‘There are lots of fields and the nodes are long and thin, not round. They run along the ridges and the field weakens rapidly to either side.’ Tiaan took a closer look. ‘That’s strange. The field keeps changing from up to down; I suppose that’s why we’re jerking so much. Try going a little to the left of the ridge.’
Malien turned left and the jerking stopped. ‘Can you still map if I follow this heading?’
‘More or less.’
Twice more they had the same problem, when they passed over long faults in the rock that had shifted the mid-sea ridge to left or right. As Malien corrected yet again, Tiaan put a hand on her arm and pointed down.
‘Hey, that looks like a wrecked construct.’
‘What would a construct be doing way out here?’ said Malien as she turned the machine and headed lower. The mechanism began to stutter and she directed it away until it resumed its normal note.
Tiaan lost sight of the wreckage in the jumble of black basalt. ‘This country is too broken to hover across. Malien, what if it’s a thapter that crashed?’
‘It must be – it was broken in half, as if it had fallen a long way. And it’s not one of ours, so it must be from Stassor.’
Malien went lower and turned back towards the place where they’d seen the wreckage. A construct came into view. ‘Is that it?’
A shiver worked its way up the marrow of Tiaan’s backbone. ‘It can’t be. The front is smashed in but it’s all in one piece.’
‘Two crashed thapters?’ said Malien. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I suppose the second came looking for the first and met the same fate – they weren’t experienced enough to cope with these fields. Look, there’s the first. Set down. There may be someone still alive.’
‘The impact has torn it apart,’ said Malien, circling about ten spans up. ‘No one could have survived that.’
‘Sometimes miracles happen.’
Malien settled the thapter down with some difficulty, for the basalt was scored, twisted and wrenched into stacks, blades and sheer-sided ravines. There wasn’t a piece of flat ground big enough to spread a tablecloth.
The jagged rocks proved troublesome to walk on, too. Malien reached the wreckage before Tiaan, who had to go the last twenty spans on hands and knees. Her back began to ache where it had been broken.
Malien looked in through the torn metal, which had a blue tinge. ‘There’s no one inside.’
Tiaan went round the other side and stumbled over a body before she realised what it was. It was the colour of dark tea, the flesh desiccated to strands of muscle covered by a few scraps of flaky skin. The clothes were gone, apart from the faded shreds of seams. ‘Malien, could you come here?’
Malien examined the remains. ‘A natural mummy. It’s so dry here that nothing rots, and the salt would help to cure it. He was a tall man, though you wouldn’t know it, the way the drying flesh has pulled his backbone into a curve. He was definitely Aachim – see the extra-long fingers?’ She took up a scrap of cloth, inspected it and let it flutter away.
‘He must have been dead a long time,’ said Tiaan.
‘Months would be enough to cure a dead man, out here.’
They found another body not far away, a woman whose skull was crushed. ‘Thrown out by the impact,’ said Tiaan.
‘One of the lucky ones. She would have died instantly.’
Others had been less fortunate. They came on a cluster of bodies twisted into positions that indicated painful, lingering deaths. Tiaan couldn’t bear to examine them.
‘Let’s go to the other machine,’ said Malien, the shadows growing under her eyes.
The second construct was only a hundred paces away, but it was easier to fly there than pick their way across the jagged ground. It was also made of blue-black metal and was full of bodies as mummified as the others, though a faint death smell lingered inside. The bodies were still clothed.
‘That’s … not how your people dress,’ said Tiaan. ‘Malien, these people are from Aachan.’
Malien appeared to be looking right through her. ‘That’s right.’
‘Does this mean that Vithis has thapters too? He’s certainly kept the secret well …’ Again that shiver along Tiaan’s spine.
‘Vithis has no thapters, Tiaan. They’re constructs. Come on.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Up. There may be more. Can you fly the thapter?’
‘Is something the matter?’
Malien was too preoccupied to answer. Tiaan’s knees were shaking as she gripped the controller and took the thapter straight up. She couldn’t see anything but black rock and salt.
‘Higher,’ said Malien in a strained voice.
The sun reflected off something a good distance from the first two machines. Tiaan circled, scouring the rock. The wreckage was hard to pick out at first but once she’d found it, she soon saw more, and more. There were dozens of wrecked constructs down there, or pieces of constructs. Then, as the sheer scale of the site became evident, she amended that to hundreds. The sun still beat down on her but all the warmth had gone out of the day. She knew who they were.
‘It’s Vithis’s people,’ said Tiaan. ‘Inthis First Clan. They weren’t lost in the void after all.’
‘Not all of them,’ said Malien. ‘The gate must have whiplashed across the Dry Sea as it opened, scattering them here.’
They counted hundreds of constructs, strewn over an area a couple of leagues wide and about ten long. Most were wrecked, though a few machines bore only superficial damage. Then, in the middle of the area, they saw a round structure built from the metal skins of dozens of constructs.
Tiaan set the thapter down beside it. They did not get out at once. ‘Some of them survived,’ she said in a flat voice.
‘For quite some time,’ said Malien.
‘I wonder why they didn’t go for help?’
‘Even if they’d repaired one construct, this country is too rugged to hover across. And without knowing where to go, or how to find water on the way, anyone who left here on foot would have died of thirst.’
‘But there’s so many of them,’ said Tiaan. ‘There would have been thousands. Surely they could have found a way to send for help?’
‘Maybe they didn’t know what world they were on. Before the Forbidding cut off communication between the worlds, this was the beautiful Sea of Perion. They must have thought they’d been cast onto a desert world in the middle of the void.’ Malien rubbed her eyes. ‘We’d better go and see.’
They got out. The structure, built from the metal of as many as thirty constructs, was large enough to have accommodated some hundreds of people. The surrounding rocks had been smoothed, and paths constructed out of fragments so cunningly fitted together that they locked tight.
Tiaan walked around the building, marvelling at their ingenuity in creating so much with so little. The paths extended off in several directions to other, smaller structures, some of construct metal, others out of stone. The stonework was superb.
‘How did they live so long, without water?’ she said.
‘Each construct carries enough drinking water for several weeks. If most of the Aachim were killed in the crashes, the water would have lasted the survivors for months. And after that, there’s water in the Dry Sea, if you have the wits to look for it.’
‘Only salt water, and you’d have to dig through spans of salt to find it.’
‘Yes, but all it takes to turn salt water to fresh is sunlight or heat, and there’s plenty of both here. The problem wasn’t water, but food. Had everyone survived, the food would have been exhausted in a month or two. Since most were killed, it may have lasted a year, or more.’
‘It’s nearly a year and three-quarters since the gate was opened.’ Tiaan put her head inside one of the stone structures, then sprang out again. ‘It’s a graveyard.’
‘A mausoleum.’ Malien went to the entrance and stood for a minute, head bowed. ‘While any of First Clan had strength in their bodies, they would have honoured their dead according to longstanding custom.’