by Ian Irvine
After about a fortnight in the caves, the lyrinx abruptly departed late one afternoon. Nish was carried up to the top of the cliffs, where Ryll and a large band of lyrinx had gathered. Ryll carried the barrel-shaped object on his back, securely covered. Liett was there too. He gave it to her and she flew north-east with a large escort.
‘We’re marching to meet our fellows at the edge of the Dry Sea,’ said Ryll. ‘I trust you’re well shod, Nish? You humans have such useless soft feet.’
‘What are you going to do with me?’ said Nish.
‘We may exchange you, and other prisoners held elsewhere, if we get our relics back.’
‘What if you don’t?’
Ryll made neck-wringing motions with his huge hands.
Nish’s boots were in good condition, though he wasn’t much used to walking. His recent travels had been in thapters, air-floaters, constructs or clankers. The group set off at a pace he could barely maintain and, after an hour, when his legs had turned to rubber, he was taken on the shoulders of one or other of the lyrinx. It was not a position he found comfortable or dignified. They walked all night and until mid-morning the following day, and did the same every day.
The only rest they took was for the six hours in the middle of the day and, while he was carried for all but a few hours of the march, Nish was never anything but exhausted. However, the trip proved uneventful, and although he remained alert for opportunities to escape, they gave him none.
One day they were moving across a broad valley where the river was just a series of long pools up to a league in length, separated by gravel banks covered in tall reeds. Ryll and most of the lyrinx had crossed the gravel and Nish was stumbling along at the rear, with only a single lyrinx to guard him.
Without warning, a battered construct shot out of the reeds in front of them. Another construct pushed out behind and Nish heard a third moving in their direction, though he couldn’t tell where it was. The guard, taken by surprise, darted into the reeds to his right. Nish went left and hid.
He heard the sound of a construct as it pursued the rest of the lyrinx across the river. Nish crouched down and did not move, hoping that the Aachim had not noticed him dart into the reeds, but unfortunately the other two constructs remained where they were. He could hear the gentle whine of their mechanisms now, and Aachim calling to one another in their own tongue. They began to tramp through the reeds and he debated whether it was better to remain where he was or to run. He stayed.
It wouldn’t have made any difference, for they converged on him from two sides – a thickset man with flashes of white at the temples, a dark-skinned woman with a badly scarred right arm. He recognised the woman’s face, though not her name. He had seen her at some stage in his captivity a year and a half ago.
She recognised him too. ‘Cryl-Nish Hlar!’ she exclaimed. ‘What were you doing with those lyrinx?’
‘I was a hostage.’
‘Lucky we were patrolling well outside our borders. Come, you look as though you could do with a ride. And Vithis will be pleased to see you, of course.’
‘Of course,’ Nish echoed. He could well imagine it.
The three constructs headed directly to the Hornrace, hardly stopping night and day, though it seemed to take a couple of days to get there. Nish could not be sure because he slept most of the time. In his waking moments, he wondered what the Aachim wanted of him. Information, no doubt. Nish was not sure that Vithis was much of an improvement on Ryll.
He woke before dawn of the second night of travel, sated with sleep, and went up the ladder. The woman with the scarred arm was at the controls but seemed disinclined to talk. Nish pulled himself up onto the top and sat with his legs dangling down the hatch, enjoying the cool breeze on his face and the sweetish, musky perfume of the little trumpet-shaped desert flowers that only opened at night.
The construct climbed up from a small depression and, straight ahead, he saw three lights in a line, one above the other. The highest was a good hand-span above the starry horizon. After an hour they did not seem appreciably closer.
‘What are the lights?’ he said.
‘Vithis’s watch-tower.’ She absently stroked the writhen scars on her forearm.
‘It must be a tall one.’
She didn’t bother to answer. Shortly dawn broke and the shimmering heat haze obscured the land ahead. Nish couldn’t see any sign of a tower.
