‘No,’ she said in an almost inaudible squeak. ‘No, no, no!’
‘Yes,’ Nish said.
Ullii couldn’t make herself any smaller or any more insignificant. She couldn’t close down her senses to keep him at bay and she couldn’t escape. She had no choice but to take in what he was saying, though she knew he was manipulating her.
She had betrayed her friends and, for the first time, Ullii had to face up to it. She’d known it all along, but had put it out of mind – even those awful sounds as the guards on the wall had been slain without warning.
And how many people were yet to die? Dozens stood in the yard, waiting in the freezing cold for their doom. She looked out the embrasure. The vast rope-and-canvas platform would soon be finished. Two prisoners were being hauled up in a rope net, their arms and legs dangling out through the mesh.
She heard a faint, mournful wail – a young woman’s cry of soul-rending anguish. It wasn’t Irisis, for she would never have given way like that. Was it little Inouye? Was she wailing because she would never see her babies again, or because she knew that even they would suffer for the crime she’d been accused of?
Nish stood up, still holding his thumb over the gash, and looked over her shoulder. ‘It’s nearly midday. The trials will begin as soon as the last prisoners are lifted up to the amphitheatre, and Ghorr will want it well over before dark. He won’t dare stay here after the sun goes down. Air-dreadnoughts are too vulnerable to flying lyrinx.’
His nearness made her uncomfortable, though the scent of him had always calmed her. Ullii tried to rouse her previous fury by thinking about all the things Nish had done to her, but at the look in his eyes, so familiar, so guilty, so vulnerable, she could not. Violence was simply not in her nature. What would be the point, anyway? Myllii and Yllii couldn’t be brought back and the sooner she joined them the better. ‘What do you want from me, Nish?’
‘I want you to help me. We’ve got to try and save them.’
‘They have hundreds of guards,’ she said dully. ‘And dozens of mancers watching over them. I can’t do anything and neither can you.’
‘We have to try.’
‘I’m too scared.’
‘I’m scared too. But look – we’ve both done wrong, Ullii, and this is the only way we can make up for it. We have to atone for what we’ve done.’
FIVE
The operation on his forearm was more painful than it should have been, because Ullii couldn’t bear to look at the gash and insisted on sewing him up with her eyes closed. Each time the bloody needle, trailing its red threads, came at him he flinched and Ullii jumped, then forced it through his skin and flesh as if to cause the maximum of discomfort. Nish gritted his teeth and restrained himself from crying out, though it wasn’t possible to remain silent when she roughly pulled the sides of the gash together and tied the threads.
‘Thank you,’ he said once it had been done and bound with the tail of a spare shirt from her pack. ‘Now we’d better find a way out of here.’
Nish knew it was hopeless. Ullii was too timid; if he’d had his choice of all the co-conspirators in the world, he couldn’t have found someone with less initiative.
He looked out the window and blanched. How had she climbed the tower without ropes or irons? It was beyond him and that wasn’t cowardice. Nish simply didn’t have the skills to climb down that sheer face. If he tried, he’d certainly fall to his death.
The rubble blocking the stair was still too hot to approach. The rods that supported and tensioned the roof were immovable; he’d tried them earlier.
‘Ullii, you’ll have to climb down and find some rope. I can’t get out any other way.’
‘Rope?’ she said, as if she’d never heard of such a thing. ‘I don’t know where there’s any rope.’
He thought for a moment. ‘Do you know where the front door of Fiz Gorgo is?’
‘Yes. I went through it with Ghorr.’
‘If you can climb down –’
‘Of course I can climb down,’ she said, tossing her head.
‘Then go out into the yard. It’s empty now, but be careful. Ghorr might have guards posted. Around to the left, near the wall, there’s a little stone shed that Inouye uses – she’s the air-floater pilot. The innocent one whose little children are going to be murdered,’ he said deliberately. ‘The door won’t be locked, and you’ll find coils of rope in there. Can you bring one back? And make sure it’s long enough …’ He gauged the distance down to the roof. ‘You’ll need about eight or nine spans. Do you know how much a span is?’
She gave him one of her famous looks and climbed out the embrasure on the side away from the yard. Nish watched her go down, amazed at how easy she made it look, and even more amazed that such a timid person could do it at all. But then, Ullii could be surprisingly competent when she had no choice in the matter.
He glanced up. The amphitheatre looked almost complete now. The ropers, who earlier had been swarming like sailors in the rigging of a merchant vessel, were gone apart from a few above a tower on the other side of Fiz Gorgo, who were tensioning lines with a complicated array of pulleys. He couldn’t see what was going on above the deck.
Nish looked further up, to the nearest of the air-dreadnoughts, but immediately jerked his head below the sill of the embrasure. For a moment he’d thought the grey robed mancer had been staring straight at him. He took another peep. The brass spyglass was not pointed his way at all, but at the horned tower to his left. It had also been struck by that initial blast, but whatever the strange energies or magics inside, they had not been completely liberated. The tower was sagging more than this one and glowing redly three floors below the roof. Bladder-like extrusions of molten material were being forced out of the slit embrasures. One burst, filling the air with shards of brown glass which set instantly, glittering in a momentary ray of sunlight, before tinkling to the paving stones of the yard.
The tower slowly tilted as if the stone were made of toffee. One of the horns fell off and plunged through the roof, smashing its thick slabs to fragments. For a few seconds it looked as though the tower would go the same way but it subsided suddenly, twisting like a length of barley sugar, and landed in the yard with a crash that shook the whole of Fiz Gorgo. Residual magics fumed and flickered, then went out.
Nish’s tower shuddered and leaned a little further from the vertical. Ants swarmed in the pit of his stomach, but the tower stabilised. Cries came from the amphitheatre and a wave churned across the canvas, snapping several of the guy ropes. A roper, caught by a lashing end, fell backwards from his perch, plunging head down and arms spread, to his death. Nish lost sight of the man as he passed behind the roof on the other side of the building.
His tower gave another, smaller shudder and rock spalled off the walls. It couldn’t last long. Nish scanned the air-dreadnought, keeping his head below the embrasure. The mancer was watching the drama on the amphitheatre. Nish prayed that he hadn’t seen Ullii climbing down, or she’d have walked into a trap. He couldn’t see her in the yard.
Nish’s thoughts went to his friends. The trials would soon be getting underway and they wouldn’t take over-long. Long enough for the theatre and the lavish spectacle, and long enough for the artists, recorders and tale-tellers to get each victim’s story down, but not long enough for anyone to receive a fair trial. The scrutators did not believe in fair trials.
Come on, Ullii. What’s keeping you? Ghorr might have tried Irisis first, for she’d once discovered a secret that threatened every mancer, and the chief scrutator didn’t want it to get out. If the punishment was carried out after each trial they might be readying her now. Before she was tortured and slain, Irisis would be stripped naked and exposed to the icy wind and the leers of the witnesses. The artists and tale-tellers would be ordered to capture every detail of her magnificent body before the punishment, and afterwards. In this prudish world the human form was rarely depicted unclothed, but where criminals were concerned nothing was left to the prurient imagination. If such a beauty could be brought low, it could happen to anyone, and few people would fail to take the lesson.