by Ian Irvine
‘Pull me up now! You’ll pay for this, you fools.’ Ghorr’s voice was perfectly clear this time.
They all looked up but Yggur’s mist had come in again and Nish could only see the cables disappearing into brown.
‘That’s Ghorr!’ said Irisis. ‘I’ll never forget that voice if I live to be a hundred. It echoes in my nightmares.’
‘What congress have you had with the chief scrutator?’ said Klarm.
‘Not the kind you’re thinking of,’ she snapped. ‘He beat me black and bloody in Nennifer, a dozen times at least.’
‘Ghorr beat you?’ Klarm said incredulously.
‘He was too clever to let it show, but after each visit I couldn’t stand up for a day, or sit down. He inflicted all manner of excruciations on me and enjoyed every moment of them.’
Klarm frowned. ‘I –’
The mist parted up above as if Yggur had blown it away and Nish saw the remaining air-dreadnoughts straining at their cables like party balloons in a gale. They were swinging back and forth in the wind, their multiple airbags bouncing against each other and the rigging in mortal danger of tangling. Their motions jerked the cables and rippled the deck, and sent the ropes of the hanging chairs and baskets swinging in wild arcs.
‘There’s Ghorr,’ said Irisis. ‘They’re finally pulling him up.’ The chief scrutator was swaying in the air halfway between his air-dreadnought and the deck.
‘I wonder what the matter is?’ said Nish. ‘They started hauling him up ages ago.’
‘Get on with it, you fools!’ screamed Ghorr, his face purple with rage.
‘The windlass has jammed,’ said Irisis, who had exceptionally keen eyes. ‘Or broken. Looks as if they’re trying to move his rope to a hand winch.’
‘Surely they’d have to lower him first,’ said Nish, whose artificer training had taught him that much. He tried to see across to where Flangers was cutting the other cable but mist still clung to the deck.
‘You’d think so,’ said Klarm. The rope dropped sharply, whereupon Ghorr screamed at the operators. ‘But … he’s afraid!’
‘Afraid?’ Nish glanced down at the dwarf scrutator. There was a strange light in his eye. Revelation? Could they sway Klarm in so little time?
‘The chief scrutator has failed in front of the witnesses he was trying to impress.’ Klarm shook his head in disgust. ‘This whole spectacle – the attack on Fiz Gorgo, this marvellous amphitheatre, the trial and punishment – was designed for one purpose. To impress the artists, recorders, tale-tellers and witnesses with Ghorr’s power, reach and implacable resolve to extinguish all opposition. But he overreached himself and the failure only reveals his folly.’
‘The air-dreadnoughts had to be close together to hold up the amphitheatre,’ said Nish.
‘Which shows what a vainglorious notion it was. The Council advised him against the scheme,’ Klarm said quietly. ‘I suggested a less extravagant trial, but Ghorr had spent too long planning this spectacle and would not be dissuaded.’
‘Why didn’t he take us back to Nennifer or Lybing, for public trial?’
‘I cannot say. I –’ Klarm broke off as something else occurred to him. ‘Can Ghorr have been afraid of Flydd?’
‘Perhaps he was,’ said Irisis.
‘And now he’s failed in front of his own witnesses,’ Nish added. ‘And he knows the penalty for failing the Council.’
‘Not to mention losing his carefully constructed place in the Histories,’ said Irisis.
‘There’s nothing he can do about that,’ said Klarm.
‘Unless …’ Nish looked Klarm in the eye and knew that he’d reached the same conclusion. ‘Unless Ghorr should be the only one of the Council to return.’
‘He wouldn’t go that far,’ Klarm said unconvincingly. ‘Ghorr is a man who knows his duty.’
‘All the witnesses would have to die as well,’ said Nish.
‘Just the artists and recorders,’ said Irisis. ‘His own people from Nennifer won’t dare talk.’
High above, Ghorr’s rope had been looped over the side of the air-dreadnought while the artificers unwound it from the partly dismantled windlass. They fed the slack onto a hand windlass, which spun under the load, tearing the handles out of the attendants’ grasp. Ghorr dropped a couple of spans before being brought up with a tooth-snapping jerk. He squealed in fright, then roared at his officers to take personal charge. A pair of burly captains hurled the attendants out of the way, took hold of the winch and began to wind furiously. Ghorr rose into the windy zone, where a gust sent him swinging through a long arc. He yelled at his officers, who wound harder, but he swung the other way into the path of three witnesses who were being lifted in a rope basket from the other end of the air-dreadnought.
