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 looking 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.’

Muss met their eyes, one by one, and continued.

‘But I survived, for two qualities of the lyrinx I had in abundance. I could flesh-form far better than any lyrinx, for it was part Art and part innate ability, and I could do it to myself. It hurt brutally at first, but I persisted until I had gained enough mastery to assume any form roughly my own size, and use my chameleon ability to mimic whatever external appearance I cared to. To survive inside Nennifer I had to become a morphmancer beyond compare, and I had to go back in. I couldn’t live outside, nor cross the mountains alone.

‘I killed a lowly prentice and took his place. I regretted the necessity but, after all, I’d saved the lad from a fate as bad as my own. And then I set out to learn everything I could about the spell that had so disastrously transformed me, in the hope that one day I might undo it. Years passed; a decade. In one guise, then another, I learned everything there was to be known about the regeneration spell. Even how to reverse it.’

‘Why didn’t you?’ said Nish.

‘It wasn’t enough to just know how. Being a mancer of only moderate talent, I needed great power, perfectly focussed, to work the smallest of charms, and on my own I could never hope to use any Great Spell. But then, by pure serendipity, I hit upon another way. If I could gain a small piece of nihilium, I could imprint the spell on it, then attempt to undo what had been done to me. But not even the Council of Scrutators possessed such a treasure. After years of spying I was unable to discover nihilium anywhere on Santhenar. I had, however, learned that it might be created if a node were destroyed in a particular way, by feeding power back into it.’

‘Why didn’t you do it yourself?’ said Irisis.

‘You privileged people think everything is easy,’ he snapped. ‘But fate distributes talents thinly, and seldom where they’re most needed. I lacked the Art to control the destruction of a node, and no amount of hard work or self-belief could change that. I had to find a great and powerful patron to do it for me, but I feared the Council members too much to try and influence them. I had to leave Nennifer, but in the outside world there was only one position I was suited for. So I became a prober, a junior spy to Scrutator Xervish Flydd.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought …’ began Nish.

‘I made a perfect spy, for in addition to my morphmancing talent, I was stoic, patient and painstaking. After all I’d been through, I had to be. Having two minds in one, as it were, I read character very well. And being a chimaera, I find it easy to unravel what is hidden, confused, concealed or enciphered. To bolster that talent even further I made my eidoscope, to see the true forms of things, to make sense out of what is confused or hidden, and to find the true path through a maze.’

‘But you weren’t a fighter,’ said Nish.

‘Despite being part lyrinx I was physically weak, and my warring tissues magnified the least injury into a debilitating agony. I had to be careful to avoid conflict. My best defence was to hide.’

‘Well, it’s all over,’ said Klarm. ‘Tie him up, someone, then let’s collect our wounded and go home. I’ve had enough of Nennifer.’

‘You spent years spying on the scrutators,’ Irisis said thoughtfully. ‘What do you know about the Numinator, Muss?’

‘Not here, you bloody fool!’ snapped Flydd, quelling her with a glare of such ferocity that Irisis stepped backwards out of the way.

Eiryn Muss let out an inarticulate cry and skin-changed to the swirling patterns of the marble wall behind him. Within thirty seconds he was practically invisible. He cast a glance over his shoulder in the direction of the emerald throne and began to back away, his skin tones shifting to match whatever he passed in front of.

‘What’s going on?’ Klarm seized Muss by the wrist and held him easily. ‘What is this Numinator, Flydd? Are you telling me that there’s a higher power?’

‘Not here, Klarm,’ Flydd said warningly.

‘Why not?’ Klarm’s voice rose. ‘Start out as you mean to go on, Flydd. No more secrets. After what we’ve gone through, we deserve an answer.’

‘I’ll tell you once we get back to the thapter,’ said Flydd. ‘It’s not … safe.’

‘Poppycock!’ said Klarm. ‘We’re the only power left in this place.’

‘And as the chief power, I say not now. If we don’t collect our injured friends soon they’ll freeze to death. I’m at the end of my strength and we’ve got a lot of work yet to do.’ He tapped the platinum box pointedly and trudged to the door.

Klarm didn’t budge. ‘Eiryn Muss, you’re the perfect spy, and were spying long before you left this place to go into Flydd’s service. There can’t be any secret you didn’t delve into in all your time here. Tell us about this mysterious Numinator.’

Muss wiped cold sweat off his brow with his free hand. He tried to shape-change but Klarm did not let go and, after several transformations, the prober reverted to his customary form.

‘I don’t think –’ Muss broke off at the rumble of a distant collapse. The mirrored globe shuddered on its stand and the deformed reflections danced.

‘Now!’ Klarm snapped.

‘I’d also like to know,’ said Nish, feeling that he’d earned the right to defy Flydd this once. ‘I heard …’ Flydd had told him but he dared not say it, ‘… that the Council of Scrutators danced to the Numinator’s tune. How can the most powerful people in the world be cowed by someone no one has ever seen?’

