Tetrarch (Well of Echoes) (26 page)

There had been so many visitors in the day that Tiaan began to feel like a circus exhibit. Several people spoke to her, but she did not answer. The drug had left her listless. Overwhelmed by the disaster, and unused to being waited on, she could not think of anything to say to them.

The nurse gave an especially loud grunt and Tiaan heard footsteps cross the room, away from her. She opened her eyes. Gilhaelith stood by the head of the bed, staring at her. What a strange, ill-put-together fellow he was. His nose was a triangular chunk sawn off the corner of a plank, his mouth seemed to take up half his face, while his chin was so big and square it would not have been out of place in a carpenter’s toolbox.

Gilhaelith had hair the colour of beach sand, the individual hairs crinkled and lying apart from their fellows in a frizzled mass like the unbraided strands of a rope. It looked as if he had mopped the floor with his head. His eyes were smoky grey, though not hard, as pale eyes could often be – he looked contemplative, even philosophical. They were his only appealing feature.

Who was Gilhaelith, and what did he want? He was taller than Minis, which made him
too
tall, and big-framed but skinny. His bones looked too large for his muscles; he had the oddity of broad shoulders but a narrow chest, and his legs made her want to laugh.

She studied him from half-closed eyes as he went back and forth in the room, walking with a springy, bent-kneed step. He kept staring at her then looking away. Now he was coming toward her. He could walk; she never would. Tiaan did not know how to deal with him either. She closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. After standing beside her for a few minutes, he went away.

The room was empty at last. Tiaan looked around. Soft cords ran across her chest, waist and hips, binding her tightly to lengths of timber. She could move only her arms and her head.

The roof beams seemed to be massive trunks of petrified wood. The room was large and kidney-shaped, the walls built of chunks of dark volcanic rock cemented together with pale mortar. The floor was cleaved stone, slabs of irregular shape also set in mortar then varnished to the colour of beer. The walls were bare apart from three large watercolours depicting scenes from the Histories, all by the same artist.

In the far corner, a curved bookcase had been fashioned to fit the shape of the wall. It was hand-carved from thick pieces of a dark, highly figured timber, but was the work of an enthusiastic amateur, an artist rather than a master craftsman. The maker had used the natural curves of the timber, shaping them only when necessary. To Tiaan, used to furniture that was simple, geometric and functional, it was a shocking piece, self-indulgent and wasteful.

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?

T
he 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.

As the sun rose, the balloon just cleared a palisade around a vast encampment crowded with the meanest of dwellings, a refugee camp for some of the millions who had fled the fall of the great and wealthy island of Meldorin. From the top of the hill the Sea of Thurkad could barely be seen. It had rained in the night and the bare earth was an ocean of mud. Nish drifted between two decrepit dwellings before his dangling boots struck the earth and the balloon lay on its side, the last air sighing out of it. Its long voyage had ended.

Nish, roused by his impact with the mud, groaned. Though he was half-frozen, his injuries throbbed. Within a minute he was surrounded by people, all dirty, hungry and staring. Paying him no heed, they took the balloon and brazier apart with ruthless efficiency. In ten minutes every scrap had disappeared, even the scorched rope ladder he had tied himself to. They went through his pockets, removing everything but the lint. The coat vanished from his back but they left him the rest of his clothes. Then the crowd evaporated.

He sat up, still dazed. He had no idea where he was, though it was not cold enough to be Mirrilladell. The place stank of sour water and human waste.

Someone shouted. Drums rattled. He was about to call for help when a small figure came flying out from behind the nearest hut.

‘Quick!’ hissed a young voice. It was a boy of eleven or twelve, a skinny lad. He used the common tongue of the west, in which Nish had become fluent during his days as a merchant’s scribe. ‘Guards coming.’

‘That’s just as well,’ said Nish. ‘I’ve been robbed and I –’

‘Come on!’ The boy hauled him by the hand. ‘If they find you, they’ll beat you senseless.’

‘But I don’t come from here,’ Nish began. Prudence overcame outrage. He staggered after the boy, around the corner, down between the rows and into a sodden space underneath one of the huts. It was barely high enough to crawl through. When he was well inside, the boy shoved a rotting piece of timber against the entry.

‘Shh!’ he said.

‘But –’ Nish began.

‘Wait!’

Nish peered through the crack. The rattle of drums came closer and shortly a squad of guards passed by. Two of them kicked open the door of a hut and stormed inside. Dragging an elderly man from the hovel, they began beating him about the back and body with their sticks. ‘Get to work, you lazy swine! No work, no eat!’

The other soldier made a mark on his slate. They proceeded to the next hut, and the one after, all the way down the line. The old man reeled off in the other direction.

‘What is this place?’ Nish asked. It was all too much to take in.

‘It’s supposed to be a refugee camp,’ said the boy. ‘It’s really a slave city. We work fourteen hours a day, every day of the week, and all we get for it is pig swill.’ The boy seemed older than his years. No doubt kids grew up quickly here, those that survived.

A hundred questions swirled in his head but Nish was too dazed to ask them. ‘My name is Cryl-Nish Hlar, son of Jal-Nish Hlar. He is the perquisitor for Einunar.’ It could not hurt to establish that at the beginning.