Irisis couldn’t watch any more. ‘Let’s go,’ she whispered to Nish. ‘This is none of our business.’
She led him around the other side of the thapter and they climbed in and settled companionably on the lower floor, in a shaded corner. Irisis linked her arm through his again. ‘Now tell me everything. Don’t leave out the tiniest detail.’
SEVENTY-ONE
‘Take the controller,’ Malien said, ushering Tiaan toward the thapter.
‘I’m not sure I can.’ Tiaan’s knees were shaking.
‘I think it’s best. It’ll give you something to do.’
‘I thought you wanted me to talk to Minis?’
‘You can’t do that in a crowded thapter. Time enough after the dead have been dealt with.’
Vithis climbed in, followed by ten Aachim – the other clan leaders and Matah Urien – there to set down the fate of First Clan and see the dead laid to rest. Minis came last, and when no one moved to help him up the ladder, Tiaan went to do so.
‘Don’t take away the little self-respect he has left!’ said Vithis.
She returned to the controller and fastened her straps. Minis struggled in and she could feel his feverish eyes on her. It was a relief when he went below with the others. Malien had gone down too.
‘Lift off!’ rasped Vithis.
She did so, as jerkily as a novice. He stood beside her, shuddering with such suppressed emotions that Tiaan began to think he would strike her down and seize the controller for himself.
They travelled in silence, for Tiaan could think of nothing to say to him, and he, it appeared, did not trust himself to speak.
An hour into the flight, Nish came up the ladder and Tiaan had never been more glad to see him. The uncomfortable silence stretched out. Shortly they saw ahead the solitary tower, like red balls on a skewer, which the Aachim had constructed on the pinnacle in the Dry Sea.
‘Nithmak Tower,’ said Vithis. ‘Another monument to my folly. I built it to bring First Clan home from the void. If only I had looked closer to home. All that time I wasted here, striving to beam my beacon out across the limitless void, and my people were crying out for aid just days away. Why was I so fixed on the void? Why did I not think of the Dry Sea? How could I have been so blind?’
‘Is Nithmak a portal?’ asked Nish.
‘Not of itself, but one can readily be made there at need,’ said Vithis.
‘I wish I’d never made the gate at Tirthrax,’ said Tiaan. ‘I wish I’d never seen the amplimet, nor heard Minis’s call. Nor listened to him.’
‘So do I wish it,’ said Vithis. ‘I would shed every drop of my heart’s blood to make it so. If First Clan had to disappear, why could we not have died together on our own world, with dignity?’
‘I thought I was doing the right thing,’ said Tiaan. ‘Why didn’t I refuse to put the port-all together?’
‘Nithmak is a master zyxibule,’ said Vithis. ‘Nothing was done in haste this time. It was designed so carefully that a child could use it, built by masters, and checked by my own hands. It’s perfect.’
She studied the structure as they went by. ‘And you designed it to reach anywhere in the void?’ she said thoughtfully.
‘I wouldn’t say anywhere, for the void is limitless. But anywhere my people could have ended up.’
‘Could you go back to Aachan?’
‘We have gone back,’ he said grimly. ‘We clan leaders have been there a dozen times, visiting all the havens and searching for survivors of any clan. We found none. Our beloved Aachan is a volcanic hell.’
Tiaan dwelt on that as they left the tower behind. And all because of choices made thousands of years ago, by Aachim desperate to have the power that mastery of an amplimet could bring.
‘Whenever the way into the void has been opened, trouble has come out of it,’ said Malien from the top of the ladder. ‘I dread what will come through this gate if it’s left for the future’s fools to play with.’
‘Do what you wish with it,’ said Vithis. ‘Destroy it! I care not. Here is the key.’ From a chain around his neck he took a hexagonal rod carved from a single sapphire, whose corners were rounded from aeons of handling. He gave it to Malien.
Malien studied it for a moment, nodded and put it in her scrip. ‘I will see to it.’
No one spoke for hours afterwards. Tiaan held on to her controller like a lifeline, longing for the journey to be over, though not for what lay at the end of it. In the immensity of the Dry Sea the thapter did not seem to be moving.
She flew through the night and soon after dawn began to descend. ‘We saw the first construct not far ahead,’ Tiaan said.
Vithis was the first to spot the wreckage. He showed no expression, apart from a hardening of the corners of his mouth.
‘There’s one. Go lower. I would count their number first, and make sure none have been overlooked.’
Tiaan went back and forth as he directed. As many of the Aachim as could fit came up, until the compartment was so crammed that she was hard pressed to work the levers.
Vithis’s lips moved. ‘Some constructs hit so hard that they were smashed to pieces, yet others are hardly damaged. Why didn’t they repair one and send for help?’
‘This country is so rugged that not even a construct could hover across it,’ said Malien. ‘You’ll see what I mean when we set down.’
His mouth shut like a trap. ‘I’ve seen enough. Go down now.’
The heat radiating from the black rocks hit them like a furnace. They visited the isolated machines, and their dead, before turning to the stone tombs. For Minis, having to pick his way on crutches across the jagged rocks must have been another kind of torture, but he neither complained nor faltered.
Vithis examined the bodies in the mausoleums, exclaiming as he recognised one, and another. ‘My clan, oh my clan.’
It took all day and night, for there were many, many bodies. He checked each one, named it without hesitation; mourned over each, too. Each name seemed to take a little more from him. The lines of his face lengthened and deepened, his eyes became more sunken, his back more bent as the terrible night wore on. Tiaan had to sleep at last, but he was still going when she got up.
‘Ah, Sulien,’ he said, bent over the desiccated rags of a small, black-haired woman. ‘You were the greatest beauty of our times. I once thought to match you with my foster-son. Would that I had.’ Vithis stood up, wiped dust from his eye and shuffled to the next. ‘And you, Orthis – sage, philosopher, dear friend and counsellor, how I need your wise guidance now.’
So it went on – poet, architect, Mother of the Clan, beloved niece – he mourned over every one, as the sun rose higher and sucked up the last drops of perspiration.
‘You survived all this time,’ he said at the last stone mausoleum. ‘If only I had known to look here. Why did you not call? Did you not see my beacon?’
Vithis shuffled out like an old man. His skin had taken on a grey tinge and Minis, beside him, looked even worse. The dried paths of tears streaked his salt-crusted face.
‘Is that all?’ Vithis said hoarsely. ‘There are many missing. Very many that I would have expected to find accompanying these.’
‘There’s still the building constructed from the skins of the wrecked constructs,’ said Malien. ‘Perhaps some you’re looking for lie within.’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘How could I have forgotten it? Or is it that I dread what I will see inside?’
They went up the path to the metal building and began to go through each of the rooms, Vithis leading, Minis struggling along behind. Tiaan noticed that Irisis and Nish were not following and was glad. It didn’t concern them.
Vithis turned into a compartment that Tiaan and Malien had missed previously. On pallets on the floor lay an old man and an old woman, their dark robes covered in a dusting of windblown salt. They were thin to the point of emaciation and the woman’s arms were folded across her breast; the man’s lay by his sides. They too looked as if they were sleeping.