Chimaera (87 page)

‘We’ll have to rely on charged devices,’ said Luxor.

They exchanged glances. ‘And we both know how that’s going to end.’

Luxor ran out, shortly to return with six Aachim, four women and two men. They assembled in a circle around the miasmin and it grew a little.

Without warning the earth rumbled and went on rumbling. Masonry ground together and a crack began to snake across the open floor outside. Nish stood by the glass for a while, staring down at the Hornrace, which looked as though it was boiling.

Vithis’s door banged shut. Tirior and Luxor still had their arms in the air but the miasmin had shrunk almost to nothing.

‘We can’t hold it,’ gasped Tirior. ‘Sound the alarm.’

Someone lifted the glass bell jar, the miasmin was directed beneath and the bell jar clamped to its base.

‘The tower is empty, apart from those keeping Vithis’s watch,’ said Luxor.

‘Tell them to come down. It isn’t safe.’

‘They’re under his direct orders.’

‘Then send someone to find the lunatic!’ said Tirior. ‘I’ve had enough. I won’t see one more Aachim die in pursuit of this folly. If you’d supported me against him at the beginning –’

‘Not
now!
’ snapped Luxor.

‘Should I run outside?’ called Nish, looking anxiously at the roof.

‘The Span was built to resist the strongest earth tremblers,’ said Tirior.

‘But this isn’t an earth trembler,’ said Luxor. ‘It’s an attack directed at the Span itself.’

A grinding scream, so loud that it cobwebbed the glass of Vithis’s room, rose up the register. Concentric fractures formed in the ceilings outside, rapidly grew larger; then, with a roar even more deafening, the centre of the ceiling collapsed. Nish caught a momentary glimpse of something massive hurtling down and smashing through the slit above the Hornrace, before boiling dust blotted out the scene.

Pieces of stone crashed against the glass wall, which starred in dozens of places but did not break. The floor went up and down, throwing Nish off his feet. The miasmin shrank to a glowing point and vanished. Dust poured in under the door.

Nish lay on the floor, his sleeve over his eyes and nose, expecting the roof to fall on him, or the whole of the Span to collapse into the Hornrace, but after a minute or two the crashing and grinding ceased. Outside, the dust clouds slowly began to settle.

Tirior sat up, her hair grey with dust. She shoved the door open, having to push against heaped rubble.

The Span still stood, though the needle-shaped watch-tower that had once reared above it had fallen right through the building into the Hornrace, leaving a ragged hole where the slot had been. They crept across the gritty floor, which was littered with crumbled and shattered stone. Cracks radiated out from the hole.

‘Come this way,’ said Tirior.

Nish looked over the edge. The debris had formed a dam in the Hornrace, out of which the twisted spire from the top of the tower extended like a dead flower in a vase. Above, the roughly circular holes went up at least a dozen floors.

‘I always knew it was a folly,’ said Tirior, and led the way outside.

Nish followed. The episode also reminded him of the way Nennifer had been destroyed. And if the amplimet
had
woken again, what had it done to Tiaan and Malien?

M
alien was at the controller, Tiaan beside her with her chart as they cruised low across the emptiness. The Dry Sea unrolled before them, a featureless, lifeless land two thousand spans below the level of the Sea of Thurkad. Its bed was covered in an icing of crusted salt tens of spans in thickness, formed when the Sea of Perion dried up. The heat was unrelenting in daytime, despite the lateness of the season. No cloud marred the deep purple of the sky, darker than any sky Tiaan had seen before. Even the air was thicker down here. Each breath felt measurably heavier and the tang of salt dust was always in her nostrils.

Tiaan took a sip from her water bottle and settled back with her chart, glad to be away from Flydd and the field controller. Though she understood why he wanted it, it represented another escalation of a war that was already out of control. On the positive side, it was going to take at least two weeks to make a rough map of the fields and nodes of the Dry Sea. She was looking forward to the solitude.

