Oh, Tiaan! She could almost feel the tears welling in his eyes. Tirthrax is the greatest city the Aachim ever built. More than a thousand years they spent carving its chambers into the heart of the mountain. There is no city like it. Show me.
Forcing her headache away, she got out of the pouch to walk barefoot around the fire and back to where she could see the immense horn of the mountain. There was no cloud. A bloody, mottled moon shone clear and full on its snow-clad flanks, the faces of layered rock, the spire reaching up beyond the air.
A gasp, a cry of pain and joy together. The scene grew smoky, then cleared. Minis ran through a doorway, his cry vibrating in her head, loud enough to wake the child in the tent.
Tirior, Luxor, Vithis foster-father! Come see! Tiaan has brought the amplimet to the very feet of Tirthrax mountain. Look, look!
Dimly she saw faces that she had seen months ago, while trapped in that icy bubble outside the battle cavern. They crowded around, jostling each other in their excitement. There were unfamiliar faces too, and on every one she saw desperate hope, where for the past hundred years there had only been desperation.
Tiaan, said Minis, pushing through, listen carefully. We have little time left. Maybe days; at most weeks. Already many of us have died. Can you hear me, Tiaan?
‘I can hear you.’
We’re losing you. Tiaan, this is what you must do. You are days from the nearest entrance of Tirthrax, though not far from a hidden escape way. Go straight up the curving ridge you see before you. High up, the best part of a day’s climb, you will come to a sheer face. From where you are standing, it has the shape of a four-sided diamond. Do you see it?
‘I noted it as we camped today.’
At the lower point of the diamond you will encounter two folded bands of rock as red as rust, each a span or more thick. Between lies a thin yellow band. Follow them around the mountain in the direction of the double glacier; that would be to your right, I think?
‘Left,’ she said, though he gave no sign of having heard.
Go on some two thousand, one hundred steps. How tall are you, Tiaan?
‘Eighty-two hundreds of a span,’ she said. ‘But our span may be shorter than yours.’
Are you short or tall for a human woman?
‘Middling.’
Go on for two thousand, three hundred steps, more or less, and you will see a great faultline in the rocks that lifts the red and yellow bands up well above the ledge. Continue for another six hundred steps. You will come to what looks like a cave, very small. There may be water running from it. Crawl inside, and at the further end will be a blank wall. Smack your palm against the face, like this. He tapped out a complex beat and made her practise it until it was perfect.
The slab should go up to let you in. If not, you must find a way to force it. You will be in the very base of Tirthrax. Keep crawling along the tunnel. He described a series of passages to be negotiated and hidden doors to be opened. Finally, take the stair up all the way to the top. It is very far. You will need to rest on the way. There you will find a gong made of glass. Strike it and the Aachim will come, if they have not already found you. Tell them your tale and give them the amplimet. Beware of using it inside Tirthrax. So close to the node, you risk your life, and the crystal, so do it only if you have no other choice. Is that clear, Tiaan?
‘Yes,’ she said softly. ‘But …’
The Aachim will know what to do.
Tiaan explained to Haani what they were looking for. Minis’s directions proved beautifully clear, though the distances were shorter than he’d estimated. They found the fault, and the opening beyond it, after the middle of the day. Tiaan had to take off her pack to get in, the entrance being nearly blocked with ice. At the other end the wall was also crusted with ice and a thin layer of white, crystallised from seepage through the rocks. She slapped the face in the rhythm Minis had taught her. Nothing happened. She did it again. Still nothing. Frowning, Tiaan sat back.
‘Maybe the door is stuck,’ said Haani.
‘Of course! The edges are cemented up. Give me a hand, Haani.’
They tapped all around with pieces of rock, cracking the coating of ice and crystals off. The door still did not move and Tiaan had to clean out the gaps with a chisel from her toolkit. As soon as the last fragment fell, the door scraped up. Tiaan and Haani hurried through, in case it snapped down again. Light flared above them, coming from a glossy globe on the wall. Tiaan had not seen anything like it before, and it bothered her, though she had read about the clever Aachim in the Histories and knew their craft was greater than humankind’s.
As they were donning their packs, Haani said, ‘What’s that?’
It was a dull clanging, far away. ‘I don’t know,’ said Tiaan. ‘Perhaps an alarm. Well, they’ll certainly know we’re coming.’
They were in a large tunnel with smooth walls of tormented schist. Mica sparkled here and there. They kept going, following Minis’s instructions, and emerged through the final door into a cavern. Ahead, a stone stair wound up. Tiaan led the way. After the equivalent of five long flights, they came out in a stone-lined room.
‘I don’t see any glass gong,’ said Haani. Tiaan had told her about that.
‘We have to keep going up, I suppose.’
Outside, they trudged down a long corridor before emerging in a shell-shaped chamber, at least a hundred spans long, cut out of the twisted and knotted rock of Tirthrax. Tiaan just wanted the journey to end. Haani, though exhausted, plodded on without complaint.
To their left was another stair, a tight spiral of crystal treads held in place by wires. It looked too delicate to take their weight. ‘This must be it,’ Tiaan said doubtfully.
She put one foot on the lowest tread. It did not move; the stair was more solid than it looked. Lights came on above. Another alarm pealed, a higher note than the first, but there was no sign of life. No doubt they lived further up, since Minis had told her to go all that way.
The stairs kept going, floor after floor. There seemed no end to them and Tiaan was staggering long before the top. They rested on the wires, then continued, following the lights which went on above and off below. Other alarms sounded, pitched high and low, until the whole place echoed with them. The first stopped after an hour, so Tiaan supposed the others would, too.
It must have been three hours’ climb before they found themselves at the low end of another enormous chamber. This one was egg-shaped, decorated with strange arts and furnished here and there, equally strangely. Before them stood the glass gong, twice Tiaan’s height. A leather-coated wooden mallet sat beside it. Taking up the mallet, she struck the gong fair in the middle. It issued forth a low, trembly sound that she could feel vibrating in her bones.
A hundred alarms went off at once. Tiaan laid down the mallet and waited. And waited.
No one came. She struck the gong over and over. The result was the same. No one answered the call, not after an hour, or two hours, or four, or eight, or sixteen. Eventually the alarms stopped.
In the morning Tiaan struck the gong again and again. Haani did too. There was no response. Finally, in the middle of the night, after they had been in Tirthrax for a good thirty hours, Tiaan was forced to conclude that the Aachim, who had lived here for thousands of years, dwelt here no longer. The whole vast edifice of Tirthrax, the greatest city they had ever made, had been abandoned.
FIFTY-FIVE
