Tetrarch (Well of Echoes) Read online

  The tiny woman flitted back and forth like a butterfly, her colourless hair streaming out behind her. She caught at Nish’s arm, let out a piercing squeal and disappeared again.

  ‘Ullii!’ he bellowed. ‘For pity’s sake. I’m going to die!’ He was on the brink now, so precariously balanced that a child could have pushed him over.

  Ullii danced back, plucked at his arm then let go. Her mouth was wide open. She still wore the mask over her eyes.

  ‘Help me!’ he screamed, his terror echoing off the rough stone walls.

  Lightning quick, Ullii darted forward, caught him by the belt and heaved. They swayed on the edge. It was touch and go whether they might all fall; then, with a mighty wrench, Nish had Tiaan up and over to safety. He collapsed beside Ullii.

  Tiaan scrambled to her feet. He threw out an arm but she wove to one side and, letting out a cry of anguish at leaving Haani behind, fled into the darkness.

  ‘Stop her, Ullii,’ Nish wailed, but Ullii did not move.

  Tiaan wept as she ran, for abandoning Haani, but she had to. Nish would never give in. She ran on, to nowhere in particular. All directions led to the same end.

  She kept going for as long as she could. Always she took the central way, if there was one. Whenever she came to a stair, and she encountered many, Tiaan climbed it. Finally she could run no further. Her legs felt as if they were cooking in their own juices. She slowed to a walk, to a slack-kneed stumble. Her tongue felt like a leather strap.

  She must be high in the city now. Tiaan felt dizzy and her head was throbbing. She could not seem to draw enough breath. After crawling to the top of that stair, she pushed herself onto the next floor and collapsed. Her limbs felt like glue. The outfit she had chosen for Minis was reduced to filthy, bloodstained rags. She laid her head on the floor, looking sideways at the top of the stair, awaiting her fate.

  It was not long in coming. Nish walked like a man in the last throes of exhaustion. Thump-clump, thump-clump, he came. His round head appeared, capped with dark curls that clung to his skull; his spotty, unhandsome face; his strong shoulders. His jaw was set, his mouth compressed into a scar, but when he saw her lying there he gave a wolfish grin.

  ‘Oh, Tiaan, how I’m going to enjoy your trial.’

  TWO

  Nish looked like a general who had snatched victory from the abyss of ruin. His triumph turned her stomach. Only her eyes moved as he stalked toward her.

  Nish took no chances this time. Rolling her over, he put one foot on her wrist, the other across the back of her neck, and pressed hard. She did not resist. He tied her wrists behind her back and bound her to him with a length of rope.

  ‘You’ll pay!’ he snarled. ‘You evil, vicious traitor. You’ll never stop paying until the day you die. Get up.’

  Tiaan was incapable of moving. She was a traitor. She had betrayed her world.

  He nudged her in the ribs with a boot toe. ‘Move, artisan.’

  She heaved, gasped and fell down. Whatever he had once felt for her, it was long gone. All she could see was contempt.

  ‘I loathe you, artisan,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘With every bone of my body I despise you. My father is a mutilated horror because of you.’

  She could never forget that terrible battle on the edge of the plateau. Nish’s father, Perquisitor Jal-Nish Hlar, had been struck down by a lyrinx, his face, arm and chest torn apart by its claws.

  Nish lifted her to her feet by the ropes, then had to hold her up. To Tiaan’s shame, her breasts were exposed through the rags of her blouse. When Nish did not even glance down, she truly knew she was finished.

  ‘Don’t try to play on my better side.’ He thrust his face against hers. ‘After seeing the doom you brought upon our world yesterday, I have none. Move!’ He prodded her toward the stairs.

  ‘I can’t go down,’ she said, staggering. ‘I’ll fall.’

  He looked around, spying another stair in the dim distance. ‘That way then. It’ll give you time to recover.’

  ‘Hadn’t you better warn your companions?’ she croaked, hoping to discover how many there were.

  ‘I have none, only Ullii –’ He broke off. ‘My first thought was for my duty. I’ve already sent a message to the manufactory, by skeet, warning the scrutator of the invasion.’ He calculated. ‘It’s two hundred leagues as the skeet flies. And it flies fast: the message should be there tonight.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ she said, not that they could do much about such a mighty force of Aachim. So, she only had these two to deal with. There must come a chance, on the long journey back.

