Chimaera (43 page)

‘Ah!’ Muss groped around in the air like a blind man. His probing fingers touched something and he shaped the air around it, murmuring under his breath.

The air suddenly swarmed with phantoms: lost spectres or ghosts of grim Nennifer. Muss dissolved from the vaguely lyrinx shape to that of the grossly fat, bald-headed halfwit, the guise in which Nish had first known him. It stirred uncomfortable memories.

Muss morphed again, this time into an unfamiliar figure, a stocky merchant clad all in green apart from a brown hat shaped like a pudding bowl. Colours streamed across his back as the garments adjusted to his new shape. Nish wondered why he was doing it, or if he even realised that he was.

The merchant’s stubby fingers cupped the air above the chair as if feeling his way around a pair of spheres the size of melons. He sighed, clapped his hands and a metal case, shaped like two round balls joined together, appeared on the chair. The outside, mirrored like the globe on its stand, revealed distorted images of Muss, though each image was different. The left-hand one showed a short, round man, the right a puny, deformed lyrinx. The group of watchers in the background were not reflected at all.

‘How very curious,’ Klarm breathed. ‘Can the outside be a reflection of the interior?’

‘Perhaps when you called him chimaera, Irisis, you saw more truly than you knew,’ said Flydd. ‘Be ready to rush him as soon as he opens it.’

‘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.

‘T
ake 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.’

‘So you decided to undermine the manufactory to discredit and destroy me.’

‘It wasn’t personal,’ said Muss. ‘I liked and admired you, but you just wouldn’t do.’

‘I wondered how Jal-Nish always seemed to anticipate me,’ said Flydd. ‘You were spying on me and reporting to him.’

‘You don’t know what it’s been like.’

‘What
is
it like?’ Flydd said savagely. ‘Who are you really, Muss, apart from a liar, a murderer and a traitor?’

‘I was a prentice mancer once, here at Nennifer, or rather, a mancer’s prentice – a lesser creature entirely. I was young, handsome and clever, and I thought I had the whole world in front of me. Fool that I was, I didn’t realise what my master really wanted me for. I meant nothing to him. I was no more than a living body to be used and discarded once his Art had ruined me. I wasn’t the first – who knows how many boys and girls were brought to this place, to advance the scrutators’ twisted Art.’

‘He was trying to create a weapon of war from you?’ guessed Irisis.

‘A chimaera.’ Muss nodded in her direction. ‘You think of a chimaera as a phantom: a horrible, unreal creature of the imagination. But there’s another, darker kind of chimaera: a creature made by blending the tissues of two distinct species into one.

‘My master bound me to a drugged lyrinx and used one of the Great Spells, a spell of regeneration, to create a chimaera from us – a human with the strength and chameleon ability of a lyrinx. A bastard creature that could be bred like maggots, grown to adulthood in a decade and trained into an army powerful enough to take on our enemies on the battlefield.’

‘But it didn’t work,’ said Flydd. ‘It couldn’t have.’

‘I survived the transformation but I was no stronger than before, and wracked by pain. My blended tissues, seemingly integrated, were constantly at war with each other. My mind was outwardly human, inwardly a blend of human and lyrinx, and it could never be at peace. I didn’t know whether I was human or lyrinx, but I understood that I was a beast and a monster. And the joke was not yet played out. The failed spell had reproduced neither the lyrinx’s female organs of generation, nor my own male ones. It left me sexless, the worst cruelty of all, and made me useless to my master. He blamed me for the failure of his spell, mocked me for the monster I was, then had me knocked on the head and hurled out of Nennifer onto the kitchen middens for the swine to tear to pieces.’

Muss met their eyes, one by one, and continued.

‘But I survived, for two qualities of the lyrinx I had in abundance. I could flesh-form far better than any lyrinx, for it was part Art and part innate ability, and I could do it to myself. It hurt brutally at first, but I persisted until I had gained enough mastery to assume any form roughly my own size, and use my chameleon ability to mimic whatever external appearance I cared to. To survive inside Nennifer I had to become a morphmancer beyond compare, and I had to go back in. I couldn’t live outside, nor cross the mountains alone.

‘I killed a lowly prentice and took his place. I regretted the necessity but, after all, I’d saved the lad from a fate as bad as my own. And then I set out to learn everything I could about the spell that had so disastrously transformed me, in the hope that one day I might undo it. Years passed; a decade. In one guise, then another, I learned everything there was to be known about the regeneration spell. Even how to reverse it.’

‘Why didn’t you?’ said Nish.

‘It wasn’t enough to just know how. Being a mancer of only moderate talent, I needed great power, perfectly focussed, to work the smallest of charms, and on my own I could never hope to use any Great Spell. But then, by pure serendipity, I hit upon another way. If I could gain a small piece of nihilium, I could imprint the spell on it, then attempt to undo what had been done to me. But not even the Council of Scrutators possessed such a treasure. After years of spying I was unable to discover nihilium anywhere on Santhenar. I had, however, learned that it might be created if a node were destroyed in a particular way, by feeding power back into it.’