'I would honour her to the limit of my ability.'
'Just so.' Again the Matah went up the passage, returning with a metal object like a sled with three runners. Of blue-black metal, it was chased all over with intricate, interwoven patterns.
They lifted Haani onto the sled, binding her there with silken cords. She looked tiny. 'Make your farewell,' said the Matah, 'then push her to the centre. The Well will take her in its own time.' She walked away.
Tiaan stood over the child, thinking of all that might have been. Tears spotted Haani's face, forming frost marks there. Tiaan murmured a prayer, remembered from her childhood, and then could stand it no longer.
She thrust the sled into the shaft. It sat in mid-air as if resting on a sheet of glass. Scooping a handful of flowers from the basket, Tiaan sprinkled them over the body. Errant petals moved about as though on a current of air. Some drifted around the shaft.
The sled moved down, almost imperceptibly at first. Staring at the little pinched face, Tiaan felt such a pang in her heart that she thought it was going to tear apart. Letting out a great cry of anguish, she leapt into the Well.
She landed on an invisible barrier that would not let her through, no matter how she screamed and clawed at it. The Matah had anticipated her. Tiaan went still, watching the sled drift down. The Matah, hands out, drew her back. They looked at one another.
'The Well is only for those at peace with the world.'
'And if you are not?' said Tiaan.
'I made sure it would not take you.'
'You were going to the Well.'
'I felt my time had come. Did you not say that you have much to put right?'
'I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me.'
The hand released her. 'Don't stand too close,' the Matah said.
Haani's body drifted down and out of sight. A long time later there was a bright flash in the depths. A shiny bubble came rolling up the shaft. Tiaan ducked out of the way as it burst with a set of silver rays and a faint scent of flowers.
'The Well has taken her,' said the Matah. 'Come.'
Rubbing her eyes, Tiaan followed the Matah back to her chambers, where she unsealed a flask of turquoise liquor, so thick that it oozed. Pouring a hefty slug into two goblets, she passed one to Tiaan.
'Thank you, Matah.' Tiaan picked up her goblet but did not taste it.
The Matah smiled. 'Matah is a title, not my name.'
'What does it mean?'
'It's hard to say in your language. "Flawed" or "ambiguous" hero, perhaps.'
Tiaan's curiosity was aroused. 'Why flawed?'
'My people are in two minds about my role in the Histories.'
'What is your role?'
'Was,' she corrected. 'It was a long time ago. I have outlived my own expectations. My people felt that I worked too hard for humanity, in all its forms, and not hard enough for my own Aachim kind. I am venerated, yet an outcast. That is why I remained in Tirthrax when everyone else went to Stassor last year. I was not welcome at their meet.'
Tiaan took a sip of her liquor and immediately regretted it. Its thickness clung to her tongue, trickling pulses of a burning floral pungency up her nose and down her throat. She would not have been surprised if steam had burst from her nostrils. It cleared her head though, blasting the last hours clear away.
'Who are you?' she said raspily, feeling the hot passage of the liquor all the way to the pit of her stomach. She put the goblet aside, searching through her memories of the Great Tales, and the lesser, for clues to the Matah's identity. Many were the brave, and noble, and ultimately futile deeds done in the struggle with the lyrinx. Four Great Tales had been made in the last hundred years alone, though the Matah must predate them.
'I played a part in what was once known as the greatest of all the Great Tales,' the Matah said. 'The Tale of the Mirror. Sadly, that tale has fallen out of favour with your scrutators.'
That reminded Tiaan of something old Joeyn the miner had once said to her. He'd said that the Histories had been rewritten. A question for another time.
'I've heard that tale,' said Tiaan. 'Who are you?'
'My name is Malien.'
Malien! A famous name from the Histories. The Aachim could be long-lived, Tiaan knew, but she could hardly take it in. She was in the presence of a legend. 'You always seemed to be strong, yet kindly.'
Malien met her eyes. 'I can be hard as stone if I must.' In the early hours of the morning, growing feelings of longing for the amplimet, and growing unease, drew Tiaan down to the chamber with the glass gong. It was not exactly withdrawal, for she had not felt that since putting the amplimet inside the port-all and opening the gate.
She had often thought that the amplimet had some purpose of its own, developed over the thousands, if not millions of years it had lain in that cavity in the mine, after it had woken. Had she freed it to work on some purpose as aged as the very bones of the mountains? And what care would such a mineral awareness have for petty humans and their transient lives and deaths? Maybe it had been using her. How could she hope to understand the purpose of something that could, with perfect patience, wait out a million years? Tiaan was afraid of the amplimet now, yet she could not give it up.
She approached the hall tentatively, for it reeked with bitter memories. It was as cold as outside. An icy wind, whistling down the glacier from the ice cap, whirled in through the side of the mountain, frosting everything in its path.
Tiaan had entered from a stair that ended near the outer wall. As she paced toward the port-all, every step was a nagging reminder. Over to her right was the pile of rubble and ice Haani had sheltered behind. Before her lay one of the bags of platinum Vithis had thrown to her, wealth enough to buy the manufactory and everything in it. The bag had burst open, scattering slugs of precious metal across the floor.
Her boot struck something that tinkled. She bent down, then drew back. It was the ring, woven of precious metals, she had made so lovingly for Minis. Every strand held a wish or a dream. Impossible to identify with those girlish longings now.
Picking it up, Tiaan drew back her arm to hurl it out onto the glacier, but stopped in mid-throw. 'I will use it against him,' she said aloud. 'I will see him beg for it, then spurn him the way he did me.'
Putting the ring on the chain about her neck, she gathered up the platinum. It might also be useful in her quest to bring the Aachim down. After some minutes she reached the place where the gate had opened. The stone floor was scorched and the three constructs that had locked together in the gate were nearby. One lay on its side, its skin of shining blue-black metal crushed. The second was upside down. The third sat on its base but the front was smashed in.
A little thread of curiosity tugged at her. How did the constructs work? Were they like clankers, or completely different? Tiaan wondered if they might be repaired. She walked around the machines but kept going. The call of the amplimet was stronger.
She continued to the room where she had assembled the port-all. Scattered mounds of rubble had been blasted out of the wall as the gate formed. Tiaan expected to find the port-all a slaggy heap of metal and glass but it looked exactly as she had built it.
Memories of using the port-all, and opening the gate, stirred her hackles. Why, when she had built it exactly as shown, had it gone so wrong? She ran through the memories. Could it have been the wrong-handedness of it? She tried to reconstruct her recollections but again something eluded her.
As she hurried forward, longing for the amplimet etched molten tracks across her heart. She ran around the side of the machine, trying to see through the network of glass, metal, wire, ceramic and shaped stone. She was looking for the soapstone basket that held the amplimet. There it was, inside that deformed doughnut of glass that Haani had called the twisticon.
With trembling fingers Tiaan reached out to open the basket, already seeing the amplimet in her mind's eye. It was a bipyramid of quartz, inside either end of which were radiating balls of needle crystals. Single, extended needles ran down the long axis of the crystal, separated by a little central bubble half-filled with liquid. Most unusual of all, the crystal had glowed, faintly when it was a long way from a node, strongly when close. Here in Tirthrax, radiance had positively flooded out of it.