by Ian Irvine
Shand found Malien on the floor outside, some distance from her blankets. At his footfall her green eyes fluttered open. Her red hair was full of white dust.
“What have you been doing?” Shand asked gruffly, lifting her with an effort. “Crawling about on a broken shoulder. If any of your patients did that…”
“I had to know what was happening,” she said, trying to smile. Pathetic though it was, her courage warmed Shand’s heart.
“We didn’t win, but we didn’t lose either. Rulke has fled, back to the Nightland we suppose. Karan and Llian were forced through the gate before that. We don’t know where.”
Malien swayed in his arms. “Did no one try to stop them?”
“Who can stop Karan when she decides to do something? We were… a little short of courage. It happened too quickly. I tried and I failed. Tensor attacked Rulke. I fear he will never walk again.”
“Take me to him!” she cried.
Osseion and Shand carried her in, setting her down beside Tensor. She found the sight of him quite shocking. The withering fury she had previously shown toward him was gone. “Poor, foolish man,” she said, laying her hand on his brow. “Just look at you. When first I met you, callow girl as I was, I thought you would be the greatest Aachim of all time. Alas, you have a fatal flaw, Tensor.”
Tensor did not acknowledge her. Malien sighed. She pitied him now, and for Tensor that was worst of all. “And Selial, Shand? What of our leader?”
Shand just looked at her.
“She’s broken, hasn’t she?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Malien grimaced as she tried to rise. “Fix me up, Shand. It’s up to me to lead the Aachim now, out of the worst peril we have faced since the fall of Tar Gaarn.”
“You’ll do what you’re told!” he said, making a bed for her beside Tensor. “You’re not to get up today, or tomorrow.” He walked away, shaking his head. “Though how we’re going to get you two home I do not know.”
With Malien injured, Asper was the only healer among the Aachim. He was a good-natured man with spiky black hair and pupils like black lozenges across his yellow eyes. Asper set to work on Tensor. Shortly Shand added his own hands to the task. They stripped Tensor naked, washed him with wet rags and inspected him all over. The huge frame was powerfully muscled, the chest and thighs those of a wrestler, but one side of his chest was stoved in, his arm dangled uselessly and his whole skeleton seemed to have been pushed out of line.
“This is strange, Asper,” said Shand as he worked on the splintered ribs.
“What?” Asper squatted back on muscular haunches, brushing hair out of his eyes with the side of a bloody hand. He had quite beautiful hands, with the characteristic extremely long fingers of the Aachim, twice the length of his palm.
“The shape and number of his bones don’t seem right.”
Asper laughed. “We are not made as you are, do you not know? We Aachim have our own…” he searched for the right word “… race? Tribe? No, that is not right. We are our own species. Close to you, yet different.”
“I knew that. I had not realized just how much you differed from us.”
The first aid completed, Shand had all the time in the world to worry about Karan and Llian. What had Rulke said? Did they know where the gate has taken them, they might have been less willing to enter it.
“Where did they go?” asked Malien. “Has Rulke sent them back to the Nightland?”
“I don’t know,” said Mendark. “That’s not the most important question.”
“Then what is?” Shand shouted, so afraid for Karan that he felt like screaming. That would not serve with Mendark. Though not an unkind man, he was a schemer, and it seemed that he had seen an opportunity in this disaster.
“What he wants them for,” said Mendark softly. “What are we to do about that? And about him?”
“Let’s work out where they’ve gone,” said Tallia, “then we can try to bring them back.”
“No!” said Yggur, and though he tried to prevent it, a muscle in his cheek spasmed.
“What’s the matter with you?” snapped Mendark. “I’ve set you free.”
“And I intend to stay free,” Yggur ground out. “I’m not giving him another chance.”
“Had I known that it would turn you into a mouse,” sneered Mendark, “I wouldn’t have bothered.”
“You can never know what it’s like,” whispered Yggur.
