by Ian Irvine
FORTY-FOUR
‘We’ve got to do something or the atatusk are going to run right over the top of us,’ Nish said to Ryll when they met during a temporary lull in the fighting, twenty minutes later.
‘We’ve done well to hold them back,’ said Ryll, whose chest and right arm were covered in atatusk blood of a brilliant chromium green. ‘They’re the mightiest foe we ever encountered in the void, but they’re not as comfortable on this heavy world. We’re tiring them.’
‘Not quickly enough.’
The atatusk were brilliant, instinctive fighters who seemed to anticipate every stroke of their opponents, and they could take even more punishment than the armoured lyrinx, for the blubbery layer under their grey skin could not only absorb mighty blows, but was self-healing. At least five hundred men lay dead already, most from Vomix’s army fortunately, plus many lyrinx, and the atatusk were coming out of the void faster than they were being killed.
Ryll began cleaning the claws of his right hand with the point of a yellow atatusk tusk. It was as long as Nish’s forearm and greenly bloody on the thick end, where it had been torn from the jaw.
The lyrinx were as civilised as old humans, Nish mused, but sometimes it was hard to keep that in mind. ‘Do you know what I hate most about the atatusk?’
Ryll raised a scaly eyebrow.
‘It’s their contempt for us old humans,’ said Nish. ‘They do think of us as grubs, vermin to be stamped on. They assume we’re feeble, cowardly creatures who will run away.’
Ryll made a peculiar coughing bark behind his hand, then turned aside hastily.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Nish. ‘You – you’re laughing at me!’
‘You used to think of us as vermin,’ said Ryll, still smiling.
Lyrinx smiles showed hundreds of teeth and took a lot of getting used to, for their mouths were big enough to bite off a human head. However Nish had known Ryll a long time and, even after ten years, had not forgotten how to read his relatively immobile features. Ryll was vastly amused.
‘Sorry,’ said Nish. ‘We were ignorant in the olden days. We hadn’t seen the humanity inside you.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Ryll. ‘We also thought of you as pink squirming grubs with useless teeth and no claws.’ He laughed thunderously.
Nish thumped him in the chest, which was like punching the trunk of a tree. Ryll retracted his long, wickedly sharp talons, then extended them again towards Nish’s cheek. It was a fiercely friendly gesture, but these very claws had once laid open his father’s face in terrible wounds that had never healed, and Nish’s smile faded.
‘We can’t beat them, can we?’ he said, surveying the battlefield again.
‘Not unless you can stop them coming out of the void.’ Ryll nodded up towards the opening. ‘There could be millions of atatusk up there; probably are.’
Millions! A few hundred had come through so far and they were wreaking ruin upon the surrounding armies. ‘Maybe we should have a go at sealing the opening,’ Nish said, expecting Ryll to laugh the idea down.
‘Maybe we should,’ Ryll replied, ‘though I wouldn’t want to send my fliers up there.’ Jagged colours flickered chameleon-like across his chest and throat, signifying his unease. ‘The atatusk have always had our measure in the air.’
‘But they don’t fly,’ said Nish. ‘Do they?’
‘No, they can’t fly, yet they have a way of bringing us down. On heavy worlds like Santhenar, most of our fliers have to use mancery to stay aloft –’
‘I remember,’ said Nish. Ryll, born without wings, had been considered a misfit, though he had risen above that prejudice to lead the lyrinx nation. ‘How do they do it?’
‘We don’t know. Atatusk aren’t even great mancers.’
‘Flydd might know, but I don’t see him anywhere.’ He looked around and saw the sky-galleon hovering not far away. ‘I’ll ask M’lainte –’
‘Isn’t she a trifle … er, venerable?’ said Ryll.
‘You mean old?’ said Nish as they strode towards the sky galleon, which had settled on the plain while Lilis scurried around, collecting fallen spears for reuse.
The fighting had swept across this area half an hour ago and the paving was strewn with bodies – here an atatusk, practically cut in half, surrounded by a halo of human bodies, there a slight, golden-skinned Faellem man without a mark on him; further on were three dead Aachim, all with red hair, and another atatusk, this one on its back with five spears sticking up from its round grey torso.
