by Ian Irvine
The low point, as well as the left-hand side of the saddle, exploded in a spray of steam and molten rock, then they were over and hurtling down the sharp decline with an avalanche on their heels.
'Pull up,' said Malien, 'but keep well below the saddle. They might reflect the beam off the ice, even if they can't see us.'
Tiaan was already doing so. The Aachim picked themselves up from the floor, looking at each other. They were unharmed, apart from Bilfis, who had a fleck of blood on the back of his robes, below the right shoulder blade.
He rubbed it, examining his fingertip. 'Just a flying shard.'
'Where to?' asked Tiaan.
'We can't go to Tirthrax' said Malien. 'Not for long, anyway.'
'Or to any of our other known refuges.' said Bilfis, 'since they'll look there in their thaptersMalien considered. 'We've got little food or drink, and only the clothes we're wearing. Head south and west, Tiaan, for the moment.'
'What happened back there?'
'Harjax was uncomfortable with the story of your escape,' said Malien. 'As soon as their first thapter was free, he sent it to the Foshorn, to Vithis. We had a feeling the news would be bad, so we were ready to flee. The urgency of the envoy's return was alarm enough.'
And when he ordered the guards to fire on us,' added Bilfis, 'it confirmed the worst.'
Tiaan looked from one to the other. 'What news did he bear?'
'In your escape, you did more damage than you'd thought. Vithis suffered a broken arm and jaw, and three noble Aachim were killed in the construct that exploded underwater. But there was worse …'
'Minis!' Tiaan said, white-faced. 'I killed Minis.'
'You did worse than that, as far as Vithis is concerned.'
'How can anything be worse than death?'
'Oh, for some Aachim, there can be far worse,' Malien said grimly.
Part Five
Air-Dreadnought
Fifty-three
'Death in life,' Malien explained sombrely. 'You maimed him, Tiaan. He lost a leg, three fingers, and his pelvis was crushed. He may never walk again; he'll never be without pain. But worse still, he's no longer whole, and every Aachim knows it. To their eyes Minis is a ruined man. If Vithis lives another thousand years he'll neither forgive nor forget. He's declared clan-vengeance against you and all who aid you in any way. Any Aachim who does so faces exile or death.'
'Even your people?' Tiaan whispered.
'Harjax's envoy bound us as well. Perhaps he felt it was a way of allying our sundered kind. Or perhaps he felt as aggrieved as Vithis. I didn't wait to find out.'
And yet you three helped me, at the cost of your own lives.'
'It wasn't just for you,' said Malien. 'There's a higher danger and we can't do without you.'
'The nodes?' said Tiaan.
'The nodes. Bilfis has made a model of the ones near Stassor — those you've mapped — and they're more unstable than he'd imagined.'
'To put it at its bluntest,' said Bilfis, who was a pallid grey, and sweating despite the cold, 'I'm so terrified that I was prepared to break the code of clan-vengeance and become an outlaw. There is a higher duty, when the very world may be at stake.' Nodding formally to Tiaan, he went below.
The remaining Aachim seemed to be assessing her worth. The lean man was Talis the Mapmaker, whom Tiaan had met several times. The stocky one was called Forgre but she knew nothing about him. Without acknowledging her, he followed Belfis and Talis below. A mutter of voices drifted up, in which she heard her own name several times, though she made out nothing more.
Tiaan looked up at Malien, who was staring at her. What was Malien thinking? Was she regretting giving up everything to save her, Tiaan? And poor, maimed Minis, condemned to a living death. Other tragedies, other disasters, though arising out of Tiaan's actions, had ultimately been caused by others. She had done this terrible wrong by herself, out of terror for her life. No, call it by its true name: cowardice. She had maimed the man who, for all his failings, had loved her. He'd been going to help her, she felt sure of that now, and in return she'd hurt him grievously and run away.
'Clan Elienor were blamed for allowing you to escape,' said Malien, 'and have suffered the greatest penalty Vithis could impose. They've been cast out, exiled and their constructs forfeited.'
Guilt overwhelmed Tiaan. The control yoke slipped in her hand and the construct dipped sharply.
'I think you'd better let me take over. Go below and lie down.' Within seconds Malien had ejected the amplimet and taken the yoke. Grim-faced, she flew between the unclimbable peaks.
