SIXTEEN

Nish hung on desperately as the thapter rolled. The note of the mechanism rose a little, then fell again. The machine slipped through the nets before stopping with a jerk that threw him halfway out of the angled hatch.

‘What’s the matter?’ he yelled.

Malien took a while to answer. ‘Ghorr has a lock put on it that I’m having trouble breaking. I can get the thapter to lift, though not enough to make it fly.’

‘Better work fast. We’re slipping through the nets.’

‘I can feel it!’ she snapped over her shoulder. ‘I’m doing all I can, Nish. If that doesn’t work, then falling to our deaths is our fate.’

‘I don’t believe in fate,’ he muttered.

She gave him one of those looks that implied he was speaking above his station. Even Malien, the gentlest and most broadminded Aachim he’d ever met, was not entirely free of the legendary Aachim arrogance.

The thapter slipped further, the mechanism roared and the machine lifted against the meshes before falling back.

‘Still locked?’ said Nish.

Malien didn’t look up. ‘No, but I’m having trouble drawing power.’

‘Ghorr must be using it,’ he said.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I see it now, and he’s using colossal amounts of power.’ She stood up straight and gently lifted the flight lever; the thapter rose and, with a delicate wriggle and a shake, slipped free of the meshes.

It immediately dropped sharply and she struggled to hold it as she clutched the flight controller with both hands. The mechanism roared and faded. She directed the thapter towards a mud island in the swamp, landing with a thump that splattered mud and reeds everywhere.

‘Are you all right?’ said Nish.

She leaned against the side for a moment, then slid down to the floor. ‘I’m weaker than I thought. Should be able to do this in my sleep.’

Nish stared up at the air-dreadnought. The mist had dissipated everywhere except among the tangled airbags, where it was thicker than ever. A flash made it glow milkily. Something was going on up there.

Malien sat with her head on her knees. Nish tried to curb his impatience as her breathing slowly returned to normal. Ghorr was close to victory, Nish knew it.

‘Malien, we’ve got to help Yggur.’

‘What can I do, Nish?’ she said softly. ‘I can’t force strength where there is none.’

‘Ghorr has Yggur trapped. And Irisis. He’s got them all.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘I don’t know, but I am sure.’

‘Where are they? I can’t tell.’

‘Up!’ Nish said urgently. ‘They’re up among the airbags. You’ll have to –’ He broke off, expecting another flash of arrogance.

Malien got up, lifted the thapter and turned towards Fiz Gorgo, shaking her head. The mechanism faltered; the thapter dipped and her fingers worked furiously to bring it back up again. She put the nose down, travelling slowly between the trees. ‘I can’t take him on. I can barely keep this thing in the air.’

‘But …’

‘I know,’ she said gently. ‘I’m sorry, Nish, but I simply can’t do anything about it. We have to retreat while we can, and hope to take him on later. There’s a right time for every battle and this isn’t it.’ She turned the thapter away.

‘There won’t be a later,’ he said bitterly. ‘They’ll be dead!’

‘Just give me an hour … or two.’

‘We don’t have that long. Ghorr won’t dare linger once it starts to get dark. He’ll kill them straight away, or take them with him to torture them to death at his leisure.’

The thapter dipped again. Malien swerved in through the branches of a swamp forest giant. Nish ducked instinctively.

‘I must rest, Nish. Just give me an hour.’

‘What if you were to let me try?’

‘Try what?’ she said forbiddingly.

‘Just take me up there. I’ve got to do something, Malien.’

‘He’ll crucify you, Nish, then flay you alive. If you could have heard the things Ghorr said about you earlier, you wouldn’t go within a thousand leagues of him. He blames you for everything that has gone wrong today, and rightly so.’

‘I know, and I’m terrified of him, but I still have to go. He hates Irisis even more than he loathes me, Malien, and if he keeps her alive it would only be to wring such torments out of her that the very ethyr will echo with her agony. I have to go to her aid, no matter what the cost. I can do nothing else.’

