Chimaera

by Ian Irvine

  ‘I don’t think that’s going to support our weight,’ said the biggest and heaviest of the soldiers. ‘Better look for another way.’

  ‘We haven’t time,’ said Flydd. ‘It looks solid enough. A couple of beams are holding it. Just tread carefully.’

  ‘That’s all right for you,’ Irisis grumbled. ‘You don’t weigh more than a cupful of fleas.’

  ‘I’d better go first then, in case you fall and carry the lot with you,’ said Flydd callously. He stepped out onto the bridge, which was mottled white and black in the moonlight, the black patches barely distinguishable from the holes.

  Klarm followed, stepping confidently. Nish went after him, trying to place his feet precisely where the dwarf’s had gone, though it was awkward owing to the greater length of his stride. Four steps out from the edge, his right foot went through a patch of plaster. Nish tried to scramble back but was too far off-balance. He fell forwards, his left knee punched a hole through more plaster and he fell. He threw his arms out and managed to hook the left over the supporting beam.

  ‘Help!’ he roared, but the others were well back and Flydd five or six steps ahead.

  Nish was flailing desperately, the weight inexorably straightening his arm, when Klarm sprang, landed with his stumpy legs straddling the two beams and caught Nish by the collar. Legs spread-eagled like a gymnast, Klarm strained until his eyes stood out of his head.

  Nish knew the little man couldn’t do it. The beams slipped, Klarm wobbled back and forth and threw out his free arm to balance himself.

  Flydd took a step towards them. More plaster crumbled.

  ‘Don’t move!’ cried Klarm.

  Flydd froze. Klarm bellowed like a buffalo. His face and neck had gone purple and there was a bead of saliva on his lower lip. His arm trembled; then, with agonising slowness, he lifted Nish’s dead weight a fraction.

  ‘Reach up with your right foot, lad,’ he said after he’d raised Nish a couple of hand-spans. ‘You’ll have to take the strain. I’m not tall enough to lift you all the way, and if the beams slip again we’re both gone.’

  Nish felt for the beam, stretching sideways and up, but his calf muscles knotted. He couldn’t allow them to cramp. He eased back, stretched again and his foot touched the side of the beam.

  ‘You’ll have to get your foot on top,’ said Klarm, the sinews in his neck standing out like cords. ‘Push sideways and you’ll force the beam away – and I’m already doing the splits.’

  Up, up Nish reached. The beam slipped again and he saw the agonised expression on Klarm’s face as he was forced to stretch even further. Nish hooked his heel over the top of the beam, took a little of the strain and, almost miraculously, the beam came back towards him. He levered, Klarm lifted and with a heave and a shudder Nish was on the beam, clinging to it with his legs dangling down either side.

  He was drenched in sweat, his heart hammering, and his knees had turned to rubber. Nish looked back at the silent group. No miracle at all. Irisis and Flangers had linked arms around the beams, taken the strain and pulled them together.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said quietly.

  Klarm extended a hand and lifted Nish to his feet. Nish wobbled after him, this time stepping exactly where the little man had and, ten or twelve steps later, reached the other side. He turned to watch the rest of the party.

  ‘What’s that funny smell?’ said Irisis when she was halfway across. She stopped to sniff the air, no more troubled by the crossing than if she’d been walking down a path.

  ‘I can’t smell anything,’ grunted Flangers as he edged his way after her, looking green.

  ‘It’s a sweet, gassy odour.’ Irisis took another breath. ‘Not unpleasant.’

  ‘Round here, nice smells can mask … other things,’ said Klarm, kneading the muscles of his calves. ‘I’d not breathe too deeply if I were you.’

  ‘Muss did say to follow our noses,’ said Irisis.

  ‘And you know what I think about his advice.’ He sniffed the air. ‘It’s coming from that direction.’

  They went along a narrow service hall, relatively free of debris, then up a steep, straight staircase that ran on for three floors. In several places the steps were covered in rubble or broken plaster, and further up by a large, intricately carved soapstone cabinet that had fallen on a stout, muscular woman with closely cropped grey hair. Blood trickled down the steps from the back of her head.

