Tetrarch (Well of Echoes) (23 page)

‘What are we going to do about it?’ demanded the overseer. ‘We’d better have an answer by the time the scrutator gets up tomorrow, or …’

‘What?’ said the soldier, snappy because his bravery had not been recognised.

‘Or our lives may well be forfeit, and Flydd’s as well. The Council does not like failure and these past six months we have had nothing else.’

‘Time the seeker got over her self-indulgence,’ said Irisis. ‘I’ll see if I can shake her out of it.’

‘What good will that do?’ asked the overseer.

‘She saw crystal in several places in the mountain, before she went away with Nish. I’ll have her search out the best of them, and then we must dig for our very lives.’

Irisis was unable to rouse the seeker from her self-absorbed state. Something drastic had to be done. When it was nearly midnight, she went to see the scrutator. His door was closed. She knocked. There was no answer. Irisis knocked again.

‘Go to bloody hell!’ he roared, so loudly that she jumped.

Taking her courage in both hands, Irisis lifted the latch and pushed the door open. Xervish Flydd was sprawled in a wooden chair, a flask of pungent parsnip whisky dangling from one gnarled hand. An empty flask lay on the floor. He was naked but for a loin rag and his skeletal body was as scarred and twisted as his face and hands. Whatever had happened to him, whoever had tortured him and broken his bones, they had spared no part of him.

‘What the blazes do you want?’ he snarled. Flydd’s voice was clear despite the quantity of liquor he had consumed. ‘Go away! I’m sick of the lot of you.’

A half-written letter, presumably confessing the manufactory’s difficulties to the Council of Scrutators, rested on the table.

‘I have an idea!’ she said.

‘I don’t want to hear it.’ Tilting the flask up, he drained the contents in one swallow, then reached for another.

The death wish was rising up in her again. Snatching the flask from his hand, she hurled it out the door, where it smashed satisfyingly.

The scrutator rose to his battered feet, swayed and steadied himself on the table. ‘You could die for that, artisan.’

‘Crafter!’ she snapped. She wanted to run away screaming, but Irisis forced herself to meet his eyes, to hold his gaze. She had never met anyone as tough as Xervish Flydd, and she had to be just as strong. ‘If you don’t pull yourself together we could all die, scrutator. How is that going to help the war?’

‘You lecture
me
?’ he said incredulously. ‘The penalty for insubordination is death, crafter.’

‘If I’m going to die, it might as well be of my own choosing!’ Irisis gave him the kind of glare she used to quell importunate lovers and idle prentices.

He glared back, quite as fiercely. They held their positions, each waiting for the other to break, then finally the scrutator barked with laughter and pointed to the other chair.

‘Spill your idea, Irisis.’

‘Come with me, and together we will cajole the seeker, or force her if we must, out of that state. Then we get her to find the biggest cluster of crystals the mountain has to offer and we dig for them, night and day. I’ll take my turn with pick and shovel, if there’s a shortage.’

‘Not much of a plan, crafter, but it’s better than anything I can come up with. Shall we go?’

With her hand on the knob, Irisis looked back. ‘It might be an idea to dress first, surr. Wouldn’t want to alarm her unnecessarily.’

The scrutator looked down at his grizzled nakedness, grinned, and said, ‘Quite!’

Ullii squatted in the corner, exactly as she had for the past couple of weeks. Though it was cold today, she wore only her spider-silk undergarments.

‘Seeker?’ the scrutator called from the door.

The rhythm of her rocking did not alter.

He came up close. ‘Seeker?’

Nothing at all.

‘What are you thinking about, seeker? Are you remembering your friend, Nish?’

She might have rocked a little faster, though more along that line of questioning yielded nothing.

‘Here is your other friend, Irisis. Do you remember her?’ He beckoned Irisis in.

Not by so much as a blink did Ullii react, nor could he gain one from any other approach, though he spent half an hour trying.

‘I don’t know what else to do,’ he whispered to Irisis, over by the door.

‘Since being kind has not worked, maybe you should try being nasty.’

‘Better that
you
be the nasty one,’ he snapped. ‘You’ve had more practice.’

She ignored that. ‘Come outside.’

