‘They’re coming!’ hissed Gi-Had.
The soldiers jammed their torches into whatever crevices and hollows they could find. The advance guard presented their javelins. Those on the wings of the semicircle held out swords. They looked like a bunch of terrified youths. Two, armed with crossbows, moved back.
Another noise, like the skittering of a stone across the floor. The javelins wavered, dipped then firmed. Fourteen pairs of eyes stared at the black opening. Tiaan rasped her bonds furiously.
Without warning a dark creature erupted from the tunnel to the left of the middle one. Another lyrinx came out of the right tunnel. They hurled themselves through the swordsmen and attacked the javelin-armed soldiers from behind. Three were dead before they could get their weapons into position. The fourth impaled a lyrinx in its armoured thigh, then his spear was broken, and he with it.
‘To me!’ roared Gi-Had, standing at the front with the sergeant. ‘Archers, fire!’
The crossbows fired over the heads of the soldiers. A green-crested lyrinx fell, shot through the eye. Another was pierced in one mighty shoulder, though it shrugged at the injury and kept fighting. The creature was powerfully armoured there.
Four swordsmen were still on their feet, and Gi-Had. They stood shoulder to shoulder, their swords weaving, while the archers struggled to reload their clumsy weapons. A third lyrinx hurtled out of the middle tunnel. The soldiers had their backs to him and three fell without ever knowing why. The sergeant and Gi-Had fought on.
One archer fired again. The third lyrinx, which was smaller than the others, clawed at the back of its neck. It recovered, bounded across the cavern and took out both archers with single blows. A bolt shot vertically from the other crossbow, shattering a stalactite to pieces and raining down shards of limestone on the creature. A large piece struck it on the head, felling it. The second lyrinx had disembowelled Numbl, but was skewered between the thigh plates by Gi-Had. Purple blood gurgled out. Gi-Had feinted, ducked, darted to one side and ran for the tunnel that led back to the hedron mine. The lyrinx went after him, limping badly.
In all her life Tiaan had never seen such bloodshed and brutality. Everywhere she looked, men were thrashing, moaning, dying. She gave a last rasp of her bonds and they parted. She crept down to the battlefield. Twelve soldiers lay on the floor. Ten were dead, no question of it, and the others had not long to live.
One was handsome Pelf, the man who had wanted to molest her. A slash of the lyrinx’s claws had opened a rift between his ribs, from which pink foam oozed. Parts of one lung could be seen.
Despite everything, Tiaan could feel only pity for the man. She put a hand on his brow.
Pelf’s eyes opened wide as he relived the horror of the last few minutes. They drifted as aimlessly as fireflies, before lighting on her face. She saw his self-revulsion. ‘I knew I was doing the greatest wickedness of all,’ he said. ‘I brought all this down on us.’
Pelf twitched and a clot of pink foam shot from the chest cavity to land quivering on his trouser front. He watched it dribble down, then caught at her hand. ‘Take this dagger, girl. Put out my eyes that lusted over what they had no right to. Tear out my tongue that urged foul rape on you. Sever my treacherous member …’
‘Hush!’ said Tiaan. ‘You’re dying, Pelf. Make your peace before it’s too late.’
She ran to the other man. He was fatally wounded, blood pooling in the hollows of the floor beside him, and already unconscious.
She dared not go after Gi-Had, not with a live lyrinx between her and him. But she could not stay here with the mutilated dead, and maybe the lyrinx already on the way back. There had to be another way out. Perhaps that was what the tapping signified.
She’d need plenty of food if she was to venture outside, for it would take days to get back to the manufactory from here. Feeling in the unconscious man’s pack, she found some cloth-wrapped rations. ‘Have you food?’ she said hoarsely to Pelf. She felt uncomfortable about robbing the dead and the dying.
‘Take it all!’ he gasped. ‘I’ve gold in my wallet. Take that too!’
She took the provisions but not the gold, and rifled the sergeant’s pack as well, until she had as much food as she could carry. The torches were burning low now. The scene was like a twisted, classical painting of hell. Tiaan heaved the bulging pack on her back and went down between the two dead lyrinx toward the middle tunnel.
As she passed by, the smaller lyrinx grabbed her by the forearm. She tried to reach her knife but with a swift movement the creature caught that arm too, holding both in a clawed hand that could have spanned her skull. As it drew her forward, leathery elephant skin parted on its face to reveal an eye. It was large and oval, yellow with tawny specks and a star-shaped pupil.
The head was enormous, the mouth as wide as her skull. Tiaan had heard awful tales about lyrinx. It would torment her just for the fun of it. The mouth opened, revealing a large quantity of grey teeth. Its breath was strangely sweet. Chameleon colours flickered across skin that had been dark-grey.
‘Get it over with!’ she said limply.
PART THREE
SEEKER
TWENTY-THREE
Irisis sat in a leather chair in the master crafter’s old chambers, listening to the storm rage outside. The wind howled in the battlements and it was turning into a blizzard. The weather suited her mood. The experiment with Ullii was bound to fail. What was she to do then?
Another artisan might have fled to make a new life somewhere far away. Irisis could not. Her entire identity was tied up with her family and her trade. For all that she railed against them, for all that she neglected them, she would rather die, even in disgrace, than live without her family.
Nish brought the seeker down before dawn, when the manufactory was at its quietest. Even so, it was a trial for her. Ullii shied at every sound and whenever someone approached she shrank against the wall.
The crafter’s chambers comprised two rooms. The larger one was a combined office and workshop with an enormous rosewood desk in the centre, surrounded by three leather chairs. Along the far wall a wide bench was still cluttered with the equipment Barkus had been using when he died. Another wall contained a library of several dozen bound volumes, plus scrolls and fan-folded books. The smaller room was stuffed with artisans’ tools, charts and blueprints, mechanical devices complete and incomplete, and stores and materials of every kind. Irisis had found the reels of spider-silk there.
A tray beside the door contained food and drink. Irisis was tapping one foot when Nish came in, Ullii at his heels like a masked, earmuff-wearing dog. He closed the outer door and locked it, then the inner.
Ullii looked anxious. Irisis wondered if it was the unfamiliar surroundings, or what they expected of her. She stood against the inner door, head to one side, sniffing the air.
‘Would you like something to eat, Ullii?’ Irisis said loudly.
The earmuffs allowed some sound through and the seeker jumped, as if she’d not known the artisan was there. There were so many odours in the room that she had not picked Irisis out. It smelt of old books, mouldy carpet, the spicy bouquet of rosewood, oil and fuming acid from the bench, hot candle wax and an indescribable odour from the mounted swordfish over the fireplace. Irisis had half a dozen aromatic oil diffusers going over candle stubs: civet and rosemary and the sharp tang of cedar oil. She’d done it deliberately, to see if Ullii could be confused.