Tetrarch

T WENTY

Nish pulled himself against the wall, where it was darkest. His pockets were empty. He had not a copper nyd to his name, nor anything else he could use to buy or bribe his way out. He had no weapons, no means of defending himself. All he had were his wits. He might have given way to despair, but lately Nish had thought his way out of a number of difficult situations. Leaning back, he closed his eyes and went through his options. He could only see three.

Declare himself to the guards at the gate, tell them who he was and where he had come from. Likely result: a merciless beating and being thrown back into the camp, where the powers that ran it could well give him another beating. It didn't seem worth the risk.

Try to get over the palisade in the night and escape. Colm's little remark made that into an unpalatable option, though Nish knew that guards were seldom as vigilant as rumour had it. On a dark night, or a rainy one, there must be a chance.

Failing that, let's see what he could do with the boy. Colm had proven trustworthy but Nish was wary of pressing him too hard. Family always came first.

He spent the whole day under the table. It grew increasingly hot and humid until Nish could think of nothing but cool water. His last drink had been with the scrutator the previous day. Had he really come all this way in only a day? He had no idea how long he'd been unconscious. It felt like another year; another life. The scrutator would not be back to the manufactory yet, and Ullii… Poor Ullii. How was she coping? He could still hear her screams.

The hours dragged by. The building stank of unwashed bodies. There was not a breath of fresh air to be had and he felt as if he were suffocating. Nish looked up at the underside of the bench, where the grain of the timber made sawtooth patterns reminiscent of the crest of a lyrinx. He swallowed.

Considering so many people worked here, the workhouse was uncannily quiet. All he heard was the shuffle of feet, an occasional clearing of the throat and the muted tap and click of mechanical parts being put together. Nish manoeuvred an eye to a gap between the boards, looking up along the bench. The workers were putting together small clockwork mechanisms, possibly for something like a clanker.

Thwack. Someone let out a reedy scream, quickly cut off.

'Half-rations for three days. Work harder!' The voice was close by.

Nish made himself as small as possible but felt sure he would be discovered. A thick pair of hairy calves went by, attached to the filthiest feet he had ever seen. They smelled like ordure.

The feet stopped. Something struck the bench above Nish's head so hard that small objects jumped. He did not dare to breathe. He could hear the heavy breath of the supervisor. The room was completely silent. Everyone else was as afraid as he was. Nish's nose began to itch but he resisted the urge to scratch it.

'Get on with your work!' the man roared and the dirty feet moved away. The clicking and tapping resumed.

Nish endured the day. Should he declare himself, or leave it to the boy? He waited. In the early afternoon the work stopped briefly while lunch was taken at the benches. Nish could smell the water by then and had begun to shake with hunger. He was practically fainting when a thin hand reached below the bench, holding a battered wooden mug.

Nish drained it in a single swallow and immediately regretted that he had not made it last. He put the mug into the waiting hand. Shortly it reappeared with a generous chunk of black bread.

Nish eked that out, taking the tiniest of nibbles, which was just as well since it was full of hard, burnt grain and grit he might have broken a tooth on. After that he pillowed his head on his arms and slept.

When he jolted awake it was dark outside but the work was still going on. What had disturbed him?

'Don't start that again,' Colm's father hissed. 'You're not too old for a beating, boy!'

'He's here,' Colm whispered.

'What are you talking about?'

'The man is right here, under the bench. His name is Cryl-Nish Hlar and his father is a perquisitor.'

The silence stretched out, then the man dropped a wooden spanner, bent down to pick it up and stared at Nish.

Nish held his gaze. 'It's true,' he said softly. 'He is Jal-Nish Hlar, Perquisitor for Einunar, and I have come all this way on scrutator's business. I beg your help in his name.'

The man ducked away again, forgetting his spanner. Reaching forward, Nish handed it up to him.

'Which scrutator?' Colm's father said out of the corner of his mouth.

'Xervish Flydd!'

The work resumed on the bench, and only some minutes later did Nish hear any more.

'You have ruined us, Colm,' his mother muttered. 'This will be the end of your family.'

'Why couldn't you mind your own business?' his father said. There was no anger in him now; just despair. 'Why, Colm?'

'You taught me to do what I thought was right, no matter how painful.'

'Those rules don't apply any more,' his father said in a low voice.

'Just look at the poor man! He's got wounds everywhere but it hasn't stopped him.'

Both mother and father bent down, inspected Nish, then stood up again.

'Of course you can't denounce him,' said Colm's mother. 'That would also attract attention.'

'We have to,' said the father.

'He's not much more than a boy,' muttered the mother. 'He doesn't even have a proper beard.'

'Tell him to go, boy,' said Colm's father.