“Bah!” Mendark turned to Shand, putting on a smile that looked genuine. “What say you, Shand, my old sparring partner? What if Karan and Llian are trapped there? Should we even try to rescue them, or is the risk too great?”
“Seal the Nightland!” said Yggur in an inexorable voice.
“We’d better make sure he’s in it first,” said Mendark.
“Of course we must rescue them,” said Shand.
“I agree,” said Mendark. “Moreover, whatever our feelings toward Karan and Llian—and I care for them too—Rulke is the enemy. If he wants them we must thwart him.”
“What if it’s a trap?” said Yggur, the nerves twitching in his cheek again. “Maybe they’re just bait, to entice us in after him.”
“Perhaps,” said Mendark. “Or maybe he really does need them. What say you all?” He looked around at the circle of faces. “Do we try to bring Karan and Llian back, or do we run and hide? Better run fast and hide well, if we do.”
“We try,” said Malien, and one by one the others echoed her.
Mendark raised an eyebrow to his adversary.
“Damn you!” said Yggur. “Of course I’ll help—you can’t do it without me. But you won’t succeed.”
“Suppose we do. Or if we fail. What then?” Shand asked.
“Make a gate to carry us back to Thurkad,” said Men-dark.
“Can we?” asked Malien.
“It’s possible! Bury your dead, Malien, then we’ll need your artificers to rebuild Tensor’s gate and repair the copper mirror. Let’s begin!”
The Aachim went about their mournful business. Three of their number had fallen, among them tall Hintis who had so hated Llian. Death had washed away the berserker rage that had characterized his last hours. The woolly hair was powdered with dust, the unlined features at peace, save for a swollen tongue protruding out one corner of his mouth. Hintis looked like an overgrown boy.
His friend Basitor tidied him up, ever so gently brushed the dust from his hair, then two Aachim rocked the body onto a plank. Lifting him high, and the other bodies, they bore them out of the Great Tower across the western bridge into the fortress.
The Great Tower stood plumb in the middle of a plateau carved from a mountaintop, and was built over a fissure that bisected the plateau. The surrounding area was paved with large flat stones, here and there forced up by the roots of elderly fig trees. Three volcanic peaks stood above the north, east and west sides of the plateau, gently fuming. On all sides the mountain fell steeply, in a series of cliffs and terraces, to the blasted lands below, which were covered in ash and cinder. A road wound its way up to the top. On the shady southern side the terraces were moist and forested, with pavilions, temples and baths peeping out between the trees, offering glimpses of the Dry Sea beyond.
Behind the tower stood Katazza fortress, a large low structure built on a cliffed edge of the plateau overlooking the island and the Dry Sea beyond. Out of the fortress soared other braided towers, miniatures compared to the Great Tower, a thicket of slender minarets and a cluster of mushroom domes. Two stone and metal bridges ran from the fortress to the Great Tower, the only way in or out.
The Aachim were just disappearing into the fortress. Shand followed them across the bridge, musing. The Great Tower was by far the tallest building he had ever seen, and the most astounding. There was no structure like it anywhere in the world. It was built of nine spiraling cables of stone, woven together in a complex braid, the stonework faced with tiles so white that they dazzled the eye. About halfway up, and again just below the
embrasures of the top chamber, the braided stone passed beneath collars sheathed in lapis lazuli with a narrow rim of gold at bottom and top. The tower was capped by an onion-skin dome of platinum decorated with crimson.
They carried the bodies into a room that had been cleaned of every speck of dust and adorned with the beautiful, sensual art that was everywhere in Katazza. All the Aachim went in and shut the door, and apart from an occasional plangent note from inside, Shand never knew what went on in there.
Hours later they came out again. The bodies had been washed and perfumed, the hair brushed into place, each was arrayed in their finest. The Aachim carried the shrouded shapes out of Katazza, four to each one, in stately procession. They stepped carefully down the stone steps, paced across the paving stones, then followed a track that ran off the edge of the plateau. It wound among the boulders and roots of the forest trees, down to the little serpentine pavilion that Malien was so fond of, which looked through the trees over the Dry Sea. Two bore Tensor on his litter, and two more Malien on hers. The last, Tensor’s healer Asper, carried the most precious thing that each of the dead had owned.