  ‘Bah!’ Nish prodded her again.

  Tiaan was getting her breath back, though her knees were still wobbly. ‘How did you find me?’ she said, hoping Nish could not resist displaying his cleverness.

  ‘Ullii can see the Secret Art in all its forms. Irisis and I taught her to hunt you down.’

  Beautiful Irisis, Tiaan’s rival at the manufactory. She might have known. Tiaan considered what Nish had said. He was clever and liked people to know it. Perhaps she could learn more.

  ‘How did you get here so quickly?’

  ‘We floated all the way on an enormous balloon, and it was I who first thought of it.’

  ‘A balloon?’ Even speaking hurt.

  He described the device and how it worked. Tiaan listened with one ear only. Having spent her life making controllers for the eight-legged mechanical war carts called clankers, she saw the potential of flight at once. She also saw the danger, in a world where the technology of magic seemed to be escalating out of control.

  Clankers were powered by the field, a nebulous aura of force surrounding naturally occurring nodes. That power was drawn through particular crystals called hedrons, which artisans like Tiaan shaped, woke and tuned to the field. But clankers required so much power, and there were now so many of them, that they had been known to drain a node of its field. One node, not far from Tiaan’s manufactory, had simply failed. Hundreds of soldiers had died.

  But that was not the worst. Not long ago, a convoy of racing clankers had drawn so much power that it had turned the field inside out. A thousand soldiers had been struck unconscious and when they revived, a squadron of clankers and all their crew had vanished, never to be seen again. Now the war would take to the air. How much power would that require, and what would the consequences be? Could the field survive? But if it did not, could humanity?

  ‘Get moving, artisan.’

  Tiaan took one shuffling step, attempted another, and her knees collapsed.

  Ullii, who had been flitting back and forth in the shadows, crept to her side. ‘She is ill, Nish,’ Ullii said in a strange, empty voice.

  ‘She’s pretending. Get up, artisan.’

  ‘You are unkind, Nish. She is very ill.’ Taking a flask from her belt, Ullii held it to Tiaan’s lips.

  A few drops spilled onto her lower lip. Trying to lick them off, Tiaan could hear the dry rasp of her tongue. Ullii sent a small surge of water into Tiaan’s mouth. Half went down her windpipe; she coughed the rest out again. Another surge; she held it this time. After running and walking and climbing leagues inside the vastness of Tirthrax, she could have drunk a bucketful.

  When she’d had enough, Nish passed a wrapped food packet to his small companion. ‘Give her this. I can’t bear to touch her, much less waste our precious food on her.’

  Ullii broke a kind of sweet, rich bread into pieces, feeding them to Tiaan with her fingers. Tiaan wondered about the small woman. She wore a black silk mask over her eyes, her ears were covered with padded muffs, yet she seemed to hear everything and know where everything was.

  All too soon, Nish pulled Tiaan to her feet. She let out a faint cry as the rope tore her wrist. He only jerked it harder. Tears formed on Tiaan’s lashes as she stumbled after him. She blinked them away.

  ‘You are cruel, Nish,’ said the small woman.

  ‘No more than she deserves!’ he snapped, and kept going.

&nbs
p; Ullii stopped dead, crouched and slowly began to curl up, covering her face with her arms. Nish was slow to realise that she was not following. ‘Ullii?’ he said, looking around.

  There was no reply. Tiaan expected Nish to fly into a rage but he hurried back, dragging her by the rope, and fell to his knees beside Ullii. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said softly. ‘I’m really sorry.’

  Ullii remained curled into a tiny ball. Nish took off his pack and Tiaan was amazed at the change in him. She had always thought him a lecher and a layabout, and today, a monster; but he genuinely cared for Ullii.

  ‘It’s nine in the morning. We’ll camp until four.’ He tossed his cloak at Tiaan’s feet.

  She rested on it. It was cool on this level, though not unpleasantly so. Tiaan was desperately tired but there was too much in her mind for her to sleep. The past day contained a lifetime of trauma and tragedy. Minis’s betrayal, and the Aachim’s treachery from the very beginning, she could not deal with.

