SEVENTY-FIVE

Nish was sitting miserably on the floor of the thapter, which was lurching and bouncing all over the sky. It had been harried by two thapters since dawn, and now a third machine had joined them.

‘Are you all right?’ he heard Malien say to Tiaan.

‘I think I can manage for a while yet.’

‘Use the amplimet to keep above them.’

‘I’m trying to.’

A crossbow bolt spanged off the side. Nish glanced at Irisis, who was sitting cross-legged, apparently unconcerned, making another of her pieces of jewellery. This one was a brooch in silver filigree, like two figure-eights joined at the centre. She didn’t look up.

‘How did we get ourselves into this mess?’ said Nish. ‘What if the lyrinx escape and attack our defenceless cities –?’

‘Will you shut up!’ she hissed. ‘We made our choice, so don’t start whining and wringing your hands like a third-rate Minis.’ She worked for a few more minutes, then exclaimed, ‘Now look what you’ve made me do,’ and slammed the brooch down on the floor.

‘I’m sorry,’ Nish said at once. ‘You seemed so calm.’

‘Of course I’m not calm! We may have made the biggest mistake of our lives, and we’re bound to pay for it. I’ve been regretting it since the moment I opened my mouth, but –’

‘But what else could we have done? Come here.’ She sat beside him, taking his hand. ‘You’re right,’ Nish said. ‘Let’s not waste the time we have left on useless regrets. We did what was right and we’ll face the consequences.’

It didn’t appear as though the other thapters were trying to destroy Malien’s machine, but only to force it down on the salt. Tiaan kept just ahead of them for hours as she followed a roundabout course south and west, trying to draw their fire away from the lyrinx. Thus far she’d always managed to get away, through the superior range of the amplimet.

Gilhaelith was sitting up the other end, Tiaan’s map spread out on the floor before him while he made minute alterations to the geomantic globe. It was like watching grass grow.

From the heights, after the sun came up, Nish had seen terrible sights. Early on, a fleet of Orgestre’s constructs had torn straight through a band of running lyrinx, trampling them under the iron feet, smashing flesh and bones to jelly. There had been children among them.

Not long after that, the field had been whipped away from a group of flying lyrinx. They had done everything they could to keep aloft: their limbs went like bellows, their great wings thrashed, but without the aid of the Secret Art no effort could keep them in the air. Males, females and children all plummeted to the bed of the Dry Sea, their impacts making little purple marks that were swallowed by the white immensity of the salt. Nish had gone below after that. It had seemed better not to know, or at least not to see it. But it confirmed that he’d made the right decision.

The sound of the mechanism cut off abruptly. Nish scrambled to his feet but it started again at once as Tiaan tapped into another field.

‘Is everything all right?’ he said hoarsely, looking up the ladder.

‘So far,’ replied Malien in a strained voice.

‘I just hope they know what they’re doing,’ said Nish to Irisis.

‘They’ve fought this kind of battle before,’ said Irisis, intent on a new brooch.

Several hours afterwards Malien called down. ‘One of the thapters has turned away towards the Foshorn. I think Flydd’s in it. I wonder what he’s up to?’

‘I’m sure we’ll find out before too long,’ said Irisis.

Tiaan went higher and shortly the other two craft turned back. By the time they reached Nithmak in mid-afternoon, the first of the fliers were already there. A narrow stair wound around the peak from top to bottom. Though the mighty winches were still in place, the five constructs Tiaan and Malien had seen previously were gone.

Most of the fliers were spread out around the base of the peak, or hanging from the sides, though several hundred had assembled on the flat top, Liett among them, when the thapter landed. They were assembling javelards and catapults for the inevitable attack. Tiaan remained where she was, slumped in her seat, eyes closed.

‘Are you all right?’ said Irisis.

‘Just clearing my mind before we begin on the gate.’

‘You’d better have a sleep first,’ said Malien.

‘There isn’t time.’

‘The runners won’t be here for a day and a half. Remember your first gate, Tiaan. You wouldn’t want anything to go wrong this time.’

When Nish rose late the following morning after the first decent sleep he’d had in weeks, Tiaan was walking around and around the tower, as if trying to find courage after the disaster of her previous gate. Everything rested on her. What if she couldn’t make it work, or it went wrong again?

He was eating breakfast when he felt a shudder that made the red-topped tower sway back and forth. Rock cracked off one edge of Nithmak, taking five lyrinx with it, though three managed to flap to safety. Hundreds more flew up in a flapping of leathery wings and circled the tower.

‘What was that?’ said Nish, uncomfortably recalling the fall of Vithis’s watch-tower.

‘If it was an earth trembler, it was a mighty one,’ said Malien. ‘But they do have big earth tremblers around here. We’d better find out. Just in case …’

In case of what? Nish thought, as they headed for the thapter. It curved around Nithmak tower, rising slowly, before heading south-west. After some time, Irisis, who was peering over the side with her spyglass, sang out.