She took one hand off the controller to grip his shoulder. ‘You’re a true stalwart Nish. I was quite wrong about you when we first met, back in Tirthrax.’

‘I was such a callow, selfish fool then that I can’t bear to remember it.’

‘I’ll drop you up top but after that it’s up to you. I won’t risk the thapter.’

‘If he wins, he’ll be back for it in the night.’

‘And we’ve precious little strength to resist him. But we all must do what we can.’

By the time the thapter hovered just above the white deck, Malien was close to collapse. Nish stepped out onto the surface, whose foundations seemed tenuous in the extreme. Should it fail, or the Art that supported it be withdrawn, none of them would have to worry about the future.

The surviving air-dreadnoughts now began to draw in around Ghorr’s, cutting off any escape, though they made no effort to intervene. They would see the conflict through to the end, and only then would they strike. Or bow to the victor.

Klarm duck-walked Nish’s way, Flangers limping beside him, carrying Irisis’s sword but so worn out that he could barely hold the tip up. Ullii came two steps behind, peering around at Nish as if expecting him to be angry with her. He didn’t have the energy.

‘Where’s Irisis?’ said Nish.

‘Ghorr has her.’ Klarm indicated the closer sphere, presently rolling towards another whose seething inner globes were mostly shattered-glass grey, though a few were transparent. ‘Yggur is in that one, but he’s failing rapidly and I’m powerless to help him.’

Behind them the thapter lifted, almost soundlessly, sideslipped into the mist lower down, and was gone. Ghorr’s great globe rolled around them, rotating slowly, though the inner globe remained in the same orientation no matter what the motion of the outer. Irisis was trapped between the two. The globe stopped, leaving her spread-eagled upside down, staring despairingly at Nish. She waved her hands as if to push him away.

The globe stopped while Ghorr inspected the new arrival, then whirled away to orbit Yggur’s limping, failing sphere. White light forked out, once, twice, and two more inner globes exploded. Ghorr raised his good arm and a treacly brown fan of light touched Yggur’s outer sphere, which dissolved from the base like sugar in the rain. The last surviving globe, with Yggur still inside, fell to the milky floor where it stuck fast in the gooey remnants of the sphere.

Nish ran towards it, pulling out his sword as if he could break the sphere and free Yggur from his magical confinement. As he came close Yggur sagged against the wall, then stood up straight and forced out his arm, sending a final blast at his nemesis.

Had it been a ruse to lure the chief scrutator close? Nish allowed himself to hope so. Surely Yggur had been playing with Ghorr, just waiting for this moment, and was now going to destroy him.

Red lightning forked out from Yggur’s fingers but a counter-blast turned the surface of his globe into a mirror, outside and in, that reflected the blast back on him. Nish didn’t see what happened inside, though he could imagine the effect on human flesh of so much power expending itself in such a tiny space. The mirrored sphere turned black, then white and silver again, only to burst around its equator, emitting a circumferential blast of steam.

It fell in two halves, which spun like tops across the floor. The empty half went whizzing by Nish. The other spiralled directly towards Ghorr’s sphere, stopping just a few spans away.

Ghorr stepped through his inner sphere, then the outer, though the opening closed behind him at once, leaving Irisis trapped inside. He walked up to the slowly rotating hemisphere, which was still steaming.

Nish ran, though he knew it was all over. Even had Yggur survived that terrible back-blast he would be helpless against Ghorr, who seemed to be growing stronger as the battle went on. He would reassert control over the Council, attack Fiz Gorgo a second time and regain the thapter as well as all the prisoners. Victory was within his grasp.

Nish skidded to a stop beside the hemisphere. Yggur lay inside, his long frame clenched into a ball, his hair a frizzy mass of black. His clothes had been turned to char while his exposed skin was coated with soot. He lay unmoving.

Ghorr prodded Yggur with the platinum-shod tip of his staff. Yggur did not move. Ghorr jabbed it hard into his ribs. Nothing.