She led him out and around the corner, so that Ullii, even with her hypersensitive hearing, could not overhear.

‘I can’t force her,’ she said, ‘else I will lose her trust. I’ll need it when we go to examine the failed nodes.’

‘True enough. What is she afraid of most in all the world?’

Irisis considered. ‘Apart from Nish’s father, Perquisitor Hlar?’

‘Precisely! Go away. Best that you’re nowhere near.’

The scrutator went inside, this time taking a bright lantern and leaving the door wide open. Ullii groped around for her goggles and mask but he got there first and held them out of reach. She began to moan and flail her arms in the air.

‘Well, at least that’s a reaction,’ he said aloud. ‘Ullii?’

She dropped back into her slack-jawed rocking. Was it an act? Perhaps she was sulking, or punishing him for losing Nish.

He slammed the door a couple of times, opened it again and turned the lantern up to maximum brightness. Ullii put her arms over her face and began to make a keening sound in her throat.

‘Stand up, Ullii,’ he roared, knowing it would hurt her.

She did not move.

‘What are you afraid of, seeker? Are you frightened of me?’

No reply, though for an instant one eye peeped out through her fingers.

‘Do you remember Perquisitor Jal-Nish Hlar, Ullii? Nish’s father?’

She wailed and covered her ears.

He dropped his voice. ‘If you don’t wake up and help us, seeker, do you know what will happen? The Council will cut off my head.’

Ullii went still and her fingers slipped away from her ears, so he knew she was listening.

‘What will happen then, Ullii? You don’t know, do you? Well, listen good. The perquisitor will come!’

Ullii let out a little gasp, ‘No!’

‘Yes, Jal-Nish Hlar will come,
for you
! Right here, to this room.’

‘No!’ she wailed.

‘
Yes
, he will smash your goggles and rip your earmuffs apart. He will tear off your spider-silk underwear and cast it into the furnace.’

She screamed and threw her head from side to side but the scrutator did not relent. Squatting in front of her, he took her by the shoulders. Her wide eyes stared into his.

‘And then, little seeker, he will beat you and scream at you. He will torment you in ways so horrible that I cannot bear to say them. He will stake you out in the sun and leave you there
to die
! That’s what kind of a man the perquisitor is, seeker!’

‘No, no, no!’ she screamed, leapt up and raced around the room, so distressed that she cannoned off the walls.

The scrutator allowed her that freedom for a minute or two, then turned down the lantern, closed the door and, as she fled past, handed her the mask and earmuffs.

Ullii snatched them and put them on. Fleeing to her corner, she crouched down, rocking furiously.

‘On the other hand,’ said Flydd gently, ‘you could agree to help us. We know your talent has come back, Ullii.’ He was guessing about that, but Flydd felt sure that her loss of talent was due to a temporary trauma, long over, and she was pretending otherwise for her own perverse reasons.

‘Only sometimes,’ she muttered. ‘I don’t have it all the time.’

‘Better than nothing, seeker. So you will help us?’

‘Yes!’ she mumbled.

‘That is very good. Thank you, Ullii. We will start down the mine after lunch.’ He tiptoed to the door.

‘I hate you,’ hissed Ullii. ‘You are a nasty, cruel man!’

‘I am,’ he replied. ‘But not as nasty nor as cruel as the perquisitor.’

‘
M
aster, the pipes are calling!’

Gilhaelith, known locally as the tetrarch on account of his obsession with numbers to the power of four, threw himself out of bed, eyes firmly closed. ‘Where is my gown?’

The servant wrapped it around Gilhaelith’s gangling frame. Gilhaelith tied the sash with awkward jerks, sat on the bed and raised a pair of large and profoundly ugly feet. Leather slippers were pulled on. He put out a hand, blindly, for he still had not opened his eyes. The servant pressed a two-handled cup the size of a serving bowl into Gilhaelith’s fingers. The yellow liquid was too thick to ripple. Even the steam rose sluggishly.

Gilhaelith put the cup to his nose, inhaling pungent fumes of mustard-water that was more mustard than water. His head jerked back; his eyes sprang open.

‘Aah!’ he gasped, draining half the cup in a long series of swallows that bobbed his larynx up and down like a cork in a pail. ‘Aaaah!’