‘There’s smoke rising above the Hornrace. No, it’s dust. It looks like a gigantic dust storm.’

‘The rest of Vithis’s arch must have collapsed,’ said Nish from below. ‘Can we take a look?’

Tiaan turned the thapter that way and climbed until it was high enough to get a good view. ‘The whole of the Hornrace, leagues long, is covered by a vast line of dust,’ she called down the hatch. ‘It must have been the arch. It’s not going to do us any harm –’

‘The Trihorn Falls are flowing again,’ cried Irisis. ‘Oh, just look at that! Have you ever seen anything like it?’

Irisis was not given to hyperbole. Nish came scrambling up the ladder and pulled himself up onto the side next to her. Gilhaelith followed, though he was tall enough to see over. Vast arching streams of water were pouring out from the thunderhead of dust enveloping the Trihorn Falls.

‘There’s more water coming over than there was when I first saw them,’ said Tiaan. ‘Much more.’

By the time they were above the falls, the dust had begun to settle. The deluge had doubled and tripled by then. A torrent was pouring through the Hornrace, unimaginably greater than before.

‘What’s happened?’ said Nish, whose heart was hammering. ‘That’s more than the blockage in the Hornrace breaking open.’

As the dust was blown away into the Sea of Thurkad, the scale of the cataclysm became evident. ‘A great slab has cracked off the end of the Foshorn,’ said Irisis.

‘There must be ten times the flow there was before,’ said Nish.

‘More like a hundred,’ said Tiaan. ‘Just look at it.’

The flood was massive, awesome, prodigious; there were not words to describe it. And then it exploded in size again. ‘The other side of the Hornrace is collapsing as well,’ said Irisis. ‘Nish, look!’ She was on her knees, shaking his arm. ‘Oh, this is unbelievable. Half of one of the Trihorns is falling down. Now the other one is going as well. They’re being washed away.’

Those mighty peaks, that had split the flow of the Hornrace for thousands of years, were undermined in less than an hour. Peaks almost a thousand spans high tilted, toppled, rolled over and over and broke into pieces the size of hills before thundering to the bed of the Dry Sea, or into the salt lakes which were already overflowing. They could hear the roaring from on high, and even see the ground shake. Fissures zigzagged out across the salt for leagues.

The flow doubled and redoubled, until even from their height the noise was deafening. No one said a word. Even Gilhaelith was awed by the power of nature, so much greater than his greatest geomancy.

‘It’s not going to stop, is it?’ shouted Nish.

‘Not until it fills the Dry Sea –’ Irisis stopped with her mouth open. ‘They must have used the field controller to explode the node under the Foshorn.’

‘Neither Flydd nor Yggur would have done this, even if Orgestre put a sword to their necks,’ said Irisis.

‘No geomancer has the power to do what’s been done here,’ said Gilhaelith.

‘Then who has?’

‘Earth tremblers happen for their own reasons.’

He didn’t sound convinced and neither was Nish, who wasn’t a believer in coincidences.

‘It’s the end of the Dry Sea. It’s going to be the Sea of Perion again,’ said Tiaan.

‘And that too was foretold,’ said Malien.

‘How long will it take to fill?’ said Irisis.

‘Weeks, I should think,’ said Tiaan in a wisp of a voice. ‘But as soon as the water is two spans deep in this corner of the sea, all the lyrinx will drown, and Ryll will think I planned it all along. He’ll think it’s humanity’s perfect revenge – to offer them hope, then snatch it away at the last minute. There’s no death the lyrinx fear more than drowning.’

‘Liett will certainly think that,’ said Irisis.

‘What are we going to do?’ cried Tiaan, looking around wildly.

‘Don’t panic. There’s time yet,’ said Malien.

‘How much?’ she wailed.

‘It will depend on which point of the sea is lowest, and whether they have to cross it to get to Nithmak.’

‘We’d better warn them,’ said Tiaan, turning out towards the lyrinx. ‘Perhaps they can run a bit faster.’

The thapter raced from one end of the running horde, now stretched out over fifteen leagues of salt, to the other, though it seemed clear from their pace that the lyrinx knew what had happened. By the time they’d done that, the water was threading the bed of the Dry Sea and Tiaan was in a panic. Tiaan hurtled back to Nithmak, setting down right at the base of the tower in the middle of the afternoon, and running to the doors. They were still locked.

‘I wish I’d gone in before,’ she said. Tiaan threw herself back in and drove the thapter straight at the doors.

‘Stop! You don’t know how strongly it’s built,’ yelled Malien.

It was too late. The front of the thapter struck the doors with a crash that threw them all forward. The front crumpled and Malien cried out in dismay. The metal doors had buckled but still held. Tiaan pushed again and the doors tore from their hinges.

