Chimaera (6 page)

‘What about our baby?’ croaked Nish. Sooty flakes of skin broke from his lips and drifted upwards in the rising air. ‘Would you kill our little baby’s father?’

‘There is no baby!’ she said in a thin scream. ‘Yllii is dead and that’s your fault too!’

N
ish’s hand slipped and he flailed about wildly before getting another grip. ‘Yllii?’ he rasped.

‘Your
son
!’ It was an accusation – how could you not know his name? And an attack – it’s
your
fault.

‘My son?’ That threw him. His lower lip trembled. ‘Dead? How?’

How could he not know? Having lived Yllii’s death every possible way over the past four and a half months, she found Nish’s ignorance incomprehensible. It didn’t occur to her that he had no way of knowing these things. ‘You killed him!’ Ullii shrieked, half-mad with rage and grief.

Nish clung desperately to his perch. ‘You ran away, Ullii, and I couldn’t find you. I don’t know what happened from that day to this. But whatever happened to our son, I wasn’t there.’

‘You weren’t there,’ she whispered. ‘You were
never
there when I needed you, Nish. You didn’t care.’

‘I wept tears of blood for what I’d done to Myllii but I couldn’t undo it. Please, Ullii. What happened to our son?’

She swept the blade through the air. ‘Come down.’

‘Put the knife away first.’

She gave a half-hearted slash, screwed her eyes up, then laid the knife on the floor among the shattered glass, within easy reach. Nish would come down. He had to know what had happened to his son and it gave her the upper hand. At least he cares about Yllii, she thought, even if he hates me.

‘Come down, Nish.’

She studied him from under her eyelids. He seemed to be weighing her intentions. Now he began to swing his legs, trying to line himself up with the gap. Ullii could have done it with her eyes closed but he lacked her natural dexterity, and that pleased her selfish little soul. It wasn’t often that she felt superior.

Nish sucked in a breath, swung, and threw himself at the gap.

Before he let go, Ullii knew he’d miss. He’d swung out a little too far, a fraction too hard. His legs went through the gap but his body wasn’t lined up properly and he was heading straight for a pair of razor-sharp blades.

Nish jerked backwards and twisted sideways at the last instant, and his torso passed through safely. He whipped his head back, the blade shaved a clump of hair off the left side, nicking his ear, then he was through, all but his flailing left arm. It went side-on into a blade, cutting a deep gouge in his forearm before the glass broke. Blood spurted up as he slammed into a sloping slab of stone that was mercifully free of glass.

He didn’t move for a second or two. Blood pumped straight up from his forearm, coating one of the blades above him before dripping all over his face. Moving painfully, he got a thumb to the artery and the flow stopped. He looked up at her, the blood still dripping on his face, and across at the knife. She did too.

Ullii still planned to kill him. She took up the knife but Nish didn’t move. Blood welled out under his thumb and he pressed harder. She hated him for all that had happened to her since she’d been taken to the manufactory a year ago. Because of him she was alone in the world. She had no brother, no son, no friends, and now the lattice, her last resort and only comfort, had gone away. She didn’t know how to get it back.

‘I didn’t know Myllii was your brother,’ Nish said quietly, his voice barely audible over the singing of the blades in the wind. ‘I thought he was attacking you. Or holding you so the soldiers could carry you off to the air-floater.’

He looked ghastly, with his face and arm drenched in blood, and the rest of him covered in soot and flaking skin. She wavered.

Nish went on. ‘I told Myllii to stop but he reared backwards and the knife went straight into him. I’m so very sorry.’

Ullii closed her eyes. She was back at the campsite, holding Myllii and feeling his shock as the knife slid into his back. Tears welled out through her eyelids like drops of blood from a wound.
Had
Nish said that? She couldn’t remember – she’d been too overcome with joy at finding her twin after so many years of searching.

Nish could be lying. He’d used her before and he was, after all, the son of his father, Jal-Nish, the worst man Ullii had ever come across. She’d been a good judge of people once, but Ullii couldn’t tell about Nish any more.