  ‘She’s dead,’ said Flydd after a cursory examination. ‘Was she carrying it to a place of safety?’

  ‘Stealing it in the confusion, more likely,’ said Klarm, ‘else she’d have had someone to help her.’

  ‘It’s hard to see how she could have hoped to profit from it. She could hardly carry it through the mountains.’

  ‘People don’t always act rationally in a disaster.’

  ‘I’ll bet the scrutators did,’ said Flydd, moving around the dead woman and up. ‘They’ll have a refuge somewhere in here.’

  ‘I doubt if any hiding place could be proof against what’s happened here,’ said Klarm. ‘The force that sliced Nennifer up and rearranged it came from outside our three dimensions.’

  ‘Where are all the people?’ said Nish.

  ‘Probably sucked through a dimensional wormhole into the void,’ speculated Irisis gloomily. ‘Like we’re going to be before too long.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Flydd. ‘They would have fled through the rear doors and windows. If they’ve any sense they’ll be in the air-dreadnought yard around the back. Even if the walls collapse, it’s sheltered from the wind and they can make fires there.’

  ‘Getting back to the amplimet,’ said Klarm, ‘how are we supposed to master it without Yggur or Malien?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Flydd.

  ‘Seems as though we came all this way without a proper plan and we still don’t have one.’

  ‘There’s no point to having a plan, since we don’t know what we’re going to find.’

  Klarm looked unconvinced. The statement did nothing for Nish’s confidence either. ‘It’s awfully quiet,’ he said. The creaking had stopped, the cries for help faded long ago. There was no sound but the distant wind.

  They kept climbing, only to be confronted by an appalling stench on the fourth floor.

  ‘Slowly now,’ said Flydd.

  The air was hot up here. Klarm pressed open an iron door with a fingertip, and reeled back. If the smell had been bad lower down, it was revolting here, and the walls were covered with a greasy film of soot.

  ‘It smells like burnt meat, or leather. Or hair.’

  ‘Perhaps all three,’ said Flydd, crumpling a corner of his cloak in his fist and breathing through it.

  Nish pulled his sleeve down and held it over his nose, which didn’t help much since the cloth stank of vomit. He glanced at Irisis, who looked green.

  ‘What do you think has happened?’ he whispered.

  ‘Be quiet,’ hissed Flydd.

  Irisis allowed him to move ahead, then said out of the corner of her mouth, ‘The scrutators aren’t roasting us a welcome dinner.’

  Nish couldn’t even smile. They went through a second iron door, which was ajar due to the warping of its frame. The third door had been sealed with scrutator magic which it took Flydd and Klarm a considerable effort to break. The gap between door and floor was coated with soot.

  A fourth door confronted them, this one partly open. It was made of chased bronze, soot-stained in places, elsewhere banded with swirling patterns of colour from being overheated.

  The smell was even more nauseating. Flydd reached out to the bronze door but drew back before his fingers touched the surface. ‘It’s still hot!’

  He tried to force it with his boot but the hinges were stuck. Flangers levered it open with the hilt of his sword and carefully put his head through. He beckoned behind him with one hand.

  They passed through into a large, open space and stopped as one. There was just enough light to show that the chamber
was shaped like a hemisphere. The charred reek was overpowering. Klarm made a muffled noise in his throat. Nish wanted to be sick, though fortunately he had nothing left to bring up. Behind him he could hear someone spewing liquidly.

  His eyes began to pick out details. An oval central dais, about five spans long, was partly shielded by head-high blades of faceted rose quartz, preventing Nish from seeing what lay within, though he assumed it was the amplimet. Water had trickled down the sides where the inner ice wards had melted, and there were puddles on the floor. A metal column, the size of a substantial tree trunk, ran from one end of the dais up through the ceiling. So Muss hadn’t sent them to the scrutators’ lair after all. Surrounding the rose-quartz walls stood what Nish had thought were nine statues carved out of ebony, or obsidian, though their surfaces were rough and dull. It was only when Flydd put up his hand and light streamed forth that Nish realised his mistake.

