Now! she thought, as Nish arched up again. Irisis moved the ethyric belt so that the positions of its lozenges of pure force matched the places Ghorr was drawing power from, via the crystals on his belt. She withdrew from the field carefully, lest he become suspicious.
She opened her eyes to see Nish doubled over again and Ghorr raising his arms to strike. But Ghorr did not strike. He froze and her heart began to hammer. Ghorr looked around uneasily. Irisis did not meet his eye, afraid that he would be able to read what she had been up to.
A movement in the distance caught her eye. Scrutator Fusshte stood at the bow of his air-dreadnought, a spyglass to his eye, waiting like a jackal for his chief to fall. Or like a sycophant, should Ghorr succeed, to pledge allegiance anew. Either way, success or failure, Fusshte would emerge the stronger.
She looked back to Ghorr, who squeezed one fist. Nish cried out, arching his back and forming his fingers into hooks. Come on, Ghorr, she thought. Take the power, now.
Ghorr did so, then suddenly doubled over, gasping and clutching at his chest. Flecks of red sprayed across the white floor. He retched, coughing something red out onto the floor that looked for all the world like a piece of lung.
Yes! You stinking swine, take that. Irisis rose to her feet, brandishing one fist. You’re not as clever as you think.
He snapped upright and she realised that it had been a ruse to identify who was secretly attacking him. Whirling on one foot, Ghorr flung out his arm, his thick middle finger pointing at her throat.
The outer sphere split like the segments of an orange, frigid air buffeted her, then the inner sphere crashed into her back, knocking Irisis off her feet. Before she could move it rolled up her spread legs, over her buttocks and settled in the hollow of her back, where its base seemed to flow and mould itself to her contours. It was so heavy that she could not budge it, and her chest was pressed against the floor so tightly that she could hardly draw breath.
The base of the sphere flowed up her back, spread around both sides of her neck and began to draw tight. She threw out her arms before it trapped them too, and forced her fingers up in front of her throat, trying to hold back the invisible straps that were close to joining into a noose.
Ghorr had known what she was doing all along, yet felt so confident that he’d allowed her to continue. Perhaps he’d been hoping to discover her deadly secret. And now he had it.
The straps joined to form a belt, an analogue of the one she’d woven and powered by the same spindles of force. He had a keen sense of irony. The belt pulled tight, cutting off her breath in mid-gasp, and Irisis was not strong enough to hold it back. Her fingers were trapped, the knuckles digging into her throat and crushing her windpipe. In two or three minutes she would be unconscious, and two minutes after that, dead.
A choking minute went by. Ullii’s fan-shaped lattice appeared and suddenly, instantly, Irisis knew what she had to do. She focussed on that flail-covered sphere, the seeker’s unique rendering of Ghorr, and remade it.
She turned the flails to drooping, overripe bananas, the black sphere into a rotting pumpkin covered in blowflies, with fat white grubs crawling out of oozing holes in the skin. It was all she could think of to do. Not enough, surely, though Ullii’s sense of humour was rustic in the extreme.
The belt snapped tighter and she felt the bones of her neck shift. She wondered if she’d die of a broken neck before she suffocated. Time slowed right down and the last thing Irisis saw, before all went opaque, was Ullii suddenly convulse with laughter.
For an unknown time, seconds or hours, the field swirled in stately patterns more beautiful than any she’d ever seen. Dying wasn’t so bad after all.
The patterns vanished, the pressure eased and cold air rushed down her throat, and then the world went insane. Her eyes flicked open, though what she saw could not be happening. The ticking rotors of the surrounding air-dreadnoughts emitted tortured groans as they spun up beyond their maxima. There were cries as the great craft lurched in all directions, colliding and tangling with each other. Two exploded in a colossal fireball that seared her exposed cheek.
The phantom labyrinth sagged underfoot before going hard as crystal, flinging Nish and Klarm in the air. The deformed sphere on Irisis’s back crumbled like week-old bread. Pieces of the floor broke away and once again black snowflakes drifted down, while red wisps of acrid vapour, like the fumings from an alchymist’s cauldron, condensed in mid-air.
Ullii’s lattice fan was stretched like a rubber sheet, as if she’d taken it in her hands and pulled it. The knots on it were drawn out to black streaks, all but one. Ullii let go of the lattice and Ghorr’s rotting sphere went flubbing up above the fan as if she’d fired it from a catapult. It came down again and splatted against the lattice, which snapped back and wrapped itself tightly around Ghorr’s knot, squeezing it into a tighter and tighter ball until, finally, with a burst of light, both knot and lattice vanished.
Ghorr shrieked as he fell halfway through the floor. His clothes exploded into rags, revealing a wattled, sack-like belly bulging between a pair of tightly laced corsets, fat-marbled upper arms, the left one stained with old blood, and wobbling fish-belly thighs. The illusions he’d maintained for decades evaporated. His lips shrank, displaying yellow, corroded teeth and retreating gums, and jowls saggy enough to contain a handful of marbles each. The mane of hair vanished apart from a few dingy straps dangling over his ears.
The tightness around her throat was gone. Irisis sucked in a breath, rubbing her bruised throat as she tried to work out what Ullii had done. She’d destroyed Ghorr’s knot, an analogue of his mancer’s self, and her lattice in the process. She’d damaged Ghorr, stripped him of much of his mancer’s power, but had she destroyed it utterly? Surely not, or this phantom world would have vanished and they would all have fallen into the forest. So something still remained. What would he do with it?
She got up and limped across to join her friends.
SEVENTEEN
‘You haven’t finished me yet,’ said Ghorr. ‘But I can finish you.’
‘Your power is broken, Ghorr,’ said Klarm, making no secret of his derision. ‘You’ll never get it back.’
‘There’s more than one kind of power,’ Ghorr choked, trying to pull the rags over his sagging, repulsive frame.
‘You needn’t bother,’ said Irisis. ‘It’d take a sail to cover that up.’
Ghorr shot her a venomous glance, took three steps to the collapsed remains of his sphere and from inside lifted an unusual multiple crossbow. Irisis hadn’t seen one like it for ages. A massive device that only a strong man could use, it fired five bolts at once. Jal-Nish had designed the bow as a lyrinx killer long ago, though it had proved too unwieldy in the battlefield. Before anyone could move, he had its five bolts trained on them.
‘Come out, Yggur,’ he said.
Nails scratched on glass, then a blackened hand flopped over the nearer side of the hemisphere. A frizzy head and ebony face rose up above the side, frost-grey eyes brilliant against the soot.
‘Out!’ Ghorr jerked the crossbow at him.
Yggur climbed out and staggered across to the others, charred pieces of clothing flaking off him like the black snow of a few minutes ago. He could barely stand, but at least he was alive.
‘Five with one blow,’ Ghorr said. ‘It’ll have to do. Any last words, my friends? A simple acknowledgment of my mastery will do.’