‘It tried to kill me, Liett,’ Ryll gasped. ‘Tiaan twice saved me. Is she …?’
Coeland bent over her. ‘She lives.’
Ryll’s eyes widened in terror. ‘The nylatl moved. Kill it!’
The creature shot past them, hurtled through the doorway and disappeared.
‘Sound the alarm!’ Ryll choked. ‘Find it, and destroy it!’
Coeland and Liett went after the nylatl. Ryll forced himself to his feet, glancing at Tiaan, who lay as before. He eyed the hole in the wall, saluted Tiaan with a shaky hand and went out. The door slammed. The lock clicked.
Tiaan felt her senses coming back in the same order as they had disappeared. She tasted blood from a bitten tongue. Her scalp throbbed. She smelt lyrinx blood and carrion. And something else – fresh air on her face. Cold air!
The chance had come – the only one she’d get. She did not move as the lyrinx checked her, nor even as the nylatl got away and the two went after it. Only after Ryll had gone, locking the door behind him, did she climb to her feet.
The smell of freedom made her eyes water, or maybe it was the fumes. She opened her eyes and saw nothing. Tiaan almost panicked, then the room brightened as if a lantern had been turned up and her sight was back.
There was a gaping hole in the wall, large enough to get through. She put her head out. The metal was still hot but cooling rapidly. The spire, clotted here and there with rock, was steep, though not so steep that she could not climb down.
She had to take the chance even if she was caught within minutes. Tiaan stuffed her devices into her pack and threw it over her shoulder. A bare blade lay on the bench, the one Ryll had used as a scalpel. She took that too. The amplimet was on the floor. Tiaan pressed it to her lips, gave thanks for the miracle and packed it away. Finally she put a finger in a clot of Ryll’s blood and wrote crudely on the wall, ‘Two lives! My debt is paid!’
She doubted that it would stop the lyrinx from coming after her, but Tiaan wanted it to be on the record. If she was captured she would fight them to the death. Better that than be forced to collaborate again, even for Minis.
Laying a stool across the hot aperture, she crawled out and began to pick her way down. Tiaan felt hot and cold and shivery, an inevitable result of so abusing her talent. Still, she could walk, and climb, and defend herself if she had to.
It was further than it looked, and steeper. And much, much colder. After months inside the unnatural warmth of Kalissin, Tiaan was quite unused to the winter cold. Yet even the outside of Kalissin was considerably warmer than the rest of Faralladell. It would be perishing on the other side of the lake. Out of sight of the aperture, she put on her mountain clothing.
She hoped they had not yet caught the nylatl. With luck, not that she’d had much of that lately, it might be an hour or two before they discovered she was gone. Tiaan did not build up her hopes. The chance of getting away was remote.
She tried not to think of the nylatl escaping. Tiaan could still see the look in its eyes as it prepared to abandon Ryll and leap at her. She would have no chance against it, if it got out.
Not far to the bottom now. There was little likelihood of being seen from inside, for the windows were small and it was easy to keep away from them. Tiaan squinted across the lake but the mist-wreathed water blurred into the snowy shores beyond. There was no colour in this landscape. It might have been two leagues across, or five.
It was approaching noon by the time she made it to the bottom of the spire, which rose out of a collar of angular rubble clothed in dense broad-leaved trees. They looked quite out of place here.
The ground was warm – Tiaan could feel it through the soles of her boots. The air was too, though only near the ground. The wind blowing off the lake felt dank.
She negotiated her way through shoulder-high ferns. Cushiony mosses lay underfoot and the forest had a moist organic reek she had never smelt before, though she associated it with the warm forests of the north. It was not far down to the water. When she reached it Tiaan looked back.
The sun’s slanting rays passed between the cloud layers to paint the dark spire in reds and browns. Halfway up she saw her ragged escape hole. There was no sign of pursuit. Perhaps Ryll, honourable creature that he was, considered the debt repaid. Had he given her this chance?
She turned away to cast along the shore for a boat. Tiaan felt sure there must be boats, for the diet in Kalissin normally consisted of fish, frequently fresh. She had to find a boat; the island was too small to hide on. She hurried along the edge of the forest, next to the strand. Even a log would do.
The sun emitted a gloomy, umbrous light that made the lake seem blood-brown. It was, Tiaan thought, the kind of light the afternoon sun would make setting through the reek and fume of a burnt city.
Her calves were aching. She’d lost fitness in Kalissin. Perhaps the lyrinx used lines, or nets, or even, unlikely as it seemed, scooped fish up from the air as a pelican did. She smiled. They would surely not waste the Secret Art that way.
Standing on the shore, she contemplated the sullen waters. Tiaan could swim, though she had not since childhood. She put one finger in the water. It was cold, but not freezing. She figured she could swim as far as she could see – about a hundred spans.
Walking on, she came to a path. Tiaan followed it up through the forest, peering into the dim undergrowth on either side. No boat. She crept along the upper edge of the forest and down the next path to the water again. No boat. What was she going to do?
As she continued along the shore, something small and dark emerged from an open porthole at the very top of the spire and crept into the shadow. The nylatl had been hurt badly by Tiaan’s blast and the impact with the wall. Muscles had been torn, armour broken. Its skin was weeping, the spines burnt to dribbling stumps and one rear limb dragged. The nylatl had an overpowering urge to find a dark space and hibernate for a month, while its body repaired itself.
It could not hide here. Even if it burrowed into the warm earth its enemies would find it. Besides, it had to feed first. It had to find the creature that had so damaged it, and the terrible crystal. It sniffed the air and caught a scent. The nylatl began the painful climb down.
Hungry!
FORTY-SIX
Tiaan started on a piece of dried fish left over from the previous day, that being the only food she had. It softened in her mouth into flakes with a salty, heavily smoked flavour.
Something whooped in the trees on her right – she hoped it was a bird. Wavelets lapped on the shore; dull, oily surges. There was a smell of rotting vegetation. The overcast seemed to have grown more dense and banners of fog now drifted on the lake.
The strong flavour was not pleasant. Tiaan packed away the fish, drank a few mouthfuls of lake water and kept going. Not far along she saw a lyrinx print in damp sand. Whoever made it had been coming from the forest. Following the marks back, she found a faint path.
Tiaan traced it up through the forest, which was unnaturally luxuriant and hard to see in. After many false turns she crossed over a gully and found, at the top of a gentle slope, a beaten track that led toward the spire. From the track they had taken various ways down to the water.
She followed each way one by one, searching in the undergrowth on either side, but without success. About to head down another trail, Tiaan realised that she had been looking in the wrong place. They would keep the boat, or boats, up where the path first branched. Of course they would not leave it on the shore, where a gale might damage it.
The round shape to her right was not a boulder – there were no round boulders here. It turned out to be a circular boat made of leather, if boat it could be called at all. It was exactly like a high-sided bowl, the leather stretched drum-tight over a wooden frame. Something hung down inside, like a soft leather curtain with a drawstring. The craft had a floor of woven cane.