The paper went one way, the pencil another. Nish bent down for them, trying to conceal his shock. He’d thought he had escaped that fate.
‘And you could hardly appeal such a judgment, artificer, after the trouble you’ve caused. Even your own father’s reports say so. Poor Jal-Nish. Well, it’s up to me now. Have you anything to say for yourself?’
‘I believe I’ve done some good since then,’ Nish said weakly.
‘Indeed? That’s not what I heard from the plateau.’
‘What did you hear, surr?’ Nish had to force the words out, he was so afraid.
‘I heard that you threatened Ky-Ara, which led to the destruction of his clanker.’
Nish looked around frantically, wanting to deny it but not daring to. There was no truth the scrutator could not dig out and the process would be most unpleasant.
‘For the want of a clanker the artisan was lost. The crystal too! And a perquisitor maimed.’
‘Ky-Ara should have resisted me,’ Nish muttered.
‘Indeed he should, and will be brought to account for his negligence. As will you.’
The scrutator glanced down at his bony hands. The fingers were gnarled and twisted as if they’d been broken in a torture chamber, then set by someone who knew nothing about bones. He flexed his fingers, which moved as awkwardly as the limbs of a crab. Nish shuddered and tried vainly to conceal it.
The cold eyes saw everything. ‘On the other hand, you have shown courage, Cryl-Nish. And courage, I need not remind you, is an essential quality in the front-line soldier.’
‘I may be more use to you at the manufactory as an artificer,’ Nish said desperately.
‘I doubt it! You’re an indifferent artificer, Cryl-Nish, though you work hard at it.’
‘I’ve done my best. Artificing was not my choice.’
‘Indeed you have, but your best is not good enough.’
‘What about my project for Fyn-Mah? To learn about the flesh-formers?’
‘Have you done any good with it?’
‘No, but I’ve only …’
‘Leave it to her!’
‘But …’
‘No buts, artificer,’ growled Flydd.
Nish stared at the floor in despair. He was doomed. Then inspiration struck. ‘How have you gone with Ullii, surr?’
The scrutator’s mouth curled down, and then suddenly he smiled. ‘I see what you’re about. You hope to prove useful in an endeavour that an old monster like me has failed at.’
‘Well, er … the seeker is difficult to work with.’
‘I found her not unusually so.’
Nish’s mouth fell open. ‘But …’
‘People are not necessarily what they seem, boy. Sometimes we show others what they want us to see. You, for example, think of the scrutator as a bloody old bastard.’
Nish could hardly deny it, so he remained silent.
‘I understand your friend Ullii very well. We got on famously and parted friends.’
Nish could not believe that, although the scrutator would hardly lie about something so easily checked. The piece of paper fluttered from Nish’s hand. He watched it drift down but did not go after it. ‘Then it’s all over for me. I’m done for!’
Those eyes burned through him again.
‘Perhaps I can use you after all, Cryl-Nish. I don’t have the time to keep watch with Ullii. And why should I when you could do it for me? I think I will send you back to the manufactory. You can be a second-rate artificer by day. At night, when the seeker is not out hunting crystal in the mine, you will ensure that she keeps watch.’
‘Watch for what?’ Nish said stupidly.
‘For people using the Secret Art. What else?’
‘Oh!’
‘Also for Tiaan. One day she will reappear and I want to know immediately. By skeet, and damn the expense! And then I want her found. This is the sole reason I have spared you, artificer. So you and the seeker can track down Tiaan and, more importantly, this rather interesting hedron she seems to have discovered. Don’t fail me, boy, or you’re lyrinx fodder!’
The following morning Nish and Ullii were on their way back to the manufactory with an escort of six foot-soldiers and a clanker. Ullii was uncommonly cheerful. She did not say much, but when Nish mentioned the scrutator she said ‘Xervish!’ and smiled at some memory. There had to be more to the man than that unprepossessing exterior showed. No doubt there was – one did not rise to one of the most powerful positions in the land without having many talents.
Nish’s father had recovered from his rages sufficiently to travel and had been sent home to Fassafarn by ship. Nish was delighted to see him go. His father the perquisitor was bad enough, but Jal-Nish the one-armed, mutilated failure was a terrible sight to see. The expedition had gone after Tiaan on his orders and it had been a disaster. The blame could fall nowhere else.
As they walked beside the clanker, Nish wondered what would happen to his father. Would he be quietly retired on grounds of injury? Was that what happened to important people who became incapable? They could hardly send him to the front-lines.
Nish could not see Jal-Nish settling calmly into domestic impotence. He would drive his mother out of her mind. Ranii was an ambitious, clever woman who, when she was at home, could stand no interference in the way it was run.
Well, Fassafarn was a long way away, thankfully. Nish was unlikely to see home in the next five years.
About a week later, Nish was helping to carry timber for the front doors when Ky-Ara’s clanker rattled up the road. The machine was daubed here and there with mud and reeds, as if it had been hidden in a swamp. The plates were dented and streaked with rust.
The machine groaned to a stop. An elderly operator got out, removed his gloves and rubbed the small of his back. Two soldiers emerged. Turning toward the gate, they saluted smartly.
Nish set down his load, wondering what was going on. The scrutator stepped through the gate, signalling to a quartet of manufactory guards, who marched to the clanker and threw up the back hatch.
‘Come out!’ they ordered.
After a long interval, a dark-clad figure appeared in the opening, was hauled out and dragged across to the gate. Nish hardly recognised Ky-Ara. The once handsome young man was filthy, covered in sores and as thin as a crowbar. His operator’s uniform was stained with mud, and in that tormented face his eyes looked as big as Ullii’s.
There was no trial, since Ky-Ara had admitted his guilt. Nish had no idea what the punishment was going to be – execution, he presumed, in some horribly appropriate way. There was no point sending this man to the front-lines.
Ky-Ara was marched inside and bound to a stake between the artificer’s workshop and the furnaces. The elderly operator drove the clanker through the rear gate and parked it beside Ky-Ara.
‘Take the machine apart, piece by piece,’ said the scrutator to the assembled artificers.
The artificers, including Nish, began to do just that. All the clanker operators, and their prentices, stood silently by. The manufactory’s chronicler sat in a chair by the furnaces, recording everything. The teller being too sick to stand witness, another had been brought up from Tiksi. Her duty was to write the Tale of Ky-Ara’s Downfall and Ruin, that it could be told in all sixty-seven manufactories of the south-east, and possibly across the known world.
Food and drink were laid out for him but Ky-Ara touched neither in the three days it took to reduce the clanker to the myriad parts from which it had been assembled. He hung from his ropes, staring with those bloody eyes, and every part removed was a thorn of metal being twisted in his flesh.
Nish was not much given to pity, but before the operation was over he did pity Ky-Ara. The man had withered before his eyes and Nish had never seen such suffering. He wished someone would put the fellow out of his agony, but Ky-Ara was guarded night and day. Justice must take its unforgiving course.