‘What happened to Yllii?’ he said softly.

You killed him too
, she wanted to scream while stabbing Nish to the heart. Ghorr had told her so, many times, and so had Scrutator T’Lisp, the wicked old woman who had trapped Ullii with Myllii’s binding bracelet. They’d told her that Nish was evil incarnate and had to be destroyed. Ullii had believed them at the time, and for a long time after, but looking back on her months in Nennifer she began to doubt. Chief Scrutator Ghorr was a monster whose handiwork she’d seen many times in Nennifer, and on the long journey here. He’d ruined Fiz Gorgo, killed dozens of innocent people and planned to torture the rest of them to death. And she had helped him, and betrayed every one of her former friends, so what did that make her?

‘Tell me everything, Ullii,’ he said softly. ‘From the moment Myllii first appeared in the clearing, until now. I have to know.’

She began haltingly, fingering the bracelet that still clung to her wrist, immovable. Just reliving that night of Myllii’s death was torment, and the time after was worse. She could still feel Yllii’s sharp fingernails scrabbling at her insides.

‘She did it,’ Nish said when Ullii had finished that part of the tale. She turned her face up to him blankly, lost in another time, another place.

‘Scrutator T’Lisp killed our baby,’ he went on. He reached out to her, thumb still pressed against his arm, but she pulled away. ‘I did you wrong, Ullii, and I’m sorry, but I’m not the real villain. Ghorr ordered Yllii’s death so you would be free to track down Xervish Flydd for him. No one else could have found him.’

‘No,’ she said softly. ‘No one could but me.’

‘T’Lisp worked her Art so that you’d take Myllii’s bracelet, and the instant you put it on you came under her control. But then you let slip that you were pregnant, and T’Lisp knew that while you carried our baby you’d be no use to her. She directed her scrutator magic against Yllii, through the bracelet. She lied to you and she killed Yllii. And now Ghorr –’ Nish broke off, as if he’d thought better of it.

Ullii sank down among the shards of green glass, not noticing as they dug into her calves. She didn’t want to believe Nish. If what he said was true, in serving Ghorr she’d been using Yllii’s death for an even greater evil.

She thought it through ponderously, for her mind was sluggish and reluctant to face the truth. It had been easier to blame Nish; to think that the agony of Myllii’s death and the grief at his loss had caused the death of her baby. But how could that be? She clutched at her belly, and the knife which she still held in her left hand, pricked her; the memories that T’Lisp had wiped from her mind came cascading back.

Yllii had been all right until the following night, when she’d touched the bracelet – still immovably fixed to her wrist by scrutator magic – and seen that vision of Ghorr and T’Lisp again.

‘Myllii,’ she gasped, clasping the bracelet in panic, but again came that flash of the scrutators
.

Come to us, little seeker,
mouthed Ghorr
. We’ve work for you.

‘Leave me alone,’ she said aloud. ‘My little baby needs me.’

Baby?
Ghorr said to the others
. She can’t have a baby – it’ll ruin her precious talent.

She must have dreamed that, for the next instant they were gone as completely as if she’d only imagined it; then gone completely, her memories of the moment wiped clean.

Myllii wasn’t there either, but that awful screaming rang in her ears again. She reached out to the baby’s knot, for the screaming seemed to be coming from there. An agonising pain, far worse than the baby’s kicks, sheared through her belly. She wrapped her arms around her stomach, trying to protect the baby, but the pain grew until it was like barbed hooks tearing through her
.

Ullii made a supreme effort to reach beyond the pain but the barbs ripped through her flesh and she felt a great convulsion inside her, a bursting agony, as if the baby’s sharp fingernails were tearing desperately at the walls of her womb. Something burst inside her, then water gushed out between her legs, carrying the baby with it
.

‘
No!’ Ullii screamed, falling to her knees and clawing at the ground, but it was too late
.