In the mid-morning it suddenly sprang up out of nowhere and the tower was so high that it could be seen across the arid plain an hour before they reached it. It was a needle of stone floating on a mirage which only dissolved when they were a couple of leagues away. Now the true enormity of the structure Vithis had built there was revealed, a vast rectangle of stone, hundreds of spans high, with stepped cubes forming a pyramid above that. The spire-topped needle tower rose from its top, suspended on five slender, arching wings.
Nish first heard the whisper of the Hornrace, an ocean flowing into an empty sea, shortly after that, and it grew ever louder. By the time the construct drew up at the foot of the building the music of the water had become a monumental roaring and crashing, so loud that it was difficult to talk over it. The building arched right across the Hornrace and was called simply the Span.
Ahead lay a door wide enough to admit the three constructs side by side. They whined into the bowels of the structure down a spiral path cut into stone, then stopped. Nish was led up a series of stairs whose sweeping shape was vaguely reminiscent of those in Tirthrax.
They emerged on an open floor paved with pale sandstone. The space was filled with the rush of flowing water. Nish was escorted across to the middle, where a slot in the floor wide enough to have engulfed a construct, though ten times as long, emitted wisps of vapour. He looked down and his head exploded with vertigo. He was directly above the Hornrace.
Nish felt himself leaning forward, almost as if he wanted to fall. The escort’s fingers clamped onto his left biceps.
‘The lure of the depths is powerful, but Vithis would be vexed if I allowed you to escape him that way.’
Nish took another glance at the torrent and shuddered. The roar was muted here, compared to outside. They went left, up a whirling stair into a perfectly circular room with glass walls that looked out on the Dry Sea, as well as down to the race and up to the stars. Vithis stood at the side, looking away. He did not turn as Nish entered, though Nish knew the Aachim was aware of him.
‘You’ve come to gloat!’ Time had only honed the bitter edge to his voice.
‘It was not my wish to come at all,’ Nish said.
Vithis turned. It was more than a year since Nish had last seen him, but he looked decades older. His hair was white, his face etched with such grief that Nish could hardly bear to look at him. Though Vithis had not treated him kindly and was a cold, unlikable man, Nish was moved by his suffering.
‘Clan Inthis is lost. After all this time, I’ve heard no more than whispers on the ethyr.’ Vithis spoke slowly, each word measured out as before, but he seemed a lesser figure than the man Nish had known.
‘Do you mean,’ said Nish, bemused, ‘that you built all this just to search for your lost clan?’
‘Why else would I have built it?’ said Vithis.
‘We thought … at least …’
‘Go on. What did your friends Flydd and Yggur and treacherous Malien think?’
‘After you went north so suddenly, after the battle of Snizort,’ Nish said haltingly, ‘it was thought that you’d made a pact with our enemy.’
‘I don’t ally with savages.’
Hadn’t Vithis threatened to do just that in the early days? Nish could no longer remember all the twists and turns of the war.
‘I left because Tiaan had destroyed Minis, my last hope,’ Vithis went on, speaking so slowly that each word was like the grinding of an enormous mill.
‘Is Minis dead?’
‘What do you care for Minis?’
‘I liked him,’ said Nish softly
. ‘We were … friends.’ Insofar as such a weak, flawed man as Minis could make friends.
‘Minis is dead to me,’ Vithis said dismissively. ‘He’s not a whole man any more.’
‘So that’s why you abandoned all plans for conquest and retreated here,’ said Nish. ‘With Minis disabled, the only way to restore your clan was to find the ones lost in the gate.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought that needed to be stated.’
‘It does to us, surr. Humanity reads everything through the lens of our unending war. When you began to build this great tower, at such a powerful node … everyone … that is, Scrutator Flydd, believed that you were making a great weapon of war to strike down our army at a single blow.’
‘What small minds you old humans have – I care nothing for your petty wars. This tower has one purpose and only one. It is a beacon, beaming through the limitless void, to tell my lost people that I’m searching for them. Its signal is so powerful that, if they can impress their cry for help upon it and bounce it back, I’ll be able to find them. And once I do, I’ll come for them if I have to tear the very void asunder.’