‘Get out of the way!’ he shouted, but they could do nothing to avoid him. Ghorr smashed into the basket, his chair began to spin, came back the other way, and the basket and chair whirled around and around each other as their ropes spun together.
The chief scrutator tried to rotate his rope chair the other way but it wouldn’t go. The amphitheatre gave a convulsive heave that snapped the cables as taut as wires and pulled Ghorr’s air-dreadnought down by a good span and a half. Nish, Irisis and Klarm were thrown to the canvas.
‘It’s going,’ Ghorr cried. ‘Pull me up, then cut the cable.’
Nish picked himself up. Ghorr’s captains were trying to heave the twisted ropes apart but they wouldn’t budge.
‘Cut them loose!’ said Ghorr.
A shiver went through everyone on the air-dreadnought, as well as the witnesses crowded on the amphitheatre. The officer in charge of Ghorr’s air-dreadnought drew himself up. ‘Those are the recorders, Chief Scrutator,’ he called frostily.
‘And doing their duty to the end,’ Irisis said softly. ‘Look, the blonde one is writing her record even now.’
Ghorr’s reply could not be heard, though his stance said it all. There would be a penalty for that defiance. He threw his cloak off, followed by the securing rope harness, and climbed onto the sides of his rope chair, which swayed dangerously back and forth.
‘What’s he doing?’ said Nish.
‘He’s trying to untangle it himself,’ said Scrutator Klarm. ‘It can’t be done one-handed. He’ll fall.’
Ghorr stood up, hooking his injured arm around the rope with a gasp of pain, and reached up.
‘He’ll never get enough leverage,’ said Klarm. ‘Not on a moving chair.’
The wind was whistling through the rigging of the air-dreadnoughts, whose sides were crowded with staring people. The witnesses on the amphitheatre deck were equally silent and still.
The twisted ropes, with their human cargo, began to swing like a pendulum. It had grown very cold. Ghorr reached up, again and again, and his hand went back and forth. He wasn’t trying to free the ropes – he was sawing at the rope holding up the recorder’s basket.
The recorders realised it at the same moment but none of the women screamed or pleaded. They stood up, holding their scrolls with simple dignity, and kept writing.
‘There’s an image that will live in the Histories after we’re gone,’ said Irisis soberly.
Their end wasn’t long in coming. The ends sprang out of their rope, which began to untwist under the weight, before pulling free.
‘If they hit the deck they may still survive,’ said Irisis hopefully.
Nobody contradicted her, though Nish knew that such a fall, a good thirty spans, must kill them. The basket fell, the three women still standing and recording all the way down. It plunged through the mist, hit hard near the edge of the amphitheatre, the women crumpled into a mess; then basket, rope and contents went over the side.
‘Up!’ said Ghorr in a hollow voice, sliding back into his chair and fastening the ropes about him.
The crew of his air-dreadnought did not move.
‘Up, damn you, or you’ll all taste a scrutator’s quisitory.’
They remained as silent
and still as the figures on a painted jug. The crew must have been as shocked as those on the deck.
‘He crossed the line,’ said Irisis. ‘He’s finished.’
‘Not if he reaches his craft before the other scrutators do theirs.’
Klarm turned a strained face to them. ‘I’ve served Ghorr for many years, and he would not go against the best interests of the Council. It’s all that’s kept us alive, the past dark decade.’ He didn’t sound as though he believed it any longer.
‘His actions give the lie to that argument,’ said Nish.
‘The chief scrutator knows much that we do not. He always has the interests of the world at heart. He must have had a reason. He must…’ Klarm closed his eyes as if in pain.
The mist on the amphitheatre was almost gone now, revealing five suspended baskets and another eight nets bursting with people, crammed together like fish in a trawl net. All hung in mid-air while the shocked winch-hands waited to see what was going to happen.
Nish noticed a hanging chair moving slowly, almost furtively, up behind one of the nets.
‘Is that Scrutator Fusshte?’ Nish squinted at the meagre, dark-clad figure in the chair.
