Chimaera (28 page)

‘Where do they get their food from?’

‘It used to be brought in, at fabulous expense, on great supply caravans that could only move for eight months of the year, though most now comes in on air-floaters. And their indentured peasants grow what crops they may in the valley bottoms, where there’s soil and water – turnips and other charming delicacies. Do you want to share a tent tonight?’

‘It’s a bit cold for camping, isn’t it?’

‘Better the cold than being cooped up in the thapter for another night. What with all the snoring, the whispering and Flydd’s nightmares, I’ve hardly slept a wink since we left. I like to sleep alone.’

‘If I was in your tent you wouldn’t be alone,’ said Nish.

‘You don’t count. If you dared to snore I’d thump you in the ear.’

He smiled. It seemed they were friends again. ‘With an invitation like that, how could I refuse?’

Two days later they were flying between the peaks of the northern Great Mountains. Not even the thapter could rise high enough to pass over them, and the air would have been too thin to breathe anyway. The barren valleys below were filled with concealing cloud. Though they were now close to Nennifer, Malien felt confident that they would not be seen. Most of the game animals had long since been killed for the scrutators’ tables, so she didn’t expect to encounter even a solitary hunter.

Flydd still hadn’t said a word, but at every stop he went further and further, driving himself relentlessly, though his characteristic crab-like scuttle had been replaced by a stiff-legged, twisting dance, the oddest walk Nish had ever seen. He supposed the healing skin, replaced by the healers’ Art, had pulled taut and was troubling him.

Malien called down the hatch to Yggur and Klarm, who came up. ‘We’re within four or five leagues. Dare we go closer?’

‘I think not,’ said Klarm after a brief glance at the forbidding mountainside passing by. ‘Set down wherever you can find a safe place.’

Malien curved around in a circle, signalling her intentions back to a fur-shrouded Inouye, before heading for a relatively bare, relatively flat patch on the rock-littered slope. The thapter settled, gravel grating underneath. Ten spans back the dirigible came to ground silently.

Irisis opened the upper hatch and gasped at the frigid blast that swept in. Nish pulled his fur-lined coat more tightly around him, the earmuffs down over his ears, and climbed out. As soon as his boot touched the ground he felt a pang of unease, but dismissed it. How could he feel otherwise, so close to Nennifer?

He had never been anywhere like this place. The surface was utterly barren, just shattered rock and grey gravel and grit as far as his eye could see. He saw no living thing: no birds in the sky, no animals on the horizon, no plants anywhere. There weren’t even lichens on the rocks.

‘What a wasteland!’ Nish said to Irisis, who had walked away a few steps and was nudging stones over with the toe of her boot. There was nothing underneath them either.

‘The perfect place for the arid souls of the scrutators,’ she said.

‘Shh!’ Nish gave her a meaningful glance.

Klarm stood behind her, his bowed legs braced against the wind. He’d had the calipers removed before they left Fiz Gorgo, though he still put his foot to the ground gingerly. ‘Take no mind of me,’ he said. ‘I always hated Nennifer and was never more glad than to see the back of it. And –’

‘What?’ said Nish.

‘To me, the choice of location was not suggestive of unparalleled strength and supreme majesty, as the Council would have it. It indicated a deep-seated insecurity and I always wondered …’

Again he trailed off, as if he scarcely dared to speak what he was thinking – a survival strategy, surely. Ghorr had not encouraged people to speak their minds, and that included the host of lesser scrutators who weren’t members of the Council.

‘What did you wonder?’ said Yggur, coming up beside the dwarf and turning his back to the wind.

‘What the Council is most afraid of,’ said Klarm. ‘It isn’t the lyrinx, for all that we’re losing the war. And certainly not their own people, thoroughly cowed after a century of the scrutators’ iron rule.’

Nish and Irisis exchanged glances but neither said anything. It wasn’t their place.

The wind gusted up, howling around the thapter and lifting the tethered dirigible a span into the air. They ran and held it down with their weight, and the effort of running those few steps left them breathless.

‘We can talk about that later,’ said Yggur. ‘Get the dirigible tied down before it blows away.’

‘There’s nothing to tie it to,’ said Nish. ‘You can’t drive a stake into this grit.’

‘Then it’ll have to be anchored to rock. Is something the matter, Malien?’

She had her hands over her eyes and was walking back and forth, taking tiny, sliding steps that rasped across the surface. Her head was bowed. She continued for another ten steps, rotated slowly on the ball of her right foot and came rasping back.