  Haani’s broken body still lay beside the shaft, abandoned. I promised that I would never leave you, but I was too afraid, Haani. I had the chance to do the honourable thing. If only …

  The day passed. Tiaan dozed but woke as tired as before and aching in every muscle. Ullii had not forgiven Nish. She did not even look in his direction when he spoke to her.

  They ate in silence. Nish tied Tiaan’s rope to the stair and disappeared with the water bottles. Ullii squatted, watching with her masked eyes. Tiaan did not think the seeker was doing sentry duty. What would Ullii do if she tried to escape? Tiaan did not attempt it. No doubt Nish was not far away.

  After he returned, Ullii gave Tiaan a generous swig from her bottle. They headed off, Nish leading, Tiaan stumbling at the end of the rope, Ullii padding behind her. Tiaan closed her eyes. This was worse than anything she had endured in the breeding factory; worse than being held captive by the lyrinx and forced to aid them in their ghastly flesh-forming.

  She sank into a dazed daydream. Tiaan had always been a dreamer, her escape from a miserable childhood in the clanker manufactory. Her daydreams arose from romantic tales her beloved grandmother had told her.

  She conjured up the image of her mother’s mother. Tiaan thought, and remembered, in pictures, so Grandma Aaloe’s face was as clear as if she was walking beside her. A small woman, almost as wide as she was high, Aaloe had a face as round as the moon and an embrace like a warm pillow. Her man had been killed in the war when Aaloe was nineteen and Tiaan’s mother, Marnie, had just conceived. Aaloe had not partnered again but her tales were full of handsome young men rescuing beautiful maidens, or as often, maidens going to the aid of lost lovers.

  Minis had been Tiaan’s personal dream, but within minutes of meeting him that had been destroyed. She hated him for his treachery, but despised him for being so weak. He had said he loved her, but could not stand up to Vithis. Vithis ordered Minis to repudiate Tiaan. And Minis had.

  ‘Get a move on, artisan!’

  Nish jerked the rope so hard that she fell to one skinned knee. She gave him a hate-filled glare. His returning smile reminded her of a jackal.

  It had been her dreams, and her longings, that had got her into this trouble in the first place. All her life she had been a misfit. Everyone was required to mate but, being so shy, she had found one excuse after another to avoid that duty. Why could she not have settled down at the manufactory like the other artisans, taken the best partner she could find, produced the required number of children, and worked hard at the craft she had come to love?

  The evening dragged on. They made slow progress, the thin air barely enough to sustain them. No one knew where to go. Nish had tried countless ways but all doubled back on themselves as if enchanted.

  Long after midnight they stopped for dinner and a nap, after which Tiaan’s hands were untied and she was permitted to go into one of the bathing rooms to relieve herself. As he followed, she snapped, ‘Still a little pervert, Nish?’

  He went scarlet. ‘Go with her, Ullii,’ Nish said coldly. ‘Don’t take your eyes off the traitor.’

  Obediently, Ullii followed Tiaan into the room but took no further notice of her. Ullii wandered about, touching everything with her fingertips. She pulled down a lever and water gushed from a device like an upside-down funnel. The small woman jumped, began to curl up, then unfolded with all the grace of a ballet dancer. Creeping back to the tap, she wiggled her fingers under the flow, entranced.

  Tiaan slipped around the corner to a washing trough, beyond which she spied another door. Could it be this easy? Ullii was paying her no attention. Edging it open, Tiaan found herself in a set of chambers like many she had seen in Tirthrax. She went through the bedchamber, out the far door and tiptoed around a gentle curve. Passages led three ways. Straight ahead lay a stair entirely made of glass. More extravagant than any she had looked at so far, it looped back and forth across the room like the flourishes on the end of a queen’s signature. She would be seen on it from top to bottom. But it led up, and that felt right.

  As Tiaan reached the first loop of the stair she heard Nish’s bellow of rage. She bolted.

  ‘There she is!’ He took the glass treads three at a time, shaking the stair with every step.

  She fled up and up. Nish gained slowly. At the top she encountered another stair, made of obsidian, then a third, a simple spiral barely wider than her hips. It was so steep that to look down caused sickening lurches in her stomach.

