by Ian Irvine
‘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 loo
king 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.’
