Haani lay beside the shaft as if sleeping. There was frost in her hair. Tiaan took her icy hand. The Matah went to her knees, probing Haani’s chest with her fingertips. ‘Poor child. Why is it always the young ones?’ She seemed lost in some tragedy of her own.
Tiaan stood with head bowed, waiting silently.
Eventually the Matah turned to her. ‘Is there a death ritual you wish to observe?’
‘I don’t know the customs of her people,’ Tiaan said. ‘As for my own, we bury our dead, but I can’t dig a hole through rock.’
‘Nor should she lie in the catacombs filled with our dead. Her spirit could not dwell comfortably in such a culture-haunted place.’ The Matah circled the shaft.
Tiaan looked in. Blue tendrils rotated down as far as she could see. The Well seethed with power, like a spring under tension.
The Matah put one knuckle against her lip and gnawed at it, then bent to stroke the hair out of Haani’s eyes. As abruptly, she stood up.
‘Wait!’ She strode off along the further extension of the tunnel.
Tiaan sat beside Haani, holding the frigid wrist, not thinking at all. After a long wait, the Matah reappeared with a basket in one hand and a roll of fabric in the other. Placing it on the floor, she offered the basket to Tiaan. It contained small bunches of cuttings from a black, glossy-leaved plant, at the tips of which were small flowers, purple outside and white within, crimped in the form of five-pointed stars.
‘We Aachim cleave more to metal and stone than we do to gardening,’ she said, ‘but there are one or two among us who care for growing things. These are the best I could find in this part of the city.’
‘They’re beautiful,’ Tiaan said. ‘Haani loved trees and flowers.’ Folding the child’s arms across her broken chest, Tiaan placed a bunch of flowers in her hand.
The Matah unrolled the cloth, woven of a thread like metallic silk in subtle patterns of green and gold. They wrapped the child in it, leaving just her face exposed.
‘I would, if you see fit,’ said the Matah, ‘send Haani to the Well. It is an honour accorded to the greatest of us after death, and occasionally taken before that, if we so choose.’ She looked sideways at Tiaan. ‘I do not know …’
‘She is dead!’ Tiaan said more harshly than she felt. ‘She does not care.’
‘The ritual is for the living as well as the dead. But only if you judge it fitting.’
‘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.