  The statues were the remains of nine men and women, the scrutators’ chief mancers, he presumed.

  ‘Just as Eiryn Muss said.’ Flydd gave Klarm a significant glance.

  They had been turned to charcoal where they had stood, anthracised in place as they strove to work some mighty magic on the amplimet. No, not charcoal. It looked like black, honeycombed flesh, as if the living bodies had turned to char where they stood and escaping gases had foamed it up before it solidified. The statues were perfect replicas of the humans they had once been, save for the empty eye-sockets and various glistenings and dribbles, like wax that had run down the sides of a candle. Imagining the horrors they’d been through before they died, Nish’s skin crawled.

  ‘They must have been probing the amplimet,’ said Klarm. ‘And it didn’t like it. It’s a warning to us all.’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Something skittered along the curved far wall. Irisis couldn’t see what it was. She moved further out into the room, though shadows lay all around and she still felt exposed. The scrutators could be anywhere.

  ‘A warning to the Council, too,’ said Flydd. ‘Fusshte must be paralysed with terror.’

  ‘He’ll get over it,’ Klarm said dryly. ‘He’s the ultimate opportunist. Well, do we go for the crystal or the Council?’

  Irisis looked the other way, only then seeing, in the semidarkness around the circumference of the room, another ring of mancers, each standing with left arm outstretched and hand up, as if holding the whole world at bay. There were fifteen of them, and the right hand of each clutched a device that vaguely resembled her pliance, though presumably much more powerful. The mancers stood as still as the carbonised statues, apart from the faint tremble of an outstretched arm here, a pulse throbbing in a throat there; and apart from the wide, staring eyes, which revealed such terror in their hard and rigid souls as Irisis had never before witnessed. The mancers knew what their fate would be once the concentration of any one of them faltered, as sooner or later it must.

  ‘If we go for the amplimet we may be caught in the cone of control these ward-mancers have over it,’ said Flydd. ‘Yet, if we attack the Council, their hold could fail and the amplimet break free.’ He considered for a moment, gazing at one of the ward-mancers though not seeing her. ‘The Council would be less risky, I think.’

  ‘How so?’ said Klarm.

  ‘Given the fate of the inner ring, would you put your shoulder to the same wheel? Or would you stand back and let your mancers take the strain?’

  ‘I’d stand with my people,’ said Klarm. ‘How could any man do otherwise? Better it cost me life than honour.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Flydd, ‘though Fusshte would see it differently. Better the limb be amputated than the whole body die. Nothing is more important than the Council, so the Council must survive even at the cost of everything and everyone surrounding it. Can we attack Fusshte without risking their hold on the crystal?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Klarm.

  They moved through the ring of ward-mancers, Irisis passing by a dumpy, white-haired woman whose eyes did not even register her. The ward-mancers’ vision was turned elsewhere.

  ‘How can we find Fusshte in all this chaos?’ said Flydd. ‘Curse you, Eiryn Muss.’

  ‘I’m sensing something above us,’ said Irisis, crushing her pliance in her fist, the better to see.

  ‘Are they drawing on the field?’ said Flydd.

  ‘The reverse …’ Irisis tried to make sense of what she was seeing, which wasn’t easy. The patterns were weirdly truncated, as if the dimensional dislocation that had sliced up Nennifer had done the same to the fields. ‘There must be hundreds of little devices still working here – globes and so forth. I can see where they’re drawing on the field all over the place.’

  ‘Then what’s the problem?’ said Klarm roughly.

  She screwed her eyes closed, furrowing her brow. ‘That’s just it. It all looks normal except, directly above this room –’ she nodded upwards, ‘– it’s completely blank. It’s as if the field doesn’t extend through that space. And that’s impossible.’

  ‘The Council has shielded its bolthole,’ rapped Klarm. ‘They’re afraid to come out. Come on.’

  Flydd didn’t move. ‘If they’re afraid to use power, so should we be.’

  ‘So we rush them and overwhelm them with physical force,’ said Klarm. ‘It’s the one thing they won’t be expecting.’