Malien glanced back at the chart and set the lodestone in its brass bowl. ‘Is this heading all right?’

‘A little further east of north. I thought we might fly across the length of the Dry Sea in the direction of Taranta.’

Malien squinted into the white glare ahead, made the necessary adjustment to her course and closed her eyes. ‘We’ll have to make some slit goggles. I’d forgotten how bad the reflection off the salt was.’

After an hour or two Tiaan said, ‘Malien?’

‘Yes, Tiaan?’

‘Has something happened between you and Flydd? You don’t speak up in his councils anymore.’

‘I’ve begun to have reservations about what the Council is doing.’

She did not go on and Tiaan didn’t feel any need to question her. She simply gave silent thanks that she wasn’t the only one.

They worked in a companionable silence for the remainder of the day. As dusk approached, Malien looked for a place to camp. The seabed below them was featureless, apart from a ridge of broken salt in the distance. She set the thapter down on the crusted surface, which revealed not the slightest sign of life. A breeze blew strongly from the west and it was no longer warm.

‘It looks as if it could get cold here at night,’ said Tiaan, pulling on a coat.

‘It does. Let’s have a look behind the salt ridge. It’ll break the wind.’

She hovered across and they found a sheltered spot between iron-stained bergs of salt, their orange and yellow layers fretted by the wind into bizarre shapes. Tiaan hauled lumps of salt and hacked them into shape with a hatchet to make rude seats and a table.

‘We should fly east tomorrow and fill the racks with wood,’ said Malien. ‘We’ll need it.’

‘Have you been out here before?’

Malien seemed to find that amusing. ‘I’ve walked across the Dry Sea and back again, and survived it. Not many can say that.’

Tiaan couldn’t believe she’d asked such a stupid question. ‘Of course! You were in the
Tale of the Mirror
. After all the time I’ve known you it still doesn’t seem real, to be sitting here with you knowing that two hundred years ago you lived through a Great Tale.’

Malien sat on one of the seats and began peeling fruit and cutting it into a bowl. ‘It hardly seems real to me, after all this time. If only I’d known …’

‘What?’

‘No matter. The past creates the future, Tiaan. Every little thing we do shapes the way the future evolves, so I’m partly responsible for the way the world is now. We all are, those who took part in that tale and allowed the Forbidding to be broken.’

‘As am I for the things I’ve done,’ said Tiaan, slicing bread and cheese and laying them on a cloth. ‘But if we did nothing, surely we’d also be to blame for the state of the world.’ She filled a pot with water. ‘There. It’s ready.’

Malien placed her hands around the pot, closed her eyes and gave a little quiver. The air shimmered around her fingers. Steam rose from the pot, which began to bubble.

‘I’ll never get used to seeing you do that,’ said Tiaan, taking a good handful of dried chard from a packet and stirring it in.

‘I’d prefer not to do it at all. I hate using the Art for trivial purposes.’

‘We’ll get some wood tomorrow. A nice crackling fire will be cheery. Tea?’

‘Thank you.’

After dinner they settled back with another mug of chard each and their coats wrapped around them. It was already chilly and the temperature was falling by the minute.

‘I’ve also got reservations. I’m worried about what they’ll do with my map once it’s complete,’ said Tiaan.

‘If the field controller can be made to work, it may swing the balance,’ said Malien, ‘and then it’ll be tempting to wipe the enemy out.’

‘I hate the way people talk about them as though they’re vicious brutes,’ said Tiaan. ‘I’ve known lyrinx who were every bit as decent and honourable as the best of us.’

‘To survive such a war, each side must make their enemies into monsters.’

‘And if the war is won and the lyrinx eliminated, what then?’

‘If we have to commit atrocities to win, it’s almost as bad as losing. And how will the world be shaped afterwards?’

‘At least there won’t be any need for scrutators, telling everyone how to live their lives.’ Tiaan tossed the dregs of her chard onto the salt and stared moodily at the stain.

