‘Why not rush him now?’ said Nish. ‘Just to be sure.’
‘We may not be able to open the case.’
Eiryn Muss inspected the double case, turned it over and around, and scanned it from end to end with the eidoscope, muttering under his breath all the while. Another swarm of phantoms appeared up near the ceiling. He set the eidoscope down on the green table, passed his hands over the locks of the double case, caressed them with his fingertips as if playing a keyboard, then pressed down hard. Snap, snap.
‘Don’t move until he opens it and takes out what’s inside,’ said Flydd.
Gingerly, Muss lifted the top of the right-hand spherical case. There came a reflected flash. The inside was mirrored just like the outside.
Muss let out a choked gasp, then threw up the top of the other case.
‘Nooooooo!’ he wailed, as though all the demons of the underworld were clawing at his soul.
THIRTY-THREE
‘Take him!’ hissed Flydd.
They rushed him, though they need not have bothered. Muss was in such agony that he was oblivious to their presence. Even when they seized his arms and bound them behind his back, he made no attempt to resist.
‘It was all a lie,’ he said, writhing and twisting as if his intestines were full of thorns. ‘They weren’t there at all. Ghorr never had them.’
‘What isn’t there?’ said Flydd. ‘Out with it, Muss.’
‘The tears,’ Nish said suddenly. ‘The tears created by the destruction of the Snizort node.’
The scales fell visibly from Xervish Flydd’s eyes. ‘You bloody deceitful bastard, Muss!’ he said savagely. ‘So that’s what you were after all along. You weren’t my faithful servant at all. You were just using me until your opportunity came.’
Eiryn Muss looked like a man with the disembowelling hooks deep in his belly. The impassive prober that Nish and Irisis had known, the spy who’d not shown a flicker of emotion no matter what, had disappeared. Muss was in agony and showing it.
‘Forty years I sought for even the tiniest piece,’ he wailed. ‘Forty wretched years, and all for nothing.’
‘Piece of what?’ said Klarm.
‘Nihilium,’ Flydd grated. ‘The purest substance on Santhenar and the very fount of the Art. The tears of the node are made of it. Why would you betray me so, Muss?’
Muss looked up at him. ‘Betray you? I embarked on this search before I ever heard your name.’
‘You gave me your oath, to serve me truly and me alone.’
‘And so I have, whenever it did not conflict with my prior purpose.’
‘I begin to understand,’ said Klarm. ‘It was you, Muss, who tampered with the node-breaker after the Council gave it to Flydd. It had to be you, for I saw it, tested it and found it perfect, then sealed it under scrutator magic into its case. Those seals weren’t broken until Flydd took the node-breaker into the tar pits of Snizort. No one else could have broken the magic that sealed that case, for no one else ever had charge of it. No one but you, Eiryn Muss, morphmancer or whoever you are.’
Flydd went purple in his wrath and Nish stepped hastily out of the line of fire.
‘You deceitful, treacherous wretch,’ Flydd raged, seizing Muss by the throat and shaking him like a rat. ‘You stinking hypocrite. You changed the node-breaker so that it would destroy the node, and almost certainly the man who had been ordered to use it. Me, Muss!’ He shook him again. ‘You were happy for me to die as long as you achieved your goal, and you dare claim to have served me faithfully. Why, Muss, why?’
‘To create the tears, of course,’ said Irisis. ‘Muss needed nihilium for some purpose of his own, and the only way he could gain any was to destroy a node in a particular manner. But you thought the tears would form at the node-breaker, didn’t you, Muss? That’s what you were searching for so desperately when we met you in Snizort, after the node exploded.’
‘I created them,’ said Muss insistently. ‘The tears were mine.’
‘But you couldn’t find them,’ said Nish, ‘and by the time you realised that they’d been created at the node itself, they were gone. Flydd, Ullii and I saw my father take them, leaving no witnesses alive – at least, none that he was aware of. Father took the tears to the ruinous defeat at Gumby Marth and lost them to the lyrinx.’
‘Jal-Nish was an alchymist,’ mused Flydd, ‘and the tears were an alchymist’s dream. No substance holds the print of the Art more tightly.’
‘Father practised with them every night,’ said Nish, ‘and his mastery grew apace, though not as quickly as his hubris. He led the army into the cul-de-sac of Gumby Marth to lure the lyrinx in after him, planning to boost his alchymical Art with the tears and crush the enemy utterly. Not for the sake of a mighty victory, just to gain a place on the Council of Scrutators.’
‘And had he done so, with all that nihilium at his disposal,’ said Flydd, ‘not even Ghorr could have stood against him. Jal-Nish would soon have dominated the Council, and then suspended it to rule the world in his own name. But, unfortunately for him, his Art was not up to his ambition.’
‘He was a minor mancer, no more,’ said Klarm. ‘And yet he very nearly succeeded.’
‘He came up against a mighty opponent,’ said Nish. ‘The greatest mancer-lyrinx I’ve ever seen. And went within an ell of defeating him.’
‘And that’s why you went to Gumby Marth after the battle,’ said Flydd to Muss. ‘You came looking for the tears, but again you were too late. Jal-Nish was dead and the tears were in the hands of the enemy, beyond even your talents to find.’
‘Ghorr boasted that he’d found them buried in the battlefield,’ said Muss brokenly. ‘He was cock-a-hoop about it.’
‘I’ll warrant he never showed them to anyone,’ said Flydd.
‘He never did. Though once, just before the fleet left to hunt you down, he displayed the sealed cases to the Council of Scrutators.’
‘He was lying to bolster his shattered reputation,’ said Flydd, unable to conceal his contempt. ‘How did he survive so long?’ He swung around to Muss. ‘Tell me, Prober, how long have you secretly opposed me? You were accused even back at the manufactory, as I recall …’
‘It was you all along!’ Irisis almost lost control and took a step towards Muss. ‘You sabotaged Tiaan’s work and put the blame on me. You drugged her, then killed the poor stupid apothek to conceal it, and Nish and I were whipped to the bone for your crimes. We’ll bear the scars until the day we die.’
‘You weren’t whipped just for that,’ Flydd said mildly. ‘You two weren’t entirely blameless. Enough, Irisis. Leave him to me.’
Irisis dropped her fists and turned away into Nish’s arms, tears running down her dirty face, and only then did he realise how deeply the whipping had cut into her soul. She’d pretended it didn’t matter, and had even fought with her scarred back bare during one attack on the manufactory, exposing it to a thousand people. He should have known better. To have her beauty so marred had hurt her far more deeply than the whipping.
Flydd’s face hardened. ‘The only man who recognised you for what you were, Muss, was Foreman Gryste. He threw you into a cell, but no cell could hold a morphmancer. You used your Art to break out, concealed the pieces of platinum in his room that condemned him as corrupt, and fled.’ His voice quavered. ‘And I convicted poor unhappy Gryste on that tainted evidence. I was so sure he was the traitor that I refused to listen. I failed my own standards of justice and executed an innocent man.’ Flydd was shaken. ‘Why, Muss?’
‘You were never going to give me what I was looking for. I had to have an aggressive, ambitious master, one who would do anything to become scrutator. Jal-Nish was the only candidate.’