‘Malien?’ Yggur said sharply.

‘I’m not sure about this place.’

‘This campsite?’

‘No, Nennifer itself. I’m sensing a strain on the node.’

‘You’ll have to explain,’ said Yggur. ’Your Art and mine are totally different, remember?

‘I learned to be sensitive to such things,’ said Malien, speaking breathlessly, ‘while guarding the Well of Echoes in Tirthrax against the amplimet.’

‘Is the amplimet doing something to the node?’

‘No … At least I don’t think so. I feel that the amplimet has been
contained
, yet the node is under strain … like a ball of rubber squeezed between the heels of one’s hands.’

‘Irisis,’ said Yggur, ‘would you take your pliance and tell me what the field is like here?’

She withdrew it from between her breasts and squeezed it in her right hand. ‘It’s incredibly strong,’ said Irisis. ‘I can almost see it.
With my eyes
, I mean. I’ve never experienced such intensity.’

‘We’re close to one of the greatest nodes in the world,’ said Klarm. ‘Another reason why the Council chose to build Nennifer here.’

Nish was still feeling uneasy. He closed his eyes and a shimmering silver loop drifted across his inner vision. He tried to focus on it but it eluded him and disappeared.

‘The fields have been drawn right down,’ said Irisis. ‘They weren’t like this when I was here before. It’s as if the node is being sucked dry …’ She gave a spasmodic jerk. ‘Aah!’

Nish saw, or felt, a bright flash of blue; his eyes sprang open.

‘What is it?’ said Yggur.

‘It flared up,’ said Irisis shakily. ‘So strongly that I couldn’t keep it out. But now it’s died again.’

‘Can it be the node?’ said Yggur. ‘Is it bound to explode?’

‘No – it doesn’t feel like the time we went into Snizort.’

‘It’s not the node,’ said Flydd, lurching up behind them. He was staring over the edge of the mountain. ‘It’s nothing like that time …’

Everyone stared at him. ‘You spoke!’ said Irisis, her eyes lighting up. ‘Xervish … surr, you’re better!’

‘Am I, Crafter?’ He turned his eyes to her and they were as bleak as chips of stone. ‘I’m glad you think so.’

She quailed, and that did not happen often. ‘I – I –’

He turned away as if she wasn’t there and Nish saw the hurt, quickly veiled, in her eyes.

‘Then what’s going on?’ said Nish, memories of that dark time in Snizort rising up to choke him. ‘Why would the scrutators be using so much power?’

‘I think …’ Flydd seemed to be straining hard to see the unseeable. He bared his teeth. ‘They’re probing the amplimet, I’d say, hoping to master it and gain undreamed-of power. And there may also be a power struggle between the scrutators. Not a battle, but certainly intrigues and undermining of each other.’

‘But the chief scrutator –’

‘Ghorr was a thug and a bully –’ said Flydd. He broke off, rigid with rage, and had to force himself to calm down. ‘But he was also a natural leader, and he knew how to use the authority of the chief scrutator. So, despite his failures, he was unchallenged until the end. Fusshte has neither charisma nor natural authority. He repulses people and can only maintain power through terror.’

‘He’s capable of it,’ said Klarm, with an involuntary and uncharacteristic shudder.

‘The Council won’t vote Fusshte as their chief, for he doesn’t have the strength to dominate them. He may have seized the position after Ghorr’s death but, safely back in Nennifer, every scrutator will question his legitimacy. And after the fiasco at Fiz Gorgo, every ruler on Santhenar must be querying the fitness of the scrutators to rule the world.’

‘Will they rise up to overthrow the Council?’

‘Not yet,’ said Flydd. His eyes met Nish’s for a moment, though without any sign of warmth or fellow-feeling. ‘For a hundred years the scrutators have cut down every mancer, army officer, governor and provincial leader who showed signs of personal ambition. Subservience to their rule has been a prerequisite for survival and no one in Nennifer would have the initiative to mount a coup. But if the struggle isn’t resolved quickly, rebellion becomes a certainty, and that would be worse than having Fusshte as chief scrutator. Once authority is lost at the centre, the outskirts will swiftly fall.’

After the dirigible had been fastened to steel pegs driven into rock, Yggur sent two soldiers to look over the other sides of the ridge and report back. They soon returned, reporting that nothing could be seen but the same dismal vista in all directions. He set out sentries, relatively close to the thapter for their safety in case a blizzard swept in, and everyone else went below for dinner, after which they sat down to plan the attack.