‘But Ryll,’ Nish added, ‘during the war, old lyrinx were proud to die in the line of battle, protecting their young.’
Ryll gave another little cough as he skirted the dead, heaved one of the spears out and carried it with him, still dripping.
‘Old lyrinx remain strong and vigorous until their end, my friend, while your kind grow fat and feeble twenty years before you die. Truly, old humans are decadent, helpless creatures. How you climbed to the top of this world remains a mystery to me.’
The lyrinx was teasing him again but Nish didn’t mind. It was a welcome distraction.
‘We used our brains, not our brawn,’ Nish said pointedly. ‘M’lainte,’ he called up to the old woman, who was sitting on the bow of the sky-galleon, sketching a device on the skirt of her grubby gown, ‘we need your advice.’
The fighting was moving in their direction, a squad of atatusk charging through a company of Vomix’s fleeing troops as if they were field mice, flinging bodies to right and left.
‘You’d better come up.’ She tossed a rope ladder over.
When they reached the deck, M’lainte lifted the sky galleon out of spear range.
‘We can’t beat the atatusk unless we can stop them coming through,’ said Nish.
M’lainte rubbed her fingers vigorously through her thin hair, leaving it sticking up in all directions, and raised her eyes to the semicircular opening in the void barrier. ‘I don’t see how you can stop them.’
‘If we can’t,’ said Ryll, ‘Santhenar cannot survive.’
M’lainte studied the opening. ‘Even supposing the enemy could be kept back, can it be sealed? That would depend on the nature of the barrier.’ She raised her voice. ‘Lilis?’
Lilis emerged from the cabin, spectacles perched on her thin nose, studying a book as she walked, but she did not resemble a librarian now, nor a little old lady. She was dressed in a yellow blouse and red velvet knee britches held up by a broad black belt, with long black knee boots folded over at the top. Her hair was covered by a cap, and a scarlet bandanna with white spots was loosely knotted around her neck.
‘You’re looking most piratical today, my dear,’ said M’lainte, who wore the same ill-fitting and grubby clothes as ever – indeed, they might have been the same clothes she’d been wearing when Nish had first met her, more than thirteen years ago.
He thought the librarian looked more like a messenger boy than a pirate. Lilis might have passed for a boy, being so small and slight, had it not been for her lined face and hands, and the silver hair peeking out from under her cap.
‘I feel a hundred years younger,’ cried Lilis. She glanced over the side, looking down at the bloody battlefield and said, more soberly, ‘And even if I am to die today, I would not go back.’
‘We’re thinking about attempting to seal the opening,’ said M’lainte. ‘What do you know about such matters?’
‘A hole in the barrier is a violation of the natural order of the universe,’ said Lilis.
‘The natural order?’ said Nish.
‘So the philosopher Melochtes wrote, two thousand years ago. He spent a lifetime meditating on the nature of the Forbidding.’
‘Do you remember everything in the Library?’ said Nish.
‘Of course not,’ said Lilis, smiling at the thought, and held up the book. ‘But after Stilkeen made its public threat I read everything we had pertaining to the void, including this book, and I discovered that, in nature, each thing has
its own order and its own pattern. The barrier between the worlds and the void forms a smooth surface which resists puncture and, if a breach is made, the barrier yearns to repair itself.’
Below them, the sounds of battle grew louder and more violent, and Nish hurried to the side. Six atatusk with heavy spears were attacking a company of some thirty Imperial Guard armed with spears and scythe-shaped blades. The Imperial Guard were holding firm; they were the best fighters here, and surely that number could separate the enemy, surround them and finish them off. And if they couldn’t …
‘Then why hasn’t the barrier repaired itself?’ said M’lainte, but answered her own question. ‘Because it can’t while atatusk are continually passing through it.’
‘Melochtes wrote that a sizeable hole might take days to heal,’ said Lilis.
‘I wonder that Stilkeen didn’t make a gigantic opening,’ said Nish, ‘so more atatusk could come through at once.’
‘When it was cutting the hole, its light beam stopped suddenly,’ said Ryll.
