Ullii came creeping back, a little shadow from which, occasionally, those big eyes reflected a stray gleam of light coming under the door. She crouched not far away, hands on the floor but head in the air, sniffing like a dog. If she could smell as well as a dog there would be plenty to read off him: blood; tears; sweat; the scent of Irisis.
Nish lay so still that he could hear his heartbeat. She came closer, sniffing around the back of his head. Something touched his hair – a fingertip. He did not move, sensing that she was ready to spring away at any provocation. Fingers touched his hair, shaping his head as gently as a sigh.
Nish held his breath. The fingers traced his cheek and the other hand joined them: eyes, nose, mouth, ears, chin. At his infinitesimal movement she drew back. He heard the faintest sound, like an inrushing of air. And again. She was sniffing her fingers, imprinting his smell on her memory.
She edged forward and her fingers slid down the curve of his face from either side. Her hand struck the wound. Nish cried out; it was torment.
Ullii scurried to the corner and curled up into a ball. He came to his knees, enduring the shooting agony. She began rocking furiously, perhaps scared he would beat her. An interesting experiment, though it was over for the moment. When the pain became bearable Nish went out, as quietly as he could.
He walked between the furnaces, where stokers were shovelling slabs of pitch into the fire pits. The blast was so intense that they wore suits of woven rock fibre, with goggles of black glass to stop their eyes from drying out. The heat made him feel dizzy. Another worker was drawing out samples of molten metal with a cup on the end of a long rod. He was similarly garbed and goggled, and wore earmuffs, for the roar of the furnaces up close was deafening.
Nish went out the back gate, desperate for a gasp of clean, cold air. In the distance Irisis was walking along the edge of the ravine. He turned the other way, which led him to the slag and ash piles. Beyond he was brought up by the breath-snatching whiff of ammonia and a corrosive reek of phenol from the effluent drains. A group of workers, supervised by Foreman Gryste, were busy clearing tar-choked drains.
‘It’s no use,’ said Gryste, tossing his spade-tipped probing pole to one side. ‘We’ll have to go up. Glyss, are you ready?’
Glyss was a large man, big in the upper body but with thin legs and a meagre bottom. He was clad head to foot in a waxed canvas suit, booties and cap. They greased his face, his hands and every speck of exposed skin. He donned goggles, slipped plugs up his nose and went down on hands and knees. Taking half a dozen deep breaths, he scuttled up the drain as fast as a cockroach. A rope unreeled behind him. Thumping went on for a couple of minutes then stopped.
‘Pull!’ Gryste roared. Two labourers, holding the rope, hauled Glyss out again.
He was gasping, and his hands and lips were blistered. Glyss plopped on the ground, spitting bloody sputum.
‘Ready, Glyss?’ Gryste said after a few minutes.
A look of terror crossed the man’s face, then he gave a spasmodic jerk of the head. Nish resumed his walk. There were worse lives than being a soldier.
Nish paced back the way he had come. The air near the sewer drains reeked so badly that he wished for a pair of Glyss’s noseplugs. Further on, he diverted from the path that led to the front of the manufactory, not wanting to go inside. Instead he wandered along the edge of the gully, here a broken slope that plunged steeply into the gorge. Further along, the slope became a cliff.
Feeling faint, Nish sat near the edge, scowling at the leaden sky. The air was clean here but deathly cold and it was looking as though it would snow. How he hated the manufactory. It was the filthiest place he had ever been. Every plant back there was dead, while the river into which their wastes flowed was a reeking cesspit. Moreover, the place had the most miserable weather on Santhenar and it prevailed all three hundred and ninety-six days a year.
Weighing an egg-shaped pebble in his hand, Nish tossed it idly over the cliff.
‘Aah!’ came a cry from below.
Nish looked down to see a big man scowling up at him, rubbing a completely bald pate. It was Eiryn Muss. The halfwit eked out a living growing air-moss on a ramshackle structure of poles and withes on the upper edges of the ravine. Air-moss was a superlative wound dressing, though the war had used up all accessible natural supplies. It grew naturally only on tree trunks on the upper parts of escarpments near the coast, where up-draughts maintained the moist air it required. The trees here had been burned long ago, fuel for the insatiable furnaces, hence Muss’s dangerous yet poorly paid occupation.
A touch of sulphur in the air resulted in premium-quality moss, but the growth rate was so low that no normal man could have survived on the earnings, even from such an extensive array of structures as Muss had built. Fortunately Muss was no ordinary man. He was happy to eat wood grubs and beetles if he could get no better, and after each sale rewarded himself with a flask of turnip brandy and an hour of watching the sweeper boys through a crack in the wall of the bathhouse.
But Muss had sold no moss in a month and someone had plastered over the peeping hole. He was desperate for turnip brandy, had no money to get any and wanted someone to suffer for it.
Catching sight of Nish, Muss growled and began to scramble up the slope.
‘It wasn’t me!’ Nish lied instinctively.
‘I’ll kill you and eat your brains,’ Muss roared, hurling a rock at him. Nish ducked. ‘It’s Little Nish, isn’t it, the overseer’s bum chum! Enjoy your flogging the other day, Nish-Nash?’ Muss clawed his way up. ‘I’ll whip your fat little backside so hard …’
Nish fled up the path in the direction of the cliff, then darted off among the boulders. Peeking out, he saw the fellow come panting and gasping up over the edge. Muss looked around wildly, cursed and ran up the road toward the rocks, his great belly wobbling. He stopped, panting, baffled, then shambled back the other way, swearing blood-black oaths.
‘Stupid old fart!’ Nish squatted until his head steadied before continuing the other way. He had to rest every few minutes now. Must have lost more blood than he realised. He was leaning against a boulder, its frosting of wind-driven snow steadily melting, when someone appeared on the cliff edge several hundred paces further on. Yellow hair flew in the wind. It was Irisis. He thought it best to creep away, even at the risk of running into Muss again.
Something stopped him. It was the way she was standing right on the brink, staring down. Didn’t she realise how dangerous that was? What if the edge crumbled …?
Of course she realised! Maybe she was daring the cliff to hold her up. Or fling her down!
Irisis tensed, then went into a crouch. Nish’s heart turned over. She was going to jump.
He began to run. It was so awful he could not contemplate it. Her beautiful body, her lovely face, smashed on the rocks. Not brave, bold, fearless Irisis. Not even Irisis the liar, cheat and possibly murderer. It must not happen.
He lost sight of her as he pounded down into a little dip in the path. Let her still be there, he agonised as he laboured up the other side. His legs felt like wet string. Her image shivered, body and legs seeming to move separately. Nish’s neck wound pulsed; wetness ran down his chest. He felt faint. As he gained the top she was still there, trembling on the brink.
‘No, Irisis!’ he screamed. ‘Don’t jump!’
Wobbling down the slope, he hit an icy patch where the path was in shadow and his feet went from under him. ‘No!’ Nish said faintly, fell forward, landed on his knees and skidded over the edge. His head struck something and a black overcast blocked out the sky.