The day faded. Tiaan lay dozing on her bunk. Malien flew on, torn half a dozen ways. Exile could not hurt her as it did her companions, for among her own people she'd been an outsider since the Forbidding was broken. Even so, to actively defy the entirety of her kind was no small thing. And now Tiaan's life had been laid in her hands — a precious, vital life if the nodes were fading, as Bilfis suspected. What was she to do about that?
Not to mention Clan Elienor. Though the clans had disappeared on Santhenar thousands of years ago, every Aachim knew their heritage. Malien's was the House of Elienor and she was a descendant of the great heroine. Now Clan Elienor were lost somewhere in Taltid. Their homes and means of travel had been confiscated and they had been abandoned to starve in a land stripped bare and plundered by lyrinx as well as human scavengers. Her duty was clear. She must do what she could for her people.
Malien knew roughly where Clan Elienor had to be. They had been left on the coast north-west of Snizort, where they could survive for a time by fishing and collecting seaweed, though when the fish migrated south to the Karama Malama in the winter their position would be dire. There was only one thing to be done. Around midnight, Malien turned south.
Tiaan woke wrapped in blankets but still cold. The thapter was whining furiously, and someone was coughing, over and over. She touched a globe to brightness. It was Bilfis, dabbing at his lips with a cloth that was stained red.
Seeing her staring, he said hoarsely, 'It's nothing. I suffer from mountain sickness. We're much higher than Stassor, here.'
She went up the ladder. It was mid-morning and Malien stood at the yoke, as she had all night.
'We're going back to Tirthrax,' said Malien.
'But you said we wouldn't be safe there.'
'Not for long, anyway,' Malien said tersely. 'We'll fill the thapter with provisions and other essential items, then head west.'
Tiaan, full of guilt and feeling that she was only here under sufferance, asked no questions.
'I plan to share my exile with Clan Elienor,' Malien went on. 'And ask them about the node problem, though they may not be able to help. The nodes of Santhenar must be very different from those of Aachan. It's lucky I have Bilfis. He's the most brilliant of all our field mancers and if anyone can solve this problem, he can.'
Tiaan took turns with her, winding through the passes night and day, and they reached Tirthrax on the third evening after fleeing Stassor. Malien flew inside and the Aachim got out. Bilfis, still coughing blood despite the lower altitude, came last.
'Stay here,' said Malien to Tiaan. 'Keep watch and make sure it's ready to go at a moment's notice. Forgre, would you set a sentinel at the entrance? I doubt if Harjax's thapters could reach here before this time tomorrow, since he has no relief pilots and they must stop to sleep, but we'd better be sure.'
They were gone many hours, during which Tiaan had ample time to reflect on her own problems, though not to find any resolution. The Aachim reappeared after midnight, wheeling trolleys filled with food and wine, bags and boxes of tools and equipment, a number of volumes of the Histories, plus atlases and charts of the western lands. It took until dawn to pack it all inside.
The sky was clear when they departed, and there was no sign of pursuit. Malien ordered Tiaan to set a course southwest, in the general direction of Snizort, and went below.
After an hour in which she got no sleep at all, Malien came back up. They
were now flying over the north-western corner of Mirrilladell, a land of a million lakes and bogs. It looked pretty from the air but was scarcely inhabited, being bitterly cold in the long winter, and a mosquito-ridden hell in the short summer. Folktales told that the insects could bite through metal.
'Would you set down, Tiaan?' she said politely. 'Bilfis is no better. Even this height is troubling him.'
Tiaan settled the craft on a bare island in a braided stream milky with glacier-ground rock. They helped Bilfis out. He could not stop coughing.
'I begin to wonder if it can be mountain sickness,' said Malien. She unfastened his coat. 'Hold! What's that?'
There was a fresh stain on the back of his shirt. Bilfis raised a limp hand. 'It's nothing. A chip of stone hit me during the escape.'
'But that was days ago — let me see.' She tore off his shirt. Just below the shoulder blade a little green blister bulged out, leaking pale fluid.
'It's a flac!' said Malien in a rigidly controlled voice. 'Talis, my healer's bag, quickly!' 'What's a flac?' said Tiaan. Malien did not answer.