‘It would have been a corrupted form of chthonic fire,’ M’lainte surmised, ‘the stuff Stilkeen took from one of the dimensionless boxes, perhaps. Nothing else could cut such a barrier, but it must have been painful to use.’
‘Even if you can seal the opening,’ said Yulla through the open cabin door, ‘Stilkeen might make another.’
Nish turned to face her. She was sitting at a small table, studying a yellow crystal with her hand lens, and did not look up. ‘How would you seal it?’ she added.
‘Push the platform back up into place and hold it there until the barrier seals itself,’ said Nish.
‘Easy to say, not so easy to do,’ said Lilis. ‘According to Melochtes, the barrier is neither matter nor force, but rather, something than can be matter at one time and force at another. You might find it hard to take hold of.’
‘The atatusk stood on the platform,’ said Nish, ‘and they’re a lot heavier than we are.’
‘They come from the void. The platform could be solid to them yet intangible to us.’
‘Great!’ said Nish. ‘We’ve got to raise a platform we can’t feel, and even if we somehow get it into place, the atatusk, who can touch it, will simply push it down again.’
Everyone looked at M’lainte, who was an undoubted mechanical genius. ‘What’s the one thing around here that’s not of this world?’ she said distractedly.
‘No idea.’ Nish hated questions like that.
‘The web Stilkeen left behind in the audience chamber?’ said Lilis.
‘Precisely,’ said M’lainte. ‘The sticky web, partly made of shadow, with which it protects itself from contact with our physical world. I’ve a feeling some web might do nicely.’
‘How do we handle a web made of shadow?’ said Nish.
‘You collect it in a dimensionless box, of course,’ she said, as though that would be obvious even to an idiot.
‘And then what?’ Nish had no idea what M’lainte had in mind.
She did not reply. Her eyes were closed and she was deep in thought.
‘What if you nudged the platform closed with the bow of the sky-galleon?’ said Lilis, ‘and held it closed while the opening sealed itself?’
‘The barrier force would tear the sky-galleon apart,’ said M’lainte. Her eyes snapped open and she began to draw on her skirt again.
‘I’ve got it!’ she said directly. ‘Nish, you’ll have to stick shadow web all along the edge of the opening, then tie ropes to the web and heave the platform up. Once you’ve done that, you’ll climb the wall of the barrier and smear chthonic fire on the edges of the opening, until they dissolve, stick together and reseal.’
It sounded like a complicated plan, even if they weren’t under attack, and if anything went wrong it would fail, but Nish had to concede that M’lainte was a genius for thinking of it. ‘How do we get out if the opening is sealed?’
‘Leave a small section of the platform unstuck, then come through and hang from your ropes. We’ll be waiting to pick you up.’
There came a series of triumphant barking roars from below. Nish ran for the side but Ryll beat him to it. ‘They’re all dead!’ he said sombrely.
Who? Nish thought, suddenly afraid that it would be Flydd, Yggur, Maelys and all the others. He leaned over; the thirty Imperial Guardsmen had fallen, but only three atatusk; the other three were dancing on the blood-drenched corpses, waving heads and other body parts in the air.
‘The Imperial Guard were our very best,’ he said dazedly. ‘At this rate, we’ll be lucky to survive to lunchtime.’
‘Then we’d better get moving,’ said M’lainte, beside him. ‘Call Chissmoul to fly the sky-galleon, and a squad of troops to defend the opening while you seal it.’
‘They’ll never hold the atatusk back,’ said Nish, dismayed by what he had just seen. It was hopeless.
‘I’ll fetch some of my best fighters,’ said Ryll. ‘We can fight them hand to hand, but you little humans haven’t got a hope.’ He thumped Nish on the back. ‘You’ll have to stay well behind. Bring your most powerful crossbows, and long spears with a crosspiece on the shaft, otherwise the atatusk will keep coming for you – even with a spear right through them. Cheer up, Nish. We’re not beaten yet.’
Nish, trying to think of a way to attack the creatures, forced a smile. ‘I’ll take the small javelard as well, if the platform will hold it. Let’s see them fight with a heavy spear through the heart!’ he said savagely. ‘Atatusk do have hearts, don’t they?’
‘Yes, but they’re high up, behind the armoured bulge below their throats.’