‘A pity,’ Ghorr said dispassionately. ‘A great man and a great mancer – probably the greatest of all, before me. I could have learned much from him. But, like many a great mancer down the aeons, hubris was his downfall. He fought me all the way but neglected to protect himself against his own power.’

He turned to Nish. ‘My guards let me down last night, in failing to ensure that you were taken. They will pay for it.’ He raised his hand.

Nish’s sword grew too hot to hold. He dropped it and it fell straight through the white floor. Nish rubbed his burning palm.

‘But not nearly as much as you, Cryl-Nish. Oh, how you’re going to suffer.’

Irisis had watched despairingly as Yggur’s defences were broken, globe by globe, but she plunged to the depths of the abyss when Nish suddenly appeared on the edge of the platform. Why had she been so reckless? How could she have imagined she could overcome Ghorr? She’d assumed, because he’d previously fled like a craven cur, that he was a broken man. A cur he undoubtedly was, but he was still the strongest and best-equipped mancer on Santhenar.

Yggur was beaten, broken and probably dead. The burning sword fell from Nish’s fingers and disappeared through the floor. Ghorr had everything except the thapter and soon he would have that as well. Oh Nish, why didn’t you stay away? She couldn’t bear to think of Ghorr torturing him. She’d sooner take the pain on herself.

She felt all hot and congested; her face was bloated from hanging upside down. Irisis pushed against the wall and found that she could move a little. She heaved and thrust until she got herself right way up, but could go no further.

Irisis couldn’t hear what Ghorr was saying, though she’d spent enough time in his hands to imagine it. He would be treating Nish to a picturesque description of the excruciations to come. Ghorr would torture Nish on the spot to discover the whereabouts of Malien, the thapter, and his last remaining enemy, Xervish Flydd.

And Nish couldn’t hold out, for he felt pain keenly. Then, as Ghorr gestured over his shoulder in her direction, Irisis realised that Nish’s torture would only be the first act. He’d soon switch to torturing her in front of Nish, and Nish would snap. He’d tell Ghorr everything rather than be the cause of a friend’s agony.

There had to be a way out. If Ullii had been stronger-minded, she might have saved them, but even at the best of times Ullii could only perform her wonders to save herself. She’d rescued Irisis back in Nennifer purely because Ullii had felt so threatened. Unfortunately, Ullii wasn’t directly threatened now.

And then a possibility popped into her head. What if she, Irisis, were to attack Ghorr the way she’d killed Jal-Nish’s mancer on the aqueduct a year ago?

Under the most desperate duress, Irisis had constructed a concealed packet of pure force and manipulated it to the place from which Jal-Nish’s mancer had been drawing power from the field. The power had been too much for the mancer to bear. It had blown her to pieces and Ghorr had been so threatened by what Irisis had stumbled upon, all unwittingly, that he’d tortured her in fruitless attempts to uncover the secret. Fortunately Ullii had spirited her away from Nennifer first.

Yet Jal-Nish’s mancer, strong though she had been, could be no more than a novice compared to Ghorr. Moreover, Ghorr could have gleaned enough from Irisis’s tormented ramblings to fashion a protection for himself. If he had, attacking him this way was tantamount to suicide. But she had to try.

Taking her pliance from around her neck, Irisis clasped her hands around it, careful not to let Ghorr see that she’d recovered it. Hands in front of her as if begging, or praying, she sought for the field. It was all around her, and very strong here, swirling in threads and streaks of red and blue, plunging into fringed sinkholes, and arching out again. The sinkholes were the draw points that supported this whole phantom architecture in the sky.

Nish cried out. Irisis couldn’t hear it through the wall of the sphere, though she saw his face contorting in agony. The field vanished and she couldn’t find it again. She closed her eyes. She couldn’t look upon his torment and do what she had to do. Wrenching the field back into her inner eye, Irisis scanned it for the place from which Ghorr was drawing power.

