by Ian Irvine
Didn’t have long for what? He was trapped in a half-molten tower likely to collapse at any moment, being cured like a ham in a smokehouse, and his arms could barely hold him up. Half dead from dehydration, he had been reduced to licking the sooty condensation off the underside of the roof slabs. He was unarmed, opposed by hundreds of the toughest fighters in the world and dozens of mancers aching to impress their masters. Furthermore, the scrutators, collectively, represented the most powerful force ever assembled on Santhenar. The very idea of trying to rescue his friends was absurd.
But it would not go away.
THREE
The western side of the horned tower had stopped steaming. Ullii hoped it had cooled enough to climb, for there was no other way of getting to the top. Unfortunately it was also the side that faced the yard.
She went up the stair as far as she could go, eyeing the hot rubble in case a way past it had opened up. She could now discern a gap below the under-spiral of the stair, but everything radiated such heat that she could not get near it. Here and there, ribbons of molten metal, shiny as quicksilver where their coatings of grit had cracked, congealed in puddles on the treads.
It had to be the outside. Ullii squeezed through an embrasure that did not face the yard and found herself just above one of the roofs of Fiz Gorgo. She lowered herself to a roofing slab, adjusted her mask so it allowed in just a slit of light, and looked up.
The tower had been built of rough stone and the joins offered many hand-and foot-holds. Ullii was naturally dextrous, so the climb would not have been beyond her, had the tower been dry. Besides, her lattice revealed its secret strengths and flaws in a way that no one else could see. She looked up, closed her eyes and its network of cracks, crevices and stress-points opened up to her.
She pulled herself as far as the next floor, the fifth, but above that the stone was too hot to hold on to. Ullii edged sideways around the tower, one eye on the yard. If anyone looked up she would be seen, for her pale clothing and skin would stand out against the dark stone.
Fortunately the rain had become heavier, and colder, and the soldiers in the yard had their hoods down. Curling her toes around a projection no thicker than her finger, Ullii eased around the curve of the tower until she was directly above the yard. If she fell, she would die.
Above her, at the lower point of the bend, the wall was networked with horizontal cracks. If she could cross above them the worst would be over. She went up, stretched sideways to reach a convenient crack shaped like a lyrinx’s smile, and up again, sliding the fingers of her left hand deep into a crevice. She jerked them out and thrust them into her mouth – the inside was hot. She turned her head from side to side, eyes closed, sensing the heat on her cheek. There, to her left and above, where the rock was cracked like a mosaic, it felt cooler. It didn’t look very stable, though.
Ullii edged left as far as she could go, made sure her footing was sound and reached up. The first piece of the mosaic grated under her fingers and she had to hastily press it back before it dropped on her face. She fingered another, which also moved. The whole area was loose. She would have to go further and hope she could find a way around it.
It proved to be hard, slow work, for Ullii had never regained the wiry strength she’d had before she lost the baby. She edged along a tiny crack, just wide enough to get the tips of her toes inside. A span to her left and a span up she saw an easy path, though she wasn’t sure she could get to it. She felt very tired.
Suddenly her head spun and the lattice vanished. Ullii let out a cry of anguish, lost her grip with her left hand and nearly fell. She clung on with her toes and her right hand, scratching at the rock with her left and breaking her fingernails.
Ullii recovered quickly, though her heart was thundering and her calf muscles screaming. Her toes slipped. She worked them back into the crack but couldn’t find a comfortable position. Her left foot had begun to cramp and panic was eating away her confidence. The lattice was her life, her being, and compensation for all her other frailties. It made her unique and allowed her to survive in this cruel and hostile world. What if it didn’t come back?
She’d lost it before, briefly, after times of extreme stress, but never when her life had depended on it. At such moments it was normally at its strongest. Since Nish had killed Myllii, and Ullii had lost her baby, the lattice had slowly weakened. She lived in dread that it would disappear completely.
Concentrating on her breathing, Ullii let go with one hand and massaged her calf until the cramp was gone. The panic faded but the lattice did not come back. She would have to do without it.