  ‘Let’s hope Muss was right about the guards,’ said Flydd, eyeing their little group.

  He went back through the four metal doors and looked around. ‘Straight up, Muss said. Ah!’

  He headed for a set of coiling metal stairs that looked as though they’d been jammed diagonally down through the roof. As he stepped onto the first tread the stairs shook as if the only thing holding them was the shattered hole through the ceiling. A span below that, the outside curve and rail had been shorn away leaving the treads dangling precariously.

  Klarm followed, then the four surviving soldiers and Flangers, Nish and Inouye, who carried a short sword as though it were a walking stick. She’d be no use in a battle. At the first coil of the stairs Nish looked down at Irisis, who had stopped on the bottom step. ‘Is something the matter?’

  She shook her head but couldn’t clear away the after-images of the field. ‘I … think so. Everything’s so strange here; I can’t get my bearings. And …’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I can’t help feeling that we’ve missed something.’

  ‘I feel the same,’ said Nish. He looked up. The others had passed the damaged part of the stair and were disappearing through the ceiling.

  Above the ceiling the stair continued, more wobbly than before, eventually terminating just below a broken hole in the slate-clad roof. They scrambled up and through onto the roof. Not far away, the remains of an open-sided, glass-roofed passage led into a broad dome that stood some twenty spans above the roof on pillars of basalt. The dome, although tilted at a slight angle, was intact, but the roof surrounding it had been sliced and reassembled in many places.

  ‘Careful now,’ said Flydd as they headed for the passage and the entrance to the dome. ‘There could be guards inside.’

  The wind howled around the dome, though not loudly enough to block out the cries of the injured in the rear yard. A bonfire blazed in the far corner and throngs of bewildered, bedraggled people stood around it, staring at the flames.

  With a crash and a shudder, a section of Nennifer to their west collapsed. The mass of people surged away towards the far wall of the yard.

  ‘Poor devils,’ said Flydd. ‘Without food or water they can’t last long, and they know it.’

  ‘They’re brutes, all of them,’ said Irisis, recalling her previous treatment here.

  ‘Aye,’ said Klarm. ‘Corrupted by cruel masters, but human beings nonetheless.’

  Seeing no guards, they pressed on, acutely aware that the amplimet could overcome the ward-mancers at any moment. At the entrance to the dome, Flydd and Klarm laid their bare hands on the door, sensing the ma
gic that closed it. Flydd asked Klarm a question which Irisis didn’t catch. Klarm shook his head. Irisis crept closer. Flydd moved his hands across the door, taking one position after another. He looked down at Klarm, who gave another shake of the head.

  Flydd swore, stepped back and bumped into Irisis. ‘Would you get out of the way?’ he snapped.

  She gave him room. ‘Will it warn them if we break the magic?’ he said to the dwarf.

  ‘Very probably,’ said Klarm.

  They put their heads together, low down, and Irisis couldn’t see what they were doing, but shortly the door came open. No klaxon went off, though that didn’t mean there was no alarm. Flydd beckoned and they went through. ‘I’ll seal it to any but us,’ he said. ‘It won’t keep scrutators or mancers out but the guards won’t be able to get through.’

  He did so, looking haggard as he turned from the door. Aftersickness was wearing him down and there was so far to go, the worst yet to be faced.

  The space inside the dome consisted of a single open chamber, some fifty spans across, dimly lit by globes suspended from the ceiling on long chains. The central area was divided up by a maze of long tables, workbenches and cabinets, while the outer ring of the chamber was completely empty. Irisis wondered why. The walls contained tapestries and paintings glorifying the Council, and there were statues and busts of scrutators everywhere. Irisis saw many busts of Ghorr, carved in marble, obsidian and even granite. She wanted to knock them off their pedestals.

  From the look of the devices laid out on the benches, the chamber was the Council’s private workroom. In the centre a spherical turret was mounted on a metal stalk five or six spans high. Clusters of conduited bell-pulls ran out from one side of the turret, as well as flared pipes that Irisis assumed to be speaking tubes. Through the wide windows, standing at sloping tables, she saw five scrutators.