‘Then you’d better get to work,’ said Flydd.
Malien took several deep breaths, knitting and unknitting her fingers, but didn’t move.
‘You can wake it?’ said Flydd roughly.
She nodded stiffly. ‘I just don’t think I should.’
‘We’ve been through all that. Just get on with it!’
Nish had never heard anyone speak to Malien that way before. Her lip curled as she looked at the meagre old man. ‘In the circumstances, I will forgive that. Ah, but you know so little of what you’re asking.’
She regenerated her bubble, though this time it took on an opalescent translucency that reduced her to a hunched shape inside.
‘You can have your precious sleep now, Artificer,’ said Flydd.
Nish lay down and dozed off at once, only to be woken by a mutter from the other side of the tent. As he began to sit up, Irisis gripped his arm, warningly.
‘It worries me that the field is so strained,’ said Yggur. ‘One misjudgment –’
‘Let’s not speculate about that,’ Flydd said. ‘Get some sleep. You too, Klarm. You’ll need it before this is over.’
‘As will you,’ said Klarm. ‘We’re relying on you, Flydd.’
‘I don’t need much sleep these days. Master Flenser pruned me of all that was superfluous. Perhaps he did me a favour.’ He laughed harshly.
Yggur made no reply.
Nish closed his eyes and tried to get back to sleep, though now an image kept recurring – the red ruin which Flydd’s healer had revealed so fleetingly, and with such rage at man’s inhumanity to his own.
A long time later Yggur put his head out of the tent, looking up at the dark sky. A high overcast blotted out the stars and moon. ‘It’s coming dawn.’ He rubbed his stubbled cheeks. ‘Aah, it’s cold out.’
Flydd was sitting with his hands on his knees, exactly as he had been hours earlier, watching Malien.
‘Doesn’t look as though she’s having any success,’ said Yggur.
‘It’s taking too long,’ said Flydd, ‘and there’s nothing we can do to help her. This is Malien’s great task and if she can’t do it, no one can.’
Before dawn the sentries were drawn back inside the ends of the fissure. Everyone else spent the day cooped in the tents. This close to Nennifer they dared not go outside, for the risk of being seen was too great.
In mid-morning, Malien dissolved the bubble and crawled across to the food bag, where she made a scant meal of mouldy bread and hard cheese, and another of the knobbly fruits. She had trouble eating it; her hands and arms shook unceasingly. Washing the morsel down with gulps of water that spilled down her front and froze instantly, she flopped onto her sleeping pouch and fell into sleep.
Yggur and Flydd exchanged glances. Yggur jerked his head at the tent flap and went out. Flydd followed. They could be heard conversing in the fissure, though Nish didn’t catch a word.
‘What do you think they’re talking about?’ he said quietly to Irisis.
She rolled over, irritably pulling the sleeping pouch up around her ears. Nish turned onto his back, staring at the roof of the tent. Ice crystals were growing down from the ridgepole. He shivered and drew his fingers down the canvas wall. They left trails in the growing frost.
‘This is too big for any of us.’
Klarm’s voice, though soft, came from just behind Nish’s ear. He jumped. ‘What do you mean … er, Scrutator?’ Nish still wasn’t sure how to address the dwarf. In truth, despite Klarm having saved his life, Nish still felt uncomfortable with him. He rotated so he could see Klarm’s face.
‘Malien has just realised that what she’s trying to do isn’t possible. It’s too much for any mancer, or all of us together. Go to sleep,’ Klarm said abruptly. ‘It’s what you wanted.’ He got up and went out. The tent flap, stiff with ice, crackled as it fell back into place.
Nish, feeling vaguely uneasy, said softly, ‘Irisis?’
She didn’t reply. Irisis was asleep; Malien too, judging by the gentle snores issuing from the other end of the tent. There was no one to share his fears with. Inouye and Evee had been sent to the other, larger tent, occupied by Flangers and the soldiers.
He went across the litter of gear and sleeping pouches on knees and elbows. A buzz of conversation came from outside. Nish eased his head through the flap. Klarm sat hunched in his cloak just before the bend in the fissure, head tilted to one side as if listening.
Flydd and Yggur must be just around the corner – Nish could see the edge of Yggur’s long cloak draped over the rock. Unfortunately Nish still couldn’t hear. And what was Klarm up to? Had everything just been a plot to lure them here? Did he plan to betray them as the price of admission to the Council?
Long fingers wrapped around Nish’s ankle. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Malien said, soft and low.
He whirled, cracking his ear on the tent pole. A stalactite of ice fell on his head and shattered. Nish sat down, picking ice out of his hair. ‘Klarm’s up to something.’
She let go. ‘Do you think of Yggur and Flydd as fools?’
There was ice in his ear as well. He tried to get the fragment out but it melted, sending an icy trickle down to sear his eardrum. ‘Of course not.’
‘Then leave the worrying to them.’
‘What if the Council’s quest succeeds, and they learn to control the amplimet?’
‘They’ll have enough power to annihilate us.’
‘And if they fail and the amplimet gets … whatever it’s looking for?’
She looked him in the eye and for an instant Nish saw beyond the stern, almost ageless face. What was she thinking? Did she pity him?
‘Worse,’ she said almost inaudibly, and turned away.
TWENTY-THREE
Two frustrating days dragged by, and Malien spent most of that time isolated in the bubble, working at her incomprehensible task of locking onto the amplimet and forcing it to wake. When not doing that she lay in her pouch, panting or tossing in a restless sleep.
The conferences in the fissure became longer and more harried, Yggur more remote and imperious, Flydd more insanely driven. He would not be talked out of the attack, though after all this time no one saw any chance of it succeeding. To get away from them, Klarm had taken to climbing up the rocks in the dark. At least, that was what he’d said he was doing, though Nish wasn’t sure any more. He didn’t have any good reason to suspect the dwarf scrutator, but with so much time to fill in he’d come to doubt everything. And every hour the probability of chance discovery grew greater, as did the risk that the scrutators would master the amplimet first. Or the amplimet master them.
As the third night fell Malien was still going, but when she broke for a brief rest Yggur had to lift her into her sleeping pouch. Her skin had begun to wrinkle like a dried olive, and her shrunken eyes had a dull opacity as if she were developing cataracts.
‘Why is she so worn out?’ said Nish to Irisis, after Flydd and Yggur had just slipped out again.
‘Because she daren’t take power from the field. Malien is using an older Art but she has to draw it from herself, and she’s at her limit.’
‘I can’t do it,’ Malien said an hour later, pushing away the mug of honeyed tea Irisis was holding out for her. ‘Aftersickness is wearing me down and there’s no time to recover from it.’
‘Get some more sleep,’ said Yggur. ‘Flydd and I have been discussing another way.’
‘One that doesn’t require me?’ she said, lying down and closing her eyes.
‘We’ll still need you but we’ll be taking some of the load.’
They went out to discuss their plan. Klarm wasn’t there either. He’d gone climbing up the quartz ridge at dusk and still wasn’t back. He could have walked all the way to Nennifer by now, Nish thought.
‘Now I’m really worried,’ he said to Irisis.
She was sitting in the corner, sleeping pouch up around her waist, weaving a couple of dozen silver and gold wires into a complicated braid, part of a piece of jewellery she’d been working on for days. Being a jeweller had been her life’s ambition, stifled when she was a little girl by a mother who had invested the Stirm family’s future in her clever daughter. Irisis still planned to become a jeweller, ‘after the war is over.’