‘You say “I”,’ said Nish. ‘Is this the will of all your people?’
‘Of course,’ Vithis said. ‘They voted me leader. Don’t think to come between us, Cryl-Nish Hlar.’
‘I wasn’t. How do you know First Clan is out there?’
‘Tiaan,’ the name dripped like venom from his tongue, ‘heard their cries and their lost wailing after the gate was opened. Later still, I too heard cries for help. Just twice, a long time ago, but I knew they were out there.’
‘How will you get them back?’
‘Another tower in another place will create the greatest gate that has ever been built.’
‘But if you make a gate into the void,’ said Nish carefully, knowing Vithis’s rages of old, ‘don’t you risk more void creatures coming through? That’s how the lyrinx got here in the first place.’
‘There’s nothing I won’t do to get Inthis First Clan back.’
SIXTY-FOUR
Vithis questioned Nish about Flydd and Yggur’s plans, in much the same way as the lyrinx had done, though he displayed little interest in Nish’s answers. Vithis no longer feared the lyrinx and could not have cared less about the fate of humanity. First Clan was the only thing on his mind.
Nish was given a room with a window that looked south across the arid plains of Narkindie, and allowed to roam at will through the tower, so little did they fear him, though he was not permitted to go outside. After wandering on the first day he kept to the one floor, for the tower had been thrown up so quickly that it looked the same everywhere.
A few days later, he was eating black bread and spicy pickled fish in the open dining chamber when he heard the click of someone walking with a pair of crutches.
‘Hello, Nish.’
The voice was Minis’s, though the face was that of a stranger. Minis had aged more brutally than his foster-father. He was no longer an impossibly handsome young man, but one who’d been cast prematurely into a tormented middle age. The once smooth cheeks were now weathered like a desert hermit’s and creased with vertical pain lines to either side of his mouth. He walked with an awkward twist of the hips and, though he wore robes, the stump of his right leg, amputated at mid-thigh, was clearly visible.
Nish rose abruptly, unable to keep the shock off his face. Minis faltered, then came on, forcing a smile.
‘How are you, Minis?’ Nish held out his hand and the Aachim’s first finger and thumb wrapped right around it. The other fingers were gone.
The smile vanished. ‘Even less a man than when last we met,’ Minis said bitterly. ‘And no man at all to Foster-father.’
‘But …’ Nish found his eyes drawn down to Minis’s groin, then had to look away. He had no idea what to say.
‘It’s not that. Though my pelvis was smashed, in the vital respect I’m still whole. But to Vithis a maimed man is no man at all. He’s given up on me and thrown everything into this insane search for First Clan. They’re dead and gone but he can’t see it – or won’t. I think he’s going out of his mind.’
‘What do the other clans think?’ asked Nish.
‘The same, but discord would be fatal on this alien world so they’ve allowed him his way, for the time being.’
‘Well, if he’s given up on you,’ said Nish carefully, for he’d had dealings with Minis before and knew how erratic he could be, ‘you’re free at last.’
‘Free for what? What can I do like this? First Clan is extinct and no other clan would take in a maimed man. I have no future, Nish.’
‘Perhaps, outside …’ Nish began, only because he had to say something.
‘Within days I would feed the lyrinx and, though I’ve nothing to live for, I cling to the rags of the life I have.’
‘In time, Vithis may –’
‘He’ll never forgive me for calling across the void to Tiaan, or for her answering my call. He would sooner we’d all died in Aachan’s volcanic fires than end up clanless on this accursed world. Neither has he forgiven me for instructing Tiaan in the making of the gate, because it went wrong.
