The three constructs headed directly to the Hornrace, hardly stopping night and day, though it seemed to take a couple of days to get there. Nish could not be sure because he slept most of the time. In his waking moments, he wondered what the Aachim wanted of him. Information, no doubt. Nish was not sure that Vithis was much of an improvement on Ryll.
He woke before dawn of the second night of travel, sated with sleep, and went up the ladder. The woman with the scarred arm was at the controls but seemed disinclined to talk. Nish pulled himself up onto the top and sat with his legs dangling down the hatch, enjoying the cool breeze on his face and the sweetish, musky perfume of the little trumpet-shaped desert flowers that only opened at night.
The construct climbed up from a small depression and, straight ahead, he saw three lights in a line, one above the other. The highest was a good hand-span above the starry horizon. After an hour they did not seem appreciably closer.
‘What are the lights?’ he said.
‘Vithis’s watch-tower.’ She absently stroked the writhen scars on her forearm.
‘It must be a tall one.’
She didn’t bother to answer. Shortly dawn broke and the shimmering heat haze obscured the land ahead. Nish couldn’t see any sign of a tower.
In the mid-morning it suddenly sprang up out of nowhere and the tower was so high that it could be seen across the arid plain an hour before they reached it. It was a needle of stone floating on a mirage which only dissolved when they were a couple of leagues away. Now the true enormity of the structure Vithis had built there was revealed, a vast rectangle of stone, hundreds of spans high, with stepped cubes forming a pyramid above that. The spire-topped needle tower rose from its top, suspended on five slender, arching wings.
Nish first heard the whisper of the Hornrace, an ocean flowing into an empty sea, shortly after that, and it grew ever louder. By the time the construct drew up at the foot of the building the music of the water had become a monumental roaring and crashing, so loud that it was difficult to talk over it. The building arched right across the Hornrace and was called simply the Span.
Ahead lay a door wide enough to admit the three constructs side by side. They whined into the bowels of the structure down a spiral path cut into stone, then stopped. Nish was led up a series of stairs whose sweeping shape was vaguely reminiscent of those in Tirthrax.
They emerged on an open floor paved with pale sandstone. The space was filled with the rush of flowing water. Nish was escorted across to the middle, where a slot in the floor wide enough to have engulfed a construct, though ten times as long, emitted wisps of vapour. He looked down and his head exploded with vertigo. He was directly above the Hornrace.
Nish felt himself leaning forward, almost as if he wanted to fall. The escort’s fingers clamped onto his left biceps.
‘The lure of the depths is powerful, but Vithis would be vexed if I allowed you to escape him that way.’
Nish took another glance at the torrent and shuddered. The roar was muted here, compared to outside. They went left, up a whirling stair into a perfectly circular room with glass walls that looked out on the Dry Sea, as well as down to the race and up to the stars. Vithis stood at the side, looking away. He did not turn as Nish entered, though Nish knew the Aachim was aware of him.
‘You’ve come to gloat!’ Time had only honed the bitter edge to his voice.
‘It was not my wish to come at all,’ Nish said.
Vithis turned. It was more than a year since Nish had last seen him, but he looked decades older. His hair was white, his face etched with such grief that Nish could hardly bear to look at him. Though Vithis had not treated him kindly and was a cold, unlikable man, Nish was moved by his suffering.
‘Clan Inthis is lost. After all this time, I’ve heard no more than whispers on the ethyr.’ Vithis spoke slowly, each word measured out as before, but he seemed a lesser figure than the man Nish had known.
‘Do you mean,’ said Nish, bemused, ‘that you built all this just to search for your lost clan?’
‘Why else would I have built it?’ said Vithis.
‘We thought … at least …’
‘Go on. What did your friends Flydd and Yggur and treacherous Malien think?’
‘After you went north so suddenly, after the battle of Snizort,’ Nish said haltingly, ‘it was thought that you’d made a pact with our enemy.’
‘I don’t ally with savages.’
Hadn’t Vithis threatened to do just that in the early days? Nish could no longer remember all the twists and turns of the war.
‘I left because Tiaan had destroyed Minis, my last hope,’ Vithis went on, speaking so slowly that each word was like the grinding of an enormous mill.
‘Is Minis dead?’
‘What do you care for Minis?’
‘I liked him,’ said Nish softly. ‘We were … friends.’ Insofar as such a weak, flawed man as Minis could make friends.
‘Minis is dead to me,’ Vithis said dismissively. ‘He’s not a whole man any more.’
‘So that’s why you abandoned all plans for conquest and retreated here,’ said Nish. ‘With Minis disabled, the only way to restore your clan was to find the ones lost in the gate.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought that needed to be stated.’
‘It does to us, surr. Humanity reads everything through the lens of our unending war. When you began to build this great tower, at such a powerful node … everyone … that is, Scrutator Flydd, believed that you were making a great weapon of war to strike down our army at a single blow.’
‘What small minds you old humans have – I care nothing for your petty wars. This tower has one purpose and only one. It is a beacon, beaming through the limitless void, to tell my lost people that I’m searching for them. Its signal is so powerful that, if they can impress their cry for help upon it and bounce it back, I’ll be able to find them. And once I do, I’ll come for them if I have to tear the very void asunder.’
‘You say “I”,’ said Nish. ‘Is this the will of all your people?’
‘Of course,’ Vithis said. ‘They voted me leader. Don’t think to come between us, Cryl-Nish Hlar.’
‘I wasn’t. How do you know First Clan is out there?’
‘Tiaan,’ the name dripped like venom from his tongue, ‘heard their cries and their lost wailing after the gate was opened. Later still, I too heard cries for help. Just twice, a long time ago, but I knew they were out there.’
‘How will you get them back?’
‘Another tower in another place will create the greatest gate that has ever been built.’
‘But if you make a gate into the void,’ said Nish carefully, knowing Vithis’s rages of old, ‘don’t you risk more void creatures coming through? That’s how the lyrinx got here in the first place.’
‘There’s nothing I won’t do to get Inthis First Clan back.’
SIXTY-FOUR
Vithis questioned Nish about Flydd and Yggur’s plans, in much the same way as the lyrinx had done, though he displayed little interest in Nish’s answers. Vithis no longer feared the lyrinx and could not have cared less about the fate of humanity. First Clan was the only thing on his mind.
Nish was given a room with a window that looked south across the arid plains of Narkindie, and allowed to roam at will through the tower, so little did they fear him, though he was not permitted to go outside. After wandering on the first day he kept to the one floor, for the tower had been thrown up so quickly that it looked the same everywhere.
A few days later, he was eating black bread and spicy pickled fish in the open dining chamber when he heard the click of someone walking with a pair of crutches.
‘Hello, Nish.’
The voice was Minis’s, though the face was that of a stranger. Minis had aged more brutally than his foster-father. He was no longer an impossibly handsome young man, but one who’d been cast prematurely into a tormented middle age. The once smooth cheeks were now weathered like a desert hermit’s and creased with vertical pain lines to either side of his mouth. He walked with an awkward twist of the hips and, though he wore robes, the stump of his right leg, amputated at mid-thigh, was clearly visible.