Muss licked lips so dry and fissured that they crackled.

‘And be quick about it,’ said Klarm. ‘If I never see Nennifer again after today, it’ll be too soon.’

‘The Numinator created the Council of Scrutators in the first place,’ said Muss.

‘What?’ cried Flydd, who was halfway through the door. He came back slowly, now showing his age and aftersickness with every dragging step.

‘It was well over a hundred years ago …’ said Muss. ‘The Numinator – he or she, no one knows – took over the existing Council of Santhenar and shaped it to his own purposes …’ another glance over his shoulder, ‘… only one of which was to win the war. The war wasn’t going so badly then. The lyrinx were few and didn’t threaten the whole world.’

‘What were the other purposes?’ said Klarm.

‘Controlling the world was one. Rewriting the Histories, in particular the Tale of the Mirror, was another. A third was collecting information on every person: their ancestry, looks, family traits, habits and talents, and compiling the bloodline registers.’

‘What for?’ said Nish.

‘No one knows,’ said Muss. ‘A copy of each register was placed in this room, and from here it vanished.’ His head jerked up and he stared at the emerald throne as if expecting the dread personage of the Numinator to materialise there.

The emerald throne remained as it was. Muss was gazing up at something, unblinking, and his eyes widened perceptibly. He was looking at the mirrored globe.

Nish glanced at it and the little hairs stirred on his arms. The room and its contents were still reflected there, but none of the people were. He edged towards the door. ‘As Flydd said, there’s Tiaan, Malien and Yggur to be recovered, and little Inouye, if she’s still alive. We can sort this out later.’

‘I think so too,’ said Flydd, who had come back into the room. ‘Let’s go, Klarm.’

At a faint humming sound, like a swarm of bees a long way away, Muss’s mouth gaped open and his eyes bulged. With a convulsive jerk he tore free of Klarm’s hand and bolted for the door.

‘Don’t let him get away!’ yelled Klarm.

To the distant music of tubular bells the mirrored globe became as clear as glass, revealing a roiling sphere inside as bright and burning as the sun. A ray of light burst from it and fingered the surface of the table before creeping along to the eidoscope, which was still lying there. The lenses rotated of their own accord; a mass of coloured rays shot from the other end and touched Muss on the back.

Just inside the door, Muss gasped, turning slowly and with evident unwillingness, until he faced the eidoscope. The rays expanded to cover his entire body. His clothes faded and were revealed as flesh-formed protrusions of skin and tissue, mimicking the colour and texture of the real thing. They dissolved back into him and Muss stood naked and sexless, a neuter with the body of a human but the massive crested head and toothed maw of a lyrinx.

And then he shifted into two, the images superimposed. One was a weathered man of some sixty years, the other a small, aged female lyrinx. The images separated fractionally, blurred together again then sprang apart. The lyrinx image went into a crouch; the man turned as though to flee, but only managed a couple of steps before the other was on him, attacking him savagely, clawing and biting.

The two images merged, blurred and faded back into Muss, though the battle continued as his body went to war on itself. The skin of his chest bulged out as if pushed from inside. Wounds appeared without any seeming cause – three long tears across his belly like claw marks; a chunk out of one shoulder; a gouge on his lower thigh. A bulge moved down from his diaphragm, pushing his stomach out until the watchers could see the shape of his organs outlined against the stretched skin.

It moved up through his chest while he choked and gagged, then the skin burst at his throat and he was torn apart from the inside out. Muss fell into a bloody heap on the floor, the light from the eidoscope faded and the mirror became reflecting once more.

They looked at one another, their faces taut with horror.

‘What was that?’ said Irisis.

‘The vengeance of the Numinator,’ said Flydd. ‘A mancer of surpassing power and, it appears, one who guards his privacy jealously.’

‘But what –?’ Irisis continued.

‘Do you really want to ask that question here, after what we’ve just seen,’ said Flydd.

‘All things considered,’ said Klarm, ‘I think we should go now.’

He was nearly knocked down in the rush for the door.

Outside and well away from the strongroom, they stopped to splint Nish’s broken arm. Dawn had broken by the time they reached the place where they’d left the injured. Malien had recovered from her aftersickness and volunteered to go and bring back the thapter.

‘Where’s Yggur?’ said Flydd.

‘He recovered suddenly an hour ago and went off, saying he had business to attend to,’ she said.

‘You’d think this was a birthday party,’ Flydd muttered. ‘I suppose we’ll have to drag him out from under the rubble. As if we don’t have enough to do.’

Before he could organise a search team, Yggur came limping in, carrying Inouye in his arms.

‘She had a panic attack when she was left in the cupboard,’ he explained. ‘I could sense her pain from down here.’

He passed her to Irisis, who hefted the slight burden in her arms. Inouye moaned and reached out for Yggur. He laid a hand on her brow, her eyes closed, and with a little sigh she settled into sleep.