'I won't betray him. You tell him.'

Again Nish heard a slap, but thankfully Colm remained defiant.

'If he is a perquisitor's son,' the mother quavered, 'and on scrutator's work, to refuse him will mean our deaths.'

A metal cover-plate was knocked off the bench. The father's face appeared in front of Nish. The mother and son closed up on either side. 'What business?'

'I can't tell you, but I carry information vital to the war. I must find a way to escape and meet a querist or perquisitor. Or failing that, an officer in the army.'

'Very well,' said the father. 'I know my duty. We will be leaving shortly to go back to our quarters for the night. When I give the signal, come out between me and Colm. Walk carefully, looking down. Show me your hand.'

Nish held it out and the man examined the bloody scratches. 'It may do, if they don't look too closely. We have no friends here, but people know us, and in this camp anyone will betray their neighbour for an extra bowl of fishhead soup.'

The call came. Nish ducked out from under the bench and stood up between Colm and his father, who was a big man, nearly a head taller than Nish. He took a sideways glance. The building had three aisles and a line of people was forming along each of them. There would have been hundreds. Most were as haggard, thin and dirty as the boy. Few looked anywhere but at the earth floor.

The line crept forward. Nish felt a fluttering in his stomach. He had saved himself several times, by his own initiative, assisted by a generous helping of good fortune. Fortune could turn against him just as swiftly, and then he would die.

They approached the door, where each of the workers was delivered a dollop of gruel into their mug, and a slab of black bread. Nish had no mug. He was going to fall at the first hurdle. Panic told him to run but he fought it. He looked back. The father had realised the problem but did not know what to do about it. Nish was going to be discovered with the family and they would all be punished.

It was too late to get out of the way; they were only half a dozen places from the end of the line. Nish leaned forward. 'I've no mug,' he whispered in Colm's ear.

Colm passed his own back, picked up a fragment of metal lying on the bench and, with an unobtrusive flick, sent it flying down the row. It struck a hairy man on his protruding ear. He whirled and swung a blow at the man behind him, who struck back.

The fellow serving the slops came out from behind his bench, flailing at the struggling men with his wooden ladle. Colm snatched a mug from the back of the bench and held it out.

The fight was over quickly. No one wanted to attract the attention of the guards outside. The line paced by, Nish received his ration of slops and his lump of bread, the serving man taking no notice of him, and then they were through the door.

He passed the guards and was halfway across the yard when one yelled, 'Hey you!'

Nish froze, whereupon a hard hand went down on his shoulder and squeezed. 'Keep going. Don't look around.'

Nish did as he was told, expecting the soldiers to come running after him, but no one did. As he rounded the corner he saw, out of the corner of his eye, an unfortunate fellow being beaten between three laughing guards.

'It's their game,' said the father. 'Some poor wretch always turns around, and then they beat him for it.'

It took an anxious ten minutes to cross through the labyrinth of huts, shacks and hovels to the dismal space Colm and his family called home. Built from scraps of timber and canvas, chinked in with grass and mud, it was meaner than the hut of any primitive tribesman.

Inside it was barely long enough for the father to lie down. The earth floor was covered in bracken and reeds. The walls were hand-smeared mud, the roof a piece of rotting canvas smaller than a single bedsheet. They had nothing else in the world.

Two girls crouched within. The older, who might have been fifteen, was a small, unattractive creature, her hair positively dripping grease, her face full of spots and scars, and her teeth horrible black stumps. The younger, no more than five, was pretty, with wavy chestnut hair and green eyes.

'This is Cryl-Nish Hlar,' said the father, whose name was given as Oinan. 'He is an important man. He will stay with us for a little while and we are going to look after him. No one will ever mention his name. Cryl-Nish, this is my wife Tinketil, my older daughter, Ketila, and my other daughter, Fransi.'

Ketila hid her face, and a flush crept up her throat. Poor girl, Nish thought, to suffer such a handicap, especially when her sister is such a beauty. He shook hands with Oinan, with Tinketil and with a solemn, staring Fransi. Ketila would not look at him. Her hands fluttered over her mouth.

'Ketila,' said Oinan sternly.

Putting one hand behind her back, she held out the other. Nish took it and she gave him a little shy smile that went all the way up to her eyes. It revealed perfect white teeth, and it quite transformed her. She must have been wearing something in her mouth to make them look so horrible. Perhaps the spots and the scars were fake too.

'Teeth, Kettie!' snapped Oinan.

'They hurt, father,' Ketila said, soft and pleading.

'Oh, let her be,' said the mother. 'Have you no brains at all, husband? She can put them back if anyone comes.'

