Alchymist

'Go below,' the Aachim said. 'Pull out the bunk at the rear. It's warmer there.'

Tiaan did so. It lay directly above the mechanism that drove the thapter but, even so, wrapped in blankets, Tiaan was cold. She lay down and closed her eyes, fretting. All the Tirthrax Aachim had gone to Stassor the year before last, to a great meeting about the war. Only Malien had remained in Tirthrax. Though she was venerated as a hero from the Histories, her own people did not trust her. She had not been welcome at their meet, so how could Tiaan be?

Stassor lay within the great mountain chain that ran down the eastern side of Lauralin, from beyond Tiksi in the south, all the way to the north-easternmost tip of the continent at Taranta. In a straight line, Stassor was about two hundred and forty leagues from Tirthrax, but they could not travel in a straight line.

First they had to cross the Great Mountains, which were so high that not even Malien could breathe at their summits. She had to travel a winding course along glacier-filled valleys, with bare ridges as sharp as flakes of flint towering above them on either side, and then across the high plateau, the most inhospitable environment in the world. That rugged land was perpetually sheathed in ice. Nothing grew there. Nothing could have lived there, unless it had crept out of the void through some dark aperture when the Way between the Worlds was open, and delved deep into the underlying rock to suck at the warmth, and brood.

Malien dawdled, as if no more anxious to reach Stassor than Tiaan was. She ventured up every icy valley to its vantage point, sometimes only travelling for an hour or two before stopping to spend the rest of the day at some spectacular lookout, wrapped in her blankets and silently taking in the scene. It felt like a farewell journey, a final visit to everything that was beautiful and unspoiled. The trip took twenty-one days, though only after fifteen had passed did Tiaan shake free from the helpless terror that had controlled her life since Gilhaelith had been taken from ooreah Ngurle many months ago. For the first time she felt safe. Who would not, with Malien looking after them? No one could have tracked them across this wasteland. No construct could cross the Great Mountains. They were impassable on foot, by any land conveyance and even by air-floaters, since the lowest passes were higher than such machines could rise.

Malien did not question Tiaan about the intervening months, though she did show an unexpected interest in Gilhaelith. 'Where did he come from, do you think?'

'Somewhere on Meldorin. He would not talk about his past, more than I've told you.'

'An interesting man,' said Malien. 'And not entirely old human, surely. I wonder what his lineage is?'

'What do you mean?' said Tiaan.

"To have lived so long, surely he must have blood of the longer-lived species in him — Aachim or Faellem, or even Charon.'

Tiaan had not thought about that. 'But mancers can lengthen their own lives.'

'More lose their lives in the attempt than survive it, so it's attempted less often than you might imagine. And even at its best it rarely returns them to their youth. A hale middle age is the most that can be expected. For the unfortunate, however, it means death, or worse.'

'What could be worse?'

'Ending up as a monstrosity with your body parts in the wrong places, begging for release and being unable to find it.'

'Well, Gilhaelith's dead, so it doesn't matter,' said Tiaan after a long silence. He was another painful memory. It reminded her of the one man who hadn't let her down: Merryl, last seen trudging around the side of the hill near Snizort. Had he just exchanged one form of slavery for another?

'How do you know?' said Malien.

Tiaan came back to the present. 'I don't suppose I do …'

'The matriarch of Snizort went to great lengths to abduct Gilhaelith. Surely, when she fled the tar pits, she took him with her.'

'And yet they left me behind.'

'That could have been confusion when Snizort was attacked.'

'Or because the torgnadrs they patterned on me turned out to be useless!'

Forty-eight

Tiaan did not know what to expect of Stassor, except that it would be striking, beautiful and different, for each of the Aachim cities was unique. Tirthrax, carved out of the mountain's heart, bore no resemblance to the towers, pavilions and kidney-shaped dwellings she had seen in paintings of Aachan. Different again was Shazmak, their abandoned city on an island in the middle of the gorge of the River Garr, in the mountains of Meldorin. Tiaan had seen images of it in Tirthrax. Shazmak was a place of breathtakingly slender towers and pinnacles connected by swooping and coiled aerial walkways that looked as though they were made of glass. The city appeared so delicate that it might have been broken by a tap with a hammer, yet it had endured the gales for a thousand years. And still, in the end, it proved no match for treachery. The city's betrayer had been one of its own.

She was thinking these gloomy thoughts as they descended a long black slope streaked with ice, at the base of which lay an ice-filled basin bounded by crevasses. A glacier flowed out of its downhill lip. In the distance, partly concealed by a razor-topped ridge, Tiaan saw an isolated steep-sided mountain with four individual peaks, inside which nestled a field of ice. She surreptitiously checked the amplimet but it wasn't glowing at all. That didn't comfort her. Tiaan was beginning to feel that it was waiting for something; lurking; even preying.

As they approached the mountain with four peaks, Tiaan realised that the material between them was not ice at all, rather a vast silvery cube that reflected first one peak and then another, so that the whole top of the mountain appeared to shift before their eyes.

'Behold Stassor' said Malien. 'The greatest of our cities now.'

'It's nothing like I expected,' Tiaan murmured. 'It's so plain, so simple! Do the Aachim no longer care about their art and craft? In Tirthrax, every surface was decorated, every space shaped to perfection.'

'Time moves on and so must we. We yearn for simplicity now. Stassor is a new city built on the foundations of the old, but it has a beauty of its own. You'll see.'

'Tirthrax was hidden inside a mountain, yet Stassor stands on the highest peak around, for all the world to see. Do your people feel more secure these days?'

'Who could threaten us here? Not even a construct could climb these rugged passes, and what army could lay siege to Stassor? This entire land,' said Malien, a sweep of her arm indicating the white-tipped ranges on every side, 'is our land, and no one may cross its borders without our knowing.

'Besides, we no longer care to hide from the world. For thousands of years we looked back to Aachan, but our future is bound to Santhenar now. From the breaking of the Forbidding, two centuries ago, we began to take down old Stassor and build it anew, to celebrate our coming out. Do you not see its beauty now?'

The thapter had curved across a vast valley steeped in snow and up the other side, towards the four-peaked mountain. Tiaan caught her breath. With every movement the ice-coloured cube shimmered with colour — now like oil on water, now like the iridescence of a beetle's wing-case, now like the light of the sun fading from the sky. There were colours and patterns within its depths, too, and they resembled the shifting lines of sand on a wave-swept beach, or the flickering flames of a camp fire, or the play of colours in precious opal.

The thapter lifted sharply on an updraught. Tiaan's stomach lurched but Malien steadied the machine expertly and directed it towards the base of the great building, where a pattern of smaller cubes appeared to indicate an entrance.