M’lainte flew into Morrelune to gather shadow webs, the discarded dimensionless boxes and any spilled chthonic fire she could find, while Nish assembled his team: six Gendrigorean lancers and six crossbowmen to enter the void and help the lyrinx hold back the atatusk while he, Aimee and Clech closed the opening and sealed it.
He wanted Flangers but that would have left his remaining troops leaderless. Nish passed the word around for Chissmoul to come quickly.
M’lainte returned, and shortly Ryll appeared with a dozen lyrinx, plus Liett, her eyes flashing. Clearly their relationship was as stormy as ever.
‘If you think I’m going to let you do this on your own,’ she raged, buffeting Ryll about the face with her beautiful wings while he grinned sheepishly, making no attempt to defend himself, ‘you’re a sadder fool than I thought.’ She rounded on Nish. ‘You know how useless he is. Why do you encourage him?’
‘All right,’ said Nish, who had been expecting this. ‘You can come too.’
‘Of course I’m coming –’ Liett went for Ryll again. ‘You scurvy, lying …’ Evidently searching for the worst insult she could come up with, she settled for ‘… miserable human of a lyrinx.’
She battered him to the ground with her wings until he rolled onto his face, laughing and crying, ‘Enough!’
‘You said Nish would forbid me to come,’ said Liett, her crest flushed a brilliant, throbbing green.
‘How could I stop you?’ said Nish, who remembered her character very well. ‘Besides, you’re the best lyrinx flier as ever was, and I could use … what’s the matter?’
Liett was shaking her head. ‘In the old days we used the field to fly on Santhenar, but the nodes are gone, and the field with them, and without the Art we’re too heavy to lift off the ground.’
‘How come Ryll didn’t tell me that earlier –?’ Nish broke off, realising his blunder, but Ryll had walked away.
‘It wouldn’t have occurred to him,’ Liett said quietly, ‘since he has no wings.’
‘Besides, the nodes were destroyed after the lyrinx went to Tallallame,’ Nish went on. ‘He didn’t know.’
‘None of us did, until we tried to fly here.’
Nish paced back and forth. ‘What about in the void?’
‘We have little weight there. We can fly, but it’s perilous to do so near atatusk.’
‘So we’ll al
so be nearly weightless in the void,’ said Nish. Would that be a benefit or a handicap? Probably the latter, until they got used to it.
‘If you were foolish enough to enter it,’ said Liett.
Liett studied him, head angled to one side, and he imagined that she was seeing him as a pink, squirming grub. He turned away.
‘Where’s your pilot?’ said M’lainte when the human and lyrinx troops had come aboard and all their gear had been loaded. The small javelard, which, as well as firing spears could also be fitted with a leather catapult bucket, had been unbolted from its mount and was roped down so it could be deployed quickly.
‘I called for Chissmoul but she must be too far away.’ Or dead, Nish thought gloomily.
M’lainte frowned. ‘That’s awkward.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve got a lot to do before you can close the opening, and I can’t fly this craft at the same time. Can you call her again?’
‘If she’d heard, she would have come. Flying is her life.’
M’lainte tapped the toe of her boot on the deck. ‘And we have no other pilot …’
‘Wait! I’m sure Tiaan could do it,’ said Nish. ‘She was the very first to fly a thapter during the war; in fact, she and Malien worked out how to make thapters fly.’
They circumnavigated Morrelune and found Tiaan around the far side, with Merryl; both came aboard at once.
‘Can you fly this craft?’ said M’lainte, looking anxious for once. ‘I know it’s been a long time, and the sky-galleon is very different to a thapter …’
Tiaan settled onto the pilot’s seat, clearly glad to take the weight off her feet. ‘After the war, I swore I would never use such devices again. But now I have children to protect, I see that was a foolish oath. If you would give me a couple of minutes.’
Nish and M’lainte walked away to the rail and she leaned on it, looking across the plain. ‘How did you end up with Yulla?’ Nish asked.
‘I was sent to her during the war,’ said M’lainte reflectively, ‘to look after the thapter Flydd had given her, and afterwards I stayed; Yulla always had something interesting for me to do. And when she took on Persia –’