‘It is.’ Irisis shuddered. ‘Hello?’
Ghorr was jerked down, then up. He stood up in his chair, cloak trailing in the strengthening wind, and began shouting up to his air-dreadnought. He pointed at Fusshte.
‘What’s he saying?’ said Nish.
‘I can’t make it out,’ Irisis replied.
‘He’s called Fusshte a traitor,’ said Klarm. Then, as if he could not believe what he was hearing, ‘Ghorr has ordered his men to shoot him.’ He knuckled his eyes with his big hands and stared up at the drama, disbelievingly. ‘Oh, oh, oh!’
‘Ghorr knows what will happen to him if Fusshte takes over,’ said Irisis. ‘And surely Fusshte must take over, now.’
‘It doesn’t do to predict the will or the ways of the Council,’ Klarm rasped.
Fusshte signalled to his people to stop lifting. He stood up in his hanging chair and bared his meagre chest, offering himself as a target to any soldier who dared shoot down a member of the Council. Looking up to the soldiers in his air-dreadnought, Fusshte held out his arms, as though addressing them in the speech of his life.
‘He looks so calm; so measured,’ said Irisis. ‘The loathsome little worm.’
‘But not a coward,’ said Klarm. ‘The prize is within his reach and he’s risen above himself to grasp it. Any one of Ghorr’s loyal guard might well shoot him down, and Fusshte knows it. Yet he dares to defy his chief. He risks all to gain all.’
‘To be chief scrutator when Ghorr falls,’ said Nish.
‘Aye. Fusshte has always wanted that. He’s served as a loyal deputy for a decade, and even now he won’t cut down his chief, or repudiate him. He simply offers the contrast to the Council and the witnesses, and allows them to make their own choice. Sometimes a champion will fail at the highest hurdle while the underdog rises to it. Fusshte, it seems, is such a man.’
‘Yet a worm nonetheless,’ said Irisis, ‘and no more worthy of the honour than Ghorr, for all Fusshte’s courage. What’s going to happen now?’
No one fired. Ghorr’s men began hauling him up, furiously. Fusshte closed his shirt and sat down while his attendants did the same, as if it were a race and whichever of them reached their craft first would win the Council as well as the day. Nets fell from the air-dreadnoughts and the remaining soldiers and witnesses fought to get into them.
‘You’d better get to your work, if you have a plan to save yourselves,’ said Klarm. ‘The instant those nets lift off, they’ll cut the cables from above.’
Nish slashed his blade across the cable, again and again. A few more strands gave but that was all. The fibres were so resistant they must have been ensorcelled.
‘And risk taking half the baskets with them?’ said Irisis.
‘If the amphitheatre collapses while the air-dreadnoughts are still cabled to it, there’ll be a conflagration not seen since the enemy burnt the naphtha stores of Runcimad,’ said Klarm.
‘You’d better run, Scrutator Klarm,’ said Irisis. ‘If you’re going …’
Klarm turned to her, his handsome face troubled. ‘You cannot imagine how hard it was for one like me to rise to scrutator. When you’re only the height of a child, your peers cannot take you seriously. I strove harder than anyone to become scrutator, and now I wonder why. Flydd was right. The Council is corrupt; I can serve it no longer.’
‘What will you do?’ panted Nish, hacking furiously but fruitlessly.
‘I don’t know. Give me that.’
Nish handed him the sword at once. Despite his words, Klarm did have a natural authority that was hard to resist.
‘The cables were strengthened with scrutator magic at the beginning,’ said Klarm. ‘That’s why they resisted the fire for so long. Check your straps.’
They did so. He drew the blade back over his shoulder, sighted on Nish’s meagre gash and swung the blade with all his strength, muttering words under his breath as he did.
The blade went a third of the way into the cable. He wrenched it out and swung it again. It passed the halfway point this time, the cut strands unravelling and spiralling up the cable for at least a span, and with a groan the remaining strands stretched and snapped.
The cable lashed up; the deck whipped away from beneath their feet. Nish was thrown down, crashing hard into Irisis. Klarm went up in the air and Nish thought he was going to go over the side, for the scrutator wasn’t tethered.
Klarm fell near the edge. Nish caught him by the hand and the dwarf’s grip crushed his fingers. The deck snapped back, the precipice beneath them reverting to a gentle slope.