As the sun set they placed the dead in the ground among the twisting roots of a giant fig tree. Lighting up the tree with lanterns, they kept vigil all night. While their instruments wailed, and the bronze lamplight flickered on their faces, each of the Aachim composed and spoke a threnody for the dead. Far below, the little cones sprinkled around the skirts of the island were erupting, their brilliant lava fountains lighting up the bed of the sea.
At the end of the night the precious things were put beside the bodies, the graves filled and marked each with an obelisk. As the sun flashed its first beam at them from the horizon, a horn called three times three and they turned away.
Selial leaned on Shand’s shoulder. “You cannot know what it is like to bury your precious dead on another world,” she said in a choked whisper.
“I cannot,” he agreed somberly. “But I know what it is like never to know where my dead are buried.”
She had no answer to that. In silence they went back to the towers, to begin the perilous attempt on the Nightland.
The Aachim continued their preparations for the journey, in case the work failed and they had to flee in haste. They filled waterbags, packed tents, made sleds to haul gear and water across the salt, checked their water stills, or trazpars as they called them, and every other piece of equipment that would be needed. Sufficient food was already packed, for they had prepared it after their earlier rebellion.
Mendark, Tallia and Osseion made their own arrangements just as silently. Tallia collected a number of the glowing globes from the wall brackets, to light the nights of their travel. Only Shand seemed idle, for his preparations took no time at all, and he spent his time with Malien, or by himself at the top of the tower, leaning on the stone embrasure to look out across the Dry Sea, agonizing about the fate of Karan, and Llian too. Despite his well-known prejudice against the Zain race, he liked Llian and wished him no harm.
“Let’s begin,” said Mendark the following morning.
“How can we?” asked Malien. “We don’t know where the gate took them.”
“I came through it,” said Yggur, supporting himself on Tensor’s workbench, for he was still weak. “Had it taken them back to Thurkad I would have known it. They went somewhere else.”
“That’s my thought too,” said Shand. “What say you, Tensor?”
Staring straight ahead, his eyes focused on nothing, Tensor gave no response.
“My guess is the Nightland!” Malien said. “Though I can’t think why he wants them.”
“Can’t you?” said Shand. “I scarcely dare think what he might use Karan for.”
“Let’s get on with it!” Mendark snapped. “If we’re hurt, he is hurt just as badly. If we’re weak, so is he! If ever there is a time to carry the attack to him it is now.”
“I still think we should seal the Nightland!” said Yggur. “He’s had plenty of time to prepare traps, and there’s no way to identify them in that place.”
“You would abandon Karan and Llian to him?” Tallia said coldly.
Yggur bowed his head. “It is harsh, but in war there are casualties, and often the greatest, noblest and cleverest are among them. To go into the Nightland would be to risk everything. That is his world; we know nothing about it. Who knows better than I the consequences of prying into the unknown?”
“Tensor does!” Tallia said.
She sat on a tread halfway up the curve of the stairs watching Mendark. Xarah and her twin Shalah sat together, sharing a joke. The artificers had reconstructed Tensor’s pavilion as best they could. The broken columns had been rejoined with metal pins, the dents beaten out of the dome. Finally they lifted it atop the seven columns.
Mendark walked around the stepped pad, inspecting the stonework. There were many cracks and missing fragments. “It looks like a broken pot that’s been badly repaired,” he said.
“It’s a pretty sad attempt,” said Thel, the engineer in charge. She was stocky, with a strong jaw that she clenched and unclenched as she worked. “But in the time…”
The copper mirror, which Tensor had made to direct the gate after the Mirror of Aachan betrayed him, was equally flawed. A diagonal crease across it had been beaten out, but the mark was still obvious after polishing. Mendark pulled his beard.