Tinketil boiled a tin mug of water over a handful of roots, cleaned Nish's wounds and covered them with precious lard.

The parents said no more about Nish, nor spoke to him either. After a while Ketila and Fransi settled on the bracken against the far wall. Nish lay on his side facing the entrance. Oinan and Tinketil whispered to each other for a long while, a furious argument for all that they spoke so softly. Nish did not catch a word of it and finally he slept. He was woken before dawn by a flickering light at the back of the hut. Tinketil was kneeling in front of Ketila, applying the spots to her face with a clump of hair glued into the split end of a twig. The smaller girl was still asleep. Oinan was not there.

Shortly he reappeared, carrying his dinner mug. 'Hold out your hand, Cryl-Nish.'

Nish did as he was told and Oinan applied white powder to the back with a spoon, tracing out the pattern Colm had scratched the previous day. The mixture immediately began to burn and Nish had to grit his teeth.

'It only takes a few minutes,' the man said.

They were all staring at him. He wanted to weep with the pain, but they had gone through it and so could he. He counted down the seconds, then Oinan washed the quicklime off. It had taken most of the skin with it, leaving raw, weeping flesh.

'You're one of us now,' said Oinan.

A gong sounded and everyone hurried to their workhouses. So the day passed, much as the previous one had, except that Nish now had to work. Like everyone else, he was required to assemble the clockwork mechanisms, and for all his years of artificing Nish proved the slowest of all.

Back in the hut that night, as Tinketil mended a shirt by the light of a pithy reed smeared with rancid fat, Nish became aware that Ketila was watching him, though every time he looked in her direction she glanced away. She had washed her face and tied back her hair. She was not as beautiful as Fransi, but she was charmingly fresh and lovely, and Nish liked her.

Six months ago he might have taken advantage of her, had the opportunity come, but he was a wiser and a less selfish man now. Nish was no saint, but he could see her yearning. Not for him, particularly, and certainly not for the kinds of fleshy grapplings he dreamed about. Ketila was becoming a woman and wanted to be seen as one, and to be taken seriously.

'This land is so different from where I come from,' he said.

'Where do you come from, Cryl-Nish?' Her back was pressed against the wall but Ketila inclined her head towards him. Her mother noted it and smiled.

Nish looked different from the other people in the camp; there was a mystery about him. He had flown into the camp hanging from a huge balloon, and he came from the other side of the world. He had an important father and a powerful master and Ketila knew, because Colm had told them, about his great deeds and heroic struggle with the nylatl. She had seen the tooth and claw marks in his leg, when Tinketil dressed the wounds. To her, he was not short, plain and lacking in a beard. He was fascinating, exotic, bold and brave. And he spoke to her as if she was important.

'I was born in Fassafarn,' said Nish, 'which is almost as far as you can go east from here. It is the chief city of the province of Einunar, at the furthest end of the Great Mountains.'

'What is it like there?' she asked softly.

'There are enormous mountains covered in snow all year round, and valleys so deep you can hardly see the bottom…'

'I was born in Bannador,' she said. 'We also have big mountains.'

'These ones are so big that when the wind blows they write their names in the sky, and the glaciers…'

'What are glaciers, Cryl-Nish?'

'Rivers of ice that flow down from ice caps half a thousand spans thick, grinding out the bottoms of mighty valleys and not stopping until they reach the sea. Sometimes they break into chunks of ice as big as islands and float across the ocean. Many a sailor has seen an iceberg loom up out of the foggy night and knows that his little ship was going straight to the bottom and he with it, never to see his wife and his darling daughters again.'

Nish was enjoying his rhetoric, though at the last the girl bit her lip and he turned to safer waters. 'We have great snow bears in the mountains, white beasts so big that they could not get through the door of a house. I saw one once and it was almost two spans high. It could have eaten a lyrinx for breakfast.'

Ketila brightened at that. 'Are they not dangerous?'

'Very dangerous, though they seldom attack people unless they get between a mother and her cubs.' Nish's eye met Tinketil's for a second.

'Have you ever killed a snow bear?' asked Ketila.

Nish felt the urge to make up a heroic story, but suppressed it. He was not sure why. 'No, Ketila, I haven't. To tell you the truth, I don't like killing things much, and snow bears are magnificent creatures.'

'You killed the nylatl.' They had all heard that tale.

'I had to, or it would never have stopped trying to kill me. It was mad, the poor creature. The lyrinx flesh-formed it out of nothing. Did I tell you that?'

'No,' she breathed.

The whole family was listening as he told the tale of the lyrinx attack, the flesh-formed little monstrosities he had found in the ice houses on the plateau, and all that he had learned about the depraved Art since. It was a long tale, and both girls' eyelids were drooping by the time he finished it.