The baby, a little boy no longer than her hand, lay in a puddle, kicking feebly. She picked him up, staring at him in wonder. He was pink and healthy, and so beautiful that she felt a flush of love, but as she nursed him in her hands, the cord stopped pulsing and her stomach contracted again and again to expel the afterbirth. Ullii lifted the baby to her breast
.

‘Yllii. Your name is Yllii,’ she said, as if that could protect him
.

She desperately wanted him to live, for it was the only happy link left between her and Nish, the only good memory of their time together, and she loved him so
.

Yllii gave one feeble suck, a little sigh, but his head fell away from the nipple and blood from his mouth trickled down her breast. Ullii tried to blow the breath back into the infant but the pink colour faded steadily from his face. The baby breathed no more
.

Ullii looked up at Nish, not bothering to brush the tears away. ‘T’Lisp did kill our baby,’ she said at last, her voice as brittle as the glass underfoot. ‘She did it to please Ghorr, using this bracelet.’ She rose, letting the knife fall. Ullii did not look at Nish. Her fingers tore at the bracelet on her wrist, but it didn’t move. She took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘And all this while I’ve been serving and helping them. I brought them here so they could kill the only people who have ever been good to me.’

‘You couldn’t have known.’ Nish’s eyes were fixed on the bracelet.

‘I knew what they were doing,’ Ullii said, wrenching at it until it cut into the skin. She didn’t care. It burned her now; it made her Ghorr’s creature. Ullii would cut off her hand if there was no other way to be rid of it. ’And I knew I was doing wrong, serving them. I was afraid of Ghorr; that’s why I did it.’

‘Is that all?’ said Nish, who knew of old how obsessional Ullii could be.

‘I wanted retribution for Myllii and Yllii. No!’ she said savagely, ‘I called it retribution but it was just revenge. I wanted you to suffer. And Flydd too, because he didn’t save Myllii.’

‘What about Irisis?’

‘I didn’t want to harm her,’ said Ullii uncomfortably.

‘But you have, Ullii. You’ve condemned her to die like everyone else. And Tiaan too, who never did anything to you. Not to mention Malien and Yggur, whom you’ve never met, and Inouye, the pilot of the air-floater. She’s such a quiet little woman, not much older than you, Ullii. And she’s so afraid.’

‘Why?’ said Ullii.

‘Inouye is terrified that her man and her little children will be punished because she obeyed Fyn-Mah and helped to save Flydd’s life and mine. She’s afraid that wicked Scrutator Ghorr would even torture her innocent children.’

‘He wouldn’t …’ Ullii said, uncertainly. ‘How old are her children?’

‘Sann, the boy, is nearly four. Inouye’s daughter, Mya, would be two and a half, I suppose.’

‘So young,’ she whispered. ‘Have you met them?’

‘No, but Inouye often mentioned their names. No mother ever loved her children more,’ he said deliberately.

‘I loved Yllii more than anyone else could ever love their baby!’ she wailed, jerking the bracelet up and down her wrist until it scraped off the skin in crumpled strips.

‘I know you did,’ he said, very quietly. ‘But would you let Ghorr kill Inouye … if you could save her?’

‘I don’t know her,’ Ullii said sullenly.

‘Would you allow Scrutator T’Lisp, who murdered our baby, to torment innocent little Sann and Mya?’

Ullii shuddered and pulled the mask over her face, then scuttled between the glassy blades into the darkest cranny of the chamber.

‘Ullii?’

She put her hands over her ears. She had to block him out. She knew what Nish wanted of her, but it was too hard. It was much safer to drift, to hide.

He kept calling. She couldn’t block him out completely, and of course Nish knew that. Eventually she took her hands away from her ears.

‘Yes?’ she said quietly.

‘I need your help, Ullii.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘The gash in my arm is still bleeding. If you can’t fix it I’m going to die.’

‘Good!’ she said mulishly, though Ullii had a shrinking feeling inside. Already she’d taken a little comfort from his presence. She didn’t feel quite so alone. ‘I can’t do anything about it.’

‘Of course you can. You always carry a needle and thread in your pack, to sew up your spider-silk underclothes.’