‘What about Tiaan?’ said Nish relieved of his fears for Inouye.

‘I locked her in that little room at the back,’ said Malien. ‘She wasn’t rational and I didn’t have the strength to deal with her.’ She went out.

‘Tiaan is in withdrawal,’ Flydd said quietly. ‘Artisans have sometimes gone mad from it. Leave her to Evee. We’ve got work to do. The survivors will be dead within days unless we take command.’

‘We?’ said Klarm.

‘The scrutators were led by a chief with absolute authority, so we must replace him with a different kind of rule. A council –’

‘They called themselves a council,’ said Klarm. ‘If we use the same name, people will think that nothing has changed.’

‘If we change it, we’ll spend years fighting usurpers and opportunists instead of the enemy. I propose that the new council’s members be myself, Klarm, Malien, Yggur and –’

‘I won’t be part of any council,’ said Yggur. ‘And I suspect Malien won’t either.’

‘I’ll do my best to persuade her when she gets back,’ said Flydd. ‘Have the guards taken Fusshte?’

‘Unfortunately he got away in an air-dreadnought,’ said Yggur, ‘along with Scrutator Halie and more than a hundred soldiers.’

‘He would have needed more than one air-dreadnought to carry them …’ Flydd said slowly.

‘Fusshte took them all, including the one moored out front. Seven, I believe.’

Flydd cursed loud and long. ‘I should have cut him down while I had the chance. Why didn’t I?’

‘Because Muss seemed a greater threat,’ said Nish.

‘I suppose he’ll head for Lybing,’ said Klarm. ‘To damage our victory in any way he can.’

‘The truth will out,’ said Flydd. ‘We’d better get to work or there won’t be any survivors.’

It proved a brutal day and a bitter night, as hard as any Nish had ever experienced. He laboured with the rest of them, as best he could with a broken arm, and was still working when the thapter finally appeared overhead around the middle of the following day, towing the dirigible. They’d rounded up more than four thousand survivors, organised them to construct flimsy shelters inside the walls of the air-dreadnought yard and recovered enough rations to feed them, and firewood to keep them warm, for the next few weeks. Only then was Nish able to lie down on a deck made of loose planks with hundreds of other people, as close to a fire as he could get, and snatch a few hours of glorious sleep.

He’d just woken, late that afternoon, when Irisis, who was looking up at the sky, said, ‘I think that’s an air-dreadnought coming in.’

‘Who can it be?’ Flydd said. ‘Flangers, bring a detail armed with javelards, on the double.’

They hurried around to what remained of the parade ground, for the air-dreadnought was coming down in a rush.

‘Looks like it’s been through a storm,’ said Irisis. ‘The rigging is all tangled and one of the airbags has been torn open.’

‘I can’t see anyone but the pilot,’ said Nish.

‘It may be a trick. It’d be just like Fusshte.’

‘Pilot looks half-dead,’ said Inouye, who had limped after them. She shouldn’t have been walking at all, but her professional curiosity had been aroused. ‘She’s going to crash.’

Nish thought so too. The air-dreadnought swept in upon a strong wind, trying to land on the narrow strip of parade ground that remained at the southern end, but the wind swept it sideways. For a moment it looked as though the craft would come down on the precipice and tumble into the Desolation Sink, but the pilot corrected in time and the great craft lumbered towards the collapsed front of Nennifer.

Nish held his breath but she managed to turn it and the keel slammed into the ground with just ells to spare. The pilot didn’t get out. She had collapsed at her controller arm.

‘It’s the air-dreadnought that was shaken free in the earth tremblers,’ said Irisis. ‘The pilot must have been asleep on board at the time. It looks like it was blown halfway across the mountains before she could turn it.’

‘Then she’s the greatest pilot I’ve ever come across,’ said Klarm, ‘to bring that wreckage back without a crew, and no rest in a day and a half.’

‘Flangers, gather a work gang and get it tied down,’ Flydd shouted, hobbling towards the craft.

He lifted the collapsed pilot out and kissed her on the cheeks, left and right, to her bemusement. ‘Thank you, pilot. You’ll make a big difference. Nish, run and find the air-dreadnought artificers. I want this craft repaired by midnight, ready to fly east with as many of the survivors as we can cram into it. We won’t beat Fusshte to Lybing with the news, but we’ll spread it north and south as far as we can. His lies won’t stand up in the face of so many witnesses. And see what other craft were being built, and get them finished. There are a lot of people to be moved and little time.

‘Klarm, would you find all the pilots here who still have their controllers? I’ll round up the surviving chroniclers, artists and tale-tellers. There’s a new order in the world and we’ve got to get the word out right away.’

‘And as soon as we’re beyond the corrupted influence of the Nennifer node,’ said Yggur, ‘we must join forces to drive this baleful amplimet back to the state from which it woke.’

‘We have the amplimet and we have Tiaan,’ said Flydd. ‘And the Council has been overthrown. Now the long fight-back can begin.’