  Light appeared above her. Daylight – a way out. She hauled herself up by her arms. A cavern opened out before her, a hemisphere scooped from the native rock of the mountain. The floor, walls and roof were like polished granite, the flat side a single sheet of glass five spans high. Outside lay a platform with a high-backed stone seat, and beyond that a sea of peaks and snow and ice went all the way to infinity. The sun was rising.

  Tiaan ran up to the glass and stopped. It was inset into the stone on all sides. She pressed her hands against it but had to snatch them away – the glass was bitterly cold. If there was a door she could see no sign of it, nor any other way out. Putting her back to the glass, she waited. Nish was scarlet in the face, his step as unsteady as hers, but he drove himself on.

  ‘Don’t move!’ He lashed at her with the rope. One end caught her on the cheek. She cried out, he jerked her to him and swiftly bound her hands.

  ‘Call me what you like,’ he gritted, ‘I’ll not untie you again until we stand inside the gates of the manufactory.’

  Ullii came creeping up the steps. After slowly circumnavigating the room, she looked out through the glass with her masked eyes.

  When Tiaan was so bound that she could move neither hands nor arms, Nish ran a length of rope from her to him. ‘Go down!’ he croaked, harsh as a raven.

  Dead inside, Tiaan obeyed. Should she take the first opportunity to fall and carry him with her? She had just set her foot on the top step when, with a whirr, the glass wall slid into the stone.

  Nish spun around. ‘What’s that, Ullii?’

  ‘I can see the Art,’ Ullii said softly.

  Someone rose from the seat. The figure turned, tossing back her hood. As she approached, the sun caught her hair, illuminating a few flame-red strands among the grey. Her hands were bare, the fingers remarkably long, almost twice the length of her palm. Aachim! Chills fizzed up and down Tiaan’s backbone.

  THREE

  The woman stopped inside the door. She was taller than Tiaan, about the height of a human man. Her pale face was lined, though that took nothing away from an austere and ageless beauty. Large grey eyes held just a hint of green. The red eyebrows were fluffed with grey. Her small ears were perfectly circular.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she said in the common speech. Her voice was soft, low and without accent.

  No one spoke. Tiaan glanced sideways at Nish, who was staring at the woman, brow furrowed.

  ‘Who are you?’ he burst out.

  The woman turned those ice-grey eyes on him. ‘I am Matah
. I am Tirthrax.’

  ‘What are you doing in this lyrinx nest?’

  The Matah laughed, which made her young again. Tiaan found a smile. Nish was not as clever as he thought.

  ‘Tirthrax,’ the Matah said, ‘is the greatest city of the Aachim on Santhenar. It is more than three thousand years old. No lyrinx has ever come through its doors. Nor has any human, uninvited, until this day. I am Matah of Tirthrax. You will explain yourselves.’

  Nish jerked Tiaan’s lead rope so hard that she fell. ‘What’s going on?’ Flecks of spittle spattered Tiaan’s face. ‘Who have you betrayed us to, artisan?’

  ‘Release her,’ said the Matah, in a tone cold as chips from the glacier.

  ‘Keep out of it, old woman!’

  Ullii let out a squawk as the Matah spread her arms then slowly brought her hands together in front of her. A tiny golden bubble drifted from one fingertip. Floating through the air, it struck Nish on the forehead, bursting with a spray of sparkles. He went rigid, arched his back and gasped. His teeth snapped closed on his protruding tongue. With a muffled grunt, he fell to his knees. A scarlet bead formed on his lower lip.

  ‘I asked you to release her,’ the Matah said mildly. ‘Please do so.’

  Ullii hooked her fingers into claws. Her breath simmered in her throat and she looked set to spring on the Matah. Despite her anger with Nish, Ullii would not tolerate any attack on him. How had he come to inspire such loyalty? Tiaan could not fathom it.

  The Matah turned to Ullii, reached out with an open hand, and smiled. ‘I will not harm him, little seeker.’

  Ullii went still, confused. She looked from the Matah to Nish, to the Matah again.

  ‘Ullii, help me,’ he gasped.

  ‘Give me your hand,’ said the Matah.

  Ullii was a mixture of emotions: delight and terror. She slowly extended her tiny hand. The Matah’s fingers wrapped all the way around it, holding the grip for a long interval. Ullii let out an extended sigh and bowed her head, smiling enigmatically.