'A tiny, burrowing dart,' Bilfis said weakly. 'It releases a slow poison into the blood that affects the breathing. It has to be cut out at once.'
And never to be used against our own kind,' said Forgre grimly.
'It was intended for you, Tiaan,' said Bilfis, 'but you swerved unpredictably and I obviously took it instead. An irony, some might think.'
Talis raced up with the bag. Malien selected various bladed tools as well as a long thin pair of tweezers.
'It's too late,' Bilfis said. 'It'll be part-dissolved by now, Malien.'
I have to try. Hold still.'
She began to cut into him. 'There, I see it; she said after some time. 'Tweezers, Talis.'
He passed them across. 'This is a big risk, Bilfis,' said Malien. 'It's very fragile. I don't think I can get it out whole.' 'If it stays in, I die. If you break it, I die more quickly. It's designed so. I'm ready, either way.'
'It never occurred to me that they would use a flac against us,' said Malien, shaking her head.
'It's a forbidden weapon, even in clan-vengeance,' Forgre explained.
'But not against me,' said Tiaan.
'Not against the lesser species.' Malien wiped sweaty hands. Her lips moved in an exhortation, or a prayer. Slipping the tweezers into the slit, she took gentle hold of the end of the flac and tried to ease it out.
They all heard the sound, like rotten metal crunching. Bilfis jerked and his eyes went wide, then Malien was desperately, furiously raking the fragments from the wound and reaming out the residue, heedless of his pain.
Forgre held a white dish to Bilfis's back, probing the bloody residue with a forefinger. 'I think you may have got it,' he said.
Bilfis looked down at the dish and gave a rueful smile. 'I never thought—' He stiffened, gave the faintest of sighs and, with no other sign, he died.
'I wasn't quick enough.' Malien covered her face with her long fingers.
'No one ever is,' said Talis, closing the man's eyes.
Tiaan had expected them to take Bilfis's body to the Well of Echoes, but Malien was reluctant to do that given its unstable condition. They flew him up to the icefield on the high plateau, higher than Tiaan had ever been, where the cold was unrelenting. Malien melted a hole with the underside of the construct and slid the body in. Within a minute the water had frozen again, leaving him encased in ice as clear as glass. The Aachim sang a threnody in an archaic tongue.
'He loved the mountains,' said Malien, panting in the thin air. 'Bilfis would be happy that we've brought him here, where no other Aachim foot has ever trod.'
'No foot of any kind, I think,' said Talis the Mapmaker. 'No one could survive in such a high place.'
'Including us!' said Malien. A hundred thousand years from now he'll lie here unchanged. That would please him very much.' She headed for the thapter. 'But what are we going to do without him?'
They continued on to Snizort, flying long hours every day. It still took four days. Tiaan made measurements of the nodes whenever she got the chance, and marked them on the maps. Incessant work helped to keep her thoughts at bay. They passed by the battlefield, towards the Sea of Thurkad, and thence up the coast. The following afternoon they came upon a large encampment in a long but narrow inlet which had rocky ridges on either side. The camp was surrounded by a palisade of sharpened timber, the new home of exiled Clan Elienor. Tiaan saw no more of it, for as they approached Malien said, 'Go below.'
Tiaan searched Malien's lined face. Am I in danger here?'
'I don't know. It depends whether an outcast clan considers themselves bound by clan-vengeance. I won't risk it. Stay hidden while we unload the food and other supplies, and then we'll see.'
Tiaan spent the afternoon huddled under a blanket, trying to shut out the world. She could not erase her thoughts. The following morning Malien woke her. Talis and Forgre were there too.
'Stay where you are until we're in the air,' said Malien.
Where are we going now?'
'West.'
Across the sea to Meldorin?' said Tiaan. 'Where the lyrinx are?'
'We came at an opportune time. My people have just had vital news.'
'Oh?' said Tiaan.
'With Bilfis dead, only one person has the skills of geomancy and mathemancy to tell us how bad the node danger is, and how to avert it — the tetrarch, Gilhaelith. I now know where he's hiding.'
'Where is he?'
'He's north across the Sea of Thurkad, near a lyrinx city called Oellyll.'
Tiaan did not recognise the name, though it sent a shiver up her spine nonetheless. 'Is he a prisoner?'