‘One more cable should do it,’ said Klarm. ‘Run! They’re getting ready to cut us free.’
The slack on the baskets and nets was slowly being taken up, for the weight of people in them was immense, but the air-dreadnoughts weren’t planning to wait for them to be lifted all the way. Already burly men stood by the cable capstans, each with a great two-bladed axe over his shoulder, just waiting for the word.
Most of the mancers, officers of the guard, and the most important artisans and artificers had been saved. Many more were now being lifted to their craft. Almost two hundred witnesses remained on the deck, however, and for them there was no way of escape. The nets and baskets would not be lowered again. The air-dreadnoughts had to be cut free before the amphitheatre collapsed, and those remaining would be sacrificed to save the rest.
Flame licked spans up another cable – Yggur must have used the last of the naphtha on it. Half a dozen witnesses attempted to climb the life ropes, but all fell to their deaths as the ropes were plucked like gigantic strings, or were cut loose by those on the air-dreadnoughts. A gaggle of witnesses, knowing they were going to die, ran back and forth, screaming or wailing. The remainder simply stood where they were, staring up, out or down.
‘Kill the prisoners!’ Ghorr yelled as he was lifted into his air-dreadnought, but the last soldiers on the deck, knowing they had been abandoned, were concerned only for their own survival.
Nish and Irisis raced to the next cable, Klarm close behind. They fastened their safety ropes. Klarm buried the blade deep into the cable.
‘Again,’ cried Irisis. ‘They’re cutting.’
Klarm laid a hand on the cable, spoke words of scrutator magic to unbind the spell and gave the cable three mighty blows. It was now under such tension that the blade made little impression. He hacked again then tossed the blade to Nish.
‘Have a go. I’m spent.’
Someone was shouting at them. It sounded like Yggur but Nish, chopping furiously, had neither the time nor breath to work out what he was saying.
Hack, hack, hack. ‘It’s nearly through!’ Nish said.
‘If this works,’ said Irisis, ‘the deck will fold in that way.’ She pointed. ‘We won’t have much time.’
Nish hacked agai
n. The cable seemed as tough as ever.
‘Come on, come on!’ said Irisis.
Nish gave up his chopping, which didn’t seem to be doing much good, and sawed the blade back and forth, the fibres pinging apart as he worked.
‘It’s going,’ said Irisis. ‘Get ready!’
Nish gave a final hack and the cable tore apart. The deck pulled inwards, Irisis yelled, ‘Jump!’ but the deck went from under Nish, who found himself flying over the edge on the end of his safety line.
He was hurtling through the air on the wrong side of the deck. Up above, the soldiers were chopping furiously, coordinating their strokes so as to sever each of the cables at the same time. Nish jerked to a stop in mid-air, then tried to pull himself up the swinging strip of canvas, but it was hard to hold on. He would never get there before they cut loose the amphitheatre.
Klarm came over the side, hanging onto the rim of the canvas with one immensely strong hand. Reaching down with the other he gathered in Nish’s safety line, jerked it up, up, up until Nish was within reach, then dragged him over the edge.
‘Go!’ he grunted as he slashed Nish’s tether.
Nish threw himself into the U-shaped canvas valley that now ran down towards the slab-covered roofs of Fiz Gorgo. He couldn’t tell if Klarm had followed, though Nish did see the soldiers hack through the last supporting cables, one, two, three, four, five, and then six. Only two to go.
And as he gathered speed and the cables fell towards him, Nish saw something else. A tarpaulin covering a net hanging below the keel of Ghorr’s air-dreadnought had slipped, exposing a curve of dark metal. It was the thapter.
Ghorr had it and Tiaan, as well as Malien and, presumably, the amplimet.
He’d won after all.
ELEVEN
The lucky ones who had made it to the hanging chairs, baskets and nets were being drawn up towards the air-dreadnoughts, swinging back and forth, crashing into one another and, where they could, fending each other off to avoid their ropes tangling. They were not always successful. A pair of nets became hopelessly tangled and, despite the screams of the occupants, the smaller was cut loose. It had to be, for the nets were attached to different air-dreadnoughts and threatened them both. Incredibly, the small net did not pull free but hung upside down from the larger net as the air-dreadnought rose to safety.