Everyone scrambled out, and Malien inspected the damage, shaking her head. ‘We may come to regret that.’

Tiaan wasn’t listening. She ran past and up the winding stairs into darkness. Everything had been built of basalt as black as the void itself, and there were no windows here. Irisis and Gilhaelith followed at a less precipitous pace.

Nish looked across the foyer after them. ‘I think Tiaan has taken leave of her senses.’

Malien came around the side. ‘She’s been troubled for a long time, and Minis’s sacrifice shook her.’

‘She’s always been a little … obsessive.’

He went out, inspecting the defences with a professional eye. Nithmak Tower occupied the centre of the flat-topped peak, leaving a rim of bare rock all around. The top of the peak was only a few hundred spans across, and thousands of fliers stood in a ring around the edges, watching silently. Nish shivered. At least they’d keep the thapters away.

He did a rough calculation. At a pinch the top might accommodate a hundred thousand lyrinx, crammed close together, but four or five times that number had to pass through the gate, if they survived the journey.

Nithmak could not be attacked from below but was vulnerable to attack from air-floaters and thapters. ‘I wonder why Vithis chose this place?’ he said to Irisis. ‘There are dozens of larger peaks in this part of the sea.’

‘Something special about its node, you can be certain.’

‘We’d better prepare to defend.’ Nish scanned the salt with Irisis’s spyglass. ‘The lyrinx are awfully spread out.’

‘And the water is coming in quickly. The salt lakes below the Trihorn are already overflowing.’

‘It’ll take days to get to the other end of the sea,’ said Nish, ‘so it’ll be quite a while before the level starts to rise.’

‘The Dry Sea isn’t like a bathtub, Nish,’ said Malien, joining them. ‘The water’s coming in faster than it can flow away. For all we know, the level could rise to the top of this peak before it even reaches the far end of the Dry Sea, three hundred leagues away. The flow could wash Nithmak away, as it collapsed the Trihorn.’

Nish began to say something, but then shook his head and hunched down, staring at the ground. He was also starting to feel panicky. The ribs he’d cracked when Vithis had tried to drag him into the Well ached and he stood up again, rubbing his side.

Malien laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘But not, I think, in the next day and night. We have time yet.’

‘Will it be enough?’ Nish focussed his spyglass upon the straggling line of lyrinx, and the squadrons of clankers that continued to harry them, where the country permitted it. The fleetest of foot were not far from the base of Nithmak now.

‘For many, though not the stragglers. Let’s go up to Tiaan.’

It proved a long climb up steep and narrow stairs. ‘I don’t see how we’re going to get half a million lyrinx up here,’ panted Nish as he rested halfway up.

‘The gate doesn’t have to open here,’ said Malien.

Tiaan was sitting on a glass chair in a room near the top of the tower. Unlike the lower sections, its walls were spiralling strips of black metal, like the metal of which constructs were made, whose spaces had been filled in with glass. The floor was made of metal crescents cunningly locked together. A table of woven wire supported a black metal cube. Tiaan’s head rested on her hands and she was staring intently at the cube.

‘Is that it?’ said Nish. ‘Or is it a last joke by Vithis?’

Tiaan turned her head and stared right through him, as if she didn’t recognise him. Nish’s scalp prickled.

‘Vithis was not a joking man,’ said Malien.

‘There’s something inside,’ said Tiaan, clutching the amplimet in both hands. ‘I can see its aura, but I don’t know how to open the cube.’

‘There’s not much time,’ said Gilhaelith, peering out through the thick glass.

Nish went over beside him. The air was heavy with flying lyrinx. ‘Is that an air-floater, way up high?’

‘If it is, it’s bigger than the air-dreadnoughts that attacked Fiz Gorgo. I wonder what it’s up to? Orgestre could finish this by dropping boulders on us.’

‘Boulders,’ sniffed Nish.

Crash! The tower gave a gentle shudder.

‘Sometimes the simplest attacks are the most effective. That didn’t miss by much.’

‘Is there anything we can do?’

‘Go up in the thapter,’ said Tiaan. ‘Keep them away. I can’t think.’

‘Come on, Nish,’ said Malien. ‘We’ve got work to do.

‘The box doesn’t open,’ said Tiaan, as Nish and Malien clattered down the stairs. ‘Why?’

‘Perhaps it’s locked,’ said Irisis.

‘Of course it is. Vithis said so. And he gave Malien the key, that sapphire rod.’ Tiaan ran to the top of the stairs, shouting, ‘Malien. The key!’

Nish came running up with it. ‘Thank you,’ Tiaan said absently, already turning away. Then she swung back. ‘Nish?’

‘Yes?’

She put out her arms. ‘Good luck.’