'I don't think so. Word has it that he's made a deal with the enemy.'
Fifty-four
'What's the name of this place?' Tiaan asked as they were crossing the Sea of Thurkad.
Malien was at the controller. The sea here, almost eighty leagues north of the place where she had escaped from the Aachim nets, was more than twenty leagues across. In the distance she saw a gap in the range that ran down the east coast of Meldorin. The peaks were white, the flanks of the mountains dusted with an early fall of snow, for it was late autumn now. To the left, a steep-sided volcano fumed. There was no snow on its warm flanks, though similar dormant peaks to its north and south had caps of white.
Malien did not reply. She was frowning at the sullen water far below. 'Better go up; we could be seen at this height.' She lifted the thapter into the bumpy air inside the clouds.
'That's the Zarqa Gap,' said Talis, pointing, 'one of the few passes across these mountains, at least in the wintertime. See the ancient road?'
The thapter lurched. Tiaan caught another brief glimpse of the pass, then they were in opaque cloud again. Talis was silent until a second filmy gap appeared. 'It used to run all the way to the west coast, though already the forest is taking it back. The lyrinx eliminated the last people from these lands a generation ago.'
'Down south,' said Malien, 'further to our left, lie the ruins of Alcifer.'
There was nothing to see but cloud. 'I've heard that name,' said Tiaan. It gave her a shivery feeling.
'The city was designed by the brilliant architect Pitlis, for Rulke, and Rulke's seduction of him is the greatest betrayal in the Histories. Many people say that Alcifer was the greatest creation of any of the human species, anywhere in the Three worlds. It caused the downfall of my people, from which we have never recovered.'
The clouds broke and Tiaan pointed a spyglass where Malien had indicated. The mountains ran close to the sea there, and a flank of the volcano had been carved and sculpted to form the platform upon which Alcifer had been built. Great boulevards curved through it, and buildings great and small, their outlines just visible beneath aeons of growth, erosion and volcanic ash. From this distance no more detail could be seen.
On the slopes north of the city, the volcano had, long ago, formed a series of terraces covered in glittering cryst
alline salts, mud pools, geysers, fumaroles and the snaking lines of ancient lava tunnels whose tops had collapsed. Steam hung in wisps over the surface.
'That's chancy country,' said Talis, consulting an ancient gazetteer of the lands around Alcifer. 'When it rains, flows of mud and ash are dammed up against the edge of the terraces. They crust over in the dry season, though if you tried to walk there you'd go straight through.'
And slowly cook in hot mud,' said Forgre. 'Not how I'd choose to die.'
'In really wet years,' said Talis, reading from the gazetteer, 'the terrace walls burst and the hot slurry pours down the slope faster than a horse can gallop, sweeping trees and boulders away.'
'Chancy country indeed,' said Malien, rising into the clouds again.
'Is Alcifer in the Histories?' Tiaan asked.
'It's in the Tale of Tar Gaarn, which is in our Histories, but it's not much told these days. Rulke scarcely had the time to enjoy his creation, for soon after Alcifer was completed he was taken by the Council of Santhenar and cast into the Nightland; where he languished for a thousand years. Once freed, as far as is known, he never returned to Alcifer and it was never inhabited again. Who would dare?'
Have you been there?'
Malien shivered. 'No, and I'm not looking forward to it. I feel the threat, even from here.'
Tiaan opened her mouth but closed it again. Malien was the most level-headed person she know. 'Where are we going now?'
'We'll fly across the range, then swing back and come on the place at night, on foot.'
The idea seemed absurd. How could they hope to find Gilhaelith in such a vast city, with so many lyrinx below and nearby? And if they did, how could they hope to free him?
They crossed the range north of the Zarqa Gap, at a pass that bore just a dusting of untracked snow. Keeping to what cloud they could find, they continued west over grassland and forest. The sun was sinking over the impassable swamp forests of Orist as they made a sweeping curve south and then east, approaching the range at its widest point, well south of Zarqa. Malien worked a set of concealed controls beneath the binnacle, then took the machine down as the sun set, cruising in the light of the stars, just above the treetops. It was eerie; everything was black and white and Tiaan found it difficult to measure distance. Trees and rocky peaks rushed at them out of nowhere.