Opening her eyes, she worked out a path upwards and closed them again. Her supersensitive fingers and toes would tell her all she needed to know. Vision would just be a distraction.
After much trial and error she found a way around the cracked area and up onto the bend in the tower, here clotted with glassy dribbles of melted rock that had oozed through cracks in the walls and congealed on the outside. Some knobs were too hot to hold, and others would not have borne her weight, but she found a pair rooted deep in the wall that were as solid as a staircase, allowing her to rest for a while.
Ullii wasn’t thinking about retribution now, for the climb had taken too much out of her. She no longer knew why she was climbing, only that Nish had come up and not gone down again. She didn’t see how he could have lived but she wouldn’t believe he was dead until she saw his body.
The other urge that kept her going was the need to hide from Chief Scrutator Ghorr. Ullii did not know how she was going to survive on her own, but she was never going back to Nennifer.
She was clinging on with her toes and the fingers of one hand, while she wiped the trickling moisture off her forehead, when she heard a glassy crack from inside the open watch-house at the top of the tower. It was followed by a muffled groan or curse.
It could have been the tormented rocks contracting as they cooled, but Ullii did not think so. It had sounded human, and very familiar. She sniffed but could smell only hot rock. If Nish was up there, the breeze was blowing his scent away. She scrabbled up to the seventh level. Her fingers were aching and she’d broken most of her toenails. Ullii needed to rest but drove herself on; she had to know. The wall and the embrasure above her were steaming, and a trickle of smoke issued from a deep fissure to one side of it.
Ullii peered over the lip of the embrasure and was confronted by a network of hundreds of spears and blades of rock glass, arching up like scimitars from a hole in the centre of the floor. The room was full of them. A hole in the jumbled floor was blocked by congealed glass, still cracking as it cooled.
Now she smelt Nish, though it was a strange, baked odour, the arid smell of desiccated skin. Ullii felt for the knife in her pack but did not pull it out. It was enough to know it was there. A trail of smoke drifted across her face, burning the membranes in her nose. She breathed through her mouth, her eyes watering as she scanned the floor. There was no sign of him. She looked up through the network of glassy blades and there he was, his arms and legs wrapped desperately around the iron rods that supported the roof. He looked as if he could barely hang on.
Instinctively she bared her teeth, but the gesture faded as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. He was coated, no, crusted with smoke and soot. His hair and skin were black and the individual hairs of his beard stood out like bristles. Skin was flaking off his nose and lips, the whites of his eyes were like chips of marble on black velvet, and he was shaking so hard that his teeth clattered.
Nish licked cracked lips and Ullii saw blood on his tongue. She pulled herself up onto the sill of the embrasure, staring at him, overcome. Rage warred with a most desperate longing for him to put his strong arms around her and make everything all right.
Nish saw her and let go with one hand, reaching out. ‘Help me, Ullii.’
His agony showed in the crevices around his mouth, the shuddering of his arms, the staring eyes, but that was nothing to her own pain. He’d lost nothin
g; she had nothing left. He’d torn it all away.
‘Water,’ he croaked, tongue rasping over his lips. ‘Please.’
The begging made her think less of him. Nish had always been strong. Now he was weaker than her and she felt nothing but contempt. ‘Come down.’
‘The blades will cut me to ribbons.’
She hoped so. Ullii wanted to see his blood run free. ‘Jump!’
Nish considered all possible ways down, biting his sooty lip. ‘I can’t.’
Ullii had always resisted using her initiative. In the long years when the only thing she’d wanted had been her brother back, it had been easier to drift. Now the desire for retribution was so strong that it seared her.
She moved around to the next embrasure, out of sight from below. Taking her boots out of her pack, Ullii put them on then climbed onto the sill and hurled her pack up into the middle of the chamber. The fragile glass sang as it smashed and, with a tinkling roar, the central part of the network fell to the floor. She wove between the remaining spears, glass crunching under her soles, and eased her head over the sill on the yard side. Several guards had looked up at the sound, but only briefly. Pieces were falling off the tower all the time.
