‘We’ll have to go down, I think,’ she said to the seeker. ‘Perhaps if we were to look for a privy outlet.’
Ullii gave her a disgusted glare. Even with noseplugs in, she could never escape through such a stinking place.
‘Perhaps not,’ said Irisis. ‘A drainage pipe, then.’
Ullii was not good at finding that kind of thing. After several hours of searching, during which time Irisis’s anxiety grew alarmingly, she found the cleaning eye in a conduit that led from the barracks bathhouse above. She lifted it off. The inside was an oval of rough earthenware about the height of a child of ten. Ullii would have to bow her head. Irisis would need to walk doubled over.
Ullii eyed it dubiously. It stank of stagnant water and something else, sweetly rotting. She shook her head. ‘Not going in there.’
‘We’ve only an hour till dawn, Ullii. If we don’t get to the air-floater before the scrutator goes, we might as well go back and lock ourselves in. There’s no other way out of Nennifer.’
‘Don’t like this way,’ Ullii muttered.
Irisis did not either. She imagined it discharged directly over the cliff and when they got to the end there would be no way of getting out. Still, better that than Ghorr’s mercies.
‘Ghorr will soon be looking for me. We’ve got to get out of sight, if we are to find your brother.’
Irisis had purloined a lantern. She lowered herself into the conduit and Ullii had to follow. Settling the cover back in place, Irisis held up the lantern. The water, a trickle in the bottom of the pipe, flowed back behind her.
‘That way.’
The pipe wandered all over the place. Smaller pipes frequently joined it. It did not get any bigger and soon her back was aching. Something trailed across her head as she shuffled along.
The top of the pipe was festooned with grey jelly-like stuff in which matted hairs, bits of toenails and clots and scum of repulsive origin had been caught. More of the gelatinous growth had formed, or congealed, around it. All this has come from people’s bodies in the bathhouses, Irisis thought with a shiver of disgust. And what else that we can’t see?
The smell grew stronger. Irisis stumbled into a pool of still water where the pipe had subsided. Brown sludge coated her boots. The smell was revolting. Ullii gagged.
After a long interval they began to smell fresh air, carried by a night breeze up the pipe. ‘Not far now.’
Ullii grunted.
They reached it suddenly, an oval circle barely lighter than the blackness inside. Dawn was not far off.
‘Careful,’ said Irisis. ‘If you slip …’
She needed the warning more than the seeker did. Ullii was surefooted and she never took risks. Irisis edged down to the opening and was glad she had. The floor of the pipe here was covered in a slippery green growth. The pipe ended at the cliff. The lantern light revealed the stream of water arching down, beyond sight and sound, into the Desolation Sink.
She edged up the side of the pipe, where it was dry, and peered out. The cliff towered above her, almost sheer. There was nothing that resembled a ledge or handhold. Without ropes and irons, it was unclimbable.
‘I’m sorry, Ullii. We can’t get out.’
Ullii crept up beside her. ‘Xervish is going.’
‘I can’t see him.’ Irisis craned her head around. Way back to her left a shadow was rising above the escarpment. It was the air-floater. ‘Flydd! Flydd!’ She waved the lantern as vigorously as she could. ‘Flydd.’
The air-floater kept rising. Ullii shrank back into the drain with her hands up over her face, as if to ward something off.
‘What is it, Ullii? What’s the matter?’
‘Ghorr!’
Irisis put down the lantern and looked up. Figures moved on the edge. Someone was pointing down at the entrance to the pipe. The lantern must have been perfectly visible against the shadowed rock.
‘They’re coming,’ said Ullii. ‘I’ll never find Myllii now.’
‘By this time tonight, neither of us will have to worry about that,’ Irisis muttered. She waved the lantern again, hoping that Flydd might be able to see it, though it was hard to imagine what he could do.
‘Ullii, is there any way you can signal the air-floater with your lattice?’ On the way, Ullii had attempted to explain what she’d done. It had made no sense to Irisis.
‘No one else can see it,’ said Ullii, as if she were talking to a fool.
‘What if you moved it around Flydd, the way you got me out of my cell?’ Irisis knew she was talking nonsense as soon as the words left her mouth.
‘Can’t,’ said Ullii, quivering. She looked like she was going to have one of her fits.
‘Where is your little mouse?’
Ullii felt in her pocket and some of the strain faded. ‘He’s here.’
‘Can I see him?’
Ullii brought him out. The little creature gazed steadily at her. Its whiskers twitched.
‘He’s smiling at you,’ Irisis said. ‘What a brave little mouse he is.’
Ullii managed a smile of her own as she returned the mouse to her pocket.
People were running above, along the cliff edge, calling out to each other. ‘Down there,’ Irisis heard someone shout.
‘Do you think you can do anything to call Flydd?’ Irisis said softly.
‘Don’t know how.’
‘Look in your lattice, Ullii. Can you see the air-floater, and Xervish?’
‘Yes.’
Why was the seeker so changeable and difficult? ‘Do what you did to the door. It may make Flydd realise we’re here.’
‘Won’t,’ Ullii said. ‘You don’t know the lattice.’
‘Please try.’
‘Can’t.’
Ullii’s talent was as stubborn as she was. Maybe it, like her courage, appeared only when she had no other option. That was not necessarily when she was threatened; in such cases she normally put her head in the sand. But when someone she cared deeply about was threatened, Ullii could be a tiger. Was her lost brother the key?
‘Where is your brother, Ullii?’
‘Don’t know,’ she said sullenly. ‘Left me. Hate him.’
‘You don’t hate him,’ said Irisis, waving the lantern with her free hand. The air-floater rose ever higher, well out over the depression of Kalithras. In a few minutes it would be beyond sight or signal. And minutes after that, Ghorr would have soldiers down here on ropes. ‘You miss him terribly.’
‘Don’t!’
‘If Myllii has your talent,’ Irisis chose her words very carefully, ‘the scrutators might be using him too, now that he is grown up. He might be in danger.’
Ullii gasped and shook her head from side to side.
‘If we can just get away, in the air-floater we can fly across half of Lauralin. If he’s in the east, you’ll surely see him in your lattice.’
The seeker was silent. Tears ran down her face.
‘Ullii, do something. Try to call the scrutator. He will find your brother, I promise.’
Ullii closed her eyes. A knot appeared on her delicate jaw-line. Irisis held on to her pliance and tried to follow what she was doing. For an instant faint marks appeared in her mind, surely the lattice, with the colours of the field sweeping through them. One tiny pair of spots among thousands flared bright, the lattice rotated sickeningly and then the glimpse was gone.
There was a roar and blast just outside. Irisis, who also had her eyes closed, thought that Ghorr had dropped some exploding device. A gale of wind slammed her back into the wall of the pipe. Her eyes sprang open as the air-floater materialised beside them, ripples racing across its airbag like waves on the sea. The cabin was right next to her, shuddering violently under the force that had translated it instantly across a thousand spans of space. Flydd stood just a span away, his eyes wide with an expression she had never seen on his face before: sheer, naked terror.
He swore a series of oaths, looked up and saw her there with her mouth open. Reacting instantly, he threw one of the grappling ropes. She grabbed it.
‘Ullii,’ she screamed. ‘Get aboard.’
Ullii was across in an instant, leaping right into the scrutator’s arms.