“It’ll have to do.” He took a small stone out of his pocket. “Lift me up!”
Asper made a step for him. Mendark carefully placed the stone on top of the high point of the dome, then scrambled back down. While this was going on, the stair had been blocked with a screen and four Aachim had dragged in a glowing iron furnace surmounted by a contraption of coiled pipes.
“Begin!” said Mendark.
Thel poured some water into a funnel-shaped orifice and immediately steam gushed from the flared ends of seven pipes. Within minutes the air was full of fog.
Mendark held the mirror out in front of him and began to chant. The polished surface shimmered, images fleeted across it, then the pavilion was lit by a crimson flash. With a sharp crack the stone on the dome exploded into pieces, each speck tracing a glowing trail through the fog.
“Fix it, Yggur!” Mendark shouted.
Yggur held up his arms. One hand gripped a glowing red ruby. He grunted. The traces froze in place. There were seven bright ones and an uncounted number of faint trails, some barely visible.
“One, two, close together,” said Mendark. “That’s you, Yggur, and Faelamor, coming from Thurkad.”
Yggur nodded, a dim shape in the mist. “And the third, shorter one, Faelamor departing again. She didn’t go back to Thurkad.”
“She may have intended to, though,” said Malien.
Two more traces began together but halfway across the room spiraled apart, before stopping abruptly. A third, very bright trace followed a similar path, though it faded two-thirds of the way along. “The pair must be Karan and Llian,” said Shand, “and the third one, Rulke coming from the Nightland.”
“So they have gone there!” said Malien.
“Don’t jump to conclusions!” Mendark cautioned.
The seventh trace began in a slightly different place, writhed across the room, spikes jagged out of it in all directions, then it too faded. “That’s Rulke’s departing trace,” said Mendark, walking along underneath it. “I don’t like the way it ends. Something’s not right.”
“It’s meant to confuse, or entice,” said Shand.
“He hasn’t gone back to the Nightland,” said Tallia.
“That gives me a little comfort,” said Yggur.
“It doesn’t give me any,” growled Mendark. “What’s he up to?”
“Can we tell where he’s gone?” Tallia wondered.
“No! This only shows paths that begin or end here. Other gates are untraceable.”
“Nothing more to learn here,” said Malien wearily. “Let’s go in, if we must.”
; “No, I’m worn out,” Mendark whispered, sagging down on the step.
“And I,” Yggur gasped. He waved a hand and the foggy traces disappeared.
“Shall I try to trace the gate into the Nightland?” Tallia asked.
“If you like, but hold back. Don’t open it!”
“I won’t!”
“How would you begin?” Malien asked.
“Maybe there were two gates,” Tallia said. She was on her hands and knees, picking over a pile of rubble beside the pavilion.
“Two?”
“I think the one Rulke came through was separate from Tensor’s. I’m trying to find the difference.”
“Say it as you think it,” said Malien, “and I’ll tell you what I think. Perhaps we see the problem from different sides.”
Tallia looked up at Malien with sudden friendliness, liking her.
“The gate Yggur came through is dead, but Rulke’s may still be capable.”
“Why so?” asked Malien.
“The Nightland is still whole, its defenses unbroken. Tensor made use of a flaw that has always been there, though it could only be opened from outside.”
“In which case…”
“Rulke must hold it open. Let’s try to recover the gate. Be careful, he might try to take control of it again.”
They set to work. Shand sat on a bench beside the pavilion, watching, but he spoke rarely and only of inconsequential things. Tallia labored for hours, working carefully, cautiously under Malien’s direction, trying to conjure up the intangible framework of the gate, that conduit that could tame the very fabric of distance.
Suddenly Tallia flung herself down. “I can’t do it!” she said, laying her head on the dusty floor.
“Tell me what you can’t do,” said Malien, easing her arm in its sling. She climbed off her stool to walk around the pavilion, touching the stone columns with her fingertips.