowly.

‘Fusshte took them all, including the one moored out front. Seven, I believe.’

Flydd cursed loud and long. ‘I should have cut him down while I had the chance. Why didn’t I?’

‘Because Muss seemed a greater threat,’ said Nish.

‘I suppose he’ll head for Lybing,’ said Klarm. ‘To damage our victory in any way he can.’

‘The truth will out,’ said Flydd. ‘We’d better get to work or there won’t be any survivors.’

It proved a brutal day and a bitter night, as hard as any Nish had ever experienced. He laboured with the rest of them, as best he could with a broken arm, and was still working when the thapter finally appeared overhead around the middle of the following day, towing the dirigible. They’d rounded up more than four thousand survivors, organised them to construct flimsy shelters inside the walls of the air-dreadnought yard and recovered enough rations to feed them, and firewood to keep them warm, for the next few weeks. Only then was Nish able to lie down on a deck made of loose planks with hundreds of other people, as close to a fire as he could get, and snatch a few hours of glorious sleep.

He’d just woken, late that afternoon, when Irisis, who was looking up at the sky, said, ‘I think that’s an air-dreadnought coming in.’

‘Who can it be?’ Flydd said. ‘Flangers, bring a detail armed with javelards, on the double.’

They hurried around to what remained of the parade ground, for the air-dreadnought was coming down in a rush.

‘Looks like it’s been through a storm,’ said Irisis. ‘The rigging is all tangled and one of the airbags has been torn open.’

‘I can’t see anyone but the pilot,’ said Nish.

‘It may be a trick. It’d be just like Fusshte.’

‘Pilot looks half-dead,’ said Inouye, who had limped after them. She shouldn’t have been walking at all, but her professional curiosity had been aroused. ‘She’s going to crash.’

Nish thought so too. The air-dreadnought swept in upon a strong wind, trying to land on the narrow strip of parade ground that remained at the southern end, but the wind swept it sideways. For a moment it looked as though the craft would come down on the precipice and tumble into the Desolation Sink, but the pilot corrected in time and the great craft lumbered towards the collapsed front of Nennifer.

Nish held his breath but she managed to turn it and the keel slammed into the ground with just ells to spare. The pilot didn’t get out. She had collapsed at her controller arm.

‘It’s the air-dreadnought that was shaken free in the earth tremblers,’ said Irisis. ‘The pilot must have been asleep on board at the time. It looks like it was blown halfway across the mountains before she could turn it.’

‘Then she’s the greatest pilot I’ve ever come across,’ said Klarm, ‘to bring that wreckage back without a crew, and no rest in a day and a half.’

‘Flangers, gather a work gang and get it tied down,’ Flydd shouted, hobbling towards the craft.

He lifted the collapsed pilot out and kissed her on the cheeks, left and right, to her bemusement. ‘Thank you, pilot. You’ll make a big difference. Nish, run and find the air-dreadnought artificers. I want this craft repaired by midnight, ready to fly east with as many of the survivors as we can cram into it. We won’t beat Fusshte to Lybing with the news, but we’ll spread it north and south as far as we can. His lies won’t stand up in the face of so many witnesses. And see what other craft were being built, and get them finished. There are a lot of people to be moved and little time.

‘Klarm, would you find all the pilots here who still have their controllers? I’ll round up the surviving chroniclers, artists and tale-tellers. There’s a new order in the world and we’ve got to get the word out right away.’

‘And as soon as we’re beyond the corrupted influence of the Nennifer node,’ said Yggur, ‘we must join forces to drive this baleful amplimet back to the state from which it woke.’

‘We have the amplimet and we have Tiaan,’ said Flydd. ‘And the Council has been overthrown. Now the long fight-back can begin.’