Vithis looked down, saying nothing. A single tear welled in his left eye. He ignored it. ‘Uncle Mumis, Aunt Zefren. Why didn’t I hear your cries?’
Luxor tapped Tiaan on the shoulder and jerked his head at the entrance. She went out, followed by Malien and all but Vithis and Minis.
‘Clan mourning,’ said Malien to the clan leader beside her. ‘What comes after, Tayel?’
‘I can scarcely bear to think.’
A good while later Vithis emerged, more stooped than before, and more haggard. His eyes sought Tiaan out among the gathering.
‘There are more.’ It was a statement.
‘Upstairs.’ She hesitated, unsure what he wanted, then pointed.
‘You will take me there.’
Tiaan led the way. This time only Minis followed, leaving his crutches at the bottom and hauling himself up the steps. At the top, by the children’s room, she stood aside to let Vithis past. The doorway was no higher than her head but he was so bowed that he passed through freely.
He walked to the centre of the room, looked at the beds, and gave forth a cry of anguish such as Tiaan had never heard from a human throat. She turned to leave him but his arm shot out and caught her hand.
‘Stay! See what you’ve wrought by debauching my foster-son with your alien allure.’ Tears coursed down his cratered cheeks. ‘You seduced him with your charms and your deadly stone, and for that First Clan is no more. Ah, the children, the children!’
‘Foster-father,’ cried Minis. ‘Have you lost your wits? We called out for help, remember, and when she answered we used her innocent infatuation –’
‘Be silent!’
‘You approved every action we took, Foster-father, and if the gate went wrong that was due to what you did with it after it opened.’
‘It had already gone wrong. I was trying to put it right.’
‘If it did go wrong,’ said Malien, who had come up quietly, ‘and I know it did, then you must look to your own enemies, Lord Vithis. Ask yourself who wanted to see the end of First Clan. And who seized that opportunity, when Inthis were first into the gate, to be rid of them?’
‘No!’ cried Vithis, putting his hands over his ears. ‘I will not hear this. It is Aachim first and clan second, as it has always been. No one would attack another clan at such a desperate time. No one!’
He turned to Minis, who was leaning against the wall, panting. ‘And you are just as culpable. Why could you not cleave to your own? What was so wrong with the women of First Clan that you had to call out across the void for an old human mate?’ The very words were a curse.
‘You know it wasn’t like that,’ began Minis. ‘I was asked to join the call.’
‘For help. Not for a mate. You could have had anyone, even beautiful Sulien who now lies out there, shrivelled like a piece of dried meat. Our clan, the greatest and oldest of all, is dying, yet you have not produced so much as a half-Inthis child. What have I done to make you hate me so?’
‘I don’t hate you, Foster-father. I …’
‘Aaargh! Begone. And take her with you.’
Tiaan scrambled down the stairs and outside. Minis clacked after her, avoiding her eyes. A great cry of anguish came from the attic window, after which there was silence. Finally Vithis emerged. His back was no longer bent but his face was more crevassed than ever.
‘All things must pass and First Clan is no more. I will send them on their longest journey, in the way that has always been foretold. Not foretold by a mooncalf with a head full of fantasies,’ he spat, with a glance in Minis’s direction. ‘Forecast by our ancient seers. Inthis came first and we found the Well. Some say it came first and First Clan was born of it. As we came, so shall we depart. No more fitting farewell can I make my people.’
He threw his arms up, clawing for the sky, and opened his mouth to speak the Great Spell.
‘What are you doing?’ cried Malien.
‘I am summoning the Well, Matah Malien.’
Malien looked afraid. Tiaan shuddered and moved closer to her.
‘The Well cannot be summoned,’ said Malien. ‘It just is, and presently it lies chained within Tirthrax. Even to go near it is perilous.’
‘Not to me, for I am the direct heir of Inthis, founder of First Clan ten thousand years ago. I have the power and the right, for the chained Well at Tirthrax is just a shadow of what it should be.’ He raised his arms again.
‘Why are you doing this?’ said Malien.
‘The least honour I can do my people is to send them to the Well, but it is the only honour in my power.’
‘Then let us take them to the Hornrace and entomb them in the time-honoured way. Here, by the great mid-sea rift, the seat of such unstable power, is neither fitting nor safe.’
‘Here they fell and here they will be taken up,’ said Vithis softly, but then his voice rose. ‘What care I for safety? What care I if the whole of Santhenar falls into ruin? My world is gone, and my clan. I have nothing left.’
‘You have Minis,’ she said.
‘I lost him before I lost my clan or my world. It’s too late now; nothing remains of him.’ He raised his voice. ‘Flee now, any among you who fear death.’ He fixed each one of them with his baleful glare. ‘Well, Cryl-Nish Hlar?’
‘I fear your kind of death, but I would honour your dead,’ Nish said softly. ‘I will stay.’
‘There’s more to you than I thought,’ said Vithis. ‘Not much, but something. Take your place over there.’
Vithis offered them the choice, one after another, to go or to stay. Everyone stayed. ‘Then move back,’ he said. ‘The Well of Echoes – the true Well – has an appetite for the living as well as the dead.’
He reached out, clenching and unclenching his fists, and the sky changed to an ashy grey. Thunder rumbled all around them as if they were circled by storms. At least, it sounded like thunder, though it felt more like an earth trembler.
Tiaan shifted from one foot to another. They weren’t far from the mid-sea rift. What might an earth trembler do here, where the very rock beneath their feet had been riven apart by forces not even a geomancer could comprehend?
‘How can he summon the Well of Echoes?’ Tiaan asked quietly. ‘He has nothing in his hands.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Malien, ‘though there exist powers far older than the magic of crystals and devices, fields and nodes. Vithis has lived for a thousand years and is heir to Arts ten times that old, whose secrets have been passed down to none but the greatest in each generation.’
Vithis cried out a word, and a word of power it must have been, for the entire sky went black. It was an absolute darkness – no clouds showed, no moon, no stars. The ground shook so violently that loose rocks rattled like dice in a cup. Away in the distance a red glow appeared, a molten line squeezed up through the black rift.
He sang a second word. A column of yellow light seared a path down from the sky, beginning some degrees off the vertical and ending in the rocks behind the metal death-house, illuminating one of the mausoleums. The column was not solid yellow; rather it seemed to be made of a million threads of light, all different hues of yellow. And all were in motion: vibrating, revolving, shimmering.
He whispered a third word and the threads wove between one another, faster and faster, until they blended into a single bar of colour so bright that everyone had to shield their eyes. Its base drifted off the mausoleum, fingered the ground between it and the metal death-house, and began to rotate. Dust danced where it touched but the particles were instantly sucked down, apparently into the solid rock. Pieces of gravel and salt crust whirled after.