‘Nennifer has but two entrances, front and rear, and each will be strongly guarded,’ said Flydd, who was sitting on the bench with a folded fur coat under his backside, though he still winced every time he shifted his weight. ‘They had a thousand troops here previously, of which Ghorr took four hundred to Fiz Gorgo. We think about a hundred returned, so they must still have seven hundred.’

Irisis studied him surreptitiously. Despite Evee’s claims, Flydd was just a grim husk of his former self. Every time she tried to speak to him the barriers went up, which hurt after all they’d been through together. But it wasn’t just her – he kept everyone at bay. Flydd was a driven man and the only thing keeping him going was his lust to smash the Council and grind them into the frozen gravel.

‘Every entrance and exit is watched,’ Klarm added. ‘Even the sullage tunnels that discharge over the precipice into the Desolation Sink, since Irisis and Ullii’s escape that way last year.’

‘What are they really afraid of?’ said Irisis.

Flydd’s eyes met hers and she knew he was remembering his drunken revelation about the Numinator, long ago at the manufactory. For a moment he seemed almost like his old self, but the shell closed over.

‘Nennifer’s only weak point is the roof,’ he said. ‘We’ll –’

‘It’s been strengthened since air-floaters were invented,’ said Klarm. ‘And further reinforced since the first thapter appeared.’

‘Then what are we doing here?’ said Yggur. ‘Flydd, all along you claimed that you had a way in. If that’s been closed off …’

‘We’re going in,’ Flydd said savagely, ‘if I have to tear the roof off with my bare hands.’

He looked around him like a jackal and for a moment his eyes flashed red. No one met his gaze. He was a man possessed by a demon.

After a minute or two his fists unclenched and he went on more calmly, ‘There’s a weakness in the roof defences. It occurred to me after we escaped last spring.’

‘What weakness is that?’ said Klarm sharply.

‘The sentinel covering the west fourth, fifth and sixth garrets was incorrectly built into the roof cavity. Its sensing crystals look sideways, not up, leaving a gap large enough to allow the thapter to land on the roof. It would have to be piloted with exquisite precision, of course, but –’

‘The gap isn’t there any more,’ said Klarm. ‘After your escape, Ghorr had the mancer responsible for the watch flayed alive and abandoned in the centre of the Desolation Sink to die. Afterwards I personally checked the roof sentinels, replaced the one you refer to and doubled their number, just to be sure. To be very sure,’ he added, rubbing one horny hand up the other arm. ‘I’m partial to my skin the way it is – in place …’ He trailed off, realising what he’d said.

Flydd’s stare was like shards chipped off the front of a glacier.

‘I beg your pardon, Xervish,’ said Klarm, but Flydd did not reply.

‘So we don’t have a way in,’ said Nish bitterly. ‘We’ve come all this way for nothing –’

No one said anything. Everyone was pointedly avoiding Flydd’s eye. Irisis studied him from the corner of hers. His seamed and puckered face became even more mask-like, though Irisis thought she could see through the cracks. Rage was the one thing keeping him going, and he’d just lost the only chance of dealing with his enemies. He was so overcome that he hadn’t even heard Nish.

‘So we can’t break in and we can’t sneak in,’ said Yggur. ‘I suppose it’s too much to ask that either of you know of a secret entrance or exit for the Council’s convenience?’

‘If there is, none but the Council knows of it,’ said Klarm. ‘But I doubt it very much. There’s no way in or out but the front and rear doors.’

‘What about a gate?’ said Irisis. ‘A portal such as those used in olden times to travel instantly across the world.’

‘All portals failed after the Forbidding was broken,’ said Yggur. ‘And no one knows how to create them anew, or even if it’s possible.’

‘Except the one Tiaan made in Tirthrax to bring the Aachim here. Malien knows how it worked,’ said Nish.

‘That doesn’t mean I could make one, even in Tirthrax,’ said Malien. And here it would be quite impossible.’

‘Yggur, you made a gate during the time of the Mirror,’ Nish persisted. ‘I’ve read about it in the Histories …’

‘Once the Forbidding failed two centuries ago, that way failed with it,’ said Yggur dismissively. ‘I know no other.’

‘Then we’re beaten before we begin,’ said Nish.

No one spoke. The wind shrilled around the hatch of the thapter. Flydd’s head was sunk in despair.