‘Nish?’ she shook him.
‘What if it were me?’
She looked away. ‘It isn’t.’
‘All right!’ he said furiously. ‘But we can’t just leave her lying on the floor.’
Irisis hesitated, then nodded. ‘I’ll find a hide for her.’
Nish turned back. Inouye opened those tragic eyes and reached up to him with one hand. ‘Don’t leave me,’ she said in a cracked voice.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, picking her up.
‘Don’t let me die,’ she whimpered. ‘My children –’
‘You’re not going to die, Inouye.’
‘In here, Nish.’ Irisis was pointing to the top shelf of an open cabinet. ‘It’s the best we can do.’
Nish carried Inouye across. ‘Don’t leave me,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t leave me, don’t leave me.’ She was shuddering with terror.
He tried to ignore it, sliding her onto the shelf and pushing her to the back. She reached out to him but Nish ducked out of the way. He couldn’t meet her eyes. ‘We’ll be back soon.’ They probably wouldn’t be back at all.
Inouye began to wail in a low scratchy tone.
‘Bloody little fool!’ hissed Irisis. ‘Do you want to attract them to you? Lie still and shut up and you may yet survive.’
Inouye kept on wailing until Irisis whacked her. The noise stopped immediately.
‘Come on,’ Irisis muttered, red in the face.
They hurried towards the entrance, keeping low. ‘Did you have to hit her so hard?’ said Nish. ‘The poor little …’
‘You can shut up as well, Cryl-Nish Hlar, unless you want the other hand,’ Irisis said savagely.
It heartened him to discover that she wasn’t as unfeeling as she made out. They slipped out through the mage-locked door, which plucked at them like a thousand rubber fishhooks. Irisis stopped on the landing, one hand to her ear.
‘Can you hear anything?’
‘Only people groaning in the yard, poor devils,’ said Nish.
‘No, the reinforcements are on their way. Let’s get out of their path.’
They moved off the stairs into a narrow space, a sliver of green-tiled floor between two moss-covered outer walls. ‘How are we supposed to find Muss?’ said Nish.
‘I imagine he’ll find us. I didn’t believe his story for an instant. He left Flydd months ago because he was no longer useful. Then, when Flydd turned up here and the scrutators’ downfall looked likely, Muss changed sides again. He does it as easily as he changes his shape. He led us in because he wanted something that he couldn’t get himself. The amplimet, presumably.’
‘Why would he want it?’ said Nish. ‘He’s not –’
‘For decades he concealed that he was a powerful adept,’ she said in a low voice. ‘What else is he? No one knows. Muss will be close by, waiting to see who gets the upper hand and working out how he can use them to his advantage.’ She lowered her voice. ‘He’ll tell us where to find Tiaan. The stalemate won’t suit him any more than it does us. But the instant he tells us, we grab him.’
Grabbing a morphmancer didn’t seem like a very good idea to Nish. ‘What then?’
‘We bind his hands and stop his mouth so he can’t morph into another shape, and take him with us. I want the wretch where I can see him for the rest of our time here.’
‘He could be rather a handful.’
‘Then club him over the head! Whoever isn’t with us is against us, Nish.’
They were nearing the warding chamber when Nish heard the sound of massed footsteps, below and to their left. ‘That must be Fusshte’s reinforcements.’
Irisis pulled him into a rubble-choked cavern where two walls had fallen against each other to form a space shaped like a tent. While they waited, Nish couldn’t help wondering how solid the structure was.
A squad came tramping along the gritty corridor, ten men led by a stocky captain, followed a minute later by a second squad and then a third. The captain stopped, looking around in puzzlement at the dislocated walls and the stair which patently had crashed through the roof. ‘Which way?’
No one seemed to know. They turned back down the corridor, stopped again and the captain called, ‘Master Muss?’
He came towards them, reluctantly, and after a brief exchange pointed back the way they had come. The soldiers tramped off and Muss came on, stopping directly outside Nish and Irisis’s hiding place. ‘Well?’ he said.
‘It’s a stalemate,’ said Irisis. ‘Flydd and Klarm are pinned down. They can’t get to the scrutators’ turret and the scrutators can’t reach them. They’re afraid to use power.’
Muss stared into her eyes as if he suspected her of holding something back. ‘Then Fusshte will take them sooner or later.’
‘And that doesn’t suit you, Muss?’ said Irisis.
‘We’ve got to find Tiaan,’ Nish burst out. ‘She may be able to control the amplimet.’
‘Tiaan …’ Muss stared into the dusty distance. ‘I don’t think – she’s not been treated well. Unless she trusts you, you may not get anything out of her.’ His eyes seemed to look into Nish’s head.
Nish coloured. ‘Well, she’s all we have left.’
Taking the eidoscope out from under his cloak, Muss turned away. Nish peered around him. The morphmancer pushed in one spangled lens and rotated it, pulled out another, spun a third and peered through the end. He scratched his ear, performed more rotations with his eye and cheek to the end lens, then said, ‘Follow me.’
After some minutes of trekking quite as dangerous as the trip in, and rather more crowded with wailing spectres, they reached the solid wooden door of what, from the dank smell, had been a basement dungeon cell. It now lay two floors above ground level.
‘Tiaan’s cell,’ said Eiryn Muss.
Nish tried the door but it didn’t budge.
‘It’s held fast by scrutator magic,’ said Muss. ‘You’ll have to break the door to get inside.’
‘It’s solid ironwood,’ said Irisis. ‘It’d take half an hour to get through it with an axe. And we don’t have an axe.’ She stared at him expectantly.
After a long hesitation, Muss used his eidoscope again, this time not seeming to care that they saw it. Nish didn’t think that was a good sign. Muss frowned, shape-shifted a couple of times, returned to his normal form, then reached out and seemed to put his arm right through the stone beside the door. He did something on the other side and the door came open.
They pushed in. Tiaan lay on a straw-filled palliasse, staring at the ceiling. She was filthy, her clothes even filthier, and her black hair formed a tangled mass. Her arms and legs were shaking. Nish approached her tentatively, for Tiaan mistrusted him, and with good reason. And she felt the same way about Irisis.
‘Tiaan?’ he said softly.
She turned her eyes toward him, without recognition, then looked back at the ceiling. A louse the length of Nish’s fingernail crawled up her neck into her hair. She didn’t appear to notice.
‘Tiaan?’
She turned, and this time her eyes widened. She lurched to her feet, batted feebly at a point to the right of Nish, gave a gasp of horror and tried to climb the wall behind her.
Nish caught her as she fell back on the palliasse. ‘It’s like she’s seeing ghosts.’
‘Perhaps she thinks we are ghosts.’
‘What do we do with her?’ said Nish.
‘I have no idea. And to add to our troubles, bloody Muss has disappeared again.’
TWENTY-NINE
They carried Tiaan back through the spectre-infested chaos, taking turns. She did not resist. Indeed, Tiaan hardly knew they were there.
‘What’s the matter with her?’
Nish had stopped for a breather on a floor made of smashed slabs of pink gneiss that crunched and crackled underfoot. In the distance, a segment of Nennifer crumbled with a roar that shook the walls. Glass objects, warped like figures in a torture chamber, fell off a shelf. Collapses were happening all the time now.