Tiaan expected the Matah to talk her out of it, but she sat on the stone seat, saying nothing. The eyes were penetrating, though Tiaan could read nothing in them.
‘Do you not care if I live or die?’ Tiaan asked, trying to provoke a reaction. Why had the Matah saved her from Nish, only to ignore her now?
‘I care,’ said the Matah, ‘for I see you have much to offer. But if you really did plan to take your life, and I convinced you not to, you would do it as soon as my back was turned.’ She stared at the ice cap. The wind whistled around the edge of the platform.
Tiaan regarded her blue, throbbing toes. Better get inside before she got frostbite. She was not going to end it after all.
‘I have a great deal to put right.’ Tiaan turned away from the edge.
‘I hoped you would think that way,’ said the Matah, ‘since I foresee that you have a part to play in the coming war. Come in out of the cold.’
Tiaan made no reply, but as the glass closed and they headed down the stair, she was thinking: I will have my revenge on Minis and all his kind. I will bring them down if it takes the rest of my life. Her gaze settled on the grey head below her. The Matah was also Aachim. Must she destroy her as well?
The Matah waited for her at the bottom. ‘Anything else you’d like to tell me, Tiaan?’
Tiaan flushed. ‘No,’ she said softly. ‘I don’t know what’s going on. Why do folk do the things they do?’
‘Because they must.’
‘I’ve never been able to understand people. Machines are so much easier, and more reliable.’
‘That would appear to be your problem.’
FOUR
They went down, then up on the other side, to a small set of chambers simply furnished in metal and fabrics as smooth as silk. They ate together. It was plain fare – black grainy bread, preserved meat so hard that the Matah shaved curls from it with a knife, cheese layered with mustard seeds and something yellow that had the crispness and pungency of onion. The meal was settled with a glass each of a sublime green wine.
The Matah rose. ‘You must excuse me. Thanks to you I have urgent business to attend to.’
Tiaan quaffed her wine. The fumes went up her nose, her head spun, she had a vague memory of the Matah laying her on a pallet and drawing a cover over her, and that was all.
When she woke, the sun was streaming in through a glassed porthole high on the western wall. It was mid-afternoon. Tiaan stretched aching limbs and rose. Food had been set out on a stone table and a set of clothes laid over the end of the bed. Nearby was a bathing room. Pressing down the levers for water, she tore off her stained rags – clothes selected so she would look her best for Minis. Tiaan looked back on that morning, only two days ago but a lifetime away, contemptuous of the naïve trembling girl she had been. She had been a girl, though it had been her twenty-first birthday. That person, that life was over.
With a shudder of disgust, Tiaan hurled her rags into a refuse basket. Taking off the plaited leather bracelet Haani had made for her birthday, she laid it carefully on the bed. It was her most precious possession now. She stood under the warm water, brooding. She despised Minis for his fickleness, his treachery, but most of all because she had loved him with all her passionate heart and he had been too weak to stand up for her. Love was for fools! She would never love again.
On the way back, she caught sight of herself in a metal mirror mounted on the wall. Tiaan stopped to stare. Mirrors were rare in her part of the world and she had never seen a full-length one.
Neither tall nor short, Tiaan had a slender yet womanly figure which the matron of the breeding factory had rated well enough. Her skin was her best feature – it was silky smooth and the colour of honey dripping from a comb.
Pitch-dark hair, cut straight just below her ears, framed a neat oval face whose most striking feature was a pair of almond eyes, so deep-brown that they were almost purple. In better times they’d had a liquid sparkle; now they were fixed in a hard stare. Her mouth, full enough to be called sensuous, was compressed into a ridge that hid most of her remarkably coloured lips, the reddish-purple of blackberry juice.
Tiaan jerked away from the image. Neither face nor figure had moved Minis in the end. Dressing in the blouse and loose pants the Matah had left, she took enough food and drink to satisfy her. There was a kind of bread, or cake, stuffed to bursting with dried fruits, nuts, seeds and candied peel, then sliced so thin that she could see through it. There were roses and other flowers crystallised with solutions of honey. The flavours were so subtle and the creations so delicate that Tiaan could scarcely bear to touch them. There were exotic vegetables, none of which she recognised, preserved in oil as red as cedarwood.
Having eaten her fill, she was at a loss. Her dreams of revenge were foolish; futile. That armada of constructs must be twenty leagues away by now. Feeling her resolve fading, she went looking for the Matah and eventually found her on the frigid balcony.
‘Good afternoon, Tiaan,’ she said, without looking around.
Tiaan stood there, uncertainly. The Matah patted the stone seat. Tiaan perched uncomfortably on it, for the cold went right through her trousers.
‘What will you do now?’ the Matah said softly.
‘I must lay Haani to rest.’
‘Where is the child?’
‘I left her beside a great shaft that plunges down toward the mountain’s heart.’
‘What?’ The Matah sprang to her feet. ‘How came you to the Well of Echoes?’
Tiaan scrambled off the seat. ‘N-Nish hunted me there. I meant no harm.’
‘Be calm, child. You could do no harm there, though it might well have harmed you. How did you get into that place? It should not have been possible.’
Tiaan explained what she had done, and why. Coming up close, the Matah lifted the hedron on its chain but let it fall. She put her palms on Tiaan’s cheeks, thumbs resting on either side of her nose, the long, long fingers wrapped around her head. She stared into Tiaan’s eyes for a good while, then let go, shaking her head.
‘There is something about you, Tiaan …’
‘What?’ Tiaan said uneasily.
‘I cannot say, though it rings alarms. You are in peril. Either that, or you are peril. Come, I will take you to the Well.’
The Matah dissolved the re-formed cubic barrier with a gesture and they entered the tunnel. Tiaan had forgotten the cold of that place, even worse than outside. The smooth-as-glass walls of the tunnel were networked with feathery patterns of ice crystals. The whole tunnel felt to be breathing cold, for little whooshes of wind would rush past, ruffling her hair, only to turn and blow down the back of her neck.
Even when the breeze blew from behind, Tiaan found it difficult to move forward. Each step proved more difficult than the last. How had she entered so effortlessly the previous time? The Matah, who had been only a few strides ahead, had now disappeared around the corner. Tiaan forced herself on. It felt like the time she had tried to put the crystal into the port-all, before she opened the gate and brought her world to ruin.
She had done too much and could do no more. When the Matah came back, Tiaan was on the floor, hunched up against the cold. The Matah lifted Tiaan to her feet, taking her hand, and at once the opposing force was gone. Tiaan followed her to the room and the Well.
Though the room was a simple cone of rough-cut rock, its magic was manifest. Deep blue light from the shaft cut through the dark space, highlighting mist that drifted in lazy coils centred on the Well. The air was so fresh and crisp it tingled with every breath. Scattered snowflakes floated above the shaft. One landed on Tiaan’s sleeve and it was a perfect, six-pointed star, a crystal so lovely that she wished Haani could have seen it.