“I’m going to keep watch for a while,” said Noys. “I don’t trust the bastards.”
“Me either,” said Rix. “Take special care of the sentries. Make sure they’ve got gloves and furs. No more than half an hour on the wall without going in to warm themselves at the braziers. And plenty of hot drinks.”
Noys saluted. “I’ll see to it.” He turned away, then turned back. “Heard what you did further up, Lord Deadhand. You saved us, and we won’t forget it.”
“We all did our bit.”
“Aye, but you made the difference. I’ll follow you anywhere, Lord.”
“Thank you, Noys.” Rix swallowed. “That means everything to me.”
He shivered convulsively. The cold was creeping right through him now, and as he went down the icy steps, his rubbery knees could barely support him. He’d been out in the cold far too long.
But there was so much to do. He clapped his hands together and headed across the yard, then into the healery. And froze, for it looked more like an abattoir.
Three lines of four trestle tables had been set out and a seriously injured man lay on each. Most were bleeding, the blood seeping from temporary bandages, puddling on the tables then dripping on the floor. Two servant girls, no more than ten years old, were cleaning the floor with bloody mops, though the blood accumulated as fast as they could clean it away. Two even smaller girls came staggering in carrying buckets of steaming water.
A severed right leg lay on a table inside the door, along with a mashed, freshly amputated pair of hands, and at the back a tall, bald soldier, dead from a horrific head wound. Droag. Rix hadn’t liked the man, but he didn’t want to see him like this, either — taken from life by a single smashing blow.
Two blood-covered men — amateur healers — were holding down an injured soldier while a woman with a bone saw cut off his shattered right arm. The man was eerily silent. And there was Glynnie, down the far end of the room, leaning over a screaming man who had been bound to the table, stitching a foot-long gash across his chest.
He went down to her as she completed the last stitch and began to bandage the wound. Glynnie was as pale as the snow on the windowsill and swaying with exhaustion. Her clothes were still wet and she was shivering fitfully.
“Have you had anything to eat or drink?” said Rix.
“There’s no time. No one else knows as much about healing as I do. If I stop now, men will die.”
Rix cursed Oosta yet again. “What can I do to help?”
“This is my job, not yours. You’ve been fighting for our lives.”
“If there’s no one else better to do it, it’s my job. I’ve attended plenty of injuries in my time. Give the orders and I’ll see them done.”
CHAPTER 44
“If I try to climb up there, I’ll die,” said Tali.
“You’re being hysterical,” said Holm.
“I hate you.”
“So you’ve been saying for the last three hours and twenty-seven minutes.”
“Tirnan Twil had better be worth it.”
“It is.”
“I can’t do it. I’ll fall.”
“Unless I throw you over the side first.”
“I’m sure that’s why you brought me here,” she muttered.
“Don’t tempt me. Take your right foot and put it in front of your left. Then move your left foot up in front of your right. Keep doing that and you’ll reach the top in no time.”
Tali would have thumped him, had she been game to take her eyes off the track.
An uneventful four days had passed as they rode north for Tirnan Twil, travelling through the wildest country they could find, fishing or scrounging for their dinner and some nights, when they could not find anything edible, going to their blankets hungry and rising hungrier.
Finally, last night, they had reached the tiny village of Tirnan Plat, where all the houses were made from red rammed earth roofed with yellow thatch. They had exchanged the horses for as much food as they could carry, Tali had said a teary goodbye to her mount, and they had set out on foot at first light.
The mountain track had grown progressively steeper all morning. She kept feeling that there was someone behind her, or watching her, but the track above and below them was empty. At midday she turned a corner and all the blood drained from her head. The track ran diagonally up a cliff, a good thousand feet high, where an ancient fault line had carved half the mountain away.
“I’m going to die without ever seeing the place,” she said hoarsely.
Tali knew she sounded whiny, but even with her hat pulled down over her ears the sky was rocking. Her panic was rising, along with the sick fear that she was going to fall and be smashed to bits on the rocks far below.
“Steady,” said Holm, not teasing her now.
His strong hand closed around her upper arm and the panic eased a little.
“Sorry,” she croaked. “And to think I had a panic attack the first time I saw the open sky, yet it was all in my head.”
Here, death lay on every side, only a misstep away. A momentary weakness of the knees, a pebble rolling underfoot, a piece of rotten rock crumbling, an attack of agoraphobia — any of those things could send her over. And that wasn’t her only trouble. Something was wrong, she knew it. They should not have come here.
“You’ll be all right,” said Holm. “We’ve passed the worst. Tirnan Twil is just around the corner.”
He did not seem fazed by the climb. But then, a man who could hang on with one hand, twenty feet up a mast in a gale, could not be afraid of many things.
“You’ve been saying that for three hours,” said Tali.
“This time I mean it.”
“You’ve been saying that for two hours.”
“And this time it’s true.”
“And you’ve been saying — oh, what’s the use?”
“Exactly,” he beamed. “And since it’s impossible to turn back, you might as well keep going as cheerfully as possible.”
“It’d better be worth it,” she muttered.
“The view’s worth it, I promise you.”
“I don’t give a damn about the view. I meant Grandys’ stuff.”
“You should give a damn. Life is short and uncertain; you can’t spend the whole of it chasing an obsession.”
“Do we have to talk about this here?” said Tali.
He took her hand. “Come.”
She allowed him to draw her around the corner of the cliff. Tali shuffled along, watching her feet and making sure she didn’t stand on anything unstable that would tip her over. Then, a few yards around the corner, the foot-wide track broadened to a ledge ten times that width. She let go, looked up and out, and every hair on her body stood up.
“Oh!” she whispered. “That’s… that’s…”
“There aren’t enough words,” said Holm. He seemed as overcome as she was.
The other side of the chasm, two hundred yards away, was as sheer as the cliff she was standing on. The slanting afternoon light touched veins in the yellow stone as though there was a fire behind them. It was beautiful, but that was not it.
Tirnan Twil was it.
Five slender arches of golden stone, spanning the chasm. Each buttressed against the cliff on either side. All intersecting over the centre of the chasm, and that was marvel enough. It was incomprehensible that anyone could have built such vast unsupported spans, far greater than the greatest dome in Caulderon.
At the centre, rising up from the point of intersection, stood a building unlike anything Tali had ever seen, or imagined. A spire. No, a spike, for it did not aspire to the sky — it transfixed and impaled it.
It was extravagant, astonishing, impossible. It made no concessions to structure, function or practicality. Tirnan Twil was pure form.
No more than thirty feet in width, the golden stone smooth and unornamented save that the outside was shaped like a five-sided cloverleaf, it soared a thousand feet into the heavens. It was simplicity itself, and astoundingly beautiful.
Tali swallowed. “Five arches.”