Nish was staring down at the gap. The pack had carved an elongated scar through the glass spears, though it wasn’t much wider than a human body.
‘Can you throw the pack again?’ he said.
It lay under a network of quivering spears, so precariously perched that a breath could have dislodged them. She shook her head.
Nish pulled himself along the supporting rods, choosing the spot carefully. He couldn’t drop – he had to throw himself through at just the right angle and, even had he been fit and strong, that would not have been easy. His hands were shaking. He rubbed his palms down his trousers, coating them with greasy soot. He tried to rub it off again but only smeared it everywhere. Nish gripped a rod, lowered himself until he was hanging full stretch, and began to sway back and forth.
Ullii could see the fear on his face but it no longer gave her any pleasure. Nothing gave her pleasure any more. She pulled out the knife, just to be ready.
‘What are you doing?’ he said, hanging motionless.
‘You killed Myllii.’
‘Myllii?’ he whispered dazedly.
Surely he hadn’t forgotten? He truly was a monster. ‘I’m going to kill you for that, Nish.’
He closed his eyes, which turned his face into an ebony mask, then opened them with a flash of white. ‘I’m sorry. It was an accident. He just reared back –’
‘It’s too late to say you’re sorry now,’ she whispered, overcome by memories still vivid and clear.
‘Ullii,’ he begged. ‘Please.’
‘Too late. Too late.’ She turned away, the blade hanging down. Ullii couldn’t look at him. Why was he saying it now? Why not back then, when it had mattered?
‘What about our baby?’ croaked Nish. Sooty flakes of skin broke from his lips and drifted upwards in the rising air. ‘Would you kill our little baby’s father?’
‘There is no baby!’ she said in a thin scream. ‘Yllii is dead and that’s your fault too!’
FOUR
Nish’s hand slipped and he flailed about wildly before getting another grip. ‘Yllii?’ he rasped.
‘Your son!’ It was an accusation – how could you not know his name? And an attack – it’s your fault.
‘My son?’ That threw him. His lower lip trembled. ‘Dead? How?’
How could he not know? Having lived Yllii’s death every possible way over the past four and a half months, she found Nish’s ignorance incomprehensible. It didn’t occur to her that he had no way of knowing these things. ‘You killed him!’ Ullii shrieked, half-mad with rage and grief.
Nish clung desperately to his perch. ‘You ran away, Ullii, and I couldn’t find you. I don’t know what happened from that day to this. But whatever happened to our son, I wasn’t there.’
‘You weren’t there,’ she whispered. ‘You were never there when I needed you, Nish. You didn’t care.’
‘I wept tears of blood for what I’d done to Myllii but I couldn’t undo it. Please, Ullii. What happened to our son?’
She swept the blade through the air. ‘Come down.’
‘Put the knife away first.’
She gave a half-hearted slash, screwed her eyes up, then laid the knife on the floor among the shattered glass, within easy reach. Nish would come down. He had to know what had happened to his son and it gave her the upper hand. At least he cares about Yllii, she thought, even if he hates me.
‘Come down, Nish.’
She studied him from under her eyelids. He seemed to be weighing her intentions. Now he began to swing his legs, trying to line himself up with the gap. Ullii could have done it with her eyes closed but he lacked her natural dexterity, and that pleased her selfish little soul. It wasn’t often that she felt superior.
Nish sucked in a breath, swung, and threw himself at the gap.
Before he let go, Ullii knew he’d miss. He’d swung out a little too far, a fraction too hard. His legs went through the gap but his body wasn’t lined up properly and he was heading straight for a pair of razor-sharp blades.
Nish jerked backwards and twisted sideways at the last instant, and his torso passed through safely. He whipped his head back, the blade shaved a clump of hair off the left side, nicking his ear, then he was through, all but his flailing left arm. It went side-on into a blade, cutting a deep gouge in his forearm before the glass broke. Blood spurted up as he slammed into a sloping slab of stone that was mercifully free of glass.