‘Those in power can always find excuses to retain it. Your mapping may give Flydd and Yggur the secret that mancers have been looking for since the Art was first discovered – the power to shape the world.’ Malien prised off a chunk of salt with her knife and began to pick the crystals apart. She tasted one and made a face. ‘If such power is used by the best of leaders, for the best of motives and the benefit of all, it could transform Santhenar.’

‘I don’t see why the world has to be reshaped,’ said Tiaan. ‘Besides, even the best of people can be wrong-sighted, and in time there’ll be as many evil leaders as saintly ones. As many fools as there are wise folk; as many stupid, greedy and grasping ones as there are altruistic.’

Malien began arranging her crystals in a circular wall, saying nothing.

‘Once that secret is uncovered,’ Tiaan went on, ‘greedy men will fight to get it for themselves. There’ll be another war, as far removed from what we’ve suffered as our war of clankers, constructs and flesh-formed creatures is from the petty wars of two hundred years ago. Whole forests have been consumed in the furnaces of our manufactories, a thousand rivers poisoned, and a million people have died brutal deaths. We’ve abandoned our culture and given up our freedom to try and win this war. What will we sacrifice next?’

‘Something to think about,’ said Malien, ‘before you hand over your completed node maps.’

‘But what am I to do about it?’ said Tiaan.

It was a long time before Malien answered. ‘I don’t know.’

The days passed quickly, even though the work had taken longer than expected. Now the mapping was complete but for a diagonal strip beginning east of the Foshorn and running north-east across the sea in the direction of Tar Gaarn and Havissard. They heard occasional news of the war via the farspeaker. The enemy were closing in on Ashmode but battle, if there was going to be any, was some time off. Malien tried to reply at the appointed times but the slave farspeaker did not seem to be sending.

They’d just begun the final strip, and were flying past an isolated pinnacle north-east of the Foshorn, when Malien said, ‘What’s that, there on top of the peak?’

Tiaan stood up to see. ‘It looks like a tower.’

‘I wasn’t aware that anything had ever been built out here.’ Malien turned the thapter towards it.

There were hundreds of peaks and pinnacles in the Dry Sea, remnants of ancient volcanoes. This one was small, not more than a hundred and fifty spans high. The sides were precipitous, which was unusual, and an arrangement of winches big enough to lift the largest construct projected over the cliff on the western side.

On the flat top of the peak was as strange a structure as Tiaan had ever seen. A series of nine red spheres, the largest more than twenty spans across, were set on a black spire like marshmallows on a skewer. The largest sphere enveloped the base of the tower; the smallest enclosed the top, some hundred and fifty spans above the ground. Five constructs stood at the base of the western cliffs, on the salt. As the thapter approached, a number of Aachim ran out of the spire and stood staring up at them.

‘I presume this isn’t the work of
your
people?’ Tiaan said.

‘They’re constructs, not thapters. It’s Vithis’s doing.’

‘What for?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Could it be a weapon directed against humanity?’

‘Why would he build one out here?’

‘To take advantage of a particular node?’

Tiaan mapped the node, which had an unusual field, made notes on the tower and its occupants, and they continued on their path.

Two days later they were completing the last segment of their diagonal, one that Tiaan had left until the way back because of its complexity. The thapter was passing back and forth over an area south-east of the peak of Katazza, which featured in several Great Tales. Here black rock had been thrust up along fissures and torn apart along enormous faults and fractures. The country was so rugged that it would have been difficult to walk across. Steam wisped from a myriad of cracks and vents coated with red and yellow salts, while here and there along a crested ridge the black rock oozed molten orange lava. The nodes were complex in this area, which extended in a band from the northern end of the Dry Sea towards the southern, before curving around towards the Hornrace.

‘We’ll have to go lower,’ said Tiaan. ‘I can’t tell what’s going on from up here.’

As Malien was flying along the molten centre of the ridge, the thapter jerked and the whine of the mechanism broke into a series of buzzes.