The servant, ever ready, wiped Gilhaelith’s streaming nose with a kerchief the size of a tablecloth. Gilhaelith gulped the rest of the mustard-water and sprang to life. ‘Aaaaaaaah! Very good, Mihail; a fine brew this morning. Take me down the outside walkway, if you please.’

‘I … dare not, master.’

Gilhaelith smiled. The ritual was an old one. It pleased him to ask, and to have the servant refuse. He would have been irked had Mihail answered differently.

‘Meet me in the pipe chamber then.’

‘At once, Gilhaelith.’

Gilhaelith frowned at the familiarity. But after all, Mihail had served him nearly fifty years, and Mihail’s father for thirty years before that. ‘Be ready,’ he said. ‘I am hungry this morning.’ He said that every morning. Gilhaelith strode out, the mustard-coloured, mustard-stained robes flapping about his bristly shanks.

It was still dark outside as he walked across the terrace. A thumbnail paring of moon, low in the sky, gave barely enough light to see. That did not matter – Gilhaelith had trodden this path most days in the hundred years since Nyriandiol, the ultimate creation of his life and work so far, had finally been completed.

The night was a little too cool for what he was wearing but his belly radiated a satisfying warmth. Gilhaelith paused under a vine-covered pergola while a mustard-flavoured belch made its wobbly way up. His slippers rasped on the paving stones as he turned down the walkway.

A swooping suspended path of stone, the walkway curved along the outside wall of Nyriandiol, which itself swept in and out. At the far end, the path took a zigzag down and ran back the other way, and so on right down the eight levels of the monstrous building. The path had no steps and no rail. Its surface undulated like waves in the ocean. It was a colossal conceit and a dare, for there was nothing beneath it but the dull gleam of water hundreds of spans below, and to fall meant death. Many workers had died building the path; only one man dared to walk it.

Gilhaelith knew it like the most familiar parts of his body but every day it was a challenge that left his heart racing. Presently it was damp with condensed moisture from the lake, slippery in unexpected places, and if he relaxed it would claim him with profound indifference. Walking this path was a good way to start the day, or the night for that matter.

Safely at the lowest level, he grasped the handle of a door carved from solid red jasper and jerked it open. No need for locks here. The corridor was unlit. He made his way through the blackness to a small chamber, out through whose door yellow light streamed.

Mihail waited inside with breakfast – a platter of freshly salted slugs covered in foaming yellow slime. Gilhaelith downed the delicacies whole, two at a time, smacking his lips and licking the foam off his fingers. On each corner of the tray was a quartered, pickled red onion the size of a grapefruit, with which to cleanse his palate. Gilhaelith selected a quarter, inspected it, found a minute blemish and put it back. The others also failed his scrutiny; the whole sixteen quarters were blemished. Fortunately Mihail knew what to do. He deftly peeled the outer layer off the first quarter, presenting Gilhaelith with a perfect inner segment.

‘It’s too small,’ Gilhaelith said for the sake of form, but took the onion and crunched it noisily.

The servant presented a finger bowl half full of sulphur-water. Gilhaelith waggled his fingers in it, dried them on the proffered napkin and was ready for work.

‘You may go, Mihail.’

The servant withdrew. Gilhaelith took up the lantern and went through into the adjoining room, a chamber so vast that neither its ceiling nor far wall could be seen. He set the lantern on the floor, shuttered it completely and stood in the dark, listening.

The pipes
were
calling. He made out a low note, a fluttery tremble that he could feel through his slippers, and then a higher, eerie keening. Gilhaelith cocked his head. He had not heard either sound before and could not work out what their ultimate source might be.

Unshuttering the lantern, he made his way up the room. The light picked structures out of the gloom – pipes of wood and metal, most in clusters of four by four, rarely nine by nine. The values were important. He would have used larger numbers but Nyriandiol was not big enough to accommodate them. Some clusters were horizontal, though most stood upright. The end of the room was taken up by countless arrays of organ pipes, the tallest stretching up to the ceiling, which here stood the full eight storeys of Nyriandiol above them. Gilhaelith sat in a chair around which were clustered, in symmetrical arrays, more pipes of all sizes, down to ones smaller than a pencil.