He didn’t move for a second or two. Blood pumped straight up from his forearm, coating one of the blades above him before dripping all over his face. Moving painfully, he got a thumb to the artery and the flow stopped. He looked up at her, the blood still dripping on his face, and across at the knife. She did too.
Ullii still planned to kill him. She took up the knife but Nish didn’t move. Blood welled out under his thumb and he pressed harder. She hated him for all that had happened to her since she’d been taken to the manufactory a year ago. Because of him she was alone in the world. She had no brother, no son, no friends, and now the lattice, her last resort and only comfort, had gone away. She didn’t know how to get it back.
‘I didn’t know Myllii was your brother,’ Nish said quietly, his voice barely audible over the singing of the blades in the wind. ‘I thought he was attacking you. Or holding you so the soldiers could carry you off to the air-floater.’
He looked ghastly, with his face and arm drenched in blood, and the rest of him covered in soot and flaking skin. She wavered.
Nish went on. ‘I told Myllii to stop but he reared backwards and the knife went straight into him. I’m so very sorry.’
Ullii closed her eyes. She was back at the campsite, holding Myllii and feeling his shock as the knife slid into his back. Tears welled out through her eyelids like drops of blood from a wound. Had Nish said that? She couldn’t remember – she’d been too overcome with joy at finding her twin after so many years of searching.
Nish could be lying. He’d used her before and he was, after all, the son of his father, Jal-Nish, the worst man Ullii had ever come across. She’d been a good judge of people once, but Ullii couldn’t tell about Nish any more.
‘What happened to Yllii?’ he said softly.
You killed him too, she wanted to scream while stabbing Nish to the heart. Ghorr had told her so, many times, and so had Scrutator T’Lisp, the wicked old woman who had trapped Ullii with Myllii’s binding bracelet. They’d told her that Nish was evil incarnate and had to be destroyed. Ullii had believed them at the time, and for a long time after, but looking back on her months in Nennifer she began to doubt. Chief Scrutator Ghorr was a monster whose handiwork she’d seen many times in Nennifer, and on the long journey here. He’d ruined Fiz Gorgo, killed dozens of innocent people and planned to torture the rest of them to death. And
she had helped him, and betrayed every one of her former friends, so what did that make her?
‘Tell me everything, Ullii,’ he said softly. ‘From the moment Myllii first appeared in the clearing, until now. I have to know.’
She began haltingly, fingering the bracelet that still clung to her wrist, immovable. Just reliving that night of Myllii’s death was torment, and the time after was worse. She could still feel Yllii’s sharp fingernails scrabbling at her insides.
‘She did it,’ Nish said when Ullii had finished that part of the tale. She turned her face up to him blankly, lost in another time, another place.
‘Scrutator T’Lisp killed our baby,’ he went on. He reached out to her, thumb still pressed against his arm, but she pulled away. ‘I did you wrong, Ullii, and I’m sorry, but I’m not the real villain. Ghorr ordered Yllii’s death so you would be free to track down Xervish Flydd for him. No one else could have found him.’
‘No,’ she said softly. ‘No one could but me.’
‘T’Lisp worked her Art so that you’d take Myllii’s bracelet, and the instant you put it on you came under her control. But then you let slip that you were pregnant, and T’Lisp knew that while you carried our baby you’d be no use to her. She directed her scrutator magic against Yllii, through the bracelet. She lied to you and she killed Yllii. And now Ghorr –’ Nish broke off, as if he’d thought better of it.
Ullii sank down among the shards of green glass, not noticing as they dug into her calves. She didn’t want to believe Nish. If what he said was true, in serving Ghorr she’d been using Yllii’s death for an even greater evil.
She thought it through ponderously, for her mind was sluggish and reluctant to face the truth. It had been easier to blame Nish; to think that the agony of Myllii’s death and the grief at his loss had caused the death of her baby. But how could that be? She clutched at her belly, and the knife which she still held in her left hand, pricked her; the memories that T’Lisp had wiped from her mind came cascading back.