Alchymist

He passed them across. 'This is a big risk, Bilfis,' said Malien. 'It's very fragile. I don't think I can get it out whole.' 'If it stays in, I die. If you break it, I die more quickly. It's designed so. I'm ready, either way.'

'It never occurred to me that they would use a flac against us,' said Malien, shaking her head.

'It's a forbidden weapon, even in clan-vengeance,' Forgre explained.

'But not against me,' said Tiaan.

'Not against the lesser species.' Malien wiped sweaty hands. Her lips moved in an exhortation, or a prayer. Slipping the tweezers into the slit, she took gentle hold of the end of the flac and tried to ease it out.

They all heard the sound, like rotten metal crunching. Bilfis jerked and his eyes went wide, then Malien was desperately, furiously raking the fragments from the wound and reaming out the residue, heedless of his pain.

Forgre held a white dish to Bilfis's back, probing the bloody residue with a forefinger. 'I think you may have got it,' he said.

Bilfis looked down at the dish and gave a rueful smile. 'I never thought—' He stiffened, gave the faintest of sighs and, with no other sign, he died.

'I wasn't quick enough.' Malien covered her face with her long fingers.

'No one ever is,' said Talis, closing the man's eyes.

Tiaan had expected them to take Bilfis's body to the Well of Echoes, but Malien was reluctant to do that given its unstable condition. They flew him up to the icefield on the high plateau, higher than Tiaan had ever been, where the cold was unrelenting. Malien melted a hole with the underside of the construct and slid the body in. Within a minute the water had frozen again, leaving him encased in ice as clear as glass. The Aachim sang a threnody in an archaic tongue.

'He loved the mountains,' said Malien, panting in the thin air. 'Bilfis would be happy that we've brought him here, where no other Aachim foot has ever trod.'

'No foot of any kind, I think,' said Talis the Mapmaker. 'No one could survive in such a high place.'

'Including us!' said Malien. A hundred thousand years from now he'll lie here unchanged. That would please him very much.' She headed for the thapter. 'But what are we going to do without him?'

They continued on to Snizort, flying long hours every day. It still took four days. Tiaan made measurements of the nodes whenever she got the chance, and marked them on the maps. Incessant work helped to keep her thoughts at bay. They passed by the battlefield, towards the Sea of Thurkad, and thence up the coast. The following afternoon they came upon a large encampment in a long but narrow inlet which had rocky ridges on either side. The camp was surrounded by a palisade of sharpened timber, the new home of exiled Clan Elienor. Tiaan saw no more of it, for as they approached Malien said, 'Go below.'

Tiaan searched Malien's lined face. Am I in danger here?'

'I don't know. It depends whether an outcast clan considers themselves bound by clan-vengeance. I won't risk it. Stay hidden while we unload the food and other supplies, and then we'll see.'

Tiaan spent the afternoon huddled under a blanket, trying to shut out the world. She could not erase her thoughts. The following morning Malien woke her. Talis and Forgre were there too.

'Stay where you are until we're in the air,' said Malien.

Where are we going now?'

'West.'

Across the sea to Meldorin?' said Tiaan. 'Where the lyrinx are?'

'We came at an opportune time. My people have just had vital news.'

'Oh?' said Tiaan.

'With Bilfis dead, only one person has the skills of geomancy and mathemancy to tell us how bad the node danger is, and how to avert it — the tetrarch, Gilhaelith. I now know where he's hiding.'

'Where is he?'

'He's north across the Sea of Thurkad, near a lyrinx city called Oellyll.'

Tiaan did not recognise the name, though it sent a shiver up her spine nonetheless. 'Is he a prisoner?'

'I don't think so. Word has it that he's made a deal with the enemy.'

Fifty-four

'What's the name of this place?' Tiaan asked as they were crossing the Sea of Thurkad.

Malien was at the controller. The sea here, almost eighty leagues north of the place where she had escaped from the Aachim nets, was more than twenty leagues across. In the distance she saw a gap in the range that ran down the east coast of Meldorin. The peaks were white, the flanks of the mountains dusted with an early fall of snow, for it was late autumn now. To the left, a steep-sided volcano fumed. There was no snow on its warm flanks, though similar dormant peaks to its north and south had caps of white.

Malien did not reply. She was frowning at the sullen water far below. 'Better go up; we could be seen at this height.' She lifted the thapter into the bumpy air inside the clouds.

'That's the Zarqa Gap,' said Talis, pointing, 'one of the few passes across these mountains, at least in the wintertime. See the ancient road?'

The thapter lurched. Tiaan caught another brief glimpse of the pass, then they were in opaque cloud again. Talis was silent until a second filmy gap appeared. 'It used to run all the way to the west coast, though already the forest is taking it back. The lyrinx eliminated the last people from these lands a generation ago.'

'Down south,' said Malien, 'further to our left, lie the ruins of Alcifer.'

There was nothing to see but cloud. 'I've heard that name,' said Tiaan. It gave her a shivery feeling.

'The city was designed by the brilliant architect Pitlis, for Rulke, and Rulke's seduction of him is the greatest betrayal in the Histories. Many people say that Alcifer was the greatest creation of any of the human species, anywhere in the Three worlds. It caused the downfall of my people, from which we have never recovered.'

The clouds broke and Tiaan pointed a spyglass where Malien had indicated. The mountains ran close to the sea there, and a flank of the volcano had been carved and sculpted to form the platform upon which Alcifer had been built. Great boulevards curved through it, and buildings great and small, their outlines just visible beneath aeons of growth, erosion and volcanic ash. From this distance no more detail could be seen.

On the slopes north of the city, the volcano had, long ago, formed a series of terraces covered in glittering crystalline salts, mud pools, geysers, fumaroles and the snaking lines of ancient lava tunnels whose tops had collapsed. Steam hung in wisps over the surface.

'That's chancy country,' said Talis, consulting an ancient gazetteer of the lands around Alcifer. 'When it rains, flows of mud and ash are dammed up against the edge of the terraces. They crust over in the dry season, though if you tried to walk there you'd go straight through.'

And slowly cook in hot mud,' said Forgre. 'Not how I'd choose to die.'

'In really wet years,' said Talis, reading from the gazetteer, 'the terrace walls burst and the hot slurry pours down the slope faster than a horse can gallop, sweeping trees and boulders away.'

'Chancy country indeed,' said Malien, rising into the clouds again.

'Is Alcifer in the Histories?' Tiaan asked.

'It's in the Tale of Tar Gaarn, which is in our Histories, but it's not much told these days. Rulke scarcely had the time to enjoy his creation, for soon after Alcifer was completed he was taken by the Council of Santhenar and cast into the Nightland; where he languished for a thousand years. Once freed, as far as is known, he never returned to Alcifer and it was never inhabited again. Who would dare?'

Have you been there?'

Malien shivered. 'No, and I'm not looking forward to it. I feel the threat, even from here.'

Tiaan opened her mouth but closed it again. Malien was the most level-headed person she know. 'Where are we going now?'