Ah, he was clever. Yggur had created this phantom labyrinth, but Ghorr maintained it by drawing from five or six parts of the field at once. That would make it difficult to do what she had done before – perhaps impossible. Moreover, he did not draw power through a simple object like a crystal or pliance, as all mancers she knew did. Ghorr used a myriad of such devices linked together on a belt studded with crystals and linked by threads of wire. It spread the load throughout his body and protected him from overloading – though, in truth, he was such a powerful mancer that it might not be possible to overload him.

Defeating him was as far beyond her as reaching to the moon. Irisis unclenched her fists, opened her eyes and Nish doubled up in such agony that she could feel it. How could that be?

Nish fell forward and Irisis saw Ullii contorted behind him. Nish’s pain was hurting her and she was broadcasting it throughout her lattice. So Ullii hadn’t completely lost it.

It gave Irisis heart. Reaching into the field, she began to weave its tiny threads into a lozenge shape, representing one of the crystals on Ghorr’s belt. Following the patterns of the power he was drawing, she linked the lozenge to another, then another, continuing until she had made a crude representation of the nine crystals on his belt. Irisis then shuttled back and forth, weaving linkages between the lozenges and checking to make sure that they were as close as possible to the linkages of his belt. It was just like making her jewellery, really, and she’d been doing that since she was little.

A multicoloured fan flashed into her mind, then vanished. Though Irisis hadn’t seen it before, she knew what it was – it was the way Ullii saw her lattice. Ullii’s despairing broadcast must be sending it to her. The fan was clustered with knots, near and far, representing the surviving scrutators and mancers on the air-dreadnoughts, as well as Malien, Gilhaelith, Flydd and any other person who could use the Art. Other shapes denoted every crystal and artefact within leagues of Fiz Gorgo.

But the lattice was dominated by one gigantic knot, a globe clad with poisoned flails. It was the way Ullii saw Ghorr.

Another silent scream from Nish, though this time Irisis managed to divert it so as to protect her ethereal weaving. When it was as precise a representation as she could manage, she passed a spindle through each of the lozenge-crystals and spun the field around it until it was tightly concentrated there. Lastly, she wove a concealment around each lozenge. Unless Ghorr was scanning the field constantly, he wouldn’t realise what she had done.

Now! she thought, as Nish arched up again. Irisis moved the ethyric belt so that the positions of its lozenges of pure force matched the places Ghorr was drawing power from, via the crystals on his belt. She withdrew from the field carefully, lest he become suspicious.

She opened her eyes to see Nish doubled over again and Ghorr raising his arms to strike. But Ghorr did not strike. He froze and her heart began to hammer. Ghorr looked around uneasily. Irisis did not meet his eye, afraid that he would be able to read what she had been up to.

A movement in the distance caught her eye. Scrutator Fusshte stood at the bow of his air-dreadnought, a spyglass to his eye, waiting like a jackal for his chief to fall. Or like a sycophant, should Ghorr succeed, to pledge allegiance anew. Either way, success or failure, Fusshte would emerge the stronger.

She looked back to Ghorr, who squeezed one fist. Nish cried out, arching his back and forming his fingers into hooks. Come on, Ghorr, she thought. Take the power, now.

Ghorr did so, then suddenly doubled over, gasping and clutching at his chest. Flecks of red sprayed across the white floor. He retched, coughing something red out onto the floor that looked for all the world like a piece of lung.

Yes! You stinking swine, take that. Irisis rose to her feet, brandishing one fist. You’re not as clever as you think.

He snapped upright and she realised that it had been a ruse to identify who was secretly attacking him. Whirling on one foot, Ghorr flung out his arm, his thick middle finger pointing at her throat.

The outer sphere split like the segments of an orange, frigid air buffeted her, then the inner sphere crashed into her back, knocking Irisis off her feet. Before she could move it rolled up her spread legs, over her buttocks and settled in the hollow of her back, where its base seemed to flow and mould itself to her contours. It was so heavy that she could not budge it, and her chest was pressed against the floor so tightly that she could hardly draw breath.