‘But most criminally of all, I allowed Tiaan to escape, causing many deaths, my own maiming and Foster-father’s humiliation. She took the secret of flying constructs with her, which everyone now has but us, and not even our brethren at Stassor will reveal it to us. It was my own fault – Tiaan feared for her life and begged me to help her escape. I promised to do so and yet …’ His eyes met Nish’s and Minis flushed a ruddy brown. ‘And yet, when it came down to it, I couldn’t find the courage to defy Foster-father and betray our people. I did nothing and so, by default, betrayed the woman I love. This is my punishment. I am bile in Foster-father’s mouth. And in my own, it need not be said.’
Nish had to look away to hide his contempt. Minis’s dilemma had been a wrenching one, but Nish would have felt more respect for the man if he’d turned Tiaan in. At least he’d have made a choice, instead of doing nothing and whining about his regrets afterwards.
‘Had it not been for you,’ Nish said, to try to salvage something, ‘none of your people would ever have reached Santhenar. The Aachim would be extinct on your home world. You saved them.’
‘Foster-father does not count that to my advantage.’ Minis clicked away, turned, then said suddenly, ‘Have you seen Tiaan lately?’
‘Not for some time, though we’ve had many adventures together in the past year. We’ve become friends, and I’m as surprised to be saying it as you must be to hear it.’
‘I’m not surprised at all,’ said Minis, and for the first time there was a spark of life in his eyes as he turned back to Nish. ‘How did it come about? Tell me everything.’
Nish related his story from the time he’d last been with Minis, during their escape from burning Snizort, and how Tiaan had saved his life on more than one occasion.
‘She’s a wonderful woman,’ Minis sighed. ‘Tell me, does she have many lovers? I suppose she must.’
Nish resented the question and felt disloyal for answering it, though he did, curtly. ‘As Tiaan is my friend, I wish you hadn’t asked. But since you were … are also my friend, I’ll do you the courtesy of an answer. As far as I know, she has no lovers at all.’
‘Ah.’ Minis looked away. ‘Do you think there’s any chance for a maimed man like me?’
Another question Nish didn’t want to answer. ‘Minis, how can I tell what is in Tiaan’s mind? She keeps her feelings to herself.’
‘Please, Nish. In your heart, do you feel she might ever consider me?’ Minis’s shiny eyes were on him, hope warring with dread.
Nish delayed his response for as long as he could. ‘In all honesty, Minis …’ He searched his former friend’s face. What would be worse: to lie or to tell the truth? It had to be the truth, and in terms Minis couldn’t possibly misunderstand. ‘If she loved you, it wouldn’t matter that you are maimed. But you betrayed her and that
must have killed her feelings for you. I’m sorry. I wish you hadn’t asked.’
Minis turned away, trying to compose his ravaged features. ‘I – I suspected as much. Thank you for telling me. In some respects it makes my choice easier.’
Nish didn’t ask what choice. He didn’t want to know. He just wanted to get away and never see Minis again. They talked about other matters until the conversation petered out. Minis was returning to his work when the floor shook and there came a rumbling from below.
‘What was that?’ said Nish.
‘The earth trembles here from time to time. We often felt it, when we were putting down the foundations.’
Two Aachim, deep in conversation on a bench across the room, also came to their feet but soon sat down again. Minis stood at the misty slot in the floor, looking down at the Hornrace for a drawn-out moment, before nodding curtly and stumping away on his crutches.
The afternoon dragged, as did the night. Nish was used to being busy all his waking hours but there was nothing to do here. He cadged some paper and spent the following day writing down his experiences with the lyrinx, and all the questions Ryll had asked him. Later he recorded Vithis’s interrogation, just in case he escaped.
To ease the boredom, Nish began to do a sketch of the building, or at least the floors he’d been on, but soon put it away. His rudimentary drawing skills could not do the tower’s wonders justice. He returned to the slot over the Hornrace again and again, staring down at the racing water and marvelling at the power of nature, which could reduce such a staggering work as the Span to insignificance.
Again there came that little shudder, but this time the water, hundreds of spans below, cusped up for an instant before the torrent flattened it out again. Three Aachim walking by stopped to remark upon the tremor, which struck Nish as odd if they occurred all the time.
