The books might as well have been on the far side of the world. She turned the other way. Her bed was enormous, also hand-carved, though from a darker, straight-grained timber. The sheets were fine linen. There was one blanket of blue lamb’s wool, quite unlike the scratchy material in the manufactory, and a quilt filled with down so light she could barely feel it.
The luxury felt sinful; even the space did. In the manufactory, twenty people would have been crammed into this room. The floor was scattered with brightly patterned rugs in earthy reds, oranges, yellows and browns. A pot beside her bed contained a succulent plant covered in large white flowers. She could smell the nectar. No one in the manufactory had a plant in their room; nothing would grow in such cold and gloom.
This room had three huge windows, each of plain glass in many small panes grouped in threes, flooding the chamber with light and colour. In Tiaan’s experience only rich people had a window to themselves. Gilhaelith must be as wealthy as the legendary Magister of Thurkad.
She looked through the nearest window. All she could see was blue sky with wisps of high cloud. To someone who’d spent her life in the manufactory, that was a welcome novelty. The sun had not been much in evidence in her long winter’s trek across Mirrilladell either. She longed to feel it on her face.
A shadow passed by the end window – Gilhaelith again. She hoped he would not come in. He knocked at the door. She did not answer but after an interval he entered. He was now dressed in long yellow robes which concealed his ungainly figure. She imagined he had come to interrogate her.
‘You are better, I hope?’ he said in her tongue, which he spoke with a rather flat accent, as if he had learned the language from a book.
‘Yes, thank you. Apart from my broken back!’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said formally. He looked down the line of her body under the covers.
‘It’s done.’ She wished he would go away. The conversation was pointless.
‘Is there anything you would like?’
‘I’d like to go out in the sun.’ It came out without her thinking about it.
‘I will arrange it at once.’
He went to the door. Shortly two servants wheeled in a small bed and slid her onto it. Gilhaelith pushed her out of the door, around the corner and along a suspended, undulating stone walkway.
Tiaan caught her breath at the view, not to mention the drop into the lake. ‘How can you live at the top of a volcano?’
‘Booreah Ngurle, the Burning Mountain,’ said Gilhaelith, misinterpreting the question. ‘Welcome to Nyriandiol. My house.’
She counted the windows as they went by. Eighty-one. And there were another seven levels below this one. ‘House’ was not the word for it. It was almost the size of the manufactory.
Gilhaelith parked the bed on a small paved area at the rear of the building. Some distance away was a stone skeet house. She could hear their harsh cries. To her right the arid inner slope of the crater swept down, not quite barren of life, but nearly. Steam wisped up from vents, discoloured yellow or brown. Workers, the size of ants, could be seen toiling at them. Below, occupying perhaps a third of the floor of the larger crater, the lake was as brilliantly blue as lapis lazuli. Nearby a large fat-tailed lizard scratched among the rubble. The crater aroused a deep-seated fascination; she had never seen anything like it.
‘What’s that lizard doing?’ she wondered.
‘Looking for a suitable place to lay its eggs.’
‘Isn’t this a dangerous location to do that?’
‘Indeed, and for us too, though I have dwelt here more than a century.’
She opened her mouth and closed it again. In her part of the world the normal lifespan (for those not sent to the war) was less than sixty years, though a few people lived longer. Gilhaelith clearly was not a normal old human like her. And yet he did not appear to be Aachim, as Malien was.
The sun slanted in on her face. It felt wonderful to be warm. ‘Could I look over the other side?’
He wheeled her across so she could see down the outer slope to the forest. It was luxuriantly different from the impoverished forests around her manufactory.
‘That’s where I … crashed?’ she asked.
‘Back the other way.’ He pointed. ‘The construct is damaged, but I think it can be repaired.’
She did not have the strength for question and answer, nor for thinking about what had caused the crash. For some reason she couldn’t explain, she did not want him to know about the capricious amplimet. ‘It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters now …’
The sun was beating down on her head. She felt ill and Gilhaelith’s looming presence discomforted her.
‘I’d like to go back to my room, please.’
The servants wheeled her away, but an hour later she was still sweating. Gilhaelith had not questioned her. He must want something from her, otherwise he would not have treated her so well. What was it? Her helplessness was terrifying.
Tiaan’s second day began the same way as the first, with embarrassing toilet operations by Alie, a pale fleshy woman with a figure like a bale of wool and a square face utterly devoid of expression. Breakfast was spooned into her as if she was a baby. Alie talked the entire time she was in the room, but her words were empty. It was so tiresome that Tiaan closed her eyes and turned away.
‘Bitch thinks she’s better than us,’ Alie said to the healer on the way out.
‘And she can’t even wipe her arse,’ Gurteys agreed. ‘What is the master thinking?’
Tiaan bit her lip. Why did they resent her so? She hadn’t said a thing to them.
Gurteys plied her healer’s art with all the indifference of the true professional, and so roughly that it hurt. In the afternoon she reappeared with a contraption made of wood and leather. Rolling Tiaan onto her side, she propped her in place with cushions and pulled her gown down to the waist.
‘What are you doing?’ Tiaan asked.
Gurteys fitted the rows of straps around Tiaan’s chest, belly and hips and pulled them tight until they pinched the skin. She adjusted the position of the wooden spars. ‘The brace will ensure the bones set in place.’
The brace was uncomfortable lying down. Tiaan could not imagine what it would be like sitting up. ‘How long will I have to wear it?’
‘How would I know?’
‘Well, you’re supposed to be the healer.’
‘A month. Two? Until your back is healed.’ A bell rang and Gurteys hurried out, leaving Tiaan’s garments around her waist.
Gilhaelith thrust the door open. He had been in several times today, but this time, realising that she was half-undressed, he spun on one foot and dashed from the room, shouting orders. Gurteys reappeared, roughly jerking Tiaan’s gown over her shoulders. ‘You’re more trouble than you’re worth!’ she said between clenched teeth.
‘I didn’t say a thing,’ cried Tiaan, but the healer had gone. Why had Gilhaelith reacted that way?
NINETEEN
The balloon, carrying no more weight than Nish and the brazier, drifted high and fast. The streaming winds carried it across the Filallor Range, which ran south from the western end of the Great Mountains, separating frigid Mirrilladell from the more equable western lands. The forests of central Lauralin passed beneath unseen. Still out of it, Nish drifted north of Booreah Ngurle in the dark, slowly descending. The brazier had gone out hours ago and the air in the balloon was cooling rapidly. The craft skimmed the top of a solitary tree, floating over scrub towards a broad, sluggish river.