The base of the sphere flowed up her back, spread around both sides of her neck and began to draw tight. She threw out her arms before it trapped them too, and forced her fingers up in front of her throat, trying to hold back the invisible straps that were close to joining into a noose.

Ghorr had known what she was doing all along, yet felt so confident that he’d allowed her to continue. Perhaps he’d been hoping to discover her deadly secret. And now he had it.

The straps joined to form a belt, an analogue of the one she’d woven and powered by the same spindles of force. He had a keen sense of irony. The belt pulled tight, cutting off her breath in mid-gasp, and Irisis was not strong enough to hold it back. Her fingers were trapped, the knuckles digging into her throat and crushing her windpipe. In two or three minutes she would be unconscious, and two minutes after that, dead.

A choking minute went by. Ullii’s fan-shaped lattice appeared and suddenly, instantly, Irisis knew what she had to do. She focussed on that flail-covered sphere, the seeker’s unique rendering of Ghorr, and remade it.

She turned the flails to drooping, overripe bananas, the black sphere into a rotting pumpkin covered in blowflies, with fat white grubs crawling out of oozing holes in the skin. It was all she could think of to do. Not enough, surely, though Ullii’s sense of humour was rustic in the extreme.

The belt snapped tighter and she felt the bones of her neck shift. She wondered if she’d die of a broken neck before she suffocated. Time slowed right down and the last thing Irisis saw, before all went opaque, was Ullii suddenly convulse with laughter.

For an unknown time, seconds or hours, the field swirled in stately patterns more beautiful than any she’d ever seen. Dying wasn’t so bad after all.

The patterns vanished, the pressure eased and cold air rushed down her throat, and then the world went insane. Her eyes flicked open, though what she saw could not be happening. The ticking rotors of the surrounding air-dreadnoughts emitted tortured groans as they spun up beyond their maxima. There were cries as the great craft lurched in all directions, colliding and tangling with each other. Two exploded in a colossal fireball that seared her exposed cheek.

The phantom labyrinth sagged underfoot before going hard as crystal, flinging Nish and Klarm in the air. The deformed sphere on Irisis’s back crumbled like week-old bread. Pieces of the floor broke away and once again black snowflakes drifted down, while red wisps of acrid vapour, like the fumings from an alchymist’s cauldron, condensed in mid-air.

Ullii’s lattice fan was stretched like a rubber sheet, as if she’d taken it in her hands and pulled it. The knots on it were drawn out to black streaks, all but one. Ullii let go of the lattice and Ghorr’s rotting sphere went flubbing up above the fan as if she’d fired it from a catapult. It came down again and splatted against the lattice, which snapped back and wrapped itself tightly around Ghorr’s knot, squeezing it into a tighter and tighter ball until, finally, with a burst of light, both knot and lattice vanished.

Ghorr shrieked as he fell halfway through the floor. His clothes exploded into rags, revealing a wattled, sack-like belly bulging between a pair of tightly laced corsets, fat-marbled upper arms, the left one stained with old blood, and wobbling fish-belly thighs. The illusions he’d maintained for decades evaporated. His lips shrank, displaying yellow, corroded teeth and retreating gums, and jowls saggy enough to contain a handful of marbles each. The mane of hair vanished apart from a few dingy straps dangling over his ears.

The tightness around her throat was gone. Irisis sucked in a breath, rubbing her bruised throat as she tried to work out what Ullii had done. She’d destroyed Ghorr’s knot, an analogue of his mancer’s self, and her lattice in the process. She’d damaged Ghorr, stripped him of much of his mancer’s power, but had she destroyed it utterly? Surely not, or this phantom world would have vanished and they would all have fallen into the forest. So something still remained. What would he do with it?

She got up and limped across to join her friends.