'Thank you,' said Ketila. 'That was a wonderful tale. You are so brave. Good night, Nish.'

'Good night.'

When they were asleep he said quietly to Oinan, who had been out earlier in the evening, 'Have you had any luck so far?'

'No. It's a delicate matter, Cryl-Nish. I have to be sure we won't be informed on before I ask my favour.'

Since there was no more he could do, Nish settled down to sleep. It was not a good start. The weary days went by. One night, something roused Nish in the early hours of the morning. It had been a noise, far off. He looked out through the opening of the hovel. It was still pitch dark. Crawling outside, he stood up and stretched. The night was mild compared to what he was used to. The stars glittered in a clear sky. He wandered around the huts, relieved himself, yawned and headed back. Again came that noise, a faint, distant roar like an angry mob.

Fleeting across to the palisade he peered through a knothole. It was dark outside, which was strange. Normally the guards patrolled with blazing torches, calling to one another. He went further along, to a gap between two poles, and heard that faint roar again.

Nish pulled himself up the palisade. There was not a guard in sight. He slipped his leg over and sat atop the fence as if it was a saddle. The roar was louder from here and he made out a glow in the north, from the direction of Nilkerrand.

A not-so-faint glow when he stood up, one foot on the outside rail, the other in the valley he had been sitting on. It looked like a fire. He knew there was no forest up that way, and it was too early in the season for the fields to be burning. It must be in the city.

The sound came on the wind, louder now, a terrified mob. Flames shot up. Nilkerrand was burning, its hundred thousand inhabitants running for their lives, and the guards of the refugee camp had fled. The battlefront must have moved faster than anyone expected. It was almost on them.

Racing back to the hovel, Nish shook Oinan and Tinketil awake. 'Get up!' he hissed. 'Nilkerrand is burning and the guards have run away. The enemy is upon us.'

They must have been used to fleeing in the night for they woke instantly and pulled their boots on. Nish felt for his own. Tinketil woke the children, who were just as silent and grimly efficient. In a reed-light Nish saw Ketila's eyes on him again.

'I'll wake the camp,' Nish said, crawling out.

Oinan caught his leg. 'There'll be a stampede. We'll never get out.'

'I can't let everyone be slaughtered in their beds. How will I find you?'

'Which way, Colm?' cried Oinan.

'Down the gully where the waste runs,' said the boy without hesitation. 'We can get through the fence at the far end, if there are no guards at all.'

'I'll meet you there,' said Nish, 'but if I don't come, go without me.'

He ran down the row to where the great gong hung by the workhouse. Snatching up the mallet, he thumped the gong, one, two, three.

There were cries all over the camp. 'Wake!' he roared. 'Nilkerrand is burning and the enemy is upon us. Wake!' Giving it one last thump, he dropped the mallet. Then, thinking that it was a better weapon than his bare hands, Nish tucked it under his arm.

People were running everywhere, shouting, screaming and crashing into each other. Down the row, one of the hovels was ablaze. As he turned the corner, Nish was swept off his feet by a stampede. Holding his arms over his head, he scrunched up and waited for them to go by.

Once they passed, he crept along the walls of the buildings. A flame leapt up to his left: someone had set fire to a shanty and in its light a mob was attacking the gate. A dark figure went over the top and hurled the bar off. The gate burst open.

Nish kept going. Most of the camp was behind him now. Stumbling along in the dark, he fell off the edge of an embankment, skidded in greasy clay and slid all the way to the bottom. Judging by the putrid smell, he was in the gully. The drain must be just to his right. Well, that saved him looking for it.

He picked his way down. Several others must have had the same idea, for he could see figures further along. Perhaps it was the family. Nish did not call out in case it was not. A vibrating shriek of terror came from behind, then screams from hundreds of massed throats. Was it the enemy? He had to know. Scrambling up the side of the gully, Nish climbed a mound, stood on tiptoes and stared towards the gate, clearly visible in the flames.

People were streaming back, screaming and trampling each other in their desperation to get away. He knew what was behind them but had to see it with his own eyes.

A great shape came over the palisade, landing in front of the flames. The silhouette was unmistakable – a massive body, crested head and leathery wings. A lyrinx. Others stormed through the gate.

Nish could not bear to watch. He hurtled down the gully, splashed through the stinking muck in the bottom and along the other side, running and running despite the agony in his injured leg. He could not ignore it, but it was a reminder of what it would be like to be eaten alive. Nish rounded the corner and the fence stood in front of him. Several of its poles had been torn away. Someone was just going through the gap. He squeezed after them, tearing his shirt.

On the other side he looked around for Colm's family, but they were nowhere to be seen.