‘What happened?’ asked Flydd.
‘I don’t know.’ Malien could barely speak. ‘There was no resistance at all. As soon as I pushed, the wards gave way like rotten ice … as if they’d been eaten away from inside.’
‘The amplimet must have already woken,’ said Klarm. ‘It had set a trap for the scrutators but got us instead. Now there’s an irony for you.’
‘So we just wait for Fusshte to take us?’ said Irisis.
No one said anything. The barrage had stopped; now the klaxons were cut off in mid-cry. The guards were equally silent. Not a sound came from the length and breadth of Nennifer.
Nish could feel the tension building. His skin prickled and his diaphragm began to thud back and forth like a beaten drum. He swallowed and his ears popped, but the pressure on his eardrums was still there. He did it again and again. It made no difference.
The moonlight faded like a slowly lidded eye. When it shone out again the double rings were brighter than before.
‘Why haven’t the guards come after us?’ he said.
‘They’re afraid to move,’ said Irisis.
Nish’s diaphragm was beating so hard he could barely draw breath. Afraid?
‘What was that?’ hissed Flangers.
The wind had died down too, and they heard a curious noise.
‘It sounds like rushing water,’ said Irisis, looking towards the precipice only a dozen spans away.
‘Any water on the ground would be frozen iron-hard at this time of year,’ said Nish.
She wriggled across to the edge, keeping within the shed’s shadow, but came straight back.
‘It’s rushing out of a fissure in the cliff and freezing as it falls.’
‘Funny we didn’t hear it before,’ said Nish. The ground gave the faintest tremor. ‘Did you feel that?’
‘Earth tremblers are common here,’ said Klarm.
Again they heard that brittle crunching, though this time it was like a clanker’s metal feet grinding across a field of crystals and crumbling them to shards. There came a drawn-out, subterranean rumbling and the ground shook hard enough to toss Irisis off her feet.
‘We’re not finished yet,’ said Flydd, standing up and lurching back and forth with a maniacal glint in his eye.
‘What have we done?’ gasped Malien. ‘Yggur …?’ She looked around wildly.
‘He’s unconscious,’ said Flydd dismissively. ‘Overcome by aftersickness. He’ll be no further use tonight.’
‘The amplimet’s broken free,’ said Malien, climbing to her feet and bracing her back against the shed as the vibrations grew stronger. ‘We’ve got to stop it before it gets out of control.’
‘How can we, Malien?’ Turning away, Flydd gave a series of low-voiced orders to the troops and they readied for action.
‘You don’t understand. It’s … It’s …’
‘What?’ At the expression on her face he spun around and caught her by the lapels of her coat. ‘What is it?’
‘I … think it’s come to the second stage of awakening,’ she said, then her eyes rolled back in her head.
Flydd cursed and let her fall. ‘Two down.’
Nish was shocked by his callousness, even in this desperate situation. The Flydd he’d once known so well had been replaced by a ruthless stranger.
‘Second stage of awakening?’ said Klarm. ‘What’s she talking about, Flydd?’
‘I don’t think I want to know.’
There came a tearing screech, like metal being torn apart, followed by a low shudder that shook more fragments of roof slate onto their heads and shoulders. They moved down to the corner where the structure was still sound, and Nish peered across the mooring ground. The shuddering grew stronger; then, with a deafening roar, a boiling shaft of light the width of a room burst up through the roof of Nennifer. Coloured particles whirled around and up until the column faded against the bright moon. And then the whole world moved.
‘What the hell was that?’ said Flydd, picking himself up. The ground beneath their feet was still quivering.
‘I don’t know,’ said Klarm. The whites of his eyes were showing. ‘But I suggest we run for our lives.’
‘We’ll be seen,’ said Flydd.
The rings around the brilliant moon had given way to a gigantic moonbow. The ground shook again and parts of the moonbow disappeared as if washed away. The parade ground wrenched sideways, hurling them against the wall. Nish’s hand went straight through a crack, to his bemusement. He wrenched it out just before the crack snapped closed, losing the skin along his right thumb. The soldier who’d been hit on the head got up, shakily.
‘Move!’ roared Flangers, hurling Nish out of the way. He picked up Malien and ran with her as the shed collapsed behind them.
Nish lay where he’d been thrown, unable to believe what he was seeing. A series of ground waves spiralled out from Nennifer, heaving solid paving stones in the air and shaking the tethered air-dreadnoughts like balloons in a storm. The first wave threw him up and backwards, and it was like being hit by a moving clanker. He’d just landed on his shoulder when the second wave tossed him head over heels. Falling head-down, he saw the ground coming up and threw out his arms to break his fall, but it dropped away again.
‘Run!’ Flydd heaved Nish to his feet. Irisis had taken Malien from Flangers, who was struggling to lift Yggur.
‘Which way?’ Nish gasped.
‘Towards Nennifer, you bloody fool. This is our chance.’
But they’ll see us! Nish thought. He watched them go, thinking they’d lost their minds, until another shock knocked him down and the outer edge of the parade ground began to tilt beneath his feet. And then he ran until his heart was bursting. Ahead, a knife-edged crack appeared, curving out from the centre of Nennifer. The inner side rose and the outer fell, leaving a cliff a third of a span high. Irisis pushed Malien up it, then went over in one great bound, her bright hair flying in the moonlight. Flydd scrambled over, followed by several of the soldiers. Nish made a last effort and smelt a whiff of brimstone as he sprang.
The crack opened visibly beneath him and clouds of misty dust boiled out. The groaning in the depths was like the prisoners in the dungeons of Nennifer suffering their daily torments.
He landed on the high side, skidding on his knees, out of breath. Surely he was the last? No, one of Yggur’s soldiers was labouring up the slope carrying another, who looked to have broken his leg.
He was almost to the cliff when the outer section of the parade ground dropped sharply. The man with the broken leg screamed. His partner, straining with all his might, lifted the injured soldier above his head and tossed him up onto solid ground. Reaction sent him sliding the other way, down the steadily increasing slope of the falling slab.
The soldier put his head down and even made a little ground before the slope grew so steep that he could gain no traction on it. He clung on with hands and knees, looking up at them in despair as the whole great slab of parade ground, fifty spans wide and about two hundred long, ground off, carrying him over the cliff into the vast abyss of the Desolation Sink.
TWENTY-FOUR
‘What have we done?’ said Nish, lying on the ground with his hands over his face.
Flydd jerked him to his feet. ‘I don’t know, but we’re going to make the best of it.’
The whole of Nennifer was shaking and, it seemed, the mountains behind them. More slabs of parade ground fell into the Desolation Sink and springs burst out of the ground, freezing instantly to brittle fountains. The tethers snapped on the nearer of the air-dreadnoughts, which lifted sluggishly on its flabby airbags.
Spiralling lines of force appeared in Nish’s inner eye, radiating out from the point whence that column of light had originated. His head whirled and he felt a sudden attack of nausea, like lying down when very drunk. Weird visions fleeted through his mind – the vast bulk of Nennifer as transparent as a glass maze; magnified views of one part of it, then another. Distant cries carried to him as if the people were standing close by. Then the enormous building was cut into curving slices and slowly forced apart by a boiling white nothingness.